Disaster at Stalingrad

CHAPTER 1 Führer Directive 41

As Hitler read through the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW — Headquarters of the Armed Forces) Operations Staff briefing for Operation Blau (Blue), the plan for the 1942 summer campaign, the angrier he got. The Wehrmacht’s Operations chief, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, had become attuned by now to Hitler’s body language and braced himself.

‘This is not what I want!’ Hitler said. He fumed at the plan and its General-Staff trained officers, so steeped in the traditions from Scharnhorst to Schlieffen, the very system that Hitler had concluded was manifestly inferior to the intuitive judgement of his genius. Behind that contempt was the rage that so many of these generals, as well as the senior commanders at the front, had obeyed his orders grudgingly and with the most obvious of reservations. ‘No! No! No! I will have no more of these vague, elastically framed tasks!’

By that he meant the mission orders on the Auftragstaktik principle that granted the commander in the field great leeway and initiative in exactly how he executed those orders. Freedom of action was the last thing he wanted to give Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group South. The last time he had done that for his senior officers was in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union the previous June. And what had they done with that freedom of action? They had failed to take Leningrad and Moscow and were stunned by the Russians’ winter counteroffensive. Their precious General Staff methods failed them when the Russians came howling through the snow to throw them back in panic, that brother to blood-stained rout. The whole army would have come apart at the seams if he, Adolf Hitler, who had held no more than a corporal’s rank in the Great War, had not issued his stand fast and fight it out order. He had saved the army through this act of sheer will.

Now they were back to their old tricks. Freedom of action be damned. It was only their way of giving themselves the leeway to fail and then blame it on him. His attitude to the professional army was becoming indistinguishable from what he had once told an acquaintance was the way to deal with the opposite sex. ‘When you go to a woman, take a whip.’ Now he would hold the whip over the Army’s generals.

‘I want no generalities, Jodl. Do you hear me? I want this plan in exacting detail.’ Jodl attempted to explain that senior commanders were traditionally given the initiative to plan their own methods. The look on his Führer’s face made Jodl instinctively take a step backwards.

Hitler snatched the plan out of Jodl’s hands and said, ‘I will deal with the matter myself,’ and stormed off, leaving the man shaken.¹

The conception of Operation Blau was Hitler’s. It was his child, and he now had to take it severely in hand after it had been spoiled into sickliness by the Army and Wehrmacht Operations staffs. He would make a man of it. It had the audacity and ambitious sweep of Barbarossa, but this time he would control it and force it to victory. He went to the map of the Soviet Union and swept his fingers across its south. Here, he said to himself, between the Donets and the Don, we will engage and destroy the bulk of the remaining Soviet field forces.

And all this was to be only the opening move to quench Germany’s insatiable thirst for oil. Hitler had been driven in so many of his schemes by an obsession with economic resources, and oil was above all his focus. Oil was vital not only for the Wehrmacht but for the very existence of modern Germany, and Germany had no oil. Its synthetic oil production could not come close to meeting demand, and Romanian oil could not either. The only remaining source within Hitler’s grasp was in the vast mountainous region of the Soviet Caucasus and Transcaucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The two oilfields at Maikop in the Kuban east of the Black Sea and Grozny, capital of the Chechens, in the mountains produced about 10 per cent of all Soviet oil. South of the mountains in the Transcaucasus, however, lay the richest oilfields of all around the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan at Baku on the Caspian Sea. These fields produced 80 per cent of Stalin’s oil, about 24 million tons by 1942.² Transcaucasia, which included the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was also the location of the richest manganese mines in the world, supplying the Soviet Union with 1.5 million tons annually, half of its needs.

The struggle between the Donets and Don was meant only to clear the way for the simultaneous thrust across the Caucasus to the oilfields of Baku on the coast of the Caspian and farther north to Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga. Oil was what Germany and the Soviet Union both needed. With this stroke he would take it and at the same time deprive the enemy of it. As a bonus, the route for Allied supplies to the Russians from Persia would be severed at the moment when it seemed to be reaching the tonnage of aid sent by the Arctic convoys.

His imagination took flight as he dictated to his secretary ten single-spaced pages of minute directions for the upcoming offensive. As he finished he could see Stalin being dragged in a cage through the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate his triumph.

Stalin had unconsciously divined Hitler’s plan for the summer offensive. All you had to do was look at the map. The wide open steppe that stretched from the Donets to the Volga and beyond fairly beckoned to a mechanized invader. Yes, it would be a drive to the south that the Germans would try, then across the mountains of the Caucasus. This region was rich in economic targets, and he knew of Hitler’s obsession with such booty. But then he made a further divination that obscured the spot-on accuracy of the first. He believed that, before heading south, Hitler would drive on Moscow for the decisive battle to take the ancient Russian capital. Only then, Stalin concluded, would he turn to the Caucasus. He did not know that, two days before, Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 41, that ordered just such an attack to the south as the primary German effort for 1942.

The directive was based on the conclusion that the ‘enemy in his anxiety to exploit what seemed like initial successes has spent during the winter the bulk of his reserves earmarked for future operations.’³ The Stavka, or command element of the armed forces of the Soviet Union,⁴ had indeed accumulated eleven new reserve armies as a strategic reserve. Georgi Zhukov, the most brilliant and successful of Stalin’s generals, urged him to concentrate that force to destroy the German Army Group Centre. Instead, Stalin distributed them across five fronts for the defence of Moscow.⁵ The Germans had done their best to make Stalin’s wish father to that thought. They had conducted numerous reconnaissance missions over Moscow and left detailed city maps to be captured by Soviet patrols. It was all Stalin needed to continue to deceive himself. It was a remarkable achievement in self-deception in the face of the accurate intelligence to the contrary from a number of highly placed Soviet agents of proven veracity.

Hitler’s directive instead stated that the centre of the front was to be held on the defensive ‘while all available forces are concentrated for the main operation in the southern sector, with the objective of annihilating the enemy on the Don and subsequently gaining the oilfields of the Caucasian region and the crossing of the Caucasus itself.’⁶ Hitler’s emphasis at this point was clearly on securing the oil of the Caucasus. He said plainly, ‘If we don’t secure Maikop and Grozny, then I must put an end to the war.’ The city of Stalingrad on the Volga did not loom at all in the scale of things for Hitler. Its only importance was as a war armaments centre and Volga crossing, both of which would be lost to the Soviets if the city were simply bypassed.⁷

‘Yes!’ said Hitler has he took off his spectacles. ‘This is just the sort of analysis I need.’ He then read it out loud to the officers assembled at the Führer Naval Conference.

Hitler’s summation was simple, ‘This reads like an annex to my Directive 41. I congratulate the naval staff. Its conclusions fully support that directive.’⁹

He had every reason to give praise. By midsummer of 1941, it had become apparent to both Moscow and London that the Germans were thrusting towards the Caucasus. The British and Russians jointly occupied Iran in August, ousted the pro-Axis shah, and began to prepare the ports, oilfields, railways and roads to receive supplies and equipment. After Pearl Harbor large numbers of American troops began arriving to serve in auxiliary capacities for the British as American ships began to reach Persian Gulf ports. From January to April 45,000 tons of cargo originating from the USA and Canada had been transferred to the Soviets. Britain contributed another 2,500 tons. In May alone the tonnage was expected to double, almost equalling the tonnage sent by one Arctic convoy. The first American Douglas A-20 Havoc light bomber was flown into Persia in February. By April another 38 had arrived with monthly deliveries of about a hundred a month scheduled. The Americans built a truck assembly plant which began work in April and was scheduled to assemble almost 400 that month and over a thousand a month thereafter.¹⁰ The Persian Corridor was beginning to swell with cargoes headed for the Soviet Union just as Hitler had determined that that door to the Caucasus must be slammed shut.

Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to the Republic of Turkey, had every reason to feel satisfied. General Emir Erkilet had just told him that ‘participation in the war against Russia would be very popular in the Army and in many sectors of the population’.¹¹ The pro-German element in the Turkish Army was becoming more assertive, with encouragement coming from Berlin. Germany had been plying the Turks with reasons to enter the war on its side for over a year. Noted military historian John Gill observed,

The poorly equipped Turkish Army became the recipient of huge amounts of captured French and Soviet equipment, especially artillery and machine guns. German training teams were actively at work with the Turks to bring their army out of its World War I mindset into something vaguely resembling readiness for modern war. If the Turks were to join the Axis, they had to be prepared to contribute effectively.

Papen had assured the Turkish leadership that Turkey would have ‘a leading place in the Axis new order’, and that Germany would ensure that important ‘territorial rectifications’ would be made in Thrace, the Dodecanese Islands, northern Syria and Iraq all the way down to Mosul, and even in the Crimea. Especially attractive was the promise of Turkish territorial expansion into parts of the Caucasus inhabited by ethnic Turks, the Azeris, and even into Central Asia with its Turkic Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs and Kyrghiz. This had great appeal to the Pan-Turanism of important elements in Turkish society.¹³

Probably the most important encouragement was a remarkable gesture by Hitler to transfer all of the Muslim prisoners captured from the Red Army, most of whom were of Turkic origin, to Turkey for ‘internment’. These numbered over a quarter million of the over three million Soviet POWs taken in the great encirclement battles of 1941. The gesture by Hitler had come about because of the visit to the Eastern Front at the height of the German rampage in 1941 by a group of senior Turkish officers arranged by Colonel Ali Fuat Erden. They were aware of the death by starvation that awaited Soviet POWs and pleaded with Hitler to spare their fellow Turkic Muslims.¹⁴

Hitler had been impressed by the opportunities. He had looked upon the Turks positively as former allies from the First War but had come to see them in another light after the recent visit of an Arab delegation. The Arabs had told him that the Germans really should be Muslims because it fitted their nature better. He had not known much of Islam before this encounter but was now intrigued by it. He pondered the history of Europe and concluded that the defeat of the Arab invasion at Poitiers (Tours) in AD 732 had been a great lost opportunity for the Germans.

In his recorded dinner conversations he would constantly insult Christianity as making the Germans too weak and compassionate, but praise Islam as the only religion he could respect. Come the final victory there would be an end to the churches in Germany:

If Hitler looked upon the Soviet Muslims as useful auxiliaries in his war against Bolshevism, he would have nothing to do with anti-Soviet East Slavs — Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. Although he had millions of them in POW camps, very many of whom would have been glad to join the war against communism, he abhorred the idea of putting weapons in their hands. It was a justifiable conclusion given what he intended to do to them after his victory — those who survived were to be reduced to illiterate serfs of the Herrenvolk.

The German Army was far more practical and appreciated the possibilities these POWs presented. They had a leader ready-made in the captured Soviet general and war hero, Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov. He had been captured after his 2nd Shock Army had been cut off and destroyed in the fighting for Leningrad in early 1942. He surprised his captors by declaring that Stalin was the greatest enemy of the Russian people and stated his willingness to form an army to fight the communists. Hitler would only go so far as to allow the creation of a Russian Liberation Army, simply as a propaganda ploy. Vlasov would receive no troops to command, although a million Soviet citizens were taking up arms fighting for the Germans, but these were German Army controlled personnel. For Vlasov, a Russian patriot, there was only the bitter frustration of a priceless opportunity thrown away.¹⁷

Hitler’s priorities were elsewhere. Thus, by early 1942, the last of the surviving Soviet Turkic and other Muslim POWs had been released into the custody of the Republic of Turkey. Goebbels brilliantly used this Nazi ‘humanitarian gesture’ to drive home pro-German sentiment in the Muslim world. It also had the effect of demoralizing the remaining Turkic troops in the Red Army and required the most brutal repression by the NKVD, which further alienated that part of the Soviet population.¹⁸

The Germans expected that, if Turkey entered the war, it would put pressure on the British in Syria, Iraq, and Persia but put its main effort into an invasion of the Caucasus. The Germans as well asked for U-boat access to the Black Sea and for sole access to Turkish chromite ore, vital to German war industry.

Now if only the Turks would go along. The problem was that the Turkish leadership was split. The Army was increasingly for war; the President was unsure, and Prime Minister Sükrü Saracoglu favoured the West. All this time, the British had not been idle and were doing their best to keep Turkey neutral. In the face of this balance, ‘Hitler ordered preparation of a plan to rearrange the constellation of political power in Ankara to suit Berlin’s purposes better.’¹⁹

The logisticians on the Soviet General Staff were the most frightened of men. The reports they had to present to Stalin would have stunned a man with a lesser will or a more forgiving approach to failure than the Vozhd.²⁰ Not that Stalin did not worry. He too was frightened, but he was patient and steady. He had panicked in the opening days of the German invasion when the shock had sent him to cower at his dacha outside Moscow for two weeks. When a delegation from the Politburo arrived, he thought they had come to arrest him. Instead they begged him to take the state in hand again. Since then his grip had not so much as quivered.

He did not shoot the logisticians as he had the military intelligence officers who had tried to warn him of the German invasion. He had learned not to dispose of everyone who brought bad news. That only resulted in more bad news arriving in the form of nasty surprises. But their reports would have snapped the nerve of a lesser man.

The Soviets had barely survived 1941. Losses had been beyond enormous. The battles for Moscow alone had cost 2.5 million irrecoverable losses, a figure that would long remain a state secret, and at the same time millions of men of military age were now under German control.²¹ Huge areas of the most productive parts of the western Soviet Union had been overrun by the Germans. Of those thousands of factories that had been evacuated to the Urals, many were still in the process of reconstitution. Soviet war production was in a potentially deadly trough.

Soviet territorial, population, agricultural and industrial losses had been staggering. Every index of production showed a collapse after 1940.

Key elements of industrial production had also collapsed compared to 1940. Of the 145,000 trucks supporting industry, barely 35,000 were still operational. Of the 58,400 metal-working lathes working in 1940, only 22,900 remained. Electric power had been reduced from 48 to 29 billion KwH. Ferrous sheet metal production, of which modern mechanized warfare devoured vast quantities, fell from 13.1 million tons to 4.5 million.

Agriculture was in even worse condition. Of the 150 million hectares of sown area in 1940, barely 67 million remained in Soviet hands. The cattle herd had fallen from 55 to 28 million. Horses were still essential for agriculture and for the Army to pull its artillery and wagons, and of the 21 million available in 1940, only 8 million remained. These losses led to a collapse of food production.

Unconsciously, not a few Soviet senior officers thanked God for the aid pouring in from the Western Allies. The British had made extraordinary efforts after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Churchill had said in the House of Commons that if Hitler had invaded hell he would find something favourable to say of the devil. Churchill loathed the Soviet Union as the totalitarian thug that it was, having attempted to strangle it in its cradle after the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet he recognized that the enemy of his enemy was for the moment his friend, and that Germany could not be defeated without the Russians. Otherwise the long night would close on Western civilization. Strategic necessity is rarely pretty.

This aid was sent by Arctic convoys at a time when British resources were being stretched to the limit after they had been driven from the continent at Dunkirk and in Greece. It was sent even though it meant starving the desperate struggle in the Western Desert that defended Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline to the British Empire in India and beyond. Tanks that could have given short shrift to Rommel were winched off British ships at Murmansk and Archangelsk. The British people had almost no replacement clothing because of the vast amounts sent to Russia. By November 1941 locomotives by the hundreds and railcars by the thousands had been shipped to strengthen the Iranian State Railway as an additional route for aid to the Soviet Union. By that month, by Russian admission, British and American aid was exceeding Soviet production.²² Even though the loss of Malaya in early 1942 cut off the British supply of rubber, they shared their own precious reserve with the Soviets.

Despite this outpouring of aid, which left the British with a desperately slim inventory of their own, Stalin demanded more and more. He wanted 30,000 tons of aluminium immediately for the engines for Soviet tank and aircraft factories. He wanted a monthly quota of 500 tanks and 400 aircraft and belittled the equipment that was sent at such cost. Churchill firmly rebuffed these outlandish demands and stated to Stalin that any precipitate action would lead to disasters that would help only Hitler. Nevertheless, he did arrange for 5,000 tons of aluminium to be shipped from Canada with another 2,000 tons to follow each month.²³

The British deliveries came from their own production and from their allocation of Lend-Lease aid from the United States. In late September 1941 the Anglo-American Supply Commission travelled to Moscow and was treated coldly. In consequence, Churchill asked President Franklin Roosevelt to increase aid to the Soviets. Roosevelt promised that from July 1942 until January 1943 the United States would deliver to Britain and the Soviet Union 1,200 tanks a month, rising to 2,000 a month thereafter. He promised aircraft deliveries of 3,600 a month as well.²⁴

From October 1941 to 30 June 1942, the Soviets had received most of the promised 1.5 million tons of aid. Over 83 per cent of it came across the Atlantic to the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk. The rest came first by ship and then overland through the Persian Corridor into Soviet Azerbaijan, and by a third route across the Pacific in Soviet ships from American ports, undisturbed by the Japanese who wished to stay out of the war with the Soviet Union.²⁵ Most of the Soviet ships were in fact chartered American ships conveniently reflagged with the hammer and sickle.²⁶

Soviet losses in the first year of the war had been so severe that Allied aid was vital. In 1941-2, Allied-provided (mostly British) tanks amounted to 15 per cent of the total Soviet tank force. The first Lend-Lease cargoes arrived at Russian northern ports in November 1941 carrying 59 Curtiss fighter planes, 70 M3 light tanks, 1,000 trucks, and 2,000 tons of barbed wire. Convoy PQ-16, which sailed in May 1942, delivered 321 tanks and 2,500 trucks in addition to huge amounts of general cargo. Most of the military equipment was employed in the areas closest to the ports — around Leningrad and Moscow — in order to minimize the already grinding strain on Soviet railways.

American-provided supplies and war materials far exceeded the tonnage of actual weapons. Already, American trucks and jeeps were becoming ubiquitous, coming in a stream that filled a vital gap left by Soviet losses and anaemic production.

It was precisely in these areas of sustenance and transport that Lend-Lease was so vital to the Soviet war effort. If soldiers are malnourished or cannot be moved expeditiously about the front, the importance of tank and other weapons production pales.

The Soviets had indeed made heroic efforts to maintain production, but 1941 had been devastating. Not only were large industrial areas lost, but 1,500 factories had been moved to the Urals ahead of the Germans and were out of production for many months. By early 1942 production had resumed on a large scale.

Whole new populations were drafted to replace lost industrial workers as factories ran around the clock. Women, ‘fighters in overalls’, shouldered much of this work. The Soviet bureaucracy was as indifferent to their welfare and safety as the generals were to their soldiers’ wellbeing. Yet out of this supreme achievement came 11,000 tanks in the first six months of the year.²⁷ This concentration on weapons production came at a great price. The Soviets simply did not have the resources to build a balanced force.

Sustaining production and the forces in the field, however, was the vital Allied contribution to the Soviet war effort — specialty steels and other metals such as aluminium (without which the engines for Soviet tanks and aircraft could not have been made), machine tools, munitions, and the explosive components of munitions. The American chemical industry was able to produce almost immediately a huge volume of explosives that the Soviets simply could not have replaced. These were the calories of war.

Huge amounts of field telephone wire, radios, radar sets and other communications equipment were filling a void. The Soviets had a phobia about communicating by radio and preferred wherever possible to use telephone wire, which they could not have done without American aid. American Ford, Willys and Studebaker trucks and jeeps were making up the grave shortfall in Soviet production of these vehicles.

As important was the growing amount of food for a country whose most productive agricultural areas were now producing food for the Germans. American dehydrated eggs were soon known as Roosevelt’s eggs, a play on the word Russian word yaitsa which means both eggs and testicles. Canned spam and other meat called tushonka, stewed pork in gelatin, were becoming common along with beans, dried peas, butter, vegetable fat, oil and margarine, canned or dried milk, grits and coffee.²⁸ Not a few amazed German soldiers would be lectured by their officers when they would capture a Studebaker truck filled with American canned food that the Americans would someday pay for all this.

The Americans, had they known, should have worried. Stalin was playing a deep strategic game. In December, when the Germans were within miles of the Kremlin, he had sternly reminded the panicking General Staff that the Germans were only a temporary enemy. The main enemy, the glavny vrag, was the United States. Lenin had so identified the Americans as the most dangerous of communism’s enemies, as did Hitler. It was this ideological legacy of the founder of Soviet power that legitimized Stalin in the eyes of the party and people, and the part about enemies he took with deadly seriousness.

That did not keep him from bargaining for every ton of wheat, fats, aviation fuel or aluminium, every bullet, truck or plane he could squeeze from the Americans. The myriad influential Americans sympathetic to the Soviet Union would pressure their government into pouring forth the materials of war.

They did not work alone. Inside the US Government, agents of the NKVD, Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS) worked directly on orders from Moscow. Roosevelt’s chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, who played a critical role in the Lend-Lease talks, was a Soviet agent. Most important of them was Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who had got himself appointed to oversee all Lend-Lease shipments to his master in the Kremlin. White ensured that the US armed forces were not allowed to make any inquiries on the operational use or performance of any of the equipment sent to the Soviets. The Soviets refused to allow the Americans to send observers and technicians to the Eastern Front.²⁹

The Soviets were all too often non-cooperative or even hostile to Britons and Americans working in the Soviet Union on Lend-Lease aid; some of them were arrested to disappear into the Soviet gulag. Those naval and merchant marine personnel who arrived in Soviet northern ports discovered that they were not out of danger once they had docked. The main port of Murmansk was regularly bombed by the Luftwaffe from bases in Northern Norway. Then they were shocked by what they experienced at the hands of their allies. They often found the Russians charming but terrified of being seen to fraternize with Westerners by the NKVD. Added to that was the abject poverty seen in the ports, the zombie-like slave labour from the gulag and German POWs used to unload ships, the brutal medical care, ‘the numerous petty formalities, the passes and visas, the plethora of guards and the prohibition of movement’, all of which strained the morale of everyone involved. It certainly killed any flirtation with communism in many of them.³⁰