consolation was that his corps commander, General Strecker, and fellow staff officers at XI Corps headquarters felt the same way. ‘It is a real pleasure to be together with such men.’
The dismissal of Haider, as well as marking the end of the general staff as an independent planning body, also removed Paulus’s sole remaining protector at a critical moment. Paulus must have been secretly dejected to lose the chance of a new appointment. Hitler had said that with the Sixth Army he could storm the heavens, yet Stalingrad still did not fall. A team from the propaganda ministry awaited its capture, ‘ready to film the raising of flags’, and the press begged to be allowed to proclaim ‘
The pressure and criticism Paulus had received ‘from morning to night’ for not having taken Stalingrad made him ‘highly nervous’, according to Groscurth. The strain exacerbated his recurring dysentery. Staff officers noticed that the tic from which he suffered on the left side of his face became more pronounced. In Sixth Army headquarters at Golubinsky, a village on the west bank of the Don, he stared at the detailed, large-scale map of Stalingrad. Much of the city had already been taken, and his intelligence staff estimated that the Soviet casualty rate was running at roughly double the German. He could only hope that Hitler was right about the enemy running out of reserves at any moment. His own resources were dissipating rapidly, and the astonishing tenacity of the enemy dismayed them all.
Much of the criticism directed against him was based on the fact that the Sixth Army, with two corps from the Fourth Panzer Army, was the largest formation in the German Army, at nearly a third of a million men strong. Outsiders, with no experience of the fighting, could not understand the problem. One can certainly argue that Paulus could have used his troops better, but his critics appeared to forget that while around eight of his divisions were committed to the fighting in the city, another eleven divisions manned nearly 130 miles of front, stretching across the greater and lesser Don bends and then over the steppe to the Volga north of Rynok, as well as a strip south of Stalingrad opposite Beketovka. (See Map 4.) Only a single division remained in reserve.
On the northern flank, out in the increasingly bleak steppe, Strecker’s XI Army Corps, General Walther Heitz’s VIII Army Corps and Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps faced constant attacks from four Soviet armies, attempting to relieve pressure on the city itself. On the right, General Jaenecke’s IV Army Corps (opposite General Shumilov’s 64th Army) linked up with the weak Romanian Fourth Army, an over-extended defence line which petered out in the northern Caucasus. In all, Yeremenko’s command included Chuikov’s 62nd Army, the 64th Army round Beketovka, the 57th Army down to beyond lake Sarpa, the 51st Army holding the line of the rest of the lakes and then the 28th Army stretching down into the emptiness of the Kalmyk steppe.
For the German, Romanian and Russian armies on the southern flank, the war in the steppe was essentially like the First World War, only with better weapons and the occasional appearance of modern aircraft. For the armoured formations out on both flanks, the sunbaked plains, over which they had charged like warships at full speed just weeks before, now struck them as deeply depressing. The lack of trees and mountains made southern Germans and Austrians homesick. The rains of the
Fighting in Stalingrad itself could not have been more different. It represented a new form of warfare, concentrated in the ruins of civilian life. The detritus of war — burnt-out tanks, shell cases, signal wire and grenade boxes — was mixed with the wreckage of family homes — iron bedsteads, lamps and household utensils. Vasily Grossman wrote of the ‘fighting in the brick-strewn, half-demolished rooms and corridors’ of apartment blocks, where there might still be a vase of withered flowers, or a boy’s homework open on the table. In an observation post, high in a ruined building, an artillery spotter with a periscope might watch for targets through a convenient shell-hole in the wall, seated on a kitchen chair.
German infantrymen loathed house-to-house fighting. They found such close-quarter combat, which broke conventional military boundaries and dimensions, psychologically disorientating. During the last phase of the September battles, both sides had struggled to take a large brick warehouse on the Volga bank, near the mouth of the Tsaritsa, which had four floors on the river side and three on the landward. At one point, it was ‘like a layered cake’ with Germans on the top floor, Russians below them, and more Germans underneath them. Often an enemy was unrecognizable, with every uniform impregnated by the same dun-coloured dust.
German generals do not seem to have imagined what awaited their divisions in the ruined city. They lost their great Blitzkrieg advantages and were in many ways thrown back to First World War techniques, even though their military theorists had argued that trench warfare had been ‘an aberration in the art of war’. The Sixth Army, for example, found itself having to respond to Soviet tactics by reinventing the ‘storm-wedges’ introduced in January 1918: assault groups of ten men armed with a machine-gun, light mortar and flame-throwers for clearing bunkers, cellars and sewers.
In its way, the fighting in Stalingrad was even more terrifying than the impersonal slaughter at Verdun. The close-quarter combat in ruined buildings, bunkers, cellars and sewers was soon dubbed ‘Rattenkrieg’ by German soldiers. It possessed a savage intimacy which appalled their generals, who felt that they were rapidly losing control over events. ‘The enemy is invisible,’ wrote General Strecker to a friend. ‘Ambushes out of basements, wall remnants, hidden bunkers and factory ruins produce heavy casualties among our troops.’
German commanders openly admitted the Russian expertise at camouflage, but few acknowledged that it was their aircraft which had produced the ideal conditions for the defenders. ‘Not a house is left standing,’ a lieutenant wrote home, ‘there is only a burnt-out wasteland, a wilderness of rubble and ruins which is well-nigh impassable.’ At the southern end of the city, the Luftwaffe liaison officer with 24th Panzer Division wrote: ‘The defenders have concentrated and fortified themselves in the sections of the town facing our attacks. In parkland, there are tanks or just tank turrets dug-in, and anti-tank guns concealed in the cellars make it very hard going for our advancing tanks.’
Chuikov’s plan was to funnel and fragment German mass assaults with ‘breakwaters’. Strengthened buildings, manned by infantry with anti-tank rifles and machine-guns, would deflect the attackers into channels where camouflaged T-34 tanks and anti-tank guns waited, half-buried in the rubble behind. When German tanks attacked with infantry, the defenders’ main priority was to separate them. The Russians used trench mortars, aiming to drop their bombs just behind the tanks to scare off the infantry while the anti-tank gunners went for the tanks themselves. The channelled approaches would also be mined in advance by sappers, whose casualty rate was the highest of any specialization. ‘Make a mistake and no more dinners’ was their unofficial motto. Wearing camouflage suits, once the snow came, they crawled out at night to lay anti-tank mines and conceal them. An experienced sapper could lay up to thirty a night. They were also renowned for running out from cover to drop a mine in front of a German tank as it advanced.
Much of the fighting consisted not of major attacks, but of relentless, lethal little conflicts. The battle was fought by assault squads, generally six or eight strong, from ‘the Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting’. They armed themselves with knives and sharpened spades for silent killing, as well as sub-machine-guns and grenades. (Spades were in such short supply, that men carved their names in the handle and slept with their head on the blade to make sure that nobody stole it.) The assault squads sent into the sewers were strengthened with flame- throwers and sappers bringing explosive charges. Six sappers from Rodimtsev’s guards division even managed to find a shaft under a German stronghold and blew it up, using 300 pounds of explosive.
A more general tactic evolved, based on the realization that the German armies were short of reserves. Chuikov ordered an emphasis on night attacks, mainly for the practical reason that the Luftwaffe could not react to them, but also because he was convinced that the Germans were more frightened during the hours of darkness, and would become exhausted. The German
