Disaster at Stalingrad

CHAPTER 13 Der Totenritt bei Leninsk

The Romanian 3rd Army was strung out thinly along the northern arm of the Don River and huddled in the morning cold. It was badly armed and worse commanded by officers who thought bullying and screaming were the sum of leadership. Then a short but crushing artillery strike hit them. Almost immediately 500 tanks of 5th Tank and 21st Armies of General N. F. Vatutin’s Southwest Front hit. They came out of the morning mist followed by waves of infantry. The Romanians had already been half-beaten men. The first blow from Operation Uranus finished the job. Their army quickly came apart surviving as little more than a flag on a map at OKW. The Italian 8th Army to the west was being fixed in place by the 1st Guards Army. The Italians would be of no help to their fellow Latins.

To the east Colonel General K. K. Rokossovsky’s 65th, 24th and 66th Armies of the Don Front attacked 6th Army’s I and XI Corps. Understrength and spread thinly along terrain difficult to defend, they were soon fighting for their lives. Stalin had a special regard for this general of whom he said, ‘I have no Suvorov, but Rokossovsky is my Bagration’, alluding to one of the great Suvorov’s exemplary disciples.

Zhukov was everywhere, urging the commanders forward. He was optimistic because there were no German units, especially panzers, to corset up the Romanians. That would have held things up, a special worry since the attack was not as strong as had been hoped. Zhukov would have given anything for another three weeks to prepare. Already the reequipment of Soviet tank units with T-34s had slowed because of the shortage of aluminium for their engines. The Red Air Force was also feeling the same problem. As it was, the ground forces employed for the overall operation included only 71 per cent of the men and 79 per cent of the tanks originally planned. Zhukov had also warned his commanders that fuel was in short supply and that enemy fuel dumps were critical objectives.¹

As soon as the seriousness of the Soviet attack had been confirmed, Seydlitz ordered Operation Quicksilver executed. It would be the most difficult of all manoeuvres, to retreat while still in contact with the enemy. He thanked God that Manstein had ordered the concentration of his XIV Panzer Corps in his rear near Kalach.²

That was not doing the Germans west of the Don crossing at Kalach any good. Fifth Tank Army’s spearheads knifed down through 6th Army’s line of communications. T-34s surged over the tracks of the single rail line supporting 6th Army, savaged truck convoys and overran supply dumps and maintenance yards. The tank crews delighted in blowing up trains as they passed. For sheer spectacle, it is hard to beat an exploding locomotive and a long line of rail cars thundering off the tracks into wreckage and ruin. Nothing seemed able to stop the Red Army spearheads as they drove east towards Kalach. They came so fast that the panicked Germans made them a gift of the precious fuel dumps. The icy mists and snow were working for the Red Army as Richthofen’s reconnaissance aircraft were kept grounded. He recorded in his diary then, ‘Once again the Russians have masterfully exploited a bad weather situation. Rain, snow, ice and fog are preventing any action by the Luftwaffe at the Don.’³

Generalleutnant Karl Strecher’s XI Corps with three divisions (44th, 376th, 384th Infantry) found itself attempting to disengage while being strongly assailed by Soviet 65th Army in its front even as it was struck in the rear by the 21st Army’s 3rd Cavalry Corps. The 44th Hoch- und Deutschmeister Division, Seydlitz’s old division of tough Austrians, led the way to the bridges over the Don that would unite them with the rest of 6th Army, wiping out the flank regiment of the enemy’s cavalry corps. It was slow going because of a fuel shortage afflicting the entire army. They still had their horses, though, and that meant their artillery and wounded came out with them. Luckily they had been bypassed by the Soviet tank corps heading for Kalach. But the cavalry hung on to the German flank, striking suddenly and without warning out of the snow, while masses of infantry from 65th Army pressed hard on their heels. One officer opined it was like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the last time German soldiers were so threatened by cavalry in the open field. His companion replied, ‘No, Heinz, Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 comes closer. Pray God we do not find our Beresina.’⁴

The Soviet attack had hit the 376th Division which had already been reduced to barely 4,200 men. Being farthest west it fought as the rearguard and quickly began to come apart. Its survivors, accompanied by terrified Romanian stragglers fleeing eastward, merged with the more resolute Austrians who pressed on through the blowing snow.

Chuikov had only been told of the offensive a few days before. For him it must have lifted an enormous burden. ‘We all clambered out of our dugouts to listen for the sounds of our counter-attack. It wasn’t possible — it was too far north.’ one soldier wrote later.⁵ It was not long before Chuikov’s scouts were reporting that the Germans were breaking contact all along the fighting lines, slipping away like quicksilver disappearing through a crack in the floor.

Along with the scouts came the snipers desperate not to let their prey out of their sights. Those unwary enough to rush too far forward were dropped by a single sniper who seemed to be covering the German withdrawal from the area of the Barrikady Factory.

Chuikov quickly linked up his isolated elements and pushed them forward to keep after the Germans. In a matter of minutes, his men were passing the famous factories and other buildings that had become the graves of countless Russians and Germans, past ground over which the armies had shoved and pushed against each for the gain of blood-soaked yards. Only the cold had smothered the stench of countless rotting bodies as the snow blanketed their remains and softened the broken outlines of the city’s buildings. By day’s end they were on the outskirts of the city where the Germans had abandoned an endless number of derelict vehicles, tanks, guns, and every other assorted piece of equipment armies possess.

One of the last German soldiers out of the city turned to take one last look at the desolation. Then he spat in its direction, turned, and marched west.

The small collection of villages known as Akhtubinsk served as a railway, road and river hub, 180 miles north of Astrakhan and 80 miles southeast of Stalingrad. Some thought had been given to its importance. At dawn the engines of the Soviet fighter-bomber squadrons were just being turned over when the Me 109s swooped out of the sky in their strafing runs. Hardly an aircraft got off the ground before it was shot up.

Within a few hours the small town fell to the 3rd Panzer Division. An hour later the first squadrons of Ju 52s began to arrive at the military airfield. It was a first-rate airfield as befitted the R&D Institute of the Air Force of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. It had also been the airfield from which Soviet fighters had been attacking 1st Panzer Army for days. Now Me 109 squadrons circled, flying top cover. On the runways tanks had pushed the blackened hulks of Soviet aircraft off into the grass to let the transports land.

They brought fuel, ammunition, and everything else. The fuel came directly from the refineries captured intact at Maikop. And they brought mail, to the joy of men who had not had a mail delivery since they had reached Tiflis weeks before. As important, they brought in Luftwaffe ground crews and their equipment to sustain the Stuka, Ju 88 and Me 109 squadrons supporting the panzer army’s final drive on Stalingrad.

By early morning three Soviet tank corps were converging from the west on the bridge over the Don at Kalach. On the east bank, XIV Panzer Corps was echeloned behind the town. Their arrival had stopped a panic that was spreading through the supply, maintenance and medical echelons. Seydlitz had placed them there to defend the major river crossing and to support his infantry divisions converging on the line Kalach-Sovietski-Verkhne-Tsaritsynski. Manstein had assured him that 11th Army would be committed to tie in to the right of 6th Army.

The Soviet 26th Tank Corps was winning the race to the river, running down and scattering the last of the frantic rear-echelon troops rushing to safety. Its commander, Major General Rodin, was determined to take the bridge by coup de main, a painful German speciality so far in the war, one that he hoped to turn on them. Lieutenant Colonel Grigor N. Filippov, commanding the lead 19th Tank Brigade, was just the man to administer the lesson.

At the head of his column were two captured German tanks and a reconnaissance vehicle, driving with their lights on to alleviate any suspicion. Incredibly they drove past hundreds of Germans in the dark who simply waved at them. It was six in the morning with just an edge of light on the horizon when Filippov came upon two Germans with an old Russian peasant. A word to his men, and the two Germans were shot dead. Filippov climbed down from his tank to talk to the trembling old man. ‘Uncle Vanya, which way to the bridge?’ As soon as he heard Russian, the man’s shaking ceased. He immediately climbed into the first tank and pointed the way.

Not long afterwards his column reached the high west bank of the Don with Kalach at the other end of the bridge. They barrelled down the steep road and charged right onto the bridge, scattering the guards. From the bluff above sixteen T-34s fired down into the town in support. The head of the column broke into the town right into the guns of an understrength tank company of 16th Panzer Division.⁶ The first Soviet tanks were quickly knocked out, but now the bridge was filled with Soviet tanks. Enough were getting across to widen the bridgehead.

On the bluffs above the river Soviet artillery had arrived and began to fire into the town to support Filippov’s tanks. Motorized infantry were descending the road to the bridge and behind them more tanks. The German support troops were fleeing eastward from the town as more of 16th Panzer’s weak units were thrown into the fight to retake the bridge. One by one the weakened units of XIV Panzer Corps were committed to eliminate the Soviet bridgehead over the river. But Soviet strength flowed in faster than German, and the corps was slowly pushed back. A desperate call from Seydlitz to Hoth released most of XLVIII Panzer Corps, concentrated at Yeriko-Krepinski, to the battle for Kalach, but Hoth kept back the 29th Motorized Division as an operational reserve.

Raus’s aide woke him at two in the morning. ‘Herr General, Manstein orders us forward.’ The Austrian was instantly awake. Within moments his orders went out to assemble the division and get it ready to move at first light. In ten minutes he was dressed and stepped out into the cold and was enveloped in the icy mist. He was still taken aback by the T-34s of his headquarters guard, despite the German cross and the months of training he had put the division through with these reconditioned Soviet tanks. The panzergrenadier guard at his tent was cradling his Stürmgewehr with more than a little affection. The men had taken so well to the new automatic assault rifle that he believed they would mutiny if ordered to turn them in for the old bolt-action Kar 98.

A similar order had also set Grossdeutschland into a frenzy of activity. Hörnlein was just as pleased as Raus with his new equipment. The morale of both divisions of LX Panzer Corps was high. As with all the divisions of 11th Army, Manstein had seen to it that they had winter clothing and rations.⁷ These two panzer divisions were the newly forged spear-tip of the operational reserve that the field marshal so carefully amassed. He had by now disobeyed so many Führer orders that his head was in a noose. Only success would prevent the hangman from dropping the trap door. As the news of the Soviet offensive along the Don began to build a picture of the extent of the attack, he ordered 11th Army to move north to support Seydlitz’s withdrawal. The orders went out at night for movement at first light the next day. Raus and Hörnlein had their reconnaissance battalions moving out by 03.00 and their panzers by 04.00.

South of Stalingrad Soviet engineers had carefully cleared the minefields in front of narrow sectors of the overstretched 4th Romanian Army. One day after the Don Front’s attack to the north, Soviet guns roared in the early morning to smash into the defences of the 1st and 18th Romanian divisions guarding the southern flank of 6th Army. The targets of the guns shifted inland after only a few hours as the Stalingrad Front unleashed its 13th Tank Corps (57th Army) 4th Cavalry and 4th Mechanized Corps (51st Army) to overrun the thin Romanian positions and plunge deep into the enemy rear. With 350 tanks these three corps were the equivalent of a tank army. Their objective was Kalach towards which 5th Tank Army was aiming from the northwest. A German observer noted that the Soviet attack ground forward methodically ‘as if on a training ground: fire — move — fire — move’.⁸ In Stalingrad, the men of 62nd Army heard the noises of battle and realized that the offensive was true after all. ‘It was an incredible feeling. We were no longer alone.’

By the end of the first day, 4th Mechanized Corps had advanced 27 miles to Verkhne-Tsaritsynski, half-way to their objective. The 13th Tank Corps had penetrated even closer to Kalach in a running battle with 6th Army’s withdrawing divisions. The 4th Cavalry Corps, guarding 4th Mechanized Corps’ southern flank, reached Abganerovo. Behind them came a wave of rifle divisions. The Soviet attack was aided just as that in the north by an icy mist that blinded the defenders and grounded German air reconnaissance.

The successes of the day hid a dangerous lack of supplies and trucks. The build-up for the attack had been grossly hindered by the difficulty of getting material and supplies over the ice-choked Volga. The river was not yet fully frozen over but filled with huge chunks of ice rushing downstream. Leading formations had only enough food for one more day. Nevertheless, the morale of the attacking troops was sky-high. They knew they were turning the tables on the ravagers of the Motherland. They shot hundreds of Romanian prisoners out of hand.

Raus and Hörnlein’s reconnaissance battalions had heard the thunder of Yeremenko’s attack to the north. It was not long before they encountered the fleeing rear-echelon troops of the 4th Romanian Army.⁹

Generalmajor Leyser, commanding 29th Motorized Division, had put his men on alert ready to move off at a moment’s notice that morning as the rest of the XLVIII Panzer Corps took off for Kalach. He did not have long to wait as the radio filled with frantic calls from the Romanians holding the line to the east. Out of communication with army group, Hoth ordered Leyser east.

The 29th roared off to meet the enemy. Leading the way was the 129th Panzer Battalion, deployed in a wedge formation with fifty-five Panzer III and IV tanks in front. On the flanks were the self-propelled antitank guns. Behind in their half-tracked armoured personnel carriers came the grenadiers, followed by the artillery. The commanders stood in their open turret hatches. Visibility was less than 100 yards. Then the fog lifted.

At the same moment the tank commanders stood up straight: before them, not 400 yards away, approached the tank armada of the 13th Tank Corps. The cupola hatches slammed shut. The familiar commands rang out: ‘Turret 12 o’clock!’ — ‘Armour-piercing’ — Range 400’ — ‘Many enemy tanks’ — ‘Open fire!’¹⁰

It was the classic meeting engagement which goes to the side which reacts quickest and most aggressively. Today it was Leyser’s panzers. To that response was added the advantage of more effective communication. Every German tank had a radio and could respond immediately to a changing situation. Only the company commander in Soviet tank units had a radio, which put a premium on follow the leader and preplanned actions. The difference was lethal. The panzers killed and killed. Tank after tank blew up or collided with others. Within half an hour the remnants of 13th Tank Corps were retreating eastward.

Amazingly a train suddenly appeared from the east and stopped to disgorge masses of Soviet infantry. The Soviets had actually driven a train full of troops into their breakthrough. The cleverness of the idea died right there as the 29th’s artillery got the range and smashed one wagon after another.

Hardly had the 13th Tank Corps been routed than word came over the radio to Leyser that another Soviet corps had penetrated 24 miles south. This was 4th Mechanized Corps with about ninety tanks. Leyser’s division had taken few casualties and now resumed its wedge formation driving south across the hard, snow-covered ground. The Soviet corps should have been much farther to the west when Leyser’s panzers found it at a place called Verkhne-Tsaritsynski. Its commander, Major General Vassili Volsky, had handled his unit poorly during its advance causing so many delays that it brought the Stalingrad Front commander to a state of incandescent rage. Yeremenko was already in a foul mood because Volsky had had the unheard-of temerity to write to Stalin personally, stating that Uranus was too risky. Clearly his timidity was a direct response to his lack of faith in the operation. He had already morally defeated himself when Leyser caught up with him and finished the job. Dozens of burning pyres, the remnants of his tanks, sent their smoke into the air as the survivors fled eastward.

The scouts of the Soviet 4th Cavalry Corps relayed the oddest reports to their commander, which he passed up the chain of command, sowing confusion at each level. Large columns of T-34s were coming north towards the corps’ penetration at Abganerovo Station. The 61st, 63rd, and 81st Cavalry Divisions of the corps were all raised in Turkestan and had never seen combat. The Central Asian cavalrymen were mounted on hardy steppe ponies. One brigade was even mounted on camels.

By the time it was clear from their markings that these were not Soviet tanks, Grossdeutschland and 6th Panzer Divisions were closing on Abganerovo Station from both sides. By then the Russian corps commander, General Shapkin, realized he had to break out and threw an entire cavalry division at the closing arm of 6th Panzer while another tried to escape through a gap between two dry river beds.

The Turkmen cavalry swept forward, spurring their little steppe horses. With a resounding ‘Urrah!’ thousands of sabres came out. The Germans were openmouthed, amazed, at the spectacle of 5,000 horsemen surging towards them. They thought they had slipped back in time to the wars of Frederick the Great or Napoleon. All it took was fingers depressing triggers to send streams of machine-gun bullets into the packed ranks for the spectacle to turn into carnage. Then the tanks and artillery fired high explosive and shrapnel. Whole ranks went down in the storm, those behind piling up on the dead and wounded heaps of men and screaming horses.

The Germans covering the gap between the dry riverbeds now noticed:

The German tanks pursued firing at the frenzied camel cavalry. The mass of surviving camel riders turned and ran through an area that was still marshy despite the snow. ‘The camels proved quicker and better able to move across the country and consequently won the race.’ Also in the race was Shapkin, lashing his horse to the rear while two of his division commanders lay dead among their men.”¹¹

As Raus’s tanks stopped at the marshy ground, Grossdeutschland was chasing the surviving cavalry division in their direction. They came streaming into a trap as 6th Panzer’s tanks turned about and its panzergrenadiers deployed on the flanks of the oncoming Turkmen horsemen. In moments the dense ranks of cavalry disintegrated into an abattoir of dying and wounded men and horses. Here and there groups of horsemen tried to break through only to be cut down. At last the survivors leapt off their horses to surrender.

Raus radioed Hörnlein thanking him for beating the enemy into the killing zone, ‘just like a safari!’ Hörnlein took it well, though it annoyed him that his fine division had only played the role of beaters for 6th Panzer. At this point LX Panzer Corps wheeled west followed by 11th Army’s two corps, its new mission: destroy Soviet forces as far as the Volga.

In the darkness of the early morning, strong elements of 3rd Cavalry Corps crossed the Don just west of 6th Army’s western flank and rode for the bridge at Akimovka over the Don, 20 miles north of Kalach. They were to slice right behind the German XI Corps. These were mostly Cossacks, raised to the saddle and combat-hardened, not unblooded Turkmen. Nine miles north of the bridge the Red Army’s 16th Tank Corps (24th Army) was cutting through the 76th Division (VIII Corps) aiming to cut off any Germans west of the Don.

At the bridge there was chaos as mobs of Germans and Romanians fled the disasters to the west. Many of the Germans had been separated from their units or were the few survivors. Here and there small units and guncrews hung together during the unrolling disaster. Among them were Soviet prisoners harnessed to carts to replace fallen horses. Any man who dropped was shot.

Now the innate ability of the German Army to pull itself together appeared. Officers, pistol in hand, stopped the rout, sorted out the men, put them into ad hoc combat units to defend the crossing and wait for the Russians to attack. Through all of this the core of Hoch- und Deutschmeister hung together, crossed the bridge, and headed south. On its way it was joined by the retreating columns of the 113th Infantry Division, all that was left of VIII Corps since the Russians tank corps had rolled over 76th Infantry Division. Two weak divisions were now all that was left of two of 6th Army’s corps.

Seydlitz felt as if a primeval force was blasting out of the radio at him. Hitler was in a rage, that state that had overawed and terrified countless men. He could picture Hitler frothing at the mouth that his orders had not been obeyed to the letter. ‘What is going on? How dare you not obey your orders?’ the voice demanded. He then looked at the radio operator, drew his finger across his throat. The sergeant’s eyes dilated to saucer size as he realized the general had ordered him to cut off the Führer. The general just winked at the sergeant. ‘Damned ionosphere.’¹³

The ionosphere was acting up all over the place from the perspective of OKW. It was amazing how a conspiracy could affect the weather so conveniently. The patient efforts of Stauffenberg and Tresckow to place reliable men in critical positions were paying off. However, the need to win the battle had subsumed but not replaced the plot against Hitler. The plotters were patriots who did not see a catastrophic German defeat on the edge of Asia to be a necessary precursor to removing Hitler. The hecatomb of disaster was a price they were not willing to pay. They would win the battle and get rid of Hitler, but winning the battle required disregarding the Führer orders.

In truth Seydlitz did not need the distraction of a madman at that moment when the fate of a quarter of a million German soldiers hung in the balance. The corps attempting to withdraw from the northern Don had met with disaster. The Russians were pouring across the crossing at Kalach and pushing back his weak XIV Panzer Corps. Even the commitment of the two divisions of XLVIII Panzer Corps had not stemmed their advance. At the same time the divisions pulling out of Stalingrad were in danger of being cut off. Behind them Soviet rifle divisions were filling the roads to join the battle.

At last the weather had cleared enough for the Luftwaffe to support the fight. The Red Air Force filled the skies to contest every German air mission, especially over the fighting at Kalach. Soviet antiaircraft units lined both banks of the river. Both sides watched the air battles, with burning aircraft plummeting to the ground again and again. Richthofen’s Stukas repeatedly struck at the bridge. The Soviet fighters were waiting in swarms and fought their way through the Me 109 escorts to down the dive-bombers. The Germans had never seen such suicidal determination on the part of the Russians to close for the kill. Although they lost two planes for every German, it was a price they willingly paid. The bridge remained intact and packed with units crossing to join the battle.

What struck both Seydlitz and Manstein was the size of the Soviet reserves, which the enemy had hidden so well. They would have been even more disconcerted had they known the size of the force that would have been available if the Soviet timetable had not been disrupted and advanced three weeks. It was not simply a question of numbers. The Soviet reserves were rested, well-fed, well-armed, and clothed for winter fighting. The men of 6th Army in contrast were exhausted after months of brutal fighting, their units shells of their former selves. Despite the horrific lessons of the previous winter, they had not even received their cold-weather clothing.

Manstein realized that the crisis of the battle was approaching. Sixth Army could shatter at any moment. Retreating while in contact with an aggressive enemy is probably the least attractive situation a soldier can find himself in. He’s liable to be infected with panic and be cut down by the enemy on his heels. To pull off a successful retreat takes hardened men under tight control.

As bad as the situation was, Manstein took a moment to imagine what the situation looked like to the enemy. His perceptions were remarkably accurate. Stavka at that very moment was optimistic over the developing battle at Kalach. Stalin on the other hand was shrewdly concentrating on the defeat of Stalingrad Front’s pincer by the LX Panzer Corps. That paled, however, at his apprehension over 1st Panzer Army’s rapid drive up the Volga’s eastern shore heading straight for Stalingrad. Powerful German forces were about to assail Yeremenko’s armies from both sides of the Volga. He dispatched Vasilevsky to oversee the battle there. He also parted with the pearl of the Stavka reserve, the 2nd Guards Army, telling Yeremenko of this by phone. ‘You will hold out — we are getting reserves down to you,’ he commanded menacingly. ‘I’m sending you the 2nd Guards Army — the best unit I have left.’¹⁴

Stalin was fulfilling the primary role of the commander — the allocation of the reserve. Manstein was about to do that same thing. His remaining front reserves were the four divisions of V Corps (9th, 73rd, 125th, 198th Infantry Divisions) that had been transferred from the semi-tropical coast of the Black Sea to the snowy steppe, and the four Gebirgsjäger divisions that had scaled the Caucasus. The mountain divisions had not even arrived yet and were still entraining at Rostov. ‘Seydlitz, I’m sending you V Corps. It’s my last reserve. But I intend to constitute a new reserve in a few days. You must contain the enemy at Kalach in the meantime.’¹⁵

That reserve was 11th Army and its panzer corps, but now it had another vital mission — to destroy Stalingrad Front. With that mission accomplished and all threat from southeast of Stalingrad eliminated, the 11th Army would then be able to countermarch to be thrown into the battle for Kalach. It was a logical plan. It reminded the field marshal of the German victory at Tannenberg in August 1914. He was also reminded of the great Moltke’s aphorism that no plan survives the first shot. The danger in his plan was that Southwest Front could be a tougher nut to crack than he anticipated. Timing here was everything. It did not matter if he destroyed Yeremenko’s command if it took so long that 6th Army collapsed in the meantime. Everything now depended on the panzers and on the men of the army he had led to victory at Sevastopol. He had been able to ensure that they were rested and equipped to fight in the winter.

Yeremenko’s front had just lost its first-echelon tank, mechanized and cavalry corps. Behind them were his rifle divisions pursuing the fleeing Romanians. They had emerged from their defences between the Sarpinsky Lakes, a chain of elongated lakes stretching for about 25 miles south of the Beketovka Bulge. The panzer corps now ploughed on northwest to round the northernmost Lake Sarpa. The two infantry corps were to penetrate the defences between the lakes as the whole 11th Army wheeled east. The speed of the two panzer divisions, however, would put them in combat again before the infantry could arrive along the line of lakes. Manstein calculated that this would work to his advantage. Yeremenko would concentrate on the threat from the panzers and commit his own tank reserves against them. He still had four tank brigades and the survivors of his decimated first-echelon corps. Russian tenacity would now be at a premium.

By the time Grossdeutschland was approaching the Beketovka Bulge, the short autumn night had come, but Hörnlein pressed his men on. The reconnaissance battalion was far ahead of his leading panzer battalion when, out of a side road, a Soviet tank column appeared heading west. The wind was blowing snow again, and the Soviet tank commanders were buttoned up. Soon both columns were on the same road but heading in opposite directions. One Soviet tank commander, though, did brave the elements to stand in his turret, the price of leadership. He could make out the T-34s heading east, but it was too dark to see their German markings. He yelled across to the men in the turrets and shouted with some annoyance, ‘Na frontu, tovarishche! Na frontu! [To the front, comrades! To the front!]’ as he waved west, baffled that so many tanks could be leaving the battlefield.

He did not have time to wonder much more as he saw the turrets in the other column all turn simultaneously to face his tanks. With a boom, they fired almost all at once, and his brigade died at point-blank range. There were no misses, and every shot found a vital spot that ignited death by fire or explosion. The German tank commanders fell back into their turrets just as they fired to avoid the rain of exploding ammunition, flaming fuel, and jagged metal that flew between the columns. The burning column did wonders for the morale of the follow-on panzer grenadiers and artillery. That is what’s called a bonus affect.

The end point of Stalin’s secret railway supplying Stalingrad Front was boiling with activity as the advance elements of the 2nd Guards Army (two rifle corps and 2nd Mechanized Corps) began detraining and deploying to the east. At the same time artillery batteries that had been supporting 62nd Army just a short while before were arriving and also heading east. Overhead squadrons of the Red Air Force were also heading east. Stavka had directed that the 8th Air Army that had been supporting Yeremenko’s westward thrust now be diverted to supporting the defence of Leninsk from Kleist’s oncoming 1st Panzer Army.

Stalin had every right to fear Kleist. His four panzer divisions were flush with tanks — what was left of their original German panzers and hundreds of American Shermans and British Valentines. The excellent automotive characteristics of both tanks had resulted in relatively few breakdowns in the enormous distances covered from Baku and Ordzhonikidze. For the first time in the war, the Germans had a fully motorized field army — III Panzer Corps (3rd, 13th, 23rd Panzer Divisions), LVII Corps (5th SS Wiking, 50th, 111th, 370th Infantry Divisions), and XLIV Corps (97th and 101st Jäger Divisions) — every man and pound of equipment and supplies rode in a combat vehicle or a truck, almost all of which were the big, robust American Lend-Lease ones.

For the commander of the 384th Rhinegold Infantry Division, it was the ultimate humiliation. He stood in the snow with his aide holding a white flag. In front of him was a nameless Soviet division commander to whom he was surrendering. His division had been trapped by the onrushing tank spearheads of Don Front. He had lost contact with the rest of XI Corps which had disappeared to the south more as a rabble than an organized force.

The news was radioed to the Don Front commander, who was riding that indescribable high of pursuing a retreating enemy. Rokossovsky had the scent of a kill in his nose; the Germans had littered their path with discarded equipment of every kind, a sign that panic was turning into rout. His Don Front armies were pressing forward everywhere. Already his 16th Tank Corps had taken the Don bridge at Akimovka, trapping thousands of Germans and Romanians on the west bank. So he was shocked that night when Stalin himself had called to tell him of Yeremenko’s defeat and to order him to redouble his efforts and link up with Southwest Front to crush the Germans between them.

He was even more shocked to hear a note of worry in Stalin’s voice, something he had never heard before. He was so shocked that it took him a few minutes after he hung up to realize that the Vozhd had threatened to shoot him if he failed.

He instinctively felt his jaw as his tongue ran over his stainless steel teeth. As a disciple of Tukhachevsky he had been arrested in the great purge that decimated the senior officer corps in 1937-8; his NKVD interrogators had made much of his aristocratic Polish ancestry as they broke nine of his teeth, cracked three ribs, smashed his toes with hammers, and pulled out every one of his fingernails. He endured three mock executions when the men around him were all shot. He survived because he proved that the officer who was claimed to have denounced him had actually died in 1921. He was unexpectedly released in 1940 and reinstated because Marshal Timoshenko was in desperate need of good officers to command the growing Red Army. Yes, Rokossovsky took Stalin’s threats seriously. Don Front would redouble its efforts. He had a trump that Stalin had given him. ‘I assign Chuikov’s army to you — 62nd Army is closer to the enemy than you are. Southwest Front’s 1st Tank Corps will cross the Don south of Kalach and take Lyapichev Station, cutting off a major supply route. You will link up with them.’ then Stalin hung up.

Chuikov was stunned when Rokossovsky gave him his new mission — attack 6th Army’s flank. ‘Comrade General, my army is not fit for manoeuvre in the open field. My divisions are mere skeletons. We have little ammunition and supplies; the floating ice in the river has nearly cut off our support from the east bank. All my artillery is on the east bank, and for the same reason can’t be brought across.’

Chuikov gave his orders. Then he visited one of the cramped field hospitals in a basement. He found Zaitsev to his surprise on the floor on a thin pallet. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘That damned German sniper nearly bagged this hare, Comrade General.’ Zaitsev laughed through a painful wince. He described how König and he had danced around each other as the Russian had followed the withdrawing Germans. ‘He got two of my team, and I forgot to be patient.’

‘There will be more Germans.’

‘But this one I especially wanted.’

Chuikov forced himself to smile. ‘We’ve been ordered forward; maybe we’ll get him for you.’

Rokossovsky’s men would have to run hard to catch up with Vatutin’s armies. Already most of 5th Tank and 21st Armies had crossed the Don and were pounding away at the increasingly fragile front that Seydlitz had thrown up. The 1st Tank Corps had crossed the Don just above its confluence with the Chir River, 25 miles southwest of Kalach, and cut the main rail line supporting 6th Army from the west. The Germans had only one more line: Rostov-Kotelnikovo-Zhutovo-Lyapichev. Unfortunately, Lyapichev was directly in the path of the oncoming 1st Tank Corps.

The next morning 1st Tank Corps hit Lyapichev. They burst into the town in the early morning scattering the support units clustered there. Tanks crossed the tracks in a dozen places to fire into the wagons packed in the sidings. Some of them were still full of men, troops of V Corps, which Manstein had ordered north to support 6th Army. One division had already detrained and was marching north.

Now Germans boiled out of the cars only to be run down or machine-gunned by the tanks. Their antitank guns were tied down on flatcars, and the only weapons they had were small arms, entirely useless against tanks. The Soviet tankisti would call this day ‘the German hunt’ as they killed and killed. Germans ran across the snow in all directions away from the town. A Soviet motorized brigade arrived next to disgorge its infantry to sweep through the streets and yards. The corps commander, General V. V. Butkov, surveyed the slaughter and carnage. For him revenge for his Motherland was indeed sweet. ‘Take no prisoners.’

The German 9th Division marching north from the station turned almost to a man to stare south at the sudden noise of battle. Within minutes commands were echoing up and down the column to about turn.

Another train with men of a third division was approaching the station from Zhutovo when the driver noticed smoke and fire ahead. He had just begun to slow the train down when a T-34 lumbered onto the track in front of him and turned to straddle the rails. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the wheels shot cascades of sparks as the brakes took hold and began slowing the train. Too late. The tank fired. The round struck the engine head-on, exploding the boiler and scalding to death the engine crew. As the shattered vehicle shrieked its death, it jumped the tracks, and careered over into the snow. Behind it car after car followed it off the tracks, to crash and splinter, spilling out hundreds of men.

The elation in Stavka at the seizure of the enemy’s main rail hub was matched by shock at Army Group B headquarters. Even Manstein’s famous iron nerve wavered for a moment, then righted itself as more information came in. The rest of V Corps was detraining outside Lyapichev and throwing up defences to contain the enemy’s tanks as was the 9th Infantry Division to the north. The problem was that the V Corps was meant to stabilize Seydlitz’s and Hoth’s hard-pressed armies. His counterstroke force was still engaged with Stalingrad Front. The race against time was on, and it looked like the crisis would burst before 11th Army could accomplish its mission and rescue 4th Panzer and 6th Armies.

As the Soviets were rampaging in the railyards, Grossdeutschland and 6th Panzer had penetrated past the northernmost of the Sarpinsky Lakes and struck deep into Stalingrad Front’s assembly areas. Their black cross T-34s sowed endless confusion among the Russians. Unit after unit was taken unawares as the Soviet-made tanks approached only to discover that they were German-manned. One by one the second-echelon tank brigades of 65th and 57th Armies were encountered and destroyed before they could be properly deployed.

To the south, 11th Army’s two infantry corps engaged the Soviet rifle divisions that had followed the initial breakthrough. Here the Germans had a clear advantage of seven fresh full-strength divisions against three Soviet rifle divisions. In three hours of intense fighting, the Germans drove the Russians back into their defences between the lakes. Continuing the attack, they broke through, taking thousands of prisoners, and pursued the enemy north where they expected to meet up with the two panzer divisions.

The infantry corps would soon have to finish off Southwest Front on their own. Manstein had been keeping a close watch on the progress of the two panzer divisions. They were desperately needed in the fighting to the west, but to pull them out too soon would allow Southwest Front to survive and threaten the German rear with another attempt at encirclement. Not yet. Not yet.

Major General Rodion Malinovsky was under the oppressive cloud of Stalin’s suspicion. As with Rokossovsky, his future rode on the attack of 2nd Guards Army to stem Kleist’s advance. His sin in Stalin’s eyes was to have possible foreign connections, a fact that had already sent countless men to the gulag. At the age of fifteen the young Malinovsky had joined the Imperial Army to fight the Germans. His courage and stout heart earned him a St George Cross. Sent to France with the Russian expeditionary corps, he rose to sergeant and was badly wounded. When the corps was disbanded after the October Revolution, he stayed on to fight the Germans as a recruit of the French Foreign Legion with which he won the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he returned home, joined the Red Army, and distinguished himself in the Civil War. In this current war, he had proved himself again and again to be a skilful and successful leader. He was so able that Stalin, despite his suspicions, gave him command of his finest army. Now that army was all that stood between Stalingrad and the enemy.

It was a formidable obstacle. Its 2nd Mechanized Corps held 17,000 men and was 220 tanks strong, almost all of them new-model T-34s. The armour of the German-manned Shermans was a bit thicker than the T-34’s, and its turret basket allowed the crew to fight the tank more effectively. Balancing that was the fact that the T-34’s high-velocity 76mm gun had a penetrating advantage over the Sherman’s 75mm weapon. The corps’ three infantry brigades were all motorized. Malinovsky’s six infantry divisions were tough, experienced, and well-equipped. Every formation was commanded by a veteran officer who had done well in previous assignments. The oncoming battle would be for the first time between evenly matched mechanized forces, each with strong air support, and each commanded by a talented and tough commander.

Perhaps because they were so evenly matched they took the same mirror-imaging approach. Fix the enemy in the front with infantry and wheel a massive tank attack around a flank and into the rear. Ominously they both picked the same flank. Fifteen miles east of Leninsk, the infantry corps of both armies collided in a great bruising fight over the low mounds that were all that was left of the ruins of the 13th-century capital of the Golden Horde, Shed-Berke. Both wanted to use the mounds as a defensive line to hold the other until their tanks could fall on the enemy’s rear. To the north over 600 tanks of both sides were converging on the same point — on the German right and the Soviet left — in the greatest meeting engagement in history.

It was a titanic crash of iron cavalry. There was no manoeuvre, no long-range duelling, as the masses of tanks flew at each other and fired at almost point-blank range. Tanks rammed each other like ancient galleys. The ranges were so close there were hardly any misses except where panic or excitement threw off the aim. Every hit at such ranges on hull or turret penetrated whether it was an American 75mm or Soviet 76mm gun. The Shermans lived up to their American nickname of Ronsons by lighting up after a single hit as their fuel caught fire, while the T-34s exploded because too much ammunition was vulnerably stored. Whether it was a Sherman gushing fire from its hatches or a T-34 with its turret twisting in the air, blown off by exploding ammunition, men died horribly. ‘In modern mechanized war men do not die in fields of flowers with shouts of Urrah on their lips.’¹⁶

Imperceptibly the tide shifted in the German favour. The electrically powered turret baskets in the American and German tanks allowed each crew to fight more effectively even in the point-blank mêlée. Rudel’s Stuka squadron more than did its part. Overcast skies with cloud at 300 to 600 feet, execrable flying weather, kept most of the Red Air Force and Luftwaffe grounded — except Rudel who only looked at it as a dare from the weather god. Rudel led his squadron in sortie after sortie that killed tank after tank.

On his seventh sortie as dusk was settling he flew over the fighting to the enemy’s rear to find tempting fuel targets. He dropped down low and flew over a village into heavy flak, but flying just over rooftop level protected him. He looked down a long gulley behind the village and found Malinovsky’s tank reserve.

He realized that the force was preparing to strike deep into the army’s rear and did not want to be dependent on fuel convoys. He alerted the squadron.

Rudel led the way, dropped his bombs, and then attacked with his 20mm cannon. Normally those guns would have been ineffective against tanks, but the fuel drums were another matter. With the first bombs, the column stopped abruptly and then in a few minutes resumed its orderly exit from the gulley. But by now Rudel’s squadron was swarming over them, and the Russians scattered in panic out of the gulley and across the steppe.

Only night finally grounded the Stukas, which had accounted for almost forty tanks and dozens of trucks. By his quick thinking and aggressiveness, Rudel had wrecked Malinovsky’s reserve tank brigade and his motorized brigade which he had been preparing for the killing stroke against 1st Panzer Army. Unknown to Rudel, there was a vital bonus amid the burning tanks and trucks scattered though the gulley and the surrounding steppe. Malinovsky was among the dead.

As night fell the loss of the army commander and much of his senior staff was not known yet. The great meeting engagement had cost them over a hundred tanks to the Germans’ sixty. The fighting between the infantry of both armies flared and rumbled all day. As Rudel was riding the dusk into his last attack, SS Wiking broke through the Soviet 13th Rifle Corps and rampaged through the enemy’s rear. Late that night, after the fighting had stopped, the Germans could hear the noise of tank engines revving up and stood to their own vehicles lest the Russians come in the night. It was only the remnants of 2nd Guards Army pulling out in defeat. The Germans would immortalize the tank battle as Der Tottenritt bei Leninsk (‘The Death Ride of Leninsk’).