One of the greatest problems with allied armies was confusion. Front-line units were continually being shelled or bombed by their own allies. ‘God help us and make this battle short,’ wrote Corporal Balogh. ‘Everyone is bombing and shelling us.’ Less than a week later, he wrote: ‘Oh God, stop this terrible war. If we are to take part in it for much longer our nerve will break… Will we ever again have a nice pleasant Sunday at home? Will we have the chance to lean on our gates again? Will they remember us at home?’ Morale became so low that the Hungarian military authorities forbade soldiers to write home in case it led to severe unrest back in Budapest. Even bribery failed to work. Before the next attack, the soldiers were encouraged ‘with the best meal possible—chocolate slabs, preserves, lard, sugar and goulash’, but most of them suffered badly from stomach-ache afterwards, because ‘a man here isn’t accustomed to such a meal’.
‘The Russians have remarkable marksmen,’ wrote Balogh on 15 September. ‘God, don’t let me be their target. We are facing the best Russian units,’ added the ill-informed corporal, ‘Siberian riflemen under the command of Timoshenko. We are cold, but it is not winter yet. What would happen in winter if we are left to stay here? Help us, Blessed Virgin, to return home.’ The next day’s entry—another plea to ‘God and the Blessed Virgin’—was the very last. Balogh’s diary, retrieved from his body near the bank of the Don, was translated into Russian a few days later at the headquarters of General Vatutin’s South-West Front and sent to Moscow.
The Italian 8th Army, which held the Don flank between the Hungarians and the 3rd Romanian Army, had caused concern to the Germans ever since late August. Führer headquarters was forced to agree that XXIX Army Corps should be used to strengthen the Italian defence. Its staff issued the following advice to liaison officers: ‘You should treat them politely, and a political and psychological understanding is necessary… The climate and environment in Italy makes an Italian soldier different from a German soldier. Italians tire more easily on one hand, and on the other they are more exuberant. You should not be superior towards our Italian allies who came here fearlessly into hard and unfamiliar conditions to help us. Don’t call them rude names, and don’t be sharp with them.’ Understanding did little to change the Italians’ manifest lack of enthusiasm for the war. A sergeant, when asked by a Soviet interpreter why his whole battalion surrendered without firing a shot, replied with sound civilian logic: ‘We did not fire back because we thought it would be a mistake.’
The Sixth Army, in a show of Anti-Comintern unity, even had an allied unit in the form of the 369th Croatian Regiment attached to the Austrian 100th Jäger Division. On 24 September, the Poglavnik of Croatia, Dr Ante Pavelić, arrived by air to inspect his troops and present medals. He was greeted by General Paulus and a guard of honour provided by Luftwaffe ground troops.
Strategically, the most important allied formations were the two Romanian armies on either flank of Paulus’s Sixth Army. Not only were they ill-equipped, they were not even up to strength. The Romanian regime, under pressure from Hitler to provide more troops, had drafted more than 2,000 civilian convicts sentenced for rape, looting and murder. Half of them were sent to 991 Special Straf-battalion, but so many deserted on its first encounter with the enemy that the unit was disbanded, and the remainder transferred to the 5th Infantry Division on the Don Front opposite Serafimovich.
Romanian officers appear to have been unusually paranoid about the enemy infiltration of their rear. Outbreaks of dysentery were regarded with more than suspicion. ‘Russian agents’, declared a warning circular from 1st Romanian Infantry Division, ‘have been carrying out mass poisonings in the rear to cause casualties among our troops. They use arsenic, one gram of which is enough to kill ten people.’ The poison was supposedly concealed in matchboxes, and the ‘agents’ were identified as ‘women, cooks and helpers connected with the provision of food’.
Germans of all ranks who came in contact with their allies were often dismayed at the way in which Romanian officers treated their men. They had an attitude of ‘lords and vassals’. An Austrian count, Lieutenant Graf Stolberg, reported: ‘Above all the officers were no good… they did not take any interest in their men.’ A pioneer corporal from 305th Infantry Division noticed that the Romanian field kitchens prepared three sets of meals—‘one for officers, one for NCOs and one for the men, who got only a little to eat’.
Relations between the two allies were expressed in frequent brawls. ‘To avoid in future lamentable incidents and misunderstandings between Romanian and German soldiers, whose friendship is sealed with blood shed in the common cause on the field of battle,’ the commander-in-chief of the Third Romanian Army recommended the organization of ‘visits, dinners, parties, small feasts and so on, so that Romanian and German units should establish a closer spiritual link’.
During the early autumn of 1942, Red Army intelligence officers had only an inkling of the Wehrmacht’s dependence on ‘Hiwis’—short for ‘Hilfswillige’ or volunteer helper. While some were genuine volunteers, most were Soviet prisoners of war, drafted from camps to make up shortages in manpower, primarily as labourers, but increasingly even in combat duties.
Colonel Groscurth, the chief of staff of XI Corps in the greater Don bend, observed in a letter to General Beck: ‘It is disturbing that we are forced to strengthen our fighting troops with Russian prisoners of war, who already are being turned into gunners. It’s an odd state of affairs that the “Beasts” we have been fighting against are now living with us in the closest harmony.’ Sixth Army had over 50,000 Russian auxiliaries attached to its front-line divisions, representing over a quarter of their strength. The 71st and the 76th Infantry Divisions had over 8,000 Hiwis each, roughly the same number of men, by mid-November, as their total German strength. (There is no figure for the number of Hiwis attached to the rest of the Sixth Army and other ancillary formations, which, according to some estimates, would bring the total to over 70,000.)
‘Russians in the German Army can be divided into three categories,’ a captured Hiwi told his NKVD interrogator. ‘Firstly, soldiers mobilized by German troops, so-called Cossack sections, which are attached to German divisions. Secondly, Hilfswillige made up of local people or Russian prisoners who volunteer, or those Red Army soldiers who desert to join the Germans. This category wears full German uniform, with their own ranks and badges. They eat like German soldiers and are attached to German regiments. Thirdly, there are Russian prisoners who do the dirty jobs, kitchens, stables and so on. These three categories are treated in different ways, with the best treatment naturally reserved for the volunteers. The ordinary soldiers treated us well, but the worst treatment came from officers and NCOs in an Austrian division.’
This particular Hiwi had been one of eleven Russian prisoners taken from the camp at Novo-Aleksandrovsk, at the end of November 1941, to work for the German Army. Eight were shot when they collapsed on the march from starvation. This survivor was attached to a field kitchen with an infantry regiment, where he peeled potatoes. Then he was transferred to looking after horses. Many of the so-called Cossack units formed for anti-partisan and rear-area repression, which he mentioned, contained a high proportion of Ukrainians and Russians. Hitler loathed the idea of Untermensch Slavs in German uniforms, so they had to be redefined as Cossacks, who were considered racially acceptable. This reflected the fundamental disagreement between the Nazi hierarchy, obsessed with the total subjugation of the Slav, and professional army officers who believed that their only hope was to act as the liberators of Russia from Communism. As early as the autumn of 1941, German Army intelligence had come to the conclusion that the Wehrmacht could not possibly win in Russia unless it turned the invasion into another civil war.