Читать книгу Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams - Paul Martin - Страница 35

O, I have passed a miserable night,

So full of fearful dreams, of ugly sights

William Shakespeare, Richard III (1591)

Prolonged sleep deprivation, uncontrollable stress and starvation make a lethal cocktail, as Hitler’s troops found to their cost during the Battle of Stalingrad in World War Two. In June 1941 German forces invaded the Soviet Union and were soon threatening Moscow. The capture of Stalingrad on the River Volga became a key strategic objective. Stalin decreed that the city must be defended to the bitter end. The titanic struggle that ensued cost the lives of at least 800,000 Axis soldiers and 1.1 million Soviet soldiers.

The fight for Stalingrad (now renamed Volgograd) began in earnest in the summer of 1942, as the Germans advanced rapidly towards its suburbs. There was fierce Soviet resistance and the fighting dragged on into the harsh Russian winter. By September 1942 the battle was being waged at close quarters among the buildings, cellars, sewers and bunkers of ‘the Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting’.

To increase the pressure on their opponents, the Soviet commanders ordered continual raids to be carried out by night. They did this partly because the Germans lacked protection from their air force at night, but mainly to induce exhaustion among the enemy. To augment the night raids, the Soviets fired flares indicating that an attack was imminent even when it was not. Their air force also attacked German positions every night. The Soviets kept up the psychological pressure throughout the night, with loudspeakers blaring out propaganda broadcasts, surreal tango music, or the sound of a ticking clock. The strategy was highly effective. ‘We lie exhausted in our holes waiting for them,’ wrote one German soldier. The German commanders begged for air support, citing their men’s exhaustion.

The German troops’ health started to deteriorate badly even before the dreadful Russian winter had begun to bite. There was a sharp rise in deaths from infectious diseases including dysentery, typhus and paratyphus. The actual prevalence of these diseases was not much worse than it had been a year earlier, but the numbers of infected men who were dying from them increased fivefold. It was as though the German soldiers had lost their capacity to resist infection. The Russians noticed this phenomenon, which they referred to as ‘the German sickness’.

In November 1942 the Russians launched a huge and ultimately successful counteroffensive that soon had the Germans encircled within the ruined city. But the Germans were under orders from Hitler not to surrender, and so they fought on through December while the Russians gradually tightened the noose. Conditions for the German troops became appalling as their supply lines were cut off and the Russian winter froze them. There was hardly any food and little or no medical care.

In mid-December 1942 the German military doctors in Stalingrad noticed a new phenomenon: more and more apparently healthy troops were suddenly dying for no obvious reason. The Germans were unsure whether the deaths were the result of starvation, exposure, exhaustion or an unidentified disease. A German army pathologist named Girgensohn, who was sent to Stalingrad to investigate the problem, became convinced that a combination of exhaustion, stress, cold and lack of food was responsible for the much higher death rate. The Russian night attacks and round-the-clock activity had caused severe sleep deprivation, and Girgensohn concluded that this had amplified the effects of the food shortage by ‘upsetting the metabolism’ of the exhausted Germans. We know now that one symptom of prolonged sleep deprivation is a marked increase in metabolic rate and hence the requirement for food. Whatever the precise explanation, the pressure was too much for the Germans. In February 1943 the Battle of Stalingrad finally ground to a halt, as the crushed and starving remnants of the German army surrendered.