Stalingrad was a city stretching for some 50km along the western bank of the Volga River. With half a million inhabitants, it was predominantly industrial. Stalin, after his rise to power, renamed this city, formerly called Tsarityn, to Stalingrad. (However, it was renamed again to Volgograd in 1961.)
Both Hitler and Stalin recognized the importance of Stalingrad. To Hitler, it was where oil, grain, wheat from the Ukraine and the Caucasus passed through. To Stalin, it was the city he had defended against immense odds during the civil war until reinforcements came. Both of them regarded the city as an important symbol.
On August 19, General Friedrich Paulus' 6 th Army approached Stalingrad, with two thrusts toward the city, one towards the centre and south, the other towards the north. German troops, apparently tired after advancing across the Caucasus, were unexcited. Hitler predicted that the thrust to Stalingrad would take the city in a matter of days at most, considering its ‘early destruction to be of high importance'.
Four days later, on 1800 hours August 23, the battle for Stalingrad began with over 1000 German aircraft bombing the city. [10] The raid damaged many of the city's wooden buildings. That same day Paulus' 6 th Army reached the outskirts of the city. Slowing down to a grinding halt, the mile, as one general put it, was replaced by the yard as a unit of measurement.
The slow progress, with many buildings changing hands many times, irritated and at some times infuriated Hitler. He dismissed Field-Marshal List, also ordering that the male population of Stalingrad be executed when the city was occupied. The female population, he did not elaborate.
However, the attack proceeded slowly and therefore General von Richthofen wrote late in September, “In the town itself progress is desperately slow.” [11] He also remarked about ‘endless engagements' in which the Russians fought heroically, ceding cellar after cellar after only the toughest of fights. However, at night the Russians would stage counterattacks on German positions. ‘If we throw the Russians twenty yards back in the day,' as one private put it in a letter, ‘the Russians throw us back twenty yards in the evening.'
Here is one typical morning taken from the excellent The Great Patriotic War :
0730 hours Enemy has reached Academy Street
0740 hours 1 st Battalion 38 th Mechanised Brigade is cut off from our main forces
0750 hours Fighting occurs near Matveyev—Kurgan hill and in the streets leading to the station.
0800 hours the station is in enemy hands
0840 hours the station is in our hands
0940 hours the enemy has recaptured the station
1040 hours the enemy has reach Pushkin St. which is ½ km from Army Battle HQ
1100 hours two regiments of infantry supported by 30 tanks are moving toward the Technical Institution
On that same day, the Russian 62nd Army was reduced to strength of only 50,000 men. However, Stalin soon replaced the commander of the 62nd Army with Vasily A. Chuikov, a peasant's son with a scholar's brain. Chuikov was lucky to be alive even before he reached the besieged city. Both the car and the aircraft transporting him to Stalingrad crashed, but Chuikov escaped. Also, several bombs scored direct hits on his command bunker, but somehow, according to the Russians, Chuikov escaped alive. Even then, none of his command bunkers were more than ¾ km away from the German line during the siege. He seemed to have a lucky star.
On September 20, the Germans seized a 3km stretch in the north and another 1km stretch in the south of land along the Volga River. Incidentally, these were the only fulfilments of Barbarossa's initial objective in 1941.
The Germans were making slow progress throughout the city. German troops, lacking in artillery, were instructed to make up for it by heavy bombing. The effect was such that few buildings were left standing, even in the city centre.
The Russians continued ferrying reinforcements across the Volga. The Germans tried to stop the Soviets from doing so by bombing it with a certain degree of success. On one of the more fruitful attempts, a survivor records that ‘the river was red with blood'.
At the annual Nazi gathering in Munich to celebrate the coup attempt in 1923, Hitler pledged solemnly to his party that he would be master of Stalingrad shortly, and that he considered its battle, along with the entire eastern front, completely won.
Reality was something different. The Nazis were capturing Stalingrad inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, only at a terrible cost. Actually, the battle for Stalingrad was not the ‘final and decisive battle' as Hitler imagined, but Hitler being gradually led by Stalin into the deep and dark abyss…
Stalingrad had become such a place of desolation and intense fighting that German officers began describing it as a ‘cauldron'. It was a paradox. Inside this furnace men, fighting to the death froze. It was no surprise than a German NCO compared it to ‘Verdun, bloody Verdun with new weapons'. (Verdun was the site of a great battle in the First World War) By the middle of September, the Russians, despite tenacious resistance, had been pushed back house-by-house to the city proper
On September 25, German tanks had reached the edge of the Krasny Oktyabr factory. Four days later, Hitler warned his commanders in the West about the risk of an Allied invasion of France, called by Stalin and the Western Allies as the ‘Second Front.' This threat forced Germany, unlike the Soviet Union, to only throw in 65% of troops into the Eastern Front; the Soviet Union could easily commit 90% or even more.
Meanwhile, Soviet partisans raided and burnt down a town near Bryansk. This act of defiance was severely dealt with; those who were caught died a gruesome death.
On September 27, the Nazi swastika flew over the Communist Party branch in Stalingrad. But resistance still continued for two days in the basements and cellars.
October 11 was the first assault free day for the Germans. Paulus was planning to have one big, and hopefully final, attack on this irritating bone stuck in his throat, he was busy preparing for this.
Three days later, the big thing came. Yet the same thing happened. The Tractor Factory changed hands many times. The same thing happened with the Barricade Factory. The Russians were fighting for every cellar, every corridor, every attic, every basement, every staircase—and when the thing seemed under control, a Russians counterattack would set the Germans back to square one.
Three more days later, the Germans launched another attack. Goering's Luftwaffe pounded the garrison continuously and furiously. Many tanks tried to breakthrough. Yet the German attempt failed again.
Driven literally back to the river, the Germans pounded the Stalingrad defenders with surrender leaflets, yet they refused to accept them. In fact, by now the Soviet soldiers were defending nothing but ruins, ruins of a city which used to have half a million inhabitants. Such was the ferocity of the battle.
With winter coming, Hitler was counting on the quick capture of Stalingrad and Grozny (and perhaps even Baku) before it set in.
In the Caucasus, the Germans were advancing at snails pace, though there were no battles around that area.
Meanwhile, heavy rain, a prelude to snow, began to fall in Stalingrad. This aided the Germans somewhat. With the fall of the Tractor Factory, Hitler was sure that Stalingrad would fall anytime soon and was just waiting to mop up what remained of the Soviets in Stalingrad. By the end of October, the Russians still possessed 800m of the western bank of the Volga.
In El Alamein, Egypt, a major battle raged between Field Marshal Rommel and General Montgomery. The outcome of the battle was still undecided, yet the Allies possessed much more men than the Germans and Italians.
Victory for El Alamein was essential for the Axis. If it was captured, the road to Cairo would be open and Mussolini, the Italian ruler, would make the triumphal entry into Egypt's capital that he had so often boasted of.
However, the Germans were driven back, and though the retreat started slowly, the Allied forces pushed them back all the way to Tunisia in a matter of weeks. There, the resistance stiffened.
On November 11, the Germans launched a final attack on the forces defending Stalingrad. The attack made good progress; a 500m stretch of the banks of the River Volga was captured. Most of the Red October Factory was captured (the Russians still held a small portion. But the attack had generally petered out on November 15.
General Paulus, commander of the 6 th Army, was delighted that 85% of Stalingrad had been captured, though the offensive was stopped. He thought that the next offensive would drive the Soviets back to the eastern bank of the Volga.
The Russians encircle the Sixth Army.
Actually, the situation was not as good as the Germans thought. General Georgi Zhukov, together with Stalin, had been planning a counteroffensive to encircle and destroy the 6 th Army as early as September. The long flanks of the German offensive were guarded mainly by allied troops from Romania, Hungary, and Italy. Only the spearhead of the attack was composed of German troops. This made the spearhead (the 6 th Army) extremely vulnerable. During the German attack on Stalingrad, Zhukov began gathering reinforcements on the Don River and east of the city.
Contrary to the public belief that the Germans did not know about the attack, new documents show that in spite of the Soviet High Command's attempt at concealing the reinforcement, word eventually leaked out to Paulus and the commanders about the counteroffensive to relieve the city. However, most of them refused to pass it on to Hitler, believing that victory at Stalingrad was so close. Only General Zeitzler persuaded Hitler to halt the Sixth Army's assault on Stalingrad and guard the flanks of the offensive. Marshal Antonescu, the ruler of Romania, also urged Hitler to reconsider his army placements. But he did not know about the Soviet plan.
With the Soviet offensive beginning at the Don at 0730 hours (it started with artillery bombardment), the trap slammed shut. At 0848 hours exactly, the over a million Russians began pouring into the thinly guarded flanks. The Soviet estimate at that time was that there were 900 Soviet tanks against 675 German, the actual figure was probably that there were only 300 less well equipped German tanks against the T-34 and KV-1. The Soviets also had a marginal advantage in the air. The Germans and Romanians also used obsolete Czech 37mm anti-tank guns. For the first time in the war, the Soviets managed to do what the Germans had done in 1941, to crash through using the principles of blitzkrieg (lightning war) against a numerically and much technologically weaker enemy. Adding to the chaos, some Romanians, less loyal to Hitler's fight to the death orders, fled. The rest put up a very brave defence but were practically eliminated by Soviet troops. This just shows how outnumbered they were. The Soviet advance also moved so quickly, destroying lines of communication, that when after four days they were at Kalach, 60 km west of Stalingrad, the Germans guarding it thought that the Soviet tanks advancing were their next watch.
On November 22, when the Russians opened their offensive east of Stalingrad, Paulus immediately communicated directly to Hitler, telling him of the danger facing his Sixth Army, requesting permission to pull out before the Soviet pincers met. Goering, upon discussing with Hitler, disagreed with Paulus. He promised Hitler and Paulus that his Luftwaffe could supply 700 tons of supply every day. Why withdraw when one could be supplied from the air and the corridor later restored by a counterattack?
Paulus, upon receiving Hitler's reply, was stunned. He knew that Goering was boasting. To supply the 6 th Army with 700 tons of material daily would require 136 flights of the Luftwaffe's Ju-88s—an operation would take almost all of the transport planes available. This was not possible because many were needed for the supplying the defence of Tunisia, which was currently being held. Hitler and Mussolini, both seeing the situation at Tunisia, agreed that the supply planes would be transported over ‘once resistance in Tunisia ended', which was to last for at six weeks, or at the most two months. But because the tenacious resistance in Tunisia lasted for not six weeks but six months, Paulus was to be deprived of his supplies.
Anyway, the Soviet pincers linked up on November 23 at the town of Sovietskiy, south east of Kalach, trapping the 225,000 German and 25,000 allied troops in Stalingrad. A week later on December 1, the airlift got going. From December 1-7, the Luftwaffe delivered a total of 680 tons of supplies to Paulus—he was promised 7 times the amount of supplies. In the later part of December an average of 135 tons was delivered each day, but this dropped dramatically in January 1943 due to the harsh weather combined with Soviet attempts to shoot down the planes. The troops inside Stalingrad starved. On Christmas Day 1942 Paulus allowed his soldiers to slaughter 400 horses for meat, thereafter which they would live on 50g—an eighth of a loaf—of bread every day.
As the Sixth Army starved in Stalingrad, Hitler appointed Field Marshal Manstein, one of his most brilliant commanders, to plan for a dramatic rescue. On November 26, Manstein set up his HQ in Novocherkassk. However, he could not launch his offensive yet due to the fact that reinforcements would only arrive the next day and even then, the poor weather would hamper the offensive, codenamed Operation Winter Storm, greatly.
It was only on December 12 that the Germans started rolling. General Hoth, leading the 23 rd Panzer, advanced. Over the next three days the Germans made good progress against the opposing 51 st Army, to the delight of Paulus who expected to be out of Stalingrad by Christmas.
Meanwhile, the Soviet High Command ( Stavka) was receiving reports of the progress of the Germans. To this effect, they sent 130 tanks to aid the ring around Stalingrad.
On 18 December, Manstein urged General Zeitzer at OKH to ‘take immediate steps to initiate the breakout of the 6 th Army', seeing that to be rescued, Paulus would have to breakout and he would have to break in simultaneously. This caused a meeting to be held, after which Major Eismann, chief intelligence officer of the newly created Army Group Don, agreed to visit the pocket at Stalingrad. Touching down at Gumrak airfield at 0750 hours in the morning, Eismann, Paulus, his Chief of Staff, and several other commanders held another meeting in Paulus' HQ. Both agreed that the breakout would be risky, and Paulus urged Eismann to request to Manstein to carry out the offensive as soon as possible. However, Major Gen. Schmidt, Paulus Chief of Staff thought differently. Thinking that a breakout go to show that the Germans now held the inferior position, he strongly advocated to Eismann to ‘supply the Sixth Army better'. Schmidt sadly had the last word.
On the afternoon of 19 December, Manstein urged Zeitzer to order Paulus to breakout. His force itself was now threatened with encirclement. Paulus' last chance to escape lay with the breakout. Getting no reply, he then urged Paulus himself to disobey Hitler by breaking out.
Paulus refused, giving the following reasons: He had fuel to advance only 20 miles or 30 miles at the most, and cold weather would have prevented him from advancing.
Actually, Paulus was lying. He did not want to disobey Hitler's orders—his code of honour prevented him from doing so. But there his chance lay—would Paulus grab it or would he ignore it? Manstein knew that it was technically impossible for him to break in by himself—earlier he had stressed that both the breaking in and breaking out must occur simultaneously.
(It was actually true that Paulus had fuel only to advance for 20 miles, but he admitted after the war that he could have covered the 30 miles required just by reducing his vehicles by 30%)
The next day, Hoth captured the town of Myshkova, only sixteen miles away from Stalingrad. Paulus, after constant pressure, had finally agreed to a breakout. However, he told Manstein that he would only release tanks unsupported by infantry, whereupon he was told to forget about the breakout. That day, the Luftwaffe dropped a record 250 tons of supplies to Paulus. [13] This would never be repeated.
On the 21 st of December, Manstein made one last attempt to get the 6 th Army to breakout—this time by persuading Hitler himself. Speaking direct by telephone to his Rastenburg HQ, all Hitler said was, “I fail to see what you are driving at. Paulus has only enough petrol for 15 to 20 miles. He says himself that he can't break out now.”
Hitler refused to supersede his order on the grounds that it could not be done because Paulus' ‘trump card'—his lack of petrol.
As the sun set in Novocherkassk, Manstein knew that his efforts were like a leaf going down the drain. What was this Operation Winter Storm—involving the best German tanks, trying to rescue someone who refused to budge?
Three days later, the Russians launched a counterattack. Threatened with encirclement like Paulus by two pincers, Manstein withdrew and stopped the entire rescue plan.
The Sixth Army was now trapped forever in Stalingrad, never, ever, to be released.
“When the nerves break down, there is nothing left but to admit that one can't handle the situation, and kill oneself.”--Hitler, after Paulus' surrender, 1 Feb |
The Germans were now retreating along the whole of southern Russia. On December 28, General Zeitzer got permission from Hitler to begin a full scale retreat for all armies in the Caucasus. There was a threat, he warned, of the Soviet counterattack isolating the whole force in the Caucasus. By New Year 1943 the Russians were only 250 km away from Rostov-on-Don. Meanwhile, back in the Stalingrad ‘cauldron', supplies had been reduced to one slice of bread a day for each soldier. However, Stalin had no intention of finishing off the trapped Germans yet, as he thought correctly, it could wait. Pushing the Germans back to the Ukraine had the priority.
The Germans east of Rostov-on-Don launched several local counterattacks with the aim of delaying the fall of the city. On Valentine's Day the city fell with little resistance. A week earlier, Kursk had fallen, and on 24 January, Voronezh had fallen. Meanwhile, the Soviets thrust toward the great city of Kharkov. The Germans, outnumbered greatly (7:1) put up a brave resistance for several days, but after which they evacuated and burnt the city down.
Two days after the city's fall, Manstein was planning an attack to recapture Kharkov. Hitler agreed only after heavy persuasion. On February 19 1943, the attack on started. The Russians were caught by surprise, thinking that the Germans were exhausted totally. Actually, it was the Russians who were tired, after advancing so fast; they were also far away from their supply bases. After a week of resistance from the Russians, the Germans killed 23,500 troops and took 9000 prisoners in the battle of Kharkov. The Germans rushed to take Belgorod about 75 km to the north—just before the thaw of the Russian winter managed to hamper all offensive operations.
In Leningrad, the Soviets launched an attack, Operation Spark, to relieve the city by opening a corridor. Finally, after some resistance, the Germans yielded the town of Shlisselburg and a stretch of land, barely 15km in width. Through this food and ammunition were sent. However, the siege was not over yet. This corridor was constantly under German artillery shellfire until the city was finally relieved in January 1944. For the besieged citizens of Leningrad, the corridor was known as the ‘Road of Life'. Ironically, it was known as the ‘Road of Death' to the Germans, since many trucks crossing the corridor got shot.
Meanwhile, back in the Cauldron, the Russians had sent a surrender ultimatum on January 8, giving Paulus honourable but questionable (since Moscow rarely kept its promises) terms of surrender:
To the Commander in Chief of the German Sixth Army, The Sixth Army, formations of the Fourth Panzer Army, and those units sent to reinforce them has been completely encircled since the 23rd of November, 1942. The soldiers of the Red Army have sealed this German Army Group within an unbreakable ring. All hopes of the rescue of your troops by a German offensive from the south or southwest have proved vain. The German units hastening to your assistance were defeated by the Red Army, and the remnants are now redrawing to Rostov-on-Don. The German air transport fleet, which brought you a starvation ration of food, munitions and fuel has been compelled by the Red Army's successful and rapid advance repeatedly to withdraw to airfields more distant from the encircled troops. It should be added that the German air transport fleet is suffering enormous losses in machines and crews at the hands The situation of your troops is desperate. They are suffering from hunger, sickness and cold. The cruel Russian winter has scarcely yet begun. Hard frosts, cold winds and blizzards still lie ahead. Your soldiers are not provided with winter clothing and are living in appalling sanitary conditions. You, as Commander in Chief, and all the officers of the encircled forces know well that there is for you no real possibility of breaking out. Your situation is hopeless, and any further resistance senseless. In view of the desperate situation in which you are placed, and in order to save unnecessary bloodshed, we propose that you except the following terms of surrender: Y our reply is to be given in writing by ten o'clock, Moscow time the 9th of January 1943. |
Paulus, loyal (to a certain extent) to Hitler, refused to accept the demands made upon him. The next day, the Red Army attacked. Many of the soldiers agreed with Paulus. As the Soviets tightened their ring around Stalingrad, many of the few aircraft stopped landing due to the runway, which had been cratered by Soviet artillery. Instead, they dropped their supplies. Some tried to board the empty planes back to Germany. This caused Paulus to issue an order that no one was to board an aircraft without written permission from the 6 th Army's Chief of Staff.
Conditions continued to worsen. Soon the hospitals operating in the cellars refused to accept anymore wounded. On the 23 rd the Germans lost the Gumrak airfield. A week later fighting began in the factories. That day, 30 th January, the 6 th Army was split into two groups, with Paulus in the south. He was captured that very day. Refusing to commit suicide, he surrendered his pocket. The northern pocket held out until February 3 before it, too, surrendered. A total of 91,000 prisoners were taken. Red Army witnesses described ‘endless rows of hungry people'. The final battle for Stalingrad had sapped the heart, soul, and mind of those who had taken part.
That night (Feb 1), the Russians published a special report proudly announcing the Germans surrender in Stalingrad. A copy of it was given to Hitler.
When he heard that Paulus had surrendered, Hitler was angry beyond description. Earlier that week he had instructed Paulus to stand fast and had promoted him to a Field Marshal. His motive was transparent—no German Field Marshal had surrendered or been captured by any enemy. Hitler wanted Paulus to commit suicide or at least fight to the last man and the last bullet. The death of Paulus, according to him, would only make the other pocket fight even more ferociously.
Hitler ordered a meeting to be held the very next day, February 1, at noon. Through his speech it was obvious that Hitler was infuriated.
After the defeat at Stalingrad Hitler refused to face reality for a few months. He refused to hear the names of either Paulus (for surrendering) or even Goering (for failing to get the airlift going). His tone was that of an angry, but not yet mad, man. He talked rather loudly.
Not loudness, but silence, was happening on the Eastern Front. The thaw, as has already been mentioned, severely hampered both Russian and German efforts to launch offensives.
1943, the decisive year of the whole Barbarossa Campaign, had begun.
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Goebbels' rallying Sportspalast speech to the nation after the German defeat at Stalingrad