prepare the German people for any eventuality—including disaster in Russia.
“We have thrown the national existence into the balance,” he wrote. “There is no turning back now.”
Meanwhile, Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky shuttled back and forth between Moscow and the Stalingrad fronts. They walked the terrain, spotted artillery targets and German troop concentrations for special attention, and met with their generals to refine tactics.
During Zhukov’s visit to General Vatutin’s command post north of the Don River bridgeheads at Serafimovich and Kletskaya, Stalin reached him with an important telegram:
November 15, 1942
Comrade Konstantinov:
You can set the moving date for Federov and Ivanov [the offensives by Vatutin and Yeremenko] as you see fit, and let me know when you come back to Moscow. If you think it necessary that either one or the other move one or two days earlier or later, I empower you to decide that question according to your own best judgment.
Zhukov and Vasilevsky checked their preparations on both fronts and agreed to begin the counterattack in the northern sector on November 19, and on the southern front a day later. Stalin approved the plan without comment.
Operation Uranus would commence within ninety-six hours.
From the Obersalzburg, where he had been resting since the Beer Hall Speech, Adolf Hitler radioed a message to Sixth Army Headquarters on the steppe:
I know about the difficulties of the battle for Stalingrad and about the loss of troops. With the ice drifting on the Volga, however, the difficulties are even greater for the Russians. Making use of this [time] span we will avoid a bloodbath later on. I expect therefore that the Supreme Command, with all its repeatedly proven energy, and the troops, with their courage often demonstrated, will do their utmost to break through to the Volga at the metallurgical works and at the gun factory and occupy these parts of town.
In accordance with Hitler’s orders, the pioneers turned right and left along the Volga and tried to roll up the fanatical defense behind the Barrikady. The battle lasted all day and on that night, two Soviet biplanes came up the river at only a fifty-foot altitude and hovered over Lyudnikov’s position. A circle of bonfires lit by the trapped Russians illuminated the small area in which it was safe to drop supplies. But as the pilots prepared to unload bales of food from their open cockpits, the Germans lit another chain of bonfires to confuse them. Since the pilots were unable to gauge the extent of Lyudnikov’s territory, most of the supplies they dropped fell into German lines or sank in the Volga.
At a field kitchen in the rear, west of the Barrikady, cook Wilhelm Giebeler waited for news of his 336th Battalion. Ever since the battle for the factory district began, a friend, a dispatch runner, had kept him informed of the action at the front. The first day, he had come back and told him everything was going well; the next he had returned with snapshots, letters, and other personal effects of men Giebeler had known well. He told the cook to send them on to their next of kin. By now Giebeler had hundreds of small bundles to mail back to Germany.
Listening to the symphony of shells and grenades exploding to the east, he thumbed through the letters and pictures and waited for his friend to make his nightly visit. But the man did not appear. Giebeler never saw him again—nor any other soldiers of the 336th Battalion.
General von Richthofen had not given up his feud with Sixth Army Headquarters. In a telephone conversation with Chief of Staff Kurt Zeitzler at Rastenburg on the night of November 16, the outspoken Luftwaffe commander exploded:
“Both the command and the troops are so listless… we shall get nowhere…. Let us either fight or abandon the attack altogether. If we can’t clear up the situation now, when the Volga is blocked and the Russians are in real difficulty, we shall never be able to. The days are getting shorter and the weather worse.”
Zeitzler agreed.
The weather, indeed, was getting worse. It had changed dramatically, as it always does on the steppe, which knows only one extreme or the other: light or dark, abundance or famine, cruel heat or numbing cold, life or death—everything or nothing.
Warm weather had lasted through October, then it turned cold overnight. At first, drizzles drenched the plains. Then snow flurries whipped the barren land. The steppe grass turned brown, and wilted. Men caught in the open turned their collars up to ward off the chill. The sky no longer blazed with iridescent hues; it was sullen, gray, menacing. It whispered of winter.
The quartermasters of Sixth Army had learned bitter lessons from the previous year and had already dug into the many
Along the railroads leading to Stalingrad, ten depots had laid in stocks for both Sixth Army and the German panzer groups bogged down in the Caucasus. But moving the supplies east was difficult, for Russian partisans had received orders to impede enemy traffic to the Don and Volga. As bridges and track blew up in fiery explosions, the supply line from Kharkov to Stalingrad clogged, cleared, and clogged again.
Fortunately, the warehouses at Chir, a railhead only sixty miles west of Stalingrad bulged with appropriate items and as the first frosts touched the steppe in early November, some units of the Sixth Army received warm clothing. Convoys of trucks trailed back and forth across the steppe, bringing winter gear to German soldiers. Other convoys managed to get through with badly needed replacements for infantry regiments and battalions.
Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert had boarded a troop train at the town of Boblingen in Germany, waved farewell to his wife, Irene, and watched her out of sight. Surrounded by fourteen comrades, the private quickly adjusted to the camaraderie of soldierly life. The train rolled eastward for endless days and, as it moved through the Ukraine, signs of war multiplied. Brunnert saw burned-out villages and railroad cars reduced to skeletal wrecks. He and his comrades decided to post guards at night, but the partisans never attacked and, weeks after leaving Boblingen, the unit arrived at Chir. There, Brunnert pitched a tent and when he got up in the morning, he saw everything covered with frost. He also saw thousands of Russian refugees headed toward Germany and labor camps. They lay in clusters on flatcars. Most wore rags; some munched sunflower seeds, their only food. In the fields around the tracks other Russians picked through garbage heaps for bits of decaying food. Brunnert was shocked at the sight.
He waited at Chir until he got orders to join a truckload of twenty-four men headed toward the front line. On all sides there was only dreary steppe country. On the eastern horizon, a deep and steady roar made the earth tremble.
To most Sixth Army soldiers, the persistent rumbling on the horizon was their only contact , with the horror on the banks of the Volga. For the more than two hundred thousand men in the rear echelons, the killing was just a peripheral event they viewed in brief agonizing moments: the wounded screaming as they were manhandled out of ambulances, the stained and torn uniforms that piled up in grotesque mounds outside surgeons’ tents, the thousands of crosses in regimental graveyards on the desolate prairie.
At Peskavotka Depot, forty miles northwest of Stalingrad, Karl Englehardt distributed equipment and food. He also supervised twenty
