Ostkrieg (60 page)

Already in mid-September, the nights on the steppe had turned bitingly cold, but it was not until early November that the real winter arrived, with temperatures plunging to near zero. Ironically, this provided the Germans one last chance; as ice floes began to make the Volga unnavigable, it would be impossible, as Chuikov knew, to bring reinforcements across the river. On 11 November, Paulus launched his final offensive, a carefully prepared assault by specially trained pioneer battalions; not infantry as such, these were men expert in the art of demolition and the use of explosives. Their task was to blaze a trail that would be exploited by any able-bodied infantry that could be scrounged. With ruthless efficiency, the pioneers blasted and demolished buildings in their path and managed to carve a small corridor into the Lazur chemical works, but the Germans lacked the infantry to pass into the breach and exploit this last opportunity. On the night of 15 November, a Soviet counterattack forced the commander of the Fifty-first Corps, Seydlitz, to use his last reserves. Once again, the Germans had achieved meager gains at the cost of enormous casualties.
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On the seventeenth, even Hitler seemed to have recognized the futility of it all. “I am aware of the difficulties of the fighting in Stalingrad,” he acknowledged in his order of the day, to be read to all the troops, “and of the decline in combat strengths.” All he could offer, however, was the hollow assertion that “the difficulties of the Russians are even worse” while urging his troops to make one last effort to secure the factory district and break through to the Volga. Time was up, however; the Sixth Army now judged that almost half its battalions, with company strengths under fifty men, were “fought out,” while all available units in the east were being dispatched to North Africa to deal with that crisis. The Sixth Army had taken virtually all of Stalingrad but had largely destroyed itself in the process; two days later, the Russians would seal its fate. In truth, even as the Germans limped into Stalingrad, they had reached their limits. Not only had the stubborn Soviet resistance in the peripheral battles of the summer as well as Hitler's ill-judged splitting of the German offensive eroded the strength of the Wehrmacht and ensured that the campaign goals of 1942 could not be attained; they had even inverted those aims. Lost in Hitler's belated determination to seize Stalingrad, for reasons of prestige and to stabilize his regime, was the original target of the summer offensive, the oil fields of the Caucasus. The second, and final, culmination point had been passed; once again, Hitler had lost his race against time. But, as Robert Citino has soberly reminded us, “the most shocking aspect of 1942 . . . is how absurdly close the Wehrmacht came to taking not one but all of its objectives.”
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Despite repeated Soviet efforts in 1942 to relieve Leningrad and eliminate the German salient at Rzhev, the northern and central sectors of the front had remained stable, so German victories in the south had produced a huge bulge, which seemed to invite an enemy counterattack in the direction of Rostov. When it came at dawn on 19 November, it was as if the whole weight of the front came pushing down on the weak Don sector, threatening to cave in the entire overextended edifice. As some in the German command had feared and Hitler had predicted, the Soviets aimed not just to cut off the Sixth Army in Stalingrad but to seize Rostov in order to trap both Army Group A and Army Group B, with the ultimate goal nothing less than the destruction of the entire southern sector of the front.

Even as the fate of Stalingrad hung in the balance, the Soviets in mid-September had begun tentative planning for a possible counteroffensive. Although in his memoirs Zhukov outlined a dramatic scene at Stalin's headquarters, where he and Vasilevsky on 12–13 September—at the same time Rodimtsev's Thirteenth Guards were about to be sent across the Volga to prevent the fall of Stalingrad—allegedly outlined plans for a bold, war-turning attack, the truth seems both more pedestrian and more ambitious. Almost certainly, initial ideas of a counterstrike at Stalingrad revolved around merely saving the beleaguered city itself from falling to the Germans. When it became obvious that the forces were lacking for any immediate relief action, thoughts turned to the possibility of building the necessary strength for a more decisive counterstroke. Any chance of success, in turn, depended on a rapid buildup of Soviet forces as well as the continued pinning down of enemy troops in Stalingrad. Although Zhukov claimed later that the plan all along was to feed just enough Soviet troops into the Stalingrad meat grinder to keep the
battle going, this is likely an overstatement of the Stavka's control of events. At least as important as the stubborn resistance put up by Chuikov's men was the fact of insufficient German strength as well as Paulus's uninspired direction of the battle. Without the Germans' failure to take advantage of their early September opportunities, Zhukov would have had no chance to reverse the situation.
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In the event, however, and to Stalin's surprise, the Red Army held at Stalingrad, even as troops were ruthlessly stripped from the front lines and sent into the reserve, to be rebuilt and reequipped for the coming offensive. By mid-October, too, Soviet plans had grown in scale and ambition. Operation Uranus, the plan to encircle the Sixth Army, had a companion, Operation Mars, that was, in fact, regarded as at least its equal in importance, not least because the Stavka allocated it forces equal to the southern operation and Zhukov was personally involved in its planning. Directed at the encirclement of German forces in the Rzhev salient, Mars was, if successful, to be followed up by an even more ambitious operation, Jupiter, which aimed at nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center. By the same token, Uranus was to set the stage for Saturn, an operation aimed at recapturing Rostov and trapping Army Group A in the Caucasus. Where Uranus seemed a high-risk venture that depended for its success not only on Stalingrad holding out until it could be launched, but also on the Germans not then breaking out of the encirclement, Mars appeared a more certain proposition. Soviet troop dispositions certainly pointed to the initially greater importance of Mars. The Stavka deployed 1.9 million men, nearly 3,500 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces, and more than 1,000 aircraft against Army Group Center, the target of Mars, while it massed 1.1 million troops, 1,500 tanks, 15,500 artillery pieces, and fewer than 1,000 aircraft in the south. The only problem with Operation Mars, as Geoffrey Roberts has noted, was that it failed, at a loss of some 350,000 total casualties, because the Germans expected the major counteroffensive to come in the center. What they had not expected, however, was that the Soviets could simultaneously launch another large offensive in the south. In any case, in both these offensives, relatively small assaults (Mars, Uranus) were to be followed by large encirclement operations (Jupiter, Saturn) that, if successful, would have shattered the entire German eastern front. In effect, the Soviets intended nothing less than to win the war in 1943.
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Anyone at Hitler's headquarters who could read a map, including the Führer, understood the potential threat along the understaffed Don front. Still, despite Hitler's fears and increasing indications of Soviet preparations, Uranus caught the Germans by surprise. Although Foreign
Armies East had been warning since late August of an enemy ability to launch an offensive, it had consistently pinpointed the sector of Army Group Center as the most likely area of Russian activity. This failure resulted not only from a chronic underestimation of enemy capabilities but also from elaborate Soviet concealment and deception measures. Learning from earlier German actions, the Soviets kept knowledge of the upcoming attack on a strictly need-to-know basis, troop and supply movements took place at night, and the assault forces were brought forward only at the last moment. They also employed false signals to convince the Germans that they were preparing defenses in the south, thus reinforcing the German belief that any enemy offensive would be on the central sector. They also effectively fed the Germans' illusion that Soviet strength was just as exhausted as their own. On the eve of the offensive, General Zeitzler stated categorically, “The Russians no longer have any resources worth mentioning and are not capable of launching a large scale offensive.”
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Zeitzler's assurances might have comforted some, but they hardly corresponded to reality. Their ambitious plans for a dual offensive, in fact, revealed just how successfully the Soviets had again absorbed the German blows while continuing to expand their economic output. By November 1942, half of European Russia, an area of some 80 million people that contained nearly half the cultivated land and the bulk of the industrial resources of the Soviet Union, had been lost. In addition, the Red Army had suffered frightful casualties, with the dead, wounded, and missing totaling well over 8 million, with millions more Soviet civilians perishing under German occupation. Losses in weapons, tanks, and artillery had been equally calamitous. Yet, by the end of 1942, the Soviets vastly outproduced the Germans in every category of weapons. Already a highly militarized society with a centrally directed economy, the Soviets managed through ruthless mobilization measures to better convert their remaining resources into the weapons of war than did the Germans. Nor did it hurt that they had increasing access to Lend-Lease supplies. Although the bulk of the considerable American contribution to the Soviet war effort arrived after Stalingrad, the fact remained, as Mark Harrison has emphasized, that a Soviet economy always on the edge of collapse benefited even from the limited quantities of Western aid made available to it in 1942. As it turned out, Zeitzler was only half right: the Germans had exhausted their immediately available resources, while the Soviets were soon to deploy a combined attack force of 3 million men on the central and southern sectors.
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Despite Hitler's flash of insight and mid-August prediction that
Stalin would repeat the “Russian attack of 1920” with a thrust across the Don aimed at Rostov, not until late October, amid increasing signs of an enemy buildup, did the focus of German attention shift to the Don front. Despite his concern over the steadfastness of his Rumanian and Italian allies, however, there was little Hitler could do other than urge the rapid seizure of Stalingrad, which would free German troops for defensive operations. The Führer also directed that the Don front be “fortified as strongly as possible and mined,” but this was of little value given the paucity of construction materials and the near-complete absence of antitank weapons on the part of the Rumanians. In the event, some Luftwaffe field divisions were shifted into defensive positions, even though the army command had grave doubts about their battleworthiness. Despite his public assertions to the contrary, then, Hitler's attitude and actions betrayed a deep fear at the prospect of powerful Soviet attacks directed at the weakest part of the Axis line.
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On 2 November, alarmed by growing signs of a Soviet buildup along the vulnerable Don front, Hitler ordered the bombing of bridges erected by the Soviets to funnel troops into bridgeheads south of the river, while, the next day, he directed the transfer from the west of the Sixth Panzer Division and two infantry divisions. With the situation growing more threatening by the moment, Army Group B on the ninth shifted the Forty-eighth Panzer Corps into the Don bend as a mobile reserve in order to brace the Rumanian position. On paper a formidable force, in reality it had been badly depleted by the fighting at Stalingrad, with the Twenty-second Panzer Division possessing only forty-two operational tanks, the Fourteenth Panzer Division lacking its infantry regiments, and the Rumanian First Armored Division barely combat ready. At the same time, anticipating the possibility of deep enemy penetrations, the army group command directed that the cities of Karpovka and Kalach be made into “fortified areas” and ordered that a number of “alarm battalions” be created for rapid deployment in the rear. Far from being overconfident, both Hitler and much of the German command appeared to be profoundly disquieted by the prospect of an imminent enemy attack and fully aware of the limited German ability to respond.
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Yet neither the Führer nor the OKH could summon the courage to do anything really decisive, such as suspend the fighting in Stalingrad, pull the Sixth Army out to defensive positions, or shorten other sectors of the front. In reality, given the exhaustion of German reserves, there was little the Führer could do. He could hardly denude the central sector of troops in the face of strong indications of a major enemy operation, while giving up the Caucasus would negate the whole purpose of
the summer campaign. At the same time, he so misjudged the urgency of the situation that he left his military headquarters to give his traditional speech in Munich marking the anniversary of the failed putsch, at which he assured the Old Fighters that Stalingrad would soon fall, then decamped to the Berghof, where he planned a long holiday. Instead, events in North Africa demanded his immediate attention. Preoccupied with the need to secure the Mediterranean flank, and troubled by the necessity of dispersing his already inadequate forces, Hitler could only hope for “no new surprises” in the east. The Führer's fabled luck, however, was about to run out. Ironically, during a roughly two-week span while he was away from the military nerve centers of the Reich, the most dramatic events of the year, and perhaps of the war, unfolded: Rommel's retreat from El Alamein, followed by the Allied invasion of North Africa and the Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad.
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The offensive that Zeitzler believed the Russians incapable of launching began just before dawn on 19 November in thick fog and driving snow following an eighty-minute artillery barrage. Although facing an equal number of Axis troops, which admittedly were supported by far fewer tanks and artillery, the Soviets, again emulating the Germans, had skillfully massed their forces, creating points of main effort at which they enjoyed a marked superiority in strength. Moreover, they had carefully aimed their assault at the poorly trained, equipped, and motivated Rumanian divisions, rather than tangle with frontline German units. Attacking out of the Kletskaya and Bolshaya bridgeheads, the Soviets planned for troops from the Don front to strike southeast toward Kalach, while the next day Red Army forces from the Stalingrad Front would attack south of the city and advance northwest toward the same objective. At the same time, an outer defense line would be established along the Chir and Krivaya Rivers so that, if all went as planned, the double encirclement would net not only the Sixth Army in Stalingrad but also Axis forces in the Don bend as well.
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