Stavka, 6 November 1942
The Soviets picked up the news of the fall of the city from the German intercepts. Stalin was enraged. No one mentioned that he had personally directed that Chuikov’s army join the encirclement of the Germans. Now he ordered that Rokossovsky’s 66th Army be thrown into the city instead of strengthening the encircling ring. Zhukov called from the front to argue against it. ‘Comrade Stalin, the 66th Army is vital to this operation. We can retake the city once we have destroyed the trapped enemy.’
But Stalin was having none of it. The impossible had happened. The city that bore his name had fallen after he had made its successful defence the pivot of the war for the Soviet peoples. ‘You are thinking only in military terms, but I must balance that with the political cost. How will the morale of your armies be affected if they find out the city had fallen?’
Zhukov replied, ‘They will simply get on with it.’
Stalin was getting angry. ‘The will to fight will be gone. No, you must retake the city immediately, and no one will be the wiser. We can pass it off that the enemy just infiltrated a few saboteurs.’
One last time Zhukov tried to argue, but Stalin cut him off. ‘Just do it.’
As he hung up the phone, he was thinking ahead. The battle could go either way. Should Zhukov win and destroy the trapped Germans, then it would be a disaster for Hitler. Would he sue for peace? Stalin thought, ‘I certainly wouldn’t. There is still a lot of war in the Germans even if they lose this battle.’
But if the battle went the other way, the game was up for the Soviet Union. Lenin’s legacy would be in danger. His spies in OKW had told him that Hitler had talked of a negotiated peace in the spring. How attractive would that be if he were victorious? Stalin put himself in Hitler’s place and knew that such a peace would be a punitive one. Yet what other choice was there? With the loss of the oilfields and Allied aid, there was not a lot of war left in the Russians. He expected that the Soviet Union’s name would become inaccurate as such a peace was likely to shear it of almost all its non-Russian territories. It would be reduced to a Russian core with its centre of gravity moving east. The communist state could survive in this core. The Russians had proved to him that they were a state-minded people, willing to defend Lenin’s legacy.
All well and good, in theory, he thought, but what is to happen to Stalin? He had left a blood-stained path to power. How the knives would sharpen. It would require the iron control of the NKVD if he were to survive. He was pleased in his appointment of Abakumov to replace Beria. The man was pitiless and relentless in his sniffing out of disloyalty, even before the thought had occurred.
Abakumov was indeed pitiless and relentless, but even he could smell a disaster in the wind. The existential question then became, ‘How will Abakumov fare?’ Already members of the Politburo were putting out certain feelers and if Stalin knew about them… Loyalty had its limits. Kill for Stalin? Of course. Die for Stalin? Now that was a different matter.5
Werewolf, 6 November 1942
‘Mein treuer Reinhard,’ Hitler exclaimed, as Heydrich entered and gave him the stiff-armed salute, the Hitler Gruss. He came over and took Heydrich’s hands in his own he was so delighted to see him. ‘I am surrounded by generals with their red-striped trousers. They always tell me what cannot be done. With you I know I have a man who just does the impossible. The only one here like you is this young Stauffenberg. You must meet him.’
‘We have already met, mein Führer. He greeted me personally at the entrance to your compound.’ Hitler was pleased. He had developed the utmost confidence in his new OKW Deputy Chief of Operations. Stauffenberg was not so pleased. He had already known enough of Heydrich to despise him before they had even met. But after shaking his damp, soft hand, he had viscerally recoiled from the man, though he had enough self-control not to show it.
That reaction only added urgency to his plan to pry military intelligence out of Heydrich’s grasp. As they walked the long path through the pinewoods to Hitler’s bunker, Stauffenberg commented that the SS Panzer Corps being created in France was a juicy plum for any able man willing to throw his fate onto the scales of the battlefield. ‘You would understand, I am sure. The urge to test oneself in battle is irresistible, as you showed when you took part in the air battles against the English.’
Heydrich smiled a bit. It had been a delicious experience, and he chafed to do more than cow Czechs and kill Jews. Of course, getting control of all intelligence functions of the Reich was one thing, but his future would require more combat distinction than a few air brawls with the British.
Stauffenberg went on:
The Führer has not transferred the SS back to the Eastern Front because he is convinced that the Amis will land shortly in France. We all bow, of course, to his strategic insight. Think what glory would shower down on the man who drove them into the sea. This time, I wager, they will not be allowed to get away. Ah, here we are!
He was not foolish enough actually to suggest to Hitler that he appoint Heydrich to command the SS Panzer Corps. He knew that Hitler would not take it well for an Army officer, even one as favoured as he was, to make any suggestions about command appointments within the SS. It was Hitler’s private army aglow with a fire for National Socialism that he felt the Army did not show enough. He was confident that Heydrich would bring up the matter but only in private with Hitler.
And he was right. Hitler made the announcement at the next OKW staff meeting. ‘I have decided to entrust command of the new SS panzer corps to my faithful Heydrich. Until the corps is deployed, he will retain control of all intelligence functions already under his purview.’
Stauffenberg was aghast. He had overplayed his hand badly. He had wanted to reassert Wehrmacht control of the Abwehr and had been willing to buy it with a potentially dangerous assignment. Stauffenberg had weighed the importance of the Abwehr against putting a very sharp sword in Heydrich’s hand. The plotters needed the Abwehr to open channels for a negotiated peace after Hitler’s removal. Now Heydrich had the sword and the Abwehr.
At least he would be in France and not on the Eastern Front when it came time to remove Hitler. Hopefully Canaris could continue to deceive Heydrich as to his feelers to the Amis. Suddenly things had become a lot more dicey.6
76/78 Tirpitzufer, Abwehr Headquarters, Berlin, 7 November 1942
Admiral Canaris had just returned from a clandestine meeting in Switzerland with a representative of the British MI6. The man had borne Churchill’s answer to the admiral’s question of what terms Germany could expect to end the war. ‘His Majesty’s Government will make no peace with Hitler or his regime.’ What it left unsaid was even more important than what it did say. Churchill was implying that peace was possible if Hitler were removed and the Nazis suppressed.
He was interrupted by the arrival of a courier from Stauffenberg, a reliable young officer. The dispatch he delivered informed him of Hitler’s decision to subordinate the Abwehr to the Sicherheitsdienst and Heydrich as well as the latter’s appointment to command the SS Panzer Corps organizing around Toulon in southern France. It was clear that if Hitler and his entourage were eliminated it would leave enormous power in his former protégé’s hands. If anyone could keep the Nazis in power after Hitler, it was Heydrich.
Canaris went over to the window to watch a cold rain beat down. Something would have to be done to make sure Heydrich did not step into Hitler’s shoes. He called for his aide. ‘Order Major von Fölkersam to report to me immediately.’
LX Panzer Corps assembly area, north of Abganerovo, 7 November 1942
Before dawn Crrossdeutschland and 6th Panzer Division had assembled without incident. Raus observed that,
The officers looked at their watches. They and their men were fully conscious of the significance of the approaching hour. Suddenly the silence was disrupted by the sounds of explosions. All the guns of the division fired, and it almost seemed as if the shells were going to hit the assembling German troops. Involuntarily, eve
ryone flinched and stopped, but the first salvo had already screamed over the heads of the men and was coming down on the hastily prepared forward positions of the Soviet rifle division that had just arrived the day before. The earth quivered from the explosion of the heavy shells. Stones, planks and rails were hurled into the air. The salvo had hit the centre of the enemy’s chief strongpoint. This was the signal for the Witches’ Sabbath which followed.7
As the artillery kept up its rapid fire, the tank engines turned over. In a deep wedge formation Raus sent over a hundred tanks through the snowy steppe. The blow was so powerful that the Russians of the 343rd Rifle Division were stunned:
His light and heavy batteries stood intact in their firing positions. They had been enveloped and caught in the rear by German tanks before they had been able to fire an accurate round. The limbers which the Russians had moved up quickly had not reached the guns. The horse teams drawing them had fallen under the machine-gun fire. Horse-drawn limbers and ammunition carriers, which had overturned, continued to lie about for hours afterward. Horses which had survived were nibbling at the frozen steppe grass while standing in teams together with the bodies of those which had bled to death in the fire. Here and there, horse teams dragged a dead horse along. Blood on the snow marked their paths. The remnants of the Russian infantry had been scattered and had disappeared in the tall steppe grass as if they had been whisked away by a gust of wind… The numbers of captured Russian guns and other heavy weapons, as well as of horses and vehicles of all kinds, including field kitchens, increased by the hour.8
Raus was amazed that the Soviet 16th Tank Corps had not sought to counter his attack on the rifle division in the Soviet first-line defence. He had no idea that Stalin’s order to redirect that division as part of the 66th Army to retake Stalingrad had sown confusion in the enemy command. The 66th Army had just begun moving its rifle divisions into the belt of encirclement to give defence in depth against any German attack so that the tank corps could mass to counterattack. The 343rd Rifle Division had just arrived when it received the order to move back to retake Stalingrad. It was preparing to move when Raus fell upon it.
As night fell, Raus saw to the resupply and refuelling of his division. LX Panzer Corps kept him informed of Grossdeutschland’s similar success. It too had gutted an enemy rifle division and not suffered any tank counterattacks. That luck could not last. Tomorrow the Soviet tank corps could be expected to come out fighting.9
His right flank would be secured by the 11th Army’s XXX Corps’ three divisions marching west after the defeat of Southwest Front. On its right LIV Corps’s four divisions would drive up through Stalingrad, make contact with the SS Wiking elements in the city, and then strike west against Vatutin’s armies.
That night, as the German panzer divisions rested, Zhukov was again on the phone to Stalin, begging him to rescind the order to redirect 66th Army east to drive the Germans out of Stalingrad. Reconnaissance stated that, because crossing the Volga in the face of so much floating ice was so dangerous, only a battalion or so of Germans had been able to cross, out of the entire 1st Panzer Army waiting on the east bank after its victory at Leninsk.10
This time Stalin relented. The loss of two rifle divisions to Raus and Hörnlein’s panzers underlined how serious their threat was. But Stalin sought to have it both ways. Two of 66th Army’s four rifle divisions could reinforce the two tank corps, but the other two would have to retake Stalingrad. The grand old man of the Prussian Army, the late Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke had had a phrase for this back and forthing: ‘Order, counterorder, disorder.’11
Verkhne-Tsaritsynski, 8 November 1942
After night had fallen Raus’s and Hörnlein’s divisions stopped only long enough to resupply their ammunition and top off their fuel. After midnight they moved out. ‘Only the pale light of the stars made it possible to identify, at very close range, the dim outlines of the tanks and their dark trail in the thin layer of snow.’ Raus knew that he was going to engage the 16th Tank Corps some time that day. It would be far better if he could arrange the terms rather than let the enemy commander have a say. The way to do that was to take something that would attract the enemy to him like iron filings to a magnet. The village of Verkhne-Tsaritsynski answered perfectly. Roads led out of it in all four directions, and although the Soviets were smart enough not to garrison it and make it a target, in German hands it would be like a bone in the throat.
The outlines of the village were just becoming visible as the morning mist, which had cloaked the German advance, lifted. A reconnaissance detachment found it empty, and the reinforced 11th Panzer Regiment and attached units forming a Kampfgruppe rolled forward, commanded by the redoubtable Colonel Walther von Hünersdorff, one of the most talented and aggressive officers of the panzer corps. Then suddenly the scouts at another point reported, ‘There is a heavy concentration of hostile tanks in a broad depression south of here. More tanks are following.’ The Soviet tanks started to emerge from the depression but were immediately knocked out by panzers that had lined some low hills surrounding it. The Soviet tanks withdrew. Then the panzers sprang forward to line the depression and fire down into the enemy tank concentration. The Soviets assumed an all-around defence and fired back. Within half an hour it was over and nothing remained of the Soviet brigade but a tank graveyard for seventy burning vehicles.
MAP №11 ‘MANSTEIN IS COMING’ 8 NOVEMBER 1942
As the battle in the depression raged, another Soviet tank brigade coming from the north attempted to come to the rescue just as the tail of 11th Panzer Regiment entered the village. The attached panzergrenadiers, antitank units, and engineers were able to take over the defence of the village, leaving the panzers for mobile defence. A third enemy tank brigade was seen coming from the west to join the battle. Both the German and Russian commanders were broadcasting in the clear because of the need for quick action. But it was the Germans who were faster off the mark and more tactically nimble. The German radio intercept reported to Hünersdorff the Russian message, ‘Motorized brigade on the way; hold out, hold out!’ He attacked the brigade coming from the east and sought to turn its flanks. The Russian commander kept lengthening his own front, but kept suffering heavy losses from the accurate German crossfire. Finally, he withdrew down a sunken road, sacrificing his rearguard and leaving forty tanks on the field.
Part of what the Germans were intercepting were the frantic conversations between the commanders of the two tank corps. Major General Maslov, commanding 16th Tank Corps, was begging Butkov for help. Butkov whose 1st Tank Corps was now sparring with Grossdeutschland, was reluctant. Maslov pleaded, ‘I’ve lost two tank brigades already. The enemy will break through if I don’t get any reinforcements.’ Maslov was running up against a divided command. He reported to Rokossovsky while Butkov reported to Vatutin. By the time that got sorted out, 6th Panzer was burning out the last elements of Maslov’s corps. Into that battle Butkov now sent two of his four brigades.12
The Soviets were committing numerically superior forces to the battle but piecemeal. Using his panzergrenadiers, engineers and antitank units to hold the village, the German colonel manoeuvred his tanks to strike one enemy brigade after another with superior numbers. From radio intercepts and air reconnaissance he knew the tank brigade from the west would take an hour to reach the field while the mechanized brigade was approaching the village. He directed the main body of his panzers through a depression that brought them onto the Russian rear. The tank battalion of the brigade was quickly shot up, causing the motorized battalions to veer off and escape to the northwest. The last Soviet brigade, arriving after the defeat of the mechanized brigade, ran straight into the reconcentrated panzers. A bitter duel took place in which the Russian tanks, which had advanced without cover, suffered brutal losses.
Still another mechanized brigade was attacking, but Hünersdorff struck it in the flank so quickly it could not change front. The tank battalion of thirty tanks was destroyed, and the motorized infantry
fled. From the west, the tank brigade finally arrived and with motorized infantry broke into the village, overrunning a 105mm gun battery and a number of antitank guns. German engineers with antitank mines rushed the T-34s and took them out one at a time.
Now the Soviets were attacking from the southeast hoping to cut off the Kampfgruppe. Finally, the Soviet commander staked everything on one card. Heavily concentrated and echeloned in depth, all his tanks rolled forward like a huge wave about to swallow up the German forces. This mass attack, too, was stopped in the hail of fire of more than 100 German tank guns.
Now Hünersdorff played his trump. He threw in his panzer reserve to counterattack the enemy’s flank, which quickly folded. Then those panzers that had been in the defence also went over into the attack, closing to very short range. The Soviets fought hard but all of a sudden, like a receding tide, they flooded back, leaving a mass of wrecked and burning tanks in their wake. The 16th Tank Brigade had been burned out. Maslov did not live to report his failure, but Butkov’s brigades were still on the way, and Rokossovsky had thrown in the 66th Army’s separate tank brigade as well.13
Hünersdorff’s victory had come at the cost of leaving his panzergrenadiers and others to hold off more attacks on the village by tanks and motorized infantry. He was shocked to get a message from an officer in the village asking permission to abandon it. The reply was an emphatic no, but the situation had reached a crisis point. The troops in the village were almost out of ammunition. For hours as Hünersdorff’s panzers had parried one tank attack after another, the Soviets had been attacking the village. German antitank gunners and engineers with shaped charges had knocked out tank after tank that had barged into the village. Again and again, the Germans had thrown back each infantry assault, but now they were at the end of their resources, and there seemed no end of Russians.
Disaster at Stalingrad Page 29
