In planning for the relief of Sixth Army, Manstein had to assume that the forces to break through to Stalingrad would be provided by OKH, as there was nothing available to his command. These forces were promised: four armoured divisions, four infantry divisions and three Luftwaffe field divisions, some from Army Group A and some from Germany, all to arrive by 5 December. These forces might be enough to create a corridor to Sixth Army, but they were nowhere near enough to restore the original front.
In the meantime, the Luftwaffe was attempting to supply Sixth Army. The routes that could be flown were of course well known to the Russians, who placed large numbers of anti-aircraft guns along the thirty miles or so that they occupied, and Soviet fighters were constantly on the lookout for the incoming Junkers. On some days, the weather was so bad that no flying could take place; on others, the temporary airstrips in the pocket iced up. Soon flying by day became just too dangerous as more and more German aircraft were shot down, and as the airstrips were not equipped for night flying, loads instead had to be parachuted in. Sixth Army had insufficient fuel to move the containers dropped, which meant that the contents had to be manhandled to where they were needed, and in any case nothing like the quantities promised were ever delivered. In the first week of the airlift, 23–29 November, only 277 tons (193 of fuel, 70 of ammunition and 14 of food) were delivered, less than 10 per cent of that promised, which was itself far less than what was needed. In the second week, 30 November to 6 December, there was an improvement to 503 tons, still only 20 per cent of that promised. The Luftwaffe’s best day was 31 December when, using 146 aircraft, it delivered 200 tons, but it never got anywhere near the amount Göring had rashly promised and which Colonel-General Baron von Richthofen, commanding Army Group B’s affiliated Fourth Air Fleet, had warned everyone who would listen was impossible.70 The Luftwaffe’s officers and men did their best. The Germans lost 480 aircraft and around 1,000 aircrew killed in the attempt to keep Sixth Army in being, and they managed to fly out 24,627 wounded, but it was never going to be enough: even if every transport aircraft the German armed forces possessed had been available, it was an impossible task, and even Göring must have known it.
Within the pocket, rations were reduced for combat units to eight ounces of meat (from killing and butchering artillery and transport horses), eight ounces of bread and one ounce of cheese per man, with half that for rear echelon soldiers. It was nowhere nearly sufficient to keep a man healthy and active in temperatures of thirty below zero, but, as long as the hope of swift relief was there, morale remained high. The besieged soldiers knew that Manstein had taken over a new army group – ‘Manstein will get us out’ was the cry – and Manstein had signalled Paulus, assuring him that he would do all in his power to relieve him and his army. It took two weeks for Army Group Don’s promised reinforcements to arrive, and even then they fell short of what had been promised and all the while the Russian rings round Stalingrad grew stronger. Colonel-General Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army got 17 Panzer Division from Army Group Centre, 23 Panzer from Army Group A in the Caucasus and 6 Panzer from France. The need to find troops to occupy all of France after the Torch landings, the risk of an Allied landing in the south of that country and the requirement to send more troops to Tunisia combined to ensure that there were few spare formations to send to Manstein.
In the same way that the Battle of the Somme in 1916 cannot be considered in isolation from what was happening simultaneously at Verdun 120 miles to the south-east, so Stalingrad must be looked at in the light of what was happening at Rzhev on the Upper Volga and 600 miles north-west of Stalingrad. Rzhev was the tip of a German salient that the Germans had held since 1941 and from which they still threatened Moscow, which was 150 miles south-east of it. There, on 25 November, two days before Manstein took command of Army Group Don, General Ivan Konev’s Western Front with 800,000 men in eighty-three divisions and 2,350 tanks fell upon the defensive positions of the German Ninth Army in Operation Mars. Mars was originally intended to be launched in tandem with Uranus, but the winter freeze was late in that area and Mars was delayed until the rivers and streams froze to allow the tanks to cross without bridging. With seventeen infantry and six armoured divisions, Ninth Army, commanded by Colonel-General Walter Model, was the strongest army that the Germans had on the Eastern Front; it had already beaten off numerous Soviet counter-attacks, some of them in very fierce fighting, and it knew its area well. Initially the Red Army broke through and the Germans formed ‘hedgehogs’, a system of all-round defence in the villages that dotted the steppe. Fighting in the snow was ferocious and there were no divisions to send south to Manstein. The Soviets poured through, the Germans shelled their flanks, counter-attacked, eventually cut off huge numbers of Russians and by 15 December had stabilized the front. The Red Army lost around 400,000 men killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner and lost 1,700 tanks. By then, however, it was too late to send help to Manstein.
Manstein’s plan to rescue Sixth Army – and by now he was determined to take them out of the pocket rather than simply reinforce them – was in two phases. Phase One – Wintergewitter – envisaged Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army driving a corridor through the encircling Russians. Once he had made contact with Sixth Army, which would advance to meet him when he was within twenty miles (Sixth Army had hoarded sufficient fuel for only that distance), a convoy would follow through with 2,000 tons of fuel, for without it Sixth Army could not move any further. That fuel would fill the petrol tanks of a Sixth Army convoy that would be ready and loaded with wounded and would drive out through the corridor to the west and return with 4,000 tons of fuel, rations and ammunition. Once Sixth Army had been replenished with fuel and ammunition, Phase Two – Donnerschlag – would begin, with the army withdrawing to safety through the corridor, although, as far as Hitler and OKW were concerned, it would be a relief operation only, with Sixth Army continuing to hold Stalingrad.
Hoth’s armoured spearhead attacked the Russian ring on 12 December with 260 tanks. Then, on 19 December, the Soviets launched Operation Little Saturn north-west of Stalingrad and fell upon the Italian Eighth Army and what was left of the Romanian Third. They broke. The Russians poured through, tearing a huge gap in the German front, posing a real risk of the whole of Army Group A being cut off in the Caucasus. Manstein had no option but to detach Hoth’s strongest armoured division, 6 Panzer, to deal with the new threat. Hoth had now only thirty-five tanks and, although the men could see the flares over Stalingrad and the parachute loads falling over the city, there was no chance of reaching it. When the Russians overran one of the two German airfields supplying Stalingrad, most of the aircraft got away and it was recaptured in a counter-attack, but not before the Russians had destroyed all the stockpiled stores and air traffic control equipment.
What happened next is still argued over. Field Marshal von Manstein in his memoirs says that he now ordered Paulus to attempt to break out over the twenty miles or so separating the Sixth and Fourth Armoured armies, but that, while Paulus was willing to have a go, his chief of staff, Major-General Arthur Schmidt, persuaded him to decline and insisted that all that was needed was a sufficient airlift of supplies. Other authors, including Manstein’s ADC,71 say that Paulus begged to be ordered to break out and that Manstein said that he could not give that order but that he would back Paulus up if he decided to do so unilaterally. The fact is that Sixth Army could not have broken out as an army with all its vehicles and equipment – it simply did not have the fuel to do so – but it might well have been able to get the men out on foot by divisions, or even by battalions and companies, before its small arms ammunition became exhausted and starvation began to set in. Officers within the pocket were quoted as saying better for six divisions to get out than twenty to be lost, but nobody was prepared to risk giving the order: Hitler was adamant that Sixth Army must stay put as the springboard for a great offensive that would end the war in 1943, and there was still hope now that Field Marshal Milch of the Luftwaffe had arrived to
resolve the chaos at the airfields, where many of the ground crew, recently transferred from North Africa, had no idea about cold-start procedures nor much experience of loading drills. Milch did indeed improve matters, but the air bridge remained incapable of delivering anything like the quantities needed.
On 21 December, Sixth Army reported its first deaths of starvation, although the death certificates read ‘death from exhaustion’. By 23 December, Hoth’s remaining panzers had advanced twelve miles but were still a very long way from making contact with Sixth Army. They could do no more, and, as Manstein manoeuvred desperately to restore the Don Front, Fourth Armoured Army was forced to pull back. It would never get any nearer to the beleaguered city and soon the word began to spread inside the pocket that the attempt to get Sixth Army out had failed. Farther north, the Russians now attacked the Hungarian Second Army – never the most enthusiastic of Germany’s allies, the Hungarians would have been much happier fighting the Romanians than the Russians, and, armed as they were with Austro-Hungarian equipment from the Great War, they could not stop the T-34s. When the Red Army overran some of the airfields behind the Hungarians from where Stalingrad was being supplied, the German airlift became even less effective since it now had to operate from 200 miles away. But the important thing was to repair the rupture in the German front: Stalingrad and the Sixth Army must take their chances.
As the siege went on, rations were cut again and medical supplies ran out. The wounded had to be left lying in the streets and were finally forbidden rations at all: food was to be issued only to those capable of fighting. First the main airstrip in the pocket was lost, then the last remaining. Sixth Army was pushed back into the ruins of the city and, on 9 January, Paulus refused a call from the Russians to surrender. As ammunition ran out and the last remaining cats, rats and pieces of horseflesh were eaten, it was obvious to all that the end was near. On 28 January, Russian tanks cut the pocket in half and Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal; his badges of rank and baton were dropped by air into the area still held by the Germans.* It was presumably intended to stiffen his resolve – no German field marshal had ever surrendered or been captured, and the implication was that Paulus had better shoot himself before the city fell. Next day, all hope, ammunition and food gone, Paulus surrendered his part of the pocket, and the last remnants of Sixth Army ran up the white flag on 2 February 1943.
The Battle of Stalingrad, from September 1942 to February 1943, tore the guts out of the German army – destroyed it, wrecked it, devastated it – and yet it went on fighting for another two and a half years. No other army in the world, then or now, could have done that, and yet Stalingrad was the turning point of the whole Second World War. It was not just the loss of Sixth Army and the damage done to the flanking armies; it was not just the 120,000 dead German soldiers of Sixth Army and the 90,000 who spent years in Russian prison camps, most of them dying before the remnants were released in 1955; it was not just the 474,400 dead in the rest of the Ostheer between November 1942 and February 194372 (it had already lost 400,000 dead, including 13,000 officers, since the start of Barbarossa), more than twice as many as the British or the Americans lost in the whole of the second war; it was not just the exposure of the Luftwaffe’s inability to perform as more than airborne artillery; it was not just the effect on a German population accustomed to an unbroken string of victories, although it was all of those too. The real significance of Stalingrad lay in the realization by both Germany and Russia that the Red Army not only would resist, but could resist, and that Russia was just too vast to be conquered without far more armoured and mobile units and far more men than even the Germans could produce. There could not now be a swift victory over the Soviet Union, or indeed anything other than a stalemate at best. It need not have been so. Had the German army not frittered away its strength in the summer of 1942 by trying to do far too much at the same time; had it retained Manstein’s Eleventh Army in the south after the fall of Sevastopol; had it put everything into achieving a secure jump-off line before diving into the Caucasus; had von Weichs been given another Panzer Army–First–then Stalingrad might have been encircled and captured in July 1942. Even as it was, once it became clear that the Russians would continue to hold Stalingrad, had the German army gone into defence along the Volga and then gone for the Caucasus, it might still – just – have snatched something from the debacle.
Stalingrad and the offensives associated with it cost Germany’s allies heavily too. Of the 250,000 men in the Hungarian Army, over half were either killed or captured, and the Italians lost 114,520 killed, captured or wounded, to the extent that their Eighth Army could not be reconstituted and the remnants were recalled to Italy in March. Of the 49,000 Italian prisoners, 28,000 died in captivity. One Romanian army was destroyed and the other badly mauled. Of course, Stalingrad cost the Russians too. They did not publish their casualties at the time but they cannot have been less than half a million, of which perhaps 200,000 might have been killed. Tactically, the only service that Sixth Army’s stand did provide was to hold down seven Russian armies and give Manstein time to restore the front. A faster capitulation might have allowed the Soviets to cut off and annihilate Army Group A as well as Sixth Army and have allowed them to begin their final advance to Berlin a year before they actually did.
After the war, with Hitler dead, the German generals placed most of the blame for Stalingrad on him, insisting that they could not disobey the order for Sixth Army to stand fast. In fact, while officers who did disobey Hitler’s orders were sometimes flung into jail, as we have seen they were nearly always released and reinstated fairly soon afterwards, and generals who disobeyed or refused to carry out an order that they thought was wrong were not executed but placed on Führer Reserve, a euphemism for retirement, and even then often recalled – Rundstedt more than once. Indeed, in September 1942, Hitler had sacked Field Marshal List as commander of Army Group A, largely for arguing with him and failing to advance into the Caucasus swiftly enough. That his supply lines, now augmented by camel trains, had provided insufficient fuel for him to move any faster was ignored, and Hitler, whose previous experience of military command had been of a section of ten men twenty-five years previously, took over command of the army group himself. He did not move to the front but remained in East Prussia while List’s erstwhile chief of staff, Lieutenant-General von Greiffenberg, did the actual work. In due course this command arrangement was seen even by Hitler to be impracticable, and Colonel-General Ewald von Kleist, previously Commander First Panzer Army, was appointed on 21 November, while the Red Army was breaking though the German flanks at Stalingrad.
Now, however, with the disintegration of the Hungarian and Italian armies to the north of Stalingrad, there was a 200-mile gap in Army Group B’s sector of the German Eastern Front through which poured troops of the Red Army’s Voronezh and South-Western Fronts, led by Lieutenant-General Popov with four tank corps totalling 924 tanks and self-propelled guns with their associated infantry and field artillery. Ignoring his flanks, Popov moved as fast as he could, hoping to get to the River Dnieper before the spring thaw made the ground impassable to vehicles. Farther south, opposite Army Group Don, the front was now only 150 miles from Rostov on the River Don, a town vital to Army Group A because through it ran the only railway line and the main supply route. If the Soviets could break though and get to Rostov, then the whole of Army Group A in the Caucasus would be in danger of being cut off. For the moment, the latter threat had been averted, but Popov’s advance threatened the whole southern wing of the German army in the East, for, if the Red Army could get to the River Dnieper, and all the indications pointed to that being their objective, then Army Groups A, Don and much of B would be in deadly peril. Manstein asked for a free hand, and, surprisingly, Hitler eventually gave it. The field marshal would fight the sort of battle the German army were so good at, a mobile battle of manoeuvre, not the static unyielding defence that Hitler seemed to favour. Taking Army Group A under command as well,
Manstein had available for mobile operations First and Fourth Panzer Armies, the former from Army Group A, and First Army. In addition he was given Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser’s SS Panzer Corps of three panzer grenadier divisions, which had recently been moved from France and which were up to strength in men and vehicles. Manstein’s first action was to order Army Group A to withdraw from the Caucasus Front; Hitler resisted the move for reasons both of morale and of economics, but eventually agreed to it.
Popov crossed the River Donets and on 14 February entered Kharkov. Kharkov lies in the Ukraine and was the first Soviet city to be retaken by the Red Army. It had been held by II SS Panzer Corps, which had been ordered by Hitler to hold the city. Hausser, on his own authority, although supported by Manstein after the event, withdrew as Popov’s tanks approached. Hitler was not pleased but Hauser got away with it – you could disobey, as long as you were subsequently proved right. The Russians too were disappointed – they had hoped and expected that the city would be defended and intended to surround it, bypass it and mop it up later in a smaller-scale repetition of Stalingrad. When the Red Army entered Kharkov, it found that, of a pre-war population of nearly a million, only around 400,000 remained. Many had, of course, fled in advance of the Germans, but, once more underlining the stupidity of a policy that alienated a people who, if treated decently, might well have forsaken communism and Stalin, the Allgemeine SS and NSDAP bureaucrats following the army had executed around 30,000 Jews, Communist Party officials and anyone suspected of helping the partisans. Many had died of starvation, as the priority for food produced locally was for it to be exported to Germany, and many of the able-bodied had been deported to Germany as forced labour to replace Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The Russians had no sympathy for those who were left and the NKVD took over the building formerly used by the Gestapo and began to execute those suspected of collaborating with the Germans, and many who had had nothing to do with the Germans but were denounced by fellow citizens in the settlement of old scores.
Second World War, The Page 45