All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  It was Hitler’s ill-fortune that the battle perfectly suited the elemental spirit of the Red Army. A panzergrenadier officer wrote: ‘We have fought for fifteen days for a single house, with mortars, machine-guns, grenades and bayonets. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms … The street is no longer measured in metres, but in corpses. Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives – one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights – the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately for the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.’

  It is important to recognise that, while Chuikov’s battle was critical, elsewhere along hundreds of miles of front fighting continued unabated through the autumn and winter, killing more people than perished at Stalingrad. ‘Hello, my dear Marusya and daughter Tanya!’ partisan commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote home from Ukraine. ‘This is to tell you that so far I am alive and in good health. We are still in the same place, i.e., the upper reaches of the river Shelon. We are experiencing hard fighting right now. The Germans have sent against us tanks, aircraft, artillery and mortars. Our partisans are fighting like lions. Vasya Bukov killed fifteen Germans with a rifle on 7 June. It is very hard to deal with them because they have the firepower. We are entirely dependent on local people for supplies, and they are really very good here. The Germans are many and we are few, that’s why we don’t sleep more than 2–3 hours a day. Yesterday I went to the banya [bath house] after the battle, and remembered how in peacetime one could sip a little glass of vodka after the banya and have a proper rest, and go fishing at weekends. How is your sister Shura feeling now? Has she put on a little weight now that you are feeding her after her experience of starvation in Leningrad?’ He concluded optimistically, ‘The fascists aren’t fighting as well this year as they did last.’

  Conditions in Leningrad progressively eased, though Russia’s second city remained under bombardment. Its inhabitants were still desperately hungry, but most received just sufficient food to sustain life. In March 1942, the authorities launched a campaign to clear the streets of snow, debris and rubble, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens participated. In April, a new commander was appointed, Lt. Gen. Leonid Govorov. Though a taciturn man, the forty-five-year-old gunner was intelligent, cultured and humane. The NKVD reported from Leningrad during the summer: ‘In connection with the improvement in the food situation in June, the death rate went down by a third … The number of incidents of use of human flesh in food supply decreased. Whereas 236 people were arrested for this crime in May, in June it was just 56.’

  Yet for soldiers on the line in the north, horror remained a constant. Nikolai Nikulin noted in his diary on 18 August that some cooks and NCOs were all that was left of his own division. He complained that the morning issue of porridge was often laced with shrapnel, and he was tormented by thirst: ‘During the night I crawled twice to a shell crater for water. It was as thick and brown as coffee, and smelt of explosives and something else. In the morning, I saw a black crooked hand protruding from that crater. My tunic and trousers are as stiff as cardboard with mud and blood, the knees and elbows holed by crawling on them. I have thrown away my helmet – not many people wear them here; one normally shits into a helmet, then throws it out of the trench. The corpse near me stinks unbearably; there are so many of them around, old and new. Some turn black as they dry, and lie in all sorts of postures. Here and there in the trench one sees body parts trampled into the mud – a flattened face, a hand, all as brown as the soil. We walk on them.’

  At the end of August, the Germans suddenly abandoned their strategy of containment, and launched a major offensive to take Leningrad. When this failed, the Russians countered with their own attack, which achieved dramatic gains. Some cultural life revived in the city: there were art exhibitions, concerts, and a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the Philharmonic Hall. The people of Leningrad now had sufficient faith in their own survival to turn their minds to the plight of their fellow sufferers in Stalingrad. Vera Inber wrote: ‘It shows in the expression on people’s faces, in the trams, on the streets: all the time we feel for Stalingrad … Now everything will be decided at Stalingrad – the whole fate of the war.’

  Through the winter of 1942, Leningrad continued to be bombed and shelled. One barrage began during a theatre performance: partway through the second act of the premiere of a comedy about the Baltic Fleet, The Wide Wide Sea, an actor appeared in front of the curtain and demanded of the audience, ‘What shall we do, comrades? Take shelter or continue?’ There was thunderous applause and cries of ‘Continue!’ On 12 January 1943, Govorov was ready to launch a new offensive to break the blockade. Zhukov revisited the city, and set his own stamp on operations. As usual indifferent to casualties, he demanded caustically, ‘Who are these cowards of yours who don’t want to fight?’ On 16 January, the key position of Shlisselburg was recaptured, and two days later it was formally announced that the blockade was broken. In the city, its famous poet Olga Bergholz wrote, ‘This happiness, the happiness of liberated Leningrad, we will never forget. The cursed circle is broken.’ On 3 March another citizen, Igor Chaiko, wrote, ‘A thought is forming in fiery letters in my mind: I can overcome anything … Spring is a symbol of life. The Germans are shelling us again, but the menace is shrinking in the sunlight.’

  Cats, almost of all which had been eaten, suddenly became useful again, to dispel a plague of rats: an entire trainload of feline warriors was dispatched to the city. German shelling, now inspired by mere malice rather than military purpose, continued throughout 1943 – July witnessed the worst bombardment of the siege. Only in January 1944 did the Red Army launch the assault that finally pushed back the Germans beyond artillery range of the city. But Leningrad’s fate was decided in the spring of 1942, when it became plain that its surviving inhabitants could be fed. It was officially stated that 632,253 people died in the course of the siege, but the true figure is assumed to be at least a million. Soviet propaganda suppressed reporting of much that happened during the city’s agony. When Olga Bergholz visited Moscow to broadcast at the end of 1942, she was warned to say nothing about the siege’s horrors: ‘They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger.’

  Strategically, the northern struggle was much less important than the battle for Stalingrad. Nonetheless, Leningrad’s experience was at least as significant in showing why the Soviet Union prevailed in the Second World War. It is unthinkable that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham – or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad’s survival, as in that of Stalin’s nation. If the city’s inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given up. But in the Soviet Union no such choice was available, and those who attempted to make it were shot. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

  Even as the defenders of Leningrad were experiencing a fragile revival of life and hope, further east and south the Stavka launched its strategic counterstrokes. Operation Mars, which began on 25 November 1942, is almost forgotten, because it failed. Some 667,000 men and 1,900 tanks attempted an envelopment of the German Ninth Army which cost 100,000 Russian lives, and was repulsed. A battle that elsewhere in the world would have been deemed immense was scarcely noticed amid the eastern slaughter. Some men found any alter
native preferable to fighting on. ‘Just as I lay down to rest before breakfast,’ wrote Captain Nikolai Belov, ‘a runner came from the Commissar, summoning me to HQ. It turned out that soldier Sharonov had shot himself. What a scoundrel! He left the drill parade pleading sickness and ran into me on the way to his quarters, all doubled up. I ordered him to stay in my dugout under guard, but finding it momentarily empty he took the opportunity to shoot himself.’

  Fortunately for Stalin, Zhukov and the Allied cause in the Second World War, the other great Soviet operation of the winter, Uranus, was vastly more successful than Mars. The Germans lacked strength adequately to man their enormous front. There was a three-hundred-mile gap between Second Army at Voronezh on the upper Don, and Fourth and Sixth Panzer Armies south-eastwards at Stalingrad. Short of manpower, von Weichs, the army group commander, deployed Hungarian, Italian and Romanian formations to cover the flanks of Sixth Army. German intelligence failed to identify powerful Soviet forces massing against the Romanians. On 19 November Zhukov opened his offensive, hurling six armies against the northern Axis perimeter, followed by a thrust westward next day by the Stalingrad Front south of the city.

  The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army

  A German anti-tank gunner, Henry Metelmann, was supporting the Romanians when the Russian offensive struck. ‘The whole place trembled, bits of earth fell on us and the noise was deafening. We were sleep-drunk, and kept bumping into each other, mixing up our boots, uniforms and other equipment, and shouting out loudly to relieve our tension. We went out from one bedlam into another, an inferno of noise and explosions … Everything was in utter turmoil and I heard much shouting and crying from the Romanian forward line … Then we heard the heavy clanging of tracks. Someone further along quite unnecessarily shouted: “They are coming!” And then we saw the first of them, crawling out of the greyness.’ The Russian armour rolled over Metelmann’s gun, all of its crew save himself, and two Romanian armies, whose soldiers surrendered in tens of thousands. Many were shot down, while survivors in their distinctive white hats were transported downriver by barge to prison camps. A Russian sailor, gazing upon a crowd of PoWs staring listlessly at the ice floes, observed that the captives had been eager to glimpse the Volga: ‘Well, they’ve seen the Volga now.’ Romania paid dearly for its adherence to the Axis, suffering 600,000 casualties in the course of the eastern campaigns.

  On 16 December the river froze, and the ice quickly became thick enough to bear trucks and guns. In the ruins of Stalingrad, fighting ebbed – the critical battles were now taking place south and westwards. Five days later, Soviet tanks completed a perfect double envelopment behind Paulus’s Sixth Army: Zhukov’s spearheads met east of the Don crossing at Kalach. Many times in the course of the war the Russians achieved such encirclements. Many times also, the Germans broke out of them. What was different here was that Hitler rejected the pleas of Sixth Army’s commander for such a retreat. Paulus was ordered to continue his assault on Stalingrad, while Manstein began an attack from the west, to restore contact with Sixth Army. By the 23rd, his spearheads had battered a passage to within thirty miles of Stalingrad. Then they stuck. The field marshal urged Paulus to defy Hitler and break out to join him, as was still feasible. He refused, condemning 200,000 men to death or captivity. Manstein’s forces were spent, and he ordered a general retreat.

  Along the entire German front in the east, the approach of Christmas prompted a surge of sentimentality. Every Sunday afternoon, most men within reach of a radio listened to the request programme Wunschkonzert für die Wehrmacht, broadcast from Berlin to provide a link between soldiers and families at home. Relentlessly patriotic, it highlighted such numbers as ‘Glocken der Heimat’ (‘Bells of the Homeland’) and ‘Panzer rollen in Afrika vor’ (‘Panzers Roll in Africa’). Soldiers loved to hear Zarah Leander sing ‘Ich weiss es wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n’, a special favourite of German civilians: ‘I know, one day a miracle will happen/And then a thousand fairy tales will come true/I know that a love cannot die/That is so great and wonderful.’

  Many Germans, especially the young, were gripped by a paranoia no less real for being rooted in Nazi fantasies. Luftwaffe pilot Heinz Knoke succumbed to emotion on Christmas Eve, listening to ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ – ‘Silent Night’: ‘This is the most beautiful of all German carols. Even the British, the French and the Americans are singing it tonight. Do they know that it is a German song? And do they fully appreciate its true significance? Why do people all over the world hate us Germans, and yet still sing German songs, play music by such German composers as Beethoven and Bach, and recite the works of the great German poets? Why?’ Paratrooper Martin Poppel wrote in the same spirit from Russia:

  Our thoughts and conversations turn towards home, to our loved ones, our Führer and our Fatherland. We’re not afraid to cry as we stand to remember our Führer and our fallen comrades. It’s like an oath binding us together, making us grit our teeth and carry on until victory … At home, they’ll be sitting under the Christmas tree as well. I can see my brave old Daddy, see him stand and drink with reddened eyes to the soldiers. And my courageous mother, she’ll certainly be crying a bit, and my little sister too. But one day there’ll be another New Year when we can all be together, happily reunited after a victorious end to the mass slaughter of the nations. That superior spirit which moves the young people must lead us to victory: there is no alternative.

  The sentiments of these young men, cogs in a war machine that had wreaked untold misery, reflected the triumph of Goebbels’ educational and propaganda machine, and the tragedy of Europe to which it contributed so much. That Christmas of 1942 in Russia, millions of German soldiers approached a rendezvous with the collapse of their leader’s insane ambitions that would hasten many to their graves.

  Goering professed the Luftwaffe’s ability to supply the German forces isolated in the Stalingrad pocket – though the most rudimentary calculation showed that such airlift capacity was lacking. Through December, as ammunition and rations dwindled, Paulus’s men lost ground, men, tanks, and soon hope. On 16 January 1943, a Wehrmacht officer at Stalingrad wrote in a valedictory letter to his wife: ‘The implacable struggle continues. God helps the brave! Whatever Providence may ordain, we ask for one thing, for strength to hold on! Let it be said of us one day that the German army fought at Stalingrad as soldiers never before in the world have fought. To pass this spirit on to our children is the task of mothers.’ To most of those trapped in Paulus’s pocket, however, such heroic sentiments represented flatulence.

  On 12 January, four Russian fronts struck at Army Group Don, north of Stalingrad, driving back the Axis forces in disarray. The Pasubio Division, part of the Italian Eighth Army in the Don pocket, found itself struggling westwards. Without fuel, the hapless troops were obliged to ditch heavy weapons and take to their feet. ‘Vehicles complete with loads were being abandoned along the road,’ wrote artillery Lieutenant Eugenio Corti. ‘It broke my heart to see them. How much effort and expense that equipment must have cost Italy!’ If exhausted men sought to snatch rides on German vehicles, they were thrown off with yells and curses.

  Corti made ineffectual efforts to preserve discipline in his unit. ‘But how can you expect people who are unused to being well-ordered in normal civilian life to become orderly … simply because they find themselves in uniform? As enemy fire rained down, the rabble quickened its stumbling pace. I now witnessed one of the most wretched scenes of the whole retreat: Italians killing Italians … We had ceased to be an army; I was no longer with soldiers but with creatures incapable of controlling themselves, obedient to a single animal instinct: self-preservation.’ He cursed his own softness, in failing to shoot a man who defied orders that only the wounded should ride on the few sledges. ‘Countless instances of weakness like mine accounted for the confusion in which we found ourselves … A German soldier in our midst was beside himself with contempt. I had to admit he was right … we were dealing with undisciplined
, bewildered men.’

  At a dressing station, ‘the wounded were lying atop one another. When one of the few orderlies tending them appeared with a little water, to the groaning was added the cries of those he inadvertently trod upon. Outside, straw had been laid on the snow, on which several hundred men were lying … it must have been –15 or –20 degrees. The dead lay mingled with the wounded. One doctor did the rounds: he himself had been twice wounded by shell splinters while performing amputations with a cutthroat razor.’

  Whichever of the warring armies held the ascendant, Russian sufferings persisted. In a peasant hut, Corti came upon a stricken family. ‘I was greeted by the corpse of a gigantic old man with a long whiteish beard lying in a pool of blood … Cowering against a wall, terror-stricken, were three or four women and five or six children – Russians, thin, delicate, waxen-faced. A soldier was calmly eating cooked potatoes … How warm it was in that house! I urged the women and children to do their eating before more soldiers arrived and gobbled the lot.’ Axis troops were often bemused and impressed by the stoicism of the Russians, who seemed to them victims of communism rather than enemies. Even after the alien invaders had brought untold misery upon their country, simple country-folk sometimes displayed a human sympathy for afflicted and suffering Axis soldiers which moved them. Corti wrote: ‘During halts on those marches many of our compatriots were rescued from frostbite by the selfless, maternal care of poor women.’