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lUUSTRATED HISTORY OFWORID WAR ilBallantine War 27904 ^g) $2.95 in U.S.A $3.25 in Canada

Stolingrod: The turning point

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Ihe lumiig pointGeoffrey lukes

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Editor-in-Chief: Barrie PittArt Director : Peter Dunbar

Military Consultant : Sir Basil Liddell HartPicture Editor: Robert Hunt

Design Assistants: Gibson MarshCover: Denis PiperResearch Assistant : Yvonne MarshCartographer: Richard NatkielSpecial Drawings: John Batchelor

Photographs for this book were especially selected from the following Archives : from left to right page 12-13 Ullstein

;

18-19 Suddeutscher Verlag : 22-23 Sado Opera Mundi : 25 Sado Opera Mundi : 26 Sado Opera Mundi : 27 Sado Opera Mundi

:

29 Sado Opera Mundi ; 31 Keystone ; 36-37 Sado Opera Mundi ; 38-39 Sado Opera Mundi ; 42 SuddVerlag Ullstein : 46 Ullstein

;

47 Sado Opera Mundi Sudd. Verlag Sado Opera Mundi : 48 Sado Opera Mundi : 48-49 Ullstein : 49 Sado Opera Mundi ; 50 SadoOpera Mundi : 52 Sado Opera Mundi : 54 Sado Opera Mundi : 57 Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte Sudd. Verlag; 58-59 Sudd.VerlagBibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte : 62 Imperial War Museum : 64 Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte Sado Opera Mundi ; 66 Novosti

;

68 Sado Opera Mundi Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte; 70 Ullstein; 71 Sudd.Verlag Sado Opera Mundi; 72-73 IWM; 74-75 SadoOpera Mundi Ullstein; 77 Sado Opera Mundi ; 78 VHU Praha; 79 Sado Opera Mundi; 80 Sado Opera Mundi ; 81 VHU Praha;82 Sado Opera Mundi ; 83 VHU Praha; 87 Ullstein Novosti IWM; 88 NTIU Praha; 88-89 NTIU Praha; 89 VHU Praha; 91 Sudd.Verlag Ullstein ; 92 Sado Opera Mundi ; 93 Sado Opera Mundi ; 94-95 Ullstein ; 97 Sado Opera Mundi Bundesarchiv

;

98 Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte Sado Opera Mundi; 100 Bundesarchiv; 101 Sudd. Verlag; 104-105 Sudd. Verlag; 107 NovostiIWM VHU Praha; 110 Sado Opera Mundi; 111 Sado Opera Mundi; 112 Novosti Sudd.Verlag; 113 Ullstein; 114 IWM; 115 IWM;116-117 Sudd. Verlag; 118-119 Zennaro; 120 VHU Praha; 121 \'HU Praha; 125 Zennaro VHU Praha; 126-127 Novosti ; 128 VHUPraha ; 131 Sado Opera Mundi ; 133 Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte VHU Praha ; 134 VHU Praha ; 135 Novosti ; 137 Sado OperaMundi ; 139 Novosti ; 140 IWM Sado Opera Mundi ; 143 Ullstein ; 144 Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte Ullstein ; 145 Ullstein

;

146 Ullstein: 147 Zennaro; 148 Ullstein Novosti ; 148-149 VHU Praha; 150-151 Novosti; 153 Novosti Sudd. Verlag: 156-157

Novosti ; 158-159 Sudd.Verlag.

Copyright© 1968 by Geoffrey Jukes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the

United States by Ballantine Books, a division of

Random House, Inc., New York, and simultane-

ously in Canada by Ballantine Books of Canada,Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

ISBN 0-345-27904-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition : September 1968Fourth Printing : November 1978

Contents

8 'Why Stalingrad?'

22 'The Russian is finished'

40 Yeremenko takes over

54 Death of a city

62 'Every German must feel he lives under the muzzle of a Russian gun'

84 Hitler changes the team

104 'There'll be a holiday in our street, too'

116 Zhukov springs the trap

130 'VI Army will still be in position at Easter'

142 Annihilation

160 Bibliography

Stalingrad

The critical battleIntroduction by Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart

Stalingrad was the most long drawn-out battle of the Second World War,and proved the most crucial. GeoffreyJukes, who has made a distinguishedmark as an expert on the EasternFront, has written an account of this

momentous struggle that is worthyof its theme.After the narrow failure of Hitler's

invasion of Russia in 1941 the GermanArmy no longer had the strength andresources for a renewed offensive of

that year's scale, but Hitler was un-willing to stay on the defensive andconsolidate his gains. So he searchedfor an offensive solution that withlimited means might promise morethan a limited result. No longerhaving the strength to attack alongthe whole front, he concentrated onthe southern part, with the aim of

capturing the Caucasus oil - whicheach side needed if it was to maintainits full mobility. If he could gain thatoil, he might subsequently turn northonto the rear of the thus immobilisedRussian armies covering Moscow, or

even strike at Russia's new war-industries that had been establishedin the Urals. The 1942 offensive was,however, a greater gamble than thatof the previous year because, if it

were to be checked, the long flank of

this southerly drive would be exposedto a counterstroke anywhere along its

thousand-mile stretch.

Initially, the German Blitzkrieg

technique scored again - its fifth

distinct and tremendous success since

the conquest of Poland in 1939. Aswift break-through was made on theKursk-Kharkov sector, and thenGeneral Ewald von Kleist's 1st PanzerArmy swept like a torrent along the

corridor between the Don and theDonetz rivers. Surging across theLower Don, gateway to the Caucasus,it gained the more westerly oilfields

around Maikop in six weeks.The Russians' resistance had crum-

bled badly under the impact of theBlitzkrieg, and Kleist had met little

opposition in the later stages of his

drive. This was Russia's weakest hour.Only an instalment of her freshlyraised armies was yet ready for action,

and even that was very short of equip-ment, especially artillery.

Fortunately for Russia, Hitler split

his effort between the Caucasus andStalingrad on the Volga, gateway to

the north and the Urals. Moreoverwhen the first attacks on Stalingrad,by Paulus's 6th Army, were checkedin mid-July - although narrowlychecked. Hitler increasingly drainedhis forces in the Caucasus to reinforce

the divergent attack on Stalingrad.This was by name, 'the city of Stalin'

so Hitler could not bear to be defied

by it - and became obsessed by it. Hewore down his forces in the prolongedeffort to achieve its capture, losing

sight of his initial prime aim, the vital

oil supplies of the Caucasus. WhenKleist drove on from Maikop towardsthe main oilfields, his army met in-

creasing resistance from local troops,

fighting now to defend their homes,while itself being depleted in favour of

Paulus's bid to capture Stalingrad.

At Stalingrad the Russians'

resistance hardened with repeated

hammering, while the directness, andconsequent obviousness, of the Ger-

man attacks there simplified the

Russian Higher Command's problemin meeting the threat. The Germans'concentration at Stalingrad also, andincreasingly, drained reserves fromtheir flank-cover, which was already

strained by having to stretch so far -

nearly 400 miles from Voronezh alongthe Don to the point where it nears

the Volga at Stalingrad, and as far

again from there to the Terek in the

Caucasus. A realisation of the risks

led the German General Staff to tell

Hitler in August that it would be

impossible to hold the line of the Donas a defensive flank, during the winter- but the warning was ignored by himin his obsession with capturing

Stalingrad,The Russian defenders' position

there came to look more and moreimperilled, even desperate, as the

circle contracted and the Germanscame closer to the heart of the city.

The most critical moment was onOctober 14th. The Russians now hadtheir backs so close to the Volgathat they had no room to practise

shock-absorbing tactics, and sell

ground to gain time. But beneath the

surface, basic factors were working in

their favour. The German attackers'

morale was being sapped by their

heavy losses, and a growing sense of

frustration, so that they were becom-ing ripe for the counter-offensive that

the Russians were preparing to launch- with new armies, against the Germanflanks which were held by Rumanianand other allied troops of poorerquality. This counter-offensive waslaunched on November 19th.

Wedges were driven into the flanks

at several places, so as to isolate

Paulus's 6th Army. By the 23rd the

encirclement was complete, more thanquarter of a million German and allied

troops being thus cut off. Hitler wouldpermit no withdrawal, and relieving

attempts in December were repulsed.

Even then Hitler was reluctant to

permit the 6th Army to try to break-out westward before it was too late,

and air supply had proved inadequate.The end came - the end of a battle of

over six months' duration - with the

surrender of Paulus and the bulk of

what remained of his exhausted andnear-starving army on January 31st,

although an isolated remnant in a

northerly pocket held out for two dayslonger.Geoffrey Jukes's book benefits from

his extensive knowledge of Russiansources, especially the six-volumeHistory of the Great Patriotic War of

the USSR, as well as the memoirs of

some of the military leaders that havebeen published since then.

That official history provided muchmore factual evidence than the purelypropagandist accounts published in

the wartime and early post-war years.

It corrected the absurdly exaggeratedpicture of Stalin's dominant influence

on the struggle previously prevailing.

But it should be borne in mind thatthe revised account was produced in

Kruschev's period and with his back-ing - so that it tended to emphasise,and over-emphasise, his influence onthe Stalingrad struggle while be-

littling that of Stalin. Moreover the

influence of Marshal Zhukov, whichhad been relegated to the backgroundin Stalin's time but was becomingmentioned afresh after Stalin's death,

was again being put in the shade byKruschev and his sychophants. SinceKruschev's overthrow it has come to

receive its due share of recognition,

following the publication, in 1965, of a

one-volume history that while sum-merising the earlier six-volumehistory considerably revised its

content and conclusions. MoreoverZhukov himself was allowed, or evenencouraged, to produce his ownmemoirs, and these, significantly,

contradict a number of assertions in

Marshal Chuikov's earlier account of

the Battle of Stalingrad.

This long process of tampering withhistory, and perverting it for propa-

gandist aims, should be borne in mindwhen studying narratives and state-

ments from Russian sources. It also

compels caution in regard to anyfigures of strength or casualties given

in them, even though they may appearmore factual than the broader figures

published earlier.

'Why Slalingrad?'

The great plain of Europe stretchesfrom the coast of the English Channelacross the Low Countries, Germany,Poland, and the Soviet Union to thefoothills of the Urals. Occasionally, asif about to change its character, it

gathers into the folds of undulatinghills, but always it subsides again intomonotonous flatness. Bounded on thenorth by the sea, and on the south -

at least until the Ukraine - by moun-tains, it has for centuries been thestage on which first the tribes of

Europe, Celt, Teuton, and Slav, thenthe fanatics of religion, and finally themore formalised, but no less warlike,armies of the national states whichsucceeded them, have enacted thegory dramas in which European his-

tory so deplorably abounds.Inevitably in the absence of com-

manding heights, the most importantdefensive .barriers of the plain are its

great rivers - Rhine, Elbe, Oder,Vistula, Bug, Dvina, Dniestr, Dniepr,Don,Volga,and their tributaries-whichflow across it to north or south. And it

was on the banks of the mightiest of

these, the Volga, and its scarcely less

great neighbour, the Don, that the

great complex of battles knownto history as 'Stalingrad' took placein late 1942 and early 1943. Here wherethe immense cornfields of the Ukrainegive way to the ravines and gullies ofthe Volga basin, the armies of twomilitant ideologies clashed in a fight

for possession of a city, not originallyconsidered a prime military objective,but which by the symbolism of its

name and the doggedness of its de-fence came to dominate the efi'orts ofboth sides, and brought the Naziattempt to forge an Empire in the Eastcrashing down in ruins.

Not that this was the first time theRed Army had brought the Germansto a halt. The irresistible tide ofGerman conquest had poured overEuropean Russia throughout the sum-mer of 1941, as it had over WesternEurope in the previous year, anddivision after division of the ill-

equipped, ill-trained, and ill-led RedArmy had experienced the fate of thePoles, French, Dutch, Belgians, Yugo-slavs, and Greeks - encirclement andcapture. For them there had been, too,

the additional cross of barbaric ill-

treatment at the hands of their cap-

The Road to Stalingrad : German panzerin the drive to the Don

tors, as the Soviet Union was not asignatory of the Geneva Conventionon treatment of war prisoners, andbesides, the Russian shared bottomplace with the Jew in the obsceneracial pecking order of the Nazis, atthe pinnacle of which stood the'Herrenvolk' - the Master Race;German, of course. Thus the Germanrespect for legality, which at its

best ensured reasonably correct treat-

ment for those in Western Europe andScandinavia, but at its worst showed atendency to exalt the letter of the lawabove its spirit, met in the East in

unholy wedlock.There were no legal bars to the

application of Nazism in its full horrorto the helpless masses of Russianprisoners, and in the camps they diedin their hundreds of thousands. About5,500,000 officers and men of the RedArmy were captured in the course ofthe war, three-quarters of them in

1941, and about 4,000,000 of them weredead before the war reached its end.Treatment of the civilian populationwas little better, particularly once theGerman army had moved on to theeast and been succeeded by the civil

administration with its apparatus ofGestapo, special (execution) teamsand concentration camps.The result had been in the occupied

areas to stifle enthusiasm for Nazismas a deliverance from the horrors ofthe Stalin regime, and in the un-occupied areas to quicken the will toresist, for at least the draconianseverities of Stalinism were temperedby the promise of a better future, andsome signs of this had already begunto appear in the form of the industrialrevolution wrought under the Five-Year Plans. Stalin chastised them•with whips, but Hitler with scorpions,and Nazism offered for the Slav nofuture other than that of a helot inthe German farming colonies whichwere to be established in the East asthe granary of the 'Thousand-YearReich'.Though many individuals would

collaborate with the Germans becausethey believed a German victory in-

evitable, or because of the personalhardships they had suffered fromStalin's communism, or to feed theirfamilies, or be rid of the Russian yoke(this last consideration was particu-

larly strong among some of the non-Russian minorities which make upmore than a third of the Soviet popu-lation), for the bulk of the Russiansthe home-grown dictatorship wasmuch the lesser of two evils; and asevidence of Nazi atrocities was skil-fully publicised by the CommunistParty, and concessions were made tofoster patriotism and recruit religiousfeeling for the cause, the Soviet resis-tance hardened and the populationrallied round the figure of Stalin asthey had never done in peacetime.So despite brilliant victories in the

field in the summer and autumn of1941, the Germans found the Red Armyand the Stalin regime still untoppledas the winter approached. Of the threemajor objectives - Leningrad, Moscow,and Kiev, the first two were still un-taken when the winter approached,and what was more ominous, the hand-ling of Soviet troops by their seniorcommanders was noticeably gettingbetter, as the old Stalinist war-horseswere shunted away to the rear andtheir place taken by younger men witha more up-to-date outlook and betterprofessional grounding in the militaryart.

Among these the most outstandingfigure was undoubtedly the ex-Chief ofGeneral Staff". Army General GeorgyKonstantinovich Zhukov, and it washis decisiveness and ability to enforcehis personality on events which nowbrought him to the fore. In October1941, Stalin sent him to Leningrad,where in a three-day whirlwind ofactivity he organised order out of thechaos of the defence organisation, andimposed a solution which in the handsof others proved capable of with-standing a siege of more than 9(X) days.From there he was summoned urgent-ly back to Moscow, which was in

imminent danger of capture, and herehis actions and advice as commanderof West Front (the Army Groupdefending the city) and as a memberof Stavka (the General Headquarters)not only succeeded in fending theGermans off" from the capital, butexploited the weather and the Germanexhaustion- to improvise a counter-ofi"ensive which flung the Wehrmachtright back on its heels, brought its

General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov

10

11.

The first Winter in Russia caught the

Germans too thinly clad

Army Group Centre to the brink of

disintegration, and inflicted on Ger-many its first major defeat on land in

the entire war. Never after this wasthe German army able to mount astrategic off"ensive along the entire

front as it had done in 1941.

But eventually the Zhukov off'ensive

petered out for lack of resources, andboth sides paused to take stock. Forthe German generals, the experienceseems not to have been fully digested.

They could rationalise the defeat asbeing due to Hitler's vacillations overpriorities, or to the mud of autumn or

to the snow and ice of the winter - as if

Stalin had never handicapped the RedArmy's generals by vacillation orwrong decision, as if the autumn rainand winter snow had not fallen onHerrenvolk and Untermensch alike;

and as if the sending of German troopson an essentially high-speed mobileoperation in weather which froze their

lubricants solid so that their vehicleswould not move, so that their gunscould not be fired until each shell or

12

cartridge had been individually scra-

ped clear of the frozen grease whichmade it too large for the breech, wasnot in itself a negation ofgood general-ship for which they were themselvesresponsible.

If the Soviet troops were properlyclad for the winter, while the Germanswere not, this was somehow to be laid

at someone else's door. It was as if

Stalin, with his passion for secrecy,

had managed to conceal not only thestrength of the Red Army's reserves,

but the severity of the Russian win-ter; anyway, when the good cam-paigning weather returned in thespring, it would all be difi"erent. It

had not been Soviet generalshipwhich won the Moscow battle for

them, it had been 'General Winter*with some help from the Fiihrer; andin the meantime, German troops hadgained some useful experience ofdefensive fighting which had beenlacking from their ofl'ensive-mindedtraining.So reassured the German generals,

missed the main lesson of the wintercampaign - that the entire campaignin the East depended on overcoming

tne Red Army before it developed theability to cope with fast-movingarmoured warfare, and that in essencethis meant overcoming it before thewinter of 1941. Already there had beenevidence that the ruinous Sovietattempts to stand fast, with theinevitable consequence of encircle-ment, were being abandoned underthe influence of better thinkingstimulated by manpower shortage,and that when the Russians had fully

absorbed the lessons of the summer(Zhukov undoubtedly had, as wasshown by his order during the Moscowcounteroff"ensive which categoricallyforebade frontal attacks againststrongpoints, enjoining the use of by-passing tactics instead), the RedArmy would, in the new campaigningseason, prove harder to catch.For its part, the Soviet leadership,

and Stalin in particular, over-estimated the significance of thechange in the strategic balance, justas the Germans underestimated it,

and planned to follow up Zhukov'ssuccess with a strategic ofi"ensive

along the whole front; and it was onJanuary 5th, 1942, that the chain of

decision which made the Battle ofStalingrad inevitable really began tobe forged. On that day Zhukov wassummoned from his headquarters ofWest Front (in Soviet military par-lance 'Front' means an Army Group)to a meeting of Stavka, at which futureoperations were to be considered; andhere Stalin propounded a plan for ageneral ofi"ensive along the entirefront between Leningrad and theBlack Sea.Zhukov knew that although theGermans had just taken a nastybeating in the centre, and a lesser onein the south, they were still a strongand dangerous enemy, and he arguedfor a strong off"ensive confined to thecentre, where the German ArmyGroup Centre was in greatest disarray.But Stalin's mind was made up, andat the end of the meeting the Chiefof General Staff, Marshal Shapo-shnikov, told Zhukov 'You werewasting your time arguing; theSupremo had already decided. TheDirectives have already been issued .

.'

'Then why did he ask for ouropinions?'

'I don't know, my dear chap, I

don't know', said Shaposhnikov, andsighed. He did not favour the generaloffensive either.

A few days later the offensive waslaunched, but nowhere could it bestrong enough to ensure success.Everywhere it failed; in places it led

to disaster, with more armiessquandered, and the Red Army left

that much weaker to face the summer,worse still, the shaky morale of theGerman army was restored as it

fought its first large-scale defensiveactions of the war, and acquiredexperience which its offensive-orient-

ed training had not given it. Thus theRed Army lost its chance of a break-through in the centre, and a furthersummer campaign on Soviet territorybecame inevitable. Both sides beganto plan their offensives, and bothselected the southern sector of thefront for their main attacks.The winter's fighting had left the

front line very convoluted in shape;Leningrad was besieged, part of theCrimea was still in Soviet hands, andsouth of Kharkov was a large bulgein the line known as the 'Barvenkovosalient'. Thus the Stavka plan was for

13

the relief of Leningrad and the be-

sieged Crimean fortress and navalbase of Sebastopol, coupled with amajor attack out of and north of theBarvenkovo salient, the last of whichwas to be the centre-piece of theentire summer offensive and was to

aim at the recapture of Kharkov. It

was to be conducted by forces fromtwo Army Groups - South-West andSouth Fronts - under the command of

Marshal S. K. Timoshenko, a Civil

War veteran, who had become People'sCommissar for Defence after thedebacle of the winter war with Fin-land and carried out a ruthless re-

organisation of the Red Army.The offensive out of the Barvenkovo

salient was to take the form of a pincermovement by 6th Army (Lieutenant-General A M Gorodnyansky), whichwas to strike out of the north face of

the salient heading for Kharkov.From the Volchansk area north-eastof the city, Lieutenant-General D I

Ryabishev's 28th Army, with ele-

ments of the adjacent 2l5t and 38thArmies, would move down to meet 6thArmy. A combat group commandedby Major-General L V Bobkin wouldthrust west out of the salient towardsKrasnograd to protect the rear of 6thArmy as it headed north. And toensure that German forces on thesouth face of the salient were keptbusy the 9th Army (Major-GeneralF M Kharitonov) and 57th Army(Lieutenant-General K P Podlas) wereto mount limited offensives designedto pin them down.The plan was a fairly predictable

one, given the shape of the front lineand Kharkov's importance, both asthe second largest Soviet city inGerman hands and as a main centre ofGerman communications and supplyin the south. That, however, was notnecessarily fatal to its success; manyless imaginative moves have beensuccessful given the right conditions.Its really fatal flaw was more basic;it fitted, as if by design, into the Ger-man plans.Hitler's design for the summer was

much more ambitious than Stalin's,but before it could be put into effectthe Wehrmacht had some preliminaryoperations to carry out. The Sovietbridgehead in the Crimea was to beeliminated; so was the Barvenkovo

salient. Consequently, as Timoshenkobegan to pack the salient with assaultforces (including about 600 tanks,two-thirds of his total armour) soField-Marshal Fedor von Bock, com-manding Army Group South, wasconcentrating most of his VI Army(Colonel-General Friedrich vonPaulus) against its north face, andassembling his I PanzerArmy (Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist) oppositethe southern neck of it, at Barvenkovo,In short, Timoshenko's best weapons -

his T-34 medium and KV-1 heavytanks, superiors of any German tank -

were being committed to a punch intothin air against the lightly-heldeastern face of the salient, while thereal threat developed behind them inthe form of 'Operation Fridericus' -

the sealing off of the salient.Neither commander realised what

the other was up to, and had Bockbeen ready to go before Timoshenko's

FINLAND 300 Miles

500 Kms,

Sabastopoi*

BLACK SEA

mhLimit of German and Finnish advance Dec 5. 1941

Reoccupied by Russian forces December 6.1941

to end of April 1942

14

KV1 was to prove as effective

St''32Tons°Ipeed:33n,ph.Ar..our,n,ax,:1.8inchesat60«.Crew:4.

Armament : 1 x 76.2mm gun. 2 x 7.62mm mg

Weight°52rns. Speed : 22 mph. Armour (max) : 4.5 inches front. Crew:

5.

Armament : 1 x 76.2mm gun. 3 x 7.62mm mg

tanks were launched into the void,his Army Group South might havefound itself in serious trouble; but in

fact Timoshenko opened his offensive

on May 12th, 1942, about a week beforeBock was ready. At first, Timo-shenko's southern pincer appeared to

be going" well (although the northernone was in difficulty from the outset)and the only snag from Timoshenko 's

point of view was that the tankbrigades of his southern force did notseem to be encountering much opposi-tion. Where had the Germans gone?The question was answered on May

17th when probing patrols, sent out toestablish the identity and strengthof the German forces on the southernflank, came back with prisoners fromI Panzer Army. Realising that he hadwalked into a trap and that with everyhour that passed his armies wererolling deeper into danger, Timo-shenko telephoned Stavka, and soughtpermission to slow down the offensivewhile he regrouped to meet the newthreat. Permission was refused. Khar-kov must be recaptured.The Soviet offensive had not been

without its effects on Bock's peace ofmind. 'Fridericus' had been meant asa standard two-pronged operationwith thrusts from both north andsouth to pinch out the neck of thesalient, but it could no longer becarried out as such, because thenorthern neck, at Balakleya whichwas held by the XLIV InfantryDivision (a Viennese division of theformer Austrian Army) was undervery heavy Soviet pressure ; it was byno means certain that it could beheld, and certainly no offensive couldbe mounted from there.

With some trepidation Bock there-fore decided on a one-armed 'Frideri-

cus', carried out solely by I PanzerArmy from the south side of thesalient, with infantry support pro-vided by XVII Army. A force of twoPanzer, one motorised, and eightinfantry divisions was thereforeassembled south of Barvenkovo, andhurled into battle on the morning ofMay 17th, one day earlier than thetwo-pronged 'Fridericus' had been dueto start. There was some initial diffi-

culty in breaking through the Sovietpositions, but by the afternoon of the22nd, XIV Panzer Division had reached

the south bank of the northern Donetsat Bayrak, opposite the hard-pressedAustrians of XLIV Division. Thepocliiet was closed and inside it wasmost of Timoshenko's assault force,

for though he had managed on the 19thto obtain Stavka's permission toabandon the offensive and had sent hisdeputy, General Kostenko, forwardto organise the withdrawal, Kleisthad moved too fast for him.Some Red Army units managed to

fight their way out to the east, butmost of the forces in the pocket werecut to pieces, 29 Soviet divisions wereshattered, and many others severelymauled. Three armies had ceased to

exist - 6th, 9th, and 57th, togetherwith their commanders, except for

Kharitonov and his HQ of 9th Army,who were flown out at the last

moment; Kostenko was dead; Bobkinand his assault group were no more;9th Army, which had under Khari-tonov acquired an enviable record in

the defensive battles of the previousautumn, would be sorely missed in theprolonged defence which wouldfollow; two-thirds of the tanks weregone.

I I

Area occupied by German forces May 12/26, 1942

0=d Russian offensive

^m^ German counteroffensive May 17

e= =c> Retreating Russian army remnants

80 Miles

120 Kms.

16

And this had been only a tidying-upoperation; the main German offensive

was yet to come!Many of the German generals had

been opposed to the invasion of theSoviet Union, especially with theunsubdued British at their back andthe likelihood that Britain would in

due course provide the bases for aninvasion of the Continent, and of thewar on two fronts which Germany so

dreaded. Since the ambitious 1941

plan with its offensive along theentire front, had brought neither thepromised annihilation of the RedArmy nor the collapse of the Stalinregime, the planners had to lookmore closely at the military, political,

and economic premises of the war in

deciding where to mount their majoreffort with their now more limitedforces. Hitler, too, was preoccupiedwith political and economic realities -

since the failure of the Blitzkrieg in 1941

inevitably committed Germany to

a prolonged war, in which she now hadthree major industrial powers rangedagainst her, including the greatestcolossus of all, the United States.In the summer and autumn of 1941,

Stalin's regime had withstood shocksgreater than those which had toppledthe regime of the Tsars in the FirstWorld War. Apart from the reasonsalready discussed, and perhaps moreapparent to Hitler than to any of hisgenerals, was the fact that indus-trialisation had endowed Stalin withsinews of war such as no Tsar hadever had. Much of the new industrialmight of Russia - in particular thegreat steel plants of the Urals such,as those at Magnitogorsk - as out of

Germany's reach for the foreseeablefuture, and the Soviet ability toproduce tanks there was being supple-mented by machinery evacuated fromwestern industrial areas before theGermans arrived. In aircraft, too,

Soviet production was rising steadily.Thus, as Blitzkrieg tactics had failed

in 1941, the longer the Russian Bearremained unkilled, the more likely it

was that he would eventually over-throw his antagonist, especially nowthat much of America's industrialmight was behind him.But the Russian economic colossus

had a very marked Achilles' heel, inthat Soviet oil was mainly in the

Caucasus, and from the oilfields ofMaikop, Grozny, and Baku therewere only a handful of routes by whichit could reach distribution centresand eventually move the wheels andtracks of the Red Army. There wasthe rail link through Rostov. Therewas another, branching off the first

at Tikhoretsk and making its way toStalingrad, and a third went alongthe western shore of the Caspian Seafrom Baku to Grozny, and on toAstrakhan where it linked up with aline to Central Russia. Last and mostimportant was the mighty Volgaitself, along which the huge oil-bargesplied direct from Baku.Capture Rostov, and the first route

was cut. Take Maikop and Grozny,which were north of the Caucasusmountains, and the second and thirdrail routes would be severed. Establishtroops on the west bank of the Volga,and the last route would be cut,killing the Soviet economy and bring-ing the Red Army to a halt. Betterstill, if the Caucasus was crossed andBaku captured, Soviet oil would turnGermany's wheels and make it

possible for her to withstand a pro-

longed war, without having to dependon the Rumanian oilfields at Ploesti -

vulnerable as they were to attack bySoviet bombers from the Crimea(until the Soviet bridgehead therewas eliminated), or longer-rangeBritish or American aircraft from theMiddle East.Even by themselves, these were

persuasive reasons for Hitler to placethe emphasis of his 1942 campaignon the south; but there were others.Germany had both feet firmly plantedin the western part of the Kharkovindustrial area, but the eastern part -

the coal anji steel of the Donbass - wasstill under Soviet control. A drive tothe Volga would rip straight throughit, adding it to Germany's sources ofmilitary-industrial power.Furthermore, there were great poli-

tical benefits to be reaped from suc-cess in the south. Turkey might beinduced to abandon her neutrality,for though her government's policywas generally pro-Allied, there was agreat deal of goodwill there for Ger-many, based largely on the comrade-ship in arms of the First World War.By defeating the hereditary enemy of

17

Turkey and appearing on the Turko-Soviet border; furthermore, by cut-

ting the supply route from Americato the Soviet Union which passedthrough Iran, and thus threateningthe Anglo-Soviet control of thatcountry, Germany would become apower in the Middle East - able, if theTurks would play, to threaten theentire British position in that part of

the world by advancing on the oil-

fields of the Persian Gulf and on theSuez Canal, to take the British 8thArmy in the rear.

These, of course, were long-termconsiderations. In early 1942 thetask confronting the German militaryplanners was the more modest,though still formidable problem,of gaining the positions which wouldenable them to realise the glittering

Stalingrad: ... the natural place

to anchor the eastern end of theflank defence line . .

.

prospects already moving in Hitler'slively though disordered imagination.Germany's forces were already con-siderably extended in maintaining theexisting front line after the losses ofthe winter battles. A move south-eastwards against the Caucasus wouldextend the front line even more; theforces sent down into that area wouldnot be available for quick redeploy-ment in the event of trouble elsewhereon the front, and, furthermore, theywould be presenting their rear to anySoviet riposte which might take theform of a north-south thrust along theDon towards Rostov.

If that should happen, they wouldeither be cut off or would have to makea hasty retreat out of the Kuban andCaucasus. It was therefore necessaryto set up a flank and rear guard tocover them against this danger, andthe question was where this guardshould be placed, bearing in mind that

Germany's forces were very stretchedand her allies, Rumania, Italy, andHungary, with their relatively poorly-equipped, badly trained and doubt-fully enthusiastic forces, would haveto take part in the operation.The ideal line emerges even from a

cursory glance at the map. South of

the major communications centre of

Voronezh, the Don begins to bendeastwards. It continues thus until eastof Serafimovich, where it turns southbefore finally resuming a westerlycourse to its mouth in the Sea of

Azov. The Volga, on the other hand,bends westward between its mouth atAstrakhan and Stalingrad. Thus anydefensive line based on the Don wouldhave the river in front of it to a pointeast of Serafimovich, and from thereto the Volga is less than fifty miles.

Only over this stretch could the RedArmy attack without first making anopposed crossing of a major river, and

hence the natural place to anchor theeastern end of the flank defence linewas the Volga, in the Stalingrad area.Here the river is about a mile wide.

Traffic on it could be disrupted by airor artillery bombardment, and anySoviet attempt to attack across theriver would be hampered by thewidth of the water obstacle presentedby it. There was no need to take thecity; cut off" from the north, accessibleonly by river boats under constantartillery and aircraft fire, it would beindefensible.So no particular plan was made to

take it. As Kleist said after the war'At the start Stalingrad was nomore than a name on the map to

US', and the way the city graduatedfrom its supporting role in the drama,and gradually usurped the lead, is

shown in Hitler's statements andDirectives as the year wore on, and asthe political, economic, and military

factors battled for supremacy in his

brilliant but warped mind.The basic plan for the summer,

drafted during- the preceding winterby the Army High Command{Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH)had envisaged only a modest campaignin the south. The centrepiece was to

be in the north, in the capture of

Leningrad and a link-up with theFinns. The plan was rejected, but theLeningrad operation remained in all

the drafts which followed, and this

fact was in due course to influence thefighting far away on the Volga.On March 28th the Chief of General

Staff of OKH, Colonel-General FranzHaider, a brilliant planner who wasunusual in being a product not of thePrussian General Staff, but of the oldBavarian army (and perhaps evenmore unusual in that, unknown to

Hitler, he had been a key figure in anabortive plot to assassinate him in

1938), presented the revised operationalplan for the summer offensive at aconference held at Hitler's headquart-ers, the Wolfs-schanze (Wolf's Lair)deep in the gloomy forests of EastPrussia near Rastenburg. It was code-named Fall Blau (Case Blue - there hadbeen a reversion to the use of coloursfor code-names since the failure of thegreat exception 'Barbarossa') andenvisaged a two-stage offensive.

It was unusual in that it was to bemounted from a backward-slanting

line, and therefore the first force tomove would be that which startedfrom the furthest point west. Thiswould drive south-east along the Donfrom the Kursk-Kharkov area, herdingTimoshenko's armies away from theriver and getting round behind them,and then, at the appropriate moment,the force at the southern and easternend of the line would move out dueeast from the Mius river, shepherdingthe Soviet South Front away to northand west. The two forces would meetwest of Stalingrad, encircling andwiping out the whole of the SovietSouth-West and South Fronts, tobring the first phase of the operationto a successful conclusion, and onlythen would they swing south towardsthe Caucasus and the oilfields.

Hitler accepted the plan, butrejected the Directive into which it

was translated, and insisted on draft-ing it himself, making it much morespecific than usual (a Directivenormally laid down the objectives butleft the details of their attainment tothe commanders concerned, butHitler mistrusted his generals,especially since the winter debacle).The result. Directive No. 41 of April

5th 1942, therefore gives a very goodpicture of Hitler's thinking at thetime. In it he said 'it is fundamentallynecessary to unite all available forcesfor conduct of the main operation in

the southern sector, with the aim of

20 Faff Blau: left Haider's version, right Hitler's version

destroying- the enemy west of the Don,so as subsequently to capture the oil

regions in the Caucasus and cross theCaucasus range'. He also said 'in anyevent, an attempt must be made to

reach Stalingrad itself, or at least toremove it from the list of industrialand communications centres by sub-jecting it to the action of our heavyweapons . .

.' The emphasis was clear.

It was 'fundamentally necessary' todestroy the Soviet forces in the south,and then take the oilfields; but 'an

attempt' must be made to takeStalingrad or bring it within range ofheavy guns or bombers.Bock was given formidable forces

for the operation. For the northernpincer along the Don he had IVPanzer Army (Colonel-GeneralHermann Hoth) and VI Army (Colonel-General Paulus); for the southern,I Panzer Army (Kleist) and XVIIArmy (General Richard Ruoff), whileXI Army (Colonel-General Erich vonManstein) would also bQ available onceit had cleared the Crimea and cap-tured the fortress of Sebastopol.Satellite forces under command ofArmy Group South would consist of

III and IV Rumanian, VIII Italian, andII Hungarian Armies, and the totalforces under Bock's command thuscame to 89 divisions, nine of themarmoured.In early May 1942, the two Soviet

'Axes' (headquarters controlling morethan one Army Group) in the south -

South-West and North Caucasus -hadbetween them 78 divisions (14 of

them cavalry) and 17 tank brigades,which on the face of it was an adequateforce with which to defend their area.But these figures have to be inter-

preted with some care. First of all, aSoviet division at full strength wasonly two-thirds to three-quarters ofthe size of its Axis counterpart.Secondly, in all respects bar personalcourage, the Soviet infantryman andhis junior officers were not equal tothe German. Thirdly, Soviet tacticswere still stereotyped and wasteful.Fourthly, the Soviet armoured forceslacked the German experience of deeppenetrations; Blitzkrieg was some-thing they had read about in books,whereas the German commanders hadbeen waging it successfully since 1939,

and their familiarity with the hand-

ling and supplying of fast-movingtank and motorised infantry columnsmore than made up for their in-

feriority in quality of armour. Asfighting vehicles, the German tanks -

predominantly PzKw Marks III andIV - were markedly inferior to theheavy Russian KV-1, and especially tothe medium T-34 (the most successfultank produced anywhere during theSecond World War) in armour, gun-power, and mobility.Moreover, Soviet inferiority had

been increased by the debacle in theBarvenkovo salient in May whichdestroyed 29 Soviet infantry divisionsand two-thirds ofTimoshenko's tanks,leaving him outnumbered in armourby about 8 to 1 by the time the Germanattack began; and the German cap-ture of the Crimea wiped out a furtherfive Soviet armies with a total of atleast fifteen divisions. Thus therelatively favourable balance offereesof early May had evaporated by theend of June, and the prognosis for amajor German ofi'ensive in the southwas good.

It would be tedious to try and tracethe story of the manpower balance indetail throughout the battles whichpreceded those at Stalingrad itself;

suffice it to say that when the SovietArmy Group entitled 'StalingradFront' was formed on July 12th, with38 infantry divisions under command,14 of those divisions had less than1,000 men each and another six less

than 4,000, against a full-strengthestablishment of 15,000. Three armieswhich had fought in the Kharkovoff"ensive in May (21st, 28th, and 30th)had between them 21 divisions, all

officially classified as 'remnants' andthe 4th Tank Army formed on July22nd, had 80 tanks; by August 10th it

had none. There was no steam for theRussian steamroller here; and it wasprimarily the off"ensive out of theBarvenkovo salient which had broughtthe Red Army to this pitch.

21

'The Russian

is finisiied'

On 28th June, Bock made his first

move, launching IV Panzer Armyagainst Voronezh, a key town in theSoviet lateral communications sys-

tem behind the front line. Two dayslater he set VI Army in motion,heading north-eastwards against thesame target with the aim of forming apocket centred on Stary Oskol, in

which the Soviet 6th, 21st, and 40thArmies would be trapped. The twoGerman armies would be behind them,and the Hungarian II Army would bewest of them. It would start the offen-

sive off with a bang.Timoshenko, however, refused to

co-operate. Soviet sources do not saywhether he had advance information,though he may well have had since onJune 19th the operations officer ofXXIII Panzer Division, Major Reichel,had made a forced landing close to theRussian lines while on a flight to aneighbouring corps headquarters.Reichel had with him some documents,including the objectives for phase oneof 'Case Blue', which were not re-

covered and both his corps com-mander, General Stumme, and hisdivisional commander. General von

Boineburg-Lengsfeld, were relieved of

their posts and later court-martialledfor this breach of security.

It seems highly likely that thedocuments fell into Soviet hands, butwhether the Soviet believed them ornot is a different matter. 'Plants' of

this kind are not unusual in war, andthe mouths of many such gift horseswere to be sceptically examinedbetween 1939 and 1945. In any case,

given the Soviet inferiority in forces

on the southern sector of the front andStavka's reluctance to move its

reserve armies away from the centralsector (it still believed at this pointthat the main German offensivewould inevitably be aimed at Moscow)Timoshenko had no alternative but towithdraw, once the Panzer divisionswere on the move. They were out toencircle and destroy his forces; oncethey had broken through, for him tostand fast was to play the game as theywanted him to.

But Voronezh had to be held, for if it

fell, Soviet lateral communicationswould be imperilled; worse, theGermans would have the option ofstriking north behind Bryansk Front

towards Moscow. Stavka did notknow that Moscow was definitely noton the German agenda for 1942, and thefact that Voronezh was the first

German objective would reinforce thebelief of those who considered theReichel documents part of anelaborate deception. So Stavkareserves began to pour towardsVoronezh: two 'combined-arms'(infantry) armies and one tank armytook up positions on the east bank of

the Don. while another tank armyfrom the right wing of the adjacentBryansk Front was redeployed to thearea south of Yelets with orders to

take IV Panzer Army in flank andrear. It was touch and go. for IVPanzer Army had already reached theKastornoye - Stary Oskol railwayby the evening of July 2nd, and putout a hook round the left flank of 40thArmy, ready to gather it in. while VIArmy, launched into battle on June30th, was only 25 miles from StaryOskol by nightfall on July 2nd, andwas preparing to round up 21st and28th Armies.On this occasion, at least, Stavka

reacted quickly. A new headquarterswas hastily set up at Voronezh byLieutenant-General F I Golikov and agroup of staff officers to ensure on-the-spot control, and the Chief of theGeneral Staff, Colonel-General A MVasilevsky. flew at once from Moscowto Bryansk Front Headquarters.Everything was ready just in time.The Germans seized a bridgehead overthe Don on July 6th, but against theentrenched Soviet forces were unableto make any progress, and whilebattering on the gates of Voronezhthey found themselves in danger ofbeing outflanked, when the BryanskFront reserve launched its counter-attack from south of Yelets on thesame day. The XXIV Panzer Corps andthree infantry divisions had to bedetached to cope with this new threat,and Voronezh was saved. To take it

would now require a major operation.This created the first major problem

of decision for the German leadership.The stubbornness with which theRed Army defended Voronezh was dueto Stavka's fear that its fall would bethe prelude to a drive on Moscow, butsince the Germans in fact had nointention of driving north, the quick

capture of the city was secondary to

the rounding up of Timoshenko'sarmies. And while the divisions of IVPanzer Army were engaged in theattempt to take the city - a task for

which they were not suited, and whichwasted their advantage of mobility -

the armies of South-West Front wereslipping quietly away behind strongrearguards, in good order, and withall their heavy equipment.Hitler was not usually averse tc

taking his generals" decisions for

them, but on this ocasion he showedunusual diffidence. On July 3rd hearrived at Bock's headquarters, butwent no further than to say he "no

longer insisted" on the captui'e of

Voronezh - but Bock was influencedby the fact that his patrols werealready in the outskirts of the town,and persisted with the undertaking.As the Soviet reserves poured in. anda new Army Group (Voronezh Front)was set up, it became dangerous to

relax the pressure for fear that themuch increased Soviet forces wouldcounterattack into the flank and rearof Bock"s forces, and so much of IVPanzer Army was tied down thereuntil July 13th: even then it failed totake the eastern part of the city, or tocut the Soviet supply lines north of

the Don, and meanwhile Timoshenko'sarmies trudged away across the steppe,almost unmolested. EventuallyHitler lost patience, dismissed Bock,and thereafter blamed him for thefailure of the offensive, as well as thedisaster at Stalingrad in which it

culminated six months later.

Even before Bock's dismissal.Hitler had intended to split ArmyGroup South into two, one (A) to

handle the thrust to the Caucasus, theother (B) to drive to the Volga; henow put this into effect, moved hisheadquarters from Rastenburg toVinnitsa in the Ukraine, and em-barked on a radical revision of theoperational schedule, culminating in

the issuing of Directive No. 45 onJuly 23rd. But before this Directive is

considered, some account must betaken of the military situation, bothas he saw it, and as it was in realitj'.

There is no doubt that the weaknessof the Soviet resistance to the east-

ward advance of IV Panzer and VIArmies had surprised Hitler. His

24

motorised infantry inside

JA

^^5^

'lif-^^ll.if^ -r-,€

.*¥.*

iTop left: The easy advance . . , nowhere

' would the Russians stand and fight.

Bottom left: All the invaders saw of the

enemy were the few unfortunateprisoners. Above: and the worthless

trophies left behind by an army skilfully

withdrawing

troops were rolling ahead over theendless cornfields of the Ukraine atspeeds reminiscent of the first heady-weeks of the invasion in the previoussummer, and the clouds of dust whichmarked their progress were hardly-

thicker than the fog of pseudo-sociological nonsense which theideologists of Nazism were raising in

premature exultation over the down-fall of the Russian Untermensch. Evenhis generals, who sometimes tried tobring Hitler down to earth, seem tohave fallen into the prevailing moodof euphoria, Haider, perhaps the mostsceptical of them all, could find noanswer, when Hitler said to him onJuly 20th 'The Russian is finished',

other than 'I must admit, it looks like

it'.

There was no denying that the RedArmy was withdrawing in the southat speeds appropriate to panic fiight,

but their reluctance to stand and beencircled, and their refusal to abandontheir heavy equipment, indicated ahasty but organised retreat to a moredefensible line. General Warlimont,Deputy Chief of Operations Staff" atHitler's headquarters, OKW (High

Command of the Armed Forces)claimed later that '.

. . we were still

waiting for a real great victory; it

seemed to us that the enemy had still

nowhere been brought to battle, asthe small number of prisoners and thesmall amount of captured equipmentproved.' He was right; but there is

nothing to suggest that he or his

superiors, except for Haider, waitedother than in silence.

Admittedly, Hitler was always,until long after Stalingrad, reluctantto listen to suggestions that the RedArmy was not at the end of its tether,

and many months later, when his

whole sleazy empire was falling

about his ears, he ordered the head of

'Foreign Armies East' (the branch of

Military Intelligence responsible for

estimating the strength of the RedArmy) to be committed to an asylumfor estimates which the Fiihrer regar-

ded as exaggerated. So it probablyrequired a stout heart, and contemptfor one's career prospects, to suggestto the Supreme Warlord that theenemy was not yet breathing his last.

Nevertheless, it seems odd that hardlyany were sufficiently concerned to

stand out against the euphoricvapourings of Hitler and his en-tourage. For the real situation wasnot quite so rosy.Not that all was well with the Red

Army. There was deep gloom amongthe Soviet public at the apparentlyendless retreat, and the 'spineless-

ness' of the men in the south, and their

generals was being openly contrastedwith the staunchness of the defendersof Leningrad and Moscow. This causedtensions between the southerngenerals and the men sent down fromStavka which persist to this day, for

after all, if Timoshenko had beenallowed to abandon his May offensive

when he first requested permission,his forces would have been in a muchbetter position to meet the Germanonslaught. Stavka and Stalin werethe real villains of the piece, and thesouthern generals knew it; but thegeneral public did not. All they knew,and all the common soldier knew, wasthat day by day more of the Sovietindustrial heritage, built up so

recently and at such sacrifices, wasbeing surrendered to Germanpredators.

27

The mood of the Soviet infantry as

it trekked away into the big bend of

the Don was thus one of depression anduncertainty, not relieved in the least

by the exhortatory resolutions being-

passed by enthusiastic bodies of

civilians deep in the rear. Morale waslow, and many a Soviet officer hasrelated how in those dark days of

July his first task in the Stalingradbattle was to stand at a bridge or roadjunction, pistol in hand, organisingstragglers into ad hoc units andlistening to their ingenious reasonswhy they couldn't stop at the moment.Nevertheless, the withdrawal was

in general an orderly one, and its

length was easily explained. Theobvious place to stand and fight wasat the eastern end of the big bend in

the Don, and the timing of the with-drawal was governed by the rate atwhich the armies of the StavkaReserve could be deployed to thesouth. These armies had, it will berecalled, been deployed in the centreso that they would be available to

defend Moscow if necessary ; they wereall north of a line drawn fromBorisoglebsk to Saratov, and did notbegin to move south until early in

July.The sensible thing to do was to

deploy them in the area of the Donbend, behind Timoshenko's retreatingforces, and this was in fact whatStavka was doing with them. To havecommitted them piecemeal forwardwould no doubt have been moredramatic, but their installation in

prepared positions made bettermilitary sense, though, of course, it

also meant that they were not identi-

fied at the front, and this confirmedthe Germans in their belief that theRed Army had no operational reservesleft. The German actions that flowedfrom this misconception were to becatastrophic to the Wehrmacht, for

so far from being finished, the Russianshad 'not yet begun to fight'.

First, Hitler began to worry thatthe imminent collapse of the RedArmy would necessitate dramaticaction by the British and Americans,in the form of an invasion of WesternEurope. He had denuded the West of

twelve divisions during May and June,and transferred them to Russia for

the summer ofi"ensive. Now he held

back the elite SS Panzer GrenadierDivision 'Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler'

from the battle, and on July 9thordered it to move to the West, later

ordering the crack Motorised InfantryDivision 'Gross Deutschland' to followit. He then began to worry aboutpossible Soviet diversionary actionagainst Army Group Centre, and sentIX and XI Panzer Divisions to rein-

force it.

On July 11th Hitler issued aDirective, No. 43, ordering Manstein'sXI Army, fresh from the capture of

Sebastopol, to cross the Kerch strait

and take part in the invasion of theCaucasus, then a few days later, hecountermanded it and despatched theentire army, except for one corps,

away to the north, where its ex-

perience in capturing fortresses couldbe exploited for the capture of

Leningrad (an operation which hadsurvived from the first draft plan for

a summer off"ensive where it madesense, to the final one where it did

not, because the emphasis had beenshifted to the south).Then, to compound folly with folly,

on July 13th, Hitler ordered IV PanzerArmy, which was advancing onStalingrad, to turn south-east andassist Kleist's I Panzer Army in

seizing crossings over the lower Doneast of Rostov. The IV Panzer hadonly just been released from its choreat Voronezh to resume the taskallotted to it in the original Directive,

but now it was diverted from that, to

assist Kleist, whose forces (spear-

heading the southern arm of thepincer) had only been set in motionfour days previously.To make matters worse, Kleist did

not need any help, for on that very dayStavka ordered a general withdrawalof South Front over the Don, except atRostov, so that Hoth closed an almostempty bag and arrived at the Doncrossings to find them almost un-defended and the approach roadscrowded with Kleist's traffic withwhich his own tanks then proceeded to

entangle themselves, impedingKleists' move into the Caucasus.After the war Kleist claimed that if

IV Panzer had not been diverted in

this way, it could have taken

Marshal S K Timoshenko

28

'^^^'^B'

Stalingrad without a fight at the endof July. This is debatable, for Panzerdivisions are not ideally suited to

the taking of large cities, and sub-stantial forces from Stavka reserve -

notably 62nd and 64th Armies, alreadydeploying in the area - would presum-ably have been switched to defend thecity had it been under threat from aPanzer Army instead of from theoverburdened infantry of VI Army.But whatever the merits of Kleist's

assertion, there is no doubt whateverthat IV Panzer Army was not neededin Kleists' area, and at least one Sovietauthority (Marshal Yeremenko) hasgone so far as to describe its diversionas a 'gross strategic miscalculation'.Again, there is no evidence that anyof the German generals objected at thetime, whatever they may have saidabout it later, for they were unawareof the Stavka Directive for a generalwithdrawal, and hoped for a handsome

30

Col. General Hermann Hoth,commanding IV Panzer Army

tally of Soviet divisions - though so far

they had had no luck. Even when thesouthern pincer (I Panzer and XVIIArmies) had begun to move, it haddone no more than shepherd SouthFront away before it, for just as South-West Front had hinged back onVeronozh, so South Front was hingingback on Rostov, and another attemptat encirclement had failed.

The High Command, however, still

clung to the belief that the Red Armywas finished, and it was at this point -

July 23rd, 1942 - that Hitler issued his

Directive No. 45. In view of the situa-tion it was a surprising document.The orderly sequence of the originalplan - first the Volga, then theCaucasus - was gone, and the two aimswere to be achieved simultaneously.Nor was it now enough to be able tobombard Stalingrad - it must betaken. As for the Caucasus oilfields,

Maikop and Grozny were not enough,despite the fact that the capture ofGrozny would make it possible to cutoff" Soviet oil supplies by rail from themain fields at Baku. The main fields

themselves must be taken, eventhough this would involve a crossing ofthe Caucasus Range - a major defen-

sive barrier with few passes and thoseat heights of over 10,000 feet, in narrowdefiles where a few determined defen-ders could hold up an entire division.The IV Panzer Army was still

milling around at the Don crossings,and despite the need for it furthernorth, it was six days before its orderswere changed. On July 29th Hothsucceeded in putting his first tanksacross the river; no sooner had hedone so than he received new orders.He was to leave one division behind,to maintain contact with Kleist, andbring the rest back over the Aksayriver to take Stalingrad from thesouth. The city had begun to seize theGerman imagination.The Red Army had not been sitting

back waiting for the Germans to makeup their minds where to go next, forhowever the importance of Stalingradmight fluctuate in the minds of Hitlerand his generals, there was no doubt ofthe place which it held in the Sovietmystique. The very name meant'Stalin's city' - and names can beimportant. Had not Hitler changedthe name of the pocket-battleshipDeutschlancl because of the possibleeffects on morale if a ship named'Germany' should be sunk? More thanthat, Stalin himself had played animportant role in defeating the Whitearmies of General Denikin at this

place (then called Tsaritsyn) in 1920.

During the subsequent years, thecity had been selected as a showpieceof the Soviet Union, and had becomean industrial giant, stretching for

twentyfive miles along the west bankof the Volga. Stalingrad sustained apopulation of 600,000 with its factories- three of which, the 'Red October'steel plant and 'Barricades' ordnanceplant, and the Stalingrad TractorFactory, stretched in a row along theriver in the northern sector of thecity and with their associated'Workers' Settlements' immediatelywest of them, were to play an impor-tant part in the battle which was to

come.Though the city, as a special sign

of Stalin's favour, was heavily ladenwith the wedding-cake architectureso dear to his heart, it was neverthe-less a source of pride to its inhabitants,with parks and walks along the river

bank, with numerous ravines and

31

gullies running down to the Volga,and with many signs in its centre of

the more spacious future to which all

aspired. The Volga itself, almost amile wide here had numerous islandsin it ; its west bank was high and steep,

overhanging in places, and with manycaves beneath the overhangs. Withinthe city were a number of low hills,

one of which, the three hundred and

Rostov. After its fall on July 25th,

Stalingrad became even more vital

to the Russian defence

thirty five foot high Mamayev Kurgan(Mamay's Burial Mound) commandedan excellent view of the city centre.Though there was no bridge over theVolga, there were important rail androad ferries, and the river port was animportant one becoming even more so

after the fall of Rostov and its rail

routes on July 25th. This city wouldnot be abaind'oned lightly by theRed Army.A number of changes were now made

in the organisation of defence of thearea. South-West Front had been

^^

J

abolished, and the Army Groupssubordinated directly to Stavka,while the new Voronezh Front, formedto contain Bock on the north, hadbeen put under a former Deputy Chiefof General Staff, General N F Vatutin,while its neighbour to the north,Bryansk Front, came under anotherformer Deputy CGS, General F I

Golikov. These appointments bothreflected the influence of Zhukov, forthe two men had served under him inthe recent past and both were to playprominent roles later in the

Stalingrad battle, as Zhukov's in-volvement in and direction of it

increased. With South-West Frontabolished, as its forces withdrew intothe bend of the Don, they would beabsorbed into the new StalingradFront which was being formed withtroops of the Stavka reserve armies.The new Front came officially into

existence on July 12th, andTimoshenko at first commanded it,

but it was clear that he would haveto go - not into disgrace because onthe whole the retreat into the Don

Battle in the Don bend

4iiK

jfe

m

i.*-

^

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34

bend had been conducted with fair

skill and economy, but because thenew Front was too important to becommanded by a general around whomhung the smell of defeat; in any casehe belonged to the older generation ofRed Army commanders which wasnow yielding the field to men broughtup in a more modern tradition, asso-ciated either with Zhukov himself, orwith Zhukov's erstwhile patron, thegreat Marshal Tukhachevsky, whomStalin had 'purged' and executed on atrumped-up charge of plotting withGermany against the Soviet state.So on July 22nd Timoshenko wasgiven a senior command in the im-portant but for the present less

hectic north-western sector of thefront, and his place was taken byGeneral V N Gordov, who had justthree days previously taken overcommand of 64th Army, one of theformations from Stavka reservewhich had been deployed into the Donbend, and was in course of taking upits positions.Army Group 'B' had formed

three sub-groups for the attack onStalingrad, and set them the followingtasks: the Northern Group, consistingof two Panzer, two motorised, andfour infantry divisions was to attackon July 23rd from the Golovsky-Perelazovsky area, aiming to cap-ture the big bridge over the Don atKalach, behind the Soviet forcesdeployed west of the Don. The centralforce, of one Panzer and two infantrydivisions, attacking on July 25th, wasto strike from the Oblivskaya -

Verkhne-Aksenovsky area, also to-wards Kalach - and while these twogroups formed a back-stop to the

Soviet forces in the Don bend, VIArmy was to come in from the westand roll them up, thus leaving theroad to the Volga open. The oppor-tunity was then to be exploited by thethird (southarn) group, of onearmoured, one motorised and fourinfantry divisions, which would havecrossed the Don at Tsimlyanskay onthe 21st and have established a largebridgehead from which it wouldadvance on Stalingrad from the south,while the other two groups havingfinished their task in the Don bend,would advance to the Volga from westand north-west of the city.For the execution of this plan the

Commander-in-Chief of Army GroupB, Colonel-General Freiherr vonWeichs, had a total force equivalent to30 divisions - though less than two-thirds of these were German - and overtwelve hundred aircraft, outnumber-ing the Soviet forces in the Don bendby about two to one. For a defensiveoperation, however, this was not ahopelessly unfavourable ratio for theSoviet commanders. For them amuch more serious disparity was thatin weapons, as thanks largely to thelosses in the Kharkov ofi'ensive, theywere outnumbered by about two to onein tanks and guns, and three to one inaircraft, and to make matters worsenearly three hundred of the fourhundred aircraft possessed by their8th Air Army were of obsolete types,for* the best of the newer aircraft -

Yak-1 fighters, Pe-2 light bombers andthe excellent 11-2 ground attack air-craft (the Sturmovik) - were availableonly in very small numbers. Thismeant in practice that the Germanshad almost complete air superiority

StormovikSpeed : 250 mph. Armament : 2 x 23mm cannon, 2 x 7.62 mg, 1 x 1 2.7 mg (rear).Max Bomb load : 1 ,321 lbs bomb. Crew : 2

35

Stalingrad drew them on. Below: The panzers deploy^l^«om?^erman infantry

columns fill the roads between Don and Volga

*^^% ^

^>

/^ -

over the entire area.Of his total of thirty divisions,

Weichs was able to deploy abouttwenty against the Soviet forces inthe Don bend (almost all of themGerman, and one of them Rumanian),to which he was able to add one morecorps from early August, when ItalianVIII Army began arriving to take overits sector along the Don each side ofVeshenskaya. The Soviet forces com-prised the 62nd and 64th Armies,supported by 1st Tank Army (whichhad one hundred and sixty tanks) and4th Tank Army (which had eightytanks), while in the northern corner ofthe bend was 1st Guards Army, whichplayed no particular part in thebattle except to hold a bridgeheadsouth of the river at Kremenskaya.But all the armies which had to takethe main weight of the German attackwere newly formed, and the two tankarmies were particularly raw, as theycame into existence only on July22nd.Apart from some skirmishing

between XIV Panzer Corps and theforward elements of 62nd Army alongthe River Chir from July 17th on-wards, there was no major action untilJuly 23rd, when five German divisionsattacked the right wing of 62nd Armynorth of Manoylin, while 64th Armyfound itself under attack on the riverTsimla. After three days of fighting,XIV Panzer Corps broke through62nd Army's defences and advancedto Kamensky on the Don, outflanking62nd Army from the north. The 1stTank Army, which was deployedbehind 62nd, attempted to cut off theGerman force by attacking due northacross its rear, while 4th Tank Armytried a heading-ofi" attack from thenorth of the German salient - but asneither army had been in existencefor more than five days, as both con-tained a heterogenous mixture oftanks and non-motorised infantry,were still only partially equipped andwere commanded by infantry officerswho lacked experience ofworking witharmour, it was hardly likely theirattacks would succeed; and they didnot - especially as they were not co-ordinated in any way, and were givenweak artillery support and practicallyno air cover.While this mismanaged attack was

37

faltering to its inevitable end, XXIVPanzer Corps was driving a wedgebetween 62nd and 64th Armies as it

headed for Kalach from the south-westalong the west bank of the Don.Stavka became very uneasy at the

southern penetration and on July 28th

ordered Gordov to strengthen the

southern defences of the area betweenthe rivers from Logovsky on the Donto Raygorod on the Volga, so onAugust 1st he deplo/ed 57th Army andsome of his reserve units along the

line in question, and was also givencommand of 51st Army, which was to

be deployed south of the Volga bendfrom the Sarpa Lakes to the pointwhere the front line petered out in the

Kalmyk Steppe towards Rostov. Thisgave Stalingrad Front a total front

line nearly four hundred and forty

miles long, and in vijew of the diffi-

culty of administering such a longfront, it was decided to establish a

new Army Group, South-East Front,which would take over the southernhalf of Gordov's line. The search for asuitable officer to command it beganat once.Meanwhile the situation at the front

in the Don bend had quietened downto some extent, as although theGerman mobile forces had reached theDon and made deep penetrations oneach side of 62nd Army, the untriedtroops from Stavka reserve hadacquitted themselves well, andneither VI nor IV Panzer Armies wasin any position to force the Don line,

or round up 62nd Army, withoutpausing to regroup. Most of IV Panzerhad by now come back from its use-

less expedition to the Don crossings in

the south, and on July 31st Hoth tookit on to the offensive in the Tsimlyan-skaya area against the over-extended51st Army, which with five under-strength infantry divisions was at-

tempting to cover a one hundred andtwenty five mile front from Verkhne-Kurmoyarskaya to Orlovskaya.Hoth's blow broke through 51st

Army's defences, and it began a

hasty withdrawal towards theTikhoretsk - Krasnoarmeysk railway

;

and so by August 2nd he had reachedKotelnikovo, and there remainedbetween him and Stalingrad onlyeighty four miles of country withsome minor natural obstacles, the

chief of which were the Aksay andMyshkova rivers.

There had been some commandchanges in Stalingrad Front; 62ndArmy had been taken over by GeneralA I Lopatin, while the acting com-mander of 64th Army, Lieutenant-General A I Chuykov, had handed hisarmy over to Major-General M SShumilov, returned to report to Frontheadquarters in Stalingrad, quarrelledwith Gordov (for whose qualities as aFront commander he had little

respect) and returned to 64th Army togive a written account of the with-drawal of some of the army's unitsacross the Chir while under his com-mand. On the morning of August 2nd,Shumilov sent for him, told him ofHoth'sbreakthroughwhich threatened

to outflank the entire army and maybethe entire front, and suggested he goto the southern sector to take charge.

Chuykov was only too pleased toget out of v^riting the report forGordov, and left at once. On arrival in

the southern sector, he discoveredtwo Soviet infantry divisions, part of51st Army, wandering across thesteppe on their way to Stalingrad torejoin the army with which they hadlost contact, taking with them tworegiments of Ka ty usha rocket mortars,obviously shaken by the heavy lossesthey had sufl'ered from Hoth's attack,

38

but with no radio. Chuykov comman-deered them, positioned them behindthe Aksay river and put a brigade ofmarines behind them to stiffen theirresolution. He then contacted FrontHQ, reported what he had done andwas told that 208th Infantry Divisionfrom Siberia was detraining in thearea and should also come under his

command - if he could find its HQwhose whereabouts were unknown.After several hours' searching he

found that the division had begun todetrain on the previous day, but thatfour trainloads had been shot up byGerman aircraft and the survivorsscattered. A little further on, atChilekov station, he found severalmore trainloads of troops of thedivision detraining, but suddenly

Russian rolling stock . . . shot up,the reinforcements scattered

twenty seven German aircraftappeared and bombed the station,causing heavy casualties among thetroops, and putting his radio out ofaction. Cursing Gordov for not havingensured air cover for the division,

Chuykov went on rounding up strag-glers, organising them into units andsending them off on assignments.With this improvised force he

organised a defence along the Aksay,sent out reconnaissance patrols which

established that Hoth's main forcewas making a wide detour to theeast - obviously with intention ofstriking at Stalingrad from the south.Chuykov's own force on the Aksaywas attacked on August 6th but drovethe German and Rumanian infantryback, and in fact held on to its

positions until ordered to pull back onAugust 17th in conformity with ageneral withdrawal of the entire line.

He had learned some useful lessonsin breaking up German attacks, andwas to put them to good use in a moreimportant role at several crucialstages later in the battle.

On the main front in the Don bend,the situation for the Red Army hadworsened following the failure of thecounterattack. The 62nd Army hadlost most of its eight infantrydivisions, which fought their way outin small groups but left much of theirequipment behind and would takesome time to re-assemble and re-

equip. In their place, it had gainedsome of the divisions of 1st TankArmy which had been disbanded, aswell as one division which belongedto 64th Army but had been leveredaway to the north by the Germanpenetration between the two armies.The great bridge at Kalach had beenseized intact by a daring coup de mainof a small body of German assaultengineers, and the German tankscould begin crossing into the neck ofland between Don and Volga. Gordovhad made a bad start as a Frontcommander, and clearly could nothold the position much longer.By August 16th the last bridgehead

on the stretch of the Don which runsfrom north to south betweenKamensky and Verkhne-Kurmoyar-skaya had been given up, but furthernorth, along the west-east stretch ofthe Don before it reaches the big bend,1st Guards and 21st Armies remainedin possession. of several stretches ofthe south bank between Kletskayaand Serafimovich, and were even toextend them, while the Rumanians ofIII Army remained stolidly on thedefensive. These forgotten bridge-heads, about which no-one at OKW,OKH, or Army Group B then seemedconcerned, were to prove decisivewhen the heat and dust of August hadgiven place to the snows of November.

39

Yeremenko

takes over

At first, Stalin was concerned to findnot a replacement for Gordov, but acommander for the new South-EastFront, but in view of subsequentdevelopments, caused by Gordov's un-satisfactory handling of the battle inthe Don bend, more than ordinarysignificance was to attach to theappointment of the man given chargeof the new Army Group.On August 1st a thick-set Soviet

general was arguing with his doctor ina room of a hospital in Moscow, wherehe was recovering from a leg injury,his second serious wound of the war. Hewas attempting to persuade thedoctor that he was fit to return toduty, and after some acrimoniousdiscussion about the rights of patientsversus doctors in deciding when aman was fit to leave, the irate doctorhad subjected him to a practical testof his ability to walk without hisstick. Half a dozen steps brought out acold sweat on his forehead, and hisleg went numb.'Enough, enough,' cried the doctor

triumphantly. 'Now it is clear,

esteemed Colonel-General, who is

mistaken about the moment of re-

40

COvery. There's still fundamentalhealing to be done'.Sheepishly the general confessed

that he had already reported himselfto Stavka as ready to return to thefront.

'So much the worse for you', saidthe doctor, 'Without a note from thedoctor in charge they won't even lookat your report.'

Bluff having failed, the generalresorted to an emotional appeal. 'Tell

me, Professor, hand on heart, if youwere suffering from an illness like

mine, in its present stage, could yousit calmly on one side, knowing thathundreds of people were dying fromwounds and waiting for your help,

yours, Professor, no-one else's?'

The professor thought about this,

but gave no direct answer. In the endhe said 'All right then, if you give meyour word of honour to follow strictly

the regime I prescribe, I won't objectto your discharge.'The general spent the rest of the

day practising walking without astick, while he waited for a telephonecall. Towards midnight it came, fromthe Secretary to the People's Com-

missar for Defence. 'Your report hasbeen examined. Come to the Kremlinat once.'

He left his stick in Stalin's outeroffice, and walked carefully but boldlyinto the meeting room of the StateDefence Committee. Stalin, who wasjust concluding a telephone call,

turned to him, looked him carefully in

the eye and said, 'Well, so you thinkyou're all right?'

'Yes, I've recovered,' said thegeneral.One of the other members of the

committee remarked on his limp, buthe passed it off with an assurance ofwell-being which he was far fromfeeling.

'Well then,' said Stalin, 'we'll con-sider you as back in the ranks. You'revery necessary to us just now. Let'sget down to business. At Stalingradnow circumstances have so turned outthat we can't get by without takingsteps to strengthen this very import-ant sector of the front, and withoutsteps calculated to improve the direc-tion of the troops. It has been decidedto divide the Stalingrad Front whichwas formed recently into two. TheState Defence Committee intends toassign you to head one of them.What's your view on it?'

'I am ready to serve anywhere youthink it necessary to send me'answered the general. His name wasAndrey Ivanovich Yeremenko, hisrank, Colonel-General, and his agethirty-nine.Yeremenko was one of Stalin's

favourite trouble-shooters, and hadalready received some difficult assign-ments, not all of which had beensuccessfully carried out. But he wasstrategically gifted, and a fire-eatingoptimist who thrived on challenges.Perhaps his optimism sometimes ranaway with him, and perhaps he wasrather prone to cast himself as a manof destiny, but the situation was notone for the faint-hearted, and no-onehad ever accused him of being that.He at once departed for the GeneralStaff" building to familiarise himselfwith the situation in the south, andreturned to Stalin's office that even-ing. After some argument with StalinabouX the desirability of maintaininga single Front in the area (implicitlywith himself in charge of it instead of

Gordov), he bowed to Stalin's deci-sion, and then asked for the commandof the northern of the two Fronts,pointing out that the long Germanflank along the Don would be veryvulnerable to a counterattack, whichwas more suited to his temperamentthan defence. Stalin heard him out,and replied 'Your proposal deservesattention, but that's a matter for thefuture; at present we have to stop theGerman offensive'.

He paused to fill his pipe, andYeremenko hastened to agree withhim.'You understand correctly', re-

sumed Stalin, 'and that is why we aresending you to South-East Front, to

hold up and stop the enemy who is

striking from the Kotelnikovo areatowards Stalingrad. South-East Frontmust be created from scratch, andquickly. You have experience of this;

you set up Bryansk Front fromscratch [in 1941]. So go, rather, fly,

tomorrow to Stalingrad and set upSouth-East Front'.Yeremenko arrived in Stalingrad on

the morning of August 4th, and wasmet at the airfield by a car sent by his'Member of Military Council', theman responsible for overseeing thePolitical Department of the Front,responsible for indoctrination, propa-ganda, morale, and welfare of thetroops, for ensuring the maximumco-operation from the local Partyauthorities, for obtaining co-opera-tion from the Party and Governmentin Moscow, if need be, and (discreetly)

for ensuring that Yeremenko re-

mained 'politically' sound. The 'Mem-ber of Military Council' was nostranger to the south ; he was the FirstSecretary of the Ukrainian Com-munist Party, and had served Timo-shenko in the capacity which he nowfulfilled with Yeremenko. His rank asa Commissar was equivalent to aLieutenant-General, and he was ashort, very stocky man with anearthy ebullience which after the warwould become known to the world atlarge. His name was Nlkita Serge-yevlch Khruschchev.Yeremenko was given four days to

set up the South-East Front, and wasto enter into command on August9th. The line dividing his responsibili-ties from those of Gordov ran straight

41

i

Above : Col. Andrey Invanovich Yeremenko. Below : His Political CommisarLieutenant-General Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev

PZKWIIIThese would spearhead the attack. Weight : 25.4 tons. Speed : 28 mph. Armour(max) : 50mm. Crew : 5. Armament : 1 x 50mm. 2 x 7.92mm mg

76.2 mm. These would keep it at bay. M/e/fir/if; 3,500! bs. Range : (ceiling) 14.766 yds.

Ammunition :^ 3.7b lb shell

43

The front line Aug 21 1942

The front line Aug 31

AUG22XIV PZ CORPSBREAKS THROUGHRUSSIANPERIMETER

across from Kalach and down thevalley of the Tsaritsa river to theVolg-a, thus cutting- the city area intotwo. His headquarters were in anunderground installation, the Tsarit-syn Bunker, which had been speciallybuilt earlier in the year. No soonerhad he begun to organise his head-quarters than his reactions were putto the test, as on August 7th, Hoth'sPanzers (which Chuykov had observedby-passing the Aksay line on the 5thand 6th) approached Stalingrad fromthe south, drove in 64th Army's left

flank, and came within nineteen milesof the city. He could expect no helpfrom Stalingrad Front, whose forceswere fully committed, and his otherarmies (51st and 57th) were muchbelow strength, 51st having only theequivalent of one full-strength divi-

sion in the area - the remnants of twoothers were still on the Aksay line

with Chuykov, too far away to be ofassistance.Panic broke out in the city, and

draconian measures had to be takento keep civilians off" the roads needed

44

for military traffic, after which animprovised force of tanks, anti-tankguns, and Katyusha rocket mortarswas hastily assembled and sent downto confront Hoth at Abganerovo.Several days of fierce fighting followedthe first clash on August 9th, buteventually Hoth's penetration wasstopped, and he abandoned for themoment the attempt to break throughfrom the south. Thus Yeremenko hadpassed his first test, but sterner oneswere to come, beginning on August10th, while the fighting at Abganerovowas at its height.On that day a very serious situation

arose on the left wing of StalingradFront, immediately adjacent to Yere-menko's right, when General l^opa-

tin's 62nd Army got into difficulties

while attempting a counterattackwith three of its divisions. Althoughthey caused the Germans some lossesthey themselves became surroundedon three sides, and were able to escapeonly with great difficulty and heavycasualties, and- though the Germanadvance stopped for the time being on

Rocket Artillery. Katyusha rocket mortar batteries helped to stem the first

onslaught at Abganerovo. They fired in salvoes

the west bank of the Don, the situa-tion remained critical because thenatural line of advance towardsStalingrad was directly athwart theline of demarcation between Stalin-grad and South-East Fronts, with all

the difficulties entailed in coordinat-ing operations between two command-ers of equal status, especially asconcerned the movement of reserves,of which Yeremenko at that time hadnone, thus being forced to rely onGordov (whom almost every Sovietsenior officer seems to have foundmost difficult to work with or for, andwho at that time had none either).

Yeremenko reported the difficulty toStavka, with the perhaps unexpectedresult that late on the evening of the13th he found himself appointed tocommand both Fronts, with Gordovas his Deputy for Stalingrad Frontand Golikov (late of Bryansk Front)fulfilling the same duties in respect ofSouth-East Front. Thus he becamethe Supreme Commander on the spot,and though members of Stavka fre-

quently visited his HQ, any decisionswhich had to be taken quickly, weretaken by him. His faculty for snapaction was soon to be tested to thefull, for Paulus was about to mountthe most serious threat so far, in theform of an attack on the city fromnorth, west and south.Hitler had been rather restive

about the failure of his generals tocapture Stalingrad, and Paulus wasnothing if not responsive to his

master's wishes. The deadline ofAugust 25th had been set for thecapture of the city, and this was nowgetting near, so operational ordersfor the capture of the city were issuedby VI Army HQ on August 19th, andthe start of the operation was set for0430 hours on the 23rd. In the first phasea mobile spearhead composed of XVIPanzer, III and 60th Motorised Divi-sions, commanded by Lieutenant-General Hube, would blast a pathacross the corridor between Don andVolga from bridgeheads either side ofVertyachi. When they had reachedthe northern suburbs of Stalingrad(Spartakovka, Rynok and Latashin-ka), they would prepare to move southinto the city, while follow-up forcesconsolidated and widened the corridorseized by them. The IV Panzer Armywould then blast into the city fromthe south, once it had been sealed off

on its northern side, and General vonSeydlitz-Kurzbach's 51st. Corps wouldhead east from Kalach, maintainingcontact on its north flank with thefollow-up to Hube's force and aimingto hit Stalingrad at the junctionbetween 62nd and 64th Armies so as to

cut them off" from each other.

At the appointed hour Hube's force

set off, overrunning the Soviet de-

fences by weight, speed, and efficiency.

Miles away to the south-east theycould see the clouds of smoke raisedas Stalingrad burned under theattacks of Luftflotte IV, which thatday flew over 2,000 sorties in a terror

45

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Left: Paulus surveys the approachA tb Stalin55S5.r,«v.^i^. Mrmy^wtturies^r^AOed .n the c.ty. Middle: Early Soviet counterattack . . . Soffom.-T^reTuTsed

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i' I^oV^M*''?''^ ^"^^'^^ *^« defenders

^.Signallers lay the lines5. The inevitable 88s..6.... and the indefatigable panzers

49

The opening barrage, fioffo/n; The first prisoners

campaign familiar to those at Warsawand Rotterdam. By mid-afternoonHube's men were in sight of the cityitself, and as the evening drew in theysmashed their way through the im-provised defence put up by the womenworkers of the 'Barricades' Factorymanning anti-aircraft guns, and rolled

on to the high western bank of theVolga north of Rynok. There theyspent the night preparing for the nextday's battle, in which surely the citywould fall. But unknown to them,Yeremenko was about to perform anact of midwifery, bringing a fortress

to birth out of a dead city.

He had awakened early that morn-ing, to the news that the Germanswere on the move at the junctionbetween 62nd and 4th Tank Armies(4th Tank now had only infantry; all

its tanks had been lost in the battle in

the Don bend); so at dawn he alertedColonel Sarayev, the commander of

10th Division of troops of the NKVD(People's Commissariat for InternalAffairs). These were essentially inter-

nal security troops, the uniformedcousins of the secret police, and thushad no heavy weapons such as artil-

lery - but in spite of this, the defenceof the thirty-one mile long citydefence perimeter was in their hands,as the regular army formations couldnot be spared for the task.At 0800 hours, Yeremenko rang HQ

62nd Army for a situation report,from which it became clear that theGermans were heading straight for

the city at high speed. At 0900, theChief of Staff of 8th Air Army, GeneralSeleznev, rang. 'Pilots just back fromreconnaissance report heavy fightingin the Malaya Rossoshka area. Every-thing on the ground's burning. Thepilots saw two columns of about 100tanks each, followed by dense columnsof infantry in trucks. It's all movingtowards Stalingrad. The heads of thecolumns are passing the MalayaRossoshka line. Large groups ofenemy aircraft are bombing our forcesto clear the way for their columns.'Yeremenko wasted no words. 'My

decision: put up all aircraft of Stalin-grad Front at once. Strike a powerfulblow at the columns of enemy tanksand motorised infantry'. He thentelephoned Major-General of AirForces TT Khryukin, commanding

the air forces of South-East Front,ordering him to commit all his groundattack aircraft against Hube'scolumn, after which he summoned hischief of armour. General Shtevnev,and Head of Operations, GeneralRukhle.The telephone rang again. It was

Khrushchev. 'What's new?''Not specially pleasant news.''I'll come to HQ at once.'

And again, this time the commanderof the anti-aircraft corps. ColonelRaynin, reporting that his sounddetectors at Bolshaya Rossoshka hadpicked up the noise of Hube's tanks.Yeremenko ordered him to be ready touse his guns against tanks and air-

craft, as the city was bound to bebombed soon.Now Shtevnev and Rukhle had

arrived, so he ordered Shtevnev to

scrape together the remnants of twotank corps about to be sent to the rearto re-form and re-equip, to block theGerman advance and prepare for acounterattack (a forlorn hope, this,

considering that. the two corps hadbetween them fewer than 50 tanks,most of them the obsolete T-70).

Rukhle was sent off to prepare theappropriate orders.

It was now 1100 hours and Khrush-chev had arrived to report that theParty organisations and the workers'formations were prepared to join in

the defence, and wanted to be givenassignments. An air of uneasinesspervaded the headquarters, and it

required an effort of will on Yere-menko's part to maintain a facade of

calmness among all the frenzied

activity. The phone rang again. TheHead of Communications, Major-General Korshunov reported in aworried tone that a trainload of

ammunition, food and reinforcementshad been shot up by the Germanarmour,'The enemy tanks are moving on

Stalingrad. What are we to do?' 'Yourduty. Stop panicking.' replied Yere-menko sharply.Colonel Sarayev, of the NKVD, came

in.

'The enemy tanks are nine to tenmiles from Stalingrad, and movingfast towards the northern part of thecity,' said Yeremenko.

'I know,' said Sarayev in a whisper.

51

Milestones on the way

'What have you done?''In accordance with your previous

orders I have told the two regimentsoccupying the defences on the northand north-west to be ready for battle.'Yeremenko ordered that in addition

the reserve regiment in Minina suburbshould redeploy to the 'Barricades'factory in the threatened area.Now his Deputy for South-East

Front, Lieutenant-General Golikov,was on the line. The plot was thicken-ing. The IV Panzer Army had begunattacking from the south at 0700; bynoon they had captured Tingutastation and the siding at the seventy-four kilometre marker. The 38th RifleDivision was partially surrounded,but elsewhere the Germans had beenbeaten ofl", and a counter attack onTinguta was being prepared. 'Good,carry on. Order 56th Tank Brigade in

South-East Front reserve to preparefor immediate action.'

Food was brought in, but there wasno time to eat. The Deputy Chief ofGeneral Staff" was on the line fromMoscow, wanting to know how thesituation was developing. While Yere-menko was talking to him, word wasbrought that the commander of 62ndArmy, General Lopatin, wanted tospeak at once on the telephone.'Lopatin leporting. Up to 250 tanks

and about 1,000 truckloads of motor-ised infantry with very strong simul-taneous air support have wiped out aregiment of 87th Rifle Division and theright flank of 35th Guards Rifle Divi-sion north of Malaya Rossoshka.'

'I know. Take steps to close thebreach at once and throw the enemyback from the middle perimeter,restore the situation.'

52

Now Colonel Raynln reported thathis guns were fighting tanks east ofOrlovka, and had suffered some losses,

and Colonel Sarayev came to say thatthe 282nd Regiment of 10th NKVDDivision was engaged with enemytanks and motorised infantry east ofOrlovka. Yeremenko began to runover in his mind the state of hisreserves; he had some specially goodunits which had already proved them-selves, but they were not many - onebrigade of tanks, one of motorisedinfantry, rather more than one oftank-destroyers, and one infantrybrigade now on its way. The telephonerang to interrupt his chain of thoughtThis time not a soldier, but Malyshev,the Minister for Tank Production andrepresentative of the State DefenceCommittee, speaking from the Stalin-grad Tractor Factory, which hadbecome a major producer of tanks.'From the factory we can see fight-

ing going on north of the city. AAgunners fighting tanks [these werethe guns manned by women factoryworkers which Hube's column over-ran in late afternoonl. Several shellshave already fallen in the factoryarea. The enemy tanks are advancingon Rynok. We've prepared the mostimportant targets for blowing up.'

'Don't blow anything up yet. Defendthe factory at whatever cost. Get theworkers' detachment ready for battleand keep the enemy out of the factory.Help is already on its way.'Malyshev handed the phone over to

Major-General Feklenko. 'I'm at thetank training centre, I have about2,000 men and 30 tanks. I have decidedto defend the factory.''A correct decision. I appoint you

sector commander. Organise thedefence of the factory with forces ofthe training centre and workers'detachment at once. Two brigadesare on their way to you, one tank, one

1 rifle.'

Now the Chief Engineer of South-East Front, accompanied by its supplyofficer, arrived, to report proudly thatthey had completed the building of apontoon bridge across the Volga fromthe Tractor Factory in ten days, twodays less than scheduled. The bridgewas nearly two miles long.'Very good. Thank the men who built

it and the officers who supervised

them, especially Comrade Stepanovand the others. As for the bridge, I

order it to be destroyed.'The two technical men looked at

each other, wondering whether Yere-menko had gone off" his head.

'Yes, yes, destroy it, and imme-diately.' He explained briefly why it

had to be done, and they left to do hisbidding.At they left, the artillery special-

ists, Major-Generals Degtyarev andZubanov came to report that theGermans were very close to the mainammunition stores, and were told toshift as much of the ammunition aspossible to a safe place.Now came some better news. Colonel

Gorokhov entered to report thearrival of his troops, 124th Rifle

Brigade, on the opposite bank. 'Getyour brigade over as fast as you canand take it to the Tractor Factory.Report to Comrade Feklenko there;he'll give you your assignment.'Again Yeremenko tried to eat his

breakfast (it was now nearly 1800

hours) but again the telephone rang.

Colonel Raynin reported 'Largegroups of German bombers approach-ing Stalingrad from west and south-west. They'll be over the city in threeto five minutes. The air raid alarm hasbeen sounded, the combat order hasbeen given, and the fighters are takingoff.'

'Right. Carry on', said Yeremenko,as calmly as he could, while his heartbegan to beat fast; and sweat brokeout on his forehead. 'Big groups' - thatmeant thirty or forty in each group;at least one hundred aircraft (in fact

it was about six times that, since

many of the aircraft made several

sorties). As the aircraft came in Hube'sforce began to attack southward fromRynok. First they were met by mortarand anti-aircraft gun fire; soon thetank-destroyer battalions with anti-

tank rifles came up, and hastily tookupaposition on the Sukhaya Mechetkacreek, half a mile north of the TractorFactory, After some hours of hardfighting Hube's tanks retired to refuel,

repair and take on ammunition for thenext day. While they did so, the hard-pressed defenders of the TractorFactory were being reinforced.

At last Yeremenko could have his

breakfast.

53

Death of a city

^-^

^v <V

The fires started by the Germanbombers burned through the night,and the sun rose next morning on ascene of utter devastation. There hadbeen two months of sunny weatherwithout any rain, and the houses in

the suburbs, predominantly of wood,had gone up like tinder, so that overhuge areas of the outskirts only thebrick chimney-stacks remained, like

so many tombstones. In the centreand the industrial area, where thebuildings were of more substantialconstruction, things looked at first

sight more normal, but closer inspec-tion revealed that inside the wallswere nothing but charred heaps ofruins. Some oil storage tanks hadgone up like gigantic fireworks,releasing their contents to flow inburning streams down to the Volga,there to spread, still burning, over its

surface. The jetties had gone up inflames, as had many of the ships there.The telephone system had ceased tofunction, as the wooden telephonepoles had flared up and gone, and thevery asphalt of the roadways hadadded its measure to the holocaust.Early bombing had put the watersystem out of action, so that the fire-

men could but watch helplessly as thestreams of water from their hosesdwindled first to a trickle and then tonothing.Because of the nearness of their

airfields, the bombers were able tomake several trips each, and duringthe day Stalingrad had received theequivalent of two thousand-bomberraids. By the morning of the 24th thecity was in ruins, and thousands of its

citizens lay dead. Though after the warmany German authors were to claimthat the raids had pursued strictlymilitary objectives, it had beenprimarily a terror raid. True, theblocking of roads by fallen buildingshampered the movement of Yere-menko's forces to the threatenedsectors of the front line, and true,there was always the chance that theCommand Post would be put out ofaction; but there were few Soviettroops in the actual city area, as mostof them were deployed outside it in theouter and middle defence perimeters.Later experience of the Western

Allies at Cassino and Caen was toshow that destruction of large build-

ings can assist a determined defenderby impeding the attackers' access tohis positions and to that extent, theGerman bombing of Stalingrad was amistake. The exercise of hindsight is

one of the more pernicious vices of thehistorian, but it is tempting to wonderwhat the outcome would have been if

Luftflotte IV had been enough of aprecision instrument to be used in-stead against the static troops of the10th NKVD Division, Feklenko's menin the grounds of the Tractor Factory,or Golikov's tanks assembling tocounterattack at Tinguta. For the factwas that when on the morning of the24th the Germans renewed their attackon the ground, they ran into a defenceof rock-like consistency, and it wasthis sudden elusiveness of a prizewhich had seemed within their graspwhich led them from then on to applymore and more force at the tip of a

long and vulnerable penetration, incomplete disregard of the danger towhich their northern flank along theDon was exposed.Nor was there any vital necessity to

do so, as on August 23rd Hube's menhad in fact attained the aims set outin the original plan - to establish aline from Don to Volga at the pointwhere they were nearest to each other,and to bring Stalingrad and theVolga under fire. In addition, they hadsplit Stalingrad Front in two, and cutthe railway lines on which its lateralcommunications were heavily depen-dent. Yet the German corridor acrossthe neck of land between Volga andDon was still very narrow, and Yere-menko hoped to snip through it so asto restore the integrity of his front.When the tanks and motorised in-fantry of Hube's columns attackedalong the Sukhaya Mechetka on themorning of the 24th, they met withsuch heavy opposition from Feklen-ko's mixed bag of reinforcements -

ranging from Gorokhov's infantrybrigade to battalions of Stalingradmilitia - that so far from gainingground, they made no progress all

morning, were counterattacked in thelate afternoon, and forced back oneand a quarter miles.Meanwhile, the bombers continued

to make most of their attacks not onthe Soviet positions in the vitalnorthern sector, but on the city area

55

itself. This did not make Yeremenko'sand Khrushchev's task any easier, asurgent arrangements had to be madeto evacuate women, children, and oldpeople across the Volga, and the signsof disorder and confusion among thecivilian population forced Yeremenkoto declare matial law on the 25th; butevery bomb that fell on the city wasone bomb less on Feklenko's forcenorth of the Tractor Factory, and hismen made full use of the relief thusafforded.

Balked on the north, VI Army nowattempted to break in from the west.Under cover of the morning mists onAugust 25th, a group of 25 tanks andan infantry division crossed the Donsouth of Rubezhnoye and began toadvance on the central part of Stalin-grad. They were halted by a combatgroup of one tank brigade (169th) andone infantry division (35th Guards)under the command of Yeremenko'sdeputy for Stalingrad Front, Major-General Kovalenko. The combat groupfought its way into the partiallyencircled 87th Rifle Division at Bol-

56

shaya Rossoshka, and relieved it. Agroup of 33 soldiers of 87th Rifle Divi-sion, all from Siberia and the Far East,like so many of Russia's best soldiers,

performed a remarkable exploit inholding out for two days against aforce of 70 German tanks which hadsurrounded them, and destroying 27 ofthem, making especially good use ofthe improvised weapon known to thewhole world as a 'Molotov cocktail',but (because of its unfortunate asso-ciations with the Soviet invasion ofFinland in 1939) described more pro-saically by Soviet authors as 'a

bottle with an inflammable mixture'.Despite the fact that most of them hadnever seen action before, their totalcasualties were one man wounded,and though this was by no meanstypical of Soviet operations, in whichcasualties were often unnecessarilyheavy because of the primitive natureof small-unit tactics, it was a pointerto the way in which the battle in thecity itself should be fought.With the Germans for the moment

fended off" at the outskirts of the city.

The onslaught : Terror attack launched against the city area. Bottom: Thebombardment closes in

r^ if *

J, ,

i i.

Yeremenko's thoughts turned to thecounterattack for which he was soeager. His object was to force XIVPanzer Corps to abandon its corridorthrough to the Volga, or, hopefully, todestroy it, and the means by whichhe hoped to achieve this was by gettingastride its lines of communication,using the 21st and 1st Guards Armiesin the north (a Soviet 'Guards' forma-tion was one which had distinguisheditself in battle. It received a betterscale of equipment, and its men weregiven higher pay; it was not, however,formed from specially selected re-cruits like 'Guards' units in otherarmies).On the 24th, two divisions of 21st

Army had already begun to probe theGerman positions at Serafimovich andKletskaya, and part of 1st Guards hadattacked near Novo-Grigoryevskaya;It extended its bridgehead on the rightbank of the Don, but the forces em-ployed were not strong enough to cutoff Hube's force. On the 25th severaldivisions of 63rd Army attacked fromthe Yelanskaya-Zimovsky line, mov-ing south and capturing anotherbridgehead across the Don. GeneralKovalenko's combat group had by nowbeen reinforced by two more rifledivisions and some tanks, and on the26th it put in another counterattackout of the Samofalovka area in aneffort to lever the Germans ofl" a num-ber of commanding heights, but therewas not enough artillery support, theattack was badly co-ordinated, andthe Luftwafi"e too strong, so the attackwas a complete failure.Now General Shtevnev put in an

attack in the neighborhood of Goro-dishche and Gumrak, with a forcedrawn from 62nd Army. This succeed-ed in blocking for the time being anyfurther attempts at a break-in fromnorth-west of the city, but again wasnot strong enough to achieve anymore than that, so Yeremenko'scherished project of an attack downon the northern flank of VI Army hadto be abandoned for lack of forces.How near it had come to success,Yeremenko was not to know until

Top: Luftwaffe troops move up throughoutlying villages

Bottom: Armoured car on the banks ofthe Volga

59

after the war, when it became knownthat the C-in-C XIV Panzer Corps,

General von Wietersheim, had becomeso uneasy about the fate of Hube'scolumn , isolated on the bank of theVolga, and at times dependent solely

on air drops for supply, that he de-

cided to withdraw it, only to be over-

ruled by the C-in-C of Army Group 'B\

Colonel-General von Weichs.Now. however, a new threat arose on

the southern sector. The IV PanzerArmy had been trying since August19th to break through the southerncorner of the Stalingrad defences at

Tundutovo, but with no success to

speak of and very heavy casualties,

especially to its XXIV Panzer Divi-

sion, as the Soviet defences on thehigh ground between Beketovka andKrasnoarmeysk on the Volga wereelaborate, well-designed, and mannedby several divisions of the Soviet64th Army with tank support. Hothhad therefore called off the attack,

and while Yeremenko was heavilyoccupied with making counterattacksnorth and north-west of Stalingrad,IV Panzer Army's tanks and motori-sed infantry were being quietly movedround from the southern to the south-western sector to regroup at Abgane-rovo, whence they were launched at

dawn on the 29th against 126th Rifle

Division of 64th Army. Hoth's inten-

tion was to hammer a wedge into thecentre of 64th Army, then to execute aright-turn into the rear of the Sovietpositions between Beketovka andKrasnoarmeysk, thus by-passing thestrongpoints which he had been tryingin vain to reduce by frontal assaults,

capturing the Volga bank and highground south of Stalingrad, andcutting off" the left wing of 64th Army.However, the German attack went

better than expected. General vonHauenschild's XXIV Panzer Divisonbroke through the Soviet line at

Gavrilovka with the aid of some veryeffective work by the 'Stuka' dive-

bombers of Luftflotte IV, and pene-trated into the rear areas of both62nd and 64th Armies. At once thesituation changed. From an attemptto cut off the left wing of 64th Army,it had now become possible to grasp amuch bigger prize - the right wing of

64th Army and perhaps the whole of

62nd Army as well. All that was

required was for IV Panzer Army toabandon its proposed right wheel, andcontinue northwards, while VI Armyshould come down to meet it. If this

move succeeded, Stalingrad would bebound to fall this time, for lack of

troops with which to defend it; butArmy Group B would have to actquickly, for Yeremenko had alreadysmelt a rat.

General Weichs, commanding ArmyGroup 'B' reacted fast to the newsituation, and at noon on August30th transmitted an order to VI Armyin which he said 'everything nowdepends on VI Army concentratingstrongest forces possible . . . launchingan attack in a general southerly direc-

tion ... to destroy the enemy forceswest of Stalingrad in co-operationwith IV Panzer Army . .

.

' On the fol-

lowing day he again urged him tomove 'It is important that a quicklink-up be made between the twoarmies, followed by a penetration intothe centre of the city.'

But Paulus would not move. How-ever far short of his expectationsYeremenko's counterattacks hadfallen, they had persuaded bothWietersheim and Paulus that theirnorthern front was in a very precari-

ous situation. The Soviet counter-attacks had not yet petered out, andPaulus considered that if he detachedhis fast forces for a drive to thesouth, his northern front might wellcollapse. Not until September 2nd didthe Soviet pressure on Paulus relax;then he at once sent his tanks off to

make contact with Hoth. On Septem-ber 3rd, Seydlitz's infantry also madecontact with the forward elements of

IV Panzer Army, and a neat encircle-ment operation had been carried out.

There was only one thing wrong; theRed Army had escaped again. Whathad happened?Yeremenko had not realised that

Hoth was after the left wing of 64thArmy, and had unwittingly read theGerman mind before it changed, so bythe time Weichs and Hoth hadchanged their plans and decided toexploit their unexpected success bygoing north instead, the Headquartersof Stalingrad Front was alreadyfeverishly issuing a stream of orders,which amounted to an abandonmentof the outer perimeter of the Stalin-

60

grad defences. The right wing of 64thArmy began to pull back on the nightof August 29th-30th, most of it goinginto the middle defence line, whiletwo divisions (29th and 204th) werewithdrawn into Army reserve, and62nd Army began to disengage on thefollowing night, taking up positionsin the middle defence zone north of

64th. It was not exactly a victory;rather it was a 'Dunkirk', for thecordon sanitaire around the city hadbeen given up, and the Germans nowpressed hard on Stalingrad from all

directions.But by an odd combination of

premature optimism and second-guessing, Yeremenko had managed to

save his main forces. His counter-attacks had on the whole been a failure

except in one vital respect; they hadpinned Paulus down for the vital daysfrom August 30th to September 2nd;his guess about the German inten-tions was wrong at the time he madeit, but in effect he spotted theiropportunity before they did, so 62ndand 64th Armies lived to fight anotherday. But how many more days? It hadbeen touch and go this time, and therenewed German pressure in thesouthern sector forced an immediatewithdrawal from the intermediate tothe inner defence zone on September2nd. Here for the first time the Ger-mans used self-propelled guns; thoughYeremenko says they did not achievethe desired result, he hastens to pointout that he immediately asked Stalinfor some. Clearly he was worriedabout the effect of these weapons ontroops who had never seen thembefore, and whose room to manoeuvrewas daily becoming more and morerestricted.

The city now presented a terriblepicture of destruction. It had beenunder almost continuous air attacksince August 23rd, and the bombard-ment on September 2nd was especiallyheavy. The fires burning in Stalingradcould be seen many miles away overthe steppe; worse from the militarypoint of view was that the ferries overthe Volga, now the only means ofsustaining the Soviet forces, wereunder constant bombardment, notonly by aircraft but also by artillery.

At night, the Germans illuminatedthe river with flares, causing further

hardship to the Soviet command,which had already been forced to giveup daytime ferrying almost entirely.

But luckily the wind sometimescarried the flares away, sometimesthey were too low, too high, too near ortoo far away to be useful to the artil-

lery spotters of VI Army, and some-how or other the stream of ammuni-tion, food, and reinforcements keptcoming, as come they must; 62nd and64th Armies had been in almost con-tinuous action since mid-July, andinevitably were short of manpowerand equipment by the beginning of

September. Furthermore, the nextstage of the battle - the fighting on theinner defence line was about to begin.

61

'Every German

must feel he lives

under the muzzle of

a Russian gun'

It had now become inaccurate todescribe the northern part of Yere-menko's area as 'Stalingrad Front', asit was cut off from the city, except for62nd Army. This army was thereforeplaced under the jurisdiction of South-East Front, so that there was oneArmy Group north of the Germanbreach - Stalingrad Front, stretchingabout 250 miles from Babka on theDon to Yerzovka on the Volga, withfive armies (1st Guards, 21st, 24th,63rd and 66th), and one south of it -

South-East Front with four armies(62nd in the city, 64th and 57th to thesouth of it and further south still,

51st Army, defending the fairly quietsector behind the lakes of Tsatsa,Barmantsak, and Sarpa, below whichthe front line petered out into theKalmyk Steppe, penetrated only byan occasional patrol from each side.

It was impossible and perhaps impru-dent to try to administer such a largemilitary establishment from theunderground bunker in the Tsaritsaravine, a few miles from the front line,

and so Yeremenko and Khrushchevdeparted quietly across the Volga,moved some 25 miles north and thencrossed back to the west side, wherethey established their headquarters inthe village of Malaya Ivanovka. Therethe might of Stavka descended uponthem at the beginning of September,in the form of the Deputy SupremeCommander (the redoubtable GeneralZhukov), and the Chief of GeneralStaff, Colonel-General Vasilevsky.They asked questions, they probed,they visited the front line, they evenexamined the bridgeheads over theDon, though why they did so, theytold no-one, not even Yeremenko. Infact, before they left Moscow Stalinhad told them to examine the possi-bility of using the bridgeheads as thebases for a great counteroffensive, andto tell nobody what they were up to.

In 1920 the White forces of GeneralDenikin had been defeated here bysuch a movement, and it had been to alarge extent Stalin's own plan, so oldmemories were stirring as he lookedat the General Staff maps and Paulus'extended northern flank.

But when he looked at the situationmap for September 2nd, the idea of agrand coup de main vanished for themoment from his mind. That would

take time to prepare, and from thelook of things Stalingrad was notgoing to hold out long enough for it,

so he dashed off a message to Zhukovat Ivanovka.'The situation at Stalingrad is

getting worse. The enemy is threeversts [about two miles] from Stalin-grad. Stalingrad may be taken todayor tomorrow if the northern group of

forces does not give immediate help.

Require the commanders of the forcesdeployed north and north-west of

Stalingrad to strike at the enemy atonce, and go to help the Stalingraders.No procrastination is permitted. Pro-crastination now equals crime. Throwall aviation in to help Stalingrad. InStalingrad itself there are very fewaircraft left.

Report receipt and measures takenwithout delay.

J. Stalin.'

The word 'Stalingrad' recurs like adrum beat throughout the message.Often Stalin's senior commanderscould argue with him, but not this

time; he wanted something done atonce with the two armies (24th and66th) which had just arrived in theSamofalovka - Yerzovka - Loznoyearea from Stavka reserve. True, theywere not yet fully trained, and theyconsisted mostly of older reservists

(the prodigal way in which Sovietmanpower had been squandered in

1941 and in operations such as theKharkov offensive of May 1942 was still

having its effects), but they had notbeen in action much as yet, and there-

fore were much nearer their full

strength than those south of them, so

they were put into the attack onSeptember 5th, in yet another effort

to pinch out the German salient

between Don and Volga.They did not succeed, but the Ger-

mans had to divert some of their

efforts northwards to beat them off,

and this took some of the pressure off

62nd and 64th Armies as they endea-voured to organise some kind of de-

fence line around the perimeter of

Stalingrad. The 'inner defence line'

sounded good enough, but in manyplaces it was no more than a line onYeremenko's map. Wire had to be putdown, mines laid, trenches and fox-

holes dug, all sorts of things had yetto be done. Nor was there an excess of

63

Top: The last open spaces before the city

Bottom: Panzers deployed to meet thethreat from the north

«l '^

manpower available, as many of therifle divisions were barely equal to acompany at full strength; 87th had 180

men left, 112th had 150; 99th TankBrigade had 120 men and no tanks.This situation finally got the better

of the commander of 62nd Army,General Lopatin. He had been growingsteadily more pessimistic as thebattle wore on, though he had per-formed creditably up to now, but withthe Volga at his back and superiorenemy forces before him, his willbegan to crack. He decided Stalingradcould not be held, and began to with-draw his units without orders, sothere was nothing for it but to dismisshim. For the time being his Chief-of-Stafi", Major-General N I Krylov tookover command, but good Chiefs-of-Stafi" are almost as hard to find asgood army commanders, so thisarrangement could only be temporaryand Yeremenko cast about for asuccessor among the generals on thespot.

At 64th Army HQ, there was nocommand problem. Major-General M.S. Shumilov had commanded the armysince July 30th, and was a competent,calm, and untemperamental man, notgiven to extremes of optimism oi

pessimism. As his Deputy he hadLieutenant-General Vasily IvanovichChuykov, who had himself been thecommander of 64th Army when it wasa reserve army assembling and train-

ing around Tula, and who had been its

commander from the time it arrivedin the Stalingrad area until Shumilovtook over from him. He was by nomeans the 'fifth wheel on the car', butsince command of the army was in

Shumilov's capable hands, Chuykovcould be spared, and so it was thatChuykov was chosen to command62nd Army, thus becoming in the eyesof the Soviet public the outstandingfigure of the Stalingrad defence.Chuykov was then aged forty-two.

He had been Military Attache in Chinaat the outbreak of war, and had beenback only since March 1942. Until Julyhe had seen no action, but he had since

acquitted himself well. He wasdecisive, conscientious and an opti-

mist. Of course, Stalin had to ratify

the appointment, but his onlyquestion of Yeremenko was 'Do youknow him well enough?' Yeremenko

answered that'Chuykov was known to

him as a leader on whom one couldrely, and Stalin confirmed the pro-posal to give him 62nd Army, so hetook over on September 12th.

Chuykov, by his own testimony, hadbeen studying German battlefield

tactics closely during his few weeksin action. Though he admired thepolished way in which they co-

ordinated their aircraft, tanks, andinfantry, he was by no means over-awed by them, considering them oftensluggish and irresolute. On takingover an army soon to be completelyisolated on right and left, with abroad river at its back, and a superiorcommand sufficiently far away not to

be able to supervise his every move,he would have far more freedom of

action than a Soviet army commandernormally possessed, and therefore hisviews on how his army should fight

are of more than ordinary relevance.He believed that German methods

derived their extraordinary successmainly from the excellent coordina-tion of elements - aircraft, tanks andinfantry - not in themselves of out-standing quality. In the fighting onthe Don and Aksay rivers he had notedthat until the Luftwaffe was over theSoviet positions, the tanks would notattack, and until the tanks hadreached their objectives the infantrywould not go in, so the problem as hesaw it, was essentially one of breakingthe chain, by whatever means; and hehad also noted a certain dislike of theGerman infantry for close combat,observing that they would often openup with automatic weapons from halfa mile's distance.Putting together these two factors—

- dependence on co-ordination and dis-like of close combat - he arrived at theconclusion that the correct way tofight was to keep as close to them aspossible. That way the Luftwaffewould be unable to attack the Sovietforces without putting its own troopsat hazard, so the chain would bebroken at its first link, and the infan-try forced to fight in the close combatwhich he believed them to dislikeagainst an enemy who had not first

been softened up by bombers andtanks. As he himself later put it

'Every German soldier must be madeto feel that he was living under the

muzzle of a Russian gun'. It seemed tohim that inside the city these tacticswould be easy to apply, and the

Germans would be deprived of theirtrump card - the Luftwaffe, providing,of course, that his own troops werewilling and able to come to grips withthe Germans at close quarters.Chuykov's introduction to his new

army was neither auspicious nordesigned to give him confidence thathis ideas could be applied. To beginwith, no-one had any idea where its

headquarters were. Yeremenko be-lieved it to be in the Tsaritsynbunker, the underground commandpost in the Tsaritsa ravine untilrecently occupied by himself and hisFront headquarters, but it was notthere, so Chuykov wandered about thecity, marvelled at the makeshiftbarricades in the streets - incapable ofkeeping out a lorry, much less a tank -

and finally found an officer who knewwhere 62nd Army's command postwas. He guided Chuykov to the foot ofthe Mamayev Kurgan, and the newcommander scrambled up the hill toKrylov's dug-out, where he found theChief-of-Staff on the telephone tellingoff the commander of an armouredformation who, without orders, hadwithdrawn to the bank of the Volgafrom Hill 107.5 (Soviet practice was todesignate hills by their height inmetres as marked on the army maps),thus putting his headquarters behindthat of the Army.

Clearly, if this was allowed, it wouldbe the end of Chuykov's plans to fight

the Germans at close quarters, so theunfortunate General in charge of thearmour was sent for, told by Chuykovpersonally that he was guilty ofcowardice, that any future act of thiskind would be treated as treason anddesertion, and given until 0400 hours toput his command post back on hill

107.5. When the Deputy Front Com-mander, General Golikov arrived, thearmour commander was put throughthe wringer once again for goodmeasure.Chuykov's first request to Golikov

was for several additional divisions.He was faced by a total estimated atbetween eleven and fourteen Germandivisions, with reinforcements, sup-ported by approximately one thousandaircraft of Luftflotte IV, against which

65

62nd Army had a motley collectionincluding three armoured brigadeswith one tank between them (the twowith no tanks were soon moved acrossthe Volga to re-equip and reform),seveial infantry divisions each aboutequal to a full-strength battalion,Colonel Sarayev's 10th NKVD Division(more or less up to strength but shortof heavy weapons) and two infantrybrigades also near full strength. Theirsupporting air forces were com-pletely dominated by Luftflotte IV,which gave the Germans complete airsuperiority, and to make mattersworse, the ex-commander of 62ndArmy, General Lopatin, completelybroken in spirit, was still hoveringaround Army headquarters, continu-ing to infect his former subordinateswith his pessimism.Chuykov persuaded him to bow him-

self out of the battle, but the damagewas done, for soon the Deputies to theArmy Commander for Artillery,Tarks, and Engineering, pleadedilmess and disappeared across theVolga. Intensive work by the Com-munist Party organisations in theArmy, by the Political Department,by the Generals themselves, and arousing message from Yeremenko andKhrushchev, did something to restoreflagging morale, but still more wasneeded. Golikov's representations hadbeen effective, and a stream of rein-forcements was on its way - no lessthan ten infantry divisions, twoArmoured Corps and eight ArmouredBrigades were scheduled to arrive fromStavka reserve in the fortnight be-ginning on September 13th, and atleast half of the infantry was assignedto 62nd Army. Indeed, it was to receive10,0(X) men and 1,(X)0 tons of supplies inthe next three days.To ensure the safe arrival of these

reinforcements, it was essential toprotect the very vulnerable landingstages, which at present were wellwithin range of the German guns,62nd Army's bridgehead being onlythree miles wide at its narrowestpoint. Besides, an attack suitedChuykov's temperament, as it wouldbring his men into close contact withthe Germans and make it difficult forthe Luftwaffe to operate against them.

Lieut. General A I Chuykov in command

As far as he was concerned, no-man's-land should not be wider than agrenade-throw.

He and Krylov stayed up until 0200hours planning the attack. The armywould defend actively on its right andleft flanks, and its centre would attackto recapture Razgulyayevka stationand the railway line south-west of it asfar as the sharp bend near Gumrak,where it would consolidate, using therailroad embankment as an anti-tankobstacle, and then advance to Goro-dishche and Alexandrovka. The neces-sary regrouping would be carried outat once, and the attack launched onthe following day, September 14th.Conscious of a job well done, Chuy-

kov went to bed. At 0630 hours he wasawakened by the crash of bombs andshells. The Germans had forestalledhim.What had happened was that Seyd-

litz' 51st Army Corps had been laun-ched into a two-pronged attack againstcentral Stalingrad, south-east fromGorodishche and north-east fromPeschanka with two Panzer, onemotorised, and three infantry divi-sions. By afternoon the forwardSoviet defences had been overrun andthe Machine-Tractor Station, its

housing estate, and that of the air-

fleld captured, while the southernprong was barely being held off fromKuporosnoya and the bank of the Vol-ga. Worse, Chuykov had only thevaguest idea what was going on, as hiscommand post at the top of theMamayev Kurgan had been undercontinuous bombardment all day byGerman guns and mortars, its com-munications almost completely knoc-ked out, and by 1600 hours he hadalmost no contact with his troops.Even Chuykov, a man given to stud-

ied understatement, describes thesituation as 'somewhat disquieting'.As it happens, the Germans were beingheld off at the western edge of the'Barricades" and 'Red October" factor-ies' housing estates, but this he did notknow. All he knew was that it wasimpossible to direct the battle fromthis command post, so after hastilydrawing up a plan for a limited attackthe next morning he and his staff

departed foodless (breakfast had beenblown up by a bomb, dinner hadreceived a direct hit from a mortar)

67

A«x: ii^

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Luftwaffe troopsflush out a shelter

Top right: Factorieswere prime targets

Middle right: Burntout hangar. Theairfield was soon in

German handsBottom right:

Staltngraderswatch the gradualincursion* ^'^.'.^

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for the Tsaritsyn BunRer. Here theywere able to remain for only threedays, which was unfortunate, for it

offered much better protection thanthe dug-outs on the Mamayev Kurgan,being 30 feet below ground level, andhaving much more space.These were important considera-

tions as this battle was not and couldnot be directed by remote control.The bridgehead was so small thatreactions to enemy moves had to bequi ck and operations could not be con-trolled from the far bank of the Volga -

apart from anything else, the RedArmy had none of the special water-proof cable required for carrying its

telephone communications across theVolga, and its signals troops had touse ordinary insulated cable, whichrequired renewal every few days.Maintaining contact betwen 62ndArmy headquarters, Front HQ atIvanovka, and the elements of 62ndArmy support arms (artillery, aircraftand supply services) on the east bankproved difficult enough, so the extraload to be carried if 62nd Army HQ hadmoved east of the Volga would prob-ably have proved too muchThere was, of course, radio ; but that

could be jammed, or worse, the mes-sages passed over it monitored by theefficient German intercept services,and besides, radios were every bit ashard to come by as waterproof tele-

phone cable -. most tanks were still

without them. In any case, for ageneral of Chuykov's temperament,personal contact with his troops wasimportant, so as Zhukov had done be-fore him, during the defence ofMoscow, he maintained his commandpost in the threatened area so that themorale of his troops would not beadversely affected by the sight of theirgeneral departing.The HQ Staff arrived at the bunker

shortly before 0300 hours on Septem-ber 14th. At 0300 hours the Army'sartillery began bombarding the Ger-man positions, and half an hour laterthe counterattack began. Chuykov atonce telephoned Yeremenko to advisehim of the fact and ask for air coverfrom dawn onwards. The Front Com-mander agreed, and gave Chuykov thewelcome news that reinforcementswere on the way; Major-General A I

Rodimtsev's 13th Guards Rifle Divi-

72

sion would be assembling during theday at the Volga ferry terminal nearKrasnaya Sloboda. At once Chuykovdespatched a group of staff officers tomeet the division, then he and Krylovturned back to their immediate task -

the counterattack.The news was bad; the counter-

attack had failed, and the Germanswere again advancing, making for theCentral Station (Stalingrad-1). If theyoccupied it there was a serious dangerthat they would slice through 62ndArmy and seize the central landingstage before Rodimtsev's divisioncould arrive. Stalingrad's fate againhung in the balance as lorry-loads ofGerman infantry poured into its cen-tre behind the Panzer spearheads.Indeed, many of the Germans appearto have thought the city as good astaken, and Chuykov's men saw'drunken Germans jumping down fromtheir lorries, playing mouth-organs,shouting like mad and dancing on thepavements'. The front line was little

more than half a mile from Army HQ,and the ferry terminal was endangered.

Chuykov's last reserve of 19 tankswas on the southern outskirts of thecity. He ordered one battalion - ninetanks - to come to the command post,and while awaiting its arrival Krylovformed two assault groups from thestaff officers and the headquarterguard. When the tanks arrived, twohours later six of them, with one of theassault groups were sent to block thestreets leading from the railwaystation to the landing stage, and theother three, with the second group, torecapture a group of buildings knownas the 'specialists' houses', where theGermans had installed heavy machine-guns covering the landing stage andthe river.

At 1400 hours Rodimtsev arrived,after a perilous journey through thecity from the landing stage, to reportand receive instructions. His 13thGuards Division was near full strength,with about 10,000 men, but was shortof weapons and ammunition. In partic-ular over a thousand of his men had norifles, and though Golikov had beeninstructed to deliver the necessary

weapons to the Krasnaya Sloboda areaby evening, there was no guaranteethat they would arrive before thedivision began to cross to the city.Chuykov immediately gave orders forweapons belonging to 62nd Army'ssupply personnel on the east bank tobe collected and delivered to Rodimt-sev's guardsmen, while Rodimtsevwas instructed to bring his anti-tankguns and mortars over, but to leavehis other artillery on the east bank,where it could do its job in greatersafety, under direction from spottersin the city.

Rodimtsev was given the sectorfrom Mamayev Kurgan in the southto the Tsaritsa river on the north, andthe tasks of clearing the Germansfrom the city centre, the specialists'houses and the railway station withtwo of his regiments, while a third wasto hold the Mamayev Kurgan and abattalion of infantry remain at ArmyHQ as a reserve. Chuykov told him toset up his command post in someexisting dug-outs on the Volga bank,and when he objected to taking up his

Chuykov's command became firmer,

the Russian defence took shape

^^V .^ ,-,,

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'm^r Foretaste of tJie battle t<fto

headquarters behind those of theArmy, blandly assured him that oncehe had carried out his assignment hecould move his command post forward.Rodimtsev departed to make his

arrangements. His division would be-gin to cross at dusk, in about five

hours' time. It was now 1600 hours, andChuykov's shattered divisions wouldhave to hold on for another ten totwelve hours. There were no reservesleft - even the staff officers and HQguard were in action. The only possi-bility was Colonel Sarayev's NKVDdivision, but this did not consist ofArmy troops, and there was no love lostbetween Sarayev and the Army Com-mander. On the one hand, Chuykovwas contemptuous of the'fortifications' - blockhouses andbarricades - which Sarayev as 'com-mander of Stalingrad garrison" hadput up, while Sarayev for his part wasdisposed to treat Chuykov as an equal,not a superior, until finally Chuykovhad to 'pull rank' on him. 'Do youunderstand, your division has beenincorporated into 62nd Army. Youhave to accept the authority of theArmy's Military Council withoutargument. Do you want me to tele-

phone Front HQ to clarify the posi-tion?'Sarayev conceded the point. "I con-

sider myself a soldier of 62nd Army",he replied.

So that point was cleared up, butthere was still the main problem ofreserves. It was clear that none of theNKVD troops could be spared; how-ever, Sarayev had under his commanda number of armed police, firemen, andfactory workers. They were short ofweapons, but there were about 1,500 ofthem, so Chuykov gave orders toSarayev to select some solid build-ings, especially in the city centre,fortify them, instal 50-100 men in each,and defend them to the bitter end.Weapons and supplies could be drawnfrom 62nd Army.News from the front line was spor-

adic, and often the easiest way togauge the progress of the fighting wasto go to the Pushkin Street exit andlisten. Keen ears were not needed - theGerman 71st Infantry Division waswithin 500 yards of the bunker. Theline now seemed to be holding, thoughonly just. One of Chuykov's regimental

commanders had been missing sincemorning, and so delicately poised wasmorale that no one could be certainthat he had not simply run out on hismen.Just before dusk, Major Khopko

arrived to report that his last tank hadbeen put out of action near the station.Chuykov packed him off back to hispost with orders to hold on with thehundred or so men he had left, and thetank - which could fire, though it

could not move - until relieved by menfrom Rodimtsev's division 'or else . .

.'

The fighting began to subside asdusk fell, so Chuykov and his staff

took stock of the position. The Ger-mans had advanced as far as theMamayev Kurgan and the railway line,

and had reached the Central RailroadStation, though they had not yet cap-tured it. They had occupied manybuildings in the city centre, almostwiped out the units in 62nd Army's cen-tre, and destroyed the ObservationPost on Mamayev Kurgan. On thesouthern sector they had been held,but all the signs were that they werepreparing to attack again.

All night long 62nd Army HQ buzzedwith activity as officers came andwent - some to fight, some to pin downthe Germans in the specialists" housesand round the station so that theywould be too busy to interfere with thedisembarkation ofRodimtsev"s troops;others still to and from the landingstage to meet the incoming battalionsand lead them to the front line.

Despite all their efforts, it did notprove possible to bring the entire divi-

sion across that night, but rather morethan two-thirds of it was brought overand went immediately into position,though none too soon: the Germanattack was renewed the next morning,with elements of three divisions (71st,

76th, and 295th) attacking the station

and the MamayevKurgan, while in thesouthern sector the expected Germanattack duly materialised, mounted byunits of XIV and XXIV Panzer and94th Infantry Divisions. The Luftwaffewas extremely active, and Rodimt-sev's troops were heavily engaged be-

fore they had even got their bearings.The railroad station changed handsfour times during the day, but wasback in Soviet hands by nightfall,

though elsewhere the battle went

76

better for the Germans. They held thespecialists' houses, despite furious andrepeated attacks by the 34th Regimentof Rodimtsev's division supported bytanks, thus retaining the ability tomachine-gun the central landingstage, and also inflicted heavy losseson Colonel Batrakov's infantry bri-

gade and accompanying elements ofthe NKVD Division, forcing them backto the forestry station, while Dubyan-sky's Guards division was forced backto the western outskirts of the citysouth of the Tsaritsa river.

The battle for the Mamayev Kurganwent on all day with varying fortunes.This insignificant hill, marked asHeight 102.0 on both German andSoviet maps dominated the entire citycentre, so both sides were to set greatstore by it, and right up to the end ofthe Battle of Stalingrad possession ofit would be contested, so fiercely that

it remained free of snow throughoutthe winter - the heat of explodingshells and bombs made it too hot forsnow to lie. The Guardsmen of Rodimt-sev's division were locked in a fight tothe death with elements of threeGerman divisions (XXII Panzer, 71st,

and 295th Infantry) throughout Sep-tember 15th, and by evening it beganto look as if they would be forced oft' it,

so Chuykov ordered the remainingregiment of the division (the 42nd) tobe brought across the Volga that nightand sent straight to the MamayevKurgan to be in position before dawn.Apart from the problems of the front

line, Chuykov was now directing thedefence under severe physical differ-culties, for German machine-gunnershad moved into the valley of theTsaritsa and had the Army HQ in theirsights, so that it was dangerous to gooutside. The HQ Guard was again in

It was not to fly

overall ofStalingrad

i^

action near the bunker and woundedwere being brought into it. To add tothe congestion inside, the morale ofsome of the weaker vessels began tocrack towards evening and large num-bers of officers and men made excusesto come in on 'urgent business' so thatthey could shelter from the incessantbombing and gunfire. The bunker hadno ventilation system, and the atmos-phere inside became intolerable, soChuykov ordered a secondary com-mand post to be set up on the bank ofthe Volga opposite the south end ofZaitevsky Island to assist in control-ling the units of the army's right wingin the northern part of the city.

Again the fighting eased ofi" duringthe night. The 42nd Regiment cameover the river and took up positions atthe foot of the Mamayev Kurganalongside the men of the now veryweakened 112th Rifle Division, and atdawn the artillerypounded the Germanpositions for ten minutes, then the42nd with one regiment of 112th Divi-sion advanced into a hurricane ofmortar fire and bombs. A short thoughvicious hand-to-hand struggle settledthe issue, and the Soviet troops beganto dig in again on the summit* but thebattle had been a costly one, and whenthe leading platoon reached the top ofthe hill, six men were left of the thirtywho had begun the ascent, while thelosses in the formations behind themwere almost as heavy. Neverthelessthey succeeded in beating off theGerman counterattack which followedalmost at once, and holding on to thevital height. The emphasis now shiftedto the Stalingrad-1 Railroad station.Here a battalion of Rodimtsev's

Guards had been installed since cross-ing the river on the night of September14th, and on the morning of the 17ththey came under very heavy attackfrom a force of German automaticriflemen supported by about 20 tanks,which drove them out of the stationand surrounding buildings. They re-grouped, counterattacked, and re-covered the lost ground, only to bedriven out again. In all the areachanged hands four times during theday, but when night fell, it was againin Soviet hands littered with burnt-out tanks and the bodies of hundredsof dead of both sides. Mutual exhaus-tion, as much as the approach of dark-

ness, brought the fighting at thestation to an end for the time being.That night, with his headquarters

under harassing fire from machine-gunners of the German 71st InfantryDivision, Chuykov left the Tsaritsynbunker to move to a new commandpost. To move through streets infestedwith German machine-gunners andtanks was too dangerous. The partytherefore crossed the Volga to Kras-naya Sloboda, moved by road to Ferry62, then transferred to an armouredlaunch to recross the river to the new

Above: Russian patrol races to athreatened spotBelow: Strongpoint In the rubbleAbove right: Where armour could move,it always won in this first stageBelow right: Where armour wasblocked, light anti-tank guns blastedthe buildings

78

site. On the way from KrasnayaSloboda Gurov, the Army's 'Memberof Military Council' suggested a mealand a bath, but while the Army Com-mander lingered over a cup of tea, thenight began to pass away, and with it

the opportunity of getting back to theother bank, since the ferries nowworked only by night. A mad dashto the landing stage ensued, andChuykov managed to leap from thebank to the last ferry, which had al-

ready left the landing stage. On arrivalat the new command post he took

stock of the situation and found thatseveral of his senior officers had'disappeared' while on the easternbank. Thus fragile was morale still.

The new command post was underthe overhang of the Volga bank under-neath some oil tanks. A number of.

sunken barges lay in the shallow waternearby, half above the surface, and inthese the staff officers installed them-selves, while the Military Council andChief-of-StafT were put into some opentrenches. All, for the moment, were inthe open air, pending the building ofdug-outs, which the sappers began on

at once and nobody knew whetherthe oil tanks were empty or not. It wasa great come-down from the custom-built Tsaritsyn bunker, but that wasno longer 'safe', if that word could beapplied to any place in the bridgehead,and at least the new post was Ij milesfrom the front line.

At daybreak the Luftwaffe appearedagain and the fighting was renewed,but at 0800 hours Richthofen's planesvanished; Stalingrad Front, north ofthe city, had begun a probing attack.However, it soon petered out, and by1400 hours the German aircraft wereback in force. During their absence thetroops on the army's right flank im-proved their positions, and those onMamayev Kurgan also gained 100-150yards. In the centre the situationdeteriorated somewhat and the rail-road station, which had changed handsfifteen times in five days, finally fell tothe Germans on the evening of the18th, nor were there any reserves leftwith which to retake it, for the magni-ficent 13th Guards Division of GeneralRodimtsev had been reduced to askeleton.

It had not been sacrificed to no pur-pose; unquestionably it had savedStalingrad on September 14th, andeven now individuals or groups of twoand three men were fighting on in thebasements, behind the platforms, orfrom under railway carriages andwould do so night and day for sometime to come. In so doing they wouldgradually change the whole characterof the battle, bringing to life Chuykov'sdictum that 'every German must bemade to feel he is living under themuzzle of a Russian gun'. But as alarge infantry formation they nolonger existed, after the pounding towhich they had been subjected duringtheir first few days in the line.

In the area south of the city,Kuporosnoye fell, bringing the Ger-mans out on the Volga at yet anotherplace, completing the isolation of 62ndArmy, hampering the work of theferries even more, and creating athreat to the supply and artilleryservices which packed the far bank ofthe river; the artillery had becomeparticularly important, because thecontinued shrinking of the bridgeheadmade it more and more impractical tomaintain field-gun and howitzer regi-

79

ments in the city itself, and Yere-menko was forced to assemble thefragments of units withdrawn to theeast bank to regroup and reform into

a defensive force covering the sectorbetween Sredne-Pogromnoye andGromki, opposite the sections of thebank held by the Germans.The 62nd Army's position now

appeared desperate, and in an effort to

ease the pressure on it, Yeremenkomounted a full scale attack on Sep-tember 19th, aimed at breakingthrough the German defences in the

Chuykov and Yeremenko possessed alarge measure of the prima donnatemperament often found in a success-ful military commander, and thatYeremenko's accounts of incidents inhis wartime career have more thanonce been challenged by other gen-erals, but on this occasion, it is

doubtful whether Chuykov's allega-tions can be fully substantiated. Hehimself admits that Paulus had notyet committed the main forces of VIArmy to the attack on the city, andimplies that Stalingrad Front's

Inevitably, the advance slowed as it

reached the factories

Gumrak-Gorodische area, and linkingup with 62nd Army, which was to join

in by attacking with three infantrydivisions and anarmouredbrigade fromthe vicinity of the Mamayev Kurgantowards Rynok and Orlovka in thenorth-west and west of Stalingrad.This attack was a failure, and Chuykovhas commented on Yeremenko's exe-cution of it with some acerbity,alleging that it was prepared withundue haste, that the forces were ill-

trained and unduly dispersed, that it

was launched at the wrong time andagainst the main forces of VI Army,which had not yet been worn down bythe fighting in the city, and waslaunched in daylight despite theGerman superiority in the air.

Though he blames most of thesefaults on General Gordov, the formerFront commander (who has been therecipient of almost as much blame for

Soviet errors as Hitler has been for

German ones), the allegations areaimed also at Gordov's superior,

Yeremenko. It is true that both

80

counterattack should not have beenmounted until he had done so.

It is doubtful, on Chuykov's owntestimony as to the strength of hisarmy on September 19th, whether it

couldhave stood up tp an all-out attackby VI Army long enough for a counter-attack by Stalingrad Front to save theday. Nevertheless, it is true that thecounterattack failed, and was repelledby VI Army without any transfer offorces from 62nd Army's front, apartfrom aircraft. Yet this argues onlythat the attack was badly executed,not that it was wrong to attempt it;

and the two divisions which arrived asreinforcements specifically for thecounterattack (Gorishny's and Bat-yuk's) were to prove as valuable asRodimtsev's had been in th6 days thatfollowed. Stalingrad Front renewedits attack on the 20th and at 0200

hours on the 21st Yeremenko rang upChuykov warning him that an arm-oured brigade had broken through the

German positions and would soon link

up with 62nd Army in the Orlovka area.

The 62nd Army staff sat up all nightwaiting for the link-up to be reportedbut Yeremenko's optimism proved

premature - by four months and five

days.Most of the southern city was now in

German hands, but on the southernoutskirts stood a vast building: thegrain elevator, defended by about 30guardsmen, and 18 men of the 'NavalInfantry' (not marines, but sailorswhom the High Command had pressedinto service because of the manpowershortage). The sailors won a tremend-ous reputation wherever they wereused, and most of the ones in theelevator were a particularly tough

tank support attempted on September21st to break through to the left bankof the Tsaritsa river, and but forheavy fire from the artillery on theeast bank of the Volga would havedone so, and on the 22nd Rodimtsev'smen were driven away from the cen-tral landing stage. Almost the wholeof 62nd Army's rear was now open toGerman fire, while only the stages inthe north of the city could now beused - and that only at night. Batyuk'snewly-arrived division was given thetask of liquidating the German force

. . . and the defenders fought back fromthe debris

breed from the Arctic, who wereordered to the elevator on the eveningof the 17th to reinforce the garrison of

guardsmen.The elevator was attacked by a

German battalion and the fighting

went on for five days. In the end ele-

ments of three German divisions(XXIX Motorised, XIV Panzer and94th Infantry) were drawn into thebattle, but not until the 22nd, whenhardly any of the garrison were left

alive, and they had neither water norammunition, was the elevator cap-tured. This action showed in micro-cosm how the German commitment to

the taking of Stalingrad could be madeto escalate, given firm defence byrelatively small bodies of men; butthe capture of the elevator meant thatthe southern part of the city was nowfor all practical purposes in Germanhands, though as in the railwaystation area small bodies of men con-tinued to fight on in the German rear.

In the centre of the city, the situa-

tion was critical, German troops with

in the central landing stage area andtaking firm control of the valley of

the Tsaritsa.Chuykov sent for Batyuk and

briefed him on the use of small com-bat groups, as he was not sure in his

mind that Batyuk had adapted him-self away from the peacetime drills

under which the units were muchlarger, until finally Batyuk (who hadin fact taken note of the peculiaritiesof street fighting in Stalingrad beforehis division crossed the Volga, andmade his dispositions accordingly)cut short his commander's haranguewith a few well-chosen words, 'I've

come to fight, not parade. My regi-

ments have Siberians in them . . ,',

after which Chuykov left him to geton with the job.

Within an hour, at 1(XX) hours onSeptember 23rd, Batyuk's men wereput in to the attack down the Volgabank towards the landing stage, whileRodimtsev attacked northwards with2,000 reinforcements, but the Germanswere too well dug in. and two days ofof fierce fighting failed to dislodgethem. Nevertheless, Paulus was un-able to extend his penetrations fur-

81

ther, and from the evening- of the 24ththe fighting- began to die down again.

The 62nd Army had been split in two,

but it was still in business.

82

Ae^fs/id/>e/o»v; The first stalemate

V'

Hitler changes

the team

While the battle had been raging overthe ruins of Stalingrad, dramaticevents had been taking place at

Hitler's headquarters. The offensive

against the Caucasian oilfields hadalso stalled short of its objectives, andthe Fuhrer, never very trustful of his

generals, was looking for scapegoats;and so he had sent one of the fewsoldiers who enjoyed his confidence,

Colonel-General Jodl of OKW, to theheadquarters of Army Group A to find

out why its C-in-C, Field Marshal List,

was not making better head-way,Jodl returned to report that List

had acted exactly in accordance withHitler's own orders, but that the ter-

rain and the strong Russian resist-

ance had combined against him.Hitler fell into one of his tempers

and ordered Jodl's replacement, but in

fact Jodl, who believed that 'a dic-

tator, as a matter of psychologicalnecessity, must never be reminded of

his own errors, in order to maintainhis self-confidence' never again vio-

lated his own dictum, and was notreplaced. But List was, on September10th. So was General von Wietersheim,commander of XIV Panzer Corps,

84

followed by General von Schwedlerof IV Panzer Corps - the first forobjecting to the use of Panzers tohold open the Rynok corridor fromDon to Volga, a task more suitablefor infantry, and the second for the'defeatist' suggestion that the con-centration of such strong forces at thetip of a salient with vulnerable flankscould be very dangerous for VI Army.These dismissals were, however,overshadowed by the departure ofColonel-General Haider, the Chief ofGeneral Staff at OKH on September24th.

It was already time for the plannersat OKH to turn their attention to thecoming winter, and try to predictwhere the Red Army's winter offensive

would be launched; and the majorityopinion was that it would take placein the middle of the front; and so bothHaider and the C-in-C Army GroupCentre, Field-Marshal von Kluge,were anxious for reinforcements,which were not available because ofthe pressure of events in the south.New Soviet divisions were being iden-tified on the central sector almostdaily, would be active for a few days

and then disappear, into reservebehind the centre as Kluge and Haiderbelieved.Personal relations between Hitler

and Haider had been deteriorating for

months, and a fairly trivial argumentover these evanescent Soviet divi-

sions grew out of all proportion, so

that on September 24th Haider wasdismissed. His successor, Zeitzler,

was promoted over the heads of manysenior and better generals; his forte

was logistics. Hitler wanted a manwho would move troops to where he,

Hitler, said they should go, andZeitzler would be good at that; so hejoined the clique of pliable yes-menwith which OKW and OKH weregradually being packed. Hencefor-ward Hitler would exercise much moredirect control than Haider had evergranted him.

Hitler's principal adjutant, GeneralSchmundt, was promoted to headthe Army Personnel Office, so Paulus(who throughout his career showedhimself as good a courtier as asoldier) sent him congratulations;and this too was to have a dispropor-tionate effect on the course of theStalingrad battle, for Schmundtthereupon confided to him that hewas being considered as a replacementfor Jodl as Chief-of-Staff- at OKW.Paulus was given to understand thata quick seizure of Stalingrad wouldadvance his cause very considerablyand so at once began to plan his re-

turn to the corridors of power throughthe ruins of Stalingrad - which was apity, for his talents were essentiallythose of a staff officer rather than afield commander.The argument about the vanishing

Soviet divisions had more connectionwith Stalingrad than the Germansrealised at the time. Though Stalin'scourt could be quite as Byzantine asHitler's, Stavka on the whole lackedthe atmosphere of feverish intriguewhich enwrapped Hitler's headquar-ters. Sometimes glacially slow tomove, it was on the whole a place ofpurposive contemplation rather thanof frenzied activity, and Stalin inter-fered less with it than Hitler did withhis General Staff. Like Schwedler,Stavka had become interested in thelong exposed German fiank along theDon, and as already mentioned, the

Deputy Supreme Commander, Zhukov,and ChiefofGeneral Staff, Vassilevsky

,

had visited the Soviet bridgeheadsacross the Don early in September.When they returned to Moscow

they held a conference at which ^preliminary plan for a counter-offensive was worked out, and it wasin this connection that new Sovietdivisions began appearing and dis-appearing on the central sector. Theywere being 'baptised' on the relativelyquiet parts of the central front, thenwithdrawn, and the Germans werequite right to conclude that they weregoing into reserve. They were; butnot in the centre. They were beingdispatched to the Stalingrad area, forwhat was afoot was a giant pinceroperation - the encirclement anddestruction of VI Army, IV PanzerArmy, and as many of the satellites ascould be put in the bag.The German attention must be kept

concentrated on Stalingrad, andtherefore the city must be held. Butto treat Stalingrad as a mincingmachine, as the Germans had done atVerdun in 1916, and as Paulus seemedprepared to do, was neither an elegantsolution nor a possible one, given theRed Army's acute shortage of man-power. Besides, the bridgehead atStalingrad was now so small that topack large forces in there would raiseappalling supply problems, and ex-pose the closely-packed masses to aslaughter at the hands of the Luft-waffe and the German infantry -

whose capacities, whatever the short-comings of thier higher leadership,were very formidable.The decision not to fight a

battle of attrition was therefore notentirely voluntary, but in any case,

such a battle would not appeal toZhukov, the only Soviet senior com-mander to date who had shown how toturn a superior enemy to fiight - atMoscow in the previous year - andwho, to do so, had found it necessaryto issue an order 'categorically for-

bidding' frontal attacks on strong-points. So 62nd Army was reinforcedenough to keep it as a going concern,but the overwhelming majority of thedivisions sent to the south fromStavka reserve between September1st and November 1st went not intothe city but into concentration areas

85

north of the Don bend. Chuykov'srequirements were heavy, and hereceived the equivalent of ten divi-

sions; but nearly three times thatnumber - twenty-seven divisions -

went into the assembly areas behindStalingrad Front.The command structure, too had to

be reorganised. Yeremenko's dualresponsibility was abolished, and theFronts were confusingly renamed,Stalingrad Front becoming Don Frontand being put under command of

Lieutenant-General K. K. Rokossov-sky, while South-East Front wasrechristened Stalingrad Front, withYeremenko retaining command of it,

and a new Army Group, South-WestFront, was established, under thecommand of Lieutenant-General N. F.

Vatutin. At the appropriate time it

would take up positions on the rightof Rokossovsky's forces, but for thetime being its existence was keptsecret, and its troops remained behindthe line, training, equipping - andpreparing.Success of the Soviet plan depended

on two things; first, the generalStavka assessment that Germanstrength was ebbing slowly, and thatthere would be no large strategicreserves available to throw in againstthe Soviet offensive when it waslaunched; and secondly, on the con-tinued success of 62nd and 64th Armiesin pinning down a large German force

in the Stalingrad area. This in turndepended on 62nd Army's ability to

hold the city, because once it fell VIArmy would be in a position to divertforces, both its own infantry and thetanks of IV Panzer Army, to defendits northern flank.

The bridgehead on the Volga nowcomprised only the northern part of

the city consisting of the TractorFactory, the 'Barricades' ordnanceplant, the 'Red October' steel worksand a number of other smaller plants,stretching in a row along the bank ofthe Volga north of the MamayevKurgan, and with the housing estatesfor their workers directly west ofthem. Under the dual stimuli - hope ofadvancement and fear of the Russianwinter, now beginning to announceits approach - Paulus launched hisheaviest attack yet, on October 4th.

Though most of 62nd Army was in

86

good heart, there were still from timeto time serious problems of morale.In late September, Chuykov had begunto be suspicious of the reports comingby radio from two brigades whichwere cut off from the main body of theArmy, and were fighting indepen-dently south of the Tsaritsa. Oninvestigation he discovered that thecommander, and headquarters staff

of the formation had abandoned theirmen and installed themselves onGolodny Island in the Volga, wherethey were manufacturing false reportsabout the progress of the fighting, andtransmitting them to Army HQ.Chuykov is silent about the punish-ments he inflicted, but they wereprobably extreme.

It was, however, too late for onSeptember 26th one of the abandonedbrigades left its positions, summonedthe ferries, and fled across the river.

The other was withdrawn before it

could do the same, and ferried northto the factory district, where undernew officers it subsequently performedwell. However, the withdrawal hadfreed German hands on the left of62nd Army, and preparations began foryet another major German onslaughton the Mamayev Kurgan, which wasnow the linch-pin of the southern endof Chuykov's precarious toe-hold inthe city.

German confidence was now at its

height, at any rate among the troopswho did the actual fighting. Their airsuperiority was still almost absolute,for although two new Soviet airarmies were deploying further north,they were being husbanded for thecounteroffensive and not committedto battle for fear of giving the showaway. New formations from Germany- mostly specialised units, such asengineers and flame-thrower detach-ments - were being brought in for thelast heave, and no particular care wastaken to camouflage the intention tomount new attacks. So cocky weresome, particularly those who had notyet been in battle, that they wouldshout across to the Russian positions(which were frequently on the oppositeside of a street, or in the next building'Russ! Tomorrow bang-bang !\ thuswarning their embattled opponentsand giving them time to take appro-priate steps.

Those who went : Top /eft: Col. General Haider, Chief of the General Staff. Top

right .Field Marshall List, C-in-C Army Group A. Those who came : fioffom/e/f;

Lieut. General KK Rokossovsky, Commander, Don Front. Bottom right : General

NF Vatutin, Commander, South West Front87

The bridgehead was now so smallthat almost all of it could be broughtunder fire from small arms, and move-ment in the open by day had becomealmost synoymous with suicide. Gainsor losses in battle were measured bythe yard, and the basic unit of combatwas the individual sniper or the stormgroup of mixed arms, usually auto-matic weapons, hand grenades, Molo-tov cocktails, machine guns and anti-

tank rifles, or sometimes an anti-tankgun. This was not street fighting in theusual sense of the word, as to emergein the open was usually too dangerous,and most of the fighting took place in

side the ruined buildings. The stormgroups were usually composed of

assault groups of six to eight meneach. Their job was to break into abuilding, and they were lightly armedwith machine carbines, grenades,daggers, and spades (which were often•used as axes as well).

They were supported by a reinforce-ment group, which would follow up assoon as the assault groups were in-

side, and establish a field of fire aroundthe target to prevent the approach of

enemy reinforcements. For this pur-pose the reinforcement groups weremore heavily armed, with heavymachine-guns and automatic wea-pons, mortars, anti-tank rifles orguns, crow-bars, picks, and explo-sives. In addition, the reserve groupwas used to supplement the assaultgroups, to block ofl" the flanks againstenemy attack, and if necessary tocover the withdrawal of the assaultand reinforcement groups. These high-ly specialised small units proved verysuccessful, and the small size of thebasic unit, the assault group, made it

possible to construct storm groups ofvarying sizes and compositions accor-ding to the nature of the target.In defence, the storm groups would

be deployed with anti-tank weaponson the ground floor, machine guns onthe higher storeys, and infantry at all

.levels including the basement. The62nd Army, thanks to its specialisedstructure and tactics proved itself

superior in close fighting, even againstodds, and Paulus' neglect of the need toadopt special methods to meet the par-ticular conditions showed yet again

The Street fighting

/. Russian assault group moves in

2. Once inside, the fighting was fierce

and ruthless

3. Support group holds off enemyreinforcements4. The Germans never became as skilful

as the Russians. Luftwaffe troopsarrogantly stand, inviting slaughter

88

the lack of resourcefulness with whichthe German leadership approached thesituation. Against the skill and cun-ning of Chuykov's specialised tactics,

his only answer was to concentratemore and more force at the tip of thesalient - just where Zhukov wanted it.

Chuykov had succeeded in forging62nd Army into a highly competentbody of house-to-house fighters, andhis tactic of keeping close to the enemywas paying off. On many of the sectorswhere the fighting was fiercest, theLuftwaffe was either reduced to impo-tance or reduced to bombing bothsides impartially, but now all theindications were that a major Germanattack was impending. The 62nd Armywould need all its skill and com-bativeness.The indications from reconnais-

sance, and from the German careless-ness over concealing their intentions,made it possible to deduce by Septem-ber 26th that Paulus' offensive was tobe mounted from the Gorodishche -

Razgulyayevka direction against thehousing estates of the 'Barricades' and'Red October' factories, thence into the

factories themselves and the Volgabank behind them. In the realisationthat each successive German attackreduced still further his limited roomto manoeuvre, and knowing that morereinforcements were on their way(General Smekhotvorov's 193rd Infan-try Division would begin to cross theriver on the evening of the 27th,followed on the 30th by the 308thInfantry of General Gurtiev and onOctober 3rd by General Zholudev's37th Guards), Chuykov decided to tryto disrupt Paulus' preparations bymaintaining constant bombardmentby the artillery group on the eastbank, and strengthening the defenceson the north side of the city, atpresent very weakly held by thethoroughly exhausted 112th InfantryDivision and a much understrengthtank brigade.The situation at the Mamayev

Kurgan was again causing anxiety, asthe Germans were on its western andsouthern slopes, little more than onehundred yards from the top. A strongcounterattack here would perhapsrestore the position; it might even

disrupt Paulus' plan to attack thefactory area by making him divert

troops back to the centre of the city -

and they would be vulnerable to artil-

lery bombardment while in transit

along the Gumrak-Stalingrad road.

However, the bulk of the army wouldhave to remain in position to with-stand the Paulus offensive, and in theend only the understrength divisions

of Gorishny, Batyuk, and Rodimtsevfeould be used.Chuykov was still so apprehensive

that his subordinates would revert to

the peacetime practices of attack bylarge formations that in the order for

the attack (Army Order No. 166 of

September 26th) he found it necessaryto state 'I again caution all unit andformation commanders not to executecombat operations with entire units

such as companies and battalions. Theoffensive should be organised mainlyon a small-group basis, with automaticweapons, hand grenades, bottles of

inflammable mixture and anti-tankrifles . .

.'

After a60-minute artillery bombard-ment, the infantry moved out at 0600

hours on the 27th, but after someinitial gains they were forced to go to

ground by German dive-bombers about0800. At 1030 a massive German assaultbegan against the Mamayev Kurganand the 'Red October' housing estate.

Three German divisions, XXIV Panzer,100th Infantry, and 389th Infantry,

were involved, 100th a fresh division

and 389th newly made up to strength.

Chuykov had beaten Paulus to thepunch by only four and a half hours,and the most critical period for 62ndArmy had begun.The Luftwaffe plastered the entire

bridgehead with bombs and the strongpoint of Gorishny's 95th Division atthe top of the Mamayev Kurgan wasobliterated. Army HQ under the over-

hang of the Volga bank was under air

attack throughout the day, and theopen oil reservoir adjacent to the oil

tanks above the HQ began to burn,covering the area with a pall of chok-ing black smoke. Towards mid-day thetelephones began to give trouble andthe radio .links to cease functioning.Clearly, there was serious trouble atthe front line, but it was impossible tofind out at HQ how bad it was.The Leaders of 62nd Army therefore

dispersed to find out, Chuykov toBatyuk's division, Krylov to Gorish-ny's, and Gurov to the armouredformation. When they got back theyfound that many of their staff officers

had decamped, so they compared notesas best they could, but it was well after

nightfall by the time they had a full

picture of the situation. In the north,the Germans had breached the mine-fields, overrun the forward positions of

112th Division and in places forced it

back over a mile, penetrating the'Barricades' housing estate, while in

the centre, Gorishny's division hadbeen driven off the Mamayev Kurganwith heavy losses, and what was left of

it was hanging on precariously to thenorth-east slopes. 'One more battlelike that' thought Chuykov, 'andwe'll be in the Volga'.Khrushchev rang from Front HQ,

and Chuykov told him that in spite of

all 62nd Army's efforts, German supe-riority in men and materials wasbeginning to give them the upper hand,but that his Military Council wasworking on ways to destroy the forcebattering its way into the city fromthe Razgulyayevka area.'What help do you need?' Khrush-

chev asked.'I'm not complaining about the air

force, which is putting up a heroicfight, but the enemy has mastery of

th6 air. The Luftwaffe is his trumpcard in attack. Therefore I ask for

more help in this field - air cover, if

only for a few hours a day'.Krushchev replied that the Front

was already doing all it could, butundertook to see if yet more could bedone.That night (September 27th-28th),

unit commanders and political wor-kers were sent out to the dug-outs andtrenches to bring their men up to thehighest pitch of resolve, while two of

Smekhotvorov's regiments were fer-

ried across and sent straight into theline on the western edge of the 'RedOctober' housing estate. The artillery

shelled the Mamayev Kurgan all night,

so that the Germans on the top wouldhave no chance to dig in. and a counter-attack by Batyuk's division and theremnants of Gorishny's was organisedfor the coming day.The Luftwaffe came in again at

dawn on the 28th, dropping everything

90

m^'^ -*

^̂-•C>

Above andbelow: The open oil reservoir hit by Luftwaffe 27th September

^1

k pall hung above the city all day

fi, -'--ai^:

they could lay their hands on (there is

no record of a kitchen sink being-

dropped, but pieces of metal, ploughs,tractor wheels, and empty cans fell

by the hundred on the heads of Chuy-kov's men, along with the bombs).They maintained constant attacks onthe troops, the ferries, and the ArmyHQ. Five of the six cargo ferries wereput out of action, the flames from theburning oil tanks spread to theMilitary Council's dug-out, and Chuy-kov's personal cook, Glinka, wasinjured in the shell hole which heused for a kitchen.Nevertheless, Chuykov detected

grounds for hope. The German attacksseemed to him to lack co-ordination,and to be slower than in the past.Better still, Krushchev's promise toimprove the air support had bornefruit, and the Air Commander, the32-year-old Major-General Khryukin,gave 62nd Army the strongest air sup-port it had yet received, under whichthe counterattack on the MamayevKurgan went in with some prospect ofsuccess. The summit was not recap-tured, but was made untenable to the

Germans, and became for the timebeing a no-man's-land, under heavyartillery fire from both sides.

The fighting of September 28ththerefore had gone reasonably well for62nd Army, but its position was still

precarious in the extreme, so Stavkareconsidered its earlier resolve toreinforce the 62nd Army area assparingly as possible, especially sincean attack on Kuporosnoye by 64thArmy, made on September 27th, alsofailed, leaving 62nd Army isolated asbefore. Now reinforcements began topour down to Stalingrad; but notinfantry or tank divisions for 62nd or64th Army. This time most of themwere machine-gun battalions and'fortified area' troops (static forma-tions, mostly formed from older men,and intended primarily for staticdefence), and they were not intendedfor the city.

The order from Stavka was to fortifythe islands in the Volga and the eastbank between Sredne-Pogromnoyeand Gromki. The artillery on the eastbank was reorganised to form part ofthe defences, w^hile continuing to

Below and right : By the end of

September the Germans commandedthe river crossings. Far right

:

Reinforcements are put into the line

iK^

support the troops in the city, andnine machine-gun battalions and onerifle division were despatched fromStavka reserve to the east bank. Sowas the 159th Fortified Area, withtwelve battalions of machine-gunsand artillery, and a number of otherformations, including 43rd EngineerBrigade, which at once set aboutlaying mines along the east bank.

If the Germans should break throughhere and charge north up the eastbank, the Soviet divisions assemblingwest of the river behind the Don wouldbe endangered. The grand plan for anencirclement operation would col-

lapse, and the biter would be tit. So afence must be put up befiind62nd Army.Stavka was hedging its bets.

Now that most of the cargo ferries

had been lost, the ferrying of men andammunition across to the city was tobecome more difficult, and there werealso large numbers of wounded, whomit had not been possible to evacuateduring the night. And now fresh Ger-man infantry and tanks were beingbrought up to the 'Red October'settlement, and, the hitherto quiet

'Orlovka salient', on the Army's farright, was about to erupt.The Orlovka salient jutted out north

of the city for about five miles, andwas about a mile wide at its neck, justeast of Orlovka itself. The Germansaround it (elements of XVI Panzer,60th Motorised, 100th, and 389thInfantry Divisions) were primarilyoccupied with guarding the northernflank of VI Army against any attemptby Yeremenko to break through andrelieve Stalingrad and as long as theSoviet troops inside the salient re-mained quiescent, the Germans werenot too concerned about them. Chuy-kov for his part had no troops to sparefor dramatic action in a relativelyremote part of the sector held by62nd Army, so he refrained from pro-voking the Germans in this area, andgarrisoned it with relatively weakforces. Nevertheless, Paulus did seesome danger in the continued exis-tence of the salient. If Yeremenkoshould succeed in breaking through toit, his left flank on the Volga atLatashanka would be cut off", and if

Chuykov should put any of his new

P

divisions into the salient, the flank of

the German forces attacking into thefactory area would be vulnerable.With the initiation of the ofl'ensive

in the northern part of the city, whichwould involve a major attack into thefactory area, it was clearly time for

Paulus to liquidate the Orlovkasalient, and this he proceeded to do.

The weak forces there were soon over-run, and in view of intelligence reportsof concentrations of tanks and in-

fantry from the German XIV Panzerand 94th Infantry Divisions in theVishnevaya. "Long" and "Steep" gullies

and "Red October" cemetery, obviouslyin preparation for a renewed attackon the Tractor and 'Barricades"

factories, Chuykov decided he coulddo nothing about the situation in theOrlovka salient, so he withdrew mostof Andryusenko"s infantry brigade,

strengthened them with an anti-tankregiment and two companies fromGorokhov's brigade, and prepared to

launch a counterattack in three days*

time on the'Barricades"housing estate.

Guryev"s 39th Guards Infantry Divi-

sion began crossing the Volga thatnight. September 30th. It was only athalf strength, but proved to be of

outstanding quality, so Chuykov de-

cided to place it between the Silicate

Factory and Zuyevskaya Street, as heplanned to use it in the counterattackagainst the Barricades housing estate.

However on the following day its

neighbours on the left. Smekhot-vorov's division, suffered a severereverse when the Germans drove adeep wedge into their positions andappeared likely to break through intothe 'Red October' factory, and thedecision was then taken to deploy the39th Guards behind Smekhotvorov'smen, with orders to turn the factorybuildings into strongpoints. On Octo-ber 1st the German pincers met on theOrlovka salient, cutting off" Andryu-senko"s 3rd battalion, the only onewhich had not been withdrawn. Thebattalion had only 200 rounds per rifle

and two days" food. In spite of that it

held on for five days, and on October7th 120 survivors managed to get backto 62nd Army's lines, leaving 380 deadand wounded behind them.The position of 62nd Army was now

deteriorating rapidly. Smekhot-vorov's division haa been in serious

Now the factories became the centres ofbattle

trouble ever since its arrival; it hadlost three regimental and three batta-lion commanders on its first day. andafter less than a week in action wasdown to less than 2.000 men. Fortun-ately another division of reinforce-ments was already assembling acrossthe Volga. Colonel Gurtyev"s 308thInfantry, mostly Siberians. On Bat-yuk's and Rodimtsev's sectors in thecity centre, the Germans were justabout being held, but were intensi-fying their pressure. A battalion ofGermans disguised in Red Armyuniforms had attempted to penetratedown the 'Steep" Gulley to the Volga,but had been detected and wiped out,Smekhotvorov's division Was beingpushed back, the Germans were get-ting closer to the 'Red October' factory,and to add to Chuykov's problems hisCommand Post again came underattack.More than a week previously the oil

reservoir above it had caught fire, andever since the post had been under apall of oily black smoke, which made

94

the working conditions there almostintolerable, but at least provided asmoke screen to keep the Luftwaffeaway. On October 2nd, however, adetermined air and artillery attackwas launched against the post, andthis time the oil tanks themselveswere burst open, engulfing the com-mand post, the sunken barges and theVolga itself in blazing oil. The tele-

phone lines went up in flames, theradio worked only intermittently,and there was no escape route, soKrylov ordered the staff into theintact dug-outs and told them tomaintain contact with the troops byradio. The fire lasted for several days,the post remained under bombard-ment, and it was impossible to sleep,

but perhaps the most irritating fea-

ture of those days, according toChuykov, was to be called constantlyto the radio by Yeremenko's Chief-of-Staff. General G F Zakharov, toanswer pettifogging questions de-signed solely to establish whether theArmy HQ still existed.From now on the German pressure

steadily intensified. Everywhere in

the north of the city the Soviet

perimeter was contracting slowly,and the 'Red October" factory cameunder direct attack, but so far Gur-yev's men were holding on ; so were thedivisions in the city centre. But now anew threat developed, when on Octo-ber 4th Chuykov's patrols establishedthe presence of three German infantryand two Panzer divisions on a threemile front between the Mechetka andHill 107.5 north of it. The TractorFactory was about to be attacked.On the previous day Chuykov had

been notified that 37th Guards Infan-try Division (Major-General Zholu-dev) w^as to begin crossing to Stalin-grad that night. It had to come acrosswithout its anti-tank guns, be-cause of the shortage of boats, and,for some unexplained reason, its HQcould not cross that first night, so theregiments were placed directly undercommand of Army HQ and rushed intoposition to the right of Gurtyev's men,to defend the Tractor Factory. Thenext night they were joined by thelight tanks of 84th Armoured Brigade- the medium tanks could not be fer-

ried over. The light tanks were uselessagainst the German Mk III and IV

95

tanks, so they were dug- in and used as

static firing points.

The reinforcements had arrived

only just in time, for scarcely hadthey reached their positions when the

major German attack on the TractorFactory was launched on October 4th,

with elements of XIV Panzer, 60th

Motorised and 389th Infantry Divi-

sions. The 37th Guards stopped themin their tracks, and they made noprogress at all. October 6th was quiet,

as the Germans paused to regroup,

and Yeremenko, taking this as a sign

of German exhaustion, prodded Chuy-kov to use 37th Guards for a counter-attack on the following day, butthe counterattack never took place,

because the Germans forestalled it

with a full-scale attack by the twoinfantry divisions and a mass of tanks.

The 37th Guards were pressed slowlyback, exacting a heavy price for everyfoot of ground, and the main Germangain of the day was - one block of

flats in the Tractor Factory housing

estate. At 1800 hours the Katyusharockets scored a fortuitous but fan-

tastic success, wiping out almost an

entire German battalion west of therailway bridge over the Mechetkawith one salvo. This brought Paulus'losses for the day to almost fourbattalions - a high price for a block offlats. He paused to reconsider.The lull lasted for four days, but it

was clear that fighting would beextremely hard when it resumed. Bothsides regrouped, and 62nd Army pre-pared to meet the renewed attack onthe Tractor Factory. Yeremenkoordered a counterattack against thewestern outskirts of the Tractor Fac-tory settlement, which was launchedby 37th Guards and one regiment ofGorishny's division on the 12th, andit is indicative of the tension betweenthe main Soviet protagonists thatChuykov writes 'We did not expectany great results from the counter-attack but felt that on this occasionthe Front Commander was not asking62nd Army to carry out active opera-tions to no purpose' (author's italics).

And his reason for giving Yeremenkocredit for some sense 'on this occa-sion'? Simply that he had receivednotification that 62nd Army was soon

111'

_$miiTii

i

to be put on short rations of ammu-nition, always a sign to a Sovietcommander' that a big offensive wasto be mounted somewhere else. Themost absolute secrecy was beingmaintained about the plannedcounteroffensive - Yeremenko himselfhad been informed of 'Plan Uranus', asit had been named, less than a fort-

night previously - but this signal wasunmistakable.By the standards of Stalingrad the

counterattack was quite successful,for Zholudev's men gained over 300

yards and Gorishny's about 200 - butthat was as far as they could go. Theyfought for the whole of the 13th with-out gaining another inch and on the14th, Paulus launched five divisinos,two of them Panzers, against theTractor and 'Barricades' Factories.October 14th was the supreme

crisis for 62nd Army. The Luftwaffeflew nearly 3,000 sorties, while on theground XIV and XXIV Panzer, 60thMotorised, 100th Infantry, and 389thInfantry Divisions stormed in againstZholudev's, Gorishny's, and Gurtyev'sdivisions and the 84th Armoured Bri-

gade. Just before noon, part ofZholudev's line was overrun, and agroup of about 180 tanks brokethrough, some making for the Trac-tor Facotry, others along theMechetka to take the adjoining 112thDivision in rear. Confused fightingwent on all day, and by midnight theGermans had surrounded the TractorFactory on three sides, and werefighting in the workshops. Around thewalls lay some 3,000 German dead.East Prussians of XXIV Panzer Divi-sion and Hessian infantrymen of 389thDivision, as well as untold hundredsof Zholudev's guards. That night theVolga ferries evacuated 3,500 Sovietwounded, the largest total for anysingle day of the battle.The attack was renewed the next

day, with the addition to the Germanforce of 305th Infantry Division, asPaulus attempted to extend his gainsnorth and south along the bank of theVolga. He was very near to success;62nd Army had been split, the EastPrussians of XXIV Panzer Divisionreached the bank of the Volga at thenorth end of the Tractor Factory, and

The Tractor Factory

Across the railways and throughthe factory yardsthe fighting grewever fiercer

Chuykov's 'northern group' (tliree

infantry brigades and the very fewsurvivors of 112th Division) wereencircled in Spartanovka; communi-cations with them were only sporadic.Zholudev's 37th Guards Division hadbeen forced away from the TractorFactory, and what remained of it wasfighting as separate garrisons, mostlyin the Tractor Factory housingestate.Gorishny's division was also in a

bad way, and German infantrymenhad slipped through to about 350

yards from the Army HQ. The tele-

phone wires were in flames, not onlyat the Command Post but across theriver at the emergency commandpost, thus threatening a completebreakdown of communication withthe Army and Front Artillery on theeast bank, so Chuykov was forced toconsider the possibility that this timethe Army HQ would be destroyed, andgot through to Yeremenko, askingpermission to transfer several sec-

tions of Army headquarters acrossthe Volga, undertaking that he him-self, Gurov and Krylov would remainin the city. Yeremenko refused. Thesight of HQ packing up would be toomuch for the front-line troops at so

crucial a moment.So they stayed where they were,

and by the night of October 16th, theGermans had been halted once again.Zholudev's and Gorishny's divisionslost 75 per cent of their men on Octo-ber 15th, but so heavy were the losses

of the German attackers, that Paulus'offensive again ground to a stop. Hewas running short of manpower -

already he had had to call on otherparts of Army Group B for reinforce-ments which could ill be spared, andeven on the Replacement Army in

Germany, and now he could expect nomore reinforcements, while the Sovietbarrel was not quite empty. One regi-

ment of General Lyudnikov's 138thRifle Division had already crossedinto the city. The other two arrivedon the night of October 16th-17th, andwere at once sent to stiffen the sec-

tors held by Zholudev's and Gorishny'sdivisions.Chuykov did not feel he could dis-

regard any sector of his front for long.

He observed a large force of Germanscollecting in a position from which

Orlovka

60th MOT. DIVXVI PZ. DIV.

100th INF. DIV.Gorodishche ^^

71st, 76th, 295thINFANTRY DIVS.

Gumraktstation

HOSPITAL

XXIV PZ. DIV.

/

/

.Mamaye\\ Kurgan i

\^ h

I Ryno^

/ /

/

Jo. 1 station

LANDINGSTAGE

^

^th INF. DIV.WXXIX MOT. DIV.

p,;/^No. 2 ijation

''7

/elshanka

(mining suburb)

TRACTORFACTORY

'BARRIKADYFACTORY

'' V

''KRASNYOKTYABRFACTORY

62nd ARMY

XIV PZ. Div.y

64thARMY.

2 miles

Kuporosnoye

5f

The front September 12 1942

The front September 26

The front October 13

The front November 18

Miles,

,

6

Kms. 10

Below: The Attacker. Right.The Defender

/

1

Kiifiiit

••i^V../-' liHa

.{<l ~^«*

At *

•

S^^r'vg'.g^rr //

they could attack the 'Red October'factory, and had to make dispositionsto meet this possibility, while on thequieter sectors to the south of thefactory area, he was suspicious thatPaulus was planning to make a sur-prise break while the bulk of 62ndArmy was pinned down in the factoryarea, though actually he seems tohave credited Paulus with too muchsubtlety here.Yeremenko had spoken to Chuykov

on the 15th, and being convinced (hedoes not say why, but the request tomove part of the Army HQ across theriver probably had something to dowith it) that Chuykov's spirits hadfallen (it would be a miracle if theyhad not, but Yeremenko's capacityfor optimism in and out of season wasnotorious) decided to pay him a visit,

and after one abortive attempt to getacross, he succeeded at the secondattempt. Chuykov was not verypleased to see him (throughout thebattle he did his utmost to discouragevisits from VIPs, which he considereda burden and a distraction, but thevisit passed off without any overtunpleasantness, and Yeremenko left

at dawn, granting Chuykov's requestfor more reinforcements (in smallunits, and not divisions) and ammuni-tion. However, Chuykov's temper wasnot improved when the next day hewas notified of an ammunition allo-

tion for the next month which wouldlast one day of heavy fighting;vigorous protests produced only asmall increase. Clearly somethingvery big incdeed was being planned.On the night of the 17th, 62nd

Army moved its command post yetagain, to a spot on the river bankabout half a mile south of the BannyGully and the same distance from theMamayev Kurgan. They would remainhere until the battle was over. TheGermans continued to make groundtowards the 'Red October' factory onthe 18th, and late in the morningoverran Smekhotvorov's right flank,threatening to encircle some units ofthe adjacent Gurtyev division, so toprevent this, Chuykov ordered Gurt-yev's men to withdraw some 200-300yards, the first time that he hadordered a retreat in the city areasince taking command of the army.October 19th and 20th were relative-

102

ly quiet by the standards of Stalin-grad. The Germans continued toattack the isolated northern group atSpartanovka, and kept up the pressureon the factories, but without anysignificant success. Paulus was get-ting no more reinforcements, butcould still redeploy troops fromquieter sections of VI Army's longfront, whereas reinforcements of 62ndArmy presented much greater physicaldifficulties. Intelligence reported anew concentration of Germans in the'Barricades' housing area, and 62ndArmy's supply units had to be raidedfor fresh manpower. The farriers,tailors, cobblers, mechanics, andstoremen were formed into infantrycompanies and ferried across to thecity.

On October 21st the Germans cameon against the 'Barricades' and 'RedOctober' factories, and 62nd Army'slast ferries, but again with no successto speak of. The following day, how-ever, the pressure intensified as

Paulus threw in the 79th InfantryDivision with tank support. By even-ing the Soviet line at the Barricadesfactory had been broken, the Germanswere advancing on the factory alongthe railway sidings, and a companyof automatic rifiemen from 79thInfantry Division had reached thenorth-west corner of the 'Red October'steel plant. The following morningthe pressure was again stepped up, andby late afternoon two-thirds of the'Barricades' factory was in Germanhands while small groups of Germanswith tommy-guns penetrated into theworkshops of the 'Red October' plant.

The strength of both sides was ebb-ing away, as Paulus' divisions were

being eaten up in the fighting at therate of one every five days, or evenless in the factory area, and clearly hecould not sustain his pressure in-

definitely, while as against that, theSoviet forces in the city had beensplit, the Tractor Factory and most of

the 'Barricades' had- fallen to theGermans, and fighting was takingplace inside the 'Red October' plant,where Soviet machine gunners insidethe dead furnaces were trying to holdback the Germans at the other end of

the foundry shop, while 37th Guards,308th, and 193rd Infantry Divisions of62nd Army had almost ceased toexist - between them they musteredonly a few hundred men.On the 25th the attack on the

northern group at Spartanovka wasrenewed, the centre of the settlementwas lost, and Gorokhov's troops fell

back towards the river; but after twomore days of fighting - in which gunsof the Volga Flotilla of the SovietNavy did great execution among theattacking Germans - VI Army waspushed back. Further south, mattersboded ill for Chuykov, as troops of theGerman 79th Division pushed throughtowards the 'Red October' plant, andreached the HQ of Guryev's 39thGuards, into which they began lobbinghand grenades. Chuykov hurriedly dis-

patched a company of the Army HQGuard which retrieved the situation,but could not get back to the commandp'ost, and they had to be left withGuryev's division at the 'Red October'works. Worse still, on the same day(October 27th), German machine-gun-ners reached a point between the'Barricades' and 'Red October' plantsless than 400 yards from the Volga,

bringing 62nd Army's last remainingferry landing under direct Germanmachine-gun fire.

Fortunately yet another division ofSoviet reinforcements - Sokolov's45th Infantry - had begun to crossduring the previous night, and tv/o

battalions of it had managed to reachthe city before dawn on the 27th. Theywere put into position between thetwo factories, with orders to keep theGermans away from the river, and thisthey succeeded in doing until evening,when on the left fiank they were forcedback about 110 yards. One day offighting had cost 45th Division half themen of its first two battalions, andlanding the remaining units of thedivison would be very slow and diffi-

cult; it would take two to three days.But could 62nd Army hold out thatlong? Paulus now held nine-tenths ofthe city, and every inch of the Soviet-held tenth was under fire. Chuykov'smen held only the Mamayev Kurgan,a few factory buildings, and a narrowstrip of the Volga bank, several mileslong but only a few hundred yardswide.Incredibly, they did hold out, and

even managed to mount a smallcounterattack with three patched-uptanks. Fighting continued until Octo-ber 30th but the German attacks weregrowing weaker and weaker. The62nd Army had outlasted Paulus again.

Detritus of battle

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There were to be more attacks byVI Army, and more anxious momentsfor Chuykov, but none to match thosewhich his army had already survived.It was clear that the German offensivewould not reach the objectives setback in the spring, the winter wouldsoon be setting in, and the attritionof the summer had left the Wehr-macht ill-prepared to face it. The menof 62nd Army did not know it, butalready on October 14th Hitler hadsuspended offensive operations every-where except at Stalingrad and on asmall sector of the front in the Cau-casus. They did know - not throughofficial channels, for the most strin-gent security covered the preparationsfor the counteroffensive, but throughthe grapevine which operated asstrongly in the Red Army as in anyother - that something very big was inthe wind. There was the reduction intheir allotment of ammunition, thecomings and goings of top brass fromStavka, Stalin's speech on November7th, the 25th anniversary of theRevolution, with its cryptic state-ment 'There's going to be a holiday in

our street, too'.

Yeremenko told Chuykov that theGermans were planning to discon-tinue their offensive against 62ndArmy, and withdrawing troops fromthe city to the flanks and rear. Theywere not - yet - but a nod is as good asa wink, and Chuykov read this guardedstatement as an invitation to keep VIArmy in the city by harassingoperations. Shumilov put his 64thArmy into a small offensive in thesouthern area, at Beketovka, osten-sibly designed to relieve the city, butactually meant to divert Germanattention from what was going onnorth of the Don.What was going on north of the Don

certainly needed to be kept fromGerman eyes - if possible. The Stavkateam - Army General Zhukov, Colonel-General Vassilevsky - familiar faces,these, at Don Front headquarters hadcome once again at the beginning ofNovember, bringing with them a newvisitor, Colonel-General of ArtilleryN N Voronov, the Head of Artillery ofthe Red Army. On November 3rdZhukov started the final round of

conferences of all commanders downto divisional level, first at the head-quarters of 5th Tank Army of the newSouth-West Front, then one for theirDon Front counterparts, and finallyone for the commanders of the sou-thern pincer, at HQ Stalingrad Front.The scope of the plan was vast, and

so were the forces assembled to exe-cute it. From west to east along theDon from Veshenskaya to the begin-ning of the big bend, and from thereacross to the Volga at Yerzovka stoodfive armies - 5th Tank, and 21st ofSouth-West Front, 65th, 24th, and66th of Don Front. To the south thereinforced 57th and 51st Armies ofStalingrad Front had already occupiedthe defiles between the series of lakes.Altogether the force comprised overone million men, with thirteen thou-sand five hundred and forty-one gunsand mortars, eight hundred and ninetyfour tanks, and one thousand onehundred and fifteen aircraft. That theGermans had only been dimly aware ofits existence, and only too late recog-nised its purpose was a tribute to RedArmy security and skill in deception,and a reproach to the intelligenceservices of Hitler and his generals,but it must also have contained someelement of luck.Huge though the force was, it was

none too big for the task set it. Innumbers, it was slightly inferior to thetotal Axis forces in the area, sincethese numbered also slightlymore thanone million, v/ith about ten thousandguns and mortars, six hundred andseventy-five tanks, and about twelvehundred aircraft, and thus it was onlyin tanks and guns that the Red Armyhad a clear edge. With this in mind,and in accordance with the goodmilitary principle of striking theenemy at his weakest point, Zhukovand his Stavka colleagues planned toconcentrate their tanks, guns, andaircraft against the Rumanian forceson either side of VI and IV PanzerArmies - III Rumanian on the Don andIV Rumanian west of the lakes southof Stalingrad.

• These Rumanian armies were knownto be poorly equipped, disgruntled(few of them could see what businessthey had there in the depths ofRussia), and often on bad terms withthe Germans. Furthermore, because

of the shortage of German troopswhich had made it necessary to seek aRumanian contribution, Hitler hadhad to bow to the wishes of the Ruma-nian leader, Marshal Antonescu, andemploy them as complete formations,against the wishes of some of hisgenerals who wanted to 'corset'them with German troops to stifi'en

their resistance. Their equipment waslamentably inadequate, particularlyin anti-tank weapons and tanks, andto make matters worse VTH ItalianArmy, on the immediate west of TIT

Rumanian, was in little better case,so there would be little hope of help ^from the flank if III Rumanian got into Mtrouble.Because of their inadequate equip-

ment and low level of enthusiasm for

the cause, the Rumanians had donenothing about the Soviet bridgeheadson the Don's west bank at Serafimo-vich and Kletskaya, but they had keptan anxious eye on them, and could notbut notice, however strict the So\aetprecautions, that they were beingreinforced. The Rumanian comman-der, Colonel-General Dumitrescu, hadmore than once warned of the dangerrepresented by the Soviet bridgeheadsand though he had not gone so far asto volunteer the services of his troopsto eliminate them, he had requestedthe directing of German tank andanti-tank units to III Army's sector.

Hitler did not believe that anyserious danger was presented by theRed Army bridgeheads over the Don,and here his normal urge to write off

the Russians before events reallyjustified such a course was fortified bya military intelligence assessment,made in September, which creditedthe Red Army with 'no operationalreserves of ari^ significance". In thelight of hindsight, this assessmentseems incredible, but at the time it

was made the Soviet territories underGerman occupation contained about40"'(, of the Soviet Union's total

population, the Red Army's losses had,

already come to more than the entirearmed forces strength with which it

had started the war, and the use of

Assembly of power. Vast Russian forces-infantry, light armour and squadronsof the many T34s. were brought upfor the pincer battles

106

f , .

older reservists, sailors, and mendrafted from Siberia gave fair reasonto believe that the 'Russian steam-roller' was fast running out of steam.Nevertheless; the way in which this

assessment, based as it would have to

be on inadequate information, 'guess-

timation', and approximation, hadbeen elevated by Hitler and OKH into

an article of faith, reflects little

credit on the headquarters proceduresof Germany's armed forces.

Anyway, though Hitler was not toodisposed to take the Rumanian an-

xieties seriously, he did agree to maketank and anti-tank forces available to

them, and ordered XLVHI PanzerCorps into HI Army's sectoron Novem-ber lO'th. The first snows of the winterhad already arrived by the time theCorps, temporarily detached from IVPanzer Army, left for Serafimovich,taking with it some units of XIVPanzer Division.The Corps consisted of XXII German

Panzer Division and a Rumanian tankdivision, and was in bad shape. It hadlarge numbers of obsolete Cz-ech tanks,

but few of the better German Mk III

and IV tanks; its Panzer Grenadierregiment had been removed from it

some months before, and its AssaultEngineer battalion had been detachedby Paulus for use at Stalingrad. SinceSeptember it had been inactive, lyingbehind Italian VIII Army, and be-

cause of the fuel shortage many of thetank engines had not been started for

two months, while the tanks had beendug in, and camouflaged and protectedagainst frost with straw and reeds.

When the German division was or-

dered to take the road, sixty-five of

its one hundred and four tanks couldnot be started and even after intensivework only forty-two could be put in

running order. The reason was simple.The straw had attracted mice, themice went into the tanks to look for

food, and developed a taste for theinsulation covering the electrical

wiring, so when the tanks were startedup short circuits developed in their

electrical systems, and several of

them were set on fire by sparks. Theother formation - Rumanian I PanzerDivisions - did not suffer this parti-

cular problem, but of its one hundredand eight tanks all bar ten wereobsolete Czech 38-Ts, no match for the

Soviet T-34S or KV-ls. As XLVIIIPanzer Corps slithered and sparkedits uncertain way towards its newsector, few of its sweating soldiers canhave regarded the episode as a goodaugury for the coming battle, norwould their spirits have been raisedhad they known that this crazycollection of vehicles was beingplaced right in the path of the Sovietarmoured spearhead - Lieutenant-General P L Romanenko's 5th TankArmy, a full-strength formation withhundreds of T-34s, the best mediumtanks then available to any army in

the world.November opened badly for Ger-

many. On the 4th, Rommel's army in

Africa began the long retreat to Tri-

poli, and on the 8th Anglo-Americanforces landed in French North Africa.

Hitler found it necessary to invadeunoccupied France, thus tying upformations which at a pinch couldhave been despatched to the EasternFront, whither so many of the Germanunits in Western Europe were later to

go. In the midst of the crises thusengendered, and with Army Group B atlast beginning to wake up to thedanger which hung over it, Hitler left

the headquarters at Vinnitsa to go to

Munich, as November 9th 1942, was theanniversary of the unsuccessful at-

tempt to seize power in Bavaria in

1923, and he was due to speak at thecelebrations in the Burgerbraukeller.What were disaster in Africa and dan-ger on the Eastern Front comparedwith the opportunity to revive oldmemories and make a misleadingspeech on how well the war was goingunder his inspired leadership, in

particular how 'no power on earth will

force us out of Stalingrad' ?

Back in the city, meantime, Chuy-kov had a new problem - the ice on theVolga. Because of the immense size

of the river, and its relatively souther-ly position, it can take weeks or evenmonths to ice up. Once the tempera-ture reaches 15' (Centigrade) belowzero, large masses of ice move downit, rendering it completely impassableby shipping, though once the tempera-ture drops further, the mass of ice

freezes solid and stops moving, makingthe river usable by wheeled or foot

traffic. The large ice mass was now in

motion, and Chuykov feared that

108

Paulus would time another offensivefor the period when 62nd Army wouldbe deprived of its supply routes, so hehad already done what he could tostock up during" the few days of navi-gation remaining", and had laid downstrict orders of priority - first, menand ammunition; second, food; third,

warm clothing.But somehow or other Chuykov

could not get the supply services to

understand that a cold, hungry sol-

dier with ammunition is better than awarm, well-fed one without. TheDeputy Head of Supply Services of theRed Army, General Vinogradov, wasin charge on the east bank, and hehad his own ideas, so a flood of ear-flaps and felt boots cascaded upon62nd Army, until its depots werebulging with surplus clothing andfood, and Chuykov had to persuadeKhrushchev to intervene and makeVinogradov go away, after which62nd Army proceeded to beg, borrow,or steal whatever ammunition it

could lay its hands on. Former sailorsand fishermen in its ranks made theirown boats and rafts so that the moreorthodoxmeans of delivering ammuni-tion could be supplemented during thefew navigation days left. Food wasbrought over as well, and Chuykovaccumulated a reserve of 12 tons ofchocolate. At a pinch, the Army couldsurvive on that for one or two weeks.Patrols confirmed that Paulus was

regrouping for a last heave once again,when they established that VI Army'slast uncommitted formation - 44thInfantry Division - had been broughtinto the city. Clearly the Germanoffensive would be soon - Chuykov'sfear was that Paulus would co-ordinateit with the interruption of navigationon the river was about to prove fullyjustified.

At 0630 hours on November 11th,Paulus put in his last bid for captureof the city, with seven divisions(XIV and XXIV Panzer, 100th Light,44th, 79th, 305th, and 389th Infantry),with elements of 161st and 294thbrought in by air from Rossosh andMillerovo. They came in on a three-mile front between Volkhovstroyev-skaya Street and the Banny Gully,astonishingly strongly consideringthat most of them had already been

J

very roughly handled in the fighting

of the previous weeks. Chuykov'stroops met them head-on, and theisolated northern group under ColonelGorokhov attempted to relieve thepressure by counterattackingfrom therailway bridge over the mouth of theMechetka towards the Tractor Fac-tory.After five hours of the grim close-

quarter fighting which had become thenorm for the battle, Paulus committedhis tactical reserve, overrunning theright flank of Gorishny's 95th Divisionand reaching the Volga in the RedOctober plant area on a frontage ofabout 600 yards. Lyudnikov's 138thDivision was now cut off from the restof 62nd Army, which had thus beendivided into three parts - Gorokhov'snorthern group in Spartanovka, Lyud-nikov's division on the Volga north ofthe Red October plant, and the mainbody from south of the latest Germanbreach to the Mamayev Kurgan.But this time there was not the

tension that there had been in 62ndArmy on previous critical days, forthe defenders knew that this wasPaulus' last fling, and though thefighting was hard, the Luftwaffe'ssupport lacked the edge it had had inOctober, as Richthofen's men weredown from 3,000 sorties a day to abouta third of that number. The Sovietcasualties were very heavy in thefighting on November llth-12th (118thGuards Regiment had two hundred andfifty men when the fighting began onthe 11th, and lost Two hundred andForty-four of them in the first five anda half hours), but this time everyonecould see that there would be an end toit, and soon.Sure enough, on the evening of the

12th the German attack petered out,though there was still plenty of actionand Lyudnikov's division was in avery precarious position. Chuykovtook to calling him by radio to tell

him that help was on the way. Thiswas pure bluff, and was intended forGerman ears, in fact Chuykov had nohelp to give in the short term, and therelief of Lyudnikov's division wouldbe a matter of creeping back towardshis positions building by building.Now everywhere in the city 62nd Armybegan to counterattack, block byblock, house by house, room by room.Almost imperceptibly the tide was

109

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beginning to turn.On the evening of the 18th Chuykov

and his senior officers were holdinga rather despondent meeting in theirdug-out. They were worried aboutmanpower, as Yeremenko had notkept his promise of draft reinforce-ments.The telephone rang. It was Front

HQ. 'There will be an Order comingthrough shortly. Stand by to receiveit.'

They looked at each other. Whatcould this be? Suddenly, Gurov, the'Member of Military Council' struck

Above: Imperceptibly, the tide turned.

Right: Zhukov plans the counterattack

his forehead. 'I know what it isl It's

the order for the big counter-offensive!'

It was. South-West and Don Frontswere to attack the following morningfrom the Kletskaya area, making for

the big Don bridge at Kalach. Stalin-grad Front would take the offensiveon the 20th from the Raygorod area,also heading for Kalach, while 62ndArmy would keep the Germans in thecity busy by counterattacks, so thatthey could not transfer forces to othersectors. Zhukov had baited his trapwell. Now he was about to spring it.

114

Zhukov springs

the hop

For the Germans of VI and IV Pan-zer Armies, November 19th began like

any other day. Ahead of them was thepack-ice still rolling sullenly down theVolga and behind them, the mutelyreproachful chimneys of the Stalin-grad suburbs rising out of the ruins.

As the sky lightened, the usualexchanges of fire began. The morningwas a foggy one, and neither their ownnor the Soviet air forces were inevidence. They had begun anotherattack on the previous day, but thezest which had been in evidence a weekbefore was lacking, for the pitcherhad been too often to the well, andonly their discipline kept them going.It looked as if they would spend thewinter whittling away at the toughIvans of Chuykov's storm groups; it

was a far cry from the old war ofmovement of the summer.Did they but know it, the war of

movement had begun again seventymiles to the north-west of them. At0730 hours Voronov's guns and mor-tars - three thousand five hundred ofthem - laid down an eighty-minutebarrage against Rumanian III Army.

The barrage lifted and through themist there came down on the dazedRumanians the Soviet infantry, waveupon wave, and with them the mena-cing shapes of the T-34s, over twohundred of them, in 5th Tank Armybrushing aside the Rumanian leftwing, while the 4th Tank Corps ofChristyakov's 21st Army hammeredagainst its right flank. For a while theRumanians seemed to be holding, butsoon T-34's broke through and mixedformations of tanks and cavalryplunged into the rear areas of III Army,shooting up headquarters, shatteringthe reserve units as they attempted tomove up, overtaking and scatteringthe front line infantry as it attemptedto withdraw.The Rumanians broke, and their

divisions fell to pieces, streaming inpanic towards the rear. Behind themthe stolid Soviet infantry plodded on,rounding up the pathetic groups offleeing Rumanians, while the mobileforces gathered themselves for theirnext missions - 1st Tank Corps tohead south-east towards the Don, 26thTank Corps towards Kalach and its

Captive in the mist

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Left: Briefing before battle

Left below: Armour moves upAbove: Katyusha rocket batteries signal

the beginning of the artillery barrage

bridge, 4th Tank Corps towardsGolubinsky; all in fact heading for

the rear of VI Army, with nothing in

their way except the rickety XLVIIIPanzer Corps with its mouse-nibbledtanks. First it was ordered north-eastagainst 4th Tank Corps, but as soonas it was on the road it was ordered toturn about and head north-westagainst the much larger and moredangerous force, the two corps (1st

and 26th) of 5th Tank Army.The XLVIII Corps did its best, but

the mice had done their work too welland the unlucky crews had anotherdifficulty to contend with: they hadhad no snow-sleeves for the tank-tracks, so those that could move at all

slithered desperately over the frozensteppes. They managed to get acrossthe path of Romanenko's tanks andto do some damage, but they weretwenty against over ten times thatnumber, and 5th Tank Army was in ahurry. It wheeled left and right roundthe obstruction, accepted the loss often per cent of its tanks as fortune ofwar, and roared off to the south-east,barely pausing in its stride. By dawnon the 29th the 26th Tank Corps wasin the village of Perelazovsky, and theheadquarters of V Rumanian ArmyCorps was smashed. The 5th TankArmy had been given four days to getto Kalach, and already had coveredmore than one-third of the way.Dawn on the 29th saw the beginning

of Yeremenko's attack, towardsKalach from the south, with 51stArmy, and towards the rear of VI

Army at Stalingrad from the south-east with 57th Army. Here, too, theRumanian-held sectors had beenchosen as targets for Soviet onslaught.Yeremenko had the smaller force,two armies as against the five in thenorth, and he had not received com-mand of the northern force forwhich he had longed those long weeksago in Moscow, but still, he was com-manding a major attack, and, as hewrote later, 'there was nothing morepleasing for those who had known thebitterness of retreat and the bloodylabour of many months of defence.'Yeremenko's attack was itself a

two-pronged one. On his right, parts of64th and 57th Armies with a force ofsix infantry divisions would strike uptowards the rear of VI Army, andwhen they had made a breach the 13thMechanised Corps would advancetowards the Chervlenaya river to penin the Stalingrad force, while on hisleft 51st Army would make a holethrough which the 4th Mechanisedand 4th Cavalry Corps would belaunched towards Sovetsky and on toKalach, thus to forge the ring ofencirclement around the bulk ofArmyGroup B. The forces facing Yere-menko's assault grouping comprisedthe VI Army Corps of RumanianIV Army, with four infantry divisionsand cavalry, stiffened somewhat bythe German XXIX Motorised Division.Here too there was thick mist, and

the attack, scheduled for 0800 hourshad to be postponed first until 0900then until 1000 hours. Finally themist began to lift, and at 1000 Kat-yusha salvoes signalled the beginningof the artillery bombardment. By1500 the Axis defences had been piercedon all sectors and the mobile forces

121

were away in full cry over the horizon.

The key to success of the operation

was of course the advance on Kalachby the tanks and cavalry. But these

by themselves could create only a

token encirclement, which wouldhave to be turned into a real one bysubstantial forces of infantry, so the

Soviet plan of attack on the northernsector, where Zhukov had personally

taken charge, included a number of

secondary attacks, some aimed at

fragmenting the Axis forces in the

area, others at creating an 'outer

front of encirclement' which meantestablishing forces in positions fromwhich they would be able to withstandany attempt to relieve Paulus' force

once it was surrounded. Thus whileRomanenko's Tank Corps were head-ing south-east towards Kalach, hisinfantry was making south-west andsouth to establish itself along the eastbank of the River Chir, and the 65thand 24th Armies of Rokossovsky 's DonFront were pinning down the Germandivisions in the small bend of the Don,while his remaining army (66th)

kept the north flank of VI Army busyin the corridor between Don and Volga.Army Group B had had some inkling

(though too late and too indeflnite) ofthe coup being prepared along thenorth flank of its front, but Yeremen-ko's attack south of Stalingrad tookthem completely by surprise, and theonly German formation of any size inthe southern area was the XXIXMotorised Division, commanded byMajor-General Leyser. Like XLVIIIPanzer Corps in the north it wasbedevilled by conflicting orders andhampered by fleeing Rumanians, butat least- the mice had not been at its

tanks. On the morning of November20th the commander of IV Panzer-Army, Colonel-General Hoth, dis-

patched the division to seal off thebreach made by the mixed force fromSoviet 57th and 64th Armies, and in thecourse of the morning it inflicted asevere local reverse on XIII Mechan-ised Corps, temporarily halting theSoviet advance.While the action was still in pro-

gress, Hoth received news that theRumanian front had been broken bySoviet 51st Army further south, andhe prepared to send the division downto deal with this, too. Meanwhile the

commander of the Soviet mobileforce, 4th Mechanised Corps, heard ofthe serious reverse suffered by hiscolleagues further north, and onreaching the Zety area he stopped,expecting to fight a defensive battle.Since his was the southern prong ofthe pincer movement on Kalach, therewas some danger that the entireoperation would stall, but in factXXIX Motorised was ordered back tothe Stalingrad area to defend thesouthern flank of the position there,

as despite the temporary setback toXIII Mechanised Corps it had provedrelatively easy to get the offensivegoing again.Yeremenko's only remaining pro-

blem was how to get 4th MechanisedCorps on the move once more, and hesolved this by despatching an aircraftto the Corps Commander, GeneralVolsky, with a 'categorical demand'to get on with the job. Volsky com-plied, and gave no further trouble,resuming his advance on the 22nd andreaching Kalach twenty-four hourslater. His Corps' performance, in fact,

earned it elevation to 'Guards'.The slow reaction of the Germans to

the cataclysms on VI Army's flanksrequires explanation, as the Germanarmy after all prided itself, not with-out reason, on the excellence of its

staff work and the speed with which it

could react to situations. All autumnVI Army had tempted fate by concen-trating so much of its weight forwardand underestimating the Soviet abi-

lity to exploit the fact. Germany hadalready that month been hit by anumber of crises in other theatres, andit might have been thought that its

leaders would be at their posts, work-ing day and night to find an answer to

the problems so suddenly heapedupon them.Not a bit of it! Hitler, after the

Munich celebration, had gone to hismountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in

the Bavarian Alps. HQ Area 1, the rele-

vant section of OKW, was in make-shift quarters on the edge of the town,and the operations staff of OKW was inj

its special train in the station at Salz-

burg, a few miles away over the Aus-trian border, while OKH was hundredsof miles off, in the East Prussianforests near Angerburg. The Luft-waffe High Command (OKL) was also

122

123

up there, though as usual no-one wasquite sure where the Reichsmarshalland C-in-C of the Luftwaffe, HermannGoring, might be (it turned out hewas in Paris). To make matters evenmore complicated, VI Army head-quarters were also on the move. Upto the opening of the Soviet counter-offensive they had been at Golubinsky,west of the Don, but a permanentheadquarters had been built at Nizhne-Chirskaya, some forty miles furtherdown the Don, at its junction with theChir.

It was intended to serve as HQ VIArmy during the coming winter, andhad excellent communications to HQArmy Group B. OKH, and OKW. Whentherefore, the headquarters at Golu-binsky were threatened by the advanceof Romanenko's tanks, and even moreclosely by the forward movement ofthe 4th Tank Corps operating in frontof Chistyakov's 21st Army, the Golu-binsky headquarters were hastilyevacuated on November 21st, and awild rush through the night ended inarrival at Nizhbe-Chirskaya, on themorning of November 22nd. Paulusclaimed that he had gone to Nizhne-Chirskaya to make use of its excel-lent communications facilities andacquaint himself with the situationbefore moving his headquarters backinto the pocket which was forming,but Hitler, on the other hand, assumedhe was leaving his troops in the lurch,and at once ordered him to take upheadquarters at the Gumrak airfield

on the outskirts of Stalingrad.Whatever the truth of the matter,

VI Army lacked leadership during thevital days of November 21st-23rd, whilethe Soviet forces moved with inexor-able speed over the 125-mile gapbetween Romanenko's and Yeremen-ko's start lines. At a time when speedand co-ordination were essential if

anything was to be saved from thewreck, Paulus and his staff weretrundling up and down the icy roadsof the Don steppe - it is just slightlyodd that Paulus had taken so many ofhis staff to Nizhne-Chirskaya if all hewanted to do there was make a fewtelephone calls, but every commanderhas his own methods.Not that Paulus had been completely

inert. In Stalingrad itself, on ordersfrom Weichs at Army Group HQ, he

124

had terminated all attacks, andpulled out elements of XIV, XVI andXXIV Panzer divisions for despatch tothe Don against the advancing col-umns of South-West and Don Fronts,and on the afternoon of the 22nd heand his Chief of Staff, Major-GeneralSchmidt, flew into Gumrak to the newheadquarters.Events were now moving almost too

quickly to follow. Everywhere theRumanian front had crumbled, and theSoviet strike forces were moving fastthrough open snow-covered countryon both sides of the Don. If they wereto establish a really solid encircle-ment one force or other must getacross the river, which was, of course,frozen, but would not bear the weightof tanks and heavy guns. There wasonly one bridge - at Kalach - and theproblem was whether it could beseized before the Germans could blowit up. An orthodox attack would be nogood, as the demolition charges werealready in place, and the only hope wasswift coup de main, before the bridgeguard could be aware what washappening.Major-General Rodin's 26th Tank

Corps seized the village of Ostrov onthe night of November 21st-22nd. fromwhere Kalach was about three hours*run down the road for a mobile column,if it could get through without arous-ing suspicion, so he decided it wasworth a try, and assembled a column of

five tanks, two companies of infantry-men in lorries, and one armoured car.

In charge of the column was thecommander of 14th Motorised Rifle

Brigade, Lieutenant-Colonel GN Filip-

pov. The column drew up on theOstrov-Kalach road, ready to go. at0300 hours and Filippov climbed intothe leading vehicle. 'Lights on", heordered. They were going to pretendto be Germans. Surely the bridgeguards would not expect a Sovietcolumn to approach the bridge, withno attempt at concealment, and its

headlights blazing?The next three hours were a time of

almost unbearable suspense as therest of Rodin's force made ready to

follo\Y up and waited for news. Justbefore 0600 hours. Filippov's men

Now speed was essential asthe Russian

infantry flooded acrossthe Don Steppe

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Stormoviks over the battlefield

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approached the bridge, and part of thedetachment hived off to seize the nearside when the signal was given, whilethe rest rolled on to the bridge anddisappeared into the darkness. A fewminutes later a rocket soared into theair from the far bank. They had madeit; the bridge was in Soviet hands andintact. Not content with this, thedetachment then attempted to cap-ture the town itself, but this wasoverambitious for two companies andfive tanks. The Germans, nowthoroughly aroused, pushed themback, surrounded them and endea-voured to recapture the bridge. Filip-

pov's small force was under heavypressure for many hours, but finally

Rodin's main force arrived to relieve

it and prepared to take the town.While the Tank Corps were on the

rampage, the infantry were tighteningtheir grip on the pockets of by-passedRumanians in the north. The Ru-manian IV and V Corps, surrounded atthe Village of Raspopinskaya, pro-vided the first major haul of prisoners,when towards evening on the 23rd theoflacer in command. Brigadier Sta-nescu sent an officer out with a whiteflag to discuss surrender terms. Onreceiving satisfactory conditions, his

force of five divisions capitulated, andtwenty-seven thousand oflftcers andmen trudged off into captivity.The afternoon of the 23rd also saw a

much more important developmentthan the mere rounding up of theRaspopinskaya group, significantthough that was, when at 1600 hoursthe forward elements of Volsky'scorps, which had captured the farmbuildings at Sovetsky, saw tanksapproaching from the north. For atime it was difficult to make out whosethey were, but as they camenearer the familiar squat silhouetteswere unmistakable. They were T-34sof General Kravchenko's 4th TankCorps, spearheading the advance ofSouth-West Front from Kalach.The door had been closed behind

VI and IV Panzer Armies, and all thatremained was to bolt it. That, toocame nearer to completion that day,for in the evening the forward infantry

units of 21st Army reached the Donnear Kalach - the town itself havingfallen to a joint attack by t^o ofRomanko's tank brigades just before1400 hours. The full extent of theirsuccess was as yet unknown evento the Stavka, which believed theyhad about eighty five thousand Axistroops encircled, whereas in actualfact there were inside the ring twentyGerman and two Rumanian divisions,plus large numbers of individual andspecialist units, a total of s^boutthree hundred and thirty thousandmen.This was the true measure of ^2nd

Army's achievement: by holding on toStalingrad they had drawn more andmore German troops into the area,and prepared the ground for a coup ofepic dimensions. They had withstoodtremendous pressure, and now theroles were to be reversed, for thebesiegers had become the besieged,and the encircled Germans, Ruman-ians, and Croats were to suffer all that62nd Army had suffered, for longer,and with the added burdens of cold,hunger, and hopelessness, for unlike62nd Army they were not defendinga cherished piece of their homeland,on the banks of a river which to aRussian is just as much 'liquid his-tory' as the Thames to an Englishman.They were the soldiers of an army

of conquest, an army whose perform-ance depended on a conviction of pro-fessional superiority, just as much asthe ideology of its political mastersdepended on a theory of racial dami-nance. Discipline and the fear ofcaptivity in the hands of the Unter-mensch would keep them at their posts,but the time would come when thepossibility of death in a Soviet prisoncamp would seem infinitely preferable '

to the certainty of death -from cold,starvation, sickness, or a Russianbullet.

Twenty-seven thousand Rumanianofficers and men trudged off intocaptivity

129

'VI army will

still be in

position

at Easter'

At first the German reactions to

encirclement were mixed. Some of thesubordinate commanders felt thatStalingrad should be evacuated at

once, while it was still possible to

break through to the West. Otherswere reluctant to give up the posi-

tions at Stalingrad, not merely be-

cause of the effort which had beenput into gaining them, but becausethe cellars and ruins at least offered

shelter from the vicious Russianwinter. In any case, whatever theultimate decision would be, everyonecould agree on the need to defend theArmy's rear. This was an essentialprerequisite to any future action, asclearly there would be neither break-out nor holding on if the Red Armyoverran the German positions frombehind.For the moment, therefore, Weichs

had hedged his bets, and with thepossibility of encirclement in mind, hehad already on November 21st issuedan order to VI Army to hold Stalin-grad and the front along the Volga 'in

any circumstances' and to prepare to

break out. But before there could beany thought of a breakout, a number

130

of problems would have to be solved,and the most important of these wasfuel. Because of the general shortageof fuel, all German formations wereunder-supplied, and priority was givento those with mobile tasks to per-form. Since September, VI Army andits accompanying formations fromIV Panzer Army had been engagedrelatively low requirements in fuel

and therefore with low allocations.Ammunition was also • short, and

Paulus estimated that he had food for

six days only. He therefore radioed to

Army Group B on the evening of the22nd, stating that he intended holdingStalingrad, but that he could not doso unless he succeeded in sealing off

his front to the south and couldreceive plentiful air supply, andrequested freedom of action to aban-don his northern front and Stalingradin order to break out if necessary. Thereply to this request came almost atonce, and not from Wechs but fromHitler himself. The VI Army muststay put and 'must know that I amdoing everything necessary to assist

and relieve it. I shall issue my ordersin good time.'

t

J- -.

Now VI Army was defending . . . andwinter was coming

.^

Paulus tried ag-ain on the morningof the 23rd, and Weichs supported hisrequest by emphasising to OKH theimpossibility of adequate air supply.Even before a reply was received,Paulus held a conference with hisCorps Commanders, and just beforemidnight despatched a message toHitler personally, pointing out thedeterioration in the conditions at thefront since the previous day. Sovietbreakthroughs in south and south-west were imminent, many of thefield and anti-tank artillery batterieshad no ammunition left, and the armyfaced 'annihilation in the immediatefuture' unless abandonment of theeastern and northern fronts, withconcentration of all forces for a break-out to south and south-west (along theeast bank of the Don towards Rostov)was authorised. Even so, muchmaterial would have to be abandoned,but some of it, and the majority ofthe men, would be saved. Again heasked for freedom of action.Hitler's reply arrived the next

morning in the form of a Fuhrer-befehl (a Fuhrer's Order, the mostbinding form of command). Not onlywas there to be no withdrawal, but allunits of VI Army still west of the Donwere to withdrew eastwards: into thepocket. The order ended with thewords 'The present Volga and presentNorthern Fronts to be held at allcosts. Supplies coming by air'.The question of air supply was

crucial to Hitler's decision, andrequires closer examination. It hasalready been mentioned that theSoviet commanders thought thatthere were about eighty-five thousandAxis troops in the pocket, whereasthere were actually about three hun-dred and thirty thousand. This figurewas only established after the battle,and at the time the question of airsupply arose, the Germans themselveswere extremely uncertain how manymen would have to be supplied. TheOperations Staff" thought there wereabout four hundred thousand; theArmy Quartermaster General, Wagner,made it three hundred thousand;about two hundred thousand undercommand.Thus the discussion over aircraft

requirements took place in an atmo-sphere of great uncertainty, and the

132

figures eventually reached wereapproximate only. It was eventuallydecided on the basis of GeneralWagner's figures that about six hun-dred tons a day would be needed, andthat to supply this amount aboutthree hundred of the Luftwafl'e's work-horses, the three-engined Junkers 52,

would be necessary. It was fairly clearfrom the beginning that these air-craft were not to be had; the minimumfigure of three hundred could not beattained, let alone the margins neededto cover aircraft under repair,damaged on take-off or landing on theimprovised airfields, or shot down bythe Soviet fighters and anti-aircraft,which would raise the numbers re-quired to at least five hundred.In the circumstances the Chief-of-

Staff of the Air Force, Colonel-GeneralJeschonnek, placed so many reserva-tions on the possibility of air supplythat it was clear he doubted its fea-sibility. Goring, however, disregardedthe caution of his advisers, and with aflamboyant contempt for the possibleundertook that the Luftwaffe wouldkeep VI Army supplied from the air.

This was what Hitler wanted to hear,and he ordered Stalingrad to be held,in the hope that somehow or otherGoring would cajole a miracle out ofthe Luftwaffe. At the same timeHitler was hopeful that the Sovietrecovery could be wished out of exist-

ence by the exercise of superiorgeneralship, and the man he selectedon November 20th to restore the situa-tion was the conqueror of the Crimea,Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein,who had already shown himself in theFrench and Russian campaigns to beof outstanding talent, and was atpresent serving on the northernsector of the Front.He was instructed by OKH to form a

new Army Group in the Don bend,between Army Groups A and B, takingunder command VI, IV Panzer, andIII Rumanian Armies, with the taskof 'bringing the enemy attacks to astandstill and recapturing the posi-tions previously occupied by us.'

jConsidering that two of the three,armies were already almost encircledand the third being battered to apulp by the Soviet armour, it was anot immodest requirement to layupon a general even of Manstein's

quality.Manstein and his staff had to travel

by train because of the weatherI onditions and the uncertainties ofrail travel in Russian conditions(railway lines were a favourite targetfor the growing- numbers of Sovietpartisans) and it was the 24th beforehe reached the headquarters of ArmyGroup B at Starobelsk where hefound Weichs and his Chief-of-Staff,von Sodenstern in a state of apatheticdespondency. He was unable to esta-blish even whether VI Army hadreceived the instruction despatched byhim before he began the journey, tokeep control of the Kalach bridge atwhatever cost, but in any case, it

mattered little, as they had lost it

two days before, and by the timeManstein reached Novocherkassk,where his headquarters were to be,he had in effect no forces left.

Five of the seven divisions of III

/^HLeft: Field-Marshal Eric von MansteinBelow:Jhe Luftwaffe, Goring boasted,would now keep VI Army supplied

Rumanian Army had been swept up inthe Raspopinskaya surrender, andthough the encircled armies at Stalin-grad were still in being, their freedomof action was so restricted by theFuhrerbefehl of two days previouslythat there was little he could do withthem. Worse still, Zhukov had notbeen idle while Manstein's train wascreeping across Russia. He had beenpouring infantry across the Don toestablish firm fronts facing bothwest and east against either a sortieto relieve VI Army or an attempt byit to break out. They were heavilysupported by artillery and Katyushas,including over thousand anti-tankguns".No brilliant improvisation would

help here; what Manstein needed wasforce. To complicate his task, hecredited the Russians with the inten-tion to strike right down to the southcoast at Rostov, thus cutting off

Army Group A as well, whereas infact, though this was a task given toVatutin and Yeremenko for a laterphase of the operation, it was entirelysecondary to the destruction of theStalingrad force, and received lowerpriority both in force and supply sothat Yeremenko was unable to carryit out. This was a problem that wouldface Manstein only later, and thebreathing space given to him by thiswas to be well exploited.While the front of Army Group Don

was held by a mixture of units formedad hoc from supply personnel. Luft-waffe ground staff, and men returningfrom leave, Manstein bombarded OKHwith requests for forces, and duringthe first days of December thesebegan arriving, XI Panzer from OKHReserve, VI Panzer from WesternEurope, 62nd, 294th, and 336th Infantrytwo Luftwaffe Field Divisions, andone of mountain troops. What wasleft of XLVIII Panzer Corps was alsobrought into the line, and when it

became apparanet that Zhokov didnot for the moment contemplate anymajor attack across the Chir, butintended his force there to hold thering while the seven field armieswhich he had concentrated aroundStalingrad got on with the job ofannihilating VI Army, everyone couldbreathe more freely.The forces on the Chir, now grouped

134

tM&^v

into 'Army Detachment Hollidt' (its

commander) even succeeded in hold-ing their bridgehead at Nizhne-Chirskaya, a mere twenty-five milesfrom the western perimeter of VIArmy. Soviet attempts to eliminateit and to make some crossings of theirown were frustrated by XI Panzer inthe second week of December in aseries of brilliantly conducted actionswhich for the time being eliminatedthe threat of further Soviet pene-tration across the Chir, though at theexpense of about half the divisions'tanks, and enabled Army Group Donto concentrate on the relief operation,while divisions continued to arrivefrom the Caucasus, northern sectorsof the front, Poland, and the West.Although the bridgehead at Nizhne-

Chirskaya was relatively near to theStalingrad force (twenty-five miles),Manstein decided not to mount themain relief attempt from there, as it

was too obvious a choice, and in thatLeft andbe^ow: Russian ack-ackclos«sthe ring

sector it would be easy for theRussians to reinforce their cordon. Inaddition, to make the attempt fromthere would involve an opposed cross-ing of the Don, so he chose instead toapproach from the south-west, thoughthe distance involved was seventy-fivemiles. Here Yeremenko's troops weremore thinly spread, and would takelonger to reinforce, while instead ofthe Don only the minor Aksay andMyshkova rivers would have to beforced.Under the plan, code-named

Wintergewitter (Winter Tempest), therelief force, headed by Colonel-GeneralHoth and the staff of IV Panzer Army(now unemployed because most of thearmy itself was inside the pocket)could either make straight for Stalin-grad or, if the Soviet resistanceproved too strong, could thrust northalong the east bank of the Don to theNizhne-Chirskaya bridgehead, whereXLVIII Panzer Corps would join themfor a thrust along the short route tothe city. Whichever variant of the

^a--^*i

Winterge witter: the attempt to break the ring

plan was followed, VI Army was tobreak out and advance to meet therelieving- force on receipt of thecodeword Donnerschlag (Thunderclap).Donnerschlag presented a difficulty

in that it was extremely unlikely thatVI Army would be able to hold its

existing positions (which it was undera strict injunction from Hitler to do)as well as break out towards the HothGroup, but this was glossed over inManstein's operational order so thatHitler's attention would not be drawnto it; in fact he was preparing to face

136

the Fuhrer with a fait accompli, byrelieving VI Army and then withdraw-ing it from its exposed position.The collection of forces for Winter-

gewitter took some time. The 57thPanzer Corps was extracted fromArmy Group A, which was veryreluctant to give it up, and had con-siderable trouble with muddy roadswhile moving back to entrain atMaykop, as the thaw had set in earlyin the Caucasus. When it arrived,there were found to be insufficientflat-cars for its tanks, some of which.

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<j

Mobile light artillery moves up tosupport the counterattack

and all of the heavy artillery, had tobe left behind. OKW showed greatunwillingness to release from reserveXVII Panzer Division, and it eventu-ally arrived ten days late. Neverthe-less, a force of thirteen divisions,including VI, XVII, and XXIII Panzerwas eventually got together, andManstein, deciding he could postponethe attempt no longer sent it off onDecember 12th. Behind it a mass oflorries, tractors and buses waited,ready to rush three thousand tons ofsupplies down the corridor to VI Army,as soon as Hoth's tanks had openedthe road.At first the Soviet opposition was

light. The 51st Army consisted of eightdivisions, supported by the 4thMechanised Corps, and was manifestlynot strong enough to stop the Germanadvance, though it could and didattempt to delay it. The delay was initself important, because the realeffort to stop Hoth was to be made onthe Myshkova river between Verkhne-Kumsky and Kapkinsky, and the force

chosen for the assignment had to betransported to the area.The reason for this was that

the second phase of the Soviet offen-

sive (Operation 'Saturn') had beenlaunched away to the north, where astrike force provided by Vatutin'sSouth-West Front and the adjacentVoronezh Front of General Golikov(recently promoted after having actedas Yeremenkp's deputy at Stalingrad)

was launched against Italian VIII

Army on the middle Don, after whichit was to bear down on the Germanforces along the Chir, smash them andmake down towards Millerovo andRostov, behind Army Groups A andDon.That which Manstein had feared was

indeed in the mind of Stavka, butnot in the form of Yeremenko'sadvance down the Don (though thattoo had been planned). The 2nd GuardsArmy, commanded by Lieutenant-General R Y Malinovsky, had beenformed to take part in this offensive,

and was designated to start fromKalach headed for Rostov and Tagan-rog, but when it became clear that theHoth offensive was a serious under-

137

taking with some chance of success,it was decided to transfer 2nd GuardsArmy to the Myshkova river.

The army was fresh, not worn downby previous battles, and comprisedsix full-strength rifle divisions, amechanised corps, and specialist units.There was one tank regiment in

each of the two infantry corps (of

three divisions each), and it was, as aGuards formation, better suppliedwith artillery, machine guns andautomatic weapons than the generalrun of Soviet armies. Many of its menhad been transferred from the Navy,and they provided a solid backbone tothe divisions. Altogether it was aformidable acquisition of strength,and the only question was whether it

could get to the Myshkova beforeHoth. It was not a motorised army, soits infantry would have to march thewhole way, in the capricious alter-

nation between night frost and dailythaw of the early Russian winter,anything up to one hundred andtwenty-five miles.The ofi'ensive by South-West and

Voronezh Fronts was launched with-out the 2nd Guards, and soon began toafl"ect the battle further south. TheItalians were soon shattered and theSoviet assault groups began to leverArmy Detachment Hollidt out of its

positions on the west bank of the Chir,

including the Nizhne-Chirskayabridgehead. This meant that therewould be no possibility of assistancefrom XLVIII Panzer Corps, and theoption of an advance up the east bankof the Don no longer existed; now it

was the direct thrust or nothing. Asagainst this, Manstein was able onDecember 17th to commit XVII Panzeron the left wing of the Hoth Group,thus significantly increasing thestrength of his mobile force.

This gave Manstein a considerablepreponderance in armour over theSoviet forces opposing him, though tocontinue with the operation wasrisky while the front north and westof Hoth's group showed every sign ofimpending collapse. But to abandonthe attempt meant to write ofi" thewhole of VI Army, because the collapseof the front on the Chir threatenedthe supply airfields. The airlift hadcome nowhere near fulfilling Goring'sboasts, but without it VI Army could

last only a matter of days, so thebreakthrough had become a matter of

the utmost urgency.But, oddly, Paulus was showing

little enthusiasm for it now. It seemedhe was happy to wait for Hoth to blasta way through to him, and the likeli-

hood that Hoth would be able to do sowas hourly growing less, as 2ndGuards Army's forward elements werebeginning to deploy along the Mysh-kova, the smaller Soviet units alreadythere had been put under Malinovsky'scommand, and a new armoured forma-tion - 7th Tank Corps - had alsoarrived, under an energetic com-mander who was already making aname for himself as a tank leader,General P A Rotmistrov. Fallingback into line on 2nd Guards Army'sright was another Soviet formation,roughly handled already, but still

capable of fighting - the 5th ShockArmy of General M M Popov. Hoth hadlost the race against the Red Army.The only way to save the operation

was for VI Army to break out into therear of the Soviet forces on theMyshkova, so Manstein contactedPaulus, who was evasive, then got intouch with Zeitzler at OKH askinghim to 'take immediate steps toinitiate the break-out by VI Armytowards IV Panzer Army" - askinghim, in efi"ect, to order Paulus tobreak out, or at least to persuadeHitler to change the order which tiedVI Army down in the city. That pro-duced no response either, so havingspent much of December 18th in vainattempts to solve the problem bytelephone and radio, he decided to trya more personal approach, and thatevening he dispatched his Chief Intel-ligence Officer. Major Eismann, intothe pocket, to give Paulus an exposi-tion of his views.Eismann drove from Novocherkassk

to the Morozovskaya airfield and tookoff" from there shortly before dawn,landing at Gumrak at 0750 hours onthe 19th. He was at once taken to ArmyHQ nearby. After he had put Man-stein's case for a break-out, Paulusproceeded to emphasise the difficuities

of carrying it out. The Chief of Opera-tions and the Quartermaster-Generalof the Army echoed him, but bothexpressed the personal opinion that animmediate breakout was not only

138

imperative but feasible.

It was, however, the Chief-of-Staff,

Major-General Arthur Schmidt, whogave the definitive answer. He was aconvinced Nazi and a strong characterwho as the siege went on becamemore and more the real commander of

VI Army. 'It is quite impossible to

break out just now ... VI Army will

still be in position at Easter. All youpeople have to do is supply it better.'

Eismann argued with them all day,but to no effect, Paulus eventuallyquoting the Fuhrerbcfehl as excludingthe possibility of a breakout.When Eismann returned late on the

19th, Manstein toyed with the idea of

dismissing Paulus and Schmidt, butthe possibility of obtaining approvalfrom OKH and Hitler without longnegotiation seemed so low that hegave it up. On the 20th he againattempted to induce Zeitzler to bringpressure to bear, but without result,

and finally at 1800 hours he orderedPaulus to 'begin Winterge witter attack

'VI Army will still be in position at

Easter ..."

as soon as possible", emphasising "It

is essential that Donnerschlag shouldimmediately follow Wintergeivitterattack."Paulus" only response was a verbal

bombardment. To regroup for theattack, he said, world take six daysand entail serious risks in the northand west of the perimeter. The troopswere too weak, and since they had hadto slaughter the horses for food, theirmobility was too low for such anundertaking, especially in extremecold. Manstein rejected all theseexcuses, and Paulus came back withthe final one that it was impossible tocomply with the order because it

involved an advance of thirty milesand he had fuel for only twenty. Inother words, he would not move.Since Paulus pleaded technical

difficulties, and Zeitzler had proven abroken reed, Manstein made one lastattempt, a personal appeal to Hitler.On the afternoon of the 21st he tele-phoned the Fiihrer to try to persuadehim that VI Army must break out atonce. All Hitler did was to quotePaulus' objections back to him.

^

JL

Whichever way the Germanstried to

move, Russian infantry or Russian

armour waited to block them

'Paulus has only enough petrol for

fifteen to twenty miles at most. Hehimself says he can't break out at

present'.Thus was sealed the fate of VI Army.

The Army Commander pleaded lackof fuel and the Fuhrer's order. TheFiihrer refused to change the orderbecause the Arm^ Commander pleadedlack of fuel. The blind led the blindinto the abyss.On the Myshkova Hoth. then as in

140

the autumn of 1941 old-fashionedenough to believe that Army Groupcommander's orders were meant to becarried out, had been locked in battlefor several days with Malinovsky'sforces. He had managed to get acrossthe river in one place near Nizhne-Kumsky and had surrounded severalunits of up to a regiment in size. Hismen were fighting with the character-istic efficiency of the German soldier,

though with little hope of success. Adispatch rider who was captured andtaken to 2nd Guards Army's Chief of

Staff, General Biryuzov, told him'Our soldiers consider themselves

sentenced to death . . .

At its nearest point, the Hoth groupwas a mere twenty-two miles from VIArmy's perimeter, where the soldiersof the beleaguered army could see theflashes of the guns lighting up thenight sky away to the south, and hear,when the wind was in the right direc-tion, the rumble of explosions, so theirspirits were high in the days beforeChristmas. On the 22nd Hoth made hisfinal effort, hurling over sixty of histanks against one regiment of the 24th

Guards Rifle Division on Malinovsky'sright flank.

The regiment consisted largely ofex-sailors from the Pacific Fleet, whoas if to show their contempt for the'mild' winter of European Russia,cast off their tunics and fought in thesub-zero temperatures in their navalvests. After hours of fighting, Hoth'stanks had to give them best and with-draw. Darkness fell, and in his com-mand post Malinovsky summed upthe day's results. 'Today we havefinally halted the formidable enemy.Now we'll go into the attack our-selves'.

On Christmas Eve, 2nd Guards Armydid just that. Hoth fought a series ofstubborn rearguard actions all theway back to his starting line atKotelnikovo, but by the time the re-

treat stopped he had been pushed backsixty miles beyond it. On VI Army'ssouthern perimeter they watchednight after night as the flashes in thesky receded further and further till

flnally they were seen no more. On theChir, too, where the men on thewestern edge of the Stalingrad peri-meter had watched the firework dis-

plays from the Nizhne-Chirskayabridgehead twenty-five miles away, thesky grew dark, and with it the pros-pects of VI Army.On New Year's Eve Biryuzov was

working in 2nd Guards Army HQwhen an officer was ushered in fromRotmistrov, bearing an invitation toa New Year Party. The Chief-of-Staffwas a rather grim and solemn man,and his first reaction was that thiswas an impermissible frivolity. How-ever he thought better of it, andshortly before midnight made his wayto the tank general's headquarters inKotelnikovo. On the way he passed aburnt-out German tank, and impelled

by curiosity he shone his torch on it.

It was camouflaged for the desert -

one of the reinforcements intended forRommel in Africa. Shrugging hisshoulders - he had no love for theAnglo-Americans - he passed on hisway.Opening the door of Rotmistrov's HQ

he stopped in amazement. There wereall the senior officers, right up to theChief-of-General Staff, Vasilevsky,standing round a Christmas tree, andon a table nearby all kinds of fruit,

wines from France, cheese fromHolland, butter and bacon from Den-mark, all sorts of conserves fromNorway; and all stamped 'For Ger-mans Only'. 'Not all my men can readGerman', said Rotmistrov' so becauseof their lack of education they grabbedit all. But we'll have to give the candlesback to Hitler so that he can lightthem in mourning for VI Army'.A few days before, VI Army too had

had a special feast - Christmas Dinner.Six ounces of bread, three of meatpaste, one of butter, one of coffee. ForBoxing Day there was an extra treat;two horsemeat rissoles per man.

141

Annihilation

In Stalingrad the cold grew more andmore Intense. The 62nd Army, frombeing a beleaguered outpost, was nowpart of a ring of steel, formed by sevenarmies. Apart from its old comradesin arms of 64th Army there wag 21st,

24th, 57th, 65th, and 66th, all waitingto go in and finish off the quarry.Chuykov still had his problems, of

course, since for weeks the masses of

ice had come rolling and tumblingdown the Volga, and supply had beenalmost impossible. They had evenresorted to air drops by the little

PE-2 'sewing machines', but this wasvery chancy; one hundred yards outin one direction and the Germansgot the supplies; one hundred yardsthe other way and they disappearedinto the Volga.On December 16th, at about 1600

hours, his attention was drawn by aloud crashing noise. Rushing out of

his dug-out he saw an immense massof ice coming down from behindZaytsevsky Island, crushing every-thing in its path. It was visibly slow-ing down, and right opposite the dug-out it came to a halt. The Volga atlast was frozen solid, and by next

142

morning plank roads had been laid

cross it so that supplies could nowcome in with relative ease, new mencould come in, and the worst battereddivisions could be withdrawn to rest

and make up to strength again.

Contact could be made withLyudnikov's isolated division, and onDecember 23rd this was done. Thenext day Sologub's, Smekhotvorov's.and Zholudev's skeletal divisions andthe remnants of two infantry brigadeswere transferred to the reserve to

reform, and even as they were leaving,

Guryev's began to clear the enfeebledGermans out of the 'Red October'factory. The Mamayev Kurgan wasstormed, but the Germans would notbe dislodged, and in defence showedthat they had learnt well the lessonstaught them by 62nd Army.Despite their hunger and the hope-

lessness of their position, there wasno collapse, as long as they believedManstein was on his way. Even whenthat hope withered, the Army fadedaway rather than cracked. DuringDecember about 80,000 men, one

The beginning of the end

^it^h-

%

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'•^•«yfef

X

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quarter of the encircled force, werelost from wounds, hunger and sick-ness, but the remainder continued to

fight, and the Soviet Don Frontcommander, General Rokossovsky.decided that a set-piece operationwould be needed to reduce them.The main attack would be delivered

from the west by Batov's 65th andChistyakov's 21st Armies, who wouldaim to split the encircled force. The66th (Zhadov) and 24th (Galanin)Armies would attack simultaneouslyfrom the north while 57th (Tolbukhin

)

and 64th (Shumilov) came in from thesouth. The 62nd Army was assignedthe task of keeping the Germans busypnough so that they could not with-draw forces to cope with the otherArmies' attacks, and of stopping anyattempt by them to retreat across thefrozen Volga. The date of the attackwas set for January 10th, 1943.

However the Stavka Representative,Colonel-General of Artillery Voronov,and Rokossovsky decided first to trythe efi'ect of an off"er of honourablecapitulation, so on January 8th theysent representatives to the Germanlines under a flag of truce. The off"er,

typed on Stavka notepaper, was aninteresting blend of 20th Centurypsychological warfare and 18th-century military punctilio. It read:'TO THE COMMANDER OF VI

GERMAN ARMY SURROUNDED ATSTALINGRAD, COLONEL-GENERALPAULUS, OR HIS REPRESENT-ATIVE.'The VI German Army, formations

of IV Panzer Army, and attachedreinforcement units have been com-pletely encircled since 23rd November,1942. Units of the Red Army had sur-rounded this group of German forceswith a solid ring. All hopes of rescueof your forces by an attack by Germantroops from the South and South-Westhave proved unjustified. The Germanforces which hastened to your aidhave been smashed by the Red Army,and remnants of those forces areretreating towards Rostov. The Ger-man transport air force, which is

bringing you starvation rations offood, ammunition, and fuel has beencompelled to change its airfieldsfrequently because of the successfulswift advance of the Red Army and tofly to the positions of the encircled

_\Left above : Only a fortunate few were to

escape. Left below : Bad weathergrounded the majority of the Luftwaffe.Above : No escape

troops from a long distance. Inaddition to this the German transportair force is suffering immense losses in

aircraft and crews from the RussianAir Force. Its assistance to theencircled troops is becoming fictitious.

'The situation of the encircledtroops is serious. They are suffering

hunger, sickness, and cold. The severeRussian winter is only beginning;hard frosts, cold winds and blizzardsare still to come, and your soldiers

have not been provided with winteruniforms and find themselves in

severe, unhealthy conditions.'You as the Commander, and all

officers of the encircled forces under-stand very well that you have no real

possibilities of breaking the ring of

encirclement. Your situation is hope-less and further resistance is comp-letely pointless.

'In view of your hopeless position,

and to avoid senseless bloodshed, wepropose that you accept the followingterms of capitulation;

'1. All the encircled German forces

headed by you and your staff to ceaseresistance.

'2. You to hand over to us all per-

sonnel, armaments, all militaryequipment and military property in

working order.

'We guarantee to all officers, NCOs,and men who cease resistance their

lives and safety, and after the end of

145

the war return to Germany or to any-

country to which the prisoners express

a desire to go.

'All personnel of forces which sur-

render may retain their militaryuniform, badges of rank and medals,personal effects, valuables, and in the

case of senior officers, their swords.'Normal rations will be instituted

immediately for all officers, NCOs andmen who surrender. Medical aid will

be given to all wounded, sick, andfrost-bitten.'Your reply is expected at 1500 hours

Moscow time on January 9th, 1943 in

written form by a representativepersonally appointed by you, whomust drive in a light vehicle with awhite flag along the road from Konnysiding to Kotluban station.

'Your representative will be met byauthorised Russian officers in area'B' 0.5 km South-East of siding 564 at

1500 hours on January 9th, 1943.

'In the event our proposal for capitu-lation is refused by you, we warn youthat forces of the Red Army and RedAir Fleet will be compelled to take thematter to annihilation of the en-

circled German forces, and for theirdestruction you will bear theresponsibility.'The ultimatum was signed by

Voronov on behalf of Stvka and byRokossovsky as C-in-C Don Front,and was one of considerable psycholo-gical persuasiveness, with its refer-

ences to the horrors of winter still tocome, its cold but accurate description(verifiable as such by Paulus) of thefailure of the relief expedition, thepromise of food and medical treatmentand the old-fashioned touch, echoingGrant's surrender terms to Lee atAppomattox in 1865, and appealing tothe traditional sense of militarycourtesy 'senior officers may keeptheir swords'. To redouble its effect

on morale, copies of it were droppedto Paulus' troops.But however persuasive the terms,

Paulus was not yet disposed to give up,

or perhaps was not sufficiently strong-willed to overrule the determinedSchmidt, so the terms were rejected,

and Voronov set about fulfilling thethreat in the last paragraph of theultimatum. He wanted a quick end to

\

the business, for the seven armiestied up at Stalingrad could be betterused elsewhere in developing theoffensive into a total shattering of theGerman front in the south. Operation'Ring', the dissection and annihilationof VI Army and its attached units,

was to go forward.It was a carefully planned operation,

for The Red Army's senior com-manders had a healthy respect for theGerman soldier which imposed ontheir planning a cautious concern for

the practicable, which Hitler's

generals frequently found it necessaryor expedient to ignore. The Fuhrerconstantly demanded miracles fromhis troops, and frequently got them,but Stavka, as befitted the instrumentsof an avowedly atheistic regime,tended to eschew the supernatural.For Operation 'Ring' they had

seven armies, whereas Paulus had theequivalent of two (VI, most of IV

Far left: Supplies down to the occasional

parachute drop. Centre: Food or

ammunition ? Below: Wire for the last

defence

!

Panzer, numerous individual units,two Rumanian infantry divisions, anda battalion of Croat separatists). Buta Soviet army was about equivalent insize to a German corps, and two of thearmies (62nd and 64th) were muchbelow strength. The Germans actuallyhad slightly more men and tanks inthe pocket than did the force encir-cling it, though the Red Army had asuperiority in artillery of three totwo, and in aircraft of three to one.But there was a world of difference

between the well-clad, properly fedtroops of Don Front, with the scent ofvictory in their nostrils, and the cold,

hungry and ill-clad soldiers of VIArmy, just as the T-34s of Rokossov-sky's mobile forces, properly suppliedwith fuel and ammunition, could notbe compared with the German Mk III

and IV tanks, almost immobile andalmost impotent for lack of both.Nevertheless, Voronov took no risks,

and the operation was conducted ascarefully as if the Germans were freshand unweakened.He opened the proceedings at 0805

hours on the morning of January 10th,

with a fifty-five minute bombardmentby thousands of guns and mortars andhundreds of aircraft; then, at 09(X)

hours precisely, the storming of

Stalingrad began with an attackacross the city from Vertyachi to-

wards the 'Red October' factory aimedat splitting Paulus' force in two. Atthe same time secondary attacks wereput in from Tsybenko to Basarginostation and from Yerzovka towardsGorodishche.Once more the tortured soil of

Stalingrad heaved under the explosionof bomb and shell, and the familiarnames of months back - the Rosso-shka river, Pitomnik, the Tsaritsa -

crept back into the communiques.But this time the sequence was like aspeeded-up film, for wljere in theautumn Paulus was using divisions,

and fighting against well-fed troops,

Voronov was using armies and fight-

ing a starving, freezing and demoral-ised enemy, without food, ammuni-tion, or hope. In the circumstances it

was a tribute to the German soldier

that he would still fight at all, butfight he did, though he knew his causewas lost.

Even so, it was not to be expected

147

66th ARMYYerzovka*

GERMAN RESISTANCE\CEASES FEB. 2

62ndARMY

Stalingrad

GERMAN RESISTANCECEASES JAN. 31

Beketovka

64th ARMY

VI Army front on night of Jan. 9,1943 The front at end of Jan. 17

The front at end of Jan. 13 @ Last German pockets Jan. 25 Feb. 2

r-tfJ*

Storming t

that he could repel the Soviet on-slaught. What had taken Paulus weeksto capture, Voronov and Rokossovskyregained In days. The main force (thewhole of 65th Army plus the strikingforces of 21st and 24th) reached thewest bank of the Rossoshka on the13th, the Germans were pushed backfrom the Chervlenaya river, and on the14th lost their main supply airfield atPitomnik. By evening of the 16th theGerman-held perimeter had been re-

duced from about five hundred andfifty square miles to less than twohundred and fifty. For supply thereremained only the subsidiary airfield

at Gumrak; and if the Luftwafi"e hadbeen unable to meet even the starva-tion minimum of three hundred tonsa day (there had never been anychance that they could supply the sixhundred tons necessary for propersustenance of the besieged garrison,and their best performance was thedelivery of two hundred and eightynine tons in one day) with two air-

fields, there was not a hope that VIArmy could be kept going with onlyGumrak available.

Plan of attack

The scenes at the airfields beggareddescription in those January days. Anaircraft would land, bumping its wayover the snow-covered runway, andunloading would go on at high speed,because the Soviet artillery frequentlybombarded the area, Soviet fightersswooped overhead ready to pick off" theunwieldy German transports as theycame and went, and roving groups ofT-34s periodically shot up the airfield.

Then the loading would begin, whileharassed Movement Control officersand Feldgendarmerie, frequently withdrawn pistols, attempted to sort outthe genuinely entitled from thedeserters - the bandaged officer whoturned out to have no wound under-neath the dressing on his arm, theColonel who had written his owndocuments ordering himself to fiy outto Army Group Don 'for special duties',or the sergeant with the self-inflictedwound.Meanwhile, the stretcher-borne

wounded waited helplessly to beloaded, wondering, if still capable ofthought, whether they would getaboard at all, and whether, if they did,they would survive the packs of Sovietfighters and the hundreds of heavyanti-aircraft guns which the RedArmy had installed on the steppealong their route. Then all would beready; the aircraft would jolt its wayto the end of the runway, gatherspeed and lumber into the air, in atleast two instances with a panic-stricken wretch still hanging to thetailplane until within minutes hisfrozen hands relaxed their grip and hefell to his death.That was the reality behind the

bombastic utterances of the Naziradio, and the military communiqueswith their references to 'stubbornresistance against overwhelminglysuperior forces'. In the front line, theinfantry fought stolidly on, but be-hind them the organism was rotting.They were the shell on the egg, con-cealing the fact that the inside hasgone bad; and like the eggshell, theywere about to be cracked. Voronov andRokossovky were already planninghow to crack them, by putting intoefi'ect the second and final phase ofOperation Ring.By the evening of the 17th the

Germans were back on the inner

149

defensive perimeter of the city itself,

and an uneasy lull began while Don

Front regrouped for the last push.

Gumrak airfield fell into Soviet hands

on the 21st, and the final stage ot

Operation Hing began on the following

day. The main parts were played by

the infantry and massed artillery,

particularly the latter - on the front

occupied by 21st, 57th, and 64th

Armies there was a gun or mortar

every six yards for fourteen miles -

four thousand one hundred of them.

No army could stand up for long to

this weight of attack, and by the 25th

Don Front had reached the centre of

Stalingrad. At the 'Red October" hous-

ing estate and on the Mamayev Kur-

gan Chistyakov's tanks of 21st Armysuddenly found not Germans but

The airfield recaptured with Luftwaffe

planes grounded

Soviet troops ahead of them. The62nd Army's main force was no longerisolated from Don Front.Now Paulus occupied an area of only

thirtysix square miles, and his forcewas split into two as Chuykov's hadbeen for so many weeks. Its destruc-tion was a matter of days.Both German and Soviet generals

and military theorists agree that up

to about January 24th, VI Army wasperforming a useful service to Ger-many by tying down the Sovietarmies there - in particular Yere-menko's offensive towards Rostovwas starved of troops because of thecontinued resistance of VI Army, andhe failed to achieve his objective ofcutting off Army Group A's retreatfrom the Caucasus. But by the 24th it

was clear that Army Group A wasgoing to make its escape throughRostov, and that VI Army, whose lastairfield, Gumrak, had fallen threedays previously, was in any case nolonger capable of tying down Sovietforces of any size.

Some commanding officers had be-gun to negotiate the individual sur-renders of their units with the oppos-ing forces, despite orders to thecontrary, and there was no point infurther resistance. At 1645 hours onthe 24th Manstein received a signalfrom VI Army which reported, amongother things '.

. . Frightful conditionsin the city area proper, where abouttwenty thousand unattended woundedare seeking shelter in the ruins. Withthem are about the same number ofstarved and frost-bitten men, andstragglers, mostly without weapons. . . Last resistance on city outskirtsin southern part of Stalingrad will beoffered on January 25th . . . TractorFactory may perhaps hold out a little

longer . ..'

Manstein made a last attempt bytelephone to persuade Hitler to allowa surrender, but in vain. Major Zitze-witz, the OKH liaison officer inStalingrad had been flown out in oneof the last aircraft to leave Gumrakon the 20th, and on the 23rd had madea similar attempt in a personal inter-view with the Fiihrer. But Hitler wasby now completely out of touch withreality, and was talking of sending asingle battalion of the new (and un-tried) Panther medium tanks throughthe hundred miles and more of Soviet-controlled territory between ArmyGroup Don and Stalingrad to open acorridor. Zitzewitz was flabbergasted,but he did his best to bring Hitler backto earth. He spoke of hunger, frost-

bite, lack of supplies, the untendedwounded, and ended with the bluntstatement 'the troops at Stalingradcan no longer be ordered to fight to the

151

last round because they are no longer

physically able to fight and no longer

have a last round'.Hitler looked through him. 'Man

recovers very quickly' he said, andsent a radio message to Paulus.

'Surrender is forbidden. VI Army will

hold their positions to the last manand the last round, and by their heroic

endurance will make an unforgettable

contribution to the establishment of

a defensive front and the salvation

of the western world.'

So VI Army was sent to its doomwith a sordid lie. It was no longer

making any contribution, unforget-

table or otherwise, to the establish-

ment of a defensive front. Nor, cometo that, could the people of occupiedWestern Europe be readily expected

to view the regime which had des-

troyed their freedom and independencein 1939 and 1940 as contributing to the

'salvation of the western world.'

Paulus had had to move his head-

quarters from Gumrak when the

Soviets overran it, and had installed

himself and his staff in the basementof a large department store, the

•Univermag', on the western outskirts

of the city. On January 30th this fact

became known to General Shumilovof 64th Army, in whose sector it was,

and he at once organised a mobile

detachment of tanks and motorisedinfantry from 38th Motorised Brigade,

adding an engineer battalion whosejob was to clear the mines around the

store. With the detachment was theIntelligence Officer of the Brigade,

Senior Lieutenant Ilchenko. By 0600

hours on the 31st they had surroundedthe store and began shelling it.

After a few minutes a German Officer

came out of the side door and mo-tioned for an officer to come over.

Ilchenko crossed the street, and theofficer said 'Our boss wants to talk to

your boss'.

'Our boss is busy. You'll have to deal

with me' said Ilchenko, and with twoof his soldiers was taken down to the

basement, where they met Schmidtand Major-General Rosske of Paulus'staff. Rosske said that the surrenderwould be negotiated only with repre-

sentatives of the Front or Armycommand. Ilchenko reported this byradio to Shumilov, who at once sent

his Chiefs of Operations and Intelli-

gence, Colonels Lukin and Ryzhov. Onarrival they negotiated first withRosske then with Schmidt, who said'Paulus has not been answerable foranything since yesterday', thoughfrom time to time they disappearedinto the room where he lay chainsmoking and twitching nervously, onhis bed. Paulus' staff refused to nego-tiate the surrender of the northerngroup, which was now under thecommand of General Strecker, and asfor the southern group they agreed toits capitulation but pointed out thatthey had no means of delivering theorder to their troops.

It was finally agreed that theorder would be delivered by officers

from each army, and Colonels Ryzhovand Mutovin of 64th Army staff weredesignated to accompany the Germanstaff officers on this task. Only after

they had left was Colonel Lukin takento see Paulus. The VI Army HQ wasgiven one hour to pack up, and whilethey were doing so Shumilov'sChief-of-Staff, Major-General Laskin,arrived to conduct Paulus andSchmidt to Shumilov's headquartersat Beketovka.Shumilov awaited their arrival with

impatience and curiosity. At last thedoor opened and a tall, grey-hairedman in the uniform of a Colonel-General entered the room. He raisedhis arm from, force of habit, in theNazi salute, then sheepishly lowered it

and said 'Good day' instead of HeilHitler.Austerely Shumilov asked for his

identity documents. Paulus felt in hispockets and produced his servicebook. Shumilov, determined to takeno chances examined it and then askedfor documents certifying that Pauluswas the C-in-C of VI Army. Fortunate-ly Paulus had that, too (Shumilovdoes not say what he would have doneif Paulus hadn't), and finally thepunctilious commander of 64th Armyasked whether the reports that he hadbeen promoted to Field-Marshal weretrue. (They were; Hitler had pro-moted him in the hope that this wouldencourage him to die fighting.)

Schmidt had been listening withgrowing impatience to the conver-sation, and could no longer bear to beexcluded from it. With a pride notperhaps entirely appropriate to the

152

..J^

Thesurrenderof Field-Marshal Paulus. . . and his army

circumstances he announced in aceremonious tone, 'Yesterday, byorder of the Fuhrer, the rank ofGeneral Field-Marshal, the highest inthe Reich, was conferred upon ColonelGeneral von Paulus'.Shumilov believed a Chief-of-Staff

should speak when spoken to, andturned back to Paulus. 'Then I mayreport to Stavka', he said 'that Field-

Marshal Paulus has been takenprisoner by troops of my Army?''Jawohr, came the answer.During the official interrogation

which followed, Paulus' spirits beganto pick up, when he realised that hecould expect civilised treatment fromhis captors, and by the time lunch wasserved he was happier than he hadbeen for weeks. He called for vodka,poured a glass for each of his staff

officers, and proposed a toast. 'Tothose who defeated us, the RussianArmy and its leaders'. All rose anddrank.General Strecker's northern group

lasted only a little while longer, and

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Wi1under pressure from 62nd, 65th, and66th Armies it too capitulated, onFebruary 2nd 1943. There were threedays of national mourning in Germanyand for some weeks even Hitlerappeared to have lost faith in hismilitary genius, so that Mansteinenjoyed for a brief period a freedomof action which few German generalshad had that year. He made good useof it, inflicting a serious reverse onthe over-extended armies of Golikovand Vatutin, and recovering much of

the lost ground north of the Don. Butthe Stalingrad campaign really endedon February 2nd, 1943, since no sub-sequent tactical victory could erasewhat had happened on the bank of theVolga.The military importance of the

victory can be expressed partly in

figures. Almost the whole of five Axisarmies had been wiped out by the timethe thaw came - all of VI Army, mostof IV Panzer Army, five out of sevendivisions of III Rumanian, almost all

of IV Rumanian and of VIII Italian

Armies. Some thirty-two divisions

and three brigades were completelyshattered, and a further sixteen

153

divisions lost more than half their

personnel, while many more had to

abandon much of their heavy-

equipment to get away. Total Axiscasualties in killed, wounded, miss-ing, or captured will never be knownwith absolute certainty, but theywere in the neighbourhood of onemillion five hundred thousand betweenAugust 1942 and February 1943, whileabout three thousand five hundredtanks and assault guns (about sevenmonths production) were lost, withover half a year's output of guns andmortars (about twelve thousand), andthree thousand aircraft (at least fourmonths' production). Altogether theequipment lost between August andFebruary would suffice to equipapproximately seventy-five divisions.

Yet the figures tell only part of thestory. German generals couldrationalise the defeat, as they had theone at Moscow, by pointing to variouserrors made by Hitler, and after thewar many of them were to fight thebattle over again in their memoirs,this time winning it. If Haider'soriginal plan had been followed; if

Kleist and Ruoff had been set inmotion later, so that they and Hothcould have got round South Frontinstead of simply herding it away tothe Caucasus; if Hoth had not beensent south to help Kleist, who neededno help; if Hitler had not diverteddivisions back to the West; if all

these things, and others had beendone difi'erently, then the outcomewould have been difi'erent.

But there is one fatal flaw in thistype of reasoning; when examinedclosely the enemy is always assumedto be doing what he actually did,

whereas in real life, each side's

actions are to some extent deter-mined by those of its adversary. If

the Germans had behaved difl"erently,

the Stavka reactions would also havebeen difi'erent; and Stavka made its

mistakes too, the most obvious onebeing the mounting of the Kharkovofl"ensive in May, The historian,writing after 'the event, has inform-ation which the general conductingthe battle did not have at the time,and any battle, but particularly oneof the scale and complexity of Stalin-grad, is a dynamic event, in whichdecisions have to be taken frequently,

quickly, and on incomplete inform-ation. In the nature of things, a pro-portion of them will inevitably bewrong, some of them disastrously so.

And all that can be said is that thedecisions taken by the Soviet generalswere more often right than those ofthe Germans, and fewer of the wrongones were disastrouly wrong.Taking the general picture, there-

fore, the flexibility and imaginative-ness of the Soviet defence, and theboldness of the counterofi"ensive planconceived and executed primarily byZhukov and Vasilevsky, was a productof high military skill, when comparedwith the dull mincing-machineapproach adopted by the commandersof Army Group B and VI Army, and it

was superior generalship, not super-iority in numbers which decided theissue. Insofar as the Stavka gambled,it gambled successfully, first on its

ability to maintain 62nd Army in its

isolated position, and secondly onbeing able to assemble the largestrike forces for the counteroffensivewithout attracting the attention ofthe Germans. The German leaders, onthe other hand, gambled on theirability to remove a nation with twiceGermany's manpower potential fromthe list of combatants in a matter of

months, and that they came so neaito success is a tribute to their skill in

excution rather than a commend-ation of their judgement in selectingsuch an objective in the first place.The Soviet side, too, has its dis-

putes, but on a more personal level,

as to whether the 'Southern generals'or the 'Muscovites' were the moreresponsible for the victory. In Stalin'stime, this kind of argument could notarise, since all success flowed from hisgenius. But once he had left thescene the arguments broke out withall the more fury for having been pentup for ten years. Khrushchev had beenin the south ever since the beginningof the war, and felt the odium attachedto the 'Southern generals' reflectedupon himself.

It is a fact that of the generalsposted to the Stalingrad area to

restore the situation were a numberwho had held high posts in the battleof Moscow - Zhukov, Vasilevsky,Yeremenko, Golikov, Vatutin,Rokossovsky, G F Zakharov (Yere-

154

menko's Chief of Staff), Batov (65thArmy), Zhadov (66th Army), and thatthese men took leading- roles; Zhukov,the supreme director, and all theFront commanders having actuallyheld field command in the Moscowbattle. During the ascendancy ofKhrushchev, the role of these menwas played down, and the importanceof the 'locals', especially Khrushchev,being exaggerated.One name which has not so far been

mentioned at all so far is that ofGeorgy Malenkov, who, as a memberof Stalin's secretariat, spent muchtime on the spot, and probably playeda more important part than Khrush-chev in keeping Stalin informed andensuring that the Party machinerywas mobilised behind the Stalingradoperation. Yet little or nothing is

known about his time there, becausehis fall from power in 1955 has madehim a non-person whose name is

almost never mentioned, and whosepresence at Stalingrad is ignored.However, it is clear that the leading

role in preparing the 'trap' and thenspringing it was Zhukov's. As DeputySupreme Commander he was thesenior soldier concerned with theoperation, and he was certainly nofigurehead in this or any of his otherbattles before or after. The 62nd Armywas the cheese in the trap, andChuykov's handling of it, particularlyin the development of small-formationtactics to suit the unique conditions(there had never been a siege inside acity of comparable scale and duration)made it possible for 62nd Army toretain its foothold and therefore tohold the large German force in its

vulnerable forward position longenough for the counteroffensive forceto be assembled. Equally, withoutYeremenko's frantic but inspiredimprovisations on August 23rd, it is

doubtful whether 62nd Army wouldhave had time to develop the tacticswhich it so successfully employedagainst German forces with, localsuperiority, especially in the air.

Soviet sources publish only veryscanty data about the Red Army'sown losses, but it is clear that theywere considerably less than those ofthe Germans, as German figures showno big 'round-up' of Soviet troops atany time 1942 after May, few of the

Soviet wounded fell into Germanhands, casualties from cold or hungerwere negligible by comparison withthose of the Germans, and the onlymajor attrition was among the divi-sions sent into Stalingrad. Lossesamong these were at times very heavy,but most of the wounded were evacu-ated across the Volga where presum-ably most of them stood a good chanceof recovery. As to the killed, theremoval for reburial of corpses buriedin the city produced one hundred andforty seven thousand two hundredGerman and forty six thousand sevenhundred Soviet dead.Of the three hundred and thirty

thousand surrounded within the ori-

ginal perimeter (of which the cityarea formed only a small part), onlyninety one thousand marched out afterthe capitulation. These men werealready in a very weak state from coldand lack of food, and tyhpus had alreadymade its appearance shortly before thesurrender. After the men had beenmoved to temporary prisoner of warcamps in the Beketovka-Krasnoar-meysk area, a typhus epidemic brokeout, killing about fifty thousand ofthe enfeebled survivors, and of theremainder many thousands died whilebeing marched to camps in the hinter-land, mostly in Central Asia. TheGerman prisoners were put to forcedlabour, and the last of them returnedonly in 1955. Altogether only five

thousand of the original ninety onethousand prisoners ever saw Germanyagain.And what did Hitler think of it all?

He was dumbfounded at the surrender,and prophesied that the Generalswould be tortured and made to giveanti-Nazi broadcasts over MoscowRadio. They made the broadcasts all

right, though it does not appear thatthey were in fact tortured - at leastnone of those who returned after thewar made any allegation of serious ill-

treatment. Some twenty four Generalswent into captivity, and unlike theirmen, most of them survived the war.Paulus was an active member of theanti-Nazi 'Free Officers' Committee',though he had so much of the courtierin his make-up that it is impossible totell whether he had 'seen the light' oradapted himself to serve a new master- perhaps the latter, as after the war

155

he elected to live in the Soviet Zoneof Germany.Apart from the military conse-

quences of the defeat - the most strik-

ing of which was the permanentchange in the manpower balance,which developed so that whereas in

November 1942 the Red Army began its

counteroffensive on a basis of roughlyparity, seven and a half months later,

when it began the battle of Kursk, it

had a superiority in manpower of overtwo to one - there were important poli-

tical effects too. In Munich, the birth-place of the Nazi movement, rioting

broke out among the students, and.though it was brutally suppressed, it

showed that some cracks had begun toappear in the fasade of German unitybehind Hitler.Henceforward, a German soldier

sent to the Eastern Front was both ahero and martyr. In the Asia MinorMiddle East area, any German hope ofinveigling Turkey into the war on theside of the Axis faded away in thestrong light of reality, as did theheady dreams of taking the British inthe rear, cutting off the Allied MiddleEast oil supplies at source, or stopping

Ji

4* %

the flow of supplies to Russia throughIran.But the supreme irony was that

Germany was able to go on fightingfor another two years and threemonths after that fatal February dayin Stalingrad. Though she never suc-ceeded in laying her hands on the oil

of the Caucasus, the success of herindustrial chemists in manufacturingpetrol from coal enabled her to keepher armies and her economy going,though admittedly not without crippl-

ing shortages, caused more by Alliedbombing of the refineries than by lack

of raw materials or refining capacity.Hitler's apprehensions about his ownoil supply, which had led him to urgehis armies on beyond the relativelysimpler task of disrupting Soviet oilsupply, and to a fatal division of forcewhich gained them neither the Cau-casus nor the Volga, had been exag-gerated.

So, in the end, it had all beenunnecessary . . .

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157

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Bibliography

The Year of Stalingrad Alexander Werth (Hamish Hamilton. London. Knopf,New York)Russia At War 1942-1945 Alexander Werth (Barrie and Rockllffe. London.Button, New York)Juggernaut Malcolm Mackintosh (Seeker & Warburg. London. The MacmillanCo, New York)Hitler's War on Russia (US: Hitler Moves East 1941-1943) Paul Carell (Little,Brown. Boston. Harrap, London)Stalingrad Yeremenko (Moscow)Barbarossa Alan Clark (Hutchinson, London. Morrow, New York)The Beginning of The Road (US: The Battle for Stalingrad) Vasili Chiukov(Holt, London. Rinehart & Winston, New York)A History of Russia Nicholas V Riasonovsky (Oxford University Press, Oxford& New York)The Soviet Army ed B H Liddell Hart (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London)A History of the Soviet Army Michel Carder (Pall Mall Press, London)Haider's Diaries (English Translation in manuscript at Office of Chief ofMilitary History, Department of the Army, Washington)Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1939-45 General Walter Warlimont (Weidenfeld &Nicholson, London)

160

Stalingrad . . . Where Hitler threw in entire

divisions in suicidol attacks, and the Russians

annihilated them in the most vicious battles ot the

Second World War. . . When it was all over, the

once proud German VI Army, 330,000 strong, had

been entirely wiped oot.

ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II