Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Deadlocked in the western Caucasus, List’s operations now shifted their center of gravity east to the Terek River region, where German forces once more raised hopes of the decisive breakthrough to the oil fields beyond. The Terek, a swiftly flowing river 100–250 yards wide with steep, rocky banks, protected the key targets: Grozny, Ordzhonikidze, and the Ossetian and Georgian Military Roads. These latter, the only two routes through the mountains capable of carrying heavy military traffic, were especially important since their capture would raise the possibility of a swift thrust through the mountains to the great prize: the rich oil fields of Baku. Kleist’s mobile divisions had reached the Terek at Mozdok in late August, and in the first week of September managed to punch out bridgeheads across the river in a few spots, but fierce enemy resistance, the transfer of units elsewhere, and a lack of fuel forced them to halt attacks.70

  By October, Kleist concentrated all available units of the First Panzer Army along the Terek in the hope of waging one last breakthrough battle. Leading off the attack on 25 October, the Third Panzer Corps forced its way across the river, punched a hole in Soviet defenses, and cut off enemy forces at Nalchik. The panzer divisions now wheeled to the southeast and over the next few days crossed numerous swiftly flowing rivers as they skirted the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. By the twenty-ninth, they had reached the Ardon River, at the head of the Ossetian Military Road. The Twenty-third Panzer Division seized Alagir, thus closing the road, on 1 November, while that evening spearheads of the Thirteenth Panzer were only ten miles from Ordzhonikidze on the Georgian Military Road. With the tantalizing prospect of opening the route to Baku, the Germans redoubled their efforts, while, equally frantic at the threat facing them, the Soviets put up increasingly stiff opposition. Facing ferocious resistance every inch of the way, battling the cold and swirling snowstorms over treacherous roads that did not suffice for resupply, let alone movement, and easy prey for enemy air attacks, Kleist’s forces struggled forward. By the third, a handful of German battalions had battled to less than two miles from the city, but now gains were being measured in yards rather than miles. On the sixth, little more than a mile from the city, the Germans had their hopes crushed by a Soviet counterattack that forced a retreat. Transport difficulties and partisan attacks had now forced almost half of all supply trains to the Caucasus temporarily to a halt: too weak to pursue any further offensive operations, the Germans had lost the initiative, which now passed over to the enemy. A crossing of the eastern Caucasus was no longer in the offing, a reality Hitler had implicitly accepted in early October when he ordered the refineries and oil storage facilities at Grozny, Saratov, Kamyshin, Baku, and Astrahkan, once the key objective of the campaign, to be bombed. Over a thousand miles from the German border, with just a few company-strength battalions sputtering forward, and a mere mile from the objective, the drive to the oil fields had finally failed and with it the Caucasus campaign.71

  The propaganda images became familiar to Germans in the summer of 1942: scenes of tramping soldiers, their deeply bronzed faces and arms caked in dust, marching into the never-ending horizon of the Russian steppe against an apparently nonexistent foe; tanks raising enormous clouds of dust as they fanned out over the trackless expanse, commanders erect in their turrets, urging their compatriots on; German troops entering Cossack villages being greeted as liberators. While these images were not completely inaccurate, they failed to tell the whole story. While they had recovered much of their morale and spirit in the victories of the spring and early summer, these Landsers also knew that sooner or later the Russians would resist furiously, that the endless daily marches brought them no closer to trapping their elusive foe, that the blazing heat, lack of water, and insufficient supplies sapped their strength and left them vulnerable to dysentery, typhus, and typhoid fever, and that the enemy had largely destroyed anything of value in this sparse region.72

  The Germans very likely could have seized Stalingrad in late July if they had possessed the ability to do so. That they did not. At the time, the two German panzer corps under Paulus’s command had a total of perhaps 200 tanks, against a Russian figure of 1,289. Moreover, while a large Soviet buildup around Voronezh threatened the German left flank, the bulk of its panzer units were, just as Halder had complained, tangled in a great armored knot around Rostov. In addition, Hitler’s decision to split the offensive on 23 July meant that the bulk of available fuel and supplies had been redirected to Army Group A, effectively paralyzing the Sixth Army for days. Its mobility impaired, unable to concentrate its scattered units, and suffering a perilous shortage of ammunition and fuel, the Sixth Army had to wait in frustration as the enemy made good use of the respite. Not only did the Soviets strengthen their defenses west of the Don, but, beginning on the twenty-fifth and continuing for the next few days, they also launched a series of counterblows. Although these were hasty and uncoordinated, the very frenzy with which they were undertaken halted the German forward progress and inflicted not insignificant losses in men and material. On the twenty-seventh, Halder noted in his diary that “the battle of Sixth Army west of the Don is still raging with unabated fury,” while the next day he worried, “Due to lack of fuel and ammunition, Sixth Army was unable to attack.” By the thirtieth, the note of concern had risen visibly in Halder’s entries, the OKH chief now writing anxiously, “A wild battle is raging in Sixth Army sector inside the Don bend west of Stalingrad. . . . Sixth Army’s striking power is paralyzed by ammunition and fuel supply difficulties.” Although Weichs, the commander of Army Group B, succeeded in a late July telephone call to Hitler in getting priorities rearranged in his favor, valuable time had been lost. Stopgap logistic measures such as using JU-52 transport planes to bring fuel and ammunition to forward units helped restore some mobility but were hardly feasible in the long run.73

  Just a week after the issuance of Directive No. 45 (which might well be subtitled “Too much, too few, too far”), its great fault became clear: in demanding that German forces do everything at once, it effectively stripped each army group of the ability to achieve its objectives. Having now decided that taking Stalingrad was vital, in contrast to the original view that it was a secondary goal that need only be neutralized, Hitler found to his great frustration that his forces could not seize it in a rapid thrust. Both Weichs and Paulus, in fact, doubted that the Sixth Army had the strength to attack the city at all, a point seemingly confirmed by the unrelenting Soviet counterattacks. On 29 July, they communicated their concerns to Major Engel, Hitler’s adjutant, stressing that “for the battle of Stalingrad not enough infantry is available,” that their “forces [were] too weak in relation to their tasks and that . . . counterattacks could no longer be mastered with the forces available.” Hitler now realized that, if the Sixth Army’s stalled advance was to be got going again, it would have to be reinforced, inevitably at the expense of Army Group A. On 31 July, then, he put Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, then striking into the Caucasus, under the control of Army Group B in order to support the Sixth Army’s attack from the south while also redeploying the Italian Eighth Army to the Don River as flank protection, thus freeing German divisions for the attack to the Volga. The commitment to taking Stalingrad having been made, there could now be no turning back. Hitler had denuded the Caucasus operation of the forces it needed to succeed, so, for military, political, and psychological reasons, conquering the city on the Volga was an absolute necessity.74

  Doing so meant reactivating the Sixth Army, which sat largely motionless, crippled by a lack of fuel, for the first week of August as well as clearing the stubborn Soviet defenders west of the Don. By 4 August, even as the crisis triggered by the enemy counterattacks abated and the supply situation improved somewhat, the Sixth Army’s motorized units could still move only within a radius of twenty-five to thirty miles, while the infantry divisions were limited to a mere five to ten miles. Nonetheless, the reinforcements he had received as well as the arrival of German units from the northern Don flank allowed Paulus
to plan a Cannae-style envelopment of the enemy: the Fourteenth Panzer Corps, with its left wing brushing the Don, was to attack southward, while the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, similarly sweeping along the Don, was to spearhead an attack to the north, with both pincers meeting at Kalach. Although Paulus preferred to wait until 8 August, Hitler and Halder, fearful of a possible Soviet withdrawal, pushed for the assault to begin on the seventh. That morning, supported by massive Luftwaffe air strikes that destroyed practically every bridge over the Don, the German armored spearheads smashed through Soviet defenses and raced toward the key transportation center of Kalach. By dawn on the eighth, the two armored thrusts met just southwest of the city, trapping some 100,000 Soviet defenders. By the tenth, Soviet forces were crowded into a pocket less than four miles in diameter where, after frenzied resistance, they were annihilated the next day.75

  The swift destruction of the Soviet Sixty-second and First Tank Armies in the tight Kalach Kessel raised hopes at Hitler’s headquarters for a similarly swift seizure of Stalingrad, roughly forty miles to the east. Even as the pocket at Kalach tightened, Paulus had spun forces off to prepare for the further advance to the Volga, but he faced a dilemma. On his northern flank, the Soviets still held a number of bridgeheads across the Don that had to be eliminated, notably at Kremenskaya and Serafi-movich, but Paulus’s hasty mid-August efforts to clear them amounted to little. At the cost of considerable losses, the enemy stubbornly clung to his foothold south of the Don, which tied down substantial portions of the Fourteenth Panzer Corps and the Eleventh Corps for a prolonged period. Lacking both the time and the resources needed to reduce the remaining enemy pockets, Paulus turned his attention to pushing across the Don and making for the northern suburbs of Stalingrad. Not for the last time, German failure to reduce a Soviet bridgehead would have dire consequences. Nor was German success west of the Don as complete as it might have seemed. As a result of persistent fuel and ammunition shortages as well as stiff Soviet resistance, it had taken Paulus a month to clear the bulk of enemy forces from the Great Bend of the Don and then only at the cost of time and considerable losses in men and materiel. By mid-August, even before the plunge to the Volga, his armored forces had lost half their strength. Given the slow pace of advance to the Don and the disconcertingly high numbers of Red Army soldiers who had escaped the German trap, it was foolish to believe that Stalingrad could be seized quickly with forces sapped of strength and fighting power by the stubborn fighting along the Don.76

  Significantly, the Sixth Army’s offensive strength had been reduced to such an extent that initially all it had available for the push across the Don was a single armored division, two motorized divisions, and four infantry divisions. Suspecting that the Russians had strongly fortified the direct route east from Kalach, which in any case was crisscrossed with deep gullies that offered splendid defensive opportunities, Paulus ordered his forces to cross the Don to the north at Vertyachiy. His mobile units were then to move quickly along a high ridge of ground to reach the Volga, thirty-five miles to the east, in the northern suburbs of Stalingrad. At the same time, the trailing infantry divisions would offer flank support, with some wheeling to the southeast to occupy the city itself while others turned to the south to link up with the forces of Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. Neither an attempt to destroy enemy forces west of the city nor a gamble on a swift drive into the heart of Stalingrad, this move of Paulus’s seemed primarily intent on occupying the land bridge between the Don and the Volga and protecting his flanks. With such a limited force, it was perhaps no surprise that he struck a cautious, almost defensive note. Russian troops, he stressed, could be expected to defend Stalingrad stubbornly and to launch heavy counterattacks, although he added the almost wistful hope that perhaps, after all, the fighting in the Don bend had finally destroyed the enemy’s ability to resist.77

  In order to secure a lodgment area for the main attack, Paulus’s spearhead groups pushed across the Don against strong resistance on 21 and 22 August. Despite Soviet counterattacks on the northern flank and efforts to destroy the two floating bridges across the Don, the German attack went off as planned on the twenty-third. Supported by massed aircraft, and with utter disregard for its flanks, at dawn the Fourteenth Panzer Corps burst out of the bridgehead and raced for the Volga. Encountering virtually no resistance from the surprised Soviet defenders, German tanks raised enormous clouds of dust on the arid grasslands of the steppe as they rolled eastward. By midafternoon, spearheads of Hans Hube’s Sixteenth Panzer Division had leaped the thirty-five miles and reached Rynok, to the north of Stalingrad, where they brushed aside fire from antiaircraft and antitank guns operated by local women who had been given only rudimentary training and established defensive positions along the Volga. They also seized American Lend-Lease jeeps, which proved very popular with German officers. Late that evening, the Sixteenth Panzer reported its achievement to the Fourteenth Panzer Corps. Within a half hour, Hube received a terse order from Hitler: “16th Panzer Division will hold its positions under all circumstances.”78

  That same evening, the Luftwaffe struck Stalingrad in a massive terror attack, the largest air assault it had mounted since the opening day of Barbarossa. Arguing that “we must tell the army and the people that there is nowhere left to retreat,” Stalin had forbidden the evacuation of the city, so its population was swollen by masses of peasant refugees, with livestock in tow, desperately seeking to cross the Volga. The extensive use of incendiaries caused the city, already broiling under the summer heat, to blaze “like a gigantic torch,” visible for forty miles. Over the next two days, the Luftwaffe completed its destructive work. Richthofen noted with dry satisfaction in his diary that the city was “destroyed, and without any further worthwhile targets.” Another, less sober German observer was overcome by the spectacle of Stalingrad ablaze. It was, he recorded, “a fantastic picture in the moonlight.” The three-day attack left Stalingrad in ruins, with tens of thousands of people killed, utilities disrupted, and communications with the outside world severed. For a time, in fact, the cessation of news left Moscow with the impression that the city had already fallen.79

  The speed of the Germans’ advance and the savagery of their aerial assault had clearly stunned the Soviet defenders, so much so that Richthofen, disgusted up to now by what he saw as the army’s lack of fighting spirit, believed that the city could be taken in an all-out assault, albeit with high casualties. Stalin, too, feared that his namesake city might fall at any time but in his usual fashion averted a nascent crisis by quick and firm action. On the twenty-fourth, he demanded absolute defense of the city and ordered Eremenko, the commander of the Stalingrad Front, to launch a series of counterattacks. These latter posed a serious dilemma for the Germans since, despite their impressive dash to the Volga, Hube’s forces had carved out only a narrow corridor a few miles wide. Paulus’s original intention of exploiting this breakthrough by a swift move into the city quickly faded as Soviet assaults left the Fourteenth Panzer Corps the hunted rather than the hunter. Unable to penetrate into Stalingrad, with its communications and supply lines cut, and with its strength severely reduced, the Fourteenth Panzer Corps had no choice but to assume a hedgehog position on the twenty-sixth and go on the defensive. That same day, General Wietersheim, commanding the Fourteenth Panzer Corps, called for the immediate withdrawal of his units, a request that Paulus tersely rejected. Although Hube was able to hold on to the narrow corridor, his victory was costly. The incessant Soviet counterattacks against both the northern corridor and the German Fifty-first Corps moving toward the city from the northwest did not achieve all that Stalin had hoped, but they nonetheless strained Paulus’s resources to the limit. By the end of the month, the Sixth Army had been largely confined to holding and consolidating its gains while awaiting the arrival of the Fourth Panzer Army from the south. In a bad sign, the German leap into Stalingrad from the north had turned into a limp because of insufficient force.80

  Even as Paulus’s troops pushed ah
ead to Stalingrad from the northwest, Hoth’s weak Fourth Panzer Army launched its drive on the city from the southwest, but, since it ranked only third on the priority list for fuel, its ability to move quickly was greatly diminished. In addition, as it moved north in scorching heat across the arid steppe, it had to drop formations off for flank protection, units that were desperately needed at the sharp end. Nonetheless, Hoth had devised an ambitious plan of attack. The Forty-eighth Panzer Corps was to push across the lower Don on 1 August, wheel eastward, then, with the Rumanian Sixth Army Corps protecting its left flank, strike swiftly to the north in the hope of seizing the southern part of the city in a surprise attack. All went as planned for most of the first week, with his forces advancing up to thirty miles a day, but Stalin and the Stavka responded with great urgency. On the sixth, Soviet forces not only delayed the German advance along the Aksai River, some forty miles to the southwest of Stalingrad, but also succeeded in throwing the Rumanians back across it. Over the next two weeks, Soviet forces under General Chuikov thwarted the Germans and forced Hoth to probe further to the east to find a way through enemy defenses. In grinding fighting, Hoth’s forces wrestled forward through heavily mined Soviet defense lines and against repeated counterattacks, pushing slowly through to the Abganerovo area by the seventeenth, where the attack stalled.81