Messengers arrived in a stream with pleas from trapped regiments. At a solitary telephone, an officer scribbled down final words from decimated formations as they fell under Russian armor.
Hoth was helpless. With the Rumanian forces destroyed, he had too few guns and tanks to stop the enemy. It had also become apparent that the Soviet plan was breathtaking in scope. Colored arrows on the battle maps already showed a distinct arc to the northwest, around his pitiful forces, toward Kalach and its bridge over the Don. If the bridge should fall before Sixth Army pulled back from the Volga, Hoth foresaw a mass grave for the Germans in Stalingrad.
But thirteen hundred miles west of the emerging tragedy, in his Alpine Berghof, Hitler had a different view of the situation. Upon receiving Paulus’s suggestion that Sixth Army withdraw to the southwest, he responded quickly with a sharp command to hold fast.
Radio message Number 1352
TOP SECRET
Army Group B
Urgent!
21 November 42, 1525 hrs.
TO: HQ Sixth Army
Führer Order:
Sixth Army will hold positions despite threat of temporary encirclement.… Keep railroad line open as long as possible. Special orders regarding air supply will follow!
The implications of the order were stunning to consider. And while Paulus and Schmidt pondered the message, a phone call came in from Lt. Gen. Martin Fiebig, commander of the Eighth Air Corps. The generals discussed the latest events and Fiebig referred to the bridge at Kalach. Schmidt said he saw no immediate danger there and added, “The commander in chief is thinking of forming a hedgehog defense.”
“And how do you propose to keep the army supplied?” asked Fiebig.
“That will have to be done from the air.”
Fiebig was astonished. “A whole army? It’s quite impossible! I advise you not to be so optimistic.”
Fiebig hung up and immediately called his chief, General Richthofen, who then phoned Albert Jeschonnek, Goering’s deputy, and raged at him: “You’ve got to stop it! In the filthy weather we have here there’s not a hope of supplying an Army of 250,000 men from the air. It’s stark staring madness! …”
On the night of November 21, the vanguard of the 16th Panzer Division, which had left the outskirts of Stalingrad two days earlier, arrived on the Don to act as a covering force for units fleeing out of the great loop of the Don. But the division arrived too late to do more than hold a few bridges open for Rumanian and German stragglers. At the bridge he held, Lt. Eberhard von Loebbecke commanded the rear guard as a Russian tank appeared on the roadway. Loebbecke, who had lost his left arm to a French machine gunner in 1939, was standing upright before the T-34, which fired one round at him. The shell ticked his empty sleeve and exploded some yards behind him. Knocked down by the explosion, the lieutenant rose almost immediately to direct return fire. In their open turret, the Soviet crew stared in amazement at the man who had apparently lost his arm to the shell and yet bounced up off the ground without any discomfort. While they hesitated, a German antitank gun put a round into the T-34, and it blew up in front of Loebbecke’s eyes.
That night, relentless winds moaning over the steppe turned snow drifts into miniature mountain ranges on the flat prairie. The temperature fell below zero and the skies promised more snow. For thousands of square miles, west and east of the Don River, the land seemed lifeless.
But the steppe teemed with desperate men, skulking across the fields in small groups. Rumanian and German, they ran on frozen feet, propelled only by a common urge to survive. They fled through the night seeking food, shelter, and the protection of friendly guns.
Other men roamed the fields with different goals in mind. Lt. Col. Grigor Fillipov led the men of the Soviet 14th Motor Artillery Brigade away from the main body of Soviet troops moving down from the Don, and struck for the town of Kalach. Fillipov had no maps. He had only five tanks, supported by several trucks carrying infantry. His drivers turned on every light and sped through the darkness. Beside the road, hundreds of enemy soldiers waved to the “friendly” tankers, who ignored them and pushed on.
At 6:00 A.M. on November 22, Fillipov spied an old man, a Russian civilian, pulling a peasant cart, with two German soldiers walking beside him. The colonel issued whispered instructions and his men shot the Germans dead, then clambered down from the T-34s to talk to their terrified countryman.
“Uncle Vanya, which way to the bridge?” they asked. When he heard them speak his native tongue, the old man stopped trembling, climbed into the first tank and Fillipov waved his combat group on to the east.
In Kalach, the German garrison lived in a state of uneasy expectation. Refugees had been passing through for the past thirty-six hours, and the boom of heavy guns from the northwest sounded closer each hour. But no one in the garrison knew how badly the situation had deteriorated.
At Colonel Mikosch’s Engineer Training School on the hill at the eastern edge of town, pioneers had begun another regular workday, practicing the skills of street fighting, demolition expertise, and weaponry, both German and Russian. Several captured Russian tanks were being used by pupils for firing demonstrations at the range on the west side of the Don. Each day, the tanks trundled across the bridge, up the steep west bank, and onto the steppe for gunnery lessons.
On this morning, a German Propaganda Company correspondent, Heinz Schröter; had come to film the scene. When the tanks crossed the bridge and went past him up the hill, he photographed them and then, shortly afterward, Schröter heard the usual sounds of cannon fire from the gunnery range.
At Sentry Post Number 3, a sergeant named Wiedemann dozed near his .88-millimeter antiaircraft gun. Behind him in a hut, the crew of eight slept. Wiedemann, too, had watched the tanks go by, counting them off as they roared up the slope and disappeared.
The garrison returned to a routine schedule. The snow had stopped and voices rang loudly in the clear air. Laughter echoed as soldiers threw snowballs at each other. When the tanks suddenly reappeared, the indifferent Sergeant Wiedemann watched them speed past. As the third machine rumbled onto the bridge a machine gun suddenly chattered. The tanks kept going on to the east bank where they quickly separated and turned off on either side.
Grabbing his binoculars Wiedemann screamed, “Those damn tanks are Russian!” and pounded on a piece of metal to alert his crew, which burst out of the hut. Two tanks had not yet crossed the bridge. The .88-millimeter gun fired at a three-hundred-yard range, and the T-34s ignited. The second in line teetered for a moment, then somersaulted directly onto the frozen surface of the Don below.
When the first tanks went over, cameraman Schröter had been even closer to the bridge. A lieutenant suddenly ran past him, yelling unintelligibly, and Schröter thought he had gone berserk. The officer was waving a pistol until a machine gun stuttered and he pitched to the ground.
Schröter grabbed his equipment and ran. So did most of the Germans in the immediate vicinity. In the underbrush on the east bank, Col. Grigor Fillipov radioed frantically back to the Soviet 26th Armored Brigade for help. He had won the bridge by sheer luck but he expected the Germans to react viciously.
While Colonel Fillipov dug in at Kalach, the phone rang in General Schmidt’s office at Chir, fifteen miles to the south. It was Luftwaffe commander Martin Fiebig calling, and he again warned about the folly of an airlift, “Both the weather and the enemy are completely incalculable factors.…” But the conversation was interrupted by a group of German generals, who suddenly swept into the headquarters.
“Papa” Hoth had arrived from Businovka, where the southern flank had totally evaporated. At a loss to give a clear picture of the nightmare, Hoth listened intently while Schmidt and an old friend and school classmate, Gen. Wolfgang Pickert, debated a solution. Mimicking a former professor’s manner, Schmidt said, “Pickert, decision with brief statement of reasons!”
Pickert’s answer was incisive. “Get the hell out of here!”
Schmidt agreed bu
t went on, “We cannot do that. For one thing, we don’t have enough gas.”
Pickert offered to help with his antiaircraft troops, who could manhandle guns across the flat land and carry ammunition by hand.
Schmidt continued, “We have, of course, considered breaking out, but to reach the Don means thirty miles of steppe without any cover.… No, Pickert, it could only have a Napoleonic ending.… The army has been ordered to hold its ground at Stalingrad. Consequently we shall fortify our positions and expect supplies from the air.”
Pickert could not believe what he heard. “… From the air? In this weather? It’s quite out of the question. You must get out, I say. Get started now!”
But Sixth Army did not get started. Even though General Paulus was convinced it should, he continued to wait for Hitler’s approval. In the meantime, he put his army on alert to move quickly in case permission came.
At 2:00 P.M., after Hoth had flown west to gather together the remnants of his shattered Fourth Army, Paulus and Schmidt went back to Gumrak at the edge of Stalingrad. Flying over the bulk of their army, hemmed in between the Don and Volga, the generals saw bright fires on both sides of the aircraft as men of the Sixth Army began to burn unneeded equipment.
Warehouses filled with food and clothing were being put to the torch. At one of them, Lt. Gerhard Dietzel tried to salvage something from the flames. Seeing a cache of champagne and wine about to be consumed, he raced back and forth between the inferno and his Volkswagen with armfuls of bottles. When the car was filled, Dietzel jumped in and started the motor. A supply officer blocked his way:
“Can you pay for it?” he demanded.
Dietzel began to laugh uproariously. Pointing at the raging fires, he replied, “But, don’t you see, money doesn’t mean anything anymore!” He gunned the motor and raced off with his treasure.
At Kalach, Russian Colonel Fillipov unexpectedly received reinforcements when tanks of the 26th Armored Brigade charged across the bridge and joined him at the eastern edge of town. It was incredible, but with German resistance only sporadic and ineffective, the 26th Brigade then wheeled southeast out of Kalach and headed toward the village of Sovetsky, thirty miles away. And somewhere beyond Sovetsky, General Yeremenko’s southern-front troops were driving up toward a junction with their comrades.
German soldiers inside the rapidly developing pocket learned of their plight in different ways.
At a field hospital, a pharmacist named Wendt was passing out morphine and bandages to medics when a soldier ran in and announced: “The Russians have closed the bridge at Kalach!” Wendt thought he was joking, but when a friend phoned headquarters and confirmed the story, Wendt refused to panic. He thought the mess would be cleaned up quickly.
A veteran sergeant, Eugen Steinhilber, learned the bitter truth when several of his comrades left by bus to go to Chir, and from there back to Germany for furlough. They were back in a few hours, saying: “We can’t get over the Don. The Russians have the bridge.” Since Steinhilber had been in a pocket once before and gotten out safely, the news failed to faze him. He had just written to his wife, “By December I’ll be home. I’ll go back to school … and finish my training as electrical engineer.…”
From his new Gumrak command post, Paulus sent another urgent cable. In it, he begged for the chance to save his Army:
HQ Sixth Army
G 3 Section
22 November 42, 1900 hours
Radio Message
To Army Group B
The Army is encircled.… South front still open east of the Don. Don frozen over and crossable.… There is little fuel left; once that is used up, tanks and heavy weapons will be immobile. Ammunition is short, provisions will last for six more days.… Request freedom of action.… Situation might compel abandonment of Stalingrad and northern front.…
Three hours later he received a vague answer from the Führer, “Sixth Army must know that I am doing everything to help and to relieve it.… I shall issue my orders in good time.”
Hitler was still puzzled about how to save Paulus, but until he decided on the best course of action he intended to keep Sixth Army in position. Most of that afternoon was spent with Kurt Zeitzler and Albert Jeschonnek. Both officers had come to the Berghof determined to sway Hitler from the idea of an airlift; Jeschonnek pointed out the problems of weather and insufficient airfields within flying distance of Stalingrad.
Though Zeitzler felt Jeschonnek was not forceful enough in making his case, Hermann Goering thought otherwise when he heard details of the conference. He called Jeschonnek and warned him not to “put the Führer out of sorts.”
That night, Hitler came down from his mountain and went by train to Leipzig, where a plane waited to fly him to Rastenburg, East Prussia. He would issue orders later.
Chapter Seventeen
In an earthen bunker just west of Gumrak Airfield, an impatient Friedrich von Paulus waited for the Führer to allow him to quit the Volga. To reinforce his argument, Paulus again reminded his immediate superiors of the perils Sixth Army faced:
23 November, 1145 hours
To Army Group B:
Murderous attacks on all fronts.… Arrival of sufficient air supplies is not believed possible, even if weather should improve. The ammunition and fuel situation will render the troops defenseless in the very near future.…
Paulus
Once again Army Group B forwarded the message on to Hitler at Rastenburg, along with the comment by General von Weichs who agreed totally with Paulus’s analysis of the situation.
On the steppe beyond the Don, General Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps continued its swirling series of tank battles with marauding Soviet columns. As a result, it was impossible to link up with any Rumanian forces still fighting on the vast plain. Russian radio-jammers even managed to convey bogus signals to any units seeking General Heim.
Between the Chir and Kletskaya at the Don, the last Rumanian outposts were about to fall. Gen. Mihail Lascar, a mustachioed strongman, had collected elements of four divisions in the midst of “burning houses and Rumanian corpses.” The Russians called on him to surrender and he wired German Army Group B for authority to break out. By the time permission arrived, he was trapped. Instead of surrendering, Lascar released four thousand men and sent them to seek union, if they could do so, with Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps, somewhere on the steppe. Then Lascar walked into captivity, his reputation unsullied by defeat. The battlefield he left “was a fantastic sight … full of dead horses … some horses were only half dead, standing on three frozen legs, shaking the remaining broken one.…”
The soldiers he had released wandered dazedly, begging food, freezing to death beside the road. A trail of bodies marked each highway, down which roared lengthening columns of Russian tanks and trucks; only a few Rumanians reached Heim, who shepherded them and his ill-fated panzers south toward freedom. Miraculously, his forces made it to the bank of the river Chir. But within hours, German military police arrested him. Hitler had accused him of dereliction of duty in not stopping the Soviet offensive with his mobile reserves. The Führer insisted that Heim had disobeyed Army High Command instructions radioed to him in the field and thus had failed to attack the enemy at crucial times in the first hours of conflict. Stunned by the charges against him, Heim went home to Germany to face a military tribunal.
During a tense, gloomy conference at Rostov, General Steflea, the Rumanian Army chief of staff, met with a German liaison officer and read field reports of Lascar’s surrender. Appalled at what had happened to his Third and Fourth armies, Steflea berated his ally: “All the warnings which for weeks I have been giving to the German authorities have passed unheeded.… Of the four divisions of the Fourth Rumanian Army there are only three battalions left.… German Army Headquarters failed to meet our requirements. And that is why two Rumanian armies have been destroyed.”
The German liaison officer could not rebut the charges. Instead, he promised to pass on General Steflea’s statements to higher au
thority.
At roadblocks outside the town of Sovetsky, fifteen miles southeast of the bridge at Kalach, Soviet T-34 tanks dueled at ten-yard range with German rear guards trying to hold the village. The din of this battle reached Russian tankers of Gen. Viktor Volsky’s 4th Mechanized Corps as they cautiously probed the fields south and west of the town. Nervous because they were close to lead elements of the Russian spearheads from the northern Don offensive, they kept shooting green recognition flares to announce their own presence. Just before 4:00 P.M. on November 23, another series of green flares soared upward from the northwest and Volsky’s T-34s roared ahead. Hundreds of white-clad Russians surged toward them and the two forces came together in a frenzy of shouts, embraces, and tears.
Almost hysterical with joy, the Russian soldiers danced about in the snow to celebrate an incredible triumph. In less than ninety-six hours, they had sprung a trap around the German Sixth Army. Inside that “pocket” were more than 250 thousand German troops—prisoners, isolated on a vast plain of snow.
All over Russia, radio announcers were hailing the Red Army’s incredible victories. The names Kalach and Sovetsky rang through the airwaves as the Soviet people heard for the first time of the encirclement at Stalingrad.
But in Moscow, Stalin did not celebrate. The premier had “gotten his blood up” as he sensed an even greater opportunity for his armies in the south. Looking at the maps, he saw the possibility of creating an even larger pocket. Several hundred miles below the encirclement at the Volga, German Army Group A stood immobile in the Caucasus. If the Red Army could capture the city of Rostov on the Sea of Azov, the Stalingrad trap would become just a minor phase of a greater triumph. Thus Stalin urged his generals on:
To Comrade Dontsov [Rokossovsky] 23 November 1942 Copy for Comrade Mikhailov [Vasilevsky] 1940 hours
The World War II Chronicles Page 57