Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [172]
From early January, an increasing number of German soldiers began to surrender without resistance or even to desert to the enemy. Deserters tended to be infantrymen at the front, partly because they had more opportunity. There were also cases of officers and soldiers who refused evacuation, out of bravery and an almost obsessive sense of duty. Lieutenant Löbbecke, the commander of a company of tanks in 16th Panzer Division, had lost an arm in the fighting, but soldiered on without having the wound properly treated. His divisional commander could not persuade him to go for treatment. Eventually, General Strecker got hold of him.
‘I request permission to stay with my men,’ Löbbecke said immediately. ‘I cannot leave them now when the fighting is so desperate.’ Strecker, presumably from the smell, realized that the stump of Löbbecke’s arm was putrefying. He had to order him on to an aircraft out of the Kessel to a base hospital.
For the truly incapacitated, the only hope of evacuation back to a field hospital was by sled or in an ambulance. Their drivers were already recognized as ‘steering-wheel heroes’, because of the very high casualty rate. A moving vehicle – and ambulances were among the very few allowed any fuel – immediately attracted Russian ground fire or air attack.
Walking wounded and sick made their own way to the rear through the snow. Many stopped to rest and never rose again. Others arrived in spite of appalling wounds or advanced frostbite. ‘One day somebody knocked at our bunker,’ remembered a Luftwaffe lieutenant at Pitomnik. ‘Outside stood an older man, a member of the Organisation Todt engaged on road repair. Both his hands were so badly swollen from frostbite that he would never be able to use them again.’
Reaching the general hospital by the airfield was still far from a guarantee of evacuation or even treatment in the large tents, which did little to keep out the cold. Wounds and frostbite represented only a small part of the workload, which threatened to overwhelm doctors. There was a jaundice epidemic, dysentery and all the other sicknesses, accentuated by undernourishment and often dehydration, since there was no fuel to melt the snow. The wounded were also far more exposed to Soviet air attack than they had been at the front. ‘Every half-hour Russian aircraft attacked the airfield,’ reported a corporal later. ‘Many comrades who were just about to be saved, having been loaded into aircraft, and were waiting to take off, lost their lives at the very last moment.’
The evacuation by air of the wounded and sick was just as unpredictable as the incoming supply flights. On three days, 19 and 20 December and 4 January, over a thousand were taken on each occasion, but the overall average, including days when no flights were possible, between 23 November and 20 January came to 417.
Selection for the aircraft was not made by the severity of wounds. It developed into a ruthless triage due to the shortage of aircraft space. ‘Only the lightly wounded, those able to move themselves, could hope to get away,’ recounted an officer courier. ‘There was enough room for only about four stretchers inside a Heinkel fuselage, but you could pack in nearly twenty walking wounded. So if you had been severely hit, or were so sick that you could not move, you were as good as dead.’ Luck, however, could still intervene. By pulling rank, this officer managed to get an infantry non-commissioned officer, who had been lying at the airfield for three days with a bullet lodged in his back, on to his aircraft. ‘How this man had got to the airfield,