Stalingrad

5. General Paulus’s First Battle

The curious chain of events which brought General Friedrich Paulus to command the Sixth Army began with Hitler’s angry disappointment towards the end of 1941. And a year later, a very similar frustration would lead to the disaster which befell Paulus and his divisions.

In November 1941, while the world’s attention was focused on the approaches to Moscow, the situation in the eastern Ukraine had fluctuated wildly. At the climax of Army Group South’s advance, the leading divisions of Kleist’s First Panzer Group reached Rostov-on-Don on 19 November in driving snow. The following day, they seized the bridge over the great river, the last barrier before the Caucasus. But the Soviet commander, Timoshenko, reacted quickly. The left flank of the German spearhead was weakly guarded by Hungarian troops, and a thrust there, combined with counter-attacks across the frozen Don, soon forced Kleist back.

Hitler was furious, having just exulted in the illusion that both Moscow and the Caucasian oilfields lay within his grasp. To make matters worse, this was the first withdrawal by the German Army during the Second World War. He refused to believe that Field Marshal von Rundstedt lacked the strength and the supplies, and he refused to accept that Kleist should be permitted to pull back his troops, many of them badly frost-bitten, to the line of the river Mius.

Rundstedt indicated on 30 November that if confidence no longer existed in his leadership, then he wished to be relieved of his command. Early the next morning, Hitler dismissed him. He ordered Reichenau, the commander of the Sixth Army, to take over and halt the withdrawal immediately. This, Reichenau attempted—or pretended—to do. A few hours later, a shamelessly short time, he sent a message to Führer headquarters with the information that withdrawal behind the Mius had become inevitable. Reichenau, an overactive bulldog of a man whose apoplectic expression was heightened by his monocle, did not endear himself to Rundstedt, who later described him as a ‘roughneck who used to run around half naked when taking physical exercise’.

On 3 December, the Führer flew down to the Ukraine in his Focke-Wulf Condor to find out what had happened. He first spoke to Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS Leibstandarte Division. Dietrich, to Hitler’s astonishment, supported Rundstedt’s decision to withdraw.

Both Rundstedt and Reichenau had their headquarters at Poltava, where Charles XII of Sweden, the first modern invader of Russia, had been defeated by Peter the Great in 1709. Hitler made his peace with Rundstedt, who had not yet departed. It was agreed that the old field marshal should still return home, although now it would be for sick leave. Nine days later, he received a cheque for RM250,000 from the Führer as a birthday present.

Hitler, still slightly suspicious of Reichenau, at first insisted that he remain commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army as well as of Army Group South. But over dinner, while the Führer carefully chewed his millet and pumpkin and potato puffs, Reichenau argued convincingly that he could not run two headquarters at once. He recommended that General Paulus, his former chief of staff, should take over the Sixth Army. Hitler assented, although without much enthusiasm. Thus, on New Year’s Day 1942, Paulus, who had never even commanded a division or corps, found himself catapulted up the army list to the rank of General of Panzer Troops. Five days later, he became commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, just after Timoshenko launched a major, but ill-coordinated, offensive towards Kursk.

Friedrich Wilhelm Paulus came of Hessian yeoman stock. His father had risen from the post of bookkeeper in a reformatory to become the Chief Treasurer of Hesse-Nassau. The young Paulus had applied to join the imperial navy in 1909, but was refused. A year later, the army’s enlargement offered an opening. Paulus, almost certainly feeling at a social disadvantage in the Kaiser’s army, was obsessed with his turnout. His contemporaries called him ‘der Lord’. In 1912, he married Elena Rosetti-Solescu, the sister of two brother officers, members of a Romanian family with princely connections. She disliked the Nazis, but Paulus, who had joined the Freikorps in the fight against bolshevism after the First World War, most probably shared Reichenau’s admiration of Hitler.

As a company commander in the 13th Infantry Regiment, the tall and fastidious Paulus was competent yet uninspired when compared with Erwin Rommel, the commander of the machine-gun company. Unlike Rommel, a robust leader prepared to ignore his superiors, Paulus possessed an exaggerated respect for the chain of command. His work as a staff officer was conscientious and meticulous. He enjoyed working late at night, bent over maps, with coffee and cigarettes to hand. His hobby was drawing scale-maps of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia. He later appeared to his son’s brother officers in the 3rd Panzer Division as ‘more like a scientist than a general, when compared to Rommel or Model’.

Paulus’s good manners made him popular with senior officers. He even got on well with that rumbustious thug Reichenau, when he became his chief of staff in August 1939. Their teamwork impressed other senior officers during the first year of the war, in which their most memorable moment was taking the surrender of King Leopold of the Belgians. Not long after the conquest of France, General Haider summoned Paulus to Berlin to work as chief planner on the general staff. There, his most important task lay in evaluating the options for Operation Barbarossa. Once the invasion was well under way, Reichenau asked Haider to let him have his chief of staff back again.

Paulus’s ‘fantastic leap’ to army commander, as friends described it in letters of congratulation, was marred exactly a week later. On 12 January 1942, his patron, Field Marshal von Reichenau, went for his morning run at Poltava. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero. Reichenau felt unwell during lunch, and suddenly collapsed from a heart attack. Hitler, on hearing the news, ordered Dr Flade, the Sixth Army’s senior medical officer, to bring him straight back to Germany. The unconscious Reichenau was strapped to an armchair fastened inside the fuselage of a Dornier.

The pilot insisted on landing at Lemberg to refuel, but he crash-landed some distance from the field. Doctor Flade, despite a broken leg, fired signal flares to attract help. By the time the party finally reached the hospital in Leipzig, Reichenau was dead. Flade reported to Paulus afterwards that the ill-omened crash had been almost like a film. ‘Even his field marshal’s baton had been broken in two.’ Hitler ordered a state funeral, but did not attend. He gave Rundstedt the distinction of representing him.

Although Paulus’s rather aloof manner made him appear cold, he was more sensitive than many generals to the well-being of his soldiers. He is also said to have cancelled Reichenau’s order of 10 October 1941, encouraging the ‘severe’ treatment of Jews and partisans, yet when the Sixth Army reached Stalingrad, its Feldgendarmerie was apparently given the task of arresting Communist activists and Jews to hand them over to the SD Sonderkommando for ‘punitive measures’.

Paulus certainly inherited a heavy legacy. From the very start of Barbarossa, the massacres of Jews and gypsies had been deliberately mixed in, whenever possible, with the execution of partisans, mainly because the phrase ‘jüdische Saboteure’ helped to cloud the illegality of the act and to bolster the notion of a ‘judeo-bolshevik’ conspiracy. The definition of partisan and saboteur was soon widened far beyond the terms of international law, which permitted a death sentence only after a proper trial. In an order of 10 July 1941, Sixth Army headquarters warned soldiers that anyone in civilian clothes with a close-cropped head was almost certain to be a Red Army soldier and should therefore be shot. Civilians who behaved in a hostile fashion, including those who gave food to Red Army soldiers hiding in woods, were also to be shot. ‘Dangerous elements’, such as Soviet officials, a category which extended from the local Communist Party secretary and collective-farm manager to almost anyone employed by the government, should, like commissars and Jews, be handed over to the Feldgendarmerie or the SD-Einsatzkommando. A subsequent order called for ‘collective measures’—either executions or the burning of villages—to punish sabotage. According to the evidence of SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner, Field Marshal von Reichenau himself gave the order early in July 1941 for 3,000 Jews to be shot as a reprisal measure.

The behaviour of many soldiers in Army Group South was particularly gruesome. Reichenau’s Sixth Army headquarters issued the following order on 10 August 1941: ‘In various places within the army’s area of responsibility, organs of the SD, of the Reichsführer’s SS and chiefs of the German Police have been carrying out necessary executions of criminal, bolshevik and mostly Jewish elements. There have been cases of off-duty soldiers volunteering to help the SD with their executions, or acting as spectators and taking photographs.’ It was now forbidden for any soldiers, ‘who have not been ordered by a superior officer’, to take part in, to watch or to photograph any of these executions. Later, General von Manstein’s chief of staff passed the message to the Offizierkorps of the Eleventh Army in the Crimea that it was ‘dishonourable for officers to be present at the execution of Jews’. German military logic, in another of its distortions of cause and effect, does not appear to have acknowledged the possibility that officers had already shamed themselves by furthering the aims of a regime capable of such crimes.

Occasionally atrocities were halted, but not for long. On 20 August, chaplains from the 295th Infantry Division informed Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, the chief of staff, that ninety Jewish orphans in the town of Belaya Tserkov were being held in disgusting conditions. They ranged from infants up to seven-year-old children. They were to be shot, like their parents. Groscurth, the son of a pastor and a convinced anti-Nazi, had been the Abwehr officer who, that spring, had secretly passed details of the illegal orders for Barbarossa to Ulrich von Hassell. Groscurth immediately sought out the district commander and insisted that the execution must be stopped. He then contacted Sixth Army headquarters, even though Standartenführer Paul Blobel, the head of the Sonderkommando, warned Groscurth that he would report his interference to Reichsführer SS Himmler. Field Marshal von Reichenau supported Blobel. The ninety Jewish children were shot the next evening by Ukrainian militiamen, to save the feelings of the Sonderkommando.

Groscurth wrote a full report which he sent direct to headquarters Army Group South. Appalled and furious, he wrote to his wife: ‘We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.’ At the first opportunity, he went on leave to Paris to see Field Marshal von Witlzleben, one of the leading members in the anti-Hitler movement.

The massacre of the innocents in Belaya Tserkov was soon dwarfed by a far greater atrocity. Following the capture of Kiev, 33,771 Jews were rounded up in the last days of September, to be slaughtered by Sonderkommando 4a and two police battalions in the ravine of Babi Yar outside the city. This ‘Gross-Aktion’ was once again entirely within the Sixth Army’s area of responsibility. Reichenau, along with certain key officers from his headquarters who attended the town commandant’s planning conference on 27 September 1941, must have known their fate in advance, even if the soldiers detailed to assist in the round-up may have been taken in by the cover story of’ evacuation’. Soviet Jews did not imagine what awaited them. They had little idea of Nazi anti-Semitism, because under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, no criticism of National Socialist policies had been published. The town commandant in his proclamation posters had also lulled suspicions with the instruction: ‘You should bring with you identity papers, money and valuables as well as warm clothing.’ The Sonderkommando, which had expected 5,000–6,000 Jews, was astonished to find that more than 30,000 had turned up.

Field Marshal von Reichenau’s notorious order to the Sixth Army of 10 October 1941, which was supported by Field Marshal von Rundstedt, quite clearly makes the Wehrmacht chain of command jointly responsible for atrocities against Jews and civilians in the Ukraine. ‘In this eastern theatre of war, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of war, but also the ruthless standard-bearer of a national ideal and the avenger of all the bestialities perpetrated on the German peoples. For this reason the soldier must fully appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.’ Their duty was to ‘free the German people forever from the Jewish-Asiatic threat’.

Reprisal burnings and executions did not end with Reichenau’s death and Paulus’s arrival. For example, on 29 January 1942, some three weeks after the new commander-in-chief of Sixth Army took over, the village of Komsomolsk near Kharkov with 150 houses was burned to the ground. During this operation, eight people were shot and two children, presumably so terrified that they stayed hidden, were burned to death.

German soldiers were bound to mistreat civilians after nearly nine years of the regime’s anti-Slav and anti-Semitic propaganda, even if few of them consciously acted at the time out of Nazi values. The nature of the war produced emotions that were both primitive and complex. Although there were cases of soldiers reluctant to carry out executions when ordered, most natural pity for civilians was transmuted into an incoherent anger based on the feeling that women and children had no business to be in a battle zone.

Officers preferred to avoid moral reflection. They concentrated instead on the need for good military order. Those who still believed in the rules of war were often horrified at the conduct of their soldiers, but instructions to respect procedures had little effect. ‘Interrogations should end with the release of the prisoner, or putting the prisoner in a camp,’ emphasized an order from the 371st Infantry Division. ‘Nobody should be executed without the order of the officer in charge.’

They also despaired at the scale of looting. Few soldiers offered to pay the locals for livestock and produce, mainly because the German government refused to provide adequate rations. ‘The Landsers go to vegetable gardens and take everything,’ a company commander in the 384th Infantry Division wrote in his diary later that summer, during the advance to Stalingrad. ‘They even take household items, chairs and pots. It’s a scandal. Severe prohibitions are published, but the ordinary soldier hardly restrains himself. He is forced into such conduct by hunger.’ The effects were particularly serious in a country of such extreme climate as Russia. The plundering of food reserves condemned the civil population to death by starvation when winter came. Even honey-making became impossible, because the sugar needed to keep bees alive during the winter was seized.

The terrible truth, which very few officers could bear to recognize, was that the army’s tolerance or support for the Nazi doctrine of a ‘race war’ on the eastern front, exempt from normal military and international law, was bound to turn it into a semi-criminal organization. The failure of generals to protest demonstrated a total lack of moral sensibility, or of moral courage. Physical courage was unnecessary. The Nazis, in the earlier stages of the Russian campaign, would not have dared to do anything worse to a senior officer who objected than remove him from his command.

Hitler’s ability to manipulate generals was uncanny. Although most generals in the Sixth Army were not convinced Nazis, they were nevertheless loyal to Hitler, or certainly pretended to be. For example, a letter written on 20 April would be dated ‘Führer’s Birthday’ and proclamations were signed ‘Long Live the Führer!’ But it was perfectly possible for a general to keep his independence and his career unharmed, using military rather than political exhortations. General Karl Strecker, the commander of XI Corps and an unashamed old warhorse, made a point of never acknowledging the regime. He signed proclamations to his soldiers: ‘Forward with God. Our belief is in victory. Hail my brave fighters!’ More important, he personally countermanded illegal orders from above, on one occasion driving from unit to unit to make sure that officers understood him. He chose Groscurth as his chief of staff and, together, they were to direct the last pocket of resistance at Stalingrad, loyal to their own sense of duty, but not to the Führer.

Contrary to all rules of war, surrender did not guarantee the lives of Red Army soldiers. On the third day of the invasion of the Ukraine, August von Kageneck, a reconnaissance troop commander with 9th Panzer Division, saw from the turret of his reconnaissance vehicle, ‘dead men lying in a neat row under the trees alongside a country lane, all in the same position—face down’. They had clearly not been killed in combat. Nazi propaganda, simultaneously provoking both atavistic fears and hate, incited soldiers to kill as much out of the former as the latter, yet at the same time it also reminded them that they were brave German soldiers. This produced a powerfully destructive combination, for it is the attempt to control the outward signs of cowardice which produces the most violent reaction of all. The greatest fear that Nazi propaganda encouraged among troops was a fear of capture. ‘We were afraid,’ Kageneck acknowledged, ‘afraid of falling into the hands of the Russians, no doubt thirsty for revenge after our surprise attack.’

Officers with traditional values were even more appalled when they heard of soldiers taking pot-shots at the columns of Soviet prisoners trudging to the rear. These endless columns of defeated men, hungry and above all thirsty in the summer heat, their brown uniforms and fore-and-aft pilotka caps covered in dust, were seen as little better than herds of animals. An Italian journalist, who had seen many columns, wrote: ‘Most of them are wounded. They wear no bandages, their faces are caked with blood and dust, their uniforms are in rags, their hands blackened. They walk slowly, supporting one another.’ The wounded generally received no medical assistance, and those who could not march or who collapsed from exhaustion were shot. Soviet soldiers were not allowed to be transported in German military transport in case they infected it with lice and fleas. It should not be forgotten that 600 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed in Auschwitz on 3 September 1941. This was the first experiment there with Zyklon B.

For those who reached prisoner-of-war camps alive, the chance of survival turned out to be not much better than one in three. Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment. The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization, was responsible for prisoners of war. Its attitude was reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s remark in 1914 that the 90,000 Russian prisoners captured at Tannenberg ‘should be left to starve’.

On the southern front, a German camp at Lozovaya, overrun by Timoshenko’s January advance, revealed appalling conditions, with Red Army prisoners dying ‘O f cold, of starvation, of brutal maltreatment’. Yury Mikhailovich Maximoν of the 127th Rifle Division, captured in the autumn of 1941, was one of those taken to Novo-Aleksandrovsk. The so-called camp there had no huts, just open ground with a barbed-wire fence. The 18,000 men were fed from twelve cauldrons in which odd hunks of horseflesh were boiled. When the guards on duty gave the order to come forward to receive food, sub-machine-gunners shot down anybody who ran. Their corpses were left there for three days as a warning.

German officers at the front wanted prisoners to be better treated for practical reasons. ‘Their information on enemy numbers, organization and intentions may give us more than our own intelligence services can provide,’ read an instruction from the chief intelligence officer of the 96th Infantry Division. ‘Russian soldiers’, he added, ‘respond to interrogation in a naive way.’ The OKW propaganda department at the same time issued orders that Russian desertion must be encouraged to save German lives. But intelligence staffs at the front knew well that this could ‘work only if promises made to deserters are kept’. The trouble was that they were usually treated just as badly as any other prisoners.

Stalin’s dislike of international law had suited Hitler’s plan for a war of annihilation, so when the Soviet Union proposed a reciprocal adherence to the Hague convention less than a month after the invasion, its note was left unanswered. Stalin did not usually believe in observing such niceties, but the ferocity of the German onslaught had shaken him.

Within the Red Army, there was no formal equivalent to the illegal orders issued to the Wehrmacht, but members of the SS, and later other categories such as camp guards and members of the Secret Field Police, were almost certain to be shot after capture. Luftwaffe pilots and panzer crews also risked lynching, but on the whole the shooting of prisoners was random rather than calculated, while acts of wanton cruelty were localized and inconsistent. The Soviet authorities desperately wanted prisoners, especially officers, for interrogation.

For partisans, including Red Army detachments, hospital trains were regarded as legitimate targets, and few pilots or gunners spared ambulances or field hospitals. A doctor with the 22nd Panzer Division observed: ‘My ambulance had a machine-gun mounted on top and a red cross on the side. The red cross symbol was a farce in Russia, and served only as a sign for our own people.’ The worst incident took place on 29 December 1941, when a German field hospital was overrun at Feodosia on the Crimean coast. Soviet marine infantry, many of them apparently drunk, killed about 160 German wounded. A number of them had been thrown out of the windows, others were taken outside, soaked in water and left to freeze to death.

The occasional, primitive atrocity committed by Red Army soldiers during the first eighteen months—there would almost certainly have been more if they had not been retreating so rapidly—prompted many Germans to make comparisons with the Thirty Years War. A truer link, however, would have been to the Russian civil war, one of the cruellest of twentieth-century conflicts, which Hitler’s crusade against bolshevism had reignited. But as the war progressed, Russian outrage and a terrible desire for revenge was fired much more by news of German acts in the ‘Occupied territories’: villages burned to the ground in reprisals, and civilians starved, massacred or deported to work camps. This impression of genocide against the Slavs aroused, along with the desire for revenge, a pitiless determination not to be beaten.

General Paulus did not take over the Sixth Army at an easy moment, and he was probably more shaken by Reichenau’s death than he showed. His first experience of senior command in January 1942 coincided with Stalin’s ill-judged general offensive, following the Red Army’s success round Moscow. In fact, it was a difficult time for all German forces on the southern front. General von Manstein’s Eleventh Army in the Crimea had not yet managed to seize Sevastopol, and a surprise attack by Red Army troops from the Caucasus at the end of December had taken the Kerch peninsula. Hitler, apoplectic with rage, had the corps commander, General Count von Sponeck, court-martialled.

Paulus moved Sixth Army headquarters forward to Kharkov, Marshal Timoshenko’s objective. The temperature had dropped to thirty degrees below zero, sometimes lower. German transport by rail and road was frozen solid, and horse-drawn carts could provide only the barest rations.

Timoshenko’s plan had been to cut off the industrial region of the Donbas and seize Kharkov in a huge encirclement, but only the southern part of the pincer had managed to pierce the German lines. This had been a successful thrust, taking a salient nearly sixty miles deep. But the Red Army lacked the resources and fresh troops, and after two months of bitter fighting, their attacks ground to a halt.

The Sixth Army held on, yet Paulus was uneasy. Field Marshal von Bock, whom Hitler had reluctantly appointed to command Army Group South, did not disguise his feeling that he had been overcautious in counter-attacking. Paulus kept his command, with the support of his protector, General Haider. His chief of staff, Colonel Ferdinand Heim, was moved instead. In his place came Colonel Arthur Schmidt, a slim, sharp-featured and sharp-tongued staff officer from a Hamburg mercantile family. Schmidt, confident of his own abilities, put up many backs within Sixth Army headquarters, although he also had his supporters. Paulus relied greatly on his judgement, and as a result he played a large, some say an excessive, role in determining the course of events later that year.

In the early spring of 1942, the divisions that were to perish at Stalingrad took little interest in staff gossip. Their immediate concerns were replenishment and rearmament. It said much for the professional resilience of the German Army (and much less for its sense of self-preservation) that memories of the terrible winter were virtually effaced as soon as spring and new equipment arrived. ‘Morale was higher again,’ remembered one commander, whose company at last had a full complement of eighteen tanks. ‘We were in a good state.’ They were not even greatly disturbed by the fact that even the long-barrelled version of the Panzer Mark III had only a 50-mm gun, whose shell often failed to penetrate Soviet tanks.

Although no announcement had been made within divisions, everyone knew that a major offensive would not be long in coming. In March, General Pfeffer, the commander of the 297th Infantry Division, said half-jokingly to a captain who was reluctant to be sent back to France for a battalion commander’s course: ‘Just be happy that you’re getting a break. The war will last long enough and be terrible enough for you to get a good taste of it.’

On 28 March, General Haider drove to Rastenburg to present the plans demanded by the Füihrer for the conquest of the Caucasus and southern Russia up to the Volga. He did not suspect that in Moscow, the Stavka was studying Timoshenko’s project for a renewed offensive in the area of Kharkov.

On 5 April, the Führer’s headquarters issued orders for the campaign to bring ‘final victory in the East’. While Northern Army Group, with Operation Northern Light, was planned to bring the siege of Leningrad to a successful conclusion and link up with the Finns, the main offensive—Operation Siegfried, renamed Operation Blue—would take place in southern Russia.

Hitler was still convinced of the Wehrmacht’s ‘qualitative superiority over the Soviets’, and saw no need for reserves. It was almost as though his removal of the army-group commanders had also effaced all memory of the recent failures. Field Marshal von Bock, the most rapidly reappointed, doubted that they had the strength to seize, let alone hold, the Caucasian oilfields. He feared that the Soviet Union was not running out of reserves as the Führer’s headquarters so firmly believed. ‘My great concern—that the Russians might pre-empt us with their own attack—’he wrote in his diary on 8 May, ‘has not diminished.’

That same day, Bock welcomed General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, who had broken the Demyansk encirclement. Seydlitz, an artilleryman, was a descendant of Frederick the Great’s brilliant cavalry general, known in his youth for galloping between the sails of a windmill in full swing, but most famous for the great victory of Rossbach in the Seven Years War, where his massed squadrons carried the day. Walther von Seydlitz was also impulsive and, like his ancestor, he was also doomed to ill fortune and an embittered old age. Seydlitz had arrived that afternoon by air from Königsberg, where he had snatched a few days’ leave with his wife, before taking over command of LI Corps under Paulus. When he and his wife had said goodbye at the airfield, they never imagined, ‘that it was a farewell for almost fourteen years’.

Seydlitz went forward to Kharkov the next day. The city, he found, had not been seriously damaged when captured. ‘The buildings mainly date from tsarist times, except for a new university in bombastic Stalinist style, and a huge American-built tractorworks. In the centre almost everything is built of brick, while further out, houses are made of wood.’ In his new corps, he found that he had two Austrian divisions, the 44th Infantry Division, successor to the old Habsburg Hoch– und Deutschmeister regiment, and General Pfeffer’s 297th Infantry Division.

On 10 May, Paulus submitted to Field Marshal von Bock his draft plans for Operation Fridericus, the elimination of the Barvenkovo salient gained by Timoshenko during the January offensive. Bock’s fears of a Russian attack proved correct even sooner than he had feared. Timoshenko had assembled 640,000 men, 1,200 tanks and nearly a thousand aircraft. On 12 May, six days before the scheduled start of Operation Fridericus, the Red Army launched twin attacks from around Volchansk and from the Barvenkovo salient to cut off Kharkov. Bock warned Paulus not to counter-attack too hurriedly or without air support, but Soviet tank brigades broke through the front of General Walther Heitz’s VIII Corps and by that evening, Russian tank units were a dozen miles from Kharkov.

Next morning, Bock realized that the enemy breakthrough round Volchansk was more serious than he had realized. Paulus’s Sixth Army received a heavy battering from different directions. In seventy-two hours of fighting, much of it in heavy rain, sixteen battalions were destroyed. Paulus was convinced that a holding action, giving ground where necessary, was the only solution. Bock, however, had other ideas. He persuaded Haider to convince Hitler that a bold counter-attack with Kleist’s First Panzer Army could transform a setback into victory. The Führer, who lived for such moments, immediately recognized the opportunity. Claiming the idea for his own, he galvanized Kleist into moving his First Panzer Army rapidly into position to strike at the enemy’s southern flank. He ordered the Luftwaffe to concentrate every available attack group to pin down Timoshenko’s formations until Kleist was ready.

Kleist struck at the southern side of the Barvenkovo salient before dawn on 17 May. By midday, his spearhead had advanced ten miles, even though his panzer divisions had to engage the T-34 at close range, otherwise their ‘shells bounced off like fireworks’.

That evening, Timoshenko signalled Moscow, pleading for reinforcements to stop Kleist. According to Zhukov, Timoshenko did not warn Moscow that his armies were likely to be encircled, but the chief commissar of the front, Nikita Khrushchev, claimed that Stalin persistently refused to allow them to withdraw from danger. (This later formed one of his indictments of Stalin during his famous denunciation in 1956 at the XX Party Congress.) Finally, on 19 May, Timoshenko called off the offensive, with Stalin’s agreement, but it was too late.

Bock decided that the moment had come for Paulus to attack from the north to seal the trap. The fighting which resulted, a gradual compression of over a quarter of a million Soviet troops, led to unusual situations. According to a senior NCO in the 389th Infantry Division, his grenadier regiment found itself in a merciless battle with what he described as a ‘bandit battalion’ of women soldiers, commanded by a redhead. ‘The fighting methods of these female beasts showed itself in treacherous and dangerous ways. They lie concealed in heaps of straw, and shoot us in the back when we pass by.’

Just as the ring was closing, part of the 2nd Panzer Regiment and some mechanized artillery found themselves cut off at nightfall within the massed Russians. Their commander was the legendary Hyazinth Graf von Strachwitz, known as the ‘Panzer-Kavallerist’. The forty-nine-year-old Strachwitz, a renowned cavalryman in the First World War—his troop had been so far to the front in the advance of 1914 that they had seen Paris in the distance—still retained the dark moustache and the dashing good looks of a 1920s film star. More important, he had not lost the uncanny nose for danger which had made his reputation as a lucky commander.

As this small force from 16th Panzer Division had no idea of the situation around them when darkness fell, Strachwitz ordered a hedgehog defence until daybreak. Just before first light, he took Captain Baron Bernd von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was one of his squadron commanders, and two of the artillery officers up a small hill, ready to look around. As the four officers were focusing their binoculars, Strachwitz suddenly grabbed Freytag-Loringhoven by the arm and dragged him down the slope. He shouted a warning to the two gunners, but they were not quick enough. Both were killed by a shell from a Russian battery on another small hill. Strachwitz, wasting no time, ordered the drivers to start up, and the tanks and vehicles charged in a body out of the vast arena, to rejoin the rest of the division.

Red Army soldiers fought back bitterly for more than a week during humid spring weather. They made desperate charges—sometimes with arms linked—at the German lines at night, but the trap was firm and they were massacred in their thousands under the curiously dead light of magnesium flares. The bodies piled in front of the German positions testified to their suicidal bravery. The survivors wondered if they would ever get out. One unknown Russian soldier trapped in the pocket wrote on a scrap of paper how, watching ‘the German searchlights playing on the clouds’, he wondered if he would ever see his sweetheart again.

Less than one man in ten managed to escape. The 6th and 57th Armies, caught in the ‘Barvenkovo mousetrap’, were virtually annihilated. Paulus and Kleist’s armies had secured nearly 240,000 prisoners, 2,000 guns and the bulk of Timoshenko’s tank force. Their own losses were not much more than 20,000 men. Congratulations arrived from all quarters. Paulus found himself fêted in the Nazi press which, reluctant to praise reactionary aristocrats, made much of his modest family origins. The Führer awarded him the Knight’s Cross and sent a message to say that he fully appreciated ‘the success of the Sixth Army against an enemy overwhelmingly superior in numbers’. Schmidt, Paulus’s chief of staff, argued in later years that the most influential effect of this battle was on Paulus’s attitude towards Hitler. The Führer’s decision to back the ambitious counter-attack convinced Paulus of his brilliance and of the superior ability of OKW to judge the strategic situation.

Ironically in the circumstances, Paulus also received an unusually emotional letter of appreciation from Major Count Claus von Stauffenberg of the general staff, who had stayed as his companion during part of the battle. ‘How refreshing it is’, wrote Stauffenberg, ‘to get away from this atmosphere to surroundings where men give of their best without a thought, and give their lives too, without a murmur of complaint, while the leaders and those who should set an example quarrel and quibble about their own prestige, or haven’t the courage to speak their minds on a question which affects the lives of thousands of their fellow men.’ Paulus either did not notice, or more likely he deliberately ignored, the coded message.

Paulus was clearly reluctant to examine Hitler’s faults, yet after the way the plans for Barbarossa had been changed at the Führer’s whim the previous year, he should have been able to assess the real danger for field commanders. Hitler, intoxicated with the notion of his own infallibility, and profiting from almost instant communications with their headquarters, would try, godlike, to control every manoeuvre from afar.

6. ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’

Early on 1 June, Hitler took off from the airfield near Rastenburg in his personal Focke-Wulf Condor for the headquarters of Army Group South at Poltava. The subject of the conference was the great summer offensive. He was in an exhilarated mood when he greeted Field Marshal von Bock and his senior commanders, including Kleist of First Panzer Army, Hoth of Fourth Panzer Army and Paulus of Sixth Army. The senior Luftwaffe officer present was Colonel-General Baron Wolfram von Richthofen.

Richthofen, a cousin of the ‘Red Baron’, whose squadron he had joined in 1917, was a hard-faced man, both intelligent and arrogant. His record of ruthlessness spoke for itself. He had commanded the Condor Legion in Spain, when the technique of carpet-bombing was invented and had been directly responsible for the destruction of Guernica in 1937, an event which came to symbolize the horror of modern war. It was Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps which destroyed Belgrade in April 1941, killing 17,000 civilians: an act for which his commander-in-chief, General Alexander Löhr, was executed after the war by the Yugoslavs. The following month, during the invasion of Crete, Richthofen’s aircraft reduced the Venetian architecture of both Canea and Heraklion to rubble.

During the conference, Hitler hardly mentioned Stalingrad. As far as his generals were concerned it was little more than a name on the map. His obsession was with the oilfields of the Caucasus. ‘If we don’t take Maikop and Grozny,’ he told his generals, ‘then I must put an end to the war.’ At that stage, the only interest in Stalingrad was to eliminate the armaments factories there and secure a position on the Volga. The capture of the city itself was not considered necessary.

The first phase of Operation Blue was to capture Voronezh. The second was to trap the bulk of the Soviet forces in a great pincer movement west of the Don. The Sixth Army would then move towards Stalingrad to secure the north-east flank, while Kleist’s First Panzer Army and the Seventeenth Army would occupy the Caucasus. After Bock had finished his presentation, Hitler spoke. He made it all sound so simple. The Red Army was finished after the winter fighting, and the victory at Kharkov had again confirmed German supremacy. So certain was Hitler of success in the south, that as soon as Sevastopol fell, he planned to send Manstein’s Eleventh Army northwards. He even told Manstein about his dream of sending armoured columns through the Caucasus into the Middle East and India.

Before Operation Blue could start in earnest, two lesser offensives had to be performed to straighten the front and prepare the start-line, with bridgeheads across the river Donets. On the afternoon of 5 June, as a last treat, many officers and soldiers from the Sixth Army went to the Kharkov ballet. The unpaid dancers had been kept alive through the winter on Wehrmacht rations. That day, they danced Swan Lake and the packed audience, sweating in their feldgrau uniforms, greatly enjoyed their interpretation of Prince Siegfried’s tragedy, trapped by the wicked Rothbart. (This curious conjunction of two code-names—Siegfried, the original name for Operation Blue, and Rothbart, the German equivalent of Barbarossa—was entirely coincidental.) After the performance, the audience hurried back to their units. On that hot moonless night, leading elements from the Sixth Army started to move north-eastwards to the Volchansk sector.

On 10 June, at two in the morning, companies from the 297th Infantry Division began to cross the Donets by assault boat. Having secured a foothold on the far side, pioneer companies set to work constructing a sixty-yard pontoon bridge. By evening tanks of the 14th Panzer Division were rattling across. The next morning, a bridge further upstream was seized before the Soviet troops guarding it could blow their charges. But this crossing was so narrow that, on the following day, traffic jams built up between minefields on both sides of the route, marked by white tape. A cloudburst turned the dirt road into a morass. Then two shells exploded, blasting fountains of mud and black smoke into the air. This panicked the horses of a baggage wagon. They reared, then bolted off the road, through the white tape. A mine exploded. One horse was blown to bits, the other fell to the ground bleeding. Their wagon caught fire. Flames then spread to another one close by, which was loaded with munitions. Small-arms ammunition and grenades started to explode in an instant battle.

The pattern of skirmishes, successes and relatively minor mishaps continued the next day. A major on the staff of a Swabian division was sitting next to his general on a railway embankment during a visit to a point unit. He was killed instantly by a shot from a Russian sniper concealed in a thicket. Their driver was also hit, in the left shoulder. The general, having ordered the infantry and a pair of self-propelled assault guns to exact revenge, had the corpse of his staff officer placed in his vehicle, and left ‘the fateful place’. During dinner that evening in the headquarters mess tent, junior officers debated the advantages of a sudden death. Some regarded the major’s unexpected end as desirable, almost a military ideal, others were depressed, seeing it as the robbery of a life, reducing the body of an officer to the level of shot game. The general remained angrily silent throughout, clearly unsettled by the death of a subordinate from a bullet intended for himself.

While the Sixth Army and the First Panzer Army secured the start-line for Operation Blue, due to start on 28 June, all the headquarters concerned were thrown into confusion. On 19 June, Major Reichel, the operations officer of 23rd Panzer Division, flew in a Fieseler Storch light aircraft to visit a front-line unit. Contrary to all security procedures, he had taken with him a set of detailed orders for the whole operation. The Storch was shot down just beyond German lines. A patrol sent out to recover the bodies and the documents found that the Russians had got there first. Hitler, on hearing the news, became almost incoherent with rage. He demanded that Reichel’s divisional commander and corps commander should face a court martial.

The great irony was that Stalin, when told of the captured papers, dismissed them out of hand as forgeries. Reverting to his obsessive obstinacy of the previous year, he refused to believe anything which contradicted his own view that Hitler would again strike at Moscow. South-Western Front headquarters sent Reichel’s papers to the Kremlin by aircraft, but Stalin, during his meeting on 26 June with General Golikov, the commander of the threatened Bryansk Front, threw the papers aside angrily when he saw that Golikov believed them to be authentic. Golikov was sent straight back to his headquarters to prepare a quick pre-emptive attack to recapture Orel. He and his staff worked on a draft plan all the next day and through most of the night, but their labours were wasted. The German offensive began a few hours later.

On 28 June, the Second Army and the Fourth Panzer Army, which were deployed near Kursk, attacked due east towards Voronezh, not north towards Orel and Moscow, as Stalin expected. A forward air controller from the Luftwaffe, usually a lieutenant aided by a couple of NCOs with one of the latest radio sets, was attached to the headquarters of the leading panzer divisions, ready to call in air strikes. Once the initial breakthough was achieved, Hoth’s panzer divisions advanced rapidly, with Richthofen’s Stukas smashing strong-points or tank concentrations ahead.

The breakthrough of Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army caused great alarm in Moscow. Stalin agreed to Golikov’s requests for more tanks, and transferred several brigades from the Stavka reserve and Timoshenko’s South-Western Front. But because of bad communications, their deployment for a counter-strike took time. A Focke-Wulf 189 from a close reconnaissance squadron located their concentration areas and, on 4 July, Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps struck again.

On 30 June, Paulus’s Sixth Army crossed the start-line prepared on the eastern side of the river Donets. It had the Second Hungarian Army on its left and First Panzer Army on its right. The resistance encountered was stronger than expected, with T-34s and anti-tank guns both dug in and camouflaged from the Stukas as well as the panzers. This form of fighting, however, put the Russian tank troops at a disadvantage because the far more experienced German panzer troops outmanoeuvred them easily. Soviet crews either fought to the end without moving, or they made a run for it at the last moment. ‘The Russian tanks come out of their emplacements like tortoises’, wrote an observer, ‘and try to escape by zigzagging. Some of them still wear their camouflage netting like green wigs.’

The German divisions advanced across immense fields of sunflowers or corn. One of the main dangers they faced was from Red Army soldiers, cut off by the rapid advance, attacking from behind or from the flank. On many occasions, when German soldiers fired back, the Red Army soldiers fell, feigning death, and lay there without moving. When the Germans approached to investigate, the Soviet soldiers waited until almost the last moment, then ‘shot them at close range’.

In spite of their relentless advance, German staff officers remained uneasy after the capture of Major Reichel’s plans. They had already been debating privately whether or not Kharkov had been a decisive victory: now, they feared a trick. They did not know if the enemy was preparing reserve armies for a surprise counter-attack, or planning to withdraw into the hinterland, extending their supply lines further across vast regions with poor communications. At this stage, however, their fears were greatly exaggerated. The chaos on the Soviet side was so great, owing to the breakdown in communications, that staff officers and commanders were having to fly around in biplanes, dodging the Messerschmitts, trying to locate their troops.

The Reichel affair cast a long shadow. This idea of the cunning Russian trap was perpetuated and enhanced after the battle of Stalingrad by many survivors and German historians of the Cold War period, who ignored the rather obvious fact that Stalin’s greatest mistake since the invasion had been to refuse to let his forces retreat. The Red Army’s starting to withdraw ahead of the Germans in July 1942 was not part of a devilish plan. Quite simply, Stalin had at last accepted the wisdom of allowing commanders to evade encirclement. As a result, the German pincer attack west of the Don closed uselessly.

The Stavka, however, was agreed that Voronezh, a vital communications centre, should be defended to the last. They knew that if they did not hold on there, and prevent the Germans advancing across the upper Don, then the whole of Timoshenko’s South-Western Front would be outflanked.

Voronezh was to be the first major battle for the recently mechanized 24th Panzer Division, which until the year before had been the Wehrmacht’s only cavalry division. Flanked by the Grossdeutschland and 16th Motorized Divisions, 24th Panzer Division charged headlong at Voronezh. Its panzer grenadiers reached the Don on 3 July, and secured a bridgehead on the far side. The following evening, panzer grenadiers from the Grossdeutschland captured the bridge on the main road to Voronezh in an audacious coup de main, before the Russians realized what had happened.

Hitler flew once more to Poltava, on 3 July, with his retinue, to consult with Field Marshal von Bock. He was again in triumphant mood with the capture of Sevastopol, and had just made Manstein a field marshal. ‘During the conversation’, wrote Bock in his diary, ‘the Führer took great pleasure in the idea that the English get rid of any general when things go wrong, and thus were burying any initiative in their army!’ The German generals present were forced to join in the sycophantic laughter. Although the Führer was clearly in exuberant form, he was also anxious not to allow the Soviet armies to escape, especially those south-east of Voronezh within the Don bends. It looked as if the town would fall rapidly.

Hitler then made a disastrous compromise decision. He allowed Bock to continue the battle for Voronezh with the one panzer corps already engaged, while sending the rest of Hoth’s army southwards. But the German forces left behind lacked the strength to achieve a rapid result. The Soviet defenders held out in ferocious street-fighting, where the Germans lost their main advantages.

More by happenstance than strategy, the fighting at Voronezh was part of a phase for the Red Army of concentrating defence on cities, not on arbitrary lines on the map. The new flexibility had allowed Timoshenko’s armies to pull back, avoiding encirclement, but they had already been so badly mauled that on 12 July a new army group command—the Stalingrad Front—was established by Stavka directive. Although nobody dared voice the defeatist suggestion that the Red Army might be forced back as far as the Volga, a suspicion began to grow that this was where the main battle would have to be fought. The most significant evidence was the prompt dispatch from Saratov of the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, whose five regiments came from the Urals and Siberia. Its divisional headquarters took over command of all local NKVD units and militia battalions, set up an armoured train detachment and two tank-training battalions, and took control of the river traffic across the Volga.

These seemed glorious days for German front-line regiments. ‘As far as the eye can see’, wrote an observer, ‘armoured vehicles and half-tracks are rolling forward over the steppe. Pennants float in the shimmering afternoon air.’ Commanders stood fearlessly erect in their tank turrets, one arm raised high, waving their companies forward. Their tracks stirred up dust and propelled it outwards like smoke clouds in their wake.

These days were especially intoxicating for young officers, racing to retake Rostov-on-Don. The recovery of their morale with the spring weather, the new equipment and the great success at Kharkov had laid to rest the nightmare of the previous winter. ‘It was almost as if we had two parts to our head,’ explained Count Clemens von Kageneck, a lieutenant in 3rd Panzer Division soon to win the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. ‘We were charging ahead exultantly and yet we knew that the enemy would attack again in the winter.’ They had also half-forgotten Russia’s ability, with its huge distances, extreme weather and bad roads, to grind down their modern machinery and force them back to the tactics and conditions of the First World War.

In the early months of the campaign, the infantry calculated carefully how far they had marched since they crossed the frontier on the morning of Barbarossa. Now they did not bother any longer. They tramped ahead, their faces caked with sweat and dust, at the ‘10-Kilometer-Tempo’ (six miles per hour) in an attempt to keep up with the motorized formations. Panzer commanders also seemed to forget that the artillery of most German divisions was still unmechanized, their plodding trace-horses coughing regularly in the dust-clouds, and gun crews swaying with fatigue on their backs. Yet technology and the flatness of the steppe brought one great advantage. Any wounded from the advance-to-contact engagements were rapidly evacuated by ‘Sanitäts-Ju’, a Junkers 52 converted into an air ambulance.

Struck by the limitless horizon and expanse of sky, and perhaps also influenced by the sight of vehicles swaying crazily in and out of potholes like ships in a heavy swell, the more imaginative saw the steppe as an uncharted sea. General Strecker described it in a letter as ‘an ocean that might drown the invader’. Villages became the equivalent of islands. In the sun-baked steppe, they also offered the most likely source of water. But a panzer commander might spot an onion-domed church tower in the distance, then on arrival, find beside it the rest of the village destroyed, perhaps with timbers still smouldering. Only the brick chimneys remained standing. The carcasses of horses and livestock lay around, their bellies swollen in the heat forcing their legs grotesquely in the air. Often, the only sign of life would be the odd cat, miaowing in the ruins.

In a village unscathed by the fighting, an old peasant might appear hesitantly, then snatch off his cap as if for a barin before the revolution, and hurry to draw water for the visitors. Some of the village women might meanwhile be driving their geese off into a nearby gully or copse, to conceal them, but they soon found that German soldiers had as good a nose as any Communist Party requisition group.

Soldiers did not just take turnips and onions from the fields, they raided almost every allotment or kitchen garden that they passed. Chickens, ducks and geese were the favourite spoils of war because they were so portable and easy to prepare for the pot. Clemens Podewils, a war correspondent attached to the Sixth Army, described in his diary the arrival of a combat group in one village on 30 June following a sharp skirmish. ‘Black figures jump down from tanks and half-tracks. Suddenly a great execution is carried out. The poultry, with bloody ruffs and beating their wings in a paroxysm, was carried back to the vehicles. The men jumped back on board, the tank tracks ground the soil, and the vehicles moved on again.’ The one thing which they did not bother to take from the locals that summer was their sunflower seeds, which German soldiers jokingly called ‘Russian chocolates’.

There is an unsettling disparity in many accounts, with no connection made between horrifying scenes and their own involvement. ‘A really small boy stood in our way,’ wrote a twenty-year-old theology student in a letter. ‘He no longer begged, he just muttered: “Pan, bread”. It was eerie how much sorrow, suffering and apathy could exist in a child’s face.’ Shortly afterwards, the same theology student turned soldier, just before his death, revealed the lyricism of an early nineteenth-century Romantic: ‘Germany, I have not yet used this word, you country of big, strong hearts. You are my home. It is worth one’s life becoming a seed for you.’

German allies looted with their own paradoxical notion of morality that it must be right to steal from Communists. ‘Our lads have stolen three jugs of milk,’ wrote a Hungarian corporal in his diary. ‘The women had brought the milk down to the basement, when our lads appeared with grenades and pretended to throw them. The women were scared and ran away, and our lads took the milk. We pray to God to help us in future as well.’

That July, Hitler became increasingly impatient with delays that were essentially his own fault. Panzer divisions would streak ahead in sudden breakthroughs, but then came to a halt at a crucial moment when fuel ran out. This represented a doubly goading delay for the Führer, with his eyes constantly straying across the map to the oilfields of the Caucasus.

His feverish mood pushed him into the most disastrous change of plan, which in fact wasted more time and more precious fuel as formations were redirected. The central stage of Operation Blue had been a rapid advance by Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army towards Stalingrad to cut off Timoshenko’s retreating troops, before the attack was launched against Rostov and across the lower Don into the Caucasus. But Hitler was so desperate to speed the attack into the Caucasus, that he decided to run the two stages concurrently. This, of course, greatly reduced the concentration of force. Entirely against Haider’s advice, he diverted Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army southwards and also deprived Sixth Army of XL Panzer Corps, thus slowing its advance down into a slow, frontal assault towards Stalingrad.

Field Marshal von Bock could not conceal his exasperation at the Führer’s arbitrary decision to split Operation Blue from a coherent two-stage whole into two totally separate parts. Hitler also decided to divide Army Group South into two. Field Marshal List, a Bavarian, was to take Army Group A into the Caucasus, while Field Marshal Baron von Weichs was to command Army Group B, with the Sixth Army as its largest formation. The Führer, only too well aware of Bock’s disapproval, dismissed him, blaming him for the delay at Voronezh. Hitler thus changed not only the organization, but also the timing and the sequence which formed the logic of Operation Blue. His next step, two weeks later, was to increase its scope considerably, while reducing the forces available still further.

The Führer’s attention was focused firmly on the approaches to the Caucasus, as he waited impatiently for signs of a great battle of encirclement, trapping Timoshenko’s forces on the steppe north of Rostov. But the only encirclement achieved was a comparatively small one by XL Panzer Corps at Millerovo on 17 July. The panzer divisions, wasting no time, left other troops to round them up. They wheeled south-eastwards, and their point units reached the town and railway station of Morozovsk on the following day. On the next day after that, they reached the lower Don, an advance of 125 miles in just over three days.

Once again, the fate awaiting Soviet prisoners was terrible. Stepan Ignatevich Odiniktsev, a clerk in 60th Cavalry Division, was one of those captured at Millerovo on 17 July. Along with thousands of other Russian prisoners, he was herded to a makeshift cage at Morozovsk, next to the main railway line which ran east to Stalingrad and westwards back through the Ukraine. Some prisoners were dispersed over the following weeks to other hastily erected camps, and Odiniktsev found himself in another open barbed-wire cage near the village of Golubaya. ‘We were starved to death,’ he recounted after being found over three months later by Red Army troops. ‘On the best days we received a little rye in boiled water. Meat from a dead horse was a delicacy. We were constantly beaten with rifle butts, sometimes without any reason. Each day, dozens of people died from starvation or beating.’ Although the NKVD was highly suspicious of any Red Army soldier taken by the Germans, Odiniktsev’s interrogator believed his story. ‘This man’, he scribbled in pencil at the bottom of the typed report, ‘looks like a skeleton covered with skin.’

So rapid was the German advance at this time that, on 19 July, Stalin personally ordered the Stalingrad Defence Committee to prepare the city for war immediately. The Stavka feared that Rostov would not hold out for long. The Seventeenth Army was poised to cross the Don on the Black Sea side, First Panzer Army was advancing on the city from the north, and part of Fourth Panzer Army was about to strike across the Don to the east of it. On 23 July, 13th and 22nd Panzer Divisions backed by panzer grenadiers from the SS Wiking Division, struck right into the heart of Rostov as far as the main Don bridge. Fighting in the city was fierce, especially the defence by NKVD troops of their headquarters, but by the end of the following day, the last main pockets of resistance were crushed in an operation of systematic clearance, building by building. The Führer was exultant. The retaking of Rostov obliterated his bad memories of the previous winter.

Hitler had arrived at his new advanced headquarters at the Ukrainian town of Vinnitsa on 16 July. As an alternative to the Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg, it was code-named Werwolf. (The word Wolf, the old German version of Adolf, clearly gave the Führer an atavistic thrill.) He was no doubt reassured to know that Vinnitsa was ‘fudenrein’—‘cleansed of Jews’—after mass executions by a police battalion the previous autumn. The town, it later transpired, had also been the site of Stalinist atrocities in 1938 when NKVD troops massacred over 10,000 Ukrainians, but the Germans did not discover the graves until 1943.

The Werwolf complex of large and comfortable log cabins had been built in a pine wood north of the town. The deceptively simple ‘Führer house’ was built round a private courtyard. Hitler, paranoid in enemy territory, also had a concrete bunker. His bodyguard, Rattenhuber, described the security precautions at Vinnitsa during his interrogation by SMERSH officers soon after the end of the war. Stalin, who was obsessed with every personal detail about Hitler, received a special report from Abakumov, the head of SMERSH.

The effort and attention to detail, when serving the Führer’s needs and safety, were reminiscent of a Byzantine court. Before he arrived, Gestapo teams searched the walls for microphones and explosives. A large vegetable garden was organized by a German horticultural firm, Zeidenspiner, and dug by the Todt Organisation. Hitler’s personal chef, Hauptsturmführer Fater, had to go out to select the vegetables himself. Any other vegetable destined for the Führer’s plate had to be dug up under the eye of an appointed courier who then brought the produce direct to the kitchen. All the food was chemically analysed before cooking, and sampled by a taster before it reached his plate. Samples from the water supply also had to be checked several times a day. Mineral water was bottled in the presence of couriers, and brought in. Even the laundry was X-rayed to ensure that no explosive had been concealed. Oxygen tanks were stored outside the bunker ready to pump in air, because Hitler was afraid of noxious vapours from the ferroconcrete. The Gestapo supervised the filling of these tanks and tested them regularly.

The Führer’s stay during the second part of July coincided with a period of great heat. The temperature was close to forty degrees. Hitler, sweating profusely, was most uncomfortable, especially in his state of feverish impatience during the advance on Rostov. Unable to bear the wait, he kept goading Haider to speed the operation. He had so convinced himself that the Red Army was in the final stages of collapse that on 23 July he rewrote Operation Blue, in Führer Directive No. 45. ‘In a campaign which has lasted little more than three weeks, the deep objectives outlined by me for the south flank of the Eastern Front have been largely achieved. Only weak enemy forces have succeeded in escaping encirclement and reaching the far bank of the Don.’

Hitler, having already ignored the strategic rationale on which the whole plan had been based, now increased its objectives at a stroke. Sixth Army would take and occupy Stalingrad. He was no longer content with the original idea of just advancing to the Volga and destroying the arms factories. Paulus should then send motorized groups down the Volga to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Army Group A under Field Marshal List was now ordered to seize the whole of the eastern seaboard of the Black Sea and most of the rest of the Caucasus.

List, on receiving this order two days later, stared in disbelief. He could only conclude that Hitler possessed intelligence confirming the collapse of the Red Army which had not been passed down. The army commanders also heard that Manstein’s Eleventh Army, having now completed the conquest of the Crimea, was leaving for the Leningrad front, and that the Grossdeutschland and the SS Leibstandarte panzer grenadier divisions were to be sent back to France. ‘The constant underestimation of enemy potential’, wrote Haider in his diary, ‘is gradually taking on a grotesque form and becoming dangerous.’

Hitler tried to justify this high-risk gamble on the basis of reinforcements arriving from their allies. Although the Führer could be most persuasive in his full, uplifting, propaganda flow—what Rommel cynically called a ‘sun-ray cure’—he convinced few generals on this particular subject. When he spoke in grandiose terms of the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies, the Second Hungarian Army and the Eighth Italian Army, they knew perfectly well that they could never be equated to a full German corps, let alone an army, mainly because of their lack of defence against tank attack. German generals also shared the opinion formed by Field Marshal von Rundstedt about this ‘absolute League of Nations army’, which included Romanians (whose officers and NCOs were in his view ‘beyond description’), Italians (‘terrible people’) and Hungarians (‘only wanted to get home quickly’). With a couple of exceptions, such as the Slovaks (‘first rate, very unassuming’) and Romanian mountain troops, he and other German commanders considered them ill-equipped, ill-armed, ill-trained, and completely unprepared for warfare on the Ostfront.

Although arrogantly expressed, many of Rundstedt’s observations are confirmed from other sources. Diaries, letters and Soviet interrogation reports make the lot of allied soldiers and NCOs painfully, and sometimes pathetically, clear. Corporal István Balogh was part of the 1st Hungarian Motorized Brigade which left Budapest railway station on 18 June, ‘amid silent people and sad sounds of bugles’, destined for ‘the blood-soaked land of Russia’. ‘Mother of God guarding over Hungary,’ he wrote in a minute diary, which was taken from his body on the bank of the river Don three months later and sent to Moscow, ‘pray for us and defend us from all sins and disasters! Amen.’ Moods were very mixed as they departed, with sadness, an ancient dread of the Russian steppe and moments of febrile optimism. In some of the troop trains ‘songs were heard’, another Hungarian recounted later when interrogated. ‘Soldiers and officers drank wine and there was gaiety. Nobody knew what war was really like.’

Five days later, Balogh’s train passed some of the battlegrounds of the previous year. ‘Everywhere crushed Russian tanks can still be seen. We look at them and fear the idea of this Red hell moving against Hungary. Thanks be to God that this has been stopped. We are firmly confident that we shall smash the Red danger for Europe.’ On 1 July at Ivanovka, they heard artillery fire for the first time. ‘Everywhere the remains of burnt-out German vehicles can be seen. Aren’t the Germans starting to lose their military luck? Believe in God so that good fortune will stay with us in spite of some defeats.’

The vast majority of all allied soldiers were conscripts, of whom at least half were illiterate. A lack of familiarity with technological advance made them liable to panic if attacked by tanks or aircraft. Their daily pay, as a Romanian cavalry lieutenant acknowledged when captured, was only ‘enough to buy one litre of milk’. The medical services appeared to have changed little since the previous century.

Morale in Hungarian units was not improved by the way the officers treated their men. Field punishment in the allied armies could be arbitrary, if not chaotic. ‘A man went to his comrade without the permission of his detachment commander,’ Corporal Balogh recorded on 3 July. ‘They wanted to hang him, but changed the punishment to eight hours’ guard at night, but this was also postponed. Three other soldiers were hanged, however. To my regret, it is as if we were still living in the fourteenth century.’ Romanian soldiers could still be condemned to flogging by their officers. Disciplinary measures had become even more necessary after the Romanian forces suffered 98,000 casualties in the siege of Odessa during the late summer of 1941. Few of them had understood the reason for continuing to advance east of the Dniester, once Bessarabia had been reoccupied.

The Balkan attitude to war remained primitive in other ways. A number of soldiers expressed their disappointment at the shortage of pickings in Russia after all that their officers had promised them. ‘The habit of looting is in the blood of Germans and Hungarians alike,’ one of them naively admitted to his NKVD interrogator after capture.

The true weakness of these allied armies was not put to the test until that autumn. By the time that Hitler came to recognize, but not to acknowledge, the mistake, it was too late to evade disaster. When one contemplates Hitler’s almost compulsively over-optimistic ambitions at this stage, it is clear that he never read, or never digested, Leo Tolstoy’s tale, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ written in 1886. In it a wealthy peasant named Pahom is told of the rich earth in the land of the Bashkirs beyond the Volga. They are simple folk and he will be able to get all the land he wants from them without much trouble. When Pahom reaches the land of the Bashkirs, they tell him that for a thousand roubles he can have as much land as he can walk round in a day. Pahom, despising them for their lack of sophistication, is exultant. He is certain that he can enclose a huge distance. Almost as soon as he starts out, however, he spots one attractive feature after another that he decides to include, a pond over there, or a stretch of land that would be good for flax. Then, he notices that the sun is starting to go down. Realizing that he risks losing everything, he runs faster and faster to make it back in time. ‘I have grasped too much’, he tells himself, ‘and ruined the whole affair.’ The effort kills him. He dies at the finishing post, and that is where he is buried. ‘Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed,’ was Tolstoy’s conclusion. The difference in the story less than sixty years later was that it was not a single man buried there in the steppe, but hundreds of thousands of proxies.

7. ‘Not One Step Backwards’

On 28 July 1942, while Hitler was still celebrating the capture of Rostov, Stalin sensed that the moment of crisis was at hand. Soviet forces retreating from Paulus’s Sixth Army faced annihilation west of the Don. If the Germans then advanced across the Volga, forty miles further on, the country would be cut in two. Convoy PQ-17 had just been destroyed in the Barents Sea and the new Anglo-American supply line across Persia would soon be threatened. The Soviet Union faced strangulation.

That day, Stalin suddenly stopped pacing up and down his office in the Kremlin while listening to a report from General Vasilevsky. ‘They’ve forgotten my Stavka Order!’ he burst out. This order, issued the previous August, stated that ‘anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. Those falling into encirclement… and who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowance and assistance.’

‘They’ve forgotten it!’ Stalin said again. ‘Write a new one on the same lines.’

‘When do you want me to report with the new order?’ Vasilevsky asked.

‘Today. Come back as soon as it is ready.’

Vasilevsky returned that evening with the draft of Order No. 227, more commonly known as ‘Not One Step Backwards’. Stalin made many changes, then signed it. The order was to be read to all troops in the Red Army. ‘Panic-mongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ Anyone who surrendered was ‘a traitor to the Motherland’. Each army had to organize ‘three to five well-armed detachments (up to 200 men each)’ to form a second line to shoot down any soldier who tried to run away. Zhukov implemented this order on the Western Front within ten days, using tanks manned by specially selected officers. They followed the first wave of an attack, ready ‘to combat cowardice’, by opening fire on any soldiers who wavered.

Three camps were set up for the interrogation of anyone who had escaped from German custody or encirclement. Commanders permitting retreat were to be stripped of their rank and sent to penal companies or battalions. The first on the Stalingrad Front came into being three weeks later on 22 August, the day before the Germans reached the Volga.

Penal companies—shtrafroty—were to perform semi-suicidal tasks such as mine clearance during an attack. Altogether some 422,700 Red Army men would ‘atone with their blood for the crimes they have committed before the Motherland’. The idea so appealed to the Soviet authorities that civilian prisoners were transferred from the Gulag to shtraf units, some say almost a million, but this may well be an exaggeration. Promises of redemption through bravery usually proved to be false, mainly because of bureaucratic indifference. Men were left to die in their ranks. On the Stalingrad Front, the 51st Army was told to round up officers who had escaped from encirclement. The first group of fifty-eight officers heard that they would be sent in front of a commission to allocate them to new units, but nobody bothered to interrogate them. Instead, they found themselves, without trial or warning, in penal companies. By the time the mistake came to light nearly two months later, they were ‘already wounded or killed’.

The system of NKVD Special Departments, re-established the year before to deal with ‘traitors, deserters and cowards’, was strengthened. The Special Department or OO (Osobyi Otdel) dated back to 1919, when Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, wanted complete control over the armed forces. In April 1943, less than two months after the battle of Stalingrad finished, the Special Departments, under their chief, Viktor Abakumov, became SMERSH, the acronym for Smert Shpionam—Death to Spies.

Rifle divisions had an NKVD Special Department staff of up to twenty officers, with one ‘Operational representative’ per battalion, and a headquarters guard unit of twenty to thirty men, who held prisoners and executed ‘cowards and traitors’. The Special Department officer recruited his own agents and informers. According to a former SMERSH informer, he tended to be ‘pale because they usually worked during the night’, and, on parade, he ‘looked closely in our faces as if he knew something bad about each one of us’.

NKVD Special Departments took their work of rooting out spies and traitors with great seriousness. An officer, using the name Brunny, wrote to the author and journalist llya Ehrenburg complaining that the newspapers did not publish enough in praise of the Special Departments. ‘It is very difficult to discover an experienced fascist spy. This requires great intelligence and a good eye. An NKVD soldier should be very keen and know the special rules of this game. The press publishes much about the terrible deeds of the Germans, which is necessary. But it is also important to make our soldiers hate traitors.’

The Wehrmacht tried to exploit the Stalinist approach to loyalty. One German instruction strongly recommended that Soviet prisoners should be warned ‘of the treatment which awaits them at the hands of the NKVD’ should they manage to escape ‘from German captivity and return to the Red Army’.

Another department of the NKVD, set up by Beria in the autumn of 1939, dealt with enemy prisoners of war. Its first major task had been the liquidation of over 4,000 Polish officers in the forest at Katyn. In the summer of 1942, however, its officers were underemployed because so few Germans were captured during the Axis advance.

Every member of a small detachment from the 29th Motorized Division of Fourth Panzer Army was interrogated by Lieutenant Lepinskaya from the political department of South-Western Front headquarters. Her questions to gauge their morale provided little encouraging material. ‘Most of the soldiers want to fight to the end,’ she had to report. ‘No cases of desertion or self-inflicted wounds. Officers strict but fair.’

Lepinskaya had more luck with Romanian prisoners. An officer admitted that his men hated Marshal Antonescu for having ‘sold their motherland to Germany’. Romanian soldiers were even more forthcoming. They told her of ‘fist-fights with Germans’, even that a German officer had been killed after he shot two of their comrades. Their own officers were ‘very rude’ to them and often struck them. There had been numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds, despite lectures from officers that they were ‘a sin against the Motherland and God’. Lepinskaya concluded that the Romanians were clearly in a ‘low political moral state’. Her report was passed rapidly back to Moscow.

The advance across the Don steppe provided many mixed experiences for the Sixth Army after the winter snows. General Strecker, the commander of XI Corps, found it ‘as hot as Africa, with huge dust clouds’. On 22 July, his chief of staff, Helmuth Groscurth, recorded a temperature of ‘53 degrees in the sun’.

Sudden rains, while temporarily turning tracks to mire, did little to solve the water shortage, which was the main preoccupation of the German Landser during that time. The Red Army polluted wells during the retreat, while collective farm buildings were destroyed, and tractors and cattle driven to the rear. Supplies which could not be moved in time were rendered unusable. ‘The Russians have poured petrol over the grain supplies,’ a corporal wrote home on 10 August. ‘Soviet bombers drop phosphorus bombs at night to set the steppe on fire,’ reported a panzer division. But many of the columns of black smoke on the horizon were started by cordite burns round artillery positions.

The German gunners in shorts, with their bronzed torsos muscled from the lifting of shells, looked like athletes from a Nazi propaganda film, but conditions were not as healthy as they might have appeared. Cases of dysentery, typhus and paratyphus began to increase. Around field ambulances, cookhouses and especially butchery sections, ‘the plague of flies was horrible’, reported one doctor. They were most dangerous for those with open wounds, such as the burns of tank crewmen. The continual movement forward made it very difficult to care for the sick and wounded. Evacuation by a ‘Sanitäts-Ju’ air ambulance was the best hope, but Hitler’s insistence on speed meant that almost every transport aircraft had been diverted to deliver fuel to halted panzer divisions.

For soldiers of the Sixth Army, the summer of 1942 offered the last idylls of war. In Don Cossack country, the villages of whitewashed cottages with thatched roofs, surrounded by small cherry orchards, willows and horses in meadows provided an attractive contrast to the usual dilapidation of villages taken over by collective farms. Most of the civilians, who had stayed behind in defiance of Communist evacuation orders, were friendly. Many of the older men had fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war. Only the previous spring, just a few weeks before the German invasion, Cossacks had risen in revolt at Shakhty, north of Rostov, declaring an independent republic. This had been stamped out by NKVD troops with a rapid and predictable brutality.

To the surprise of a company commander in the 384th Infantry Division, Cossacks remained friendly even after looting by his soldiers. They handed over eggs, milk, salted cucumber and even a whole ham as a gift. He then arranged to purchase geese for two Reichsmarks a bird. ‘To be honest, people give everything they have if you treat them correctly,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I’ve never eaten so much as here. We eat honey with spoons until we’re sick, and in the evening we eat boiled ham.’

During the rapid German advances, Stalin sought to blame his generals. He kept changing commanders in the vain hope that a ruthless new leader could galvanize resistance and transform the situation. He even rang one army commander to dismiss him, then told him to call to the telephone one of his own corps commanders who was to be his replacement. A sense of failure and disaster spread, destroying the confidence partially rebuilt after the battle before Moscow. The Red Army, still suffering from Stalin’s premature offensives early in the year, lacked trained troops and experienced NCOs and officers. Most of the conscripts hurled into battle had often received little more than a dozen days’ training, some even less. Young peasants drafted in from collective farms were pitifully ignorant of modern warfare and weaponry. A cavalryman who found an aluminium tube on the ground thought he could use it as a handle for his horsebrush. It proved to be an incendiary bomb, which blew up in his hands.

The Germans never ceased to be astonished at the profligacy of Russian commanders with their men’s lives. One of the worst examples came during the defensive battles west of the Don. Three battalions of trainee officers, without weapons or rations, were sent against the 16th Panzer Division. Their commandant, who surrendered after the massacre, told his captors that when he had protested ‘about this senseless task’, the army commander, who was clearly drunk, had bellowed at him to get on with it.

The Red Army still suffered from the old fear of initiative left from the purges. But out of the latest disasters in the south, which finally destroyed the reputations of Stalinist witch-hunters, a new breed of commander was starting to emerge—energetic, pitiless and much less afraid of commissars and the NKVD. Zhukov’s achievements provided the light and the hope for many other rising officers, furious at the Red Army’s humiliations.

General Vasily Chuikov, soon to become the army commander in Stalingrad, was one of the most ruthless of this new generation. His explosions of temper were compared to those of Zhukov. His strong, peasant face and thick hair were typically Russian. He also had a robust sense of humour and a bandit laugh which exposed gold-crowned teeth. Soviet propaganda later portrayed him as the ideal product of the October Revolution.

Chuikov had missed the first disastrous six months of war, having been in China as a military attaché accredited to Chiang Kai-shek. After his recall to the Soviet Union, he became acting commander of a reserve army near Tula. Early in July, when still suffering from a spinal injury, he received orders to move his incomplete divisions, now designated the 64th Army, to hold the Germans west of the Don.

Chuikov, accompanied by his chief commissar, Konstantin Kirkovich Abramov, reached Stalingrad Front headquarters on 16 July. They heard that the enemy was advancing rapidly towards the Don, but nobody had any details. The 62nd Army was spread out on the upper part of the Don’s eastern loop, and Chuikov had to bring his divisions in to cover the lower part, south of the river Chir. He was understandably worried about the morale of the army on his left, having intercepted a lorry full of officers with spare cans of fuel, escaping to the rear without permission.

Just to his right, above the river Chir, the Austrian 44th Infantry Division was heavily engaged against three divisions of 62nd Army. The fighting was particularly brutal. A captured corporal told his interrogator that an officer had ordered them to shoot two wounded Red Army soldiers they had found ‘hiding in a ditch’. Further north, however, the Germans had broken through in strength, cutting off many regiments when they reached the Don at Kamensky.

German reconnaissance planes quickly pinpointed the weak points along the Don, and the deployment of Chuikov’s forward divisions. On 25 July, the Germans attacked in force. This baptism of fire for the 64th Army was not made any simpler by dust storms, nor by the fact that essential detachments were still stuck behind in Tula. The next morning brought a German armoured attack, and although the panzers terrified the crews of the light T-60 tanks, who tried to hide in gullies, their shells could do little to the heavy KV tanks.

‘They had a longer range,’ explained a German panzer commander. ‘We could not attack them across the open. So, like ships at sea, I pulled my tanks right back out of sight, made a wide detour, and attacked them from behind.’ The Russian heavy tanks scattered, except for one which had lost a track; its traverse mechanism had jammed, so the turret could not turn. We lined up behind him, and started to shoot. We counted our hits on this tank, but none of them penetrated the armour. Then, I saw the hatch of the tank move. I guessed that they wanted to surrender, so over the radio I told my company to cease fire. The Russians then opened the hatch completely and climbed out.’ The crew were totally confused, shaken and deafened, but not one of them was even wounded. ‘It was depressing to realize how inferior our tank guns were.’

The German strike through the right flank of 62nd Army to the Don soon caused chaos. A rumour spread in the rear echelons of Chuikov’s 64th Army on 26 July that German tanks were about to cut them off. A stampede to the pontoon bridge over the Don began. The panic then infected front-line troops. Chuikov sent staff officers to the river bank to restore order, but German aircraft had already spotted the opportunity. Waves of Richthofen’s Stukas appeared and several of Chuikov’s senior officers were among those killed.

The 62nd Army was in an even worse position. The 33rd Guards Rifle Division, commanded by Colonel Aleksandr Utvenko, found itself trapped on the west bank of the Don, attacked by two German divisions. ‘They would have quickly finished us off if we had not dug ourselves in deeply,’ Utvenko told the writer Konstantin Simonov shortly afterwards. His division, down to 3,000 strong, was having to send the wounded on carts and camels to the rear at night. The Germans were also sustaining heavy losses. On just one battalion sector, 513 German corpses were dragged into a balka, or gully. The Russians were so short of ammunition that they had to attack to capture enemy guns and ammunition. They had so little to eat that they boiled wheat from surrounding fields. On 11 August, the remains of the division split into small groups to fight through to the Don. ‘I myself reloaded my pistol five times,’ Utvenko recounted. ‘Several commanders shot themselves. Up to 1,000 men were killed, but they sold their lives dearly. One man took a leaflet out of his pocket and started walking towards the Germans. Galya, a woman interpreter on our staff, shouted: “Look at him! The snake is going to surrender!”, and she shot him with her pistol.’

The last pocket of resistance, having run out of anti-tank ammunition, was overrun by German panzers. Utvenko and his remaining companions jumped from a small cliff into a marsh, where he was wounded in the feet by shrapnel from a shellburst. Able only to crawl, Utvenko spent the next day hiding in a field of sunflowers with some twenty soldiers. That night, they collected more survivors, and swam across the Don. Eight of them drowned. Utvenko was pulled across by his adjutant, a former gynaecologist called Khudobkin, who had an epileptic fit just after they reached the far bank. Utvenko remarked afterwards that it was fortunate he had not had it in the river. ‘If we don’t die here,’ Khudobkin replied, ‘we’ll survive the war.’ Khudobkin had a particular reason for believing he would live. His mother had received notification of his death in the Crimea, where he had been badly wounded, and she had organized a church service. According to Russian superstition, if your memorial service took place when you were still alive, you would not go to an early grave. Simonov clearly sensed in that terrible summer of 1942 that this idea was symbolic for the whole country.

Despite the disasters and chaos from bad communications, Red Army units continued to fight back. They made the most of night raids, since an attack during daylight immediately brought a response from the Luftwaffe. The German company commander who kept a diary in the 384th Infantry Division recorded on 2 August: ‘Russians resisting hard. These are fresh troops and young.’ And again the next day: ‘Russians resisting hard. They are getting reinforcements all the time. One of our sapper companies avoided battle. Very shameful.’ His own soldiers then began to suffer badly from stomach-ache, perhaps due to contaminated water. ‘It’s terrible here,’ he wrote a few days later. ‘Such terrifying nights. Every single one of us is tense. One’s nerves don’t stand a chance.’

In an attempt to counter Luftwaffe air superiority, Red Army aviation regiments were transferred hurriedly from the central and northern fronts. A regiment of night-fighters landing for the first time at a new base to support the Stalingrad Front discovered that their aerodrome was no more than a large field planted with watermelons and surrounded by tomato plants, which the local peasants continued to harvest even while fighters landed and took off. The regiment’s presence was soon spotted by a Focke-Wulf reconnaissance aircraft, and when strafing Messerschmitts came in just above ground level, the adjacent peasant market was caught in their fire. In an instant the rural scene became one of total chaos, with panic-stricken horses rearing in the shafts of wagons, children screaming, awnings ripped by machine-gun bullets and stallholders killed among their fruit and vegetables. Less damage was done to the night-fighter regiment, which found itself forced to maintain an exhausting schedule of sorties. Often there was no time to eat at the field kitchen by the side of the runway, so ground crew would bring plates out to the aircraft at dispersal and pilots ate in their cockpit. The rules of security drummed into the ground personnel by commissars were so absolute that they never counted the number of aeroplanes on the field, or even how many failed to return from a mission.

In the confused air skirmishes at this time, Major Kondrashov, the commander of the regiment, was shot down behind German lines. His left leg, which he later lost, was mangled in the crash, but a peasant woman who lived nearby managed to drag him clear of the wreckage and care for him in her house. The site had been marked by fellow pilots from his regiment, and soon after dawn, two of them landed by her house. They carried Kondrashov out and bundled him into the rear seat of one of the aircraft. The pilot then flew him to a military hospital.

Aerial dogfights over the Don during those last days of July and early August attracted the attention of the whole battlefield below. German infantrymen and panzer crews alike would shade their eyes with a hand against the sun, peering up at the blue sky and vapour trails. Russian aircraft generally attacked ground targets at midday. It was such a regular run that Messerschmitt 109s would often make sure that they were around, ready to jump them. There were cheers whenever an enemy machine was hit, and the stricken aircraft, pouring smoke, corkscrewed down and exploded on the ground. The reputation of star fighter pilots began to grow within the German Army as well as the Luftwaffe.

In this war of movement, the staffs of panzer and motorized divisions seldom bothered to have their headquarters camouflaged. Working in hastily pitched tents through the night on new sets of orders, or checking ammunition and casualty returns, they found that their spirit lamps attracted swarms of insects, not enemy bullets. They caught up on sleep during the day, their heads nodding and rolling around, as the headquarters vehicles moved to the next location.

The commander of the 16th Panzer Division, General Hans Hube, would take a nap in the middle of a battle in front of his staff, thus inspiring confidence in his unflappability. ‘Papa Hube’, as he was known to his troops, made an immediate impression with his powerful, solid face and black artificial hand, having lost an arm in the First World War. Hube was a creature of firm habit and organization. Battle or no battle, he made sure that he ate regularly every three hours, ‘consuming so many calories and vitamins’. Although no intellectual he was a brilliant, clear-thinking man’, according to more than one officer who knew him well. Hitler admired him greatly as a soldier, but because this ‘old warhorse’ was a realist who said what he felt, the Führer considered him ‘too pessimistic’ towards the end of the battle of Stalingrad.

A number of Hube’s panzer commanders made dismissive remarks about the stupidity of the enemy, leaving tanks halted in the open, and thus presenting perfect targets for Stukas or the 88-mm antiaircraft guns, deadly in a ground role. They knew that the T-34 was overall a much better armoured fighting vehicle than anything which Germany had yet produced. On the other hand its gunsight was not very good, few Russian commanders had decent binoculars, and even fewer had radios. The Red Army’s greatest weakness, however, was its poverty of tactics. Their tank forces failed to use terrain properly and demonstrated little familiarity with the principles of fire and movement. And, as Chuikov readily acknowledged, they were incapable of coordinating attacks with Red Army aviation.

Complacency sometimes led the Germans into relaxing their guard. At first light on 30 July, a group of T-34s, having approached under cover of darkness, surprised Hube’s headquarters in a village. Officers struggled into their clothes as shells exploded among the headquarters and rear-echelon vehicles. Podewils, the war correspondent then attached to the division, stuck his head outside. ‘Not an encouraging sight’, he noted in his diary. ‘Vehicles of every sort chaotically trying to overtake each other as fast as they could to get away!’ The Germans had also been surprised on the previous day by another unexpected skirmish, which Hube drily called a ‘Hussar affair’.

The initial shock was soon over. A company from the 2nd Panzer Regiment arrived, and very soon six T-34s were ablaze in the open on some marshy low ground. One T-34, in a suicidal attack, charged at the divisional transport vehicles in the village, but suddenly encountered a German panzer which, ‘with a direct hit at point-blank range, literally blasted its turret into the air’. Hube, after observing the early morning action, remarked to Podewils: ‘You’d better go up to the front line. It’s safer there.’ Podewils and his companion left later in the morning. They drove forward over the corduroy road across the marsh. One of the blackened T-34s still smouldered. It gave off ‘the smell of burnt flesh’.

At corps headquarters he heard that over the last eight days the Red Army had sent nearly a thousand tanks across the Don: just over half of them had been destroyed. These figures were greatly exaggerated. The Red Army commander had only 550 tanks allocated, and many of them never managed to cross the Don. Wildly over-optimistic reports from the front were largely to blame. One panzer crewman observed that ‘whenever a Russian tank was hit, almost every panzer in the battle claimed it as a kill’. Yet the sight of so many destroyed Russian tanks impressed all who saw it. General von Seydlitz said that from afar the shot-out KVs looked like ‘an enormous herd of elephants’. Whatever the exact figure destroyed, many Germans felt convinced that they must be close to total victory. The Russian hydra could not go on for ever growing more heads for them to chop off.

The Führer, again frustrated at the slow progress, reverted to the original plan of the Fourth Panzer Army assisting the Sixth Army to capture Stalingrad. The loss in time and the cost in fuel were not mentioned. Hoth’s armoured divisions reacted quickly. Advancing north against very weak opposition, they soon threatened Kotelnikovo, just under a hundred miles south-west of Stalingrad. But the main question was whether they could make up for Hitler’s changes of plan. General von Richthofen, on the basis of the air reconnaissance reports, noted in his diary on 2 August: ‘The Russians are throwing forces from all directions towards Stalingrad.’

Paulus, in a confident mood according to Richthofen, launched pincer attacks led by 16th and 24th Panzer Divisions and supported by Richthofen’s Stukas. After two days of fighting, they surrounded eight rifle divisions and all the artillery left west of the Don. The encirclement was finally accomplished at Kalach. From the top of a small precipice overlooking the ‘quiet Don’, the first panzer crews gazed across at the town of Kalach in the violet evening light. The setting sun behind their tanks threw long shadows in front of them towards the east. Beyond Kalach, the steppe stretched ahead to Stalingrad. Kalach itself consisted mainly of small workshops, a dilapidated railway station and ‘höchst primitiv’ wooden shacks.

After their success, the panzer crews joked among themselves with relief and happiness, coming down from the tension of battle. Songs rang out from some of the tanks. But soon their commanders pulled them back into ‘hedgehog’ defensive position. After dusk had fallen, the thousands of Russian stragglers trapped on the west bank started to attack, and the night was continually broken with bursts of machine-gun fire, flares and crackling exchanges of rifle fire.

The next day, the Germans started to clear the woods systematically, a number of officers comparing it to a rather large deer shoot. The prisoners taken included a senior signals officer and his personnel, most of whom were women. That night, another battle broke out, this time by moonlight, around the German positions. The following morning, the Germans set fire to the dry brush to drive the remaining Russians out of the woods. Finally, the area was regarded as ‘cleansed of enemy’. Few escaped. Of the 181st Rifle Division of 62nd Army, which had been 13,000 strong at the start of the fighting, only 105 men slipped back across the Don.

The fighting had indeed been hard. Many German soldiers did not share Paulus’s confidence, nor Hitler’s opinion that the enemy was finished. On the first day, the anti-tank battalion of the 371st Infantry Division lost twenty-three men. More and more often, Sixth Army soldiers, like those in the 389th Infantry Division, were hearing the ‘Urrah!’ of charging Soviet infantry. One soldier writing home was utterly dejected by ‘the many, many crosses and graves, fresh from yesterday’, and the implications for the future. Heavy losses in other divisions also seem to have dented morale. The 76th Infantry Division had to detail extra soldiers for burial parties. One of those men selected told his Russian interrogator, when captured a month later, that he and his two companions had had to deal with seventy-two corpses in a single day. An artillery corporal, on the other hand, who had worked for twenty-nine hours without a proper break, was in no doubt about a victorious outcome for the Wehrmacht. ‘The Russians can shoot as much as they want, but we’ll shoot more. It’s a great pleasure when a couple of hundred Russians attack. One self-propelled assault gun is enough, and they all make a run for it.’

Some units were rewarded with extra rations of chocolate and cigarettes for their exertions, which they enjoyed during the relative cool of the evening. The fighting had been hard. ‘The only consolation’, a pioneer wrote home, ‘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 of leave.’

Nowhere was Stalin’s ‘Not one step back’ order more applicable than in the threatened city that bore his name. The civil-war battle, which took place when the town was still called Tsaritsyn (in Tartar it meant the town on the Tsaritsa, or yellow river), was invoked along with the myth that Stalin’s leadership there had turned the tide against the White armies and saved the Revolution. The regional military committee did not shrink from using every measure to turn the city into a fortress. The task was far from easy. Stalingrad curved for twenty miles along the high western bank of the Volga. The defenders would have a broad stretch of exposed water behind them, across which all supplies and reinforcements would have to come.

Throughout the region, the population was mobilized. All available men and women between sixteen and fifty-five—nearly 200,000 –were mobilized in ‘workers’ columns’, organized by their district Party committees. As in Moscow the year before, women in kerchiefs and older children were marched out and given long-handled shovels and baskets to dig anti-tank ditches over six feet deep in the sandy earth. While the women dug, army sappers laid heavy anti-tank mines on the western side.

Younger schoolchildren, meanwhile, were put to work building earth walls round the petroleum-storage tanks on the banks of the Volga. Supervised by teachers, they carried the earth on wooden stretchers. A German aircraft suddenly appeared. The girls did not know where to hide, and the explosion from a bomb buried two fourteen-year-old girls. When their classmates dug them out, they found that one of them, Nina Grebennikova, was paralysed with a broken back. Her shocked and weeping friends cleaned off the wooden stretcher, and carried her on it to a Stalingrad hospital, next to where the Tsaritsa gorge opens on to the Volga.

Anti-aircraft defences were a high priority, but many of the guns had not yet received shells. Most batteries were formed with young women, mainly Komsomol members, who had been recruited in April with the inescapably pointed question: ‘Do you want to defend your Motherland?’ Batteries were sited on both banks of the Volga to defend key installations, such as the power station at Beketovka just to the south, and the large factories in the northern sector of the town. There, the workers on arms-production lines, such as the Stalingrad tractor factory, which had converted to the production of T-34 tanks, received rudimentary military training.

The Stalingrad Defence Committee issued decree after decree. Collective farms were ordered to hand their grain reserves over to the Red Army. Tribunals were set up to try those who failed in their patriotic duty. Failure to denounce a member of the family who deserted or failed to enlist carried a ten-year sentence. The director of a high school ordered to take sixty-six of his seventeen-year-old pupils to enlist them at the district military commission, was put in front of a tribunal because thirty-one of them deserted en route.

Tribunals also dealt in absentia with civilian ‘deserters’, most of them denounced by retreating refugees. Those pronounced guilty were sentenced as a ‘Traitor to the Party and to the Soviet State’. All too often guilt was a matter of timing. Y. S., who ran away when her village was bombed, was sentenced to six months’ labour camp ‘for deserting her place of work’, while A. S., who refused to leave her home when the Germans were approaching, was condemned in absentia as a ‘traitor to the Motherland’. A minimum of ten years in a Gulag labour camp awaited her.

For some time to come, the political department of the Stalingrad Front paid ‘special attention to the investigation of male conscripts from regions of the Ukraine liberated by the Red Army in the winter 1941/2’. Those who had ‘refused to evacuate’ their towns and villages were, by definition, suspect of being ‘systematically anti-Soviet’ and of having collaborated with the Germans.

Declarations in Moscow about freedom of religion carried little weight in the Stalingrad region. The head of the agricultural bank in one district, who sent his brother, an officer in the Red Army, some prayers, ‘advising him to recite them before battle’, was condemned for ‘Anti-Party action’. Civilians also had to be very careful about commenting on the speed of the German advance or the incompetence of the Russian defence. A. M., a worker in a Volga fish-factory, was accused of ‘political and moral degeneracy’ and ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’ because he allegedly ‘praised the Germans and blackened the leaders of the Party, the Government and the Red Army’.

Stalin, warned of the atmosphere of panic behind the front, resorted once again to changing commanders. Having dismissed Timoshenko on 21 July, to replace him with General V. N. Gordov, supervised by Vasilevsky, he then decided in early August to split the front into two commands, with the southern part extending from the Tsaritsa (see Map 6) in the centre of Stalingrad southwards into the Kalmyk steppe. Colonel-General Andrey Yeremenko, who had not yet entirely recovered from his leg wound, on hearing of his appointment to command the southern half, argued against splitting the front through the centre of Stalingrad, but this only irritated the supreme commander-in-chief.

Yeremenko flew down on 4 August in a Douglas transport aircraft and landed at the small airfield on the north-west edge of the city. Khrushchev met him with a car and they drove to the headquarters. For Yeremenko, the lack of information about the enemy was depressing. Five days later, Stalin reorganized the front commands again and promoted Yeremenko to command both. But Stalin, still nervous, sent Zhukov down to investigate and report back.

The chief danger, as Yeremenko soon spotted, was a simultaneous attack from Paulus’s Sixth Army attacking across the Don from the west and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army attacking from the south-west. The whole of the lower Volga was in danger, and there was panic in Astrakhan after German bombing. The oil refineries by the estuary into the Caspian burned for a week, emitting filthy black clouds. Other raids caused chaos, for the ports were packed with refugees, and the quays piled with factory machinery, destined for evacuation eastwards. Now, apart from the desert, the only escape route was across the Caspian Sea.

Few forces were available to oppose Hoth’s forces in the semi-barren Kalmyk steppe, which Russians from the north thought of as ‘the end of the world’. Lev Lazarev, who commanded a detachment of marine infantry there, said of the area: ‘It’s not Russia, it’s Asia. It was hard to understand the reason to fight for such territory, yet we all knew that we had to stand or die there.’ With no soldiers available, the Soviet military authorities had turned to the navy. Brigades of sailors were transferred by rail across Siberia from the Far East fleet. Their officers were eighteen-year-old cadets originally from the naval academy in Leningrad, where they had fought in the early part of the siege. In August, while the sailors were en route from the Far East, the cadets received three weeks’ field training on the Kalmyk steppe. These eighteen-year-olds awaited the tough sailors they were to command with trepidation. But they did not disgrace themselves in battle. The casualty rate for the young lieutenants would be terrible. Out of Lazarev’s class of twenty-one cadets, only two remained alive the following year.

On the German side, meanwhile, a sense of unease began to grow in spite of their victories. ‘After the Don we will advance to the Volga,’ wrote the company commander who kept a diary in the 384th Infantry Division. But he recognized the danger. Germany simply did not have ‘enough troops to push forward along the whole front’. He began to suspect that the war had developed a momentum of its own. It would not come to an end when they reached the great river that was supposed to mark their final destination.

8. ‘The Volga is Reached!’

On 21 August 1942, infantry companies from General von Seydlitz’s LI Corps crossed the Don at dawn in inflatable assault boats. They rapidly established a bridgehead near the village of Luchinsky. More and more companies paddled furiously over the broad expanse of water. A few miles downstream at Vertyachy, a whole battalion crossed the Don in relays in less than seventy minutes.

Once bridgeheads were secured, pioneer battalions went to work building pontoon bridges to take the tanks and other vehicles of General von Wietersheim’s XIV Panzer Corps. The German pioneers, intrigued by the mysterious contrasts of the ‘quiet Don’, referred to the river affectionately as ‘the stream’. A number of soldiers and officers in the Sixth Army seem to have fallen for this stretch of Don Cossack country. Some dreamed of having a farm there once the war was won.

Soon after midday on 22 August, the bridge was ready, and General Hube’s 16th Panzer Division, ‘the battering ram of the corps’, began to cross. The tanks, half-tracks, self-propelled assault guns, eight-wheeled reconnaissance vehicles and trucks rattled deafeningly over the pontoon bridge.

That night, as soon as the moon rose, Russian aircraft began their bombing runs. Vehicles were hit on both banks, and they burned brightly, illuminating the target area, but the bombs continued to miss the bridge itself. Hube’s divisional headquarters received reports of skirmishes around the edges of the bridgehead. From time to time, the shrieking whoosh of Katyusha rockets from ‘Stalin organs’ could be heard. The sound was unsettling, but the enemy batteries were firing blind. Behind the infantry screen the laagered panzer troops made final checks on their vehicles, or caught up on a little sleep. At 04.30 hours, as the dawn rose ahead of them in the east, Count von Strachwitz’s Abteilung of the 2nd Panzer Regiment, reinforced with panzer grenadier companies, moved forward towards the Volga. The tank crews, conscious of the historic event, found it ‘a very exhilarating moment’.

The steppe between the Don and Volga, stone-hard in the summer drought, offered fast going. Tank commanders standing in their turrets, wearing goggles against the dust, had to keep an eye out ahead for a hidden balka or gully that might not be visible to the driver. For the first dozen miles, the panzer crews sighted few enemy. The slightly rolling terrain of dry, rough grass seemed eerily empty.

The sun had still not risen high in the sky when General Hube, after a flurry of radio transmissions, suddenly halted his headquarters. Engines were switched off to conserve fuel. They waited in the baking heat. Soon the droning of a small aeroplane could be heard. A Fieseler Storch liaison aircraft appeared. It circled, then came in to land alongside the armoured vehicles. The pilot climbed out and strode over. It was General von Richthofen. Richthofen, now commander-in-chief of the Fourth Air Fleet, hardly bothered to conceal his mood of impatience with the army. ‘General Paulus is worried about his left flank,’ he had noted in his diary only three days before. He was also displeased when told that the Luftwaffe’s main priority was ‘to shoot up tanks!’ For fighter pilots, ground attack was regarded as menial and unnecessarily dangerous work. It had none of the skill of aerial combat and ran the risk of a lucky shot from the ground when Russian infantry lay flat on their backs and fired away with their rifles.

Richthofen, in shirtsleeves and with his uniform cap pushed back, exposing part of his shaved head, greeted Hube curtly. On orders from Führer headquarters, all of Fourth Air Fleet’s resources were to be diverted to the Stalingrad Front, ‘to cripple the Russians completely’. ‘Make use of today!’ he told Hube. ‘You’ll be supported by 1,200 aircraft. Tomorrow I can’t promise you any more.’

In the afternoon, the panzer crews looked up, squinting against the sunlight, to see waves of Junkers 88 and Heinkel 111 bombers, as well as squadrons of Stukas ‘in tightly packed groups’, flying towards Stalingrad. A mass of shadows passed across the steppe. On their return, the Stuka pilots ‘sounded their sirens’ to greet the advancing troops. The panzer crews waved back exultantly. In the distance, they could already see the columns of smoke rising from the city, which Sixth Army headquarters, in an excess of propagandists enthusiasm, described as ‘Stalingrad, the city of Stalin, the starting-point of the Red revolution’.

For the citizens of Stalingrad, Sunday, 23 August, was ‘a day which will never be forgotten’. The model city of which they were so proud, with its gardens along the high west bank of the Volga and the tall white apartment buildings which gave the place its modern, cubist look, became an inferno.

The loudspeakers in the streets attached to lamp-posts began to repeat: ‘Comrades, an air-raid warning has been sounded in the city. Attention, comrades, an air-raid warning…’ The population had heard so many false air-raid warnings, broadcast in the same monotonous voice, that few took this one seriously at first. Only after anti-aircraft batteries opened fire did people begin to run for cover. Those picnicking on the Mamaev Kurgan, the huge Tartar burial mound which dominated the centre of the city, were the most exposed. Down in the long broad streets which ran parallel to the Volga, the mass of refugees from outlying districts found little protection, apart from trenches in courtyards and gardens dug by block committees for those who could not reach a cellar in time.

Richthofen’s aircraft began to carpet-bomb in relays, ‘not just industrial targets, but everything’, said one student present that day. The high-explosive bombs oscillated gently as they dropped in sticks from the Heinkels. Descriptions of scenes in the city make it hard to imagine anyone surviving outside a cellar. Incendiary bombs showered on the wooden houses down the south-western edge of the city. They burned to the ground, but in the smoking ash, their spindly brick chimneys remained standing in rows like a surrealist graveyard. Closer to the banks of the great river, the shells of the tall white apartment blocks remained standing, even when hit, but most of the floors inside collapsed. Many other buildings were smashed open, or set afire. Mothers cradled dead babies, and children tried to rouse mothers killed beside them. Hundreds of other families were buried alive in rubble.

One German pilot, after his aircraft was hit by one of the women’s anti-aircraft batteries, managed to bale out, but when his parachute opened, he drifted straight down into a blaze. Those citizens of Stalingrad who saw his end were so shocked by the onslaught around that even the satisfaction of poetic justice was beyond them.

The huge petroleum-storage tanks on the Volga bank were also hit. A ball of flame rose about 1,500 feet into the sky, and over the following days, the column of black smoke could be seen from over two hundred miles away. Blazing oil spread across the Volga. Bombs destroyed the telephone exchange and waterworks, and the main Stalingrad hospital was straddled by a stick of bombs. Windows were blasted in and children hurled from their beds. They included Nina Grebennikova, the fourteen-year-old whose spine had been broken a week before by the bomb which fell near the petroleum-storage tanks. The attack on the hospital so terrorized members of the staff that they ran away, abandoning their patients, some of whom were left for five days without food or care.

One mother, caught in the open with a daughter whose legs froze in shell-shock, ‘literally had to drag her home’ through the bombing. No driver would attempt the journey. With virtually all the fathers away at the front, or now mobilized, women were left to cope with the appalling aftermath. Viktor Goncharov’s wife, helped by her eleven-year-old son, Nikolay, buried her father’s corpse in the yard of their apartment block, which had received a direct hit. ‘Before filling in the grave,’ the son remembered, ‘we searched for his head, but could not find it.’ Her mother-in-law, Goncharova, the wife of the Cossack veteran, was lost in the chaos. Somehow the old woman managed to live through the battle to come, surviving for just over five months in a bunker. They did not find each other again until the end of the war, nearly three years later.

The aerial assault on Stalingrad, the most concentrated on the Ostfront) represented the natural culmination of Richthofen’s career since Guernica.[3] Fourth Air Fleet aircraft flew a total of 1,600 sorties that day and dropped 1,000 tons of bombs for the loss of only three machines. According to some estimates, there had been nearly 600,000 people in Stalingrad, and 40,000 were killed during the first week of bombardment.

The reason why so many citizens and refugees still remained on the west bank of the Volga was typical of the regime. The NKVD had commandeered almost all river craft, while allotting a very low priority to evacuating the civil population. Then Stalin, deciding that no panic must be allowed, refused to permit the inhabitants of Stalingrad to be evacuated across the Volga. This, he thought, would force the troops, especially the locally raised militia, to defend the city more desperately. ‘No one bothered about human beings,’ observed one of the boys trapped behind with their mothers. ‘We too were just meat for the guns.’

While Richthofen’s bombers pounded Stalingrad, the armoured spearhead of 16th Panzer Division had advanced virtually unopposed across the steppe for nearly twenty-five miles. ‘Around Gumrak’, the division recorded, ‘enemy resistance became stronger and anti-aircraft guns began firing wildly at our armoured vehicles from the north-west corner of Stalingrad.’

This resistance came from the batteries operated by young women volunteers, barely out of high school. Few had fired the guns before, owing to the shortage of ammunition, and none of them had been trained to take on targets on the ground. They had switched targets from the bombers over the city on sighting the panzers, whose crews ‘seemed to think they were on a Sunday promenade’. The young gun crews furiously wound the handles, depressing the barrels to zero elevation—the Soviet 37-mm anti-aircraft guns were fairly crude copies of the Bofors—and traversed on to the leading armoured vehicles.

The German panzer crews quickly overcame their initial surprise, and deployed to attack some of the batteries. Stukas soon arrived to deal with others. This unequal battle was watched in anguish by Captain Sarkisyan, the commander of a Soviet heavy-mortar battalion, who later related what he saw to the writer Vasily Grossman. Every time the anti-aircraft guns fell silent, Sarkisyan exclaimed: ‘Oh, they’re finished now! They’ve been wiped out!’ But each time, after a pause, the guns started to fire again. ‘This’, declared Grossman, ‘was the first page of the Stalingrad defence.’

The German spearhead pushed on for the last few miles. At about four in the afternoon, just as the August sunlight was softening, they reached Rynok, to the north of Stalingrad, and there ‘the soldiers of the 16th Panzer Division gazed on the Volga, flowing past right before their eyes’. They could hardly believe it. ‘We had started early in the morning on the Don,’ recalled one of Strachwitz’s company commanders, ‘and then we were on the Volga’. Somebody in the battalion produced a camera and they took photographs of each other, standing on the backs of their vehicles, gazing through binoculars to the far shore. These were included in Sixth Army headquarters records with the caption: ‘The Volga is reached!’ The camera, turned southwards, took other souvenir pictures. One showed columns of smoke from the Luftwaffe raids and is recorded as ‘view from the outskirts of Stalingrad on fire’.

Soon after their arrival, the fighter ace Kurt Ebener and a companion from the ‘Udet’ fighter wing wheeled over the Volga just north of Stalingrad. The pilots spotted the tanks and panzer grenadiers below, and ‘a feeling of overwhelming joy and relief for their comrades on the ground below’ inspired victory rolls and other aerobatics in celebration.

Like the other panzer commanders, Captain Freytag-Loringhoven stood on top of his tank to gaze through binoculars across the wide river. The view was excellent from the much higher western bank. ‘We looked at the immense, immense steppe towards Asia, and I was overwhelmed,’ he remembered. ‘But I could not think about it for very long because we had to make an attack against another anti-aircraft battery that had started firing at us.’

The anti-aircraft battery crews were astonishingly resilient. According to Captain Sarkisyan, ‘the girls refused to go down into the bunkers’. One of them, called Masha, is said to have ‘stayed at her post for four days without being relieved’, and was credited with nine hits. Even if that figure is an exaggeration, like many at the time, the 16th Panzer Division’s report casts no doubts on their bravery. ‘Right until the late afternoon’, stated one account, ‘we had to fight, shot for shot, against thirty-seven enemy anti-aircraft positions, manned by tenacious fighting women, until they were all destroyed.’

The panzer troops were horrified when they found that they had been firing at women.[4] The Russians still find this squeamishness curiously illogical, considering that Richthofen’s bombers had killed many thousands of women and children in Stalingrad that very same afternoon. German officers in Stalingrad did not suffer chivalresque illusions much longer. ‘It is completely wrong to describe Russian women as “soldiers in skirts”,’ wrote one of them later. ‘The Russian woman has long been fully prepared for combat duties and to fill any post of which a woman might be capable. Russian soldiers treat such women with great wariness.’

The Soviet defenders of Stalingrad were in a dangerous position, partly because General Yeremenko had concentrated most of his available forces to slow Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army advancing on Stalingrad from the south-west. He had never imagined that Paulus’s forces would break through so suddenly and so boldly on his right.

Nikita Khrushchev joined him at the underground headquarters tunnelled deep into the Tsaritsa gorge. The threat they faced was so urgent that when two engineer officers arrived to report that their men had just finished building a pontoon bridge across the Volga, they were told to destroy it immediately. The two sappers stared at their commander-in-chief in horrified disbelief. Protests were cut short. It is not hard to imagine the panic there would have been in Stalingrad, to say nothing of the reaction in Moscow, if the Germans were to have carried straight through in one swoop and seized a bridgehead on the east bank of the Volga—as Strachwitz had in fact wanted to do.

Stalin was furious when he heard that German troops had reached the Volga. He forbade the mining of factories, the evacuation of machinery or any other action which ‘might be taken as a decision to surrender Stalingrad’. The city was to be defended to the very end. The Military Council had posters put up all over the city proclaiming a state of siege: ‘We shall never surrender the city of our birth. Let us barricade every street. Let us transform each district, each block, each building into an impregnable fortress.’ Many men panicked, including even the secretary of the Stalingrad Komsomol Committee, who ‘deserted his post’ and fled to the eastern bank without permission.

Those workers not directly involved in producing weapons for immediate use were mobilized in militia ‘special brigades’ under the commander of the 10th NKVD Division, Colonel Sarayev. Ammunition and rifles were distributed, but many men received a weapon only after a comrade was killed. In the northern industrial suburb of Spartakovka, badly armed worker militia battalions were sent into battle against the 16th Panzer Division with predictable results. Students from the technical university, digging trenches on the northern flank of the city, carried on although already under direct fire from 16th Panzer Division. Their faculty buildings near the Stalingrad tractor plant had been destroyed by bombs dropped in the first waves. The teaching staff helped form the nucleus of a local defence ‘destroyer battalion’. One of the professors was a company commander. The battalion commissar was a young woman mechanic from the tractor plant, which had been converted to build T-34s. There, volunteers jumped into the tanks even before they had been painted. As soon as ammunition, stacked in the factory, had been loaded, they drove them off the production line and straight into battle. These tanks lacked gunsights, and could only be aimed at almost point-blank range by the loader peering down the barrel while the gunner traversed the turret.

Hube sent off his motorcycle battalion, probing the northern flank. ‘Yesterday we reached the railway line’, a corporal wrote home next day, ‘and captured a train with weapons and supply vehicles, which had not even been unloaded. We also took many prisoners. Among them were many “soldiers in skirts”, whose faces are so repulsive that one can scarcely bear to look at them. Hopefully this operation won’t last much longer.’ The booty of American Lend-Lease material proved very popular. The officers of 16th Panzer Division especially appreciated the American jeeps, fresh in their new Russian markings, which they considered a much better vehicle than their own equivalent—the Kübelwagen.

Red Army aviation regiments were also thrown into the battle on 24 August, but a Yak stood little chance against a Messerschmitt 109, and the Shturmovik fighter-bombers, although armoured underneath, were extremely vulnerable when tailed by a competent pilot. German soldiers cheered from below when Luftwaffe pilots dispatched their enemy ‘mit Eleganz’, as if the air war was a sort of bullfight conducted for the pleasure of spectators on the ground.

German bombing raids on the city continued, with another ‘major air attack’ on the afternoon of 25 August. The power station at Beketovka was badly damaged, but soon repaired. Otherwise Luftwaffe squadrons continued pulverizing the length of the city. Many people lost all their possessions, but families spontaneously shared whatever they had left. They knew well that the next day they might find themselves in the same state; and nothing reduced the notion of private property more rapidly than such destruction from the sky.

Permission was at last given to allow Stalingrad women and children to cross to the east bank on the NKVD’s commandeered craft. Only a few steamers were spared, however, because most were needed for evacuating wounded and bringing back ammunition and reinforcements. The journey was certainly as hazardous as remaining on the west bank, because the Luftwaffe continued to attack boats crossing the Volga. The ferry jetty, upstream of the Tsaritsa gorge, was hit again, and the Shanghai restaurant just above it, a favourite peacetime meeting-place in a strip of park on top of the river bank, was burned to a shell. The families crossing saw blackened bodies floating past like charred logs, and patches of the river still burned with oil from the storage tanks. The children from the hospital, including Nina Grebennikova, tied to a stretcher, were moved across the Volga on 28 August, and taken to a field hospital on the east bank.

The guns of 16th Panzer Division had also been at work since that first Sunday evening, announcing their presence on the Volga by sinking a freight steamer and shelling a gunboat. They also shelled the railway ferry, leaving a tangle of burnt and destroyed carriages, and over the next few days sank seven river craft. The tank crews claimed them as ‘gunboats’ and did not seem to realize that they might be evacuating civilians.

On their third evening, German panzers sank a paddle-steamer taking women and children from the city to the east bank. Hearing screams and cries for help, soldiers asked their commander if they could use some of the pioneers’ inflatable boats to rescue them. But the lieutenant refused. ‘We know how the enemy fights this war,’ he replied. After night had fallen, the panzer crews pulled their blankets up over their heads so that they did not hear the cries any more. Some women managed to swim to the west bank, but most swam to a sandbank where they stayed the whole of the next day. The Germans did not fire when they were evacuated the next night, as proof that they were different from the Russians. ‘We wouldn’t hinder such a thing!’

Behind the foremost German positions on the Volga bank was a sort of semi-cultivated parkland, with oaks, walnut trees, sweet chestnut and oleanders, bordered by allotments with melons, tomatoes, vines and fruit trees. There the advance units of 16th Panzer Division dug in, using the vegetation for cover. The pioneer battalion’s head-quarters was hidden under a large pear tree. During lulls in the firing, panzer crews and combat engineers picked ripe fruit, using caps and helmets as baskets. After the weeks of desiccated steppe, to gaze upon the broad Volga, ‘like a calm lake’, from leafy shade, somehow intensified the sensation of having reached the end of their journey to the frontier of Europe. It seemed such a pity that the Russians continued to resist. Soldiers, at the very first opportunity, wrote home from the Volga, proud to be among the first to stand at the new eastern extremity of the German Reich. A few who had served in the Balkan campaign the year before found that their first glimpse of white apartment buildings on the high western bank had reminded them of Athens. This curiously inapposite connection led some of them to refer to Stalingrad as the ‘Akropolis’.

Units of Sixth Army still waiting to cross the Don were jealous of the glory seized by the vanguard. An anti-aircraft gunner wrote home: ‘Soon we too will have the right to sing: “There stands a soldier on the Volga bank”.’ An artilleryman also wrote home about the Wolgalied, for which Franz Lehár wrote the music: ‘The song will really be true in our case.’

Many were convinced that victory could not be far off. ‘You can’t imagine the speed of our dear motorized comrades,’ a soldier in the 389th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘And with it the rolling attacks of our Luftwaffe. What a feeling of security we get when our pilots are above us, because you never see any Russian aircraft. I would like to share with you a little glimmer of hope. Our division will have fulfilled its duty as soon as Stalingrad falls. We should then, God willing, see each other again this year. If Stalingrad falls, the Russian Army in the south is destroyed.’

The position of Hube’s division, however, was far from secure. The threat to the Volga river traffic, to say nothing of furious telephone calls from the Kremlin, increased the urgency for Yeremenko to order counter-attacks from the northern flank to crush the Germans’ narrow corridor. Russian artillery could fire into this strip, little more than four miles wide, from both sides, and the Germans were in no position to respond. Not only Hube’s 16th Panzer Division, but the rest of Wietersheim’s Corps was almost out of fuel.

On 25 August, Richthofen flew to join Paulus and General von Seydlitz at the headquarters of 76th Infantry Division. Paulus’s nervous tic on the left side of his face became more pronounced when he was under strain, and he also suffered from recurrent dysentery—what the Germans called ‘the Russian sickness’—which did not help him relax. The intolerant Richthofen noted that the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army was ‘very nervous’ about the situation. That night, the Luftwaffe dropped supplies to Wietersheim’s XIV Panzer Corps by parachute, but most fell into no man’s land or into enemy hands. The following morning, German air reconnaissance reported Soviet armoured forces gathering to the north.

Richthofen, like Hitler, subscribed to the view that a rapid victory at Stalingrad would solve all the problems of an extended left flank at a stroke by bringing about the final collapse of the Red Army. To weaken now was the biggest danger, like teetering on a tightrope. Paulus was perfectly aware of such logic. He persevered, keeping his faith in Hitler’s judgement that the Russian forces must be all but finished. When General von Wietersheim subsequently recommended the partial withdrawal of XIV Panzer Corps, Paulus dismissed him and promoted General Hube to take his place.

Much depended on the rapid advance of the Fourth Panzer Army from the south, but Hitler had obliged Hoth to leave a panzer corps behind in the Caucasus. He was thus reduced to XLVIII Panzer Corps and IV Corps. Also, as General Strecker observed at this time, ‘the closer the German attack gets to the city, the smaller are the daily gains’. An even fiercer defence was being prepared behind the lines. The Stalingrad Defence Committee issued its orders: ‘We will not abandon our city to the Germans! All of you, organize brigades, go to build barricades. Barricade every street… quickly in such a way so that the soldiers defending Stalingrad will destroy the enemy without mercy!’

On 27 August, the first rain for five weeks fell, but the real cause for delay to Hoth’s right flank had come from the resistance put up by Soviet troops around lake Sarpa, and near Tundutovo in the hills south of the Volga bend below Stalingrad. That day, for example, the penal company attached to the 91st Rifle Division repulsed numerous attacks by superior enemy forces. The political department of Stalingrad Front later reported to Shcherbakov: ‘Many men have compensated for their faults through bravery and should be rehabilitated and returned to their regiments.’ But once again, most of them died long before anything was done.

The advance went better two days later when Hoth suddenly switched XLVIII Panzer Corps over to the left flank out in the Kalmyk steppe. The German Army’s chief advantage lay in the close cooperation of the panzer division and the Luftwaffe. In the constantly changing battle, German infantrymen used the red flag with swastika as identification panels on the ground to ensure they were not bombed by their own aircraft. But the real danger of Stukas attacking their own ground forces by mistake came in fast-moving armoured operations.

Lieutenant Max Plakolb, the commander of a small Luftwaffe forward air control section, was attached to the headquarters of 24th Panzer Division. At this time, when 14th and 24th Panzer Divisions and 29th Motorized Infantry Division were starting to swing round the south-west of Stalingrad, Plakolb settled himself at the radio. The point units of 24th Panzer Division had advanced much faster than the neighbouring division, and Plakolb suddenly overheard on his radio a contact report: ‘Concentration of enemy vehicles…’ The pilot then proceeded to give 24th Panzer Division’s position. With ‘the greatest alarm’, since the Stukas were approaching, Plakolb called up the squadron himself, using the code word ‘Bonzo’, and persuaded them to abort their attack just in time.

So rapid was the advance of XLVIII Panzer Corps from the south that by the evening of 31 August its point units had reached the Stalingrad–Morozovsk railway line. Suddenly, it looked as if an opportunity of cutting off the remnants of the Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies had appeared. Paulus’s infantry divisions, slowly advancing eastwards from the Don, could never have got round the Russian rear. The only chance was to send XIV Panzer Corps down from the Rynok corridor to seal the trap, as Army Group headquarters strongly urged. This represented a considerable gamble, and Paulus decided against the plan. Hube would have had to turn his ill-supplied panzers round, break off the running battles and ignore the enemy armies then massing just to the north. Yeremenko, alerted to the danger, pulled his remaining forces back out of the trap.

In some cases the retreat was dictated by panic, rather than design. In 64th Army, the crews of Anti-Aircraft Battery 748 ran away, abandoning their guns. This incident rapidly became a case of conspiracy, in the ever-suspicious eyes of commissars, with the allegation that a member of the battery then ‘led a battalion of German sub-machine-gunners’ in an attack against the neighbouring 204th Rifle Division.

On Paulus’s northern flank, XIV Panzer Corps had hardly been idle. The Russians continually mounted diversionary attacks on both sides of the corridor. General Hube’s responses to these ill-coordinated lunges were sharp and successful. He moved his headquarters on 28 August into a tapering ravine which offered better protection against the nightly air attacks. He ensured himself an undisturbed night’s rest by sleeping in a straw-lined pit under his tank.

Russian bombers began to attack by day as well as night, flying in low over the Volga. Black puffs from the German flak guns marked their approach in the morning sky. On one occasion, a German fighter roared in at ground level above Hube’s ravine before climbing to attack the bombers in the clear sky. For those watching from the headquarters, this fighter seems to have offered the magical vision of an aerial Teutonic knight in shining armour. ‘This silver streak’, wrote one of those present in his diary with revealing emotion, ‘veered to the east over the river into enemy territory, a crystal, a harbinger of the dawn.’

On 28 August, Russian fighters also attempted to attack the new Luftwaffe base near Kalach, but a Messerschmitt 109 fighter group chased them off. Proud of their victory, the suntanned young fighter pilots assembled for debriefing, but their austere commander—who was known as ‘the Prince’ because of his resemblance to a medieval statue in a cathedral—did not congratulate them. Instead he passed on the order which had so irritated Richthofen. ‘Gentlemen, flying for fun and seeing who can shoot down the most enemy machines must stop. Every machine, every drop of fuel, every hour’s flying is irreplaceable. The easy ground life we are leading is completely irresponsible: in the air it is even more so. Every shot must go to assist the infantry, if there is no target in the air.’ Resentful murmurs greeted his words.

As is often the case at the end of August, the weather changed suddenly. On Saturday, 29 August, rain fell for almost a whole day and night. Soldiers were soaked, and trenches filled with water. ‘This shitty Russia’ was a common reaction in letters home at this time. They seemed so close to what they thought was their final objective after an advance of almost four months without respite.

The 16th Panzer Division at Rynok on the bank of the Volga no longer enjoyed its earlier mood of heady optimism. The allotments and orchards in which they had concealed their vehicles had been smashed by Soviet artillery fire, leaving shell craters and trees shattered by shrapnel. They were all concerned by the growing concentrations to the north. Hube would have come under strong pressure earlier if the Russian railhead at Frolovo had been closer to the front, and the Soviet infantry could have deployed more quickly. The 24th Army joined the 66th Army and the 1st Guards Army preparing for a counter-attack. Once formations had detrained, they marched off in different directions, but in the chaos, nobody seemed to know where they were. The 221st Rifle Division did not even know for sure to which army it belonged and its commander had no information on the positions or strength of the enemy.

On 1 September, he ordered the reconnaissance company to go off in groups of ten to find out where the Germans were. With soldiers mounted on local horses, they moved southwards across the Stalingrad–Saratov railway line. The division followed in a mass. Suddenly, German aircraft returning from a raid on the city sighted the advancing force. Some twin-engined Messerschmitt nos peeled off to strafe them while the other aircraft returned to base to bomb up again. They came back at around midday, but by then the division had deployed and the tempting target was dispersed.

The reconnaissance groups returned having sighted some German units, but they were unable to draw a front line for their commander. It simply did not exist in a recognizable form. The Russian commanders were ‘worried and angry’. Although their infantry greatly outnumbered the Germans facing them, none of their tanks, no artillery, and few of their anti-tank guns had arrived.

The situation proved even more disastrous for 64th Rifle Division, which was assembling to the rear. Morale collapsed under German air attacks, which also destroyed its field hospital killing many doctors and nurses. The wounded being taken to the rear recounted tales of horror which unnerved the inexperienced troops waiting in reserve to be marched forward. Individuals, then whole groups, began to desert. The divisional commander ordered the most fragile units to form up. He harangued and cursed them for such a cowardly failure to serve the Motherland. He then adopted the Roman punishment of decimation. With pistol drawn, he walked along the front rank counting in a loud voice. He shot every tenth man through the face at point-blank range until his magazine was empty.

Zhukov, having just been appointed Deputy Supreme Commander, second only to Stalin, had arrived in Stalingrad on 29 August to oversee operations. He soon discovered that the three armies earmarked for the operations were ill-armed, manned by older reservists, and short of ammunition, as well as artillery. On the scrambler line to Moscow, he persuaded Stalin that the attack must be delayed by a week. Stalin agreed, but the German advance to the western edge of the city, now that Seydlitz’s corps had linked up with Fourth Panzer Army, alarmed him again on 3 September. He rang General Vasilevsky, the chief of staff, demanding to know the exact position. As soon as Vasilevsky admitted that German tanks had reached the suburbs, his exasperation with Zhukov and other generals exploded. ‘What’s the matter with them, don’t they understand that if we surrender Stalingrad, the south of the country will be cut off from the centre and will probably not be able to defend it? Don’t they realize that this is not only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We would lose our main waterway and soon our oil, too!’

‘We are putting everything that can fight into the places under threat,’ Vasilevsky replied as calmly as possible. ‘I think there’s still a chance that we won’t lose the city.’

A short time later Stalin rang back, then dictated a signal to be sent to Zhukov. He ordered that the attack must take place immediately, whether or not all the divisions were deployed or had received their artillery. ‘Delay at this moment’, he insisted, ‘is equivalent to a crime.’ Stalingrad might fall the very next day. After a long and argumentative telephone call, Zhukov finally persuaded him to wait two more days.

Whether or not Stalin had been right and Zhukov wrong is hard to tell. Paulus had time to reinforce XIV Panzer Corps, and the Luftwaffe took full advantage of its power against targets on the open steppe. The 1st Guards Army managed an advance of only a few miles, while 24th Army was forced right back to its start-line. But at least this unsuccessful offensive managed to deflect Paulus’s reserves at the most critical moment, when the tattered remnants of 62nd and 64th Armies fell back to the edge of the city.

The Germans also suffered one of their heaviest casualty rates that summer. No fewer than six battalion commanders were killed in a single day, and a number of companies were reduced to only forty or fifty men each. (Total casualties on the Ostfront had now just exceeded one and a half million.) The interrogation of Soviet prisoners indicated the determination which they faced. ‘Out of one company,’ ran a report, ‘only five men were left alive. They have received orders that Stalingrad will never be given up.’

Red Army soldiers felt that they had fought hard and well during the first ten days of the battle. ‘Hello my dear ones!’ wrote a soldier to his family. ‘Since the 23rd of August, we have been constantly involved in hard battles with a cruel cunning enemy. The platoon commander and commissar were badly wounded. I had to take over command. About seventy tanks came towards us. We discussed the situation between comrades and decided to fight to the last drop of blood. When the tanks rolled over the trenches, we threw grenades and bottles filled with petrol.’ In a very short space of time, most Russian soldiers became fiercely proud of fighting at Stalingrad. They knew that the thoughts of the whole country were with them. They had few illusions, however, about the desperate fighting which still lay ahead. Stalingrad at this moment had fewer than 40,000 defenders to hold off the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army. No commander forgot that ‘the Volga was the last line of defence before the Urals’.

The Germans were full of confidence during that first week of September. The fighting had been hard, a soldier wrote home, ‘but Stalingrad will fall in the next few days’. ‘According to what our officers tell us’, wrote a gunner in the 305th Infantry Division, ‘Stalingrad will certainly fall’. And the sense of triumph at Sixth Army headquarters was undisguised when, on 3 September, a staff officer recorded the link-up between the southern flank of LI Army Corps and the left flank of Fourth Panzer Army: ‘The ring round Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga is closed!’ From the crossing of the Don on 23 August up to 8 September the Sixth Army claimed to have taken ‘26,500 prisoners, and destroyed 350 guns and 830 tanks’.

Paulus received a letter from Colonel Wilhelm Adam, one of his staff officers, who was on sick leave in Germany and bitterly regretted his absence at such a historic moment. ‘Here, everyone is awaiting the fall of Stalingrad,’ he wrote to his commander-in-chief. ‘One hopes it will be a turning point in the war.’ Yet on the edge of Stalingrad, the nights suddenly became colder, to the point of finding frost on the ground in the morning and a skim of ice in the canvas buckets for the horses. The Russian winter would soon be upon them again.

Only a very few, however, foresaw the worst obstacle facing the Sixth Army. Richthofen’s massive bombing raids had not only failed to destroy the enemy’s will, their very force of destruction had turned the city into a perfect killing ground for the Russians to use against them.