Enemy at the Gates (29 page)

In the very next few days the supply situation can lead to a crisis of the utmost gravity.

I still believe, however, that the Army can hold out for a time. On the other hand—even if anything like a corridor is cut through to me—it is still not possible to tell whether the daily increasing weakness of the Army will allow the area around Stalingrad to be held for any length of time….

…I should be grateful if I could be provided with more information than hitherto, in order to increase the confidence of my men....

At the bottom of the page, Paulus apologized for the poor quality of the paper and his scrawl.

The other letter was from Marshal Ion Antonescu, the Rumanian chief of state, who was complaining bitterly of the mistreatment of his soldiers by German officers and troops.

Manstein was furious to receive such a letter because he respected the Rumanians' contribution to the war effort. Also, he already knew the shocking details of the destruction of Antonescu's armies. Originally there had been twenty-two divisions. Nine had been destroyed in the field; nine others had broken and fled. Only four were fit for battle.

Nagged by these distressing messages, Manstein plunged immediately into his primary task: reaching Sixth Army. Assuming Goering's airlift could keep Paulus's troops alive, Manstein hoped to carve a corridor to the fortress by mounting a two-pronged attack. One would be a diversion from the west, aimed at Kalach. Hopefully, this diversion would draw Russian units away from the second drive which would start from Kotelnikovo, seventy-three mlies southwest of the pocket.

The Kotelnikovo offensive had the advantage of avoiding any crossing of the Don. Only two of its tributaries, the Aksai and Mishkova rivers, would hinder progress, and beyond the Mishkova were thirty miles of open steppe, reaching all the way to the southern perimeter of the
Kessel.
When the German relief troops reached the Mishkova River, Manstein then expected Paulus to burst out with his army and link up with them.

But first, Manstein needed more troops and armor. Having completed a long trip from France, the first elements of the 6th Panzer Division were unloading from trains at Kotelnikovo. The 6th Panzers boasted 160 tanks operated by elite crews. Coming a few days later behind the 6th was the 17th Panzer Division, at nearly full strength. For extra support, Manstein had called for the 16th Motorized Division, which was thirty miles east of his headquarters and presently filling the gap left by the demise of the Fourth Rumanian Army. Manstein also requested the 23rd Panzer Division. It had been reduced to twenty-five tanks, but he was not aware of its dilapidated condition.

To protect the flanks of the relief expedition, the field marshal had what was left of the Rumanian forces, hastily thrown together into two under-strength corps. But all his projections were doomed—unless the airlift nourished the Sixth Army, and an improvised defense force led by Col. Walter Wenck could stall the Russians on the steppe south of the Don.

Only a few days earlier, Wenck had received urgent orders to leave his post in the Caucasus and assume command of the "screening" line in front of the Russians pushing southward toward Rostov from Serafimovich and Kletskaya.

Needing troops and equipment, the colonel instituted his own set of rules. He rode the highways and dragooned stragglers into ad hoc units. He played movies at intersections and when exhausted soldiers stopped to watch, Wenck brusquely marched them back to war. One of his noncommissioned officers found an abandoned fuel dump and put up signs reading: "To the Fuel- Issuing Point." Hundreds of cars, trucks, and tanks drove into this oasis only to become part of Wenck's new army.

On November 27, when Wenck had met Manstein at Novocherkassk to discuss the situation, the field marshal bluntly reminded the colonel of his awesome responsibility:

"Wenck, you'll answer to me with your head that the Russians won't break through to Rostov. The Don-Chir front must hold. Otherwise not only the Sixth Army in Stalingrad, but the whole of Army Group A in the Caucasus will be lost."

Wenck did not need a lecture. He needed extraordinary luck.

Chapter Eighteen

“Manstein is coming, Manstein is coming,” the shouts went along the frozen
balkas
in the
Kessel
between the Don and Volga. Soldiers cheered his name and repeated stories of his genius to each other: Manstein, whose plan to outflank the Maginot Line had led to the fall of France within six weeks; Manstein, who reduced the Crimean fortress city of Sevastopol within days. Listening to these stories, the men of the Sixth Army gloated over the coming of the hook-nosed, silver-haired legend and laughed at their temporary status of "mice in a mousetrap."

General Seydlitz-Kurzbach did not laugh at the army's predicament. Thoroughly cowed by Hitler's order to bear co-responsibility for defense of the pocket, he decided to avoid any blame in case the Sixth Army perished. He began writing.

FROM:   Commanding General               November 25, 1942

               51st Army Corps                                        morning

To: Commander in Chief of the Sixth Army [Paulus] I am in receipt of the army command of November 24, 1942 for the continuation of fighting….

The Army is confronted with a clear alternative: breakthrough to the southwest in general direction of Kotelnikovo, or the annihilation of the Army within a few days….The ammunition supplies have decreased considerably. The assumed action of the enemy, for whom a victory in a classic battle of annihilation is in store, is easy to assess….One cannot doubt that he will continue his attacks…with undiminished vehemence.

The order of the High Command…to hold the hedgehog position until help is near, is obviously based on unreal foundations…The breakthrough must be initiated and carried through immediately.

Paulus read Seydlitz-Kurzbach's comments with the tolerance a father might show a wayward son. He needed no such analysis from Seydlitz-Kurzbach. For days he had known that retreat from the Volga was imperative. In the precious hours that had been lost, at least sixty Soviet formations were now encamped on the perimeter of the
Kessel,
their guns trained on Sixth Army. To the south and west, at least eighty other Red Army units were ready to repulse any German attempt to fight through to Paulus. By November 25, the Germans inside the
Kessel
were twenty-five miles away from the nearest friendly troops.

At the air bases closest to Stalingrad, German airmen struggled to make the airlift succeed. Gen. Martin Fiebig directed the piecemeal buildup from Tatsinskaya and Morosovskaya, which had been excellent fighter and bomber bases during balmy summer months, when weather permitted hundreds of sorties each day. But now it was wintertime, and the air units on the steppe faced enoromus difficulties. Three-motored Ju-52s, transport workhorses of the Luftwaffe, flew in from distant bases. Some were old and untrustworthy; others lacked guns and radios. Crews ranged from veterans to green graduates of training schools in Germany. Many fliers came to Russia in regular -issue clothing, without any garments suited for below-zero temperatures.

On November 25, the first planes had lifted off for Pitomnik Airfield inside the
Kessel.
For two days they struggled in and out, carrying fuel and ammunition. On the third day, November 27, the weather closed down all operations and Fiebig added up the sorry totals. In the first forty-eight hours, only 130 tons had been delivered instead of the required 600. Sadly, he wrote in his diary: "Weather atrocious. We are trying to fly, but it's impossible. Here at Tatsinskaya one snowstorm succeeds another. Situation desperate."

Marshal Richthofen agreed wholeheartedly. Despairing of the airlift, he telephoned Kurt Zeitzler and Albert Jeschonnek to warn them that Sixth Army had to fight its way out before it lost its strength to move. Richthofen begged them to submit his opinion to Hitler. They did, but Hitler refused to be swayed. He told Zeitzler the Sixth Army could hold out, must hold out. If it left Stalingrad, Hitler declared, "we'll never get it back again."

When Richthofen heard this verdict, he decided that he and other commanders were "nothing more than highly paid NCOs!" Though completely disgusted, the frustrated Luftwaffe general kept his temper in check and went back to work. His rationale was simple: "Orders are orders."

Meanwhile, the Russian High Command wrestled with its own serious problems: the success of the vast encirclement. Neither Stalin nor Vasilevsky or Zhukov had dared anticipate the dimensions of their triumph. Prepared to deal with up to one hundred thousand of the enemy, they suddenly realized that nearly three hundred thousand armed soldiers had to be contained and liquidated.

In Red Army staff schools, such an operation had never been broached. Only Zhukov had practical experience in dealing with a surrounded enemy; at Khalkin Gol in Manchuria in 1939, he had successfully eliminated a portion of the Japanese Kwantung Army in a period of eleven days. But that force had totaled only one fourth of Paulus's Sixth Army, now at bay, dangerous and defiant.

On November 28, Stalin called Zhukov to discuss the complex difficulties of dealing with the Stalingrad "fortress." Once again, the premier needed his deputy's calm analysis of an emergency. Zhukov answered with a telegram the next morning:

The trapped German forces are not likely to try to break out without help from a relief force….

The German command will evidently attempt to hold its positions at Stalingrad….It will mass a relief force for a thrust to form a corridor to supply and eventually evacuate the trapped forces….

The trapped Stalingrad group should be cut in half….

But the Russians had no quick formula to achieve this goal. By now, seven Soviet armies were hugging the Sixth Army in a hostile embrace. The Sixty-sixth and Twenty-fourth pressed from the north; the Twenty-first and and Sixty-fifth barred exit to the west; the Fifty-seventh and Sixty-fourth pushed up from the south. In Stalingrad itself, Vassili Chuikov's Sixty-second Army held the Volga shoreline as it had since September.

The
Kessel
was roughly thirty miles wide by twenty miles long, its western side tapered so that it resembled the snout of a giant anteater. In its middle, five corps headquarters dotted the steppe around Paulus while on the perimeter, weary divisions faced outward.

Manning the northern front closest to the Volga were the 24th and 16th Panzer divisions. To their left, stood the depleted 60th Motorized and 113th Infantry. In the northwestern sector, the nearly destroyed 76th, 384th, and 44th divisions licked assorted wounds from their retreat across the Don. At the extreme western edge, in the "snout," the remnants of the 376th Division held a precarious foothold beside the 3rd Motorized. On the south side of the pocket, the 29th Motorized Division braced anxiously next to the 297th and 371st divisions. The 14th Panzer and 9th Flak divisions roamed the pocket in reserve, moving from position to position depending on the threat.

Two Rumanian divisions and one regiment of Croatians fleshed out the southern line closest to Stalingrad. And in the city, six exhausted battle groups held all but five percent of the town. There, the 71st, 295th, 100th, 79th, 305th, and 389th divisions clung to the same cellars and trenches they had occupied during September and October.

At the edge of the Volga, General Chuikov stormed in and out of his cliffside bunker cursing his bad luck. His war had become static—a backwash to the drama on the steppes to the west and south—and the Volga continued to plague him. Pack ice drifted by in enormous chunks, grating against each other like knives scraping glass.

On November 27, the disgusted Chuikov radioed front headquarters across the river: "The channel of the Volga to the east of Golodny and Sarpinski islands has been completely blocked by dense ice. . . . No ammunition has been delivered and no wounded evacuated."

The offensive on the steppe had not solved all his problems. Not only that, but he smarted under a directive that put his troops on short rations. Chuikov was furious with his superiors and he told them, ". . . with every soldier wanting with all his heart and soul to broaden the bridgehead so as to breathe more freely, such economies seemed unjustified cruelty!"

The Germans were already on half rations. Caught with most of its supplies on the wrong side of the Don, where the Russian offensive had swept the steppe, the Sixth Army had only six days' full rations for each man when the encirclement began. But Karl

Binder had done his job well. The quartermaster's foresight in moving his food, clothing, and cattle east, out of the danger zone made his 305th Division one of the few "rich" ones. Then Paulus ordered an accounting of available supplies, insisting on a "balancing" of provisions among the units. Binder was outraged. He had little sympathy for those who had failed to anticipate the calamity. Nevertheless he gave up part of his reserves: three hundred head of cattle, eighty sacks of flour, butter, honey, canned meat, sausage, clothing to destitute neighbors. Binder felt his labors for his own troops had been in vain.