The Second World War (74 page)

Altogether the Red Army had surrounded some 290,000 men in the Stalingrad
Kessel
, a figure which included over 10,000 Romanians and more than 30,000 Russian Hiwi auxiliaries. Hitler refused to allow the news to be released in Germany. OKW communiqués deliberately falsified the true state of affairs, but rumours began to spread at home. Hitler wanted to blame anyone but himself for the Soviet triumph. A furious exchange took place with Marshal Antonescu at the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, when Hitler tried to place responsibility for the disaster on the Romanian armies on the flanks. Antonescu pointed out angrily that the Germans had refused to provide his men with adequate anti-tank guns, and that all their warnings of an imminent attack had been disregarded. He did not know that the Sixth Army was now refusing to provide rations to his troops. German officers were saying: ‘
it’s useless to feed
Romanians because they surrender just the same’.

Sixth Army troops cut off west of the Don had managed to fall back just in time to rejoin the main body. The Stalingrad
Kessel
took on the shape of a squashed skull, with the forehead in the city and the rest defending a perimeter out in the Don steppe, measuring sixty kilometres by forty. German soldiers referred to it cynically as ‘the fortress without a roof’. Rations, which had been insufficient even before the encirclement, were cut drastically. Men became exhausted digging trenches in the frozen ground. In the bare steppe, there was little wood to cover the earth bunkers. Officers attempted to stiffen soldiers’ resolve with the argument: ‘
Even death is preferable
to a Russian prison, and we must hold out to the end. The Fatherland cannot possibly forget about us.’

The Soviet encirclement took back large areas of occupied territory. The arrival of Red Army troops was greeted with tears of joy by the plundered and starved civilians, but the NKVD arrived in their wake to seize any suspected of collaboration. Don Front headquarters launched a series of attacks in the first week of December, hoping to split the
Kessel
, but their intelligence department had grossly underestimated the number of troops they had surrounded. General Rokossovsky’s chief of intelligence thought that they had trapped 86,000 men, not 290,000.

Soviet officers also failed to imagine how determined the Germans were to hold on. The Führer’s promise that they would be relieved was accepted as the gospel truth, especially by the younger soldiers brought up under
National Socialism. ‘
The worst is past
,’ a soldier in the 376th Division wrote home with naive optimism. ‘We all hope that we’ll be out of the
Kessel
before Christmas… Once this battle of encirclement is over, then the war in Russia will be finished.’ Supply officers, having cut rations to between a third and a half of the normal issue, were more realistic. The shortage of fodder meant that the few remaining horses would have to be slaughtered.

According to the calculations of the Sixth Army’s chief quartermaster, a minimum of 300 flights a day would be needed, yet during the first week of the air-bridge, there was an average of fewer than thirty flights a day. In any case, a considerable proportion of the tonnage brought in was aircraft fuel for the return journey. Göring had also failed to take into account the fact that the airfields within the
Kessel
were within the range of Soviet heavy artillery, while enemy fighters and anti-aircraft batteries created a constant danger. On a single day twenty-two transport planes were lost through enemy action and crashes. And on some days the weather was so bad that hardly any aircraft got through. Richthofen kept ringing Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, to tell him that the whole plan of resupply by air was doomed. Göring could not be contacted because he had retired to the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

During this period, Stalin had the Stavka working on more ambitious plans. Following the success of Operation Uranus, he wanted to cut off the rest of Army Group Don and trap the First Panzer and the Seventeenth Armies in the Caucasus. Operation Saturn would consist of a major attack by the South-West and Voronezh Fronts, down through the Eighth Italian Army towards the lower Don where it entered the Sea of Azov. But Zhukov and Vasilevsky agreed that, since Manstein was likely to try to relieve the Sixth Army by striking north-east from Kotelnikovo at the same time, they should restrict the plan to an assault on the left rear flank of Army Group Don. It was renamed Little Saturn.

Manstein was indeed planning what they thought he was. An advance from Kotelnikovo was just about the only course left open to him. His offensive was codenamed Operation Winter Storm. Hitler simply wanted Sixth Army to be reinforced, so that it could maintain its ‘cornerstone’ on the Volga ready for further operations in 1943. Manstein, however, was secretly preparing a second operation called Thunderclap to extricate the Sixth Army, and hoping that Hitler would come to his senses.

On 12 December, the remnants of General Hoth’s Fourth Panzer began their attack north. He had been reinforced with the 6th Panzer Division from France and a battalion of the new Tiger tanks. Sixth Army soldiers on the southern edge of the
Kessel
heard the opening barrage a hundred
kilometres away, and the word ran round: ‘Der Manstein kommt.’ Hitler’s promise was about to be fulfilled, they told themselves. They did not know that he had no intention of letting them retreat.

Hoth’s attack came earlier than Soviet commanders had expected. Vasilevsky feared for the 57th Army in its path, but Rokossovsky and Stalin refused to change their dispositions. Finally, Stalin agreed, and ordered General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army to be diverted. The delay was not as serious as it might have been, because a sudden thaw with torrential rain bogged down Hoth’s tanks as they fought a heavy battle on the Myshkova River less than sixty kilometres from the edge of the
Kessel
. Manstein hoped that Paulus would use his own initiative and start to break out to the south, ignoring Hitler’s orders. But Paulus was too obedient to the chain of command and would not have moved without a direct order from Manstein himself. In any case, his troops were too starved to march far and his panzers had insufficient fuel.

Stalin agreed to the modified Little Saturn and ordered it to start in three days. On 16 December, the 1st and 3rd Guards Armies and the 6th Army attacked the weakly held Italian front. The Italian attitude to the war against the Soviet Union was very different to the German. Italian officers were shocked by the Germans’ racist attitude towards the Slavs, and when they took over from Wehrmacht units they made much greater efforts to feed the Russian prisoners employed on heavy duties. They also made friends with the local villagers who had been stripped of clothing and foodstuffs by the Germans.

The best Italian formations were the four in the Alpine Corps–the Tridentina, the Julia, the Cuneense and the Vicenza Divisions. Unlike the ordinary Italian infantry, the Alpini were used to harsh winter conditions, but even they were badly equipped. They had to make new footwear out of the tyres from destroyed Soviet vehicles. They lacked anti-tank weapons, their rifles dated from 1891, and their machine guns, having not been designed for Arctic conditions, frequently froze solid. Their vehicles, still painted in desert camouflage, also failed to work in the extreme temperatures, which sometimes fell below minus 30 degrees Centigrade. And their mules, unable to cope with the deep snow, died from exhaustion, lack of forage and cold. Many men suffered from frostbite, so like the Germans they tried to make good their deficiencies by taking the padded jackets and
valenki
felt boots from dead Red Army soldiers. Rations of minestrone and bread arrived frozen hard. Even the wine ration was solid. Italian soldiers and officers hated and despised the Fascist regime, which had sent them into this war so badly prepared.

As the Red Army divisions attacked in waves with their battlecry ‘Urrah! Urrah!’, many of the Italian Eighth Army formations resisted with
far greater determination than expected. But, badly armed and without reserves, their defence soon crumbled in chaos. Italian troops, exhausted and weak from dysentery, retreated in long columns through the snow like refugees, with blankets wrapped around them and over their heads. The Alpini Corps stood firm, reinforcing the flank of the Hungarian Second Army on their left.

Soviet tank brigades fanned out into their rear, the broad-tracked T-34s charging forward over the freshly fallen snow. A sudden drop in temperature meant that the ground was hard again. Supply dumps and railway junctions, with goods trains, were taken with impunity. Since the 17th Panzer Division had been transferred to help Hoth’s attack, the rear areas of Army Group Don contained no reserves.

The greatest danger to the Sixth Army came as the 24th Tank Corps overran the airfield near Tatsinskaya, which was the main air transport base for supplying the
Kessel
. General der Flieger Martin Fiebig ordered his Junkers 52 crews to take off for Novocherkassk as the tanks reached the edge of the airfield. They began to take off in a stream while the tanks fired at them. Some exploded in fireballs, and one tank rammed a plane as it taxied into position for take-off. Altogether 108 Ju 52s managed to get away, but the Luftwaffe lost seventy-two aircraft, almost 10 per cent of its entire transport fleet. The only other airfields capable of supplying Stalingrad lay much further away.

Little Saturn forced Manstein to rethink his entire strategy. Not only was the relief of the Sixth Army now out of the question, soon he would have to withdraw from the Caucasus. Manstein did not have the heart, or else he lacked the nerve, to tell Paulus of the truly hopeless situation which his army now faced. Some officers had a clear idea of their fate. ‘
We’ll never see
our homes again,’ wrote the divisional chaplain of the 305th Infantry Division, ‘we’ll never get out of this mess!’ Soviet intelligence officers, however, found their German prisoners still in a state of denial and confused logic at the possibility of defeat. ‘
We have got to believe
that Germany will win the war,’ said a Luftwaffe navigator from a Ju 52 shot down on the Stalingrad run, ‘or what is the use of going on with it?’ A soldier reflected the same obstinacy: ‘If we lose the war we have nothing to hope for.’ In Stalingrad, they had no idea that Germany’s North African front was now being squeezed from both ends.

The main point of Operation Torch was to occupy French Tunisia before the Axis transferred troops there, but the Germans reacted with a breathtaking rapidity. On the morning of 9 November, before Algiers and Oran had been secured, the first German fighters landed. Advance parties of infantry and paratroopers followed in transport planes the next day. The
local French commander, still acting on orders from Vichy, backed away from protesting at this breach of the 1940 Armistice conditions.

Hitler had no intention of allowing the Allies a base for the invasion of southern Europe, an attack which he knew would knock Italy out of the war. He intended a massive reinforcement of North Africa, even at this critical moment on the eastern front. So, despite Stalin’s scepticism and the mass demonstrations in London demanding a ‘Second Front Now’, the North African theatre was proving rather more effective than the stillborn plan to invade France in 1942. And the airlift across the Mediterranean occupied a fleet of Junkers 52 transport planes, which could have been better used to supply the Sixth Army.

The Allied advance east towards Tunis was ill organized and almost unplanned. The skeleton British First Army, commanded by a gloomy Scot, Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, was bolstered by several American armoured units and some French infantry battalions. Despite the small size of his force, which amounted to less than a corps, Anderson made the mistake of splitting it into four axes of advance. He had no idea that the Axis had already deployed 25,000 men by 25 November.

The First Army’s only real success came on that day when Blade Force, with the 1st Battalion of the US 1st Armored Regiment and the 17th/21st Lancers, advanced on Tunis from the west. The American Stuart tanks came across a forward Luftwaffe airfield near Djedeïda. Attacking like an SAS raid, their crews drove across the runway shooting up stationary Junkers 52s, Messerschmitts and Stukas. They destroyed more than twenty aircraft. This attack caused panic and convinced Generalleutnant Walther Nehring, who had commanded the Afrika Korps under Rommel, to pull in his defence perimeter. But the attack on the airfield did little to blunt German air superiority.

Elsewhere, German paratroopers and other forces ambushed the mainly British columns, inflicting heavy casualties. The 2nd Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers lost 144 men in a single attack on Medjez against a paratroop battalion, backed by 88mm guns and some panzers. To make matters worse, American aircraft strafed their own ground troops. They began to fire back at any aeroplane which appeared, with the slogan ‘If it flies–it dies.’ The arrival of the 10th Panzer Division and a few of the new Tiger tanks punished Anderson’s troops on 3 December, forcing them back with heavy losses. It was an unequal struggle against a much more proficient and better-armed enemy.