It is unclear whether he reached this conclusion on practical or humanitarian grounds. Talking of the heavy artillery in the city, especially howitzers, Hitler added: ‘We can’t replace what we have in there. If we abandon it, we abandon the whole purpose for the campaign. To think that I will come back here next time is madness… We won’t come back here, so we can’t leave.’
Manstein’s plan was for Paulus to break out once Hoth’s tanks came to within 20 miles of the perimeter. However, on 16 December Zhukov unleashed Operation Little Saturn to turn Hoth back. Once again, it was their allies who proved the bane of the Wehrmacht: the Soviet South-west Front destroyed the Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don, opening a 60-mile gap and allowing the Russians to attack Manstein’s right flank towards Rostov. The loss of Rostov would have cut off Kleist, who in November had been named commander of Army Group A in the Caucasus, so Hoth’s force was weakened to prevent this happening, thereby wrecking his chances of getting close enough to Stalingrad to prise the Sixth Army out.
On 19 December Manstein ordered Paulus to break out to the south-west, but Paulus now preferred to follow Hitler’s orders to stay put. (‘Dear Field Marshal,’ Paulus had replied in a postscript to an earlier request, ‘In the circumstances I hope you will overlook the inadequacy of the paper and the fact that this letter is handwritten.’61) Manstein’s under-strength divisions nonetheless got to within 35 miles of Stalingrad, but the whole momentum of Winter Tempest stalled when on 23 December Hoth’s armour was forced to halt on the River Mishkova, unable to make any further headway in the face of tough Russian opposition and the monstrous weather conditions. The irony of the operation’s codename was not lost on anyone. If Stalingrad was the turning point of the war, the halt on the River Mishkova was what prevented it from turning back again. By 28 December Manstein had to pull Hoth’s force back in order to prevent its encirclement.
Yet, even if Manstein had got the whole way to Stalingrad, it is not certain that Paulus could have been rescued. On one day 180 tons of supplies got through, but for three weeks he had received only 120 tons a day, and after Christmas the nightly average was down to only 60 tons.62 It is hard to imagine the despair felt when the starving Germans opened a container that had been successfully parachuted into the city only to find that it held a kilo of ground pepper and a case of condoms.63 Once the airfields at Morovskaya and Tatsinskaya on the Don had fallen to the Russians at Christmas, the closest German-held airfields to Stalingrad were even more distant, further cutting down the number of possible flights.
The first German death by starvation within what they were calling the Kessel (cauldron) was recorded on 21 December. In early December the daily bread ration for the encircled forces was 200 grams per head, which was cut further at Christmas. They were also given, recalled a survivor, Colonel H. R. Dingler, ‘watery soup which we tried to improve by making use of bones obtained from horses we dug up’. The lack of petrol meant that tanks had to be kept in the rear of infantry, with the result that ‘when the Russians broke in – as later on they did – counter-thrusts lacked every vestige of momentum.’64 Paulus’ army was disintegrating, and probably could not have crossed the 20 miles back to safety even if Hoth had broken the stranglehold.
Lice infections broke out because it was too cold to wash; the frozen bodies of horses littered the roads; sentries who fell asleep at their posts didn’t wake up; with petrol being hoarded by the commissariat for the breakout, there was no fuel to turn the abundant snow into desperately needed water; bread that had frozen solid, called Eisbrot (ice bread), provided a taunting reminder of how close they were to salvation if only they could find fuel. ‘The men were too weak to dig fresh emplacements or communication trenches,’ records one historian of the Sixth Army’s plight in the Kessel that Christmas; ‘when forced out of their old positions they would simply lie on the ground behind heaped-up snow “parapets”, numb with cold and the inevitability of death. To be wounded might be lucky, more often it was a stroke of hideous misfortune among comrades too exhausted to lift a man onto a stretcher; where medical services had no anaesthetic other than artificially induced frostbite.’65
There were terrible scenes at Pitomnik airport as Junkers attempted to fly the wounded and others away to safety. Soldiers who rushed to get on to planes without documentation were shot, and there were two cases of men hanging on to the tail wheels of planes, who soon afterwards fell to their deaths. The self-discipline of the Wehrmacht collapsed at Pitomnik, as desperation to escape overcame the most famed Teutonic virtue of the Army. When the cratered runway proved too badly damaged by Russian artillery fire to use, and twenty men had to be unloaded from one plane, a Lieutenant Dieter recalled:
At once there was a terrific din, everyone shouting at once, one man claimed that he was travelling by order of the Army Staff, another from the SS that he had important Party documents, many others who cried about their families, that their children had been injured in air raids, and so on. Only the men on stretchers kept silent, but their terror showed in their faces.66
It was understandable; those wounded men whose stretchers were offloaded and placed too far away from the stoves in the makeshift shanties at the perimeter of the airfield simply froze to death.
On Christmas Day the Germans were finally expelled from the Tractor Factory, and an ingenious method was used to get them out of the main office building of the Red October Factory, when a storming group of Lieutenant-General V. P. Sokolov’s division carried a 122mm howitzer into the factory piece by piece, which they then reassembled inside the walls. After a few rounds at point-blank range, ‘the German garrison in the factory ceased to exist.’ The next day Paulus received only 70 tons of supplies, less than 10 per cent of what he knew he needed for survival. A German soldier, Wilhelm Hoffman of the 267th Regiment of the 94th Infantry Division, made a last entry in his diary, writing: ‘The horses have already been eaten. I would eat a cat; they say its meat is also tasty. The soldiers look like corpses or lunatics, looking for something to put in their mouths. They no longer take cover from Russian shells; they haven’t the strength to walk, run away and hide. A curse on this war…’67 It was about this time that Dingler and his comrades ‘began to discuss what to do if the worst came to the worst. We talked about captivity. We talked about the question of committing suicide. We discussed the question of defending what we held to the last bullet but one… There was no compulsion from above in any direction. These things were left to be decided by the individual himself.’68
On 8 January 1943, the commander of the Don Front, General Konstantin Rokossovsky, dropped leaflets offering the Germans an honourable surrender, sufficient rations, care for the wounded and repatriation to Germany after the war, all on the condition that their military equipment be handed over undamaged. Tempting as it was, this was refused, because – so Dingler told Mellenthin – they did not trust the Russians, still hoped against hope that they might escape and wanted to give Army Group A enough time to withdraw from the Caucasus. Rokossovsky therefore opened up a major offensive against the southern and western parts of the perimeter on 10 January, codenamed Operation Ring. ‘The cover of the tomb is closing over us,’ was the perceptive judgement of a Colonel Selle at that time, and so many German soldiers were now committing suicide that Paulus had to issue an order forbidding it as dishonourable.69 As the so-called Marinovka nose, the south-western protuberance of the Kessel, came under Russian attack, some German troops found that their fingers were so badly swollen from frostbite that they could not fit inside their rifles’ trigger guards. Summary execution was resorted to in order to keep the German troops fighting, in conditions so cold that mortar shells ‘rebounded off the frozen earth and exploded as air bursts, causing more casualties’.70 Yet once the Marinovka had fallen, it was even worse for the defenders, as they were now forced out into the open. ‘There were no trenches and no places for the riflemen,’ recalled Dingler; ‘the decimated troops, overtired, exhausted, and with frostbi
tten limbs, simply lay in the snow.’ All heavy weaponry had to be disabled – often by means of a grenade down the barrel – and then abandoned. The Kessel’s last contact with the outside world came on 23 January when Gumrak airfield – ‘a snowy desert filled with aircraft and vehicles’ – fell to the Russians. ‘Everywhere lay the corpses of German soldiers too exhausted to move on,’ Dingler wrote. ‘They had just died in the snow.’
Saturday, 23 January also saw the Führer issuing another rather predictable order to Paulus: ‘Surrender is forbidden. Sixth Army will hold their positions to the last man and 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.’71 One week later, Hitler appointed Paulus a field marshal, in order to prevent him from surrendering, because no German field marshal had ever before surrendered his forces in the field. There’s a first time for everything, however, and at 07.35 hours on Sunday, 31 January Paulus was captured in his bunker, and his (southern) pocket of forces in the Kessel collapsed. The basement under the 1937-built Univermag (central department store) where Paulus and his chief of staff General Arthur Schmidt made their makeshift headquarters, is one of the few places where Germans did not suffer from chilblains and frostbite. On display there today are Paulus’ drawings dated November 1942 of red elephants outside the city trampling on the German flag in their march to Stalingrad, pictures which imply a severe lack of confidence in ultimate victory.
Hitler was disgusted and sarcastic at his Führer-conference at the Wolfschanze at 12.17 the next day, 1 February, equating the Sixth Army with a suicidal rape victim, to the Army’s disadvantage. ‘True to form,’ he told Zeitzler,
they surrendered themselves. Because otherwise, you gather yourselves together, build an all-round defence, and shoot yourself with the last cartridge. If you can imagine that a woman, after being insulted a few times, has so much pride that she goes out, locks herself in, and shoots herself dead immediately – then I have no respect for a soldier who shrinks back from it and prefers going into captivity.72
At least Hitler was to practise what he preached in that respect. Meanwhile, on 15 January, the Red Army reintroduced gradations of rank signified by epaulettes and other such badges of seniority, for reasons of discipline, morale and ease of recognition during battle. Some thought this step reminiscent of tsarism, although it was not a view that was expressed too vocally.
Two days after Paulus’ capture, the northern pocket surrendered too. Paulus, Schmidt, twenty-two other generals and a further 91,000 soldiers shuffled off into Soviet captivity, the only survivors of the 275,000 or so (estimates vary) Germans, Romanians, Italians and Russian anti-Soviet volunteers who had been cut off within the Kessel on 23 November 1942.73 An even greater percentage of German prisoners died in two years of Russian captivity before the end of the war than Russians died in four years of German captivity. Of the more than 90,000 Wehrmacht soldiers who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 9,626 ever returned to Germany, and some of them not until 1955.
The Soviets meanwhile lost 479,000 killed or captured in the Stalingrad campaign between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943, and a further 651,000 sick or wounded, a total of 1.13 million.74 ‘Stalingrad had become a symbol of resistance unparalleled in human history,’ wrote Chuikov. Such hyperbole is often written by old soldiers about their past battles, but in his case it was true. Chuikov’s memoirs were written with some bitterness during the Cold War, in 1959; the general was angry with Western historians downplaying the importance of his battle. Specifically attacking J. F. C. Fuller, Winston Churchill, Omar Bradley, Heinz Guderian, Kurt von Tippelkirsch ‘and other apologists of imperialism’, he went to great pains to point out the differences between El Alamein and Stalingrad. ‘At El Alamein the British were faced by four German divisions and eight Italian divisions,’ he argued,
and what is more, the main German and Italian forces managed to avoid being defeated in battle; on the Volga and the Don, however, in the period of the counter-attack by the Soviet armies from 19 November 1942 to 2 February 1943, thirty-two divisions and three brigades belonging to Nazi Germany and her satellites were destroyed. Sixteen more of the enemy’s divisions suffered serious defeat… In the battle of Stalingrad, Humanity saw the dawn of victory over Fascism.75
Chuikov was only slightly exaggerating the figures, and it is worth pointing out that little humanity was shown by the defenders of Humanity, even towards their own citizens. It is not known how many Russians – deserters or prisoners, known as Hiwis, short for Hilfswillige (volunteer helper) – fought for the Germans. No fewer than 150,000 served with the SS alone during the war, which was probably merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.76 It was an embarrassing subject for the post-war Soviet authorities, so details about their service are sketchy, but it is estimated that over 20,000 Hiwis surrendered or were captured at Stalingrad. It is still not known what the NKVD did to them, although there are accounts of their being worked to death in camps, and of others ‘being beaten to death, rather than being shot, to save ammunition’.77 With the NKVD, it is best to err on the most brutal side of estimates.
A total of twenty German divisions – thirteen infantry, three Panzer (the 14th, 16th and 24th), three motorized and one anti-aircraft – had been lost by the Wehrmacht, as well as two Romanian divisions, a Croat regiment, service troops and members of the German construction unit known as the Organisation Todt. ‘The destruction of these divisions was bound to alter the whole balance of power on the Eastern Front,’ commented Mellenthin with some understatement. Zeitzler agreed, writing in 1956 that Stalingrad ‘was the turning point of the entire war’.78 The historian Nigel Nicolson considered Stalingrad to be ‘even worse than 1812, for at least Napoleon’s army was retreating: from Stalingrad there was no retreat. The nearest comparison might be if the British Expeditionary Force had been totally destroyed at Dunkirk.’79 With the remains of the Sixth Army in captivity, German strength in southern Russia was halved; moreover, the half-million men whom Zhukov had detailed to besiege Stalingrad were now available for other duties, and would be directed against Manstein, who was busy withdrawing, often asking for permission from the OKW only after he had given his orders. Manstein owned a pet dachshund that raised its paw when it heard the command ‘Heil Hitler’, but he himself showed a more independent spirit.
Stupidly, the Nazis attempted to pretend that the Sixth Army had not been captured at all, but had died fighting the Bolsheviks. ‘True to its oath of allegiance to fight to the last breath,’ a communiqué from the OKH announced on 3 February, ‘the Sixth Army under the exemplary command of Field Marshal Paulus has succumbed to the superiority of the enemy and unfavourable circumstances… Generals, officers, non-commissioned officers and men fought shoulder to shoulder down to the last bullet.’ Nonetheless, ‘the sacrifice of the Sixth Army was not in vain.’80 As the truth filtered back, especially after the Soviets paraded the POWs through the streets of Moscow in front of the world’s media, the credibility of German communiqués was further undermined.
Superlatives are unavoidable when describing the battle of Stalingrad; it was the struggle of Gog and Magog, the merciless clash where the rules of war were discarded. Merely staying alive in the frostbitten winter of 1942/3 was an achievement, but the two vast armies fought each other hand to hand and house to house throughout it, with a desperation and on a scale never before seen in the annals of warfare. Around 1.1 million people died in the battle on both sides, with only a few thousand civilians still there out of the half-million who had lived there before the war.
Charles de Gaulle’s (necessarily very private) comment when he visited the area in November 1944 on his way to Moscow to meet Stalin – ‘Un grand peuple’ – referred to the Germans, for having got that far and endured that much.81 Today it is impossible not to agree with him, however appalling the decision-making of their High Command, and especially their Supreme Warlord. Yet in the street battles
of Stalingrad it had been the Russian fighting man who had prevailed, defending his Motherland. The unbelievably dogged resistance shown by the ordinary Russian soldier had delivered victory. Operation Barbarossa had indeed, as Hitler had predicted, made ‘the world hold its breath’ and it was only after Stalingrad that it could finally begin to exhale.
11
The Waves of Air and Sea
1939–1945
Such is the U-boat war – hard, widespread and bitter, a war of groping and drowning, a war of ambuscade and stratagem, a war of science and seamanship.
Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 26 September 19391
The British politician the 2nd Viscount Hailsham once said that ‘The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill’s arrival at the premiership at that precise moment in 1940.’2 Another candidate for the intervention of the Almighty in the Second World War might be the Allied cracking of the German Enigma codes, producing a stream of decrypts known by their British special security classification, Ultra. This allowed the Allies for much of the war to read many of the communications sent and received by the OKW, OKH, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Abwehr, SS and Reichsbahn (railways), amounting in total to several million items of intelligence.3 From the correspondence of the Führer himself right down to that of the harbour-master of Olbia in Sardinia, messages were routinely decoded by the Allies. It made the Second World War, as Michael Howard has put it, ‘like playing poker with marked cards, albeit against an opponent with a consistently better hand than you’. Its importance can be gauged from the jokey acronym ‘BBR’ that the Americans gave to Ultra, which stood for Burn Before Reading.
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 42
