The Second World War (75 page)

Eisenhower was relieved to reach Algiers, after his weeks in the damp tunnels of the Rock of Gibraltar. But instead of being able to focus on the faltering campaign in Tunisia, he became enmeshed in the problems of supply and of French politics. Eisenhower was driven to distraction by
French officers and their ‘
morbid sense of honor
’. He had hoped that the Allies had now arrived at a workable compromise, with Darlan appointed high commissioner for North Africa, and Giraud as commander-in-chief of French forces, although he still wanted supreme command over all Allied troops. On the other hand, Churchill’s only reason for supporting Darlan–that he might win over the French fleet in Toulon–had now disappeared along with its scuttled ships.

Eisenhower soon received a nasty shock. Once news of the ‘Darlan deal’ leaked out in the United States and in Britain, moral outrage knew no bounds. The press and public opinion were appalled by the idea that the Allied supreme commander had made a Vichy quisling the leader of North Africa, especially when it became clear that anti-semitic legislation was still in place and political opponents had not been released from prison. In fact Gaullists were being treated particularly badly. Darlan did not, however, show much satisfaction in his position. He was well aware that the Americans might soon discard him as a ‘squeezed lemon’.

De Gaulle wisely held his tongue in public, since this problem had been created by the Americans. Perhaps he had already perceived that Vichy officers loathed him almost as much as they loathed the British. Although he never acknowledged it, the American policy of dealing with Darlan and Giraud ahead of him would work ultimately in his favour. These two stepping stones prevented a civil war in North Africa.

The Special Operations Executive was alarmed by the deep distrust that the Darlan deal was causing not just among the Gaullists in London, but above all in Allied relations with the French resistance of the interior and even in other countries. Along with the American
OSS (Office of Strategic Services), SOE
had rapidly set up bases in Algiers to train the many young French volunteers for work in Tunisia. One of their recruits was called Fernand Bonnier, who had started to mix in monarchist circles and added de la Chapelle to his name in a grandiose gesture. Those dreaming of a restoration, with the Comte de Paris becoming King of France, viewed de Gaulle as a possible regent who would pave the way, if only because the general’s family was known to have been monarchist.

In this murky world of conspiratorial complications, a plot to assassinate Darlan took shape. It involved Gaullists, who passed $2,000 from London via General François d’Astier de la Vigerie to finance the operation; Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Dodds-Parker of the Grenadier Guards, the senior SOE officer in Algiers; and Fernand Bonnier, who carried it out. Dodds-Parker, who had accompanied the French resistance leader Jean Moulin to his aircraft on his final return to France, trained Bonnier in pistol shooting and later claimed, inaccurately as it turned out, that his
own gun had been used in the assassination. The plan was for Bonnier to be spirited away from Algiers on board the
Mutin
, a boat commanded by Gerry Holdsworth of SOE’s secret flotilla for infiltrating agents in the Mediterranean. But just after ambushing and shooting Darlan in the stomach on 24 December, Bonnier was captured, court-martialled and executed with indecent haste to avoid a trail which might bring out many embarrassing deails.

Eisenhower, shaken by the event although he had earlier longed for ‘a damned good assassin’, summoned Dodds-Parker to Allied Force Headquarters to demand a categorical assurance that SOE was not involved. Dodds-Parker gave it to him. How far knowledge of the plot had spread in advance is hard to establish. OSS in London was certainly aware of it and approved, but it seems that neither Churchill nor Sir Charles Hambro, the head of SOE, gave any form of authorization. The despatch of the ‘squeezed lemon’ provoked few tears, even among those Allies who had supported him. Roosevelt cold-bloodedly remarked to one of his White House guests on New Year’s Eve that Darlan was just a ‘
son-of-a-bitch
’.

In the Stalingrad pocket, troops in the encircled Sixth Army kept up their spirits as Christmas approached. Although they were suffering from lice, cold and hunger, it offered an escapist alternative to pondering their fatal predicament. They knew that Manstein’s Operation Winter Storm to relieve them had failed, yet many soldiers were still prey to ‘
Kessel
fever’, imagining that they could hear the artillery of the SS Panzer Army, which Hitler had promised, coming to their rescue. They could not believe that their Führer would abandon the Sixth Army. But both the OKW and Manstein realized that it would have to be sacrificed to tie down the Soviet armies surrounding it, while the Germans forces in the Caucasus were evacuated.

Sixth Army soldiers dreamed of celebrating Christmas ‘
in the German way
’. They prepared small gifts to give to each other, often little carvings or secretly hoarded food, which they could ill afford. In their bunkers under the snow, an extraordinary generosity of comradeship developed in the face of adversity. On Christmas Eve, they sang ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’, the familiar words making many break down in tears at the thought of their families back in Germany. Yet Christian instincts did not extend to the Soviet prisoners held in two camps within the
Kessel
. Deprived of any food so as not to reduce German rations, the few survivors were reduced to eating the bodies of their comrades.

Reality could not be denied for long. No supply flights had arrived for two days, because of the Soviet tank attack on Tatsinskaya airfield. The Sixth Army was dying by degrees from starvation on its diet of
Wasserzuppe –
a few pieces of horsemeat boiled in melted snow. The army’s pathologist, Dr Hans Girgensohn, who had been flown into the
Kessel
in mid-December, soon came to an alarming discovery after carrying out fifty autopsies. Soldiers were dying of hunger far more rapidly than they would do in other circumstances. This, he concluded, came from the interacting effect of stress, prolonged malnutrition, lack of sleep and intense cold. This interfered with the body’s metabolism. Although the soldier might have consumed a few hundred calories worth of food, his digestive system absorbed probably only a fraction. The resulting weakness also reduced his ability to survive disease. Even those who were not ill were far too weak to attempt a breakout through deep snow, and in any case Paulus lacked the courage to defy Hitler’s orders.

Conditions in the field hospitals were appalling beyond belief. Blood from open wounds froze even inside the tents. Limbs gangrenous from frostbite were sawn off. Pliers were used on fingers. No anaesthetic remained, and those with stomach or serious head wounds were left to die. The desperately overworked surgeons had to carry out a pitiless triage. ‘
The German soldier suffers
and dies with uncomplaining bravery,’ wrote the chaplain of the 305th Infantry Division. ‘Even the amputees were composed.’

Only walking wounded were now evacuated by transport plane, because stretchers took up too much room. Feldgendarmerie armed with sub-machine guns tried to hold back the crowds of wounded and malingerers who attempted to storm each plane on the ice runways at Gumrak and Pitomnik airfields. Even a secured place on a plane was no guarantee of survival. The heavily loaded Junkers 52s and large Focke-Wulf Condors struggled to gain height before reaching the perimeter, where Soviet anti-aircraft batteries fired away at them. Soldiers watched a number crash in a fireball, knowing they were full of wounded comrades.

The new year of 1943 brought another irrational surge of hope when Hitler in his message promised that ‘
I and the whole German Wehrmacht
will do everything in our power to relieve the defenders of Stalingrad, and that with your staunchness will come the most glorious feat in the history of German arms.’ Out of respect for the suffering of the Sixth Army, Hitler banned the consumption of brandy and champagne at Führer headquarters.

The German people were still not told that the Sixth Army had been surrounded, and soldiers writing home were threatened with severe punishment if they revealed this fact. One sent home a New Year’s drawing, but in the corner in tiny letters he wrote in French: ‘
It’s twenty days since we were encircled
. It’s terrible to be sitting here in this trap. But they say to us, “Hold on, hold on!”, but we get 200 grams of bread per day and some
horsemeat soup. We have almost no salt. Lice are a torture and it is absolutely impossible to get rid of them. It is dark in the bunkers and it is minus twenty or thirty outside.’ But his letter never reached home, for it was in a Feldpost sack on one of the transport planes shot down. The Don Front intelligence department was using German Communists and deserters to sift all this intercepted mail. Another soldier wrote sarcastically: ‘
On the first day of the holidays
, we had goose with rice for dinner, on the second day, goose with peas. We have been eating geese for a long time. Only our geese have got four legs and horseshoes.’

Stalin begrudged every delay in the mounting of Operation Ring, the coup de grâce for the Sixth Army. Rokossovsky would have forty-seven divisions supported by 300 aircraft. On 8 January, Don Front headquarters sent two emissaries under a white flag offering surrender terms to Paulus. But almost certainly on the orders of his chief of staff, Generalleutnant Schmidt, they were sent back with the document they had brought.

Two days later at dawn, Operation Ring began with a heavy artillery bombardment and the scream of Katyusha rocket batteries. Red Army officers now referred with pride to their massed guns as the ‘God of War’. The main attack was directed against the ‘Marinovka nose’, a salient in the south-west of the
Kessel
. German soldiers, wrapped up like scarecrows, could hardly fit their swollen, frostbitten fingers round their triggers. The white landscape, with little mounds of snow marking unburied bodies, was pitted with black shellholes stained yellow at the edges by cordite. On the southern sector, the remnants of a Romanian division broke and ran, leaving a kilometre gap in the defence line. The 64th Army immediately sent in a brigade of T-34 tanks, their tracks churning through the frozen snow-crust.

German divisions in the south-west, forced to withdraw, found it impossible to establish a new defence line as the ground was too hard to dig trenches. They had so little ammunition left that soldiers waited until their Soviet attackers were at almost point-blank range. The chaplain of the 305th Division recorded the ruthless Soviet attack, ‘
crushing the wounded
with tanks, pitiless shooting down of wounded and prisoners’.

Pitomnik airfield was a chaotic mess, with blackened, smashed aircraft and piles of frozen corpses outside the hospital tents. There was little fuel left to evacuate the remaining wounded back to field hospitals. Some were dragged on sledges, until their comrades gave up exhausted. The scenes of misery were almost beyond imagination. Dispirited and shell-shocked soldiers tried to escape back towards the ruined city in such numbers that the Feldgendarmerie found it hard to maintain discipline. Yet most men fought on, joined in many cases by Russian Hiwis, who knew full well what fate awaited them when the battle was over.

On 16 January, Pitomnik was abandoned, and the last Messerschmitts stationed there flew out on orders from Richthofen. The other smaller airfield at Gumrak was in no state to receive transport aircraft and was itself now under direct artillery fire. The Luftwaffe began to parachute supplies in, but most drifted and fell behind Soviet lines. A whole battalion of German troops from the 295th Infantry Division surrendered that day. Some battalion commanders could not face the suffering of their men any more. They limped on frost-bitten feet, their lips had cracked open, and their bearded faces had the yellow, waxen aspect of departing life. Crows circled and landed to peck out the eyes of both the dead and the dying.

The Red Army felt no pity, especially after gruesome discoveries. ‘
When liberating the
hamlet of Novo-Maksimovsky,’ Don Front NKVD reported, ‘our soldiers found in two buildings with bricked-up windows and doors seventy-six Soviet prisoners, sixty of them dead from starvation, some bodies decomposed. The remaining prisoners are half alive and most of them cannot stand up because they are so starved. It turned out that these prisoners spent about two months in these buildings. The Germans were starving them to death. Sometimes they threw them pieces of rotten horseflesh and gave them salted water to drink.’ The officer in charge of the camp, Dulag-205, later stated in a SMERSh interrogation that ‘
from the beginning of December 1942
, the command of the Sixth German Army, in the person of Lieutenant General Schmidt, absolutely stopped supplying the camp with food and mass deaths from starvation started’. Soviet soldiers showed no mercy to the German wounded, especially after they came across the last few surviving Russian prisoners who had been starved in another camp at
Gumrak
. Tragically, their rescuers killed them unintentionally by giving them too much food.

On 22 January, Sixth Army headquarters received a signal from Hitler. ‘
Surrender out of the question
. Troops fight on to the end. If possible, hold reduced Fortress with troops still battleworthy. Bravery and ten acity of Fortress have provided the opportunity to establish a new front and launch counter-attacks. Sixth Army has thus fulfilled its historical contribution in the greatest passage in German history.’ In Stalingrad, where men had dragged themselves on all fours ‘
like wild animals
’, the conditions in cellars were even worse with perhaps as many as 40,000 wounded and sick out of those still left alive in the Sixth Army. Toes and fingers on badly frostbitten hands and feet often came away with the bandages as these were taken off. Nobody had the strength to remove the bodies of those who died. Grey lice could be seen leaving them in search of living flesh.