Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

CHAPTER 9 The Terror Raid

The 62nd Army had been consumed in the fighting west of the river. All of its divisions had been destroyed, and only remnants and its headquarters had escaped over the river. The forces left to 1st Tank Army were transferred to the 62nd, and the tank army disappeared. It also picked up one division from 64th Army, most of which had been able to escape over the Don thanks to Chuikov’s leadership.¹

In wiping out the Kalach pocket, the Germans had not been able to bounce across the river immediately because 6th Army by this time was both exhausted and its combat power badly depleted. There were only 163 tanks left in the army’s panzer corps. Despite the Soviet losses in the bridgehead, the Germans had been badly wounded as well. The combat power of a number of the infantry divisions had fallen dangerously, with severe losses since the offensive had begun. Many were reduced to companies of forty to fifty men, even before they had crossed the Don.²

It was not until 16 August that the main bridge over the Don at Kalach was seized in a daring attack by Leutnant Kleinjohan and men of the 16th Pioneer Battalion. Incredibly the Soviets had not destroyed the bridge after the remnants of the Kalach pocket had fled across it. The western bank of the Don was much higher than the eastern and gave the Germans a splendid view of the hasty defences the Soviets were throwing up. Five days later, at dawn, the infantry of Seydlitz’s LI Corps marched across the bridge and straight into combat against a violent Soviet defence.

Seydlitz’s infantry widened the bridgehead to a depth of over a mile and width of 3 miles. The next night XIV Panzer Corps assembled on the west bank and watched as burning vehicles lit the way for an endless Soviet air attack on the bridge. This failed, and with first light on 23 August, 16th Panzer Division began to cross. It assumed a wedge formation as it passed through the German lines to burst through the Soviet defences and head northeast to its objective of the Volga.

By afternoon, with dust trails billowing behind them, they could see the silhouette of Stalingrad to their right. Every tank commander stood in his turret to watch. As they passed the northern suburbs a mass of antiaircraft guns opened up on them, but at point-blank range the panzers smashed every position at almost no loss. The antiaircraft batteries had been manned by female volunteers from the Red Barricade gun factory in Stalingrad. The women had not been able to fire an effective shot in return, so poorly trained were they in the antitank capabilities of their guns.

In the late afternoon:

That afternoon two German Messerschmitt Me 109 fighters flew over the division and were so overjoyed to see the advance made by their comrades on the ground that they did victory rolls over the tanks.

Roosevelt was not happy with the way the meeting was going. Stalin’s message had brought them all together to discuss its requests. The last sentence was the controversial one.

The President’s special assistant and trusted confidant, Harry Hopkins, was there as the administrator of Lend-Lease. Hopkins was so close to FDR that he lived in the White House. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White was present because all monetary Lend-Lease issues of coordination with the Soviets went through him. The State Department was represented by Alger Hiss. Admiral King was having a hard time not shaking the teeth out of the three of them. He would have done a lot more had he known that all three were communists and agents of the Soviet Union. Never before had treason wrapped its coils so closely around an American presidency. The chief NKVD officer in the United States described Hopkins as ‘the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States’.⁵ Even Roosevelt had said, ‘Harry and Uncle Joe got on like a house afire. They have become buddies.’⁶ Hiss was actually using Lend-Lease transport to send highly classified US Government documents to the Soviet Union.⁷

White was adamant. ‘Mr. President, we absolutely must, I repeat, must resume our convoys to the Soviet Union. If they go under, we cannot win the war against Germany.’

Hopkins added, ‘There is a good chance, given the German drive towards the Volga, that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler if he thinks we are stinting on aid.’

Roosevelt looked closely at him. ‘Did he ever mention that to you, Harry?’

‘Not in so many words, but some of his closest advisors were a lot more explicit.’

Turning to King, Roosevelt said, ‘Now just when can we resume the Arctic convoys, Admiral?’

King had had enough. ‘You will have to ask my successor, Mr President, because if you order the resumption of the convoys I will offer you my resignation.’

Roosevelt straightened up in his wheelchair he was so surprised. He knew King was as blunt and salty a sea dog as ever ran the US Navy, but he was not used to such an ultimatum, anyway not since Douglas MacArthur had issued a similar threat back in 1934 over cutting the training budget for the National Guard. He had caved then, just as he was going to do now.⁸

Units falling back into Stalingrad were amazed to find a veneer of normality after the relentless German pounding and constant retreating. The novelist Victor Nekrasov recorded his impressions:

It was not to stay that way for long.

During their afternoon dash to the Volga the men of XIV Panzer Corps saw the massed might of Luftflotte 4 flying towards Stalingrad and greeted it with cheers and sirens. They were witnessing the preamble to one of the great aerial terror raids of the war. Its aim was to break the will of the population and defenders and it was directed against the dense downtown residential areas, factories and utilities. The antiaircraft batteries quickly ran out of ammunition because some officious fool had concentrated all their ammunition in one place. The Germans had identified it and specifically targeted it.

Nekrasov and his companions watched transfixed from a balcony. ‘From behind the station the planes came in a steady stream, just as they do in a flypast. I had never seen so many of them. They flew in flocks, black, repulsive, unperturbed, at various levels.’¹⁰ These flocks were all part of a 1,600-sortie sequence of raids. Incendiaries ignited the wooden housing in the southwest of the city. Closer to the river, the tall white blocks of apartments were reduced to shells. A ball of flame 1,500 feet high erupted from the exploding oil tanks along the Volga, spewing burning oil across the broad river. The huge cloud of oily smoke would be seen 200 miles away. The telephone exchange and the waterworks were destroyed, the main hospital bombed, and even the bakeries had been targeted. The dead were everywhere.¹¹

General Yeremenko wrote:

The city had been stunned. The raids would continue for the next few days killing at least 40,000 people. Luftflotte 4 lost only three aircraft. It was the largest raid on the Ostfront since the beginning of the war. Appropriately it was the apogee of the career of Luftflotte 4’s commander, Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, who had first made his name in the terror bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. The close German ground-air coordination that Chuikov found so admirable was due to Richthofen’s innovations.¹³

On 25 August, two days after the German panzers had reached the Volga north of the city, the Stavka declared a state of siege. The terror bombing continued to smash the city into rubble. Everything now rode on the city’s defence. If it fell the rail links and the equally valuable river links to the Caucasus and Caspian Sea would be lost, slamming shut another funnel of Allied aid and cutting off 70 per cent of the Soviet Union’s oil. The result would be systemic collapse of the war effort and the Soviet state. Stalin realized that he himself would be consumed by this scenario. He had consigned too many people to oblivion to believe he would escape. The Germans had a word for what was looming he thought. They called it Götterdammerung, the death of the gods and the end of the world. He could taste the irony. Only briefly. Philosophy was of no use in this crisis. Sheer will was, and Stalin had that iron trait as few men had.

Stalin had defended this city on the Volga in the civil war. Then it had been named Tsaritsyn. In his honour it had been renamed Stalingrad, Stalin’s city. Rebuilt as a communist industrial showplace it now boasted a population of half a million. It was a significant arms producer with four huge factories. The new Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory had been converted to tank production when the war started. One of the oldest artillery makers in the country had been refurbished and named Barrikady Gun Factory. Other important factories were the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) Iron Works and the Lazur Chemical Factory. There were oil refineries as well, with oil tanks along the river.¹⁴ Volunteer factory workers were pressed into defence units and teenage girls and young women from the Komsomol were encouraged ‘strongly’ to join air defence batteries, such as the ones destroyed by XIV Panzer Corps. Evacuation of the population had begun, but factory workers remained behind to keep turning out war material, especially the T-34s from the Tractor Factory. They were given rudimentary military training.

The city stretched for 20 miles along the Volga and nowhere was more than 2 miles deep. A grid of straight streets ran perpendicular to the river as did a number of deep gullies, both of which offered quick routes of penetration to an attacker. The western approaches were high ground that dominated the city, and the defenders would have the broad Volga at their backs, a barrier to retreat as well as a barrier to be crossed by any reinforcements and supplies. On military grounds it was a wretched place to try to defend.¹⁵

The Stalingrad Defence Committee ruthlessly stripped nearby collective farms of their grain reserves and hunted down anyone guilty of defeatism or disloyalty. On the collective farms,

With the start of the war Stalin had ordered rings of defences to be built around the city, but spring floods had washed them out. Some 200,000 men and women in the region were mobilized to rebuild them.

Most of it was too little too late; the defences were only 30 per cent complete when the Germans came charging right through them.¹⁷

The 16th Panzer Division had found itself alone on the banks of the Volga just north of Stalingrad. The rest of 6th Army and its own XIV Panzer Corps had not caught up with it. The division went into a hedgehog formation to be able to defend itself from any direction. The next morning it attacked due south into Spartakovka, the northernmost suburb of Stalingrad. They met such a storm of steel from the well-entrenched defenders, both men of the 62nd Army and factory workers, that they recoiled. The Soviets counterattacked. Many of their T-34s were unpainted and even without gun sights, fresh from the assembly lines of the Tractor Factory and manned by the workers who had forged them. So determined were they that some of the tanks penetrated to the headquarters of the 68th Panzer Regiment and had to be destroyed at point-blank range. At the same time, another strong Soviet force attacked from the north.

The only success the Germans had was to take the landing stage of the big railway ferry on the river, severing communications from Kazakhstan to both Stalingrad and Moscow. Nevertheless, 16th Panzer was so closely pressed by the Soviets that only the determined support of the Luftwaffe kept the attackers from overrunning it. Its only hope lay in a link-up with the rest of the panzer corps.

The ‘rest of the panzer corps’, 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, was having considerable problems of its own. It had turned north and away from 16th Panzer after they had both broken out of the bridgehead to take up positions along the Tatar Ditch and bar any Soviet forces from descending into the narrow neck between the Don and Volga. The Tatar Ditch was an ancient trench and parapet designed to keep raiding Tatar armies from mounting slave and plunder raids into the Russian lands. It was still a formidable barrier that the Soviets had been trying to turn into an antitank obstacle.

On the way the division ran into a train which was being hurriedly unloaded. The Germans overran it and sent the Russians flying with a few well-placed shells. They found a treasure in the waiting boxcars. It was packed with American Lend-Lease supplies — ‘magnificent brand-new Ford lorries, crawler tractors, jeeps, workshop equipment, mines, and supplies for engineering troops’. The officers especially liked the American jeep, freshly painted in Russian colours. They uniformly agreed that it was much superior to its German equivalent, the Kübelwagen.¹⁸

While the Germans were marvelling at their war booty, the Soviet 35th Rifle Division, reinforced with tanks, cut across the rear echelons of both German divisions, rushing to seal off the bridgeheads over the Don. It placed itself firmly between the German VIII Corps holding the bridgehead and the XIV Panzer Corps whose divisions had now finally linked up. Sixth Army was prevented from quickly joining up with the isolated mobile divisions.

Four days after the 16th Panzer had reached the Volga and been joined by the 3rd Motorized Infantry, Colonel A. A. Sarayev, commander of the 10th NKVD Division, thought he had a chance to isolate them completely. He stripped Stalingrad of almost all of his units and city militia and threw them into the fighting in the northern suburbs. The panzer corps was now commanded by General Hans Hube who had come up from 16th Panzer after Paulus sacked his predecessor. Hube was a one-armed veteran of the First World War and about as aggressive and feisty a man as ever commanded armour.

His men and he were daily witnesses to the air battles above as the enemy repeatedly bombed them. Their own Me 109s fell on the Russian bombers like hawks among pigeons. He did not know that three Soviet armies were marching down towards him from where they had de-trained to the north. By now the Luftwaffe had achieved such air superiority over the Red Air Force that the German troops below looked up at the aerial battles as a show put on for them, applauding when aircraft after Soviet aircraft spiralled burning to the ground. To the west the Red Air Force made an attempt to attack Luftflotte 4’s airbases in the Don bridgehead, but its planes were swatted out of the sky by Me 109s.

The next day Zhukov arrived in Stalingrad. Stalin had just appointed him as Deputy Supreme Commander. Zhukov had become a junior member of Stalin’s ‘Cavalry clique’ during the Russian Civil War which later, no doubt, spared him in the purge of the officer corps. In 1939 he had defeated the Japanese Kwantung Army in the battle of Khalkin Gol, dropping bundles of samurai swords at the feet of a delighted Stalin. In no other man did Stalin repose such confidence to be able to retrieve a hopeless situation. After all, he had saved Leningrad and Moscow when they were on the brink of falling. Stalin had used him as a one-man fire brigade to retrieve hopeless situations in that first terrible part of the war. He was also the only man who could shout back at Stalin and live to tell about it, so valued had he become. So now he must accomplish the same miracle for Stalingrad.¹⁹

Zhukov did not like what he saw. He rang Stalin and told him the counterattack must be put off for a week; the armies involved were simply too inexperienced, made up of older reservists and short of ammunition. The Vozhd had no choice but to agree. They both had to watch as the Germans blocked the northern end of the narrow neck between the Don and the Volga, cutting off Stalingrad from that direction.

What happened next alarmed even a man of Zhukov’s fortitude. The sudden disappearance of the visible NKVD units in the city to reinforce the fighting in the northern suburbs took a while to be noticed, but when it was, the inescapable conclusion was that the city was being abandoned. Mass panic convulsed the population. No steps had been taken to evacuate them. Stalin had not wanted to show any alarm, and the local NKVD commander had not wanted to waste Volga river transport in moving civilians when he desperately needed it to move the wounded to the east bank and supplies and reinforcements to the west bank.

One woman remembered. ‘Shops were simply left open — abandoned — as thousands of people tried to flee in any direction, to go wherever they could.’ A wounded soldier in the city hospital noticed the sudden disappearance of the hospital staff; the administrator wandered through the wards apologizing that his staff had simply fled. The patients looked out the windows:

Amid the chaos, the workers at the Tractor Factory met. They decided to stay. From this assertion of will, calm eventually spread through the remaining population. Determination replaced the panic. There was also a deep, abiding hatred. The city would not be given up.

Somewhere amid the endless defeats and retreats, amid the terror from the skies, the soldiers at the front and the civilians in Stalingrad hardened. Stalin’s ‘not one step back’ order had been the beginning. The introduction of a merciless ruthlessness to those who ran away or failed in their duty was part of it. Blocking units of the NKVD regularly shot men drifting back from the fighting without authorization. Penal battalions were established at division and higher levels; these were sent into suicidal attacks in order, as Stalin himself dictated, ‘to redeem themselves with their blood for the crimes against the Homeland’. It was as if ‘Order No. 227 became the ultimate expression of fear as a motivational tool.’²¹

It was more than that though. The Russians were reaching deep into their sense of themselves. Despite the ‘union’ aspect of the Soviet Union and the presence of numerous non-Russians, it was a Russian experience.

Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Mereshko put his finger on what caused the Russians to stiffen their backs and snarl at the Germans. ‘Some officers and soldiers had believed that they could retreat all the way to the Ural Mountains but [in fact] any further retreat would lead to the death of the Motherland. There was nowhere left to retreat.’

Order 227 had been a slap in the face to the Red Army and the people. Mereshko went on, ‘It opened the eyes of the army and the people, showed them the truth of the situation facing the country.’ It led to the slogan, ‘There is no land beyond the Volga.’ Firing squads and penal battalions did not make Order 227 effective, one veteran said. ‘The motivation had to be within us.’²² For some Red Army soldiers there was a different motivation. The men of the 64th Rifle Division (66th Army) were from an older age group only recently called to the colours. Their training had been minimal, their equipment incomplete, and their leadership brutal to the point of idiocy. They were also desperately hungry. Thrown unprepared into an attack, they lost thousands of men. The result was a serious mutiny, immediately brought to heel by the NKVD. Three hundred men were shot and another thousand sent to the penal battalions.²³

Seydlitz was straining at the leash to follow the XIV Panzer Corps to Stalingrad. Instead he had to wait until the huge column of Ford trucks had dropped off their supplies in the bridgehead for his corps. Everyone was impressed with the hardy American vehicles now painted in German grey. They were the booty from the captured ships of Convoy PQ-17, a gift from the Führer himself who had regretted the necessity earlier to divert most of that army group’s transport to supply the attack into the Caucasus.

It occurred to Seydlitz that here was an opportunity. To the dumbstruck shock of the transport officer, Seydlitz, on his own authority, simply seized his trucks as soon as they were unloaded. Then he loaded the infantry of his two lead divisions on them. The men were tired, and if he could save them another 30-mile road march in this brutal heat, so much the better. He laughed to himself that he now commanded the LI ‘Motorized’ Corps. He carefully neglected to tell Paulus of his ‘requisition’ of all the Fords. You could say his family motto was coined by St Francis of Assisi: ‘It is easier to beg forgiveness than seek permission.’ Paulus was not a man to think outside of regulations.²⁴

It did not take long for Seydlitz’s two advance divisions to trample the Soviet 35th Rifle Division into the scorched steppe grass and motor towards Stalingrad, barely 45 miles away, three hours or so by truck if the columns kept moving. Seydlitz put his mobile elements, reconnaissance units and some truck-towed 88mm antitank and antiaircraft batteries up front to keep the retreating Soviets on the run as the Luftwaffe’s Stukas and Ju 88s harried them from the sky. The outer layers of the defence of Stalingrad were overrun with hardly any fight. Then the Germans came to an abrupt halt at the inner defence along the steep banks of the Rossoshka River manned by remnants of the 62nd Army. Those much abused troops now fought back from good positions and stopped Seydlitz’s infantry cold. The truck ride was over almost before it had started. Nevertheless, Seydlitz would hold on to the trucks as if they were an inheritance.

Paulus said nothing about the trucks when he joined Seydlitz at the headquarters of the 76th Infantry Division. His new chief of staff, newly promoted Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow, did his best to justify Seydlitz’s action. To his relief Paulus had more to worry about than trucks. His old chief of staff, upon whom he had become too dependent many had said, had been wounded. His replacement would take time to get his hands around the situation and get to know the army. Tresckow had been quickly sent from Army Group Centre headquarters; his excellent record made him an obvious choice.

Paulus and Seydlitz were joined by Richthofen, who noticed how nervous the 6th Army commander was and how the tic on the left side of his face had become more pronounced. Paulus was also suffering from recurrent dysentery, the same disease that had sapped Lee at Gettysburg of his driving will and keen judgement, and Paulus was no Lee. Richthofen had none of his cousin’s famous chivalry. He had a contempt for the weak. So a man like Paulus, nervous tic and all, took him aback. After all, the man wore gloves in this heat because he abhorred dirt, and he took a bath twice a day and changed into a fresh uniform each time. During active operations! What to make of such a man?²⁵

Well, that was neither here nor there at the moment. They had more pressing problems. Richthofen, like Hitler, was an advocate of a swift victory that would solve the problem of overextension. That was little comfort to Paulus who was fully aware of how overstretched his resources were. His losses in infantry and panzergrenadiers had been grievous. Hence the worsening tic.²⁶ He was obviously without the reserves of will and boldness that would have buoyed a tougher, more experienced man. The difference between a creature of the staff and an instinctive and pugnacious fighting man was starkly apparent. What his training and his own eyes told him was a highly dangerous situation was subsumed in his robot-like obedience to Hitler’s will. Blind faith had indeed supplanted reason. When the commander of XIV Panzer Corps suggested a withdrawal because his corps was almost out of fuel and badly overextended, Paulus had relieved him because it bespoke a lack of that same blind faith and replaced him with Hube.

One of the reasons for Paulus’s nervous tic was the stout Soviet resistance in the inner defence belt, but that was deceiving. Had Seydlitz only known of the panic in the city, he would have thrown away the scabbard to blast through and dragged his fastidious and nervous army commander with him.

The advance elements of Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army reached the Stalingrad-Morozovsk Railway Line in the evening. A great opportunity now presented itself. A good part of both 62nd and 64th Armies could be cut off in Stalingrad’s inner defence belt by an encirclement of the panzer corps of the two German armies. Army Group B headquarters quickly endorsed the plan as did Tresckow.

At this point Paulus took counsel of his fears. It would be far too risky to have his XIV Panzer Corps make such a manoeuvre while it was already heavily engaged with the defenders of Stalingrad’s suburbs, threatened by heavy Soviet forces from the north, and cut off from 6th Army’s main body and supplies. Paulus declined to make the attempt. The two Soviet armies had time to escape into the city. The last chance to destroy the enemy in the field was lost. The 6th Army was now committed to grinding urban combat. Paulus, who had been so apprehensive of his infantry losses, had thrown his army into the very situation that devoured men.