The Road to Berlin (10 page)

At the German refusal to accept surrender terms, the
Stavka
inquired of Voronov: ‘What do you propose to do next?’ Voronov signalled that
Koltso
would open as planned on ‘plus four’. Just after dawn on the morning of 10 January, Rokossovskii and Voronov took their stations at Batov’s command post with 65th Army. At 0805 hours with the signal rockets flickering along the perimeters, massed Soviet artillery—more than 7,000 guns, howitzers and heavy mortars mounting the heaviest Soviet barrage so far in the war—opened fire through the swirling winter fog, a fierce bombardment that ranged over the German defences
as the prelude to the attack from the west, the north-west, the north-east and the south, along the fifty miles of the inner encirclement. During the night, bombers of the 16th Air Army raided German positions on the perimeter and in the depth of the pocket; while the barrage was fired off in the morning, more bombers and ground-attack planes with fighter escorts pounded the positions again, paying close attention to the aerodromes. Soviet artillery spotters correcting the fire through the mist watched ‘a sea of flame’ and columns of smoke rising from the German positions. After fifty-five minutes of this battering, a salvo of rockets signalled the infantry attack: Soviet riflemen riding on tanks followed by more infantry moved through the thick snow into the smoke-covered German lines, a bludgeoned ruin of bodies, smashed guns and tumbled pillboxes. The fierceness of the Soviet assault appalled the Germans (who had expected the attack somewhat later), and the tenacity of the Germans troubled the Russians. On the perimeter, for all the short, savage counter-attacks, the Soviet tanks rolled on to gun-pits and dugouts flattening guns which fired off their meagre ammunition. On the first day Soviet troops had advanced as far as five miles on some sectors. Voronov began the first of his daily reports to the
Stavka
on the course of the operations.

After three days of very heavy fighting, the western tip of the pocket, the ‘Marinovka nose’, was reduced on 12 January at the cost to the Don Front of 26,000 casualties and the loss of 135 tanks (by the evening of 12 January only 122 of the original tank force of 257 remained). Four days later the southeastern area (Tsybenko–Elkhi–Peschanki–Alekseyevka) was occupied, while 65th and 21st Armies drove forward into the middle pocket. The main supply airfield, Pitomnik, had fallen to the Russians; along the road to Pitomnik lay the ghastliest human wreckage, the wounded who in their thousands had hauled themselves in their infinity of agonies towards the German transport aircraft. As the Russians closed in, maddened men fought to board the JU-52s, behind them great clumps of dead frozen to a brittle stiffness. Elsewhere, batteries and battalions fought down to the last rounds, and in the, closing act divisional and corps commanders with their staff officers took up posts as the last, despairing riflemen of their formations. The withdrawal eastwards pressed more and more ragged, starving men into the terrible ruins of the city as supplies and ammunition finally dribbled away without even the minuscule scraps of the past weeks.

The bitter and unyielding German resistance baffled Voronov on two counts: why was there no surrender, and where did this strength spring from? One answer was provided by the capture of German orders forbidding surrender, while the interrogation of prisoners showed that German officers were stiffening garrisons, however minute, wherever possible. The real shock came with the interrogation of the quarter-master of Sixth Army, Colonel von Kulowsky. The Soviet command now learned that up to 22 November, 250,000 German troops had been encircled, of which 215,000 remained by 10 January: losses to that date had been 10,000 killed and 25,000 wounded (10,000 wounded being taken out by transport
planes). Since the Soviet attack began, only 1,200 casualties had been evacuated by air; no reinforcements had been flown in save for 500 men returning from leave. The German troops were now living off their horses and had already consumed 39,000 of them.

Map 2
Operation
Koltso
, Stalingrad, January–February 1943

On the morning of 17 January, Soviet army commanders met at a command conference at which Voronov and Rokossovskii were late in arriving. The commanders wanted a break in operations, two or three days’ pause, in which to regroup; the low tally of prisoners taken by the Red Army—6,896—as well as Soviet casualties was proof enough of the savagery of the fighting. The offensive continued, however, without ‘the pause’ suggested by the formation commanders. From Gumrak, the only airfield left to the defenders apart from one air-strip, the transports flew out the last of the wounded. Four aircraft had landed at Gumrak on 18 January, but this small runway, covered with the debris of scattered stores and smashed machines, could render only minute aid to the Stalingrad ‘fortress’, which had shrunk in depth and width to a mere ten miles by five. On 22 January Soviet troops began the final reduction of the German divisions now bereft of two-thirds of their strength. Gumrak fell that day after heavy fighting, and the Soviet tanks moved eastwards along the railway line. On the same day, forward elements of 21st Army made contact at Krasnyi Oktyabr with Rodmitsev’s 13th Guards from Chuikov’s 62nd Army. Having halved the
pocket, Soviet troops had finally split it in two. Throughout the seven hours of winter daylight, Soviet guns were ranged as rapidly as possible on their targets; the tanks churned over section after section, wiping out weapon-pits and dugouts or simply grinding the defenders into their holes in the ground. Outside in the high wind and under the endless bombardment survivors of divisions, privates and generals alike, assembled to fight the last battle to the last round; below ground were the horrendous cellars, the largest in the centre of the city, cavernous clammy morgues filled with the dead, the dying and even more wounded.

During the night of 31 January, units of the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade and 329th Engineer Battalion blockaded the
Univermag
building, headquarters of Sixth Army. All telephone lines were cut. In the morning, senior lieutenants Il’chenko and Mezhirko with a few tommy-gunners went into the ruined building and into the basement to present a formal Soviet ultimatum and demand for capitulation. At noon, Field-Marshal Paulus was driven off in a car to Shumilov’s
HQ
and thence to Zavarykin, Don Front command centre, where Voronov and Rokossovskii waited to interrogate him. Although a general surrender now took place, in the northern sector the German garrison continued to resist. On 1 February, concentrating many thousands of guns (300 to one kilometre, five times the density of the opening barrage), Soviet gunners poured shells on to this group in a fifteen-minute pulverisation bombardment. At 1600 hours on 2 February 1943, operations formally ceased at Stalingrad.

It remained only to round up the prisoners and bury the dead. The Soviet tally was twenty-two divisions destroyed, plus 160 support and reinforcement units. The list of captured equipment from the Don Front rolled on—5,762 guns, 1,312 mortars, 156,987 rifles, 10,722 automatic weapons, 10,679 motorcycles, 240 tractors, 3,569 bicycles, 933 telephone sets, 397 kilometres of signals cable.… On 4 February Voronov and Rokossovskii flew to Moscow. The Don Front was wound up, and its forces, organized into the Central Front, were on their way to deployment between the Voronezh and Bryansk Fronts, facing Kursk. During his stay in Moscow, Rokossovskii learned that he would command the new Front and that its assignment was to carry out a deep outflanking blow in the direction of Gomel–Moghilev–Orsha and Smolensk, a great scything attack into the flank and rear of Army Group Centre.

A new glittering Red Army, laden with decorations, loaded with honours and stiffened with braid, rose swiftly out of the blood and grime of the Stalingrad victory. First came the new marshals, among whom Stalin himself was to figure very shortly. On 18 January 1943, the day on which the Leningrad blockade was pierced by the junction of the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts and the day after the Soviet communiqué on the breaking of the German defences at Stalingrad, General Zhukov publicly received his appointment as Marshal of the Soviet Union; Col.-Gen. Voronov also became a Marshal of Artillery (the Supreme
Soviet having two days earlier formalized the wholly new appointments of ‘Marshal of Artillery’, ‘Marshal of the Armoured Forces’ and ‘Marshal of Aviation’ for the Soviet armed forces). Novikov, who had commanded the air forces at Stalingrad, and Fedorenko both became colonel-generals. Within two months, Novikov, the iron man of the Red air force who had pulled this arm out of the shattering chaos of 1941, became the first Marshal of Aviation (and went on to become chief Marshal of Aviation). Vasilevskii was promoted to full general on 18 January and a month later, with the fall of Kharkov, was appointed a Marshal of the Soviet Union, a meteoric rise which had taken him from major-general to marshal in just under twenty months. The field commanders received their share of promotion, but none as yet attained the Marshal’s gold star: Rokossovskii became a colonel-general (and was by April a full general); Govorov in Leningrad became a colonel-general. The formation commanders each received higher notches of rank. Important also were the decorations, a whole array of which had been introduced in all their evocative distinctiveness, like the Order of Suvorov (with three classes) of which Badanov at 25th Tank Crops had been, for his raid, the first recipient.

Stalin moved swiftly and adroitly into this newly constituted military elite. Up till now he had enjoyed the title of ‘Supreme Commander’,
Verkhovnyi
, though without formal military rank as such; after the capture of Kharkov in mid-February, and the first Red Army Day (23 January) with a real scent of triumph about it, Stalin himself assumed the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union, a ‘concession’ to the collective appeal of the
Politburo
. There was, however, more to it than the Marshal’s star with its gold and jewels and mere adhesion to the powerful cult of the army. Stalin’s assumption of rank came at a time which he himself identified in his Order of the Day on 23 February as ‘the decisive moment of the war’; simultaneously, and for the first time, Soviet operations were publicly identified with ‘Stalinist strategy’ and a ‘Stalinist military school of thought’ (the very first hint of which had appeared exactly a year before in the Order of the Day No. 55 which put the five ‘permanently operating factors’—
postoyanno deistvuyushchii faktory
, the solidity of the rear, the morale of the army, the quantity and quality of divisions, weaponing, and the capability of the command staff—above ‘transitory’ aspects such as ‘surprise attack’). The great and subsequently grotesque rationalization of early defeat was the myth of ‘planned withdrawal’, though this great exculpation of Stalin had yet to be formulated into a set of ritual phrases.

Stalin had also announced the transformation of the Red Army into a regular, professional force, a cadre army upon which was conferred all the outward signs of military professionalism—promotion, decoration and now badges of rank with the introduction of the shoulder-boards, the
pogon
, which in 1917 soldiers had torn off the shoulders of officers of the Imperial Russian Army. When new rank marks were being debated, Marshal Budenny reminded the officers discussing the problem of the revolutionary slogan
‘Doloi zolotopogonnikov!’.
(‘Down with
the golden shoulder-boards!’). The question of formal rank insignia (instead of the collar badges with their geometrical rhomboids and diamonds) came to the fore early in 1942, over the need to distinguish the Guards regiments and divisions: men in Guards units wore their distinctive sign,
Gvardiya
, and it was proposed to give them special Guards uniforms and the
pogon
. But to give shoulder-boards to elite formations and to ignore the rest meant, as a number of officers pointed out, ‘making two armies’. Three times Stalin refused to take any binding decision although he was shown all the designs for uniforms and shoulder-boards for ‘soldiers, sergeants, officers and generals’. Then in October 1942 Stalin decided—the
pogon
for each man in the Red Army. Front and formation commanders were all for the idea, to distinguish ‘officers from men’, and to increase ‘the authority of the commanders’.

Early in October Zhukov and Vasilevskii were consulted by Stalin at the close of a
Stavka
session (dealing with the Stalingrad offensive) over the question of the
pogon
. Stalin told them that the State Defence Committee had decided to go ahead in the interests of ‘strengthening discipline’, in which the first step would be the elimination of ‘dual command’ and the institution of
edinonachalie
—duly enacted on 9 October—and then the formalization of ranks in the Soviet armed forces. Khrulev then showed Zhukov and Vasilevskii the proposed new uniforms and shoulder-boards. At the final meeting at the Kremlin, all those present voted in favour of the
pogon
—including Shchadenko, head of the Main Administration for Forming New Units, hitherto a bitter opponent of the
pogon
but who now raised both his hands in agreement, to the astonishment of the assembled officers. At the beginning of January Khrulev approached Stalin for a final decision on the
pogon
, much to Stalin’s annoyance, who jumped at him for ‘going on about it’; but in a few minutes Col.-Gen. Drachev, chief supply officer, was summoned to the Kremlin, where Stalin, Kalinin and Khrulev were looking at the designs. Kalinin was full of approval; Stalin joked about Khrulev’s ‘suggesting that we bring back the old regime’. On 6 January 1943 the Supreme Soviet issued its decree on the introduction of the
pogon
, which would be put up in the first half of February. (A special factory in Moscow had to run out the new emblems; a Soviet order to Britain for gold braid angered British officials, incensed at shipping what to them were mere fripperies. But this was no mere ornament, for it marked, physically and visibly, a major transition in the Red Army.)