The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  In the days to come, Kreiser would be one of the fortunate men flown out of the Kessel.

  That night, another Soviet storm group crossed the German lines. Faulty Soviet intelligence reports had pinpointed General Paulus’s command bunker within the city limits and the blond sniper, Tania Chernova, and three other Russians had been sent to kill him.

  Carefully picking their way past mountains of rubble, the execution squad looked for German sentries outlined against the snow. Tania was trying to control her temper because the girl ahead of her blundered frequently and made too much noise. “That cow,” Tania thought as she looked at the plump figure that increasingly annoyed her.

  The “cow” stumbled and a fiery explosion smashed Tania to the pavement. Unconscious, she bled into the gutter from a gaping wound in her stomach. Moments later, Vassili Zaitsey hurried to her side and tenderly lifted her limp form.

  Zaitsev struggled back to his lines, to a cellar hospital where doctors worked desperately to staunch the flow of blood from Tania’s wounds. For hours they despaired of saving her, but by morning she rallied and the surgeons made plans to transport her across the Volga for a major operation.

  After Tania regained consciousness, her first questions were about what had happened to her patrol. Told that the woman ahead of her had stepped on a mine but survived with only superficial injuries, she listened to the details with mixed emotions. Her vendetta with the Germans was ended; she had “broken eighty sticks” in her three months of war. But the image of that “damned cow” kept intruding on her thoughts and made her furious.

  On the morning of December 14, the German 6th Panzer Division charged ahead toward the Kessel and ran directly into Russian reinforcements of almost three hundred tanks. One platoon of panzers was chased by forty Russian T-34s, and an armored battery which went to their rescue came over a low rise to find the Russian tanks barely a thousand meters away. Painted white “just like the Germans,” with black numbers on the turrets, they were surrounded by a large knot of soldiers.

  For a moment, Lt. Horst Scheibert wondered whether he had stumbled on elements of the German 23rd Panzer Division that was providing support for 6th Division’s drive to the pocket. Everything looked so German, then he noticed that the gun barrels seemed more stubby, and the turrets had no domes.

  Still hesitant and nervous, he moved his force closer. At six hundred meters, he had not made up his mind to shoot. He trembled as the distance closed rapidly.

  Suddenly the soldiers ahead jumped for their own tanks and Scheibert only had time to scream, “Achtung!” into the radio before two Russian tanks came at him.

  Scheibert hollered again, “Fire! Russians!” But the enemy got off the first shots. At only three hundred meters, they missed completely.

  German gunners were more accurate. The first two Russian tanks blew up violently, and “the rest was child’s play.” Reloading with tremendous speed, the Germans slamed shells through the confused enemy formation. Thirty-two curling black pillars of smoke marked the total destruction of one of the Soviet tank columns outside Verkhne-Kumski.

  But other Russian armored groups still controlled the town. The Germans could not yet break through toward the Mishkova River.

  While grenadiers of the 6th Panzer Division probed for a weak spot in the Russian defense, they heard and saw the Junker and Heinkel transports streaming through the sky toward Pitomnik Airfield as the Luftwaffe tried to sustain life in the Kessel. Paulus’s tirade against Martin Fiebig on December 11, had resulted in increasing the air shipments to Stalingrad by fifty tons a day. Still it was not nearly enough.

  The fault could not be charged solely to the German pilots, whose varied problems defied solution. Russian fighters and antiaircraft were taking an ever greater toll of transports. But the most exasperating worry was the weather of southern Russia. A fulcrum for colliding maritime and continental fronts, it frustrated countless forecasts. Aircraft expecting good weather at Pitomnik frequently encountered low clouds, fog, or even blizzards that forced detours to bases hundreds of miles away. When that happened, both the cargos and planes were lost to the Stalingrad shuttle for several days at a time.

  To counteract such failures, meteorologists tried to rely on eyewitness reports from observers inside the Kessel. But these men often failed to broadcast. There was no fuel to power the generators for their radios.

  A more deadly foe was ice. It tore up engines and immobilized planes for weeks, forcing mechanics to cannibalize parts from wrecks to repair damaged motors. And the mechanics themselves had to overcome unexpected hazards. When they removed their gloves to make delicate adjustments on equipment, their fingers froze to the metal. Maintenance that should have been accomplished was left undone, with catastrophic results.

  Human error led to another series of mishaps. Since the Luftwaffe refused to allow army quartermasters to supervise the loading of the transports going to Stalingrad, famished soldiers at Pitomnik frequently opened crates of utterly worthless goods. One day it was thousands of protective cellophane covers for hand grenades—but no hand grenades. Another time, it was four tons of marjoram and pepper—at a time when troops were killing mice and eating them. Again, several thousand right shoes. Most ironic of all was a shipment of millions of neatly packaged contraceptives.

  While airmen braved death to carry such unusual supplies to the Kessel, the Germans in Stalingrad scrounged for protein.

  Thirty-one-year-old Cpl. Heinz Neist met an officer, Lieutenant Till, who smiled mischievously and asked: “Want something to eat?”

  Neist gratefully accepted the offer and sat down before an aluminum plate that was loaded with potatoes, meat and gravy. When he looked warily at the feast Till grinned: “Believe me, it is not a human being.” Neist needed no further urging and ate everything in front of him. The meat tasted just like veal and only when he finished, did he ask what it was. Till told him it was the last of the Doberman pinschers.

  Neist could not have cared less. His stomach was full for the first time in weeks.

  In his snowhole at the edge of no-man’s-land, Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert could not imagine such a meal. His clothes had frozen to his body, but his worst complaint was about his stomach. It doubled him over with knifelike pains.

  His main meal each day was a watery soup. More was out of the question, because whenever he held out his mess tin, his name was recorded to prevent him from getting a second helping. What really made him furious was the sight of sergeants eating from plates heaped with solid food. Afraid to speak out about the privileges of rank, the private began to wonder whether everyone in the pocket really depended on each other for survival.

  Like thousands of others, he foraged for extra food where he could. Once, the head of a frozen horse provided brains for a delicious meal. Another time, a roll of medicine tablets helped assuage his hunger.

  Given a break from front-line duty, he went to the rear to seek warmth and rest. Within hours, however, he faced an arms inspection. Never having been issued proper lubricants, Brunnert frantically scratched and rubbed his weapon with scissors, stones, even his fingernails, until most of the rust disppeared. But the senior corporal who inspected Brunnert’s platoon used a carefully sharpened match to pry into each rifle. Disgusted with the results, he promptly placed Brunnert and the others on extra guard duty. Walking his post that night, Brunnert had barely enough strength to stand. His legs felt like rubber, and he feared the extra workload would finish him.

  Forty-five miles south of the Kessel, at the village of Verkhne-Kumski, the 6th Panzer Division was still unable to push through Russian opposition. The northern and eastern horizons were filled with Soviet T-34 tanks and antitank guns that poured a fountain of projectiles at the Germans.

  It was like a gun duel on the ocean, but here the snowfields assumed a crazy pattern of tank treads and long black streaks left by exploding shells. In the inevitable confusion of vehicles firing and then moving quickly to new positions, Germans shot at G
ermans, Russians at Russians.

  When T-34s entered the village, a frantic German officer radioed: “Request permission to abandon the village.…” It was not granted. Another formation of panzers invaded the town from the west; by noon, almost all its ammunition was spent.

  Colonel Hunersdorff appeared in the midst of his weary troops. Leaning out of his tank, he screamed: “You want to be my regiment? Is this what you call attack? I am ashamed of this day!”

  He kept it up, hurling invective on all sides and his soldiers reacted with cold rage. Some openly questioned his right to tell them how to fight. But Hunersdorff’s motive was simply to galvanize his tankers. This he did. His tirade was followed almost immediately by another desperate call for help from the Germans inside Verkhne-Kumski. Hunersdorff gave the order to burst into the village “at maximum speed whatever the losses,” and five companies formed a column with the few tanks carrying armor-piercing shells leading the way.

  Still furious at Hunersdorff, the panzer crews roared ahead spraying the fields on both sides with indiscriminate machine-gun fire. The unorthodox approach terrified the Russians, who jumped up and ran wildly across the plains. Inside their Mark IVs, the Germans assumed that the Russians thought they were insane.

  Verkhne-Kumski fell easily this time, but within hours an “inexhaustible supply” of Russians counterattacked and Combat Group Hunersdorff had to retreat to the west. Out of ammunition, almost out of fuel, each tank carried a load of wounded that clung desperately to the turrets. The combat groups’ diary recounted in laconic fashion, “This day was connected with heavy losses.”

  It was also a day of heavy losses for the Russian 87th Guards Division. Jammed into a blocking position south of the Mishkova River as the result of Marshal Vasilevsky’s appeal to Stalin, the Guards had marched for a day and a half without pause from the Beketovka area, just below Stalingrad.

  In the vanguard of the division was Sgt. Alexei Petrov, who had just trained a new gun crew for the offensive, and he urged his men to a faster pace. Snow obscured his vision and exhaustion became the main enemy, but he allowed no one to rest. Petrov himself held on to the barrel of the gun and slept while walking. Finally they arrived at the Mishkova River—and immediate combat with the 6th Panzer Division around Verkhne-Kumski.

  Petrov had never seen nor heard such heavy shelling. Hour after hour, explosions blew the ground into pillars of frozen dirt and snow, and the horizons blossomed with endless flame. To Petrov, it was worse than in Stalingrad.

  On the flat plain were thousands of bodies, tossed like broken dolls onto the ground. Most were Russians, victims of German artillery and Stukas. At the height of the bombardment, Petrov saw a tiny figure, no more than three feet high, waving his arms wildly. Amazed, Petrov looked more closely and saw that it was the upper body of a Russian soldier. Beside it on the ground lay a pair of legs and hips, neatly severed by a shellburst.

  The man was looking at Petrov and his mouth opened and closed, sucking air, trying to communicate one last time. Petrov gaped at the apparition until the arms stopped flailing, the mouth slackened and the eyes glazed. Somehow the soldier’s torso remained upright and forlorn beside the rest of the body.

  Chapter Twenty

  Still unsure of the relief force’s location, Paulus prepared for the crucial decision of how to link up with Manstein. After assigning the 53rd Mortar Regiment the dangerous job of leading the breakthrough, he moved armored combat groups to the southwestern corner of the pocket. But he could find only eighty tanks fit for action.

  He also called on Maj. Josef Linden, whose engineer battalions had been decimated at the Barrikady Gun Factory a few weeks before, for two special assignments. The first was plowing clear the road network around the Kessel, a simple job on the surface, but exceptionally difficult because of the gasoline shortage.

  The second task was equally vital: Two road construction battalions and a bridge company were needed to deactivate the minefields so that the German tanks and trucks could break out quickly when Paulus gave the word.

  After four days of fighting, Manstein’s soldiers were still on the way to Stalingrad, but the attack had slowed to a snail’s pace. Combat Group Hunersdorff of the 6th Panzer Division had not yet captured Verkhne-Kuffiski and, supported by part of the battered 23rd Panzer Division, the replenished tankers went back to the village.

  The drive bogged down again so the 6th slipped off to the west to out-flank the enemy. Around the village of Sogotskot, the Russians had prepared a vast network of rifle pits that made it impossible for tanks to advance. Nor would any of the Russians surrender. From distances of ten feet or less, the Germans shot into the trenches. “The tanks stood … like elephants with fully extended trunks,” and when the Russians raised their heads, the “trunks” recoiled and blasted them with point-blank fire. Still the Russians held. Finally, when Soviet armor came up to help, Combat Group Hunersdorff again had to back away as the twilight of December 16 obscured the land between the Aksai and Mishkova rivers.

  In Stalingrad, every Russian along the Volga shore heard a tremendous crashing noise and Vassili Chuikov bolted from his cave to witness a glorious sight: An enormous wave of ice was pushing down past Zaitsevski Island. “Smashing everything in its path, it crushed and pulverized small and large ice floes alike, and broke logs like matchwood,” was how he described it later. And while the general held his breath, the monstrous ice pack slowed and, just opposite Chuikov’s fortress bunker, shuddered to a halt. For minutes it groaned and heaved. Behind it, thousands more chunks of ice slammed into the jam with terrific violence. The “bridge” held.

  A short time later Chuikov sent sappers across the ice to see whether it would support traffic. By 9:00 P.M. they had returned safely, and he ordered planks to build a highway to the far side.

  His supply problems were over.

  Just a few hundred yards west of Chuikov’s jubilant cliffside headquarters, Capt. Gerhard Meunch was faced with his first case of insubordination. It had been triggered by the Führer’s “Christmas Drive,” the annual fund-raising campaign for the Nazi party that reached even into the Kessel.

  One platoon from Meunch’s companies refused to make any donations. When he asked the reason, an officer said: “Captain, you will have to see for yourself what is wrong.”

  Meunch went to visit the platoon, reduced to six men, and inquired about the trouble. The men told him they were no longer prepared to fight. One trooper added: “Captain, I will no longer play the game. We are fed up!”

  Stunned by their attitude, Meunch wisely decided to say nothing. He sent the men to the rear and waited beside their machine gun until replacements came to fill the gap. Then he went to his command post, called for the rebels and told them they could sleep at his quarters that night.

  In the morning, he shared breakfast with them, and as the group sat on the floor sipping hot coffee, Meunch watched them carefully and noticed they seemed a bit more relaxed. Gingerly he brought up the previous night’s difficulty. The rebels answered without hesitation.

  The underlying cause of their mutiny was a letter from one of the soldier’s wives, who had asked why he was at the front while several of his friends stayed at home. The soldier had been so upset that he had read the letter to his friends. It had driven them into a state of rebellion as they, too, began to wonder why they had to fight the war for malingerers in Germany.

  Meunch let them talk out their bitterness, then brought them back to reality. “According to martial law, you are liable to punishment,” he told them. “You know how refusal to obey an order will be punished. Are you prepared to return to your positions, and not desert or do foolish things? Can you promise that?”

  They answered with a spontaneous chorus of yesses. One soldier went further, “We will fight for you as long as you command the battalion. But if you are wounded or killed, we wish to be free to make our decisions.”

  Meunch considered the offer briefly, then chose to compromise . “
All right, confirm it by handshake,” he replied. “As long as I command the battalion you will have to fight. Thereafter you may do what you want.”

  The men shook hands with him on the bargain.

  Later that day, December 17, 150 miles to the southwest at Novocherkassk, Erich von Manstein dined with Freiherr von Richthofen. While the two men sipped wine, they ranged over their mutual problems in trying to save the Sixth Army. Richthofen had just lost two of his bomber squadrons, which OKW had transferred without notice to another sector. To Richthofen, the move was tantamount to “abandoning Sixth Army to its fate.…” He minced no words when he exclaimed that it was “plain murder!”

  He had phoned Gen. Albert Jeschonnek back in East Prussia to make that charge. But Jeschonnek “formally disclaimed all responsibility” for the order. Now Richthofen confided this conversation to Manstein. Both men were appalled by the decisions being made from the safety of the Wolf’s Lair, more than a thousand miles away.

  By the time dinner ended, the two were in agreement; they were “like a couple of attendants in a lunatic asylum.”

  After dinner, OKW’s decision to transfer the Stukas back to the upper Don suddenly became clear. Another Russian attack had routed two Italian divisions from their positions fifty miles west of Serafimovich. No one yet realized that this was the opening of Stalin’s second great attack, aimed at seizing the port city of Rostov and trapping the entire German army in Southern Russia. Reports so far were sketchy, but Manstein added what fragmentary information he possessed to his pessimistic appraisal of the future. He was well aware of the disaster the news implied. If the Italian Army failed to hold, his German divisions would have to go to their rescue. The result: Sixth Army at Stalingrad would be lost. Overwhelmed by a sense of onrushing catastrophe, the field marshal fixed his attention on the men in the Kessel, whose time for deliverance was at hand.