The Road to Berlin (4 page)

Stalin raised no objection to these proposals. Vatutin and Golikov were now to get down to detailed operational planning, so that all plans could be submitted, scrutinized and approved by early December. The reinforcements would be forthcoming, and the General Staff would report separately on the movement of these units. To free Vatutin for
Saturn
, Chistyakov’s 21st Army with 26th and
4th Tank Corps, would be handed over to the Don Front for operations along the inner encirclement. Even more important, Vasilevskii would be free to devote his full attention to reducing ‘the ring’—on this, Stalin was emphatic:

Enemy forces encircled at Stalingrad must be liquidated.… That is an extremely important matter.… Mikhailov [Vasilevskii] must concentrate on that task alone. As for the preparations for operation
Saturn
, let Vatutin and Kuznetsov get busy with that. Moscow will help them. [
IVOVSS
, 3, p. 43.]

At this point Stalin nursed the highest hopes of decisive strategic success against the whole southern wing of the German armies, but everything depended on a rapid reduction of the encircled Sixth Army in order to free Soviet troops for the new offensive operations. Time and time again Stalin urged rapid ‘liquidation’ on the
Stavka
officers and Front commanders, and early in December he became utterly demanding in this matter. He had meanwhile built up a special and extremely powerful reserve which he apparently intended to loose against Rostov when the situation turned in his favour—the 2nd Guards Army, formed from the 1st Reserve Army in the Tambov-Morshansk area under the
Stavka
order of 23 October. This new formation was one of the most formidable in the Red Army, and now received orders to move to the Stalingrad area at top speed; Malinovskii, formerly a deputy commander of the Voronezh Front, took over the army command from Kreizer (who remained as deputy commander). Biryuzov had been summoned at two hours’ notice from 48th Army to take over as chief of staff. But very shortly 2nd Guards was at the centre of a major Soviet dilemma, whom to strike down first—Paulus in his huge, bristling ‘hedgehog’, or Manstein who was leading the de-blockading force?

On 21 November Manstein had been ordered south from Vitebsk to take over ‘Army Group Don’, which would include Fourth
Panzer
Army, Sixth Army and 3rd and 4th Rumanian Armies; Army Group B comprised 8th Italian, 2nd Hungarian and Second German Armies. When at the end of the month Army Group Don, standing now between Army Group B and A, took over the Don-Volga area, the situation looked bleak, though at the time of Manstein’s assumption of his new command a moment of relative calm had settled. The situation between the Don and the Chir had been momentarily stabilized and the line presently held by
Armeeabteilung Hollidt
, formed from units scratched up on the Chir. Out of the wave of men swept down by the first Soviet attacks, Colonel of
Panzertruppen
Wenck had formed ‘screens’ made up of motley units assembled from the roadsides and headquarters. Manstein used the Wenck-Hollidt group to bar the way on the Don-Chir front against any Soviet attack against Rostov. He also proposed to use General Hollidt’s
Armeeabteilung
in an attack on Kalach to burst into the Stalingrad ‘ring’; while from the south
Armeegruppe Hoth
(with XLVII
Panzer
Corps) would attack from Kotelnikovo in the direction of the Stalingrad ‘ring’, to roll up the western or southern Soviet encirclement. In the event, Operation
Wintergewitter
(‘Winter Tempest’) was mounted by
Armeegruppe
Hoth
from the south with 232 tanks;
Armeeabteilung Hollidt
was also to have struck out for Stalingrad, but remained pinned down by ceaseless Soviet attacks. On 2 December, Manstein and Hoth considered the final plan for the break-in from the south, an attack west of the railway line running from Kotelnikov–Shutovo–Abganerovo after taking the line of the river Aksai; after the elimination of Soviet forces between the Aksai and the Myshovka, they were to advance north-eastwards in order to make contact with Sixth Army south-west of Tundotov railway station. The attack was provisionally fixed for 8 December, but the
Panzer
divisions had still not reached their positions and at this time rain made the going difficult. Col.-Gen. Hoth nevertheless finally decided to attack on 12 December, irrespective of whether or not 17th
Panzer
Division had arrived to fill out XLVII
Panzer
Corps.

At the beginning of December, the German command had managed to establish a strong circular defence for the encircled Sixth Army and had momentarily halted Soviet troops on the outer encirclement; more than half the available Soviet strength was tied down on the inner encirclement holding Sixth Army. The liquidation of Sixth Army had been assigned primarily to the Don Front and to 62nd, 64th and 57th Armies of the Stalingrad Front; on 27 November, 21st Army and its supporting tank corps was assigned to the Don Front, and Col.-Gen. Vasilevskii ordered by Stalin to supervise the elimination of ‘the pocket’. On 30 November Vasilevskii issued a revised version of his earlier orders for operations against Sixth Army’s ‘hedgehog’—the Don and Stalingrad Fronts were to attack from the south, west and north-east, once again with the object of splitting the pocket and joining up in Gumrak; the main attack would be delivered from west to east. The Don Front would attack with 21st, 6th and 24th Armies along the river Rossoshka-Borodin line on 2 December, to link up at Alekseyevka; the Stalingrad Front would secure the operation from the south, thus splitting the main enemy force in the Marinovka–Karpovka–Bolshaya Rossoshka–Gumrak area. Yeremenko selected Alekseyevka as the axis of his main attack to be launched by 62nd and 64th Armies. He duly attacked on 2 December and Rokossovskii attacked two days later, but five days of bloody fighting brought no sign of the pocket being cracked open and split. Stalin, along with the
Stavka
officers, only now realized the extent and resilience of the force trapped in the Stalingrad pocket, which would have to be broken up by sledgehammer blows—such as 2nd Guards could provide.

From Don Front
HQ
at Zavarykin, Col.-Gen. Vasilevskii had already reported to Stalin on 4 December that the inner encirclement needed drastic reinforcement before it could reduce Sixth Army in its positions. Stalin thereupon ordered Vasilevskii, Rokossovskii and Yeremenko to prepare a fresh offensive operation that must be ready not later than 18 December. To strengthen the assault, Malinovskii’s 2nd Guards would be released to the Don Front, while the junction of the Stalingrad and South-Western Fronts would be strengthened by setting up a new army, 5th Shock, to be introduced between 5th Tank and 51st Armies.
Lt.-Gen. M.M. Popov, one of Yeremenko’s deputy commanders, would take command of 5th Shock Army, established from 10th Reserve Army and made up from 7th Tank Corps (from
Stavka
reserve), 300th, 315th, 87th Rifle Divisions and 4th Mechanized Corps (from Yeremenko’s front), 4th Guards, and 258th Rifle Division plus 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps (from Vatutin’s front). Malinovskii’s 2nd Guards was especially powerful: three corps (1st Guards, 13th Guards Rifle Corps, 2nd Guards Mechanized Corps), three divisions in the rifle corps, three mechanized brigades in the mobile corps, manned largely by experienced Guards troops. Malinovskii and his staff flew from the rear areas to the Don Front, while the men and equipment of 2nd Guards followed in 165 trains due to unload north-west of Stalingrad. The first units began arriving on 10 December and made for the concentration area of Vertyachii–Peskatovka, the tough Siberians and well-trained units of the Far Eastern command now all welded into the 2nd Guards. Both Yeremenko and Rokossovskii had been told in telephone messages from Vasilevskii during the night of 4–5 December of the arrival of fresh forces for the inner encirclement front, and both Front commanders had specific orders to work out new attack plans incorporating 2nd Guards. Malinovskii himself took part in the meeting of the Don Front Military Soviet which assembled on 8 December to decide on the employment of the new formation, and the next day Stalin had the revised plans submitted for his inspection.

This new plan envisaged a three-stage operation to split up and then to annihilate Sixth Army: the first stage would use Don Front troops—basically 2nd Guards—to destroy the four German infantry divisions west of the river Rossosh; the second stage would use Don Front troops in an operation aimed south-eastwards on Voroponovo, for which the 64th Army of the Stalingrad Front would also strike (isolating and destroying the southern sector of the pocket); the third stage would be a general assault by all the armies of the Don and the Stalingrad Fronts committed to the inner encirclement, aimed at Gumrak. These proposals were submitted on the morning of 9 December to the
Stavka
, after which Vasilevskii left for an inspection of 5th Tank and 51st Army lines at the outer encirclement, where a critical situation was building up as more and more reports filtered in of German concentrations obviously gathering for a breakthrough operation to relieve Sixth Army. As for the plan to reduce the pocket, Operation
Koltso
(‘Ring’), Stalin insisted on only marginal alterations, mainly to telescope the first two stages, a modification stipulated in his signal of 11 December to Vasilevskii
(VIZ
, 1966 (1), p. 25):

Comrade Mikhailov
Strictly Personal

1.Operation Koltso will proceed in two stages.

2.First stage—break-in to area Basargino, Voroponovo and liquidation of western and southern groupings of the enemy.

3.Second stage—general assault by all armies of both fronts for liquidation of main body of enemy troops to west and north-west of Stalingrad.

4.Operations in the first stage to begin no later than that date fixed in telephone conversation between Vasiliev [Stalin] and Mikhailov [Vasilevskii].

5.Operations in the first stage to finish no later than 23 December.

11 December 1942, 0020 hours
VASILIEV [Stalin]

But events precipitated by Manstein’s breakthrough attack overtook this plan, and both
Koltso
and
Saturn
underwent major revision once
Armeegruppe Hoth
went over to the attack at Kotelnikovo as the darkness gathered on 12 December.

Both German and Soviet commanders raced the clock. On the Soviet side, although the attack plans for Operation
Saturn
had been submitted by Golikov and Vatutin by the end of November and approved by the
Stavka
on 2 December, Col.-Gen. Voronov (who acted as
Stavka
‘co-ordinator’ of these two fronts for the operation aimed at Rostov) was forced to seek a postponement of the attack due to open on 10 December. To allow time for final preparations and troop movements,
Saturn
would now unroll on 16 December. While this was the first significant departure from the ‘timetable’ set up in the Stalin-Vasilevskii conversation of 7 November, the second was the failure of Romanenko’s 5th Tank Army to clear German forces from the lower Chir (the German salient which jutted towards Stalingrad and reduced the distance between the Soviet inner and outer encirclement to a mere twenty miles). The capture of Tormosin and Mozorovsk was intended as a prelude to
Saturn
to isolate Paulus fully from the south-east and to establish good jumping-off positions for an advance on Tatsinskaya, Likhaya—and then Rostov. Once in Likhaya, the Red Army would have a stranglehold on a vital rail communications centre for Army Group Don; at Rostov, the trap would close over the million men of Army Group A stranded in the Caucasus. Wiping out the German troops in the Chir salient would also affect the inner encirclement, since the ‘isolation’ of Paulus would then be fully secured, at least by the reckoning of the Soviet command.

Romanenko had opened his attack on 30 November along a front of some thirty miles on the Oblivskaya–Rychkovskii sector, with 50,000 men, 900 guns and mortars and 72 tanks. His objective was a line running from Mozorovsk to Loznoi (twenty-five miles south-east of Mozorovsk), to be reached by 5 December. To reinforce 5th Tank Army, four rifle divisions had already been stripped from the inner encirclement (from 21st and 65th Armies); along the attack sector Romanenko deployed six rifle divisions, two cavalry corps, one tank corps, a tank brigade and eight artillery regiments. On the morning of 2 December, 5th Tank Army attacked after a thirty-minute artillery barrage. This was the prelude to a full week of very heavy fighting that precipitated a severe crisis for Manstein, aware that the lower Chir had to be held at almost any cost and with it the one bridge over the Don at Verkhne-Chirskaya. There was nothing for it but to use XLVIII
Panzer
Corps to hold this front.

The Soviet response to stiffening resistance on the Chir front was to form the 5th Shock Army to bolster 5th Tank; Popov’s shock army, its divisions drawn
from the South-Western and Stalingrad Fronts (plus 7th Tank Corps under Maj.-Gen. Rotmistrov from the
Stavka
reserve), numbered 71,000 men, 252 tanks and 814 guns (in all, five rifle divisions, one tank, one mechanized and one cavalry corps). On the edge of Yeremenko’s outer encirclement was 51st Army, 34,000 men with 77 tanks, three rifle divisions (302nd, 96th, 126th), 13th Tank Corps, 4th Cavalry Corps and 76th UR ‘garrison troops’. (To the south lay 28th Army with 44,000 men, 40 tanks, and 707 guns and mortars.) What Vasilevskii sought to establish at once after his inspection of the junction between South-Western and Stalingrad Fronts was the whereabouts of the divisions earmarked for 5th Shock Army (87th, 300th and 315th Rifle Divisions), as well as those of 7th Tank Corps. The whole of the next day, 10 December, he spent with 51st, 5th Shock and left-flank units of 5th Tank Army, estimating Soviet effectiveness and gathering intelligence of German strength and movements. Army Group Don’s strength was set at thirty divisions, seventeen of which faced the South-Western Front, 13th, 5th Shock and 51st Armies of Stalingrad Front; in front of 5th Shock were units of XLVIII
Panzer
Corps (and prisoner interrogation indicated that 17th
Panzer
Division was in reserve at Tormosin), while ten divisions (six of them Rumanian) were ahead of 51st Army.