Enemy at the Gates

for battle.

Nagged by these distressing messages, Manstein plunged immediately into his primary task: reaching Sixth Army. Assuming Goering’s airlift could keep Paulus’s troops alive, Manstein hoped to carve a corridor to the fortress by mounting a two-pronged attack. One would be a diversion from the west, aimed at Kalach. Hopefully, this diversion would draw Russian units away from the second drive which would start from Kotelnikovo, seventy-three miles southwest of the pocket.

The Kotelnikovo offensive had the advantage of avoiding any crossing of the Don. Only two of its tributaries, the Aksai and Mishkova rivers, would hinder progress, and beyond the Mishkova were thirty miles of open steppe, reaching all the way to the southern perimeter of the Kessel. When the German relief troops reached the Mishkova River, Manstein then expected Paulus to burst out with his army and link up with them.

But first, Manstein needed more troops and armor. Having completed a long trip from France, the first elements of the 6th Panzer Division were unloading from trains at Kotelnikovo. The 6th Panzers boasted 160 tanks operated by elite crews. Coming a few days later behind the 6th was the 17th Panzer Division, at nearly full strength. For extra support, Manstein had called for the 16th Motorized Division, which was thirty miles east of his headquarters and presently filling the gap left by the demise of the Fourth Rumanian Army. Manstein also requested the 23rd Panzer Division. It had been reduced to twenty-five tanks, but he was not aware of its dilapidated condition.

To protect the flanks of the relief expedition, the field marshal had what was left of the Rumanian forces, hastily thrown together into two under-strength corps. But all his projections were doomed—unless the airlift nourished the Sixth Army, and an improvised defense force led by Col. Walter Wenck could stall the Russians on the steppe south of the Don.

Only a few days earlier, Wenck had received urgent orders to leave his post in the Caucasus and assume command of the “screening” line in front of the Russians pushing southward toward Rostov from Serafimovich and Kletskaya.

Needing troops and equipment, the colonel instituted his own set of rules. He rode the highways and dragooned stragglers into ad hoc units. He played movies at intersections and when exhausted soldiers stopped to watch, Wenck brusquely marched them back to war. One of his noncommissioned officers found an abandoned fuel dump and put up signs reading: “To the Fuel-issuing Point.” Hundreds of cars, trucks, and tanks drove into this oasis only to become part of Wenck’s new army.

On November 27, when Wenck had met Manstein at Novocherkassk to discuss the situation, the field marshal bluntly reminded the colonel of his awesome responsibility:

“Wenck, you’ll answer to me with your head that the Russians won’t break through to Rostov. The Don-Chir front must hold. Otherwise not only the Sixth Army in Stalingrad, but the whole of Army Group A in the Caucasus will be lost.”

Wenck did not need a lecture. He needed extraordinary luck.

Chapter Eighteen

“Manstein is coming, Manstein is coming,” the shouts went along the frozen balkas in the Kessel between the Don and Volga. Soldiers cheered his name and repeated stories of his genius to each other: Manstein, whose plan to outflank the Maginot Line had led to the fall of France within six weeks; Manstein, who reduced the Crimean fortress city of Sevastopol within days. Listening to these stories, the men of the Sixth Army gloated over the coming of the hook-nosed, silver-haired legend and laughed at their temporary status of “mice in a mousetrap.”

General Seydlitz-Kurzbach did not laugh at the army’s predicament. Thoroughly cowed by Hitler’s order to bear co-responsibility for defense of the pocket, he decided to avoid any blame in case the Sixth Army perished. He began writing.

FROM: Commanding General

November 25, 1942, morning

51st Army Corps

TO: Commander in Chief of the Sixth Army [Paulus]

I am in receipt of the army command of November 24, 1942 for the continuation of fighting….

The Army is confronted with a clear alternative: breakthrough to the southwest in general direction of Kotelnikovo, or the annihilation of the Army within a few days…. The ammunition supplies have decreased considerably. The assumed action of the enemy, for whom a victory in a classic battle of annihilation is in store, is easy to assess…. One cannot doubt that he will continue his attacks… with undiminished vehemence.

The order of the High Command… to hold the hedgehog position until help is near, is obviously based on unreal foundations… The breakthrough must be initiated and carried through immediately.

Paulus read Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s comments with the tolerance a father might show a wayward son. He needed no such analysis from Seydlitz-Kurzbach. For days he had known that retreat from the Volga was imperative. In the precious hours that had been lost, at least sixty Soviet formations were now encamped on the perimeter of the Kessel, their guns trained on Sixth Army. To the south and west, at least eighty other Red Army units were ready to repulse any German attempt to fight through to Paulus. By November 25, the Germans inside the Kessel were twenty-five miles away from the nearest friendly troops.

At the air bases closest to Stalingrad, German airmen struggled to make the airlift succeed. Gen. Martin Fiebig directed the piecemeal buildup from Tatsinskaya and Morosovskaya, which had been excellent fighter and bomber bases during balmy summer months, when weather permitted hundreds of sorties each day. But now it was wintertime, and the air units on the steppe faced enoromus difficulties. Three-motored Ju-52s, transport workhorses of the Luftwaffe, flew in from distant bases. Some were old and untrustworthy; others lacked guns and radios. Crews ranged from veterans to green graduates of training schools in Germany. Many fliers came to Russia in regular -issue clothing, without any garments suited for below-zero temperatures.

On November 25, the first planes had lifted off for Pitomnik Airfield inside the Kessel. For two days they struggled in and out, carrying fuel and ammunition. On the third day, November 27, the weather closed down all operations and Fiebig added up the sorry totals. In the first forty-eight hours, only 130 tons had been delivered instead of the required 600. Sadly, he wrote in his diary: “Weather atrocious. We are trying to fly, but it’s impossible. Here at Tatsinskaya one snowstorm succeeds another. Situation desperate.”

Marshal Richthofen agreed wholeheartedly. Despairing of the airlift, he telephoned Kurt Zeitzler and Albert Jeschonnek to warn them that Sixth Army had to fight its way out before it lost its strength to move. Richthofen begged them to submit his opinion to Hitler. They did, but Hitler refused to be swayed. He told Zeitzler the Sixth Army could hold out, must hold out. If it left Stalingrad, Hitler declared, “we’ll never get it back again.”

When Richthofen heard this verdict, he decided that he and other commanders were “nothing more than highly paid NCOs!” Though completely disgusted, the frustrated Luftwaffe general kept his temper in check and went back to work. His rationale was simple: “Orders are orders.”

Meanwhile, the Russian High Command wrestled with its own serious problems: the success of the vast encirclement. Neither Stalin nor Vasilevsky or Zhukov had dared anticipate the dimensions of their triumph. Prepared to deal with up to one hundred thousand of the enemy, they suddenly realized that nearly three hundred thousand armed soldiers had to be contained and liquidated.

In Red Army staff schools, such an operation had never been broached. Only Zhukov had practical