Disaster at Stalingrad

INTRODUCTION ‘The Dancing Floor of War’

There is no doubt that Stalingrad was the decisive battle in the war against Germany. Up to Stalingrad, the flood tide of German victories seemed unstoppable. After Stalingrad it was a remorseless ebb tide for the Wehrmacht that only ended in the ruins of Berlin and a bullet in the brain of Adolf Hitler.

Upon what did this turning point in history pivot? Soviet propaganda emphasized the resolve of the Russian fighting man, Stalin’s decisive ‘not one step back’ order, and the immense output of Soviet war industries heroically relocated to the Urals. All of this was true, but it was not the whole story. What is missing in that is the keystone in the arch of victory.

That keystone was logistics. It is that which feeds, clothes, equips and sustains the fighting man. It begins in the wheat fields, mines and steel mills, continues to factories that produce uniforms, tanks and shells, and its end is when the cook dumps a meal into a mess tin, or a quartermaster issues a new rifle, ammunition or uniform. Disrupt any part of this process, and you disrupt the ability of the armies to fight. Frederick the Great’s dictum ‘Without supplies, no army is brave’ was as true in 1942 as when the Prussian king said it two centuries before.

It is little known that, as the German 1942 summer campaign roared to life, the logistics lifeline of the Red Army, Soviet war industries and the population in general was badly frayed and near to snapping. Most of Soviet war industry had either been lost to the Germans or had been evacuated to the Urals where it was being reassembled. In a miracle of improvisation, many of these factories were put back into operation in a very short time, but it still was not enough. Vital materials such as aluminium and copper were in short supply, the aluminium necessary for tank and aircraft engines, and the copper for myriad uses, especially brass for cartridges and shells. The Soviet Union by then had also lost its richest agricultural lands and a huge part of its population. What remained was reduced to a diet that teetered between constant hunger and malnutrition. Soviet prewar stocks of motor vehicles, especially trucks, had been reduced by more than half, and new production was meagre.

Given these disabilities, how did the Red Army humble Hitler’s ambitions at Stalingrad? What was their margin of victory? Though subsequent Soviet historians were loath to admit it, that margin was the massive aid provided by Great Britain and the United States. Edward R. Stettinius, the man responsible for coordinating the provision of war supplies to America’s allies, stated, ‘Enough supplies did get to Russia… to be of real value in the summer fighting of 1942.’¹ The US Army Center for Military History was clear that ‘In committing munitions and equipment to the titanic defence of Stalingrad, the USSR knew that material losses could be mitigated in ever mounting quantities by future lend-lease receipts.’² Even a major participant in the battle and future leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita S. Khrushchev stated, ‘if we had to cope with Germany one to one we would not have been able to cope because we lost so much of our industry’.³ This author was told by a senior Russian military historian at a July 1992 seminar on the Second World War at the Russian Military History Institute that foreign aid, even in November 1941, exceeded Soviet production, so much damage had the Germans already inflicted by then.

At that time, most aid received by the Soviets was from Britain, provided at great cost to the British war effort and the British people who went short in innumerable ways to support their allies. American aid had just begun and was in the form of raw materials. It was to grow exponentially until, by the time of Stalingrad, American trucks and jeeps, canned food, and dried eggs and milk were ubiquitous to the average Red Army man, one of whom commented that it was only because of Lend-Lease that the troops were able to get more than one meal a day. British and American tanks and planes were making up about 15 per cent of the total Soviet inventories, a not inconsiderable margin. More importantly and out of the sight of the soldier, the factories were relying on Canadian and American aluminium to build four out of every ten tank and aircraft engines. In effect, foreign aid made it possible for the Soviets to complete 40 per cent of these weapon systems. Essentially, for every thousand tanks or planes the Soviets produced by the time of Stalingrad, 150 were made in Britain or the United States, and another 340 were built with Canadian and American aluminium. Without that aid, the Soviets would only have been able to deliver 510 tanks or planes per the thousand they actually did. Supporting this are Stalin’s repeated requests for priority materials, with aluminium and concentrated foods such as meat and fats at the top of the lists.

None of this denigrates the bravery or heroism of the Red Army soldier or the sacrifice of the civilian population. It does emphasize, however, that bravery and heroism are far more effective with a tank and a full belly than without them.

Thus this alternative history will take that path not taken, the one of sacks of wheat, tons of aluminium, great convoys stuffed with trucks, explosives, tanks, and thousands of the other countless elements of war that made their way from the fields and factories of Great Britain, Canada and the United States across oceans, mountains and deserts to reach the Soviet Union. Then will the drama of battle be played out.

The weight of woes was not all on the Soviet side of the scale. German resources were inadequate for the campaign that eventually unfolded. Hitler’s stated objectives for the 1942 summer offensive were to destroy the bulk of the remaining Soviet field armies east of the Don and to overrun the Caucasus and Transcaucasus regions of the Soviet Union to acquire the economic resources Germany lacked, primarily oil. These objectives were to be undertaken consecutively. However, when Hitler decided to accomplish them concurrently, he badly overstretched German resources in all categories, condemning his armies to be neither strong enough in the attack on Stalingrad nor in the lunge into the Caucasus.

Hitler further compounded these errors by becoming obsessed with taking the city of Stalingrad and condemned his 6th Army to be burned out in what was essentially Verdun on the Volga. Ironically the original planning did not emphasize any importance attached to the city itself other than as a location towards which 6th Army would be directed. The city fighting devoured men the way German mobile operations did not. The Germans called it the ‘Rats’ War’, Der Rattenkrieg, so vicious and remorseless it was. Homer, perhaps the most profound observer of men in war, captured the imagery and essence of that battle in lines written some 3,000 years before.

Hitler again compounded the problems burdening his forces by his chronic inability to accumulate a reserve without immediately expending it. So, as 6th Army screamed for reinforcements, there were no available operational reserves on the Eastern Front. At the same time the Soviets were accumulating huge reserves. Herein is an insight into the nature of German and Soviet command. Hitler’s growing insistence that he make all important decisions, which rapidly devolved into reserving his permission to move even single divisions, hobbled his outstanding stable of generals. As Hitler curtailed the initiative allowed his generals, Stalin increased the command scope of his own team of talented officers. He also showed a much more balanced and shrewd strategic grasp, and listened to and often followed the advice of his leading commanders.

What masked Hitler’s imposed burdens on his forces were their outstanding combat capabilities. German training and tactical and operational expertise were clearly superior to those of the Soviets. Air-ground coordination was a particularly lethal tactical combination.

What resulted was that German resources dwindled as their forces continued to struggle beyond their culminating point. Soviet resources at the same time continued to grow, fed by a careful accumulation of reserves and the resources in material and supplies provided by their own relocated war industries and the arrival of increasingly large amounts of foreign aid, chiefly through the Arctic Convoys and through the Persian Corridor, with the transpacific route through Vladivostok beginning to come on line. Germany was inexorably losing the war of material. Ironically, it was not their inevitable defeat that strikes one but how close they actually came to winning, as Charles de Gaulle once observed.

In 1944, General Charles de Gaulle visited Stalingrad and walked past the still-uncleared wreckage. Later, at a reception in Moscow, a correspondent asked him his impressions of the scene. ‘Ah, Stalingrad, c’est tout de même un peuple formidable, un très grand peuple,’ the Free French leader said. The correspondent agreed. ‘Ah, oui, les Russes…’ De Gaulle interrupted impatiently, ‘Mais non, je ne parle pas des Russes; je parle des Allemands. Tout de même, avoir poussé jusque‘à lá.’ (‘That they should have come so far.’).⁵

‘That they should have come so far’ offers a tantalizing hint at how close the issue actually was. What would it have taken, within the realm of rational options, for the game to have gone to the Germans is a question that always hangs in the air, with its answer just out of reach.

The decision nodes, where events hung in the balance, are like the railway switching yards of history. The smallest change can send a train laden with the might of armies in a totally different direction. The changes then start branching exponentially.

The great Theban general, Epaminondas called the great plain of Boeotia ‘the dancing floor of war’, a primal description of a blood-soaked ground that fully applied to that other blood-soaked ground between the Don and the Volga. The task of alternative history is to change the tune on that dancing floor, to see what unexpected fate the new beat and step will bring forth.