Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

CHAPTER 8 ‘Those Crazy Mountain Climbers’

Heydrich was pleased with himself. He had used the Navy carefully to put him in charge of the cipher systems of the Wehrmacht. It had not been a next big step to induce Hitler to let him also take over military intelligence, the Abwehr. Add to that his control of the SS’s Sicherheitsdienst, and all the reins of intelligence and counterintelligence were in his hands.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, had been Heydrich’s commander and mentor when he was a naval cadet and junior officer. For a long time, though, Heydrich had suspected Canaris of being in contact with the British MI6. Indeed he was, for the express purpose of getting rid of Hitler, whom he despised for leading Germany to ruin. Heydrich had sniffed so close to the truth that the British had launched their failed assassination attempt against him partially to protect Canaris. Now Heydrich was in a position to do something about his suspicions. He confronted Canaris.

He was stunned when Canaris matter-of-factly admitted it. ‘Of course, I am in contact with the British. That’s my job, Reinhard. Better to deceive the enemy when you can actually communicate.’ He then went on to describe the contacts and the deception operations each was a part of. Of course, it was all a carefully prepared cover story. He had had the wit to plan ahead for the time when it might be needed. Thus the angel of death passed over him.¹

Heydrich’s cozy arrangement with Dönitz had led to the great victories at sea. The Kriegsmarine was riding high. Now he would bring it down. To this Goring listened with great attention.

Heydrich could see the greed flicker in Goring’s eyes.

Heydrich’s role in turning the Enigma compromise to Germany’s advantage and his backing of Dönitz’s attack on the convoys had elevated his reputation with Hitler beyond even his fatherly affection. Hitler would deny him nothing. So Heydrich’s suggestion that half a million men be transferred from the Navy to the Luftwaffe, SS and Army was eagerly approved by Hitler. The Luftwaffe would profit most from an influx of high quality and technically adept personnel. The Army desperately needed combat replacements for the open, running sore of the Eastern Front. And, of course, the Navy was also a source of just the sort of racially pure and fit men the SS wanted.

Naval personnel were transferred as individuals, not as organized units as the Soviets were successfully doing with their naval personnel. Heydrich made sure that they would lose all connection with their former service. Dönitz threatened to resign, but swallowed his pride. The Führer knew best. It did not take him long to discover that the knife in his back had been stuck there with Heydrich’s clammy hand.²

As 6th Army stalled on the Don Bend after its exhausting victory, Army Group A had plunged south across the 300-mile Kuban towards the Black Sea coast and the passes through the Caucasus Mountains. The Kuban stretched between the Black and Caspian Seas and was bound on the north by the Don Steppe and the south by the forbidding ranges of the Caucasus. It had been settled as a marcher land against the wild tribes of the mountains by even more ferocious Cossacks.³ The three German armies attacked on line with 17th Army crossing the Don and striking south along the Sea of Azov to move down the Black Sea coast. The 1st Panzer Army in the centre attacked towards Maikop and Armavir and 4th Panzer Army towards Pyatigorsk. Each of these last two objectives led to a major highway through the mountains. Across their path lay two major water obstacles, the Manych and Kuban Rivers, flowing east to west. Pyatigorsk in particular led to the Georgian Military Highway along which Allied aid from Persia flowed.

It was a race. The Germans were intent on encircling the Russians. The Russians were intent on not being encircled as they conducted a fighting retreat into the ideal defensive terrain of the mountains. In their drive south the 16th Motorized and 3rd Panzer Divisions of 4th Panzer Army swept up to the 400-mile-long Manych River. It was the last great physical barrier before the mountains were reached.

It had been made an even greater barrier by the hand of man. The river was essentially a series of dams and their reservoirs, often a mile wide. It was a thorny problem for the commander of the 3rd Panzer Division, General Hermann Breith. The banks of the narrowest parts of the reservoirs were strongly held by NKVD troops. Instead of attacking there, Breith’s infantry crossed in assault boats at the widest point, 2 miles across, just above a dam. The surprise was complete, and the Germans overran the dam to prevent its demolition. Within minutes the armoured columns of the division were crossing and heading south towards Asia.

The Turkish-German treaty of alliance may have been secret, but it did not take long for the British and the Soviets to discover its existence. Even if they had not, the sudden presence of hundreds of Wehrmacht officers and NCOs in Turkey, the transfer of an expeditionary corps, and the redeployment of the Turkish armies to the borders would have been a resounding tip-off.

For both of them the imminent entry of Turkey into the war might turn out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The British had stripped just about every unit they safely could from their 10th Army guarding Syria, Iraq and Persia and sent them off to shore up 8th Army on the Egyptian border. They arrived just in time barely to stave off Rommel’s attack in July. There would be precious little left to stop any Turkish thrust into 10th Army’s area of operations.

The Soviets had as much if not more to fear. This new threat meant that their forces between the Caucasus and the Turkish border would have to fight front and back. Now both the oilfields at Baku and the Persian Corridor route of supply from the Allies were in danger. With the greatest reluctance, Stalin released a few more armies from Stavka reserve to bolster the defences of the Transcaucasus Front that defended the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Turkic Azerbaijan.

Things looked far more difficult from the perspective of the German advisory group in Ankara. Although captured French and Soviet weapons stocks had done much to modernize the Turkish Army as far as artillery and automatic weapons went, its logistics were, to put it kindly, primitive, consisting largely of pack animals in caravan trains and a very limited number of motor vehicles. Signals and communication remained grossly inadequate. The Turkish Air Force was simply in no condition to go up against the Russians. Goring was prevailed upon to scrape up a few Luftwaffe fighter units, pulling them from Norway now that the Allies had put a temporary halt to their convoys.

That meant that the German expeditionary corps, XLIV Corps (97th and 101st Jäger Divisions), commanded by General der Artillerie Maximilian de Angelis, would be operating on a shoestring. These divisions, however, had been organized and trained to operate under difficult conditions. They were taken from Army Group A. Field Marshal List had raised a bloody fit over the loss of these two specialized divisions at the end of July. He was more than mollified by their replacement with the even more specialized LV Mountain Corps (3rd and 5th Gebirgsjäger Divisions) which were being wasted as normal infantry in Army Group North around Leningrad. Now List would have four of the German Army’s seven mountain divisions; the rest remained locked in battle in the desolate reaches of Lappland. At the last minute Hitler confirmed the transfer of the three excellent mountain divisions of the Italian Alpini Corps.⁴

Chuikov handed over command of 64th Army to a replacement on 30 July. He had been relieved by the front commander, who summoned him to his headquarters in the city. Gordov told him, ‘The enemy has been pinned down in our defence positions, and he can now be wiped out with a single blow.’ Chuikov was astounded that the front commander could say such a thing after the drubbing the Germans had given them. Chuikov would write later, ‘I came to the conclusion that the Front Commander did not know the situation at the front. He took wishful thinking for reality, and did not realize that a new threat, a large-scale attack, was imminent.’ Gordov angrily dismissed his concerns and told him to write a report on his actions as army commander.

Wishful thinking was also afflicting the commander of the remnants of 62nd Army, who reported that his army was ‘firmly holding its defensive positions’ and, with 1st Tank and 21st Armies, ‘is completing the encirclement of the enemy’. It reminded Chuikov of the anecdote about the man who caught a bear. ’“Bring it over here,” someone said, “I can’t,” he replied. “It won’t let me.”’⁵

Two days later Chuikov was ordered by the Front Military Council personally to examine the situation south of Stalingrad and take whatever measures necessary. He found chaos. Divisions were retreating ahead of the oncoming Germans who had crossed the Don farther south. They had taken heavy losses. He took them under his command and ordered them to set up defensive lines north of the Aksay River.

Another division was arriving at two railway stations in the area. The Luftwaffe, as ever informed of ripe prey by its reconnaissance, attacked both stations just as the troops were unloading. Chuikov was walking to the buildings where his communications had been set up at the Chilekov Station when he saw three flights of aircraft coming towards him. ‘Suddenly there was the roar of explosions… I could see the carriages and the station buildings on fire, with raging flames rapidly leaping from one building to another.’ Chuikov thought to himself if only air cover had been provided to the stations, all this loss could have been avoided.⁶

He was out of touch with 64th Army headquarters for long periods inspecting, reorganizing, threatening, bringing hope to beaten men and getting soaked in frequent downpours. On one occasion his sudden arrival at a unit nearly cost him his life. He was wearing a British aid raincoat which a sentry recognized as foreign. And foreign to this man meant German. Chuikov missed death only by the barest of margins as he blurted out the response to the sentry’s challenge.

The Luftwaffe continued to torment any Soviet unit on the road. It so savagely strafed and bombed his 29th Rifle Division marching to set up positions along the Aksay River that it suffered more casualties than in the fighting west of the Don. Nevertheless, Chuikov was confirmed in command of these forces, the Southern Group, which he had already positioned along the Aksay.

On the 5th, the Germans attacked and drove a wedge over the river. Chuikov observed that they used the same battle drill as in the fighting west of the Don, ‘air attack, then artillery, then infantry, then tanks. They did not know any other order in which to attack.’ Chuikov determined to defeat this battle drill by an artillery strike on their assembly areas followed by an infantry attack. He fretted about taking these odds and ends of units into even a simple offensive operation. He had no tanks and no air support either, nor antitank weapons. He had to hit before the Germans could ferry their tanks across the river. He struck at daybreak. The artillery thundered down on the unsuspecting Germans who broke and fled back across the river. Their tanks never crossed, and he did not even have to employ his infantry.⁷

For the next ten days, the Germans again and again tried to cross the river in force. Chuikov threw them back each time, each time varying his tactics. He would counterattack at night or at dawn when the Luftwaffe could not be in the sky. His artillery ranged into the depth of the German positions disrupting their attempts to concentrate. Chuikov and his scratch force had shown that the Germans could be beaten.

Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko’s leg still had not recovered from the last of the three wounds he had suffered so far in the war. He was thankful that he was flying in one of these comfortable American Dakota transport aircraft rather than taking an overland route to Stalingrad. The Vozhd had just appointed him to command both fronts defending Stalingrad. The plane landed at the small airport on the outskirts of the city. Waiting for him was People’s Commissar Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Yeremenko braced himself. The Ukrainian commissar was a Politburo member and close to Stalin. Cold and ruthless as his master, he had executed the created famine in 1931-2 that starved to death up to ten million of his fellow Ukrainians on Stalin’s orders. He had also supervised the building of the Moscow subway in which thousands died. Dread preceded him, and fear followed in his wake. Yeremenko in contrast was an affable man who always had time for his subordinates. Somehow they would have to get along. On one thing they were in complete agreement. Stalin’s ‘Not one step back’ order would be ruthlessly enforced.

Even the rear was in panic. The port city of Astrakhan on the estuary of the Volga where it entered into the Caspian Sea was in fear after a German air raid. Astrakhan was a vital rail and water communications hub that fed supplies and reinforcements to Stalingrad. It was filled with terrified refugees and crated machinery from evacuated plants. Now huge, greasy clouds of black smoke poured from the burning oil storage tanks the Germans had hit.⁸

By 7 August the spearheads of the 16th and 24th Panzer Divisions had met on the Don across the river from Kalach. Sixth Army had cut off the forward elements of 62nd and 1st Tank Armies — nine rifle divisions, two motorized and seven tank brigades. It took the Germans another four days to mop up the pockets, bagging 50,000 prisoners, 1,000 armoured vehicles, and 750 guns. Of the 13,000 men the 181st Rifle Division had begun the fight with, barely a hundred were able to escape across the Don. This was just the sort of encirclement that the Germans had been seeking but had so far eluded them. It took another four days to round up all the cut-off Soviet forces. It was almost like beating game as they set fire to the brush to drive them out of hiding. Paulus’s chief engineer, after meeting with his commander, said that ‘The Army was full of hope… my eyes met those of Paulus, questioning, almost unbelieving… were the Russians finally at the end of their tether?’⁹

There were still more Russians to deal with on the west bank of the Don. Next Paulus attacked the smaller of the two bridgeheads to the north, but the Soviet armies there were able to avoid encirclement and withdrew across the Don. The fighting had not gone all one way. The Germans had taken heavy losses, the harbinger of more to come. One soldier wrote home, ‘Many, many crosses and graves, fresh from yesterday.’ Paulus’s infantry had marched, fought and bled for the last month. They were exhausted, and there was still farther to go. One pioneer observed hopefully, ‘The only consolation is that we will be able to have peace and quiet in Stalingrad, where we’ll move into winter quarters, and then, just think of it, there’ll be a chance for leave.’¹⁰

Major Adrian von Fölkersam was one of those daring men attracted to special operations. The Brandenburg Regiment drew such men like a magnet, and among that elite Fölkersam was one of the best. He was the grandson of a Russian admiral and spoke the language fluently. Now he and the detachment of sixty men he called ‘the Wild Bunch’, Russian-speaking Balts and Germans, were miles behind the lines in the town of Maikop with its surrounding oil wells and refineries. The problem was that the Soviets still held the town and did not seem in any hurry to leave.

The Wild Bunch had arrived in Maikop in a very ordinary way; they drove in dressed in NKVD uniforms. Fölkersam called on the commanding general and introduced himself as Major Turchin from the Stalingrad Front. The general seemed pleased to see someone who had been close to the action and assigned them good quarters in the town. For the next few days the Brandenburgers wandered about coolly, finding out where everything of importance was.

On the evening of 8 August they could hear the rumble of guns to the north. Army Group A was driving south. A Russian officer told Fölkersam that the Germans were only ten miles away. That night he called his men together and issued them their final instructions. He wanted chaos and confusion among the enemy.

In the morning Leutnant Franz Koudele walked into the main military telephone communications office and announced to the officer in charge that Maikop was being abandoned. The officer was not inclined to argue with an NKVD officer and promptly fled with his men. Koudele now found himself connected to every Soviet command in the Caucasus and flooded with messages demanding to know what was going on to the north. ‘We cannot connect you, sir,’ Koudele replied with just the proper tone of anxiety in his voice. ‘Maikop has been abandoned.’¹¹

The panic at the telephone office spread, abetted by the rest of the Brandenburgers, and triggered a Soviet stampede out of town, the general near the front. At the oilfields, Fölkersam’s men stopped the Soviet engineers from destroying the facilities on the authority of the general who had already fled. The engineers then joined the exodus.

That same day 13th Panzer Division of 1st Panzer Army overran the Maikop oilfields and was greeted by Fölkersam who, in a way, gave them the keys to the city. Somewhere behind the advancing columns were 10,000 oil industry workers ready to keep the fields running for Germany.¹²

The Romanian 3rd Army made good progress working along the coast of the Sea of Azov while 17th Army’s V Corps was locked in bitter fighting to take Krasnodar on the Kuban River. The fighting for this former capital of the Don Cossacks had been bitter. The Germans had reached it on the 10th and met determined Soviet resistance in the orchards and suburbs. There were huge oil refineries around the city of 200,000 people. They went up in flames as the Soviets destroyed everything of value to the Germans while evacuating as much of the population and useful material as possible. They had to hold the bridge over the Kuban in the city centre.

The next day 1st Battalion, 421st Infantry Regiment, had fought its way within 50 yards of the bridge unbeknownst to the Soviets. They watched the tightly packed flow of personnel and equipment crossing the bridge. It looked as if once again the Germans would be able to pull off another daring coup de main and seize the crossing. A company commander leapt to his feet pointing his pistol. He took three steps forward and was immediately shot through the head. His men charged. This time the Soviet engineer officer in charge of the bridge was alert. The racing Germans were only 20 yards from the bridge when he blew it.

Without the bridge, it took the Germans until the night of the 13th and 14th to find a way across the river and resume their advance.¹³

The men of the 5th SS Division Wiking at first saw what they thought was a great white cloud sitting in the distance. As they got closer the towering twin summits of Mt Elbrus became clear. Its west peak was the highest point in Europe at 18,510ft. Its permanent icecap fed twenty-two glaciers.

Most of the men of the Wiking Division were volunteers from northern Europe who had joined the Germans to help wage their anti-Bolshevik struggle. Of its three motorized regiments, Germania was recruited from ethnic Germans, Westland from Dutch and Flemish volunteers, and Nordland from Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. With them was the Slovak Fast Division (1st Slovak [Mobile] Infantry Division), together forming LVII Panzer Corps.

Behind them came XLIX Mountain Corps with the 1st and 4th Gebirgsjäger Divisions and the three Italian Alpini divisions. Their objective was the Klukhor Pass with the glaciers of Mt Elbrus hanging above. Through the pass ran the Sukhumi Military Highway to the port of Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, which was the southernmost of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet’s remaining three major naval bases.

After the loss of its main base at Sevastopol, the fleet had occupied bases at Novorossiysk, Tuapse, and Sukhumi along the narrow coastal strip below the mountains. Each was also defended by an army, and each was now a target. V Corps was heading to Novorossiysk, the Romanian Mountain Corps was attacking through the foothills of the Caucasus to Tuapse, and XLIX and the Alpini Corps were to open the way to Sukhumi for the Vikings of the SS and the Slovaks. From Sukhumi it was only a hundred miles to the Turkish border at Batumi.

Initially List had planned for LVII Panzer Corps to be the main force in the drive on Tuapse. However, he concluded that it would be wasted there. The Romanians would be enough to fix Soviet forces in that direction. It was not necessary to attack all three Soviet naval bases in strength. His mountain corps would punch through the mountain passes that would give the Germans access to the thin coastal strip and roads to Sukhumi. Take Sukhumi, and the other two bases would be cut off — another great battle of encirclement. Unfortunately, the Gebirgsjäger and Alpini would be spent in simply fighting through the mountains. That’s where LVII Panzer Corps came in as the exploitation force.

While the mountain troops were breaking through the high passes, 1st Panzer Army was to ‘advance parallel to the eastern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains to seize Nal’chik and Mozdok, cross the Terek River, and capture Grozny, the coast of the Caspian Sea near Makhachkala, and ultimately Baku’.¹⁴ To help his panzers get through the mountains of southern Chechnya, List assigned to 1st Panzer Army the new LV Mountain Corps.

Already Stalin was pouring reinforcements into the North Caucasus Front commanded by his old crony from the Civil War, Marshal of the Soviet Union Semyon Budenny. They were desperately needed; the front was burnt out and in a shambles. In a report of 13 August to the Stavka, Budenny wrote that of his seven armies four were no longer combat effective, three of them down to fewer than 7,000 bayonets each. Rifle divisions were reduced to 300 to 1,200 bayonets. He complained that the reasons for failing to defend the Kuban were:

He concluded by saying that ‘The Front’s chief mission is to defend the axes to Tuapse and Novorossiysk resolutely. Therefore, it is necessary to resolve [this mission] by means of a solid defence of the mountain defiles that protect Tuapse and Novorossiysk.’¹⁵ Nowhere did he mention Sukhumi.

Adding to Budenny’s miseries, Lavrenti Beria descended on the region. The ghoulish head of the NKVD came to spread terror among the native peoples of the Caucasus. The Imperial yoke had been bad enough, but they had writhed under the crueller yoke of Soviet Power. For good reason, Stalin doubted their loyalty, and he sent Beria to use the only tool he knew — terror. Stalin, the Georgian, had no love for these peoples, many of whom were Muslim, especially the Chechens who had raided down into Georgia for centuries before the Russians finally subdued them. Of course Beria’s cruelties accomplished just the opposite of what he had intended. Everywhere the arrival of the Germans was met with rejoicing, gifts of food and cattle, and volunteers, many, many volunteers.

Beria’s ruthlessness had been a pillar of Stalin’s rule as the war threw defeat after defeat at the Red Army. Stalin trusted no one, but Beria’s usefulness had given him a certain protection from Stalin’s paranoia. That did not keep Stalin from keeping a dossier on Beria as a serial rapist and paedophile. You never knew when that might prove useful.¹⁶

These were heady days for the Germans; Hitler’s fantastical dreams infected the men of Army Group A as they rolled over the Kuban. The engineers were calculating how much bridging equipment they would need to cross the Nile, and ‘whenever a trooper was asked, “Where’s our next stop?” he would frivolously reply, “Ibn Saud’s palace”.’ The mountain troops joked as they marched over the hot, flat steppe, ‘Down the Caucasus, round the corner, slice the British through the rear, and say to Rommel, “Hello, general, here we are!”’¹⁷

Tank crews from Grossdeutschland Division took possession of 150 Soviet T-34 medium tanks at the Kharkov Tractor Repair Plant and loaded them onto flat cars. Their destination was the siding at a large former Soviet training centre outside of Rostov.

A week before Hitler had gone back on his decision not to transfer the division to France and convert it to a panzer division. He would send it to France after all. Again Manstein had had to plead with him not to do so and suggested an imaginative alternative. Grossdeutschland could be converted in a much shorter time if it were done in theatre and with the Soviet tanks being repaired in Kharkov. At first Hitler was dead set against it. ‘Das ist wanzig, Manstein, heller wanzig [This is madness, Manstein, sheer madness]! To reequip the iconic division of the German Army with the creations of these Untermenschen is completely unacceptable.’

Manstein was all honey and light:

‘No, Manstein, no. It is unacceptable.’

The field marshal had detected a lessening of his Führer’s anger. The appeal to him as a frontline soldier had some effect. Hitler had never hesitated to bring down the General Staff a peg or two by saying that he alone had been in the trenches the way most of them never had been. Only he understood what the average soldier, the Landser, was going through. Now for the clincher. ‘You know, mein Führer, it would be a delicious irony to use these tanks as nails in the coffin of the Bolsheviks.’ He got his way. To make up the earlier loss of Leibstandarte, Hitler agreed to transfer Raus’s 6th Panzer Division from France to be reequipped with Soviet tanks. They could turn over their complement of new German equipment to Leibstandarte.

As long as the Soviet tanks had not been burnt out or the turret ring damaged, they could be repaired. At the Kharkov plant the tanks had not only been repaired but improved. Each one had been outfitted with a radio as all German tanks were. Instead of just a crank to turn the turret, an electrical system was installed to make engaging a target faster. The German tankers loved the T-34; it was easier to maintain, more heavily armoured and better armed with its high-velocity 76mm gun than even the best of the German tanks, the Mark IV.¹⁸

The Gebirgsjäger were eager to pass through the Wiking and Slovak divisions to begin the ascent into the mountains after a long, hot march through the Kuban. The Alpini were no less eager. Their corps commander had moved from unit to unit addressing them:

The elite troops of the Italian Army were excellent. The mass of the Italian Army, however, suffered from the deep incompetence of the officer corps compounded by the corruption and unrealities of the Fascist regime.¹⁹

The German and Italian objectives were the high mountain passes, the most important of which was the 9,230-foot Klukhor Pass and the beginning of the Sukhumi Military Highway. Defending a 275-mile stretch of mountains and passes was the 46th Army. It had largely neglected the defence of the passes, never believing the Germans would attempt to break through such forbidding terrain. At most the passes were defended by companies or battalions. The company at the mouth of the Klukhor Pass had no idea of the troops they were up against. The 1st Gebirgsjäger Division fixed the enemy’s attention to their front with a demonstration, climbed the flanking mountain, and fell upon their rear, collapsing the defence by the evening of the 17th. They were followed by the Austrians and Bavarians of the 4th Gebirgsjäger Division, and together they pushed on to overwhelm the strong Soviet defence of the pass exit.²⁰

It was a close-run thing. The attackers had expended the last of their ammunition just as the Soviet defenders broke and fled. Their margin had been filled by the mules of the Alpini. The Italians had developed special mule supply units that could navigate some of the harshest mountain trails. They had generously shared them with the Germans. The Alpini were at the same time clearing the high passes of the main range to the southwest and suddenly found themselves also in the forests on the southern side, with Sukhumi barely 12 miles away on the Ossetian Military Highway.²¹

Mules or not, neither the Germans nor Italians would have broken through the increasing Soviet resistance had not the Luftwaffe flown close air support. Flying through mountain valleys is tricky in peacetime. In wartime it adds a whole new dimension to risk. One man who positively relished the intensified risk was Major Hans-Ulrich Rudel who had used every bit of influence and pull to bring his new squadron of Stukas to the fight. Rudel was the ideal new German — devoted to National Socialism and Hitler and as lethal as the plague. For him:

Particularly dangerous to the troops fighting their way down the rear slopes of the mountains was an armoured train whose artillery raked the Germans. Every time Rudel’s Stukas attempted to take it out, timely warnings of their approach caused it to flee for safety into a mountain tunnel. The train always won the cat and mouse game with the Stukas until the day Rudel changed the rules. While the train was hiding in its lair, Rudel’s Stukas hit the tunnel mouth with special bombs that collapsed the entrance, sealing the train inside.

Rudel tried to answer every call for close air support, but ‘battles in the mountain forests are particularly difficult; it is fighting blindfold’. Yet time and time again his Stukas delivered steel on the target, earning the praise of the troops on the ground.

With the Klukhor now cleared, the Wiking and Slovak divisions flowed down through the pass and onto the Sukhumi Military Highway as it led through the lush semi-tropical forests towards Sukhumi, only 25 miles away.

The German mountain troops could not resist the opportunity to climb Mt Elbrus itself, even as the attack on the passes began. The Italians heard of it and insisted on going along. The Germans had wanted the glory for themselves until the Italians asked how useful the mules were. A group of men from each of the German and Italian divisions then made the ascent and planted their division flags and the swastika and royal Italian flag on its summit. It made an enormous propaganda splash, but Hitler launched into one of his tirades at what he thought was a wasteful stunt. His architect, Albert Speer was there:

He need not have worried. Sukhumi was well in hand.