Friedrich Paulus pressed toward Stalingrad. The ever-lengthening north flank of 6th Army along the Don was covered by the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Italian 8th Army, and the Romanian 3rd Army, while the Romanian 4th Army held a thin line in the Kalmuk steppe south of Stalingrad. The flanks thus were guarded by extremely weak forces, since none of the allies had good equipment or adequate training.
Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army had now turned northeast and was pressing through Elista across the steppe toward Stalingrad. About fifty miles south of the city, Hoth’s attack broke down against fierce resistance by the Soviet 57th and 64th Armies.
Originally the Soviet high command, Stavka, did not plan to hold Stalingrad. It intended to withdraw Red forces east of the stream, so the Germans would be forced to overwinter on the unprotected steppe. But the unexpected splitting of the German offensive called for new decisions. Stalin removed Timoshenko from command in the south and ordered Andrei I. Eremenko to take over and keep the city.
Stalingrad was no fortress. The old city of Tsaritsyn (Stalin had named it after himself in 1925) was surrounded by a jumble of old wooden structures, barrack-like apartments, industrial installations, and railroad switchyards sprawling fifteen miles along the west bank of the river, and two to four miles back from it. Above the apartments and factories reared water towers and grain silos. Numerous balkas (dry ravines or gullies with steep banks) and railway embankments eased the defense, as did the high western bank of the Volga and, west of the city, a twenty-nine-mile arc of woods, a mile wide at its thickest, protecting against dust and snow-storms. In August 1942 Stalingrad held about 600,000 people, including refugees.
Eremenko had five armies, some hard-hit. But Stalin issued a
Paulus’s mobile spearhead reached the Don near Kalach on July 28, but because of fierce Soviet resistance it was August 23 before 6th Army forced passage of the Don. Massive Stuka bombing attacks on the city during the day and night of August 24 killed many civilians, turned office blocks into rubble, and set fire to wooden structures in older neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, 16th Panzer Division under one-armed General Hans Hube swept aside Russian infantry west of the city and women workers crewing antiaircraft guns at the Barricade gun factory, and reached the Volga near Rynok, ten miles north of Stalingrad, at 6:30 P.M., August 24, 1942. The original purpose had thus been attained: German artillery at Rynok could seal off traffic on the Volga.
On August 27, Stalin appointed General Georgy K. Zhukov as deputy supreme commander of the Red Army, and sent him to direct the defense of Stalingrad.
In oppressive heat (it had not rained for two months), German forces backed by tanks crashed against barricades that blocked nearly every street. Russians fought back from machine-gun nests, within buildings, and amid the rubble. Mortars hidden in holes and crevices dropped shells on the advancing Germans. The Russians defended fortresslike complexes—the steelworks Red October, the artillery factory Barricade, the warehouse complex Univermag, and the tractor plant Dzherhezinsky. The Germans were soon exhausted. Supplies were slow arriving and insufficient; ammunition was in short supply. Progress was slow, counterattacks frequent, and losses high. The name Stalingrad began to have a hypnotic effect on Russians and Germans alike, especially Hitler, who insisted on capture of the entire city.
At Rynok 14th Motorized Corps came under almost unrelenting attack as the Russians tried to sweep around this northern anchor and roll up the German positions. Day after day more than a hundred tanks along with massed Russian infantry hurled themselves against the corps behind a curtain of artillery fire. The Russian commanders ignored high casualties. The only thing that saved the corps was its artillery, the guns sometimes shooting up assembly areas before the Russians could launch their attacks. The Germans learned not to occupy inclines facing the enemy (forward slopes), as they could not be protected from Russian armor. Instead they held the reverse slopes, massing tanks in hollows just behind the main line of resistance, and knocking out enemy armor as it reached the crests above.
General Gustav von Wietersheim, commanding 14th Motorized Corps, watched his strength decline. He recommended that 6th Army be withdrawn to the west bank of the Don, forty-five miles away. The only result was that Hitler removed him because he was “too pessimistic.”
As the German offensives stumbled to a halt, radical changes in leadership came about. On September 10 Hitler relieved List, because his army group had not captured the whole Caucasus. He did not name a successor, and commanded the army group himself in his spare time from supreme headquarters.
Hitler’s long conflict with Halder came to a head. Hitler reproached Halder and the army general staff, calling them cowards and lacking drive. When Halder presented proof of new Soviet formations totaling 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad and half a million in the southern Caucasus, Hitler advanced on him, foaming at the mouth, crying out that he forbade such “idiotic chatter” in his presence.
Halder, who looked and acted like a prim schoolmaster, persisted in explaining what would happen when the new Russian reserve armies attacked the overextended flanks that ran out from the Stalingrad salient. On September 24, Hitler dismissed him.
Hitler said arguments with Halder had cost him half his nervous energy. The army, he said, no longer required technical proficiency. What was needed was the “glow of National Socialist conviction.” He couldn’t expect that from officers of the old German army.
The new chief of staff was Lieutenant General Kurt Zeitzler, a tank expert and man of action. Zeitzler soon took note of the cliques and intrigue in Hitler’s headquarters, became excessively cautious, and did nothing to challenge Hitler’s decision to keep 6th Army at Stalingrad.
Yet, as Field Marshal Manstein wrote: “A far-sighted leader would have realized from the start that to mass the whole of the German assault forces in and around Stalingrad without adequate flank protection placed them in mortal danger of being enveloped as soon as the enemy broke through the adjacent fronts.”
Hitler held stubbornly to the idea that had become fixed in his mind: the enemy was shattered, and would not rise again. He accepted no evidence to the contrary, and he was ready to sack any officer who did not obtain objectives, however unrealistic, or who wanted to pull back to more defensible positions.
Stalingrad had virtually been destroyed. The Germans had gained eight-tenths of the rubble but couldn’t oust the Russians from the rest.
The principal problem, of course, was the flanks. General Hoth had at his disposal on the south two widely spaced corps of the Romanian 4th Army. Beyond the Romanians a 120-mile hole had opened in the Kalmuk steppe, only meagerly veiled by a German motorized division. To the west, the Romanian 3rd Army, Italian 8th Army, and Hungarian 2nd Army held a 400-mile front along the Don. None possessed antitank guns that could stop Russian T-34s.
The Russians had assembled a million men with 13,500 cannons, 900 tanks, and 1,100 aircraft in three army groups or fronts on either side of Stalingrad.
In thick fog on November 19, 1942, Southwest Front commander N. F. Vatutin launched the first arm of a giant pincers movement (Operation Uranus) some eighty miles west of Stalingrad at Kletskaya and Kremensk on the Don. The target was the Romanian 3rd Army. Soviet artillery had previously registered targets, and guns laid down a curtain of shells on the unsuspecting Romanians. Soviet tanks used compasses to guide them. The Romanians stood up to the assault only briefly before they ran away. A giant hole twenty miles wide opened in the German front. Soviet tanks streamed south toward Kalach.
The next day Stalingrad Front commander Eremenko smashed a broad fissure in the Romanian 4th Army south of Stalingrad. This army disintegrated as well. With virtually no opposition, the Russian attack wedge swung to the northwest to link up with the Soviet advance from the Don.
If 6th Army had been given freedom of movement at once it might have broken out of the trap with its men and equipment intact. But Hitler had no intention of allowing the army to retreat, and, when Paulus asked
