Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (43 page)

Meanwhile, Sixth Army was dying. Its demise was hastened on January 16, 1943, when it lost Pitomnik, the last usable airstrip in the pocket. Utterly unsuitable and dangerous strips at Gumrak and Stalingradskiy were used for the next few days, but Gumrak was lost on the twenty-first. That same day six transports were wrecked during landings at Stalingradskiy, because the deep snow on the runway concealed deep shell craters. The last Ju-52 landed at Stalingradskiy at 12:20
P
.
M
. the next day and was fortunate enough to take off again unharmed with the last load of wounded and a few sacks of mail. From now on supplies would have to be airdropped, which entailed a further loss of supplies, because many supply containers disappeared into snow banks, were lost in the ruins of the city, or were blown off course, to land behind Russian lines.
⁸⁷
All the while, the pocket continued to shrink.

Salsk was evacuated about the same time Pitomnik fell. The Ju-52s flew to their last “airfield” within range of Stalingrad. It was a cornfield called Zverevo, the most primitive facility imaginable. The runway consisted of packed snow over the naked ground. There were no buildings at all. Ground crews and pilots worked out of snow huts and, later, tents. The He-111 airstrips in the vicinity were evacuated because of the nearness of the Soviet armor, but the Ju-52s had nowhere else to go: one more retreat would carry them beyond the range of Stalingrad.

The Red Air Force attacked Zverevo on January 18. All of the German flak units had long since been committed to ground combat, and the Ruman ian antiaircraft unit assigned to protect the field took cover as soon as the Russians appeared. Thirty more transports were knocked out; ten of them were completely destroyed. The survivors nevertheless continued resupply operations.

On January 22, the Russians again called on Paulus to surrender and threatened to massacre the entire garrison if he did not comply. The trapped Hessian radioed for instructions. Both Manstein and Zeitzler believed he should capitulate, but Hitler rejected the idea, saying that the Communists would not abide by any conventions or international agreements and that no prisoners would survive Soviet captivity anyway. He was almost right on this point: only about 7,000 of the 90,000 men who finally surrendered ever lived to see home again.

The final assault on Stalingrad began on January 23. Three days later the pocket was cut in half. Paulus (now a field marshal) surrendered on January 31, and the last pocket of resistance was eliminated on February 2. The German Army had suffered its most decisive defeat.

Wolfram von Richthofen was referred to by Professor Suchenwirth as the only “man of vision and resolution” in the Stalingrad relief effort.
⁸⁸
During the seventy days of operation, 4th Air Fleet had flown 6,591 tons of supplies and evacuated 24,910 sick and wounded soldiers, according to General Morzik’s estimate.
⁸⁹
Irving’s figures are somewhat higher: 8,350 tons delivered in seventy-two days, for an average of 116 tons per day.
⁹⁰
General Plocher stated that 4th Air Fleet could have flown 200 to 300 tons per day to the garrison had there been good weather, but there was no good weather.
⁹¹

The 4th Air Fleet flew well over 3,400 missions in logistical support of the Sixth Army during the siege.
⁹²
It lost 488 transport aircraft alone: 266 Ju-52s, 165 He-111s, 42 Ju-86s, 9 FW-200s, 5 He-111s, and 1 Ju-290.
⁹³
Of these, 166 were outright losses, 108 were missing, and 214 were so badly damaged that they could not be repaired. This was enough to equip five full wings—a whole air corps, and a large one at that (by 1942 standards).
⁹⁴
Nazi Germany had lost well over half of its Ju-52 transport fleet, as well as the majority of its experienced crews and many of its instructor pilots—losses it could never replace.
⁹⁵
The veteran 9th Flak Division was also destroyed when Stalingrad fell. It had destroyed 174 Soviet tanks and shot down 63 Russian aircraft during the siege.
⁹⁶

The Stalingrad airlift failed for numerous reasons. Fourth Air Fleet had to support several operations simultaneously. The size of the encircled force was too large, the number of available aircraft was too small, the air bases and technical facilities were inadequate, the distances involved were too great, the forward bases could not be held, the number of fighter-escorts was insufficient, supply lines were too long, the season was wrong, and the weather was awful. The underlying cause for the disaster, however, was that the battle should never have been fought in the first place. Hitler was wrong in rejecting the advice of his generals and insisting that Sixth Army remain where it was, in Stalingrad. Richthofen bluntly told the Fuehrer all of this and more to his face in a conference at the Wolf’s Lair on February 11. The supreme commander, he said, should give his army commanders freedom of action and stop “leading them by the scruff of the neck as though they were children.” When Hitler tried to justify his behavior by saying that they would be fighting in Germany by now if he had not acted as he did, the baron contradicted him. Hitler, still shaken by the magnitude of his defeat, was impressed by Richthofen’s frankness. He decided it was time to make him field marshal.
⁹⁷
Richthofen’s promotion was made effective on February 16, 1943.
⁹⁸

The Siege of Stalingrad had cost the Axis 270,000 soldiers, as well as 488 aircraft, most of them with their crews. Goering, as usual, was looking for scapegoats. He announced his intention of court-martialling Jeschonnek and General of Flyers Hans-Georg von Seidel, the chief of supply and administration of the Luftwaffe, because they were responsible for the disaster, but Hitler would not allow it. He knew where the real blame lay. He later told Manstein: “I alone am responsible for Stalingrad. I could perhaps put some of the blame on Goering by saying he gave me an incorrect picture of the Luftwaffe’s potentialities. But he has been appointed by me as my successor, and as such I cannot charge him with the responsibility for Stalingrad.”
⁹⁹
Unofficially, however, he held Goering at fault, as in fact he was. “I certainly got the blame,” Goering recalled later. “From that time on, the relationship between the Fuehrer and myself steadily deteriorated.”
¹⁰⁰

CHAPTER 11

The Bombings Begin, 1942

W
hile the bulk of the Luftwaffe was engaged on the Russian front, the R.A.F. recovered from the Battle of Britain. British industry, which had necessarily concentrated on the production of defensive aircraft (fighters) in 1940 and the first half of 1941, turned its efforts toward offensive aircraft (bombers) in the latter half of the year. In early 1942 the R.A.F. began to bomb Germany in earnest. Prior to then, the British raids were of little more than nuisance value. Certainly Hermann Goering did not take them very seriously. In the fall of 1941, he said to Galland, Kammhuber, and Moelders of the Western defensive measures: “This whole phoney mess won’t be necessary any more once I get my squadrons back to the West.”
¹

The first major raid came against Luebeck. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, commander-in-chief of the R.A.F. Bomber Command, chose it as the target because it was “built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation.”
²
Its wooden buildings were built close together, especially in the
Altstadt
, the medieval center of the town. Also, the city was known to be lightly defended.

On the night of March 28–29, 1942, Bomber Command dropped about five hundred tons of high-explosive and incendiaries on the town. More than 250 people were killed and some 200 acres of buildings were destroyed—about half of the old city. In the suburbs another 2,000 homes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
³
Dr. Goebbels called the damage “enormous.”
⁴

The raid on Luebeck was followed by raids against the Baltic seaport of Rostock on four consecutive nights, from April 23–27. Also an ancient city and lightly defended, Rostock was devastated. The R.A.F. employed 468 bombers, many of which were new Lancasters (carrying six-ton bombs). Sixty percent of all houses in the center of the town were destroyed, the center of the town was reduced to rubble, and the Heinkel plant was severely damaged.
⁵
Goebbels called it “terror bombing.”
⁶

The
Terrorangriffen
(“terror attacks”) reached new heights on the night of May 30–31, when the R.A.F. conducted its first thousand-bomber raid of the war. The attacks reached Cologne shortly after midnight and dropped 1,500 tons of bombs on the city—including 8,300 small incendiary (“stick”) bombs, plus HE, phosphorus, fire bomb canisters, and heavy mine bombs. Their targets were not the Rhine River port facilities or the armaments factories in the area, nor the military bases nearby. They aimed for the heart of the city. Entire streets were wiped out. Some twelve thousand fires were started. The mixture of bombs was devastating. The explosive bombs blocked streets, so fire engines could not get to many of the burning buildings. Some 18,500 buildings were destroyed, 9,500 heavily damaged, and 31,000 partially damaged. Four hundred eighty-six civilians were killed, 5,000 wounded, and 100,000 left homeless—more than 59,000 of them permanently so.
⁷
The entire raid had taken only ninety minutes. Fortunately for the inhabitants, Cologne was one of the eighty-two cities Hitler had singled out in his decree of September, 1940, which ordered accelerated construction of air raid shelters. When the bombs struck there were 500 public air raid shelters (enough to protect 75,000 people), 42,000 private air raid shelters, 14 auxiliary hospitals, 27 emergency first-aid stations, and 14 stations for secondary medical assistance in the city, with 29 more medical facilities under construction.
⁸
Without these measures, the civilian death toll would have been much higher.