Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  After pausing for a few days because of fuel shortages and to reorganize his forces, Hoth resumed the onslaught on the twentieth, this time attacking on his right flank. Once again, stout resistance forced slow going as over the next week Hoth struggled to gain the decisive breakthrough, hoping to push through first at Tundutovo Station, then at Tinguta Station, both south of Stalingrad. By the twenty-seventh, with his forces seriously depleted, Hoth again paused to concentrate and redeploy his armored units, this time to the west. Renewing the assault on the twenty-ninth to the west of Abganerovo Station, Hoth finally found the weak spot in the enemy defenses. His forces pressed forward through Zety and Gavrilovka, with his spearheads on 31 August reaching the Kalach-Stalingrad railroad just east of Basargino Station, only twelve miles west of the city’s center and in position to link up with the Sixth Army. On 1 September, however, the Twenty-fourth Panzer Division thrust straight east in an attempt, foiled by Soviet defenders, to seize the center of the city. Nor, fearing continued attacks on his vulnerable northern corridor to the Volga, was the cautious Paulus willing to risk turning sizable forces to the south. Not until the morning of the third, then, did spearheads of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army meet in the Pitomnik-Gonchara-Gumrak Station area less than fifteen miles from the center of Stalingrad. Any brief hopes that the city might yet be captured on the fly quickly evaporated as probing attacks over the next two days revealed that the Soviets had every intention of defending it.82 German forces, seriously weakened by the bitter two-week struggle just to reach Stalingrad, now faced the daunting task of bitter urban fighting in order to secure it.

  Moreover, although a series of stubborn Soviet counterattacks across the Don against Italian forces holding the northern shoulder of Army Group B had been contained, these short and violent bridgehead actions had serious implications. Unable, as Halder admitted, to set the situation right and throw the Russians back across the river, the flank battles of the last week of August underscored the fatal weakness of the overstretched Axis defenses along the Don. Even Hitler had come to suspect that “the crucial danger” lurked in the area of the Italian Eighth Army, but he could reinforce the Italians only by stripping German divisions from the fighting front. The Stavka, too, took note of the poor performance and exposed position of the Italians. Once again, exaggerated hopes for a swift victory by an inadequate force had proved illusory as the Germans lacked sufficient power to achieve the objectives set them by the Führer. Once the Fourteenth Panzer Corps had reached the Volga, it not only lacked the strength to penetrate into Stalingrad but had to fight hard just to ward off its own annihilation. While the rest of Paulus’s troops were engaged in a stalemate, Hoth’s panzer army, with only around 150 tanks, was itself too weak to carry out its assigned task in one sweep, let alone provide much relief to the Sixth Army. Having left Italian, Hungarian, and Rumanian units guarding their exposed and vulnerable flanks, the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army had struggled to the city on the Volga but faced a sobering question: What now?83

  On 3 September, both Hitler and Stalin thought the fall of Stalingrad imminent, a belief that caused the one to avoid reflection and the other to redouble his frenzied efforts to save the city. With its huge steel mills, tractor factories, and ordnance works, Stalingrad was one of the key armaments production centers, especially for tanks, in the Soviet Union. At the same time, with much of European Russia now under German occupation, the Volga, navigable all the way to Moscow, had become the vital transport artery of the Soviet war economy. Stalingrad, as the major port, rail junction, and communications center along the lower Volga, had, thus, assumed even greater significance. Finally, the city had a certain symbolic importance, the successful defense during the civil war of Tsaritsin, as it was then known, being attributed to the young chairman of the regional war council, Josef Stalin. Not surprisingly, then, the dictator was frantic in his efforts to defend “his” city, in late August ordering his favorite troubleshooter, Zhukov, to take charge of its overall defense. Ironically, with German troops perched on the Volga and the city wrecked by the massive late August bombing raids, the goal set for the Sixth Army—to neutralize the city of Stalingrad—had seemingly been accomplished. Hitler himself had throughout the summer regarded the seizure of Stalingrad as of secondary importance. But, with it evidently ripe for the taking, he now failed to weigh the prospect of halting the attack. Indeed, his order on 2 September to annihilate all the men and deport all the women because the entire population was Communist and therefore “particularly dangerous” already hinted that seizing Stalingrad for ideological and prestige reasons was assuming decisive importance in his mind.84

  Before that murderous action could be imposed, however, the city had to be taken. The problem was how since the Germans would be unable to use their favorite tactic of the Kesselschlacht. Stretching for some thirty to forty miles along the west bank of the Volga but rarely more than five miles in depth, Stalingrad was less a city than an urbanized, industrialized bridgehead. In the south lay the old town, which bordered the main rail station and the main river docks, while the central section was a modern city center with wide boulevards, government buildings, and department stores. The northern part of the city was dominated by four huge industrial complexes that had been converted to armaments production: the Dzerzhinsky tractor works, which now made tanks; the Barrikady ordnance factory; the Lazur chemical works; and the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) metal plant. The Tsaritsa River bisected the southern sector, the center was dominated by the three-hundred-foot-high Mamayev Kurgan, an ancient burial ground, while high bluffs along the west bank of the river afforded defensive shelter. Such a city would be difficult to envelop, especially by German forces who were already at the end of overextended supply lines and threatened by strong enemy opposition from their flanks, while its very narrowness seemingly invited frontal assaults to seize control of the riverbank. In either case, however, German commanders were aware of the danger of getting drawn into prolonged and bloody urban fighting, such as that at Sevastopol just a few months earlier, which had cost them seventy-five thousand casualties. The original plan of Blau, in fact, had been designed to avoid just such a confrontation, yet here they were. With winter rapidly approaching and the Sixth Army at the end of a long and very tenuous supply chain, the Germans had to do something. Characteristically, they chose to attack.85

  With defenses around the city incomplete and the bulk of Soviet formations consisting of battle-weary or poorly trained rifle units, hastily assembled and thrown together with shortages of every type of weapons, this was precisely what Stalin feared. On 3 September, he frantically implored Zhukov to mount an offensive against the vulnerable German northern corridor. “Situation in Stalingrad worsened,” he telegraphed. “Enemy about three kilometers [two miles] from Stalingrad. City can be taken today or tomorrow. . . . Attack enemy immediately. . . . No delay permissible. Delay would be criminal.” Although Zhukov was able to persuade a skeptical Stalin that an attack could not be mounted before the fifth, when it came, it was too uncoordinated and disjointed to have the desired impact. Not least, German air superiority and near constant Stuka attacks did much to blunt the Soviet assault. The Soviet attack did, however, manage to tie down scarce German forces that might have been better employed elsewhere. On that same day, in fact, Hoth’s Forty-eighth Panzer Corps had launched a thrust into the city that, after five days of intense fighting and heavy losses by both sides, finally reached the Volga at Kuporosnye. Hoth’s forces had not only split the city in two, with the center and industrial areas to the north, but also separated the Soviet Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Armies, leaving the former isolated in its defense of the city. Already, however, things were slipping out of German control. The savage combat clearly indicated that the Sixth Army had squandered its chance to encircle Soviet defenders before they could retreat into the rubble of Stalingrad. To root them out now was going to take a great deal of time and cost many lives. That realization, along w
ith his frustration at the slow pace of operations in the Caucasus, had occasioned Hitler’s bitter outburst on 7 September.86

  What to do in light of this reality was the subject of two conferences on 12 September, one in Moscow, and the other in Vinnitsa. Zhukov had flown to Moscow to discuss the looming disaster at Stalingrad as well as to seek ways to turn the situation around. With Vasilevsky’s support, he persuaded Stalin that repeated attacks on the northern corridor were futile since the Soviets lacked the strength to punch through, and that in any case it was pointless to waste their forces in local defensive fighting. A permanent solution to the crisis, he and Vasilevsky argued, required not just an active defense but a large-scale counteroffensive that would transform the strategic situation. With an eye on the weak German flanks, Zhukov and Vasilevsky proposed that Soviet forces be built up for a counterattack against the vulnerable Rumanian and Italian forces. Both estimated that it would be the middle of November before the necessary units could be assembled and the counterblow struck. Significantly, however, they also assumed that the Germans now lacked the strength to realize their strategic goals for 1942, with the result that the bulk of Red Army reserves could be committed to Uranus, the code name for the planned counteroffensive.87

  That same day, Weichs and Paulus discussed similar concerns at Hitler’s headquarters in Vinnitsa. Although Paulus later claimed that the Führer had disregarded their warnings about the exposed flanks, insisting instead that the Russians had exhausted their resources, this seems unlikely. As early as 16 August, concerned that Stalin would repeat Bolshevik tactics from the Civil War and thrust powerful forces across the Don in the direction of Rostov, he had ordered the Twenty-second Panzer Division into the area behind the Italian Eighth Army to bolster its defenses. Similarly, on 9 September, he ordered that the Don sector be mined and strengthened as much as possible since “strong enemy attacks” aiming at Rostov had to be expected against the Italians. Just four days after the conference with Paulus, in fact, Halder specifically noted that “Hitler was still greatly worried about the Don front.” The persistent overextension of the army, of course, made it impossible to deal effectively with the weakness on the flanks until the situation in Stalingrad had been resolved. Only the quick capture of the city would permit the necessary redirection of forces to alleviate the growing threat on the flanks. A race of sorts had, thus, begun, with the Soviets hoping to cling to the city long enough to scrape forces together for a counterattack and the Germans desperately hoping to avoid just such a stalemate.88

  At first glance, the odds seemed to favor the Germans since, with the addition of two corps from Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, the Sixth Army was the strongest formation in the Ostheer. Of the twenty-one largely understrength divisions in his army, however, Paulus could commit only eight to the fighting in the city, with most of the remainder manning the nearly 130 miles of front to the north and south of the city; only one division was left in reserve. Moreover, this was no longer an operational battle of movement that required skill, coordination, and effective cooperation of all arms, something at which the Germans excelled. This had become, as the Landsers termed it, a Rattenkrieg (rat’s war), fought by small squads from street to street and house to house, in ruined buildings, in piles of rubble, in factories with twisted metal frames and shattered machines, in grain silos and cellars, through sewers from one house to the next to pop up behind the enemy in a sudden spray of submachine-gun fire and a blast of grenades. Here, in the words of General Hans Doerr, the chief of staff of the Fifty-second Corps, “the kilometer as a unit of measurement gave way to the meter, the staff map to the city plan.” This was fighting reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I; the Germans had lost their great blitzkrieg advantage. Nor did Paulus, although a competent commander, have the imagination or verve to wage such a battle.89

  Insofar as Chuikov, the tough, determined, inspirational commander of the Soviet Sixty-second Army, had a plan, it was to “hug” the enemy—to hold positions as close as possible to the Germans so that they would be reluctant to call in artillery and air strikes, thus negating their superior firepower. Since Chuikov had noted that the Germans disliked fighting at night, he also ordered small combat squads to infiltrate enemy positions in the darkness, to rattle the Germans psychologically as well as exhaust them physically. “If only you could understand what terror is,” wrote one Landser from Stalingrad. “At the slightest rustle, I pull the trigger and fire off . . . bursts from the machine gun.” Constant ambushes, the presence of deadly snipers, and continual nightly air raids by Soviet planes were all part of the wearing-down process to exhaust the Germans and shatter their nerves. To blunt the carefully prepared German attacks, Chuikov established a system of fortified strongpoints, “breakwaters,” manned by infantry with antitank rifles and machine guns designed to fragment and deflect the attackers into channels where camouflaged tanks and antitank guns waited. Trench mortars and grenades would be used against the advancing infantry while Katyusha rocket launchers, normally protected within the steep bluffs of the Volga, would be backed out to launch their deadly arsenal, then just as hurriedly returned to safety. All the while, heavy artillery removed to the east bank of the river would pound German positions. All this was designed to force the German infantry into a style of fighting that it loathed and for which it was not prepared: close-quarter combat. In fighting such a savage war of attrition, the Russians aimed not only to erode the Germans’ strength but also to destroy their morale. Little wonder, then, that even at the time Stalingrad became known as “Verdun on the Volga.”90

  In retrospect, the battle for Stalingrad can be divided into four main phases, with the Germans in each aiming to break Soviet defenses and reach the west bank of the Volga. The first phase, accompanied by a thunderous artillery bombardment and savage air assault, began in the early morning of 13 September, with the goal of taking the old town south of the Tsaritsa River, occupying the main river docks and landing area, and splitting the Soviet Sixty-second Army. North of the Tsaritsa, the Germans aimed at seizing the heights of Mamayev Kurgan, which would allow their artillery to dominate the entire city. Although the attack achieved some initial success—in the south, troops from Hoth’s Forty-eighth Corps took the major part of the old city and penetrated into the harbor, while, in the north, Paulus’s Fifty-first Corps gained the railway station and reached the Volga in a narrow corridor—it soon bogged down in the rubble of the inner city. The key point in the battle, both symbolically and in actuality, came early on the fourteenth, when German troops reached the crest of the Mamayev Kurgan and seemed poised to surge to the Volga, the central landing site, and Chuikov’s headquarters, not more than eight hundred yards away. It might as well have been eight hundred miles, however, as troops from Alexander Rodimtsev’s elite Thirteenth Guards Rifle Division were hurriedly ferried across the Volga, leaped from their boats, and, with the Germans less than a hundred yards away, charged up the steep banks and straight into the melee. Nearly a third of his men were lost in the first day, but Rodimtsev’s fierce counterattack saved the riverbank and swept the Germans back off the Mamayev Kurgan. Chuikov later claimed that, without Rodimtsev’s determined intervention, Stalingrad would likely have fallen in mid-September.91

  Although certainly inspiring from the Soviet perspective, the incident pointed to two persistent problems confronting the Germans: their inability to stop the flow of enemy reinforcements across the river into the city and Paulus’s uninspiring direction of the battle. Despite the massive and effective employment of his Stuka dive bombers, for example, Richthofen was exasperated by what he saw as Paulus’s bland and timid leadership, his failure to exploit opportunities by driving his units on, and the lack of fighting spirit in the troops. The absence of bold, reckless leadership seemed especially obvious when compared with the fanatic actions of the Soviet commanders. To Richthofen, not merely motivation but a recognition that audacious action now would save lives in the future was lacking. The cautious
clearing of the city block by block, which Paulus preferred, simply gave the enemy time to recover and would lead to a slow strangulation of German forces.92

  Nothing illustrated Richthofen’s point more than the ferocious battle that raged for days for control of an enormous concrete grain elevator in the south of the city near the river. With only two old machine guns and a few antitank rifles, the fifty-odd defenders of the silo, with the grain on fire and in choking smoke and dust, without water, and with no chance of relief, turned away at least ten German assaults on the eighteenth alone. “Our battalion, plus tanks, is attacking the elevator, from which smoke is pouring,” noted Wilhelm Hoffman in his diary. “Barbarism. . . . The elevator is occupied not by men, but by devils that no flames or bullets can destroy.” Although the attacks continued, not until the twentieth were German tanks able to finish the place off. Even then, the fighting hardly abated, as Hoffmann despaired a few days later: “Our regiment is involved in constant heavy fighting. After the elevator was taken the Russians continued to defend themselves just as stubbornly. You don’t see them at all; they have established themselves in houses and cellars and are firing on all sides, including from our rear. . . . Barbarians, they use gangster methods. . . . Stalingrad is hell.” The wearing, consuming fighting, of an intensity the men had never experienced, not only accelerated the “approaching exhaustion” of the battle-weary troops, but also sapped their morale. Despite German successes—by the twenty-sixth Paulus had declared the south and the center of the city won, with the swastika flying over the Stalingrad party building—the mid-September action clearly showed what an enormous expenditure of time and forces a systematic mopping up of the city would entail when every block, every key feature of the cityscape—a grain silo, the main railway station, Mamayev Hill, the various factory complexes in the north—had to be fought over for days. Yet that was precisely what Paulus had in mind—and was the type of unimaginative leadership that drove Richthofen to despair.93