How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

14 STALINGRAD

THE STALINGRAD CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA IN 1942 IS ONE OF THE MOST POIGNANT examples ever recorded of a ruler engineering his own destruction.

When the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, protested the self-defeating operations, Hitler removed him. Only in the late stages when the German 6th Army had been isolated and a quarter of a million men were about to be lost was Erich von Manstein able to induce Hitler to grant just enough leeway to keep the entire southern wing of the German army from being destroyed as well.

After Stalingrad, Germany surrendered the initiative in Russia. Hitler never could summon enough strength thereafter to alter the balance of power against him. Despite heroic efforts by his soldiers, he had doomed himself to the slow, inevitable destruction of his army and his regime.

Two elements of the 1942 campaign stand out. First, Hitler committed the oldest and most obvious mistake in warfare: he neglected the principle of concentration and split his efforts between capturing Stalingrad on the Volga River and seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus. Either task would have been enough for his gravely weakened army. It was madness to attempt both, since the two thrusts diverged in different directions over hundreds of miles, leaving insufficient strength in either arena. The Red Army seized the opportunity, stopped both offensives, and concentrated against the closest danger, Stalingrad.

This brought on the second element of the campaign: Hitler, instead of being satisfied with an advance to the Volga and interdicting traffic on the river, which had been his stated aim, insisted on 6th Army capturing the city itself. This forced it to concentrate in the built-up area at the end of an extremely deep salient, offering the Russians an invitation to lock 6th Army in place by launching a street-by-street urban battle. As this titanic hand-to-hand clash went on, the Soviets assembled armies on the long, weakly held defensive lines on either flank, unleashed a powerful counteroffensive, and surrounded 6th Army.

Russian preparations for this counteroffensive were unmistakable. Yet Hitler refused to allow 6th Army to withdraw, and—because he had committed his other forces to the Caucasus—had insufficient troops to strengthen either flank of the salient.

Well before the Russians actually launched their counterstrike on November 19, 1942, the battle for the city had been lost. After 6th Army was encircled, Hitler refused to marshal strength from less-threatened theaters to break through the Russian ring and free the trapped army. The forces made available to Manstein, who was saddled with the job, were too few and arrived too late.

In the end, Manstein could not save 6th Army, and had to expend his skill and troops to keep an even greater Stalingrad from being created by a thrust of the Red Army to Rostov, where it could cut off Manstein’s army group and the army group in the Caucasus.

At every stage Hitler made disastrous decisions—dividing his army in the first place, insisting on seizure of Stalingrad, refusing to allow 6th Army to retreat, failing to go all out to save the army once it had been surrounded, and refusing to heed evidence that the Russians were about to isolate the two army groups in the far south.

By 1943 the incapacity of Adolf Hitler as a commander was revealed for all to see. This showed Red Army generals not only that he could be beaten, but how he could be beaten. And it proved to senior German officers that, since Hitler would not listen to them, there was little chance of a stalemate, and the Allies would almost surely insist on total subjugation of Germany.

The German army in the east (Ostheer) came out of the winter of 1941–1942 with 2.4 million men on the front, counting replacements, more than 600,000 fewer than had started the campaign in June 1941. The situation was worst among infantrymen, whose numbers had fallen 50 percent in the south and 65 percent in the center and north. This weaker army had to defend a line that, since Hitler prohibited straightening out loops and protuberances, wove in and out for 2,800 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The quantity of German weapons was declining as well. Tank production was below 600 units a month. When Halder told Hitler Soviet tank manufacture was more than three times as great, Hitler slammed the table and said it was impossible. “He would not believe what he did not want to believe,” Halder wrote in his diary.

At least the Mark IV tanks had been rearmed with long-barreled high-velocity 75-millimeter guns and could meet the Soviet T-34s on better terms. But nearly a third of the artillery pieces were old French cannons, the number of combat-ready aircraft had fallen to half what it had been in June 1941, while shortages of fuel and ammunition were great and growing.

In the early spring, special operations removed dangerous Soviet penetrations and freed a number of German forces that had been surrounded.

Manstein launched a surprise thrust in the Kerch peninsula of the Crimea, May 8–18, which shattered three Russian armies and yielded 169,000 prisoners. This induced the Russians, under Semen K. Timoshenko, to make a premature diversionary attack in the Kharkov region to the north, giving the Germans an opportunity to thrust into their flank in the Donetz region. These battles, May 17–22, used up a great part of the Soviet forces from the Volga to the Don. The Germans captured 239,000 men, and destroyed more than a thousand tanks and two thousand cannons.

Manstein opened a third offensive against the Crimean fortress of Sevastopol on June 7, a gruesome confrontation that lasted three weeks. After storming Soviet positions, Germans captured 97,000 enemy soldiers, but 100,000 got away on ships of the Soviet Black Sea fleet.

Soviet morale declined from these defeats, and Stalin commenced a new drive to get the western Allies to establish a second front to draw off German forces. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed an alliance with Britain on May 26, but this brought no guarantees and not many supplies.

Although army chief of staff Franz Halder tried to get Hitler to remain on the defensive in 1942, Hitler insisted on a summer offensive in the south (Operation Blue). Hitler called for Army Group South under Fedor von Bock to advance in two directions—eastward across the Don to Stalingrad on the Volga with one army, and southward to the oil fields of the Caucasus with four.

The campaign opened on June 28, 1942. Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army with two armored corps (800 tanks and self-propelled assault guns) achieved complete surprise, broke through the Russian lines, and seized Voronezh in a few days. The army then swung southeast down the west bank of the Don through ideal tank country—open rolling plains, dry and hard from summer drought, broken occasionally by deep valleys in which villages were tucked away. Infantry divisions attacked simultaneously and secured the flanks and rear of the armor. Hoth hoped to trap many Russians in the great bend of the river.

While Hoth’s fast troops rolled down the Don, 17th Army (Richard Ruoff) and 1st Panzer Army (Ewald von Kleist) seized Rostov on July 23.

Nevertheless, Russian commanders were able to withdraw numerous divisions across the Don south of Rostov and at Kalach, forty-five miles west of Stalingrad. Hitler blamed Bock and removed him from command.

Hitler now made an irretrievable error. He had concluded, because of the initial success of the offensive, that Soviet strength had been broken, and diverted Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army south to help Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army cross the lower Don to open a path to the Caucasus.

“It could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July,” Kleist said after the war. “I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again, a fortnight later, the Russians had gathered sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.”

Panzer leader Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin voiced the opinion of nearly all senior officers in this campaign. When Stalingrad was not taken in the first rush, it should have been shielded with defensive troops and not attacked directly.

“By concentrating his offensive on a great city and resorting to siege warfare,” Mellenthin wrote, “Hitler was playing into the hands of the Russian command. In street warfare the Germans forfeited all their advantages in mobile tactics, while the inadequately trained but supremely dogged Russian infantry were able to exact a heavy toll.”

On the day Rostov fell, Hitler set up two new army groups, with new goals. Army Group A (17th and 1st Panzer Armies) under Wilhelm List was to seize the mountain passes and oil fields of the Caucasus, while Army Group B (2nd, 6th, and 4th Panzer Armies) under Maximilian von Weichs was to build a defense along the Don, drive to Stalingrad, block off the land bridge between the Don and the Volga, and interdict traffic on the Volga.

In his original plan, Hitler intended four armies to press into the Caucasus, while one went toward Stalingrad. Now three armies marched on Stalingrad—an objective of infinitely less importance than the oil fields—while two armies drove into the Caucasus.

This was lunacy to every professional soldier, and Halder protested to Hitler. But the Fuehrer paid no attention, and also ignored evidence of powerful Soviet formations to the east of the Volga and in the Caucasus. Hitler transferred his headquarters to Vinnitsa in Ukraine, and took over direct command of the southern part of the front.

Army Group A swept over the lower Don into the Caucasus. The 17th Army seized Krasnodar, crossed the Kuban River, and penetrated the thickly wooded west Caucasus Mountains to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Elsewhere, mountain troops could not drive the Russians out of the high passes. Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army, slowed by fuel shortages, captured the oil field of Maykop, 200 miles south of Rostov, though not before the Russians had destroyed it. But Kleist did not have the strength to drive to Batum, Tiflis, and Baku, which would have secured the Caucasus.

In Army Group B, 2nd Army fought around Voronezh, while the huge 6th Army with twenty divisions under Friedrich Paulus pressed toward Stalingrad. The ever-lengthening north flank of 6th Army along the Don was covered by the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Italian 8th Army, and the Romanian 3rd Army, while the Romanian 4th Army held a thin line in the Kalmuk steppe south of Stalingrad. The flanks thus were guarded by extremely weak forces, since none of the allies had good equipment or adequate training.

Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army had now turned northeast and was pressing through Elista across the steppe toward Stalingrad. About fifty miles south of the city, Hoth’s attack broke down against fierce resistance by the Soviet 57th and 64th Armies.

Originally the Soviet high command, Stavka, did not plan to hold Stalingrad. It intended to withdraw Red forces east of the stream, so the Germans would be forced to overwinter on the unprotected steppe. But the unexpected splitting of the German offensive called for new decisions. Stalin removed Timoshenko from command in the south and ordered Andrei I. Eremenko to take over and keep the city.

Stalingrad was no fortress. The old city of Tsaritsyn (Stalin had named it after himself in 1925) was surrounded by a jumble of old wooden structures, barrack-like apartments, industrial installations, and railroad switchyards sprawling fifteen miles along the west bank of the river, and two to four miles back from it. Above the apartments and factories reared water towers and grain silos. Numerous balkas (dry ravines or gullies with steep banks) and railway embankments eased the defense, as did the high western bank of the Volga and, west of the city, a twenty-nine-mile arc of woods, a mile wide at its thickest, protecting against dust and snow-storms. In August 1942 Stalingrad held about 600,000 people, including refugees.

Eremenko had five armies, some hard-hit. But Stalin issued a “Ni shagu nazad!” (“Not a step back!”) order on July 28, and reinforcements began to arrive. Eremenko got eleven divisions and nine Guards brigades, supplied from dumps on the steppe east of the river. He mobilized 50,000 civilian volunteers into a “people’s guard,” assigned 75,000 inhabitants to the 62nd Army, organized factory workers into rifle companies and tank units (using T-34s driven right off the floor of the tractor plant Dzherhezinsky where they were made), assigned 3,000 young women as nurses and radio operators, and sent 7,000 boys aged thirteen to sixteen to army formations. But Eremenko did order the evacuation of those too old or young to fight—200,000 crossed over to the east bank in a three-week period.

Paulus’s mobile spearhead reached the Don near Kalach on July 28, but because of fierce Soviet resistance it was August 23 before 6th Army forced passage of the Don. Massive Stuka bombing attacks on the city during the day and night of August 24 killed many civilians, turned office blocks into rubble, and set fire to wooden structures in older neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, 16th Panzer Division under one-armed General Hans Hube swept aside Russian infantry west of the city and women workers crewing antiaircraft guns at the Barricade gun factory, and reached the Volga near Rynok, ten miles north of Stalingrad, at 6:30 P.M., August 24, 1942. The original purpose had thus been attained: German artillery at Rynok could seal off traffic on the Volga.

On August 27, Stalin appointed General Georgy K. Zhukov as deputy supreme commander of the Red Army, and sent him to direct the defense of Stalingrad.

In oppressive heat (it had not rained for two months), German forces backed by tanks crashed against barricades that blocked nearly every street. Russians fought back from machine-gun nests, within buildings, and amid the rubble. Mortars hidden in holes and crevices dropped shells on the advancing Germans. The Russians defended fortresslike complexes—the steelworks Red October, the artillery factory Barricade, the warehouse complex Univermag, and the tractor plant Dzherhezinsky. The Germans were soon exhausted. Supplies were slow arriving and insufficient; ammunition was in short supply. Progress was slow, counterattacks frequent, and losses high. The name Stalingrad began to have a hypnotic effect on Russians and Germans alike, especially Hitler, who insisted on capture of the entire city.

At Rynok 14th Motorized Corps came under almost unrelenting attack as the Russians tried to sweep around this northern anchor and roll up the German positions. Day after day more than a hundred tanks along with massed Russian infantry hurled themselves against the corps behind a curtain of artillery fire. The Russian commanders ignored high casualties. The only thing that saved the corps was its artillery, the guns sometimes shooting up assembly areas before the Russians could launch their attacks. The Germans learned not to occupy inclines facing the enemy (forward slopes), as they could not be protected from Russian armor. Instead they held the reverse slopes, massing tanks in hollows just behind the main line of resistance, and knocking out enemy armor as it reached the crests above.

General Gustav von Wietersheim, commanding 14th Motorized Corps, watched his strength decline. He recommended that 6th Army be withdrawn to the west bank of the Don, forty-five miles away. The only result was that Hitler removed him because he was “too pessimistic.”

As the German offensives stumbled to a halt, radical changes in leadership came about. On September 10 Hitler relieved List, because his army group had not captured the whole Caucasus. He did not name a successor, and commanded the army group himself in his spare time from supreme headquarters.

Hitler’s long conflict with Halder came to a head. Hitler reproached Halder and the army general staff, calling them cowards and lacking drive. When Halder presented proof of new Soviet formations totaling 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad and half a million in the southern Caucasus, Hitler advanced on him, foaming at the mouth, crying out that he forbade such “idiotic chatter” in his presence.

Halder, who looked and acted like a prim schoolmaster, persisted in explaining what would happen when the new Russian reserve armies attacked the overextended flanks that ran out from the Stalingrad salient. On September 24, Hitler dismissed him.

Hitler said arguments with Halder had cost him half his nervous energy. The army, he said, no longer required technical proficiency. What was needed was the “glow of National Socialist conviction.” He couldn’t expect that from officers of the old German army.

The new chief of staff was Lieutenant General Kurt Zeitzler, a tank expert and man of action. Zeitzler soon took note of the cliques and intrigue in Hitler’s headquarters, became excessively cautious, and did nothing to challenge Hitler’s decision to keep 6th Army at Stalingrad.

Yet, as Field Marshal Manstein wrote: “A far-sighted leader would have realized from the start that to mass the whole of the German assault forces in and around Stalingrad without adequate flank protection placed them in mortal danger of being enveloped as soon as the enemy broke through the adjacent fronts.”

Hitler held stubbornly to the idea that had become fixed in his mind: the enemy was shattered, and would not rise again. He accepted no evidence to the contrary, and he was ready to sack any officer who did not obtain objectives, however unrealistic, or who wanted to pull back to more defensible positions.

Stalingrad had virtually been destroyed. The Germans had gained eight-tenths of the rubble but couldn’t oust the Russians from the rest.

The principal problem, of course, was the flanks. General Hoth had at his disposal on the south two widely spaced corps of the Romanian 4th Army. Beyond the Romanians a 120-mile hole had opened in the Kalmuk steppe, only meagerly veiled by a German motorized division. To the west, the Romanian 3rd Army, Italian 8th Army, and Hungarian 2nd Army held a 400-mile front along the Don. None possessed antitank guns that could stop Russian T-34s.

The Russians had assembled a million men with 13,500 cannons, 900 tanks, and 1,100 aircraft in three army groups or fronts on either side of Stalingrad.

In thick fog on November 19, 1942, Southwest Front commander N. F. Vatutin launched the first arm of a giant pincers movement (Operation Uranus) some eighty miles west of Stalingrad at Kletskaya and Kremensk on the Don. The target was the Romanian 3rd Army. Soviet artillery had previously registered targets, and guns laid down a curtain of shells on the unsuspecting Romanians. Soviet tanks used compasses to guide them. The Romanians stood up to the assault only briefly before they ran away. A giant hole twenty miles wide opened in the German front. Soviet tanks streamed south toward Kalach.

The next day Stalingrad Front commander Eremenko smashed a broad fissure in the Romanian 4th Army south of Stalingrad. This army disintegrated as well. With virtually no opposition, the Russian attack wedge swung to the northwest to link up with the Soviet advance from the Don.

If 6th Army had been given freedom of movement at once it might have broken out of the trap with its men and equipment intact. But Hitler had no intention of allowing the army to retreat, and, when Paulus asked permission to do so, Hitler refused.

On November 22 the Soviet 26th and 4th Tank Corps closed the back of the pincers around Kalach. With this, 250,000 men in twenty German and two Romanian divisions were closed within a pocket at Stalingrad measuring thirty miles east and west, and twenty-five miles north and south.

General Paulus asked for freedom of action, but Hitler refused. The army, Hitler commanded, had to curl up in a ball like a hedgehog. Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe, promised grandiloquently that the army would be supplied by air until a new battle group could be formed to break the caldron.

Senior Luftwaffe officers said it couldn’t be done, but Hitler listened to Göring, not the air generals.

As the Luftwaffe tried to organize an airlift, the Russians forged a double ring around 6th Army to hinder a breakthrough from either inside or out. They posted 395 antiaircraft guns along the Luftwaffe line of flight and sent in 490 fighters to shoot down the transports.

The daily needs of 6th Army totaled 700 tons. Colonel Fritz Morzik, Luftwaffe air transport chief, said that in the best of circumstances he could fly in 350 tons. The entire Luftwaffe, he pointed out, possessed only 750 Ju-52 cargo aircraft, and there was enormous demand for them elsewhere. Though the air officers pulled additional air freight assets together, along with airplanes from flight schools, they could assemble only about 500 machines, of which on average only a third were ready for operations on any given day. Weather was atrocious, and this reduced deliveries. Göring had ordered at least 300 tons to be flown in every day. But from November 25 to 29 6th Army received 269 tons total, and from November 30 to December 11 only 1,267 tons.

Ammunition supplies dropped, fuel became scarce, and the men of 6th Army began to starve.

Meanwhile the Soviet army group Voronezh Front under F. I. Golikov on the north opposite the Italian 8th Army prepared for another—even more dangerous—enveloping movement. Hitler, ignoring the threat, handed Manstein the task of relieving 6th Army.