Douglas Mercer
December 28 2024
Continued from Empyrean (Part Twelve)
THUNDERCLAP
Naturally the funeral of Adolf Hitler was a solemn affair but my recollection was that everyone was in high spirits as well; as we heard the majestic words of Kammler echo in the wind we all knew that this was just a passing over and that the bond of our people would flow on as it ever did. Our new Fuhrer spoke appropriately and well, and hit all the right notes for the audience of the selected few in front and the thousands up in the amphitheater like hill; he spoke our ancient people of the North, and the night skies thousands of years ago when our sun worshipping people collected on hills in Ireland to worship our creator to the light of ten millions stars; how through the vast vistas of time our people had made their ascent and evolved to become who we are; no mention was made of how this vertiginous ascent was nearly derailed, as now we were back on course and no enemies ring us about; he spoke of Time and of Eternity and how we had made good on the promise of time and eternity, and as one people were now facing forward; the speech was not filmed though it was written down and takes an inconspicuous place in the archives, as in only correct; no, the words that ran out that sacred day filter down to us by word of mouth, circulating first through the small circle and then fanning out to all of us; once the paean to the ancestors was given his theme was that of the returning beggar, of the man on the park bench who some thirty years later was that incarnate Colossus who bestrode the world and as prophesied; but what all remembered was that he spoke of him as a person; how his habits were so diametrically opposite what one would think of someone in his position; bohemian, he would sleep until noon and then stay up all night and what he wanted to do most was talk; always the unending monologue, inquisitive about everything, interested in everything, his mind a vast organ which encompassed everything in the world and wanted nothing more than to understand it and so to surpass it, always with his eyes on the totality and our place in the cosmos; during the war he allowed note taking at these marathon sessions of torrential and never ending speech but once Victory was in hand he forbade it; a big movement in those years was that we were to become an oral, not a written culture, and he believed in it, that the ancient melodies and ancient memories must be inscribed in our hearts, never parchment; as if by word of mouth or legend a people could accrue all that they needed of their lore; and it was in one of the teaching sessions in 1958 that one our leaders spoke of the dire days during what was then called the Battle Of Stalingrad; that in a particularly divine frenzy Hitler had said of the ongoing battle that if I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny I then I must liquidate this war; we got it of course, and that and our dominance of Egypt and Saudi Arabia is what allowed us to strangle in the crib any dissenter among what would become our chief ally, America; of course had we not got it, and we came as close as humanly possible to not getting it, he never would have liquidated the war; he would have fought on and tasked his men to fight on to the final bell of recorded time and to never capitulate, to the point of burning Germany to the ground so that out of its ashes a new World might be born; he would have fought on even to the point of putting a bullet in his mouth if that is what it came to; and as he did the noble deed of the captain going down with the ship he would have exhorted his fellows not to lose heart, to hunker down and wait out the dark days, wait them out for the coming man that he was sure was on its way. To wait and prepare for their descendants to work toward this goal in another time and another place. Of course if that had been our fate he knew full well that he would have gone down in history for a time as the world historical monster, madman and psychopath; he accepted this possibility with great equanimity but in the end it was he who created monsters---and we all lived to tell the tale.
When I think of the battle of Stalingrad as we then called it I still find it hard to see it clearly in my mind. The heady first days of Barbarossa when we were literally roaming the countryside at will had slown down; they had finally found a general who had studied ours and they gave us the shock of our lives when they put the plan into action; when after a long string of effortless victories a man suddenly finds himself up against it his mettle will be tested sorely; and one will see if one is made only of fair weather; as an officer in the Sixth Army I was caught in the pocket along with Paulus and there were days when I had to learn that hope was only a substitute for action; we were trapped seeing no way out or any means of escape. Had Hitler’s dream, our dream, Germany’s dream, come to its end? Would it end here on the barren expanse and glacial waste? When I look back to myself in those days I see myself as if from the outside, and when I try to put myself in that position I cannot, it was as if I had no internal consciousness at the time but was only a moving mannequin summoning all my energy for the fight and then the wait, the seemingly interminable wait, when I and my brothers knew that on our fate, on our army’s fate, hung the fate of the world.
So dreamlike was it the streets seemed to dissolve in fire and falling debris and the city was no longer measured by meters but by corpses. For with the incandescent incessant aerial bombardment and the cutthroat hand to hand urban warfare where each window was a death trap and each floor to be guarded with one’s life Stalingrad was no longer a town, it was an abattoir and a charnel house and a graveyard where armies set free from commands met in a mockery of battle, was more akin to roaming gangs of free corps in shrouded cemeteries where enormous clouds of burning, blinding smoke cast a constant pall which made it difficult to determine where the sky began and the earth ended; it was a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames, always the flames, and the fires burning out of control which themselves made a mockery of the tens of degree below zero weather; and when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, even the dogs would plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
Of course the Volga was our Mississippi and we placed great strategic importance on Stalingrad; first, it was the largest industrial center of the Soviet Union and an important transport hub on the Volga River. Controlling Stalingrad meant gaining access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and having supreme authority over the Volga River. But this had been a blue print of aims and as the old saying goes no military plan survives it first contact with reality, no plan of man ever really, though what we men saw was no reality that we had been acquainted with but a psychotic realm of eerie shapes and forms where the human being in the midst of it had to simply go under and become a thing which was confessing strength or obeying orders; how different from out effortless glide across the steppe; for the battle soon degenerated into house-to-house fighting, which escalated drastically as both sides continued pouring reinforcements into the city. We had at great cost and loss of life thrown the Soviet defenders back into narrow zones along the Volga's west bank. However, winter set in within a few months and conditions became particularly brutal, with temperatures often dropping tens of degrees below zero freezing and men stood in place hoping only to stand; it had become that most horror inflicting thing, we were back to the stagnated trench warfare of the Great War but in conditions which made the mud of the Somme appears to be a swanning picnic.
It was on November 23 1942 that at Kalach the Soviets sealed the ring around us. We were forced to take up positions on the open steppe and sanitation became a thing of our past. We learned later that Hitler himself ordered us to hold the city and set in motion Operation Winter Storm; the airlifts of supplies were only intermittently successful and disease, dysentery, and starvation ravaged our men. We learned later that Hitler had said that the Sixth Army is dug in and will defend the stronghold! I can tell you from a eyewitness position that such an order must have seemed the height of madness, but then in retrospect on those icy days and nightmarish nights of bloody phantasmagoria how much of Hitler seems like madness? Was it madness when the beggar said he was going to rule the world?; Was it madness when he said his small party would scale the heights? Was it madness when he said that he would break out of the ring of Jewish control that was encircling the world? Divine madness perhaps, because in the end only facts on the ground prove anything. Once can meticulously describe the litany of our pain: conditions in Stalingrad had been unbearable for a long time. Once cut off and isolated, the deprivation only increased. Half a million men had bludgeoned each other and the cityscape for months, with artillery and bombs obliterating city block after city block. A large portion of the pocket was outside the city proper on the steppe that surrounded Stalingrad, and conditions were no better there. Trees did not grow on the windswept steppe, so there was no firewood to gather. There were no prepared positions, so dugouts had to be blasted in the frozen earth with explosives. There were some burned-out and deserted tanks left over from earlier battles; these became firing positions and provided some shelter. Food quickly became scarce, forcing cooks to slaughter draught horses to feed the troops. There were constant Soviet probing attacks around the entire perimeter, so none of the German units could conserve ammunition; they were always under pressure. The drops from the skies, when our planes could even give in were of little help; no, on those days the only help was to become a machine, a machine of survival, and the memory of what we were there for, the love of our people, and the dim image of the future.
As a requisitely trained historian of the realm I have of course read the accounts of Operation Winter Storm and Operation Thunderclap. I take them with a grain of salt, however well intentioned. To me that is all a dream, a paper dream of maneuvers and strategies, bearing only a tangential relationship to what was accomplished and what we lived as our experience; we learn from the archives that Manstein learned that amid the doom and gloom that the 6th Panzer Division had delivered a stunning victory, that in a two-day running battle north of Kotelnikovo, the division virtually destroyed the Soviet IV Cavalry Corps; the 85th Cavalry Division was smashed, its commander killed, the 115th Cavalry Division decimated and its commander killed, and 56 tanks of 65th Tank Brigade destroyed. The corps commander escaped by swimming the river, but his entire staff was captured. The only significant group to escape was a troop mounted on camels, as they were the only ones able to freely negotiate the extensive marshlands in the area. There was also good news from the pocket. After a week of one attack after another without any apparent effect, the assaults were slackening. The brave defenders of Stalingrad had done an outstanding job parrying one thrust after another, eliminating one penetration after another, surrendering not one meter of ground.
One could go on and on indefinitely and get not whit closer to the truth; history is not only the mother of truth but is in the mind’s eye of the beholder and I can tell you true what it was like; of more interest to me is how it appeared to us; from the dying fields and the pounding alarm we seemed to suddenly feel that we were beginning to break free, out of the dim and fiery and smoky mist opening after opening appeared and what had been a brutal army in front seemed to dissipate in the mist. Moses never made it to the Promised Land because we are promised nothing; the promise is what we make it; and the water never parted to let that army through because great nature does not collude in fantasies; no, this was what we had done, what we had done by the sheer strength of implacable tenacity alone, by the utter power of an iron will, out manned, with no the equipment shipped in from the West, by all lights it should have been us on the ash heap of history just as prophesied from a reading room in London. But, my friends, my comrades, my brothers, I was there and saw it with my own two eyes, which is the only unimpeachable source there is. Read the history books by all means if there is any lingering fog in your eyes; but remember that it was the spirit of our nation and not marks on paper which eluded the enemy in time. And as we bore down what that gap meant, what that opening meant, what the clear sky seen through the changing clouds and the wild alarm meant, what it meant was victory. Long was the time in that hellish inferno—but conquering it came to pass. And anyone who tells you they know how it happened has no idea.
It was this why I begged off seeing the images of synthetic reality of this battle-----it seemed so unreal that no machine of fog and fire could make it any more eerie or supernatural. I had pictures in my head which were so garish and gaudy that it was always going to be unreproduceable. It was as if reality itself had been shaken and all the past was now a dream, and as we grouped together to see what there was to see it was like I saw my men for the very first time, and they saw me for the very first time—and we saw the earth and the land for the first time; and the sky above had been new born. This might have lasted two hours, this fugue like state which we all were in and as more companies and tanks came in we could see that their goggling expression showed that they were participating in it as well, as if we were now all on Holiday, and the festivities were just up ahead in the East. And so in daze we all began to head off to see if our leaders could be found to give us orders, but we knew what they would be. To set the earth on fire and to engage in an orgy of homicidal rage, to make reality incarnadine. As I moved forward I seemed to see other scenes as well, high northern plains on starlit nights, where solid stones were which in their massiveness touched the sun in its flight. We were reeling and we were moving again, and a murderous rage filled our hearts with no compunction. And one among us gave us the watchword of cruelty; that we had been fired in the forge and we recalled Himmler telling us that this was a new kind of war, a war to the knife, but we needed no remembered speech to tell us what we had just been through, we needed no ghost from hell to tell us that the life had left the building and that only a savage fury of death could light the way. When the elders had been children they had not taught them this, but then we had our great teacher nature which had schooled and steeled us; and we had nothing left to learn and no one harbored any idea of returning to childhood scenes. A river of blood ran scarlet before us and we reveled in wading in it---for on a field of black gules always bleeds down and down and anyone who tells you any different has yet to conceptualize victory. History has many cunning passages and forced corridors deceive us by vanities: but no deception here! Just a pure crystal vision! And by the time we were done and had got there the spires of Moscow were not burning; we had not expected fierce firefights and we were correct. We simply sat down in the unoccupied buildings and began doing business, imbuing them with life. An eerie kind of quiet pervaded the place and our emotions having run riot we had been becalmed too. It was all a thing of the past now, no more important than any other thing dredged up from the womb of time. One could write about it, or remember it; but when the processing is instantaneous it seems moot. So strange you know: Victory.
I once spoke of all this to an American colleague—who though he admired the society we had built wondered if it was, as the Americans say, worth the flame. As we had a habit of speaking freely I told him that he had yet to be coordinated—that the Americas had had it too good for too long and in truth had entered into the future on our coattails. I reminded him that the savage homicidal fury we exhibited—for that is what it was, Sade that old ideal game player would have blushed---was the work of the coming race and the coming man, and that whether we were—or are!—human is a question for the academic playing his twaddling parlor games. I reminded him of the vacillating Jefferson who posed a false binary: holding the wolf by the ears or letting it go. There is always a third option I told him. Kill it. That’s what the wolf does. And I told him the tale of Celine as well, and that for the sake of it a friend of mine visited Junger in the mid-sixties just to see how the old codger was getting along. The erstwhile scribbler had to admit that he was a great admirer of our society but was discomfited by what it entailed. It was then that he told his interlocutor that while he was whiling his merry time on the Left Bank in contemplation of Beauty he had been suddenly accosted by Celine, one he took to be a mad and grimacing man fit to for the strait jacket and the asylum. Celine had castigated him for lounging about in the smoke of cigarettes while the Jews still roamed the earth. He had been exhorted by the novelist to begin crazed killing sprees of maddening giddy lust—and Junger had tried to reason with him but to no avail. Junger then said that often he ponders this scene and wonders who was the lunatic—him or the madman. By now of course every schoolboy knows the answer.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Fourteen)
