All summer, refugees had been pouring into Stalingrad from the west, some driving their animals in front of them, some on bicycles, some on horses, some, mainly party administrators, in cars and lorries, but most on foot. By the time the Germans had closed up to the Volga, the population within the city had swollen to an estimated 1.5 million from a pre-war total of 400,000 and Stalin forbade the Red Army from evacuating them, a stance he did not reverse until the late summer, when he accepted that the presence of useless mouths that had to be fed was an intolerable burden on the defence of the city. All through the summer and autumn, the Red Army had been building up its strength from the vast and seemingly inexhaustible pool of manpower that was the Russian population, and by the summer the enormous losses of 1941 had been all but replaced. These new brigades and divisions were not fed into Stalingrad, however, where Chuikov received only the reinforcements necessary to prevent a complete collapse, but instead they were trained and equipped for the massive counter-blow that the Stavka had been planning.
The Germans had little warning of what was to come. Some indications that the Russians might attempt an attack on the Romanian Third Army on Sixth Army’s left flank were countered by stationing XXXXVIII Panzer Corps behind it, but this was a corps in name only: its two German armoured divisions had just seventy-seven tanks between them and the forty-one belonging to 22 Panzer were unreliable because, during the period of immobility due to severe fuel rationing, mice had got inside the vehicles and chewed through their electrical wiring. The corps’s other division, the Romanian 1 Tank Division, had 103 tanks but 40 of them were Czech light tanks and virtually useless against Russian armour. The Germans had bitten off far more than their available manpower could chew, and the launching of the drive into the Caucasus before Stalingrad was taken, the inability of Hitler to listen to military advice and sanction a closing down of the attack on Stalingrad, the vastly over-extended supply lines, the demands of Leningrad, the need for security in the rear areas and a failure by German industry, efficient though it was, to replace vehicle losses all conspired to put the German Eastern Front in a precarious state as the winter of 1942/43 approached.
With four Army Groups, North, Centre, A and B, the Germans were trying to hold nearly 2,000 miles of a front that ran from Leningrad in the north to Stalingrad on the Volga, then south and west across the Caucasian front to the Black Sea at Novorossiysk. Sixth Army opposite Stalingrad had twenty divisions, six of them supposedly armoured or motorized, but most of their tanks and many of their other vehicles had been removed on the grounds that, as the taking of Stalingrad was now a matter of street fighting by the infantry, the vehicles were not needed and not having to provide fuel for them eased the logistic problem. Sixth Army’s southern neighbour, Fourth Panzer Army, was down to two German and two Romanian divisions, and again they had few tanks, and those formations that were sent up to add some depth and stiffen the defences behind Sixth Army were soon sucked into the fighting for the city. Rifle companies in Sixth Army infantry battalions were down to forty men not much more than platoon strength, and at one stage Paulus ordered that tank crews should be used as infantry – he was deaf to protests that to waste these highly skilled men, who could not easily be replaced when the time came for tanks to be manned again, was counter-productive. In October formations had been ordered to reduce their staffs by 10 per cent to boost front-line units, but attempts to use surplus Luftwaffe ground troops to increase combat strength failed when, instead of being used as individual reinforcements for existing infantry divisions, the Luftwaffe insisted that they form their own divisions commanded by Luftwaffe officers and NCOs, none of whom had any experience of or training in ground warfare.
Like Churchill, Hitler desperately needed a victory, and this became more urgent after the success of Operation Torch in the Mediterranean, when even in Germany the legend of the Führer’s invincibility was beginning to wear a little thin. Like Alamein to Churchill, Stalingrad had become a symbol to Hitler. He had claimed over and over again in public speeches and in discussions with his allies that the Germans were on the Volga to stay and that Stalingrad would soon be taken – `fragments to be mopped up’ was an expression used – and he could not now disengage.
In normal circumstances, the Germans would never have placed the allied armies in the front line along the Volga and the Don, yet, with all the German formations fully committed, there was no alternative. North-west of Sixth Army was the Romanian Third Army, covering a length of 100 miles with fourteen divisions, which on the face of it seems not unreasonable, but they were very short of modern equipment and had only sixty 75mm anti-tank guns for the whole army, the rest being horse-drawn 37mm weapons firing rounds that would simply bounce off Russian T-34 tanks. The Romanians had not been able to close up to the River Don completely, and there was a forty-mile strip on the west bank that was still held by the Russians and which allowed the Red Army to go back and forth across the Don under cover of darkness or smoke. On the Romanian Third Army’s left was the Italian Eighth Army of ten divisions, which, like the Romanians, had never been equipped to German army standards despite the promises made. South of Fourth Panzer Army was the thirteen-division Romanian Fourth Army, again covering a frontage of about 100 miles but with only thirty-four effective anti-tank guns. German intelligence about the forthcoming attack was sketchy. The army Chief of the General Staff in Berlin thought it unlikely that the Red Army would be able to launch anything like the offensives of the previous winter, while Hitler, with that extraordinary intuition that just occasionally proved him right and his professional advisers wrong, thought that the outbreak of bridge-building over the Don in front of the Romanian Third Army might indicate a major thrust in the direction of Rostov, and he ordered a stiffening of the Romanian front by German divisions – but there were very few German divisions available to send. As it turned out, Hitler was correct to expect an attack, but wrong in failing to draw the obvious conclusion and withdraw Sixth Army to a more easily defended and shorter line. Instead, he still hoped to capture Stalingrad before the Russians moved.
Operation Uranus was the Russian name for the counter-attack to be launched by the new armies raised during the summer. It was intended to take the Germans on at their own game and carry out a massive encirclement of Sixth Army by driving through the weakest points of the German front north and south of Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army and meeting at Kalatsch fifty miles west of Stalingrad. For Uranus, the Red Army had amassed over a million men, 900 tanks, 12,000 artillery pieces and 100 multiple rocket-launcher batteries, supported by 1,200 aircraft. On the morning of 19 November 1942 in a thick fog the Russian artillery opened up on the forward positions of the Romanian Third Army. The Russian artillery controllers could not see their targets but, having checked the ranges in the weeks and days before the attacks, they did not have to. After an hour and twenty minutes, the artillery and the rockets switched to targets farther back and the 300 T-34 tanks of I and XXVI Tank Corps of the South-West Front, which had crossed the Don under cover of a smoke screen during the bombardment, advanced. In parts of the front, the Romanians fought hard and well, but mostly there was panic as the soldiers tried desperately to get away from the seemingly unstoppable Soviet tanks. After the tanks came the infantry of First Guards Army and within a few hours the Russians were through. An attempt by Lieutenant-General Ferdinand Heim’s XXXXVIII Corps to seal the breach failed when he lost contact first with the Romanian Army, whose communications were never very good, and then with his own Romanian tank division, and finally when dwindling fuel forced him to halt and pull back. The preponderance of aircraft that the Russians had been able to concentrate and the snow that began to fall that day cancelled the superiority the Luftwaffe had enjoyed hitherto, but until well into the afternoon Sixth Army staff to the east thought the Russian attack was merely a local offensive, a `side effect’ of their own attacks on what was left of the city, and it was only at Headquarters Army Group B that suspicions of the Russians’ real intentions began to surface, a view that was reinforced the next day when another Soviet spearhead of Fifty-First and Fifty-Seventh Armies with 220 T-34s launched itself out of the mist to the south and drove through the Romanian Fourth Army. Now it was clear that the Russians were attempting an encirclement, and both Army Groups A and B began to move such mobile units that they had to try to prevent it. Increasingly heavy snow, iced-up tracks, shortage of fuel and the inability of the Luftwaffe to provide either air reconnaissance or ground support meant that all these measures were far too late, and by the evening of 20 November the Russians had penetrated to a depth of forty miles behind the front. On 21 November an attempt by XXXXVIII Corps to relieve the increasingly desperate situation west of Stalingrad failed and 25,000 Romanians were killed or captured. On 22 November the Russians cut the Stalingrad to Rostov railway line, the main supply route for Sixth Army and in some senses its lifeline, and on 23 November the Soviets closed the ring when 45 Armoured Brigade from the South-West Front’s IV Armoured Corps moving east met advance elements of the Stalingrad Front going west at Kalatsch.
Inside the ring were the whole of Sixth Army, elements of Fourth Panzer Army that had not managed to move in time and stragglers from both Romanian armies. The corps commanders of Sixth Army assumed they would now break out, something they could still have done relatively inexpensively before the Soviets had time to reinforce the ring, but Paulus demurred. Hitler’s instructions had been to stand still, and he intended to do just that and carry on with attempts to take the city. The wretched General Heim, having quite properly withdrawn what was left of his corps to avoid being cut off, now found himself placed under arrest on Hitler’s direct orders, accused of failing to stop the Soviet advance, flown to Berlin and flung into Moabit Prison, where he languished until April 1943 before the Führer relented and allowed him to retire from the army. That this could happen indicates the grip Hitler had by now succeeded in imposing upon the Wehrmacht – even two years previously the army would never have allowed one of their own to be treated in such a way.
Hitler refused the recommendation of Colonel-General von Weichs, Commander Army Group B, that Sixth Army should break out; it must now defend and wait to be relieved. Along the front facing the Volga and running through Stalingrad defence positions already existed, although they had been constructed as jump-off lines for attack rather than defence, but across the wide expanse of steppe to the army’s rear nothing other than scattered alarm posts had been constructed, as it had not been thought necessary to defend against an approach from that direction. The soldiers dug in as best they could, an activity that became increasingly difficult as the temperature dropped and the ground froze. The army’s winter clothing was held in supply depots outside the perimeter and the men had only temperate-climate uniforms, leather boots and one blanket per man. Straw and old newspapers became prized to stuff boots and to pack inside jackets, whereas the Russian soldiers were well equipped with felt boots, sheepskin jackets and fur hats. When the ring closed around them, Sixth Army held fuel and rations for one week and, if not replenished, would have only three options: starve, surrender or break out, and the second implicitly and the third explicitly had been ruled out.
No historian doubts that the battle of Stalingrad ranks among the most important engagements of World War II. Indeed, the significance of the battle between August 1942 and February 1943 was readily apparent to contemporaries. In an article published on 2 February 1943, the day the German Sixth Army finally surrendered, Washington Post columnist Barnet Novet called it the equivalent of the Battle of Verdun and the First and Second Battles of the Marne, combined. In November 1943, during the Tehran Conference, British Prime Minister Winston L. S. Churchill presented Soviet Premier Josef Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad on behalf of King George VI and the British people, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1944 that the battle was the turning point of the war.
Scholars and veterans have questioned, however, whether Stalingrad represents the most significant turning point of the war, and whether it ranks as the single most critical battle on the Eastern Front. Some opine that the successful Soviet defense of Moscow in November and December of 1941 was a more important battle (see Albert Seaton’s The Battle for Moscow), whereas others point to the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 as more critical. In a November 1943 Moscow speech, Stalin suggested that Kursk was decisive, and modern authors David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House argue in The Battle of Kursk (1999) that Kursk represented “a turning point in the war strategically, operationally, and tactically.” Moreover, German and Soviet generals shared this view in their memoirs (see works by Heinz Guderian, F. W. von Mellenthin, Erich von Manstein, Aleksandr M. Vasilevsky, and Georgii K. Zhukov), although all of them also suggested that the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad were critical, as well.
Despite these debates, however, many historians remain convinced that the battle for Stalingrad represents the decisive turning point of World War II in Europe. Michel Henri summarized the case well in The Second World War (1975), and it has been reinforced by Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad (1998), Geoffrey Roberts’ Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History (2002), and Stephen Walsh’s Stalingrad, 1942–1943: The Infernal Cauldron (2000). These authors hold that Stalingrad was significant because of massive German personnel losses, the psychological blow to German morale of losing an entire army for the first time in the war, the corresponding lift in Soviet and Allied morale as the myth of German invincibility was shattered, the political and diplomatic impact on neutral nations and at the 1943 Tehran Conference, and the inability of Germany after Stalingrad to launch strategic offensives on a scale matching those of 1941 and 1942.
Finally, if contemporary accounts have any meaning, there is little doubt that ordinary Germans marked Stalingrad as a significant downward turn in their fortunes. All German radio broadcasts were suspended for an unprecedented three days of mourning following the defeat, and it became readily apparent after the battle that Germany was suddenly fighting for survival rather than victory.
References
Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad. New York: Viking Press, 1998.
Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
Henri, Michael. The Second World War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1975.
Roberts, Geoffrey. Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History. London: Pearson Education, 2002.
Seaton, Albert. The Battle for Moscow. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1980.
Walsh, Stephen. Stalingrad, 1942–1943: The Infernal Cauldron. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000.
