Ivan’s War (34 page)

‘I cannot understand how men can survive such a hell,’ a pilot in the Luftwaffe wrote home. ‘Yet the Russians sit tight in the ruins, and holes and cellars, and a chaos of steel skeletons which used to be factories.’
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‘The Russians are not men, but some kind of cast-iron creatures,’ another German concluded.
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This was outrage speaking, the voice of shock when victory was neither swift nor cheap. But until November, Paulus’s men could still believe that they would beat the Slavic devils, crushing them as they had done for seventeen months. Their German rearguard would support them, their planes deliver vital food, rescue the wounded. As the thermometer dropped and the nights grew longer, however, it was the Red Army, and not the invader, that would take the initiative.

The ruins of Stalingrad were the icon of Red Army stoicism, but it was not within the city itself that the outcome of that winter’s long campaign would be decided. Chuikov’s 62nd Army surely earned the honour of the title ‘guards’, but it was planning, not merely endurance, that would save the
Soviet cause. In November 1942, a massive operation, codenamed Uranus, was set in train. Its aim was to encircle Paulus’s trapped 6th Army, cutting off its retreat from the city. As Soviet and German troops duelled over rust and rotting bricks, more than a million men were gathering beyond their horizon. Armies were brought into position on three fronts, forming a giant trap around Stalingrad. They waited only for the signal to move out across the steppe.
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It would not have consoled the city’s defenders, but life was hardly easy for the divisions that converged on the city from bases to the north and east. Supply problems would dog them, too, including shortages of winter clothing. Men died of frostbite and hypothermia before they ever reached the front.
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But the operation, which began on 19 November, was a swift and complete success. Three days later, the 6th Army had been surrounded, trapped in the city that their Führer could not allow them to abandon. The mood among Red Army troops in Stalingrad would lift, though there were months of suffering to come. General Paulus held out till the end of January, and the battle to secure the region as a whole continued for weeks after that, but action and a glimpse of victory raised Soviet morale despite November’s fog. Survivors of the great encirclement campaign would later remember the day the order came to strike the enemy at last as the happiest of their war.
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As Konstantin Rokossovsky’s trap closed around the city, it was even possible for wounded veterans to complain, as one wrote to his wife, that they were lying in hospital and ‘missing all this’.
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For months, Red Army men had nursed envy for the invader, for Fritz, with his well-nourished body and his modern guns. There was even, among the better-educated troops, a kind of cultural awe, for these were the people whose civilization had produced Bach, Goethe and Heine (no one, I found, referred to Marx). There had been signs that German morale was cracking elsewhere on the Eastern Front by October. Soldiers based near Smolensk were said to be depressed as winter closed in yet again, and those returning from the Don to rest in occupied Ukraine were already anxious about the possibility of a Soviet recovery.
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From November, trapped in Stalingrad and on the frozen steppe around it, Wehrmacht soldiers tasted their first despair. ‘Snow, wind, cold, and all around us – sleet and rain … Since my leave I have never undressed. Lice. Mice at night,’ Kurt Reuber, a thirty-sixyear-old German from Kassel wrote to his family in December. ‘There is just enough food to stop us from dying of hunger.’
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While Paulus struggled to resist surrender, the two sides starved in a twilight fog. ‘Clay and mud,’ Reuber explained. Like the Russians, the Germans
lived in dugouts. There was not even much wood left to reinforce the walls or roof after the bombing and the fires. In fact, there was almost no vegetation at all amid the rubble. In late December, Reuber observed a scrawny Russian pony that had wandered over to his dugout and was nibbling a piece of broken timber. The shivering creature was so hungry that even this would do for food. ‘Today it will be our dinner,’ Reuber remarked.
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When the last Germans were captured a month later, even their wretched shelters impressed Russian troops.
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Soviet dugouts had been even more primitive and cramped. Their commanders, writing from well behind the lines, were concerned at the darkness, the lack of air and space.
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A woman veteran put it more vividly. ‘Let us just say,’ she told me, ‘that with those people sleeping there, and all their clothes, and a fire – well, it wasn’t a place where you went in to breathe.’

Those last weeks were a calvary for soldiers of both sides. A near equality of misery prevailed. The adversaries locked together, contesting spaces that passed between them, back and forth, each time costing dozens, hundreds of lives. After Stalingrad fell, Alexander Werth toured the ruins and was struck by the battle relics that close combat had left. ‘Trenches ran through factory yards and through the workshops themselves,’ he wrote. ‘And now at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes; and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among the brick debris, and now half-filled with snow.’
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When the thaw came that spring, another witness saw a chunk of ice floating along the Volga with two frozen bodies, a Russian and a German, fixed on to it just as they had died, clasped in a simultaneous assault.

Described like this, the city might have seemed to be the same nightmare for everyone, but from November there was a crucial difference between the experience of Soviet and German troops. For the invaders, suddenly besieged, Stalingrad was a terrible shock, a catastrophe after the victories of 1941. ‘We have not received any Christmas parcels yet,’ a soldier in Paulus’s 6th Army wrote home on 10 January. ‘They’ve promised us that they’re keeping them behind the lines, and that when we come back they’ll give them to us … We have absolutely nothing to eat, our strength is ebbing away in front of our eyes, we’ve turned into wrecks … I’ve reached the point where I no longer thank the Lord that he has spared my life thus far. I see death every hour.’
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The expectations of Soviet troops had always been less high. They were not dreaming of their Christmas trees, nor of the sweets and cakes that they had never known. If they thought about home, it was about the life their enemy had destroyed. But now, backed up by their spectacular Katyushas and by the
first friendly aircraft they had seen since 1941, they seized a chance to take revenge. The Germans, in other words, were facing a kind of anti-progress, losing one by one the things that made them feel human. Red Army men, by contrast, were getting their first scent of real success. Exhausted, filthy, battle-hardened troops prepared to celebrate. ‘The prestige value of having fought at Stalingrad,’ Werth wrote, ‘was enormous.’
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The party took the credit for the spirit that emerged at Stalingrad. The brotherhood and selflessness to which that battlefield gave birth were rapidly adopted as the offspring of its ideology, its wise guidance. ‘Thousands of patriots are proving themselves to be models of fearlessness, courage and selfless dedication to the motherland,’ the soldiers’ front-line paper crowed. ‘After the war, our people will not forget the ones who honourably served their homeland. The hero’s children will be proud of their father. But the names of the coward, the panic-monger and the traitor will be pronounced with hatred.’
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On the anniversary of the revolution that November, a Stalingrad oath appeared in the press, allegedly from the city’s defenders. ‘In sending you this letter from the trenches,’ the men declared, ‘we swear to you, dear Joseph Vissarionovich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad.’
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The message was drummed home at mass rallies. It was repeated in the printed orders of the day. Newly arrived men, anxiously waiting to know if fate would send them across the Volga with the rest, were made to sit through lectures on the epic heroes of the past. Courage was a topic that soldiers were forced to discuss in small groups led by their
politruks
, although no one among them might ever have seen a German, let alone a corpse.
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Films also worked on the men’s consciousness. That autumn, soldiers in camps along the Volga might have seen
The Defence of Tsaritsyn, The Great
Citizen
and – especially for the Ukrainians – a recreation of the life of the Cossack Bohdan Khmelnitsky.
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Epics like these could roll out every few weeks now that the film industry had been mobilized entirely for the service of the front.
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Soldiers were also shown newsreel of Soviet successes, while documentaries, such as the famous
Defeat of the German Armies near
Moscow
, reminded them how bedraggled and beaten the invader had looked only months before.
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‘You look at our own captured fascist beasts,’ a man remarked, ‘and you know there just aren’t enough ways to punish them for all the atrocities, betrayals and crimes that they’ve committed.’
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It also helped that some of the reserves were well-trained, well-prepared 
and fit. The army had begun to look the part. Siberians were valued most of all. They seemed to be professional, not least because many had learned to shoot. They also knew how to take cover and to dig the deep, narrow trenches that provided shelter from tank tracks and airborne shells alike. ‘The most important thing,’ Ageev wrote home at this time, ‘is that there is no more of the “tank-fright” that we saw so much of at the beginning of the war. Every soldier … knowingly digs deeper into the earth.’
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Those who still panicked at the sight of eyeless, sinister machines were trained out of their fear by an exercise (called ‘ironing’) that forced them to lie in a trench while Soviet tanks were driven over their heads. ‘After this,’ a German intelligence report noted of Red Army troops, ‘they all fought with exceptional courage.’
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The men, meanwhile, dismissed their terrors with black humour. ‘The deeper you dig,’ they would mutter, ‘the longer you’ll lie.’
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For all the froth, the real culture of the front could not be hidden from the men. Whatever the party might do, stories of cruelty, deceit and wasted life flooded back. Military hospitals were not sealed off from the civilian world. Local people could smell the blood and gangrene; they often helped to dig mass graves near battle sites. As ever, they also participated in the parallel economy that flourished when the NKVD’s grip was weak. Wounded soldiers traded in guns, watches, pens and even Zeiss cameras;
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the German trenches were full of attractive loot. Meanwhile, a new class of outlaws, deserters, dealt in every trade from cash and weapons to the trafficking of human lives. The NKVD detained more than 11,000 military personnel near the Stalingrad Front between October and December 1942, more than 1,000 of whom turned out to be deserters or former Red Army men now working for the enemy.
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A favourite ruse had been to dress in women’s clothes, though one man, who had been hiding for eleven months, was found buried at the bottom of a grain bin.
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The police could not keep up with the crime wave. Instead, they tried to make examples out of any men they caught. Desertion was the infraction that most offended them. ‘Comrade commissar,’ an NKVD man told his boss as he escorted ten new miscreants, ‘we should fulfil comrade Stalin’s order 227 with these deserters and shoot them on the spot. They’re not saving the motherland, but their own skins.’
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It was a natural response to lawlessness, but overall, the number of deserters, as opposed to criminals, was falling. The weather must have played a part. As the thermometer dropped to thirty degrees below freezing, there was not much chance in Stalingrad for anyone who chose to strike out on their own. However, there were other reasons for compliance in the ranks.