Gerhard braced his legs and pulled as hard as he could.
Schrumpp didn’t budge.
He could feel heat against the side of his right leg. The flames were drawing closer. Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of a crowd of men moving toward him. He glanced around and saw the horde of wounded men. Beaten away from the Junkers, they were making for another destination. No matter that the Messerchmitts were single-seater aircraft, with no fuel in their tanks. In the eyes of the damned, they were a ticket out of Hell.
“Come on, Berti. I can’t do this alone. Can you hear me?”
He caught a faint groan and a nod of the head.
“Right then, on the count of three, push with your good leg. One . . . two . . . three!”
A terrible groan emerged from Schrumpp. It rose to a high-pitched howl of pain as Gerhard managed to drag him from the cockpit, his shattered leg scraping against the side of the cockpit, before dropping him onto the wing.
Gerhard scrambled off the wing to the ground and dragged his friend after him. Schrumpp’s weight knocked Gerhard off his feet and by the time he’d pulled himself up, the crowd of shuffling, dead-eyed wounded men had surrounded his own plane, fighting to get into the cockpit, while others of the living dead trudged toward the second plane.
Gerhard stood, faced the mob, took out the service revolver strapped to his hip and fired two shots over their heads. It stopped the oncoming men for a few seconds—long enough for Gerhard to lift Schrumpp onto his back and stagger in the direction of the control tower.
He saw three more men dashing toward him. For a second, Gerhard thought he would have to drop Schrumpp and fight them off. Then he realized that they were ground crew, good men who had worked day and night to keep him and the other pilots flying.
“Are you all right, sir?” one of them asked.
“What happened to Herr Hauptmann Schrumpp, sir?”
“He was shot up. He needs a tourniquet round his leg, fast. Use some harness strapping, anything that can be tied tight. Then carry him over to the Ju 52 and tell the pilot he doesn’t move until I tell him to. Got that?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Good. I’ll be there in a minute. Got to get Hauptmann Schrumpp something for his journey.”
Gerhard ran across the airfield to the buildings clustered around the control tower. One of them contained the sick bay where their medical officer had worked until a Heinkel left one day and a short while later the pilots discovered that their doc had been on it. His medicine cabinet was in place, however, and because they ran the transport planes, the Luftwaffe had a few supplies. Gerhard opened the cabinet and extracted several ampules of opium and as much bandaging as he could stuff into the pockets of his trousers and flight jacket. He noticed a pair of crutches lying on the floor and picked them up. Then he ran to the officers’ mess. It was as filthy and chaotic as everything else in the Kessel, but there was half a case of vodka left and Gerhard grabbed a bottle.
He raced over to the Junkers. He opened his leather flight jacket to reveal the uniform underneath, with its badges of rank and medal ribbons. Schrumpp was lying on the ground beneath the fuselage of the Ju 52 with his leg bound tight below the knee.
“Why isn’t he aboard?” Gerhard asked.
“It’s the pilot, sir,” one of the ground crew replied. “Says he can only take walking wounded. It’s an order from High Command, sir. He can’t disobey it.”
“Well, we’d better get Hauptmann Schrumpp on his feet then, hadn’t we?”
Gerhard fished the opium ampules out of one pocket. “Give him a couple of these in the leg, and put the others in his pockets. Pour as much of this vodka down his throat as you can. Wrap these bandages around his leg. See if you can pull him upright onto the crutches. I want him standing upright by the door of the plane in less than two minutes. Go!”
As the men set to work, Gerhard came out from under the Junkers and made his way to the door. He’d hoped that the pilot would turn a blind eye if presented with a fellow Luftwaffe man, but he understood why he had refused to do so. A man on a stretcher took up as much room on a plane as four men standing upright. He was also less likely to return to fighting fitness. Evacuation had been restricted to the walking wounded.
Gerhard arrived by the aircraft door. A large, stone-faced chained dog was standing there, sub machine gun in hand, barring the way.
There was a loud mechanical sound. The engines were starting up.
“Got a pass, sir?” the military policeman asked, having to shout to make himself heard as the engines burst into life.
“No,” Gerhard yelled. “But I’m not taking this flight. Just need to speak to the pilot. Let me aboard. If I don’t get off, you can shoot me.”
The chained dog frowned, not certain how to respond.
“I would remind you, I am a lieutenant colonel.”
The dog considered the grief an angry colonel could cause him and got out of the way.
Gerhard clambered up into the cabin of the aircraft, made his way through the ranks of wounded to the cabin door, and opened it.
The pilot turned and had already started shouting, “What the hell are—” before he saw he was addressing a senior officer of his own service and stopped himself. “I’m sorry, Herr Oberstleutnant, I had no idea . . .”
Gerhard nodded brusquely. It didn’t hurt if this babe-in-arms—there were still spots on the boy’s barely shaven face—felt intimidated by his presence. “I understand you refused passage for a fellow Luftwaffe officer.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
Gerhard held up a hand to stop him. “But nothing. I understand the rule. Walking wounded only. That is why Hauptmann Schrumpp, a fighter ace who has fought for the Reich since the first day of this war, will enter this aircraft on his feet. And you will carry him out of here. You may be sure that I will call Generaloberst von Richthofen’s headquarters to make sure that he has arrived safely. Do you understand?”
“But sir—”
“But nothing. Hauptmann Schrumpp flies aboard this plane, or I will make sure, before this damned city falls, that every man in the Luftwaffe, from Göring himself on down, knows that you turned your back on a fellow officer in his time of need. So, I will ask you for the last time: may I have Hauptmann Schrumpp brought aboard?”
“Yes, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
“Good man. I knew you’d see sense.”
As the chained dogs opened fire on the men, their fellow Germans who were fighting to get on the plane, Gerhard had Schrumpp, held upright by the ground crewmen on either side of him, carried aboard the plane. Once aboard, he would remain standing by the sheer press of bodies.
Gerhard made sure the aircrew supervising the cabin knew that they were looking after one of their own. Schrumpp was barely conscious, rescued from his pain by a fog of opium and alcohol. Gerhard patted him on the shoulder.
“Goodbye, old friend. Fly safely . . . And good luck with the nurses.”
The moment Gerhard jumped back onto the tarmac, the door of the Junkers closed behind him, the chocks were pulled away from its wheels and it taxied toward the runway.
Gerhard watched as it ascended into the sunless gray sky and saw the bursts of the anti-aircraft shells peppering the air around it as it clawed its way upward.
The Junkers ran the gauntlet without a scratch. It flew across enemy territory without interruption and landed safely at Salsk, an airfield some way to the west of Tatsinskaya, which had fallen to the advancing Red Army on Christmas Eve.
Late on the night of January 12th a message was received by the Luftwaffe radio operator at Pitomnik. Squadron Captain Schrumpp had survived his flight out of Stalingrad and been taken into surgery. His right leg was amputated below the knee, but he survived the operation.
Gerhard, however, was trapped in Stalingrad. And there the ordeal was about to get worse.
•••
By dawn on January 16th the Russians had advanced so far into the Kessel that the
y were on the verge of capturing Pitomnik. Gerhard and his fellow pilots were ordered to fly their planes to another airfield, Gumrak, which was a dozen kilometers closer to the city itself. Their journey was completed in a matter of minutes, though the landing was complicated by the discovery that no one had been alerted to their arrival, so the airfield was still covered in thick snow.
A young pilot’s voice echoed in Gerhard’s headphones. “What shall we do, sir? We can’t see the runway.”
“Land, of course. We’ve got nowhere else to go.”
It made no difference where they touched down. The cold made every piece of ground as hard as concrete, and it was a matter of chance whether one ended up in any of the craters left by Russian bombs and artillery shells.
Gerhard had never flown in or out of Gumrak before, so was not familiar with its layout. He circled the field to size it up, then used the position of the tower and hangars—all of which had been virtually destroyed—to make a guess as to the likely orientation of the main runway. Then he led his men into land. A couple of the less-experienced pilots had trouble controlling their aircraft on the slippery ground, but they and their machines all survived unscathed.
For the ground crews, however, going by road in trucks filled with equipment and spares, which was normally a short drive, became a three-hour descent into a frozen hell.
The road was swamped by retreating troops, exhausted, frozen, their eyes blank and their hands and feet swaddled in strips torn from bandages, old blankets and dead men’s uniforms. The units these men had once belonged to had all disintegrated: infantrymen, engineers, grenadiers, gunners and tank crews, regular soldiers and SS men alike were intermingled in a single, formless, shuffling mass of beaten and battered humanity. Many had thrown their weapons away: there was no point in carrying them any further for their ammunition had long since run out.
As the trucks tried to force their way through, they came under siege from retreating soldiers trying to climb aboard. Desperate, exhausted and past caring about any consequences, the soldiers pleaded for the chance of a ride, or begged for fuel to feed their own abandoned vehicles. When their pleas were ignored they resorted to threats and then assaults, which had to be beaten off with fists, rifle butts and any hammers and wrenches that the mechanics could grab to use as weapons.
The attacks never lasted long. The men who mounted them had little strength and soon collapsed in the filthy, bloodstained snow.
And these were the men who were fit and healthy.
For the injured and diseased, the situation was incomparably worse. Those whose condition meant that they could not be moved were left to their fate at Pitomnik. A handful of doctors and orderlies stayed behind to look after their patients, though they knew that as soon as the Russians arrived they would shoot them all.
Anyone who could move set off for Gumrak, propped on comrades’ shoulders, hauling themselves on crutches, or lying on improvised sleds hauled by fellow Germans who were barely any stronger than the men they were pulling behind them.
Stalingrad had become a vast experiment in finding new ways to die. A week earlier, a consignment of meat paste had been aboard one of the few successful flights to drop supplies to the Sixth Army by parachute. On the advice of the Wehrmacht’s top nutritionists, the paste had been enriched with extra fat to provide more energy to the men who ate it.
Instead, when the tins were forced open and their contents consumed by the ravenous soldiers, men started dropping like flies. Their starved bodies could not process the fatty paste. The attempt to feed them had ended up killing them.
Men who had survived every attack from the Russians, the weather and their own High Command found themselves on a death march along which every meter of road claimed more victims. Men lay where they fell and died where they lay. Their passing was marked by the lice, with which every man in the army was infested. The moment the supply of warm blood ceased, the insects scuttled out of their former host’s hair and clothing, in search of new, living bodies to colonize.
Crows flocked from their perches on silent gun barrels, burned-out tanks or the semi-demolished cottages of the peasants who had once farmed the land, clustered on the chilling corpses and picked out eyeballs before they could freeze into pebbles of ice.
•••
“That wasn’t the worst part, sir,” the crew chief told Gerhard when they arrived at the airfield. “There’s a camp half a kilometer from the gates to the airfield. They’ve got Russians there, captured when the army came through in August: two thousand of them. When we went by there were hundreds pushed up against the fence, holding their hands through the wire, like beggars. I swear to God, sir, our lot look half-starved, but the Ivans . . . they were human skeletons. Someone on the road said the camp quartermaster forgot to order their rations. Word is, they’ve not had any food since before Christmas, so they’ve taken to eating each other.”
Gerhard had no response. There came a point when one’s senses could not register any more suffering, when compassion ran out like the diesel in all the abandoned trucks and cars and motorbikes that littered the Stalingrad landscape.
“Huh,” he said dully, when the crew chief had finished.
The two men stood opposite one another, too exhausted to know what to do, and then Gerhard said, “You think that’s bad? The hospital here makes the slaughterhouse at Pitomnik look like a fancy Swiss sanatorium.”
“Will any of them get out, sir?”
“God knows, I—”
Before Gerhard could finish the sentence, he was interrupted by one of his pilots running toward him, saying, “Sir, sir, you’re wanted in the control room.” The pilot reached Gerhard, gave a breathless smile and said, “I can’t be certain, sir, but I think we’re getting out of here.”
“Is it true? Have we been told to leave the Stalingrad front?” Gerhard asked when he arrived at the tent that had been used as the airfield’s control center since the tower had been put out of action.
The station commander nodded. “It seems von Richthofen decided that the order to stand and fight to the last man did not apply to Luftwaffe personnel.”
“We don’t stand and fight,” Gerhard said. “We fly.”
“That was Richthofen’s point. Von Manstein tried to overrule him, but he called Göring and received his authority to pull out. You are to be on your way as soon as possible.”
“Where to?”
“Good question. Salsk was overrun yesterday.”
“What?” Gerhard asked, thinking of Berti Schrumpp. “Are the Russians attacking there too?”
“They’re attacking everywhere.”
“But did everyone get out in time?”
“I believe so,” the station commander said.
“Thank Christ,” Gerhard muttered.
“Last I heard, everyone was relocating to some place called Zverevo, near Shakhty. If you ask my advice, you should aim for Taganrog. That’s where von Manstein’s got his Army Group Don headquarters, and there’s an airstrip, so you should be safe there.”
“And if we aren’t?”
“Then what does it matter? The war will be as good as over.”
Gerhard nodded and asked, “What about the ground crew? I’m not leaving them behind.”
“We’re falling back to the last runway. The Stalingradsky Flying School. There’s a couple of Ju 52s coming in for them today. I’ll be leaving with them.”
“Then I wish you good luck.”
“You too, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
The Messerschmitts filled their tanks to the brim with virtually the last aviation fuel that Stalingrad had to offer, for they would need every drop to take them more than five hundred kilometers southwest to Taganrog. They took off again at midday and as their wheels left the runway and the pilots pulled into the steepest climb they could manage to escape the guns of the Russian tanks, they could see beneath them the first long rows of Red Army soldiers, rank upon rank marching toward the airfield’s western perim
eter.
•••
When they reached Taganrog, Gerhard went in search of news about Berti. But with the loss of Stalingrad only days away and the Russians applying pressure that threatened to open the southern half of the Eastern Front, no one cared about the fate of a single airman. With no fighter wing left to command, he found himself idle for the first time in more than three years while the pen-pushers of the Fourth Air Fleet worked their way around to finding him a new job.
Almost a month had gone by, Stalingrad had been taken by the Russians and every remaining man in the Sixth Army had either been killed or captured before Gerhard received a message saying that a clerk from Luftwaffe regional headquarters at Poltava had called with the information Gerhard had requested. The man was a clerk, with the rank of corporal. He’d left his name as Underfeldwebel Götz.
“Good day, Herr Oberstleutnant,” Götz’s voice intoned, oozing the bureaucratic attitude of boredom, obstruction and mild resentment from every syllable, when Gerhard got through to the correct department at Poltava. “I gather you were inquiring about one of your officers, Squadron Captain Albrecht Schrumpp.”
“That’s right, Corporal. He was wounded on the ninth of January, flown out of Pitomnik to Salsk, where he was treated for his wounds. I want to know about his present condition. The last I heard, the operation had been a success.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line, then a grunt and Götz replied, “That’s not what it says here, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
“What do you mean?”
“According to our records, and I have no reason to doubt them, squadron captain Schrumpp died on the morning of the tenth of January. There were complications.”
“What do you mean, complications?” Gerhard’s voice rose, as if he could will his words to be true. “I told you, the operation was a success.”
“Well, sir, I don’t know about that. But I do know that the death has been confirmed, the squadron captain’s family are being notified, though the process is taking longer than usual at the present time. There are a lot of deaths to be dealt with.”