Red Army units were at this time. The vigour and heroism of the
defence of Stalingrad are the measure of the revival which a few men,
Chuikov, Khrushchev, Rodimtsev, Yeremenko, were to kindle in merely
weeks; but equally there is evidence that all was not well with the
Red Army in July 1942. Chuikov himself has described how on his first
day at the front he was on a personal reconnaissance:
I came across two divisional staffs . . . they consisted of a
number of officers travelling in some three to five trucks filled to
overflowing with cans of fuel. When I asked them where the Germans
were, and where they were going, they could not give me a sensible
reply ... It was clear that to restore to these men the faith they
had lost in their own powers and to improve the fighting quality of
the retreating units would not be easy.
Of the 21st Army, on the right flank of the Stalingrad front, and
the first control centre which Chuikov visited, he wrote:
Army H.Q. was on wheels; signals and supplies were all mobile,
in motor vehicles. I did not like such mobility. In everything here
one could sense a lack of firm resistance at the front, a lack of
tenacity in battle. It seemed as if someone were running after the
Army H.Q., and in order to escape pursuit everyone, from the Army
Commander downwards, was always ready to make another move.
Of Gordov (who was dismissed on the arrival of Yeremenko and
Khrushchev) :
His hair was turning grey, and he had tired grey eyes which
seemed to see nothing, and whose cold glance seemed to say, "Don't
tell me about the situation, I know everything, and there's nothing I
can do if that's how fate has turned out."
Between 25th and 29th July, while Hoth was milling about on the
lower Don at Tsimlyanskaya. the 6th Army made an attempt to rush
Stalingrad. The feeble resistance he had met up to that time
encouraged Paulus to commit his divisions as they arrived on the
battlefield instead of pausing for breath, and the result was that
German and Soviet reinforcements were fed into battle at roughly the
same rate, while the Russians had started the battle with a slight
numerical advantage—for the battered 62nd Army (at that time
under General Lopatin) had been ordered to stand and fight by three,
then five, and seven infantry divisions, and a long, untidy action
followed in which the Russians were gradually levered out of the Don
bend. But the 6th Army was so roughly handled that it no longer had
sufficient strength to force the river unaided. Nor did it clear the
Russians out of the loop of the river at Kletskaya, and the omission
was to have a truly catastrophic sequel in November. At the time,
Paulus did not have the strength to chase the Soviet infantry out of
every little loop on the west bank, and these bridgeheads were soon
to be forgotten in the all-consuming battle for Stalingrad. After the
area had ceased to be an active sector of the front it was handed
over to the Rumanians, and they did nothing about the bridgeheads,
but remained on the defensive for the duration of their period in the
line.
The unexpected strength of Russian resistance in the small bend of
the Don had convinced Paulus that the 6th Army had no chance of
forcing a crossing by itself, and a lull followed during the first
week of August while Hoth's Panzer army fought its way up from the
south. During this period the balance of numbers began to swing back
against the Russians, for the new 64th Army, which had played so
important a role in stiffening the 62nd in its resistance to Paulus'
first attack, was having to extend its left flank farther and farther
to the west as Hoth approached. By 10th August the whole of Paulus'
6th Army was in position facing due east and all the army and
divisional artillery had been brought up to the right bank of the
Don. More significant, and a portent of the way in which Stalingrad
was gradually to draw off all the offensive strength of the
Wehrmacht, Richthofen's 8th Air Corps, which had been covering
Kleist's advance in the Caucasus, was brought back to the Morozovsk
airfield complex for support in the next attack on the town.
Another week passed while Hoth fought his way up from the Aksai,
and then, on 19th August, the first serious attempt by the Germans to
storm Stalingrad began.
Paulus, as the senior general, had overall command of the
operations, with Hoth subordinate to him, and he had evolved a
conventional plan for a concentric attack with the armour on the
wings. The Russian front was about eighty miles in circumference, but
owing to its convex shape, from Kachalinskaya along the east bank of
the Don and curving back to the Volga along the course of the
Mishkova River, it was less than fifty miles across. It was defended
by two armies, the 62nd and 64th, with a total of eleven infantry
divisions, many of which were understrength, and the remains of
different mechanised brigades and other fragments left over from
earlier battles. Paulus had nine infantry divisions in the centre,
two Panzer and two motorised on his southern.
At first the attack did not prosper. Hoth, in particular, had
difficulty in penetrating the positions of the 64th Army between
Abganerovo and the Sarpa Lakes, and veterans of the 1941 fighting
noted:
The German tanks did not go into action without infantry and
air support. On the battlefield there was no evidence of the
"prowess" of German tank crews . . . they operated
sluggishly, extremely cautiously and indecisively.
The German infantry was strong in automatic fire, but ... no
rapid movement or resolute attack on the battlefield. When advancing
they did not spare their bullets but frequently fired into thin air.
Their forward positions, particularly at night, were beautifully
visible, being marked by machine-gun fire, tracer bullets, often
fired into empty space, and different-coloured rockets. It seemed as
if they were either afraid of the dark, or were bored without the
crackle of machine-guns and the light of tracer bullets.
The Germans certainly fought well enough later, and it may be
that the initial caution came from the natural reluctance of soldiers
who believe the war is over to expose themselves unnecessarily in the
last flare-up. It is plain from diaries and letters at the time that
this belief was universal:
The company commander says the Russian troops are completely
broken, and cannot hold out any longer. To reach the Volga and take
Stalingrad is not so difficult for us. The Führer knows where
the Russians' weak point is. Victory is not far away. [July 29th]
Our company is tearing ahead. Today I wrote to Elsa, "We
shall soon see each other. All of us feel that the end, Victory, is
near." [August 7th]
On 22nd August, Wietersheim's 14th Panzer Corps succeeded in
forcing a very narrow breach in the Russian perimeter at Vertyachi
and fought its way across the northern suburbs of Stalingrad,
actually reaching the steep banks of the Volga on the evening of 23rd
August. It now seemed to Paulus, and to his superior, Weichs, that
Stalingrad was within their grasp. For with Wietersheim ensconced on
the Volga, with the railway bridge at Rynok in mortar range, the
difficulty of supplying the Russian garrison, much less reinforcing
it, seemed insuperable. During the day Seydlitz's 51st Corps followed
Wietersheim into the breach, and it appeared that the whole of the
62nd Army could be rolled up from the north. That night the Luftwaffe
was called upon to deliver the
coup de grâce
.
In numbers of aircraft employed, as in weight of explosives, the
bombardment of the night of 23rd-24th August was the heaviest strike
mounted by the Luftwaffe since 22nd June, 1941. The whole of
Richthofen's air corps was used, together with all available Ju 52
squadrons and long-range bombers from airfields as far away as Orel
and Kerch. Many of the pilots in Richthofen's corps made up to three
sorties, and over half the bombs dropped were incendiaries. The
effect was spectacular. Nearly every wooden building—including
acres of workers' settlements on the outskirts—was burned down,
and the flames made it possible to read a paper forty miles away. It
was a pure terror raid, its purpose to kill as many civilians as
possible, overload all the services, sow panic and demoralisation, to
place a blazing pyre in the path of the retreating army—the
pattern of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, and Kiev.
With satisfaction Wilhelm Hoffmann, of the 267th Regiment, 94th
Division, noted:
The whole city is on fire; on the
Führer's
orders
our
Luftwaffe
has sent it up in flames.'That's what the
Russians need, to stop them resisting...
But as 24th August came and went, and the 25th, and the days
following, it became painfully clear that the Russians were
determined to fight in front of, and if necessary in, Stalingrad.
Wietersheim managed to keep open his corridor to the Volga, but had
no success in widening it southward, while the Russian 62nd Army
slowly withdrew along the Karpova and the railway line which ran
parallel. Sheer weight of metal had allowed Hoth to force the 64th
Army back to Tundutovo, but its front had held and the hopes of an
orthodox Panzer breakthrough never approached fulfilment.
This was the second major German effort to be stopped dead in a
month, and in its wake we can see the result—unpremeditated on
either side—of the strange magnetism which Stalingrad was to
exert on the two contestants. On 25th August the Regional Party
Committee proclaimed a state of siege:
Comrades and citizens of Stalingrad! We shall never surrender
the city of our birth to the depredations of the German invader. Each
single one of us must apply himself to the task of defending our
beloved town, our homes, and our families. Let us barricade every
street; transform every district, every block, every house, into an
impregnable fortress.
On that very day the Führer and his entourage moved from
Rastenburg to Vinnitsa, where his headquarters were to remain for the
rest of 1942. Weichs was ordered to launch another attack and "clear
the whole right bank of the Volga" as soon as Paulus' forces
were ready, and on 12th September, the day before this "final"
attack was to be launched, the two generals were summoned to the
Führer's new headquarters, where Hitler repeated to them that
"... the vital thing now was to concentrate every available man
and capture as quickly as possible the whole of Stalingrad itself and
the banks of the Volga." Hitler also told them that there was no
need to worry about the left flank along the Don as the arrival of
the satellite armies (which were to protect it) was proceeding
smoothly.
[Paulus claims in his "Papers," "Both General
Weichs and I drew attention to the very long and inadequately held
Don front, and the dangers inherent in the situation," though
this assertion should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no
confirmation of it from others who attended the conference of 12th
September. Furthermore, the "dangers inherent" were largely
imaginary at this period, while the Germans still had some reserves
uncommitted and the Panzer divisions had not been ground down in
three months of street fighting.]
In addition he had allocated an additional three fresh infantry
divisions (two of them came from the disbanded 11th Army of
Manstein), which would be arriving in the 6th Army area within the
next five days.
At almost the same moment that Hitler moved to Vinnitsa, the
Russians, too (although undoubtedly without knowledge of this), gave
recognition to the fact that the centre of gravity had shifted
irrevocably southward, and that the war would be decided at
Stalingrad. For Timoshenko was quietly removed from command and
transferred to the northwestern front, and the same team that had
evolved the battle-winning plan for the Moscow counteroffensive was
moved to Stalingrad: Voronov, the artillery specialist; Novikov,
chief of the Red Air Force; and Zhukov, the one commander in the
Soviet Army who had never been defeated.
twelve
| VERDUN ON THE VOLGA
The fighting in the Eastern campaign reflects the whole spectrum
of military experience. The cold steel and ferocity of the cavalry
charge differ little from the Middle Ages; the misery and privation
of interminable bombardment in a stinking dugout recall the Great
War. Yet the dominant characteristic of the Russian front is a
composite one. Open warfare and manoeuvre alternate with bouts of
vicious infighting in a manner that evokes both the Western Desert
and the subterranean grapplings of Fort Vaux.
[The centrepiece of the French perimeter at Verdun. For an account
of its siege (and probably the finest individual description of close
combat in the Great War) see Alistair Home,
The Price of Glory
.]
Certainly the tremendous battle which was to be fought out in
Stalingrad has its nearest parallel in the horrors of Falkenhayn's
"mincing machine" at Verdun. But there are significant
differences. At Verdun the contestants rarely saw one another face to
face; they were battered to death by high explosives or cut down at
long range by machine-gun fire. At Stalingrad each separate battle
resolved itself into a combat between individuals. Soldiers would
jeer and curse at their enemy across the street; often they could
hear his breathing in the next room while they reloaded; hand-to-hand
duels were finished in the dark twilight of smoke and brick dust with
knives and pickaxes, with clubs of rubble and twisted steel.
At first, while the Germans were in the outskirts, it was still
possible for them to draw advantage from their superiority in armour
and aircraft. The buildings here had been of wood, and all had been
burned down in the great air raid of 23rd August. Fighting took place
in a giant petrified forest of blackened chimney stacks, where the
defenders had little cover except the charred remains of the
matchboard bungalows and workers' settlements that ringed the town.
But as the Germans edged deeper into the region of sewers and brick
and concrete, their old plan of operations lost its value. General
Doerr has described how