As the German offensives stumbled to a halt, radical changes in leadership came about. On September 10 Hitler relieved List, because his army group had not captured the whole Caucasus. He did not name a successor, and commanded the army group himself in his spare time from supreme headquarters.
Hitler’s long conflict with Halder came to a head. Hitler reproached Halder and the army general staff, calling them cowards and lacking drive. When Halder presented proof of new Soviet formations totaling 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad and half a million in the southern Caucasus, Hitler advanced on him, foaming at the mouth, crying out that he forbade such “idiotic chatter” in his presence.
Halder, who looked and acted like a prim schoolmaster, persisted in explaining what would happen when the new Russian reserve armies attacked the overextended flanks that ran out from the Stalingrad salient. On September 24, Hitler dismissed him.
Hitler said arguments with Halder had cost him half his nervous energy. The army, he said, no longer required technical proficiency. What was needed was the “glow of National Socialist conviction.” He couldn’t expect that from officers of the old German army.
The new chief of staff was Lieutenant General Kurt Zeitzler, a tank expert and man of action. Zeitzler soon took note of the cliques and intrigue in Hitler’s headquarters, became excessively cautious, and did nothing to challenge Hitler’s decision to keep 6th Army at Stalingrad.
Yet, as Field Marshal Manstein wrote: “A far-sighted leader would have realized from the start that to mass the whole of the German assault forces in and around Stalingrad without adequate flank protection placed them in mortal danger of being enveloped as soon as the enemy broke through the adjacent fronts.”
Hitler held stubbornly to the idea that had become fixed in his mind: the enemy was shattered, and would not rise again. He accepted no evidence to the contrary, and he was ready to sack any officer who did not obtain objectives, however unrealistic, or who wanted to pull back to more defensible positions.
Stalingrad had virtually been destroyed. The Germans had gained eight-tenths of the rubble but couldn’t oust the Russians from the rest.
The principal problem, of course, was the flanks. General Hoth had at his disposal on the south two widely spaced corps of the Romanian 4th Army. Beyond the Romanians a 120-mile hole had opened in the Kalmuk steppe, only meagerly veiled by a German motorized division. To the west, the Romanian 3rd Army, Italian 8th Army, and Hungarian 2nd Army held a 400-mile front along the Don. None possessed antitank guns that could stop Russian T-34s.
The Russians had assembled a million men with 13,500 cannons, 900 tanks, and 1,100 aircraft in three army groups or fronts on either side of Stalingrad.
In thick fog on November 19, 1942, Southwest Front commander N. F. Vatutin launched the first arm of a giant pincers movement (Operation Uranus) some eighty miles west of Stalingrad at Kletskaya and Kremensk on the Don. The target was the Romanian 3rd Army. Soviet artillery had previously registered targets, and guns laid down a curtain of shells on the unsuspecting Romanians. Soviet tanks used compasses to guide them. The Romanians stood up to the assault only briefly before they ran away. A giant hole twenty miles wide opened in the German front. Soviet tanks streamed south toward Kalach.
The next day Stalingrad Front commander Eremenko smashed a broad fissure in the Romanian 4th Army south of Stalingrad. This army disintegrated as well. With virtually no opposition, the Russian attack wedge swung to the northwest to link up with the Soviet advance from the Don.
If 6th Army had been given freedom of movement at once it might have broken out of the trap with its men and equipment intact. But Hitler had no intention of allowing the army to retreat, and, when Paulus asked permission to do so, Hitler refused.
On November 22 the Soviet 26th and 4th Tank Corps closed the back of the pincers around Kalach. With this, 250,000 men in twenty German and two Romanian divisions were closed within a pocket at Stalingrad measuring thirty miles east and west, and twenty-five miles north and south.
General Paulus asked for freedom of action, but Hitler refused. The army, Hitler commanded, had to curl up in a ball like a hedgehog. Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe, promised grandiloquently that the army would be supplied by air until a new battle group could be formed to break the caldron.
Senior Luftwaffe officers said it couldn’t be done, but Hitler listened to Göring, not the air generals.
As the Luftwaffe tried to organize an airlift, the Russians forged a double ring around 6th Army to hinder a breakthrough from either inside or out. They posted 395 antiaircraft guns along the Luftwaffe line of flight and sent in 490 fighters to shoot down the transports.
The daily needs of 6th Army totaled 700 tons. Colonel Fritz Morzik, Luftwaffe air transport chief, said that in the best of circumstances he could fly in 350 tons. The entire Luftwaffe, he pointed out, possessed only 750 Ju-52 cargo aircraft, and there was enormous demand for them elsewhere. Though the air officers pulled additional air freight assets together, along with airplanes from flight schools, they could assemble only about 500 machines, of which on average only a third were ready for operations on any given day. Weather was atrocious, and this reduced deliveries. Göring had ordered at least 300 tons to be flown in every day. But from November 25 to 29 6th Army received 269 tons total, and from November 30 to December 11 only 1,267 tons.
Ammunition supplies dropped, fuel became scarce, and the men of 6th Army began to starve.
Meanwhile the Soviet army group Voronezh Front under F. I. Golikov on the north opposite the Italian 8th Army prepared for another—even more dangerous—enveloping movement. Hitler, ignoring the threat, handed Manstein the task of relieving 6th Army.
15 MANSTEIN SAVES THE ARMY
WITH STALINGRAD SURROUNDED, AND TWO ROMANIAN ARMIES VIRTUALLY EXTINGUISHED, it was apparent to senior officers on both sides that a war-winning victory lay within reach of the Russians.
Only 150 miles separated Rostov and a flimsy new defensive line Manstein formed along the Chir River, a hundred miles west of Stalingrad. Yet the left wing of Army Group A lay deep in the Caucasus 375 miles from Rostov, while 4th Panzer Army, south of Stalingrad, was 250 miles from Rostov.
If the Russians could crash through to Rostov, they could cut off the remainder of Army Group B, the scratch forces Manstein was throwing together in his new Army Group Don, and the two armies of Army Group A in the Caucasus—in other words, all German forces on the southern wing.
If the southern German flank were eliminated, the remaining German forces in the east would be too weak to fend off the Red Army, and Germany would lose the war in months, if not weeks.
The Red Army was planning to unleash this strategic thunderbolt and had selected a vulnerable point of attack: the Italian 8th Army on the Don just northwest of the Chir.
Manstein formed an emergency defense line with communications zone troops in Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army around Kotelnikovo, eighty miles southwest of Stalingrad, closing a void where the Romanian 4th Army had vanished.
Although worried about a Russian strike for Rostov, Manstein’s foremost task was to liberate 6th Army. Unless this army was freed, there was no hope of restoring the situation on the southern wing. If the army remained at Stalingrad, it would die. Any relief operation had to break open a path for 6th Army to come out, not to reestablish a supply line to it. Surely, Manstein told himself, Hitler would see the light when the time came and allow the army to withdraw.
There were two possible escape routes. The closest was straight west to Kalach. Here, however, the Russians were massed and would contest every inch. There was a slightly better chance to break through around Kotelnikovo and drive northeast toward Stalingrad.
Once a relief operation started from Kotelnikovo, pressure on 6th Army would ease, because the Red Army would have to challenge the relief forces. When this happened, Manstein reasoned, German elements on the Chir could strike toward Kalach, smash into the rear of the Soviet siege ring th
ere, and facilitate 6th Army’s breakout.
But time was of the essence. Army chief of staff Zeitzler agreed to send 57th Panzer Corps under Friedrich Kirchner (23rd and 6th Panzer Divisions, and 15th Luftwaffe Field Division) to 4th Panzer Army to spearhead the relief drive from Kotelnikovo, and eight divisions in a new Army Detachment Hollidt (General Karl Adolf Hollidt) to advance from the upper Chir. These forces were to arrive in the first days of December.
They might be enough, if they came in time, to cut a corridor to 6th Army, replenish it with fuel, ammunition, and food, restore its freedom of movement, and get it out. Manstein so informed the Fuehrer on November 28.
“I told Hitler,” Manstein wrote later, “it was strategically impossible to go on tying down our forces in an excessively small area while the enemy enjoyed a free hand along hundreds of miles of front.”
It was December 3 before Hitler even replied, and he refused to allow 6th Army to switch troops from its northern flank to the southwest to prepare for the relief force. Manstein did not realize that Hitler had not the slightest intention of evacuating 6th Army from Stalingrad.
Most of the reinforcements did not arrive on time. Of the eight divisions for Army Group Hollidt, three didn’t appear at all, one of the panzer divisions was so shot up as to be useless, and one Luftwaffe Field Division arrived too late. All that came in time for Hollidt was the 48th Panzer Corps under Otto von Knobelsdorff with the 11th Panzer and the 336th Infantry Division, and a Luftwaffe Field Division. For Hoth, only the 57th Panzer Corps arrived.
With so few troops, Manstein gave up the idea of relieving 6th Army from two directions. Everything now depended upon a direct strike (code-named Winter Tempest) by 4th Panzer Army from Kotelnikovo.
Because of delays in the arrival of 57th Panzer Corps, Manstein had to postpone the strike to December 12. Meantime, a dangerous threat appeared on the Chir front. On December 7, the Russian 1st Armored Corps forced its way over the river near Surovikino, twenty miles upstream (northwest) from the Chir’s junction with the Don at Nizhna Chirskaya. The Russians swept toward State Farm 79 fifteen miles in the rear. General Knobelsdorff had lined his 336th Infantry Division along the river on the right or east, and the Luftwaffe Field Division on the left.
The situation was grim. A Soviet breakthrough on the Chir would unhinge the drive toward Stalingrad, clear the way to the Morosovsky and Tatsinskaya airfields only twenty-five and fifty miles away, from which supplies were being flown to Stalingrad, and open a path to crossings of the Donetz River and Rostov.
Hermann Balck’s 11th Panzer Division checked the Russian advance at the state farm. While his antiaircraft guns and his engineers formed up below the farm to prevent the Russians moving south, one panzer grenadier (motorized infantry) regiment delivered an attack on the farm from the southwest at dawn on December 8. Once the Russians were locked in this engagement, Balck’s panzer regiment and his second panzer grenadier regiment thrust into the rear of the Russians from a low ridge northwest of the farm.
This rear attack caught the Russians just as they were about to advance northward against the rear of 336th Division. Truck after truck loaded with infantry went up in flames as the panzers charged through the column. The tanks destroyed this force, then turned into the rear of the Russian armor at the state farm, knocking out fifty-three tanks and sending the remainder fleeing.
Over the next four days, Balck’s panzer division, using the 336th Division as a pivot, turned back two simultaneous assaults by the Russian 5th Tank Army, one half a dozen miles northwest of Nizhna Chirskaya, the other fifteen miles upstream. On December 17 and 18 two new violent attacks broke across the Chir. The 11th Panzer drove one back to a narrow foothold, then turned on the other. The division had only twenty-five tanks left, but got on the rear of the advancing Russian armor and destroyed sixty-five enemy tanks before the Russians woke up to what was happening. The remaining Russians fled. Over the next few days, new Russian attacks convulsed the Chir front, but 11th Panzer, acting like a fire brigade, broke the back of one breakthrough after another, and by December 22 the Soviets had given up.
Part of the reason for the German success was the expertise and discipline of the panzer troops. Part was due to the Russian tank crews, who had scarcely any training. Likewise, the Russian commander sent in tank corps (groups of brigades about the size of divisions) without coordinating times of attacks, permitting Balck’s panzers to deal with one crisis at a time.
While these fights were going on, Manstein launched Operation Winter Tempest, using only 57th Panzer Corps. His attack surprised the enemy, and made good progress, although the Russians brought up troops from around Stalingrad and counterattacked again and again.
The real threat now came in a massive way and from a new direction. On December 16, 1942, the Russian 1st Guards Army overran the Italian 8th Army on the upper Chir, and knocked a sixty-mile hole in the line to the left or northwest of Army Detachment Hollidt. It was obvious the objective was Rostov and a far greater “Stalingrad.” Manstein ordered Army Detachment Hollidt to pull back on a shorter front to guard the Donetz crossings of Forchstadt and Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, only eighty-five miles northeast of Rostov.
But Manstein held doggedly to his advance on Stalingrad, calling on the army high command (OKH) to order 6th Army to break out toward 4th Panzer Army.
There was still hope. The strike against the Italians had drawn off most Soviet mobile formations, leaving a narrow window of opportunity at Stalingrad. If 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army attacked toward each other, they could crack through the defensive shell and meet. However, they had to use every ounce of their collective strength.
But Hitler refused to sanction a breakout. Incredibly, he ruled that 4th Panzer Army was to continue to attack toward the city, but 6th Army was to remain in place. Hitler wanted to hang on to Stalingrad and supply it by a land corridor.
In desperation, Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the caldron on December 18 to get General Paulus to defy Hitler and save the army. Manstein promised to put the onus entirely on his own shoulders, relieving Paulus of responsibility. Paulus replied that he couldn’t do anything because the surrender of Stalingrad was forbidden “by order of the Fuehrer.”
Manstein hoped he would change his mind. The critical moment came on December 19. The 57th Panzer Corps crossed the Aksai River, against bitter Russian resistance, and reached the narrow Miskova River, just thirty miles from the siege front. Behind the front Manstein had assembled transport columns with 3,000 tons of supplies, plus tractors to mobilize part of 6th Army’s artillery. All were to be rushed through as soon as tanks cleared a way. Manstein sent an urgent appeal to Paulus and Hitler: 6th Army must disengage and drive southwest to join 4th Panzer Army.
Hitler took hours to reply: 6th Army could break out, he said, but it still had to hold existing fronts north, east, and west of the city. This was manifestly impossible. Paulus now showed his moral cowardice. He informed Manstein that his one hundred tanks had enough fuel to go only twenty miles. Before he could move, air deliveries had to bring in 4,000 tons of fuel. There was no possibility of this, and Paulus knew it.
Drawn between Hitler demanding he stay and Manstein demanding he move, Paulus clutched at the straw of fuel to do nothing. Not even to save his army was Paulus going to buck his Fuehrer. Yet he and Manstein knew that the fuel could have been allocated to half his tanks, giving them mobility for forty miles—enough to break through.
In the week that followed, the fate of 6th Army was decided. For six days Army Group Don had run every conceivable risk to keep the door open. But Manstein could leave 4th Panzer Army in its exposed position no longer.
The panzer corps was having to fend off stronger and stronger attacks, and a greater danger was growing to the west where most of the Italian army had disappeared and Army Detachment Hollidt’s left flank was being threatened. Russian spearheads were driving toward the Donetz River and were not more than 120 miles from Rostov.
> On December 22, Manstein was forced to release 48th Corps from the Chir to restore Army Detachment Hollidt’s left wing, and he had to send 6th Panzer Division from Hoth’s army to help. Manstein knew there was now no chance of 6th Army breaking out. On December 27, two Soviet armies and four mechanized corps launched a major assault against the weakened 57th Panzer Corps, now down to only a couple dozen tanks, threatened to envelop both flanks, and compelled it to withdraw to Kotelnikovo. The attempt to relieve Stalingrad had failed.
It was now plain that 6th Army was going to die. Adolf Hitler had caused it. But while the senior German generals grieved the fate of the army, most were frantically trying to figure how to block the Soviet thrust toward Rostov.
At this nadir of German fortune, Erich von Manstein saw opportunity where the rest of the senior German officers saw disaster.
Manstein conceived a spectacular plan to transform defeat into victory. He proposed that the German army surrender the territory it had won in the summer, which it couldn’t hold anyway, and that all forces on the southern front, except 6th Army, of course, withdraw in stages to the lower Dnieper, some 220 miles west of Rostov.
Manstein was certain when withdrawal commenced that the Russians would launch an offensive aimed at cutting the Germans off from the vital Dnieper crossings at Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye where all supplies came through. This would create a vastly extended Russian front stretching across lower Ukraine.
Manstein proposed that a powerful German force be concentrated near Kharkov, 250 miles northwest of Rostov and 125 miles northeast of Dnepropetrovsk. When the Soviets extended themselves westward toward the Dnieper crossings, the German forces around Kharkov would drive into their northern flank. As Manstein told Hitler and the OKH, this would “convert a large-scale withdrawal into an envelopment operation” that would push the Russians against the Sea of Azov and destroy them.
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 18
