Russia at war
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Soviet forces in this area very considerably, and to make more thorough
preparations for the operation. New units from the Stavka Reserve were being thrown in, including the 2nd Guards Army under the command of Lieut-Gen.
Malinovsky.
[Ibid., p. 43.]
The Germans had made a first attempt to break through to Stalingrad from the west at the end of November, but had failed. After that the Germans reorganised their forces by
forming a newly-named Army Group called "Don", the purpose of which was a) to stop the Russian advance into the Don country and b) to break the ring round Stalingrad. This Army Group included all the German and allied troops between the Middle Don and the
Astrakhan steppes, and its two big striking forces were to be concentrated at Tormasin inside the Don Bend and at Kotelnikovo, south of the Don Bend and some ninety miles
south-west of the Stalingrad pocket. Field-Marshal von Manstein, the "victor of the Crimea", whose prestige was high in the German army, was placed in charge of these operations.
But the formation of the great striking force, especially at Tormasin, met with
considerable delays due to enormous transport difficulties. According to the Russians, these were largely due to constant partisan attacks on the railways, so that reinforcements could only be brought to the Don country from the west in all kinds of roundabout ways.
As time was short, Manstein decided to attack with the Kotelnikovo striking force only.
Later he explained:
It was closer to Stalingrad, and it did not have to force the Don on its way there.
There was a good hope that the enemy would not expect a big offensive in this
sector... Facing the Kotelnikovo group there were, indeed, at first, only five Russian divisions, as against fifteen facing the Tormasin group.
[von Manstein, op. cit., p. 353.]
On December 12 Manstein's Kotelnikovo forces, including several hundred tanks, struck out on a narrow front towards Stalingrad along the railway from the Caucasus.
[ The Germans say about 250, the Russians 600.]
In three days it advanced thirty miles, despite strong Russian resistance. On December 15
the Germans succeeded in forcing the Axai river, but to the north of it the Russians had taken up defensive positions, and were receiving considerable reinforcements. The
German advance was slowed down; but by December 19, with hundreds of bombers
supporting them, they reached the Myshkova river, the last natural barrier between them and Stalingrad. They forced this river, too, and then, in von Manstein's words, the
Germans "could already see the glow in the Stalingrad sky." That glow was all that von Manstein was to see of Stalingrad. Postponing the "Operation Saturn" plans to "liquidate the Stalingrad bag", the Russian High Command gave first priority to smashing
Manstein's Army Group advancing from Kotelnikovo, and also his forces in the Tormasin area.
To deal with the former, Russian reinforcements were rushed to the Myshkova river,
barely twenty-five miles from the Stalingrad "bag", in particularly difficult conditions.
Malinovsky's 2nd Guards Army had to travel over 125 miles from beyond the Volga to
reach its destination; it was a forced march of twenty-five to thirty miles a day through the snow-covered steppe and in a howling blizzard. By the time Malinovsky's men
reached the Myshkova river, which the Germans had already forced in several places,
they were very short of petrol, and replenishments were delayed by the weather and the state of the roads. The Russians had to fight for several days with infantry and artillery alone, and it was not till December 24 that their tanks were able to enter the fray. But the Germans were held, and then on the 24th the Russians struck out with both tanks and
aircraft, and hurled them back to the Axai River where they were determined to make a stand; but now the Russian forces were striking heavier and heavier blows, and the
Germans were driven back to Kotelnikovo. This they abandoned on December 29, and
the remnants of Manstein's troops hastily retreated to Zimovniki and thence beyond the river Manych on the way to the Northern Caucasus. This river was fully sixty miles
south-west of Kotelnikovo, where the Manstein offensive had started on December 12.
In this attempt to break through to Stalingrad the Germans had lost (according to Russian claims) 16,000 dead alone, and a high proportion of their tanks, guns and vehicles. A few days after it was all over I was to see the scene of this extraordinary German retreat, all the way from the Myshkova river to Zimovniki.
A question that puzzled the Russians at the time, and for a long time afterwards, was why Paulus, with the rescue force only some twenty-five miles from the Stalingrad cauldron, did not attempt to break out to meet it, or at least make its advance to Stalingrad easier by a counter-attack which would at least have drawn off some of the Russian forces.
Since the war, a great deal has been written on this highly controversial operation—by von Manstein himself, by Walter Goerlitz, by Philippi and Heim and others. First of all, it still remains something of a puzzle what von Manstein (or "Gruppe Hoth", as the Germans usually call it) hoped to achieve, short of getting the whole of the German
forces at Stalingrad to break out; for it is very hard to see how Gruppe Hoth could have hoped to hold a narrow corridor to Stalingrad for any length of time, without the Russians cutting it. It seems clear that von Manstein undertook this operation with the "mental reservation" that, having broken through to Stalingrad, or got sufficiently near it, he could either persuade Hitler to give Paulus the order to pull his forces out of the Stalingrad cauldron, or confront Hitler with a fait accompli based on the force majeure argument that there was no other way.
There were four days, between December 19 and 23, while Gruppe Hoth was holding the
bridgeheads, north of the Myshkova river, when Paulus could have attempted a breakout with some chance of success. Manstein had two different operations in mind: first,
Operation Wintergewitter which aimed at establishing a link between Gruppe Hoth and Paulus's forces, largely for the purpose of rushing supplies by land to Stalingrad, since the airlift to Stalingrad had as good as broken down; and, secondly, Operation
Donnerschlag, meaning the breakout from the cauldron of the whole Stalingrad force.
Paulus argued that he needed several days for preparing either operation; the troops were in very poor physical condition, and needed food and other supplies ("at least ten day's rations for 270,000 men"), and there was also a desperate shortage of petrol; also 8,000
wounded would first have to be evacuated. In the last analysis, it seems apparent that, whether there was a good chance or not for the Stalingrad forces to break out, both Paulus and von Manstein dithered during those four crucial days of December 19 to 23, since no permission had been received from Hitler to abandon Stalingrad. Neither, it seems, was prepared to act without Hitler's express permission, since such a major act of disobedience to the Führer would set up a dangerous "revolutionary" precedent which might have a disastrous effect on the discipline of the Wehrmacht generally. Moreover, Hitler, they thought, might countermand any order that he had not himself given.
What also made Paulus hesitate (unlike at least one of his generals, von Seydlitz, who favoured a breakout) were the extravagant promises showered on him by Hitler: Goering had "guaranteed" that the troops at Stalingrad could be adequately supplied by air, and so could easily hold out till the spring of 1943, by which time the whole of the Don country would presumably be reconquered by the Germans. After the failure of Manstein's
attempt to break through to Stalingrad, Paulus (and Manstein, for that matter) consoled themselves with the thought that, despite the failure of the airlift, the German forces in the Stalingrad cauldron were still serving a useful purpose in tying down large Russian forces, while Manstein was now able to
devote himself to an even more vital task than saving the 6th Army—namely, to keep the Rostov-Taman Gap open, and so enable the
much larger German forces in the Caucasus and Kuban to pull out with the minimum of
loss.
According to Walter Goerlitz, Paulus had, for many years, been a Hitler enthusiast, and therefore meekly accepted Hitler's order to cling to Stalingrad whatever the sacrifice. It was not till after the attempt on Hitler's life of July 20, 1944 that he was prevailed upon to join hundreds of other German officers and generals in their appeal to the German army and people to overthrow Hitler. Goerlitz thus tends to demolish the legend, partly built up by the Russians, that "von Paulus" (as they invariably called him) was a rather noble anti-Nazi figure. It is true that he later settled in Eastern Germany and advocated, right up to the time of his death in 1957, the closest co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union. (Which does not prevent him from having been one of Hitler's most wholehearted planners of both the war in Poland and the invasion of Russia in 1941).
Recently, there have been some German writers to take the view that all the controversy of what Manstein and Paulus should have done between December 19 and 23 evades the
main issue, which was simply that the Manstein offensive had been badly planned and
that Paulus could not have broken out. As Philippi and Heim say:
There is really nothing to show that in those late December days a break-out of
those down-at-heel troops was still possible, even when one considers that the
prospect of breaking through to freedom would encourage them to perform
superhuman deeds of valour. When, on December 21, the OAK6 (i.e. the command
of the 6th Army) described the proposed breakout as a Katastrophenlösung... it was right in the sense that this could only amount to a gesture of despair by a large mass of people in very poor physical condition trying to fight their way to the Myshkova, across fifty km. of snowbound steppes and against a perfectly fresh, intact and
heavily-armed enemy. The conditions for Donnerschlag and Wintergewitter were equally unfavourable.
[ Philippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 195.]
Whether this is correct or not will no doubt remain a matter of controversy among
military historians; judging from the Germans I saw in Stalingrad over six weeks later, they must still have been in reasonably good condition around December 20; they had by then been encircled for less than a month, and were not yet anywhere near real starvation.
They also said that they were still "full of fight" at the thought of von Manstein about to break through to Stalingrad. Even in January, those still in reasonably good condition fought with the greatest stubbornness during the Russian liquidation of the cauldron.
While the 2nd Guards Army under Malinovsky was about to hurl back the Germans from
the Myshkova River, the Vatutin-Golikov advance into the Don country from the north
was successfully continuing.
Advancing rapidly both into the Middle Don and further west, this time with considerable air support (4,000 sorties in the first few days of the offensive), they routed the remnants of the Rumanian 3rd Army, the Italian 8th Army and dislocated that German "Tormasin"
striking force which was planning to attempt a breakthrough to Stalingrad—to coincide with the "Kotelnikovo" thrust. An area of some 15,000 square miles was liberated. To quote the History,
[ IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 50.]
A smashing defeat was inflicted on the Italian 8th Army and on the left flank of
Army Group "Don". Five Italian divisions were smashed... and one brigade of Blackshirts. In the autumn of 1942 this army had about 250,000 men and now lost
about one half of its effectives. Heavy losses were also inflicted on operational group
"Hollidt", belonging to the left flank of Manstein's Army Group "Don". Five of its infantry divisions and one tank division were smashed...
[After quoting an Italian eyewitness account (Giusto Tolloy, Con l'armata italiana in Russia, Torino, 1947) on the encirclement of large Italian forces south of Boguchar and the panic caused among the Italian officers and soldiers, the History protests against certain Italian allegations that many thousands of Italian war prisoners
failed to return after the war. It argues that many of those whom the Italians counted as war prisoners had, in fact, found their death in battle "and found their grave in the steppes of the Don." It quotes Khrushchev's speech at Tirana (Albania) in 1959 saying that war was "like a fire—easy to jump in, but not so easy to jump out. Well, the Italians just got burned in the War." It adds, however, that a large number of Italians who had survived the Don Battle were murdered by the Germans, particularly at Lwow in 1943, after they had refused—this was after the fall of Mussolini—to swear allegiance to Hitler.
There is, in reality, another explanation for the failure of many of the Italians in Russia to return to Italy after the war; and there was a great deal of talk about this in Moscow towards the end of the war: although the leaflets dropped on Italian troops urging them to surrender to the Russians promised that they would be sent to a "warm climate", many thousands of Italian war prisoners were actually sent to camps in northern and central Russia, where large numbers died of pneumonia, tuberculosis, et cetera.]
After the failure of the Hoth-Manstein group to break through to Stalingrad, and its retreat to Kotelnikovo and beyond, Malinovsky's troops pursued them beyond the
Manych River, and were planning to break through to Rostov from the south-east. But
there is no doubt that the Russian offensive, which had achieved such spectacular results since November 19, and right through the rest of November and December in the Don
country, was now, by the beginning of the New Year, to meet with much suffer German
resistance. It was essential for the Germans to keep the "Rostov Gap" open as long as possible, for this remained the main escape route for the German forces which were now
—at the beginning of January—hastily beginning to pull out of the Caucasus and the
Kuban. Thanks to Stalingrad, Hitler's attempt to conquer the Caucasus had been a
complete failure.
Chapter IV STALINGRAD CLOSE-UPS
Close-Up I: The Stalingrad Lifeline.
By January 1, 1943, the Germans inside the Stalingrad Pocket—an oval measuring about forty-four miles from west to east and fourteen miles from north to south—had been
isolated from the outer world, except for some transport planes, for over six weeks. By December 24 all hope of being rescued by von Manstein's "Gruppe Hoth" had vanished.
It was during the first fortnight of January that, with a small group of other
correspondents, I was able to travel along that fantastic railway east of the Volga which had been for months the only lifeline for the Russian troops defending Stalingrad. It was along this line, too, that troops, equipment and supplies had been taken in October and November to the area south of Stalingrad, whence Yeremenko had struck out on
November 20.
Leaving Moscow on the morning of Monday, January 3, 1943, we travelled in an old-
fashioned, pre-revolution sleeping car attached to the Moscow-Saratov express. The
candlesticks were still inscribed "Compagnie Internationale de Wagon-Lits", and the washstand had beside it a brass plate saying, first in pre-revolutionary Russian spelling, and then in French: "Sous le lavabo se trouve un vase". Not that, in travelling in such relative luxury we were getting anything unheard of in the Soviet Union even in 1942-3; there were other people in the sleeping car—higher officials, "intellectuals" on some special mission, officers from the rank of colonel up, et cetera.
There was, of course, no dining car, and we had to do with "dry" rations, supplemented by the tea provided by the amiable old provodnik's samovar. The other carriages of the train were, however, "hard" third-class carriages, packed mostly with soldiers, and, with all
the windows shut, extremely hot, stuffy and smelly with that characteristically Russian blend of smells, leather boots, black bread, cabbage fumes and makhorka tobacco.
It was foggy and thawing the day we left Moscow, and icicles were dripping outside the carriage window. We passed Kashira, with its burned-out houses, remnants of the
German advance on Moscow a year before—grim days which now seemed very far
away. Since the Stalingrad encirclement one now felt that nothing like that could ever happen again...
The next morning we reached Tambov and in the afternoon, Kirsanov. The station
platform was crowded. Just outside it was a big open-air kolkhoz market. It worked mostly on a barter basis. Butter cost here a third of the Moscow price, but most of the eggs and butter were bought with tobacco or soap... There were crowds of young soldiers on the platform, some carrying whole bundles of brand-new rifles. Many were about
eighteen, and seemed to be leaving home for the first time; on the platform were also crowds of elderly and old women, many of them crying, and a few making the sign of the Cross as they kissed the boys good-bye. The boys pretended to be quite unperturbed, and argued vigorously with the woman guard in the next carriage who claimed vociferously that it was full up. They squeezed in all the same...
At Saratov the next morning it was sunny and very cold, minus 25 °C. and with deep
snow. Saratov, with its handsome wide avenues, looked unusually prosperous. Numerous leading educational establishments had been evacuated here from Moscow, Leningrad
and other places, and the city had been nicknamed "Professaratov"... Theatres (including an opera house) and several cinemas were going strong. We had a large meal at the
Railwaymen's Club...
That night our carriage was joined on to a goods train. It had grown dark by now, and there was just enough light to see an immense number of trains of every kind at and
around Saratov Station, and to realise its importance as a railway junction... We crossed the great bridge across the Volga, and then travelled through what the maps called
"Autonomous German Volga ASSR", and it seemed clear now why the Soviet