Barbarossa (47 page)

But it appears that Manstein was not allowing this restriction to
worry him unduly, for he wrote that it was obvious this would not be
possible in practice, "for when the Soviets attacked on the
northern or eastern fronts [the - Army] would have to give way step
by step. In the event, undoubtedly, Hitler would have had no choice
but to accept this fact, as he did on later occasions. (Not that we
could say so in the operation order, of course, as Hitler would have
learnt of it through his liaison officer at Sixth Army Headquarters
and immediately issued a countermand.)"

[Manstein 323-24. It is perfectly possible that this rather
abstruse device—explained by Manstein in memoirs written some
twelve years later—carries the subtle implication which he
attributed to it. But from his writing
at the time
it is clear
that Manstein was still of two minds about the right course for the
6th Army to adopt. For in a long appreciation to Zeitzler (which as a
matter of course would have been seen by Hitler) he had written,
"Should [the 6th Army] be left in the fortress area, it is
entirely possible that the Russians will tie themselves down here and
gradually fritter away their manpower in useless assaults."]

This was the key element in all the calculations—the
handling of the 6th Army. Because, short though it was of fuel and
ammunition, exhausted by the strain of fighting without relief, this
force was the largest single concentration of the German Army in the
East. It had been the very spearhead of the summer offensive. It
contained some of the finest divisions.

[As, for example, the 29th Motorised, which had led Guderian's
drive across White Russia the previous year. See Ch. 4.]

These men, the flower of the Wehrmacht, were desperate. Their
qualities, and their desperation, would put a diamond head on the
drill.

It is still not clear how close to unanimity Paulus and his corps
commanders were on the desirability of attempting a breakout. Indeed,
the army commander's ambivalence reflects, as well as magnifies, that
of Manstein himself. In a letter to Manstein, dated 26th November, he
spoke of ordering a breakout "in an extreme emergency," and
concluded by saying that he regarded Manstein's appointment as a
guarantee that "everything possible is being done to assist"
the 6th Army. But neither of these terms is very precise, and at the
time when this appreciation was drafted Paulus was still trying to
consolidate his new perimeter. It seems likely that by "an
extreme emergency" he was thinking of failure to do this, or the
collapse of the perimeter under a concentric assault. At all events,
there is no evidence of a comprehensive battle plan having been drawn
up by his staff for getting the army into an assault formation
at
any time
, either during the first crisis or in accordance with
the Winter Tempest plan.

Manstein had no means of knowing what was in Paulus' mind. They
communicated seldom—in contrast to the direct link between
Paulus and Hitler. He was compelled to rely (until the last stages of
the battle, when a short-wave radio link was established) on reports
in longhand, delivered "by hand of officer." General
Schulz, the Chief of Staff at Army Group Don, and Colonel Busse, the
Chief of Operations, flew into the pocket at different times to try
to establish a closer contact, and to brief the army commander on the
plans for raising the siege. How successful they were in this is not
known, but each returned (according to Manstein) with the overall
impression "that Sixth Army, provided it were properly supplied
from the air, did not judge its chances of holding out at all
unfavourably." In other words, there was a substantial body of
opinion, to put it no higher, that preferred holding to sortie.

Manstein himself knew that time was running out. The Russian
redeployment, his own weakness, the threat of a drastic strategic
reversal in some other sector of the front—these things made it
impossible to postpone the relief attempt any longer. On 10th
December he sent word to Paulus that the attack would be started
within twenty-four hours, and on the 12th, Hoth crossed the starting
line, with the 23rd Panzer leading. Winter Tempest had begun.

The column was spearheaded by the 57th Panzer Corps, with part of
two Luftwaffe field divisions, and its flanks protected by the
reformed remnants of the 4th Rumanian Army.

[The corps was commanded by General Kirchner, and comprised the
6th Panzer (Rauss) at full strength and 23rd Panzer (Vormann), which
had only about thirty runners.]

At the rear a mass of vehicles of every kind, trucks of French,
Czech, and Russian manufacture, English Bedfords and American GMC's
captured during the summer, agricultural tractors towing carts and
limbers—pressed into service by the resourceful Colonel
Finkh—waited with three thousand tons of supplies which were to
be run through the corridor to revictual the 6th Army.

During 13th and 14th December the attack made good progress. The
Russian force guarding the approach route was the 51st Army, but it
had been reduced to about half its strength since the breakthrough
in November.

[The actual strength of the 51st Army at the start of Winter
Tempest was four rifle and four cavalry divisions, with one tank and
one motorised brigade forward and one tank and one rifle brigade in
reserve. The tank brigade in reserve (117th) had been badly mauled in
an ineffective spoiling attack against the 4th Panzer Army positions
at Kotelnikovo on 8th December.]

Three tank brigades had been switched across to the attack on the
Nizhne-Chirskaya bridgehead, and some of the artillery had been
placed on the siege perimeter.

Against light opposition the Panzers rolled steadily forward,
making about twelve miles a day. The ground was hard, iced over with
a light covering of snow. At first sight it seemed completely flat,
without ground elevation or cover of any kind. But in fact the whole
terrain was split and crisscrossed by a network of deep and narrow
gullies (not unlike the
wadis
of North Africa) into which the
snow had drifted. Here lay groups of Russian infantry, sometimes up
to a battalion in strength and with a full complement of heavy
weapons. The cavalry kept its horses there during the day, sheltered
from the freezing winds, and rode out at night when the air was still
to harass the German flanks with mortar and machine-gun fire. At
times—usually in the evening or at first light—isolated
packets of T 34's would attack the columns, forcing a halt for a few
hours. An iron-grey sky, with an overcast ceiling at five hundred
feet, had grounded the Luftwaffe, and Hoth had no means of knowing
whether with each clash he might not have run head on into a
full-scale counterattack. Between ten and fifteen miles in the rear
engineers struggled to keep the great soft "tail," with its
eight hundred loaded trucks, from lagging too far behind the armoured
carapace.

By 17th December the leading tanks of the 6th Panzer had reached
the Aksai. The river was seventy feet broad, frozen hard enough to
carry a foot soldier, but too thin for a tank. There were two
bridges, at Shestakovo and Romashkin, where the railway from the
Caucasus crossed the river. During the night gunfire from the siege
front, thirty-five miles to the north, could be heard.

At his headquarters at Stary-Sherkatsk, Zhukov was receiving twice
daily reports of the progress of Hoth's column.

To say that he was regarding its approach with equanimity is too
facile—particularly in the light of the constant tendency on
the part of the Russian commanders in general and the
Stavka
in particular to overestimate German capabilities, which persisted
right up until the last days of the war. But the only measures taken
locally to deal with the threat were the despatch of about 130 tanks,
one mechanised and one tank brigade, and two infantry divisions (each
with full tank and artillery complement) to defend the Aksai
crossings. Whether this was because he was a prisoner of his own
planning rigidity or whether (as many German writers have suggested)
Zhukov was in fact regarding the thrust by the 4th Panzer Army as a
perfectly timed push on the "swing door," much as
Schlieffen had intended the French to thrust into Alsace, we have no
direct means of knowing.

What we do know is that the Russians were determined not to be
distracted from their main prize—the 6th Army. Once they had
tightened the noose at Stalingrad and began to concern themselves
with the purpose of breaking up the German relief attempts, they
began to redeploy along the Chir, which would seem to indicate that
they expected this threat to come from the most obvious quarter—the
bridgehead at Nizhne-Chirskaya. The real essence of the Russians'
strategic planning, when they felt themselves to be secure at
Stalingrad, was their second blow, whose purpose, even more ambitious
than the isolation of the 6th Army, was nothing short of the
disintegration of the German southern wing. Here it was they who had
rejected the obvious course. A blow down the east bank of the Don
would, it was felt, "be too constricted by the lay of the land,
be vulnerable on both flanks and open to the danger of a pincer
movement by the enemy at Rostov and in the Caucasus. The thaw, being
unpredictable in the Black Sea region, would have restricted mass
operations." (That this consideration was wholly valid is
apparent from the difficulties experienced by the 57th Panzer Corps
in travelling north.)

It seems probable, though its official historians do not admit as
much, that the
Stavka
felt a certain uneasiness about the
central sector, which had lain dormant throughout the year, and
believed that a blow at the junction of the southern and central
sectors would give its forces more elbowroom and serve to draw off
any German reserves that might be accumulating there. To this end it
had concentrated two army groups, under Generals Golikov and Vatutin,
and put into them its last three reserve armies.

[These were the 6th (Golikov), which was primarily an infantry
army, and the 1st and 3rd Guards (Vatutin), each of which contained
one tank corps and one mechanised corps. If all units on these two
"fronts" were up to strength at the start of the
offensive—which seems likely—this would have given an
armoured strength of about 456 T 34's.]

The area selected for the attack—a stretch of front thirty
miles on either side of the Don bridgehead at Verkhni Mamon—was
defended in the main by Italians.

[The 8th Italian Army (General Gariboldi). The Italian area
overlapped with that of the 2nd Hungarian Army in the north, and also
included a few weak remnants from the 3rd Rumanian Army.]

There was only one German division (the 298th) in the combat zone,
and two battalions of another (the 62nd) at Kantemirovka. The mobile
reserve (27th Panzer) was a weak unit, being re-equipped with
repaired and reconditioned tanks from the workshops at Millerovo. The
ice on the Don was so thick that the Russian tanks could cross at
will, and a thick fog covered the battlefield during the day,
heightening the panic and confusion of the luckless Italians.

That evening, as the first coherent reports began to come into
Manstein's headquarters, it was plain that something very serious
indeed had happened. The immediate responsibility was not his, for
the attack had fallen against the right flank of Army Group B, but a
glance at the largest-scale map showed the threat the new Russian
thrust carried, both to Army Group Don and to every man in the
Caucasus. In a telephone conversation that night Weichs told Manstein
that he had "committed" (
übergeben
) the whole
of the 27th Panzer at the western end of the Russian breakthrough,
but had "as yet no news of its fortunes." (Two days later
it was reduced to eight runners.) Weichs also asked that Army
Detachment Hollidt pull back and westward, in order to take over some
of the shattered flank of his own army group.

During these last critical days Manstein's problem resembled more
and more that of a three-dimensional chess player, with each board
showing a losing game. On that same day when the Italians broke below
Voronezh, his whole position on the lower Chir started to crumble.
While the 11th Panzer had been crouching, hull down, around the
Nizhne Kalinovski bridgehead, the Russians had put in four infantry
divisions against the weak foothold to the east of the Don at
Nizhne-Chirskaya and driven the Germans back to the west bank. That
night they made two more crossings in force on either side of
Lissinski, and the following morning threw an independent armoured
brigade and an entire motorised corps (the 94th) against the 7th
Luftwaffe Field Division at Oblivskaya.

[Of the Luftwaffe field divisions Balck said, "After a few
days they were gone—finished—in spite of good mechanical
equipment. Their training left everything to be desired, and they had
no experienced leaders. They were a creation of Hermann Goring's, a
creation which had no sound military foundation—the rank and
file paid with their lives for this absurdity." (Mellenthin,
180.)]

Once again Balck roused the weary 11th Panzer and started west to
tackle the most serious of the new penetrations. But it was now plain
that any idea of a supporting move by the 48th Panzer Corps to assist
Hoth's relief attempt was out of the question. Sheer weight of
numbers was levering Army Detachment Hollidt out of the Chir bulge,
and its complete evacuation was in sight.

The only glint of light came from the far eastern tip of the
front. On the morning of 18th December, Manstein received a message
from Hoth saying that the 17th Panzer had arrived in the line and
concentrated. This meant that the 4th Panzer Army now contained three
Panzer divisions and their supporting elements, and was substantially
stronger than any of the Russian forces that had so far been
identified against it.