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.
At 6:30 A.M. on November 19, the predawn darkness between Serafimovich and Kletskaya became a brilliant blaze of orange and red flame as thirty-five hundred Russian guns heralded the attack.
Trapped in straw-lined trenches, soldiers of the Rumanian Third Army watched the artillery bursts march precisely up and down their lines. Bunkers collapsed, suffocating hundreds; shell-shocked men screamed in fear and blocked their ears to escape the terrifying noise. When the cannonade finally stopped, the Rumanians heard the ominous sound of tank motors as the Russian Fifth and Twenty-first Tank armies burst forth from their bridgeheads.
The T-34s stormed through clinging fog and snow into the lines of bewildered Rumanians. Most succumbed to “tank fright,” leapt from cover, and ran. Only a few stayed to duel the armor.
Eight miles to the south, a German weather observer, Sgt. Wolf Pelikan, stirred fitfully in his warm cot as he tried to ignore the rolling gunfire intruding on his sleep. It continued, so Pelikan slipped out of bed and dressed. Dirt cascaded on him from the ceiling and he swore as he brushed off his uniform. When the noise suddenly ceased, he finished dressing in a more leisurely manner, and his thoughts turned to breakfast and the pancakes he liked so well.
A shout brought him to the door and he recognized a company messenger, pointing frantically to the north.
“The Ivans are here! The Ivans are here!” he kept saying.
Pelikan hollered back, “You’re crazy.”
The commotion awakened his comrades, who poured from the bunker to laugh at the messenger. Someone even threw a shoe at him, but he kept pointing, wordlessly now, to the north.
Pelikan looked in that direction and froze. A wind had blown away the fog and he saw them clearly, huge black tanks, sitting motionless on a rise about a mile off. Pelikan’s stomach churned.
At that moment the first hysterical Rumanians appeared. Weaponless, screaming, they never paused in their flight. When one of them yelled that Russian troops were right behind, the news destroyed any semblance of order in the German ranks.
Pelikan and the others forgot all discipline. Orders rang out and were as quickly countermanded. Men swept belongings into trucks, which started sluggishly in the freezing weather. The commanding officer scurried to a light plane and took off to the south.
With Russian tanks still hovering on the slope, the rest of the German unit jumped into vehicles and roared away. Bouncing along in a bakery truck, Pelikan silently thanked God for the chance to survive.
At Golubinka, fifty miles to the southeast, Capt. Winrich Behr heard the details of the Soviet attack from Lt. Gerhard Stöck, the liaison officer posted to the Rumanian Third Army at Kletskaya. Stöck told him the Third Army had been torn apart, was running toward Golubinka, and Behr rushed to tell Paulus and Schmidt, who took the dreadful report calmly. Amazed and pleased at their composure, Behr waited while the generals analyzed the situation. Schmidt suddenly exclaimed: “We can hold!” Paulus agreed and ordered the 48th Panzer Corps to head north, into the breach along the Don.
Thirteen hundred miles to the west of Sixth Army Headquarters, Hitler slept soundly at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps. The Führer had been there for nearly two weeks, dallying in his mountain retreat. But the problems he refused to acknowledge during the past summer and fall had pursued him. In Africa, the Allies were moving to trap Rommel’s legions; in Russia, his Soviet Union Intelligence expert, Col. Reinhard Gehlen, had just warned him of the extreme likelihood of a Russian counteroffensive behind Sixth Army.
Despite these reports, Hitler remained convinced that his Third Reich would endure. He was incredibly proud of the fact that his armies ruled more than three hundred million people: from the Atlantic coastline in France to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, from the northern capes of Norway to the bleached sands of Libya. He had reached an apogee of power. But on November 19, when the Red Army launched its massive counterattack at the Don, his Nazi empire began to wither imperceptibly. And though more than two years would pass before it finally collapsed, the decline would prove irreversible.
In a quiet conference room, Hitler peered intently at the latest battle maps and examined the terrain on the left flank of the Sixth Army. He showed no undue concern as he asked about the weather and Luftwaffe groups operating in the region. Unhurried, controlled, Hitler weighed the options and issued an order. It was the first of many fatal decisions he would make in the coming weeks.
That order reached Gen. Ferdinand Heim at 11:30 A.M., as he was leading his 48th Panzer Corps out to challenge the Russian Twenty-first Army rampaging south of the Don. It instructed him to change direction and speed to the sector around Blinov, where the Soviet Fifth Army had also made a serious penetration. Irritated by the confusing orders, the general skidded to a halt and redirected his columns toward the new target almost 180 degrees in the opposite direction. When the 48th Panzer Corps clumsily started up again, it was inundated with remnants of Rumanian divisions, running across the snowfields. Heim absorbed as many of these troops as he could and kept going toward his new target.
No planes interfered with the drama on the steppe, for both air forces had been grounded by the foul weather. As a result, General von Richthofen had flown south to the Caucasus, where excellent conditions permitted strikes against the Red Army. Absorbed with bombing runs along the Terek riverfront, he was stunned to hear of the massive Soviet offensive at his rear. Unable to dispatch aircraft north into the storm along the Don, he excused his impotence by saying, “once again the Russians have made masterly use of the bad weather.”
That bad weather had almost caused Marshal Vasilevsky to postpone Operation Uranus. Frantic phone calls with Generals Vatutin, Christiakov, Romanenko and STAVKA in Moscow had preceded the attack. Deprived of close air support, and fearful of sending tanks into a blinding cover of fog and snow on the exposed steppe, the Russians launched Uranus with a premonition of catastrophe. But the first hours had already brought incredible success. Masses of Rumanian prisoners swarmed into Soviet lines. Red Army tank patrols quickly penetrated twenty miles southward, and by afternoon were within firing range of German Sixth Army’s supply dumps.
At the town of Bolshe Nabatoff, thirty miles south of Kletskaya, Quartermaster Karl Binder was trying desperately to save his carefully hoarded rations. He had collected eight hundred cattle to feed his division during the winter and now, fearful of Russian tanks, he acted to shift his ponderous burden eastward, across the winding Don before the enemy seized the bridge at Akimovski. As he issued instructions to eight herdsmen, the first Russian shells whined into the compound and the cattle broke in terror. The herdsmen managed to turn the mass which stampeded, snorting and lowing, toward the Don miles away.
After the cattle had gone, Binder began heaving huge sacks of flour into trucks while his men filled other vehicles with bread, clothing, and blankets. Retreating Rumanian troops helped themselves to as much food as they could carry and for once, no German officer demanded receipts.
Enemy fire increased, buildings began burning furiously. Convinced he had salvaged all he could, Binder led his convoy out of Bolshe Nabatoff while behind him, the depot burned like a bright red torch.
All day long, teams of Russian tanks roamed the white steppe, shooting into headquarters detachments, supply dumps, communications centers, and then pulling back into the mist to strike again miles away. Their tactics confused and demoralized the Germans. Radio reports flooding into Golubinka placed the Russians forty miles south of the Don, then fifty miles southeast of the Don—everywhere! Hysteria marked the voices that begged Sixth Army for reinforcements and advice.
Discipline broke; unit commanders arbitrarily ordered their men to the east, toward Stalingrad. Their troops had become fearful, sullen and were openly hostile to their superiors, who ran about screaming threats of courts-martial to maintain order.
In this bedlam, Lt. Hermann Kästle shepherded his mortars to the Don. He pushed ahead on the congested roads, and held his place against repeated attempts by other officers to jockey men and equipment in front of him. Panic frequently replaced reason, and Kästle saw several arguments degenerate into fist fights as soldiers stood in the snow and smashed each other over trivial slights.
In late afternoon, Kästle neared a bridge crossing the Don. Suddenly another lieutenant appeared, waved a Luger in his face, and told him his tank held priority over Kästle’s mortars. When Kästle said his guns were equally important, the lieutenant pointed the pistol at his head and told him to back away.
Kästle searched the officer’s eyes, and knew he faced death if he refused. Shaking his head in disbelief, he pulled the mortars aside and watched passively as the tank commander jumped onto his machine and rode triumphantly over the river.
At Sixth Army Headquarters, Captain Behr kept the lines to Gerhard Stöck open throughout the day. Stöck had proved to be the most reliable witness to the unfolding chaos. He kept reporting the defection of Rumanian officers, who left thousands of soldiers to wander the steppe, and his account of the tragedy was distressingly accurate.
On his own maps, Behr had also watched the slow progress of General Heim’s relief force. The 48th Panzer Corps finally reached Blinov in the afternoon. But the Russians had come and gone, hitting and running across the flatlands. General Heim took his panzers out of town again, seeking the elusive enemy, who was avoiding direct engagement.
In Stalingrad, ninety miles east of the fluid battleground, the city had again assumed its familiar crown of explosions and tracer bullets chasing each other through the darkening sky. On the edge of the Volga, Russian Col. Ivan Lyudnikov’s trapped division still clung to its “island” under the cliff behind the Barrikady Gun Factory. Up above, German pioneers had spent another day trying to destroy them, but again they failed. Inside the Barrikady itself, Maj. Eugen Rettenmaier learned of the Russian counterattack back at the Don and sank into a deep depression. Unable to understand how his leaders had failed to prepare for the blow, he knew the situation at Stalingrad had become hopeless.
North of the Barrikady, past the shattered tractor works, the 16th Panzer Division had spent another torturous day on the outskirts of Rynok. But after dark, they received orders to turn their backs on the Volga. Mechanics labored hurriedly over tanks and trucks; soldiers received extra rations and ammunition. Then they filed out of their deep balkas, where they had lived since August, and went to shore up the gap in the line along the Don, ninety miles to the rear.
The weather was turning worse; a strong wind blew snow into the faces of the tankers and infantrymen. Masses of people wandered past them: Rumanians clutching their belongings, human flotsam from an unseen debacle beyond the western horizon.
At Golubinka, General Schmidt read the latest dispatches and tried to gauge the extent of the Russian penetration. Scattered rumors merged with verified reports to form a kaleidoscope of tank sightings, making it impossible to pinpoint the enemy’s whereabouts.
At 10:30 P.M., Schmidt suddenly announced: “I am going to bed now,” and disappeared into his quarters. As he went back to the phone and Gerhard Stöck, Captain Behr marveled again at Schmidt’s coolness, a blessing in the face of the long day’s discouragement.
South of Stalingrad, more Russian forces waited through the bitterly cold night to begin the second part of Operation Uranus. From the suburb of Beketovka down to the shores of the salt lakes, Sarpa, Tzatza, and Barmantsak, the Sixty-fourth, Fifty-seventh, and Fifty-first armies were massed along a 125-mile front. Confronting them was the vastly overextended Fourth Rumanian Army, stretched thin across the wintry steppe to protect the German Sixth Army’s right flank. It was the Russian High Command’s intention to punch quickly through the Rumanian positions and race northwest toward the Russian armies descending from the Don.
In the early hours of November 20, shivering Red Army soldiers cleaned their weapons again, and wrote last letters to relatives in unoccupied Russia. Sgt. Alexei Petrov had no one to write; Lt. Hersch Gurewicz thought wistfully of his father and brother, but had no idea where they were.
At his headquarters cottage, General Yeremenko could not sleep. Convinced that the southern-front attack should be delayed until all the German reserves had been drawn north to meet the first phase of the Soviet offensive along the Don, he had spent hours arguing his case with STAVKA in Moscow. But STAVKA had refused his plea, and now Yeremenko brooded about the possibility of failure.
At dawn he had more worries. The weather had not changed, and a thick fog, mixed with snow, shrouded his armies. Troops had great difficulty forming into assault groups. Tanks ran into each other. Airplanes poised to the east, across the Volga, sat helplessly on runways.
Yeremenko delayed H-hour. From Moscow, STAVKA demanded the reason and Yeremenko sat at his desk and patiently explained his decision. STAVKA was not happy, but Yeremenko held his ground. For more than two hours, past nine o’clock, he waited for the weather to clear. As STAVKA came back on the BODO line to plague him, his meteorologists promised sunlight within minutes.
At 10:00 A.M., Yeremenko’s artillery commenced firing and the soldiers of the Rumanian Fourth Army fled wildly in every direction. Within a few hours, the astonished Yeremenko excitedly called STAVKA to say that ten thousand prisoners had already been processed. STAVKA demanded he recheck his figures. They were correct.
Pvt. Abraham Spitkovsky had seen the prisoners coming almost as soon as the bombardment ceased. Rising from his hole when the “Urrahs” from his comrades sounded the charge, he plunged through the snow toward hundreds of black figures walking toward him with hands raised over their heads. Up and down the front beside him, Russian soldiers shot blindly into the ragged ranks and when Spitkovsky thought of the weeks and months of running, of cringing among the corpses, and of lice he, too, brought up his machine pistol and fired long bursts into their columns.
While Spitkovsky paused to reload his gun, he looked down at the rows of dead men and was completely unmoved.
One hundred twenty miles northwest of General Yeremenko’s almost effortless breakthrough, the Germans were still trying to contain the Russian forces moving down from Serafimovich and Klatskaya.
At the village of Peschanyy, thirty miles south of Serafimovich, General Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps finally met the enemy. His 22nd Panzer Division plunged into a firefight with T-34s, but the 22nd was already crippled; its mouse-eaten wiring had reduced tank strength to twenty.
Antitank guns acting as support helped explode twenty-six Russian tanks, but that was not enough. The Soviet armor broke away and the Germans hobbled after it. By the afternoon, the panzers were surrounded by new Russian formations and fighting for survival.
The steppe battleground resembled islands in a sea. Trapped units retreated into hedgehog defenses and lashed back at the enemy closing in around them. The Rumanians who continued to fight were almost totally isolated. A meteorological officer in the 6th Division kept a diary, later captured by the Russians:
In morning enemy opened heavy artillery fire at sector held by 13th Pruth Division.… Division wiped out.… No communication with higher command.… Currently encircled by enemy troops. In pocket are the 5th, 6th and 15th divisions and remnants of the 13th Division.
The report spoke for the entire “puppet army.”
During the night, German Quartermaster Karl Binder had crossed and recrossed the Don, bringing out food and clothing for his 305th Division. Back again on the western side of the frozen river, he found that his old supply depot at Bolshe Nabatoff still remained in German hands. The Russian tanks had merely burned some of the buildings before racing off again into the fog.
Binder collected what equipment he could from the ruins, then returned to the bridge at Akimovski to wait for his cattle. Lost somewhere in the near blizzard of the previous night, the herd had not been seen by anyone.
On a bluff overlooking the town, Binder stared west into the vast steppe. Close by him, two Russian prisoners were being interrogated by a German officer, who suddenly shouted something and waved a pistol. When one of the Russians bolted, the German shot him in the back of the head.
Horrified, Binder rushed over and begged the officer to spare the other prisoner’s life. He said he could use him as a driver. The officer shrugged disdainfully and holstered his weapon. Binder led the Russian back to his car, where the prisoner poured out a torrent of thanks in fluent German. The young man explained that he had learned the language while studying medicine in Moscow.
Russian shelling increased; dead bodies lined the roads, and wounded men called for help. A Rumanian officer waved feebly from a clump of bushes, and Binder and his new friend went to him. The man had wounds in an arm and his right leg. After Binder cut open his trousers, the Russian medical student took his knife and skillfully picked pieces of shrapnel from the lacerations. The Rumanian fainted.
Binder heard his cattle coming long before they showed on the horizon. With shells bursting intermittently in the town of Akimovski, he stood patiently at the bridge and listened to the sound of hooves hitting the ground. Then they appeared, a mass of animals, raising a huge cloud of snow as they ran ahead of the shouting herdsmen. Their noses dripping icicles, their eyes caked with ice and snow, they passed over the bridge into corrals in the deep balkas between the Don and Volga.
Satisfied with his coup, Binder dropped the Russian and wounded Rumanian officer at a dispensary and started setting up new depots for his division on the east side of the Don.
Only a few miles away, Gen. Arthur Schmidt was briefing Friedrich von Paulus at Sixth Army headquarters about the deteriorating situation. After announcing that the 24th Panzer Division was having difficulty negotiating immense snowdrifts on the way from Stalingrad to defend the vital bridge at Kalach, he added that a Russian tank column had just been reported within range of Golubinka itself.
Paulus abruptly terminated the discussion. “Well, Schmidt, I will no longer stay here. We will have to move.…”
Paulus suddenly seemed agitated and even Schmidt lost some of his calm. The two men said a curt good-bye to their staff and went out to pack.
They took off a short time later and flew first to Gumrak Airport, five miles west of Stalingrad. After a brief conversation there with General Seydlitz-Kurzbach, they flew southwest to the communications center of Chir, from where Paulus hoped to maintain reliable radio contact with higher headquarters.
In the meantime he acted quickly to smash the second stage of the Soviet counterattack by sending the 29th Motorized Division into battle south of Stalingrad. On alert to join General Heim’s 48th Panzer Corps west of the Don, the 29th was able to move swiftly through rolling fog on the right flank of the Russian Fifty-seventh Army, which was pushing past negligible resistance from Rumanian outposts. The counterattack stunned the Russians.
Both sides suffered losses as the first tanks opened fire, and, when mounted infantry clashed, the full battle was joined. The fog lifted and German observers saw a Soviet armored train passing by to the west. Behind it several other freight trains had stopped to disgorge Red Army foot soldiers. German panzers sighted on these inviting targets and poured hundreds of shells into the packed boxcars. Through binoculars, the gunners watched countless Russian bodies cartwheeling into the air and down onto the snow.
On either side of the railroad embankment, Soviet tanks milled about, ramming each other and firing aimlessly. German batteries shot point-blank into these vehicles and the Russian 13th Mechanized Corps, ninety tanks strong, began to blaze and explode. Sensing a chance to completely seal the Russian breakthrough on the southern flank, 29th Division commander, Gen. Ernst Leyser, prepared to annihilate the burning enemy force. But as he did so an order reached him from Army Group B, more than two hundred miles away at Starobelsk, to pull back and guard the Sixth Army’s rear at the Don.
In the fading afternoon light of November 21, the frustrated Leyser reluctantly broke contact and rode off to the northwest. From nearby fields, tanks started to fire over his car at unseen targets. The general suddenly had no idea whether they were friends or foes.
General Leyser’s temporary victory brought a brief dividend to Paulus. News of the bloody defeat of the Russian 13th Corps quickly filtered back to Gen. Viktor Volsky’s 4th Tank Corps and the tubercular general slowed his drive, now aiming for Kalach on the Don. Still spitting phlegm into his handkerchief, the cautious officer refused to go on and insisted on reinforcements against renewed German assaults. But the Germans had gone.
Agonizing over the rupture of both his flanks, General Paulus made up his mind about the future. He authorized a dispatch to Army Group B at Starobelsk and recommended the obvious: withdrawal of the Sixth Army from the Volga and Stalingrad to positions more than a hundred miles to the southwest, at the lower Don and Chir rivers.
Army Group B commander, Freiherr von Weichs, forwarded the recommendation to OKW headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, with a strong endorsement. He shared Paulus’s conviction that an immediate withdrawal was the only alternative to total disaster.
And disaster was close at hand. South of Stalingrad, General Yeremenko’s units, after crushing the Rumanians, split “Papa” Hoth’s Fourth German Tank Army in two. At a weather-beaten farmhouse outside Businovka, “Papa” Hoth sat besieged. Outside, the wind howled at the windows which were boarded over and stuffed with bits of paper and cloth. Inside, flickering candles shone on a band of weary staff officers, trying to keep in touch with their scattered combat groups on the steppe.
Messengers arrived in a stream with pleas from trapped regiments. At a solitary telephone, an officer scribbled down final words from decimated formations as they fell under Russian armor.
Hoth was helpless. With the Rumanian forces destroyed, he had too few guns and tanks to stop the enemy. It had also become apparent that the Soviet plan was breathtaking in scope. Colored arrows on the battle maps already showed a distinct arc to the northwest, around his pitiful forces, toward Kalach and its bridge over the Don. If the bridge should fall before Sixth Army pulled back from the Volga, Hoth foresaw a mass grave for the Germans in Stalingrad.
But thirteen hundred miles west of the emerging tragedy, in his Alpine Berghof, Hitler had a different view of the situation. Upon receiving Paulus’s suggestion that Sixth Army withdraw to the southwest, he responded quickly with a sharp command to hold fast.
TOP SECRET |
Army Group B |
Urgent! |
21 November 42, 1525 hrs. |
TO: HQ Sixth Army
Führer Order:
Sixth Army will hold positions despite threat of temporary encirclement.… Keep railroad line open as long as possible. Special orders regarding air supply will follow!
The implications of the order were stunning to consider. And while Paulus and Schmidt pondered the message, a phone call came in from Lt. Gen. Martin Fiebig, commander of the Eighth Air Corps. The generals discussed the latest events and Fiebig referred to the bridge at Kalach. Schmidt said he saw no immediate danger there and added, “The commander in chief is thinking of forming a hedgehog defense.”
“And how do you propose to keep the army supplied?” asked Fiebig.
“That will have to be done from the air.”
Fiebig was astonished. “A whole army? It’s quite impossible! I advise you not to be so optimistic.”
Fiebig hung up and immediately called his chief, General Richthofen, who then phoned Albert Jeschonnek, Goering’s deputy, and raged at him: “You’ve got to stop it! In the filthy weather we have here there’s not a hope of supplying an Army of 250,000 men from the air. It’s stark staring madness! …”
On the night of November 21, the vanguard of the 16th Panzer Division, which had left the outskirts of Stalingrad two days earlier, arrived on the Don to act as a covering force for units fleeing out of the great loop of the Don. But the division arrived too late to do more than hold a few bridges open for Rumanian and German stragglers. At the bridge he held, Lt. Eberhard von Loebbecke commanded the rear guard as a Russian tank appeared on the roadway. Loebbecke, who had lost his left arm to a French machine gunner in 1939, was standing upright before the T-34, which fired one round at him. The shell ticked his empty sleeve and exploded some yards behind him. Knocked down by the explosion, the lieutenant rose almost immediately to direct return fire. In their open turret, the Soviet crew stared in amazement at the man who had apparently lost his arm to the shell and yet bounced up off the ground without any discomfort. While they hesitated, a German antitank gun put a round into the T-34, and it blew up in front of Loebbecke’s eyes.
That night, relentless winds moaning over the steppe turned snow drifts into miniature mountain ranges on the flat prairie. The temperature fell below zero and the skies promised more snow. For thousands of square miles, west and east of the Don River, the land seemed lifeless.
But the steppe teemed with desperate men, skulking across the fields in small groups. Rumanian and German, they ran on frozen feet, propelled only by a common urge to survive. They fled through the night seeking food, shelter, and the protection of friendly guns.
Other men roamed the fields with different goals in mind. Lt. Col. Grigor Fillipov led the men of the Soviet 14th Motor Artillery Brigade away from the main body of Soviet troops moving down from the Don, and struck for the town of Kalach. Fillipov had no maps. He had only five tanks, supported by several trucks carrying infantry. His drivers turned on every light and sped through the darkness. Beside the road, hundreds of enemy soldiers waved to the “friendly” tankers, who ignored them and pushed on.
At 6:00 A.M. on November 22, Fillipov spied an old man, a Russian civilian, pulling a peasant cart, with two German soldiers walking beside him. The colonel issued whispered instructions and his men shot the Germans dead, then clambered down from the T-34s to talk to their terrified countryman.
“Uncle Vanya, which way to the bridge?” they asked. When he heard them speak his native tongue, the old man stopped trembling, climbed into the first tank and Fillipov waved his combat group on to the east.
In Kalach, the German garrison lived in a state of uneasy expectation. Refugees had been passing through for the past thirty-six hours, and the boom of heavy guns from the northwest sounded closer each hour. But no one in the garrison knew how badly the situation had deteriorated.
At Colonel Mikosch’s Engineer Training School on the hill at the eastern edge of town, pioneers had begun another regular workday, practicing the skills of street fighting, demolition expertise, and weaponry, both German and Russian. Several captured Russian tanks were being used by pupils for firing demonstrations at the range on the west side of the Don. Each day, the tanks trundled across the bridge, up the steep west bank, and onto the steppe for gunnery lessons.
On this morning, a German Propaganda Company correspondent, Heinz Schröter; had come to film the scene. When the tanks crossed the bridge and went past him up the hill, he photographed them and then, shortly afterward, Schröter heard the usual sounds of cannon fire from the gunnery range.
At Sentry Post Number 3, a sergeant named Wiedemann dozed near his .88-millimeter antiaircraft gun. Behind him in a hut, the crew of eight slept. Wiedemann, too, had watched the tanks go by, counting them off as they roared up the slope and disappeared.
The garrison returned to a routine schedule. The snow had stopped and voices rang loudly in the clear air. Laughter echoed as soldiers threw snowballs at each other. When the tanks suddenly reappeared, the indifferent Sergeant Wiedemann watched them speed past. As the third machine rumbled onto the bridge a machine gun suddenly chattered. The tanks kept going on to the east bank where they quickly separated and turned off on either side.
Grabbing his binoculars Wiedemann screamed, “Those damn tanks are Russian!” and pounded on a piece of metal to alert his crew, which burst out of the hut. Two tanks had not yet crossed the bridge. The .88-millimeter gun fired at a three-hundred-yard range, and the T-34s ignited. The second in line teetered for a moment, then somersaulted directly onto the frozen surface of the Don below.
When the first tanks went over, cameraman Schröter had been even closer to the bridge. A lieutenant suddenly ran past him, yelling unintelligibly, and Schröter thought he had gone berserk. The officer was waving a pistol until a machine gun stuttered and he pitched to the ground.
Schröter grabbed his equipment and ran. So did most of the Germans in the immediate vicinity. In the underbrush on the east bank, Col. Grigor Fillipov radioed frantically back to the Soviet 26th Armored Brigade for help. He had won the bridge by sheer luck but he expected the Germans to react viciously.
While Colonel Fillipov dug in at Kalach, the phone rang in General Schmidt’s office at Chir, fifteen miles to the south. It was Luftwaffe commander Martin Fiebig calling, and he again warned about the folly of an airlift, “Both the weather and the enemy are completely incalculable factors.…” But the conversation was interrupted by a group of German generals, who suddenly swept into the headquarters.
“Papa” Hoth had arrived from Businovka, where the southern flank had totally evaporated. At a loss to give a clear picture of the nightmare, Hoth listened intently while Schmidt and an old friend and school classmate, Gen. Wolfgang Pickert, debated a solution. Mimicking a former professor’s manner, Schmidt said, “Pickert, decision with brief statement of reasons!”
Pickert’s answer was incisive. “Get the hell out of here!”
Schmidt agreed but went on, “We cannot do that. For one thing, we don’t have enough gas.”
Pickert offered to help with his antiaircraft troops, who could manhandle guns across the flat land and carry ammunition by hand.
Schmidt continued, “We have, of course, considered breaking out, but to reach the Don means thirty miles of steppe without any cover.… No, Pickert, it could only have a Napoleonic ending.… The army has been ordered to hold its ground at Stalingrad. Consequently we shall fortify our positions and expect supplies from the air.”
Pickert could not believe what he heard. “… From the air? In this weather? It’s quite out of the question. You must get out, I say. Get started now!”
But Sixth Army did not get started. Even though General Paulus was convinced it should, he continued to wait for Hitler’s approval. In the meantime, he put his army on alert to move quickly in case permission came.
At 2:00 P.M., after Hoth had flown west to gather together the remnants of his shattered Fourth Army, Paulus and Schmidt went back to Gumrak at the edge of Stalingrad. Flying over the bulk of their army, hemmed in between the Don and Volga, the generals saw bright fires on both sides of the aircraft as men of the Sixth Army began to burn unneeded equipment.
Warehouses filled with food and clothing were being put to the torch. At one of them, Lt. Gerhard Dietzel tried to salvage something from the flames. Seeing a cache of champagne and wine about to be consumed, he raced back and forth between the inferno and his Volkswagen with armfuls of bottles. When the car was filled, Dietzel jumped in and started the motor. A supply officer blocked his way:
“Can you pay for it?” he demanded.
Dietzel began to laugh uproariously. Pointing at the raging fires, he replied, “But, don’t you see, money doesn’t mean anything anymore!” He gunned the motor and raced off with his treasure.
At Kalach, Russian Colonel Fillipov unexpectedly received reinforcements when tanks of the 26th Armored Brigade charged across the bridge and joined him at the eastern edge of town. It was incredible, but with German resistance only sporadic and ineffective, the 26th Brigade then wheeled southeast out of Kalach and headed toward the village of Sovetsky, thirty miles away. And somewhere beyond Sovetsky, General Yeremenko’s southern-front troops were driving up toward a junction with their comrades.
German soldiers inside the rapidly developing pocket learned of their plight in different ways.
At a field hospital, a pharmacist named Wendt was passing out morphine and bandages to medics when a soldier ran in and announced: “The Russians have closed the bridge at Kalach!” Wendt thought he was joking, but when a friend phoned headquarters and confirmed the story, Wendt refused to panic. He thought the mess would be cleaned up quickly.
A veteran sergeant, Eugen Steinhilber, learned the bitter truth when several of his comrades left by bus to go to Chir, and from there back to Germany for furlough. They were back in a few hours, saying: “We can’t get over the Don. The Russians have the bridge.” Since Steinhilber had been in a pocket once before and gotten out safely, the news failed to faze him. He had just written to his wife, “By December I’ll be home. I’ll go back to school … and finish my training as electrical engineer.…”
From his new Gumrak command post, Paulus sent another urgent cable. In it, he begged for the chance to save his Army:
HQ Sixth Army
G 3 Section
22 November 42, 1900 hours
Radio Message
To Army Group B
The Army is encircled.… South front still open east of the Don. Don frozen over and crossable.… There is little fuel left; once that is used up, tanks and heavy weapons will be immobile. Ammunition is short, provisions will last for six more days.… Request freedom of action.… Situation might compel abandonment of Stalingrad and northern front.…
Three hours later he received a vague answer from the Führer, “Sixth Army must know that I am doing everything to help and to relieve it.… I shall issue my orders in good time.”
Hitler was still puzzled about how to save Paulus, but until he decided on the best course of action he intended to keep Sixth Army in position. Most of that afternoon was spent with Kurt Zeitzler and Albert Jeschonnek. Both officers had come to the Berghof determined to sway Hitler from the idea of an airlift; Jeschonnek pointed out the problems of weather and insufficient airfields within flying distance of Stalingrad.
Though Zeitzler felt Jeschonnek was not forceful enough in making his case, Hermann Goering thought otherwise when he heard details of the conference. He called Jeschonnek and warned him not to “put the Führer out of sorts.”
That night, Hitler came down from his mountain and went by train to Leipzig, where a plane waited to fly him to Rastenburg, East Prussia. He would issue orders later.