The heated train continued through the Russian landscape covered by the first snows of winter. Manstein and his staff officers discussed music and mutual friends and relations, played chess and bridge, and skirted round politics. Lieutenant Stahlberg, hearing that Manstein was related to the late President von Hindenburg, wondered which of the field marshals in this war might become ‘the saviour of the Fatherland’ in the event of total defeat. ‘Certainly not me,’ Manstein replied swiftly.
The field marshal’s birthday, his fifty-fifth, fell on 24 November, the day of their arrival at the headquarters of Army Group B. General von Weichs, showing Manstein the updated operations map, did not conceal the gravity of the situation. The signal from Führer headquarters had just arrived, ordering the Sixth Army to maintain Fortress Stalingrad and await resupply by air. Manstein, according to his aide, appeared surprisingly optimistic. Even the 150-mile gap between the German troops on the southern side of the Stalingrad Kessel and Army Group A down in the Caucasus did not deter Manstein from selecting the old Don Cossack capital of Novocherkassk for his headquarters. He had Don Cossacks in sheepskin hats and Wehrmacht uniform as the guards on the main entrance. ‘When we entered or left the house,’ his aide-decamp reported, ‘they stuck out their chests and stood to attention as if for His Imperial Majesty the Tsar himself
Hitler gave strict instructions that the news of the encirclement at Stalingrad was to be kept from the German people. On 22 November, the communiqué had admitted that there had been an attack on the north front. The next day, just after the complete encirclement of the Sixth Army, only counter-attacks and enemy casualties were mentioned. A subsequent announcement made it sound as if the Soviet attacks had been beaten back with heavy losses. Finally, on 8 December, three weeks after the event, it was acknowledged that there had also been an attack south of Stalingrad, but there was still no hint that the Sixth Army had been cut off. The fiction was maintained into January through the vague formula ‘the troops in the area of Stalingrad’.
The Nazi authorities could not, of course, prevent the rapid spread of rumour, especially within the army. ‘The whole Sixth Army is surrounded,’ a soldier in a field hospital heard almost immediately from the chaplain. ‘That’s the beginning of the end.’ Attempts to silence soldiers and officers with disciplinary measures backfired, and the lack of frankness only increased the sense of unease in Germany. Within a few days of the encirclement, civilians were writing to the front asking if the rumours were true. ‘Yesterday and today’, wrote a paymaster from Bernburg, ‘people have been saying that there has been a breakthrough in your area?!’
The Nazi authorities believed that they could suppress everything until a relief force was ready to break through to Stalingrad. Paulus, meanwhile, may have been deeply sceptical of Goering’s guarantee to supply Sixth Army by air, but he felt unable to dismiss the arguments of his own chief-of-staff that they could at least hold on until early December, when Hitler promised a breakthrough to relieve them.
Paulus faced what Strecker called ‘the most difficult question of conscience for every soldier: whether to disobey his superior’s orders in order to handle the situation as he deems best’. Officers who disliked the regime and despised the GRÖFAZ (‘Greatest Commander of All Time’), as they privately referred to the Führer, hoped that Paulus would oppose this madness and trigger a reaction throughout the army.* They thought of General Hans Yorck von Wartenburg’s revolt at Tauroggen in December 1812, when he refused to fight any longer under Napoleon, an event which triggered a wave of patriotic feeling in Germany. Many believed in the comparison. General von Seydlitz apparently invoked it in conversation with Paulus, when trying to persuade him to break out; so did Colonel Selle, the Sixth Army’s Engineer-in-Chief. Schmidt, on the other hand, considered that: ‘Such an action against orders would become a mutiny with political undertones.’
Paulus’s answer to Selle sounded fatalistic indeed: ‘I know that the history of war has already pronounced judgement on me.’ Yet he was right to reject the Tauroggen comparison. Yorck, without any communications, could claim to act in the name of the King of Prussia without being deprived of his command. But in an age when every headquarters was in constant touch by radio, courier and teleprinter, the order for a commander’s arrest would be communicated immediately. The only actor in this drama capable of playing the part of Yorck was Manstein, as Tresckow and Stauffenberg had recognized, but Manstein, they would discover, had no intention of accepting such a dangerous role. ‘Prussian field marshals do not mutiny,’ he said the following year, emphatically contradicting the Yorck tradition when approached by a representative of Army Group Centre.
Many historians have also given the impression that almost every officer in the Sixth Army believed that an attempt should be made immediately to break out of the Russian encirclement. This is misleading. Corps commanders, divisional commanders and staff officers were firmly in favour of a breakout, but in the infantry especially, regimental and battalion commanders were much less convinced. Their troops, especially those who were already dug in with bunkers, did not want to abandon their positions and heavy weapons to ‘march out into the snow’, where they would be exposed to Russian attack in the open. Soldiers were also reluctant to move because they believed the promises of a strong counter-attack coming to rescue them. The slogan in support of this at the end of Paulus’s order of the day on 27 November – ‘Hold on! The Führer will get us out!’ – had proved very effective. (Schmidt later tried to deny that this phrase had emanated from Sixth Army headquarters, and even suggested that it was invented by a subordinate commander.)
Within the Kessel, soldiers tended to believe the ‘Hold on!’ slogan as a firm promise. So did many officers, but others instinctively guessed the reality. One remembered how a fellow lieutenant of panzer grenadiers, on receipt of the news, signalled with his eyes for him to come to his vehicle so that they could discuss the situation in private.
‘We’re never going to get out of this one,’ he said. ‘This is a unique opportunity which the Russians aren’t going to let slip by.’
‘You’re a real pessimist,’ the other replied. ‘I believe in Hitler. What he’s said he’ll do, he’ll stick to.’
17
‘The Fortress Without a Roof’
During the first week of December, the Russians made determined attacks to split the Sixth Army. In heavy defensive fighting, its panzer divisions lost almost half of their remaining 140 tanks. They were badly handicapped by the shortage of fuel and ammunition. On 6 December, a battle group from the 16th Panzer Division was sent into a counter-attack on foot because they had no fuel for their half-tracks. Lieutenant von Mutius, the young officer who had been so proud to be the last member of the Wehrmacht to withdraw across the Don, was the second-in-command.
Their objective was a hill north of Baburkin which they managed to seize, but suddenly Russian tanks appeared out of a balka supported by infantry. The battle-group commander gave the order to pull back. ‘A systematic withdrawal was impossible,’ reported a sergeant-major later. ‘Each man ran for his life. The enemy fired after us with all their weapons. Half of the battle group was wiped out. Lieutenant von Mutius was badly wounded. In order to prevent worse casualties, he kept shouting “Spread out!’” The sergeant-major was convinced he had saved many lives, as he lay there helplessly waiting for the Russians. The survivors thought him ‘a real hero’.
After numerous attacks, Soviet commanders realized that the besieged were far from beaten. The 57th Army of the crucial southwestern sector had suffered heavy casualties. Explanations for Soviet failure were interesting. One report – ‘artillery and infantry did not interact very well when storming the enemy defence line’ – sounds like a circumlocution for heavy casualties from friendly fire. ‘Soldiers are not well enough instructed on the need to dig trenches,’ was another unhelpful observation. Their failure to do so led to ‘irreparable losses from German tanks and aeroplanes’. No mention
was made of the fact that the ground was frozen hard, and that entrenching tools were in very short supply.
Behind the lines, NKVD officers and interpreters worked late into the night interrogating German prisoners, including the first deserters, as well as ‘tongues’ captured by reconnaissance companies. ‘The bolsheviks often seized prisoners from us,’ reported a lieutenant from the Austrian 44th Hoch- und Deutschmeister Infantry Division. Don Front intelligence was trying to identify demoralized divisions, on which attacks should be concentrated. It soon observed that the 44th and the 376th Infantry Divisions, both of which had retreated from across the Don, had not been able to dig proper bunkers. Most of their men, during this period when the weather changed from hard frost to rain and back to hard frost again, were existing in holes in the ground covered by tarpaulins. The NKVD was particularly interested in any signs of national resentment. ‘It is said of Austrian soldiers that they don’t fight well,’ replied a Lieutenant Heinrich Boberg, when interrogated by Captain Dyatlenko on 10 December. ‘There is an element of truth in this, but I would not say it is true of the 44th Infantry Division. Austrians have historical reasons for not being as rigid as Prussians. And because Austrians are used to getting on with other nationalities, they don’t have the same sort of national pride as Prussians do.’ The Nazi designation of ‘Ostmark’ for Austria seemed to disappear remarkably quickly from an Austrian’s vocabulary when captured.
Once the major attacks of early December ceased, Don Front continued to maintain pressure on the 44th Infantry Division with raids, using Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft. Yet Sixth Army morale remained, on the whole, remarkably robust. Another senior lieutenant from the 16th Panzer Division later reported that, at that stage, ‘doubts about a positive outcome to the battle simply did not arise’. Landsers, especially those out in the snow-covered steppe, joked about ‘the fortress without a roof. Most of the younger ones, educated under a totalitarian system, did not expect to be told the reasons for their plight. The Führer’s assurance was, for them, a promise that would never be broken.
Rations were soon reduced drastically, but officers and NCOs assured them that this situation would not last. The Luftwaffe would bring in what they needed, and then a great relief force, led by Field Marshal von Manstein, would advance from the south-west to break the encirclement. Many soldiers convinced themselves, or perhaps were told by less imaginative officers, that they would be out by Christmas. ‘Since the 22nd of November we’ve been surrounded,’ a soldier in the 376th Infantry Division wrote home. ‘The worst is past. We all hope that we’ll be out of the Kessel before Christmas… Once this battle of encirclement is over, then the war in Russia will be finished.’ Some were persuaded that they would immediately be given leave, and actually spend Christmas at home with their families.
Those responsible for administering the air-supply operation were far less optimistic. The Sixth Army’s chief quartermaster signalled on 7 December: ‘Rations cut to between a third and a half so that the army can hold out until 18 December. The lack of fodder means that the bulk of the horses will have to be slaughtered by the middle of January.’
The Luftwaffe officers in charge of Pitomnik airfield, drawn from the 9th Flak Division, had no illusions. They knew that a minimum of 300 flights a day would be needed to restore the Sixth Army’s fighting capacity, and that was out of the question. In any case, the greatly strengthened and bolder Red Army aviation, as well as anti-aircraft fire round the edge of the Kessel, represented a formidable challenge to the lumbering Junkers 52 trimotors. Jeschonnek and Goering did not consider that the airfields might lie within range of Soviet heavy artillery. Worst of all, they made no allowance for the weather, even after the experiences of the previous winter. There would be many days with zero visibility, and many when the temperature would be so low that it would be almost impossible to start aircraft engines, even with fires lit underneath them. Apart from Richthofen, however, Luftwaffe officers, either within the Kessel or outside, did not dare speak out. ‘It was defeatism if you voiced doubts,’ said one of them.
As well as bringing in fuel, ammunition and food – in theory two tons per Junkers 52, and rather less for a Heinkel 111 – the aircraft would fly out the wounded from the general field hospital next to Pitomnik airfield. Perhaps the best indication of officer pessimism was the secret decision to send out all German nurses, even before most of the wounded, to ensure that they never fell into Russian hands. Although great efforts were made to keep this secret, officers from the 369th Croat Infantry Regiment heard and lobbied the Luftwaffe to fly out their mistresses, disguised as nurses. The lieutenant whom they approached rather admired the Croats as soldiers and promised to help. His colonel, however, took a high moral line. ‘But surely it doesn’t matter’, the lieutenant replied, ‘whether they’re Croat whores, nursing sisters or whatever. They must be got out to save them from the Russians.’ The colonel still refused. The lieutenant later suspected that the Croats managed to smuggle their women on to planes.
Encampments, bunkers and tents spread to the side of the airfield. There were numerous headquarters and signals detachments with radio masts and vehicles, as well as the general field hospital. Pitomnik rapidly became the main focus for Soviet fighter and bomber regiments. During the course of 10, 11 and 12 December, Soviet aircraft carried out forty-two air raids.
The Russians, despite all their air activity over the Kessel, still did not realize how large a force they had surrounded. Colonel Vinogradov, the chief of Red Army intelligence at Don Front headquarters, estimated that Operation Uranus had trapped around 86,000 men. The probable figure, including allies and Hiwis, was nearly three and a half times greater: close to 290,000 men. The allies included the remnants of two Romanian divisions, the Croat regiment with 100th Jäger Division and a motor-transport column of Italians who had picked a bad moment to come to find wood in the ruins of Stalingrad.*
In the fighting west of the Don and on the northern flank, Strecker’s XI Corps had suffered most. The Austrian 44th Infantry Division lost nearly 2,000 men, the 376th 1,600, and the 384th over 900. Officers throughout the Sixth Army sat down at makeshift tables in earth bunkers under the snow to write by candlelight to next of kin: ‘I have the sad duty to have to inform you that…’
With the Sixth Army reduced to conditions very similar to those in the First World War, older soldiers found themselves remembering the existence of the Western Front and its gallows humour. After the cold of mid-November, a wet period of thaw had set in, with ‘General Mud’ reappearing briefly before ‘General Winter’. Some returned to the old practices of trench life, such as resorting to the only certain source of warm liquid, when relieving themselves, to rinse the caked mud from their hands.
The construction of trenches and bunkers varied according to the circumstances of each division. Those who had been forced to withdraw or take up new positions faced heavy labour, although much of the work was given to Hiwis and other Russian prisoners. The Germans had learned from the street fighting in Stalingrad. They dug bunkers under knocked-out tanks and made better use of existing features. But in the first days after the encirclement, the ground had still been frozen, and even fires did little to soften the earth before digging. Out in the steppe, the greatest shortage was wood both for fires and for beams to cover the earth bunkers. Peasant houses close to the front line did not last long. Any inhabitants who had already packed straw round their houses, then a layer of planks and logs outside to insulate them for winter, were soon evicted. If they had stayed, they would have seen their home rapidly dismantled, as German soldiers took planks, beams, doors and even windows to improve their dugouts.
Soldiers, having demolished the houses of civilians, revealed an instinctive desire to turn their own dugout into a new home. The revetted communications trenches and the earthworks round the entrances to bunkers gave no impression of what one might find within. They fashioned frames for picture postcards or cherished snapshots. Some things we
re always respected. No man would touch or insult the photograph of a comrade’s wife or children. Officers made sure that they had bunks, benches and a table. General Edler von Daniels, the commander of 376th Infantry Division, had a bunker complex designed by one of his staff with impeccable architectural plans after they moved to their new position on the south-west flank. The commanding officer of Dr Kurt Reuber, the priest serving as a doctor with 16th Panzer Division, had a particularly large bunker dug so that he could fit a piano inside, which had been abandoned by another division. And there, underground, unheard above and muffled by the earth walls, he played Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata. His interpretation was beautiful, but also, it seems, obsessive. ‘The commanding officer played on, even when the walls trembled from bombardments and soil trickled down.’ He even continued to play when officers came in to report on the fighting outside.
Some units were fortunate enough to retain their old positions. The 297th Infantry Division, south of Stalingrad, had finished its elaborate underground sanatorium before the Russian offensive. They feared that they might lose it together with all the hospital equipment, beds, crockery and cutlery brought by train from Germany. But when the front line of the Kessel was established, their precious hospital, to their relief, was still just a few miles behind the new front line.
Many soldiers had still not received proper winter clothing before the encirclement, so they resorted to improvisation with varying degrees of success. Under their uniforms, more and more of them wore articles of Soviet uniform – buttonless tunic shirts and baggy quilted trousers and the highly prized quilted jackets. In hard frosts, a steel helmet became like a freezer compartment, so they wore puttees, scarves and even Russian foot bandages wrapped round their heads as insulation. Their desperation for fur gloves led them to kill stray dogs and skin them. Some even tried to make tunics out of amateurishly cured horse hide from the knacker, but most of these articles were uncomfortably crude, unless a former saddler or cobbler could be bribed to help.