A World at Arms (89 page)

The military advantages of the Soviets were two. The Axis units facing them at the places where the pincers would strike were in both cases mainly Romanian.
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These had never been provided by the Germans with the equipment necessary for combat on the Eastern Front, and, once actually involved in the fighting using obsolete and inadequate weapons, were never properly supplied.
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The insistence of the Germans, and this was Hitler’s own decision, to drive into the Caucasus at the same time as he pushed the offensive toward Stalingrad made it impossible to keep any substantial number of German units on the flanks of 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army. On the contrary, as the fighting in the city absorbed more and more German divisions, these could be provided only by taking them from the flanks, putting them at the point of the thrust into the city, and increasing the length of front entrusted to Germany’s allies.

In the last weeks before the Soviet offensive began, two interacting German errors accentuated the difficulties they would face. The massive diversion of resources to Tunisia has already been mentioned; November 1942 was not the best time for Germany to begin building up a second army in North Africa with all that involved in men, materiel, and transport. Even more important, the careful preparations that the Soviets deliberately shrouded in secrecy completely misled German army intelligence, which for most of the Eastern campaign was great on amassing details but hopelessly mistaken in its strategic assessments.
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They now
thought that the main Soviet winter offensive would come on the central portion of the Eastern Front-where the Russians were indeed planning operation “Mars.” Not until the last days before the attack did they have even a minimal picture of what might happen, and even then, the persistent underestimation of the Soviet Union would leave them misjudging the situation. Hitler himself repeatedly referred to a possible Soviet offensive across the Don; but the fact that he never insisted on substantial measures to counter this possibility shows that he thought of it neither very seriously nor consistently; it is only in retrospect that his musings on it have assumed any importance.
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As it was, the Soviet offensive achieved a surprise of dramatic proportions because in the last weeks before its launching the Germans were still giving priority to the push inside the torn city.
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The big offensive was postponed for about ten days from its original opening date. On November 19, following a massive artillery barrage, the Southwest Front’s infantry opened a path for 5th Tank Army to break through the Romanian 3rd Army. Without either heavy tanks or anti-tank guns adequate to deal with Soviet tanks, the Romanian army disintegrated that day. Some units fought hard, some surrendered, many tried to escape the onrush–but there was no way they could hold up the attacking 5th Tank Army, which had advanced half the 70-mile distance to Kalach on the Don by the end of the day. The Don front of Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovski assaulted further east, advanced less rapidly, but kept the Germans from moving westwards to support the Romanians. On the following day, while General Andrei I. Eremenko’s Stalingrad Front launched its southern pincer through the Romanian units of 4th Romanian Army (assigned to the German 4th Panzer Army), the advance spearheads of 5th Tank Army were closing on Kalach. As German and Romanian remnants and assorted rear area headquarters and installations tried to hold at a few places but mostly to flee the advancing Red Army, the two jaws of the pincers came closer. On the morning of November 22 the spearhead of 5th Tank Army seized the Don bridge at Kalach,
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and on the following day the two Soviet forces met about ten miles southeast of Kalach. The whole German 6th Army, most of the German divisions in the 4th Panzer Army, and some of what was left of the 3rd and 4th Romanian Armies were surrounded.
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The Germans had to make some new decisions quickly, and soon after the Soviet high command also faced new choices. The Germans reacted immediately to the attack on their northern flank by halting the offensive inside Stalingrad and beginning to shift some of the troops near the city westwards, but the big decisions which had to be made in the next two days involved the larger question of whether the 6th Army
and the portions of the 4th Panzer north of the breakthrough of Eremenko’s southern pincer should fight their way back in a southwesterly direction through the enveloping Russian armies or try to build up a circular front while a relief force attempted to pry open the encirclement from the outside.
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Inside the Stalingrad area, all the highest German commanders thought a breakout was the appropriate step, and on November 22 and 23 began with the preparations for such a move on November 25 and 26. On the outside, the German Army Group commander strongly held the same opinion, and so urged headquarters, where General Zeitzler, Chief of the General Staff of the army, favored such action. The belief of the local air force commander, von Richthofen, that adequate air supply of the isolated army was impossible, reinforced these arguments. Hitler, however, hoped to relieve the encircled army where it was, wanted to avoid the conspicuous humiliation of giving up a city he had just publicly promised to hold, and seems to have believed that the experience of the preceding winter, when Cholm and Demyansk had held out until relieved, could be repeated. Furthermore, he still hoped and expected to win the war, and because for that victory Germany needed to seize the oil resources of the Caucasus and to close off the area by holding the lower Volga from Stalingrad to Astrakhan, it made no sense to him to give up any more territory that had been taken at great cost and would need to be taken again than absolutely necessary. He was encouraged in adopting and holding this attitude by Göring and von Manstein.
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The German air force Chief of Staff, General Hans Jeschonnek, had already discussed air supply of Stalingrad with Hitler on the train as they returned to East Prussia from Hitler’s vacation in Berchtesgaden. There were now projects for collecting air transports to create a bridge of flights to the isolated garrison, and it seems clear that Göring and his experts saw this very differently. The air force officers, both the transport officers at headquarters and the commanders out in the field, thought that limited tonnage could be flown in for a few days, assuming either a quick breakout or minimum sustenance until a quick relief.
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Göring, on the other hand, hoped to recoup his own and the air force’s position with Hitler by promising a level of deliveries which was quite impossible
given German air transport resources–simultaneously being drained by the building up of the bridgehead in Tunisia-the weather conditions in the area, the inadequacy of the infra–structure required for any such air supply effort, especially in the winter, the enormous number of troops to be supplied and equipped and, of course, the obviously to be expected counter–measures of the Red Air Force.
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Göring assured Hitler that the 6th Army would receive an average of 500 tons daily; 6th Army was promised 300 tons; but even this figure was not reached on one single day.
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Field Marshal von Manstein had been summoned by Hitler to take over a newly formed Army Group Don, which included the forces inside Stalingrad and the remnants of 4th Panzer Army southwest of it. Reinforced by a number of new divisions, it was expected to make a relief assault based on Kotelnikovo. The push was to reach the encircled army and thereafter restore the whole situation.
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If von Manstein could not take Leningrad, at least he could hold Stalingrad. Once arrived on the southern front, von Manstein broke with all the other German army and air force generals and believed that it was possible to hold Stalingrad and relieve the beleaguered forces there by the offensive he was planning; it was his assessment that at least the attempt should be made. Concerned primarily about his reputation as a daring and always successful military commander, both at the time and after the war, he reinforced Hitler’s inclination then and faked the relevant portion of his memoirs after the war.
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The Germans inside the encirclement were told to make no further withdrawals in the north, east and south. They built up a new front in the west and tried to hold out against the Red Army with hopelessly inadequate supplies, ammunition, and fuel. Outside the Stalingrad pocket the remnants of the 3rd Romanian Army and some German units built up a new front to the west on the Chir river while Manstein gathered the remnants of the German 4th Panzer and 4th Romanian Army to the south. He tried to organize what reinforcements he could get for a counter–attack northeastwards toward the encircled army. He never received all the forces promised–there were far too many other demands on the German army both elsewhere on the Eastern Front and in Tunisia-and by the time he was ready to move, new Soviet operations had altered the situation. By the end of November, even before actually starting the relief operation, Manstein was beginning to see how unrealistic his earlier assessment of the situation had been, especially in regard to air supply;
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but this made little difference now that firm orders to
hold had been issued to 6th Army. The most favorable time for initiating a breakout attempt had already passed, and the prospect of the relief offensive which was to be launched in a few days encouraged ridiculously optimistic expectations.

The relief offensive had to be postponed several days as Manstein gathered what units he could. The slowness of the Soviet pursuit after their initial success alone made it possible for the Germans even to start such a move on December 12. The drive included all of two understrength Panzer divisions, joined after much argument by a third, and in ten days pushed approximately half–way across the 8o-mile gap separating their starting position from the encircled troops. As it became obvious after seven days that the Red Army was containing this thrust, the only possibility became a breakout attempt toward the stalled relief force. Manstein would not order such an action against Hitler’s insistence that Stalingrad be held, and certainly Paulus, the commander inside the pocket, could hardly defy both his immediate military superior and Hitler.
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No additional opportunities would ever occur because by this time the new Soviet offensive, launched on November 25, was collapsing the Axis front further north; and the problem facing the Germans was not one of rescuing the lost garrison of Stalingrad but instead that of keeping both Army Group Don and Army Group A in the Caucasus from both being cut off themselves by an onrushing Red Army.
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The Red Army had caught the German-Romanian forces in the Stalingrad pocket but took some time to exploit the resulting chaos on the Axis front. The Stavka did not realize at first how large a force had been encircled and did not immediately develop appropriate follow-up operations.
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The plan to destroy the Stalingrad pocket, code-named “Koltso” (Ring), called for an assault eastwards into the German perimeter to the Volga, splitting it into north and south pockets which could then be destroyed in turn. The German relief offensive of December 12 forced the Russians to divert key units destined for “Koltso” to containing Manstein’s thrust. In this they entirely succeeded, but Koltso was postponed as a result, eventually until January 10. The four weeks from December 12 to January 10, however, saw a steady weakening of the resistance from the pocket as the German forces were quite literally being starved out.

A vastly larger operation was approved on December 2 under the code–name “Saturn” to drive behind the whole newly formed German front in the Don river bend, behind Manstein’s Army Group Don and behind the German Army Group A in the Caucasus by heading for
Rostov. This vast project was modified to “Small Saturn” for two reasons: the Manstein counter-offensive seemed likely to create problems for Saturn as well as Koltso and, in addition, there was what has to be called the failure of still another Soviet offensive called “Mars.” This operation, launched on November 25, against Army Group Center, was originally coordinated with the Stalingrad offensive. It had, however, been halted without any major breakthrough by December 10, so that, although heavy fighting between the attacking West and Kalinin Fronts and Army Group Center continued, the Stavka could see that there were good reasons not to repeat the previous winter’s over–ambitious offensives.
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The “Small Saturn” project called for an envelopment of most of Army Group Don by an attack southwards across the Don through the 8th Italian and 3rd Romanian Army and an offensive westward into the German relief army pushing toward Stalingrad from the southwest. Launched by the Southwest Front on December 16, the Red Army offensive in a few days ripped through the Italian and Romanian armies on the Don, pushed back the German units in the area, and, in the process, not only threatened to collapse the whole Axis front in the south but more immediately to seize the main airfields from which the Stalingrad pocket was being supplied. In the following days, the Germans had to build up a new front west of the Soviet breakthrough, replacing the vanished Italian 8th Army with whatever reinforcements they could locate. Simultaneously, the Soviet attack against the relief force not only halted Manstein’s effort but threatened to cut off Army Group A in the Caucasus. As the Red Army pushed forward slowly but successfully, the Germans had to make some quick decisions: whether to try a break–out from Stalingrad or abandon the encircled garrison, and also whether to risk having Army Group A cut off or to pull back the forces there and use them to rebuild the southern front.

One German decision was to abandon the Stalingrad garrison. No break–out was ordered and none was attempted. As the relief force was driven back by the advancing armies of the Stalingrad Front and the German air bases at Tazinskaya and Morozovsk were first threatened and then seized by the armies of Southwest Front, no hope of escape remained for the encircled Germans. When Koltso was mounted by the Don Front under Rokossovski on January 10, an enfeebled German 6th Army was pushed eastwards, losing its main airport at Pitomnik on January 16.
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In the following weeks, the Red Army battered its way into Stalingrad, splitting the German 6th Army, overrunning the defending forces and eventually ending the fighting on February 2. While the Red Army suffered substantial losses, the German defeat was both total and
conspicuous. About 250,000 Germans and tens of thousands of Romanians and Russian auxiliaries had been in the pocket. Some 30,000 wounded were flown out, and the Russians took 91,000 prisoners. About 150,000 German soldiers had been killed or had died of cold, hunger and wounds. Of even greater significance than this loss in dead and captured–which included practically all of the officers–was the public and morale aspect of the Soviet victory and German defeat.