Throughout that terrible retreat, Hitler’s allies cursed the Luftwaffe, which dropped supplies only to German units. Corti wrote: ‘We watched those aircraft avidly: we found their form and colour repugnant and alien, like the uniforms of German soldiers…If only the familiar outline of some Italian plane had come into sight! If only the slightest thing had been dropped for us, but nothing came!’ Italians’ misery was compounded by censorship at home which kept their families in ignorance of those perishing in the snow: ‘Back in the distant patria nobody knew of their sacrifice. We of the army in Russia lived out our tragedy while the radio and newspapers went on about other things altogether. It was as if the entire nation had forgotten us.’
Corti recoiled from the spectacle of Germans massacring Russian prisoners, though he knew that the Red Army often did likewise to its own captives. ‘It was extremely painful – for we were civilised men – to be caught up in that savage clash between barbarians.’ He was torn between disgust at the Germans’ ruthlessness, ‘which at times disqualified them in my eyes from membership of the human family’, and grudging respect for their strength of will. He deplored their contempt for other races. He heard of their officers shooting men too badly wounded to move, of rapes and murders, of sledges loaded with Italian wounded hijacked by the Wehrmacht. But he was also awed by the manner in which German soldiers instinctively performed their duties, even without an officer or NCO to give orders. ‘I…asked myself…what would have become of us without the Germans. I was reluctantly forced to admit that alone, we Italians would have ended up in enemy hands…I…thanked heaven that they were with us there in the column…Without a shadow of a doubt, as soldiers they have no equal.’
Again and again, German tanks and Stukas drove back pursuing Russian armour, enabling the retreating columns to struggle on, amid murderous Soviet mortaring. One Italian soldier’s testicles were sliced away by a shell splinter. Thrusting them in his pocket, the man bound the wound with string and trudged onward. Next day at a dressing station, he lowered his trousers; fumbling in his pocket, according to Eugenio Corti’s account, he proffered to a doctor ‘in the palm of his hand the blackish testicles mixed with biscuit crumbs, asking whether they could be sewn back on’. Corti survived to reach the railhead at Yasinovataya, and thence travelled through Poland to Germany. A hospital train at last bore him home to his beloved Italy. At the end of 1942 an Italian general asserted that 99 per cent of his fellow countrymen not merely expected to lose the war, but now fervently hoped to do so as swiftly as possible.
In January 1943, the German line in the east suffered a succession of crippling blows. On the 12th, in the far north, the Russians launched an attack which, at the end of five days’ fighting, opened a corridor along the shore of Lake Ladoga that broke the siege of Leningrad. A simultaneous assault further south recaptured Voronezh and wrecked the Hungarian formations of Hitler’s armies. In late January, Soviet forces closed on Rostov, threatening German forces in the Caucasus, which were soon confined to a bridgehead at Taman, just east of the Crimea. On 31 January, Paulus surrendered the remains of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Zhukov became the first wartime Soviet commander to receive a marshal’s baton, soon joined by Vasilevsky and Stalin himself. On 8 February the Russians entered Kursk, and a week later Rostov; they took Kharkov on the 16th.
Stalingrad transformed the morale of the Red Army. A soldier named Ageev wrote home: ‘I’m in an exceptional mood. If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’ Vasily Grossman was disgusted by what he perceived as the gross egoism of Chuikov and other commanders, vying with each other to claim credit for the Red Army’s victories: ‘There’s no modesty. “I did it, I, I, I, I, I …” They speak about other commanders without any respect, recounting some ridiculous gossip.’ But, after the horrors and failures of the previous year, who could grudge Stalin’s generals their outburst of triumphalism? The struggle for Stalingrad had cost 155,000 Russian dead, many of them consigned to unmarked graves because superstition made frontoviks, as Russians termed fighting soldiers, reluctant to wear identity capsules, the Red Army’s equivalent of dog tags. A further 320,000 men were evacuated sick or wounded. But this butcher’s bill seemed acceptable as the price of a victory that changed the course of the war.
The Allied world rejoiced alongside Stalin’s people. ‘The killing of thousands of Germans in Russia makes pleasant reading now,’ wrote British civilian Herbert Brush on 26 November 1942, ‘and I hope it will be kept up for a long time yet. It is the only way to convert young Germans. I wonder how the Russians will treat the prisoners they capture…it will show whether the Russians are really converted to civilised life.’ The answer to Brush’s speculation was that many German prisoners were killed or allowed to starve or freeze, because the contest in barbarism had become unstoppable.
The Red Army achieved stunning advances in the first months of 1943, gaining up to 150 miles in the north, to halt beyond Kursk. Soviet generalship sometimes displayed brilliance, but mass remained the key element in the Red Army’s successes. Discipline was erratic, and units were vulnerable to outbreaks of panic and desertion. Command incompetence was often compounded by drunkenness. Captain Nikolai Belov recorded scenes during an attack that were not untypical:
The day of battle. I slept through the artillery bombardment. After about 1½ hours, I woke and ran to the telephone to check the situation. Then I ran up the communication trench to 1st Rifle Battalion, where I found its commander Captain Novikov and chief of staff Grudin dashing about with pistols in their hands. When I asked them to report, they said they were leading their men to attack. Both were drunk, and I ordered them to holster their weapons.
There were piles of corpses in the trenches and on the parapets, among them that of Captain Sovkov, whom Novikov had killed – I was told that he had shot a lot of [our own] soldiers. I told Novikov, Grudin and Aikazyan that unless they joined the forward company, I would kill them myself. But instead of advancing towards the river, they headed for the rear. I gave them a burst of sub-machine-gun fire, but Novikov somehow found his way back into the trench. I pushed him forward with my own hands. He was soon wounded, and Grudin brought him in on his back. Both of them, notorious cowards, were of course delighted. Assuming command of the battalion myself, in the evening I crossed the Oka river to join the leading company of Lieutenant Util’taev. When night fell, I advanced with three companies, but the assault failed.
The fundamental cause of the disasters which befell the German armies in Russia in the winter of 1942–43 was that they had undertaken a task beyond their nation’s powers. The Wehrmacht was saved from immediate disaster only by the generalship of Manstein. Hitler had said grudgingly back in 1940, ‘The man is not to my liking, but he is capable.’ Manstein was almost certainly the ablest German general of the war. In March he stabilised his line, launched a counter-attack which retook Kharkov, and checked the momentum that had borne forward the Soviet spearheads from the Volga to the Donets, thus securing Hitler another breathing space.
But for what? The balance of advantage on the Eastern Front had shifted decisively and irrevocably against Germany. The power of the Soviet Union and its armies was growing fast, while that of the invaders shrank. In 1942, Germany produced just 4,800 armoured vehicles, while Russia built 24,000. The new T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans then deployed save the Tiger, began to appear in quantity – Chelyabinsk, one of Stalin’s massive manufacturing centres in the Urals, became known as Tankograd. That year also, Russia built 21,700 aircraft to Germany’s 14,700. The Red Army deployed six million men, supported by a further 516,000 NKVD troops. In the winter fighting of 1942–43, Germany lost a million dead, along with vast quantities of materiel.
The Wehrmacht’s combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army: until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical skills no longer