From the suburbs of Kotelnikovo, the white-painted tanks and trucks of the 6th Panzer Division fanned out to the northeast and, at 5:15 A.M. on December 12, raced for Stalingrad. Operation Winter Storm, the attempt to break through to Sixth Army, had begun. “Show it to them; give it to them, boys,” cheered tank expert Colonel Hunersdorff from his command vehicle. Watching the tanks’ treads churn the snow, he waved his men toward the Kessel, seventy-three miles away.
Surprisingly, the Russian resistance was negligible. Bewildered by Manstein’s accelerated timetable, their rear guards fell back after offering only token fire. The worst problem facing the Germans was the ice that covered the roads and prevented the panzers from getting ample traction.
In the village of Verkhne-Tsaritsyn, forty-five miles northeast of Kotelnikovo, worried Russian leaders converged to discuss the new German drive. Marshal Vasilevsky presided, and he and Nikita Khrushchev exchanged opinions with other generals about German intentions. Convinced that Soviet forces were not sufficient, Vasilevsky tried to phone Stalin, but could not reach him. Increasingly alarmed by further news of German advances, he asked General Rokossovky to send the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front reserve to a line just north of the Mishkova River. Rokossovsky refused, citing his own needs for troops to help throttle Paulus in the pocket.
When Vasilevsky insisted, Rokossovsky held his ground. The two men argued at length and finally, Vasilevsky threatened to phone Stalin directly and placed another call to the Kremlin. But the circuits were busy and it would take hours to get a connection.
Vasilevsky paced nervously through the day while the German relief expedition gathered momentum.
During the afternoon, Hitler met with his advisors in Rastenburg. Jodl was there. So were Heusinger and Zeitzler, and six lesser aides.
Zeitzler began with a depressing report about the entire eastern front. The condition of the Italian troops defending the flanks was broached. It was agreed that, at best, they were unreliable. As to Stalingrad, the Führer agreed with Zeitzler that it was a precarious situation, but he still categorically refused to order a retreat. He felt that to do so would jeopardize “the whole meaning of the campaign” of the previous summer.
On this note, General Jodl launched a discussion of the dangers posed by the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa and the defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein. As Jodl spoke, Hitler interrupted several times to make biting remarks about men and armies. Regarding Rommel, he declared: “He has always got to spar around with all kinds of miserable elements out there. If you do that for two years, eventually your nerves go to pieces.… That’s the Reichsmarshal’s [Goering’s] impression, too. He says that Rommel has completely lost his nerve.”
Going on, Hitler voiced his concern about the Italian armies in Africa and Russia, “I didn’t sleep last night; that’s the feeling of uncertainty. Once a unit has started to flee, the bonds of law and order quickly disappear unless an iron discipline prevails.… We succeed with the Germans, but not with the Italians. We won’t succeed with the Italians, anywhere.”
The conference went on until 3:00 P.M., adjourning after a briefing on the air supply program for Stalingrad. The figures were impressive as to number of flights attempted per day. But the statistics hid the fact that while planes were taking off for the city, their loads were not reaching troops inside the Kessel. Continuing bad weather forced planes to abort missions; Russian fighters had begun harassing the airlanes, and antiaircraft batteries were being reinforced. As a result, the steppe was becoming a highway of broken aircraft—a graveyard of planes.
By now Sixth Army headquarters was aware that Manstein was coming. Buoyed up, nervous, Paulus and Schmidt waited through the day for progress reports of Operation Winter Storm. They were hopeful, but each knew that time was robbing Sixth Army of its strength to break loose and meet its saviors.
That day’s Sixth Army War Diary reflected the precipitate decline inside the Kessel:
December 12, 1942, 5:45 P.M.
Rations decreased since November 26. Another ration decrease on December 8 as a result of which the fighting power of the troops has been weakened. At the present time, only one-third of the normal rations. Losses here and there because of exhaustion.
That night, Marshal Vasilevsky finally reached Stalin to explain developments of past hours. He told the premier that the Germans had already reached the southern bank of the Aksai River, and he wanted permission to detach the Second Guards Army from the Stalingrad front and move it at all possible speed to a blocking position in front of the German panzers.
Stalin’s immediate reaction was violent. He refused to go along with the proposal and assailed Vasilevsky for trying to pry troops loose from Rokossovsky without first checking with STAVKA in Moscow. Stalin warned him that he was holding him personally responsible.
In return, Vasilevsky was incensed, for he knew it was his duty to maintain the security of both fronts. His anger served no purpose. Stalin told him his request would be discussed that night at the Defense Committee meeting and rudely hung up.
At 5:00 A.M. the next morning, Stalin called back. He now agreed fully with Vasilevsky’s plan; the Second Guards Army was alerted for a forced march.
The decision came none too soon. At 8:00 A.M. on December 13, bleary-eyed German tank crews crossed the Aksai River on a rickety bridge. Now only the frozen Mishkova River remained as a natural barrier to the Kessel around Stalingrad.
Desperate to keep abreast of the relief force’s progress at Gumrak Airfield, Paulus ordered ten radio operators to monitor every wavelength for messages from the oncoming panzers. But Russian technicians constantly foiled their efforts by jamming channels and broadcasting false information.
While Paulus lingered in this limbo, he also had to contend with pressures on every sector of the Kessel. In the ruins of Stalingrad, the Soviet Sixty-second Army denied its own weaknesses and harassed the Germans from the tractor factory to the Tsaritsa Gorge. These aggressive tactics were totally consistent with Chuikov’s military philosophy. The combative general knew of no other way to wage war.
From her home in Kuibyshev, Chuikov’s wife had written recently and reminded him of that trait.
I at times imagine you have entered into single combat with Hitler. I know you for twenty years. I know your strengths.… It’s hard to imagine that someone like Adolf could get the better of you. This could not happen. One old lady, a neighbor, meets me every morning and says: “I pray to God for Vassili Ivanovich.…”
Though beset by supply problems, and disgusted with the front command for not sending enough ammunition, Chuikov continued to mount small attacks against the increasingly weary Germans. One of his storm groups concentrated on the potato cellar that Lt. Wilhelm Kreiser had held since late October. While his exhausted men slept at their guns, the Russians crawled up, then drove them outside, back to the system of trenches that Kreiser had thoughtfully prepared for just such an emergency.
Kreiser rallied his men to counterattack, but he forgot to keep low. From a nearby cottage, a Russian machine gunner put one bullet in his left shoulder, another through his arm. The lieutenant went down into the snow. Still conscious, he gave command of the company to another lieutenant and then staggered off to the rear. In minutes, his successor followed him there with a bullet through his own arm.
Kreiser radioed for reinforcements, then led a group of wounded to an aid station, where a doctor jabbed him with morphine and put him on a sled. Towed further to the rear by a Hiwi laborer, the drowsy Kreiser fell asleep and rolled off into the road. When the loyal Hiwi came back and dragged him from a snowbank, the grateful lieutenant mumbled his thanks and fell unconscious.
In the days to come, Kreiser would be one of the fortunate men flown out of the Kessel.
That night, another Soviet storm group crossed the German lines. Faulty Soviet intelligence reports had pinpointed General Paulus’s command bunker within the city limits and the blond sniper, Tania Chernova, and three other Russians had been sent to kill him.
Carefully picking their way past mountains of rubble, the execution squad looked for German sentries outlined against the snow. Tania was trying to control her temper because the girl ahead of her blundered frequently and made too much noise. “That cow,” Tania thought as she looked at the plump figure that increasingly annoyed her.
The “cow” stumbled and a fiery explosion smashed Tania to the pavement. Unconscious, she bled into the gutter from a gaping wound in her stomach. Moments later, Vassili Zaitsev hurried to her side and tenderly lifted her limp form.
Zaitsev struggled back to his lines, to a cellar hospital where doctors worked desperately to staunch the flow of blood from Tania’s wounds. For hours they despaired of saving her, but by morning she rallied and the surgeons made plans to transport her across the Volga for a major operation.
After Tania regained consciousness, her first questions were about what had happened to her patrol. Told that the woman ahead of her had stepped on a mine but survived with only superficial injuries, she listened to the details with mixed emotions. Her vendetta with the Germans was ended; she had “broken eighty sticks” in her three months of war. But the image of that “damned cow” kept intruding on her thoughts and made her furious.
On the morning of December 14, the German 6th Panzer Division charged ahead toward the Kessel and ran directly into Russian reinforcements of almost three hundred tanks. One platoon of panzers was chased by forty Russian T-34s, and an armored battery which went to their rescue came over a low rise to find the Russian tanks barely a thousand meters away. Painted white “just like the Germans,” with black numbers on the turrets, they were surrounded by a large knot of soldiers.
For a moment, Lt. Horst Scheibert wondered whether he had stumbled on elements of the German 23rd Panzer Division that was providing support for 6th Division’s drive to the pocket. Everything looked so German, then he noticed that the gun barrels seemed more stubby, and the turrets had no domes.
Still hesitant and nervous, he moved his force closer. At six hundred meters, he had not made up his mind to shoot. He trembled as the distance closed rapidly.
Suddenly the soldiers ahead jumped for their own tanks and Scheibert only had time to scream, “Achtung!” into the radio before two Russian tanks came at him.
Scheibert hollered again, “Fire! Russians!” But the enemy got off the first shots. At only three hundred meters, they missed completely.
German gunners were more accurate. The first two Russian tanks blew up violently, and “the rest was child’s play.” Reloading with tremendous speed, the Germans slamed shells through the confused enemy formation. Thirty-two curling black pillars of smoke marked the total destruction of one of the Soviet tank columns outside Verkhne-Kumski.
But other Russian armored groups still controlled the town. The Germans could not yet break through toward the Mishkova River.
While grenadiers of the 6th Panzer Division probed for a weak spot in the Russian defense, they heard and saw the Junker and Heinkel transports streaming through the sky toward Pitomnik Airfield as the Luftwaffe tried to sustain life in the Kessel. Paulus’s tirade against Martin Fiebig on December 11, had resulted in increasing the air shipments to Stalingrad by fifty tons a day. Still it was not nearly enough.
The fault could not be charged solely to the German pilots, whose varied problems defied solution. Russian fighters and antiaircraft were taking an ever greater toll of transports. But the most exasperating worry was the weather of southern Russia. A fulcrum for colliding maritime and continental fronts, it frustrated countless forecasts. Aircraft expecting good weather at Pitomnik frequently encountered low clouds, fog, or even blizzards that forced detours to bases hundreds of miles away. When that happened, both the cargos and planes were lost to the Stalingrad shuttle for several days at a time.
To counteract such failures, meteorologists tried to rely on eyewitness reports from observers inside the Kessel. But these men often failed to broadcast. There was no fuel to power the generators for their radios.
A more deadly foe was ice. It tore up engines and immobilized planes for weeks, forcing mechanics to cannibalize parts from wrecks to repair damaged motors. And the mechanics themselves had to overcome unexpected hazards. When they removed their gloves to make delicate adjustments on equipment, their fingers froze to the metal. Maintenance that should have been accomplished was left undone, with catastrophic results.
Human error led to another series of mishaps. Since the Luftwaffe refused to allow army quartermasters to supervise the loading of the transports going to Stalingrad, famished soldiers at Pitomnik frequently opened crates of utterly worthless goods. One day it was thousands of protective cellophane covers for hand grenades—but no hand grenades. Another time, it was four tons of marjoram and pepper—at a time when troops were killing mice and eating them. Again, several thousand right shoes. Most ironic of all was a shipment of millions of neatly packaged contraceptives.
While airmen braved death to carry such unusual supplies to the Kessel, the Germans in Stalingrad scrounged for protein.
Thirty-one-year-old Cpl. Heinz Neist met an officer, Lieutenant Till, who smiled mischievously and asked: “Want something to eat?”
Neist gratefully accepted the offer and sat down before an aluminum plate that was loaded with potatoes, meat and gravy. When he looked warily at the feast Till grinned: “Believe me, it is not a human being.” Neist needed no further urging and ate everything in front of him. The meat tasted just like veal and only when he finished, did he ask what it was. Till told him it was the last of the Doberman pinschers.
Neist could not have cared less. His stomach was full for the first time in weeks.
In his snowhole at the edge of no-man’s-land, Pvt. Ekkehart Brunnert could not imagine such a meal. His clothes had frozen to his body, but his worst complaint was about his stomach. It doubled him over with knifelike pains.
His main meal each day was a watery soup. More was out of the question, because whenever he held out his mess tin, his name was recorded to prevent him from getting a second helping. What really made him furious was the sight of sergeants eating from plates heaped with solid food. Afraid to speak out about the privileges of rank, the private began to wonder whether everyone in the pocket really depended on each other for survival.
Like thousands of others, he foraged for extra food where he could. Once, the head of a frozen horse provided brains for a delicious meal. Another time, a roll of medicine tablets helped assuage his hunger.
Given a break from front-line duty, he went to the rear to seek warmth and rest. Within hours, however, he faced an arms inspection. Never having been issued proper lubricants, Brunnert frantically scratched and rubbed his weapon with scissors, stones, even his fingernails, until most of the rust disppeared. But the senior corporal who inspected Brunnert’s platoon used a carefully sharpened match to pry into each rifle. Disgusted with the results, he promptly placed Brunnert and the others on extra guard duty. Walking his post that night, Brunnert had barely enough strength to stand. His legs felt like rubber, and he feared the extra workload would finish him.
Forty-five miles south of the Kessel, at the village of Verkhne-Kumski, the 6th Panzer Division was still unable to push through Russian opposition. The northern and eastern horizons were filled with Soviet T-34 tanks and antitank guns that poured a fountain of projectiles at the Germans.
It was like a gun duel on the ocean, but here the snowfields assumed a crazy pattern of tank treads and long black streaks left by exploding shells. In the inevitable confusion of vehicles firing and then moving quickly to new positions, Germans shot at Germans, Russians at Russians.
When T-34s entered the village, a frantic German officer radioed: “Request permission to abandon the village.…” It was not granted. Another formation of panzers invaded the town from the west; by noon, almost all its ammunition was spent.
Colonel Hunersdorff appeared in the midst of his weary troops. Leaning out of his tank, he screamed: “You want to be my regiment? Is this what you call attack? I am ashamed of this day!”
He kept it up, hurling invective on all sides and his soldiers reacted with cold rage. Some openly questioned his right to tell them how to fight. But Hunersdorff’s motive was simply to galvanize his tankers. This he did. His tirade was followed almost immediately by another desperate call for help from the Germans inside Verkhne-Kumski. Hunersdorff gave the order to burst into the village “at maximum speed whatever the losses,” and five companies formed a column with the few tanks carrying armor-piercing shells leading the way.
Still furious at Hunersdorff, the panzer crews roared ahead spraying the fields on both sides with indiscriminate machine-gun fire. The unorthodox approach terrified the Russians, who jumped up and ran wildly across the plains. Inside their Mark IVs, the Germans assumed that the Russians thought they were insane.
Verkhne-Kumski fell easily this time, but within hours an “inexhaustible supply” of Russians counterattacked and Combat Group Hunersdorff had to retreat to the west. Out of ammunition, almost out of fuel, each tank carried a load of wounded that clung desperately to the turrets. The combat groups’ diary recounted in laconic fashion, “This day was connected with heavy losses.”
It was also a day of heavy losses for the Russian 87th Guards Division. Jammed into a blocking position south of the Mishkova River as the result of Marshal Vasilevsky’s appeal to Stalin, the Guards had marched for a day and a half without pause from the Beketovka area, just below Stalingrad.
In the vanguard of the division was Sgt. Alexei Petrov, who had just trained a new gun crew for the offensive, and he urged his men to a faster pace. Snow obscured his vision and exhaustion became the main enemy, but he allowed no one to rest. Petrov himself held on to the barrel of the gun and slept while walking. Finally they arrived at the Mishkova River—and immediate combat with the 6th Panzer Division around Verkhne-Kumski.
Petrov had never seen nor heard such heavy shelling. Hour after hour, explosions blew the ground into pillars of frozen dirt and snow, and the horizons blossomed with endless flame. To Petrov, it was worse than in Stalingrad.
On the flat plain were thousands of bodies, tossed like broken dolls onto the ground. Most were Russians, victims of German artillery and Stukas. At the height of the bombardment, Petrov saw a tiny figure, no more than three feet high, waving his arms wildly. Amazed, Petrov looked more closely and saw that it was the upper body of a Russian soldier. Beside it on the ground lay a pair of legs and hips, neatly severed by a shellburst.
The man was looking at Petrov and his mouth opened and closed, sucking air, trying to communicate one last time. Petrov gaped at the apparition until the arms stopped flailing, the mouth slackened and the eyes glazed. Somehow the soldier’s torso remained upright and forlorn beside the rest of the body.