Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  Caption

  Map 6 Operation Uranus, November–December 1943

  Paulus with sixty divisions and 1,000 tanks. A strong defensive perimeter was established facing east and west. When Manstein's Don Army Group finally assailed the circle on December 12, in driving rain and sleet, his prospects were poor. German forces hit hard against fierce resistance. At one point they advanced forty miles towards Stalingrad . In a state of confusion and in atrocious weather a Soviet counter-thrust was organized with reserve armoured divisions. On December 24 Manstein's relief column was itself threatened with encirclement. It was hastily withdrawn, and Paulus was left to his fate.

  The Soviet plan had been well prepared. There was scant possibility of Paulus fighting his way out of Stalingrad. Short of vehicles, ammunition and fuel, constantly subjected to air attack, the 6th Army was still capable of fighting but not of moving very far. Manstein's counter-stroke caught the Red Army off guard, but the skilful redeployment of reserves and the considerable numerical superiority favoured the Soviet side. For the first time Stalin's military machine had been able to prepare and execute a large-scale operation involving millions of men and hold it together under the fog of war. Stalin became eager for more. This time his staff had thought ahead. Two new operations were on the table. The first, Operation Saturn, was a more ambitious plan to cave in the German southern front and recapture Rostov, cutting off German forces in the Caucasus. The second was the operation to annihilate the encircled German armies at Stalingrad, Operation Koltso, or Ring. The first had mixed success. Substantial German forces managed to escape capture in the Caucasus by fighting their way through a narrow corridor along the Black Sea coast. The German front was rolled back across the Donbas industrial region towards the Dnepr River. Once Zhukov had provided the trigger, Stalin returned to his old habits of command, pushing his armies on beyond what they could realistically achieve. By March Manstein had not only stabilized the German front in the south but could undertake limited counter-offensives against exhausted Soviet troops. Once again Stalin had overplayed his hand.

  Further to the east there was a battle still to be won. The German 6th Army, with remnants of Italian and Romanian forces and part of the 4th Panzer Army, was bottled up in the Stalingrad pocket, but it was not yet beaten. Though prospects of rescue were remote, German forces continued to fight, if for no other reason than Hitler's insistence that they should not surrender. The pocket was a large one. German forces occupied an area of steppe in front of the city, around which they threw a defensive cordon, a circle of guns and tanks to keep the enemy at bay. There were still three operational airfields, to which a trickle of supplies was brought in by the slow transport aircraft of the Luftwaffe. German air power over Stalingrad evaporated. A new generation of high-performance Soviet fighters enacted a grim toll. Losses amounted to 488 transports and over 1,000 crewmen. Wounded soldiers were flown out of the pocket, but hundreds of them died in air crashes. The supply operation was a failure. Instead of the promised 500 tons a day, the average was less than 100, and it fell even lower during the poor weather of December and January.50 Paulus was left to fight with what he had.

  General Friedrich Paulus was not the stuff of military legend. A bourgeois officer in an army still dominated by Germany's military gentry, he made his reputation as an able organizer and staff officer. He took control of the 6th Army only because of the sudden death of its flamboyant and tough commander, Walther von Reichenau, in January 1942. He was Reichenau's opposite: a quiet, subdued, unassertive individual who never lost his temper or became overexcited, loved Beethoven and hated the boorish side of military life. He was fastidious, even fussy, about his personal appearance. A fellow officer recalled a man ‘well-groomed and with slender hands, always beautifully turned out with a gleaming white collar and immaculately polished field boots’. Stalingrad was the last place on earth for the tidy and the timid. Paulus could not bring himself to disobey Hitler, and his leadership was a poor example to his men. He was remembered as ‘tired and listless’, prone to bouts of debilitating illness, devoured by an unspoken bitterness at the role fate had assigned him.51

  It was now the turn of German soldiers to suffer. They were subjected to an endless bombardment from guns, rockets and aircraft. They were short of ammunition and spares. They fought in temperatures which by January were as low as minus thirty degrees. To keep warm they wrapped torn shreds of material around their feet and legs, and covered their shoulders with anything that came to hand. Military standards gave way to a crude instinct for survival. One veteran recalled that in the icy atmosphere the German soldiers were overcome by feelings ‘of the bitterest disillusionment, hidden terror and mounting despair’.52 Food rations were cut to a minimum: two ounces of bread and half an ounce of sugar a day. Occasionally there was horsemeat. The lucky ones caught cats or rats. Rumours of cannibalism persist.

  It was not until late December that Zhukov and Stalin turned back to the Stalingrad cauldron. They believed that only 80,000 poorly supplied soldiers and non-combatants were sealed up in the ring and that they would probably surrender once the option was given to them. In case they did not, a force of forty-seven divisions was drawn up around the perimeter, reinforced with 300 aircraft and 179 tanks.53 It took time to divert the necessary supplies, and to Stalin's irritation the attack could not begin until January 10. Two days earlier Paulus was given the option of capitulation. Two Soviet officers, accompanied by a bugler and carrying a red flag, approached German lines. Firing started, and they beat a hasty retreat. They came back, and this time were conducted blindfolded to meet senior officers. The surrender terms were dismissed out of hand.54 The following day the heaviest artillery barrage of the war heralded the final struggle for Stalingrad.

  German troops fought a final desperate contest, against the Soviet enemy, against the cold, against hunger and fear. They were condemned men. They were forced to fight and die rather than surrender, but there was little to fight for except to postpone death. Under the terrible bombardment the snow-clad cauldron turned from white to black and grey. In three days Soviet forces cleared the grasslands in front of the city, then resistance stiffened. It became clear from the interrogation of German prisoners that not 80,000 but more than 250,000 troops were now ensnared. Instead of a few days, Operation Ring took three weeks. By January 17 the pocket was reduced to half its original size. Paulus was again invited to give up. Without instructions from Hitler he again refused. His men were pressed back into the city itself, where they fought with methods they had learned from Chuikov's troops.

  On January 22 the Soviet forces regrouped for the final push into the city, while Chuikov's 62nd Army, still fighting an increasingly pointless battle of its own, pressed from the river towards the German positions. Some German troops began to surrender of their own accord, since surrendering could be no worse than death. But others killed their wounded as they retreated rather than let them fall into enemy hands. At Gumrak, the last airfield in German hands, the final flights to safety provoked a frantic and unseemly scramble for a seat. Officers tried to bribe their way onto the planes. The Red Army isolated and reduced one section of the city at a time.55 By January 26 the vanguard had established contact with the 62nd Army by the Barricades Factory. The men of both forces embraced, in tears. The last Soviet push took them to Heroes of the Revolution Square. Paulus had so far eluded efforts to capture him, but interrogators knew from the conversations of captured officers that he was still somewhere in the centre of the city. On January 31 it was learned that he was in the Univermag building on one side of the conquered square.

  The building was shelled and flame-throwers were brought up. A German staff officer emerged from the entrance and signalled to a young Soviet officer, Lieutenant Fyodor Yelchenko. With two other soldiers, Yelchenko followed the German inside. In the basement he found hundreds of German soldiers, dirty, reeking, fearful. Here Yelchenko agreed to the terms of German surrender, not with Paulus, but with his staff.
Finally he made his way into a room at the back of the headquarters and found Paulus lying on a bed, unshaven and sour. Yelchenko later remembered saying, ‘Well, that finishes it.’ Paulus gave him ‘a miserable look' and nodded assent. A little while later a car was brought up, and Paulus was rushed away to the headquarters of Rokossovsky's Don Front.56

  To the north a fanatical resistance was kept up until February 2, but after that the city was still. News of the surrender shocked Hitler. On January 30 he had promoted Paulus to Field Marshal to stiffen his spine. The same day Goering issued a communiqué to the battling forces: ‘Stalingrad will remain the greatest heroic struggle of our history… fighting to the very last.’57 On February 1 Hitler raged in his headquarters against Paulus's betrayal: ‘In peacetime in Germany, about 18,000 or 20,000 people a year chose to commit suicide, even without being in such a position. Here is a man who sees 50,000 or 60,000 of his soldiers die defending themselves bravely to the end. How can he surrender himself to the Bolshevists!’58 The mood of despondency was evident throughout the Reich. The following day German radio repeatedly played Siegfried's Funeral March from Wagner's Götterdämmerung.

  On the Soviet side Stalingrad was greeted as a turning point in the war. ‘Up till then one believed in victory as an act of faith,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘but now there was no shadow of doubt: victory was assured.’ The mood in Russia was not ‘noisily exultant’, observed a war correspondent, but displayed a feeling of ‘deep national pride’.59 A high price was paid for the victory. The Red Army had lost another half million men in the struggle.60 The people of Stalingrad, who began to filter slowly back into the city to search for belongings or shelter, lost almost everything. Yet for the first time German losses were also catastrophic: 147,000 dead and 91,000 taken prisoner. German forces lost their reputation for invincibility. There was, according to General Malinovsky, who led the defeat of Manstein's relief column in December, ‘far more drive and punch in our troops than there used to be’.61 The moral contrast between the two sides was as significant as the material victory.

  In the days after the battle the strangest thing about the city was its silence. Fresh snow covered the ruins. The frozen carnage was grimly visible here and there. German stragglers were rounded up from the cellars and Soviet soldiers searched for snipers and booby traps. Most of the remaining Germans were too weak or ill to move. The prisoners who could walk were marched to the rear, to be fed and clothed. A few days after the end of the battle a primitive war memorial was raised on one of the cliffs overlooking the city, its foundations dug out by German prisoners. In Moscow Zhukov and five other generals were awarded the Order of Suvorov, 1st Class. Stalin made himself Marshal of the Soviet Union, his first military rank. From then on he wore his new uniform in public in place of the familiar plain tunic.

  7

  The Citadel:

  Kursk, 1943

  To a distant land is our comrade now departing, His native winds a sad farewell are piping, His beloved town, his home, his lover's tender gaze, Vanish with his native fields in a deep blue haze.

  Popular wartime song

  The German defeat at Stalingrad soon passed into legend. The Soviet soldiers who found themselves packed into airless boxcars deep inside Russia, in an atmosphere laden with the familiar smells of Russian life – black bread and cabbage, leather and coarse tobacco – had poured into the Stalingrad front with evident trepidation. But after the victory it became a status symbol to have fought at Stalingrad (and survived). The stories of heroic resistance were embellished; memories of the initial panic were officially suppressed. It has remained in the modern memory unique among the battles of the Second World War. It was a victory necessary for the self-belief of ordinary Russians; it was a victory necessary for the Allies at a critical juncture in the war. Stalingrad symbolized the change in Soviet fortunes.

  Yet the battle was not decisive. The Stalingrad victory was won in harsh winter conditions, against an overstretched and demoralized enemy, many of whose troops were drawn from Germany's weaker allies. This is not to diminish the extent of the victory, for it showed not only the raw fighting power of the Soviet soldier when effectively employed, but the ability of the Red Army to organize large and complex operations against the world's most effective armed forces. (It is difficult to imagine British or American forces in 1942 winning the battle around Stalingrad.) Soviet strengths – as well as German weaknesses – explain the outcome at Stalingrad. But the Red Army faced a still formidable enemy. The counter-offensives in March 1943 around Kharkov were a timely reminder that though the German army had lost a battle it had not yet lost the war. German forces were still deep in Soviet territory. They remained unbeaten in summer campaigning weather, when the German brand of well-organized, concentrated, mobile warfare was most deadly.

  The eventual victory of Soviet arms in 1943 and 1944 has usually been portrayed as a result of the Soviet Union's overwhelming resources, of what one German general later described as ‘the gigantic Russian superiority of men and material’.1 More commonly German defeat has been interpreted as a result of German errors – Hitler's poor strategic grasp, sloppy intelligence, logistical overstretch and so on. Neither interpretation does justice to the historical reality. In the decisive battles from Stalingrad to the autumn of 1943 the numerical imbalance was much less marked than it was to become in the final stages of German defeat. German forces were not overwhelmed by sheer numbers, like some wagon train ambushed by Indians, nor did the Red Army win simply because its enemy declined. The operational experience and technological assets at the disposal of German forces in 1943 rendered their fighting power more remarkable than it had been in 1940. Soviet victory came as the result of a profound transformation of the way the Red Army made war.2

  The transformation began at the top. At the height of the war, with Germany perilously close to seizing the whole of southern Russia, Stalin at last confronted his own inadequacy as Supreme Commander. Zhukov's appointment as his deputy signalled the dictator's gradual abdication from the role of military supremo that he had played since June 1941. The appointment marked one of the critical turning points of the Soviet war effort, not because of the qualities of leadership that Zhukov had already displayed, but because it symbolized yet another revolution in the relationship between the politicians and the army. The reassertion of political influence following the purges, renewed again in the disastrous summer of 1941, was reversed in 1942. Lev Mekhlis, the incompetent and vindictive head of the Main Political Administration of the Armed Forces, was removed from office in June and confined to propaganda activities. On October 9 political commissars were abolished in all smaller military units, and even at the level of fronts and armies the right of the political representative to interfere in purely military decisions was much reduced. In October their counter-signature on operational orders was no longer required, and in December they became assistants to the commander. During 1943 122,000 former political officials were drafted to the front as junior officers, where they learned the lessons of military command the hard way. The officer corps was encouraged to take initiatives and to assume responsibility. For many this was an unaccustomed opportunity, and they responded to it slowly. Self-reliance and flexibility in command did not spring up overnight. As if to demonstrate that the Supreme Commander was in earnest about the change, the term ‘officer’, rather than the familiar ‘comrade’, was used more widely. Officers once again were permitted to wear the trappings of the old imperial army, the gold braid and shoulder boards that revolutionary crowds had torn off in 1917. Divisions that distinguished themselves in combat were given the Tsarist designation of ‘Guards’.3 The planning and running of the war effort, from operations to communications and supply, was increasingly handled by the General Staff rather than the larger Military Council, on which the politicians also sat. Stalin still insisted on being informed about the decisions made by the staff. In the mornings he telephoned the chief of operations for a detailed survey of
the front, whose intricacies he knew perfectly; in the evening around eleven o'clock the chief of staff, or his deputy, would come to the Kremlin to make a detailed report, which could last well into the night. The difference lay in Stalin's attitude. He seldom interrupted the reports. He allowed the staff to suggest operations; he came to insist that front commanders should be consulted for their views first. The soldiers slowly overcame their natural caution and began to argue openly with Stalin. It was discovered that Stalin could tolerate dissent, if forcibly and sensibly expressed. He liked to be told the truth, however unpalatable. He took advice and bowed to others' judgement.4

  The experts Stalin surrounded himself with were men of exceptional character, promoted in the heat of battle on merit. Their capability allowed Stalin to shift the responsibility downward; their success ensured their survival. The appointment of General Aleksandr Vasilevsky as chief of staff in July 1942 set the pattern. A veteran of the First World War and the civil war, Vasilevsky was one of that younger generation of officers which survived the purges. He was a model staff officer. He was picked out by Stalin as a man able to give quick, accurate accounts of the tide of battle, and he spent much of the early part of the war touring from front to front, often under fire, reporting to Moscow the true state of affairs. He had the gift of a natural commander: he could grasp the battlefront as a whole and its likely course of development, but he was alive also to the many hundreds of details that can turn a battle. He developed clear views of his own on each major operation, but he was willing to listen patiently and deliberately to others, and arrive at judgements that he stuck to resolutely and consistently. His ideas were communicated to Stalin with a tactful firmness in hundreds of evening meetings. From all accounts he was liked by the men who worked with him on the staff's gruelling eighteen-hour shifts.5