The Second World War (36 page)

Jodl, though no friend to Halder’s OKH, shared its understanding of the difficulties faced by the troops on the ground. When the reports of two emissaries he had sent to the Caucasus front failed to soften the Führer’s harshness towards List, Jodl himself went to visit Army Group A. He found the 4th Mountain Division stuck fast in a defile so narrow that it had no hope of breaking through to the Transcaucasus and its oil. The force advancing on Tuapse was equally blocked by Russian resistance and had no prospect of getting to the port before winter closed the passes. When he insisted to Hitler that List’s predicament was insoluble and incautiously indicated that the Führer had contrived the impasse, the result was an outburst of fury. Hitler, acutely sensitive to any implied slur on his powers of command and obsessed by the danger of repeating mistakes made during the First World War, declared that Jodl was behaving like Hentsch, the General Staff officer who had sanctioned the retreat from the Marne in 1914. He banished him and Keitel from his headquarters mess, installed stenographers in his command hut to take a verbatim record of his conferences so that his words could not be quoted against him, and dismissed List, assuming command of Army Group A himself on 9 September. He simultaneously sent the black spot to Halder, via Keitel, a man he chiefly valued for his widely remarked qualities of lackey and sycophant. On 23 September the army chief of staff left the Führer’s presence in tears, to be replaced forthwith by General Kurt Zeitzler. ‘Never contradict the Führer’ was Keitel’s advice to Zeitzler on the threshold of office. ‘Never remind him that once he may have thought differently of something. Never tell him that subsequent events have proved you right and him wrong. Never report on casualties to him – you have to spare the nerves of the man.’ Zeitzler owed his promotion mainly to his friendship with Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, but he was also a dogged infantry soldier with an impressive fighting reputation. ‘If a man starts a war,’ he retorted to Keitel, ‘he must have the nerve to bear the consequences.’ During the twenty-two months when he served Hitler as army chief of staff, there were to be repeated passages of blunt speaking between them. After Halder, a ‘swivel-chair’ soldier, in Hitler’s dismissive phrase, he brought a down-to-earth directness to the command conferences which Hitler found reassuring, and they were to rub along effectively even in the worst of crises.

Such a crisis was now in the making. Hitler’s allusion to the Battle of the Marne was not without point. Then the German army had overextended itself and the high command had taken too little note of the danger levelled by a strongly garrisoned city on its flanks. Now on the Volga a similar danger loomed. Army Group A, reaching southward towards the Caucasus, maintained – with difficulty – lines of communication 300 miles long which it lacked the strength to protect against Russian forces located in the steppe to its east. Army Group B, which had earlier dawdled down the Donetz-Don corridor, was now being drawn into a battle around Stalingrad, and all the signs indicated that Stalin was transforming the city into a formidable centre of resistance. The parallel between 1914 and 1942 was not exact. At the Marne the German army had been beaten because it failed to find the force to capture Paris on its flank. The risk posed in 1942 was that Hitler would overreact and, by concentrating too much force at Stalingrad, deny his armies in the mountains and the open steppe the means to defend themselves against an enemy counter-stroke. Such was precisely the operational outcome towards which Stalin and the Stavka were now groping their way.

The first inkling of the plan for a Russian counter-stroke had been disclosed to Winston Churchill by Stalin when the British Prime Minister visited Moscow on 12-17 August. The moment was a low point in Anglo-Soviet relations. Although the obstacle presented by Russia’s treatment of Poland had been partially removed – by Stalin’s agreement the previous December to release his 180,000 Polish prisoners and transport them via Iran to form the ‘Anders Army’ under British command in Egypt – the Russians now had reason to reproach the British. After the massacre of convoy PQ17 in June, Britain had decided to interrupt the convoying of Soviet supplies to the Arctic ports. More critically, in Washington in July, the opening of the ‘Second Front’ had been definitively postponed from 1942 to 1943. These reproaches Stalin threw in Churchill’s teeth. He was also suspicious of Britain’s offer to help defend the Caucasus, where the local Muslims had been supported by a British army in an effort to secede from Russia in 1918 and were even now displaying a favour towards the German invaders which had prompted Beria to send secret police troops to the region. On the eve of the leaders’ parting, however, Stalin relented. Desperate for the sort of supplies only Western industry could provide – not weapons, which the Urals factories were beginning to produce in plenty (16,000 aircraft and 14,000 tanks in the second half of 1942), but trucks and finished aluminium – he confronted Churchill with his demands. To smooth the transition from accusation to supplication, he ‘let the Prime Minister into the immensely secret prospect of a vast counter-offensive.’

The outline of the plan was still vague. It was not to be clearly defined until 13 September, by which time the Battle of Stalingrad had been raging for three weeks. According to Russian calculations, its inception was even earlier than that. On 24 July, Rostov-on-Don, the sentry-box of southern Russia, had fallen to the German Seventeenth Army. Its tank-heavy neighbours, the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, broke eastward across the Don in the next six days and, while the First wheeled south to drive to the Caucasus, the Fourth turned north-eastward to support Paulus’s Sixth Army in the assault on Stalingrad. Resistance had been so slight that a sergeant of the 14th Panzer Division recorded that ‘many of the soldiers were able to take off their clothes and bathe [in the Don] – as we had in the Dnieper exactly a year earlier’. By 19 August the Sixth Army was positioned to begin the attack on Stalingrad as Hitler’s Fourth Panzer Army approached on a converging route. Stalingrad largely comprised a sprawl of wooden buildings surrounding modern factories in a strip twenty miles long on the west bank of the Volga, which was a mile wide at that point. Much of the city was destroyed in a day of bombing by the VIII Air Corps on 23 August. Through the smouldering ruins the Sixth Army pressed forward for the culminating advance to the Volga shore.

In the month that had elapsed since the crossing of the Don, however, Stalin and the Stavka had improvised at Stalingrad a defence as strong as they had found for Leningrad the previous autumn and for Moscow in December. All three cities had a symbolic importance for Hitler; Stalingrad had a particular significance for Stalin. Not only was it the largest of the many Russian cities to be given his name. It was also the place where in 1918 the ‘southern clique’ – Stalin, Voroshilov, Budenny and Timoshenko – had defied Trotsky over the conduct of the war against the Whites, the episode which launched his rise to power within the party. During August, accordingly, he rushed men and material to the Stalingrad front, created a ring of defences, appointed new and vigorous commanders and made it clear that his order of 28 July, read out to every Soviet soldier – ‘Not a step backward!’ – must apply most sternly of all there. ‘Unitary command’, which would once again relegate commissars from an equal to an advisory status beside generals, was to be reintroduced on 9 October. Meanwhile he counted on his Stalingrad generals to resist retreat as if he himself stood at their elbows. V. N. Gordov and Yeremenko were the commanders of Stalingrad and South-Eastern Fronts respectively, V. I. Chuikov commanded the Sixty-Second Army in the city itself, and Zhukov was in overall charge of the theatre.

Zhukov’s meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin on 13 September, however, concerned advance rather than retreat. In a dramatic leap of imagination he and Vasilevsky – now Chief of the General Staff, a post inherited from Zhukov on the latter’s appointment as First Deputy Defence Commissar – outlined a plan for a wide encirclement of the German forces on the lower Volga and the destruction of Paulus’s Sixth Army in the city. Stalin’s arguments for a narrow encirclement were dismissed; that would allow the Germans to break out and slip away. So too was his contention that the necessary force did not exist; in forty-five days it could be assembled and equipped. Stalin thereupon withdrew his objections, adding that the ‘main business’ was to ensure that Stalingrad did not fall.

It had come close to doing so. After the burning of the wooden quarters of the city on 23 August, the German Sixth Army had found itself drawn into a bitter battle for ‘the jagged gullies of the Volga hills with their copses and ravines, into the factory area of Stalingrad, spread out over uneven, pitted rugged country, covered with iron, concrete and stone buildings’, as one of Paulus’s divisional commanders described it. For every house, workshop, water-tower, railway embankment, wall, cellar and every pile of ruins a bitter battle was waged, without equal even in the First World War.

By 13 September, the day after Paulus had returned from a conference with Hitler at Vinnitsa on the battle for the city, the Russian front line was still at least four and in some places ten miles from the Volga. It was held by three divisions of the Sixty-Second Army, which Chuikov had just been appointed to command, and the garrison deployed about sixty tanks. One of the divisional commanders, A. I. Rodimtsev, was experienced in street fighting, which he had learned with the International Brigade at Madrid in 1936. By contrast, Chuikov noted, ‘on the pretext of illness three of my deputies had left for the opposite bank of the Volga.’ Between 13 and 21 September the Germans, using three infantry divisions in one thrust and four infantry and Panzer divisions in another, drove down the banks of the Volga to surround the core of the defence – the Tractor, Barricades and Red October factories – and brought artillery fire to bear on the central landing stage to which men and supplies were ferried nightly from the east bank.

However, the struggle had exhausted the vanguard of the Sixth Army, and a pause intervened while fresh troops were assembled for the street battle. It began again on 4 October. Chuikov was no longer defending above ground. His strongpoints had become subterranean and his headquarters troglodyte, its staff officers and specialists inhabiting tunnels and bunkers dug into the western bank of the Tsaritsa river near the Volga landing stage. Only the strongest buildings survived, to be fought over for a fractional advantage of dominance that each conferred. An officer of the 24th Panzer Division during the October battle wrote:

We have fought for fifteen days for a single house with mortars, grenades, machine-guns and bayonets. Already by the third day fifty-four German corpses are strewn in the cellars, on the landings, and the staircases. The front is a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling between two floors. Help comes from neighbouring houses by fire-escapes and chimneys. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to night. From storey to storey, faces black with sweat, we bombed each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of dust and smoke. . . . Ask any soldier what hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight. And imagine Stalingrad; eighty days and eighty nights of hand-to-hand struggle. . . . Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest storms cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

The Nietzschean-Nazi rhetoric apart, this is not an exaggerated picture of the Stalingrad battle. Chuikov, no sensationalist and a cool-headed newcomer to the war – he had previously been Russian military attaché in China – describes a succeeding stage.

On 14 October the Germans struck out; that day will go down as the bloodiest and most ferocious of the whole battle. Along a narrow front of four or five kilometres, the Germans threw in five infantry divisions and two tank divisions supported by masses of artillery and planes . . . during the day there were over two thousand Luftwaffe sorties. That morning you could not hear the separate shots or explosions, the whole merged into one continuous deafening roar. At five yards you could no longer distinguish anything, so thick were the dust and the smoke. . . . That day sixty-one men in my headquarters were killed. After four or five hours of this stunning barrage, the Germans started to attack with tanks and infantry, and they advanced one and a half kilometres and finally broke through to the Tractor Plant.

This lunge marked the penultimate stage of the German advance. On 18 October a lull fell over the city. ‘From then on’, noted Chuikov, ‘the two armies were left gripping each other in a deadly clutch; the front became virtually stabilised.’ In some places it was less than 300 yards from the Volga. The Red October Factory had been lost to the Germans, the Tractor and Barricades factories were only partly in Russian hands, and Chuikov’s front was split into two pockets. But the garrisons, inspired by his famous slogan to fight as if ‘there is no land across the Volga’, held on, the wounded (35,000 in all) being ferried back each night in the boats that brought replacements (65,000 men) and ammunition (24,000 tons) from the far shore. The Germans of the Sixth Army, though supplied and reinforced more easily, were as much gripped by exhaustion as their enemies. Richthofen, the local Luftwaffe commander, noted in a November entry in his diary: ‘The commanders and combat troops at Stalingrad are so apathetic that only the injection of a new spirit will get us anywhere.’ But no new spirit was forthcoming. Hitler appeared to have forgotten whatever reason he had ever had for committing the Sixth Army to the battle for the city. Its waging had come to overshadow the strategy of capturing the Caucasus or even the consolidation of the ‘steppe front’ north of the city, along the line of the Don, against a Russian counter-attack. Hitler’s dangerous tendency to obsess himself at his twice-daily command conferences with yards instead of miles and platoons instead of armies had robbed his direction of the struggle of all perspective. If his soldiers now succeeded in pushing Chuikov and the remnants of the Sixty-Second Army over the Stalingrad cliffs and into the Volga, at best he would have achieved a local success at catastrophic cost; the twenty divisions of the Sixth Army had already lost half their fighting strength. If they failed, the
Ostheer
’s largest offensive concentration would have been devastated for no result and the initiative given to the Red Army.