The news from the Soviet front followed hard on the Allied landings in North Africa and the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein. Hitler, who had retired to his Bavarian redoubt, the Berghof, hurried back to his winter headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Here he took stock of the situation. At first, according to one witness, he was ‘completely uncertain what to do’. But he was, he told Mussolini on 20 November, ‘one of those men who in adversity simply becomes more determined’.30 His decision to stand and defend Stalingrad was in part a statement of that determination, in part a recognition of what retreat or surrender would mean in terms of morale for Germany’s war effort. To justify his order to Paulus he grasped at a slender straw, offered to him by the air force chief, Hermann Göring, who was at headquarters on 24 November to discuss the Stalingrad situation. Though Göring’s staff doubted the ability of the Luftwaffe to do anything very much in the south after the losses sustained in the summer and autumn, their wayward chief assured Hitler that the besieged city could be supplied from the air, until such time as relief forces could be organised to break through. He promised to fly in 500 tons of supplies a day. Armed with this assurance Hitler reiterated to Paulus that day the need to stand fast.31
The airlift operation was a disaster. Instead of the 500 tons promised, the air force supplied fewer than 100 tons a day, and considerably below this by the end of December and during January. The Luftwaffe units in the east were down to only a quarter of their strength by the end of the year, flying in the teeth of a Russian winter, starved of fuel and technicians. German forces were compressed into a progressively smaller pocket of territory around the city, so the number of airfields available fell, until by mid-January German aircraft dropped supplies by parachute. Slow, poorly armed transport aircraft had to fly over 150 miles from crowded, ill-prepared airfields against a numerous enemy. Command in the air around Stalingrad, which German forces enjoyed until October, evaporated. By December there were fewer than 375 German fighter aircraft for the whole Soviet front, and many of those were unserviceable. Aircraft and crews were drafted in from training stations in Germany to augment the dwindling stock of pilots skilful enough to navigate the dangerous winter route. Soviet air forces set up a well-organised air blockade around the city, while ground forces fought to capture the remaining German airfields. In less than two months the Luftwaffe lost 488 transport aircraft and a thousand crew, while German forces in the Cauldron ran short of food, ammunition and medical supplies.32
While the Luftwaffe burned itself out in pursuit of a hopeless ambition, the German army planned a dramatic overland rescue. Its inspiration was Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, victor at Sebastopol. He was put in charge of the hastily formed Don Army Group, made up of forces scattered westwards by the Soviet offensive together with the remaining German reserves. A small group of Panzer divisions gathered south of the Soviet corridor at Kotelnikovo, under the command of General Hermann Hoth. Manstein planned to use this group to rush through the Soviet forces, link up with Paulus’s army moving south-west and retreat back to a secure defensive line. The attempt began in heavy rain on 12 December, and made steady progress in difficult conditions. By 23 December Hoth’s force advanced 40 miles, then ground to a halt in fierce tank fighting with Soviet reinforcements rapidly deployed into the area. The critical point of the whole Stalingrad campaign had been reached. After the initial shock of the German assault, Soviet commanders in some haste, and with poor intelligence on German intentions, succeeded in mounting a strong counter-blow. Though Manstein and Paulus later complained in their memoirs that a great opportunity to fight a successful retreat from Stalingrad was lost because of Hitler’s insistence that Paulus stay put, the truth is more complicated.
When Zhukov and the Soviet General Staff first planned to encircle Paulus at Stalingrad, they realised that German forces would not stand idly by but would try to rescue him. The Uranus plan anticipated this. The corridor separating Paulus from the remaining German forces had to be wide enough to make rescue difficult, and it had to have a strong outer ring of defences and reserves to counter any German thrust. Over sixty Soviet divisions were poured into the breach, with almost a thousand tanks. Though Manstein’s forces, with fewer tanks, made remarkable progress in driving blizzards and over difficult, toughly defended terrain, the Soviet high command was able to redeploy its reserves on the right flank and in front of the attacking force. By 24 December there was a very great danger that the whole of the force striking towards Stalingrad might itself be encircled. Manstein was forced to order withdrawal, the last gamble in ruins. All along the German southern front Soviet forces went over to the offensive, destroying Italian and Hungarian armies and weakened German divisions, driving towards Rostov-on-Don. The result was an operational triumph for Soviet commanders. Throughout 1941 and 1942 the German army had profited from the Soviet inability to coordinate their forces, to react to circumstances, to think through a plan and to execute it consistently. It was not just German mistakes that cost Hitler victory at Stalingrad. In the bitter attritional warfare of 1942 the Red Army was coming of age.33
For Paulus the end was only a matter of time. By late December his soldiers were beyond rescue. The German force, almost a quarter of a million men, was still an obstacle of sorts, but the conditions they experienced were destructive of strength and will. There were desperate shortages of food, the endless bombardments, the collapse of medical services for the wounded and sick, and the grim, unbearable realisation that there was no way out. Wilhelm Hoffmann, a German infantryman who arrived with his unit in Stalingrad in early September, wrote his last diary entry on 26 December: ‘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 …’34 By January the temperatures were down to –30 degrees centigrade, and food supplies were reduced to 2 ounces of bread a day, half an ounce of sugar, and a little horsemeat. Each soldier was allowed one cigarette.35 There was little fuel and ammunition. The German guns that had blasted the city flat fired only sporadically. The troops dug in to underground shelters and trenches and awaited the worst.
Stalin and Zhukov gave little thought to finishing off the Cauldron while the battles raged to seize back the Don steppe. Soviet intelligence informed the Supreme Command that only eighty thousand men were in the net, not all of whom were military combatants. It was assumed that 6th army would either surrender or be eliminated rapidly, at Soviet leisure. So the plan to destroy the German pocket, codenamed Operation ‘Koltso’, was not drawn up until 27 December. It was proposed that the armies of the Don front, to the north of Stalingrad, would attack from west to east, driving German forces back into the city, splitting them into smaller groups which would then be reduced by air and artillery bombardment, stage by stage. Difficulties in moving supplies and men into position postponed the opening of the offensive until 10 January, to Stalin’s intense irritation. The force that gathered around the perimeter of the Cauldron was a hammer expected to crack a nut: 47 Soviet divisions, 5,600 heavy guns and mortars, 169 tanks and 300 aircraft.36 Two days before the attack was unleashed Paulus was given an opportunity to surrender. A small delegation of soldiers approached German lines and was promptly fired upon. The following day, armed with a bugler and a red flag, they tried again. This time they were taken blindfold to German lines. Paulus would not meet them; the surrender terms were dismissed out of hand. The following day, 10 January, at eight o’clock in the morning, Soviet artillery began the heaviest barrage since the war began.37
When Soviet armies rolled forward they made slow progress against determined German resistance. Fierce fighting brought surprisingly heavy casualties from an enemy thought to be on his last legs. In terror at what would happen to them if they were caught, German troops fought with whatever desperate energy they could muster. It was now their turn to figh
t to the last man and the last bullet. After a few days Soviet commanders discovered why progress was so costly. From captured orders and the interrogation of prisoners it was discovered that 250,000 men had been encircled in November, not eighty thousand. This number exceeded the number of Soviet troops attacking the city. They were under orders not to surrender but to die as heroes. Most did die, from wounds, from frostbite, from starvation, hundreds of miles from Hitler’s headquarters, where the Army Chief-of-Staff ostentatiously ordered his entourage to eat ‘Stalingrad rations’ while the battle raged.38 Soviet forces pressed forward through the outer defence lines, until, under the weight of shelling and bombing, short of ammunition and heavy weapons, the German front collapsed. By 17 January the occupied pocket was less than half the size it had been at the start of Koltso. On 22 January the last push began into the city itself, where one-third of the original German force dug in. More and more German soldiers began to surrender in circumstances of utter hopelessness and panic. Those who stayed in their bunkers were incarcerated by the heavy tanks that passed overhead, or flushed out by flamethrowers and grenades. On 26 January the forward units of the attacking force finally met up with the 62nd army, which had continued to hold the west bank of the Volga, an anvil to the Soviet hammer. At 9.20 in the morning men of Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards attacking the Red October Factory watched as panic broke out among the German units in front of them. Down the hill to the west of the factory settlement came a heavy tank column of the Soviet relief force. Soldiers from the two armies embraced in tears.39
Five days later the bulk of the remaining German forces surrendered. In his headquarters in the Univermag department store basement, with hundreds of frightened German soldiers huddled in the foetid air of overcrowded cellars, Paulus was found by a small detachment of Soviet troops led by Lieutenant Fyodr Yelchenko. Depressed, almost detached from his grim surroundings, Paulus refused to meet his captors face to face. His staff officers agreed to the surrender and asked for a car to take their chief away in order to prevent a lynching. Paulus and 23 German generals were taken into captivity, where Paulus publicly recanted his wicked ways. He ended up after the war living in Dresden, in communist East Germany, where he died in 1957.40 Farther to the north of the city German forces refused to accept the surrender and battled on until 2 February until they had nothing left with which to fight. The Battle of Stalingrad was finally at an end.
There was no doubt that the Red Army had won a remarkable victory. In Moscow the journalist Alexander Werth found a pronounced psychological shift in the population: there was no longer grim, anxious desperation, but a renewed self-confidence. ‘No-one doubted that this was the turning-point in World War II,’ wrote Werth later.41 The aura of German invincibility vanished – German losses were catastrophic. In the struggle since November, 32 divisions of German, Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces had been annihilated and a further sixteen all but eliminated. Twelve thousand guns and mortars had been destroyed or had fallen into Soviet hands; according to Soviet sources, 3,500 tanks and three thousand aircraft had suffered a similar fate.42 The talk in the Soviet press was all of Cannae, the ancient battle where Hannibal’s Carthaginians routed Rome. Early in February Werth was invited with other western journalists to visit the scene of Soviet triumph. On the approach to Stalingrad they were surrounded by a seemingly endless stream of men, lorries, horses, even camels, moving in an untidy mass westwards, to new battles. The temperature was -44 degrees centigrade. In Stalingrad itself the battleground was frozen into a gruesome still life of the conflict – dead men and horses stiff where they had fallen, burnt-out tanks and trucks, the litter of cruel combat. In the basement of the Red Army House, Werth was shown two hundred emaciated, disease-ridden Germans, their skin parched and yellowed, gnawing the frozen bones of one last horse while they waited in threadbare coats and rags for boots, to be taken off to prison camp. There seemed, Werth later reflected, a ‘rough but divine justice in the yard of the Red Army House at Stalingrad’.43
The fall of the city reverberated worldwide. A year earlier a batch of maps sent from England to Moscow helpfully titled ‘Follow the war with this map of the world on Mercator’s projection’ did not even include Stalingrad. Now the name was on everyone’s lips. On 20 February British cities celebrated Stalingrad Day, the ‘twenty-fifth anniversary’ of the name (it was actually the seventeenth). The following day the Royal Albert Hall hosted a glittering array of the rich and the good in a salute to the valour of the Red Army.44 Three weeks after the capture of Stalingrad, Stalin sent Churchill film of the battle which Churchill, laid up with pneumonia, watched with a private projector set up in his bedroom.45 The effect on Hitler’s allies, who shared in the collapse, was no less marked. The suffering inflicted on Romanian, Italian and Hungarian forces made them reluctant partners of the Reich. ‘It is now certain’, the Italian Foreign Minister told Mussolini on 8 February, ‘that hard times will come.’46
Hitler, as usual, blamed everyone but himself for the catastrophe. When he heard the news of Paulus’s surrender he could hardly contain himself with rage. The day before he had promoted Paulus to Field Marshal. Though he harboured to the end the illusion that 6th army could be rescued in the spring, he expected Paulus to fight to the very last if rescue proved impossible, leaving the final bullet for himself. He became obsessed with the view that the heroic sacrifice of so many German soldiers was besmirched by the failings of ‘one single characterless weakling’.47 For weeks he would not allow Göring’s name to be mentioned for failing to keep the airlift going. His staff watched him age visibly over the period of crisis, crippled by gastric disorders which gave him pronounced bad breath, ill-tempered and depressed. His way of coping with the psychological blow was simply to pretend that Stalingrad had never happened. He refused to mention it again and busied himself in a flurry of insignificant staff work in preparation for further victory plans in 1943.48 For the German public there was no disguise for the disaster. Too many were killed or captured to pretend that Stalingrad had not happened.
* * *
It has always been a temptation to signify Stalingrad as the turning-point of the Second World War. Field Marshal Keitel, Hitler’s Chief-of-Staff, later confessed that this was the moment at which Germany ‘played [her] last trump, and lost’.49 But it was not a decisive victory on its own. It demonstrated a remarkable improvement in the operational skills and battle-worthiness of Soviet soldiers and weapons. The awesome scale of the carnage on both sides, fighting to the death for a city that no longer eixsted, indicates the special character of the savage contest between invader and victim. The victory had a moral and psychological impact well beyond the significance of the strategic triumph. It laid the foundations of Soviet self-belief for battles in 1943 that were really decisive.
Stalingrad was only one part of a much more ambitious Soviet campaign. The rapid success of Soviet armies encircling the 6th army in November encouraged the Soviet General Staff to exploit the advantages they enjoyed in winter fighting, and the obvious exhaustion of the enemy, by pushing the German front back along its whole length, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. With the enemy on the run in the south, Stalin seized the reins back from Zhukov and bullied and urged commanders to rush in hot pursuit before the enemy could regroup. In the north the siege of Leningrad was broken though not lifted; on the central front the German line was pushed farther away from Moscow. In the south the aptly named Operation ‘Gallop’ was launched at the end of January with the object of driving German forces from the industrial Donetz basin farther back into the Ukraine, and trapping and destroying the whole of the German southern front. The retreating German armies in the Caucasus region narrowly escaped the fate of Paulus, but so swift was Soviet pursuit that by the beginning of February large pockets of German forces were holed up on the wide peninsulas that form the gateway to the Sea of Azov.
There were fears among the German commanders that the whole of the southern front would collapse. One city after
another was liberated. At the farthest point Soviet advance forces pushed the enemy almost to the river Dnepr. But Stalin had overplayed his hand. Soviet forces were in turn exhausted from the long gruelling battles in appalling winter conditions, against an enemy adept at rapid withdrawal and tough rearguard defence. It proved difficult to move supplies and reserves, many of which were stranded far in the rear of Stalingrad, so rapid had been the progress of Soviet armies. Stalin was furious at the delays, and ordered the NKVD to take over the running of the railways in the south, but their intervention, brutal but inexperienced, played havoc with already inadequate schedules.50 The large advantage in number of tanks enjoyed by Soviet armoured divisions at the start of the offensive petered out on account of poor maintenance and heavy losses. Sensing growing Soviet weakness, von Manstein gathered together another strike force for a defensive counter-stroke. Soviet intelligence failed to detect the concentration of German forces south of Kharkov, preferring to believe that the armoured columns they had identified were part of a general retreat. Poor planning and constant pressure from Supreme Headquarters blinded local Soviet commanders to the danger. German armies, pushed back like a coiled spring towards the river Dnepr, were released on 20 February with devastating effect against an enfeebled enemy. By mid-March Kharkov was recaptured and the German line stabilised, not along the Dnepr as Stalin had hoped, but on the Donetz, 150 miles farther east.51
The German counter-attack was a timely reminder that the Red Army still faced a powerful and well-armed enemy. The spring thaw at the beginning of April brought both sides to a standstill after nine months of continuous warfare and enormous losses. The final German counter-attack had left an untidy front-line. In the central area opposite the city of Voronezh there existed a large Soviet bulge far into the German lines, around the city of Kursk. This salient was 120 miles wide from Belgorod in the south to within a few miles of Orel in the north, and posed a threat to the German forces on either side. It was here that the conflict was renewed again in the summer.
Why the Allies Won Page 13
