Stalingrad

How the Red Army Triumphed

Michael K. Jones

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Military
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781848847071
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Segunda Guerra Mundial

The acclaimed historian offers a radical reinterpretation of the WWII Battle of Stalingrad using eyewitness accounts and newly uncovered archival material. In this revelatory work of military history, Michael Jones provides fresh insight into the thinking of the Russian command and the mood of ordinary soldiers. The Russian 62nd Army began the campaign in utter demoralization yet turned the tables on the powerful German 6th Army. Jones explains this extraordinary performance using battle psychology, emphasizing the vital role of leadership, morale and motivation in a triumph that turned the course of the war. Soviet Colonel-General Anatoly Mereshko fought throughout the battle as staff officer to the commander, Chuikov. Much of the testimony he provides to Jones is entirely new—and will astonish a western audience. It is backed up by accounts of other key veterans as well as recently released war diary and combat journals. This new material shows that the standard narrative of the battle disguises how desperate the plight of the defenders really was. In place of those oft-repeated stories is a far more terrifying reality—one that reveals the Battle of Stalingrad as not only a victory of tactics, but also an astounding triumph of the human spirit.

Chapter One

Not a Step Back!

It was the summer of 1942 and the German 6th Army was on the move. An elite formation, undefeated in battle, it had conquered Belgium and France in the summer of 1940, and Yugoslavia, Greece, southern Russia and the Ukraine in the summer of 1941. Now it had annihilated a Russian counter-offensive at Kharkov and was accelerating towards the city of Stalingrad, on the river Volga, to sever the country’s grain and oil reserves and destroy a significant part of her industrial output.

Russia’s southern front had been blasted wide open. The encirclement of Russian armies at Kharkov tore a massive gap in the country’s defences and through it the Germans were advancing at the alarming rate of 40–50 kilometres a day. The troops thrown in to oppose them came from hurriedly formed reserve armies; they were poorly trained, ill-equipped and badly coordinated. It was an entirely unequal contest: the Germans overwhelmed and humiliated their opponents, creating a mood of deep despair.

The German summer offensive of 1942, codenamed Operation Blue, had two major objectives. The first was to reach Stalingrad and the Volga, cutting the transport of vital raw materials up the Volga river. Once this had been accomplished, the second was to strike south into the Caucasus and capture its oilfields. Economic factors were the driving force behind Hitler’s strategy and the full occupation of Stalingrad was not specified in the original operational directive. It was deemed sufficient to destroy the industrial capacity of the city and block the passage of the Volga. Events were to develop a terrible momentum of their own.

The official Soviet view was straightforward: Stalingrad would always have been held, regardless of the strength of the enemy offensive. In truth, as Anatoly Mereshko freely admitted, if the original order of Operation Blue had been kept to, Stalingrad’s position would have quickly become hopeless. But the rapid collapse of Russian armies at Kharkov made Hitler over-ambitious and he now committed a fundamental error in strategy, insisting that Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields be captured simultaneously. On 23 July the two army groups on his southern front, A and B, were directed to move forward at the same time: A to capture the Caucasus, B to advance on Stalingrad.

The German Plan

Hitler’s directive of 23 July 1942 defined the shape of the Stalingrad campaign. Herbert Selle, head of the German 6th Army’s engineering section, described the situation:

On 30 June 1942 the 6th Army had left its jumping off point, east of Belgorod, and began to take the offensive. After two days of hard defensive fighting Russian resistance seemed to be broken and the German units went into an all-out pursuit . . . By 23 July the main body of the 6th Army was astride the upper course of the river Chir.

This was the crucial moment. Selle continued:

The original German plan of operation had called for the conquest of Southern Russia in chronological phases. First, Army Group B, with its 6th Army and 1st and 4th Panzer Armies, was to seize Stalingrad and establish a defence front between the Don and the Volga. After this, Army Group A was to advance in to the Caucasus further south. It was fairly certain that the strategic objectives of this plan could be achieved before winter. However, in view of the successful advance of the 6th Army, Hitler and the High Command decided that the Soviets were so shattered that only a fraction of these forces were now necessary to bring about the collapse of the Don–Volga front.

‘Under the impulse of this wishful thinking’, Selle concluded,

the original operational plan was discarded and a new directive issued, which allotted to Army Group B the Don–Volga objective while, at the same time, Army Group A was assigned the mission of conquest of the Caucasus area. The idea of any point of main effort was dissipated by this dispersal of forces.

This undoubtedly led to a dilution of the German offensive, as one of their strongest mobile formations, pointing directly at Stalingrad, was diverted south. Herbert Selle caught the mood of frustration:

On the basis of how our operations had proceeded up to that point, and with all the forces available to us, it had seemed logical, in July 1942, that the 6th Army would reach the crown of the great Don bend at Kalach in a few days. But many of our rapid, hard-hitting units, and a large quantity of transport material were transferred to Army Group A with the change in plans, at the very moment when everything depended on rapid action and concentrated effort.

Anatoly Mereshko agreed:

After the Kharkov disaster there was a 300 kilometre hole in our front. But, to use one of our proverbs, the Germans ‘wanted to catch two rabbits’. The 6th Army was so strong Hitler believed it could capture Stalingrad on its own. The 4th Panzer Army, one of their best mobile formations, had originally been on the left flank of the advance; it was now dispatched to Rostov. If it had been kept where it was, supporting a direct attack on Stalingrad, I think the city would have fallen to the Germans in July 1942. We would not have had the strength to oppose such a strong concentration of forces. Instead, the Panzers were pushed south, cutting across the communication lines of the 6th Army and impeding their advance. Diverting the 4th Panzer Army was their main strategic mistake.

So there was nothing preordained about the successful defence of Stalingrad. With hindsight, the Germans should have stuck to their original plan, and concentrated a quicker and stronger attack on the city. Hitler’s directive of 23 July had another consequence for the course of the campaign. The original strategic plan, Operation Blue, had recognized the Germans were only strong enough to launch an offensive on one front, their southern one. Now Hitler decided to reopen a northern offensive as well, with an attack on Leningrad, codenamed ‘Northern Lights’. After the German capture of Sevastapol, Manstein’s 11th Army could either have been deployed in the Caucasus or to buttress the 6th Army’s advance on Stalingrad. Instead, it was withdrawn from the southern theatre and transferred to the outskirts of Leningrad, effectively depriving the offensive of all substantial reserves.

Manstein, one of Hitler’s best generals, was rightly critical of this decision:

Could there be any justification for taking the 11th Army away from the southern wing of the Eastern Front, now that it was free in the Crimea, and employing it on a task which was palpably less important – the conquest of Leningrad? On the German side, after all, the decisive results in that summer of 1942 were being sought in the south. This was a task for which we could never be too strong, particularly as it was obvious, even now, that the duality of Hitler’s objective – Stalingrad and the Caucasus – would split the offensive in two directions.

Manstein believed the right strategy was for his force to follow the attacking army groups as an operational reserve.

It is worth stressing Manstein’s objection: ‘this was a task for which we could never be too strong’. The plan for Army Group B to occupy the Don–Volga line took a strategic risk, for its forces were not numerous enough to occupy a coherent front along the Volga, and instead, its main front would be drawn up a hundred kilometres further west, along the river Don. The bend of that river would be used as a jumping-off point for an assault on Stalingrad. All would still be well if Stalingrad fell quickly, but the longer term danger was obvious. The Germans were putting their heads in a noose – as crude Russian cartoons later depicted – and almost inviting a counter-attack on their flanks. Of course, the Russians had to hold out at Stalingrad first. But were they to do so, and if the siege became a protracted one, the German position would be increasingly vulnerable.

The danger was compounded as more and more German troops were funnelled into Stalingrad. The armies on their flanks, composed of the forces of their allies, the Romanians, Italians and Hungarians, were of unreliable quality. They made a tempting target. It was vital to back these armies up with a strong German reserve.

Finally, but particularly galling, Manstein’s army was equipped with heavy siege guns. As Russian resistance in Stalingrad stiffened, these would have been devastating against their defensive positions within the city. Instead, they were moved north to Leningrad.

Manstein summarized the long-term risks for the Germans. The attempt to gain control of the Volga by taking Stalingrad was admissible on a short-term basis, only if the assault on the city was quickly successful. ‘To leave the main body of the Army Group at Stalingrad for weeks on end, with inadequately protected flanks, was the cardinal error.’ If Stalingrad continued to hold out, the most hard-hitting formations of Army Group B would be tied down in a battle within the city, leaving the Don front covered by the weaker forces of their allies.

But it is easy to be wise in hindsight. The mood of confidence was not confined to Hitler – it had infected the whole German High Command. They did not believe the Russians had any significant reserves left – and were thus incapable of holding Stalingrad or threatening them with a major counter-offensive. And both sides were to make major mistakes that summer.

The Russian Experience

The immediate Russian experience was traumatic. German strength appeared overwhelming and their own position hopeless. Anatoly Kozlov described what it felt like:

It was very difficult to stop the German army – it was as if we had been ordered to stop a hurricane. We had hoped that our allies would open a second front in the summer of 1942 and there was a terrible sense of despair when we were left to face the Nazis alone and things went so wrong for us. There was this huge mass of retreating people: the structure of whole armies had disintegrated and it was impossible to find your division. When the Germans reached the Caucasus most of us had lost all hope of victory.

Gamlet Dallakian emphasized the feeling of desolation:

Smashed at Kharkov, bled white and forced to retreat to the Don, we thought that the war was lost and we could never withstand such a strong enemy. There seemed no way of stopping the Germans – they were breathing down our necks the whole time we were retreating towards the Don.

The crisis began at Kharkov. Here Timoshenko’s ambitious early summer offensive had been destroyed by a classic German battle of encirclement. This failure, and its terrible consequences, undermined the faith of even the most ardent Bolshevik. Praskovja Graschenkova had been taken onto the divisional staff of one of the newly formed Russian armies.

‘The retreat from Kharkov was the most terrible time of my life’, Graschenkova admitted frankly. ‘It was an absolutely desperate situation. The Germans were so well-equipped. They had motorized divisions. We tried to fight them in the field but they spotted us from the air.’ Her voice began to trail away and she looked down at the ground. ‘I felt it was all so hopeless. Yes, I was a convinced communist but for the first time in my life I started praying, crying out to God to help me. I tried to remember my grandmother’s prayers.’

Graschenkova’s cry expressed the profound despair of many. The fighting in the summer of 1942 was an unequal contest between a highly professional, well-trained German army – whose morale was sky high – and a demoralized Soviet force flung in against them. Evgeny Kurapatov – who fought in one of the new makeshift Russian divisions – put it like this:

We desperately needed better equipment and training. The commander might give an order but the tail of the division would still be waiting for it hours later. Instructions would reach our troops when it was too late to enact them. We made mistake after mistake.

Mikhail Borisov was the sole survivor of five different artillery crews during the retreat from Kharkov.

Our failings included poor equipment and a chronic shortage of ammunition. We were stuck with an inadequate 45mm battalion gun, which was only able to penetrate enemy tank armour at a range of less than 100 metres. We had little confidence in the effectiveness of such a weapon – which we nicknamed ‘Goodbye to the Motherland!’, and it hardly helped when we were only issued with a pitiful two shells a day.

The situation in the skies above was little better. ‘On one occasion our retreating infantry was strung out along the steppe’, Borisov recalled.

Above us were six of our I-16s [Polikarpov single-engine fighters]. These aircraft were ponderous and slow – the troops called them ‘donkeys’. Suddenly one German Messerschmidt appeared. We watched the combat above but it proved to be a very short fight. The German plane shot them down, one by one. We were all at his mercy, for there was nowhere to take cover – and we waited helplessly for him to open up on us with his machine guns. Instead, after flying over us several times at low level, he tipped his wings at us in a derisory, mock-salute, and flew off. You cannot imagine what that felt like! We were left so humiliated – left with such a hopeless anger in our hearts. I remember shaking my fist at that departing plane and thinking ‘We cannot fight like this!’

The enemy relished any chance to humiliate the retreating soldiers. ‘Two of us were sent out on reconnaissance’, Mereshko remembered.

We took horses and rode out on the steppe to look for the Germans. Finally, we found them: line upon line of marching infantry. We galloped off as fast as we could, then two Messer-schmidts appeared. One circled us, the other opened fire with his machine gun. They could have easily finished us off. Instead, they chased us for thirty minutes for the sheer enjoyment of it. I was yelling riding instructions to my mate, as we turned our horses this way and that, desperately trying to avoid the bullets. The machine gun fire got closer and closer. Then, suddenly, they tired of their sport and flew off.

Another witness to the terrible retreat was Viktor Nekrasov, who conveyed his impressions in his novel, Frontline Stalingrad. He recalled stupefying heat, the burning sun, all-pervasive dust and, always, the overwhelming speed of the German advance. ‘The general mood was frightful. The Germans were deep inside Russia, descending like an avalanche on the Don – and where was our front – did it exist at all?’ Nekrasov remembered the all-pervasive feeling of despair only too vividly: ‘When civilians asked our retreating troops where they were going, we could not look them in the eye.’

The snippets of soldiers’ conversations Nekrasov recorded carry an unmistakable sense of inferiority. ‘What’s the use in trying to fight the Germans. They are travelling from Berlin to Stalingrad in motor vehicles and here we are with 1890s rifles.’ ‘We cannot sustain such a loss in territory. Our evacuated factories are not able to work for us. The Ukraine and the Kuban have gone, so there’s no grain. The Donbas has gone, so there’s no coal . . . when the Volga line of communication is cut we will lose our oil from Baku.’ ‘Even if we fight to the last man, heroism is not enough. They will flatten us with superior organization and masses of tanks. Only a miracle can save us now’ (emphasis added). In such desperate times, a rough-hewn yet almost spiritual language began to emerge ‘Faith’, Nekrasov recalled, ‘that was all that was left to us then – faith’.

The body language of the rival armies said everything. Mereshko recalled:

The Germans were so confident, which was natural – because they had come all the way from Kharkov to the Don. It would make anybody confident. They marched forward purposefully in the summer heat, sleeves rolled up, wearing shorts, and singing their songs.

In awful contrast, Mereshko remembered seeing the retreating Russian army, and wondering if its troops were sleep-walking. Groups of men passed him in some kind of terrible trance: ‘They were really desperate people, almost prostrate with exhaustion, absolutely numb, unable to react to anything. We realized that they were no use to us in that condition and we just took their weapons off them.’

In public, propagandist rhetoric was still served up. A letter from Red Army Private Bogolubov, who had joined the 62nd Army, declared emphatically: ‘We are sure that our enemy will suffer bitter defeat, just like at the battle of Moscow. We are ready to die in such a place of honour. We won’t let the enemy take another step forward.’ Recently released NKVD reports convey a rather different mood amongst many ordinary soldiers. On 20 July 1942 regimental clerk Kolesnikov declared:

The German army is far smarter and more capable than ours. Look at their equipment. And what do we have? A few ancient aeroplanes. The newspapers say we are holding the Germans, but it’s not so. Our press is lying to us.

A letter from Private Ivan Chechkov to his wife Katya reiterated the same, dismal theme:

We undertook an assault, but the enemy surrounded us. They dropped paratroopers ahead of our position and started to drop bombs. The...