by Roy Jacobsen
But before the arbiter of history could open his mouth to greet the Feldmarschall, Manstein leant over the desk, his uniform creaking, and held out a piece of paper, wafted it, as a sign to Markus that he should read it and give it some thought, which he did.
“A report from one of Hünersdorff’s field commanders?”
On my way to Oberst von Hünersdorff, who had his command centre in a dugout beneath his tank, I was also hit – between the ribs. It was a miracle because the bullet was slowed and deflected by my thick winter gear, my pipe and a cigarette case. I was propelled backwards. Comrades dragged me into a dugout under a tank and a doctor was able to remove the bullet on the spot and bandage the wound. And so I was able to stay with my comrades…
Markus looked up quizzically.
“Is that all?”
Manstein nodded.
“This man is pleased not to have to leave the Myshkova,” he said. “What does that tell you?”
“I don’t think he really means it, Herr General. It’s a report. He knows you and Hoth and Raus are going to read it.”
“You don’t think he would have felt he was letting down his comrades if he had been sent back?”
“Probably,” Markus had to concede. “But I still think that’s what he really wanted…”
“What is it then that we really want, Hebel? Can’t we make up our minds?”
Markus gave a start and cleared his throat:
“I’ve made a decision, Herr General.”
He put the order to retreat on the desk, smoothed it out with his trembling hands and completed the action with a little bow, as though he were presenting a holy relic. The Feldmarschall held the piece of paper between his fingertips and read aloud:
“Withdraw from Vassilyevka at once. Leave a rearguard, consisting of a Panzerregiment, Kompanie II/Pz. Rgt 114 (without Hanomag S.P.W.s) and two batteries from Art. Rgt 76 until 2400 hours – under the command of Oberst v. Hünersdorff.
“Destination: Potemkinskaya on the Don.
“Route: 146.9, where you will be met by 17 Pz. Div….”
The Feldmarschall looked up and smiled weakly:
“So Hünersdorff will also form the rearguard?”
“He’s the only person able to do it, Herr General.”
“You’re probably right.”
Manstein bowed his head and coughed, and Markus thought he detected signs of doubt in the smooth-shaven muscular jaw. But then the General raised his head and stared straight at him. “I could have written the same myself,” he said. “Good. You’ve done your duty, Hebel. Nothing is more difficult.”
He lowered his head again. But after a few seconds’ hesitation he lifted the pen and scrawled “Signed by von Manstein”, while Markus watched his hand as he wrote, no trembling, but now he noticed that the Feldmarschall’s hair had turned whiter than the Russian snow.
“I see you are still here, Hebel,” he said, suddenly raising his head again. “And that’s good. I have a question for you. Looking back over all these weeks, can you pick a time when we should have ordered Paulus to break out?”
“No, Herr General,” Markus answered in the same businesslike tone as when he had held a lecture on Richthofen’s work. “Point One: I don’t think Paulus would have been able to do it because I agree with you that the prerequisite for success in something as complicated and dangerous as this is that he himself believes in it, and he doesn’t, all the signs are that he doesn’t, from this distance, and that is how our actions are judged. And Point Two: I don’t think he would have done it even if he’d had the means to do it so long as Hitler refused to give his consent.”
“That answer is a Trojan horse, Hebel – what’s inside it?”
“Doubt, Herr General.”
“Reasonable doubt?”
“Reasonable but not enough to invalidate the two points. It’s Hitler who has to bear the responsibility, not you. You have done your duty, everyone agrees on that. Richthofen, Fiebig, Hoth, Hollidt, Kirchner, Raus, they all agree. The relief operation cannot go ahead.”
“And posterity. Will it be as unanimous?”
“Hardly, Herr General. You will have your command attacked time after time, by critical voices and grieving mothers, hate-filled fathers and aggressive historians, doves and hawks, Nazis and Communists, for the Battle of Stalingrad will be repeated over and over again as long as there are people on earth, and you will feel an unease every time, greater than I have ever encumbered you with because I’m just one painful thought, a nonentity who can be crushed with a glare. You will devote the rest of your days and all your intellect – in the form of your memoirs – to showing respect for the pain and suffering at Stalingrad and defending the decision you have now made. At first, this will not present you with any great problems. As a result of this action, you will be able to save the whole army in the Caucasus. But the man who succeeds will also have to carry with him a suspicion that he not only has the ability to see into the future but that he has also shaped it, and the question of whether you could have succeeded if Paulus had not stood his ground in Stalingrad will always remain. And to that question there is no answer.”
Markus had got up. He looked at the General in bemusement, as though searching for his own voice. The old man had leant forward again, either to show Markus his white air or to conceal an enigmatic smile. Markus, at any rate, saw only the hair, and not the smile, it is not his narrative anymore, it is the Feldmarschall’s, and for all we know it has been all along.
Vassilyevka, 24 December, 1942:
Evacuation of the bridgehead goes ahead unhindered at 2100 hours. The rear-guard starts moving – as ordered – at 2400 hours under sporadic enemy fire. Destination: Potemkinskaya on the Don. Telegram to say that the Führer has awarded Hünersdorff the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Army Group Don (Manstein), 4th Panzer Armeeoberkommando (Hoth) and 57th Panzerkorps (Kirchner) commend the efforts of the 6th Panzerdivision and reserve special acknowledgement for the nth Panzerregiment and its commander, Oberst v. Hünersdorff.
Two Fronts
A good eighteen months after the Sixth Army had been completely destroyed at Stalingrad, on 16 September, 1944, to be precise, Hitler was in his Wolfschanze bunker in Rastenburg, eastern Prussia, along with Guderian, Keitel and Göring. These men were listening to General Jodl’s depressing report on the situation in the east: all the fronts had collapsed, production was falling in the Reich, resources were in short supply, all troop reserves were used up and the Russians were in Poland, in great numbers. Hitler’s face is ashen, his expression solemn and he doesn’t protest as he usually does about “defeatist” talk.
Jodl conscientiously manoeuvres his way through the whole tragedy and eventually moves on to the second chart, which represents the Western Front, and declares that the situation there, sector by sector, from south to north, is almost equally grim; only in one single area is there a ray of light, in the Ardennes, a hundred kilometres of impenetrable forest and steep hills, held by no more than four American divisions, some poorly armed and battle-weary, including troops recuperating from other theatres of war, convalescents and reservists, according to Jodl.
Hitler snaps out of his grey lethargy, raises his hand and shouts:
“Stop.”
He lets a few seconds pass before announcing: “I have decided! I’m going to attack. Here, through the Ardennes, over the River Maas to Antwerp!”
A week later Jodl and Keitel receive the general outlines of a western offensive, together with orders to draw up a detailed strategy for the operation. On October 9 they present their assessment of five possible offensives through Holland and Alsace. Hitler tells Jodl to prepare an in-depth operational plan with the aim of driving a wedge between the British and American armies so that (1) the British forces can be driven back to another Dunkirk – “and this time they won’t get away” – and (2) we can secure the strategically important town of Antwerp and gain much-needed breathing space in the west before attemptin
g to regain the initiative in the east.
Two days later Jodl sets out Operation Christ Rose, and on the basis of these guidelines on October 27, the Commander of Overkommando West, Feldmarschall von Rundstedt, and the Commander of Army Group B, Feldmarschall von Model, present a plan of attack for the German Army Command West at the H.Q. in Fichtenhain near Krefeld. It is given the code name “Martin” and the plan for Army Group B is named “Operation Autumn Mist”.
The generals in command of the relevant armies (Manteuffel, Dietrich and Brandenburger) are also present at this meeting in Krefeld, as well as their Chiefs of General Staff. None of these eight officers believe that the prescribed offensive can succeed and suggest instead a “small solution”, a limited attack from Aachen to Liège with the possibility of encircling ten to fifteen American divisions, to give the Allies a fright and in so doing gain some respite.
But Hitler brushes all these reservations aside. It has to be the “big solution” – Antwerp! And the code name is now “Operation Watch on the Rhine”, which sounds suitably defensive, should the Allies get wind of the plan. The time of attack is set for November 27, but owing to a lack of fuel has to be delayed until December 10, then December 16. And no military expert, no historian, no-one involved, no relatives, no member of future generations will ever comprehend the point of it. We lack the imagination. We don’t know the Ardennes.
Léon’s Bridge
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Basically, we have only one choice to make, the truth or a lie, even if both have so many variants that one can be led to believe that life is complicated. When Jakob Hemmerling, a forester, in the spring of 1894 wrote in his report to Das Königliche Forstamt in Prüm that “there is no bridge over the River Our at Frankmühle”, he might have been lying or he could have been telling the truth.
Let’s say he was lying: there was a bridge.
In that case, we would presume that Hemmerling’s motive for the lie was the footling nature of the case, that he wanted to have it settled as soon as possible; Holper, the miller, had only done what the border farmers had done for centuries, cross the border wherever he needed to, and he was honest enough to admit it. And a man should not be punished for his honesty, even if it borders on stupidity.
This is a plausible explanation. Hemmerling also knows his lie cannot have any negative consequences either for himself or the two affected nations. Everyday life is made easier for a poor miller without it costing anybody anything. It was a handsome, pragmatic and prudent lie which – if it should ever come to light – will only expose and ridicule the legal principle, poke fun at the bureaucratic system and maybe also at the nation state’s fragile borders.
However, it is quite feasible that something else may have motivated Hemmerling. He could have been standing on the bank of the Our one bleak, rainy day in mid-winter, staring at Holper’s ramshackle bridge, which was within a whisker of being rushed away by the roaring masses of water, and he may have thought: Is that thing really a bridge? And he may have smiled at the thought because in fact he has been commissioned to identify, and if necessary remove, “a bridge”, not a pile of junk.
Well, it is a bridge, in the sense that it enables a relatively sure-footed person to walk from one bank to the other, two banks which happen to be situated in two different countries. But it is unlike any of the other “bridges” which span the same river and the same border between the two nations, so if the common features of these other “bridges” constitute a kind of definition, then the Frankmühle bridge definitely does not fall within it. Jakob Hemmerling can therefore happily return home and write in his report that there is no “bridge” at the place in question in the Our Valley, and he is able to return home with a clear conscience.
But, as the quick-witted reader will have noticed, this can then no longer be classified as a lie. This latter interpretation – which excludes the Frankmühle bridge from the category of “bridge” – challenges the very distinction between the truth and a lie.
Strangely enough, the other possibility, that he was telling the truth, leads to a similar conclusion. Let’s imagine that there wasn’t a bridge there, neither a bridge nor a “bridge”, so to speak, and that in other words Jakob Hemmerling was standing on the German side of the river and could see only water flowing and not some man-made link between the two nations, then his report is as truthful as it can be, within the broadest possible definition of the concept “bridge”.
This might mean that the miller, Holper, did not build a bridge and that the first person to inspect the bridge, Krebs, the land surveyor, was therefore seeing things or had gone to inspect the wrong bridge, for instance the one in Gemünd, which is also a bit of a rickety construction. But we know that this is not the case, we made it clear that the miller lost patience with the two countries’ small-minded bureaucrats and built a bridge himself, which we even briefly described. Which means that the truth must be either that the autumn’s high waters swept away the bridge, at some time in the period between Land Surveyor Krebs’ inspection and Forester Hemmerling’s, or else that Holper, the miller, dismantled the bridge in this same period so that the river would not destroy it, and put it into winter storage. In both cases he has every intention of re-erecting it as soon as the level of the river allows.
If this is the case, Hemmerling, the forester, also has truth on his side. But only with respect to the letter of the law, not with respect to its spirit. The spirit of the task obliges him to use his brain as well as his eyes, and if his brain (matured and sharpened on these very border issues) did not tell him, by analytical means, that the bridge would undoubtedly reappear, then a simple question directed to the miller himself, or a new inspection in the spring, would have convinced him. In other words, the case is such that if there had not been a bridge when the forester carried out his inspection, neither a bridge nor a “bridge”, then Jakob Hemmerling was concealing the fact that there has been and will be a bridge at Frankmühle. His report is both true and untrue, what is true one day is a lie the next and vice versa, just like Schrödinger’s cat.
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On the morning of 22 January, 1945 Lieutenant Edward B. Fitsch (plus crew) took off from the Le Perron airbase in northern France in his B-26, and only minutes later he was at the head of two squadrons of American bombers, thirty-six B-25S and five B-26S in all, on a raid over the Ardennes to put paid to the German retreat. Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive had ground to a halt, as predicted by even his own generals, and now his troops will not to be allowed to return home unhindered and gather strength for more stunts.
Visibility is good, there is a light wind and Fitsch has specific orders to “take out” all the bridges spanning the Our, and trap the fleeing German soldiers in the Luxembourg forests so that the advancing American ground forces can “destroy” them there, or at least force them to leave behind their heaviest materiel.
But as Fitsch leaves French airspace and enters the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg his radar and some of his radio equipment packs up and the navigator has to struggle with a number of unsolvable problems in the skies. As a result of these difficulties, ten of the bombers lose contact and abort the mission. But Lieutenant Fitsch has got good eyes, good binoculars and also good maps, so he decides to carry out the operation nonetheless.
The squadron flies in along the Our Valley from the south while Fitsch and his men count and plot the bridges for all they are worth and communicate the positions to their comrades in the formation behind. They go into a wide bank north over Luxembourg and then Belgian territory, “Raum St Vith”, as the Germans call it, and come back along the Our Valley again from the north. Straggly clouds have come between the Americans and the European landscape, and moreover the German flak batteries have spluttered into life in the white, snowy forests on both sides of the black river. Fitsch, however, has had experience of winter days in the air, so he sends orders to ignore the artillery and break off, which was the plan – the plan he had himself concocted during his sweep north
– and at 1202 hours precisely he drops his load on the bridge at Dasburg, immediately afterwards reporting back to the base in France “an excellent and surprising hit”, whereafter one bridge after the other is blown to pieces, all down the Westwall, the Siegfried Line.
But as the Lieutenant starts climbing again he spots a bridge which isn’t on the map but obviously does still exist, a thin, white line across the murky Our, which now flows in an unbroken line from Lommersweiler by St Vith in the north until it is absorbed by the River Sauer in the south.
“We’d better have a closer look at this,” he says to the navigator, who has finally sorted out the radar equipment, so the German fighters, which incidentally they have not seen a sign of throughout the raid, now pose less of a threat. The Lieutenant banks over Luxembourg, veers northwards, brushes Belgium and once again comes in along the Our Valley from the north. This time he dives lower. He flies lower than he has ever done before in a B-26, and he has to because the cloud cover has become denser, as has the German flak. But he can’t make up his mind:
“Is that thing there a bridge or not?”
“It’s impossible to say,” the navigator answers with binoculars to his eyes. “If it is, it’s very small.”
Lieutenant Fitsch reflects in the few seconds he has available before making his decision:
“It’s not a bridge!”
But the artillery fire has become ferocious now, as though it is the Führer’s bunker in Berlin itself they are defending, and this arouses the Lieutenant’s suspicion, and even though he stands by his decision, this suspicion takes the edge off the satisfaction he feels on this historic day as he heads south-west again, “home” to the base in Le Perron, safe and sound.
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