All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [115]
German savagery reconciled Stalin’s nation to the savagery of its own leaders: Hitler’s invasion united tens of millions of Russians who had hitherto been alienated by ideological and racial differences, purges, famines, institutionalised injustice and incompetence. The ‘Great Patriotic War’ Stalin had declared became a reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples than any other event since the 1917 Revolution. Even Hitler’s SS became reluctantly impressed with the Soviets’ indoctrination of their own soldiers. Whatever delusions persisted in Berlin, on the battlefield almost every German soldier now recognised the magnitude, perhaps the impossibility, of the task to which his nation was committed. Panzer officer Wolfgang Paul acknowledged: ‘We have blundered, mistakenly, into an alien landscape with which we can never be properly acquainted. Everything is cold, hostile and working against us.’ Another soldier wrote home: ‘Even if we capture Moscow, I doubt whether this will finish the war in the east. The Russians are capable of fighting to the very last man, the very last square metre of their vast country. Their stubbornness and resolve are quite astonishing. We are entering a war of attrition – and I only hope in the long run Germany can win it.’
The last letter from Russia received by gunner lieutenant Jasper Monckeburg’s family in Hamburg was dated 21 January 1942: ‘Forty per cent of our men have got oozing eczema and boils all over their bodies, particularly on their legs … Our duty periods stretch over forty-eight hours, with two or three hours’ sleep, often interrupted. Our lines are so weak, twenty to thirty-five men per company over two kilometres, that we would be completely overrun if we, the artillery, did not stem the onslaught of the enemy, who are ten or twelve times stronger.’ After repulsing one Russian attack, infantrymen carried the lieutenant into his bunker: ‘Since I had been lying for 4½ hours in the snow – 35 degrees of frost – I could no longer feel hands or legs and was completely unable to stand … If it weren’t for this swinish cold!’ Monckeburg was killed a few days later.
Gen. Gotthard Heinrici, visiting Berlin in February, was struck by Hitler’s indifference to eyewitness accounts of the enormous tragedy unfolding in the east. The Führer chose to discuss only technical issues such as the design of anti-tank defences. When once he spoke of the Russian winter, it was with flippancy: ‘Luckily nothing lasts for ever, and that is a consoling thought. If, at this present moment, men are being turned into blocks of ice, that won’t prevent the April sun from shining and restoring life to these desolate places.’ A German soldier named Wolfgang Huff wrote on 10 February 1942, at Sinyavino in Russia: ‘Dusk is falling. The crack of artillery fire – and white smoke rises above the forest. The harsh reality of war: gruff cries of command, struggling with ammunition through the snow. And then a surprising question – “Did you see the sunset?” Suddenly I thought: how grievously we have broken the peace and tranquillity of this land.’
Throughout February, at Stalin’s orders his armies threw themselves again and again at the German positions – and were repulsed with huge losses. The Soviet supply system was close to collapse, and many soldiers existed at the extremities of privation. 2.66 million Russians had been killed in action. But the campaign had cost the German army almost a million casualties, together with 207,000 horses, 41,000 trucks and 13,600 guns. On 1 April, its high command judged only eight of 162 divisions in Russia to be ‘attack ready’. Just 160 tanks were serviceable among sixteen