Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

CHAPTER 11 Der Rattenkrieg

Again the Israilov brothers, Khasan and Hussein, watched German parachutes flittering down through the night sky. This time there were hundreds. They were the men of 4th Battalion, Luftlande-Sturmregiment 1 (Parachute Assault Regiment 1), Flieger Division 7 (7th Airborne Division). Many of the men, including their commander Major Walter Gericke, wore the cuff band ‘Kreta’ in honour of their desperate air assault on the island of Crete in May 1941.

They were Hermann Goring’s pride and joy. Their losses on Crete had been so high that Hitler refused to conduct another large-scale airborne landing. It then took an appeal to Goring by Army Group A for just one battalion to be used in a night air drop. He had asked Hitler, who relented as long as it was only one battalion. The Luftwaffe was, in any case, hard put to divert enough Ju 52 transports for the drop of even one battalion.

As he came down in his chute, Gericke could see the lines of bonfires that had guided the transports to their drop zone. The Chechens had done just what they said they would do. Let’s hope, he thought, they would have the promised number of men on the ground to assist in his mission. He was determined to go on no matter what,

Within half an hour he was conferring with Khasan. To enormous relief, he could tell by moonlight that the woods were filled with well-armed men. He shuddered for a moment. They reminded him of the natives of Crete who had come out of their homes with scythes and pruning hooks, kitchen knives and old swords, to fall on his paratroopers with a fury they had never expected. Mountain peoples are tough and unforgiving. An even greater surprise were the twenty-two Studebaker trucks waiting to move the extra ammunition and equipment that had been dropped with them. Israilov laughed as he pointed to them, ‘Gift of the American people! We snatched them off the Georgian Military Highway for you. Just dressed as NKVD men and pulled them off the road.’

Their move through the countryside was mercifully uneventful. By dawn their objective was in sight, the vast Grozny oilfields, a forest of derricks and the cracking and refining plants that left a haze in the air. Now it all depended on the element of surprise. The German armies in the south needed not merely oil but refined petroleum products, and those were made by the cracking and refining plants. The oil by itself was of little immediate use. Gericke’s mission was to take those plants. His problem was that there was a garrison in Grozny to protect the fields and, on Stalin’s orders, the plants had been set for demolition if the Germans seemed about to overrun them. Gericke considered that even a surprise attack would not be quick enough to forestall the destruction of the plants.

The Studebakers were a godsend. He gathered his company commanders and quickly revised their plans. He turned to Israilov, ‘You still have those NKVD uniforms?’¹

‘Of course, my friend.’

Within an hour the truck convoy entered the main road to the fields with Chechen drivers dressed in NKVD uniforms, a surefire unquestioned pass to anywhere they wanted to go. The Chechens spoke fluent Russian and had that cold self-confidence that could bluff through anything. Israilov slipped his men between Grozny and the fields waiting to ambush the garrison when it sallied out.

The few guards at the main cracking plant were overpowered almost without a shot, but it was too good to be true that everything would fall to Gericke’s coup de main. The chief engineer at the plant was shot just as he set off the demolitions that sent the facility up in a ball of fire.

Already that morning Chuikov had reported to the front military council that he was completely without reserves while the enemy continued to commit fresh forces. ‘[A]nother few days of such bloody fighting and the Army would disintegrate, would be bled to death. I asked for the Army to be immediately reinforced by three fresh divisions.’

That night a near full-strength 92nd Naval Infantry Brigade from the North Sea Fleet crossed the Volga as did a tank brigade. The sailors had not been incorporated into the Red Army but fought in their own uniforms, bell-bottom trousers, sailor caps with the ribbon hanging from the back, and their telnyashka shirts. They were as tough as the frozen sea they had sailed. With them was the 137th Tank Brigade with light tanks to help stop the Germans from getting to the Volga east of Mamayev Kurgan.²

That day’s fighting raged along almost the entire perimeter of 62nd Army’s front from the Red October complex in the north past the Kurgan and through downtown Stalingrad to the El’shanka River. Seydlitz’s 295th Infantry Division stormed the hill only to be thrown off by battalions of the 13th Guards and 112th Rifle Divisions. That afternoon the Germans counterattacked and took the summit. They now had the perfect observation post to see everything within Chuikov’s lines, the ferries and the opposite shore of the Volga, and to call down accurate artillery fire. They did not have, however, undisputed control of the hill. Chuikov’s men were still in possession of significant parts of it which prevented the Germans fully exploiting its potential.

On Chuikov’s southern perimeter, XLVIII Panzer Corps drove the fragments of Soviet units back and crossed the El’shanka River near its confluence with the Volga. Chuikov then consolidated these fragments under the 35th Guards Division which finally brought the Germans up short.

The high tempo of fighting continued on the 17th. Now the grain elevator on the bank of the Volga became the focus of both armies. This huge structure still filled with grain dominated the skyline of the city. So important was it that Paulus chose its likeness to adorn the Stalingrad victory medal he designed. Chuikov had to defend it because it anchored his line on the Volga. Guardsmen and naval infantry were infiltrated to garrison it through a network of tunnels. They held out until the 20th when the Germans finally stormed it. One German soldier wrote:

Already the Germans were referring to this brutal city fighting as Der Rattenkrieg, the rats’ war.

Those ‘devils’ were suffering their own hell. One naval infantryman wrote:

Warrant Officer Zaitsev was marching with his regiment at night to avoid air attack. Ahead of them on the horizon was a ghastly sight.

Zaitsev’s company commander announced, ‘That’s where we’re headed, but right now, sailors, we have to prepare you for action.’⁵ For the next three days the regiment received intensive training in street fighting, grenades, and close combat with bayonets, knives, and shovels. At the end, they traded in their Navy uniforms for ill-fighting Red Army brown, but they kept their striped Navy telnyashki underneath.

It was a sight that few men of the 23rd Panzer would ever forget as they closed on Grozny and its oilfields. South of the city stretched a forest of derricks, here and there some of them were spouting fire like giant flamethrowers. Nearer the city a huge fire burned in the centre of the complex of cracking plants and refineries. The panzers were like the cavalry coming to the rescue, a theme so many of them had picked up from American movies before the war and in reading the Western adventures written by Carl May and so beloved of German schoolboys. Only this time, the cavalry rode in on steel steeds, and the settlers were the besieged battalion of Flieger Division 7.

They bypassed the city to ensure the capture of that part of the fields and their facilities that had not been destroyed. Smoke rose from the city, courtesy of the Israilov brothers and their bands of Chechen rebels who had attacked as the garrison had rushed out to secure the oilfields. The Germans would later blanch at the atrocities the Chechens had committed on the Russian population of the city. If any ethnic group was atrocity-prone, it was the Chechens. They were already hated in the rest of the Soviet Union as the cruellest of the underworld mafias. Now they were sating their revenge on the Russian civilian population. The communists went first, then they worked their way down.⁶

Fifty miles away to the west, 3rd Panzer was chasing the retreating Russians down the Georgian Military Highway. They bounced into Beslan and secured the road east to Grozny and then pressed on south. Outside Ordzhonikidze, the Soviet 9th Army gathered the fragments of units coming south and made its last stand. Strong tank attacks suddenly drove north out of the town. The British Valentines and American M3s, however, were very badly handled as if by amateurs who had never been in a tank before. Over a hundred tanks were left burning or abandoned when the survivors fled back into the city. Only later did the Germans learn that the Soviets had been using the stocks of Allied tanks from the parks outside the city, crewing them with infantry, truck drivers and whoever else could be scraped up. It would take the arrival of two of Kleist’s infantry divisions to break the defence on 20 September and capture the vast sorting fields of British and American supplies and equipment.

Kleist’s men had been at the end of a fraying logistics pipeline. Now they had everything. Food of all descriptions, boots, medical equipment and supplies, fuel, and above all fields full of American Studebaker and Ford trucks and jeeps. So many, in fact, that the Germans were able to refit XL Panzer Corps completely with more than its establishment of transport. There was enough left over to re-form two infantry divisions as motorized units. The Germans had got used to incorporating captured enemy equipment into their units, but they had never seen war support war in such a lavish style.⁷

Late than night Major Engel was writing in his diary of the day’s events at the Führer Headquarters:

Hitler had made it clear that the General Staff officers were out of touch. “‘Same old song: too old, too little experience at the front.” Chief said he had a better impression from younger General Staff officers,’ such as Major von Stauffenberg, who often made statements before Hitler that affected operational decisions.⁸

Hitler had not been happy with Colonel Gehlen’s report:

Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East had, in fact, done a superlative piece of order-of-battle analysis. If anything, they underestimated Soviet numbers.

Hitler’s reasoning was confounded by the fact that, with almost the same number of men at the front as the Germans, Stalin had been able to amass 1,242,470 men in Stavka reserve while the Germans essentially had no strategic reserve. Gehlen’s office estimated that the Soviet class of 1925 was providing Stalin with 1,400,000 more men. The German class was little more than one-third that number.⁹

Halder received another disquieting report that went into his next briefing for Hitler. The information was as of the 14th and rated the fighting strength of all the infantry battalions in 6th Army. Seydlitz’s LI Corps, which had been in the hardest fighting, was bleeding away. Of its 21 infantry battalions, 12 were rated as weak, 6 as average, and 3 as medium-strong. The pioneer battalions were rated average.¹⁰ Halder knew that Hitler would not want to hear this; his mind always needed to assume every division was at full strength. He then kept assigning missions that dead men could not fulfill.

Gehlen’s statistics-laden briefing which Halder supplemented with LI Corps’ waning strength had been the last straw. Hitler acted quickly to decapitate the General Staff that he so despised. He summoned Halder and told him, ‘Herr Halder, we both need a rest. Our nerves are frayed to the point that we are of no use to each other.’ Halder took the hint and resigned.

Halder went to his room to pack and pen a note to his protégé Paulus. ‘A line to tell you that today I have resigned my appointment. Let me thank you, my dear Paulus, for your loyalty and friendship and wish you further success as the leader you have proved yourself to be.’ Even before Halder’s aide could drop the note off at the OKW dispatch office, Paulus was reading the message from Werewolf giving him his old boss’s job. He was to report immediately and turn his army over to Seydlitz. He felt an immense sense of relief even though his men had just raised the swastika flag over the huge and now shattered Univermag department store in the city centre. He would no longer be responsible for bleeding 6th Army to death. Over the last six weeks, his army had suffered 7,700 dead and 31,000 wounded; fully 10 per cent of 6th Army had been lost. Every day the fighting got harder, the Russians more determined, and his losses were not replaced. He thought that now perhaps his near uncontrollable tic might go away.¹¹

Next it was Jodl’s turn to be humbled. Hitler assembled the OKW staff to announce the immediate promotion of Major von Stauffenberg to Generalmajor (brigadier general) and his appointment as deputy chief of OKW’s Operations Staff. He came over to shake the stunned Stauffenberg’s hand. The new general noted that the Führer’s hand was trembling. Stauffenberg’s appointment was seen for what it was, a rebuke to Jodl. Hitler clearly thought he needed a minder.

Most angry was Bormann. Hitler apparently had not known that Stauffenberg was a deeply religious Catholic. It was too late to get to Hitler to warn him off. The Führer would lose too much face. What Bormann did not know was that Stauffenberg had come to find Hitler and his Nazis repugnant and had been so alarmed at the treatment of the Jews and the assault on religion that he been drawn into the anti-Hitler plot by Tresckow.

Now that he had got their attention, Hitler had one more announcement. ‘I have decided to replace Weichs as well. A man with more ruthlessness is required at this decisive stage in the struggle against Bolshevism. Manstein will now command Army Group B.’¹²

Within twenty-four hours of his appointment, Manstein ordered the siege train of heavy guns that had been left at the shattered Soviet fortress to be moved to Stalingrad. At the same time rail construction troops were set to work to strengthen the line from Kalach to Stalingrad and a subsidiary line from Rostov through Kotelnikovo to Stalingrad.

The most imposing of the guns were the two 600mm and one 800mm railway guns. The former were named Thor and Odin. The latter, named Schwerer Gustav (Heavy Gustav), weighed 1,350 tons and could throw a 7-ton shell as far as 23 miles that would destroy any fortification known at that time. Developed by Krupp in the 1930s specifically to destroy the fortifications of the Maginot Line, Gustav was not ready in time for that battle. It had been ready to crack open Sevastopol. It was the largest-calibre rifled weapon in the history of artillery to see combat, and fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece.

A second 800mm gun named Dora had already arrived at Stalingrad in mid-August. A train with a total length of almost a mile was needed to transport it to its siding emplacement 9.3 miles west of the city. It had fired its first shell on 13 September.

Two 280mm rail guns as well as two 420mm and two 355mm howitzers were also sent north in addition to four 305mm mortars. Both of the 420mm guns were short-ranged and left over from First World War. Manstein could not give 6th Army more infantry, but he could give it crushing artillery.

The sailors looked askance at the boat and barge that had come to pick them up to cross the Volga. It was badly holed and leaking energetically. The boat operator was throwing boxes of canned American meat into the hold to make room for the ammunition being loaded. Zaitsev joked, ‘What are you doing, Sarge? The Second Front is going to drown down there!’ Leaks or no, the men crossed the Volga that night without incident. By five in the morning the entire 284th Division had made it across the river. They were part of what would be called ‘feeding the fire’, the constant stream of replacement formations slipped across the river to keep going the conflagration that was burning out 6th Army.

The Russians kept sending in new formations from the Stavka reserve while 6th Army received no reinforcements from outside its own army area except for half a dozen pioneer battalions.

Its only augmentation consisted of 70,000 Soviet citizens. These were the Hiwis (Hilfswillige or volunteer helpers). Some were anti-Soviet volunteers, including many Cossacks, and others were recruited out of POW camps. They wore German uniforms and performed credibly, usually well treated by the Germans but sure to be shot on the spot if captured. Some German divisions had as many Hiwis as Germans. Among the many non-Slavic nationalities, there were six battalions of Turkmen alone in 6th Army, as well as Balts, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Khirgiz, Tatars and many more. Hatred of communism also drove large numbers of Slavs including Russians into German uniform. The Ukrainians were especially well-represented, steeped in hatred for the seven to ten million of their people purposely starved to death by Stalin in the evil winter of 1932-3, the murder by hunger, they called it. Without their willing support, 6th Army would have been an empty shell by the time it reached the Don.¹³

As a counterweight to German air superiority, the massed guns on the east bank of the Volga smashed German communications and battalions massing for attack. Vassily Grossman, the Soviet war correspondent, wrote, ‘On the other side of the Volga, it seemed as if the whole universe shook with the mighty roaring of the heavy guns. The ground trembled.’¹⁴

As Zaitsev and his sailor buddies were climbing into their barge, an anonymous figure was being driven along the northern flank of the German salient, sometimes within 200 yards of the German lines. It was the Deputy Supreme Commander himself. Zhukov. The next night he made a similar inspection to the south of Stalingrad. The genesis of the visit was when Zhukov had been summoned to Stalin to explain the failure of his offensive against the northern German salient. He told Stalin that he needed more reserves. Stalin picked up the map showing the location of all Stavka reserves. While he was studying it, Zhukov mentioned to Vasilevsky that they needed to find another solution.

Stalin’s acute hearing picked it up, and he asked, ‘And what does “another solution” mean?’ The generals were surprised, and Stalin told them to go back to the General Staff and come back with something.

The next morning they presented an audacious plan. The German salient with its head at Stalingrad offered an enormous opportunity. Its flanks were increasingly being held by the Germans’ Romanian allies, not the best of troops, to be charitable. Keep Stalingrad alive, they argued, feed just enough troops to keep the fire hot and the Germans’ attention there. At the same time assemble the mass of the Stavka reserves on either flank. Then conduct a deep encirclement on both flanks, deep enough so that 6th Army’s mobile divisions could not intervene. Late on the night of the 13th Stalin gave the plan his full backing. ‘No one, beyond the three of us, is to know about it for the time being.’ They assigned the codename Uranus to it.¹⁵

Now Zhukov and Vasilevsky were conducting an inspection of the forces north and south of Stalingrad, the jumping-off points for the planned offensive.

Manstein did not prowl the front lines like Zhukov. He was close enough, as far as he was concerned, at 6th Army headquarters. He had flown in almost immediately after his appointment to command Army Group B. Perhaps no senior officer on either side had as keen a grasp of battle at the operational-strategic level of war. He said to Seydlitz and Tresckow, ‘Anyone who can read a map should be horrified at the opportunity we are providing the enemy.’ He traced with his finger the salient’s long flanks.

He hesitated and looked amused at the term:

Seydlitz spoke up. ‘My old corps is about burnt out; we just keep getting weaker and weaker, suspended in this endless Rattenkrieg as my men call it now.’ Manstein could see that the man was as exhausted as his old corps. The experience of throwing away lives for this pile of rubble and twisted steel had shaken him.

Months of inadequate sleep showed in him. He was made of far sterner stuff than Paulus, but the campaign was hollowing even him out. Of this Manstein took careful note. ‘I tell you, Herr Feldmarschall, that we are like a candle that is about to sputter out. We need reinforcements immediately. The army is eating itself alive.’

The field marshal said, ‘There are no reserves left on the Eastern Front that can be released.’

‘No reserves? You have seven divisions of your old 11th Army sitting around. We need them here. And Grossdeutschland is in reserve as well.’

‘They are the small change in my account. I must save them for a crisis.’

Tresckow could see that his boss was becoming distraught and changed the subject. He asked, ‘What is the situation at OKW, Herr Feldmarschall?’ He did not mention his clandestine communication with Stauffenberg who had kept him abreast of every one of Hitler’s increasingly histrionic departures from reality.

‘Well, meine Herren, it all comes down to my little bank account.’ They looked puzzled, as Manstein half smiled:

Manstein had been summoned back to the Werewolf by Hitler to report on his findings at Stalingrad. Stauffenberg joined the meeting. The field marshal was shocked by Hitler’s condition. He had not seen him since their meeting in July. ‘Well, well, Manstein. What have you found out? When will the city fall now?’

‘It’s not going to fall, mein Führer.’ Hitler jerked as it struck. His face started to redden as rage rippled through his body. ‘It’s not going to fall unless we act more boldly than we have.’ He laid it on thick. ‘We are beating our heads against a stone wall at Stalingrad. The Russians just keep feeding men into the city. It’s become another Verdun.’

Hitler stood up and began to pace. He screamed, ‘I will never give up Stalingrad! Do you hear me, Manstein. Niemals! Never! It is a battle of prestige between Stalin and myself.’

‘Mein Führer, there is another way to win this battle.’ He then laid out his plan. Hitler focused intently on it. Stauffenberg made a few positive and insightful comments. As Manstein finished he said, ‘Mein Führer, I will present you Stalingrad as an early Christmas present, a very early present.’¹⁷

That night Stauffenberg invited the field marshal to dine with him alone to discuss details of the plan. It became clear that he had something else to discuss.

Since that was Manstein’s goal, he could only have been flattered that the man who had been described by everyone as the most brilliant officer on the General Staff had come to the same conclusion.¹⁸ His brief time with Stauffenberg convinced him that the man more than lived up to his reputation; he had breathed new life into OKW and was bringing very able men with front experience onto the staff. Hitler clearly favoured him. His unheard-of promotion had surprised but not alarmed Manstein. War requires fresh, young talent.

Manstein could take a hint. ‘I will be quite willing to discuss the matter of the high command with Hitler, but let me make this clear, Stauffenberg. I will not be a party directly or indirectly to any illegal undertaking.’

Stauffenberg replied,

‘You could not be more mistaken,’ Manstein replied with some heat. ‘It is the course that you suggest that will lead to the collapse of the fronts and even civil war. A war is not truly lost as long as it is not considered as being lost; he stated firmly. ’The Reich has not yet met that crisis you speak of, but if and when it comes I am positive the Führer will recognize it and turn over the high command to someone qualified.’²⁰

‘Stauffenberg, you will not discuss this matter with me again.’²¹

The younger man said only one word. ‘Tauroggen.’

Manstein reddened in the face and struck the table with his fist. ‘Tauroggen has nothing to do with it.’ Tauroggen was where the Prussian General Yorck von Wartenburg had defied the orders of his king and taken his army over to the Russian emperor in the struggle against Napoleon. His was an honoured place in German military history where his disobedience was the supreme act of patriotism for he had disobeyed his king to serve the higher needs of the nation.

Stauffenberg would not give up. ‘Tauroggen also entails an extreme loyalty.’

The field marshal drank it in and suddenly became affable. ‘What good would a staff be if the staff officers could no longer speak with complete freedom?’ He then recited a famous quotation. ‘Criticism is the salt of obedience.’ They finished their meal in near silence.²²

Panic ran through Tiflis like the plague. People remembered that Ordzhonikidze had once been named Vladikavkaz — Master of the Caucasus — by its Russian founders as they spread their rule over the mountains. Now a new master was spreading his power over the mountains, coming down the Georgian Military Highway that had not seen a foreign boot since it had been built a hundred years before. The Germans were coming. Every possible soldier in the city, to include its military school students, had been sent north to hold the descents from the passes through the mountains, but the 3rd and 5th Gebirgsjäger Divisions had swept around them and taken them from the rear one by one, making way for the panzers and motorized infantry.

The news from Tiflis spread south and panicked the 46th Army which fell back precipitately and began to melt away as the natives of the region deserted. The Turkish 3rd Army and the Jägers overran the weak rearguards and pressed on, taking the city with little resistance just as the panzers arrived from the north. With Tiflis in German control, all the Soviet armies to the east, the remnants of the Northern Group and others, were trapped.

At the same time, 17th Army, having consolidated its victories on the Black Sea coast, began the march to Tiflis with 5th SS Division Wiking and the Slovaks (LVII Panzer Corps) in the lead with orders to press on regardless of the slow pace of the following infantry corps. It was 214 miles from Sukhumi to Tiflis, and it would take the panzers less than a week to reach it. The Romanian divisions were left behind to garrison the coast and western Georgia.

The Turkish 2nd Army found itself stopped cold in the Armenian mountains outside Yerevan. The Armenians fought with the same ferocity as the Soviet defenders of the grain elevator. Although Dzhulfa had fallen with a great deal of railway rolling stock and mountains of Allied aid, the Turks there could not use the railway to move through Armenia. Although the Azeri Turks welcomed them as liberators, that area was a poor one from which to base a drive to Baku, 248 miles away over poor roads and no railway connections. Yet, when they had taken Dzhulfa, they had set in train the decisions that would lead to the collapse of the Soviet grip on this vast, rich region.

Kleist had his hands full in Tiflis trying to sort out control of the city. The Georgians were terrified of the Turks whose Ottoman masters had massacred the inhabitants in the late 18th century. Kleist put his foot down and ordered the Turks out of the city where they had already begun to loot and murder. Then there were so-called Knights of Queen Tamara, a proto-fascist group that had sprung up as the communists fled the city. Those Reds foolish enough to stay behind had met rough justice at the hands of the Knights. They were quickly enrolled as a German army auxiliary unit. With supervision they would be useful.

Most of all, Kleist needed to give his men rest, and what better place than this charming green ancient city built on the hillsides above a rushing river. He allowed the churches to reopen and was blessed by the Georgian Orthodox bishop. Luckily for the Georgians and the security of 1st Panzer Army’s line of communications, the German political administration of conquered territories had not yet caught up with 1st Panzer Army.

The Germans got on well with the Georgians whom they respected as tough fighters in the Red Army. Now, with Soviet power crushed, they threw flowers in the streets as the mountain troops and tanks had entered their city. After almost 150 years, they would finally be free of the Russians and especially the brutality of the communists. It was a case of being careful of what you wish for. The Germans were particularly taken with the blond Georgians from the province of Mingrelia, the descendants of the Colchians of the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The blond South Ossetians also amazed them. Their province lay north of Tiflis along the Georgian Military Highway as it descended from the mountains. They claimed to be the descendants of the ancient Aryan Alans, the steppe nomads who had terrorized the late Roman Empire in the wake of the Huns. Then there was the intoxicating Georgian wine and good food. Tiflis seemed like a lush paradise after the scorched steppes they had crossed north of the mountains.

For soldiers nothing this good can last as long as there is a higher headquarters. The calls from the Werewolf were insistent. ‘Move on, move on to Baku!’ The oilfields and the Caspian Sea beckoned, only 280 miles away.

By the time 1st Panzer Army headed east, XL Panzer Corps had caught up with it, the men wistfully imagining what fun might there have been in Tiflis as they passed through. After them trudged the Jägers of XLIV Corps, now attached to Kleist, and the Turkish 3rd Army. It had been agreed that the Turks would garrison the regions of Azerbaijan along the path of the German advance and keep communications open. The Turkish commander was not happy that they would not be in for the kill at Baku. Blood on their bayonets would give Turkey a strong claim to at least part of the oilfields. As it was, they would have to be satisfied with the rest of Azerbaijan as their spoils. Brother Turks the Azeris might have been, but they were also despised Shiias. The world was so complicated.

The Soviet collapse in the Caucasus was the trigger for the entry into Soviet Azerbaijan of the Indian XXI Corps (British 5th, Indian 5th and 8th Infantry Divisions). Stalin had been so frightened of the German advance that he desperately accepted the British proposal to reinforce his 53rd Army guarding Baku. Flying air support for the British and Indians were half a dozen American Air Corps squadrons. Flying ahead of the 1st Panzer Army to offer its own air support was, among others, the squadron of Hans Ulrich Rudel.

This vast tank factory just to the west of the Urals at Chelyabinsk had been nicknamed Tankograd (Tank City) by the tens of thousands of people who worked there pouring out the T-34 tank in increasing numbers. The factory complex, based on the already existing Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory, had sprung up almost overnight, assembled from dismantled factories and equipment moved ahead of the oncoming Germans in the autumn of 1941. It had been the unsung valour of the Russian people under brutal conditions that had caused it to appear seemingly out of nowhere and become the largest industrial enterprise in the Soviet Union. In a space of thirty-three days from when the order was given, it had begun production of the T-34. In addition to the tanks themselves, the complex produced their aluminium engines, Katyusha rocket launchers, and a great deal of ammunition.

The assembly lines continued to work at a high tempo, turning out hundreds of tanks a week as September came to a close. Yet the railroad spur that carried them away to the fighting forces had slowed its work. Now they loaded only half the tanks that came off the assembly lines. The rest began to fill up huge lots for the simple reason that they had no engines.

The destruction of PQ-17 had sent thousands of tons of aluminium from North America to the bottom of the Norwegian Sea or to German smelters for use in their own war industries. These shipments were nearly half of the aluminium used by Soviet war industry, vital for tank and aircraft engines. And it was not just at Chelyabinsk that production had slowed. The other great tank plants at Nizhny Tagil, Nizhny Novgorod and Sverdlovsk were also hobbled.

As well as aluminium, other raw materials such as copper were lacking. The steady stream of American trucks and jeeps, so favoured by the Red Army, had stopped too, now that the Georgian Military Highway had been cut. A thousand other things in the way of supplies and equipment were cut off, including food. Zaitsev and the defenders of Stalingrad would have no more Second Front spam, or boots, or powdered eggs and milk, no more chemicals for munitions to feed the artillery and the Katyushas, and the list went on and on. Of course, the Soviet Union had its own sources for most of these items, but it could not build tanks and planes in huge numbers and produce these other things as well. It was one or the other. Allied aid had meant it could concentrate on the weapons of war while the Allies provided the logistics of war. No longer.

This meant that the Stavka reserve armies training in their hundreds of thousands to the east of the Volga and north of the Don were not as quickly equipped as if the Allied aid had continued and, without equipment, training lagged. Everything slowed.

As soon as 6th Panzer Division closed on the training centre, Erhard Raus paid a call on Grossdeutschland’s commander. The 49-year old Walter ‘Papa’ Hörnlein as he was known by his troops, was a spare Prussian with a good deal of nerve. It was rumoured that he had sent Hitler’s headquarters a signal asking if Grossdeutschland was the only German division on the Eastern Front after it had been in continuous action from one crisis to another. He had a solid reputation as a reliable commander who always had time for his men.

Hörnlein was delighted to see Raus, whose own reputation had preceded him. ‘How was the trip from that hellhole in France you all suffered at?’

‘Ah, Brittany, I tell you the men couldn’t wait to leave,’ he said with a laugh. ‘They were anxious to experience the good weather and famous food here in Russia!’ He went on.

Hörnlein smiled in response:

‘That will be a great help, but is there any word on when we move out and where?’