The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  After Paulus departed, the frustrated Ostarhild went back to his maps. He had done everything he could to alert the “brains” of the Sixth Army, but he wondered whether they had really grasped the enormity of the danger.

  Back at Golubinka, General Paulus issued an unusual proclamation to his troops:

  1. The summer and fall offensive is successfully terminated after taking Stalingrad … the Sixth Army has played a significant role and held the Russians in check. The actions of the leadership and the troops during the offensive will enter into history as an especially glorious page.

  2. Winter is upon us … the Russians will take advantage of it.

  3. It is unlikely that the Russians will fight with the same strength as last winter.…

  Having heard Ostarhild’s briefing, Friedrich von Paulus seemed to be whistling his way past the graveyard. Actually, he was dismayed at the bloodbath his soldiers had endured, and disgusted at himself for not having taken all of Stalingrad in September, but he continued to keep a death-grip on the ruins along the Volga, while trusting Hitler to guard his flanks.

  On November 1, however, he endured another punishing attack by the Luftwaffe’s self-appointed “devil’s advocate” when air force general, Freiherr von Richthofen, confronted him again at Golubinka. Richthofen complained that the infantry was not taking advantage of the support given them by the Stukas and Junker bombers, and the harried Paulus argued back that he was hobbled by lack of men and ammunition.

  The Luftwaffe general dismissed the rebuttal, saying he personally would use his influence to get any needed supplies, and continued with a lecture: “The real explanation is to be found in the weariness of both the troops and command and in that rigid Army conservatism, which still accepts without demur one thousand men in the front line out of a ration strength of twelve thousand, and which leads to the generals being content to merely issue orders.…”

  Refusing to be drawn into a shouting match, Paulus rejected Richthofen’s charge and calmly repeated his glaring deficiencies in manpower and ammunition. The self-control Paulus exhibited was a mistake, for Richthofen flew back to his own base convinced that Paulus knew he was in error but could not admit it.

  North of the Don, the Russian forces continued their buildup. They moved at night, in long trains which came from the Moscow area and the Urals, carrying more than two hundred thousand troops. Heavy artillery, hundreds of tanks, nearly ten thousand cavalry horses, were being carried on flatcars of the single-track rail line running toward the Serafimovich and Kletskaya assembly points, 100 to 125 miles northwest of Stalingrad. Russian political officers worked tirelessly to infuse the troops with fanaticism. Each new soldier stood before the banners of his regiment and received his weapon in a formal ceremony. Martial songs were sung, and party officials read speeches on the need for devotion to the Motherland. Impressed by the panoply, most soldiers went back to their units “armed to the spiritual teeth.”

  As the men and material moved inexorably toward the front, the Germans could not fail to see their spoor. Russian deserters told astonished interrogators of the arrival of divisions and armies not only on the Don but also to the south of Stalingrad opposite the German Fourth Tank Army, in the Beketovka and Tzatza Lake sector. Intelligence officers like Karl Ostarhild put these reports together, buttressed them with visual sightings and monitoring intercepts, and came to the obvious conclusion: The enemy was about to attack from both flanks.

  Even the Axis “puppet” allies were sounding the alarm. By the second week in October, the Rumanian Third Army had fully established itself in positions along the Sixth Army’s left flank at the Don. Almost immediately, Rumanian intelligence verified what Lt. Karl Ostarhild had told Paulus. When Rumanian general Dumitrescu demanded to know what the German Army was going to do about it, the matter was forwarded to East Prussia for Adolf Hitler’s response. In the meantime, the hawk-nosed Dumitrescu seethed over another matter. His army had been forced to take over some sectors formerly guarded by the Italians, and each of his seven divisions now had to cover twelve-mile-wide fronts. With meager reserves to back up these thinly stretched units, Dumitrescu felt the situation presented an intolerable risk. When he protested to the Germans, they asked him to bear with the problem.

  In Stalingrad, Vassili Chuikov directed his own war from a new, invulnerable command post. The German attacks on the factories in October had forced him to leave his fourth headquarters in seven weeks. With his trench dugout reduced to smoldering timbers, he had retreated south along the Volga to the rear of the 284th Division, where engineers had just blasted a T-shaped tunnel into the cliff on the west bank to house divisional staff offices. It had been bored thirty feet deep into the rock, and was forty feet beneath the surface. He immediately requisitioned it and moved in.

  If he had finally gained a sanctuary, it was his only comfort, for his army had nearly disappeared. The hand-to-hand fighting for the factories had wiped out battalions, regiments, even entire divisions. Colonel Gorishny’s 95th Division had to be divided into other units. The few men from Zholudev’s elite 37th Guards went into the 118th Regiment of Colonel Ivan Ilyich Lyudnikov’s 138th Division. Lyudnikov also received driblets from Gurtiev’s 308th Division, which was massacred at the Barrikady. From groups which had come into Stalingrad seven to eight thousand strong, only a few hundred straggled away to fight under new commanders.

  From his intelligence, Chuikov knew that Paulus was planning yet another offensive against the factories. At that moment the 44th Division, the famous Hoch und Deutschmeister from Austria, was moving across German rear positions in a northeasterly direction. Its destination was the Barrikady. To counter the threat, Chuikov desperately reshuffled his troops, while calling across the river to ask Yeremenko for more help.

  But Stalingrad Front Headquarters was busy funneling troops and supplies into the Beketovka region south of Stalingrad for the upcoming counterattack. In their conversation, General Yeremenko warned Chuikov he had to occupy the Germans in the city so that Paulus could not shift his forces to the flanks.

  Yeremenko’s order answered a question Chuikov had been asking himself for some time. Why had the Germans failed to support their flanks? On the right shore of the Volga, the massed Russian artillery which had backed up Chuikov’s Sixty-second Army so well in recent weeks, had weakened noticeably as the Soviet High Command pulled out batteries for duty elsewhere. Since Chuikov had noticed the lessened firepower, he assumed the Germans must have, too, and therefore drawn similar conclusions about the withdrawal.

  He had also noticed something else, something more disturbing. Chunks of ice, “sludge,” had started to drift by on the Volga. The appearance of these floes triggered an alarm bell at Sixty-second Army Headquarters. Until the ice stopped moving and formed a solid bridge to the far shore, supply boats could not navigate through the rampaging floes. Such a situation could be disastrous for the Russians in Stalingrad.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution fell on November 7, and Joseph Stalin spoke to his people to tell them that eight million Germans had been killed in the “Great Patriotic War.” Though that figure was inflated by more than six million, another remark he made was more accurate. The premier prophesied, “Soon there will be a holiday in our streets, too.”

  But as the Russian people mourned the deaths of millions of relatives in the past seventeen months of war, they saw little reason to anticipate a “holiday.” Hungry and exhausted, only temporarily buoyed by the fact that the Germans had not yet seized the Caucasus and Stalingrad, they dared not dream that anything would ever make them want to laugh and dance again.

  In Germany, the nine-year-old Third Reich was also celebrating an anniversary. At the Lowenbräukeller in Munich, workers draped enormous swastika flags across the arches to the main hall. Massive gold eagles hung above the speaker’s rostrum on the flower-banked stage. Officials stomped about, nervously supervising every arrangement for
the gala event. They fretted over petty details and harangued everyone with the need for perfection. For Adolf Hitler was the guest of honor, to meet with his old friends and reminisce about the days of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

  His special train was rolling through the hilly country of Thuringia. It made slow time. Allied air raids had damaged the tracks, and troop trains frequently slowed its passage. During the evening of November 7, Hitler discussed the day’s major news with several aides in his dining car. Agents had reported from Spain that Allied convoys were steaming past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. No one knew their destination, but Hitler was fascinated with the bold maneuver. Almost like a disinterested party, he tried to project himself into Allied deliberations.

  While dinner was served on exquisite china, the train stopped once more at a siding. A few feet away, a hospital train marked time, and from their tiered cots, wounded soldiers peered into the blazing light of the dining room where Hitler was immersed in conversation. Suddenly he looked up at the awed faces staring in at him. In great anger he ordered the curtains drawn, plunging his wounded warriors back into the darkness of their own bleak world.

  All evening long, as his train traveled through the neat fields of Bavaria, Hitler kept fantasizing about the enemy’s plans and concluded that if he were they, he’d occupy Rome immediately. What could stop them? But as he went to bed near dawn, American and British troops were pouring ashore in Morocco and Algeria. Their goal was a junction with Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth British Army, fresh from its triumph over Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt.

  The next day, Hitler ignored the disastrous news and entered the Munich Lowenbräukeller to a throaty animal roar of obeisance. Among his old beer-drinking cronies, who chanted the words to the Nazi party song, “Horst Wessel,” he warmed to the occasion.

  Wearing the uniform of the “brownshirts,” a swastika band adorning his left arm, he stood proudly on the platform and accepted the salute: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” Then the Führer launched into a rousing speech. He hit out at the British: “They will find out … that the German inventive spirit has not been idle, and they will get an answer [to air raids on Germany] which will take their breaths away.” He scoffed at the landings in Africa: “The enemy moves forward and back, but what matters is the final result, and that you can leave to us.”

  When he spoke about Stalingrad, he became almost coquettish: “I wanted to take it—and you know we are modest—we really have it. There are only a very few small places left there. Now the others say: ‘Why don’t you make faster progress?’ Because I don’t want to create a second Verdun … but prefer to do the job with small shock troop units.…”

  His cronies rocked the Lowenbräukeller with cheers.

  Luftwaffe general Freiherr von Richthofen had been instrumental in getting these “small shock troop units” to Stalingrad. After his outburst against Paulus, he had intervened with General Jeschonnek and persuaded him to influence Hitler to release the elite combat engineers for the final assault. Grasping at any straw, the Führer had readily agreed to their use and had convinced himself that these reinforcements would eliminate all organized Soviet resistance along the Volga shoreline. Thus, while he traveled to meet with his cronies in Munich, the five battalions of “pioneers,” as they were called, packed hurriedly for the journey to Stalingrad.

  Near Voronezh, three hundred miles west of the city, cook Wilhelm Giebeler loaded his kitchen equipment onto a train. Around him, troops of the 336th Battalion grumbled loudly about their new assignment while they checked out flamethrowers, machine pistols, and satchel charges of dynamite. Giebeler had heard their griping before, on the eve of every special “dirty job.” But since the pioneers were consummate professionals at street fighting, he had no worries about their morale nor doubt as to their success at the Volga.

  When the 336th reached Stalingrad, Maj. Josef Linden was there to greet them. Put in charge of the operation by pioneer chief, Col. Herbert Selle, Linden had reported to Point X on November 7, at 0900 hours. Point X was just across the street from the Barrikady and, once there, the major scouted the terrain between the factory and the Volga. Never before had he seen so ghastly a setting for battle. “Loosely hanging corrugated steel panels which creaked eerily in the wind … a perfect mess of iron parts, gun barrels, T-beams, huge craters … cellars turned into strongpoints … over all a never-ceasing crescendo of noise from all types of guns and bombs.”

  Inside the Barrikady itself, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier, recently back from a two-week furlough in Germany, checked his four companies and found only thirty-seven men left out of four hundred. To his questions about missing individuals, he got the same answers over and over: killed, wounded, presumed dead.

  Within hours, one six-hundred-man battalion of the pioneers came under Rettenmaier’s wing. The other four battalions spread out along the main line of resistance and prepared for a coordinated assault on the area behind the Barrikady to the Volga.

  Major Rettenmaier listened intently to their extraordinary briefing. Two Russian strongpoints had to be taken: one, the Chemist’s Shop on the left side of a row of partially completed houses; the other, the Commissar’s House or “Red House,” several hundred yards west of the Chemist’s Shop and somewhat nearer the Volga bank. The Red House, a clumsy brick fortress, dominated the gently sloping terrain.

  The pioneers asked questions about the buildings and the cliff along the river. They were brisk, businesslike, but when Rettenmaier and others tried to explain that the Russians in Stalingrad fought a different kind of war, that they hid in cellars and used the sewer systems to good advantage, the pioneers said they had seen the worst already, in places like Voronezh. They were prepared for such tactics.

  After midnight on November 9, the combat groups assembled in the machine shops of the Barrikady. Straining under the burden of satchel charges, shovels, grenades, and bandoliers of bullets, they shuffled through the gloom to their starting points.

  In several large rooms at the eastern end of the factory, they waited for the signal to burst out onto open ground. Some men smoked furtively. Sgt. Ernst Wohlfahrt was a tense spectator. A virtual prisoner inside the Barrikady for weeks, he did not envy the pioneers their job. He himself had spent days hiding behind brick walls, afraid to raise his head. The Russians had never let him feel secure and he was pessimistic about the coming battle, despite the pioneers’ cocky self-assurance.

  Then a shattering explosion engulfed an adjacent room. Screams welled up and Wohlfahrt rushed in to find eighteen pioneers dead from a Russian booby trap. The survivors were suddenly subdued, fearful.

  At 3:30 A.M., German artillery fire passed over and down onto Russian lines, bringing their counterfire. When the German fire lifted, the pioneers moved onto open ground, lit by eerie flashes of gunfire. Watching them go across the cratered moonscape, Major Rettenmaier silently wished them Godspeed.

  The Chemist’s Shop fell without trouble. But at the Commissar’s House, the engineers had walked into a trap. Every opening had been sealed up by debris, and from tiny peepholes, the Russians shot with deadly accuracy. Further south, Regiment 576 quickly reached the Volga, but again the Russians held on, stealing into caves and cracks, and the engineers rolled grenades down at them. The explosives bounced harmlessly by the openings and on into the Volga.

  The next morning, when pioneers of the 50th Battalion finally broke into the Commissar’s House, the Russians ran into the cellars. In a frenzy, the Germans tore up the floor, threw in cans of gasoline, and ignited them. Then they lowered satchel charges and detonated them. Smoke cartridges were laid down to blind anyone surviving the blasts and flames. From the outside, the house seeped smoke. Detonations shook the ground as the cellar broke apart under the blast, and a messenger ran across the field to tell Major Rettenmaier that the Commissar’s House was in German hands.

  But on the edge of the Volga, the engineers who had reached the shore line the day before discovered they had
won a Pyrrhic victory. Of the group on the riverbank, only one man was not wounded. A large patrol went out to give aid, and within three hours it was reduced to three men.

  Col. Herbert Selle had been fully confident that his pioneers could take the last bits of contested soil in Stalingrad. Within days, however, he knew the truth. The five battalions, numbering nearly three thousand men, had lost a third of their forces. Selle gave orders to collect the remnants of the battalions and form them into one effective combat group for further attacks.

  In a letter to his family he acknowledged the tragic waste: “There will be many tears in Germany.… Happy is he who is not responsible for these unwarranted sacrifices.” For Selle, Stalingrad was no longer worth the price. He felt the battle had degenerated into a personal struggle between the egos of Stalin and Hitler.

  Nevertheless, the pioneers had dealt the Russians a stunning blow. Col. Ivan Ilyich Lyudnikov’s 138th Division had been trapped on the shore and held a shrinking pie-shaped slice of land only four hundred yards wide and one hundred yards deep. In front of it lay the dead of the 118th Regiment, which had met the pioneers on the open ground and in the rows of partially destroyed houses. Only six of its 250 soldiers escaped to refuge inside the wedge. Lyudnikov’s forces now numbered only several hundred men and women capable of resistance, and he radioed Sixty-second Army Headquarters for help.

  In Moscow, the Russian General Staff pursued its strategy. Overjoyed that the Germans continued to rivet their attention on the ruins near the Volga bank, STAVKA speeded up the movements of men and supplies to the flanks.

  It also called on its espionage networks for new information:

  November 11, 1942

  To Dora: [Lucy Network in Switzerland]

  Where are the rear defense locations of the Germans on the southwest of Stalingrad and along the Don? Are defense positions being built on sectors Stalingrad-Kletskaya and Stalingrad-Kalach? Their characteristics?…