Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (23 page)
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Authors: Peter Tsouras
The fighting in Stalingrad was so close and bitter that the German soldiers called it
Der Rattenkrieg.
Warrant Officer Vassili Zaitsev with his Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle.
Oberjäger Heinz Pohl with his Kar 98k rifle. He took on the cover name of Major König to deceive the Soviets in the fighting in Stalingrad. He and Zaitsev combined to change the course of history.
‘Manstein is Coming!’ The LX Panzer Corps’
Grossdeutschland
and 6th Panzer Divisions broke through, keeping Manstein’s promise to relieve the surrounded German armies.
The Terror Raid
The 62nd Army had been consumed in the fighting west of the river. All of its divisions had been destroyed, and only remnants and its headquarters had escaped over the river. The forces left to 1st Tank Army were transferred to the 62nd, and the tank army disappeared. It also picked up one division from 64th Army, most of which had been able to escape over the Don thanks to Chuikov’s leadership.
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In wiping out the Kalach pocket, the Germans had not been able to bounce across the river immediately because 6th Army by this time was both exhausted and its combat power badly depleted. There were only 163 tanks left in the army’s panzer corps. Despite the Soviet losses in the bridgehead, the Germans had been badly wounded as well. The combat power of a number of the infantry divisions had fallen dangerously, with severe losses since the offensive had begun. Many were reduced to companies of forty to fifty men, even before they had crossed the Don.
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It was not until 16 August that the main bridge over the Don at Kalach was seized in a daring attack by Leutnant Kleinjohan and men of the 16th Pioneer Battalion. Incredibly the Soviets had not destroyed the bridge after the remnants of the Kalach pocket had fled across it. The western bank of the Don was much higher than the eastern and gave the Germans a splendid view of the hasty defences the Soviets were throwing up. Five days later, at dawn, the infantry of Seydlitz’s LI Corps marched across the bridge and straight into combat against a violent Soviet defence.
Seydlitz’s infantry widened the bridgehead to a depth of over a mile and width of 3 miles. The next night XIV Panzer Corps assembled on the west bank and watched as burning vehicles lit the way for an endless Soviet air attack on the bridge. This failed, and with first light on 23 August, 16th Panzer Division began to cross. It assumed a wedge formation as it passed through the German lines to burst through the Soviet defences and head northeast to its objective of the Volga.
By afternoon, with dust trails billowing behind them, they could see the silhouette of Stalingrad to their right. Every tank commander stood in his turret to watch. As they passed the northern suburbs a mass of antiaircraft guns opened up on them, but at point-blank range the panzers smashed every position at almost no loss. The antiaircraft batteries had been manned by female volunteers from the Red Barricade gun factory in Stalingrad. The women had not been able to fire an effective shot in return, so poorly trained were they in the antitank capabilities of their guns.
In the late afternoon:
The first German tank drove past the northern suburb of Rynok onto the elevated western bank of the Volga. The bank towered almost 300 feet above the mile-wide stream. The water was dark. A chain of tugs and steamers sailed up and down the river. The Asiatic steppe glistened across from the other side: a melancholy greeting from the infinite space.
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That afternoon two German Messerschmitt Me 109 fighters flew over the division and were so overjoyed to see the advance made by their comrades on the ground that they did victory rolls over the tanks.
Roosevelt was not happy with the way the meeting was going. Stalin’s message had brought them all together to discuss its requests. The last sentence was the controversial one.
With reference to what you say about the despatch of tanks and other strategic materials from the United States in August, I should like to emphasise our special interest in receiving US aircraft and other weapons, as well as trucks in the greatest numbers possible. It is my hope that every step will be taken to ensure early delivery of the cargoes to the Soviet Union, particularly over the northern sea route.
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The President’s special assistant and trusted confidant, Harry Hopkins, was there as the administrator of Lend-Lease. Hopkins was so close to FDR that he lived in the White House. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White was present because all monetary Lend-Lease issues of coordination with the Soviets went through him. The State Department was represented by Alger Hiss. Admiral King was having a hard time not shaking the teeth out of the three of them. He would have done a lot more had he known that all three were communists and agents of the Soviet Union. Never before had treason wrapped its coils so closely around an American presidency. The chief NKVD officer in the United States described Hopkins as ‘the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States’.
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Even Roosevelt had said, ‘Harry and Uncle Joe got on like a house afire. They have become buddies.’
6
Hiss was actually using Lend-Lease transport to send highly classified US Government documents to the Soviet Union.
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White was adamant. ‘Mr. President, we absolutely must, I repeat, must resume our convoys to the Soviet Union. If they go under, we cannot win the war against Germany.’
Hopkins added, ‘There is a good chance, given the German drive towards the Volga, that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler if he thinks we are stinting on aid.’
Roosevelt looked closely at him. ‘Did he ever mention that to you, Harry?’
‘Not in so many words, but some of his closest advisors were a lot more explicit.’
Turning to King, Roosevelt said, ‘Now just when can we resume the Arctic convoys, Admiral?’
King had had enough. ‘You will have to ask my successor, Mr President, because if you order the resumption of the convoys I will offer you my resignation.’
Roosevelt straightened up in his wheelchair he was so surprised. He knew King was as blunt and salty a sea dog as ever ran the US Navy, but he was not used to such an ultimatum, anyway not since Douglas MacArthur had issued a similar threat back in 1934 over cutting the training budget for the National Guard. He had caved then, just as he was going to do now.
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Units falling back into Stalingrad were amazed to find a veneer of normality after the relentless German pounding and constant retreating. The novelist Victor Nekrasov recorded his impressions:
Shabby old trams clattered along towards us. There were lines of snub-nosed Studebakers. On them were long boxes - shells for the ‘Katyusha’. On the empty squares, crossed with trenches, there were antiaircraft guns pointing upwards, and ready for action. In the market were great piles of tomatoes and cucumbers and huge bottles of amber-coloured baked milk. Here and there could be seen people in jackets, caps and even ties. It was a long time since I’d seen that. The women still wore lipstick.
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It was not to stay that way for long.
During their afternoon dash to the Volga the men of XIV Panzer Corps saw the massed might of Luftflotte 4 flying towards Stalingrad and greeted it with cheers and sirens. They were witnessing the preamble to one of the great aerial terror raids of the war. Its aim was to break the will of the population and defenders and it was directed against the dense downtown residential areas, factories and utilities. The antiaircraft batteries quickly ran out of ammunition because some officious fool had concentrated all their ammunition in one place. The Germans had identified it and specifically targeted it.
MAP №5 STALINGRAD
Nekrasov and his companions watched transfixed from a balcony. ‘From behind the station the planes came in a steady stream, just as they do in a flypast. I had never seen so many of them. They flew in flocks, black, repulsive, unperturbed, at various levels.’
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These flocks were all part of a 1,600-sortie sequence of raids. Incendiaries ignited the wooden housing in the southwest of the city. Closer to the river, the tall white blocks of apartments were reduced to shells. A ball of flame 1,500 feet high erupted from the exploding oil tanks along the Volga, spewing burning oil across the broad river. The huge cloud of oily smoke would be seen 200 miles away. The telephone exchange and the waterworks were destroyed, the main hospital bombed, and even the bakeries had been targeted. The dead were everywhere.
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General Yeremenko wrote:
We’d been through a lot in the war up to that time, but what we saw in Stalingrad on 23 August was something completely different. Bombs were exploding all around us and the sky was filled with columns of fiery smoke ... Asphalt on the street emitted choking fumes and telegraph poles flared up like matches. The earth of Stalingrad was crumpled and blackened. The city seemed to have been struck by a terrible hurricane, which whirled in the air, showering the streets and squares with rubble.
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The city had been stunned. The raids would continue for the next few days killing at least 40,000 people. Luftflotte 4 lost only three aircraft. It was the largest raid on the Ostfront since the beginning of the war. Appropriately it was the apogee of the career of Luftflotte 4’s commander, Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, who had first made his name in the terror bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. The close German ground-air coordination that Chuikov found so admirable was due to Richthofen’s innovations.
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On 25 August, two days after the German panzers had reached the Volga north of the city, the Stavka declared a state of siege. The terror bombing continued to smash the city into rubble. Everything now rode on the city’s defence. If it fell the rail links and the equally valuable river links to the Caucasus and Caspian Sea would be lost, slamming shut another funnel of Allied aid and cutting off 70 per cent of the Soviet Union’s oil. The result would be systemic collapse of the war effort and the Soviet state. Stalin realized that he himself would be consumed by this scenario. He had consigned too many people to oblivion to believe he would escape. The Germans had a word for what was looming he thought. They called it
Götterdammerung,
the death of the gods and the end of the world. He could taste the irony. Only briefly. Philosophy was of no use in this crisis. Sheer will was, and Stalin had that iron trait as few men had.
Stalin had defended this city on the Volga in the civil war. Then it had been named Tsaritsyn. In his honour it had been renamed Stalingrad, Stalin’s city. Rebuilt as a communist industrial showplace it now boasted a population of half a million. It was a significant arms producer with four huge factories. The new Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory had been converted to tank production when the war started. One of the oldest artillery makers in the country had been refurbished and named Barrikady Gun Factory. Other important factories were the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) Iron Works and the Lazur Chemical Factory. There were oil refineries as well, with oil tanks along the river.
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Volunteer factory workers were pressed into defence units and teenage girls and young women from the Komsomol were encouraged ‘strongly’ to join air defence batteries, such as the ones destroyed by XIV Panzer Corps. Evacuation of the population had begun, but factory workers remained behind to keep turning out war material, especially the T-34s from the Tractor Factory. They were given rudimentary military training.
The city stretched for 20 miles along the Volga and nowhere was more than 2 miles deep. A grid of straight streets ran perpendicular to the river as did a number of deep gullies, both of which offered quick routes of penetration to an attacker. The western approaches were high ground that dominated the city, and the defenders would have the broad Volga at their backs, a barrier to retreat as well as a barrier to be crossed by any reinforcements and supplies. On military grounds it was a wretched place to try to defend.
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The Stalingrad Defence Committee ruthlessly stripped nearby collective farms of their grain reserves and hunted down anyone guilty of defeatism or disloyalty. On the collective farms,
thousands of Stalingrad’s citizens were finishing the job of snatching a bumper wheat harvest from the invaders. The arms crews out there had been straining under the brutal sun while the Stuka dive-bombers machine-gunned them and set fire to trains filled with grain. Nevertheless, nearly 27,000 fully loaded freight cars had already rolled away to safety in the east. Behind them came 9,000 tractors, threshers, and combines along with two million head of cattle, bawling plaintively as they pounded towards the Volga and a swim to the safety of the far shore.
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With the start of the war Stalin had ordered rings of defences to be built around the city, but spring floods had washed them out. Some 200,000 men and women in the region were mobilized to rebuild them.
As in Moscow the year before, women in kerchiefs and older children were marched out and given long-handled shovels and baskets to dig antitank ditches over six feet deep in the sandy earth. While the women dug, army sappers laid heavy antitank mines on the western side.
Most of it was too little too late; the defences were only 30 per cent complete when the Germans came charging right through them.
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