“With a force like the 6th army, I could storm the heavens” - Adolf Hitler
As the surprise Soviet counter-offensive of the winter of 1941 petered out in the freezing snows of the Russian vastness the minds of the German war planners began to turn to the inevitable summer campaign ahead, their successive offensive against a bloodied but defiant enemy.
Six months before, on June 22, 1941, the awesome German war machine, had launched itself at Russia, the largest country in the world, with a sudden and devastating ferocity. For this unparalleled attack the Germans had divided their 4 million strong strike force into three large army groups. Army Group North was to dash up to Leningrad, while bringing the Baltic area under its heel. The task of the exceptionally strong Army Group Centre was to thrust in to the Russia heartland with Moscow as the desired long stop. The Donnets River was the ambitious summer target for the Army Group South, with Ukraine and Crimea as the rich trophies.
The war opened dazzlingly for the Teutonic warriors. Punching huge gaps in the bewildered enemy defense lines the formidable Panzer divisions of the Germans streaked across the Russian plains, leaving the mopping up to the slower infantry divisions following behind. These highly trained men of the infantry, while fighting, regularly marched 30 miles a day to keep cohesion with their comrades in the armoured units moving eastward, relentlessly.
But the country, that Germany had now locked horns with was immense, and the enemy exceedingly tough. It is testimony to the superlative quality of German arms that they, hopelessly over-stretched after six months of continuous fighting, almost achieved victory. In the north they surrounded Leningrad, imposing a crippling siege on the city. In the center, German reconnaissance units stomped through knee high snow to the out-skirts of Moscow. In the south most of Ukraine was theirs.
But the Russian bear, though dreadfully mauled, refused to lie down.
In this huge gamble the Germans had taken, even a near victory amounted to a long term strategic defeat. Although they were now deep in Russia, given the size of the country and its seemingly endless human resources, it was mortally dangerous to leave the enemy undefeated, defiantly resisting.
Dreadful winter battles of 1941
The failure of the Wehrmacht to achieve total victory in 1941 thus necessitated a renewed offensive, which had to bring the enemy to heel once and for all. But after the dreadful winter battles of 1941, when Russians launched quite an effective counter punch, renewing the attack on all three fronts was not an option for the Germans. After much consideration they picked on the economically vital Southern Front, hoping their superior military could administer such a crippling blow to the Russians that they would be compelled to sue for peace. The Army Groups North and Centre were to remain on a defensive posture with a few local offensives to keep the Russian defenders pinned down.
For the renewed attack of 1942, Army Group South was reorganized with Field Marshall von Bock in overall charge. Under his command were several armies including the 2nd Army, 17th Army, the 6th Army and the 1st and 4th Panzer armies. While any of these armies could deliver a crippling blow to the Russians, the 6th was particularly strong with 11 divisions and an entire Panzer Corps in its establishment.
Operation Blue as the plan was named, though somewhat vague on its final objectives, envisaged among other things, reaching the Volga, bringing the large city of Stalingrad under control and gaining the oil rich Eastern Caucasus. Again it was hoped that by menacing this vital area they could compel the Soviets to commit its precious reserves, thus presenting the Germans with an opportunity to force the issue.
The Germans had no doubts about the superiority of their fighting men. Repeatedly, they had observed the wooden orthodoxy and the clumsy battle tactics of the Russian commanders. In contrast the Germans were trained and encouraged to fight resourcefully. When necessary their commanders did not hesitate to adopt bold initiatives and unconventional methods. Rather than attempting to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers or often wasteful firepower, the Wehrmacht embraced the idea of using surprise and speed to effectively paralyze their foe.
On June 28, 1942, an overcast day, Von Bock opened his offensive with predictable ferocity, within days splitting the Russian front in to rapidly disintegrating fragments. Once again the vaunted armoured divisions of the Germans advanced East across the endless steppe seeking an opportunity to deliver a fatal wound to the enemy. Not only were they assured of their military primacy, the Germans were also convinced of their racial superiority over an enemy their internal military literature routinely described in disparaging terms; “degenerate looking Orientals, begging whining Asians, a mixture of low and the lowest humanity, truly subhuman”.
By August 22, 1942 elements of the German 6th Army, now under command of General Paulus, reached the Volga, the border of the Asian continent, a remarkable advance from the starting point of June of 1941. Stalingrad, the city carrying the name of the Soviet dictator was in sight, tantalizingly within grasp.
The very next day, with predictable efficiency, the Luftwaffe began carpet-bombing the ill-fated city. The resulting fires turned Stalingrad in to a burning inferno of collapsed buildings, rubble and thick smoke. No human force could resist the German firepower in those conditions. Hitler who had baulked at the idea of committing his troops to city fighting in Moscow and Leningrad the previous year, now decided that he must have Stalingrad. Perhaps less sanguinely, but certainly with grim determination, Stalin had also decided that Russia would yield no more.
Powerful German divisions
So began the epic struggle between these two implacable enemies for a burnt out patch of the earth, which finally became the turning point of the War. This not so well known Russian city soon became the Verdun of the Second World War, casualties on either side so high that even victory, for whoever prevailed, would be grim. For the valiant Russian defenders there was little choice. They faced the fury of the German guns well aware that retreat only meant drowning in the freezing waters of the Volga.
Besides, Stalin who knew how to impose his will had placed Secret Service Police detachments in the rear with strict orders to summarily execute any Russian soldier disobeying the order to hold their ground to death. Such was their iron determination to give no further ground that the Russians executed nearly 14,000 of their own men for the offence of showing cowardice during the battle for Stalingrad.
For the Germans, Stalingrad turned their world upside down. Their armoured divisions trained to capture something like 50 miles a day, were now advancing at snail pace, attempting to subdue burning city squares against an enemy who rarely showed himself. One single building would change hands several times in a day, each battle only adding to the corpses lying on the floor. In such close quarter fighting German planes and tanks were often unable to join effectively through the fear of hitting their own.
A Lieutenant with the German 24th Panzer division described the battlefield thus “Stalingrad is no longer a city. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when the nights arrive, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge in to the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for any long; only men endure.”
While the fearsome battle was raging in this man made hell-hole of a burning city hundreds of powerful German divisions were holding their impossibly long front line from the Baltic Sea to the Caucasus Mountains, many almost on an R & R mode. General Paulus himself could only commit eight of the divisions of the 6th Army to the crucial battle in the city while assigning eleven divisions under his command to guard the large area under the Army’s administration and his almost 200-mile-long exposed flanks.
As the battle raged on in to the Russian winter many a General warned of the dangers inherent in a prestige battle, where the German army was paying a price totally out of proportion to the city’s fast diminishing strategic importance. But the majority of the high command including Hitler, who held the Russians in contempt, could not conceive of a large-scale counteroffensive by them. The Wehrmacht, which had traditionally prided itself on its cold rationality, was now acting increasingly on hateful prejudices, arrogance and unwarranted optimism. So General Paulus, the harried commander of the 6th Army, considered a competent staff officer, if slow-witted and unimaginative in the field, continued with tactics designed to grind down the enemy inch by inch, an approach which was essentially counter-productive to the numerically weaker but technically superior Germans.
The German battle order in the Stalingrad area now presented Marshall Zhukov the Russian commander, legendary for his coolness under pressure, with a situation where he could turn tables on the enemy. The German 6th Army intent on gaining Stalingrad at any cost was fully absorbed in city fighting. Its long and difficult flanks guarded mainly by satellite divisions from Rumania and Hungary were vulnerable. Paulus was able to provide only a sprinkling of German units to solidify the flanks. The satellite armies (Rumanian, Hungarian) were far inferior to the Germans in equipment as well as in fighting qualities. The nearest German formations of any size were far away in the Caucasus absorbed in heavy fighting in the mountains.
Exploiting the opportunity the situation presented, Zhukov decided to keep the battle of Stalingrad going even at a forbidding price, secretly accumulating huge forces at the extremities of the German flanks. It was a hard decision. The men he ferried across the Volga to battle the Germans in the inferno of Stalingrad had extremely low chances of returning alive. But in order to keep the Germans firmly focused on the city, Zhukov was willing to pay with blood for time. So for almost four months the two armies continued battling ferociously for the few remaining square miles of the city of Stalingrad. Then in the early hours of November 19, 1942, when the freezing Russian winter was well advanced, Zhukov struck. The Russians, in two huge pincer attacks, pierced the flanks of the 6th Army moving rapidly towards the farming town of kalach, their intended meeting point. On their advance they met only feeble resistance from the Rumanians and the Hungarians, the allied troops to whom the Germans had entrusted the task of guarding the rear of the 6th Army.
On November 22 when the two pincer arms of the Russians met at Kalach they had entrapped the great 6th Army of the Germans. In the bleak icy Russian Steppe, covered by a numbing winter mist, the turning point of the Second World War had been reached. Although the Germans were to fight on doggedly for another two and half years, they had irretrievably lost the initiative. Despite valiant attempts six months later in the titanic battle of Kursk to wrestle back the initiative, from Stalingrad on the Germans were largely an Army in defense.
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