Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (18 page)

By 7 August the spearheads of the 16th and 24th Panzer Divisions had met on the Don across the river from Kalach. Sixth Army had cut off the forward elements of 62nd and 1st Tank Armies - nine rifle divisions, two motorized and seven tank brigades. It took the Germans another four days to mop up the pockets, bagging 50,000 prisoners, 1,000 armoured vehicles, and 750 guns. Of the 13,000 men the 181st Rifle Division had begun the fight with, barely a hundred were able to escape across the Don. This was just the sort of encirclement that the Germans had been seeking but had so far eluded them. It took another four days to round up all the cut-off Soviet forces. It was almost like beating game as they set fire to the brush to drive them out of hiding. Paulus’s chief engineer, after meeting with his commander, said that ‘The Army was full of hope . . . my eyes met those of Paulus, questioning, almost unbelieving . . . were the Russians finally at the end of their tether?’
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There were still more Russians to deal with on the west bank of the Don. Next Paulus attacked the smaller of the two bridgeheads to the north, but the Soviet armies there were able to avoid encirclement and withdrew across the Don. The fighting had not gone all one way. The Germans had taken heavy losses, the harbinger of more to come. One soldier wrote home, ‘Many, many crosses and graves, fresh from yesterday.’ Paulus’s infantry had marched, fought and bled for the last month. They were exhausted, and there was still farther to go. One pioneer observed hopefully, ‘The only consolation is that we will be able to have peace and quiet in Stalingrad, where we’ll move into winter quarters, and then, just think of it, there’ll be a chance for leave.’
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Major Adrian von Fölkersam was one of those daring men attracted to special operations. The Brandenburg Regiment drew such men like a magnet, and among that elite Fölkersam was one of the best. He was the grandson of a Russian admiral and spoke the language fluently. Now he and the detachment of sixty men he called ‘the Wild Bunch’, Russian-speaking Balts and Germans, were miles behind the lines in the town of Maikop with its surrounding oil wells and refineries. The problem was that the Soviets still held the town and did not seem in any hurry to leave.

The Wild Bunch had arrived in Maikop in a very ordinary way; they drove in dressed in NKVD uniforms. Fölkersam called on the commanding general and introduced himself as Major Turchin from the Stalingrad Front. The general seemed pleased to see someone who had been close to the action and assigned them good quarters in the town. For the next few days the Brandenburgers wandered about coolly, finding out where everything of importance was.

On the evening of 8 August they could hear the rumble of guns to the north. Army Group A was driving south. A Russian officer told Fölkersam that the Germans were only ten miles away. That night he called his men together and issued them their final instructions. He wanted chaos and confusion among the enemy.

In the morning Leutnant Franz Koudele walked into the main military telephone communications office and announced to the officer in charge that Maikop was being abandoned. The officer was not inclined to argue with an NKVD officer and promptly fled with his men. Koudele now found himself connected to every Soviet command in the Caucasus and flooded with messages demanding to know what was going on to the north. ‘We cannot connect you, sir,’ Koudele replied with just the proper tone of anxiety in his voice. ‘Maikop has been abandoned.’
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The panic at the telephone office spread, abetted by the rest of the Brandenburgers, and triggered a Soviet stampede out of town, the general near the front. At the oilfields, Fölkersam’s men stopped the Soviet engineers from destroying the facilities on the authority of the general who had already fled. The engineers then joined the exodus.

That same day 13th Panzer Division of 1st Panzer Army overran the Maikop oilfields and was greeted by Fölkersam who, in a way, gave them the keys to the city. Somewhere behind the advancing columns were 10,000 oil industry workers ready to keep the fields running for Germany.
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The Romanian 3rd Army made good progress working along the coast of the Sea of Azov while 17th Army’s V Corps was locked in bitter fighting to take Krasnodar on the Kuban River. The fighting for this former capital of the Don Cossacks had been bitter. The Germans had reached it on the 10th and met determined Soviet resistance in the orchards and suburbs. There were huge oil refineries around the city of 200,000 people. They went up in flames as the Soviets destroyed everything of value to the Germans while evacuating as much of the population and useful material as possible. They had to hold the bridge over the Kuban in the city centre.

The next day 1st Battalion, 421st Infantry Regiment, had fought its way within 50 yards of the bridge unbeknownst to the Soviets. They watched the tightly packed flow of personnel and equipment crossing the bridge. It looked as if once again the Germans would be able to pull off another daring
coup de main
and seize the crossing. A company commander leapt to his feet pointing his pistol. He took three steps forward and was immediately shot through the head. His men charged. This time the Soviet engineer officer in charge of the bridge was alert. The racing Germans were only 20 yards from the bridge when he blew it.

Without the bridge, it took the Germans until the night of the 13th and 14th to find a way across the river and resume their advance.
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The men of the 5th SS Division
Wiking
at first saw what they thought was a great white cloud sitting in the distance. As they got closer the towering twin summits of Mt Elbrus became clear. Its west peak was the highest point in Europe at 18,510ft. Its permanent icecap fed twenty-two glaciers.

Most of the men of the
Wiking
Division were volunteers from northern Europe who had joined the Germans to help wage their anti-Bolshevik struggle. Of its three motorized regiments,
Germania
was recruited from ethnic Germans,
Westland
from Dutch and Flemish volunteers, and
Nordland
from Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. With them was the Slovak Fast Division (1st Slovak [Mobile] Infantry Division), together forming LVII Panzer Corps.

Behind them came XLIX Mountain Corps with the 1st and 4th Gebirgsjäger Divisions and the three Italian Alpini divisions. Their objective was the Klukhor Pass with the glaciers of Mt Elbrus hanging above. Through the pass ran the Sukhumi Military Highway to the port of Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, which was the southernmost of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet’s remaining three major naval bases.

After the loss of its main base at Sevastopol, the fleet had occupied bases at Novorossiysk, Tuapse, and Sukhumi along the narrow coastal strip below the mountains. Each was also defended by an army, and each was now a target. V Corps was heading to Novorossiysk, the Romanian Mountain Corps was attacking through the foothills of the Caucasus to Tuapse, and XLIX and the Alpini Corps were to open the way to Sukhumi for the Vikings of the SS and the Slovaks. From Sukhumi it was only a hundred miles to the Turkish border at Batumi.

Initially List had planned for LVII Panzer Corps to be the main force in the drive on Tuapse. However, he concluded that it would be wasted there. The Romanians would be enough to fix Soviet forces in that direction. It was not necessary to attack all three Soviet naval bases in strength. His mountain corps would punch through the mountain passes that would give the Germans access to the thin coastal strip and roads to Sukhumi. Take Sukhumi, and the other two bases would be cut off - another great battle of encirclement. Unfortunately, the Gebirgsjäger and Alpini would be spent in simply fighting through the mountains. That’s where LVII Panzer Corps came in as the exploitation force.

While the mountain troops were breaking through the high passes, 1st Panzer Army was to ‘advance parallel to the eastern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains to seize Nal’chik and Mozdok, cross the Terek River, and capture Grozny, the coast of the Caspian Sea near Makhachkala, and ultimately Baku’.
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To help his panzers get through the mountains of southern Chechnya, List assigned to 1st Panzer Army the new LV Mountain Corps.

Already Stalin was pouring reinforcements into the North Caucasus Front commanded by his old crony from the Civil War, Marshal of the Soviet Union Semyon Budenny. They were desperately needed; the front was burnt out and in a shambles. In a report of 13 August to the Stavka, Budenny wrote that of his seven armies four were no longer combat effective, three of them down to fewer than 7,000 bayonets each. Rifle divisions were reduced to 300 to 1,200 bayonets. He complained that the reasons for failing to defend the Kuban were:

He concluded by saying that ‘The Front’s chief mission is to defend the axes to Tuapse and Novorossiysk resolutely. Therefore, it is necessary to resolve [this mission] by means of a solid defence of the mountain defiles that protect Tuapse and Novorossiysk.’
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Nowhere did he mention Sukhumi.

Adding to Budenny’s miseries, Lavrenti Beria descended on the region. The ghoulish head of the NKVD came to spread terror among the native peoples of the Caucasus. The Imperial yoke had been bad enough, but they had writhed under the crueller yoke of Soviet Power. For good reason, Stalin doubted their loyalty, and he sent Beria to use the only tool he knew - terror. Stalin, the Georgian, had no love for these peoples, many of whom were Muslim, especially the Chechens who had raided down into Georgia for centuries before the Russians finally subdued them. Of course Beria’s cruelties accomplished just the opposite of what he had intended. Everywhere the arrival of the Germans was met with rejoicing, gifts of food and cattle, and volunteers, many, many volunteers.

Beria’s ruthlessness had been a pillar of Stalin’s rule as the war threw defeat after defeat at the Red Army. Stalin trusted no one, but Beria’s usefulness had given him a certain protection from Stalin’s paranoia. That did not keep Stalin from keeping a dossier on Beria as a serial rapist and paedophile. You never knew when that might prove useful.
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These were heady days for the Germans; Hitler’s fantastical dreams infected the men of Army Group A as they rolled over the Kuban. The engineers were calculating how much bridging equipment they would need to cross the Nile, and ‘whenever a trooper was asked, “Where’s our next stop?” he would frivolously reply, “Ibn Saud’s palace”.’ The mountain troops joked as they marched over the hot, flat steppe, ‘Down the Caucasus, round the corner, slice the British through the rear, and say to Rommel, “Hello, general, here we are!”’
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Tank crews from
Grossdeutschland
Division took possession of 150 Soviet T-34 medium tanks at the Kharkov Tractor Repair Plant and loaded them onto flat cars. Their destination was the siding at a large former Soviet training centre outside of Rostov.

A week before Hitler had gone back on his decision not to transfer the division to France and convert it to a panzer division. He would send it to France after all. Again Manstein had had to plead with him not to do so and suggested an imaginative alternative.
Grossdeutschland
could be converted in a much shorter time if it were done in theatre and with the Soviet tanks being repaired in Kharkov. At first Hitler was dead set against it.
‘Das ist wanzig, Manstein, heller wanzig
[This is madness, Manstein, sheer madness]! To reequip the iconic division of the German Army with the creations of these
Untermenschen
is completely unacceptable.’

Manstein was all honey and light:

‘No, Manstein, no. It is unacceptable.’

The field marshal had detected a lessening of his Führer’s anger. The appeal to him as a frontline soldier had some effect. Hitler had never hesitated to bring down the General Staff a peg or two by saying that he alone had been in the trenches the way most of them never had been. Only he understood what the average soldier, the
Landser,
was going through. Now for the clincher. ‘You know,
mein Führer,
it would be a delicious irony to use these tanks as nails in the coffin of the Bolsheviks.’ He got his way. To make up the earlier loss of
Leibstandarte,
Hitler agreed to transfer Raus’s 6th Panzer Division from France to be reequipped with Soviet tanks. They could turn over their complement of new German equipment to
Leibstandarte.

As long as the Soviet tanks had not been burnt out or the turret ring damaged, they could be repaired. At the Kharkov plant the tanks had not only been repaired but improved. Each one had been outfitted with a radio as all German tanks were. Instead of just a crank to turn the turret, an electrical system was installed to make engaging a target faster. The German tankers loved the T-34; it was easier to maintain, more heavily armoured and better armed with its high-velocity 76mm gun than even the best of the German tanks, the Mark IV.
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