Last Flight to Stalingrad Graham Hurley (sight word books .TXT) 📖

was the only way of stopping us. And you know something else? It worked.’

*

Two days later, Nehmann met Georg Messner at the airfield at Pitomnik. Messner had brought a Tante-Ju with supplies from Tatsinskaya and he looked gaunt with exhaustion. Richthofen, he said, was beginning to despair about the prospects for any kind of victory at Stalingrad. Ice floes on the river were threatening Soviet efforts to keep their front line in food and ammunition yet somehow the Ivans still managed to improvise night after night and keep the supply lines open.

‘If Paulus can’t finish this business when the Volga’s icing up and supplies are down to a trickle,’ Messner said, ‘then the game’s up.’

Nehmann would have been glad of a longer conversation. He wanted to tell Messner about Kalb, about Kirile, about the madness that was settling on the ruined city, but he never got the chance. The weather forecast for the afternoon, said Messner, was dire. Already they were having to light fires under the aircraft engines every morning at Tatsinskaya to thaw out the oil before start-up, and if he didn’t take off within the next fifteen minutes he wouldn’t get home at all.

Home. The word had ceased to mean anything. That night, Nehmann sat up with Schultz and Ernst Grimberger over a bottle of vodka. Kirile, much to his relief, now had a corner of his own at the bus depot and accompanied Schultz during the day when Nehmann was otherwise engaged. He’d made a primitive chess board with a full set of pieces and he played a series of games with Grimberger most evenings while Schultz and Nehmann talked.

‘This is a paper war for our Leader.’ Schultz was toying with his glass. ‘His maps tell him there’s a pocket or two he needs to clear out. To do that he has to lay hands on more infantry because Paulus, believe it or not, is running out. So that means that cooks, medics, signals staff suddenly find themselves in the front line. Even tank drivers, fucking Panzers, are given a rifle and a spare magazine and told to kill a few Ivans. Can you believe that? Just to make Hitler’s map look neater? The man’s obsessed. He thinks it’s his city already and no one’s got the balls to tell him different.’

It got worse. The following night, after a lengthy radio conversation with Abwehr headquarters in Berlin, Schultz appeared to call Nehmann aside.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to. We just got the latest production figures. Two thousand two hundred a month.’

‘Of what?’

‘Soviet tanks. They come out of factories out beyond the Urals. Can you imagine that? Over two thousand? Month after month? The figures went to the Chancellery and guess what? The bloody man doesn’t believe them. He thinks we’re making them up. He’s convinced it’s some kind of plot. It shouldn’t happen, therefore it hasn’t. What chance do we have, Nehmann? Be honest, for once.’

Honest. Nehmann thought about the conversation overnight. He didn’t know what 2,200 tanks might look like. Kilometre after kilometre of tanks. Hectares and hectares and hectares of Soviet armour. An eternity of low shapes on the unending steppe, and muzzle flashes, and huge explosions where men had once been. Hitler had given the Russian bear a poke and now hundreds of thousands of men – underfed, frozen, stoic, resigned – were about to pay the price. Should he write about the real betrayal? Should he risk the truth for once? Would Goebbels even read stuff like that?

*

The following day, in the late morning, a special prisoner arrived. He’d been sent back to the bus depot by a front-line Oberst who knew and respected Schultz. The prisoner had been only lightly injured but his nerve had gone. He said he’d discovered God and he wanted to talk.

‘About God?’ Nehmann was looking at the man. He was tall and he had the pallor and the blank-eyed listlessness that comes with too many days and nights under fire. He’d already been talking to Kirile and he indicated that he’d like this conversation to continue.

Schultz, for once, seemed uncertain what to do. Nehmann made the decision for him. Kirile, he knew, was deeply grateful for the part Schultz had played the night he’d fallen foul of the SS. Maybe now was the moment he’d repay that debt.

Schultz agreed. Kirile and the Russian prisoner retired to the privacy of Nehmann’s sleeping space. Within the hour, he was back again. Nehmann was alone in the room that served as an office.

‘He’s got a desk at Chuikov’s headquarters.’ Kirile nodded at the prisoner, visible through the open door. ‘He knows most of the same men I knew.’

‘And?’

‘There’s a huge attack in the offing, armies north and south.’ He cupped his hands, brought his fingers together. ‘It’s an encirclement with us in the middle. Zhukov’s in charge. That man knows what he’s doing, believe me.’

‘When is this supposed to happen?’

‘Tomorrow morning. He’s even got the code name. Operation Uranus.’

‘Tomorrow morning?’ Nehmann checked his watch, wondering where Schultz might be. ‘And you believe him?’

‘I do, yes.’ Kirile looked away. ‘If you want the truth, I’ve known since you took me prisoner.’

*

Soviet armies fell on the flanks of the German bridgehead the following morning. Within four days, the twin arms of the Soviet thrust had closed the circle sixty-five miles west of the city. It happened to be a Sunday, Totensonntag,the one day in the year that Protestants all over the Fatherland remembered the dead, and more than a quarter of a million men of Sixth Army were now cut off. Over the days to come, as Berlin slowly admitted the truth about the battle for Stalingrad, the German bridgehead on the Volga was renamed a Kessel.

Kessel. ‘Cauldron.’

29

STALINGRAD, 28 NOVEMBER 1942

Kirile disappeared five days later. He’d been sleeping in a nook in the basement where boxes and boxes of passenger tokens for use on the city’s buses were kept. There was barely space for a