He spied new enemy antiaircraft regiments near the Volga islands…
He was not a political general, but he’d heard secretly through a subordinate of Warlimont’s that the Führer meant to give him General Jodl’s position as soon as he’d taken Stalingrad.
The second assault likewise went badly. The enemy repelled him with machine-guns and Molotov cocktails. But his spearheads reached the Volga. This really meant the end for the Red Army; he was thrilled when he thought of what Coca would say. She, who’d grown up with only the best opportunities and possessions, deserved this triumph now. In six weeks at the outside he’d be telling her all about it; that was beyond doubt; and Coca, whose reflected movements in the mirror when she was brushing her hair still took his breath away, would understand and approve of all that he’d done. Major-General Schmidt stopped by to express his congratulations in advance, as he put it. Sixth Army had cleared its name! Paulus made a note to ask the orderly whether there would be enough Veuve Clicquot for every officer in Sixth Army to have a glass. Next he resolved the case of Private Dietrich, who’d been condemned to death by shooting because he’d feigned a leg injury. Paulus ordered X-rays; much to Dr. Braunstein’s amazement the tibia was actually fractured; with Bach on the gramophone he cleared all charges against Private Dietrich, considered, smiled a little, and remanded the boy home for six weeks, so that he wouldn’t develop bitter feelings against Sixth Army. That night as he closed his eyes to sleep he could see again those brilliant white-skinned volumes of Pushkin on the bookshelf, with the sun glancing in on Poltava, and once more he wondered where she’d hidden them, and then for the first time he wondered whether she’d ever read any of them, and just before he fell asleep he glimpsed Ernst’s sad, scared, grubby little face peeping in. Ernst was probably grubby again now, like all the other frontline men. Awaking suddenly, Paulus offered up a soundless prayer for the safety of both his sons. Then he ignited the lantern and bent over the enemy situation map (1:300,000 scale). On the sixteenth, as his columns whipped south in an attempt to encircle Sixty-second Soviet Army, an ambush of sunken, camouflaged T-34 tanks blew them to bits. He sent in the five new Pioneer battalions which the Führer had given him. Most of those boys died, unfortunately. On 18.10 his infantry captured the Tramvayna street line. On his inspection tour he spied one of his soldiers twirling round on his finger the blue and red cap of an NKVD officer, doubtless “sent to the rear.” In some jurisdictions those caps were green, he believed. The design was, in his opinion, garish. For some reason, he was unable to put Olga’s new dress out of his mind. The letter from Coca had said: Olga seems to be in good health, although I gather she is having financial troubles. No more trips to Paris for her! Prices are going up everywhere. You wouldn’t believe how much butter costs. The only good news is that Robert has won a prize for his part in the anti-Jewish pantomime. He is such a good child, so intelligent and so willing to please. I hope he won’t get dizzy with success! Frau Reiting has just come to me in tears; apparently her son fell in action at Leningrad. How do you think I can comfort her? She has always been so nice to us, especially to Olga. I will add her to my prayers. I have heard nothing from Friedrich, and am quite worried. Has he written to you? Yesterday a short letter came from Ernst; he says it’s been a long while since he’s seen you. The left side of his mouth twitched a trifle. Surely you could ask someone to find out if he is all right. I still pray for you every day and every night. Has it snowed there yet? All my kisses to you. I continue to believe in you and in our Führer (the last four words he knew she’d written for the censors). Not making his presence known, he ordered that congratulations and cigarettes be distributed all around. His order of the day explained that everything would proceed more smoothly now that the Tramvayna line was in our hands.
On 21.10 he sent in Seventy-ninth Infantry against the Red October and Barrikady factories. What he really needed to do was shore up General Dumitrescu of Third Romanian Army, but our Führer still had not responded to his request for reinforcements. For now he had to neglect Third Romanian, since the battle on the threshold of the Red October Works required full attention. Specifically, his boys were dying in unusual numbers—as were the Reds, of course. The orderly brought him fresh white gloves on the silver tray. Major-General Schmidt came just to say: We all believe in you, sir.—They were now approaching that moment in any close battle when the wills of attackers and defenders alike have been nearly broken, so that one great effort on one side or the other will suffice to decide the struggle. It was now that he especially regretted the loss of those forces which the Führer had redirected to the Caucasus. But Lieutenant-General Paulus was not a quitting sort of man. Opening his silver cigarette case, he lit a match, trying to work out everything thoroughly, keeping close account of frontage and distribution. It was quite complicated, actually; he almost called in Schmidt to help him. The Dzherzhinskii district was now essentially in our hands; the Red October Works couldn’t resist any longer; that day he called in seven hundred dive-bombing attacks on it; Spartanovka was about to cave in. In that month we find him writing to his old comrade Lutz: The great thing now is to hit the Russian so hard a crack that he won’t recover for a very long time. The sentiment was banal, the goal practical. Of such stuff are effective soldiers made. To Coca he wrote that Ernst’s tank regiment was performing very creditably; unfortunately, there was no time to pay the lad a visit, but she needn’t worry about him; if anything had happened he would have heard. He asked her to send Olga his kisses; he felt it incumbent on him to advise that young lady one more time of the dangers of exceeding one’s resources. To Friedrich, the other son, he wrote a brief letter of love and encouragement; Friedrich was in Africa now with Field-Marshal Rommel. First Beethoven on the gramophone, then a cigarette, then the enemy signals report, courtesy of Fremde Heere Ost, Gruppe I, Army Group B. He had to smile; Major-General Gehlen was so good at being plausible. The analysis of Red Army signals bore out Gehlen’s assertion that the productive capacity of what remained of Russian Europe had been essentially obliterated.
Shooting rockets out of windows, the Soviet enemy, their ammo belts slung across broken girders, popped up to hurl stick-grenades, then ducked back into jagged-toothed caves. Soviet factory workers charged with guns in their hands, dying almost uselessly, but not quite, because every time three or a dozen of them fell, a German did, too. There were always more Russians; his prisoners now everlastingly quoted to him the words of Zoya the Partisan, whom we’d executed for sabotage last winter: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us!—There were only eighty million Germans. Last week he’d pointed that out to Schmidt, who merely smiled and replied: I’m sure we’ll manage one way or another, sir.
First the daily enemy situation report, then the signals intelligence report. Unfortunately, we no longer possessed enough Heinkel-IIIs to continue aerial reconnaissance on as frequent a basis as before. The enemy radio was saying: Keep a tighter grip on your tanks. But what tanks did they have? Toward the end of September, their transmissions had begun very occasionally to refer to some far-off Operation Uranus. Paulus, who had been justly credited for the complete success of Operation Shark, the plan which had tricked Russia with a buildup of forces on the western front just before we launched Barbarossa (even Coca had been impressed), scented danger, not on his own sector, to be sure, but it might well prove to be a threat to Army Group Center. Field-Marshal von Reichenau would have let Group Center take care of itself; Field-Marshal von Reichenau for that matter would not even have bothered to study those enemy transmissions, but Lieutenant-General Paulus, ever considerate and conscientious even to his own detriment, sent a message in cipher to Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B, to warn them about it. They never replied, which first bewildered, then offended him. He knew that behind his back many generals called him “the office assistant.” They found him womanish; they equated him with that laughably fat and bustling Field-Marshal Keitel at OKW; they said he had no dash, no experience, no right to command Sixth Army. Their opinions shamed him more and more. Nobody except Coca had ever expressed any appreciation for Operation Shark, although it must have saved thousands of German lives. Well, that was their business, but they really ought to be more careful. When Russians are involved, reconnaissance in force will invariably escalate into a general offensive if it succeeds. No one seemed to comprehend this, not even Schmidt. Anyhow, all mentions of Operation Uranus soon faded from enemy communications. Lighting another cigarette, he made a note to query Major-General Gehlen directly about it, just as soon as—