Global Conflict

by Tom Zola

  The clock hanging on the wood-paneled wall ticked quietly. Von Manstein looked at the situation map that lay spread out on the table in the middle of the room. It displayed the entire Eastern Front. Hoth was on the other side of the table. He also looked at the map with pressed lips and sunken eyes with dark circles under them. The general field marshal with the close-cropped hair, the high forehead, and the sharply-drawn face seemed to wait tensely for a decision from von Manstein, but the Commander-in-Chief was still in a fight with himself. Finally he breathed out long and loudly and tapped his index finger against his chin. He realized that he missed his old comrade and former chief of staff Colonel Theodor Busse, who had sometimes worked with him better than Hoth did. The later was not yet so used to life as chief of staff. Nevertheless, Hoth was a brilliant strategist who didn't keep his opinions to himself.

  Von Manstein sighed. Busse had been killed in action near Stalingrad in mid-November 1942, shortly before von Manstein had taken over supreme command of the Eastern theater.

  "If we fail, Hermann," von Manstein said with a scratchy voice, "we have burned all our painstakingly scraped-together reserve forces for nothing. Then we're standing there with our pants down, and the Russians are in the key position once again."

  Hoth nodded slowly. Von Manstein knew that his old comrade was aware of the dangers of the plan. But Hoth was someone who would take the risk when he sensed an opportunity. Von Manstein, on the other hand, preferred to play it safe with his very limited resources.

  "A failed offensive – a single offensive," von Manstein continued, "could end up costing us the entire war. Launching a major attack is always a risk." Slowly he looked up, looking deep into Hoth's eyes. "A wrong decision at this point could cost the Reich its head."

  "I appreciate that about you, my old friend," Hoth replied, "that you don't make that decision easy for yourself. But all you ever talk about is the military stalemate we have to achieve in order to make the Russians willing to negotiate. But I think we can do more. Look what's happened since the beginning of the year. Ivan has lost 2,000 tanks at Kursk; and we captured 700,000 Red Army soldiers. Then their summer offensive failed, clear across the board. At least 7,000 tanks destroyed, 420,000 men killed. Our losses are an eighth of theirs.

  An eighth, Erich!

  Also, Russia is not an endless maw from which new tanks and men are spewed every second. We've dealt the Soviets a blow from which they won't recover so quickly. More importantly, their forces are now beaten into the ground. Now the enemy is confused and disorganized. In short: Now is its weakest moment. And we have the forces on the ground, right there: the 15th African’s panzers, which we add to the Kampfgruppe Sieckenius; plus Grossdeutschland and Panzer Corps Hausser. Our starting position is also solid enough for a front of this size, now that 6th Army has pushed the enemy back behind Livny and is about to reach the banks of the Don River. We can get back to Tula, Erich! Barely 170 kilometers from Moscow! And this only by committing minimal input. Even failure – and we will not fail – would not mean the collapse of the Eastern Front."

  "I don't see it that way. You're asking me to take a tremendous risk," von Manstein said in an acid tone. Once again his gaze wandered over the situation map.

  If only the Chancellor had followed my memorandum, then we would have the necessary divisions right here! In a letter to the Chancellor at the end of last year, von Manstein had demanded that the Wehrmacht withdraw from Norway and Denmark in order to free up the formations stationed there, for the war against the Soviet Union. The Commander-in-Chief East knew that this proposal had been intensively discussed in von Witzleben's inner circle, but eventually the Chancellor had rejected it. A mistake, von Manstein believed. The Poles had failed to realize that one cannot fight everywhere, especially when faced with a superior enemy. They had had to pay a high price for their military misjudgments, but von Witzleben's argument also had its point: every European country that the Wehrmacht evacuated would, out of hatred, immediately turn into an enemy of Germany because of the period of occupation – and thus become, as it were, a deployment area for the Allies. Whether the occupation of half of Europe was to the liking of von Witzleben or not, things were as they were.

  "I demand that you win this war. Fight on the defensive, make them commit frontal attacks, and then conduct backhand blows against their flanks or rear. That's what you’re always talking about. This operation would meet this very tactic par excellence. Erich, I'm telling you, we can win this fight! But we have to take risks. Let's take these risks now while we don't have the Americans on our back, because relying on static warfare could prolong this war another ten years in the worst case. The Western powers will not wait that long."

  "My God!" groaned von Manstein. "Hitler, the fool, should never have attacked the Soviets."

  "Hitler first freed us from the shame of Versailles. He solved the question of Poland, which was so dear to our hearts in Germany. He fulfilled the self-determination of the peoples in the Sudetenland and Austria, brought the German tribes home to the Reich. Never in my life have I met a more brilliant statesman."

  Von Manstein nodded. "Yes, I was also enthusiastic about the successes. But back then, there was no talk of Russia at all. And now we have this mess … " The field marshal knew precisely what the advantages were of von Witzleben as Chancellor over Hitler. Von Witzleben had returned military command to the High Command of the German Army, and had appointed Gerd von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Thus the political and military authority were at last separated again, as it should have been always the case – and the military had regained its freedom from politically-based decisions and meddling. This was supremely important in von Manstein's eyes.

  The Commander-in-Chief East once again looked at the situation map. He bent over the table and perched his reading glasses on his nose before his finger searched and found the area of Oryol. The field marshal was still fighting with himself.

  Karachev, Soviet Union, June 15th, 1943

  A tall man with dark hair and tanned skin lay on the ground before Sergeant Berning. Hard and straight as a wooden plank he was. His mouth was closed and the lids shut firmly over the eyes. The man who wore a Wehrmacht uniform and the rank insignia of a lance corporal made a very peaceful impression. His face shimmered bluish, and his chest did not move.

  The man was dead.

  Rudi Bongartz was his name. Berning stood in front of the body and was doomed to stare at him. He couldn't move, he couldn't turn away. His body didn't listen to his orders. He stared at Bongartz – Berning could not even close his eyes. He had to stare at his dead comrade. Every night, every restless minute of sleep, Berning was accompanied by this dream – the face of the dead Bongartz burned in his mind like a glowing splinter.

  *

  Sergeant Berning had had a real odyssey through the various levels of German medical care before landing in the field hospital of the 72nd Infantry Division. Due to the hectic events of the past weeks, the combat group did not have its own hospital of this size.

  Still, the accompanying document with the red stripe was adhered to the frame of Berning's hospital bed. The non-commissioned officer, along with about twenty other wounded, lay in a large room with arched windows and a high ceiling.

  The division had had an outbuilding of the town hall cleared in order to set up the field hospital. Red Cross nurses, paramedics, and doctors in white coats ran hurriedly through the room into the adjoining rooms, which were also crammed with wounded and sick people. Groaning soldiers, sometimes screaming in pain, were pushed through the room in their beds. Next to Berning, a man who had been shot in the belly whimpered every now and then; he had been unconscious most of the time since Berning's arrival. On the quiet, the nurses blew out that the chief physician, Dr. Medical Lieutenant Colonel Krüger, could not explain why this man was still alive. Somewhere in one of the adjoining rooms, the song Erika was playing quietly from the loudspeakers of a radio.

  Berning still
felt a stabbing pain in his shoulder and another in his right thigh. The paramedics had put his arm in plaster, vertically protruding from his body, so that he looked like he had a wing. That's why the soldiers called this kind of plastering "Stuka." Berning hardly had any desire to move.

  The hospital stank of sweat, human sebum, and urine, but all the poor mutts around Berning added their own stench as well. Added to this miasma of human evaporation was the pungent smell of alcohol, which triggered a sharp pain in Berning's dry nose. In addition, there was the stench of wound rot, pus, and gauze bandages. From time to time, the strong smell of perfume penetrated Berning's nose. Then there was usually one of the nurses with their Red Cross cap nearby. The nurses seemed to be bathing in perfume to better survive the day in this hell for olfactory organs.

  Berning had been almost exclusively out of it in the last few days. The strong painkillers pushed him straight into bed, to which was added exhaustion. On the very day of his wounding, he had undergone a makeshift operation at the main dressing station before that Stuka was put on him, and then he was sent back with the column of a medical company to the field hospital. Since then he had laid here in this room, and when he was intermittently conscious, a nurse helped him to take a few bites or to do his must-do; or Berning watched all the others around him dying, healing, conversing, and flirting with the girls of the hospital personnel. He himself felt completely bushed and could not stir up the energy for any activity.

  Even going to the bathroom, or eating daily, was a hell of an effort that he would have preferred to avoid. His limbs trembled constantly, he was one moment cold, then the next hot. His throat was completely dehydrated and his tongue swollen with thirst, but every sip of water burned like fire in his throat.

  Berning felt as if he was nothing but a rack of bones; as if all his muscles had left him. He didn't know what was going on with him, either. The nurses could not give him any information, and a doctor had not yet been to see him, at least in his waking hours.

  The trembling fingers of Berning's unplastered hand grabbed the edge of the brown wool blanket. His knuckles were white under the thin skin. Slowly he pulled the stiff cover up to his Adam's apple. A steel cold, which only he could feel, reached for him with icy fingers. A strong, cramping flickering of his muscles seized him. When the chill was over, Berning made a suffocated sound and finally contorted his mouth to utter a strangled laugh. His neck hurt from lying there for days. But all his sniveling sorrows seemed to him merely a dull inkling of a sensation in contrast to the throbbing and biting pain in his shoulder, where a thumb-sized projectile had torn flesh and bones from him. In addition, his skin burned and itched under the plaster – Berning feared that lice had settled there again. The war had shown him life's cruelest sides, and Berning condemned himself and all the military these days more than ever before. He held Pappendorf personally responsible for his situation. After all, it had been the master sergeant who had sent Berning all too often to do perimeter security – just as Pappendorf had, since Kursk, given almost every assignment that promised contact with the enemy to Berning.

  Hadn't the sergeant by now sufficiently proven that he was capable of fighting? Of killing? What else did Pappendorf want with him?

  A man in his late 50s in a white smock pushed himself into Berning's field of vision. The man's hair was tousled, his face narrow and worn out. Red, sore veins shimmered through the skin next to his nostrils. The nose itself was tuberous, his facial skin was infiltrated with irregularities. Behind the doctor came a young nurse with nut-brown hair. Berning already knew her. Her name was Renate.

  "Well, what have we here, Fräulein Micgy?" the doctor asked, and grasped the document hanging from Berning's bed.

  "Franz Berning, Unteroffizier," the sister replied obediently, "posted to us on the 12th, Doktor Krüger. Has already been operated on by the MDS. Projectile removed, shot fracture to right clavicle, penetrating gunshot wound at right thigh."

  "Mmm," the doctor made a noise and turned up his nose thoughtfully. "Let's see."

  The white coat stepped next to Berning's bed and pulled the blanket aside. He rudely pulled Berning's gown up, then plucked the bandage. Berning made a sorrowful noise.

  "Now pull yourself together, will ya, Herr Unteroffizier?" hissed the doctor, while he pulled out a pair of scissors, cut open the gauze bandages, and removed the plaster. Finally, he uncovered the bullet's entry wound. Berning's whole shoulder had turned into a single, dark-blue-to-purple hematoma. The place where the bullet had penetrated the body was only visible as a tiny, dark red dot.

  "Note: First observation reveals no signs of infection, wound canal inconspicuous, visible tissue bleeding in left chest to shoulder area. Slight lice infestation." The doctor stroked the reddened hives that had formed everywhere under the plaster, then he made a demanding gesture with his right hand. Immediately, Nurse Micgy pressed an X-ray into his fist.

  "Mhmm, gunshot fracture. Splintering recognizable," the doctor muttered, studying the X-ray. Nurse Micgy nodded and jotted down more notes. The graze on the neck, on the other hand, was merely of superficial nature, and Krüger paid no attention to it. Instead, he threw the blanket all the way back and removed the bandages wrapped around Berning's right thigh. The bullet through there had miraculously injured neither the bone nor the artery.

  "Well, boy, I have some bad news for you," Krüger said afterwards in an apathetic voice. Berning's eyes widened. "The wound will take you out for two months, at least. And you're gonna have to stay in bed for quite some time. Be glad the bone just cracked, otherwise you might have been out for half a year."

  A broad smile trembled on Berning's lips. Million-dollar wound!

  "Apply lice powder and put on a new cast. I want to keep him here for another week, Fräulein Micgy. Then sick leave," Krüger dictated to the nurse, who nodded vigorously and wrote some more.

  "Did I … " Berning suddenly snuffled, " ... Did I get my million-dollar wound?"

  "Million-dollar wound?" The doctor suspiciously pulled an eyebrow up.

  "Am I going home ... home, I mean?"

  "Home?"

  "I would so love to see my family again ... and Gretel. I have a girl at home, you know?"

  The doctor's face had hardened within milliseconds. Berning had no idea what was going on with Krüger.

  "Million-dollar wound? Oh, it’s like that, is it?" the doctor said with a bitterly angry voice. Now it was Berning whose face froze.

  "Fräulein Micgy, prepare the man immediately and bring him to examination room 2. I want to take a closer look at the injuries." The nurse left. She hurried through the room and called a second woman in white. Krüger bent down to Berning. Old, pulsating eyes drilled into the sergeant. "If I find out that you inflicted the wounds on yourself ... You'll see what they have in store for quitters," spat Krüger as pure hatred threatened to burst from his face.

  Mtsensk, Soviet Union, June 16th, 1943

  Eventually Field Marshal von Manstein had decided to conduct another operation in the Eastern theater; a hastily scheduled counteroffensive of the Wehrmacht was intended to win both banks of the Oka River off the town of Tula, using two wedge-shaped attack columns, one out of the Oryol area and one out of the Smolensk area. Tula itself had to be taken too. Von Manstein had decided on a limited, small-scale offensive. His troops were no longer capable of a big push anyway. But the defensive successes of the past weeks had torn gaps in the Russian lines, which the enemy was currently hardly able to fill. Von Manstein wanted to push right into these gaps. If the offensive was successful, the German-occupied territory would be significantly expanded, but without creating a new salient that would just need more forces to defend than a straightened front line. In addition, this would push the Germans way up to within 180 kilometers of Moscow, thus positioning Reich forces dangerously close to the enemy's capital again. Finally Moscow seemed to be in reach once more.

  In the north, Panzer Corps engaged the enemy from Smolensk. In the sou
th, Kampfgruppe Hoth, created from the combat formations Sieckenius and Becker as well as the 15th Panzer Division, would strike.

  Von Manstein's Chief of Staff, after struggling with the Commander-in-Chief East for quite some time, had finally received another active command when taking over his own combat formation – albeit for a limited time. Of course, the forces involved in this assault were much smaller than at Operation Citadel, although the area of operations was approximately the same size. There were two reasons for the minimal-manpower approach: First of all, the Wehrmacht could hardly spare any more troops for an attack. On the other hand, this time they did not have to chew their way through a 30-kilometer-deep defensive network of the enemy, which had been installed during six months of painstaking work. The positions of Ivans in front of and around Tula were no more than a chain of hurriedly dug-out foxholes. In addition, the enemy units in the AO were weakened and demoralized. Von Manstein therefore planned a quick raid with two panzer spearheads. They were intended to smash the enemy before he realized what was happening. After that the march to Tula would actually be just a march, and not a series of battles.

  The plan also provided for panzergrenadier units to follow the spearheads, securing the flanks before regular infantry took over the land and began digging themselves in. Once again, von Manstein was able to bring in considerable air forces for this approximately last German offensive of 1943. The blow against Tula offered him the opportunity to regain territories that the Reich had once won, and then lost back to the Soviets as the war tilted.

  "At last our side is doing something again. It was high time," Münster was pleased to say.

  "Not if you don't finally step on the gas," Engelmann countered, and caught an irritated look from his driver.

  "I'm just saying. If all we get now is something to chew on, I'll be the happiest man in the world."