Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

by William Craig

The original plans for Operation Blue did not call for the capture of Stalingrad. In fact, the city was not even a primary target for attack.

The army groups were to move eastward on a broad front to the line of the Volga River “in the area of” the city of Stalingrad. After “neutralizing” Russian war production in that region by bombing and artillery fire, and after cutting the vital transportation line on the Volga, both army groups were to turn south and drive on the oil fields of the Caucasus.

Thus, Hitler concluded, the Red Army was not about to make a major stand at Stalingrad, and he ordered Sixth Army to seize the city by force as soon as possible.

That rivalry was hardly an auspicious omen. It underlined the Germans’ desperate manpower situation, for the three satellite armies had been brought together in a haphazard manner. The Hungarian and Rumanian forces were staffed mostly by political officers who were unschooled in warfare. Both armies were riddled by corruption and inefficiency. The lowly soldier had it worst of all.

Worse, they were equipped with antiquated weapons: antitank guns were almost nonexistent; rifles were of World War I vintage.

When Hitler pivoted an entire army across another’s path, he had defied the military maxim that any interference with the delicate internal functions of a massed body of troops frequently leads to chaos.

Enormous traffic jams developed.

By the time the last Fourth Army tank had disappeared to the south, Paulus was commanding a stalled war machine. His supply lines were tangled, his tanks were without fuel, and he watched impotently as Russian rear guards vanished into the eastern haze.

Thus, Moscow knew explicit details about Operation Blue: the names of the divisions involved in the attack, the number of tanks to be committed to battle, plus the operation’s ultimate goal of severing the Volga River lifeline and capturing the oil fields of the Caucasus.

As the offensive progressed, Lucy also had forwarded each major shift in tactics, from Hitler’s indecision about taking Voronezh to his startling insistence on splitting his armies on the steppe.

While Hitler chased two hares at the same time, Stalin, on July 13, had agreed to a plan set forth by his general staff (STAVKA) to withdraw Soviet units as far as the Volga, thereby forcing the Germans to spend the coming winter in open country.

Almost a week later, when STAVKA received the astonishing news that the German Army groups had begun to split their forces on the steppe, Russian strategy changed again.

Until this time, little consideration had been given to making a determined stand on the west bank of the Volga. Now Stalin made a decision of momentous significance. He sent an order to members of the City So...

Yeremenko spent the better part of August 2 studying the maps of Stalingrad and the surrounding area. As he stared at the topographical details of the forty-mile strip of land between the Don and Volga rivers, he concluded that in order to attack Stalingrad the Germans would have to concentrate most of their strength in that narrow “bridge” where the Don and Volga come closest to each other. And he wondered whether that type of deployment might offer the Russians a chance for a successful counterattack from the flanks.

Yeremenko spoke up against the idea of two Russian fronts in the same region, especially since their boundaries met in the exact center of Stalingrad. To him, trying to coordinate the defense of a city with another commander equal in responsibility would be “utterly confusing, if not tragically impossible.”

Between Kalach and Stalingrad there was only steppe country—flat, grassy terrain that was perfect for German panzers.

The farm crews out there had been straining under the brutal sun while Stuka dive-bombers machine-gunned them and set fire to trains filled with grain. Nevertheless, nearly twenty-seven thousand fully loaded freight cars had already rolled away to safety in the east.

The “harvest victory” was the only one that Yeremenko could savor. Four rings of antitank ditches being dug twenty to thirty miles west of Stalingrad offered little hope. Neither did the “green belt,” a twenty-nine-mile arc of trees planted years before to ward off the effects of dust clouds and snowstorms. Only a mile wide at its thickest point, it could not withstand the concentrated fire of heavy artillery.

Yeremenko’s attention wandered southward, down the map to the rail center of Kotelnikovo, seventy-three miles away. Captured by the Germans on August 2, the city controlled the main road to Stalingrad.

The German line of march was obvious: through Chileko, where the Siberian 208th Division had just been decimated by the Luftwaffe, and on to ...

At the latter location, Yeremenko paid closer attention to swirling lines on the contour map indicating hills rising to elevations of from two to three hundred feet. The hills followed the main road the rest of the way to the congested suburbs of Stalingrad. With mounting excitement, he noted deep ravines cutting across the region from east to west and concluded that it would...

So, as he pored over the map, he embarked on a peculiar mental exercise: replacing the map’s impersonal symbols with his own images of rock formations, houses, and streets, he strove to understand the battleground he had inherited.

What alarmed Yeremenko about Mamaev was its staggering vista to the east—down the shimmering Volga, which was jammed daily with hundreds of tugs, barges, and steamers, whistling at each other in riverboat language and trailing wreaths of smoke as they navigated the channels between barren Golodny and Sarpinsky islands.

Mameav key tx

According to the tactics devised by General Paulus, the three German divisions crossing the steppe on Sunday, August 23, were supposed to forge a forty-mile-long corridor from the Don to the Volga. This barrier of steel would seal off Stalingrad from the north and prevent reinforcements from filtering down to the aid of the city. In theory, the plan was sound. In practice, it required perfect coordination among the participating units.

By midnight of August 23, the 16th Panzer Division on the outskirts of Stalingrad had outrun its support.

Completely separated from each other, the three divisions became a chain of “islands” dropped in the middle of a hostile sea. Until these islands joined into a solid land bridge extending outward from the main body of the Sixth Army, each would be extremely vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks.

Army Group B Headquarters informed Friedrich von Paulus of the golden opportunity offered by the bold gambit: “In view of the fact that Fourth Panzer Army gained a bridgehead at Gavrilovka at 1000 hours today, everything now depends on Sixth Army concentrating the strongest possible forces … and launching an attack in a generally southerly direction.…”

Inexplicably, Paulus did not move. Harried by the suicidal Russian attempts to break his thin corridor to the Volga, he refused to rush troops south for a linkup. Crucial hours passed. Another urgent cable went out to Paulus. Again he failed to respond. And while the German High Command tried to move its pincers, Andrei Yeremenko pulled back more than twenty thousand Russian soldiers on the steppe between the Don and Stalingrad.

On September 2, Paulus finally agreed to the southward drive toward Hoth, and within hours, the jaws of the pincers snapped shut. But Paulus had waited too long. Most of the Russian troops on the steppe had escaped into Stalingrad, and his seventy-two hours of indecision had given the enemy another chance to fight. Now the battle would be in the streets of Stalingrad, where blitzkrieg tactics were useless.

In the five days he had been at the front, Zhukov had not yet performed a miracle, but he was attempting to coordinate Russian infantry attacks with meager air and tank strikes. Such an effort needed time. This Stalin would not allow him. When Zhukov called him, pleading for a delay until ammunition arrived in sufficient quantities, Stalin gave him until September 5. On that day, Zhukov launched “human wave” assaults, which crashed into the left flank of the German corridor from the Don to the Volga and immediately foundered. At nightfall, the German corridor was still intact.

When Zhukov called him, pleading for a delay until ammunition arrived in sufficient quantities, Stalin gave him until September 5. On that day, Zhukov launched “human wave” assaults, which crashed into the left flank of the German corridor from the Don to the Volga and immediately foundered. At nightfall, the German corridor was still intact.

Ever since the Germans had turned the corner at Rostov on July 23, and burst into the land mass between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the Russians had played a skillful game of will-o’-the-wisp, drawing the Nazis further and further from their supply bases.

Halle’s arrival at the Volga marked the final isolation of the Russian Sixty-second Army.

The Sixty-second Army was now the only combat force left to deny Stalingrad to more than two hundred thousand invaders.

His men had captured several Russian couriers running through the streets with handwritten messages. Sensing that the Soviet Sixty-second Army’s telephone communications had broken down, and that it was now increasingly dependent on isolated small groups to contain the Germans, Meunch assumed that his depleted battalion could manage the last half mile toward their goal.

Chuikov sent him to organize his fifteen hundred militiamen into squads of ten and twenty in strategic buildings in the heart of the city. These “storm groups” were his answer to the German superiority in troops, artillery, and planes—especially planes. Throwing away the Red Army textbook on tactics, he was substituting an idea he had first conceived on the steppe, where he watched enemy blitzkrieg tactics against the Sixty-fourth Soviet Army, and became convinced that he could not compete against German firepower. He countered by creating a series of mini-fortresses, commanding various street intersections. The small storm groups could act as “breakwaters,” funneling Nazi panzers into approach roads already registered on by Russian artillery. When the tanks lumbered along these predictable routes, they would face a murderous fire from heavy weapons. With the tanks bogged down, the storm group could then deal with German infantry, exposed behind the flaming armor. And by fighting at such close range, the storm groups also eliminated the threat of the German Luftwaffe. Afraid to bomb their own troops, the Stukas and Ju-88s would be unable to attack the Soviet strong-points.

Finally the German High Command made a move to guard its flanks. The 48th Panzer Corps, stationed more than fifty miles southwest of the ominous Russian bridgeheads at Kletskaya and Serafimovich on the Don, received priority orders to move up to the threatened sector.

During the weeks of inactivity behind the lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems. Days behind schedule, the 48th Corps finally limped into its new quarters. It was almost totally crippled. Out of one hundred four tanks in the 22nd Panzer Division, only forty-two were ready for combat. No one notified Hitler about the status of his reserves.

In the natural land bridge between the Don and the Volga to the west of Stalingrad, Paulus had concentrated practically all of his combat divisions for the purpose of capturing the city. But he had stationed most of the supply dumps needed to maintain those divisions on the far side of the Don, to the west where it makes a gigantic loop before curving southward toward the Sea of Azov. And it was this vulnerable rear area that the Russian High Command had pinpointed as a priority target for the first phase of Operation Uranus.

After two tense days of frantic communications, the Führer had delivered an incredible verdict. He denied Paulus any freedom of movement or decision. Further, he robbed Sixth Army of its chance to escape while the Russians were trying to strengthen their hold around the pocket.

He had been appointed commander of the newly formed Army Group Don, comprising the encircled Sixth Army, “Papa” Hoth’s battered Fourth Panzer Army, and the remnants of Rumanian divisions scattered on the steppe. OKW told Manstein his primary task was to carve a corridor to Sixth Army so that supplies could be sent the Germans fighting at the Volga. But at no time was the field marshal alerted to bring the Sixth Army out of the Kessel. He was only to “give it assistance,” while working closely with both Army Groups A and B to protect the right and left flanks of the Wehrmacht in southern Russia.

Manstein plunged immediately into his primary task: reaching Sixth Army. Assuming Goering’s airlift could keep Paulus’s troops alive, Manstein hoped to carve a corridor to the fortress by mounting a two-pronged attack. One would be a diversion from the west, aimed at Kalach. Hopefully, this diversion would draw Russian units away from the second drive which would start from Kotelnikovo, seventy-three miles southwest of the pocket.

The Kotelnikovo offensive had the advantage of avoiding any crossing of the Don. Only two of its tributaries, the Aksai and Mishkova rivers, would hinder progress, and beyond the Mishkova were thirty miles of open steppe, reaching all the way to the southern perimeter of the Kessel. When the German relief troops reached the Mishkova River, Manstein then expected Paulus to burst out with his army and link up with them.

But all his projections were doomed—unless the airlift nourished the Sixth Army, and an improvised defense force led by Col. Walter Wenck could stall the Russians on the steppe south of the Don.

Only a few days earlier, Wenck had received urgent orders to leave his post in the Caucasus and assume command of the “screening” line in front of the Russians pushing southward toward Rostov from Serafimovich and Kletskaya.

On November 27, when Wenck had met Manstein at Novocherkassk to discuss the situation, the field marshal bluntly reminded the colonel of his awesome responsibility: “Wenck, you’ll answer to me with your head that the Russians won’t break through to Rostov. The Don-Chir front must hold. Otherwise not only the Sixth Army in Stalingrad, but the whole of Army Group A in the Caucasus will be lost.”

Facing the stubborn Zeitzler with the report in his hand, Hitler scornfully asked: “But what exactly do you wish me to do? Paulus can’t break out and you know it!” Zeitzler had no rebuttal. The evidence was too damning and as he left the room, he thought about the tragedy that was developing. Now, at this very moment, Hitler was correct about Sixth Army’s inability to break out. But his earlier mistakes and adamant refusal to let Paulus escape when the Kessel was first formed thirty days earlier had created this disaster.

Hermann Goering shook his head in disbelief. “It is impossible that any German officer could be responsible for defeatist messages of this sort,” he declared. “The only possible explanation is that the enemy has captured his transmitter and has sent them himself.” Thus, Zitzewitz’s reports were dismissed as Russian propaganda.

Knowing their enemy was impotent, Russian soldiers set up huge field kitchens, from which the aroma of hot food wafted toward Sixth Army foxholes. This sensual torture was worse for the Germans than seeing the tanks and guns that spelled imminent disaster.

Another key part in the new Soviet offensive was delegated to Vassili Chuikov in the city of Stalingrad. Aware that Paulus still kept seven divisions along the Volga despite manpower shortages elsewhere on his flanks, STAVKA assigned his Sixty-second Army a significant tactical role in the final liquidation of the pocket. Chuikov learned of this when a distinguished visitor, Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky, came across the Volga to his cliffside bunker. Sitting on an earthen bench, the front commander gave Chuikov the details. While simultaneous attacks were being mounted from west, north, and south, Sixty-second Army had to “… attract more enemy forces in its direction, preventing them from reaching the Volga if they try to break out of encirclement.…” When Rokossovsky asked whether the Sixty-second Army could contain any such desperate enemy maneuver, General Krylov, Chuikov’s chief aide, answered for his superior: “If in the summer and autumn all Paulus’s forces were unable to drive us into the Volga, then the hungry and frozen Germans won’t even move six steps eastward.”