Disaster at Stalingrad

by Peter G. Tsouras

  Earlier in the war, Graf Spee and Bismarck had savaged enemy shipping only to be hunted down and sunk. Now that Hitler had got himself stuck in a war with the Soviet Union, he had even less interest. If anything, the demands of the Eastern Front were voracious competitors for the same industrial production and fuel. The loss of those ships had made Hitler shy of risking the remaining heavy ships to the point they were under so many restrictions that decisive engagement of the enemy was largely avoided. Raeder did not want to lose them either, but was willing to take more risks, especially in the North Atlantic, to achieve decisive result.

  Only the U-boats found favour in Hitler’s eyes. That was due to Dönitz, whom Raeder had appointed Commander of Submarines in 1935. Almost alone among senior naval officers he had advocated a relentless attack on the soft shipping of the enemy and had revived the wolfpack tactics of the First War, vastly improving their capabilities with stronger, more hardy boats and advanced communications, especially the unbreakable naval Enigma cipher. Although Germany had begun the war with fewer than sixty boats, their success triggered a vast expansion of construction so that now they roamed the seas as the terror of the Allies, and like their wolfish namesake, pulling down one victim after another.

  Hitler may not have appreciated the surface navy much, but he was not about to let its ships rust away. His fears of an Allied invasion of Norway prompted him to state at the Führer naval conference of December 1941 that, ‘The German fleet must… use all its forces for the defence of Norway. It would be expedient to transfer all battleships there for this purpose. The latter could be used for attacking convoys in the north, for instance.’ Not surprisingly, Hitler stated at the Führer naval conference of 13 February 1942, ‘Time and again Churchill speaks of shipping tonnage as his greatest worry.’ Slowly his concern for an Allied invasion was replaced with the necessity to disrupt the Allied convoys to Russia. By this time most of the Navy’s capital ships had been concentrated there. The next month he issued orders that more submarines and aircraft were to be stationed in Norway to destroy the convoys.6 He had fixated on an Allied invasion of Norway which the British had cleverly encouraged. That led him to declare, ‘Every ship not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place.’ He was right but for the wrong reason.7

  Raeder realized that he was not going to be chief of the German Navy much longer. Sooner or later he would have to offer Hitler his resignation. Who would he recommend as his successor? His preference was for Admiral Rolf Carls, Commander Naval Group North, a man with the breadth of understanding to command the Navy. Second was Karl Dönitz. He worried about Dönitz on two counts. The man had concentrated so much on submarine warfare that Raeder felt he would let the surface fleet wither away. Also troubling was Dönitz’s enthusiastic support of National Socialism and his near worship of Hitler. He was far more political than Raeder believed proper. He had said publicly ‘in comparison to Hitler we are all pip-squeaks. Anyone who believes he can do better than the Führer is stupid.’8 So enthusiastic was he that he was referred to as Hitler Youth Dönitz.

  If Dönitz’s political enthusiasm unsettled Raeder’s concept of a nonpolitical, professional naval officer, his attitude towards the Jews appalled him. Raeder was firmly in the Christian tradition of the German Navy and fought relentlessly to protect the Navy from Nazi neo-paganism. As a Christian gentleman and naval officer, he had also gone toe to toe with Hitler himself to defend Jewish naval officers and those with partial Jewish blood and even obtained their reinstatement in the Navy.9

  Against these black marks was the undeniable fact that Dönitz was a brilliant officer and was commanding the Navy’s only successful operation. Still… for the Navy’s sake, and perhaps its soul, it would have to be Carls who would succeed him.

  Raeder was jolted out of his concentration as the starboard engine flamed. Then the plane went into a steep dive.

  Ramushevo, on the edge of the Demyansk Pocket, 25 April 1942

  Ramushevo burned on both banks of the mile-wide Lovat River. On the east bank the reinforced Panzerjäger battalion of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf had broken through the last of the encircling Soviet units that had hemmed in an entire German corps in the Demyansk Pocket. On the west bank, the Jäger divisions of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach had hammered through five Soviet defence lines to relieve the pocket. Now only the river separated them. It would not be long before German pioneers put a pontoon bridge across.10

  On the east bank, the SS were mopping up the last of the Russians still holding out in the ruins. No prisoners. Tough did not do them justice. They were hard as Krupp steel with a ruthlessness not seen since the Mongols. When the division was formed in 1939, its enlisted ranks were filled with concentration camp guards. Now 80 per cent of them were killed, wounded or missing, but the Soviets had paid many times over.

  Krupp steel aside, their losses would have been 100 per cent if had not been for the new automatic rifles that many of them had been issued as a test. This was the Maschinenkarabiner 1942 (MKb 42, quickly dubbed by the troops as the Sturmgewehr — assault rifle). The new weapon effectively outranged the Soviet submachine gun, but at the same time was far more deadly in close combat than the German bolt-action rifle. It also filled the role of a light machine gun and was reliable in the worst cold of the Russian winter. Armed with this weapon, the SS simply shot their way through every Soviet unit in their path.

  It would have done them no good if Seydlitz’s Silesian and Würtemberger Jäger had not fought their way through to the river. These were elite light infantry, and they had broken through Soviet defence after defence in a month’s vicious fighting over ground that froze, thawed, and froze again as the Russian winter fought with spring. Seydlitz’s tactical handling of the relief had been brilliant, and his physical courage exemplary. He was the scion of a great military family whose famous ancestor was Frederick the Great’s superb cavalry general and often second-in-command. At the battle of Zorndorf against the Russians in 1758, the king had issued an ill-informed order to Seydlitz, who commanded the other flank of the Prussian Army. He replied, ‘Tell the king that after the battle my head is at his disposal, but meantime I hope he will permit me to exercise it in his service!’11 His descendant was no less determined to use his own judgement.

  His ancestor had also been famously known for charging full tilt between the descending blades of two windmills. Seydlitz had inherited that trait as well.

  Nanking, China, Headquarters, Soviet Advisory Group, 25 April 1942

  General Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov was chafing at his inaction. The war was almost a year old, and he had seen none of it. At the beginning of May he was finally due to return from the Soviet military mission in China. He had requested immediate assignment to the front. ‘I wanted to get to know the nature of modern warfare as quickly as possible, to understand the reasons for our defeats and to try to find out where the German Army’s tactical strength lay and what new military techniques it was using.’12

  While in China he and the other officers chafed to get back to the Motherland in its peril as the news of one disaster after another was announced. Chuikov was born a peasant, had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and risen through rough talent. A distinguished record put him on the road to success and two tours in China as an advisor to the Nationalist Army followed. He had commanded an army in the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 and another in the war against Finland in 1940 when failure was clinging to everyone else. He learned a great lesson, concluding that an orthodox military approach would not work in an unorthodox situation. He had been bold enough to write up a summary of why Finnish tactics had been so effective and recommended countermeasures.13

  He had done so well that Stalin had sent him to China as part of the military mission to advise Chiang Kai-shek and personally briefed him as a mark of his favour. That favour was prized as much as his disfavour was deadly. Four years before Stalin had slaughtered his senior officer corps in fear of a coup led by the
brilliant Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the creator of Soviet mechanization in warfare and the concept of deep battle. Luckily for Chuikov, he had not been a part of the great man’s clique and survived when all around him were being shot or sent to the camps.

  Troop train of the 6th Panzer Division, 25 April 1942

  The men slept in the lullaby rocking of the train as it sped across the Ukraine, Poland, the Reich, and then into France. La Belle France. From the frozen hell of Russia the men would detrain into a dream world of a French spring. From frozen ground to soft beds, from frozen rations to warm bread, from Russians who were trying to kill them all the time, to French women who were willing to please a man, almost all the time. The 6th Panzer Division had been sent to France to re-equip and rebuild as a reward for its fine fighting record, an investment in future glory.

  Hardly a man would argue that the division’s survival and success was due to its commander, General Erhard Raus. Not only had he beaten the Russians at every turn, but he had repeatedly rescued his men who had been cut off by the enemy. They had affectionately coined the slogan, ‘Raus zieht heraus!’ (‘Raus gets you out!’). Raus was an Austrian with a talent for armoured warfare that some men had compared to that of Rommel. Both had gone through the hard school of the Gebirgsjäger, or mountain troops, in the First World War and won their laurels. Both were also exacting trainers of men and had inculcated the Gebirgsjäger creed of aggressive initiative and high training to their men. The test had been battle. For Rommel it had been the sand of Africa. For Raus it had been the snow of Russia.

  Raus could not afford to sleep. Already in his mind’s eye, he was seeing the transformation of his worn-out division into a resharpened sword. A thousand and one things needed to be done. The absorption of thousands of replacements, reception of hundreds of new fighting vehicles and heavy weapons, then training, training, training, and again training. He had made them lethal, and now they were to rest, rebuild. Already he was planning on making them even more lethal.

  Borisov, Headquarters, Army Group Centre, 25 April 1942

  The commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, counted himself lucky to have an operations officer with the brilliance of Colonel Henning von Tresckow. He had been one of the main architects, along with General Erich von Manstein, of the plan for the attack through the Ardennes in the 1940 campaign in the West that had destroyed France.

  Tresckow was from an ancient Prussian military family and in June 1918 he had become the youngest lieutenant in the Imperial German Army at the age of seventeen. In the last few months of that war he won the Iron Cross First Class for his outstanding physical feats and the moral courage to take independent action. His superior at the time remarked, “You, Tresckow, will either become chief of the General Staff or die on the scaffold as a rebel.’14

  What few knew in 1942 was that Tresckow was a determined member of the plot to remove Hitler. A committed Lutheran Christian himself, he once said, ‘I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.’15 As early as 1938 he had said, ‘Both duty and honour demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism in order to save Germany and Europe from barbarism.’ In the 1941 campaign in Russia he had been sickened and appalled by the treatment of Russian POWs, the infamous Commissar Order, and the murder of Jewish men, women and children by the Einsatzgruppen as well as personal observation of the massacre of Jews at Borisov. His appeal to the then army group commander to take direct action had fallen on deaf ears.

  Almost single-handedly he began to organize a plot to kill Hitler. He had made contact with like-minded men in Berlin and elsewhere, some of whom had already tried to kill Hitler, but the man had the devil’s own luck. At the same time he recruited into key positions in Army Group Centre a number of sympathetic officers.

  He was immediately impressed with a visitor from Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, Army High Command), the young Major Claus Graf von Stauffenberg who had already made a name for himself as the star of the General Staff. Born to an aristocratic Catholic family from southern Germany, Stauffenberg was descended from one of Germany’s greatest heroes, Field Marshal August Graf von Gneisenau, the soldier who had defied Napoleon’s legions at the moment of Prussia’s overthrow in 1806 and who in 1815 had rallied the beaten Prussian Army to fall on the French Emperor’s flank at Waterloo. The young Stauffenberg had grown up in a spirit of pious Catholicism, aristocratic traditions of service to the state, a classical education, and the aura of romantic poetry. One biographer described the 37-year-old count:

  Stauffenberg’s reputation as a brilliant General Staff officer continued to grow. Everyone wanted to know him, even older officers, generals reporting from the front, and the Chief of the General Staff himself sought his advice. His habit of interrupting an evening’s work to recite a poem by Stefan George contributed to his aura of distinctiveness and intellectuality.

  It was at this meeting that Tresckow concluded that his visitor was a ‘non-Nazi, and indeed saw Hitler and National Socialism as a danger’. The mass murder of the Jews had shocked him to the core of his being.16

  He would have been even more impressed if he had known that Stauffenberg kept a large portrait of Hitler behind his desk so that visitors could see that the man was mad. In discussing that madness, he had stated flatly to another officer, ‘There is only one solution. It is to kill him.’ At that time, though, he still thought that sort of thing would have to be accomplished by someone of more exalted rank.

  Berlin, 24 April 1942

  Carl Friedrich Goerdeler had been immensely relieved to draw Tresckow into the Berlin-centred move against Hitler. A World War I veteran, former mayor of Leipzig, and a conservative monarchist, he had had a distinguished career in government and economics. He had also become one of the chief organizers of the anti-Hitler plotters and had been designated by the group to assume the office of chancellor after Hitler’s removal. He had travelled overseas extensively, warning everyone he could of the dangers of Hitler, including Churchill. He had passed on to the British government his opinion that ‘the Führer had “decided to destroy the Jews, Christianity, Capitalism’”.17

  A number of the anti-Hitler plotters were monarchists like Goerdeler. The problem for them was not the restoration of the monarchy but upon whom to place the imperial crown. The old Kaiser had died in exile in the Netherlands. Crown Prince Wilhelm, his oldest son, was passed over. He had too much baggage. He had been too enthusiastic an early supporter of Hitler, although he distanced himself after the Night of the Long Knives. His oldest son and heir, Wilhelm, had been killed in France in 1940 while serving in the German Army. His younger son, Ludwig (Louis) Ferdinand (1907-94), unlike all his male ancestors, had not received a military education and was widely travelled, having lived in the United States for a while, becoming a friend to Henry Ford and an acquaintance of President Roosevelt. Returning to Germany, he became an avowed anti-Nazi.

  Goerdeler concluded that, after the chaos of National Socialism, the German people would look back to the Second Reich as a time of stability and prosperity and associate that with the monarchy. For the prince’s sake, he would do nothing to draw him into the plot. Ludwig would remain on the shelf as a possibility.18

  The North Atlantic, 25 April 1942

  For the U-boat crew somewhere in the North Atlantic, their kill of an American merchant ship off Iceland had been ecstatic. The captain had ordered a round of schnapps to each man since it was their boat’s first sinking. The boat was one of the hundreds produced by German yards and now infesting the waters between Britain and North America. Many ranged ever farther, to the Mediterranean, the South Atlantic, and beyond to the Indian Ocean. A few even reached Japan to carry vital high-value war supplies to their ally.

  Yet, while the taste of the liquor was still in the mouths of this crew, the sound of the dying ship as it broke up an
d sank stopped every man in his celebration. The groans and shrieks of rending metal were all too human as they echoed through the water and the U-boat’s hull. It was like a wounded man in no-man’s-land screaming out his death agonies, something all too common to their brothers fighting in Russia. Like the German infantry, the Landser, they would get used to it.

  For the Allies the war had reached a crisis. In the first months of 1942, the Germans had sunk an average of over 500,000 tons of shipping each month. Imports into Britain fell by 18 per cent compared to 1941.19 At the same time, both Britain and the United States were giving priority to shipments of war materials to the Soviet Union. The strain on resources was simply not sustainable.

  Two events in the murky world of cipher decoding had thrown the Allies into their precarious position. The German Navy’s B-Dienst (Beobachtungs-dienst, Surveillance Service), and the xB-Dienst (Decryption Service), which had already broken the main British naval cipher by 1935, had broken Allied Naval Cipher No. 3 in February. This was the system by which the British, Canadians and Americans coordinated their efforts in the Atlantic. The U-boat killings soared. Now the Germans could see into the Allies’ convoy communications, while the Allies were suddenly blinded. The British had largely broken the German Enigma cipher system by early 1942 and even the more complex German naval version.20 Then the German Navy cipher department added another layer of complexity to its Enigma machine by adding a fourth wheel that baffled the British codebreakers at their Bletchley Park centre. Shipping losses soared.21

  Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Washington, DC, 25 April 1942

  Admiral Ernest King was in a foul mood, a normal setting for the man. His own daughter joked, ‘He is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.’ This angry temperament made him the most disliked senior officer of the war, but he concentrated his loathing especially against the British ally of the United States. General Ismay, Churchill’s military chief of staff, described him as ‘tough as nails and carried himself as stiffly as a poker. He was blunt and stand-offish, almost to the point of rudeness. At the start, he was intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy; but he was almost equally intolerant and suspicious of the American Army.’