The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

by Andrew Roberts

  Also synonymous with Stalingrad heroism was the defence undertaken by Sergeant Jakob Pavlov and his Shturmovaya (storming groups), from 28 September for fifty-eight consecutive days, of a four-storey house 300 yards from the river.41 With machine guns and long-barrelled anti-tank guns, and their tactic of denying Panzers any easy targets, this platoon of the 42nd Guards Regiment held out valiantly under Pavlov, their lieutenant having been blinded. ‘Pavlov’s small group of men, defending one house,’ recalled Chuikov proudly, mischievously but accurately, ‘killed more enemy soldiers than the Germans lost in taking Paris.’42 It helped their subsequent fame that they came from a very wide geographical cross-section of the Soviet Union – including Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, an Uzbecki, a Tajik, a Tatar and an Abkhazian – and therefore seemed to symbolize the unity of the Motherland as well as her courage. What little remained of Pavlov’s House, as it is called, has been preserved.

  Chuikov described the Sixth Army’s offensive of 14 October as having brought ‘fighting of unprecedented ferocity. Those of us who had already been through a great deal will remember the enemy attack all our lives. We recorded 3,000 sorties by every type of aircraft on that day!… It was a sunny day, but the smoke and dust cut visibility down to a hundred yards.’ The German attacks on the Tractor and Barrikady Factories numbered 180 tanks, which broke through Zholudev’s 37th Division at 11.30 hours and went on to attack Colonel V. A. Gorishny’s 95th and Gurtiev’s 308th Divisions and the 84th Armoured Brigade. In the course of the day Zholudev had to be excavated from his dug-out, where he had been buried by a direct hit. By midnight the Germans had cut off the Tractor Factory on three sides and had entered the workshops. The fate of Stalingrad hung in the balance.

  The story of how the Red Army soldiers hung on to the right bank through Paulus’ assault of mid-October is one of quite extraordinary heroism, appalling self-sacrifice and complete lack of alternative considering what the NKVD was doing to anyone who left his post. Courage was uppermost, however, as German six-barrelled mortars kept the Volga under constant bombardment. With the thousands of wounded crawling back towards the ferries, ‘We often had to step over bodies,’ Chuikov recalled, and ‘Everything on the bank was covered in ash and dust.’43 Yet the Germans took the Tractor Factory on 16 October, and by the end of the 18th only five men from the thousands-strong workers’ detachment of the Barrikady Factory were still alive. By 23 October the Soviets were finally forced out of the Red October Factory, too, but not for long. Eight days later they advanced a hundred yards in the environs of Novoselskaya Street and won back the factory’s open-hearth, calibration and profiling shops, and soon afterwards the finished-products warehouse as well. Chuikov was greatly helped by the Soviet artillery on the left bank – 250 guns of 76.2mm calibre and fifty heavy guns – which kept the Germans under constant fire and which had been heavily reinforced by 203mm and 280mm guns in mid-October.44 On the right bank, however, the lorries carrying the Katyusha rockets had to be reversed right back into the Volga itself in order to give them the necessary elevation of fire, so close had the Germans got to the river.

  After the war there was a good deal of ill-tempered argument about which Russian units had fought hardest, even though there was plenty of glory to go around. Whenever possible, Chuikov was sent reinforcements, and in the course of the battle the Sixty-second Army was bolstered by a total of seven infantry divisions, one infantry brigade and an artillery brigade, all of which were flung into the human meat-grinder almost as soon as they arrived. The general paid tribute to the activities of the Red Army outside the city, which drew off considerable German forces, writing that ‘They held Paulus back by the ears.’ As for the Wehrmacht: ‘Some inexplicable force drove the enemy to keep on attacking. It seemed as though Hitler was prepared to destroy the whole of Germany for the sake of this one city.’

  Tsaritsyn (which was Tatar for ‘yellow river’ and had nothing to do with the tsars) had changed its name to Stalingrad in 1925 in recognition of Stalin’s successful defence of the city during the Civil War. Important though it was strategically for both sides, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that they would not have committed the resources they both did – at one point in October neither had any tactical reserves left whatsoever – had the city been called Tsaritsyn or Volgograd, as in its earlier and later incarnations. The mano a mano nature of the struggle between the two dictators was personalized in a way that Hitler publicly acknowledged when on 8 November 1942 he again broadcast about capturing Stalingrad, in a speech from Munich, the birthplace of National Socialism. ‘I wanted to reach the Volga, to be precise at a particular spot, at a particular city,’ he said. ‘By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself.’ The battle had thus taken on a symbolic significance far removed from its strategic one. In his speech Hitler claimed that ‘Time was of no importance,’ but in fact winter was fast closing in, just as it had been when he had failed to take Moscow the previous year. The Sixth Army’s next great offensive began at 18.30 hours on Wednesday, 11 November – coincidentally the anniversary of the Great War Armistice – with five infantry divisions as well as the 14th and 24th Panzer Divisions attacking on a 3-mile-wide front between Volkhovstroyevskaya Street and Banna Gully, just south of the Barrikady Factory warehouse. ‘Exceptionally heavy fighting went on all day for every yard of ground,’ wrote Chuikov, ‘for every brick and stone. Fighting with hand grenades and bayonets went on for several hours.’

  Simultaneously, attacks were made on the Mamayev Kurgan, whose height made it such a commanding position that neither side could allow the other to position artillery there, and which thus saw so much bombardment that its actual underlying physical shape was transformed during the battle. It was also said that shellfire was so unremittingly hot there that winter that snow never had a chance to settle on its slopes.45 Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran. Rodimtsev’s, Gorishny’s and Batyuk’s divisions all fought there with distinction (and to near-annihilation). At one point, when telephone communication was lost between Chuikov’s headquarters and Batyuk’s divisional command post at the Mamayev Kurgan, a signaller called Titayev was sent to re-establish it. His corpse was found with the two ends of the wire clamped tightly together between his teeth, after he had used his own skull as a semi-conductor.46

  The German attack of 11 November succeeded in reaching the Volga along a front of 600 yards, splitting the Russian forces for the third time during the battle. But as Chuikov crowed, ‘Paulus had been unable to capitalize on his superior strength, and had not achieved what he intended. He had not thrown the 62nd Army into the icy Volga.’ With Paulus’ Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army in possession of three-quarters of the city, but Chuikov’s Sixty-second Army still holding out on the right bank and receiving heavy reinforcements, the Germans decided to pour yet more forces from the Don and the south into the city, their places being taken by the Romanian Third Army and Italian Eighth Army along the Don to the north-west and the Romanian Fourth Army to the south of Stalingrad. This was to give the Russians their great chance.

  At a two-and-a-half-hour meeting of generals at the Führer’s office in Berlin during the planning of Barbarossa back in March 1941, at which Hitler spoke about German goals in Russia and the means of attaining them – ‘Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples’ – he had said that he was under ‘No illusions about our allies! Finns will fight bravely… Romanians are no good at all. Perhaps they could be used as a security force in quiet sectors behind very strong natural obstacles [rivers]… The fortunes of large German units
must not be tied to the uncertain staying power of the Romanian forces.’47 Yet he did not take his own advice, for that is precisely what now happened at Stalingrad. It was Zhukov who masterminded the double envelopment of Stalingrad from north and south which, once successfully completed on 23 November 1942, was no less successfully defended from Manstein’s counter-attack in December and then developed into an unbreakable stranglehold in January 1943, ending with the German surrender there the following month. Chuikov was left as the tethered goat in the city, to distract the German wolf, and for four days after Thursday, 19 November Zhukov flung four army groups (called fronts) into the great assault, codenamed Operation Uranus. The secret logistical buildup had been impressive: in the first three weeks of November, 160,000 men, 430 tanks, 6,000 guns and mortars, 14,000 vehicles and 10,000 horses had been ferried across the Volga and Don rivers. By then, over 1.1 million men were ready to take part in both Uranus (the encirclement of Stalingrad) and Operation Saturn (a wider swing all the way to Rostov). In Uranus, the Voronezh, South-west and Don Fronts attacked north of Stalingrad and the Stalingrad Front came around the south in a classic pincer movement. The initial bombardment by 3,500 Russian guns, mortars and rockets at 07.30 hours on Thursday, 19 November woke up German soldiers more than 30 miles away. From 1944, that day was ever after known in Russia as Artillery Day, in commemoration of the salvoes launched before the infantry assault at 08.50. German minefields had been cleared by Russian engineers working through the night before the offensive.

  The Romanians fought bravely, but Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks of the South-west Front soon created a 7-mile gap in the lines of General Petre Dumitrescu’s Third Romanian Army, and five divisions were swiftly trapped in the bend of the River Don. Every gap was exploited and expanded, and it was fitting that it had to fall to Kurt Zeitzler to break the news to Hitler, because three weeks earlier it had been he who had confidently assured the Führer that the Soviets were ‘in no position to mount a major offensive with any far-reaching objective’.48 On Friday, 20 November, the southern pincer ripped into the Fourth Romanian Army, where these forces too met with quick success, and forged an even larger, 17-mile gap, through which the IV Cavalry and IV Mechanized Corps were poured. Wide, sweeping, confident cross-country tank movements characterized Uranus just as they had the opening phases of Barbarossa, and Weichs’ Army Group B outside the city was pushed back westwards. The Russians closed the ring around Stalingrad at Sovietskiy village near Kalach-on-Don on the night of Monday, 23 November. ‘Dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape, they fired green flares periodically so that they did not miss each other, or think the other force were Germans.’49 The troops from the two connecting units came together with such speed, and at night, that they had to re-enact the whole scene the next day with cheering and mutual hugging for the propaganda footage.50

  In a sense it was not the Germans who lost the battle of Stalingrad; they had taken the whole city except for a Russian toe-hold on the right bank; rather it was the Romanian Third Army and the Italian Eighth Army to the north and the Romanian Fourth Army in the south of the city who were comprehensively outfought. When the encirclement was completed, around 275,000 of Paulus’ army were trapped. Yet the pincers were still thin, in places only a few miles deep, so at this point Hitler ought to have ordered Paulus to attempt an immediate breakout. He did not, believing that Manstein, then flying down from Leningrad, could command yet another regrouping of the Wehrmacht in southern Russia and break through from the south-west, during which the Luftwaffe could keep Paulus provisioned with food and equipment.

  Göring – against advice from the Luftwaffe generals on the spot – promised the Führer that he could fly 550 tons of supplies per day into Stalingrad.51 Yet that was based on having 225 Junkers Ju-52s serviceable every day, whereas in fact there were only about eighty serviceable at any one time, supported by two squadrons of Heinkel He-111s which could carry only 1.5 tons each.52 Admittedly, Göring hoped to bring in other planes from different theatres, but it would never have been enough to service an army of a quarter of a million men indefinitely. The statistics were discouraging for the Sixth Army’s hopes for survival: Paulus requested 750 tons a day, Göring promised 550, the Luftwaffe generals said 350 were possible, but the planes available could actually manage only half that, even before the bad weather closed in, after which an average of only 100 tons per day were delivered.53

  Paulus needed to move fast to escape the giant trap that had been sprung around him, and to meet Manstein coming north-eastwards to his relief, but Hitler refused him permission to move, and Paulus himself did not want to attempt it. ‘I gave the order finally for the Sixth Army to break out,’ Manstein told his interviewer at Nuremberg in June 1946, ‘but then Paulus said it was too late and not possible. Hitler did not want the Sixth Army to break out at any time, but to fight to the last man. I believe that Hitler said that if the Sixth Army tried to break out, it would be their death.’54 A decade after the war, and thus with the benefit of both hindsight and little likelihood of being gainsaid, Zeitzler claimed that, back in November 1942, ‘I had told Hitler that if a quarter of a million soldiers were to be lost at Stalingrad, then the backbone of the entire Eastern front would be broken.’55 The Führer hardly needed to be told of the importance of Stalingrad, himself exhorting the troops of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Armoured Army on 26 November:

  The battle around Stalingrad is reaching its climax… My thoughts and those of the German people are with you in these grave hours! Whatever the circumstances, you must hold on to the Stalingrad position which has been won with so much blood under the leadership of resolute generals! Your resolve must be so unshakeable that, as at Kharkov in the spring, this Russian breakthrough too will be annihilated by the measures that have been put in hand. Everything that lies in my power is being done to help you in your heroic struggle.56

  Earlier that same month Hitler had issued a similar ‘Stand or die’ order to Rommel at El Alamein; henceforth there were to be many such messages, in which the Führer forsook strategic manoeuvre, replacing it with a blind, unyielding test of willpower, one in which flesh and blood were set against steel and fire.

  Stalingrad was an important transport hub, industrial city and oil refinery, but not so important as to justify the emphasis the Nazis put on its capture, in fighting that still today results in mines and shells and especially bones being uncovered every springtime. Hitler was not merely being hubristic when he ordered Paulus to stay in Stalingrad, however. He also needed to withdraw Army Group A from the Caucasus, which had to be covered by Stalingrad.

  ‘Hitler’s veto on any breakout appears incredibly rash when one considers the forces involved,’ wrote Mellenthin. ‘For this was no ordinary army invested at Stalingrad; the Sixth Army represented the spearhead of the Wehrmacht, in what was intended to be the decisive campaign of the war.’57 Stalingrad certainly was that, but not for the reason Hitler intended, for in the event Manstein’s rescue bid was stopped short of its destination. With a fraction of the necessary supplies being dropped by the IV Luftflotte Junkers of Luftwaffe Field Marshal Baron von Richthofen – a cousin of the Great War ace the Red Baron – whose aircraft were put out of action by Russian fighters, anti-aircraft guns and the weather conditions, Paulus’ army started to die on its frostbitten feet. Casualties, disease, exhaustion, starvation and above all the debilitating cold later rendered a breakout impossible anyway. (Richthofen developed a brain tumour in 1944, and died the next year.)

  Chuikov now faced a renewed danger on the ground, since the Volga had started to freeze over on 12 November. Stalingrad lies on the edge of the windy, treeless steppes and was thus particularly vulnerable to temperatures that could reach as low as –45 Celsius. It was not unknown for German soldiers to build walls of frozen corpses behind which to hide from the elements. The freezing of the river speeded up once the temperature dropped to –15 Celsius in late November, but was not complete until 17 December. Before then, the i
ce floes made any river crossing impossible even for armoured boats, so the Sixty-second Army had to stay on short rations until trucks were able to cross the river. ‘We were going to have to fight on two fronts,’ recorded the Russian commander, ‘against the enemy and the Volga.’ With ammunition and food supplies dropping off dangerously, Chuikov recalled how the ‘ice-floes piled up and formed obstructions, and made a disgusting crunching noise which made our flesh creep and sent shudders up our spines, as if someone were sawing into our vertebrae’.58 Once the ice was thick enough, however, 18,000 trucks and 20,000 other vehicles crossed over to resuscitate the still-besieged Red Army.59 Meanwhile, the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the factory district continued unabated.

  By mid-December, the dire position of the Sixth Army could only possibly be alleviated by Manstein coming to the rescue. His Army Group Don looked effective on paper, consisting of two Panzer divisions, one infantry division, Hoth’s headquarters and some Romanians, and it set out on 12 December to try to cross the 62 miles to the city in Operation Wintergewitte (Winter Tempest). ‘I have considered one thing, Zeitzler,’ Hitler said of Stalingrad at the Wolfschanze that same afternoon,

  Looking at the big picture, we should under no circumstances give this up. We won’t get it back once it’s lost… To think that it would be possible to do it a second time, if we go back there and the matériel stays behind, is ridiculous. They can’t take everything with them. The horses are tired, and they don’t have any more strength to pull. I can’t feed one horse with another. If they were Russians, I’d say ‘One Russian eats up the other one.’ But I can’t let one horse eat the other horse.60