The Road to Berlin (2 page)

It is this problem, the properties of the man and the performance of the system—both operating under maximum stress—which I have tried to approach in this volume. Obviously the operational narrative must take precedence, though I trust that such priority has not totally obscured other features of the wartime scene, what might be called the social dimension (presently attracting more of the attention of Soviet historians—one could conjecture that this has some relevance to ‘post-attack recovery’, to use the language of modern strategic studies). Here paradoxes certainly abound, one of the most taxing being the relationship between centralized (indeed super-centralized) control and the role of improvisation, again both in the field and in the war industry. In many respects the operational command system was improvised, through a process of desperate trial and serious
error, a lesson not lost on present-day Soviet military planners preoccupied with the problem of combining centralized strategic direction with decentralized battle management. Nor can the factor of ‘style’, the distinctiveness for good or ill of the Soviet style of war, be excluded from these quite urgent explorations and discussions, which also in their own way turn on the relationship between the man (or the men) and the system.

Such a concatenation of the past with the present, together with the multiplicity of versions tailored to the times, virtually impelled me to compile two books, one a military–political narrative, the other (subsumed under References and Sources) more in the nature of a commentary on materials. Under that latter rubric, comprising compilation with commentary, I have attempted to span both past and present, using the categories of
non-Soviet works, captured German military documents
(supplemented by printed war diaries),
Soviet publications
, and finally,
East European
contributions where relevant. In particular, with respect to Soviet sources, I was anxious not merely to identify a specific page reference but also to delineate the context of, say, an entire chapter, the structure of an article or the wider discussion of a theme or topic. In yet another vein, though one no less important to me, I had it in mind to convey for readers not wholly familiar with Soviet publications either for reasons of language or accessibility the several flavours, not a few of which are tinged with wormwood, diffused throughout these pages. Nevertheless, the intimidating mass of Soviet publication, with more than 15,000 volumes devoted to the Great Patriotic War, rules out any claim to comprehensive coverage. What I have assembled by way of formal bibliography can only be avowedly and admittedly selective.

At the risk of being overly cumbersome in explanation I should mention those problems associated with ‘weights and measures’, registration of time (or timings) and treatment of proper names. There seemed to be no easy escape from an ungainly and inconvenient admixture of miles with kilometres, or yards with metres, and so on; this was no laxity or oversight on my part, for it stems in the first instance from extreme reluctance to interfere with the substance of documentation. While the translations are mine, I have kept the original metric measurement if that was used and
vice versa
. In any event, to go for one or the other would have meant altering the records of inter-Allied exchanges, where each side tended to use its own measurement terms, hence my leaving them as they were uttered (or recorded). As for the registration of time and timing, where Soviet military documents, reports and narratives state timings in terms of the 24-hour clock (as in 0630 hours and the like), this I have also retained, otherwise reverting to the conventional and conversational mode. Proper names present difficulties all their own, causing me to infringe my own pedantic rule over documents, to the further vexation of the purist. For example, my own rule in translating Soviet documents would render Šubašić or Beneš as ‘Shubashich’ and ‘Benesh’, or Winston Churchill as ‘Uinston Cherchill’ (complete with soft sign); indeed, the convention of diacritic points is not always observed and I therefore
proposed the compromise of confining the full notation of proper names to the index. Like all compromises, an imperfect solution.

As the time taken first to write and then perforce to rewrite substantial portions of this book expanded, so did the catalogue of my indebtedness both to individuals and to institutions grow proportionately. It is all too plain to see what guidance and insight I have gained from previous publications on the war in the east, primarily the splendid writings of Professor Earl F. Ziemke, in particular his
Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East
, Colonel Albert Seaton’s comprehensive analysis in
The Russo-German War 1941–1945
and his study of Stalin as a war leader, the work on Soviet partisans in World War II edited by Professor John A. Armstrong (published by the University of Wisconsin Press), together with the revised edition of Professor A. Dallin’s monumental and quite invaluable monograph,
German Rule in Russia
. It was from Professor Dallin that I first learned how to work my way into and through the captured German records, a tutorial experience supplemented by lessons in the kind of rigour necessary in dealing with German materials exemplified in David Irving’s
Hitler’s War
. Nor can I omit mention of the benevolent and beneficial instruction in the modes of wartime diplomacy I derived from Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s peerless five-volume history of British foreign policy, published by H.M. Stationery Office. In approaching that most distressing and anguished issue, the Polish question, I owe much to Professor Edward J. Rozek and his study,
Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland
, as well as to his personal elaboration of key documents.

I count myself singularly fortunate in having been able to work with the late Alexander Werth and the late Cornelius Ryan, thus bringing me into contact not only with fine writers but also their voluminous holdings. Helping to edit Alexander Werth’s own book
Russia at War
was a unique experience and taught me much of wartime Russia as seen by a highly gifted observer, an advantage further supplemented by the unselfish generosity of the lady who made a complete collection of
Soviet War News
available to me. For the further illumination of the printed page and the formality of documents I can only record the extensive and unstinted assistance of senior Soviet commanders, Soviet military historians and Soviet soldiers, none of whom were sparing with their time or patience in appraising those wide variations in memoir literature or evaluating documentary evidence. Here none, I think, can quarrel with a tribute to the major contributions of Academician A.M. Samsonov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, author and editor of works which no historian, Soviet or non-Soviet, can afford to neglect.

Help has also flowed in liberally from many other quarters. For example, David Fisher and Anthony Read freely discussed the nature of their quest for ‘Lucy’ and the implications of their findings. Michael Parrish, Indiana University, author of a massive bibliographical work on the Soviet Union at war, kept me through our mutual exchanges abreast of important publications, while the business of my obtaining these same sources owes so much to Mme Kira A. Caiafa, for whose advice and expertise I am deeply grateful. Obtaining books is but one
aspect of producing a book and here I have been in the extremely capable hands of Susan Loden, Dr Robert Baldock and Benjamin Buchan of Weidenfeld and Nicolson (Publishers), deftly combining the mechanisms of publishing with the balm of psychology. The most gruelling task, however, fell to Miss K.U. Brown of Defence Studies in the University of Edinburgh, who took charge of the manuscript at every stage in highly skilful fashion, so that her secretarial expertise and managerial competence have been an indispensable element in completing this work.

These past few years have been largely taken up with traversing these two roads, the one to Stalingrad, the other to Berlin. It has been both an academic and a personal trek, shared by my wife Ljubica who first pointed me in this direction and who has endured so many of the pains and penalties involved in journeys of this kind. But, in the last resort, all and any responsibility for mistaking the route, for misreading the signs and even for inadvertently misconstruing or misunderstanding the actions and motives of all those—high or low—who mapped or traversed these gruesome highways, must remain mine.

John Erickson
University of Edinburgh
1982

1

‘Surrender is Ruled Out’: The End at Stalingrad

In a matter of only days, from 19 to 23 November 1942, the impossible, the unthinkable and the unimaginable happened on the Eastern Front. The formidable German Sixth Army commanded by General Friedrich von Paulus was caught in a giant Soviet encirclement west of Stalingrad.

Two powerful Soviet armoured thrusts, striking from Kletskaya to the north of the city and from the ‘Beketovka bell’ to the south, hurled aside the flimsy Rumanian divisions covering the German flanks and raced to link up near Sovetskii, a dozen or so miles south-east of Kalach, on 22 November. The shock of the Soviet counter-offensive seemed to numb the
Führer
, who evinced great nervousness and whose headquarters gave no firm lead or instruction; at best there was only confusion or contradiction, with Col.-Gen. von Weichs, commander-in-chief of Army Group B, first receiving permission to act independently and then having it rescinded almost at once. For von Paulus, the extent of the disaster became all too plain at midday on 21 November, when Soviet tanks burst through not many miles from Sixth Army’s own
HQ
at Golubinskaya and the headquarters had to be hurriedly transferred to the railway station at Gumrak, west of Stalingrad.

As events took a nightmarish turn on 21 November, von Paulus at his temporary command post at the mouth of the river Chir contacted Army Group B and proposed pulling the seriously endangered Sixth Army back to the block of territory between the rivers Don and Chir, a move to which von Weichs apparently assented. However, the
Führer
’s own radio message in the evening ordered Stalingrad and the Volga front to be held at all costs, requiring von Paulus and his staff to return to the Stalingrad area and Sixth Army to set up a circular defence. ‘Further instructions’ would follow. But time was running out for von Paulus, and on 22 November the shape of the
Kessel
—the trap—became clearer. Soviet tank columns had already covered almost 150 miles from their initial positions at Kletskaya and Beketovka; no less than seven Soviet rifle armies with up to sixty divisions piling up behind them were closing on Sixth Army, whose land communications were practically severed, hemming in the German divisions west and south of Stalingrad.

The
Kessel
, the Stalingrad ‘cauldron’, stretched for about thirty-five miles from the east at Stalingrad to the west and some twenty miles from north to south, the encirclement line assuming the sinister and gruesomely symbolic shape of a flattened skull with its ‘nose’ protruding to the south-west. Five German corps headquarters (4th, 8th, 11th, 51st, and XIV
Panzer
Corps) stood on the bare steppe, isolated like their component twenty German divisions (and elements of two Rumanian divisions) from the main body of the German army and sliced away from their nearest neighbour, General Hoth’s Fourth
Panzer
Army whose units had also been sundered by the Soviet southern thrust. As von Paulus hurried to his Gumrak
HQ
, battle-fatigued German divisions dug in where they could along the perimeter line. Inside the shattered and fire-blackened ruination of Stalingrad six German battle groups defied blinding weariness to hold cellars, rooms, sections of skeletal factories won after weeks of the gruelling hand-to-hand fighting which raged by day and night. In round figures, some 240,000 men—though not the 400,000 first feared by the German High Command—with over 100 tanks, 1,800 guns and 10,000 assorted vehicles, were presently trapped, battered but maintaining good order, with the hard-bitten among them mocking their predicament of being ‘the mice in the mousetrap’ and impatient for release or relief, defiantly recalling that this was by no means the first
Kessel
to appear in the east.