Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (15 page)
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Authors: Peter Tsouras
Hitler was so alarmed at the failure of the encirclement and the failure of Bock to destroy significant Soviet forces on his drive to Voronezh that he flew immediately into the Army Group South headquarters. He would have gone two days earlier but for his attention to Rösselsprung. Now he was face to face with Bock, riding a wave of elation over the twin victories of Rösselsprung and Sevastopol. He told the army group commander, ‘I no longer insist upon the capture of the city, Bock, I also no longer consider it [Voronezh] to be necessary and I leave it up to you to move south immediately.’
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Hitler was correct in his operational assessment that Voronezh was not important. Its significance lay in the fact that he and his generals believed Timoshenko’s forces could be destroyed as the Germans advanced in the direction of Voronezh, just as they believed that more of Timoshenko’s Southwest Front could be destroyed as the Germans moved in the direction of Stalingrad. The cities themselves were only of secondary importance as a rail junction in the case of Voronezh and a war materials manufacturing centre in the case of Stalingrad. They correctly saw that the enemy’s forces were the main objectives. They were still not sure why the Soviets were escaping destruction, but Hitler thought it was that they were simply disintegrating as a fighting force. It was then only necessary to press hard on the heels of a rout. He had reminded Bock that the purpose of his drive towards Voronezh had been to destroy enemy forces and cover the army group’s flank.
All very good for the Supreme War Lord. But after that conclusion he failed to act on it and deliver a decisive order to turn away from Voronezh. Instead, he left the decision to Bock. This was a profound failure of leadership. Unfortunately, the army group commander was getting pulled into a hornet’s nest just then and becoming preoccupied with the tactical rather than the operational imperatives. The Soviets were now using cities as fortress centres of defence into which they sucked large numbers of ill-prepared Germans.
‘How does Winston do it?’ Lord Beaverbrook, the man called the First Baron of Fleet Street and former wartime Minister of Aircraft Production and Supply, and now Lord Privy Seal, just shook his head in wonder at the performance he had just witnessed on the floor of the House from its gallery. He was the greatest newspaper man in Britain but, unlike Hearst, he was a friend of the country’s war leader. ‘Winston can fall into the black pit of Hades and come up with his arms full of sunshine.’
What he had just witnessed was the British Lion defending himself in terms of such power and persuasion that the vote of no confidence had failed, just barely, but by just enough to keep him safe for now as prime minister. Churchill’s power of rhetoric had been vastly aided by the fact that there seemed no one able to step into his shoes. That there were no capable rivals in his Conservative Party had been made evident by the fiasco of 1940 when the Chamberlain government had collapsed, and he had been the only choice. The options had not got any better since. The problem was aggravated by the fact that in the British system war cabinets included all major parties for the sake of national unity. The alternative of the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, coming to power was too much for Conservatives, still in a majority in the House, to contemplate. He was a genuine patriot and determined supporter of the war against Hitler, but he was no war leader. Churchill had pegged him right when he had said that Attlee ‘was a very modest man but that he had much to be modest about’. A man whose whole life had been set on redistributing wealth could be no war leader.
Tobruk and the battles in the Norwegian Sea had been the milestones that had nearly sunk Churchill. One more would surely take him to the bottom. But he had found one great advantage that had come out of the disasters. The German surface fleet had come out of hiding led by the great bogeyman, the
Tirpitz.
Now most of the German ships were on the bottom, and the rest too battered to be a threat to anyone. Although at great cost to the Royal Navy, prestige, morale and the American alliance, the German fleet in being had been eliminated. And with it the threat to the convoys. Theoretically, they could be resumed.
All too theoretically. The shock of the convoy’s loss had been felt most keenly among the old salts of the Merchant Navy. They were making it quite clear that not a man would sign on for any ship going to Russia’s Arctic ports. That, and Roosevelt’s call to inform him that the United States would not support another Arctic convoy, sealed their fate. Churchill deftly plucked a silver lining from this rent garment. The Home Fleet would not have to be rebuilt to its previous size to watch a now non-existent German surface fleet. The Royal Navy’s already over-stretched resources could more efficiently be allocated to those theatres upon which the survival of Britain depended, particularly the Mediterranean. Now that Rommel was at the gates of Egypt, every ship was needed to run the reinforcement convoys through to Alexandria.
Hitler and Stalin came to critical conclusions almost at the same time in mid-July.
Stalin finally gave up the notion that Moscow was the main German objective and began to transfer Stavka reserves south. He also listened carefully to his general staff. Another great encirclement of Soviet forces was out of the question. He listened to reason, and no one was shot. Instead, he had called Timoshenko on 12 July and said, ‘I order the formation of the Stalingrad Front, and the city itself will be defended to the last man by the 62nd Army.’ Stalin was desperate to delay the enemy in order to bring up reserves and to finish the city’s defences.
His generals were doing their best to buy him that time by increasingly skilful delaying actions. They would hold the Germans just long enough to make them deploy, and then, before becoming decisively engaged, they would retreat.
As skilful as this may have been on some larger scale, to the troops involved it was demoralizing. In what seemed a headlong flight towards the Don a sense of hopelessness began to pervade the Red Army. A woman on the staff of one of the armies wrote,
It was an absolutely desperate situation. The Germans were so well equipped. They had motorized divisions. We tried to fight them in the field but they spotted us from the air . . . I felt it was all so hopeless. Yes, I was a convinced communist but for the first time in my life I started praying, crying out to God to help me. I tried to remember my grandmother’s prayers.
A great Russian writer of the war, Viktor Nekrasov, recalled,
The general mood was frightful. The Germans were deep inside Russia, descending like an avalanche on the Don - and where was our front - it did not exist at all . . . When civilians asked our retreating troops where they were going, we could not look them in the eye.
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Retreat they did, which is what saved so many of them, even before Stalin gave permission, retreat back to the lower Don and across to avoid the terror of encirclement.
Hitler transferred his headquarters from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine (codenamed Werewolf), relieved Bock, and began to assume greater control of operations. The heat greatly affected him in the special bunker that had been built for him, and he was short-tempered and even less willing to listen to his commanders than before.
What was actually a fairly well controlled Soviet retreat was in Hitler’s eyes evidence of disintegration and panic, Homer’s ‘comrade of blood-curdling rout’.
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It was then that he was seduced by what he saw as an abundance of riches. The drive towards Stalingrad became secondary to alluring possibilities at Rostov at the mouth of the Don, gateway to the Caucasus. He divided Army Group South into Army Groups A and B. The former under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm List included 11th, 17th, and 1st Panzer Armies. Army Group B, under Weichs, retained 2nd, 6th, and 4th Panzer Armies. So Hitler had flung his forces at the opposite ends of the vast front from Voronezh to Rostov, leaving only 6th Army marching largely on foot in the direction of Stalingrad.
With Hitler’s movement of his headquarters came his entourage of lackeys. Field Marshal von Kluge’s aide, Leutnant Philipp von Boeselager, had accompanied his master to Werewolf and recorded his impressions:
At the table were seated representatives of all the ministries. Although I was surrounded by men in various uniforms, I was one of the genuine military men present. These gaudy outfits and tinny decorations seemed to me worthy of a decadent royal court. What I heard of the conversations was so dreadfully banal that I remember it perfectly.
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Hosting the lunch was Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party and the
éminence grise
of the headquarters. To Boeselager it was instantly apparent that the man was ‘brutal, careless, violent, he was a man who immediately inspired fear’. Bormann was an out-and-out pagan who openly despised all things Christian. He stated, ‘National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.’ Access to Hitler was closely held in Bormann’s hands; he realized that access also put great power in those same hands. It was in his interest to make sure that Hitler had no favourites who did not have to pay obeisance to him. No chief eunuch of any Turkish sultan or Chinese emperor had a better understanding of the power that access gave. It was no wonder he was called the ‘Machiavelli behind the office desk’.
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So disgusted was Boeselager at the conversation and its anti-Catholic vitriol that he got up abruptly and left the room for a smoke and to calm down. Bormann ordered his return and asked why he had left. The young officer said that he had accompanied the field marshal to discuss the fate of his surrounded army at Rzhev but had only heard twaddle at the headquarters. ‘Take this man away,’ Bormann ordered the SS guard. He was locked up, but Kluge snatched him away and hurried him to their plane. He heard him out and said, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough. This time I was able to save you. The next time, you’ll keep your mouth shut. But basically, you’re absolutely right!’
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Chuikov still walked with a cane when he entered Stalingrad Front headquarters with his chief political officer. No one had information, but rumours flew that the Germans were approaching the great bend in the Don, only some 45 miles from Stalingrad. Earlier that month his reserve army had been renamed 64th Army and ordered to the front on the west side of the Don, but the move had been so hurried that vital elements of it were still far away in Tula. His mission was to cover the lower part of the big bend of the Don. He was not encouraged by the state of morale of the neighbouring 62nd Army on his right. He encountered a number of individual soldiers walking east who said that they were ‘looking for someone on the other side of the Volga’; he also intercepted a truck filled with fleeing officers from two of its divisional staffs.
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In everything I could see a lack of firm resistance at the front - a lack of tenacity in battle. It seemed as if everyone, from the army commander downwards, was always ready to make another move backwards . . . When I asked where the Germans were, where their own units were, and where they were going, they could not give me a sensible reply.
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As he was trying to assemble his army, Chuikov found himself replaced by General V. N. Gordov. It had been a trying time for Chuikov; Gordov was doctrinaire, refused to listen to subordinates, and lived in a world of unreality. His nonsensical orders left the army reserves on the east bank of the Don.
Like Voronezh, Rostov, near the Black Sea mouth of the Don,
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was defended as a fortress with unbelievable bitterness by the Soviets. At the implacable heart of the defence were NKVD troops, the fanatical fighting arm of the secret police. As protectors of the regime they had been specially trained in street fighting. One German commander said,
The struggle for the city core of Rostov was struggle without pity. The defenders refused to allow themselves to be captured, fought to the end, fired from concealment when overrun and not discovered or wounded until they were killed. German wounded had to be placed in armoured personnel carriers and guarded. If this was not done we found them later murdered or stabbed.
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Finally the Germans secured the city as the last of the defenders slipped across to the eastern bank of the Don. Now they had the wide river at its mouth as a final barrier against the Germans. The only way across was seemingly impossible to take, the intact bridge over the Don with its strong guard. Now 17th Army’s commander turned to the Brandenburgers, the special operations regiment of the German Army, every man a volunteer.
At 02.30 on 23 July Leutnant Grabert and his company slipped quietly through the dark towards the bridge. Grabert was with the lead squad when the Soviets detected them and opened fire. He rushed forward at the head of his men and overwhelmed the guard, ran across the long span, and set up a bridgehead. For an entire day Grabert and his men held out against vicious counterattacks. When at last they were about to be overrrun, the Stukas came screaming down from the sky to blast away the enemy.
Over the bridge rumbled the tanks of LVII Panzer Corps towards the open plains of the Kuban that led to the Caucasus and beyond to the oilfields of Baku. The tanks rolled past the bodies of Leutnant Grabert and most of his men, and into the Kuban steppe. The road to the Caucasus had been blown wide open.