13. Paulus’s Final Assault
Out in the steppe, the routine of German divisions was a world apart from the fighting in the city. There were defence lines to be held and probing attacks to be repulsed, but life offered a much more conventional existence, especially back from the front. On Sunday, 25 October, the officers of a regiment in the Bavarian 376th Infantry Division invited General Edler von Daniels, their divisional commander, to a Munich Oktoberfest shooting contest.
The main preoccupation at that time was the preparation of good winter quarters. ‘It’s not an enticing picture out here,’ a soldier in the 113th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘For far and wide there are no villages, no woodland, neither tree nor shrub, and not a drop of water.’ Russian prisoners and Hiwis were put to work digging bunkers and trenches. ‘We really need to make good use of these men because we’re so short-handed,’ wrote a senior NCO. Out in the treeless steppe, infantry divisions were forced to send trucks and working parties into Stalingrad to fetch beams from the rubble of destroyed houses for the roofs of their bunkers. South of Stalingrad, the 297th Infantry Division excavated man-made caves in the sides of balkas to form stables, stores and eventually an entire field hospital, for which all the equipment arrived by rail from Germany. During the Indian summer of early and mid-October, Germans were keen to get their ‘Haus’ ready. Even the youngest soldiers recognized the implications of digging in: they would now be there for the whole winter.
Hitler issued his own instructions for the winter. He expected ‘a highly active defence’ and a ‘proud sense of victory’. Tanks were to be protected from the cold and bombardment in specially built concrete bunkers, but the necessary materials never arrived, so vehicles stayed in the open. Sixth Army headquarters also drew up elaborate plans for the winter. Even a Finnish training film, How to Construct a Sauna in the Field, was ordered, but none of these preparations carried much conviction. ‘The Fuhrer has ordered us to defend our positions to the last man,’ Groscurth wrote home to Germany, ‘something we would do of our own accord, since the loss of a position would hardly improve our situation. We know what it would be like to be stranded without shelter in the open steppe.’
Fuhrer headquarters also decided that the majority of Sixth Army’s draught animals should be sent over a hundred miles to the rear. This would save on the supply trains required to bring forward the huge quantities of fodder. Altogether some 150,000 horses, as well as a number of oxen and even camels, had accumulated between the Don and the Volga. Motor transport and repair units were also moved back. The reasons behind such a move were understandable from a purely logistic point of view, but it would prove a serious mistake in a crisis. The Sixth Army, especially the vast majority of its artillery and medical units, depended almost entirely on horses for their mobility.
Morale, according to a sergeant-major in the 371 st Infantry Division, ‘rises and falls with the quantity of incoming post’. Almost everyone seemed to be suffering from acute homesickness. ‘Here one must become a completely different person’, wrote a senior NCO of the 60th Motorized Infantry Division, ‘and that is not so easy. It’s exactly as if we were living in another world. When the post arrives, everybody rushes out of their “little houses”—and they just can’t be stopped. For the time being, I must stand by and watch with an indulgent smile.’
Thoughts were already turning to Christmas: the ‘most beautiful festival of the whole year’. Soldiers began to discuss presents with wives. On 3 November, one division put in its ‘requirements for musical instruments, party games, Christmas tree decorations and candles’.
Leave rosters were planned, a subject which excited more hopes and disappointments than any other. Paulus insisted that priority was given to soldiers ‘who have been in the eastern theatre without a break since June 1941’. For the lucky ones who set out on the long journey, time slipped past in a sense of unreality. Home now seemed to have the dreamlike quality of a former existence. Back among their families, men found it impossible to talk about their experiences. Many were dismayed to find how few civilians had any grasp of what was happening. Worst of all, it seemed pointlessly cruel to enlighten them, if it meant that wives would agonize all the more. The only reality now seemed to be the nightmare existence they could not escape. It was human to be tempted by ideas of desertion, but few took them seriously. The most vivid memory of their leave was saying goodbye. For many, it was the last time. They knew they were re-entering hell when they passed the sign on the main route into Stalingrad: ‘Entry to the city forbidden. Onlookers put their own lives and those of comrades in danger.’ Many found it hard to decide whether this was a joke or not.
New winter outfits started to be issued at the end of October. ‘It’s a typically German affair,’ noted one officer, ‘with reversible trousers and jacket, field-grey and white.’ But soldiers out in the waterless steppe were increasingly infested with lice. ‘For the time being there is no point in even thinking of washing. Today I killed my first batch of eight lice.’ Jokes about ‘the little partisans’ soon wore off. Some of the Russian Hiwis told their German companions of a folk remedy for getting rid of them. This consisted of burying each article of clothing under the ground with just one corner left above the soil. The lice moved there and could be burned off.
Regimental doctors began to be increasingly concerned about the general health of troops at this time. When the medical obituary of the Sixth Army was debated in Berlin by consultants late the next January, they charted a vertiginous rate of increase in the death rate from infectious diseases, dysentery, typhus, and paratyphus.[11] This ‘Fieberkurve’ had started to mount rapidly from as early as July. Although the total number of sick was roughly the same as the previous year, the Berlin specialists were astounded to establish that five times as many soldiers were succumbing.
The Russians themselves had noticed the number of ill Germans with surprise and spoken of a ‘German sickness’. The doctors in Berlin could only speculate that ‘the troops’ reduced resistance’ had been due to cumulative stress, and short rations. The most vulnerable appear to have been the youngest soldiers, those aged between seventeen and twenty-two. They alone accounted for 55 per cent of these deaths. Whatever the exact causes, there can be no doubt that the health of the Sixth Army was already a matter of serious concern in early November, when the worst prospect appeared to be no more than yet another winter in bunkers under the snow.
While the Soviet 64th Army launched attacks to bring troops down from Stalingrad, the 57th Army seized a dominant hill between the Romanian 20th and 2nd Infantry Divisions. Further out, down in the Kalmyk steppe, the 51st Army carried out raids deep into the Romanian positions. One night, Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Nevsky and his company of sub-machine-gunners infiltrated through the defence line to raid the headquarters of the 1st Romanian Infantry Division in a village to the rear, where they caused chaos. Nevsky was badly wounded twice during the action. The Stalingrad Front political department, following the new Party line of invoking Russian history, decided that Nevsky must belong to the bloodline of his glorious namesake. This ‘fearless commander, the full inheritor of his ancestor’s glory’, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
11
Jaundice was recorded separately. ‘Jaundice especially predominates here,’ wrote one officer. ‘And since jaundice means a ticket home, everybody is longing to get it.’ There do not appear to be any recorded examples of soldiers eating picric acid from shells, to make them turn yellow, as in the First World War.