The Nazis- a Warning From History

by Laurence Rees

  Stalin would have admired Zinaida Pytkina’s ruthless attitude, and back in the autumn of 1942 he called for similar cold-blooded determination from the defenders of Stalingrad. But determination alone would not win the battle. During the Germans’ Operation Blue, the Red Army had demonstrated how they had mastered the art of retreating. Now they had to prove they could mount an effective attack. For the first time in the war the Red Army had to show that it understood how to prevail in a modern, mechanized war, and that they possessed tactical understanding as well as courage.

  The first real sign of that change occurred in early autumn 1942 in Moscow. Stalin was on the telephone, and Zhukov and Vasilevskii (who was made Deputy Commissar for Defence in 1942) were discussing the strategic alternatives facing the Red Army in the south. ‘Zhukov and Vasilevskii were talking to each other,’ says Makhmud Gareev, who was a close colleague of Zhukov’s, ‘and Zhukov said, “We have to look for a new solution,” and Stalin immediately overheard them, stopped speaking on the phone and asked: “Well, what solution do you mean?” Zhukov and Vasilevskii explained. Stalin said, “You’ve got a week to study the situation, but don’t involve any other Stavka members.”’

  That conversation led to the first major Soviet victory of the war – Operation Uranus. The plan was ambitious: to attack the Germans from the flanks and encircle the entire 6th Army. Both the conception and implementation of Operation Uranus demonstrated that the Red Army had changed its approach from the desperate days of Kharkov five months earlier. ‘They learnt from the Germans,’ says Makhmud Gareev. ‘They not only learnt from the Germans, but they learnt from their own mistakes.’ The Uranus plan was inspired not just by the huge, pincer-like encirclements the Germans had mounted in 1941, but harked back to the theory of mechanized ‘deep operations’ that innovative Red Army commanders had proposed in the early 1930s and which had subsequently been denounced. In accepting Zhukov and Vasilevskii’s thinking, Stalin demonstrated both his flexibility and his cynicism – who cared if Soviet officers had been persecuted for suggesting similar ideas in the past? Perhaps the plan would work now.

  The main thrust of the proposed Soviet attack would be not on the powerful German units of the 6th Army but on the Hungarian, Romanian and Italian soldiers who were stationed on the flanks. The Germans had been forced to use these armies from their Axis allies to fill in the gaps in their line – a situation that had arisen because Hitler had split his attacking force in two back in the summer.

  Many of Stalin’s previous operations had been distinguished by the ease with which the Germans had learnt of Soviet intentions, but Operation Uranus was different. This offensive was to become famous as the first example of the Soviet talent for military deception – maskirovka. Ivan Golokolenko was an officer in the 5th Tank Army who took part in Operation Uranus, and to start with even he and his comrades were deliberately misled about the true nature of the operation ahead. ‘On 20 October 1942 we received an order to prepare wood for the frosty winter to help Moscow with supplies,’ he says. His unit took the wood to a nearby train station only to discover that it wasn’t destined for Moscow at all, but was needed to camouflage their tanks which were being loaded on to railway trucks. ‘In the course of two or three days all three echelons travelled away – but no one knew in what direction we were finally going. We didn’t know our destination; even the commander of the brigade did not know, and the station masters along the route did not know either.

  ‘About 24 October we unloaded during the night at Kamulka station, north of Stalingrad. After that we travelled 55 kilometres without headlights. We travelled in complete darkness, very slowly, one car after another . . . I remember at one of the crossroads there was a group of generals standing nearby, and one of the truck drivers felt at a loss and by mistake turned his front headlights on. He heard some swearwords and then the strike of a stick against the headlights and the sound of cracking glass. Then you could hear voices saying, “Zhukov! Zhukov!”, and I could recognize Zhukov with the group of generals.’ It was Zhukov himself who had smashed the headlights on the truck. ‘He was there personally watching the progress of our convoys,’ says Golokolenko. ‘He was strict about camouflage and attached great importance to it. He would stop at nothing to achieve results . . . He was cruel and merciless with people who disobeyed orders. I think it was necessary during that war.’

  The concealment and deception of Operation Uranus went beyond merely denying the enemy knowledge of troop movements. Golokolenko’s unit was one of many ordered to build trenches and other defensive fortifications in the open, so as to give the German reconnaissance planes the impression that an offensive was not contemplated. Bridges that the Germans could actually see from the air were deliberately built many kilometres from the proposed area of offensive operation: ‘There were fake bridges as well as fake areas of troop concentration far from the direction of the attack. These bridges were built in order to distract the attention of the enemy from the direction of the main thrust.’ When it was necessary to construct genuine river bridges for the forthcoming advance they were camouflaged: ‘Some of the bridges were built as underwater bridges. They were built at a depth of 50 or 70 centimetres down in the water. From the air it was more difficult for the reconnaissance planes to spot the presence of such bridges.’

  While they waited for the order to attack, Golokolenko’s unit practised the coordination of infantry and tanks in offensive operations – incredibly, a task they had not undertaken before. They also trained to overcome one of their greatest fears – ‘tank phobia’: ‘We had to sit in trenches and tanks travelled over us, and we soldiers were supposed to stay in the trenches without fearing the oncoming tanks.’ The problem was a serious one: ‘As soon as tanks appeared, our infantry would run away. This was a real scare. I remember also this fear of encirclement. As soon as somebody said, “They’re about to encircle us!” this caused immediate panic.’

  The Red Army also prepared a form of Blitzkrieg offensive that mirrored the one used against them in 1941 by the Germans. ‘Previously tank units were used mainly as a support for infantry,’ says Golokolenko. ‘But this new idea was very different. At some narrow stretch of the front the defence would be broken and then through this narrow gap two tank corps would be introduced. The objective of the tank corps was to bypass the enemy’s fortified areas and points of resistance and go deeper and deeper to capture the really important points like bridges or city towers. Infantry was supposed to follow the progress of the tanks and clear up whatever was left – this was the new thing.’

  The Red Army also benefited from one of the most extraordinary and surprising achievements of the Soviet people during the war – their ability to out-produce the Germans in military hardware. The industrial facilities available to the Germans ought to have produced much more war material than a Soviet manufacturing base that had been disrupted by the invasion and the consequent need to relocate further east. Yet working in factories, often under appalling conditions, the Soviet workforce – half of whom were women by 1942 – utterly outperformed the Germans. In 1942, for example, they manufactured 25,000 aircraft – 10,000 more than the Germans managed to produce. And much of this military hardware (the later versions of the T34 tank in particular) was as good as or better than anything the Germans possessed.

  In readiness for Operation Uranus the Soviets managed to assemble, undetected, a force of more than a million men. A measure of their success at deceiving the Germans is given by the comment of Zeitzler, Hitler’s newly appointed Chief of the Army General Staff, on 23 October, less than four weeks before the launch of Uranus, that the Red Army were ‘in no position to mount a major offensive with any far-reaching objective’.3

  At six o’clock in the morning on 19 November, the day on which Operation Uranus was to be launched, Ivan Golokolenko’s unit knelt down before the banner of the brigade whilst an address from Stalin was read to them: ‘There was something fatherly, something parental about it. It said,
“Dear generals and soldiers, I address you my brothers. Today you start an offensive and your actions decide the fate of the country – whether it remains an independent country or perishes.” And those words really reached my heart. . . . I was close to tears when the meeting was over. I felt a real upsurge, a spiritual upsurge.’

  No one can know just how many Red Army soldiers reacted to Stalin’s message as Ivan Golokolenko did. One of the great unanswered questions of the war is whether Soviet citizens resisted the Germans out of fear of punishment if they didn’t, out of patriotism, out of love of Stalin or out of faith in Communism. The answer, almost certainly, is a mixture of all these reasons, with different motivations surfacing not just in different people but in the same person at different times. But those of us looking back today are almost certain to underestimate Stalin’s importance to the majority of the population of the Soviet Union. Given what we now know about Stalin’s terror, it is easy to overlook the extent to which he was a powerful – almost a vital – focal point during the war. Typical of the views of many Soviet veterans today is Anatoly Mereshko’s comment: ‘What people say now about Stalin killing millions of people – we didn’t know anything about it. And when we went into battle we shouted, “For Motherland! For Stalin!” Now we have no ideology. There are no slogans that would bring the people together, like “Everything for the Front! Everything for the Victory!” A lot of women and children worked at the factories with this motto. It wasn’t just hot air – it was based on people’s beliefs.’

  The artillery barrage that marked the start of Operation Uranus began at 7.30 a.m. on 19 November 1942. Just like the detailed training and deception that had preceded the operation, it too was conducted in a new way, and again in a Germanic style: ‘Previously artillery was used for 10 or 15 minutes’ shelling before the attack,’ says Golokolenko. ‘But now the big mass of the artillery – up to 500 artillery pieces – was relatively concentrated at a narrow stretch of the front, and all this mass was aiming at that narrow stretch of land with all its firepower.’

  Golokolenko rode in a truck with his men to the front line: ‘When I heard the artillery fire, it began to snow and the visibility got worse. Later that morning we heard the order to move forward. As soon as we reached the enemy’s front line of defence, we came under very powerful fire. One of our tanks exploded, then another, and yet another caught fire. The truck in which I was riding was hit in the radiator. My men dismounted and ran after the tanks. They advanced about 300 metres and the tanks stopped and the infantrymen lay down on the ground . . . I really felt horrible because in all my previous battles, like those near Leningrad, often when we started the offensive things began to go bad very quickly, and I was frightened that we would never learn to fight well, and so again when things went bad, when we began to fail, I also felt quite desperate and depressed.’

  But his unit was just unlucky – it faced a part of the enemy line that had been undamaged by the artillery fire. Elsewhere other units had made good progress, and soon Golokolenko’s brigade too was pushing on through the snow, advancing most often at night, further into German-held territory. The Romanians had been given the task of holding the flanks by the Germans, and their poor performance has been the subject of debate ever since. ‘I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the Romanians,’ says Golokolenko, ‘but they were less battle-ready than the Germans. The German Army was well trained and they were braver. Romanians didn’t have a real goal – what were they fighting for? You can’t say that we went on without facing the enemy’s resistance, but it was easier than it used to be. They didn’t seem to have prepared any defensive areas.’

  The main thrust of Operation Uranus was west of the River Don, more than 150 kilometres away from Paulus and Stalingrad to the north. Even if the Germans had responded quickly to the threat, it would have been hard for them to move their armour out to deal with the Soviet attack. But the Germans didn’t act swiftly. Paulus’s ability to react to the constantly increasing threat of encirclement was compromised by the necessity of consulting Hitler, who was taking time off from his headquarters in East Prussia and was staying at the Berghof in southern Bavaria. Those inadequate units that were sent by the Germans to counter the Soviet advance also had to deal with the snow and the consequent poor visibility. The previous German advantages of surprise and lightning attack were lost.

  In one of the legendary Soviet feats of the war, Lieutenant-Colonel Filippov and his men drove brazenly straight into the German-held town of Kalach with their lights turned off, and then, when they reached the bridge across the Don near the centre of the town, suddenly opened fire. This one dramatic action came to epitomize for the Red Army how far they had come, not just courageously but tactically as well. They had beaten the Germans and their Axis allies not because of superior numbers, but because of superior thinking. On 23 November units of the Red Army met up near Kalach and completed the encirclement of the German 6th Army. ‘We felt inspiration,’ says Ivan Golokolenko. ‘We felt confidence that we were capable of beating the enemy successfully, and this operation remained the most memorable – the brightest – event. I remember I felt as if I had wings, I felt as if I was flying. Before that I used to feel depressed, but now it was as if I opened my wings and I was capable of flying in the sky.’

  Even though they knew they were encircled, many soldiers of the 6th Army refused to accept that they were in danger. The Red Army, they believed, was composed of inferior people, badly armed and worse trained. Moreover the Führer would not, could not, let them down. The last vestiges of the overweening confidence that had created the Barbarossa plan in the first place had still not disappeared. ‘Stalingrad was surrounded,’ says Bernhard Bechler, a German officer caught within the encirclement. ‘But even then I believed that the Führer would not give us up; that he wouldn’t sacrifice the 6th Army, that he would get the 6th Army out of there.’ This faith in Hitler during the early stages of the encirclement was voiced by many surviving Stalingrad veterans. ‘Everybody thought, well, this can’t really last long,’ says Gerhard Münch. ‘It’ll only last a few days – we thought this was a temporary situation.’

  Hitler, no doubt influenced by his belief that his own ‘will’ had prevented a collapse in front of Moscow a year earlier, ordered Paulus to stay where he was and make no attempt to break out of the pocket. Göring, anxious as ever to curry favour with the Führer, boastfully promised that his Luftwaffe would supply the 6th Army by an ‘air bridge’. There was a precedent; earlier in 1942, at Demyansk, German planes had successfully air-dropped supplies to troops surrounded by the Red Army – although the Demyansk operation was on nothing like the scale of the one proposed to keep the 6th Army functioning as an effective fighting force. Simultaneously, Field Marshal von Manstein was ordered to attack from the south-west of the front to cut a relief corridor through the Soviet encirclement and relieve Paulus. His Operation Winter Tempest began on 12 December 1942 and pushed on through the snow and sleet into the Soviet ring around Stalingrad.

  When the men of the 6th Army learnt of the rescue attempt, they thought it concrete proof of the Führer’s commitment to them. ‘Allegedly Manstein was approaching,’ says Bernhard Bechler. ‘They kept telling us this story and sometimes people even imagined: “We’ve heard the roar of the guns of Manstein’s army today – he must be near!” Suddenly these ideas were cropping up, although it wasn’t true, but it was fear of the future that made people imagine these things.’

  The Soviets had placed 60 divisions inside their ring around Stalingrad and Manstein’s task was hopeless. On 19 December, the 57th Panzer Division reached the River Mishov 50 kilometres from Stalingrad – it was as near as the German relief force was ever to get. On Christmas Eve Manstein’s own force was threatened with encirclement by the Soviet troops and withdrew.

  As 1942 drew to a close it was also clear that the ambitious air bridge promised by Göring could provide but a fraction of the supplies needed within Stalingrad. Those German
planes that did manage to get through often dropped their load on the Soviet positions because of wind conditions or a change in the position of the front line. Day by day, as conditions worsened for the 6th Army, their faith in the Führer’s power to rescue them began to disintegrate.

  ‘If you haven’t experienced it yourself,’ says Bernhard Bechler, ‘you won’t know how cruel it was. When I lay down and stuck my hand under the collar, my hand would be full of lice. And the lice carried typhus . . . We had nothing to eat. There were some frozen horses and we took an axe and chopped some meat and heated it up in a pot just to have something to eat. We were just lying there, without any food, almost frozen to death, it was dreadful . . . Just imagine the scene: steppe, everything frozen, sub-zero temperatures of minus 20 or 30 degrees, masses of snow. We were lying in dugouts in the snow . . . German soldiers were lying on the ground and German tanks ran over these soldiers because they were no longer able to get up and make themselves known. I was thinking to myself, subconsciously: if people at home could see us here, if they could only see our soldiers dying so wretchedly! And as I was thinking, I was beginning to have my first doubts, asking myself; what are you doing here at Stalingrad? What are you doing here, a German officer, thousands of miles away from home? Are you defending Germany in this place? And why?’

  After Manstein’s relief effort failed, and in the emotional atmosphere of Christmas and New Year in Stalingrad, some officers in the 6th Army were so desperate that they considered suicide. ‘After our Christmas “party”,’ says Gerhard Munch, ‘I went to the regimental staff to wish them Merry Christmas. Then I learned that officers of our artillery regiment had shot themselves . . . And at New Year’s Eve my own company commanders came to me and said that, since all of this did not make sense any more, and that everything was finishing anyway, shouldn’t we all shoot ourselves together? We discussed for a whole night with each other what we should do. And at the end of this discussion it was clear that, as long as soldiers had to be led under our command, we did not have any moral right to commit suicide.’