Russia at war
Page 57
expressed great satisfaction over the successful progress of the North-African campaign.
"It opens the prospect of the disintegration of the Italo-German coalition in the nearest future", he wrote, adding that the operation clearly showed that the Anglo-American leaders "were capable of organising a serious war campaign" and that, in the Western Desert "the enemy troops had been smashed with great mastery." He predicted that Italy would soon drop out of the war. Although it was too early to say to what extent the
North-African campaign would relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, he thought the effect would be "appreciable".
Stalin also said that the campaign "created the prerequisites for establishing a Second Front in Europe, nearer to Germany's vital centres", and would "shake France out of her lethargy".
Although many Russians were scandalised by the American deal with Darlan, we now
know that Stalin himself took a completely cynical or "realistic" view of the whole thing
—which is scarcely surprising when one looks back on 1939. In his letter to Churchill of November 27 he wrote:
As for Darlan, I think the Americans have made skilful use of him to facilitate the occupation of North and West Africa. Military diplomacy should know how to use
for the war aims not only the Darlans, but even the devil and his grandmother.
Altogether, after the North-African landing, there was a very marked improvement in
inter-allied relations. As Clark-Kerr, the British Ambassador remarked to me a few days later: "The Kremlin is now sending out warm rays."
Chapter III RUSSIANS ENCIRCLE THE GERMANS AT
STALINGRAD
There was only a lapse of thirteen days between the "Oath by the Defenders of
Stalingrad" and the beginning of the great Russian counter-offensive which ended in the Stalingrad victory two and a half months later. But in the course of these thirteen days the Germans launched one more desperate offensive against Chuikov's 62nd Army whose
position had been rendered even more difficult than before by the icefloes on the Volga.
These had practically stopped all communications across the river, and had made it
almost impossible even to evacuate the wounded. And yet, once this last German
offensive was smashed, the morale of the defenders of Stalingrad was higher than ever, all the more so as they had an inkling that something very important was about to happen.
Later, Stalingrad soldiers told me with what frantic joy, hope and excitement they heard the sound of distant but intensive gun-fire on November 19, between 6 and 7 a.m., that most silent hour of the day in Stalingrad. They knew what that gun-fire meant. It meant that they would not have to go on defending Stalingrad through the winter. Through the darkness, with scarcely a glimmer of light—for it was a dim, damp, foggy dawn—they
listened, as they put their heads out of their dugouts.
Neither on November 19, when the Don Army Group under Rokossovsky and the South-
West Army Group under Vatutin struck out southward towards Kalach, nor on the 20th,
when the Stalingrad Army Group under Yeremenko struck north-west from the area
south of Stalingrad to meet them was anything officially announced. Nor was there
anything in the communiqué of November 21. With unconscious irony, Pravda devoted its editorial that day to "The Session of the Academy of Sciences at Sverdlovsk."
It was not till the night of November 22 that a special communiqué announced the
tremendous news that Russian troops had struck out "a few days ago" from both northwest and south of Stalingrad, that they had captured Kalach and had cut the two railway lines supplying the Germans in Stalingrad, at Krivomuzginskaya and at Abganerovo. It was not yet explicitly stated that the ring around the Germans in Stalingrad had been closed, but the communiqué spoke of very heavy losses inflicted on the enemy, of 14,000
enemy dead, 13,000 prisoners, et cetera.
The excitement in Moscow was tremendous, and on everybody's lips there was this one
word: "nachalos!" —"it's started". Some instinct suggested to everybody that something very big could be expected from this offensive.
[ It is interesting to note that, a few days later, Colonel Exham, the British military attaché, reckoned that this offensive "would take the Russians all the way to Kharkov"
before the end of the winter, whereas General Michela and Colonel Park of the US
Embassy were saying that it was "darned smart of the Germans to get themselves
encircled at Stalingrad, and to tie up enormous Russian forces in this way—which would cause the Russians no end of embarrassments."]
The main points about this second and decisive phase of the Stalingrad battle are:
1) The three Russian "Fronts" together had 1,050,000 men against an almost equal number of enemy troops; about 900 tanks against 700; 13,000 guns against 10,000; and 1,100 planes against 1,200.
[ IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 26. Elsewhere the History claims that the Russians had 1,200 tanks, most of them modern, whereas at Moscow they had only scraped together 750, mainly
obsolete.]
On the other hand, in the "main blow" sectors, Russian superiority was overwhelming which, according to the History, had never before been achieved in this war: a three-fold superiority in men and a four-fold superiority in equipment, especially in artillery and mortars.
Practically all this equipment had been made by Soviet industry during the summer and early autumn months, and only a small number of Western tanks, lorries and jeeps were used. Up to February 1943, 72,000 Western lorries had been delivered to Russia, but only a very small proportion of these were available by the time the Russian Stalingrad
offensive began.
2) Morale among the troops was extremely good.
3) The plan for the counter-offensive had been worked out "collectively" since August, chiefly by Stalin, Zhukov and Vassilevsky, in consultation with the commanders of the local Army Groups—Vatutin, Rokossovsky and Yeremenko.
[Zhukov, in order to make the "final arrangement", visited Vatutin's H.Q. on November 5
and that of Yeremenko on November 10. (IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 26). But the idea that he
was probably the real brain behind the operation is minimised in recent histories.]
In October and November Vassilevsky and Zhukov visited the areas of the coming
operations.
4) The preparations for the offensive were an enormous feat of organisation and had been conducted with the greatest secrecy; thus, for several weeks before the offensive all mail was stopped between the soldiers of the three Army Groups and their families.
Although they bombed the railways leading to the area north of the Don, the Germans
never got a clear idea of how much equipment and how many troops were being brought
(mainly at night) to the area north of the Don and to the two main Russian bridgeheads inside the Don Bend; and the Germans never thought that the Russian counter-offensive (if any) could assume such vast proportions. More difficult still was the task of
transporting vast numbers of troops and enormous quantities of equipment to the
Stalingrad Front, in the south. The heavily-bombed railway line east of the Volga had to be used, and pontoons and ferries had to be organised across the Volga, almost right under the Germans' noses. Unlike the country north of the Don, where there were some forests, camouflage in the barren steppes south of Stalingrad was particularly difficult.
Even so, the Germans still had no idea of the weight of the coming Russian onslaught.
5) The German command, and Hitler in particular, were so obsessed with the prestige
problem of capturing Stalingrad that they did not give sufficient attention to consolidating the two flanks of what can conveniently be called the Stalingrad salient. Strictly
speaking, it was not a salient: there was a clear "front" on its north side, but
in the south there was a sort of vast no-man's-land running through the Kalmuk steppes all the way to the northern Caucasus, with a few thin lines held here and there, mostly by Rumanian troops. In the north, too, some of the sectors of the front were held by Rumanians. The Rumanian troops had fought well round Odessa and in the Crimea, but at the beginning of winter in the Don steppes their morale was low. Here they were clearly not fighting Rumania's battle, but Hitler's, and their relations with the Germans were far from
satisfactory at any level. Further west on the Don, there were Italian troops, whose morale was also far from good. The Russians were fully aware of this, and rightly
regarded the sectors held by Rumanians and Italians as the weakest.
The offensive started along a wide front to the north of the salient at 6.30 a.m. on November 19 with an artillery and katyusha barrage; and Russian infantry and tanks began their advance two hours later. Owing to bad weather, little aircraft was used. In three days Vatutin's troops advanced some seventy-five miles, routing in the process the Rumanian 3rd Army and a number of German units that were hastily sent to the rescue of their allies. Despite strong resistance from the Germans and also some Rumanian units, Vatutin's troops of the South-West Front reached Kalach on the 22nd, meeting there
Yeremenko's forces which had broken through from the south, with rather less resistance from the enemy.
In the fighting, four Rumanian divisions were encircled, and soon afterwards surrendered, with General Lascar at their head. The same fate befell another encircled Rumanian
group commanded by General Stenescu. The routing of the Rumanian 3rd Army, as a
result of which the Russians took some 30,000 prisoners, had a far-reaching political effect on Hitler's relations with his allies. For one thing, after that Rumanian troops were placed under much stricter and more direct German supervision.
Yeremenko's Stalingrad Army Group, starting their attack one day later, advanced even more rapidly towards Kalach which it reached within less than three days, thus
forestalling the Northwestern Army Group and taking 7,000 Rumanian prisoners. The
right flank of Army Group Don, under General Rokossovsky had also struck out to.the
south on November 19, one of its prongs breaking through to General Gorokhov's
bridgehead on the Volga north of Stalingrad.
Within four and a half days the encirclement of the Germans in Stalingrad was
completed. The "ring" was neither very thick—it varied from twenty to forty miles—nor very solid, and the obvious next task was to strengthen and widen it. During the last days of November the Germans made an attempt to break through the 'ring" from the west, but they failed despite a few initial successes. What the Russians feared most was that
Paulus's 6th Army and units of the 4th Panzer Army inside Stalingrad would attempt to break out and abandon Stalingrad; but there was no sign of this happening and,
paradoxically, during the Russian breakthrough on the Don many Germans fled to
Stalingrad "for safety".
Some interesting details on the scene of this great battle were given me by Henry
Shapiro, the United Press Correspondent in Moscow, who was allowed to visit it a few days after the "ring" had closed. He went by train to a point some hundred miles northwest of Stalingrad, and travelled from there by car to Serafimovich, on that bridgehead on the Don which the Russians had captured in heavy fighting in October, and whence
Vatutin hurled his troops towards Kalach on November 19.
The railway line nearer the front had been heavily bombed by the Germans; all
stations were destroyed, and the military commandants and railway personnel
operated the railway traffic from dugouts and ruined buildings. All along the
railway towards the front there was a tremendous continuous flow of armaments:
katyushas, guns, tanks, ammunition—and men. The traffic continued day and night, and it was the same on the roads. It was particularly intense at night. There was very little British or American equipment to be seen, except an occasional jeep or tank; about ninety-nine per cent of the stuff was Russian-made. A fairly high
proportion of the food was, however, American—especially lard, sugar and spam.
By the time I got to Serafimovich, the Russians were not only consolidating the
"ring" round Stalingrad, but were now making a "second ring"; it was clear from the map that the Germans at Stalingrad were completely trapped, and couldn't get
out... I found among both soldiers and officers a feeling of self-confidence, the like of
which I had never seen in the Red Army before. In the Battle of Moscow there was
nothing like it. (Emphasis added.)
Well behind the fighting-line there were now thousands of Rumanians wandering
about the steppes, cursing the Germans and desperately looking for Russian
feeding-points, and anxious to be formally taken over as war prisoners. Some
individual stragglers would throw themselves on the mercy of the local peasants,
who treated them charitably, if only because they were not Germans. The Russians
thought they were "just poor peasants like ourselves".
Except for small groups of Iron-Guard men who, here and there, put up a stiff fight, the Rumanian soldiers were sick and tired of the war; the prisoners I saw all said roughly the same thing—that this was Hitler's war, and that the Rumanians had
nothing to do on the Don.
The closer I moved to Stalingrad, the more numerous were the German prisoners...
The steppe was a fantastic sight; it was full of dead horses, while some horses were only half-dead, standing on three frozen legs, and shaking the remaining broken
one. It was pathetic. 10,000 horses had been killed during the Russian
breakthrough. The whole steppe was strewn with these dead horses and wrecked
gun-carriages and tanks and guns—Germans, French, Czech, even British (no
doubt captured at Dunkirk)..., and no end of corpses, Rumanian and German. The
Russian bodies were the first to be buried. Civilians were coming back to the
villages, most of them wrecked... Kalach was a shambles: only one house was
standing...
General Chistiakov, whose H.Q. I finally located in a village south of Kalach—the village was under sporadic shell-fire—said that, only a few days before, the
Germans could still fairly easily have broken out of Stalingrad, but Hitler had
forbidden it. Now they had missed their chance. He was certain that Stalingrad
would be taken by the end of December.
[The Manstein offensive helped to upset this Russian time-table; if Stalingrad had fallen in December, the Russians might, indeed, have reached the Dnieper during their winter campaign, and might not have lost Kharkov, as they did in March 1943.]
German transport planes, Chistiakov said, were being shot down by the dozen, and
the Germans inside the Stalingrad pocket were already short of food, and were
eating up the horses.
The German prisoners I saw were mostly young fellows, and very miserable. I did
not see any officers. In thirty degrees of frost they wore ordinary coats, and had blankets tied round their necks. They had hardly any winter clothing at all. The
Russians, on the other hand, were very well-equipped—with valenki, sheepskin coats, warm gloves, et cetera. Morally, the Germans seemed completely stunned,
unable to understand what the devil had happened.
On my return journey I saw General Vatutin in a dilapidated school-house at
Serafimovich for a few minutes at four in the morning... He was terribly tired; he had not had a proper sleep for at least a fortnight, and kept rubbing his eyes and dozing off. For all that, he looked very tough and determined, and was highly
optimistic. He showed me a map on whic
h the new Russian sweep into the western
part of the Don country was clearly marked.
My impression was that while the capture of Serafimovich in October had cost the
Russians heavy casualties, their losses in this well-planned breakthrough were
incomparably smaller than those of the Rumanians and Germans.
At this time, the Germans and their allies were still occupying vast territories of south-east Russia. The whole of the Kuban country and parts of the Northern Caucasus were in their hands; they were still at Mozdok on the road to Grozny, and at Novorossisk on the Black Sea. On November 2 they had captured Nalchik and had nearly captured
Vladikavkaz, at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway, though here the
Russians scored a major success on November 19 by throwing in a strong force and
hurling the Germans back to the outskirts of Nalchik. At Mozdok, the Germans had failed to make any appreciable advance since the end of August. For months now Mozdok, like Stalingrad, had continued to figure in the communiqués. By aiming to drive the Germans out of the whole Don country west of StaUngrad, right up to Rostov and the sea of Azov (to begin with), the Russians rightly reckoned that if they succeeded in this they would almost automatically force the Germans to pull out of the Caucasus and the Kuban.
The even more ambitious Russian "Plan Saturn", adopted by the Supreme Command on December 3, a fortnight after the counter-offensive had started was, first, to liquidate the German forces trapped at Stalingrad and then capture the country inside the Don Bend, including Rostov, and to cut off the German forces in the Caucasus. According to the History Stalin telephoned Vassilevsky, the Chief of Staff, then in the Stalingrad area, on November 27 demanding top priority for the liquidation of the German Stalingrad forces, leaving the rest of "Plan Saturn" to the troops of Vatutin's South-West Front.
[IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 43. ]
In the first days of December the troops of the Don and Stalingrad Fronts began
their offensive against the enemy forces trapped in Stalingrad. But no substantial results were achieved. That was why the Soviet Command decided to strengthen the