He did not have time to wonder much more as he saw the turrets in the other column all turn simultaneously to face his tanks. With a boom, they fired almost all at once, and his brigade died at point-blank range. There were no misses, and every shot found a vital spot that ignited death by fire or explosion. The German tank commanders fell back into their turrets just as they fired to avoid the rain of exploding ammunition, flaming fuel, and jagged metal that flew between the columns. The burning column did wonders for the morale of the follow-on panzer grenadiers and artillery. That is what’s called a bonus affect.
Leninsk, 3 November 1942
The end point of Stalin’s secret railway supplying Stalingrad Front was boiling with activity as the advance elements of the 2nd Guards Army (two rifle corps and 2nd Mechanized Corps) began detraining and deploying to the east. At the same time artillery batteries that had been supporting 62nd Army just a short while before were arriving and also heading east. Overhead squadrons of the Red Air Force were also heading east. Stavka had directed that the 8th Air Army that had been supporting Yeremenko’s westward thrust now be diverted to supporting the defence of Leninsk from Kleist’s oncoming 1st Panzer Army.
Stalin had every right to fear Kleist. His four panzer divisions were flush with tanks - what was left of their original German panzers and hundreds of American Shermans and British Valentines. The excellent automotive characteristics of both tanks had resulted in relatively few breakdowns in the enormous distances covered from Baku and Ordzhonikidze. For the first time in the war, the Germans had a fully motorized field army - III Panzer Corps (3rd, 13th, 23rd Panzer Divisions), LVII Corps (5th SS Wiking, 50th, 111th, 370th Infantry Divisions), and XLIV Corps (97th and 101st Jäger Divisions) - every man and pound of equipment and supplies rode in a combat vehicle or a truck, almost all of which were the big, robust American Lend-Lease ones.
Stavka, Moscow, 3 November 1942
For the commander of the 384th Rhinegold Infantry Division, it was the ultimate humiliation. He stood in the snow with his aide holding a white flag. In front of him was a nameless Soviet division commander to whom he was surrendering. His division had been trapped by the onrushing tank spearheads of Don Front. He had lost contact with the rest of XI Corps which had disappeared to the south more as a rabble than an organized force.
The news was radioed to the Don Front commander, who was riding that indescribable high of pursuing a retreating enemy. Rokossovsky had the scent of a kill in his nose; the Germans had littered their path with discarded equipment of every kind, a sign that panic was turning into rout. His Don Front armies were pressing forward everywhere. Already his 16th Tank Corps had taken the Don bridge at Akimovka, trapping thousands of Germans and Romanians on the west bank. So he was shocked that night when Stalin himself had called to tell him of Yeremenko’s defeat and to order him to redouble his efforts and link up with Southwest Front to crush the Germans between them.
He was even more shocked to hear a note of worry in Stalin’s voice, something he had never heard before. He was so shocked that it took him a few minutes after he hung up to realize that the Vozhd had threatened to shoot him if he failed.
He instinctively felt his jaw as his tongue ran over his stainless steel teeth. As a disciple of Tukhachevsky he had been arrested in the great purge that decimated the senior officer corps in 1937-8; his NKVD interrogators had made much of his aristocratic Polish ancestry as they broke nine of his teeth, cracked three ribs, smashed his toes with hammers, and pulled out every one of his fingernails. He endured three mock executions when the men around him were all shot. He survived because he proved that the officer who was claimed to have denounced him had actually died in 1921. He was unexpectedly released in 1940 and reinstated because Marshal Timoshenko was in desperate need of good officers to command the growing Red Army. Yes, Rokossovsky took Stalin’s threats seriously. Don Front would redouble its efforts. He had a trump that Stalin had given him. ‘I assign Chuikov’s army to you - 62nd Army is closer to the enemy than you are. Southwest Front’s 1st Tank Corps will cross the Don south of Kalach and take Lyapichev Station, cutting off a major supply route. You will link up with them.’ then Stalin hung up.
Chuikov was stunned when Rokossovsky gave him his new mission - attack 6th Army’s flank. ‘Comrade General, my army is not fit for manoeuvre in the open field. My divisions are mere skeletons. We have little ammunition and supplies; the floating ice in the river has nearly cut off our support from the east bank. All my artillery is on the east bank, and for the same reason can’t be brought across.’
These are orders from the Vozhd, Chuikov. We have a priceless opportunity to encircle the fascists, and your army is the only one that can close the circle in time. Don’t worry. I am sending 16th Tank Corps right after you. My 16th Tank Corps will then pass through your army and link up with 1st Tank Corps.
Chuikov gave his orders. Then he visited one of the cramped field hospitals in a basement. He found Zaitsev to his surprise on the floor on a thin pallet. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘That damned German sniper nearly bagged this hare, Comrade General.’ Zaitsev laughed through a painful wince. He described how König and he had danced around each other as the Russian had followed the withdrawing Germans. ‘He got two of my team, and I forgot to be patient.’
‘There will be more Germans.’
‘But this one I especially wanted.’
Chuikov forced himself to smile. ‘We’ve been ordered forward; maybe we’ll get him for you.’
Rokossovsky’s men would have to run hard to catch up with Vatutin’s armies. Already most of 5th Tank and 21st Armies had crossed the Don and were pounding away at the increasingly fragile front that Seydlitz had thrown up. The 1st Tank Corps had crossed the Don just above its confluence with the Chir River, 25 miles southwest of Kalach, and cut the main rail line supporting 6th Army from the west. The Germans had only one more line: Rostov-Kotelnikovo-Zhutovo-Lyapichev. Unfortunately, Lyapichev was directly in the path of the oncoming 1st Tank Corps.
Kalach Front, 4 November 1942
The next morning 1st Tank Corps hit Lyapichev. They burst into the town in the early morning scattering the support units clustered there. Tanks crossed the tracks in a dozen places to fire into the wagons packed in the sidings. Some of them were still full of men, troops of V Corps, which Manstein had ordered north to support 6th Army. One division had already detrained and was marching north.
Now Germans boiled out of the cars only to be run down or machine-gunned by the tanks. Their antitank guns were tied down on flatcars, and the only weapons they had were small arms, entirely useless against tanks. The Soviet tankisti would call this day ‘the German hunt’ as they killed and killed. Germans ran across the snow in all directions away from the town. A Soviet motorized brigade arrived next to disgorge its infantry to sweep through the streets and yards. The corps commander, General V. V. Butkov, surveyed the slaughter and carnage. For him revenge for his Motherland was indeed sweet. ‘Take no prisoners.’
The German 9th Division marching north from the station turned almost to a man to stare south at the sudden noise of battle. Within minutes commands were echoing up and down the column to about turn.
Another train with men of a third division was approaching the station from Zhutovo when the driver noticed smoke and fire ahead. He had just begun to slow the train down when a T-34 lumbered onto the track in front of him and turned to straddle the rails. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the wheels shot cascades of sparks as the brakes took hold and began slowing the train. Too late. The tank fired. The round struck the engine head-on, exploding the boiler and scalding to death the engine crew. As the shattered vehicle shrieked its death, it jumped the tracks, and careered over into the snow. Behind it car after car followed it off the tracks, to crash and splinter, spilling out hundreds of men.
Kotelnikovo, 4 November 1942
The elation in Stavka at the seizure of the enemy’s main rail hub was
matched by shock at Army Group B headquarters. Even Manstein’s famous iron nerve wavered for a moment, then righted itself as more information came in. The rest of V Corps was detraining outside Lyapichev and throwing up defences to contain the enemy’s tanks as was the 9th Infantry Division to the north. The problem was that the V Corps was meant to stabilize Seydlitz’s and Hoth’s hard-pressed armies. His counterstroke force was still engaged with Stalingrad Front. The race against time was on, and it looked like the crisis would burst before 11th Army could accomplish its mission and rescue 4th Panzer and 6th Armies.
As the Soviets were rampaging in the railyards, Grossdeutschland and 6th Panzer had penetrated past the northernmost of the Sarpinsky Lakes and struck deep into Stalingrad Front’s assembly areas. Their black cross T-34s sowed endless confusion among the Russians. Unit after unit was taken unawares as the Soviet-made tanks approached only to discover that they were German-manned. One by one the second-echelon tank brigades of 65th and 57th Armies were encountered and destroyed before they could be properly deployed.
To the south, 11th Army’s two infantry corps engaged the Soviet rifle divisions that had followed the initial breakthrough. Here the Germans had a clear advantage of seven fresh full-strength divisions against three Soviet rifle divisions. In three hours of intense fighting, the Germans drove the Russians back into their defences between the lakes. Continuing the attack, they broke through, taking thousands of prisoners, and pursued the enemy north where they expected to meet up with the two panzer divisions.
The infantry corps would soon have to finish off Southwest Front on their own. Manstein had been keeping a close watch on the progress of the two panzer divisions. They were desperately needed in the fighting to the west, but to pull them out too soon would allow Southwest Front to survive and threaten the German rear with another attempt at encirclement. Not yet. Not yet.
Leninsk, 4 November 1942
Major General Rodion Malinovsky was under the oppressive cloud of Stalin’s suspicion. As with Rokossovsky, his future rode on the attack of 2nd Guards Army to stem Kleist’s advance. His sin in Stalin’s eyes was to have possible foreign connections, a fact that had already sent countless men to the gulag. At the age of fifteen the young Malinovsky had joined the Imperial Army to fight the Germans. His courage and stout heart earned him a St George Cross. Sent to France with the Russian expeditionary corps, he rose to sergeant and was badly wounded. When the corps was disbanded after the October Revolution, he stayed on to fight the Germans as a recruit of the French Foreign Legion with which he won the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he returned home, joined the Red Army, and distinguished himself in the Civil War. In this current war, he had proved himself again and again to be a skilful and successful leader. He was so able that Stalin, despite his suspicions, gave him command of his finest army. Now that army was all that stood between Stalingrad and the enemy.
It was a formidable obstacle. Its 2nd Mechanized Corps held 17,000 men and was 220 tanks strong, almost all of them new-model T-34s. The armour of the German-manned Shermans was a bit thicker than the T-34’s, and its turret basket allowed the crew to fight the tank more effectively. Balancing that was the fact that the T-34’s high-velocity 76mm gun had a penetrating advantage over the Sherman’s 75mm weapon. The corps’ three infantry brigades were all motorized. Malinovsky’s six infantry divisions were tough, experienced, and well-equipped. Every formation was commanded by a veteran officer who had done well in previous assignments. The oncoming battle would be for the first time between evenly matched mechanized forces, each with strong air support, and each commanded by a talented and tough commander.
Perhaps because they were so evenly matched they took the same mirror-imaging approach. Fix the enemy in the front with infantry and wheel a massive tank attack around a flank and into the rear. Ominously they both picked the same flank. Fifteen miles east of Leninsk, the infantry corps of both armies collided in a great bruising fight over the low mounds that were all that was left of the ruins of the 13th-century capital of the Golden Horde, Shed-Berke. Both wanted to use the mounds as a defensive line to hold the other until their tanks could fall on the enemy’s rear. To the north over 600 tanks of both sides were converging on the same point - on the German right and the Soviet left - in the greatest meeting engagement in history.
It was a titanic crash of iron cavalry. There was no manoeuvre, no long-range duelling, as the masses of tanks flew at each other and fired at almost point-blank range. Tanks rammed each other like ancient galleys. The ranges were so close there were hardly any misses except where panic or excitement threw off the aim. Every hit at such ranges on hull or turret penetrated whether it was an American 75mm or Soviet 76mm gun. The Shermans lived up to their American nickname of Ronsons by lighting up after a single hit as their fuel caught fire, while the T-34s exploded because too much ammunition was vulnerably stored. Whether it was a Sherman gushing fire from its hatches or a T-34 with its turret twisting in the air, blown off by exploding ammunition, men died horribly. ‘In modern mechanized war men do not die in fields of flowers with shouts of Urrah on their lips.’16
Imperceptibly the tide shifted in the German favour. The electrically powered turret baskets in the American and German tanks allowed each crew to fight more effectively even in the point-blank mêlée. Rudel’s Stuka squadron more than did its part. Overcast skies with cloud at 300 to 600 feet, execrable flying weather, kept most of the Red Air Force and Luftwaffe grounded - except Rudel who only looked at it as a dare from the weather god. Rudel led his squadron in sortie after sortie that killed tank after tank.
On his seventh sortie as dusk was settling he flew over the fighting to the enemy’s rear to find tempting fuel targets. He dropped down low and flew over a village into heavy flak, but flying just over rooftop level protected him. He looked down a long gulley behind the village and found Malinovsky’s tank reserve.
I see a mass of tanks, behind them a long convoy of lorries and motorized infantry. The tanks are, curiously, all carrying two or three drums of petrol. In a flash it dawns on me. They are taking advantage of the twilight and the darkness because by day they cannot move with my Stukas overhead. This accounts for the petrol drums on board the tanks.
He realized that the force was preparing to strike deep into the army’s rear and did not want to be dependent on fuel convoys. He alerted the squadron.
Attack of the most vital importance! You are to drop every bomb singly. Follow up with low level attack till you have fired every round. Gunners are also to fire at vehicles.
Rudel led the way, dropped his bombs, and then attacked with his 20mm cannon. Normally those guns would have been ineffective against tanks, but the fuel drums were another matter. With the first bombs, the column stopped abruptly and then in a few minutes resumed its orderly exit from the gulley. But by now Rudel’s squadron was swarming over them, and the Russians scattered in panic out of the gulley and across the steppe.
Every time I fire I hit a drum with incendiary or explosive ammunition. Apparently the petrol leaks through some joint or other which causes a draught; some tanks . . . blow up with a blinding flash. If their ammunition is exploded into the air, the sky is criss-crossed with a perfect firework display, and if the tank happens to be carrying a quantity of Very lights they shoot all over the place in the craziest coloured pattern.17
Only night finally grounded the Stukas, which had accounted for almost forty tanks and dozens of trucks. By his quick thinking and aggressiveness, Rudel had wrecked Malinovsky’s reserve tank brigade and his motorized brigade which he had been preparing for the killing stroke against 1st Panzer Army. Unknown to Rudel, there was a vital bonus amid the burning tanks and trucks scattered though the gulley and the surrounding steppe. Malinovsky was among the dead.
As night fell the loss of the army commander and much of his senior staff was not known yet. The great meeting engagement had cost them over a hundred tanks to the Germans’ sixty. The fighting between the infant
ry of both armies flared and rumbled all day. As Rudel was riding the dusk into his last attack, SS Wiking broke through the Soviet 13th Rifle Corps and rampaged through the enemy’s rear. Late that night, after the fighting had stopped, the Germans could hear the noise of tank engines revving up and stood to their own vehicles lest the Russians come in the night. It was only the remnants of 2nd Guards Army pulling out in defeat. The Germans would immortalize the tank battle as Der Tottenritt bei Leninsk (‘The Death Ride of Leninsk’).
Chapter 14
‘Manstein is Coming!’
Kalach, 4 November 1942
The area around Vatutin’s command post in the town was littered with shattered tanks, bodies, and the debris from the large number of German supply and maintenance units that 5th Tank Army had overrun. Hundreds of German prisoners were being escorted back across the bridge to the west bank of the Don. To the east was the smoke and noise of battle. As long as he held the Germans close they could not disengage and escape. Stalin had called him personally to congratulate him on the success of Southwest Front and to explain that it was still possible to trap the enemy between his own 1st Tank Corps at Lyapichev and Rokossovsky’s 16th Tank Corps.
Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History Page 28