Barbarossa (42 page)

Paulus may have been a good staff officer; as a commander in the
field he was slow-witted and unimaginative to the point of stupidity.
Equally certain, as can be seen from the course of his career up to
and after capture, he had a keen awareness of the sources of power,
or to put it bluntly, he knew what was good for him. With the news
from Schmundt of what extra was at stake, he threw himself into
preparations for a fourth offensive with a special enthusiasm.

This time Paulus had decided to strike head on at his adversary's
strongest point—the three giant erections of the Tractor
Factory, the Barrikady, and the Krasny Oktyabr, which lay in the
northern half of the city, ranged one after another a few hundred
feet from the Volga bank. This was to be the fiercest, and the
longest, of the five battles which were fought in the ruined town. It
started on 4th October and raged for nearly three weeks.

Paulus had been reinforced by a variety of different specialist
troops, including police battalions and engineers skilled in street
fighting and demolition work. But the Russians, though now heavily
outnumbered, remained their masters in the technique of
house-to-house fighting. They had perfected the use of "storm
groups," small bodies of mixed arms—light and heavy
machine guns, tommy gunners, and grenadiers usually with antitank
guns—who gave one another support in lightning counterattacks;
and they had developed the creation of "killing zones,"
houses and squares, heavily mined, to which the defenders knew all
the approach routes, where the German advance would be canalised.
"Experience taught us," Chuikov wrote:

. . . Get close to the enemy's positions; move on all fours,
making use of craters and ruins; dig your trenches by night,
camouflage them by day; make your build-up for the attack stealthily,
without any noise; carry your tommy-gun on your shoulder; take ten to
twelve grenades. Timing and surprise will then be on your side. . . .

. . . Two of you get into the house together—you, and a
grenade; both be lightly dressed—you without a knap-sack, and
the grenade bare; go in grenade first, you after; go through the
whole house, again always with a grenade first and you after. . . .

. . . There is one strict rule now—give yourself elbow
room! At every step danger lurks. No matter—a grenade in every
corner of the room, then forward! A burst from your tommy-gun around
what's left; a bit further—a grenade, then on again! Another
room—a grenade! A turning—another grenade! Rake it with
your tommy-gun! And get a move on!

Inside the object of attack the enemy may go over to a
counterattack. Don't be afraid! You have already taken the
initiative, it is in your hands. Act more ruthlessly with your
grenade, your tommy-gun, your dagger and your spade! Fighting inside
a building is always frantic. So always be prepared for the
unexpected. Look Sharp! . . .

Slowly and at a tremendous price the Germans inched their way into
the great buildings, across factory floors; around and over the inert
machinery, through the foundries, the assembly shops, the office. "My
God, why have you forsaken us?" wrote a lieutenant of the 24th
Panzer Division.

We have fought during fifteen days for a single house, with
mortars, grenades, machine-guns and bayonets. Already by the third
day fifty-four German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the
landings, and the stair-cases. The front is a corridor between
burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors. Help
comes from neighbouring houses by fire escapes and chimneys. There is
a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From storey to storey, faces
black with sweat, we bombard each other with grenades in the middle
of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke, heaps of mortar, floods of
blood, fragments of furniture and human beings. Ask any soldier what
half an hour of hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight. And
imagine Stalingrad; eighty days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand
struggles. The street is no longer measured by metres but by corpses

Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud
of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the
reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those
scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga
and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad
are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones
cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

thirteen
| THE ENTOMBMENT OF THE 6TH ARMY

By the end of October the Russian positions at Stalingrad had been
reduced to a few pockets of stone, seldom more than three hundred
yards deep, bordering on the right bank of the Volga. The Krasny
Oktyabr had fallen to the Germans, who had paved every metre of the
factory floor with their dead. The Barrikady was half lost, with
Germans at one end of the foundry facing Russian machine guns in the
extinct ovens at the other. The defenders of the Tractor Factory had
been split into three.

But these last islets of resistance, hardened in the furnace of
repeated attacks, were irreducible. The 6th Army was spent, as
raddled and exhausted as had been Haig's divisions at Passchendaele
exactly a quarter of a century before; and on a purely military
assessment, the concept of another "offensive" in the town
was unthinkable. Had Army Group B the strength, the correct course
would have been to strike at Voronezh and lever the Don front away by
starting from its northern end. But it had not the strength; the
whole Wehrmacht was desperately overextended on a front which had
nearly doubled in length since the start of the summer campaign. It
was in that peculiarly dangerous position of being the weaker army,
which had nothing save "initiative" to compensate for its
material inferiority. Once the momentum was lost its perils would
become acute, and once the reserves were exhausted the momentum would
be lost.

This rationalisation could, of course, be made to serve two
arguments. The first, the obvious one, dictated immediate withdrawal;
losses should be cut and a deep "winter line" occupied many
miles in the rear, on the Chir River, or perhaps even the Mius. The
alternative case and one with which soldiers can often be convinced,
was the familiar "lesson" of Waterloo and the Marne—that
"The last battalion will decide the issue." The Germans,
who had seen their own strength sucked into the inferno for week
after week, could not admit to themselves that the Russians were not
suffering attrition at the same rate. To many, and especially to
Hitler, the parallel with Verdun was irresistible. Once a place
assumes a symbolic importance its loss can destroy the defenders'
will regardless of its strategic value. In 1916, Falkenhayn's mincing
machine had been turned off when another month would have destroyed
the whole French Army. At Stalingrad it was not only the Russian
will, but the whole world's assessment of Germany's power which was
at stake. To withdraw from the field of battle would be an admission
of defeat which, though it might be acceptable to a detached and
calculating military professional, was unthinkable "in the
cosmic orientation of world political forces," as Schwerin von
Krosigk might have put it.

Hitler's attitude could have been changed (though it is by no
means certain) if he had been getting accurate intelligence reports
instead of the highly misleading figures Paulus was sending in. But
the 6th Army, from an understandable desire to justify its own
further reinforcement and to emphasise the weight it was carrying,
tended to report whole Russian divisions where only regiments or even
battalions existed, by assuming the presence of the "parent"
division once one of the subordinate formations had been identified.
Owing to the number of
ad hoc
miscellaneous units Chuikov had
cooped up in isolated parts of the city, this habit resulted in an
estimate of the Russian strength five or six times greater than the
true figure. Besides inducing the Germans to believe that they were
wearing down the Red Army at a faster rate than they themselves were
suffering, this delusion also ruled out the possibility of a Russian
counteroffensive for lack of reserves. Another serious error, for
which Weichs and Paulus must share responsibility, was the failure to
supervise the Rumanian forces on the flanks. It was bad enough trying
to protect these vulnerable positions with units which were
underequipped and had already shown themselves inferior to the
ordinary Russian infantry—still less prudent to neglect
coordination of intelligence and reconnaissance on their front, and
to ignore the periodic warning signals which the Rumanians sent in.

For these Rumanian divisions were quite unsuited to independent
front-line operations against the Red Army. They were organised along
the lines of a French infantry division of World War I (and relied
heavily on French equipment captured by the Germans in 1940). There
was only one antitank company to each division, and they had been
equipped with the obsolete 37-mm. gun. After repeated requests from
the army commander, General Dumitrescu, they received an allocation
of German 75-mm. guns in October—six per division!

Ammunition of all kinds was short, and there were no modern
antitank or anti-personnel mines. The Rumanians were also short of
rations and winter clothing; a German visitor at the beginning of
November noticed that ". . . the building of defences was being
neglected in favour of large dugouts for the command posts and
shelters for men and animals."

This weakness, and the fact that the Rumanians were not really in
position along the Don at all, but opposite a whole series of Russian
bridgeheads, some of which were as much as ten miles deep, made their
sector an obvious place for the counteroffensive. Indeed, as winter
approached, its prospects became a common subject for speculative
conversation.

"The one consolation was that the whole of this Eastern
campaign had been based on such seemingly impossible improvisations
and that, somehow, the impossible had always been achieved."
What no one seems to have realised, from Paulus' staff all the way up
to the headquarters of OKW at Vinnitsa, was the sheer weight of the
impending Russian attack. The first positive indication of what was
brewing had not come until as late as 29th October, when a report
from Dumitrescu to Weichs listed:

1. marked increases in the number of Don crossings in the Russian
rear

2. statements from deserters

3. continuous local attacks, "the sole object of which must
be to find the soft spots and to pave the way for the major attack."

After some rather dilatory measures to confirm this, chiefly by
means of air reconnaissance (which was itself becoming increasingly
difficult in the deteriorating winter weather), Paulus went to army
group headquarters at Starobelsk with a report which grossly
underestimated the strength of the Russian concentration.

Paulus' figures were "positively identified" at
Kletskaya: "three new infantry divisions with some tanks thought
to be concentrated in the area; one new armoured, one new motorised
and two new infantry formations." At Blynov, "two new
infantry formations with a few tanks." On this assessment, of
course, the Soviet offensive would be no stronger than many the
Wehrmacht had shaken off in the past. Even as late as 12th November,
exactly a week before the storm broke, Richthofen (admittedly a
habitual optimist) recorded in his diary, after a personal aerial
reconnaissance of the Russian bridgeheads:

Their reserves have now been concentrated. When, I wonder, will
the attack come? At the moment there appears to be a shortage of
ammunition [this because the Russian artillery was holding its fire
so as not to give away its position]. Guns, however, are beginning to
make their appearance in the artillery emplacements, I only hope that
the Russians won't tear too many big holes in the line!

The majority of staff officers in Army Group B were still more
concerned with the preparations for the "last heave" at
Stalingrad. Richthofen claims that even Zeitzler agreed with him, ".
. . if we can't clear up the situation now, when the Russians are in
real difficulty and the Volga is blocked with ice floes, then we
shall never be able to." The Chief of the General Staff would
surely have held a very different opinion had he known that the
Russians, far from being "in difficulties," had
concentrated over half a million infantry, 900 new T 34's, 230
regiments of field artillery, and 115 regiments of
Katyushas
on an attack frontage of under forty miles—a higher density of
man and firepower than had been achieved in any previous battle of
the Eastern campaign.

[The armour was split up into four tank corps, three mechanised
corps, and fourteen "independent" tank brigades. The
attacking armies were the 5th Tank Army, part of the 1st Guards Army,
and the 21st Army. In the south the 57th Army, the 51st Army, and the
resuscitated 64th Army. (See maps generally for dispositions.)]

While the Germans gathered their strength for a last attempt on
the rubble islets of Stalingrad and over their shoulders Zhukov's
armies moved stealthily into position, an uneasy quiet would descend
on the town for hours at a time.

Sometimes a silence more disturbing than the roar of explosions
spread over the town, which seemed like a dead place. But it
continued to watch, although no-one could distinguish night from day
any longer. Even in the short periods of calm, each factory, each
destroyed house, observed everything with intensity. The piercing
eyes of the snipers spied upon the slightest movement of the enemy.
The supply units, loaded with mines and shells . . . hastened along
the ditches which zig-zagged between the ruins. From the height of
the highest floors artillery observers were on the watch. In the
cellars the leaders bent over maps, orderlies tapped on their
machines, papers circulated, the soldiers were given directions. The
miners, busy at their dangerous work, dug galleries and tried to find
out those of the enemy.