watched in horror as two Ju-52s blew up from enemy shellfire.
A colonel beside him begged: “Herr General, you must take action. You must give permission to take off.”
But Fiebig answered: “For that I need
Standing at rigid attention, the ashen-faced colonel replied: “Either you take that risk or every unit on the field will be wiped out. All the transport units for Stalingrad, Herr General. The last hope of the surrounded Sixth Army.”
When another officer agreed, that was enough for General Fiebig. With Russian shells slamming through the fog onto the runways, he ordered an immediate evacuations
At 0530 hours, only ten minutes after the attack began, the first lumbering Ju-52s roared to life and scrambled for the sky. Incredible confusion resulted. Planes took off from all directions; two Ju-52s collided in midfield and exploded. Others ripped off their wings and tails. In the midst of this holocaust, Russian tanks appeared on the runways as twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and more planes skimmed low over them and climbed painfully into the murky sky.
When a Russian T-34 drove past Fiebig’s control tower, it prompted an aide to say: “Herr, General, it is time to go.”
But he was transfixed as he watched the terrible panorama outside the window, where the last Junkers were rolling down the field, crashing against other wreckage, skidding to a halt and catching fire.
At 0607, a German tank commander rushed in to say that the enemy had completely overrun Tatsinskaya and, eight minutes later, at 0615, the dejected Fiebig’s own plane lifted off the airfield and headed for Rostov.
On the ground below, fifty-six aircraft sorely needed for the Stalingrad shuttle, burned brightly through the haze. Only 124 of the airlift planes had gotten away safely.
Sixty miles north of the wreckage of Fiebig’s airfleet, Lt. Felice Bracci stirred in his stable and rose to the shouts of “
Still without food, the huge column of prisoners stumbled into another freezing morning. On the horizon, a lifeless sun peeped out at the Italians. A strange sun, Bracci thought, for those who came from a warm country. His breath quickly congealed on his overcoat collar and turned into tiny, white crystals. Above the column a cloud of vapor floated along with the soldiers, as though they were chain-smoking cigarettes.
The march continued through the morning. Bracci and another officer, Franco Fusco from Naples, walked side-by-side, saying nothing. Men fell out, rifles cracked and bodies dropped into the snow; the two found comfort in each other’s presence.
In early afternoon, Bracci saw a church belfry, then a few huts. He walked over a bridge; the river s underneath it had disappeared in countless snow storms. Someone called out that they had reached Boguchar, a former German headquarters, now a central assembly point for Russian divisions. Soviet cars and trucks careened past the prisoners, who halted abruptly before a large barracks. With the cold so intense that the Italians could not stand still, they jumped up and down and begged to be let inside. While they complained, a sullen crowd of Russian civilians gathered. Young, old, they muttered threats and spat on Bracci and his comrades. Some of them made gestures of beheading and strangling, then suddenly closed in and pounced on the prisoners. Like crazed wolves, the Russians stripped them of overcoats, shoes, caps, and blankets. Bracci was lucky when the Russians rejected his worn boots and ragged leggings in disgust.
The guards finally drove the villagers away, then called all doctors inside the building. Bracci was envious. He assumed the doctors’ miseries had ended and they would now take care of sick and wounded in more pleasant surroundings. He wished he had studied medicine at the university.
The doctors reappeared shortly, stripped of all medical supplies and warm clothing. After a lieutenant from Rome protested their treatment, the Russians took him inside, beat him viciously and threw him back into the street. Even then his misery had not ended. When his puppy, which had faithfully trotted beside him on the march, went to nuzzle the prostrate man, the Russians kicked it to death as he watched.
The Italian finally were crowded into barracks and, in pitch darkness, fell prostrate on the floor. Bracci was one of the last to get inside. Looking for a space to rest, he found a horizontal beam three feet off the floor and straddling it, tried to sleep. His body sagged, his head drooped. Several times he lost his balance and had to brace his feet on the ground for support. When his shoe hit a small box, he picked it up and thought it seemed full of butter. He dug greedily into it with his fingers and the greasy mixture went down easily. Only later did he find that he had eaten an automotive lubricant.
Outside the barracks, very far off, the lieutenant heard the sound of bells tolling, ringing out across the icy steppe. From a church somewhere, an organ played a solemn melody. Bracci knew what the sounds meant. He had known all day. Outside, where ordinary people lived, whether in Russia or in his beloved Rome, it was a time for happiness, for family and for love. It was Christmas Eve, 1942.
Vassili Chuikov was in a festive mood. Within the past twentyfour hours, Col. Ivan Lyudnikov’s 138th Division finally had made contact with the rest of the Soviet Sixty-second Army. For more than a month, Lyudnikov and his men had held off both the German 305th Division and the pioneers, who had first driven them onto the Volga beach. Now replenished by food, ammunition, and recruits brought over the ice bridge from the east bank, the 138th Division surged up from the shore to the flat ground behind the factories and turned south. Sixty-second Army headquarters triumphantly recorded the success: “Direct communication with Lyudnikov’s division has now been established.”
His worries ended on that score, Chuikov spent most of December 24 saying good-bye to old comrades. In his tunneledout office, he smoked his leather-holdered cigarettes and raised tumblers of vodka to toast fellow heroes of the siege, who tearfully embraced their commander. Among them were Gen. Ivan Petrovich Sologub, with whom he had fought since the summer battles on the steppe; Gen. Fedor Nikandrovich Smekhotvorov, who defended the Red October Plant almost to the last man; and Gen. Victor Grigorievich Zholudev, whose elite commandos died at the tractor factory.
These officers had been ordered out of battle to the far side of the Volga and rest camps, taking their shattered divisions with them. Once numbering more than twenty thousand strong, the two thousand survivors now walked eastward across the icecovered river, congested with heavy trucks and thousands of fresh infantrymen going the other way.
Only a short distance from Chuikov’s farewell party for his generals, a child ran through the ruins of the suburb of Dar Goya. “Come quick!” he screamed. “They’ve taken Sacha!”
The Fillipovs were not surprised. They had been anticipating this awful moment for weeks, and Mrs. Fillipov quickly scooped up some food the Germans had given Sacha for his shoe repairs and rushed out into the front yard.
Accompanied by two other teenagers, one a girl, Sacha was just going by. A platoon of enemy troops hemmed in the young Russians, who were walking barefoot through the snow. Mrs. Fillipov reached past the guards and wordlessly thrust the food at her son. As he took it, a soldier pushed her out of the way, and the procession wound around the corner to a barren clump of trees on Brianskaya Street.
A small crowd of Russian civilians gathered. The Fillipovs clung to each other, staring hypnotically at lengths of rope being flung over branches of the forlorn acacias. A German looped a noose around Sacha’s head and tightened the thick knot under his left ear; Mr. Fillipov moaned pathetically and broke away from his wife. Blinded by tears, he stumbled away, never looking back as the command was given for the execution. Mrs. Fillipov stood alone, facing Sacha while his tongue shot out from between his teeth and his face turned blue.
Their task accomplished, the German soldiers formed ranks and marched away. The Russian witnesses
