A World at Arms (84 page)

THE EASTERN FRONT: HALTING THE GERMAN ADVANCE IN THE SOUTH

Whatever the diversions to the West and the Mediterranean and whatever direct aid might be sent, the basic problem of stemming the Germans was one for the Red Army. In August and the first weeks of September, that looked frighteningly difficult. German forces were still pushing into the Caucasus; Soviet troops were still retreating. Some of the local people, unhappy with Soviet rule (as most of them had been with the Tsarist rule imposed on them in nineteenth–century conquests), collaborated with the Germans in the foolish hope of receiving better treatment and more independence from Berlin than from Moscow. On July 28, Stalin issued the famous Order No. 227 calling on the soldiers not to take a step back, appealing to their patriotism, and threatening dire punishment for any who retreated.
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The reinforcements sent did begin to stiffen resistance during September. On the Black Sea coast, in the mountain passes, and before Grozny, the Russian forces were recovering. Fighting more effectively, they were slowing down the German advance. In a few instances, German spearheads still managed to make occasional substantial advances, but by mid-September the situation was clearly changing.

The German reaction to the increasingly difficult fighting they were
now facing took two forms. One was of the ordinary type. They tried to speed up the sending of supplies, occasionally air lifting them, and they hoped to move additional troops to the front, including Italian mountain divisions to fight in the Caucasus.
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The other reaction was rather different. It was a confusion of visionary plans and drastic personnel changes. On September 12 Hitler explained to the commanders of the thrust to the east that they were not only to seize Stalingrad but thereafter to move on to the Caspian Sea, take Astrakhan and carry out all sorts of other projects.
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While he incorrectly imagined that all was going wonderfully on that eastward thrust (to be reviewed below), Hitler correctly sensed that the Caucasus operation was running into difficulty, and he reacted by a series of drastic personnel changes. Earlier he had sent home the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B; now he dropped Field Marshal List, the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group A, and for a while took over direction of the Army Group himself on September 10. A few days later he dismissed General Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff since 1938, and appointed Kurt Zeitzler who had been Chief of Staff of the Army Group in the West. His break with the highest military commanders was such that he ordered stenographic records made of his military conferences thereafter and for a while barely spoke to Keitel and Jodl, intending to replace the latter with General Paulus, the 6th Army commander.
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This series of changes should in my judgement be seen as reflecting a real break in Hitler’s view of the campaign. If all had been going as well as he thought, and if his revised plan for the offensive with its two simultaneous thrusts was as brilliant as he was certain it had to be, and if the Soviet Union was as exhausted as he believed, and if the Red Army was falling apart and without substantial reserves, as most higher German military leaders asserted, the only possible explanation for the difficulties on the road to Tuapse, Sukhumi and Grozny must be either a bad plan–and he was certainly not about to acknowledge that–or the incompetence of his generals. Change in these was obviously needed and he acted accordingly. But the reality of stiffening Soviet resistance and of exhaustion among the German assault columns was not affected by Hitler’s refusal to eat his meals with Keitel and Jodl or by the various personnel changes under way and contemplated. As for reinforcing the German Caucasus offensive with additional divisions, this was impossible, in part because some of the available forces had been sent north for the attack on Leningrad, in part because during August and September the eastward thrust toward Stalingrad was running into trouble of its own and came to have first call on whatever manpower and supplies could be sent.

In July, the Stavka had concentrated on Stalingrad before the Germans had focused their attention on it. Major steps to mobilize additional resources in defense of the city were taken in mid-July, a Stalingrad Front was established, and new forces were sent to it, some of them from reserves originally built up to defend Moscow against the anticipated German attacks there. From the Soviet perspective, Stalingrad was important not only as a major industrial center and as a place where the Germans could halt all shipping on the Volga but as the major connecting point to any operations in the Caucasus. Furthermore, it was far easier to reinforce from the center of the country than the front further south. The original plan was to hold the eastern portion of the great bend of the Don river and the river itself above and below that bend. Above the bend, the Germans were deploying the divisions of their allies to hold the advance line; below it they quickly advanced into the North Caucasus as already described. In the bend itself, the German 6th Army was to advance against the Stalingrad Front.
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The diversion of forces and supplies to the advance into the Caucasus had left the 6th Army stranded for ten days without the gasoline needed to move forward. As it resumed its advance in the second half of July, it began to be slowed down not by supply shortages but by stiffening Soviet resistance.
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The Germans thereupon split their 4th Panzer Army, with the headquarters and three of its corps heading for Stalingrad from the southwest, while one corps was added to the 1st Panzer Army which was going southward. During the first part of August, the 6th Army was able to destroy a large proportion of the Red Army units in the Don bend while 4th Panzer swept up over 50 miles from the southwest. In the last ten days of the month, the northern German attacks broke across the Don, and reached the Volga north of the city of Stalingrad even as the southern pincer reached the city’s edge and made contact with the 6th Army. By September 3, the city was besieged from northwest and south with the broad river behind it to the east.
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The Russian high command was not about to allow the city to fall without a bitter fight. General (later Marshal) A. I. Eremenko, recovered from wounds suffered earlier in the war, was sent to command the Stalingrad Front; Zhukov was recalled from an assignment on the Central front and sent to direct counter-attacks against the 6th Army on its exposed northern flank between the Don and Volga rivers. In the city itself, another very able commander, General V.I. Chuikov, was put in charge of 62nd Army, the main defending force. A steady stream of reinforcements was sent in during the last days of August and the first days of September so that the Soviet commanders on the spot began to have substantial forces to work with.
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Counter-attacks from the north battered the Germans on September 5 and 6 but were held by the Germans who pushed into the city in the following days. As more Soviet troops were sent into the city, the fighting began to be a block-by-block slogging match, moving back and forth in bloody fighting. Heavy losses for both sides characterized the street fighting, but when another major Soviet counter–attack on the 18th and 19th failed to drive back the Germans, the latter were left in control of much of the city. But they did not have all of it, had enormous difficulties in going forward and did not want to go back. The Soviets, on the other hand, were in a difficult situation as well. Their remaining troops in portions of the city were in desperate straits, and the two initial sets of counter-attacks had failed to dislodge the Germans. Both sides had new choices to make.
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The Germans could, theoretically, have pulled back to the Don, used their regrouped army to clear out all Soviet bridgeheads across the Don, and simply held there. No serious consideration appears to have been given to this possibility. But if the city were to be taken, additional troops were needed. In the immediate vicinity these could come only from the German units still west of the Don masking the Soviet Don bridgeheads. The decision was taken to do this, replacing the German troops with Romanian divisions previously assigned to the Caucasus campaign. What this meant was that added miles of the northern flank of Army Group B would be assigned to Germany’s allies while the German troops of 6th Army battered their way block by block and house by house through the city. It is surely worthy of mention that the tactic frequently utilized by the Germans earlier in the war, the surrounding of a major city by armored spearheads cutting it off, was never contemplated; the forces needed for such an operation simply no longer existed.

There is no evidence that at this time Hitler was willing either to give up one of the major projections on the Eastern Front, like those at Demyansk or Rzhev, to free up reserves which could be sent to nourish or to shield the Stalingrad offensive or to transfer major units from the West on the assumption that after mid-September the weather precluded an invasion across the Channel.
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Hitler also deliberately gave up the one other way of rebuilding the strength of the German army divisions which were slowly bleeding away on the Eastern Front. The German air force had tens of thousands of men in excess of its needs and these could have been sent for retraining as infantry replacements. Since Göring was unwilling to give them up to the influence of reactionary army officers, a sentiment Hitler strongly shared, they were organized into “air force field divisions” instead. These units of untrained men led by equally unprepared officers would
be the bane of Germany’s armed forces in the short period of their existence. Horrendous casualties to no useful military purpose were the result of this grotesque innovation.
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The weeks following September 20 were accordingly ones in which the German troops ground forward slowly, in the process focusing public attention inside Germany on the city named for the leader of the Soviet Union. Hitler only added to this fixation by his own repeated references to it in speeches on September 30 and November 8, 1942.
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This was one city, he assured everyone inside and outside the country publicly, that Germany already held and would never give up. What the German soldiers fighting in the ruins of the city thought of these remarks is not recorded.

Stalin had decided to do everything possible to hold the city or whatever portions of it the Red Army could cling to, but acting with advice from Vasilevsky and Zhukov, he came to see this not merely as a matter of getting reinforcements into the struggle for every house and factory. Beginning on September 12 and continuing thereafter, plans were developed for an operation code-named “Uranus” which looked to a very different form of defense for the city. New armies were to be pulled together for a huge pincer operation that would strike out of the Don bridgeheads in the north and across the steppe in the south to cut off the German forces battering their way forward inside the city. It would be necessary to send minimal, not maximum, reinforcements into the fighting inside Stalingrad so that the Soviet units there might hopefully hold out and in the process keep the German army occupied there. Simultaneously, a carefully coordinated buildup would be organized at the two intended axes of advance with every precaution taken to keep this project concealed from the Germans and to delude them about the strength and direction of the planned operation.
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As the exhausted soldiers of both sides grappled with each other in the rubble of the city, the Red Army began to implement its dispositions for “Uranus.” With great circumspection, troops and equipment were gathered for the offensive. Unlike the prior counter-attacks into the German 6th Army’s northern flank, in which arriving units had been thrown into battle practically from the march and piecemeal, this time massive assault forces were gathered and supplies for them collected, with all such reinforcement held back until the date set for the great counter-offensive. If the center could hold and the Germans could be kept ignorant of the plan, the prospects for success were great.
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These prospects were actually increased by four other factors. First, there was the general unwillingness of the Germans at this stage of the war to credit the Soviets with the ability to develop and implement a
coherent offensive operation on a major scale and in depth. Secondly, the steps which the Germans themselves had taken to reinforce the push into Stalingrad without providing added German troops left the northern flank of their assault entirely and the southern flank very largely entrusted to Romanian troops, whom the Gerhians had not provided with the equipment needed to fight off a Soviet attack. Thirdly, the Germans had some information on another Soviet offensive project for the Central front, code-named “Mars,” which may well have been intended as an alternative to “Uranus” if the Germans had taken all of Stalingrad, or pulled back there, or if other developments had made “Uranus” impossible.
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Finally, although it is very difficult to define or to document, there appears to have been a real stiffening of morale in the Soviet Union and in the Red Army after the “no step back” decree of July 28. As the fronts held, the Soviet Union appeared to get a second breath; a new sense that the disasters of the summer could again, as in 1941, be overcome, and that the invader might once more be halted and thrown back appeared in the country. The soldiers fought and died in Stalingrad while the forces for “Uranus” were being assembled. The rest of the Eastern Front, however, had not been quiet all summer and into the fall and must be examined.

THE EASTERN FRONT: NORTHERN AND CENTRAL PORTIONS

At the far northern end of the front, there were no significant land operations after the Soviet spring offensive had been halted. German projects for new attacks had to be scrapped because no new divisions could be sent. On the main front in Finland, there were renewed plans for a German drive on Kandalaksha and a Finnish drive to Belomorsk, both designed to cut the Murmansk railway. Neither of these offensives was ever launched because both depended on the Germans taking Leningrad and thereby relieving Finnish units for the Belomorsk and German reinforcements for the Kandalaksha operation. From the perspective of the Germans, therefore, all land actions in the north depended on the offensive in the Leningrad area, ordered in the basic April directive as a follow up to the main attack in the southern segment of the Eastern Front.
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