Inferno - Max Hastings [243]
Battlefield successes provided satisfaction but scant cause for exuberance, because so many people continued to die. Again and again in 1943, the Russians accomplished dramatic encirclements, only to find the Germans smashing their way free, conducting fighting withdrawals with their customary skill. “The Russians weren’t very good,” asserted a Waffen SS gunner, Capt. Karl Godau. “They just had the masses. They attacked in masses, so they lost in masses. They had good generals and good artillery, but the soldiers were poor stuff.” Such condescension was overstated, but it remained true that Soviet middle-ranking leadership was weak, organisation often collapsed on the battlefield, and men paid in blood for repeated tactical blunders.
The machine gunner Aleksandr Gordeev deplored the crudity of his own army’s tactics: “The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?” He briefly deluded himself that his own company, reduced to one-third strength, would be spared from making further assaults, but instead early one morning it was reinforced by rear-area personnel, some of them clerks. They were issued double rations of vodka, “and those who wanted it drank more.” Gordeev’s assistant gunner was reassigned as a rifleman, and “walked off as though assured he was facing death.” He was replaced by a soldier sweating with terror and limping from the consequences of a self-inflicted wound. Gordeev wrote, “The situation was pretty shitty; this wasn’t a company, but a drunken mob”; it was nonetheless plunged back into battle.
In Nikolai Belov’s sector of the front, on the morning of 20 February 1943, a Russian bombardment designed to pound the Germans fell instead on his own men, who suffered heavily even before meeting the enemy. After a day of bloody fighting, at 4:00 p.m. he himself was wounded. He lay between the trenches for four hours before darkness fell and submachine gunners were able to drag him back into the trenches, and thence to the rear for treatment. Belov returned to his battalion three weeks later to find almost all its officers gone, most of them dead: “Major Anoprienko left for the [Military] Academy. Division commander Colonel Ivanov is killed. Captain Novikov shot [presumably for dereliction of duty], Grudin killed. Dubovik killed. Alekseev died of wounds. Stepashin stripped of rank and sentenced to ten years [imprisonment].”
But Russia could endure such losses, and even such clumsy, brutal warmaking. Stalin’s forces were now much larger than those of Hitler, and their superiority was growing steadily: some Soviet weapons systems were better than those of the Wehrmacht. Russian air power was increasingly formidable, as ever more of the Luftwaffe’s declining strength was diverted to defend the Reich from Allied bombers. For a time in the spring of 1943, the Germans looked incapable of holding any line east of the Dnieper, 400 miles from Stalingrad. Indeed, it seemed plausible that Hitler’s Army Groups A and Don could be prevented even from getting back to the river. As thousands of prisoners were herded into cages, Russian soldiers savoured booty, notably including clothing: many men in Ivan Melnikov’s unit seized the opportunity to replace the cloths wrapped around their feet with German boots. “It was hard to take off our foot bandages, for they had stuck to the skin and one had to tear them off rag by rag,” Melnikov wrote with clinical dispassion. “Using water unsparingly, we washed our blistered, bleeding feet. Some of us put on socks that we found … Then we marched onwards full of cheer.”
At the end of January, a fast tank force directed by Southwest Front commander Nikolai Vatutin crossed the Donets east of Izyum and raced south towards Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, to get behind the Germans. On 2 February, Zhukov and Vasilevsky launched an ambitious two-pronged attack, one spearhead driving southwestwards,