Constantly refusing Rommel’s reasonable and strategically sound requests to extricate his forces from Africa, Hitler proceeded in early 1943 to make precisely the same mistake that he had at Stalingrad in late 1942, reinforcing defeat and issuing ‘Stand or die’ orders that amounted to demands for suicidal resistance for no appreciable gain. Yet Bradley took Bizerta on 7 May, the same day that the British finally entered Tunis. The British suffered heavily in the Tunisian campaign: of the 70,000 Allied casualties in Tunisia, more than half were British and, of those, two-thirds were suffered by the First Army.89 The Eighth Army has taken much of the glory and the attention of history, but the First Army deserves recognition too.
For there was plenty of glory to be shared by the end of the campaign. Although an ill Rommel was himself evacuated from Tunis back to Germany on 9 March, his successor General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim was captured on 13 May, along with no fewer than 230,000 other POWs, 200 tanks and 1,200 guns. ‘The Tunisian campaign is over,’ Alexander cabled Churchill. ‘We are masters of the North African shore.’ Six days later Churchill chose the opportunity of his speech to the US Congress to underline the point about ‘the military intuition of Corporal Hitler’ that he had made in London back in February. To be an object of fear and hatred was perfectly acceptable to Hitler, but Churchill wanted to transform him into one of derision and mirth. The master of parliamentary ridicule had spotted a way of mocking ‘Corporal Hitler’, as he increasingly took to calling him, and he unerringly grasped it. ‘We may notice’, he said of German strategy in Africa, ‘the touch of the master hand. The same insensate obstinacy which condemned Field Marshal von [sic] Paulus and his army to destruction at Stalingrad has brought this new catastrophe upon our enemies in Tunisia.’90
10
The Motherland Overwhelms the Fatherland
January 1942–February 1943
Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.
A lieutenant in the 24th Panzer Division at Stalingrad, 19421
In their original conception the plans for Operation Barbarossa had not even mentioned the city of Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd). Hitler’s idea was to reach a line running from Archangel in the north to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, with Leningrad, Moscow and the Volga river, upon which Stalingrad lies, well within the German-occupied zone. Yet because by the summer and autumn of 1942 Leningrad and Moscow still held out, and indeed the Soviets had been launching counter-offensives since December 1941, Stalingrad was to loom large in Hitler’s calculations. In January and February 1942, Russian attacks along the line from Finland down to the Crimea had seen several notable successes. Although Leningrad and Sevastopol could not be relieved, nor Kharkov recaptured, Rostov was retaken and the immediate threat to Moscow was lifted by the recapture of Kallinin and Kaluga and the elimination of German salients close to the city. By the time the great thaw set in between March and May, the Russians had advanced their front westwards by 120 miles near Rostov and up to 150 miles further north, bringing it close to Smolensk.
The Wehrmacht’s response was the second German summer offensive, Fall Blau (Operation Blue), intended to achieve in 1942 what they had seemed so close to grasping in 1941. It was launched on 8 May with no fewer than fifty-one divisions, including many from the satellite countries of Italy, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, as well as a division of Spanish volunteers. There was something of a Faustian compact involved in the use of these non-German troops, for although they made up the numbers necessary for warfare in Russia, they were not always as reliable or as effective as German and Austrian troops. Nonetheless, Blau won early and significant successes: Sevastopol fell to amphibious attack on 2 July and the Russians were then expelled from the rest of the Crimea. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who had commanded Army Group Centre in the invasion, was sacked and replaced by Kluge in December 1941 for failing to take Moscow, but was recalled to command Army Group South in February 1942. He had captured Voronezh by 7 July and the Eleventh Army of the newly created field marshal Erich von Manstein took the Kerch peninsula, from which it could cross into the Caucasus. At this key moment, on 13 July 1942, Hitler took the vital decision to try to capture Stalingrad and the Caucasus in the same campaigning season. He therefore sacked Bock again and split Army Group South into two, giving the separate parts different but complementary tasks. Army Group B in the north under General Baron Maximilian von Weichs was to clear the Don and Donets valleys and capture Stalingrad. This would provide cover for Army Group A in the south, under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, to capture first Rostov and then the whole of the oil-rich Caucasus. ‘If we do not capture the oil supplies of the Caucasus by the autumn,’ Hitler said, ‘then I shall have to face the fact that we cannot win this war.’2 When autumn came, it was not a remark of which anyone was to remind him.
On 22 July 1942, having been transferred from Army Group B to Army Group A five days earlier, the Fourth Panzer Army crossed the Don east of Rostov. Hitler believed that Stalingrad could be taken by the Sixth Army alone, so he sent the Fourth Panzer Army southwards. Yet only a week later, on 29 July, he countermanded this order, and the Fourth Panzer Army was instead directed to attack Stalingrad from the south. Few things disorientate and demoralize troops more than the countermanding of recently issued orders, as it implies confusion at the very highest level of command. As Hitler’s power depended on seeming omniscient, even 1,000 miles behind the lines, this was dangerous. Paul von Kleist, whose First Panzer Army led the drive into the Caucasus, believed Hitler had made a fatal error, writing later of this incident:
The Fourth Panzer Army was advancing on my left. It could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south to help me in crossing the Don. I did not need its aid. It merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again a fortnight later, the Russians had gathered just enough forces at Stalingrad to check it.3
The OKH Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, continually warned against Hitler’s over-confidence, pointing out the presence of Russian divisions that had not existed even the previous autumn, and predicting disaster for the Sixth Army in its thrust towards Stalingrad. On 23 July, Halder confided to his (fortunately well-hidden) war diary, about how the Führer, when faced with his realism,
explodes in a fit of insane rage and hurls the gravest reproaches against the General Staff. This chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and develops into a positive danger… This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities.4
Halder told Lieutenant-General Kurt Dittmar of OKH that Hitler ‘was a mystic, who tended to discount, even when he did not disregard, all the rules of strategy’.5 A week later, on 30 July, Halder recorded that Jodl ‘announces pompously that the fate of the Crimea will be decided at Stalingrad and that, if possible, it would be necessary to divert forces from AGp.A to AGp.B, if possible, south of the Don’.6 The diversion of such forces meant that neither army group was able to achieve its objectives under Operation Blau, and on 9 September Hitler dismissed List and took personal command of Army Group A, a post for which he was entirely unqualified, not least because he intended to stay in East Prussia directing its operations from his headquarters, codenamed the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair).
Though over-optimistic, the desire to take the important industrial city of Stalingrad was perfectly understandable. With its capture, the oil terminal of Astrakhan would be within reach, and the Russians would be denied the use of the Volga for transportation. Furthermore, Army Group A in the Caucasus would be safe from another Soviet winter offensive, attacks northwards could be launched again, and the fall of Stalin’s own name-city would be as good for German morale as it would be bad for Russian. Its capture therefore seemed to make sense at the time. What made less sense was the way that Manstein’s Eleventh Army, whic
h was badly needed in the south as a reserve in case Blau did not go according to plan, was suddenly reallocated to Leningrad.
Although the British and Americans initially had little faith that the Russians could survive Operation Barbarossa, and privately feared the worst until the Germans were turned back from Moscow in December 1941, by mid-1942 the Western Allies recognized that they could give the Russians invaluable help by drawing off German units. Stalin certainly underlined this point in his meetings with Churchill in Moscow between 12 and 15 August 1942, and did not hide his ire that no Second Front – as a large-scale assault in the west was (rather inaccurately) named – would be in the offing that year. Although General Marshall wanted to launch such an operation as soon as practicable, President Roosevelt, Churchill and Brooke all believed that an over-hasty return to the Continent might be suicidal. The most that Churchill would offer was a small-scale amphibious assault, designated a ‘reconnaissance in force’, on the French port of Dieppe, on the Channel coast.
This attack, which was undertaken on 19 August 1942, was not large enough to require any German forces to be diverted from the Eastern Front, yet was easily large enough for its failure to be a shattering blow to the 5,100 Canadians and 1,000 British Commandos and American Rangers who had to carry it out. Supported by 252 ships (though none larger than a destroyer, and thus unable to provide heavy gunfire from the sea) and sixty-nine squadrons of aircraft (which nonetheless gave only intermittent air support), Operation Jubilee was also large enough to be spotted in the Channel by a German coastal convoy, yet not large enough to achieve anything of consequence once it landed, even had it been a success. The intelligence was faulty, the planning – undertaken by the Director of Combined Operations, Lord Mountbatten – was profoundly flawed, and the results were little short of catastrophic. Within six hours of landing, three-quarters of the Canadian forces had been killed, wounded or captured, and all seven battalion commanders wounded. The Commandos and Rangers also suffered heavily.
Efforts were made, both at the time and since, to present the Dieppe Raid as having taught the Allies valuable lessons about the way the French coast could be assaulted, which were subsequently put to invaluable use in Normandy in June 1944. In fact sheer common sense ought to have told the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Mountbatten’s plan was misconceived from the outset, that tanks could not attack up shingle beaches with high esplanade walls, that proper sea and air support was required and that surprise was essential.
Meanwhile in the east General Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army was designated to take Stalingrad (he had a force of around 280,000 men at the start of the battle), and by Sunday, 23 August the 16th Panzer Division had crossed the steppe to reach the Volga just north of the city. Once there, however, the Germans could do little to interdict the river traffic because they had no naval weaponry or river-mines. They had brought along their exterminatory ideology, however, so when the Wehrmacht there were no SS involved in the battle of Stalingrad – reached the hospital for mentally handicapped children in the city, they promptly shot all the ten- to fourteen-year-old patients.7
In the short term, Army Group A did well in the Caucasus. Rostov fell on 23 July, Kleist’s First Panzer Army captured Stavropol on 5 August, and the Germans seemed about to grasp the region. At their furthest point, elements of the First Panzer Army almost reached Ordzhonikidze and were less than 50 miles from Grozny and only 70 miles from the Caspian Sea. The loss of the Caucasus, from where the Russians took 90 per cent of the oil that fuelled their tanks, planes, ships and industry, would have been catastrophic for the Allied cause. The Russians could not retake it except by crossing the 1,300-yard-wide River Volga, and by the late summer Stalingrad, on the west bank on the bend of that river, seemed about to fall. ‘What’s the matter with them?’ Stalin asked of the local military commanders there. ‘Don’t they realize that this is not only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We would lose our main waterway and soon our oil too.’8 The stakes could therefore hardly have been higher.
*
The battle of Stalingrad is deservedly considered to be the most desperate in human history. The German Sixth Army was sucked into a house-by-house, street-by-street, factory-by-factory struggle often even more attritional than the trench warfare of the Great War. The city is 25 miles long and hugs the western bank of the River Volga, confusingly called the right bank because the river flows southwards towards the Caspian. Visiting Volgograd today, and viewing the city-length battlefield, one is immediately struck by the problems faced by the Germans in their assault. To the north lie three huge factories – from north to south, the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, the Barrikady (Barricades) Arms Factory and the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) Factory. In the centre is the 300-foot-high Mamayev Kurgan, the highest hill in the city (originally the burial mound of the Tatar Duke Mamayev) and all the southern approaches to the city are dominated by an enormous reinforced-concrete Grain Elevator, which stayed in Russian hands throughout the siege, supplied by trenches and gullies connecting it to the Volga. The Wehrmacht had to capture these formidable obstacles in order to take the city.
The Red October Factory specialized in recycling metal, the Barrikady Factory in military hardware, and the Tractor Factory, named after the monstrously cruel ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, makes tractors to this day, which roll past his larger-than-life-sized statue there. In 1942 it had been turned over to making tank chassis. These three brick and concrete buildings – each half a mile long and between 500 and 1,000 yards wide – were originally erected for industrial production rather than defence, of course, but their sturdy structures might just as easily have been designed specifically for keeping out enemy armies. Although the three great factories and their adjacent Settlements (that is, workers’ tenement blocks) were well spaced, they were connected by roads that were not metalled in 1942. ‘In Russia,’ the old saying goes, ‘we have no roads, only directions.’
As well as reaching the Volga north of Stalingrad, on 23 August the Germans bombed the city’s giant oil storage tanks, setting them alight. The Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star newspaper) journalist Vasily Grossman, who specialized in reporting the activities of frontoviki (front-line troops), wrote of how:
The fire rose thousands of feet, carrying with it clouds of vaporized oil that exploded into flame only high in the sky. The mass of flame was so vast that the whirlwind was unable to bring enough oxygen to the burning molecules of hydrocarbon; a black, swaying vault separated the starry sky of autumn from the burning earth. It was terrible to look up to see a black firmament streaming with oil.9
The oil burnt for more than a week, and the pillars of heavy smoke could be seen throughout the region. At one point a spillage caused the Volga itself to catch fire. The battlefield commander of the Russian forces in the city, General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, recalled that ‘clouds of thick black smoke hung over us. Flakes of ash and soot descended on us all the time, so that everything at the command post turned black and looked black.’ The Luftwaffe dropped not just conventional bombs, but any random pieces of metal that could do damage such as plough-shares, tractor wheels, harrows and empty metal casks, which Chuikov remembered ‘whistled about the heads of our troops’.10 Grossman interviewed many of the leading figures in the defence of Stalingrad, including Chuikov, and he recorded in his 1964 novel Life and Fate: ‘An iron whirlwind howled over the bunker, slicing through anything living that raised its head above the earth’s headquarters.’11
Chuikov had joined the Red Army in 1918 aged eighteen. He fought in the Civil War and the Russo-Polish War and attended the elite Frunze Military Academy, before becoming Soviet military attaché to China for eleven years after 1926, thereby escaping some of the worst years of the purges. A protégé of Zhukov, he had fought in the Polish and Finnish campaigns of 1939–40 before being given command of the Soviet Sixty-second Army in Stalingrad. ‘He was a tough street-fighter, described by one of his staff officers as a “coarse
” man – gruby – who had been known to hit officers whose performance displeased him with a big stick he carried.’12 For all that, he was a leader, who staked everything on the Red Army remaining on the right bank of the Volga.
The Luftwaffe’s initial bombing policy, which had the effect of turning Stalingrad almost into a lunar moonscape, eventually worked in the Soviet defenders’ favour. The rubble had to be fought over brick by brick, exactly the kind of warfare that benefited the far larger but less well-equipped Russian Army. Before the Germans’ arrival, Stalingrad had been inadequately fortified, with Chuikov observing that the barricades outside the city could be pushed over by a truck. Both K. A. Gurov, the Sixty-second Army’s senior commissar, and General N. I. Krylov, its chief of staff, agreed that the defences were ‘laughable’, and Chuikov accurately told Grossman that ‘In the defence of Stalingrad, divisional commanders counted more on blood than barbed wire.’13 Chuikov coined the expression ‘the Stalingrad Academy of Street-Fighting’ and, for all the Germans’ martial skill and bravery in that school, it was the Russians who graduated summa cum laude. The Germans called the brutal, hand-to-hand, no-quarter-given fighting in cellars and sewers, with rifles, bayonets, grenades and even spades, Rattenkrieg (rat warfare). Grossman cited an occasion when a German and a Russian patrol were both in the same house, unaware of the other’s proximity. When the Germans wound up a gramophone on the floor below, betraying their presence, the Soviet troops made a hole in the floor and fired through it with a flame-thrower. So close-quarter was the combat at times that when Major-General V. Zholudev’s 37th Guards Infantry Division broke into houses in Shturmovaya (storming groups), their weapon of choice was the knife.14
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 39
