Ostkrieg (61 page)

Advancing in white camouflage suits and in a thick mist “as white as milk,” Soviet units soon overwhelmed the outmatched Rumanian defenders. Although in many areas the Rumanians put up stout resistance against the waves of Soviet infantry, their complete lack of tanks and deficiencies in heavy antitank guns doomed their efforts. By midday, Soviet armored formations had pushed through the inadequate defense line, with increasing numbers of Rumanian units giving way to “tank fright.” General Ferdinand Heim's Forty-eighth Panzer Corps swung into action almost immediately in an attempt to stem the Red tide, but a series of misadventures robbed it of any chance to make a
decisive impact on the battle. The crews of the Twenty-second Panzer Division, for example, which formed the nucleus of Heim's forces, had dug their tanks into pits and covered them with straw in an attempt to protect them from the cold. When they hurriedly moved to aid the Rumanians, however, they found, much to their distress, that mice had eaten through the electrical wiring, with the result that only 42 of the division's 102 tanks could be sent forward to meet the enemy. This problem was compounded by disagreement in the German command as to the key Soviet threat. While Army Group B ordered General Heim's forces to seal off the enemy breakthrough at Kletskaya, Zeitzler, after consulting with Hitler, redirected the corps to the northwest to blunt the Soviet thrust at Bolshaya. With fewer than a hundred serviceable tanks, and so short of fuel that they had to borrow it from the Rumanians, Heim's units were sent from sector to sector “on a wild goose chase” that merely dissipated their already insufficient strength. When they did engage the Soviets, they performed well, destroying large numbers of enemy T-34s, but, with any hope of a concentrated counterthrust lost in the confusing welter of orders, the Forty-eighth Panzer Corps was itself soon forced on the defensive.
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As it became apparent during the course of the day that the usual German strengths of tactical skill, coordination of forces, mobility, and air power were all negated by fuel shortages and poor weather, the command of Army Group B began to consider seriously the possibility that the Soviet penetrations could not be halted and that German forces in Stalingrad might be in danger of encirclement. By nightfall, Soviet armored spearheads had ripped a hole nearly fifty miles wide in the Rumanian front and were halfway to Kalach. Amazingly, the Sixth Army command itself seemed unaware of the full import of events to the west, continuing its attacks in the city. Although word had been sent from Army Group B at 6:00
P.M
. that some units might need to be shifted from Stalingrad, not until 10:00 that evening did Weichs make the seriousness of the situation clear, ordering the Sixth Army to suspend offensive operations in the city and send strong mobile forces westward for the protection of its left flank as quickly as possible. Paulus immediately complied, pulling three armored units, the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Twenty-fourth Panzer Divisions, and an infantry division from the line to form the relief force. Since there was a lack of fuel in Stalingrad and some of the units had first to extricate themselves from heavy fighting in the city, they could not be employed en masse on the west bank of the Don for several days, making any immediate halt to the Soviet attack unlikely.
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Even as Paulus's Fourteenth Panzer Corps and other assorted units managed on the twentieth to form a thin defensive line and slow the Soviet advance in the north, disaster struck to the south. At 10:00 that morning, artillery and Katyusha rockets along the Stalingrad front south of the city had launched a thunderous barrage. Forty-five minutes later, when “masses of Soviet tanks and waves of infantry” assaulted Axis lines, the ill-equipped Rumanians, despite fighting bravely in many places, had no chance of resisting for long. As Rumanian troops again succumbed to tank fright and began fleeing to the rear, the only reserve of the Fourth Panzer Army, the Twenty-ninth Motorized Infantry Division, quickly moved to stanch the Red tide. Even though it inflicted a sharp reverse on advancing Soviet columns, it alone had insufficient strength to master the situation. By the end of the day, the Fourth Panzer Army had been split in two. As along the Don front, in the south, too, the Germans were now paying the price for having sent all available units into Stalingrad. Had they possessed a mobile reserve, as the success of the Twenty-ninth Motorized Infantry indicated, the Soviet attack in the south might well have been blunted. No such reserve existed, however, and, with the smashing of the Axis line in the south, the situation now assumed alarming proportions. Back in Berchtesgaden, Hitler reacted with two decisions that revealed his full understanding of the danger that the Sixth Army might be, at least temporarily, encircled: he ordered Field Marshal Manstein to assume command of the new Army Group Don, with the task of stabilizing the situation and recovering the lost position, and at the same time he directed that preparations be made for supplying the Sixth Army by air.
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Until the twenty-first, Paulus's staff at Sixth Army headquarters, just twelve miles north of Kalach at Golubinsky, had remained cautiously optimistic that the Soviet advance might yet be checked, early that morning sending “a not unfavorable description of the situation” to Army Group B. During the course of the day, however, the realization ripened that the southern breakthrough also had Kalach as its goal and that a double envelopment now loomed as a possibility. Paulus ordered the Fourteenth Panzer Corps to attack to the southwest in an attempt to safeguard the rail line from Kalach to Stalingrad, the vital artery for maintaining the operational capability of the Sixth Army, but a lack of fuel that hampered operational mobility forced a growing recognition that the Soviets would likely win the race to Kalach and that, at the least, a temporary encirclement was probable. Shortly after noon, in fact, Soviet tanks on the way to Kalach appeared on the steppe to the west, forcing a precipitate evacuation of Sixth Army headquarters that quickly turned
into panicked flight. As German command cars, trucks, and motorcycles raced away, they collided with each other, overturned, and blocked the road, while men on foot, rushing to save themselves, threw away weapons and abandoned ammunition carts, field kitchens, and supply vehicles. In their hurried departure, they also missed a midafternoon Führer directive that acknowledged the danger of encirclement but ordered that the rail line be held as long as possible. By that time, however, any hope of stopping the Soviet advance had evaporated. The defenses at Kalach were badly prepared and inadequately manned, with a few Luftwaffe flak emplacements supported by mainly supply troops and some units of the field police. Early on the twenty-second, against virtually no opposition, an advanced detachment of the Soviet Twenty-sixth Tank Corps seized the key rail bridge across the Don at Kalach. Lacking the fuel and troops for a counterattack to retake the bridge, the Germans were now reduced, despite the grave doubts of virtually all commanders on the spot about its feasibility, to dependence on an air bridge as the only way to maintain the Sixth Army's fighting power. When the pincers finally slammed the pocket shut on the twenty-third, the Soviets had trapped, not the 85,000–95,000 men they had thought, but well over 250,000 Axis troops.
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Decisions had to be made and quickly. Hitler's order on the afternoon of the twenty-first that the Sixth Army hold its fronts “despite the danger of temporary encirclement” as well as another similar directive the next morning clearly indicated his intention to hold on to Stalingrad. With this in mind, and in view of the steadily worsening situation, on the morning of 22 November, Paulus and his staff took a fateful decision: the army would form a hedgehog position in order to prepare for a later breakout to the southwest. In view of the number of transport aircraft available and the unpredictable weather conditions, virtually none of the top frontline commanders put any hope in the supply of the army from the air, but, given their tactical position and lack of sufficient fuel reserves to allow an immediate breakout attempt, there was little other choice. The result on the ground was a chaos of uncertainty and confusion as German troops, often separated from their command and transport, had to fight a desperate defensive battle in the open on all sides. With hard, dry, fine snow lashing their faces, Landsers now withdrew along roads littered with discarded weapons, helmets, and equipment. At bridges across the numerous rivers, long traffic jams formed, while periodic panic broke out at reports of Russian tanks. Villages in the area were packed with frightened, exhausted German soldiers seeking food and shelter from the terrible cold. Supply depots were plundered in
a wild fashion, then set afire, with vital food supplies often destroyed unnecessarily. Lacking fuel, tanks had to be blown up and artillery abandoned. The worst scenes were in the field hospitals, however, where the wounded, unable to be evacuated, were often simply abandoned to their fate.
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Even as, amid the swirling chaos, Paulus initiated preparatory steps for the intended breakout, Hitler's actions revealed a rather different set of ideas. Although Paulus envisioned a breakout for 25–26 November and repeatedly emphasized both the deteriorating state of affairs and the impossibility of adequate supply from the air, his request for “freedom of action” in case the hedgehog did not succeed was brusquely rejected by the Führer. With the seriousness of the situation growing by the hour, Hitler on the evening of the twenty-second decided to leave the Obersalzberg and return to his headquarters at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia. A few hours before his departure, however, he had discussed the possibility of air supply with General Hans Jeschonnek, the chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff. Although aware of the doubts of Richthofen, among others, Jeschonnek, evidently believing that the encirclement would last for only a few days, indicated that, in principle, such an operation was feasible. After all, he noted, the previous winter the Luftwaffe had supplied 100,000 troops in the Demyansk pocket for several months. The comparison with Demyansk was specious, as Jeschonnek, much to his regret, quickly realized. Not only were three times as many men trapped at Stalingrad, but also, because many of the Ju-52s necessary for an airlift had been transferred to the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe had nowhere near the requisite transport capacity.
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After all Hitler's boasts and promises to take and hold the city, however, Jeschonnek's spontaneous assurance was exactly what the Führer wanted to hear. His attitude was shaped not only by considerations of political prestige and, since the near debacle of the previous winter, the belief that holding on in a crisis was always preferable, but also by a fundamental misjudgment of the changed power relationship between German and Soviet forces. Hitler certainly conceded the dangers in the situation but, given past Wehrmacht superiority, placed unrealistic hopes in the likelihood of a successful relief operation as well as on the feasibility of aerial provisioning. The Sixth Army, after all, had regularly been receiving some of its supplies by air even before the encirclement, so to Hitler air supply did not mark anything fundamentally new, but merely an intensification of the existing state of affairs. Moreover, the trapped forces could not break out without fuel, which would have to be flown in to them in any case. The deeper problem, of course, lay
in Hitler's inability to acknowledge the decisive Soviet superiority. Even then, his decision was not made in a vacuum. Jodl, for example, argued with seeming logic that a breakout should not be attempted and the gains of the summer abandoned without first attempting a relief operation. Although on the twenty-third Zeitzler mistakenly thought that he had secured Hitler's consent for a breakout, Goering's assurance that over a limited period the Luftwaffe could fly in the necessary supplies sealed Hitler's decision. Zeitzler, likely on the twenty-seventh and not on the twenty-fourth, tried one final time to convince Hitler that supply by air was an impossibility, going so far as to accuse Goering to his face of being a liar for his assurances regarding aerial provisioning, but the Führer would have none of it. Manstein would get his attempt at a relief operation, while the Luftwaffe was to keep the Sixth Army supplied.
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Although on the night of 23–24 November Seydlitz, the commander of the Fifty-first Corps, tried to force Paulus into attempting a breakout by withdrawing his troops on the northern flank farther than ordered, the latter, despite his equally grim assessment of the situation, could not bring himself to act on his own responsibility. Beyond the instinctive caution of a staff officer who could not countenance a risky operation without its first being properly prepared and supplied, Paulus was also deferring to Manstein, a man of towering reputation who seemed the one person with the skill and ability to reverse the situation. Having been appointed commander of the newly created Army Group Don, the field marshal arrived on 24 November at Army Group B headquarters, where Weichs pressed the urgency of an immediate breakout. Despite the fact that the Red Army was hourly consolidating its position and that the weather was steadily worsening, Manstein nonetheless considered a breakout only “a last resort.” Confident that the army could be supplied by air—and, admittedly, he was little interested in logistics—Manstein thought the best option to be a relief operation that would open a corridor to the beleaguered Sixth Army and allow supplies to be funneled into Stalingrad. Only in the event that such an operation failed would he urge a breakout of the Sixth Army. Whatever the basis of his decision, Manstein's assessment came as a devastating blow to the generals advocating a breakout and as an equally large boost to Hitler. With his decision seemingly given the imprimatur of the general of the hour, the Führer now became even more intolerant of dissenting opinions, reducing the OKH, in Richthofen's devastating phrase, to the status of “highly paid NCOs.”
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