The World War II Chronicles

by William Craig

  The tanks appeared again and Pflüger’s .75 went back into action. After the gun fired fifteen rounds, Pflüger received a phone call from his irate commander who screamed, “Only take sure shots.” And, in the middle of the battle, the sergeant had to explain why he had been so reckless with ammunition. He was told to get his crew on the ball.

  For his work in driving off yet another enemy attack, Pflüger received an official reprimand for wasting shells.

  On December 4, the Russians attacked the Kessel from the north and northwest. The 44th Division took the main blow and the fire brigade, the 14th Panzer Division, rushed to help. Fighting swirled around foggy Hill Number 124.5 and one German regiment lost more than five hundred men. Hundreds more suffered frostbite in the frigid temperatures. Sgt. Hubert Wirkner helped take back one position that had been held by Austrian troops until the Russians ran over them with tanks. He found the defenders where they had fallen. All lay naked in the snow. All had been shot.

  On the northern side of the Kessel, forward observer Gottlieb Slotta of the 113th Division talked quietly to Norman Stefan, an old friend from Chemnitz in eastern Germany. For several weeks Slotta and Stefan had shared their food, shelter, and innermost thoughts. Both men believed that Hitler would not leave them on the Russian steppe. When they talked of the past, Slotta often confided his reactions to the trauma he experienced in September when friends had ignored his warnings and died from shell-bursts. The memory still haunted him.

  Each day he trained his binoculars on the growing numbers of Red Army units deploying in front of him. Each day he phoned this ominous evidence back to headquarters. It was a hopeless gesture. The 113th Division had barely enough ammunition to hold off one concerted attack.

  Stefan was always beside him, observing the same buildup. Frequently he stood at full height and walked back and forth in the trench. Slotta joked with him about it, warning that an enemy sniper would find him irresistible.

  Finally a Russian noticed Stefan, tracked his path along the the line and, as Slotta turned to give another warning, a rifle cracked. Stefan crumpled to the bottom of the shelter. That night Slotta went to the aid station and waited beside his friend for some time. But Stefan died without saying another word.

  On the eastern side of the Kessel, at the Barrikady plant in Stalingrad, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier was faced with a renewed tempo in the fighting.

  The commissar’s house and houses 78 and 83 erupted as Red Army soldiers infiltrated them at night and fought for control of the wrecked buildings. Grenades exploded in brief flashes in the pitch-black rooms. In the morning, half-naked bodies littered the stairwells and cellars.

  Major Rettenmaier sent his officers in piecemeal to hold these battered houses behind the Barrikady. They generally lasted for three days before they, too, were wounded or dead.

  His reinforcements, mostly young soldiers from Austria, were used up by the end of November. House 83 had become a crucible, where most of the Germans who went in never came out again. For two days, men fought for just one room. Thick smoke billowed from it. Grenades killed friend and foe alike.

  When a sergeant stumbled back to Rettenmaier’s command post and demanded more grenades, a doctor looked at his bloodshot eyes and told him: “You must stay here. You may go blind.” The sergeant refused to listen. “The others back there can hardly see a thing, but we must have grenades.” Only when another soldier volunteered to take them did he slump into a chair and pass out from exhaustion.

  Rettenmaier finally had to abandon House 83. But at the commissar’s house, his troopers from the Swabian Alps held on with their characteristic “pigheadedness.”

  Rettenmaier also was facing an acute decline in morale. The half-rations his men ate did not alleviate their melancholy, and they missed their homeland most of all. Deprived of regular mail, they fell victim to forebodings of an inconceivable fate. Conversations dwindled to whispers in the shelters. Men sat on their bunks for hours, seeking solitude with their thoughts. They wrote letters at a feverish pace, hoping that airlift planes might carry their innermost sentiments to relatives waiting at home.

  When a trickle of mail arrived at the Barrikady from Germany, the lucky few read them over and over, caressing the paper, sniffing any scent.

  Cpl. Franz Deifel had returned from leave in Stuttgart two weeks earlier and each day he hoped his certificate of release from the army would arrive so he could get out of the Kessel and go back to work at the Porsche factory. In the meantime, he drove an ammunition truck each day to an observation post on the rear slope of Mamaev Hill. It was a boring job, made lively now and then by indiscriminate Russian shelling, so Diefel made a game of it, guessing which section of the road the enemy planned to hit. So far he had been right in his predictions.

  Finally, he received a summons to regimental headquarters and ran to the bunker where a clerk handed him a slip of paper: “Here’s your release.”

  Deifel read it slowly, and the clerk shook his head, muttering, “Damn rotten luck!” It had come too late: Only the wounded and priority cases could now leave Stalingrad.

  One of the priority cases who climbed into a bomber at Pitomnik was the recipient of a premature Christmas present.

  Dr. Ottmar Kohler was astounded when the staff of the 60th Motorized Division insisted he go home to see his family. Grateful for his devotion, they had rewarded the combative surgeon with ten days’ leave in Germany.

  When he refused the offer, he received a direct order from superiors to make the trip. Stunned by such solicitude, Kohler said his good-byes to men who had no chance of seeing their loved ones in the near future, if ever again, and promised to come back on time.

  The homeland Kohler visited was uneasy because the German people had finally learned some of the truth about Stalingrad. When the Soviet Union issued a special announcement about their victory on November 23, it forced Hitler to allow some information to go out in a communique from the Army High Command. No mention was made of an encirclement, only that the Russians had broken through northwest and south of Sixth Army. The communique attributed this alarming fact to Russia’s “… irresponsible deployment of men and material.”

  Because of the vagueness of the news, fear gripped the German civilian population, especially those people with relatives on the eastern front. Frau Kaethe Metzger was one of them. More and more concerned because she had not heard from Emil, she phoned the local postmaster and asked: “Is 15693 among the Stalingrad Army postal numbers?”

  Though forbidden to give out such information, the man, an old friend, answered, “Just a minute.”

  Kaethe’s heart pounded while she waited. The voice came back on the line. “Do you mean to say Emil’s there?”

  She could not answer.

  “Hello, Kaethe, hello!”

  Her eyes filled with tears, she hung up and stared blankly out the window.

  Army Group Don headquarters at Novocherkassk was a gloomy place. Nothing was working as it should, and Hitler continued to “put spokes in the wheels” of Manstein’s expedition to Stalingrad.

  The 17th Panzer Division had failed to arrive because Hitler pulled it off trains to act as reserve for an expected Russian attack far to the west of Stalingrad. And east of Novocherkassk, the 16th Motorized Divsion stayed in place because Hitler feared another attack from that direction.

  In addition, the Red Army launched a series of spoiling operations against Colonel Wenck’s impromptu army, now renamed Combat Group Hollidt. This mini-offensive, known as Little Saturn, was designed to blunt the one-two punch Manstein was readying as part of Operation Wintergewitter (“Winter Storm”), the establishing of a corridor to the Sixth Army.

  In Moscow, STAVKA was reading Manstein’s mind through the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland. Thus, Zhukov and Vasilevsky had mounted Little Saturn as a stopgap measure, which delayed temporarily their more grandiose scheme, Big Saturn, the destruction of the Italian Army and the Germans in the Caucasus.

  For his part, M
anstein could not wait much longer to make his move. A delay of only a few days might prove fatal to Sixth Army’s slim chances, so he speeded up the timetable and put his faith in the tanks assembled around Kotelnikovo. At least the 6th and 23rd Panzer divisions were ready to roll.

  In spite of the encirclement, the discipline and organization of Sixth Army remained excellent. On the road network, military police directed heavy traffic and routed stragglers to lost units. The highways were always well plowed. Road signs pointed the way to divisional, corps, and regimental headquarters. Fuel and food depots handled rationed supplies in an organized, crisply efficient manner. Hospitals functioned with a minimum of confusion, despite the increasing number of casualties, approximating fifteen hundred a day. Drugs and bandages were reasonably plentiful.

  At Pitomnik Airport, wounded men went out on the Ju-52s and He-111s at a rate of two hundred a day. They left in good order, under the watchful eyes of doctors who prevented malingerers from catching a ride to freedom.

  Given the gravity of the situation, Sixth Army was functioning better than some might have expected. But certain signs of decay were becoming evident. On December 9, two soldiers simply fell down and died. They were the first victims of starvation.

  By December 11, Paulus knew his superiors had failed him. During the first seventeen days of the airlift, a daily average of only 84.4 tons arrived at Pitomnik, less than twenty percent of what he needed to keep his men alive. Paulus was seething with frustration and when Gen. Martin Fiebig, the director of the Luftwaffe air supply, flew into the pocket to explain his difficulties, the normally polite Paulus heaped abuse on him and excoriated the German High Command.

  A genuinely sympathetic Fiebig let him rant, as Paulus told him the airlift was a complete failure. He referred constantly to the promises of adequate supplies and the brutal truth that barely one-sixth that amount had actually arrived:

  “With that,” Paulus lamented, “my army can neither exist nor fight.”

  He had only one flickering hope, which he indirectly referred to as he wrote his wife, Coca, “At the moment, I’ve got a really difficult problem on my hands, but I hope to solve it soon. Then I shall be able to write more frequently.…”

  Paulus knew that Manstein was about to keep his promise, at least, to try to save the Sixth Army.

  Chapter Nineteen

  From the suburbs of Kotelnikovo, the white-painted tanks and trucks of the 6th Panzer Division fanned out to the northeast and, at 5:15 A.M. on December 12, raced for Stalingrad. Operation Winter Storm, the attempt to break through to Sixth Army, had begun. “Show it to them; give it to them, boys,” cheered tank expert Colonel Hunersdorff from his command vehicle. Watching the tanks’ treads churn the snow, he waved his men toward the Kessel, seventy-three miles away.

  Surprisingly, the Russian resistance was negligible. Bewildered by Manstein’s accelerated timetable, their rear guards fell back after offering only token fire. The worst problem facing the Germans was the ice that covered the roads and prevented the panzers from getting ample traction.

  In the village of Verkhne-Tsaritsyn, forty-five miles northeast of Kotelnikovo, worried Russian leaders converged to discuss the new German drive. Marshal Vasilevsky presided, and he and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged opinions with other generals about German intentions. Convinced that Soviet forces were not sufficient, Vasilevsky tried to phone Stalin, but could not reach him. Increasingly alarmed by further news of German advances, he asked General Rokossovky to send the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front reserve to a line just north of the Mishkova River. Rokossovsky refused, citing his own needs for troops to help throttle Paulus in the pocket.

  When Vasilevsky insisted, Rokossovsky held his ground. The two men argued at length and finally, Vasilevsky threatened to phone Stalin directly and placed another call to the Kremlin. But the circuits were busy and it would take hours to get a connection.

  Vasilevsky paced nervously through the day while the German relief expedition gathered momentum.

  During the afternoon, Hitler met with his advisors in Rastenburg. Jodl was there. So were Heusinger and Zeitzler, and six lesser aides.

  Zeitzler began with a depressing report about the entire eastern front. The condition of the Italian troops defending the flanks was broached. It was agreed that, at best, they were unreliable. As to Stalingrad, the Führer agreed with Zeitzler that it was a precarious situation, but he still categorically refused to order a retreat. He felt that to do so would jeopardize “the whole meaning of the campaign” of the previous summer.

  On this note, General Jodl launched a discussion of the dangers posed by the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa and the defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. As Jodl spoke, Hitler interrupted several times to make biting remarks about men and armies. Regarding Rommel, he declared: “He has always got to spar around with all kinds of miserable elements out there. If you do that for two years, eventually your nerves go to pieces.… That’s the Reichsmarshal’s [Goering’s] impression, too. He says that Rommel has completely lost his nerve.”

  Going on, Hitler voiced his concern about the Italian armies in Africa and Russia, “I didn’t sleep last night; that’s the feeling of uncertainty. Once a unit has started to flee, the bonds of law and order quickly disappear unless an iron discipline prevails.… We succeed with the Germans, but not with the Italians. We won’t succeed with the Italians, anywhere.”

  The conference went on until 3:00 P.M., adjourning after a briefing on the air supply program for Stalingrad. The figures were impressive as to number of flights attempted per day. But the statistics hid the fact that while planes were taking off for the city, their loads were not reaching troops inside the Kessel. Continuing bad weather forced planes to abort missions; Russian fighters had begun harassing the airlanes, and antiaircraft batteries were being reinforced. As a result, the steppe was becoming a highway of broken aircraft—a graveyard of planes.

  By now Sixth Army headquarters was aware that Manstein was coming. Buoyed up, nervous, Paulus and Schmidt waited through the day for progress reports of Operation Winter Storm. They were hopeful, but each knew that time was robbing Sixth Army of its strength to break loose and meet its saviors.

  That day’s Sixth Army War Diary reflected the precipitate decline inside the Kessel:

  December 12, 1942, 5:45 P.M.

  Rations decreased since November 26. Another ration decrease on December 8 as a result of which the fighting power of the troops has been weakened. At the present time, only one-third of the normal rations. Losses here and there because of exhaustion.

  That night, Marshal Vasilevsky finally reached Stalin to explain developments of past hours. He told the premier that the Germans had already reached the southern bank of the Aksai River, and he wanted permission to detach the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front and move it at all possible speed to a blocking position in front of the German panzers.

  Stalin’s immediate reaction was violent. He refused to go along with the proposal and assailed Vasilevsky for trying to pry troops loose from Rokossovsky without first checking with STAVKA in Moscow. Stalin warned him that he was holding him personally responsible.

  In return, Vasilevsky was incensed, for he knew it was his duty to maintain the security of both fronts. His anger served no purpose. Stalin told him his request would be discussed that night at the Defense Committee meeting and rudely hung up.

  At 5:00 A.M. the next morning, Stalin called back. He now agreed fully with Vasilevsky’s plan; the Second Guards Army was alerted for a forced march.

  The decision came none too soon. At 8:00 A.M. on December 13, bleary-eyed German tank crews crossed the Aksai River on a rickety bridge. Now only the frozen Mishkova River remained as a natural barrier to the Kessel around Stalingrad.

  Desperate to keep abreast of the relief force’s progress at Gumrak Airfield, Paulus ordered ten radio operators to monitor every wavelength for messages from the oncoming panze
rs. But Russian technicians constantly foiled their efforts by jamming channels and broadcasting false information.

  While Paulus lingered in this limbo, he also had to contend with pressures on every sector of the Kessel. In the ruins of Stalingrad, the Soviet Sixty-second Army denied its own weaknesses and harassed the Germans from the tractor factory to the Tsaritsa Gorge. These aggressive tactics were totally consistent with Chuikov’s military philosophy. The combative general knew of no other way to wage war.

  From her home in Kuibyshev, Chuikov’s wife had written recently and reminded him of that trait.

  My dear Vassili:

  I at times imagine you have entered into single combat with Hitler. I know you for twenty years. I know your strengths.… It’s hard to imagine that someone like Adolf could get the better of you. This could not happen. One old lady, a neighbor, meets me every morning and says: “I pray to God for Vassili Ivanovich.…”

  Though beset by supply problems, and disgusted with the front command for not sending enough ammunition, Chuikov continued to mount small attacks against the increasingly weary Germans. One of his storm groups concentrated on the potato cellar that Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser had held since late October. While his exhausted men slept at their guns, the Russians crawled up, then drove them outside, back to the system of trenches that Kreiser had thoughtfully prepared for just such an emergency.

  Kreiser rallied his men to counterattack, but he forgot to keep low. From a nearby cottage, a Russian machine gunner put one bullet in his left shoulder, another through his arm. The lieutenant went down into the snow. Still conscious, he gave command of the company to another lieutenant and then staggered off to the rear. In minutes, his successor followed him there with a bullet through his own arm.

  Kreiser radioed for reinforcements, then led a group of wounded to an aid station, where a doctor jabbed him with morphine and put him on a sled. Towed further to the rear by a Hiwi laborer, the drowsy Kreiser fell asleep and rolled off into the road. When the loyal Hiwi came back and dragged him from a snowbank, the grateful lieutenant mumbled his thanks and fell unconscious.