The ‘rest of the panzer corps’, 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, was having considerable problems of its own. It had turned north and away from 16th Panzer after they had both broken out of the bridgehead to take up positions along the Tatar Ditch and bar any Soviet forces from descending into the narrow neck between the Don and Volga. The Tatar Ditch was an ancient trench and parapet designed to keep raiding Tatar armies from mounting slave and plunder raids into the Russian lands. It was still a formidable barrier that the Soviets had been trying to turn into an antitank obstacle.
On the way the division ran into a train which was being hurriedly unloaded. The Germans overran it and sent the Russians flying with a few well-placed shells. They found a treasure in the waiting boxcars. It was packed with American Lend-Lease supplies - ‘magnificent brand-new Ford lorries, crawler tractors, jeeps, workshop equipment, mines, and supplies for engineering troops’. The officers especially liked the American jeep, freshly painted in Russian colours. They uniformly agreed that it was much superior to its German equivalent, the Kübelwagen.18
While the Germans were marvelling at their war booty, the Soviet 35th Rifle Division, reinforced with tanks, cut across the rear echelons of both German divisions, rushing to seal off the bridgeheads over the Don. It placed itself firmly between the German VIII Corps holding the bridgehead and the XIV Panzer Corps whose divisions had now finally linked up. Sixth Army was prevented from quickly joining up with the isolated mobile divisions.
Stalingrad, 28 August 1942
Four days after the 16th Panzer had reached the Volga and been joined by the 3rd Motorized Infantry, Colonel A. A. Sarayev, commander of the 10th NKVD Division, thought he had a chance to isolate them completely. He stripped Stalingrad of almost all of his units and city militia and threw them into the fighting in the northern suburbs. The panzer corps was now commanded by General Hans Hube who had come up from 16th Panzer after Paulus sacked his predecessor. Hube was a one-armed veteran of the First World War and about as aggressive and feisty a man as ever commanded armour.
His men and he were daily witnesses to the air battles above as the enemy repeatedly bombed them. Their own Me 109s fell on the Russian bombers like hawks among pigeons. He did not know that three Soviet armies were marching down towards him from where they had de-trained to the north. By now the Luftwaffe had achieved such air superiority over the Red Air Force that the German troops below looked up at the aerial battles as a show put on for them, applauding when aircraft after Soviet aircraft spiralled burning to the ground. To the west the Red Air Force made an attempt to attack Luftflotte 4’s airbases in the Don bridgehead, but its planes were swatted out of the sky by Me 109s.
The next day Zhukov arrived in Stalingrad. Stalin had just appointed him as Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov had become a junior member of Stalin’s ‘Cavalry clique’ during the Russian Civil War which later, no doubt, spared him in the purge of the officer corps. In 1939 he had defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army in the battle of Khalkin Gol, dropping bundles of samurai swords at the feet of a delighted Stalin. In no other man did Stalin repose such confidence to be able to retrieve a hopeless situation. After all, he had saved Leningrad and Moscow when they were on the brink of falling. Stalin had used him as a one-man fire brigade to retrieve hopeless situations in that first terrible part of the war. He was also the only man who could shout back at Stalin and live to tell about it, so valued had he become. So now he must accomplish the same miracle for Stalingrad.19
Zhukov did not like what he saw. He rang Stalin and told him the counterattack must be put off for a week; the armies involved were simply too inexperienced, made up of older reservists and short of ammunition. The Vozhd had no choice but to agree. They both had to watch as the Germans blocked the northern end of the narrow neck between the Don and the Volga, cutting off Stalingrad from that direction.
What happened next alarmed even a man of Zhukov’s fortitude. The sudden disappearance of the visible NKVD units in the city to reinforce the fighting in the northern suburbs took a while to be noticed, but when it was, the inescapable conclusion was that the city was being abandoned. Mass panic convulsed the population. No steps had been taken to evacuate them. Stalin had not wanted to show any alarm, and the local NKVD commander had not wanted to waste Volga river transport in moving civilians when he desperately needed it to move the wounded to the east bank and supplies and reinforcements to the west bank.
One woman remembered. ‘Shops were simply left open - abandoned - as thousands of people tried to flee in any direction, to go wherever they could.’ A wounded soldier in the city hospital noticed the sudden disappearance of the hospital staff; the administrator wandered through the wards apologizing that his staff had simply fled. The patients looked out the windows:
We saw a scene of indescribable chaos - everyone out of their minds with panic–t looked as if the whole city was in the grip of some kind of collective hysteria. People were looting shops and buildings. Everybody was shouting: ‘What’s the news?’ then there was a growing refrain: ‘There’s nobody in the city’, ‘The civil authorities have vanished!’, and finally, and most ominously, ‘The Germans are coming!’20
Amid the chaos, the workers at the Tractor Factory met. They decided to stay. From this assertion of will, calm eventually spread through the remaining population. Determination replaced the panic. There was also a deep, abiding hatred. The city would not be given up.
Somewhere amid the endless defeats and retreats, amid the terror from the skies, the soldiers at the front and the civilians in Stalingrad hardened. Stalin’s ‘not one step back’ order had been the beginning. The introduction of a merciless ruthlessness to those who ran away or failed in their duty was part of it. Blocking units of the NKVD regularly shot men drifting back from the fighting without authorization. Penal battalions were established at division and higher levels; these were sent into suicidal attacks in order, as Stalin himself dictated, ‘to redeem themselves with their blood for the crimes against the Homeland’. It was as if ‘Order No. 227 became the ultimate expression of fear as a motivational tool.’21
It was more than that though. The Russians were reaching deep into their sense of themselves. Despite the ‘union’ aspect of the Soviet Union and the presence of numerous non-Russians, it was a Russian experience.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Mereshko put his finger on what caused the Russians to stiffen their backs and snarl at the Germans. ‘Some officers and soldiers had believed that they could retreat all the way to the Ural Mountains but [in fact] any further retreat would lead to the death of the Motherland. There was nowhere left to retreat.’
Order 227 had been a slap in the face to the Red Army and the people. Mereshko went on, ‘It opened the eyes of the army and the people, showed them the truth of the situation facing the country.’ It led to the slogan, ‘There is no land beyond the Volga.’ Firing squads and penal battalions did not make Order 227 effective, one veteran said. ‘The motivation had to be within us.’22 For some Red Army soldiers there was a different motivation. The men of the 64th Rifle Division (66th Army) were from an older age group only recently called to the colours. Their training had been minimal, their equipment incomplete, and their leadership brutal to the point of idiocy. They were also desperately hungry. Thrown unprepared into an attack, they lost thousands of men. The result was a serious mutiny, immediately brought to heel by the NKVD. Three hundred men were shot and another thousand sent to the penal battalions.23
Don Bridgehead, 30 August 1942
Seydlitz was straining at the leash to follow the XIV Panzer Corps to Stalingrad. Instead he had to wait until the huge column of Ford trucks had dropped off their supplies in the bridgehead for his corps. Everyone was impressed with the hardy American vehicles now painted in German grey. They were the booty from the captured ships of Convoy PQ-17, a gift from the Führer himself who had regretted the necessity earlier to divert most of that army group’s transport to supply the attack into t
he Caucasus.
It occurred to Seydlitz that here was an opportunity. To the dumbstruck shock of the transport officer, Seydlitz, on his own authority, simply seized his trucks as soon as they were unloaded. Then he loaded the infantry of his two lead divisions on them. The men were tired, and if he could save them another 30-mile road march in this brutal heat, so much the better. He laughed to himself that he now commanded the LI ‘Motorized’ Corps. He carefully neglected to tell Paulus of his ‘requisition’ of all the Fords. You could say his family motto was coined by St Francis of Assisi: ‘It is easier to beg forgiveness than seek permission.’ Paulus was not a man to think outside of regulations.24
It did not take long for Seydlitz’s two advance divisions to trample the Soviet 35th Rifle Division into the scorched steppe grass and motor towards Stalingrad, barely 45 miles away, three hours or so by truck if the columns kept moving. Seydlitz put his mobile elements, reconnaissance units and some truck-towed 88mm antitank and antiaircraft batteries up front to keep the retreating Soviets on the run as the Luftwaffe’s Stukas and Ju 88s harried them from the sky. The outer layers of the defence of Stalingrad were overrun with hardly any fight. Then the Germans came to an abrupt halt at the inner defence along the steep banks of the Rossoshka River manned by remnants of the 62nd Army. Those much abused troops now fought back from good positions and stopped Seydlitz’s infantry cold. The truck ride was over almost before it had started. Nevertheless, Seydlitz would hold on to the trucks as if they were an inheritance.
Paulus said nothing about the trucks when he joined Seydlitz at the headquarters of the 76th Infantry Division. His new chief of staff, newly promoted Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow, did his best to justify Seydlitz’s action. To his relief Paulus had more to worry about than trucks. His old chief of staff, upon whom he had become too dependent many had said, had been wounded. His replacement would take time to get his hands around the situation and get to know the army. Tresckow had been quickly sent from Army Group Centre headquarters; his excellent record made him an obvious choice.
Paulus and Seydlitz were joined by Richthofen, who noticed how nervous the 6th Army commander was and how the tic on the left side of his face had become more pronounced. Paulus was also suffering from recurrent dysentery, the same disease that had sapped Lee at Gettysburg of his driving will and keen judgement, and Paulus was no Lee. Richthofen had none of his cousin’s famous chivalry. He had a contempt for the weak. So a man like Paulus, nervous tic and all, took him aback. After all, the man wore gloves in this heat because he abhorred dirt, and he took a bath twice a day and changed into a fresh uniform each time. During active operations! What to make of such a man?25
Well, that was neither here nor there at the moment. They had more pressing problems. Richthofen, like Hitler, was an advocate of a swift victory that would solve the problem of overextension. That was little comfort to Paulus who was fully aware of how overstretched his resources were. His losses in infantry and panzergrenadiers had been grievous. Hence the worsening tic.26 He was obviously without the reserves of will and boldness that would have buoyed a tougher, more experienced man. The difference between a creature of the staff and an instinctive and pugnacious fighting man was starkly apparent. What his training and his own eyes told him was a highly dangerous situation was subsumed in his robot-like obedience to Hitler’s will. Blind faith had indeed supplanted reason. When the commander of XIV Panzer Corps suggested a withdrawal because his corps was almost out of fuel and badly overextended, Paulus had relieved him because it bespoke a lack of that same blind faith and replaced him with Hube.
One of the reasons for Paulus’s nervous tic was the stout Soviet resistance in the inner defence belt, but that was deceiving. Had Seydlitz only known of the panic in the city, he would have thrown away the scabbard to blast through and dragged his fastidious and nervous army commander with him.
Stalingrad-Morozovsk Railway Line, 31 August 1942
The advance elements of Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army reached the Stalingrad-Morozovsk Railway Line in the evening. A great opportunity now presented itself. A good part of both 62nd and 64th Armies could be cut off in Stalingrad’s inner defence belt by an encirclement of the panzer corps of the two German armies. Army Group B headquarters quickly endorsed the plan as did Tresckow.
At this point Paulus took counsel of his fears. It would be far too risky to have his XIV Panzer Corps make such a manoeuvre while it was already heavily engaged with the defenders of Stalingrad’s suburbs, threatened by heavy Soviet forces from the north, and cut off from 6th Army’s main body and supplies. Paulus declined to make the attempt. The two Soviet armies had time to escape into the city. The last chance to destroy the enemy in the field was lost. The 6th Army was now committed to grinding urban combat. Paulus, who had been so apprehensive of his infantry losses, had thrown his army into the very situation that devoured men.
Chapter 10
New Commanders All Round
Soviet-Turkish Border, 2 September 1942
Disaster in the Western Desert had brought Rommel to the gates of Egypt just as the British were trying to come to grips with the impending Turkish entry into the war. That would threaten the vast oil resources at Baku but also those at Mosul in northern Iraq and at Abadan on the Persian Gulf, both sources vital to the British war effort. If successful, the Turks and Germans would not only have stripped the Soviets and Western Allies of crucial sources of oil but also have cut the Persian Corridor through which most aid now reached the Russians. The British scraped together six divisions for their 10th Army based in Baghdad; there would have been more, but two had already been rushed off to help stop Rommel. They also set up a largely paper 9th Army in Syria and used deception to inflate its very weak forces into divisions. The Americans had been persuaded to redirect several air squadrons to bolster 10th Army. The British had offered to deploy a corps of three divisions for the defence of Baku, but Stalin had categorically refused to allow even friendly foreign troops on Soviet soil. 1
Stalin nonetheless was particularly worried about keeping the Persian Corridor open now that the Arctic route was temporarily stopped. The main route ran by rail and road from northern Iran to the rail centre at Dzhulfa in Soviet Azerbaijan, and then north through Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and Tiflis (modern Tbilisi), capital of Georgia, where it picked up the Georgian Military Highway that took it over the high passes to Ordzhonikidze (former Vladikavkaz) in North Ossetia. Ordzhonikidze was the main sorting and transshipment station for all the supplies and equipment coming through Iran. From Ordzhonikidze it was sent by rail straight up to Astrakhan where much of it was then fed directly into the defence of Stalingrad as well as equipping the growing Stavka reserve accumulating east of the Volga and north of the Don.
The Dzhulfa rail centre was also the main junction with Baku and the shipments of aid coming by sea from the Persian port of Noushahr. From that port aid was also sent to the Caspian port of Makhachkala just north of the Caucasus range. From there it was transported to Ordzhonikidze. Two alternative routes ran from Tehran through Soviet Turkmenistan to Krasnovodsk on the Caspian and from there by sea to Baku. Dzhulfa, though, was the critical junction. If it failed, the only way British and American aid could get through was to reroute it across the Caspian from Noushahr directly to the ports of Makhachkala and Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Given the lack of shipping, that would amount to only a trickle. If the terminus of Ordzhonikidze fell, only the unused sea route to Astrakhan would remain.
Stalin and the Stavka had also long been aware of Turkey’s imminent entry into the war, even the codename, Operation Dessau. A casual observer could have seen what was coming as the Turkish Army massed on the border to be joined by a German expeditionary corps. If that were not enough, their agent within the Wehrmacht’s general staff fed them the organization and date of the invasion. That had given Stavka time to alert the Transcaucasian Front’s five armies to dig in and prepare. Stalin also ordered two more armies fro
m Stavka reserve to reinforce them. Their commitment soon proved prescient.
On 2 September the Turkish ambassador handed Foreign Minister Molotov a declaration, just as Turkish armies were crossing the border into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Georgia and Armenia. The twenty-one divisions of the Turkish 2nd and 3rd Armies led the invasion. Eight divisions of former Soviet Muslim POWs were attached in separate corps to each army. Another fifteen Turkish divisions were assembling along the country’s eastern and southern borders to threaten the British in Persia, Iraq and Syria. The Turkish chief of staff, however, was reluctant to engage the British fully. Turkey needed a way out of the war if something were to go wrong. He issued confidential instructions to those armies to restrain their aggressiveness.
The German Jäger troops were under no such restraint and flowed like water seeking its own level through the difficult terrain of the border area in 3rd Army’s sector. They had to admit that the Turks might not be the brightest warriors ever to tread the earth, but they were always up for a fight, especially against a traditional enemy like the Russians. Third Army’s objective was the Georgian capital of Tiflis, 130 miles from the border, with a secondary mission to threaten Batumi on the Black Sea Coast just beyond the border. After taking Tiflis 3rd Army would then cooperate with 1st Panzer Army’s drive through Chechnya to Baku and the oilfields.
The mission of the 2nd Army was to strike through Soviet Armenia and into Azerbaijan. Its primary immediate mission was to seize the rail centre at Dzhulfa. The 2nd Army’s attack also put the Armenians at the mercy of the Turks, who were determined to finish their genocide of 1915-22. It was almost as if they were responding to Hitler’s question of 1922, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ They were going to ensure that no one did. The Final Solution of the Armenians was at hand.2
Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Page 19