The Second World War

by John Keegan

  In the month that had elapsed since the crossing of the Don, however, Stalin and the Stavka had improvised at Stalingrad a defence as strong as they had found for Leningrad the previous autumn and for Moscow in December. All three cities had a symbolic importance for Hitler; Stalingrad had a particular significance for Stalin. Not only was it the largest of the many Russian cities to be given his name. It was also the place where in 1918 the ‘southern clique’ – Stalin, Voroshilov, Budenny and Timoshenko – had defied Trotsky over the conduct of the war against the Whites, the episode which launched his rise to power within the party. During August, accordingly, he rushed men and material to the Stalingrad front, created a ring of defences, appointed new and vigorous commanders and made it clear that his order of 28 July, read out to every Soviet soldier – ‘Not a step backward!’ – must apply most sternly of all there. ‘Unitary command’, which would once again relegate commissars from an equal to an advisory status beside generals, was to be reintroduced on 9 October. Meanwhile he counted on his Stalingrad generals to resist retreat as if he himself stood at their elbows. V. N. Gordov and Yeremenko were the commanders of Stalingrad and South-Eastern Fronts respectively, V. I. Chuikov commanded the Sixty-Second Army in the city itself, and Zhukov was in overall charge of the theatre.

  Zhukov’s meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin on 13 September, however, concerned advance rather than retreat. In a dramatic leap of imagination he and Vasilevsky – now Chief of the General Staff, a post inherited from Zhukov on the latter’s appointment as First Deputy Defence Commissar – outlined a plan for a wide encirclement of the German forces on the lower Volga and the destruction of Paulus’s Sixth Army in the city. Stalin’s arguments for a narrow encirclement were dismissed; that would allow the Germans to break out and slip away. So too was his contention that the necessary force did not exist; in forty-five days it could be assembled and equipped. Stalin thereupon withdrew his objections, adding that the ‘main business’ was to ensure that Stalingrad did not fall.

  It had come close to doing so. After the burning of the wooden quarters of the city on 23 August, the German Sixth Army had found itself drawn into a bitter battle for ‘the jagged gullies of the Volga hills with their copses and ravines, into the factory area of Stalingrad, spread out over uneven, pitted rugged country, covered with iron, concrete and stone buildings’, as one of Paulus’s divisional commanders described it. For every house, workshop, water-tower, railway embankment, wall, cellar and every pile of ruins a bitter battle was waged, without equal even in the First World War.

  By 13 September, the day after Paulus had returned from a conference with Hitler at Vinnitsa on the battle for the city, the Russian front line was still at least four and in some places ten miles from the Volga. It was held by three divisions of the Sixty-Second Army, which Chuikov had just been appointed to command, and the garrison deployed about sixty tanks. One of the divisional commanders, A. I. Rodimtsev, was experienced in street fighting, which he had learned with the International Brigade at Madrid in 1936. By contrast, Chuikov noted, ‘on the pretext of illness three of my deputies had left for the opposite bank of the Volga.’ Between 13 and 21 September the Germans, using three infantry divisions in one thrust and four infantry and Panzer divisions in another, drove down the banks of the Volga to surround the core of the defence – the Tractor, Barricades and Red October factories – and brought artillery fire to bear on the central landing stage to which men and supplies were ferried nightly from the east bank.

  However, the struggle had exhausted the vanguard of the Sixth Army, and a pause intervened while fresh troops were assembled for the street battle. It began again on 4 October. Chuikov was no longer defending above ground. His strongpoints had become subterranean and his headquarters troglodyte, its staff officers and specialists inhabiting tunnels and bunkers dug into the western bank of the Tsaritsa river near the Volga landing stage. Only the strongest buildings survived, to be fought over for a fractional advantage of dominance that each conferred. An officer of the 24th Panzer Division during the October battle wrote:

  We have fought for fifteen days for a single house with mortars, grenades, machine-guns and bayonets. Already by the third day fifty-four German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and the staircases. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors. Help comes from neighbouring houses by fire-escapes and chimneys. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From storey to storey, faces black with sweat, we bombed each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke. . . . Ask any soldier what hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight. And imagine Stalingrad; eighty days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand struggle. . . . Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest storms cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

  The Nietzschean-Nazi rhetoric apart, this is not an exaggerated picture of the Stalingrad battle. Chuikov, no sensationalist and a cool-headed newcomer to the war – he had previously been Russian military attaché in China – describes a succeeding stage.

  On 14 October the Germans struck out; that day will go down as the bloodiest and most ferocious of the whole battle. Along a narrow front of four or five kilometres, the Germans threw in five infantry divisions and two tank divisions supported by masses of artillery and planes . . . during the day there were over two thousand Luftwaffe sorties. That morning you could not hear the separate shots or explosions, the whole merged into one continuous deafening roar. At five yards you could no longer distinguish anything, so thick were the dust and the smoke. . . . That day sixty-one men in my headquarters were killed. After four or five hours of this stunning barrage, the Germans started to attack with tanks and infantry, and they advanced one and a half kilometres and finally broke through to the Tractor Plant.

  This lunge marked the penultimate stage of the German advance. On 18 October a lull fell over the city. ‘From then on’, noted Chuikov, ‘the two armies were left gripping each other in a deadly clutch; the front became virtually stabilised.’ In some places it was less than 300 yards from the Volga. The Red October Factory had been lost to the Germans, the Tractor and Barricades factories were only partly in Russian hands, and Chuikov’s front was split into two pockets. But the garrisons, inspired by his famous slogan to fight as if ‘there is no land across the Volga’, held on, the wounded (35,000 in all) being ferried back each night in the boats that brought replacements (65,000 men) and ammunition (24,000 tons) from the far shore. The Germans of the Sixth Army, though supplied and reinforced more easily, were as much gripped by exhaustion as their enemies. Richthofen, the local Luftwaffe commander, noted in a November entry in his diary: ‘The commanders and combat troops at Stalingrad are so apathetic that only the injection of a new spirit will get us anywhere.’ But no new spirit was forthcoming. Hitler appeared to have forgotten whatever reason he had ever had for committing the Sixth Army to the battle for the city. Its waging had come to overshadow the strategy of capturing the Caucasus or even the consolidation of the ‘steppe front’ north of the city, along the line of the Don, against a Russian counter-attack. Hitler’s dangerous tendency to obsess himself at his twice-daily command conferences with yards instead of miles and platoons instead of armies had robbed his direction of the struggle of all perspective. If his soldiers now succeeded in pushing Chuikov and the remnants of the Sixty-Second Army over the Stalingrad cliffs and into the Volga, at best he would have achieved a local success at catastrophic cost; the twenty divisions of the Sixth Army had already lost half their fighting strength. If they failed, the Ostheer’s largest offensive concentration would have been devastated for no result and the initiative given to the Re
d Army.

  Paulus mounted a final effort on 11 November, in weather that already heralded the cold which would freeze the Volga and restore Chuikov’s solid passage to the far shore. Next day a thrust by the Fourth Panzer Army succeeded in reaching the Volga south of the city, thus encircling it completely. That was the last success the Germans were to achieve at this easternmost point of their advance into Russia. For six days local and small-scale battles flickered on, killing soldiers on both sides but gaining ground for neither. Then, on 19 November, in Alan Clark’s words ‘a new and terrible sound overlaid’ the rattle of small arms – ‘the thunderous barrage of Voronov’s two thousand guns to the north’. The Stalin-Zhukov-Vasilevsky counter-stroke had begun.

  The fragile shell

  In order to concentrate the largest possible German force against Stalingrad itself, Hitler had economised elsewhere by lining the Don over the steppe front north and south of the city with his satellite troops, Romanians, Hungarians and Italians. The kernel of his Stalingrad concentration, in short, was German; the shell was not. All autumn Hitler had blinded himself to this weakness in the Ostheer’s deployment. Now the Russians detected that, by breaking the fragile shell, they would surround and overcome the Sixth Army without having to fight it directly. It was about to suffer an encirclement by which Stalin would gain partial revenge on Hitler for those at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev which had nearly destroyed the Red Army the previous year.

  Zhukov’s plan disposed two fronts, South-West (Vatutin) and Don (Rokossovsky), west of the city with five infantry and two tank armies, and the Stalingrad Front (Yeremenko) to the south with one tank and three infantry armies. The South-West and Don Fronts struck on 19 November, the Stalingrad Front the following day. By 23 November their pincers had met at Kalach on the Don west of Stalingrad. The Third and Fourth Romanian Armies had been devastated, the Fourth (German) Panzer Army was in full retreat, and the Sixth Army was entombed in the ruins on the banks of the Volga.

  The inception of Operation Uranus (as the Russians codenamed their counter-offensive) found Hitler at his house at Berchtesgaden, in retreat from the strains of fighting the Russian war. He at once took the train to Rastenburg, where he met Zeitzler on 23 November and, in the teeth of his chief of staff’s advice that the Sixth Army must withdraw or be destroyed, peremptorily issued the disastrous order: ‘We are not budging from the Volga.’ During the next week he cobbled together the expedients that would keep the Sixth Army there. The Luftwaffe would supply it: Paulus’s statement that he needed ‘700 tons’ of supplies a day was ‘realistically’ assumed to mean 300, and the figure of 60 tons currently reaching the city in twenty to thirty Junkers 52 was multiplied by the theoretical availability of aircraft to match that figure. Manstein, the armoured-breakthrough magician, would relieve it; the reserves he would need were said to be available for an operation, ‘Winter Storm’, that would begin in early December. In the meantime Paulus was not to break out. At most, when Manstein’s attack developed, he was to reach out towards him (on receipt of the signal ‘Thunderclap’) so that the Don-Volga bridgeheads could unite to form the same threat to the Red Army they had constituted before the counter-attack of 19-20 November.

  Manstein, as commander of the newly formed Army Group Don, disposed of four armies for ‘Winter Storm’: the Third and Fourth Romanian, the Sixth (German) and the Fourth Panzer. The first two, always defective in equipment and commitment, were now broken reeds; the Sixth Army was imprisoned; the Fourth Panzer Army could still manoeuvre but had only three tank divisons, 6th, 17th and 23rd, to act as a spearhead. The attempted breakthrough began on 12 December. The Panzer divisions had some sixty miles of snow-covered steppe to cross before they could reach Paulus’s lines.

  Until 14 December they made good progress; a measure of surprise had been achieved and the Russians, now as ever, found it difficult to resist the initial impetus of a German advance. Time might be on their side but they could not match the Wehrmacht in military skill. Against the Wehrmacht’s satellites, however, they were on equal if not better terms. On 16 December the Italian Eighth Army north of Stalingrad, which had thus far escaped the Romanians’ fate, was struck and penetrated and a new threat was hurled against Manstein’s Panzer thrust. On 17 December the 6th Panzer Division lurched to within thirty-five miles of Stalingrad, close enough to hear gunfire from the city; but the pace of advance was slowing, the Italian front was bending and the Sixth Army showed no sign of reaching out to join hands. On 19 December Manstein flew his chief intelligence officer into the city in an effort to galvanise its commander. He returned with news that Paulus was oppressed by the difficulties and the fear of incurring the Führer’s disfavour. On 21 December Manstein tried but failed to persuade Hitler to give Paulus a direct order for a break-out. By 24 December his own relief effort had ground to a halt in the snows of the steppe between the Don and Volga and he could only accept the necessity to retreat.

  Retreat, too, was a consequent necessity for Kleist’s dangerously overextended Army Group A in the Caucasus. The previous autumn his motorised patrols had reached the shore of the Caspian Sea, the Eldorado of Hitler’s strategy, but had turned back near the mouth of the river Terek for lack of support. In early January the whole of the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies began to withdraw from the Caucasus mountain line, and retire through the 300-mile salient created by their headlong dash south-eastward the previous summer. As late as 12 January, Hitler still hoped to hold the Maikop oilfields. When Russian pressure north of Stalingrad cast the Hungarian Second Army into disarray, he was obliged to transfer the First Panzer Army to Manstein to augment his armoured strength. Nevertheless he directed Kleist, whose Army Group A was now shrunk to a single army, the Seventeenth, to withdraw it into a bridgehead east of the Crimea from which he hoped offensive operations could be resumed when the Stalingrad crisis ameliorated.

  The hope was quite illusory. During January the German defence of Stalingrad was expiring by inches. Daily deliveries by the Luftwaffe to the three airfields within the perimeter averaged 70 tons; on only three days of the siege (7, 21 and 31 December) did deliveries exceed the minimum of 300 tons needed to sustain resistance. In the first week of January 1943 the forward airfield at Morozovskaya was overrun by Russian tanks; thereafter Richthofen’s Ju 52s – diminished in number by the transfer of some to fly paratroops to Tunisia – had to operate from Novocherkassk, 220 miles from Stalingrad. After 10 January, when the main airstrip inside the Stalingrad perimeter fell, landing became difficult, most supplies were airdropped and the wounded could no longer be regularly evacuated. By 24 January nearly 20,000 men, one-fifth of the entombed army, were lying in makeshift, often unheated hospitals, with the outside temperature at minus 30 degrees Centigrade.

  On 8 January, Voronov and Rokossovsky sent Paulus a summons to surrender, promising medical care and rations. ‘The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun,’ they warned. Paulus, who had refused Manstein’s appeal to break out three weeks earlier for fear of offending the Führer, could not contemplate such an act of disobedience. The terrible struggle continued. On 10 January the Russians opened a bombardment with 7000 guns, the largest concentration of artillery in history, to break the Sixth Army’s line of resistance. By 17 January its soldiers had been forced back into the ruins of the city itself, by 24 January the army had been split into two, and the next day the Russian forces on the eastern shore of the river crossed the Volga and joined Chuikov’s Sixty-Second Army stalwarts in their pockets around the Barricades and Red October factories.

  Hoping for a gesture of honourable defiance, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal’s rank by signal on 30 January. No German field marshal had ever surrendered to the enemy and he thus ‘pressed a [suicide’s] pistol into Paulus’s hand’. At this final imposition of authority Paulus baulked. On 30 January his headquarters were overrun and he surrendered with his staff to the enemy. The last survivors capitulated on 2 February, leaving 90,000 unwounded to 20,000 wounded sol
diers in Russian hands. ‘There will be no more field marshals in this war,’ Hitler announced to Zeitzler and Jodl on 1 February at Rastenburg. ‘I won’t go on counting my chickens before they’re hatched.’ Rightly he predicted that Paulus ‘will make confessions, issue proclamations. You’ll see.’ (Paulus would indeed lend himself to Stalin’s Committee of Free German Officers, which would call on the Ostheer to cease resistance and work for a Russian victory.) ‘In peacetime in Germany about 18,000 to 20,000 people a year choose to commit suicide,’ Hitler continued, ‘although none of them is in a situation like this, and here’s a man who has 45,000 to 60,000 of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end – how can he give himself up to the Bolsheviks?’

  The official reaction to the Stalingrad disaster was altogether more measured. German losses between 10 January and 2 February had in fact totalled 100,000, and few of the 110,000 captured survived transport and imprisonment. For three days normal broadcasting by German state radio was suspended and solemn music, Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, transmitted instead. Hitler, advised by Goebbels, saw in the destruction of the Sixth Army and its twenty-two German divisions an opportunity at least to create a national epic. There was no need for the fabrication of epic in Russia. On the news of Paulus’s surrender the bells of the Kremlin were rung to celebrate the first undeniable Russian victory of the war. The Sixty-Second Army was redesignated the Eighth Guards Army, and Chuikov, a future Marshal of the Soviet Union, entrained it the following month for the Donetz. ‘Goodbye, Volga,’ he recalled thinking as he left Stalingrad, ‘goodbye the tortured and devastated city. Will we ever see you again and what will you be like? Goodbye, our friends, lie in peace in the land soaked with the blood of our people. We are going west and our duty is to avenge your deaths.’ When next Chuikov and his soldiers fought a battle for a city, it would be in the streets of Berlin.