Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History (37 page)

After night had fallen Raus’s and Hörnlein’s divisions stopped only long enough to resupply their ammunition and top off their fuel. After midnight they moved out. ‘Only the pale light of the stars made it possible to identify, at very close range, the dim outlines of the tanks and their dark trail in the thin layer of snow.’ Raus knew that he was going to engage the 16th Tank Corps some time that day. It would be far better if he could arrange the terms rather than let the enemy commander have a say. The way to do that was to take something that would attract the enemy to him like iron filings to a magnet. The village of Verkhne-Tsaritsynski answered perfectly. Roads led out of it in all four directions, and although the Soviets were smart enough not to garrison it and make it a target, in German hands it would be like a bone in the throat.

The outlines of the village were just becoming visible as the morning mist, which had cloaked the German advance, lifted. A reconnaissance detachment found it empty, and the reinforced 11th Panzer Regiment and attached units forming a
Kampfgruppe
rolled forward, commanded by the redoubtable Colonel Walther von Hünersdorff, one of the most talented and aggressive officers of the panzer corps. Then suddenly the scouts at another point reported, ‘There is a heavy concentration of hostile tanks in a broad depression south of here. More tanks are following.’ The Soviet tanks started to emerge from the depression but were immediately knocked out by panzers that had lined some low hills surrounding it. The Soviet tanks withdrew. Then the panzers sprang forward to line the depression and fire down into the enemy tank concentration. The Soviets assumed an all-around defence and fired back. Within half an hour it was over and nothing remained of the Soviet brigade but a tank graveyard for seventy burning vehicles.

MAP №11 ‘MANSTEIN IS COMING’ 8 NOVEMBER 1942

As the battle in the depression raged, another Soviet tank brigade coming from the north attempted to come to the rescue just as the tail of 11th Panzer Regiment entered the village. The attached panzergrenadiers, antitank units, and engineers were able to take over the defence of the village, leaving the panzers for mobile defence. A third enemy tank brigade was seen coming from the west to join the battle. Both the German and Russian commanders were broadcasting in the clear because of the need for quick action. But it was the Germans who were faster off the mark and more tactically nimble. The German radio intercept reported to Hünersdorff the Russian message, ‘Motorized brigade on the way; hold out, hold out!’ He attacked the brigade coming from the east and sought to turn its flanks. The Russian commander kept lengthening his own front, but kept suffering heavy losses from the accurate German crossfire. Finally, he withdrew down a sunken road, sacrificing his rearguard and leaving forty tanks on the field.

Part of what the Germans were intercepting were the frantic conversations between the commanders of the two tank corps. Major General Maslov, commanding 16th Tank Corps, was begging Butkov for help. Butkov whose 1st Tank Corps was now sparring with
Grossdeutschland,
was reluctant. Maslov pleaded, ‘I’ve lost two tank brigades already. The enemy will break through if I don’t get any reinforcements.’ Maslov was running up against a divided command. He reported to Rokossovsky while Butkov reported to Vatutin. By the time that got sorted out, 6th Panzer was burning out the last elements of Maslov’s corps. Into that battle Butkov now sent two of his four brigades.
¹²

The Soviets were committing numerically superior forces to the battle but piecemeal. Using his panzergrenadiers, engineers and antitank units to hold the village, the German colonel manoeuvred his tanks to strike one enemy brigade after another with superior numbers. From radio intercepts and air reconnaissance he knew the tank brigade from the west would take an hour to reach the field while the mechanized brigade was approaching the village. He directed the main body of his panzers through a depression that brought them onto the Russian rear. The tank battalion of the brigade was quickly shot up, causing the motorized battalions to veer off and escape to the northwest. The last Soviet brigade, arriving after the defeat of the mechanized brigade, ran straight into the reconcentrated panzers. A bitter duel took place in which the Russian tanks, which had advanced without cover, suffered brutal losses.

Still another mechanized brigade was attacking, but Hünersdorff struck it in the flank so quickly it could not change front. The tank battalion of thirty tanks was destroyed, and the motorized infantry fled. From the west, the tank brigade finally arrived and with motorized infantry broke into the village, overrunning a 105mm gun battery and a number of antitank guns. German engineers with antitank mines rushed the T-34s and took them out one at a time.

Now Hünersdorff played his trump. He threw in his panzer reserve to counterattack the enemy’s flank, which quickly folded. Then those panzers that had been in the defence also went over into the attack, closing to very short range. The Soviets fought hard but all of a sudden, like a receding tide, they flooded back, leaving a mass of wrecked and burning tanks in their wake. The 16th Tank Brigade had been burned out. Maslov did not live to report his failure, but Butkov’s brigades were still on the way, and Rokossovsky had thrown in the 66th Army’s separate tank brigade as well.
¹³

Hünersdorff’s victory had come at the cost of leaving his panzergrenadiers and others to hold off more attacks on the village by tanks and motorized infantry. He was shocked to get a message from an officer in the village asking permission to abandon it. The reply was an emphatic no, but the situation had reached a crisis point. The troops in the village were almost out of ammunition. For hours as Hünersdorff’s panzers had parried one tank attack after another, the Soviets had been attacking the village. German antitank gunners and engineers with shaped charges had knocked out tank after tank that had barged into the village. Again and again, the Germans had thrown back each infantry assault, but now they were at the end of their resources, and there seemed no end of Russians.

The
Kampfgruppe
commander looked at his exhausted
Panzertruppen.
The men had been in constant and desperate action for many hours. He leaned out of his tank turret and screamed in rage at the men, ‘You want to be my regiment? Is this what you call an attack? I am ashamed of this day!’

That provoked just the response he had intended. The panzer crews were so infuriated at the colonel’s insult that it was like a shot of adrenalin for each man. He ordered that they break into the village, ‘at maximum speed whatever the losses’. They attacked with such fury, spraying their machine-gun fire in every direction, that the Russians were unnerved and fled across the steppe.
¹⁴

Even now the Germans could not rest. Butkov’s and Rokossovky’s brigades were converging on them. Out of ammunition and with very many wounded loaded onto the tanks, Hünersdorff withdrew his
Kampfgruppe.
The Russians converged on the village in triumph, their tanks wending their way through scores of other burning Soviet tanks and over the bodies of their own motorized infantry. It was a Pyrrhic victory. They held a meaningless village, but it had cost them most of a tank corps. The Germans had thirty tanks knocked out but were able to recover almost every one before they withdrew. Panzergruppe
Hünersdorff
and the rest of 6th Panzer had lived to fight another day. That was the essence of Manstein’s elastic concept of battle on a tactical level. Holding terrain is not important; killing the enemy in large numbers is. Trading one to achieve the other was the essence of the art of war. As such it earned the ultimate accolade of the army group commander for 6th Panzer.

To the west Hörnlein was making easier progress against 1st Tank Corps, weakened as it was by sending two of its four brigades to help Maslov. Infantry were streaming in from Lyapichev; Butkov fed them into the fight, holding his own tanks back for counterattack. To his distress,
Grossdeutschland
was crushing them in its advance. Butkov commented bitterly to his deputy, ‘the Germans are spitting out our infantry like sunflower seed shells’, referring to the way Russians would eat a mouthful of seeds and be able to spit out a stream of shells.

On the ground it was less colourful and more brutal. German Private Alfred Novotny found himself in his baptism of combat, a recent replacement. He watched in stunned amazement as the artillery roared its preparation for the assault. Stukas followed to dive into the attack. Panzers were arriving adding to ‘the smoke, the noise, and the confusion’. He could think only of school and old friends as fear seeped through him.

Then the signal for the attack was given:

Novotny felt something shift under him. It was not the dirt but the face of a young, dead Russian soldier:

Just as Butkov was preparing his counterattack against Hörnlein’s penetration, Hoth unleashed the last of his panzers to break out of the encirclement. General der Panzertruppen Werner Kempf, commander of XLVIII Panzer Corps, was in overall command of the breakout effort. His force was such an amalgam of survivors that it was called Kampfgruppe
Kempf
rather than by any unit name. It included barely fifty operational tanks, a regiment’s worth of panzergrenadiers (out of the six that had belonged to the XIV and XLVIII Panzer Corps), engineers, flak and antitank elements. Attached also was the
Hoch-und Deutschmeister,
in the strength of a weak regiment, all that was left of the 44th Infantry Division. Every gun within range fired as part of an intense barrage, most using up what little ammunition they had left.

The artillery fell on the 14th Guards Rifle Division defending the inner side of the encirclement. The division had only arrived the day before in a special convoy of American trucks stripped from the supply services to exploit 1st Tank Army’s crossing of the Don and seizure of Lyapichev. The Soviet Guards were frantically trying to turn every ripple or depression in the ground into a defence position when the artillery struck them. Bodies flew into the air or were torn apart like rag dolls, antitank guns were broken and twisted, and the Russian batteries were decimated. Yet the surviving Soviets hung on and waited for the Germans.

As the German panzers had ground through the outer encirclement belt, frantic calls up the chain of command had led to Vatutin going over into an all-out attack to break into the pocket before the Germans could break out. Such an attack would prevent the encircled Germans from concentrating enough force to break out. He had not reckoned enough on Seydlitz’s single-minded determination not to remain passive about his own fate.

Nevertheless, Vatutin’s attacks were wearing down 6th Army’s exhausted divisions. With its artillery concentrated on supporting the break-out, 6th Army had little with which to oppose 21st and 5th Tank Armies’ attacks. Only the Luftwaffe could fill the gap, but every aircraft was committed to supporting the breakthrough. At that moment when Vatutin’s armies were cracking open the pocket in the north, Kampfgruppe
Kempf
flung itself south at the 14th Guards.

The soldiers of the 14th Guards were veterans, and their political officers had been hammering home that they were the only thing standing between the German 6th Army and escape. Now was the time to hold firm and extract a bloody vengeance for the sufferings of the Motherland. Their comrades dead about them, half their antitank guns destroyed, and their artillery shattered, they hung on. Rolling towards them were men motivated by a similar determination, but this one was fuelled by desperation. Every weapon the Soviets had left opened up as the panzers flew at them in a wedge formation. To their right came the
Hoch- und Deutschmeister,
men even more desperate and determined than the panzer crews. They had been through one harrowing retreat and were fed up with being hounded by the Russians. This time Ivan was on the receiving end.