The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [194]
The first German death by starvation within what they were calling the Kessel (cauldron) was recorded on 21 December. In early December the daily bread ration for the encircled forces was 200 grams per head, which was cut further at Christmas. They were also given, recalled a survivor, Colonel H. R. Dingler, ‘watery soup which we tried to improve by making use of bones obtained from horses we dug up’. The lack of petrol meant that tanks had to be kept in the rear of infantry, with the result that ‘when the Russians broke in – as later on they did – counter-thrusts lacked every vestige of momentum.’64 Paulus’ army was disintegrating, and probably could not have crossed the 20 miles back to safety even if Hoth had broken the stranglehold.
Lice infections broke out because it was too cold to wash; the frozen bodies of horses littered the roads; sentries who fell asleep at their posts didn’t wake up; with petrol being hoarded by the commissariat for the breakout, there was no fuel to turn the abundant snow into desperately needed water; bread that had frozen solid, called Eisbrot (ice bread), provided a taunting reminder of how close they were to salvation if only they could find fuel. ‘The men were too weak to dig fresh emplacements or communication trenches,’ records one historian of the Sixth Army’s plight in the Kessel that Christmas; ‘when forced out of their old positions they would simply lie on the ground behind heaped-up snow “parapets”, numb with cold and the inevitability of death. To be wounded might be lucky, more often it was a stroke of hideous misfortune among comrades too exhausted to lift a man onto a stretcher; where medical services had no anaesthetic other than artificially induced frostbite.’65
There were terrible scenes at Pitomnik airport as Junkers attempted to fly the wounded and others away to safety. Soldiers who rushed to get on to planes without documentation were shot, and there were two cases of men hanging on to the tail wheels of planes, who soon afterwards fell to their deaths. The self-discipline of the Wehrmacht collapsed at Pitomnik, as desperation to escape overcame the most famed Teutonic virtue of the Army. When the cratered runway proved too badly damaged by Russian artillery fire to use, and twenty men had to be unloaded from one plane, a Lieutenant Dieter recalled:
At once there was a terrific din, everyone shouting at once, one man claimed that he was travelling by order of the Army Staff, another from the SS that he had important Party documents, many others who cried about their families, that their children had been injured in air raids, and so on. Only the men on stretchers kept silent, but their terror showed in their faces.66
It was understandable; those wounded men whose stretchers were offloaded and placed too far away from the stoves in the makeshift shanties at the perimeter of the airfield simply froze to death.
On Christmas Day the Germans were finally expelled from the Tractor Factory, and an ingenious method was used to get them out of the main office building of the Red October Factory, when a storming group of Lieutenant-General V. P. Sokolov’s division carried a 122mm howitzer into the factory piece by piece, which they then reassembled inside the walls. After a few rounds at point-blank range, ‘the German garrison in the factory ceased to exist.’ The next day Paulus received only 70 tons of supplies, less than