Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Soviet forces were caught off-guard, as they had been the summer before. Stalin had anticipated the strategy proposed by Hitler’s advisers that German forces should renew their attack against Moscow and Leningrad with the object of encircling and defeating the core of the Red Army. When a German light aircraft crashed behind Soviet lines in June with full details of the planned southern attack, Stalin saw it as a clumsy piece of misinformation. When the British passed on details of German dispositions culled from decrypted German signals, Stalin had no more faith in British motives for doing so than he had displayed over their warnings in 1941 about Barbarossa.4 On 28 June German forces launched the southern campaign, Operation ‘Blue’, against the weakest point of the whole Soviet front, achieving complete surprise.

  The result was almost a repeat of the previous summer. German forces punched their way forward using a combination of large tank concentrations and massed air power. In a matter of weeks the Red Army was driven out of the whole area south of Kharkov and the Crimea was captured. Large numbers of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner, or fled eastwards in disorder. The Black Sea port of Sebastopol held out against overwhelming air and artillery attack until it fell on 4 July to General Erich von Manstein. His reward was promotion to Field Marshal. The crumbling of Soviet resistance threatened to turn into a rout. Rostov-on-Don, east of the Crimea, fell with little resistance on 23 July. Hitler was now quartered in the Ukraine, slightly north of the town of Vinnetsa. The summer base was given the codename ‘Werwolf’. It consisted of a small group of log huts concealed in woods. It was here that Hitler, ill at ease in the intense, muggy heat, prey to bouts of insomnia and soaring blood-pressure, first got news of the remarkable progress of German forces. Despite the climate, his spirits were restored. The victory that eluded him in 1941 was closer, the enemy ‘considerably weaker’ than a year before.5

  Impatient for the final showdown Hitler decided at the end of July to speed up the campaign on the southern front. He divided his forces into two separate groups, Army Groups A and B. The first group was given the task of plunging across the Don river in pursuit of the retreating Soviet forces and capturing the whole of the Black Sea coast and the Caucasus region as far as the oil cities of Maikop, Baku and Grozny. This vast area was to be conquered in a matter of weeks by the 1st Panzer army, under Field Marshal von Kleist. The second group, the 6th army and 4th Panzer army, under the command of General Paulus, was ordered to advance to Stalingrad, destroy Soviet forces on the Volga, and proceed rapidly down the river to Astrakhan cutting all communication between the north and south. Stalingrad became for the first time a primary target. Its ‘early destruction’ Hitler considered ‘especially important’.6

  In almost all postwar accounts of the German failure in the Soviet Union, this decision to divide German forces in pursuit of distant economic targets in the late summer of 1942 is regarded as the decisive misjudgement on Hitler’s part. It is easy to see why he was tempted to make it. German forces won large areas of territory very quickly in June and July. Soviet forces were clearly in disarray. In North Africa Rommel was pursuing the British forces back into Egypt. A swift strike through the Caucasus opened up the prospect of German domination of the whole Middle East. A quick victory at Stalingrad opened up the prospect of sweeping the other way, too, in a vast outflanking movement north-eastwards behind Moscow. Hitler seems not to have sensed that he was taking a gamble or risk in the summer of 1942, but was once again confident that his amateur strategy would win him more than he would get by following the stolid advice of the professionals.

  His military staff saw things in a far more sober light. They could see little sense in simply sending forces off to occupy open steppe against an enemy that had so far committed only a fraction of his forces to the southern contest. On 23 July, the day Hitler issued his directive for the new offensive, his Chief-of-Staff, General Franz Haider, complained to his diary that Hitler’s misreading of the enemy was ‘both ludicrous and dangerous’.7 The easy summer victories were achieved against weak forces, which eluded defeat by pulling back across the vast spaces of central Russia. The more German forces pushed forward on the southern front, the more dispersed they became. A long, vulnerable flank developed along the whole northern wing of the offensive, which was defended mainly by troops of Germany’s allies, Hungary, Romania and Italy. The supply trains had to follow with the fuel and ammunition over long, hot trails, with poor roads and rail routes constantly harassed by Soviet partisans. Hitler would have none of it. He berated his commanders for timidity, even defeatism, and sacked those who disagreed. Events bore out his optimism. The 1st Panzer army burst on to the northern Caucasian plain, sweeping through its rich grainlands and abundant orchards; within twelve days it had penetrated 350 miles to the very foothills of the Caucasus mountains. Here German and Italian Alpine forces, trained for mountain warfare, began the slow ascent to the mountain passes. Meanwhile Paulus’s armies moved steadily eastwards, clearing Soviet troops from the Don steppe and forcing them back to the approaches to Stalingrad. By 19 August the first assault on the city began; by the 23rd German soldiers had reached the suburbs. There was, recalled one witness, an ‘exultant mood’ at the Werwolf headquarters.8

  In the first flush of German victories a mood of panic began to grip Soviet society. Populations in the south moved eastwards in a headlong flight from an enemy they had come to regard as unstoppable. At Rostov-on-Don even the troops were infected by fear of what would happen to them if they were caught by the Germans. At the height of this crisis of morale came the historic order ‘No. 227’ from Stalin himself: the Red Army was to stand firm against the invader or be treated as criminals and deserters. The notorious Soviet NKVD security forces rounded up alleged defeatists and saboteurs, while national propaganda roused the Soviet people to a final do-or-die effort on behalf of Mother Russia. The panic subsided, to be replaced by a mood of sombre determination. Audiences in Moscow flocked to patriotic Tchaikovsky concerts. Great heroes from the Russian past, whose socialist credentials were nil, were invoked to inspire heroic resistance and hatred of the enemy. The journalist Alexander Werth, who lived in Moscow throughout the darkest days of the war, recalled that hate reached ‘a paroxysm of frenzy’ during the difficult weeks in July and August. Alexei Surkov’s poem ‘I Hate’ was published in the army journal Red Star on 12 August:

  My heart is as hard as stone.

  I hate them deeply.

  My house has been defiled by Prussians,

  Their drunken laughter dims my reason.

  And with these hands of mine,

  I want to strangle every one of them!

  A few weeks earlier Pravda published an editorial on ‘Hatred of the Enemy’: ‘May holy hatred become our chief, our only feeling’.9

  It was not mere fear of the NKVD that kept the Soviet people fighting in 1942. There was a widespread and spontaneous patriotic revival, and a wave of revulsion against German brutality. The revival was deliberately stoked by the regime. Churches were reopened, and religious attendance encouraged after years of persecution. Pravda began to capitalise the word God for the first time.10 Stalin looked to build bridges between the Red Army and the traditions of the Imperial past. New medals were struck for heroism in July 1942 named after the great Tsarist generals, Kutuzov, Suvorov, Nakhimov. More heterodox still, a medal was introduced only for officers, the Alexander Nevsky Order from Tsarist times; and at the height of the Stalingrad battle it was announced that officers would once again wear distinctive insignia and gold braid to instil a sense of pride and discipline into a hitherto classless army.

  Medals and braid would not defeat the German armies. They were the outward trappings of a more fundamental effort mounted by the Soviet Supreme Command (Stavka) to restore to the Red Army a sense of self-confidence and the means for effective resistance. Despite the rapid success of German forces in the south, the overall balance between the two sides was more even than the contest in the south would suggest. At the
start of the summer campaign the Soviet forces numbered five and a half million men, against six million Germans and their allies. Both sides had roughly the same number of aircraft, a little over 3,000; the Soviet armies had 4,000 tanks, German forces 3,200. Across the whole area of northern and central Russia the two sides built a vast defensive barricade, and it was here that Soviet forces were concentrated, protecting Moscow and the heartland of Russia itself. Only in the south were Soviet forces much weaker. By July the 187,000 Soviet soldiers here, with 360 tanks and 330 aircraft, faced an enemy force of 250,000 men, 740 tanks and 1,200 aircraft.11 It was this temporary disparity that allowed German forces to move so rapidly across the Don basin and the northern Caucasus. Stalin was reluctant to send reinforcements from farther north until he could be certain that the southern front was the main area of campaign. Until July Soviet military leaders counted on a renewed assault on Moscow. As a result they were forced to respond in a hasty and improvised way once it became clear that the German goal was oil.

  Stavka’s first priority was to re-establish a clear Soviet front-line in the south. In the Caucasus a strong defensive line was set up under the veteran cavalryman Marshal Budenny, who had fought with Stalin in the civil war, defending Tsaritsyn. Once von Kleist’s forces reached this enemy defence line on the Black Sea coast, in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains and on the approaches to the Caspian oilfields, their progress slowed down, and then halted. On 12 July a new Stalingrad front was formed on the outskirts of the city under General Gordov. Its aim was to try to slow down the German advance and to build a clear defensive line along the river Don, using the retreating armies in its construction. This proved a difficult task. Some of the soldiers in small groups, cut off from their units and their officers, never reached the front but were lost on the vast stretches of grassland, easy prey to roaming German aircraft. The army field headquarters had little idea how many troops they commanded, or, in many cases, even where the troops were. Stalin tried to salvage the situation by sacking commanders and bringing in men who had proved themselves in combat. Although this was unable to stem the tide of retreat, Soviet forces were at least falling back in better order on to the defensive line around the city, where they could make a more effective last stand. German forces reached the outskirts of the city, and by 23 August had even breached part of the Soviet front to reach the Volga north of the city, but their progress here slowed down in the face of fierce defensive fighting. The struggle now reached its critical stage. German forces, urged on by Hitler, expected to seize Stalingrad within days. For them the town enjoyed a symbolic significance that went well beyond its real strategic or economic importance. Stalin became day by day more alarmed. For him, too, Stalingrad was a symbol.

  Late in August, Stalin played one last card. He called to his Kremlin headquarters General Georgi Zhukov, the man who a year before had organised the frantic defence of Moscow and brought the German assault there finally to a halt in December 1941. On 27 August Zhukov, commander of the Soviet western front, was appointed Deputy Supreme Commander to Stalin. That evening he arrived at the Kremlin, where he found Stalin and the State Defence Committee anxiously discussing the problem of the south. Stalin offered him tea and sandwiches. While Zhukov ate, Stalin outlined the situation: it was a matter of days before German forces would capture Stalingrad unless a proper defence could be organised. Zhukov was given the unenviable task of saving the city. The following day he spent in Moscow studying Soviet dispositions. On 29 August he flew to the Stalingrad headquarters to see for himself what could be done.12

  Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, son of a shoemaker from a small village south of Moscow, had achieved a meteoric rise to become second to Stalin in the Soviet war effort. He was only 45 in 1942. A bright schoolboy, he was apprenticed to a Moscow furrier at the age of eleven. When he was nineteen he was drafted into the Tsarist cavalry where he rose to become an NCO by the time of the Revolution in 1917. During the Civil War he joined the new Red Army. He, too, fought for the defence of Tsaritsyn, where he was wounded by a grenade in fierce hand-to-hand combat. He remained a Red Army professional following the Civil War, a cavalry officer with a deep interest in military theory and the modern techniques of war. He was an able and tough commander, decisive and well organised, who paid close attention to detail and expected the utmost from his men. Stalin respected him, which perhaps explains why he survived the great purges of army staff in the mid-1930s. For Stalin, Zhukov epitomised the new young generation of communist soldiers, dedicated to the cause, anxious to move the army forward out of the cavalry age. He was an observer for Stalin of the Civil War in Spain in 1937; in 1939 Stalin chose him to command Soviet forces in a full-scale conflict with Japanese troops on the Mongolian-Manchurian border at Khalkin-Gol. For his success in routing the Japanese in a spectacular victory Stalin personally awarded him the title Hero of the Soviet Union. He had become Stalin’s military troubleshooter.13

  He was remembered by those who served with him as a hard and foul-mouthed leader, who sacked or punished officers who lacked sufficient will to win; but he was also regarded as a soldier who had a clear grasp of operational realities and could remain calm under the most adverse of circumstances. All these qualities were required at Stalingrad. When Zhukov reviewed the situation it soon became clear to him, as it was to Hitler’s critics in the German army, that the attacking force was greatly over-extended. During August it became evident that German armies had very limited reserves in the south, though they enjoyed local air superiority and an advantage in tanks. Moreover the long flanks protecting the spearhead of the German attack were not composed of German troops, but of Italians, Romanians and Hungarians, who were less well armed and less committed to Hitler’s life-and-death struggle against Marxism. Zhukov recognised almost immediately the opportunity to cut through the weakly defended sides of the salient and isolate German forces at Stalingrad in a giant pincer movement. But before that it was necessary to hold on at Stalingrad. A limited number of Soviet reserves were moved to the Stalingrad front early in September. They failed to break the German encirclement but they did enough to prevent the Germans taking the city by storm. During the early days of September Stalin anxiously prodded his commanders to keep the enemy at bay at all costs. Though he wanted Zhukov to think of a way of saving the city, because he himself could not, he found it difficult to relinquish the habit of interference.

  In the end Stalin allowed Zhukov to take the initiative. This was one of the most important decisions of the Stalingrad struggle, for it allowed the Deputy Supreme Commander to capitalise on his grasp of German weaknesses. On 12 September Stalin summoned him to the Kremlin. While he gloomily pored over maps of the front, Zhukov and the Chief of the General Staff, Alexander Vasilevsky, stood to one side whispering about the need to find another solution. Stalin’s ears pricked up: ‘What other way out?’ He sent the two men away to work out in a day a solution to Stalingrad. At ten in the evening of 13 September they returned. Zhukov took the floor, patiently explaining to Stalin that as long as an active defence could be maintained at Stalingrad itself, large reserve forces could be assembled to the north and south-east which could mount a counter-offensive against the long-drawn-out flanks of the German attack, cutting the umbilical cord of supplies and reinforcements, and encircling enemy forces. Zhukov explained that the attack would have to be made against the weaker Romanian divisions, and it would have to be made only when adequate preparations were completed, at some point in mid-November. Stalin was sceptical at first. He objected that the counter-offensive was too far away from Stalingrad to relieve the city itself. Zhukov explained that the attack had to be carried out at some distance to prevent Germany’s mobile Panzer forces from simply turning round and repelling the attack. Stalin said he would think about it, but by the end of September he was persuaded. Amidst the utmost secrecy a detailed plan was drawn up, officially approved by Stalin. Zhukov and the General Staff worked furiously for five weeks to get the counter-offen
sive organised. On 13 November Zhukov presented the completed version of Operation ‘Uranus’ to a cheerful Stalin. ‘By the way he unhurriedly puffed his pipe, smoothed his moustache, and never interrupted once’, Zhukov later recalled, ‘we could see that he was pleased.’14

  The whole success of a Soviet counter-blow rested on being able to hold Stalingrad at all costs, with very limited reinforcement. This called for the utmost sacrifice from the Soviet forces, who were to know nothing of the counter-offensive plan while they were bled white in the street-fighting. The defence of the city fell to two Soviet armies, the 62nd and the 64th. Determined German thrusts in late August pushed both armies back towards the centre of the city. By late August the front was split in two, the 62nd army besieged in the heart of Stalingrad, the 64th pushed to a small bridgehead on the Volga, south-east of the main battle. Most of the civilian population was now evacuated to the east bank of the river by a fleet of ferry boats that plied back and forth, carrying troops, guns and ammunition one way, the wounded and refugees the other. The 62nd army could continue only because of the frantic efforts of the military supply organisation and engineers in keeping open the Volga crossings in the face of heavy and repeated air and artillery attack. The long tail of the army – its artillery, air support and its rear services – was all on the far side of the Volga. From this less exposed position Soviet gunners and pilots kept up a ceaseless barrage against the approaching German forces.15

  The fighting in Stalingrad was very different from the mobile cut and thrust that German armies had practised across the steppe. Because the city had been all but obliterated by the Luftwaffe during August, it was difficult terrain in which to manoeuvre. Tanks were vulnerable to ambushes, or were simply stuck in the rubble. Progress was no longer measured in miles but in yards each day. In addition, the geography of Stalingrad did not render it susceptible to a sudden swift seizure. The city sprawled for 40 miles along the river bank, from the large factories – the Red October Factory, the Barricades Factory, the Tractor Factory – in the north, backed by extensive workers’ settlements, through the central residential and commercial area, dominated by the low hill Mamayev Kurgan, down to the houses and railway terminals of the south. Each area of the city became a battlefield, each building a fortress to be stormed. Slowly, German troops edged forward from the north and the west, using the surrounding hills as vantage ground from which to pour artillery fire into the city. By 3 September some of the units were only 2 miles from the river, pressing the 62nd army into a cluster of narrow footholds among the factories, around the central station and main jetties, and on to the remaining high ground in the city centre. The commander of the 62nd, General Alexander Lopatin, doubted that his army, which was suffering an appalling casualty rate, could hold the city. He began to move units across the Volga. For this he was promptly sacked. The commander of the Stalingrad front, General Andrei Yeremenko, a tough, thick-set Ukrainian, whose wife and four-year-old child had been killed in the German attack the year before, was forced to find a replacement at the very height of the battle.