The Second World War Page 51
As on a fishing expedition, Chekhov would take up a carefully selected position before dawn so as to be ready for ‘the morning rise’. Ever since his first kill, he went for head shots and the satisfying spurt of blood which it produced. ‘I saw something black spring out from his head, he fell down… When I shoot, the head immediately jerks backwards, or to one side, and he drops what he was carrying and falls down… Never did they drink from the Volga!’
The captured diary of a German Unteroffizier with the 297th Infantry Division just to the south of Stalingrad revealed how even outside the city ruins snipers had a demoralizing effect. On 5 September, he wrote: ‘The soldier who was carrying up our breakfast was shot by a sniper just as he was about to drop into our trench.’ Five days later he noted: ‘I have just been to the rear and I cannot express how nice it was there. One can walk upright without fear of being shot by a sniper. I washed my face for the first time in thirteen days.’ On returning to the front, he wrote: ‘The snipers don’t give us any rest. They shoot bloody well.’
The Stakhanovite mentality was deeply ingrained in the Red Army, and officers felt compelled to inflate or even invent accounts, as a junior lieutenant explained. ‘A report had to be sent in every morning and evening on the losses inflicted on the enemy and on the heroism of the men in the regiment. I had to carry these reports because I had been appointed liaison officer since our battery had no guns left… One morning just out of curiosity I read a paper marked “SECRET” sent by the regimental commander. It said that troops of the regiment had repulsed the enemy’s attack and damaged two tanks, suppressed the fire of four batteries and killed a dozen of Hitler’s soldiers and officers with artillery, rifle and machine-gun fire. And yet I knew perfectly well that the Germans had been sitting peacefully all day in their trenches and that our 75mm guns did not fire a single shell. I cannot really say that this report surprised me. By that time we were already used to following the example of the Sovinform Bureau [an official news agency].’
Red Army soldiers did not just endure fear and hunger and lice, which they referred to as ‘snipers’, they also suffered from a craving to smoke. Some risked severe punishment by using their identity documents to roll a cigarette if they still had some makhorka tobacco left. And when truly desperate, they smoked cotton wool from their padded jackets. All longed for their vodka ration of a hundred grams a day, but supply corporals stole part of it and topped up the remnants with water. Whenever soldiers had the chance, they would barter equipment or clothing with civilians for samogonka, or moonshine.
The bravest of the brave in Stalingrad were the young women medical orderlies, who constantly went out under heavy fire to retrieve the wounded and drag them back. Sometimes they returned fire at the Germans. Stretchers were out of the question, so the orderly either wriggled herself under the wounded soldier and crawled with him on her back, or else she dragged him on a groundsheet or cape. The wounded were then taken down to one of the landing stages for evacuation across the huge river, where they ran the gauntlet of artillery, machine guns and air attack. Often there were so many that they were left untended for many hours, sometimes even days. The medical services were overwhelmed. And in the field hospitals, which lacked blood banks, nurses and doctors offered their own in arm-to-arm transfusions. ‘If they don’t, soldiers will die,’ Stalingrad Front reported to Moscow. Many collapsed from giving too much blood.
The critical battle for Stalingrad also saw a major shift in power within the Red Army. On 9 October, Decree No. 307 announced ‘the introduction of a unified command structure in the Red Army and the elimination of the post of commissar’. Commanders who had suffered from the interference of political officers felt triumphant. It was an essential part in the renaissance of a professional officer corps. Commissars, on the other hand, were appalled to find that commanders now ignored them. The political department of Stalingrad Front deplored the ‘absolutely incorrect attitude’ which had emerged. Numerous examples were sent back to Moscow. One commissar reported that the ‘political department is considered to be an unnecessary appendix’.
Soviet military intelligence and the NKVD were also alarmed to discover from interrogations of prisoners that a large number of their soldiers taken prisoner were now working for the Germans in various capacities. ‘On some parts of the front,’ the Stalingrad political department reported to Moscow, ‘there have been cases of former Russians who put on Red Army uniform and penetrate our positions for the purpose of reconnaissance and seizing officer and soldier prisoners for interrogation.’ But they never imagined that there were just over 30,000 of them attached to the Sixth Army alone. Only after the battle did they discover the scale from interrogations, and how the system worked.
‘Russians in the German army can be divided into three categories,’ a prisoner told his NKVD interrogator. ‘Firstly soldiers mobilized by German troops, so-called Cossack [fighting] platoons which are attached to German divisions. Secondly Hilfsfreiwillige [known as ‘Hiwis’] made up of local people or Russian prisoners who volunteer, or those Red Army soldiers who desert to join the Germans. This category wears full German uniform, and has ranks and badges. They eat like German soldiers and are attached to German regiments. Thirdly, there are Russian prisoners who do the dirty jobs, kitchens, stables and so on. These three categories are treated in different ways, with the best treatment naturally reserved for the volunteers.’
In October 1942, Stalin faced other problems. Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang leadership in Chungking were keen to exploit Soviet weakness at this moment, when German armies threatened the Caucasian oilfields. For several years Stalin had been increasing Soviet control over the far north-western province of Sinkiang, with its mines and the important Dushanzi oilfield. With careful diplomacy, Chiang began to reassert Chinese Nationalist sovereignty over the province. He forced the Soviets to withdraw troops and hand back mining and aircraft-manufacturing enterprises which they had set up. Chiang sought American assistance, and eventually the Soviets pulled out with ill grace. Stalin could not risk alienating Roosevelt. Chiang’s very clever handling of the situation prevented the Soviet Union from taking over Sinkiang, in the same way as it controlled Outer Mongolia. The Soviet withdrawal also signified a major setback for the Chinese Communists in the province. They would not return until 1949 when Mao’s People’s Liberation Army captured it towards the end of the civil war.
The relentless German attacks in Stalingrad were renewed with even greater vigour during October. ‘A furious artillery bombardment began when we were preparing breakfast,’ wrote a Soviet soldier. ‘The kitchen in which we were sitting was suddenly filled with foul-smelling smoke. Plaster fell into our mess-tins with their watery millet broth. We immediately forgot about our soup. Someone outside shouted “Tanks!” His cry broke through the noise of thunder, of walls collapsing and someone’s heartbreaking screams.’
Although the 62nd Army had been pushed back dangerously close to the bank of the Volga, it continued to fight a terrible battle of attrition in the ruined factories of the northern part of the city. Stalingrad Front reported that its troops showed a ‘real mass heroisim’. It was, however, greatly helped by the massive increase in Soviet artillery fire from across the Volga, breaking up German attacks.
During the first week of November, Stalingrad Front noted a change. ‘In the last two days,’ observed a report to Moscow of 6 November, ‘the enemy have been changing tactics. Probably because of big losses over the last three weeks, they have stopped using big formations.’ In the course of three weeks of heavy and expensive attacks, the Germans had not managed to advance more than an average of ‘fifty metres a day’. The Russians identified the new German tactic of ‘reconnaissance in force to probe for weak points between our regiments’. But these new ‘sudden attacks’ were achieving no more success than the old ones. The morale of Soviet soldiers was improving. ‘I often think of the words of Nekrasov that the Russian people are able to bear everything that God
is able to throw at us,’ wrote one soldier. ‘Here in the army one can easily imagine that there is no force on earth which can do away with our Russian strength.’
German morale, on the other hand, was suffering badly. ‘It’s impossible to describe what is happening here,’ a German corporal wrote home. ‘Everyone in Stalingrad who still possesses a head and hands, women as well as men, carries on fighting.’ Another acknowledged that ‘the [Soviet] dogs fight like lions’. A third even wrote home: ‘the sooner I am under the ground, the less I will suffer. We often think that Russia should capitulate, but these uneducated people are too stupid to realize it.’ Infested with lice, weakened by short rations and vulnerable to many ailments, of which the most prevalent was dysentery, their only comfort was to look forward to winter quarters and Christmas.
Hitler demanded a final push to seize the west bank of the Volga before the snows came. On 8 November, he boasted in a speech to the Nazi ‘Old Fighters’ in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, that Stalingrad was as good as captured. ‘Time is of no importance,’ he claimed. Many officers in the Sixth Army listened in disbelief to his words, broadcast by Berlin radio. Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika was in retreat and Allied forces had just landed on the North African coast. It was an example of terrible bravado which would have a disastrous effect on German fortunes, especially those of the Sixth Army. Out of pride, Hitler would not be able to countenance a strategic withdrawal.
A series of ill-considered decisions followed. Führer headquarters ordered that most of the Sixth Army’s 150,000 artillery and transport horses should be sent several hundred kilometres to the rear. Huge quantities of fodder would no longer have to be sent forward, thus saving greatly on transport. This measure deprived all the unmotorized divisions of mobility, but perhaps Hitler intended to remove any possibility of retreat. His most disastrous order was to command Paulus to send almost all his panzer forces into the ‘final’ battle for Stalingrad, even spare tank drivers to be used as infantry. Paulus obeyed him. Rommel, if he had been in his place, almost certainly would have ignored such an instruction.
On 9 November, the day after Hitler’s speech, winter arrived in Stalingrad. The temperature suddenly dropped to minus 18 degrees Centigrade, which made crossing the Volga even more dangerous. ‘The ice floes collide, crumble and grind against each other,’ wrote Grossman, affected by the eerie sound. Resupply and the evacuation of wounded became almost impossible. German artillery commanders, aware of the problems their enemy faced, concentrated their fire even more on the crossing points. On 11 November, battle groups from six German divisions, supported by another four pioneer battalions, began their offensive. Chuikov promptly sent in counter-attacks that night.
Chuikov in his memoirs claimed that he had no idea of what the Stavka was planning, but this is untrue. He knew, as a report to Moscow reveals, that he had to keep the maximum number of German forces fighting in the city at that time so that the Sixth Army could not strengthen its vulnerable flanks.
German commanders and staff officers had long been acutely conscious of how weakly held their flanks were. Their left rear along the Don was held by the Romanian Third Army, and the sector to their south was defended by the Romanian Fourth Army. Neither of these formations was well armed, their men were demoralized and they lacked anti-tank guns. Hitler had dismissed all warnings, claiming that the Red Army was at its last gasp and was incapable of launching an effective offensive. He also refused to accept estimates of Soviet tank production. The output of Soviet men and women workers, in improvised and unheated factories in the Urals, had in fact reached over four times that of German industry.
Generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky had been aware of the great opportunity offered ever since 12 September, when it looked as if Stalingrad was about to fall. Chuikov had been given sufficient reinforcements to hold the city, but no more. In fact the 62nd Army had been kept as the bait in a vast trap. All through the terrifying autumn battles, the Stavka had been building up its reserves and forming new armies, especially tank formations, and deploying Katyusha rocket batteries. They had discovered how effective their new weapon was in terrifying their enemy. Soldat Waldemar Sommer of the 371st Infantry Division told his NKVD interrogator: ‘If the Katyusha sings just a couple more times, all that will be left of us will be our iron buttons.’
Stalin, usually so impatient, had finally listened to his generals’ arguments that they needed time. They had persuaded him that hammering away from the outside at the Sixth Army’s northern flank was futile. What the Red Army needed to aim for was a huge envelopment with large tank formations from much further back, to the west along the Don and from the south of Stalingrad. Stalin was not bothered that this meant a return to the doctrine of ‘deep operations’ advocated by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, which had become heretical after his execution in the purges. The prospect of a massive revenge opened his mind to this bold plan which would ‘shift the strategic situation in the south decisively’. The offensive was to be called Operation Uranus.
Since mid-September, Zhukov and Vasilevsky had been assembling new armies and training them with short periods on different sectors of the front. This procedure had the added advantage of confusing German intelligence, which began to expect a major offensive against Army Group Centre. Deception measures–maskirovka–were put in place, with assault boats openly displayed on the Don near Voronezh where no attack was planned, while troops were made to dig defensive positions conspicuously on the sectors where the offensive would take place. But German suspicions of a major offensive against the Rzhev Salient west of Moscow were in fact well founded.
Soviet military intelligence had accumulated encouraging reports on the state of the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies. Interrogation revealed a hatred among their conscripts for Marshal Antonescu, who had ‘sold their Motherland to Germany’. A soldier’s daily pay was no more than ‘enough to buy one litre of milk’. Officers were ‘very rude to soldiers and often strike them’. There had been many cases of self-inflicted wounds, despite lectures from officers that they were ‘a sin against the Motherland and God’. German troops insulted them frequently, leading to fights, and Romanian soldiers had killed a German officer who shot two of their comrades. The interrogator concluded that Romanian forces were in a ‘low political moral state’. NKVD interrogations of prisoners also discovered that soldiers from the Romanian army were ‘raping all the women in the villages to the south-west of Stalingrad’.
On the Kalinin and Western Fronts, the Stavka was also planning Operation Mars to be launched against the German Ninth Army. The main objective was to ensure that not a single division could be ‘moved from the central part of the front to the southern part’. Although Zhukov was responsible for supervising this operation as a Stavka representative, he devoted far more time to planning Uranus than Mars. Zhukov spent the first nineteen days in Moscow, just eight and a half days on the Kalinin sector of the front, and no fewer than fifty-two days on the Stalingrad axis. This alone indicates that Mars was an ancillary operation, despite its deployment of six armies.
In the view of Russian military historians, the factor which demonstrated conclusively that Mars was a diversion and not, as David Glantz has argued, a coequal operation, was the allocation of artillery ammunition. According to General of the Army M.A. Gareev of the Russian Association of the Second World War Historians, the Uranus offensive received ‘2.5 to 4.5 ammunition loads [per gun] at Stalingrad compared with less than one in Operation Mars’. This striking imbalance suggests a remarkable disregard of human life on the part of the Stavka, which was prepared to send six armies into battle with insufficient artillery support to tie down Army Group Centre during the Stalingrad encirclement.
According to the spymaster General Pavel Sudoplatov, this ruthlessness was wholly cynical. He described how details of the forthcoming Rzhev Offensive were deliberately passed to the Germans. Together, the Administration for Special Tasks of the NKVD and GRU military intelligence had p
repared Operation Monastery, an infiltration of the German Abwehr. Aleksandr Demyanov, the grandson of the leader of the Kuban Cossacks, had been instructed by the NKVD to allow himself to be recruited by the Abwehr. Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen, the German intelligence chief for the eastern front, gave him the codename Max and claimed that he was his best agent and network organizer. But Demyanov’s underground organization of anti-Communist sympathizers was entirely controlled by the NKVD. Max had ‘defected’ across the lines on skis during the chaos of the Soviet counter-attack in December 1941. Since the Germans had already identified him as a likely agent during the Nazi–Soviet pact, and his family was well known in White émigré circles, Gehlen trusted him completely. Max was then parachuted behind Red Army lines in February 1942 and soon began to radio back plausible but inaccurate intelligence provided by his NKVD controllers.
In early November, preparations were well advanced for Operation Uranus around Stalingrad and the diversionary attack of Operation Mars near Rzhev. Max was now instructed to give the Germans details of Mars. ‘The offensive predicted by Max on the central front near Rzhev’, wrote General Sudoplatov, chief of the Administration for Special Tasks, ‘was planned by Stalin and Zhukov to divert German efforts away from Stalingrad. The disinformation planted through Aleksandr was kept secret even from Marshal Zhukov, and was handed to me personally by General Fedor Fedotovich Kuznetsov of the GRU in a sealed envelope… Zhukov, not knowing that this disinformation game was being played at his expense, paid a heavy price in the loss of thousands of men under his command.’