Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

by Peter G. Tsouras

  They were Hermann Goring’s pride and joy. Their losses on Crete had been so high that Hitler refused to conduct another large-scale airborne landing. It then took an appeal to Goring by Army Group A for just one battalion to be used in a night air drop. He had asked Hitler, who relented as long as it was only one battalion. The Luftwaffe was, in any case, hard put to divert enough Ju 52 transports for the drop of even one battalion.

  As he came down in his chute, Gericke could see the lines of bonfires that had guided the transports to their drop zone. The Chechens had done just what they said they would do. Let’s hope, he thought, they would have the promised number of men on the ground to assist in his mission. He was determined to go on no matter what,

  Within half an hour he was conferring with Khasan. To enormous relief, he could tell by moonlight that the woods were filled with well-armed men. He shuddered for a moment. They reminded him of the natives of Crete who had come out of their homes with scythes and pruning hooks, kitchen knives and old swords, to fall on his paratroopers with a fury they had never expected. Mountain peoples are tough and unforgiving. An even greater surprise were the twenty-two Studebaker trucks waiting to move the extra ammunition and equipment that had been dropped with them. Israilov laughed as he pointed to them, ‘Gift of the American people! We snatched them off the Georgian Military Highway for you. Just dressed as NKVD men and pulled them off the road.’

  Their move through the countryside was mercifully uneventful. By dawn their objective was in sight, the vast Grozny oilfields, a forest of derricks and the cracking and refining plants that left a haze in the air. Now it all depended on the element of surprise. The German armies in the south needed not merely oil but refined petroleum products, and those were made by the cracking and refining plants. The oil by itself was of little immediate use. Gericke’s mission was to take those plants. His problem was that there was a garrison in Grozny to protect the fields and, on Stalin’s orders, the plants had been set for demolition if the Germans seemed about to overrun them. Gericke considered that even a surprise attack would not be quick enough to forestall the destruction of the plants.

  The Studebakers were a godsend. He gathered his company commanders and quickly revised their plans. He turned to Israilov, ‘You still have those NKVD uniforms?’1

  ‘Of course, my friend.’

  Within an hour the truck convoy entered the main road to the fields with Chechen drivers dressed in NKVD uniforms, a surefire unquestioned pass to anywhere they wanted to go. The Chechens spoke fluent Russian and had that cold self-confidence that could bluff through anything. Israilov slipped his men between Grozny and the fields waiting to ambush the garrison when it sallied out.

  The few guards at the main cracking plant were overpowered almost without a shot, but it was too good to be true that everything would fall to Gericke’s coup de main. The chief engineer at the plant was shot just as he set off the demolitions that sent the facility up in a ball of fire.

  Stalingrad, 16–17 September 1942

  Already that morning Chuikov had reported to the front military council that he was completely without reserves while the enemy continued to commit fresh forces. ‘[A]nother few days of such bloody fighting and the Army would disintegrate, would be bled to death. I asked for the Army to be immediately reinforced by three fresh divisions.’

  That night a near full-strength 92nd Naval Infantry Brigade from the North Sea Fleet crossed the Volga as did a tank brigade. The sailors had not been incorporated into the Red Army but fought in their own uniforms, bell-bottom trousers, sailor caps with the ribbon hanging from the back, and their telnyashka shirts. They were as tough as the frozen sea they had sailed. With them was the 137th Tank Brigade with light tanks to help stop the Germans from getting to the Volga east of Mamayev Kurgan.2

  That day’s fighting raged along almost the entire perimeter of 62nd Army’s front from the Red October complex in the north past the Kurgan and through downtown Stalingrad to the El’shanka River. Seydlitz’s 295th Infantry Division stormed the hill only to be thrown off by battalions of the 13th Guards and 112th Rifle Divisions. That afternoon the Germans counterattacked and took the summit. They now had the perfect observation post to see everything within Chuikov’s lines, the ferries and the opposite shore of the Volga, and to call down accurate artillery fire. They did not have, however, undisputed control of the hill. Chuikov’s men were still in possession of significant parts of it which prevented the Germans fully exploiting its potential.

  On Chuikov’s southern perimeter, XLVIII Panzer Corps drove the fragments of Soviet units back and crossed the El’shanka River near its confluence with the Volga. Chuikov then consolidated these fragments under the 35th Guards Division which finally brought the Germans up short.

  The high tempo of fighting continued on the 17th. Now the grain elevator on the bank of the Volga became the focus of both armies. This huge structure still filled with grain dominated the skyline of the city. So important was it that Paulus chose its likeness to adorn the Stalingrad victory medal he designed. Chuikov had to defend it because it anchored his line on the Volga. Guardsmen and naval infantry were infiltrated to garrison it through a network of tunnels. They held out until the 20th when the Germans finally stormed it. One German soldier wrote:

  Fighting is going on inside the elevator. It is occupied not by men but devils, whom no flames or bullets can destroy. If all the buildings of Stalingrad are defended like this, then none of our soldiers will get back to Germany.3

  Already the Germans were referring to this brutal city fighting as Der Rattenkrieg, the rats’ war.

  Those ‘devils’ were suffering their own hell. One naval infantryman wrote:

  In the elevator the grain was on fire, the water in the machine guns evaporated, the wounded were thirsty, but there was no water nearby. This was how we defended ourselves twenty-four hours a day for three days. Heat, smoke, thirst - all our lips were cracked. During the day many of us climbed up to the highest points in the elevator and from there fired on the Germans; at night we came down and made a defensive ring around the building. Our radio equipment had been put out of action on the very first day. We had no contact with our units.4

  East of the Volga, 17 September 1942

  Warrant Officer Zaitsev was marching with his regiment at night to avoid air attack. Ahead of them on the horizon was a ghastly sight.

  The reference point visible to all, the hellish fires at the edge of the steppe, gave us the sensation of walking towards the end of the world. But those were the fires of Stalingrad!

  As morning approached the sun obscured the red of the flames on the horizon, but the dark crimson clouds became thicker. It was as if a huge volcano was erupting, spitting forth smoke and lava. And when the sun’s rays lit up between the clouds, we could see things circling, like a swarm of flies . . . it looked like the entire German air force - were flying over the city in formations, stacked three or four layers thick. They were unleashing their explosive payloads on the city below. The dive-bombers dipped down into the heart of this conflagration, and from the ground below them columns of red brick dust would shoot up hundreds of metres into the air.

  Zaitsev’s company commander announced, ‘That’s where we’re headed, but right now, sailors, we have to prepare you for action.’5 For the next three days the regiment received intensive training in street fighting, grenades, and close combat with bayonets, knives, and shovels. At the end, they traded in their Navy uniforms for ill-fighting Red Army brown, but they kept their striped Navy telnyashki underneath.

  Grozny, 18 September 1942

  It was a sight that few men of the 23rd Panzer would ever forget as they closed on Grozny and its oilfields. South of the city stretched a forest of derricks, here and there some of them were spouting fire like giant flamethrowers. Nearer the city a huge fire burned in the centre of the complex of cracking plants and refineries. The panzers were like the cavalry coming to the rescue, a theme so many of them
had picked up from American movies before the war and in reading the Western adventures written by Carl May and so beloved of German schoolboys. Only this time, the cavalry rode in on steel steeds, and the settlers were the besieged battalion of Flieger Division 7.

  They bypassed the city to ensure the capture of that part of the fields and their facilities that had not been destroyed. Smoke rose from the city, courtesy of the Israilov brothers and their bands of Chechen rebels who had attacked as the garrison had rushed out to secure the oilfields. The Germans would later blanch at the atrocities the Chechens had committed on the Russian population of the city. If any ethnic group was atrocity-prone, it was the Chechens. They were already hated in the rest of the Soviet Union as the cruellest of the underworld mafias. Now they were sating their revenge on the Russian civilian population. The communists went first, then they worked their way down.6

  Fifty miles away to the west, 3rd Panzer was chasing the retreating Russians down the Georgian Military Highway. They bounced into Beslan and secured the road east to Grozny and then pressed on south. Outside Ordzhonikidze, the Soviet 9th Army gathered the fragments of units coming south and made its last stand. Strong tank attacks suddenly drove north out of the town. The British Valentines and American M3s, however, were very badly handled as if by amateurs who had never been in a tank before. Over a hundred tanks were left burning or abandoned when the survivors fled back into the city. Only later did the Germans learn that the Soviets had been using the stocks of Allied tanks from the parks outside the city, crewing them with infantry, truck drivers and whoever else could be scraped up. It would take the arrival of two of Kleist’s infantry divisions to break the defence on 20 September and capture the vast sorting fields of British and American supplies and equipment.

  Kleist’s men had been at the end of a fraying logistics pipeline. Now they had everything. Food of all descriptions, boots, medical equipment and supplies, fuel, and above all fields full of American Studebaker and Ford trucks and jeeps. So many, in fact, that the Germans were able to refit XL Panzer Corps completely with more than its establishment of transport. There was enough left over to re-form two infantry divisions as motorized units. The Germans had got used to incorporating captured enemy equipment into their units, but they had never seen war support war in such a lavish style.7

  Werewolf, Vinnitsa, 18 September 1942

  Late than night Major Engel was writing in his diary of the day’s events at the Führer Headquarters:

  F. seems determined to get rid of Keitel [Chief of OKW] and Jodl . . . asked what successor he was thinking of. He mentioned Kesselring or Paulus . . . the chief of staff [Halder] would have to go beforehand, there was simply nothing more there. At the moment he trusted nobody among his generals, and he would promote a major to general and appoint him Chief of the General Staff if only he knew a good one . . . Basically he hates everything in field grey, irrespective of where it comes from, for today I heard again the oft-repeated expression that he longed ‘for the day when he could cast off this jacket and ride roughshod’.

  Hitler had made it clear that the General Staff officers were out of touch. “‘Same old song: too old, too little experience at the front.” Chief said he had a better impression from younger General Staff officers,’ such as Major von Stauffenberg, who often made statements before Hitler that affected operational decisions.8

  Werewolf, Vinnitsa, 20 September 1942

  Hitler had not been happy with Colonel Gehlen’s report:

  I have told you, Gehlen, that the Russian is kaput, finished. And now you give me a report that says they have a million and a quarter men in reserve. What do take me for, a fool? After their losses, such a thing is impossible!

  Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East had, in fact, done a superlative piece of order-of-battle analysis. If anything, they underestimated Soviet numbers.

  Hitler’s reasoning was confounded by the fact that, with almost the same number of men at the front as the Germans, Stalin had been able to amass 1,242,470 men in Stavka reserve while the Germans essentially had no strategic reserve. Gehlen’s office estimated that the Soviet class of 1925 was providing Stalin with 1,400,000 more men. The German class was little more than one-third that number.9

  Halder received another disquieting report that went into his next briefing for Hitler. The information was as of the 14th and rated the fighting strength of all the infantry battalions in 6th Army. Seydlitz’s LI Corps, which had been in the hardest fighting, was bleeding away. Of its 21 infantry battalions, 12 were rated as weak, 6 as average, and 3 as medium-strong. The pioneer battalions were rated average.10 Halder knew that Hitler would not want to hear this; his mind always needed to assume every division was at full strength. He then kept assigning missions that dead men could not fulfill.

  Gehlen’s statistics-laden briefing which Halder supplemented with LI Corps’ waning strength had been the last straw. Hitler acted quickly to decapitate the General Staff that he so despised. He summoned Halder and told him, ‘Herr Halder, we both need a rest. Our nerves are frayed to the point that we are of no use to each other.’ Halder took the hint and resigned.

  Halder went to his room to pack and pen a note to his protégé Paulus. ‘A line to tell you that today I have resigned my appointment. Let me thank you, my dear Paulus, for your loyalty and friendship and wish you further success as the leader you have proved yourself to be.’ Even before Halder’s aide could drop the note off at the OKW dispatch office, Paulus was reading the message from Werewolf giving him his old boss’s job. He was to report immediately and turn his army over to Seydlitz. He felt an immense sense of relief even though his men had just raised the swastika flag over the huge and now shattered Univermag department store in the city centre. He would no longer be responsible for bleeding 6th Army to death. Over the last six weeks, his army had suffered 7,700 dead and 31,000 wounded; fully 10 per cent of 6th Army had been lost. Every day the fighting got harder, the Russians more determined, and his losses were not replaced. He thought that now perhaps his near uncontrollable tic might go away.11

  Next it was Jodl’s turn to be humbled. Hitler assembled the OKW staff to announce the immediate promotion of Major von Stauffenberg to Generalmajor (brigadier general) and his appointment as deputy chief of OKW’s Operations Staff. He came over to shake the stunned Stauffenberg’s hand. The new general noted that the Führer’s hand was trembling. Stauffenberg’s appointment was seen for what it was, a rebuke to Jodl. Hitler clearly thought he needed a minder.

  Most angry was Bormann. Hitler apparently had not known that Stauffenberg was a deeply religious Catholic. It was too late to get to Hitler to warn him off. The Führer would lose too much face. What Bormann did not know was that Stauffenberg had come to find Hitler and his Nazis repugnant and had been so alarmed at the treatment of the Jews and the assault on religion that he been drawn into the anti-Hitler plot by Tresckow.

  Now that he had got their attention, Hitler had one more announcement. ‘I have decided to replace Weichs as well. A man with more ruthlessness is required at this decisive stage in the struggle against Bolshevism. Manstein will now command Army Group B.’12

  Sevastopol, Crimea, 21 September 1942

  Within twenty-four hours of his appointment, Manstein ordered the siege train of heavy guns that had been left at the shattered Soviet fortress to be moved to Stalingrad. At the same time rail construction troops were set to work to strengthen the line from Kalach to Stalingrad and a subsidiary line from Rostov through Kotelnikovo to Stalingrad.

  The most imposing of the guns were the two 600mm and one 800mm railway guns. The former were named Thor and Odin. The latter, named Schwerer Gustav (Heavy Gustav), weighed 1,350 tons and could throw a 7-ton shell as far as 23 miles that would destroy any fortification known at that time. Developed by Krupp in the 1930s specifically to destroy the fortifications of the Maginot Line, Gustav was not ready in time for that battle. It had been ready to crack open Sevastopol. It was the largest-calibre ri
fled weapon in the history of artillery to see combat, and fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece.

  A second 800mm gun named Dora had already arrived at Stalingrad in mid-August. A train with a total length of almost a mile was needed to transport it to its siding emplacement 9.3 miles west of the city. It had fired its first shell on 13 September.

  Two 280mm rail guns as well as two 420mm and two 355mm howitzers were also sent north in addition to four 305mm mortars. Both of the 420mm guns were short-ranged and left over from First World War. Manstein could not give 6th Army more infantry, but he could give it crushing artillery.

  Stalingrad, 22 September 1942

  The sailors looked askance at the boat and barge that had come to pick them up to cross the Volga. It was badly holed and leaking energetically. The boat operator was throwing boxes of canned American meat into the hold to make room for the ammunition being loaded. Zaitsev joked, ‘What are you doing, Sarge? The Second Front is going to drown down there!’ Leaks or no, the men crossed the Volga that night without incident. By five in the morning the entire 284th Division had made it across the river. They were part of what would be called ‘feeding the fire’, the constant stream of replacement formations slipped across the river to keep going the conflagration that was burning out 6th Army.

  The Russians kept sending in new formations from the Stavka reserve while 6th Army received no reinforcements from outside its own army area except for half a dozen pioneer battalions.

  Its only augmentation consisted of 70,000 Soviet citizens. These were the Hiwis (Hilfswillige or volunteer helpers). Some were anti-Soviet volunteers, including many Cossacks, and others were recruited out of POW camps. They wore German uniforms and performed credibly, usually well treated by the Germans but sure to be shot on the spot if captured. Some German divisions had as many Hiwis as Germans. Among the many non-Slavic nationalities, there were six battalions of Turkmen alone in 6th Army, as well as Balts, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Khirgiz, Tatars and many more. Hatred of communism also drove large numbers of Slavs including Russians into German uniform. The Ukrainians were especially well-represented, steeped in hatred for the seven to ten million of their people purposely starved to death by Stalin in the evil winter of 1932-3, the murder by hunger, they called it. Without their willing support, 6th Army would have been an empty shell by the time it reached the Don.13