Stalingrad

one division put in its ‘requirements for musical instruments, party games, Christmas tree decorations and candles’.
    Leave rosters were planned, a subject which excited more hopesand disappointments than any other. Paulus insisted that priority was given to soldiers ‘who have been in the eastern theatre without a break since June 1941’. For the lucky ones who set out on the long journey, time slipped past in a sense of unreality. Home now seemed to have the dreamlike quality of a former existence. Back among their families, men found it impossible to talk about their experiences. Many were dismayed to find how few civilians had any grasp of what was happening. Worst of all, it seemed pointlessly cruel to enlighten them, if it meant that wives would agonize all the more. The only reality now seemed to be the nightmare existence they could not escape. It was human to be tempted by ideas of desertion, but few took them seriously. The most vivid memory of their leave was saying goodbye. For many, it was the last time. They knew they were re-entering hell when they passed the sign on the main route into Stalingrad: ‘Entry to the city forbidden. Onlookers put their own lives and those of comrades in danger.’ Many found it hard to decide whether this was a joke or not.
    New winter outfits started to be issued at the end of October. ‘It’s a typically German affair,’ noted one officer, ‘with reversible trousers and jacket, field-grey and white.’ But soldiers out in the waterless steppe were increasingly infested with lice. ‘For the time being there is no point in even thinking of washing. Today I killed my first batch of eight lice.’ Jokes about ‘the little partisans’ soon wore off. Some of the Russian Hiwis told their German companions of a folk remedy for getting rid of them. This consisted of burying each article of clothing under the ground with just one corner left above the soil. The lice moved there and could be burned off.
    Regimental doctors began to be increasingly concerned about the general health of troops at this time. When the medical obituary of the Sixth Army was debated in Berlin by consultants late the next January, they charted a vertiginous rate of increase in the death rate from infectious diseases, dysentery, typhus, and paratyphus. * This‘
Fieberkurve
’ had started to mount rapidly from as early as July. Although the total number of sick was roughly the same as the previous year, the Berlin specialists were astounded to establish that five times as many soldiers were succumbing.
    The Russians themselves had noticed the number of ill Germans with surprise and spoken of a ‘German sickness’. The doctors in Berlin could only speculate that ‘the troops’ reduced resistance’ had been due to cumulative stress, and short rations. The most vulnerable appear to have been the youngest soldiers, those aged between seventeen and twenty-two. They alone accounted for 55 per cent of these deaths. Whatever the exact causes, there can be no doubt that the health of the Sixth Army was already a matter of serious concern in early November, when the worst prospect appeared to be no more than yet another winter in bunkers under the snow.
    While the Soviet 64th Army launched attacks to bring troops down from Stalingrad, the 57th Army seized a dominant hill between the Romanian 20th and 2nd Infantry Divisions. Further out, down in the Kalmyk steppe, the 51st Army carried out raids deep into the Romanian positions. One night, Senior Lieutenant Aleksandr Nevsky and his company of sub-machine-gunners infiltrated through the defence line to raid the headquarters of the 1st Romanian Infantry Division in a village to the rear, where they caused chaos. Nevsky was badly wounded twice during the action. The Stalingrad Front political department, following the new Party line of invoking Russian history, decided that Nevsky must belong to the bloodline of his glorious namesake. This ‘fearless commander, the full inheritor of his ancestor’s glory’, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
    In the city, the great German offensive had petered out at the very end of October through exhaustion and a lack of ammunition. The last attack by 79th Infantry Division against the Red October factory collapsed on 1 November under heavy artillery fire from across the Volga. ‘The effect of massed enemy artillery has decisively weakened the division’s attacking strength,’ noted Sixth Army