The choice fell on Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov, the son of a peasant, and a veteran of the Civil War, who until a few weeks before had been in China as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek. Joining the retreating Soviet army in July, he distinguished himself by launching limited attacks against the oncoming enemy to slow up his advance. He was lucky not to have died even before he reached Stalingrad. On the way to the front his drunken driver crashed the car at high speed, leaving him in hospital for a week with an injured back. A few weeks later, in late July, he had another fortunate escape when a reconnaissance flight over the Don steppe ended in disaster with his plane forced to crash by enemy aircraft. On hitting the ground it split in two, throwing Chuikov out. He survived with nothing worse than a bump on the head. By his own admission he was ‘healthy and hardy by nature’, a handsome, sturdy man, with a loud laugh that exposed rows of front teeth all crowned with gold. He learned lessons quickly in combat, and was a master at improvisation and surprise. He never questioned that his task was to stay in Stalingrad, and to die there if he had to. By all accounts he was an inspirational leader, and certainly one with nine lives.16
Over the next two months Chuikov fought a terrible duel with his opposite number, General Friedrich Paulus. The two opponents could not have been more different. At the time of Stalingrad Paulus was 52, a successful career officer, born in a modest middle-class home in Hesse, the son of a minor official. Though he is persistently described as ‘von Paulus’, he was in fact just Paulus, that rarity in the German military leadership: a successful bourgeois officer. An enthusiast for the new style of tank warfare, he earned his place on the army General Staff by virtue of his considerable administrative skills. In 1940 he became Deputy Chief-of-Staff, but was returned to the field in January 1942 to command the crack 6th army following von Reichenau’s sudden death from a heart attack. He was an unlikely candidate for the Stalingrad confrontation. He was a quiet, subdued man who loved Beethoven. Tall, almost ascetic, he took an obsessive interest in his personal appearance and would be found each morning with a bright white collar and highly polished boots. During the approach to Stalingrad the heat made him tired and listless. His health deteriorated with bouts of dysentery, the ‘Russian sickness’. As conditions in the city grew worse, he became increasingly depressed about the toll on those under his command.17
When Chuikov assumed command of the 62nd army, Stalingrad was unrecognisable. ‘The streets of the city are dead,’ he wrote. ‘There is not a single green twig left on the trees; everything has perished in the flames. All that is left of the wooden houses is a pile of ashes and stove chimneys sticking up out of them …’18 Only the concrete and iron structures of factories, and the larger stone buildings of the city centre, remained standing above ground level, roofless, the interior walls crumbled away. Every ruin was again contested, until it, too, collapsed into rubble. On Chuikov’s first day of command, 13 September, German forces gathered for a final concentrated effort to drive Soviet troops into the Volga. The following day they captured the central Railway Station and the heights of Mamayev Kurgan. Chuikov was forced to move his headquarters from a rough mud dug-out on the hill to a safer bunker on the banks of the river Tsaritsa, near its junction with the Volga. From here he directed his dwindling forces to retake strongpoints, or in small groups to base themselves in buildings in front of the German advance, where they were to fight to the last man and the last round. It is testimony to the extraordinary nature of the contest that many did so. Over the following three days the Central Station changed hands fifteen times; on Mamayev Kurgan first one side, then the other, fought for the summit. Greatly outnumbered, and subject to constant aerial bombardment, the 62nd was slowly pushed back. By 14 September the situation was at its most desperate. At Stalin’s headquarters the decision was taken to throw in the only reinforcements to hand, the 13th Guards division led by Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Rodimtsev.
For Stalin, Rodimtsev’s men were to play the part that the ‘Steel Division’ played at Tsaritsyn a quarter-century before. It was a race against time. Small groups of staff officers from Chuikov’s headquarters were posted to hold the road leading to the jetty where the reinforcements were supposed to disembark. With only fifteen tanks between them they held the position until the first of the ten thousand guardsmen could be ferried across. They were thrown straight into combat from a gruelling forced march. One thousand of them had no rifles, and the rest were short of ammunition. Chuikov sent them straight into the heart of the battle for the central area of the city. They lacked knowledge of the terrain, and were inexperienced in city fighting, but they did succeed in stemming the German thrust, and gave valuable time for more reserves to be brought in, and for Chuikov to regroup his forces. The division took casualties of almost 100 per cent in the process, and had to be withdrawn. It took little serious part in the remainder of the battle, but Rodimtsev’s men became part of the folklore of Stalingrad.19
Over the next few days the 6th army captured new stretches of the central district, including the giant Univermag department store on Heroes of the Soviet Union Square, where the Soviet defenders fought to the last in the basement. Paulus later made the building his headquarters. Farther to the south a fierce battle raged around a giant grain elevator, where a small detachment of Soviet soldiers held out for 58 days against tanks and artillery fire. A final push by the German forces secured the central landing stage on the river itself, but a wall of artillery and rocket fire from the far bank prevented them taking advantage of it. The Soviet front line now consisted of ragged pockets of resistance, with their main strength contained within the broad industrial area in the north of the city. Some units were isolated behind the German front, from where they stole out at night to harass the enemy. On 25 September Paulus turned his forces towards the factories. Three infantry and two Panzer divisions attacked on a 3-mile front. For over a month the same pattern was repeated, German attacks by day, Soviet counter-thrusts by night, hand-to-hand fighting for every workshop and every house. Soviet forces were overwhelmed by enemy firepower. One after another the giant factories fell, until the 62nd held only the Barricades plant, on the banks of the river.
Why did Paulus fail to take the city, which was held for two months by forces constantly short of supplies, suffering debilitatingly high losses, perched dangerously on the very edge of the Volga? German forces certainly declined in fighting power as they moved farther eastward; tanks and aircraft were difficult to maintain and all units suffered very high loss rates. The morale of German forces slumped as the tempo of battle increased. ‘Stalingrad is hell on earth,’ wrote a German NCO to his mother in September. ‘It is Verdun, bloody Verdun, with new weapons. We attack every day. If we capture twenty yards in the morning the Russians throw us back again in the evening.’20 German troops found it unsettling to move from large-scale, fast-moving operations to a narrow front of close fighting, where it was difficult to make sheer numbers tell so effectively. But above all, Soviet forces exploited the urban battlefield to full advantage.
Under Chuikov’s command the Red Army developed a whole range of tactical innovations to hold the enemy at bay. Most postwar accounts of the fighting on the eastern front take an uncharitable view of Soviet tactical performance, but it is hard not to conclude that tactics played a key part in the survival of the 62nd army from August to November. Chuikov observed the German approach to warfare very carefully. He noted the German reliance on mass air and artillery attacks to push the infantry through, and the reluctance of German soldiers to engage in close combat without the protection of tanks. To reduce the impact of German firepower he insisted that the two fronts should be no farther apart than ‘the throw of a grenade’, making it difficult for German bombers to attack without fear of hitting their own side. He relied much more than his enemy on combat at night, and on hand-to-hand fighting, with daggers and bayonets, which suited the tough Siberians, Tartars and Kazakhs in his army more than tank and artillery warfare. So
viet forces became adept at camouflage and surprise, keeping their German enemy constantly on the alert and in fear. A sniper battalion found the ruined landscape a rich field for killing. Hidden in the rubble, with high-powered rifles and telescopic sights, they shot anything that moved. ‘Bitter fighting,’ wrote another German NCO in his diary. ‘The enemy is firing from all sides, from every hole. You must not let yourself be seen …’21 At night specially organised ‘storm groups’ would attack German bunkers well away from their own lines. As Soviet troops threw grenades and gave voice to the chilling ‘Hurrah’ that signalled an attack, bewildered German soldiers would wake to find automatic gunfire all around them. At dawn the storm groups would melt away, back to their dug-outs and foxholes. With them they brought up-to-date information on German strengths and dispositions. Unlike many Soviet generals, Chuikov insisted on good intelligence so that he could use his depleted forces as efficiently as possible.
As the battle went on the 62nd army received growing help from artillery and air power. On the far bank of the Volga three hundred guns were trained on the closing German forces. They were supplemented by a weapon even more feared by German infantrymen, the Katyusha multiple rocket-launcher. First developed in 1940, the B-13 rocket-launcher earned its nickname from a popular song at the time, ‘Katerina’. It was capable of delivering a salvo of over 4 tons of explosives into a 10-acre area in seven to ten seconds. Its very inaccuracy was its strength, for enemy troops could barely hear the rockets coming, and could never predict where they would fall. Chuikov used rocket-launchers, mounted on the backs of ordinary trucks, right at the front line. When his forces were pressed back to the very edge of the river, the lorries were suspended over the bank, their back wheels above the water, in order to achieve the necessary trajectory.22 To shells and rockets were added bombs. The 8th Soviet air army gave growing support to the defenders of Stalingrad, while German air activity, in deteriorating weather conditions, with mounting losses, slowly declined. There were definite improvements on the Soviet side in both equipment and tactics. By November there were 1,400 aircraft on the Stalingrad front, three-quarters of them modern combat planes, including numbers of the new Yak-9 and La-5 fighters, which could hold their own at last with German aircraft. An intensive programme of night-flying training permitted more sorties under cover of darkness against German positions. Soviet air forces were dogged with poor communications which made it difficult to control large air operations, or to direct aerial strikes accurately. From September 1942 the commander of the Soviet air armies, A.A. Novikov, began an experiment with radio control of air forces on the southern front, which made it possible to marshal and direct aircraft just as the Luftwaffe did. Soviet air power had a great deal of ground to make up, but the gap between the two air forces began to narrow in the critical months covering the defence of Stalingrad. German air forces suffered from a constant drain on aircraft and pilots that could not easily be made good. Air Fleet 4 began the campaign on the southern front with 1,610 aircraft and ended it with 240 serviceable planes.23
8 Battle of Stalingrad, September 1942 to January 1943
A further bonus for the Soviet side was Chuikov himself, who continued to lead a charmed life. In September he narrowly missed death when a bomb scored a direct hit on his command bunker. On 2 October air attack destroyed large oil tanks above his new headquarters near the river bank, bringing a cascade of burning fuel flooding into the dug-out. Somehow he and his staff escaped from the midst of the flames, which gradually slid down on to the Volga itself, floating away on the current. For much of the last weeks of battle his command base was never more than a few hundred yards from the nearest German forces. From here he directed his scattered, exhausted troops, from one last-ditch encounter to the next. After the bitter defence of the factory district, which brought both sides to a standstill by late October, Paulus marshalled his forces for one final attack. Hitler was in Munich, attending the annual ceremony to commemorate the abortive Nazi coup of 9 November 1923. Before the Party faithful he pledged that he would shortly be ‘master of Stalingrad’.24 The same day, in the cold early hours of morning, five German infantry divisions and two Panzer divisions, all well under strength, launched the last German offensive in Stalingrad. By the end of the morning the 62nd army was split, and German forces seized a 500-yard stretch of the bank of the Volga. But elsewhere the attack made little progress. Chuikov organised an active defence, ordering local counter-attacks and ceaseless harassment. By the 12th the offensive petered out. A few days later Soviet storm groups began to win back what had just been conceded: the factory district, the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan, blackened by artillery fire in the otherwise snow-covered city, and the few large buildings in the city centre still standing. On 18 November Chuikov and his staff were gathered in his bunker to discuss further operations when they received a cryptic telephone call from the Front headquarters, telling them to expect a special order. At midnight it arrived: the following day armies on the neighbouring Don and South-western fronts were to attack and encircle German forces, snapping tight the trap that Zhukov had set in September.25
The Soviet counter-offensive worked like clockwork. Enemy forces were caught by complete surprise. Although local commanders had observed Soviet troop movements on the German flanks for some time, more senior commanders hesitated to pass the news on to Hitler, when victory at Stalingrad seemed so near. At Hitler’s headquarters it was assumed that the battle for the city had consumed Soviet reserves, and that little was left for an extensive operation. It was later admitted by Hitler’s Chief of Operations, General Jodl, that this was the ‘biggest failure’ of German intelligence. The day before the attack the head of army intelligence on the eastern front, General Reinhard Gehlen, predicted limited attacks, but would suggest no date or direction.26 In fact under cover of darkness, cloud and snowfall, paying close attention to camouflage and the muffling of tank movements, the Soviet General Staff had built up a force of over 1 million men, with almost 14,000 heavy guns and mortars, 979 tanks (mostly the versatile, well-armed T-34) and 1,350 aircraft.27 They were grouped on three fronts, the South-west and Don fronts to the north of German lines, and the Stalingrad front to the south and south-east. Facing them were the Romanian armies and weaker German reserve divisions. At 7.30 on the morning of 19 November the northern fronts began the artillery barrage. Two hours later Romanian forces were hurled back by a furious onslaught from three Soviet armies. For the first time Soviet commanders found themselves with the opportunity to do what their enemy did so well: to conduct a large-scale operation with mobile forces in open country, smashing forward with tanks and aircraft.
Soviet forces made rapid progress. On 20 November the southern armies, with the less difficult terrain, were unleashed against more hapless Romanians. Large numbers of prisoners, arms and supplies were seized in the first few days. ‘In desperate plight since early morning,’ wrote one unfortunate Romanian in his diary on the 21st. ‘We are surrounded. Great confusion … We’re putting on our best clothes, even two sets of underclothes. We figure very tragic end in store.’28 He, like thousands of others, surrendered. Within three days Soviet mobile units reached the Don river, almost 150 miles from their starting point. So rapid was their progress that German sentries guarding a vital Don bridge, near Kalach, thought that approaching Soviet tanks were the next watch, come to relieve them. By the time they realised their mistake it was too late, and Soviet armoured forces were free to pour southwards to link up with armies coming the other way. On 22 November, at Sovetsky, south-east of Kalach, the two forces joined hands and Paulus was encircled. The whole steppe area in the German rear was in chaos. The snow-covered grassland was covered with the grotesquely frozen corpses of more than ten thousand horses some, like statues, hardened where they stood. Almost all the weak divisions holding the salient were eliminated. Soviet armies fanned out east and west, creating a heavily defended corridor over 100 miles wide, cutting off the German 6th army and part of the 4th Pan
zer army, and pressing the whole southern German front back to where it had stood in August. Paulus’s immediate reaction had been to pull German forces rapidly back, out of the trap, but Hitler, failing entirely to see what the Soviet operation had achieved, and obsessed with the city, ordered him to stand fast and wait for rescue. Though Paulus’s commanders urged him to break out, he stuck by the rulebook. An estimated 240,000 German and allied forces, with a mere hundred tanks and 1,800 guns, prepared for the desperate defence of a bleak area 35 miles long and 20 miles wide, the Stalingrad ‘Cauldron’.29
* * *
Why the Allies Won Page 12