Inferno - Max Hastings [96]
The advancing armies streamed through towns and cities reduced to flaming desolation either by German guns or by the retreating Soviets. Thousands of casualties overwhelmed Russian field hospitals, arriving in trucks or carts, “some even crawling on their hands and knees, covered in blood,” in the words of medical orderly Vera Yukina. “We dressed their wounds, and surgeons removed shell fragments and bullets—and with little anaesthetic remaining, the operating theatre resounded to men’s groans, cries and calls for help.” After the first five days of war, 5,000 casualties were crammed into one Tarnopol hospital intended for 200. Along the length of the front, stricken soldiers for whom there were no beds lay in rows on bare earth outside medical tents. Columns of prisoners tramped in bewildered thousands towards improvised cages, their numbers astounding their captors—and the audience in the Kremlin’s private cinema, when Stalin and his acolytes viewed captured German newsreels. A twenty-one-year-old translator, Zarubina Zoya, wrote: “When the commentator announced the number of Soviet troops killed or captured there was an audible gasp in the room, and one army commander close to me gripped the seat in front of him, rigid with shock. Stalin sat in stunned silence. I will always remember what appeared next on the screen—a close-up of our soldiers’ faces. They were just young kids, and they looked so helpless, so utterly lost.”
The world watched the unfolding drama with fascination and profoundly confused sentiments. In America, the archisolationist Charles Lindbergh proclaimed: “I would a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with Britain, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the Godlessness and the barbarism that exist in Soviet Russia.” Warwickshire housewife Clara Milburn found herself prey to bewilderment, writing on 22 June: “So now Russia will get a bit of what she gave Finland—and perhaps a lot more. Mr. Churchill broadcast tonight and said we must stand by Russia. I suppose we must, as she is now against the enemy of mankind. But I wish we need not when I think of her ways, which are not our ways.” On 1 July a Bucharest streetcar driver, seeing Mihail Sebastian with a newspaper in his hand, asked about the German advance. “Have they entered Moscow?” “Not yet. But they will for sure—today or tomorrow.” “Well, let them. Then we can make mincemeat of the yids.”
Euphoria overtook Berlin. Halder, the Wehrmacht’s chief of staff, declared on 3 July: “I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign … has been won in fourteen days”; Hitler spoke of a victory parade in Moscow by the end of August. Former doubters in high places felt themselves confounded by Soviet command incompetence, the ease with which thousands of Russian aircraft had been destroyed, the effortless tactical superiority of the invaders. At the front Karl Fuchs, a tank gunner, exulted: “The war against these subhuman beings is almost over … We really let them have it! They are scoundrels, the mere scum of the earth—and they are no match for the German soldier.” By 9 July Army Group Centre had completed the isolation of huge Soviet forces in Belorussia, which lost 300,000 prisoners and 2,500 tanks. Russian counterattacks delayed the capture of Smolensk until early August—a setback that afterwards proved significant, because it cost the Wehrmacht precious summer days—and the Red Army sustained strong