Stalin's General (27 page)

As this statement shows Stalin was concerned about the situation but confident he could handle the new crisis. Stalin always displayed such confidence to foreigners and more often than not it reflected his true feelings. But that confidence must have been shaken by the failure of the Red Army's counterattacks on the distant approaches of Stalingrad. By August 23 the Germans were at the city's gates and Stalingrad was under siege. The German attack began with massive air raids that killed at least 25,000 civilians. On August 25 the city authorities introduced martial law.

Such was the backdrop to Stalin's decision on August 26 to recall Zhukov from the Western Front and make him his deputy supreme commander (Konev replaced Zhukov as commander of the Western Front). Like Leningrad and Moscow before it, Stalingrad needed saving and Stalin wanted somebody to fight the battle the way he wanted it fought—unwaveringly, ruthlessly, and with unshakable conviction. But there was more to Zhukov's promotion than simply a desperate move to save Stalingrad. Stalin had signaled his utmost confidence in Zhukov as both his key advisor and man of action. As historian John Erickson put it, his appointment as Stalin's deputy meant “at a stroke Zhukov was transformed from ‘visiting fireman' to threatened fronts into the chief engineer of the Soviet military machine.”
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Zhukov's promotion was also symbolic of the more equal partnership between the communist regime and the Red Army that had developed during the war, including between Stalin and his generals. Significantly, on August 27 Zhukov was also named first deputy defense commissar to Stalin's people's commissar of defense. From now on Zhukov's name as well as Stalin's would be appended to many of the most important decisions governing the Soviet war effort.

To capture Stalingrad the Germans needed to occupy the city's riverbank on the west side of the Volga, which would cut off the Red Army's access to reinforcements and supplies coming from the east side. Pitted against each other in this struggle was the German 6th Army commanded by General Friedrich Paulus and the Soviet 62nd Army commanded by General Vasily Chuikov, a general in the Zhukov mold prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of victory.
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The battle within the city was prolonged and intense, beginning in mid-September
and lasting nearly three months. At the height of the battle the Wehrmacht occupied 90 percent of the city but the Germans were unable to dislodge Chuikov's troops from a sixteen-mile strip along the Volga's west bank. As long as the 62nd Army held this bridgehead the Germans could not claim victory and remained vulnerable to a Soviet counterattack that could destabilize their position not just in Stalingrad but also in the whole Don-Volga area. During the course of the battle Chuikov's forces suffered 75 percent casualties but their will to resist did not crack. While the whole world marveled at the famous house-to-house fighting in the city center, equally important to the outcome of the battle was the defense of Stalingrad's flanks by the 63rd, 64th, and 66th Armies, which stopped the Germans from pouring even more troops into the city. Crucial, too, was the struggle for air supremacy between the Luftwaffe and the Red Air Force and the rain of fire on German positions from Soviet artillery on the east bank of the Volga.
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(See
Map 15
: The Battle for Stalingrad, September–November 1942
.)

Stalin did not send Zhukov to Stalingrad immediately. Vasilevsky, appointed chief of the General Staff in June in succession to the sickly Shaposhnikov, was there already acting as Stavka coordinator. At the end of August, however, Zhukov flew to the headquarters of General Gordov's Stalingrad Front and remained in the area for most of September.
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His role as Stavka's representative was to supervise and coordinate the actions of the two fronts—Gordov's Stalingrad and Yeremenko's Southeastern—involved in the defense of the city and, equally important, to report directly back to Stalin.

Zhukov's communications with Stalin during his time in Stalingrad belong to the detailed history of the complex battle for the city, but their tone is highly revealing of the relationship between the two men at this stage of the war. Stalin trusted Zhukov's reports, respected his judgment, and was prepared to defer to his advice. Typical of Stalin's phraseology was “What are you planning?”; “Do you think …?”; “Please report.” For example on September 16 Stalin sent a message to Zhukov asking whether he “had considered the possibility of sending two rifle divisions into Stalingrad” in order to strengthen the defense of the city. In the same message Stalin informed Zhukov that he had
no objections to his plans for the conduct of the battle.
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Stalin did not usually display such deference to his generals, as evidenced by this communication to Yeremenko on October 5:

From Stavka's point of view while it was important to hang on to Soviet positions in Stalingrad—if only for psychological reasons—more critical was finding a solution that would repulse the Germans' whole southern campaign. The solution Stavka came up with was Operation Uranus—the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad of November 1942 that encircled and then destroyed Paulus's 6th Army.

According to Zhukov the two principal authors of the plan were himself and Vasilevsky. On September 12 Zhukov flew back to Moscow to brief Stalin in person about the situation in Stalingrad. After the briefing, Zhukov and Vasilevsky moved away from Stalin and
began talking quietly about the need to find “some other solution” to the problems they faced at Stalingrad. Stalin overheard them and asked what they were talking about. Zhukov was surprised by Stalin's intervention. “I had never imagined Stalin had such a keen ear.” The upshot was that Stalin told the two to come up with a new plan.

When Zhukov and Vasilevsky returned to Stalin's office that evening, the dictator was skeptical but prepared to discuss their proposals further. In the meantime the idea of a major counteroffensive was to be kept secret. Zhukov returned to Stalingrad that night but was recalled to Moscow at the end of September for a more detailed discussion of his and Vasilevsky's draft. At this point Stalin endorsed their plan.
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Like so many of Zhukov's stories, this one founders on the evidentiary rock of Stalin's appointments diary, which shows no meetings with Zhukov between August 31 and September 26. Stalin did meet Vasilevsky during this period but not on any date between September 9 and 21. It is possible the meetings on September 12 and 13 that Zhukov describes went unrecorded in the diary or took place elsewhere or that Zhukov got the dates wrong. But the evidence suggests strongly that Zhukov imagined or invented this whole episode. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. After the war the parentage of Operation Uranus was a source of considerable controversy. When Zhukov was demoted in 1946 one charge against him was that he had falsely claimed credit for the Stalingrad counteroffensive. The same accusation was repeated by Khrushchev and his supporters when Zhukov
was dismissed as minister of defense in 1957. After Zhukov's dismissal Yeremenko and Khrushchev (who had been chief political commissar at Stalingrad) claimed authorship of the counteroffensive plan and Zhukov was denied the right to comment on their claim until after Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964. There was, in fact, no foundation for the Yeremenko-Khrushchev version of events and Zhukov (and Vasilevsky) had every right to feel aggrieved. The plan may not have originated at the precise time or in the exact way Zhukov so colorfully described in his memoirs, but there is no doubt that he and Vasilevsky were the driving force behind it.

According to the Soviet General Staff's contemporaneous account of the battle for Stalingrad, planning for the counteroffensive started in the second half of September. Then, on October 4, Zhukov had a meeting with Front commanders in which he outlined the plan.
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From other documentary evidence we know that after this meeting the three Fronts involved in the counteroffensive—the Don, the Stalingrad, and the Southwestern—submitted to Zhukov and Vasilevsky their proposals for implementation. There is abundant evidence, too, that both men played an extensive role in the preparation of the counteroffensive.
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Another controversy concerning Operation Uranus is its relationship to the parallel offensive in the Rzhev-Viazma area—Operation Mars. In his memoirs Zhukov presented Operation Mars as a diversionary offensive designed to make sure that troops from Army Group Center were not redeployed to the south when Uranus was launched.
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Zhukov's characterization of Mars as a diversionary operation has been accepted by most Russian military historians but in
Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942
American historian David Glantz claimed that Mars was an independent operation considered by Zhukov to be equally if not more important than Uranus. As Glantz pointed out, Zhukov spent more time on the preparation of Operation Mars than he did on Operation Uranus and when the two operations were launched, Zhukov took charge of the coordination of the two Fronts involved in Mars (the Kalinin and the Western) while Vasilevsky looked after Uranus. The forces deployed in each operation were more or less equal. According to Glantz's figures the equivalent of 36.5 divisions were used in the
Mars offensive and 34.5 for Uranus. Total Soviet forces deployed against Army Group Center numbered 1,890,000 troops, 24,682 guns and mortars, 3,375 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 1,170 aircraft as against the 1,103,000 troops, 15,501 guns and mortars, 1,463 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 1,463 aircraft deployed against Army Group South.

Glantz makes a powerful case, especially when Mars is placed in the context of the series of Rzhev-Viazma operations that took place in 1942. All three operations were on a similar scale and designed to land a crippling blow on Army Group Center. There is no reason to assume that Mars was any different. When Mars was launched on November 25, shortly after Uranus, the two operations were accorded equal importance in the Soviet press and the headlines emphasized that a dual offensive was in progress. Such headlines did not disappear until it became apparent that Mars was failing to make the same headway as Uranus.
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