Stalingrad
Introduction
I don’t like to read about modern war because there is no honor involved and an ordinary soldier has no chance to prove his bravery. Today, it is all about machines. Drones are used to attack an enemy and they are so advanced that they can kill a single man who is hiding in an underground tunnel. Or dozens of cheap drones can be used to take out million dollar airplanes. I know this
because I have seen the videos on social media. WWI and WWII saw mechanization removing the humanity from war as many soldiers never even caught a glimpse at the enemy that they were shooting
at or bombing from on high. But it was different from the Battle of Stalingrad where the Soviets and
Nazis knew each other as they were fighting block by block, house to house, floor to floor and, sometimes, room to room. It was personal and brutal. What makes it even more fascinating to me was that either side could have won. At one point the Germans had taken over 90 percent of the city and the only thing that saved the Russians was that they had reserves coming in from Asia, allowing them
to stand fast. The Dantesque scene that will always haunt me was the thought of the crows descending on the streets of Stalingrad to peck out the eyes of the corpses for food as the frozen bodies were too stiff for birds to penetrate with their beaks. An estimated two million soldiers died at Stalingrad, plus
tens of thousands of civilians, so the eye-hungry crows had a bountiful feast.
Life in the City
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Germans used Russian corpses to corduroy the roads
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Snow was so deep that the Russians cut off the legs of hundreds of dead horses and used them to mark where the road was under the snow.
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So cold that one group was sitting in a circle and literally froze to death. Thought that they were still alive until saw the marble skin.
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Walking around in circles at hospital because had to keep moving to avoid freezing to death.
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Street to street. House to house. Room to room. Throw grenades in. Put up chicken wire. Hooks
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Stuck in one room for weeks. Everyone had to crap in the same corner and the dung pile became a pyramid.
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Soldiers fall on an old carcass of a horse, beat open the head, and swallow the brains raw.
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Russian artillery fire blew a hole into a railroad station, igniting the corpses that had been stacked against its walls up to the level of the second story windows. The frozen bodies became a gruesome
bonfire.
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The dead are lying, grotesquely twisted, their mouths and eyes still wide open with horror, frozen stiff, with their skulls torn open and their bowels hurled out.
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Life in the Hospital
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Wounded arm and bandaged it. Line of lice going into wound. Itching and infected
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Starved to death. Autopsy shows no body fat and the heart shrank to one third of normal size. Severe shrinkage of muscle.
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Dysentery. Typhus. Typhoid. Hepatitis. Jaundice Combination of cold, stress, exhaustion. Exposure.
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Wounded outside of hospitals, waiting to freeze to death.. Lightly wounded fixed first then sent back. Severely wounded were places next to the doors or windows so that the cold would take them
more quickly. Head injuries took last place because could take three hours of surgery. Walking wounded got the flights out because twenty could stand in the same amount of space as four cots
•No fuel for heat so pneumonia, and an increased weakness to other infections.•
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Shoot self through a loaf of bread to eliminate close range powder burns. Shot self in stomach or chest, more painful than arm or leg but guaranteed a successful escape.
Incapacitated patients who had been piled in trucks, which then ground to a halt, froze to death in the open. Piles of frozen corpses left by the field hospital because the ground was frozen too hard to bury them. Put bodies against the wall for insulation. A fire left patients to fend for themselves. One
guy made it but was on fire and sizzled when he lay down in the snow.
The lack of bandages was serious for the cases of severe frostbite. Often, toes and fingers stayed behind in the filthy bandages when we changed them. Top of a tin can for a scalpel. An article made from silk was taken apart to be used as stitches.
Scissors were used for amputations.
Lice
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Bury clothes in snow except for one corner so the lice could find their way out. Didn’t solve
problem but got rid of some of the lice.
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A trail of lice going up from the arm into the cast.
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The worst part was the growth of lice on the wounded. “On the operating table we had to scrape lice off uniforms and skin with a spatula and throw them into the fire. We also had to remove them from eyebrows and beards where they clustered like grapes.
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Delousing was impossible. Medical orderlies changing bandages found a grey mass of lice crawling on their own wrists and arms from the patient. When a man died, the lice could be seen leaving the body en masse in search of living flesh.
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Anger at their treatment in the pow camps led to prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off of their
bodies and throwing them ar their guards. Such protests provoked summary execution.
The Gulags
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The Germans limped on frost bitten feet, their lips were cracked right open from the frost, their
faces had a waxen quality, as if their lives were already slipping away. Exhausted men slumped to
the snow and never rose again. Those in need of more clothes stripped corpses of clothing as soon as
they could after the moment of death because once a body froze then it became impossible to
undress.
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Cannibalism. Scoop out brains. Eat the newly dead because their flesh is more tender. Sometimes
didn’t wait until the prisoner had died.
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Cannibalism. Thin slices of meat cut from frozen corpses were boiled up. The end product was
offered as ‘camel meat.”
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Corpses without arms or legs. Human heads with the brains scooped out or a torso minus livers and kidneys. The cannibals were furtive at first, moving among the dead to hack off a limb and eat it raw. Their tastes quickly matured and they searched for the newly dead, those just turning cold, and
thus were more tender. Finally, they roamed in packs, defying anyone to stop them. They even
helped the dying to die. Scattered across the compound were quartered stomachs, headless
cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh and meat. They had thousands of corpses to choose from
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While in gulag, going to cess pool, straining shit to get millet, washing it and eating it for the second
time.
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Mice descended on a soldier whose feet were frost bitten and chewed off two of his toes while he
slept.
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The dead were laid out each morning outside the barrack block. These naked, frozen corpses were stacked up in an ever extending line down one side of the camp. At Beketovka, the mountain of bodies was about a hundred yards long and six feet high.
•Conclusion
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Reading about it again to study it, not just read.
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The Russians regarded the butchery as a punitive crusade, a purgative.
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Out of 107,000 Sixth Army soldiers herded into prison camps less than five thousand back from the Soviet prisons.
Man, by nature, is an aggressive beast so there will always be war. You may as well outlaw hurricanes.
