Hitler's Panzers (32 page)

One more worn-down division was unlikely to have carried III Panzer Corps through the Russians to the far side of the Caucasus and the Turkish frontier. Had 4th Panzer Army been deployed alongside Kleist instead of fed into the Stalingrad blowtorch, the panzers would probably have run out of fuel 300 miles earlier. Had the Caucasus offensive been given logistical priority, the chances for a massively decisive Soviet counterattack against the correspondingly weakened German positions around Stalingrad would have suddenly improved. But had the 16th Motorized been in its doctrinal place, directly supporting the 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions . . . who knows?

SINCE BARBAROSSA’S INCEPTION, the panzers had been considered and used as facilitators, enablers: the military magic that rendered irrelevant historic considerations of prudence and feasibility. Previously the dissonances between mission and material were arguably bridgeable by skill, spirit, and soldier’s luck. In the fall of 1942, Germany’s mobile forces were set tasks that denied illusions. Had 4th Panzer Army been started for Stalingrad in the first place, instead of sent south, its chances for catching the Soviets off guard and getting into the city would have been solid. Sixth Army by itself was unable to move that fast—in good part due to constant fuel shortages. And by the time Hoth’s panzers returned, Stalingrad was in the process of becoming a formidable fortress and a fulcrum for counterattacks that delayed 6th Army even more.

As Franz Halder confronted that fact in the second half of July, he seems to have confronted—finally—three more. Soviet forces had grown beyond Germany’s capacity to destroy them, unless the Soviets repeated mistakes it was clear they were learning to avoid. Hitler’s decision to pursue simultaneous operations in extrinsic directions had overstrained German forces beyond the capacity of any qualitative superiority to compensate. And both Hitler’s confidence in his ability as an operational military leader and his contempt and loathing for a High Command and an officer corps he saw lacking vision and will had grown beyond Halder’s capacity to sway them in any systematic or predictable fashion.

Halder may have decided that the war was lost, and provoked his dismissal in September as an attempt to avoid his share of responsibility. His successor, Kurt Zeitzler, was more in the model of a troop staff officer than a traditional
Generalstabler
(general staffer), and deliberately sought closer contact with Hitler to improve the synergies of policy, planning, and command.

For both Zeitzler and Hitler that meant, in practice, finishing off Stalingrad. Sixth Army had two panzer and two motorized divisions. It took until August 7 to top up their vehicle tanks and fuel trucks. The Fourth Panzer Army, even lower on the fuel chain, moved forward by battle groups. Both armies met determined resistance in terrain handicapping the small-unit maneuvers that gave the panzers an edge over their numerically and materially superior foes. The VIII Air Corps provided its usual effective support—but its aircraft were also responsible for covering 1st Panzer Army. Nevertheless the little flags in the headquarters of both sides kept moving in the same direction: eastward, toward the Volga and Stalingrad.

On August 21, German infantry crossed the Don. Two days later, 16th Panzer Division reached the Volga. On September 2, 4th Panzer Army made contact with 6th Army’s 21st Panzer Division 10 miles west of the city. Mission accomplished—at least the mission indicated in the original version of Operation Blue. The Volga was subject to interdiction. The Fourth Panzer and 6th Armies had established a continuous front before Stalingrad. The Luftwaffe seemed on the way to demolishing the city from above. The Soviets had successfully withdrawn into Stalingrad, but Weichs and 6th Arrmy commander Friedrich von Paulus, who had replaced Reichenau after the latter’s death, believed this was the beginning of the end of organized resistance. To Hitler and the High Command, finishing the job by continuing into the city was preferable to staying in place and resigning the initiative. The third possibility of enveloping the enemy, the option that had squared so many circles since September 1939, did not exist: there was no maneuvering room except across the Volga, and no way across the Volga except through Stalingrad. The operational choice was a stark either-or.

The panzer commanders were more concerned than their superiors about committing to a fight whose nature denied the combined arms coordination and freedom of movement that was the key to their way of war. Summary relief of one recalcitrant corps commander encouraged the rest. On September 14 the German drive to the Volga River began. The panzer and motorized divisions were in the first assault wave, taking increasing levels of responsibility as infantry divisions, already weakened, shrank even further. The nature of the fighting has been described too often to require summarizing here. Also familiar is Hitler’s order on October 6 that made Stalingrad’s complete occupation the primary mission of Army Group A.

That meant using the panzers to destruction. Fourteenth Panzer Division had five tanks left by mid-November; 16th Panzer had two dozen. Twenty-Fourth Panzer Division, the former cavalrymen, clawed its way to the Volga by the end of September and brought the Soviet landing stage under fire. It had 34 tanks on October 17. A month later, it was down to a dozen; at the end, it counted only a couple of tanks and a few hundred men.

One of the division’s reports expressed outraged common sense. Using panzers in urban combat was an emergency measure: “House rubble, bomb craters, narrow streets, minefields, barriers, and barricades greatly reduce mobility and ability to see . . .” Not having the armor protection of assault guns, tanks were best used to support infantry attacks as opposed to leading them, and were kept as a local reserve in defense. Regiments and battalions were not suitable for employment in cities. Platoons or sections, five tanks or fewer, were the standard. Even then second thoughts were appropriate—especially about committing tanks to work with infantry untrained in cooperating with them.

ON AUGUST 26, Stalin bit a bullet of his own and appointed Zukhov his deputy supreme commander. Zukhov typified a new generation of Red Army generals: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything to crush the Germans, and not inhibited by threats from either front or rear. He shared his superior’s conviction that Stalingrad must be held—but in a strategic context. The summer of ripostes was over. Since September, Stavka, urged on by Zukhov, had been developing plans for a decisive winter campaign involving two major operations, each with two stages. Mars would be launched in mid-October against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto relatively quiet front of Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. It would be followed in two or three weeks by Jupiter, an attack in the Bryansk sector to the south intended to link up with Mars and shatter Army Group Center. Uranus would begin in mid-November and involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed and extended by Saturn, a larger double envelopment that would finish off whatever remained of Army Group B and isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus.

Described for years in Soviet literature as no more than a diversion, Mars was in fact a complement to Uranus, a double penetration intended to put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was to say the least an ambitious strategy for an army still on the road back from the seismic shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold.

Hold the Soviets did, in an epic defense that reduced the city to a wilderness of rubble, smoke, and ash; a battle whose ferocity surpassed anything the Germans had ever experienced. As the mobile units were compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, colonels and majors led from the front, hoping inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Instead Stalingrad became the domain of the assault gun.

The modified Panzer IIIs had already proven their disproportionate worth time and again with Army Groups North and Center during the summer, in sectors that were “quiet” only by comparison. Volunteers cut off from a parent branch, whose guns were still horse- and tractor-drawn, shuffled as army troops from division to division, the Sturmgeschütz-Abteilungen developed a self-image as buccaneering adventurers, successors to the sixteenth century’s Landsknechts. Colorful unit insignia and colorful nicknames—“Buffalo,” “Greyhound,” “Tiger,” “Unicorn”—proclaimed an attitude that was eroding in other parts of the army. Their official uniform was standard field gray, but when on pass or furlough not a few of the gunners decked themselves out in panzer black. “L/24s or L/42s, shorthorns or longhorns, we were the fighting bulls!” reminisced one old-time assault gunner. “ ‘An Iron Cross or a wooden cross,’ we’d joke going into a fight,” recalled another. Bravado? Perhaps. But with tanks in short supply, assets to be husbanded for major emergencies, the assault gunners restored many a position and turned back many an attack.

In the process they developed a new specialty as tank killers. The assault gun’s low silhouette was a positive advantage against opponents still learning how to read terrain. Having to aim the gun by pointing the vehicle was less of a problem in defense when targets came to you, and in large numbers unsupported by infantry. In Stalingrad there remained plenty of standard assault work to do, helping the infantry forward as they ground into the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the Volga. The price was high. Four assault-gun battalions fought in Stalingrad. One had only two of its original officers left by September. Another was down to two guns when the encirclement was complete. A third had so few survivors that it was impossible to reconstruct the details of its fight and finish.

Weichs fed Paulus’s calls for more of everything by replacing German troops north and south of Stalingrad with Romanians and Italians. That gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had been able to regain the initiative. Instead the panzers in Stalingrad were “demodernizing,” losing the ability to fight anything but the close-quarters battle of attrition they had been created to avert. Even then Vasily Chuikov, Soviet commander in Stalingrad and as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, spoke of an inexplicable force driving the Germans. It was a last flash of the fighting power that had carried the panzers through Europe, across North Africa, and into the heart of Russia. In mid-November the tide turned.

Stavka had held its hand for a month, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. A million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft, 14,000 guns—all of it went undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures and by its own belief that the Red Army was as locked into Stalingrad as the German. On November 19 two tank-headed sledgehammers struck the Romanian armies holding the flanks of the Stalingrad salient. On November 23, the Soviet spearheads met at Kalach, 50 miles west of Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement.

Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have frequently argued that 6th Army should have withdrawn immediately, with orders or without them. But the Germans were locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. The maneuver-war mentality in the headquarters of what was a foot-marching army had declined after two months of static operations. So had the resources—above all tanks and fuel—to support a fighting retreat against superior numbers in midwinter. And at the back of many minds was the question of the wounded. Evacuating them would encumber what had to be a fast-paced strike in order to have any chance of success. As for leaving them—after 18 months, awareness of German treatment of Soviet prisoners and civilians was sufficiently widespread to make the option a nonstarter for all but the most callous.

Hitler’s proposal to relieve Stalingrad from outside thus merely reinforced an attitude widespread in 6th Army. If it could be done at all, the panzers would have to do it. Most general accounts focus on the relief operation and its failure. In fact the German mobile forces had a threefold challenge between November and January. One involved keeping Operation Uranus, and eventually Operation Mars, from eviscerating the entire German position in Russia. A second involved withdrawing from a Caucasus front that was clearly no longer sustainable. Should either of those operations fail, the third challenge, successfully relieving Stalingrad, would do no more than present both what remained of 6th Army and its would-be rescuers to the Russians on the serving-dish of an ever-lengthening salient.

Fourth Panzer Army had escaped being encircled, but most of its divisions had already been sent to 6th Army. Hoth nevertheless began organizing a relief force. It was an exercise in making bricks without straw. His 16th Motorized Division, returned from its Caspian excursion with a stray greyhound as a mascot and the appropriate nickname of “greyhound division,” was more or less sustaining the link with Army Group A. In the Russian breakthrough’s northern half, a German panzer corps controlled 1st Romanian Armored Division and 22nd Panzer Division. Both were used up plugging ephemeral holes, with the 22nd taking such heavy losses it was disbanded in January. Kleist had been given command of Army Group A on November 21, and the High Command hoped to bring back at least some of his panzers for the Stalingrad operation. Most of them were, however, far away at the toe of the Caucasian sock. They were also needed to cover a retreat, finally authorized by Hitler on December 28, that could not afford to be conducted too rapidly lest it collapse into a rout of the sorely tried Germans. Eventually Hoth would acquire Kleist’s 23rd Panzer Division, with fewer than three dozen tanks and an overall effectiveness so reduced it was rated only “conditionally suitable” for attacks, even by the desperate standards of December 1942. After six months of fighting, that was all the southern front could provide for the most crucial offensive of the war to date.