flank of LI Army Corps and the left flank of Fourth Panzer Army: ‘The ring round Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga is closed!’ From the crossing of the Don on 23 August up to 8 September the Sixth Army claimed to have taken ‘26,500 prisoners, and destroyed 350 guns and 830 tanks’.
Paulus received a letter from Colonel Wilhelm Adam, one of his staff officers, who was on sick leave in Germany and bitterly regretted his absence at such a historic moment. ‘Here, everyone is awaiting the fall of Stalingrad,’ he wrote to his commander-in-chief. ‘One hopes it will be a turning point in the war.’ Yet on the edge of Stalingrad, the nights suddenly became colder, to the point of finding frost on the ground in the morning and a skim of ice in the canvas buckets for the horses. The Russian winter would soon be upon them again.
Only a very few, however, foresaw the worst obstacle facing the Sixth Army. Richthofen’s massive bombing raids had not only failed to destroy the enemy’s will, their very force of destruction had turned the city into a perfect killing ground for the Russians to use against them.
Part Three
‘THE FATEFUL CITY’
9. ‘Time is Blood’: The September Battles
The first time the German people heard of the city of Stalingrad as a military objective was in a communique of 20 August. Just over two weeks later, Hitler, who had never wanted his troops to become involved in street- fighting in Moscow or Leningrad, became determined to sieze this city at any price.
Events on the Caucasus Front, supposedly his main priority, played a major part in his new obsession with Stalingrad. On 7 September, a day when Haider noted ‘satisfying progress at Stalingrad’, Hitler’s exasperation at the failure to advance in the Caucasus came to a head. He refused to accept that Field Marshal List did not have enough troops for the task. General Alfred Jodl, having just returned from a visit to List’s headquarters, observed at dinner that List had only followed the Fuhrer’s orders. ‘That is a lie!’ screamed Hitler, and stormed out. As if to prove that he had been misquoted, instructions were sent back to Germany by teleprinter, ordering Reichstag stenographers to be sent to Vinnitsa to take down every word at the daily situation conference.
After the triumphs in Poland, Scandinavia and France, Hitler was often ready to despise mundane requirements, such as fuel supplies and manpower shortages, as if he were above the normal material constraints of war. His explosion on this occasion appears to have brought him to a sort of psychological frontier. General Warlimont, who returned after a week’s absence, was so shocked by Hitler’s ‘long stare of burning hate’ that he thought: ‘This man has lost face; he has realized that his fatal gamble is over, that Soviet Russia is not going to be beaten in this second attempt.’ Nicolaus von Below, the Fuhrer’s Luftwaffe adjutant, also returned to find ‘a completely new situation’ ‘The whole of Hitler’s entourage made a uniformly depressing impression. Hitler suddenly was completely withdrawn.’
Hitler probably did sense the truth — he had, after all, told his generals that a failure to take the Caucasus would mean having to end the war — but he still could not accept it. The Volga was cut and Stalingrad’s war industries as good as destroyed — both of the objectives defined in Operation Blue — yet he now had to capture the city which bore Stalin’s name, as though this in itself would achieve the subjugation of the enemy by other means. The dangerous dreamer had turned to symbolic victory for compensation.
One or two spectacular successes remained to sustain the illusion that Stalingrad would be the crucible in which to prove the superiority of German might. In continued fighting on the north front, Count von Strachwitz, the star commander of 16th Panzer Division, had shown that in a prolonged tank battle success depended on a cool head, straight aim and rapidity of fire. The Russians sent in wave after wave of T-34s and Lend-Lease American tanks. The American vehicles, with their higher profile and thinner protection, proved easy to knock out. Their Soviet crews did not like them. ‘The tanks are no good,’ a driver told his captors. ‘The valves go to pieces, the engine overheats and the transmission is no use.’
‘The Russians attacked over a hill,’ recalled Freytag-Loringhoven, ‘and we were on the reverse slope. Over two days they kept coming in exactly the same way, exposing themselves on the skyline.’ More than a hundred were destroyed. ‘As far as the eye could see,’ a pioneer corporal wrote home, ‘there were countless shot-up and burned-out tanks.’ The forty-nine-year-old Strachwitz received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross, and was posted back to Germany soon afterwards on account of his age. He handed over command to Freytag- Loringhoven.
The Russian attacks at this point may have been appallingly wasteful and incompetent, but there could be no doubt about the determination to defend Stalingrad at any cost. It was a resolve which more than matched the determination of the invader. ‘The hour of courage has struck on the clock…’, ran Anna Akhmatova’s poem at that moment when the very existence of Russia appeared to be in mortal danger.
Since the fall of Rostov, any means of arousing resistance had become permissible. A picture in
For Yeremenko and Khrushchev, the main decision at this moment of crisis was to chose a successor to the commander of 62nd Army, who clearly did not believe that Stalingrad could be held. On 10 September, 62nd Army fought a retreat right back into the city. It was cut off from the 64th Army to the south when the 29th Motorized Infantry Division broke through to the Volga at Kuporosnoe at the southern tip of Stalingrad. On 11 September, Yeremenko’s headquarters in the Tsaritsa gorge had come under heavy fire. Konstantin Simonov arrived at this moment. He was struck by the ‘sad smell of burnt iron’ as he crossed the Volga to the still smouldering city. In the airless bunker Khrushchev, ‘who was gloomy and replied monosyllabically… took out a packet of cigarettes and tried lighting one match after another, but the flame died at once because the ventilation in the tunnel was so bad’.
Simonov and his companion went to sleep on their overcoats in a corner of the tunnel system close to the Tsaritsa entrance. When they awoke next morning, the place was deserted. ‘There were no staff officers, no typewriters, nobody.’ Eventually they found a signalman rolling up the last of the wire. They discovered that Front headquarters had been evacuated across the Volga. The constant cutting of land lines during the bombardment had forced Yeremenko and Khrushchev to seek Stalin’s permission to withdraw their command post to the other side of the river. The only major headquarters left on the west bank was that of the 62nd Army.
The following morning, General Chuikov received a summons to the new headquarters at Yamy of the joint military council for the Stalingrad and South-Western Fronts. It took him all day and most of the night to cross the Volga and find the spot. The glow from the blazing buildings in Stalingrad was so strong that, even on the east bank of the broad Volga, there was no need to switch on the headlights of his Lend-Lease jeep.
When Chuikov finally saw Khrushchev and Yeremenko the next morning, they stated the situation. The Germans were prepared to take the city at any price. There could be no surrender. There was nowhere to retreat to. Chuikov had been proposed as the new army commander in Stalingrad.
‘Comrade Chuikov,’ said Khrushchev. ‘How do you interpret your task?’
‘We will defend the city or die in the attempt,’ he replied. Yeremenko and Khrushchev looked at him and said
