How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

another, and by December 22 the Soviets had given up.

Part of the reason for the German success was the expertise and discipline of the panzer troops. Part was due to the Russian tank crews, who had scarcely any training. Likewise, the Russian commander sent in tank corps (groups of brigades about the size of divisions) without coordinating times of attacks, permitting Balck’s panzers to deal with one crisis at a time.

While these fights were going on, Manstein launched Operation Winter Tempest, using only 57th Panzer Corps. His attack surprised the enemy, and made good progress, although the Russians brought up troops from around Stalingrad and counterattacked again and again.

The real threat now came in a massive way and from a new direction. On December 16, 1942, the Russian 1st Guards Army overran the Italian 8th Army on the upper Chir, and knocked a sixty-mile hole in the line to the left or northwest of Army Detachment Hollidt. It was obvious the objective was Rostov and a far greater “Stalingrad.” Manstein ordered Army Detachment Hollidt to pull back on a shorter front to guard the Donetz crossings of Forchstadt and Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, only eighty-five miles northeast of Rostov.

But Manstein held doggedly to his advance on Stalingrad, calling on the army high command (OKH) to order 6th Army to break out toward 4th Panzer Army.

There was still hope. The strike against the Italians had drawn off most Soviet mobile formations, leaving a narrow window of opportunity at Stalingrad. If 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army attacked toward each other, they could crack through the defensive shell and meet. However, they had to use every ounce of their collective strength.

But Hitler refused to sanction a breakout. Incredibly, he ruled that 4th Panzer Army was to continue to attack toward the city, but 6th Army was to remain in place. Hitler wanted to hang on to Stalingrad and supply it by a land corridor.

In desperation, Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the caldron on December 18 to get General Paulus to defy Hitler and save the army. Manstein promised to put the onus entirely on his own shoulders, relieving Paulus of responsibility. Paulus replied that he couldn’t do anything because the surrender of Stalingrad was forbidden “by order of the Fuehrer.”

Manstein hoped he would change his mind. The critical moment came on December 19. The 57th Panzer Corps crossed the Aksai River, against bitter Russian resistance, and reached the narrow Miskova River, just thirty miles from the siege front. Behind the front Manstein had assembled transport columns with 3,000 tons of supplies, plus tractors to mobilize part of 6th Army’s artillery. All were to be rushed through as soon as tanks cleared a way. Manstein sent an urgent appeal to Paulus and Hitler: 6th Army must disengage and drive southwest to join 4th Panzer Army.

Hitler took hours to reply: 6th Army could break out, he said, but it still had to hold existing fronts north, east, and west of the city. This was manifestly impossible. Paulus now showed his moral cowardice. He informed Manstein that his one hundred tanks had enough fuel to go only twenty miles. Before he could move, air deliveries had to bring in 4,000 tons of fuel. There was no possibility of this, and Paulus knew it.

Drawn between Hitler demanding he stay and Manstein demanding he move, Paulus clutched at the straw of fuel to do nothing. Not even to save his army was Paulus going to buck his Fuehrer. Yet he and Manstein knew that the fuel could have been allocated to half his tanks, giving them mobility for forty miles—enough to break through.

In the week that followed, the fate of 6th Army was decided. For six days Army Group Don had run every conceivable risk to keep the door open. But Manstein could leave 4th Panzer Army in its exposed position no longer.

The panzer corps was having to fend off stronger and stronger attacks, and a greater danger was growing to the west where most of the Italian army had disappeared and Army Detachment Hollidt’s left flank was being threatened. Russian spearheads were driving toward the Donetz River and were not more than 120 miles from Rostov.

On December 22, Manstein was forced to release 48th Corps from the Chir to restore Army Detachment Hollidt’s left wing, and he had to send 6th Panzer Division from Hoth’s army to help. Manstein knew there was now no chance of 6th Army breaking out. On December 27, two Soviet armies and four mechanized corps launched a major assault against the weakened 57th Panzer Corps, now down to only a couple dozen tanks, threatened to envelop both flanks, and compelled it to withdraw to Kotelnikovo. The attempt to relieve Stalingrad had failed.

It was now plain that 6th Army was going to die. Adolf Hitler had caused it. But while the senior German generals grieved the fate of the army, most were frantically trying to figure how to block the Soviet thrust toward Rostov.

At this nadir of German fortune, Erich von Manstein saw opportunity where the rest of the senior German officers saw disaster.

Manstein conceived a spectacular plan to transform defeat into victory. He proposed that the German army surrender the territory it had won in the summer, which it couldn’t hold anyway, and that all forces on the southern front, except 6th Army, of course, withdraw in stages to the lower Dnieper, some 220 miles west of Rostov.

Manstein was certain when withdrawal commenced that the Russians would launch an offensive aimed at cutting the Germans off from the vital Dnieper crossings at Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye where all supplies came through. This would create a vastly extended Russian front stretching across lower Ukraine.

Manstein proposed that a powerful German force be concentrated near Kharkov, 250 miles northwest of Rostov and 125 miles northeast of Dnepropetrovsk. When the Soviets extended themselves westward toward the Dnieper crossings, the German forces around Kharkov would drive into their northern flank. As Manstein told Hitler and the OKH, this would “convert a large-scale withdrawal into an envelopment operation” that would push the Russians against the Sea of Azov and destroy them.

Manstein’s idea would have thrown the enemy on the defensive and transformed the situation in the south. But Hitler refused. He didn’t want to give up his summer conquests, ephemeral as they were. He wanted to keep his troops not only at Stalingrad but in the Caucasus.

Manstein came to have wide personal experience with Hitler’s thinking about war and concluded that he “actually recoiled from risks in the military field.” Hitler refused to allow temporary surrender of territory. He could not see that, in the wide reaches of Russia, the enemy could always mass forces at one point and break through. Only in mobile operations could the superiority of German staffs and fighting troops be exploited. The brilliant holding action of the 48th Panzer Corps along the Chir River demonstrated how superior German leadership and flexible responses, if applied by the whole German army, almost certainly could have stopped Soviet advances and brought about a stalemate. But such a policy was beyond Hitler’s grasp.

Manstein also found that Hitler feared to denude secondary fronts to gain superiority at the point where a decision had to fall. For example, the failure to assemble a large army to relieve Stalingrad had proved disastrous. Hitler could not make rapid decisions. In most cases he finally released too few troops, and sent them too late.

“Obstinate defense of every foot of ground gradually became the be all and end all” of Hitler’s leadership, Manstein wrote. “Hitler thought the arcanum of success lay in clinging at all costs to what he already possessed.” He could never be brought to renounce this notion.

When Hitler refused to approve withdrawal of German forces to the Dnieper and a campaign to transform defeat into victory, Manstein turned to the now-urgent job of saving the southern armies from being cut off and destroyed.

While Manstein’s thin forces sought desperately to build a defensive wall in front of the Donetz, 6th Army’s death struggle began. Air supplies dwindled in the face of atrocious weather, long flights, and fierce Russian air defenses. On December 26, only seventy tons of supplies were flown in. Bread began to run out, fats virtually vanished, soldiers went on an iron ration of one meal a day. As the new year began, numbing cold, hunger, and steady Russian attacks weakened the army day by day.

On January 9, 1943, a Russian delegation called on 6th Army to give up. On Hitler’s orders Paulus rejected the demand. Manstein supported the Fuehrer’s decision. Although the army was perishing, it still had a strategic