[One, the 17th, at full strength. One, the 6th, less combat losses
(not severe) since 8th December. One, the 23rd, with about thirty
runners.]
If it could prise open the ring around Stalingrad and release the
eleven divisions of the 6th Army, the whole balance of strength might
still, if not be reversed, at least be brought nearer parity.
Manstein knew that the Russians' efforts on all other fronts would
weaken if they believed the main prize was slipping from their grasp.
But to press forward with Hoth when his own northeastern flank was
disintegrating along its entire two-hundred-mile length remained a
gigantic gamble. One, moreover, whose responsibility was solely
Manstein's. Neither OKH nor Hitler, nor even Paulus himself, showed
any great enthusiasm for the plan or appreciated the urgency of the
situation.
And here lay the rub. The 4th Panzer Army could not possibly hack
its way over the whole distance, right up to the ruins of the city,
by itself. Paulus, too, had to co-operate, to concentrate the mass of
his two hundred thousand men against a single point of the siege
perimeter and blast a way through. Yet when he was asked to do this,
or what his plans were, Paulus was evasive.
In the light of this unresponsive attitude, on 18th December,
Manstein sent a message directly to Zeitzler at OKH, requesting him
"to take immediate steps to initiate the breakout of 6th Army
towards 4th Panzer Army." And that evening the chief
intelligence officer of Army Group Don, Major Eismann, was sent into
the pocket to recount Manstein's views on how the operation should be
conducted.
No feat of imaginative power is required to visualise the dramatic
tension that surrounded this visit. Eismann was one of the last
visitors to enter the pocket from the outside world—at least
while there was still hope of relief. During the night he drove from
Novocherkassk to Morozovosk, taking off from the airstrip there in a
Fieseler Storch an hour before dawn.
Eismann touched down at Gumrak at ten minutes to eight on the
morning of 19th December, and was immediately taken to Paulus'
headquarters. Those present, in addition to Paulus and his Chief of
Staff, Schmidt, were two corps commanders and the Chief of Operations
and the Quartermaster General of the 6th Army. Eismann put Manstein's
views with as much force as he could muster, but Paulus went no
further than to admit being "not . . . unimpressed." Paulus
then proceeded to emphasise "the magnitude of the difficulties
and risks which the task outlined to him would imply." After a
moment or two the Chief of Operations and the Quartermaster General
said their piece. Each began with a general resume of difficulties,
and echoed—though perhaps with less enthusiasm—the views
of their chief. But at the end, when they came to express their own
personal opinions, both said that ". . . in the circumstances it
was not only essential to attempt a breakout at the earliest possible
moment but also
entirely feasible
."
However, the last word was spoken by Paulus' Chief of Staff, Major
General Arthur Schmidt. Schmidt was an ardent Nazi and a forceful
personality. There is no doubt that he exercised a considerable
influence on Paulus, playing the part of a "Party conscience,"
always standing at the General's elbow. "It is quite impossible
to break out just now," he told Eismann. Such a solution would
be "an acknowledgement of disaster. Sixth Army," he
claimed, "will still be in position at Easter. All you people
have to do is to supply it better."
[Many of the 6th Army General Staff officers, as will be seen, had
second thoughts about their loyalty oath after a few months in
Russian prison camps. But not Schmidt. He refused to recant, and was
sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labour. See p. 320, et seq]
The conference dragged on during the day. At intervals gunfire
shook the building. During the afternoon an egregious meal was
served. To an audience at the same time gloomy and resentful Eismann
tried to explain that the breakout was necessary "from the point
of view of operations as a whole." As to the airlift, ". .
. although the Army Group was doing everything in its power to
maintain supplies, it was not to blame when the weather brought the
airlift to a virtual standstill, nor was it in a position to produce
transport machines out of a hat." Paulus remained unconvinced.
Indeed, his attitude seems to have hardened during the day, for he
finally dismissed Eismann with the assertion that the breakout was
"a sheer impossibility," and that in any case, the
surrender (i.e., the evacuation) of Stalingrad was forbidden by order
of the Führer.
Before Eismann returned, on 19th December, Manstein was brought
the news that Hoth had forced the Aksai line and penetrated as far as
Mishkova. When his intelligence officer told him of Paulus' refusal
to co-operate. Manstein at first thought of dismissing both him and
Schmidt and replacing them with members of his own staff or promoting
corps commanders from within the pocket. But time was very short, and
the likelihood of getting such an appointment sanctioned by OKH—still
less by Hitler—without a long back and forth of communication,
threatening his own resignation, and so forth, must have deterred
him.
That afternoon, at 2:35 p.m., Manstein teleprinted to Zeitzler,
stating "I now consider a breakout to the southwest to be the
last possible means of preserving at least the bulk of the troops and
the still mobile elements of Sixth Army." He waited until six
o'clock that evening, and then, still not having secured a reply from
OKH, teleprinted directly to Paulus, "Sixth Army will begin
Winter Tempest attack as soon as possible," and, "It is
essential that operation Thunderclap should immediately follow Winter
Tempest attack."
During the next twenty-four hours Paulus came back several times
over the very high-frequency link with Novocherkassk. First he said
that to regroup for the attack would take at least six days; then
that the regrouping itself would entail serious, possibly
prohibitive, risks in the northern and western sectors of the front.
Then again, that ". . . the general debility of the troops and
the reduced mobility of units following the slaughtering of horses
for food made it most unlikely that such a difficult and risky
undertaking—particularly when carried out under conditions of
extreme cold—could possibly succeed." Finally, when all
these protestations had been patiently, or firmly, or brusquely, set
aside, Paulus played his trump card. It was impossible to move within
the terms of the order, he declared, as this entailed an advance of
thirty miles and he had fuel only for twenty. (Apart from the fact
that units always have more fuel in hand than they care to admit in
official returns, on Paulus' own admission he could have covered the
same distance by reducing the number of vehicles engaged by 30
percent. The very fact that such an objection could be put forward as
real at such a moment of crisis showed that Paulus had, in reality,
no intention of moving.)
In the meantime the other "boards" in Manstein's game
were showing a progressive deterioration. The withdrawal of
Detachment Hollidt was becoming more and more precipitate, and within
days threatened to uncover the airlift bases which were supplying the
pocket. And Hoth was reporting a sudden stiffening of resistance. A
new Russian tank corps (the 13th), together with an infantry division
and an independent tank brigade, had been identified opposite him in
the 51st Army.
On the afternoon of 21st December, Manstein spoke on a direct
telephone line to Rastenburg, in a final effort to persuade Hitler
that the whole of the 6th Army must break camp and drive southward,
without avail. "I fail to see what you are driving at," was
all Hitler would say. "Paulus has only enough gasoline for
fifteen to twenty miles at the most. He says himself that he can't
break out at present."
Here, then, was the log jam in the Stalingrad problem. The army
commander pleaded that whatever the technical requirements, he was
bound by an order of the Führer. The Führer refused to
rescind his order on the grounds that anyway, the army commander was
raising technical objections. All Manstein's efforts had been
useless, and now the risks he had run were coming home to roost. The
cream of his armour was poised right out in the steppe, at the
eastern extremity of his front, weighted down by a huge and
vulnerable convoy of supply vehicles. The mass of his infantry was
written off—gone for good, nearly a quarter of a million men.
And along the whole of his northeastern flank, for nearly two hundred
miles, Army Group Don was retreating in disarray, virtually cut off
from its neighbours, exhausted and outnumbered by five or six to one.
In eighteen months of triumph, disappointment, and fluctuating
fortunes this moment was for German arms the nadir.
BOOK III | Zitadelle
GUDERIAN. My Fuhrer, why do you want to attack in the East at all
this year?
HITLER. You are quite right. Whenever I think of this attack, my
stomach turns over.
We are in the position of a man who has seized a wolf by the ears
and dare not let him go.
Mellenthin, 14th May, 1943
fifteen
| CRISIS AND RECOVERY
The first days of 1943 opened—as had 1942—with the
German Army in dire peril. But in that first winter its predicament
had arisen largely out of accident and miscalculation. In 1943 the
causes were more serious, and more fundamental.
For over half its length, nearly six hundred miles, the front had
solidified. From the frozen Baltic, around the siege perimeter at
Leningrad, due south to Lake Ilmen, and across the pine forests of
the old Rzhev salient, and then down to Orel, the German front had
hardly altered in twelve months. Permanent emplacements of logs and
earth sheltered the soldiers; reinforced concrete protected guns
whose field of fire traversed enormous mine fields, laid during
spring and summer, while the earth was soft. In these positions the
"garrison" had a comfortable enough time. Fuel was
plentiful, clothing adequate, mail was delivered regularly. Its
situation is comparable to that of the Western front in World War I
between St. Mihiel and the Swiss frontier. Its bitterest enemies were
the terrible cold and the huge bands of Partisans who roamed the
desolate terrain, usually on horseback, and came out of the freezing
night to attack lonely German billets far behind the lines. The front
itself was often quiet for days at a time. The Germans used it as a
rest area for wornout divisions, the Russians as a training ground
for new ones.
It was to the south, where the three great rivers of the Ukraine
flowed into the Black Sea, that the campaign was being decided. Here,
six months before, the Germans had deployed the flower of their Army,
and here it was now in headlong retreat. It had failed to force an
issue in its prime. How, weakening daily, could it avoid
annihilation?
For Manstein, as he considered this problem in the first Week of
January 1943, there was not one gram of comfort.
The forces for which he had responsibility were broken into three
separate groups, each too far, and too preoccupied with its own
perils, to render the others mutual support. With Paulus gone, German
strength in south Russia was halved. The 6th Army had at most a few
weeks of diminishing effectiveness to distract what it could of
Russian strength. To the southeast, still deep in the Caucasus, Army
Group A lingered on, outside the scope of Manstein's direct command
and alarmingly vulnerable to Russian encirclement. Manstein's own
units, in Army Group Don, had taken such a battering since November
as to be hardly recognisable. Corps and divisions had lost their
identity; shot-up Panzers, anti-aircraft and Luftwaffe remnants, had
polarised around a few energetic commanders—Hollidt, Mieth.
Fretter-Pico, who gave their names to
Gruppen
responsible for
stretches of front up to a hundred miles long.
Nonetheless, the Germans' inferiority was not so great as they,
and the majority of Allied observers, believed it to be at the time.
Many of the factors present the previous winter had recurred—men
and machines had worn themselves down in the exertions of the summer
battles; winter equipment was still inadequate, for mobile warfare at
least; the tenacity and resilience of the Russian soldier had again
been underestimated—and these factors were transient. As the
Germans fell back on their railheads, if and when they could gain
time to breathe, when the temperature moderated, then they might
still expect their situation to improve. The Russians now definitely
had the stronger army—whereas in the winter of 1941 they had
never achieved more than a local numerical superiority and owed their
victory simply to the toughness and bravery of the Red Army man and
his personal ascendancy over the individual German when the
thermometer was 20 below. But equally the Russians had inherited many
of the weaknesses of the previous period.
They had brought two and a half million men into uniform since the
outbreak of war. They had lost over four million trained soldiers. A
ruthless standardisation of equipment—two types of trucks, two
tanks, three artillery pieces—had allowed them to raise
production rates in spite of losing two thirds of their factory
space. But of leaders to handle the new army there was a desperate
scarcity. Some were too cautious, others too headstrong, all
compensated for lack of experience with blind obedience to orders
from above.
The result was that taetical flexibility and speed in exploitation
were far below the German standard. Only the artillery, some of the
cavalry, and a very few of the tank brigades truly merited the
"Guards" accolade that was being so liberally dispensed.
The real problem for the Red Army had become one of adaptation: the
changeover from a defensive stance, where its rugged courage and
fortitude had carried the day, to the more complex structure of an
offensive pattern, where the initiative and training of even the
smallest units could be of vital importance.