Enemy at the Gates (27 page)

Pickert's answer was incisive. "Get the hell out of here!"

Schmidt agreed but went on, "We cannot do that. For one thing, we don't have enough gas."

Pickert offered to help with his antiaircraft troops, who could manhandle guns across the flat land and carry ammunition by hand.

Schmidt continued, "We have, of course, considered breaking out, but to reach the Don means thirty miles of steppe without any cover. . . . No, Pickett, it could only have a Napoleonic ending. . . . The army has been ordered to hold its ground at Stalingrad. Consequently we shall fortify our positions and expect supplies from the air."

Pickert could not believe what he heard. ". . . From the air? In this weather? It's quite out of the question. You must get out, I say. Get started now!"

But Sixth Army did not get started. Even though General Paulus was convinced it should, he continued to wait for Hitler's approval. In the meantime, he put his army on alert to move quickly in case permission came.

At 2:00
P.M
., after Hoth had flown west to gather together he remnants of his shattered Fourth Army, Paulus and Schmidt went back to Gumrak at the edge of Stalingrad. Flying over the bulk of their army, hemmed in between the Don and Volga, the generals saw bright fires on both sides of the aircraft as men of the Sixth Army began to burn unneeded equipment.

Warehouses filled with food and clothing were being put to the torch. At one of them, Lt. Gerhard Dietzel tried to salvage something from the flames. Seeing a cache of champagne and wine about to be consumed, he raced back and forth between the inferno and his Volkswagen with armfuls of bottles. When the car was filled, Dietzel jumped in and started the motor. A supply officer blocked his way:

"Can you pay for it?" he demanded.

Dietzel began to laugh uproariously. Pointing at the raging fires, he replied, "But, don't you see, money doesn't mean anything anymore!" He gunned the motor and raced off with his treasure.

At Kalach, Russian Colonel Fillipov unexpectedly received reinforcements when tanks of the 26th Armored Brigade charged across the bridge and joined him at the eastern edge of town. It was incredible, but with German resistance only sporadic and ineffective, the 26th Brigade then wheeled southeast out of Kalach and headed toward the village of Sovetsky, thirty miles away. And somewhere beyond Sovetsky, General Yeremenko's southern-front troops were driving up toward a junction with their comrades.

German soldiers inside the rapidly developing pocket learned of their plight in different ways.

At a field hospital, a pharmacist named Wendt was passing out morphine and bandages to medics when a soldier ran in and announced: "The Russians have closed the bridge at Karach!" Wendt thought he was joking, but when a friend phoned headquarters and confirmed the story, Wendt refused to panic. He thought the mess would be cleaned up quickly.

A veteran sergeant, Eugen Steinhilber, learned the bitter truth when several of his comrades left by bus to go to Chir, and from there back to Germany for furlough. They were back in a few hours, saying: "We can't get over the Don. The Russians have the bridge." Since Steinhilber had been in a pocket once before and gotten out safely, the news failed to faze him. He had just written to his wife, "By December I'll be home. I'll go back to school . . . and finish my training as electrical engineer…."

From his new Gumrak command post, Paulus sent another urgent cable. In it, he begged for the chance to save his Army:

HQ Sixth Army

G 3 Section

22 November 42, 1900 hours

Radio Message

To Army Group B

The Army is encircled…. South front still open east of the Don. Don frozen over and crossable….There is little fuel left; once that is used up, tanks and heavy weapons will be immobile
.
Ammunition is short, provisions will last for six more days….Request freedom of action….Situation might compel abandonment of Stalingrad and northern front….

Three hours later he received a vague answer from the Führer, "Sixth Army must know that I am doing everything to help and to relieve it….I shall issue my orders in good time."

Hitler was still puzzled about how to save Paulus, but until he decided on the best course of action he intended to keep Sixth Army in position. Most of that afternoon was spent with Kurt Zeitzler and Albert Jeschonnek. Both officers had come to the
Berghof
determined to sway Hitler from the idea of an airlift; Jeschonnek pointed out the problems of weather and insufficient airfields within flying distance of Stalingrad.

Though Zeitzler felt Jeschonnek was not forceful enough in making his case, Hermann Goering thought otherwise when he heard details of the conference. He called Jeschonnek and warned him not to "put the Führer out of sorts."

That night, Hitler came down from his mountain and went by train to Leipzig, where a plane waited to fly him to Rastenburg, East Prussia. He would issue orders later.

Chapter Seventeen

In an earthen bunker just west of Gumrak Airfield, an impatient Friedrich von Paulus waited for the Führer to allow him to quit the Volga. To reinforce his argument, Paulus again reminded his immediate superiors of the perils Sixth Army faced:

23 November, 1145 hours

To Army Group B:

Murderous attacks on all fronts….Arrival of sufficient air supplies is not believed possible, even if weather should improve. The ammunition and fuel situation will render the troops defenseless in the very near future….

Paulus

Once again Army Group B forwarded the message on to Hitler at Rastenburg, along with the comment by General von Weichs who agreed totally with Paulus's analysis of the situation.

On the steppe beyond the Don, General Heim's 48th Panzer Corps continued its swirling series of tank battles with marauding Soviet columns. As a result, it was impossible to link up with any Rumanian forces still fighting on the vast plain. Russian radiojammers even managed to convey bogus signals to any units seeking General Heim.

Between the Chir and Kletskaya at the Don, the last Rumanian outposts were about to fall. Gen. Mihail Lascar, a mustachioed strongman, had collected elements of four divisions in the midst of "burning houses and Rumanian corpses." The Russians called on him to surrender and he wired German Army Group B for authority to break out. By the time permission arrived, he was trapped. Instead of surrendering, Lascar released four thousand men and sent them to seek union, if they could do so, with Heim's 48th Panzer Corps, somewhere on the steppe. Then Lascar walked into captivity, his reputation unsullied by defeat. The battlefield he left "was a fantastic sight…full of dead horses…some horses were only half dead, standing on three frozen legs, shaking the remaining broken one…."

The soldiers he had released wandered dazedly, begging food, freezing to death beside the road. A trail of bodies marked each highway, down which roared lengthening columns of Russian tanks and trucks; only a few Rumanians reached Heim, who shepherded them and his ill-fated panzers south toward freedom. Miraculously, his forces made it to the bank of the river Chir. But within hours, German military police arrested him. Hitler had accused him of dereliction of duty in not stopping the Soviet offensive with his mobile reserves. The Führer insisted that Heim had disobeyed Army High Command instructions radioed to him in the field and thus had failed to attack the enemy at crucial times in the first hours of conflict. Stunned by the charges against him, Heim went home to Germany to face a military tribunal.

During a tense, gloomy conference at Rostov, General Steflea, the Rumanian Army chief of staff, met with a German liaison Qfficer and read field reports of Lascar's surrender. Appalled at what had happened to his Third and Fourth armies, Steflea berated his ally: “All the warnings which for weeks I have been giving to the German authorities have passed unheeded….Of the four divisions of the Fourth Rumanian Army there are only three battalions left…German Army Headquarters failed to meet our requirements. And that is why two Rumanian armies have been destroyed.”

The German liaison officer could not rebut the charges. Instead, he promised to pass on General Steflea's statements to higher authority.

At roadblocks outside the town of Sovetsky, fifteen miles southeast of the bridge at Kalach, Soviet T-34 tanks dueled at ten-yard range with German rear guards trying to hold the village. The din of this battle reached Russian tankers of Gen. Viktor Volsky's 4th Mechanized Corps as they cautiously probed the fields south and west of the town. Nervous because they were close to lead elements of the Russian spearheads from the northern Don offensive, they kept shooting green recognition flares to announce their own presence. Just before 4:00
P.M.
on November 23, another series of green flares soared upward from the northwest and Volsky's T-34s roared ahead. Hundreds of white-clad Russians surged toward them and the two forces came together in a frenzy of shouts, embraces, and tears.

Almost hysterical with joy, the Russian soldiers danced about in the snow to celebrate an incredible triumph. In less than ninetysix hours, they had sprung a trap around the German Sixth Army. Inside that "pocket" were more than 250 thousand German troops —prisoners, isolated on a vast plain of snow.

All over Russia, radio announcers were hailing the Red Army's incredible victories. The names Kalach and Sovetsky rang through the airwaves as the Soviet people heard for the first time of the encirclement at Stalingrad.

But in Moscow, Stalin did not celebrate. The premier had "gotten his blood up" as he sensed an even greater opportunity for his armies in the south. Looking at the maps, he saw the possibility of creating an even larger pocket. Several hundred miles below the encirclement at the Volga, German Army Group A stood immobile in the Caucasus. If the Red Army could capture the city of Rostov on the Sea of Azov, the Stalingrad trap would become just a minor phase of a greater triumph. Thus Stalin urged his generals on:

To Comrade Dontsov [Rokossovsky] 23 November 1942

Copy for Comrade Mikhailov [Vasilevsky] 1940 hours

According to Mikhailov's report, the 3rd Motorized and the 16th Armored Division of the enemy are either wholly or in part transferred from your front….This circumstance makes the situation favorable for all armies of your front to step up actions. Galinin is too slow….

Also tell Zhadov to start more active operations and try to tie down the enemy.

Give Batov a push; he could be much more forceful in the present situation.

General Paulus was ready to break out of the newly formed pocket, a situation the Germans called
"Der Kessel"
("The Cauldron"). In the past twenty-four hours he had assembled a battering ram of armor, artillery, and mounted infantry that would force a path to the southwest. The special group had massed around Gumrak Airfield. Lt. Hans Oettl was there; like everyone else, he was in an expectant mood. Pleased that something positive was about to happen, he watched tanks being painted white and troops receiving special white camouflage parkas.

Lt. Emil Metzger also was there, radiating enthusiasm. Since his
nebelwerfer
battery was attached to Sixth Army Headquarters, he would supply part of the firepower needed to blast a corridor through the thin Russian lines near Sovetsky. Metzger was convinced the operation would succeed.

Hours passed and Paulus did not give the order to attack. Hitler still had not given his blessing to the maneuver. Paulus cabled Hitler again.

23 November 1942

Mein Führer,

Since receipt of your wireless signal of 22 November, the situation has developed with extreme rapidity….

Ammunition and fuel are running short….A timely and adequate replenishment is not possible….

…I must forthwith withdraw all the divisions from Stalingrad itself and further considerable forces from the northern perimeter….

In view of the situation, I request you to grant me complete freedom of action.

Heil, mein Führer!

Paulus

2130 hours, 23 November 1942

While this message was being transmitted, one of Paulus's generals, Seydlitz-Kurzbach, tried to trigger an unauthorized retreat from the Volga. He ordered the 94th Infantry Division to vacate its sector at the northeastern corner of the pocket. The purpose of his plan was to stampede neighboring German units into similar withdrawals which, in turn, would force Paulus to order an exodus from the
Kessel.

Thus, on the night of November 23, Russian sentries saw giant fires blazing inside the 94th's perimeter and alerted Vassili Chuikov's command post. The flames flared again and again as ammunition dumps exploded into the black sky. In the
balkas,
German soldiers stuffed belongings into knapsacks and shouldered rifles before blowing up their bunkers with hand grenades. Important documents went into stoves. Senior officers wearing the distinctively red-striped trousers of the German General Staff took them off and burned them. At a regimental command post, where orders were given to pull back from entrenched positions, the briefing officer coldly remarked that the "planned retreat" meant the loss of one-third of "our people."

But as the 94th Division left its positions, the Soviet Sixty-second Army fell upon it. Lt. Gunter Toepke heard the Russians coming, screaming
"Urrah! Urrah!"
over and over and over. As he plunged blindly for cover, the Russians took a fearful toll. Caught in the open, and defenseless against the "steamroller" waves of Red Army attackers, the Germans died by the hundreds.

By dawn, the 94th Division "ceased to exist." Worse, General Seydlitz-Kurzbach's plan backfired. Other German units held their ground and the anticipated mass stampede to the west never took place. But the general was unrepentant. Arrogant, mulish, he insisted that his strategy was the only correct one, and that the loss of several thousand men was a small price to pay for the greater goal he had sought, the salvation of Sixth Army.