Destination Stalingrad

Destination Stalingrad is a war novel that is entirely concerned with non-English speaking people. Due primarily to this fact, detailed literary coverage in English is rather limited and for certain significant events, nonexistent. From the middle of the last century these events still loom menacingly and will not be ignored. The largest armies ever assembled on earth were involved in an unparalleled level of ferocity. As we now are well aware, it was total war!

This story deals with the most dramatic five months of that epic four-year struggle. This was the period from mid-July through mid-December in the fateful year of 1942, which was known by the Nazi invaders as “Case Blau” (Code Blue). The result of this directive was a climatic battle at the river Volga in the industrial city named by and for Joseph Stalin.

I probe some of the decisions made by Adolf Hitler while at his headquarters in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. Specifically, the plot analyzes the actions of a young German battalion commander who halted his successful assault while directly above the underground command post of the defending Russian General, Vassili Ivanovich Chuikov.

No military historian has been able to identify the German officer that led the assault team at the Russian general’s headquarters located behind the huge Red October Factory on the western slopes of the Volga River. General Chuikov has written that just such an event did take place in his The Battle for Stalingrad. With literary license I now identify the German officer as Major Walter Brennan, commander of the 2nd Infantry Battalion, 191st Infantry Regiment, 71st Infantry Division. His story is told to us primarily through his surviving battalion sergeant major, Detrich Krieger, along with the liberal use of third person omniscient narrative.

Shortly after his arrival in Poltava, Ukraine, in July 1942, Walter met and became enchanted by a beautiful Eurasian woman named Sonya Morozov who was living with her grandfather in Poltava. Raised in the Siberian city of Irkutsk near magnificent Lake Baikal, Sonya had come to the Ukraine to further her education at the University of Poltava. She stayed with her grandfather too long ad became trapped under the German occupation. Although she was only 21 the Russian beauty was mature, intelligent and quite sophisticated. She surprisingly accepted the advances of the young German officer and their romance, intensified by the demands of war, became a consuming preoccupation that led to dramatic developments.

Sonya followed her officer across the Lugansk Steppe to the city of Millerovo where they parted in a poignant and passionate farewell. Walter then moved east across the arid Don Steppe with his infantry company. Sonya was led to the southeast through the deserted agricultural plains between the two giant German army groups. The plan for her escape had been carefully worked out between Walter and one of his battalion clerks. Sonya was later reportedly assaulted and murdered by four black uniformed SS soldiers of Einsatzgruppe D who were investigating a report of desertion concerning her traveling companion. She actually has escaped through the Nazi occupied area with considerable help from her companion Wehrmacht Sergeant Heinrich Stemple. Although Stemple was twice her age, a powerful love interest inevitably developed during their harrowing survival trek across Southwestern Russia. Stemple accompanied the beautiful woman all the way to Irkutsk. He had previously planned to desert the morally disgraced German Army.

Sergeant Stemple had a wife and two daughters back in Germany and the amorous relationship between the two fugitives became predictably complicated.

Walter, who was by the time promoted to major and given command of Second Battalion, heard the false account of the atrocity concerning her Sonya and Heinrich Stemple. By then he had endured weeks of heavy fighting on the eastern steppe and in the rubble-stre