Ostkrieg (57 page)

Doing so meant reactivating the Sixth Army, which sat largely motionless, crippled by a lack of fuel, for the first week of August as well as clearing the stubborn Soviet defenders west of the Don. By 4 August, even as the crisis triggered by the enemy counterattacks abated and the supply situation improved somewhat, the Sixth Army's motorized units could still move only within a radius of twenty-five to thirty miles, while
the infantry divisions were limited to a mere five to ten miles. Nonetheless, the reinforcements he had received as well as the arrival of German units from the northern Don flank allowed Paulus to plan a Cannae-style envelopment of the enemy: the Fourteenth Panzer Corps, with its left wing brushing the Don, was to attack southward, while the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, similarly sweeping along the Don, was to spearhead an attack to the north, with both pincers meeting at Kalach. Although Paulus preferred to wait until 8 August, Hitler and Halder, fearful of a possible Soviet withdrawal, pushed for the assault to begin on the seventh. That morning, supported by massive Luftwaffe air strikes that destroyed practically every bridge over the Don, the German armored spearheads smashed through Soviet defenses and raced toward the key transportation center of Kalach. By dawn on the eighth, the two armored thrusts met just southwest of the city, trapping some 100,000 Soviet defenders. By the tenth, Soviet forces were crowded into a pocket less than four miles in diameter where, after frenzied resistance, they were annihilated the next day.
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The swift destruction of the Soviet Sixty-second and First Tank Armies in the tight Kalach Kessel raised hopes at Hitler's headquarters for a similarly swift seizure of Stalingrad, roughly forty miles to the east. Even as the pocket at Kalach tightened, Paulus had spun forces off to prepare for the further advance to the Volga, but he faced a dilemma. On his northern flank, the Soviets still held a number of bridgeheads across the Don that had to be eliminated, notably at Kremenskaya and Serafi-movich, but Paulus's hasty mid-August efforts to clear them amounted to little. At the cost of considerable losses, the enemy stubbornly clung to his foothold south of the Don, which tied down substantial portions of the Fourteenth Panzer Corps and the Eleventh Corps for a prolonged period. Lacking both the time and the resources needed to reduce the remaining enemy pockets, Paulus turned his attention to pushing across the Don and making for the northern suburbs of Stalingrad. Not for the last time, German failure to reduce a Soviet bridgehead would have dire consequences. Nor was German success west of the Don as complete as it might have seemed. As a result of persistent fuel and ammunition shortages as well as stiff Soviet resistance, it had taken Paulus a month to clear the bulk of enemy forces from the Great Bend of the Don and then only at the cost of time and considerable losses in men and materiel. By mid-August, even before the plunge to the Volga, his armored forces had lost half their strength. Given the slow pace of advance to the Don and the disconcertingly high numbers of Red Army soldiers who had escaped the German trap, it was foolish to believe that Stalingrad could be seized
quickly with forces sapped of strength and fighting power by the stubborn fighting along the Don.
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Significantly, the Sixth Army's offensive strength had been reduced to such an extent that initially all it had available for the push across the Don was a single armored division, two motorized divisions, and four infantry divisions. Suspecting that the Russians had strongly fortified the direct route east from Kalach, which in any case was crisscrossed with deep gullies that offered splendid defensive opportunities, Paulus ordered his forces to cross the Don to the north at Vertyachiy. His mobile units were then to move quickly along a high ridge of ground to reach the Volga, thirty-five miles to the east, in the northern suburbs of Stalingrad. At the same time, the trailing infantry divisions would offer flank support, with some wheeling to the southeast to occupy the city itself while others turned to the south to link up with the forces of Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army. Neither an attempt to destroy enemy forces west of the city nor a gamble on a swift drive into the heart of Stalingrad, this move of Paulus's seemed primarily intent on occupying the land bridge between the Don and the Volga and protecting his flanks. With such a limited force, it was perhaps no surprise that he struck a cautious, almost defensive note. Russian troops, he stressed, could be expected to defend Stalingrad stubbornly and to launch heavy counterattacks, although he added the almost wistful hope that perhaps, after all, the fighting in the Don bend had finally destroyed the enemy's ability to resist.
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In order to secure a lodgment area for the main attack, Paulus's spearhead groups pushed across the Don against strong resistance on 21 and 22 August. Despite Soviet counterattacks on the northern flank and efforts to destroy the two floating bridges across the Don, the German attack went off as planned on the twenty-third. Supported by massed aircraft, and with utter disregard for its flanks, at dawn the Fourteenth Panzer Corps burst out of the bridgehead and raced for the Volga. Encountering virtually no resistance from the surprised Soviet defenders, German tanks raised enormous clouds of dust on the arid grasslands of the steppe as they rolled eastward. By midafternoon, spearheads of Hans Hube's Sixteenth Panzer Division had leaped the thirty-five miles and reached Rynok, to the north of Stalingrad, where they brushed aside fire from antiaircraft and antitank guns operated by local women who had been given only rudimentary training and established defensive positions along the Volga. They also seized American Lend-Lease jeeps, which proved very popular with German officers. Late that evening, the Sixteenth Panzer reported its achievement to the Fourteenth Panzer Corps. Within a half hour, Hube received a terse
order from Hitler: “16th Panzer Division will hold its positions under all circumstances.”
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That same evening, the Luftwaffe struck Stalingrad in a massive terror attack, the largest air assault it had mounted since the opening day of Barbarossa. Arguing that “we must tell the army and the people that there is nowhere left to retreat,” Stalin had forbidden the evacuation of the city, so its population was swollen by masses of peasant refugees, with livestock in tow, desperately seeking to cross the Volga. The extensive use of incendiaries caused the city, already broiling under the summer heat, to blaze “like a gigantic torch,” visible for forty miles. Over the next two days, the Luftwaffe completed its destructive work. Richthofen noted with dry satisfaction in his diary that the city was “destroyed, and without any further worthwhile targets.” Another, less sober German observer was overcome by the spectacle of Stalingrad ablaze. It was, he recorded, “a fantastic picture in the moonlight.” The three-day attack left Stalingrad in ruins, with tens of thousands of people killed, utilities disrupted, and communications with the outside world severed. For a time, in fact, the cessation of news left Moscow with the impression that the city had already fallen.
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The speed of the Germans' advance and the savagery of their aerial assault had clearly stunned the Soviet defenders, so much so that Richthofen, disgusted up to now by what he saw as the army's lack of fighting spirit, believed that the city could be taken in an all-out assault, albeit with high casualties. Stalin, too, feared that his namesake city might fall at any time but in his usual fashion averted a nascent crisis by quick and firm action. On the twenty-fourth, he demanded absolute defense of the city and ordered Eremenko, the commander of the Stalingrad Front, to launch a series of counterattacks. These latter posed a serious dilemma for the Germans since, despite their impressive dash to the Volga, Hube's forces had carved out only a narrow corridor a few miles wide. Paulus's original intention of exploiting this breakthrough by a swift move into the city quickly faded as Soviet assaults left the Fourteenth Panzer Corps the hunted rather than the hunter. Unable to penetrate into Stalingrad, with its communications and supply lines cut, and with its strength severely reduced, the Fourteenth Panzer Corps had no choice but to assume a hedgehog position on the twenty-sixth and go on the defensive. That same day, General Wietersheim, commanding the Fourteenth Panzer Corps, called for the immediate withdrawal of his units, a request that Paulus tersely rejected. Although Hube was able to hold on to the narrow corridor, his victory was costly. The incessant Soviet counterattacks against both the northern corridor and the
German Fifty-first Corps moving toward the city from the northwest did not achieve all that Stalin had hoped, but they nonetheless strained Paulus's resources to the limit. By the end of the month, the Sixth Army had been largely confined to holding and consolidating its gains while awaiting the arrival of the Fourth Panzer Army from the south. In a bad sign, the German leap into Stalingrad from the north had turned into a limp because of insufficient force.
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Even as Paulus's troops pushed ahead to Stalingrad from the northwest, Hoth's weak Fourth Panzer Army launched its drive on the city from the southwest, but, since it ranked only third on the priority list for fuel, its ability to move quickly was greatly diminished. In addition, as it moved north in scorching heat across the arid steppe, it had to drop formations off for flank protection, units that were desperately needed at the sharp end. Nonetheless, Hoth had devised an ambitious plan of attack. The Forty-eighth Panzer Corps was to push across the lower Don on 1 August, wheel eastward, then, with the Rumanian Sixth Army Corps protecting its left flank, strike swiftly to the north in the hope of seizing the southern part of the city in a surprise attack. All went as planned for most of the first week, with his forces advancing up to thirty miles a day, but Stalin and the Stavka responded with great urgency. On the sixth, Soviet forces not only delayed the German advance along the Aksai River, some forty miles to the southwest of Stalingrad, but also succeeded in throwing the Rumanians back across it. Over the next two weeks, Soviet forces under General Chuikov thwarted the Germans and forced Hoth to probe further to the east to find a way through enemy defenses. In grinding fighting, Hoth's forces wrestled forward through heavily mined Soviet defense lines and against repeated counterattacks, pushing slowly through to the Abganerovo area by the seventeenth, where the attack stalled.
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After pausing for a few days because of fuel shortages and to reorganize his forces, Hoth resumed the onslaught on the twentieth, this time attacking on his right flank. Once again, stout resistance forced slow going as over the next week Hoth struggled to gain the decisive breakthrough, hoping to push through first at Tundutovo Station, then at Tinguta Station, both south of Stalingrad. By the twenty-seventh, with his forces seriously depleted, Hoth again paused to concentrate and redeploy his armored units, this time to the west. Renewing the assault on the twenty-ninth to the west of Abganerovo Station, Hoth finally found the weak spot in the enemy defenses. His forces pressed forward through Zety and Gavrilovka, with his spearheads on 31 August reaching the Kalach-Stalingrad railroad just east of Basargino Station, only
twelve miles west of the city's center and in position to link up with the Sixth Army. On 1 September, however, the Twenty-fourth Panzer Division thrust straight east in an attempt, foiled by Soviet defenders, to seize the center of the city. Nor, fearing continued attacks on his vulnerable northern corridor to the Volga, was the cautious Paulus willing to risk turning sizable forces to the south. Not until the morning of the third, then, did spearheads of the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army meet in the Pitomnik-Gonchara-Gumrak Station area less than fifteen miles from the center of Stalingrad. Any brief hopes that the city might yet be captured on the fly quickly evaporated as probing attacks over the next two days revealed that the Soviets had every intention of defending it.
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German forces, seriously weakened by the bitter two-week struggle just to reach Stalingrad, now faced the daunting task of bitter urban fighting in order to secure it.

Moreover, although a series of stubborn Soviet counterattacks across the Don against Italian forces holding the northern shoulder of Army Group B had been contained, these short and violent bridgehead actions had serious implications. Unable, as Halder admitted, to set the situation right and throw the Russians back across the river, the flank battles of the last week of August underscored the fatal weakness of the overstretched Axis defenses along the Don. Even Hitler had come to suspect that “the crucial danger” lurked in the area of the Italian Eighth Army, but he could reinforce the Italians only by stripping German divisions from the fighting front. The Stavka, too, took note of the poor performance and exposed position of the Italians. Once again, exaggerated hopes for a swift victory by an inadequate force had proved illusory as the Germans lacked sufficient power to achieve the objectives set them by the Führer. Once the Fourteenth Panzer Corps had reached the Volga, it not only lacked the strength to penetrate into Stalingrad but had to fight hard just to ward off its own annihilation. While the rest of Paulus's troops were engaged in a stalemate, Hoth's panzer army, with only around 150 tanks, was itself too weak to carry out its assigned task in one sweep, let alone provide much relief to the Sixth Army. Having left Italian, Hungarian, and Rumanian units guarding their exposed and vulnerable flanks, the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army had struggled to the city on the Volga but faced a sobering question: What now?
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On 3 September, both Hitler and Stalin thought the fall of Stalingrad imminent, a belief that caused the one to avoid reflection and the other to redouble his frenzied efforts to save the city. With its huge steel mills, tractor factories, and ordnance works, Stalingrad was one of the key armaments production centers, especially for tanks, in the Soviet
Union. At the same time, with much of European Russia now under German occupation, the Volga, navigable all the way to Moscow, had become the vital transport artery of the Soviet war economy. Stalingrad, as the major port, rail junction, and communications center along the lower Volga, had, thus, assumed even greater significance. Finally, the city had a certain symbolic importance, the successful defense during the civil war of Tsaritsin, as it was then known, being attributed to the young chairman of the regional war council, Josef Stalin. Not surprisingly, then, the dictator was frantic in his efforts to defend “his” city, in late August ordering his favorite troubleshooter, Zhukov, to take charge of its overall defense. Ironically, with German troops perched on the Volga and the city wrecked by the massive late August bombing raids, the goal set for the Sixth Army—to neutralize the city of Stalingrad—had seemingly been accomplished. Hitler himself had throughout the summer regarded the seizure of Stalingrad as of secondary importance. But, with it evidently ripe for the taking, he now failed to weigh the prospect of halting the attack. Indeed, his order on 2 September to annihilate all the men and deport all the women because the entire population was Communist and therefore “particularly dangerous” already hinted that seizing Stalingrad for ideological and prestige reasons was assuming decisive importance in his mind.
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