Disaster at Stalingrad

CHAPTER 7 Counting the Victories

The encirclement had been perfectly executed. The Germans had thrust into the wide steppe between the Donets and Don after seizing crossings on the former river three weeks before. Here Hitler hoped to trap and destroy the last of Stalin’s reserves.

Geyr’s XL Panzer Corps arrived at Stary Oskol only to find the wide grassy and empty steppe inside their Kessel was empty of Soviet forces.¹ Against all expectations the enemy had flown and had even been able to carry away their heavy equipment. The Germans had grown too used to being able to encircle vast numbers of Soviet troops who had been nailed to the ground and unable to manoeuvre by Stalin’s refusal to allow his commanders any tactical flexibility. This was indeed something new.

Geyr immediately reported the enemy retreat and requested permission to strike directly for the Don River and capture its crossings. Paulus refused and ordered, ‘You will swing north to link up with the Fourth Panzer Army coming down from Voronezh.’²

The defences of the great Soviet naval base and fortress of Sevastopol had finally been cracked wide open by Manstein’s 11th Army after three weeks of crushing bombardment by the greatest concentration of heavy artillery seen so far in the war. The guns and heavy mortars had smashed bunkers, cupolas and galleries one after another. The 88mm flak guns of the 18th Flak Regiment earned fame by firing their flat-trajectory high-velocity shells directly through the gunports and apertures of the Soviet defences.

The 110,000-man Soviet garrison had been decimated. Now panic flew among the survivors:

Manstein attributed this action to the Soviets’ complete contempt for human life as he described the garrison’s fight to the death. Perhaps he should have considered that it was the German record for the barbaric treatment of their prisoners that made a fight to the bitter end preferable to German captivity. It requires no wisdom at all to give an enemy such determination.

Manstein had a very useful blind eye. Not only was he indifferent to the treatment of Soviet prisoners, but he had obeyed Hitler’s infamous Commissar Order to shoot all captured communist officials. He had also lent thousands of his own Army troops to help the SS Einsatzgruppen massacre Jews. Resisting these orders might endanger his goal of becoming Chief of Staff of the Army. Complying with them could only facilitate his ambition. That, and his crushing of Sevastopol, convinced Hitler and those around him that in Manstein he had found a very hard man. And to this very hard man, he would give a field marshal’s baton.⁴

This was also the man who had put his career on the line in 1934 in protest over the dismissal from the Army of one of his officers who was classified as a Mischling because he had a Jewish grandparent. For him a German was someone who was of German culture, especially one who put his life in service of the country as a soldier.⁵

The speed of the Blitzkrieg was taking any freedom of action out of Bock’s hands as Grossdeutschland Motorized, 16th Motorized, and 24th Panzer Divisions all bounced bridges over the northern Don, their advance elements in between the retreating Russian columns. The speed of their advance surprised the Soviet bridge guards. At Semiluki, on the way to Voronezh, the Soviet engineers had lit normal fuzes which were burning as the Germans started to cross. Corporal Hempel of the reconnaissance battalion jumped into the water to rip out the fuzes, the last one barely 8 inches from 125 pounds of explosive.

Grossdeutschland’s assault-gun units, with infantry riding on the vehicles, quickly penetrated into Voronezh as far as the railway marshalling yards but were driven back by a strong Soviet counterattack. The ease of the penetration convinced Bock that the city could be seized quickly and still allow him to swing his panzers south to trap Timoshenko’s retreating forces before they could cross the Don.⁶

This was the first action of Grossdeutschland as a division. It had been formed as an elite infantry regiment from the Wachtregiment/Berlin, the Army’s guard formation for the German capital, in 1939. The name, meaning Greater Germany, had been chosen because recruits came from all over the country; it was not based on a single locality like most of the rest of the infantry divisions. It had distinguished itself in France and in Russia in 1941, in the latter campaign suffering 4,070 casualties and completely turning over its strength. Reorganized as the Army’s elite division in early 1942, it was decreed that:

The result was a military instrument as sharp and deadly as the spear of Achilles, as shown in the daring valour of men like Corporal Hempel.

Chief of the Soviet General Staff General Boris Shaposnikov picked up the phone to call Stalin. He had been the bearer of nothing but bad news since the war began, but Stalin kept him on when so many other messengers had been shot. Shaposnikov was a former tsarist officer, general staff trained, who had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks and in the ensuing years had never got on Stalin’s bad side by posing any sort of a threat.

‘Comrade Stalin, we are just getting word from the British that their convoy has been destroyed.’

Stalin cut in. ‘Well, they always overreact these capitalists, so melodramatic about losses. So, how many ships did they really lose?’

‘All of them, Comrade Stalin.’

There was quiet on the other end of the line for a very long time. Stalin felt just as he had when he had been told that the Germans had attacked on 22 June 1941. He could feel the same sort of paralytic shock seeping through his body, the same feeling that had cast him into such a trough of depression that he had hid in his dacha for the first ten days of the war. Foreign Minister Molotov had had to announce to the people the news of the invasion. Without Stalin, the communist leadership had panicked and lost its nerve. They were so frightened that they instinctively called upon the Almighty for help and begged the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow to address the nation the next day. The cleric delivered a rousing patriotic appeal to defend the Russian lands as their ancestors had done against Tatar, Pole, Swede, Frenchman and German. It was a great speech, but it was not Stalin’s.

Finally Stalin spoke. ‘All, you are sure, all?’

‘Yes, every one. Those that were not sunk were captured by the Germans. It gets worse. The British were defeated by the German fleet in a battle in the Norwegian Sea and lost several battleships.’

Stalin fought off the tendrils of paralysis. He was the Vozhd; he summoned power from deep within. His mind raced to all the possible strategic and political consequences of the disaster. Would Churchill survive this catastrophe? Stalin despised him as an anticommunist to the bone, but he knew that the Englishman would fight Hitler to the death. He was not so sure of anyone who might succeed him. The NKVD⁸ analysis said that none of them had the will or ability of Churchill. It would be all too easy for the British to make a separate peace if they were led to it by a well-meaning fool.

Then what about the Americans? Roosevelt had never shown the hostility to the first communist country that Churchill had and had been cooperative and helpful. How would his domestic enemies, none of whom were in the socialist camp, damage him with this defeat?

These questions all pointed to the central issue — the continuance of aid. That aid was becoming vital to the war effort. His propaganda apparatus could trumpet the heroic feats of Soviet production all it wanted, but he knew that Canadian and American aluminium was vital to the making of tank and aircraft engines, that American aviation fuel was keeping a larger and larger part of the Red Air Force in the air, that American trucks were becoming essential to create any sort of mobility in both battle and logistics.

How then was the Soviet Union to continue to receive this aid? The Persian Corridor and the Pacific route were the only substitutes, and neither was in any condition to take up the slack immediately. He would have to encourage the British and Americans to concentrate their shipments through those two routes. Persia was by far the more important. Shipments through there would go directly to most threatened part of the front, just to the north of the Caucasus, in that wide almost empty space between the Don and Volga.

He would have to order the communist parties and sympathizers in the Allied countries to support Churchill and Roosevelt and address the deepest condolences to both leaders with saccharin words of sympathy and thanks from the Soviet people. Yes, and they would give the strongest encouragement not to let this setback stop the convoys. Look at all the setbacks the Soviet Union had suffered and yet was fighting on. He would give the entire world-wide propaganda apparatus a good crank, a very good crank.

Beyond that there was the central problem of how to get by now that the materials from the Arctic route had been stopped. He stopped to consider how prescient he must have been to have ordered the ‘secret railway’ built, that ran from Saratov, north of Voronezh, down the east bank of the Volga to Leninsk only some dozen miles east of Stalingrad. It had been built so quickly that there had been no time to lay a track bed; the sleepers were laid directly on the ground. It was single-tracked with sidings for trains to wait as others passed. Part of the Trans-Siberian Railway had had to be dismantled to find the resources for it, but it had been done. If the Germans succeeded in taking Voronezh and its marshalling yards, he would still have an alternative route to bring Allied war materials from Persia to the threatened Moscow front.⁹

Admiral King had always been careful to hide his temper from the President. But now he was in full warpaint and feathers. ‘Mr President, the loss of the Wasp reduces our carrier strength by a full 20 per cent! We have only four carriers left, and the Essex Class won’t be coming into service until late this year and next year.¹⁰ I tell you, sir, we can no longer support both the Arctic convoys and hold the Japanese at bay, much less go over to the attack.’

He had just done what Franklin Roosevelt abhorred. He had asked the President to choose. King now envied Marshall. The general had figured out early as Chief of Staff that Roosevelt liked to employ an informal, bantering, almost jovial approach, which would allow him later to say that he had not really made a commitment. Marshall had used his stiff and formal manner to underline the finality of any decision that he asked Roosevelt to make, a decision he could not back out of later.

Now King was pressing the President in just the same manner, no more ‘our’ Navy wink-winks, nod-nods. But Roosevelt needed it both ways. He far more than King realized the centrality of keeping both the British and the Russians in the war. And in a way he was as much an Anglophile as King was an Anglophobe. He was a comfortable member of that transatlantic community of class, culture and belief. Churchill and he were two gentlemen who saw that Western civilization was at stake.

In a way, Roosevelt was also like Stalin in that he realized as a war leader that setbacks and cruel defeats must be endured and overcome. He was not like Stalin, though, in that he was answerable to the people, and the people were influenced by the press, and a very powerful part of the press were the Hearst papers owned by a Roosevelt-hater of the first order. He wistfully thought how nice it would be to have William Randolph Hearst shot.

But King would not let go of the issue. ‘How many times must we pull the British bacon out of the fire, sir?’

Roosevelt straightened up in his wheelchair:

He looked at King as if to tell him to who was boss. The admiral got the hint.

In the end, the chiefs agreed that aid to Britain and the Soviet Union must continue but that the Russian supplies would have to go by way of the Persian Corridor and the Pacific Route. There was no alternative, but it would take time for both those avenues to begin to funnel the volume of material that had been sent through the Arctic to Murmansk. That Roosevelt and Stalin had arrived at the same conclusion was due to the iron logic of their predicament.¹¹

Hitler was so alarmed at the failure of the encirclement and the failure of Bock to destroy significant Soviet forces on his drive to Voronezh that he flew immediately into the Army Group South headquarters. He would have gone two days earlier but for his attention to Rösselsprung. Now he was face to face with Bock, riding a wave of elation over the twin victories of Rösselsprung and Sevastopol. He told the army group commander, ‘I no longer insist upon the capture of the city, Bock, I also no longer consider it [Voronezh] to be necessary and I leave it up to you to move south immediately.’¹²

Hitler was correct in his operational assessment that Voronezh was not important. Its significance lay in the fact that he and his generals believed Timoshenko’s forces could be destroyed as the Germans advanced in the direction of Voronezh, just as they believed that more of Timoshenko’s Southwest Front could be destroyed as the Germans moved in the direction of Stalingrad. The cities themselves were only of secondary importance as a rail junction in the case of Voronezh and a war materials manufacturing centre in the case of Stalingrad. They correctly saw that the enemy’s forces were the main objectives. They were still not sure why the Soviets were escaping destruction, but Hitler thought it was that they were simply disintegrating as a fighting force. It was then only necessary to press hard on the heels of a rout. He had reminded Bock that the purpose of his drive towards Voronezh had been to destroy enemy forces and cover the army group’s flank.

All very good for the Supreme War Lord. But after that conclusion he failed to act on it and deliver a decisive order to turn away from Voronezh. Instead, he left the decision to Bock. This was a profound failure of leadership. Unfortunately, the army group commander was getting pulled into a hornet’s nest just then and becoming preoccupied with the tactical rather than the operational imperatives. The Soviets were now using cities as fortress centres of defence into which they sucked large numbers of ill-prepared Germans.

‘How does Winston do it?’ Lord Beaverbrook, the man called the First Baron of Fleet Street and former wartime Minister of Aircraft Production and Supply, and now Lord Privy Seal, just shook his head in wonder at the performance he had just witnessed on the floor of the House from its gallery. He was the greatest newspaper man in Britain but, unlike Hearst, he was a friend of the country’s war leader. ‘Winston can fall into the black pit of Hades and come up with his arms full of sunshine.’

What he had just witnessed was the British Lion defending himself in terms of such power and persuasion that the vote of no confidence had failed, just barely, but by just enough to keep him safe for now as prime minister. Churchill’s power of rhetoric had been vastly aided by the fact that there seemed no one able to step into his shoes. That there were no capable rivals in his Conservative Party had been made evident by the fiasco of 1940 when the Chamberlain government had collapsed, and he had been the only choice. The options had not got any better since. The problem was aggravated by the fact that in the British system war cabinets included all major parties for the sake of national unity. The alternative of the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, coming to power was too much for Conservatives, still in a majority in the House, to contemplate. He was a genuine patriot and determined supporter of the war against Hitler, but he was no war leader. Churchill had pegged him right when he had said that Attlee ‘was a very modest man but that he had much to be modest about’. A man whose whole life had been set on redistributing wealth could be no war leader.

Tobruk and the battles in the Norwegian Sea had been the milestones that had nearly sunk Churchill. One more would surely take him to the bottom. But he had found one great advantage that had come out of the disasters. The German surface fleet had come out of hiding led by the great bogeyman, the Tirpitz. Now most of the German ships were on the bottom, and the rest too battered to be a threat to anyone. Although at great cost to the Royal Navy, prestige, morale and the American alliance, the German fleet in being had been eliminated. And with it the threat to the convoys. Theoretically, they could be resumed.

All too theoretically. The shock of the convoy’s loss had been felt most keenly among the old salts of the Merchant Navy. They were making it quite clear that not a man would sign on for any ship going to Russia’s Arctic ports. That, and Roosevelt’s call to inform him that the United States would not support another Arctic convoy, sealed their fate. Churchill deftly plucked a silver lining from this rent garment. The Home Fleet would not have to be rebuilt to its previous size to watch a now non-existent German surface fleet. The Royal Navy’s already over-stretched resources could more efficiently be allocated to those theatres upon which the survival of Britain depended, particularly the Mediterranean. Now that Rommel was at the gates of Egypt, every ship was needed to run the reinforcement convoys through to Alexandria.

Hitler and Stalin came to critical conclusions almost at the same time in mid-July.

Stalin finally gave up the notion that Moscow was the main German objective and began to transfer Stavka reserves south. He also listened carefully to his general staff. Another great encirclement of Soviet forces was out of the question. He listened to reason, and no one was shot. Instead, he had called Timoshenko on 12 July and said, ‘I order the formation of the Stalingrad Front, and the city itself will be defended to the last man by the 62nd Army.’ Stalin was desperate to delay the enemy in order to bring up reserves and to finish the city’s defences.

His generals were doing their best to buy him that time by increasingly skilful delaying actions. They would hold the Germans just long enough to make them deploy, and then, before becoming decisively engaged, they would retreat.

As skilful as this may have been on some larger scale, to the troops involved it was demoralizing. In what seemed a headlong flight towards the Don a sense of hopelessness began to pervade the Red Army. A woman on the staff of one of the armies wrote,

A great Russian writer of the war, Viktor Nekrasov, recalled,

Retreat they did, which is what saved so many of them, even before Stalin gave permission, retreat back to the lower Don and across to avoid the terror of encirclement.

Hitler transferred his headquarters from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine (codenamed Werewolf), relieved Bock, and began to assume greater control of operations. The heat greatly affected him in the special bunker that had been built for him, and he was short-tempered and even less willing to listen to his commanders than before.

What was actually a fairly well controlled Soviet retreat was in Hitler’s eyes evidence of disintegration and panic, Homer’s ‘comrade of blood-curdling rout’.¹⁴ It was then that he was seduced by what he saw as an abundance of riches. The drive towards Stalingrad became secondary to alluring possibilities at Rostov at the mouth of the Don, gateway to the Caucasus. He divided Army Group South into Army Groups A and B. The former under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm List included 11th, 17th, and 1st Panzer Armies. Army Group B, under Weichs, retained 2nd, 6th, and 4th Panzer Armies. So Hitler had flung his forces at the opposite ends of the vast front from Voronezh to Rostov, leaving only 6th Army marching largely on foot in the direction of Stalingrad.

With Hitler’s movement of his headquarters came his entourage of lackeys. Field Marshal von Kluge’s aide, Leutnant Philipp von Boeselager, had accompanied his master to Werewolf and recorded his impressions:

Hosting the lunch was Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party and the éminence grise of the headquarters. To Boeselager it was instantly apparent that the man was ‘brutal, careless, violent, he was a man who immediately inspired fear’. Bormann was an out-and-out pagan who openly despised all things Christian. He stated, ‘National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.’ Access to Hitler was closely held in Bormann’s hands; he realized that access also put great power in those same hands. It was in his interest to make sure that Hitler had no favourites who did not have to pay obeisance to him. No chief eunuch of any Turkish sultan or Chinese emperor had a better understanding of the power that access gave. It was no wonder he was called the ‘Machiavelli behind the office desk’.¹⁶

So disgusted was Boeselager at the conversation and its anti-Catholic vitriol that he got up abruptly and left the room for a smoke and to calm down. Bormann ordered his return and asked why he had left. The young officer said that he had accompanied the field marshal to discuss the fate of his surrounded army at Rzhev but had only heard twaddle at the headquarters. ‘Take this man away,’ Bormann ordered the SS guard. He was locked up, but Kluge snatched him away and hurried him to their plane. He heard him out and said, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough. This time I was able to save you. The next time, you’ll keep your mouth shut. But basically, you’re absolutely right!’¹⁷

Chuikov still walked with a cane when he entered Stalingrad Front headquarters with his chief political officer. No one had information, but rumours flew that the Germans were approaching the great bend in the Don, only some 45 miles from Stalingrad. Earlier that month his reserve army had been renamed 64th Army and ordered to the front on the west side of the Don, but the move had been so hurried that vital elements of it were still far away in Tula. His mission was to cover the lower part of the big bend of the Don. He was not encouraged by the state of morale of the neighbouring 62nd Army on his right. He encountered a number of individual soldiers walking east who said that they were ‘looking for someone on the other side of the Volga’; he also intercepted a truck filled with fleeing officers from two of its divisional staffs.¹⁸

As he was trying to assemble his army, Chuikov found himself replaced by General V. N. Gordov. It had been a trying time for Chuikov; Gordov was doctrinaire, refused to listen to subordinates, and lived in a world of unreality. His nonsensical orders left the army reserves on the east bank of the Don.

Like Voronezh, Rostov, near the Black Sea mouth of the Don,²⁰ was defended as a fortress with unbelievable bitterness by the Soviets. At the implacable heart of the defence were NKVD troops, the fanatical fighting arm of the secret police. As protectors of the regime they had been specially trained in street fighting. One German commander said,

Finally the Germans secured the city as the last of the defenders slipped across to the eastern bank of the Don. Now they had the wide river at its mouth as a final barrier against the Germans. The only way across was seemingly impossible to take, the intact bridge over the Don with its strong guard. Now 17th Army’s commander turned to the Brandenburgers, the special operations regiment of the German Army, every man a volunteer.

At 02.30 on 23 July Leutnant Grabert and his company slipped quietly through the dark towards the bridge. Grabert was with the lead squad when the Soviets detected them and opened fire. He rushed forward at the head of his men and overwhelmed the guard, ran across the long span, and set up a bridgehead. For an entire day Grabert and his men held out against vicious counterattacks. When at last they were about to be overrrun, the Stukas came screaming down from the sky to blast away the enemy.

Over the bridge rumbled the tanks of LVII Panzer Corps towards the open plains of the Kuban that led to the Caucasus and beyond to the oilfields of Baku. The tanks rolled past the bodies of Leutnant Grabert and most of his men, and into the Kuban steppe. The road to the Caucasus had been blown wide open.

Hitler was in a row with his methodical and colourless Chief of the Army General Staff, Generaloberst Franz Halder. He was a master of military logic, which was why Hitler was in such a foul mood, that and the heat of a Ukrainian summer. ‘The Russians are conducting a planned withdrawal, mein Führer.’

‘Nonsense,’ Hitler shot back, ‘they’re fleeing, they’re finished, they’re at the end after the blows we’ve inflicted on them in the past months.’ Hitler did not know that the Stavka was committing new and inexperienced armies, such as the 62nd and 64th Armies, to the front rather than its high quality reserves.

Halder would not back down. ‘We haven’t caught Timoshenko’s main body, mein Führer. Our encircling operations were failures. Timoshenko has directed the bulk of his army group… to the east across the Don and into the Stalingrad area, other elements to the south into the Caucasus. We don’t know what reserves are there.’

He waved Halder aside when the general attempted to interject.

Halder implored Hitler not to split his forces on such divergent missions and to maintain his own original plan that the objectives be consecutive and not concurrent. ‘We must take Stalingrad before we advance into the Caucasus.’ Halder was even more upset that Hitler was so convinced of the disintegration of the Red Army that he had changed his mind and decided to send Manstein’s 11th Army to help take Leningrad and had directed that a number of first-class divisions be pulled out of the line. For example, he was sending the Grossdeutschland to France as an OKW reserve. His favourite 1st SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, his own bodyguard, he was also sending to France to be converted to a panzer division as part of a new SS panzer corps.²³

Hitler was about to lose his temper completely when his aide announced Manstein’s arrival. He cooled down quickly. The victor of Sevastopol rode high in his favour, and he had summoned him for the ceremony of presenting him with his field marshal’s baton. ‘Welcome, welcome, Herr Generalfeldmarschall,’ he said emphasizing the new rank. ‘I want your opinion. Halder tells me that we cannot split our resources by two main efforts — the Caucasus and Stalingrad. What do you think?’ Hitler was fishing for the answer he wanted to beat down Halder even more.

‘Mein Führer, General Halder is correct in that the risk is great.’ Hitler’s face fell. He was not happy with that response:

He could see Hitler’s objection and preempted it. ‘Mein Führer, if you leave these reserves here, I promise you I will crack open Leningrad like a rotten egg after we have taken Stalingrad.’ Hitler was convinced. He then cancelled 11th Army and Grossdeutschland’s transfer. Leibstandarte’s orders were not changed; he had great plans for his new SS panzer corps. Besides, it was not in him to accede completely to anyone’s recommendations.²⁴

On that same day he ordered Paulus to make Stalingrad his primary objective.

It looked as if 6th Army’s momentum would overrun the Soviet forces backing into the Big Bend of the Don. They had cleared the west bank except for two large pockets, one across from the east-bank town of Kalach and the other to the north across from Akimovka. Both 62nd and 64th Armies were in the Kalach pocket. Now Hitler came to the rescue of the Red Army. Sixth Army simply stopped. It had outrun its supplies and worse because Hitler had diverted half of Army Group B’s motor transport to support Army Group A’s attack into the Caucasus. Sixth Army would have to rely on its 25,000 horses. Seemingly, it was 1914 again, in the age before motor transport had become ubiquitous. Worse yet:

As a result Paulus watched the Soviet rearguards disappear into the limitless distances of the steppe.²⁵

Ironically, had 4th Panzer Army been sent directly against Stalingrad at this time, it could have easily bounced into the city, but the fleeting moment had been lost. Only after the army had extricated itself from the traffic nightmare, did Hitler once again change his mind. He detached XL Panzer Corps to Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army and sent the rest of Hoth’s 4th Panzer to cover 6th Army’s southern flank in the drive on Stalingrad.

At this now crimped rate of supply 6th Army would not be able to wipe out the Soviet bridgeheads for another two weeks. Paulus’s forces were also so spread out that a concentrated attack was not possible; he could not bring up two of his corps before the Italian 8th Army arrived to take their place.

The Soviets were perplexed at the sudden German halt. It never occurred to them that the Germans had simply run out of fuel or were confused. Nevertheless, it was a welcome breathing spell. It was more than welcome. When it came the senior staff of the 62nd Army had been standing machine pistols in hand on the bridge over the Don at Kalach threatening to shoot the panic-stricken men fleeing to the east bank. Now the rearguards reported, ‘No more enemy contact.’ Front commander Timoshenko asked his chief of staff, ‘What does this mean? Have the Germans changed their plans?’ Whatever the reason, there was an opportunity to be seized. ‘If the Germans are not following up there is time to organize the defence on the western bank of the Don.’²⁶ He brought up the newly formed 1st and 4th Tank Armies to reinforce the bridgeheads.²⁷ He was going to attack, but was relieved on 23 July, and replaced by Gordov. The new front commander was to bring those same qualities of leadership to his command of the Stalingrad Front as had made Chuikov’s life so difficult.

On 24 July the Germans introduced the green 64th Army to war as they attacked through howling dust storms. They were quickly to learn that one has not known war until one has fought the Germans. Now back in command, Chuikov found the forward elements of his army driven back by Seydlitz’s LI Corps with strong air support. The Germans then struck his main line of resistance, which had just been filled with units that had not had time to prepare their positions properly, were understrength and lacked their proper logistical support, much of which was still back in Tula. Still, Chuikov held off strong German attacks and was on the point of closing a gap between his divisions:

Chuikov sent his personal staff and his artillery commander to stop the rout at the bridge. German reconnaissance had spotted the mass of vehicles funnelling over the bridge and summoned the Stukas. With their sirens screaming they fell upon the terrified Russians and bombed and strafed them. Four of Chuikov’s senior staff were among the dead. That evening the Luftwaffe came back and broke the bridge.

In a sense the Germans should have been flattered by the arrival of these new Soviet tank armies. The Soviets had simply copied the Germans in the organization of their tank forces. The irony was that they had had a very advanced organization of their tank and mechanized forces until 1938 when Stalin ordered them disbanded because they were the creations of Marshal Tukhachevsky whom Stalin had just shot at the beginning of the great purge that was to decimate the leadership of the Red Army. This military genius had put into practice what Western advocates of armoured warfare such as Basil Liddell-Hart and J. F. C. Fuller in Britain and Charles de Gaulle in France had only advocated. All this Stalin had undone. Thus, when the Germans attacked in 1941, Soviet tank forces had been penny-packeted in brigades to support infantry forces. Tukhachevsky’s mailed fist had become nothing more than a feeble, open-fingered slap. The Germans were able to make a great slaughter in the first six months of the war because of this.

Amid the slaughter, though, came several nasty surprises for the Germans. They encountered heavier and better-armed tanks than anything in their army — the huge KV-1 and KV-2 heavy tanks, and the superb T-34 medium tank, all with the deadly 76mm gun. Luckily for the Germans, the destruction of the Soviet senior officer corps and the break up of the armoured formations in the 1937-8 purges made the Soviet tanks vulnerable to being destroyed piecemeal. Now the new tank armies were increasingly equipped with the T-34 which represented half of all tank production by the middle of 1942.

Other reforms of an institutional nature, based on the realization that the traditional military principles, feudal and reactionary as they might be, gave armies staying power in the field. Suddenly the Red Army began to assume all the old, long-despised trappings of military authority: sharp and rigid rank differentiation as the basis for discipline, strict observance of military etiquette, class status for officers, including special privileges and distinctive uniforms and insignia, the recognition of the Russian as opposed to the revolutionary military tradition, and the awarding of medals and decorations. Indeed, one of the urgent requests for aid to the British, who were more than a little surprised, was for a huge amount of gold braid.

As if the bitter cup of the convoy disaster was not enough for the British, Churchill now had a message from Stalin that added insult to injury:

Even after the loss of the convoy and the savaging of the Home Fleet, Stalin was demanding a resumption of the Arctic convoys.

The brutal Allied losses at sea combined with the constant daylight of the Arctic summer to prevent any further convoys until the autumn when the long night would begin to limit German air attacks The problem was not the availability of ships, nor the threat from the German surface fleet, which now hardly existed. The British and American merchant crews simply refused to sign on for any Arctic convoy. When the government had threatened to impress them, they struck. Churchill’s bluff had been called.

Now there were only two remaining routes for Allied aid to reach the Soviet Union: the Persian Corridor and across the Pacific to Vladivostok, the latter of which was an American problem. The British problem then was to send the cargoes that would have gone north all the way around Africa and through the Persian Gulf to Iran. Delivery time would be greatly slowed because of the immense distance involved. But it was the best Churchill and Roosevelt could do.

With or without gold braid, General Gordov was preparing to attack with all his forces to cut off the German units that had broken through. The plan was good, but Gordov’s execution was incompetent. Beginning on 26 July his forces attacked piecemeal over three days. With his army resupplied Paulus counterattacked with a major pincer operation against the Kalach bridgehead. The Germans sliced through both flanks of 62nd Army. The two panzer corps attacked from the north and south as the Stukas raced ahead to strike the enemy, while Seydlitz’s LI Corps advanced between them. The Soviets resisted bitterly as Gordov threw his tank armies at the Germans in the hilly ground at the north end of the pocket. The battle swirled over the heat-baked steppe.

Above them the Luftwaffe and Red Air Force duelled in the sky to send burning planes to crash among the tank battles or sought out each other’s supply columns. But time and time again, German superiority in communications, manoeuvre and air-ground coordination made the difference. The Soviets suffered huge losses.

As the fighting raged along the Don, Chuikov was making shrewd observations of enemy capabilities, just as he had during the Finnish War. He was watching the Germans through fresh eyes for this was the first time he had seen them in action. He noted how much of the German battle drill depended on the Luftwaffe’s effective close air support. He interrogated a German pilot and asked him how he thought the war would go. The man replied, ‘The Luftwaffe is the big fist in battle. Both the airmen themselves and the ground forces have faith in it. If we hadn’t had the Luftwaffe we would not have had such successes in the West or the East.’

He also observed that the German artillery, instead of ranging deep into the Soviet rear, methodically crushed the forward positions, a technique right out of the First War. Chuikov was also critical of the panzers whom he said did not go into combat without infantry or air support and were hesitant when they did.

One more question he asked the captured pilot. How did he think the war would go? The German shrugged and said, ‘The Führer made a big mistake about Russia. He and many other Germans did not expect the Russians to have such staying power, so it’s hard to say about the end of the war.’³¹

It was evident even in Moscow that the Red Army was unravelling on the Don despite the commitment of the new tank armies. NKVD reports made it brutally clear that things were going to go smash. The Red Army was demoralized and inept. It was also eating its own seed corn. Cadet regiments had been thrown into the battle only to be wiped out. One staff officer recalled:

So desperate had the situation become that Stalin issued what quickly became known as the ‘Not a Step Back’ (Ni Shagu Nazad!) Order No. 227. It was a brutal admission that the country’s back was up against the wall.

Hitler’s plan, codenamed Operation Gertrude, to ‘rearrange the constellation of political power in Ankara’ had fallen into place as July wore away. It had been helped along by the fortuitous death of Prime Minister Refik Saydam on 9 July. Although this was largely a figurehead position, the pro-German faction manoeuvred to fill his office with General Erkilet, a devoted supporter of Pan-Turkism. Next Foreign Minster Saracoglu was removed because his intransigence would invite German retribution and deny Turkey its share of the ‘spoils of war’. The greatest stumbling block remained the Turkish President himself. Finally, on the last day of the month, the plotters quietly removed Inönü and confined him in a coastal villa to ‘recover his health’.

The next day they put their signatures to a secret treaty with the Third Reich to enter the war and attack the Soviet Union.³⁴ The plan, crafted jointly by the German and Turkish general staffs, to form the Muslim Red Army POWs interned in Turkey into auxiliary legions to help liberate their homelands immediately went into effect. There were enough Azeri Turks to form a small corps of several legions, and separate legions were formed of Crimean and Volga Tatars, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Tajiks from Central Asia, and Chechens, Ingush, and Dagestanis from the Caucasus. It was easy to equip them from the mountains of Soviet small arms and artillery captured in the great battles of encirclement in 1941. Almost to a man, the POWs had volunteered to fight. Good treatment by the Turks had allowed them to recover their health, and the relentless pan-Turanist and pan-Islamic propaganda applied by the Turkish government had whipped them up to a fever pitch of vengeance.