Stalingrad

encirclement and reaching the far bank of the Don.’
    Hitler, having already ignored the strategic rationale on which thewhole plan had been based, now increased its objectives at a stroke. Sixth Army would take and occupy Stalingrad. He was no longer content with the original idea of just advancing to the Volga and destroying the arms factories. Paulus should then send motorized groups down the Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Army Group A under Field Marshal List was now ordered to seize the whole of the eastern seaboard of the Black Sea and most of the rest of the Caucasus.
    List, on receiving this order two days later, stared in disbelief. He could only conclude that Hitler possessed intelligence confirming the collapse of the Red Army which had not been passed down. The army commanders also heard that Manstein’s Eleventh Army, having now completed the conquest of the Crimea, was leaving for the Leningrad front, and that the
Grossdeutschland
and the SS
Leibstandarte
panzer grenadier divisions were to be sent back to France. ‘The constant underestimation of enemy potential’, wrote Haider in his diary, ‘is gradually taking on a grotesque form and becoming dangerous.’
    Hitler tried to justify this high-risk gamble on the basis of reinforcements arriving from their allies. Although the Führer could be most persuasive in his full, uplifting, propaganda flow – what Rommel cynically called a ‘sun-ray cure’ – he convinced few generals on this particular subject. When he spoke in grandiose terms of the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies, the Second Hungarian Army and the Eighth Italian Army, they knew perfectly well that they could never be equated to a full German corps, let alone an army, mainly because of their lack of defence against tank attack. German generals also shared the opinion formed by Field Marshal von Rundstedt about this ‘absolute League of Nations army’, which included Romanians (whose officers and NCOs were in his view ‘beyond description’), Italians (‘terrible people’) and Hungarians (‘only wanted to get home quickly’). With a couple of exceptions, such as the Slovaks (‘first rate, very unassuming’) and Romanian mountain troops, he and other German commanders considered them ill-equipped, ill-armed, ill-trained, and completely unprepared for warfare on the
Ostfront
.
    Although arrogantly expressed, many of Rundstedt’s observationsare confirmed from other sources. Diaries, letters and Soviet interrogation reports make the lot of allied soldiers and NCOs painfully, and sometimes pathetically, clear. Corporal István Balogh was part of the 1st Hungarian Motorized Brigade which left Budapest railway station on 18 June, ‘amid silent people and sad sounds of bugles’, destined for ‘the blood-soaked land of Russia’. ‘Mother of God guarding over Hungary,’ he wrote in a minute diary, which was taken from his body on the bank of the river Don three months later and sent to Moscow, ‘pray for us and defend us from all sins and disasters! Amen.’ Moods were very mixed as they departed, with sadness, an ancient dread of the Russian steppe and moments of febrile optimism. In some of the troop trains ‘songs were heard’, another Hungarian recounted later when interrogated. ‘Soldiers and officers drank wine and there was gaiety. Nobody knew what war was really like.’
    Five days later, Balogh’s train passed some of the battlegrounds of the previous year. ‘Everywhere crushed Russian tanks can still be seen. We look at them and fear the idea of this Red hell moving against Hungary. Thanks be to God that this has been stopped. We are firmly confident that we shall smash the Red danger for Europe.’ On 1 July at Ivanovka, they heard artillery fire for the first time. ‘Everywhere the remains of burnt-out German vehicles can be seen. Aren’t the Germans starting to lose their military luck? Believe in God so that good fortune will stay with us in spite of some defeats.’
    The vast majority of all allied soldiers were conscripts, of whom at least half were illiterate. A lack of familiarity with technological advance made them liable to panic if attacked by tanks or aircraft. Their daily pay, as a Romanian cavalry lieutenant acknowledged when captured, was only ‘enough to buy one litre of milk’. The medical services appeared to have changed little since the previous century.
    Morale in Hungarian units was not improved by the way the officers treated