ON THE same hot and dusty evening, Colonel General Paulus, commander of the German 6th Army, was sitting in his office at Army HQ. He too was thinking about the imminent capture of Stalingrad.
The windows, which faced west, were hung with heavy dark blinds. Only tiny pinpricks of light in the dense fabric bore witness to the now setting sun.
Paulus’s adjutant, Colonel Adam, tall and heavy-footed but with the chubby cheeks of a young boy, came in to report that General Richthofen would arrive in forty minutes.
The two generals would be discussing their joint air and ground operation. Its vast scale was a matter of concern to Paulus.
Paulus believed that in the fifty-day battle he had begun on 28 June with the 6th Army’s sudden thrust into the area between Belgorod and Kharkov he had already achieved a decisive victory; his three army corps, composed of twelve infantry divisions, two panzer and two motor infantry divisions, had crossed the steppe and reached the west bank of the Don. They were close to Kletskaya and Sirotinskaya; they had taken Kalach and would soon take Kremenskaya.
Army Group Command considered that—after Paulus had taken 57,000 prisoners of war and captured 1,000 tanks and 750 pieces of artillery (figures published by Supreme Command, somewhat to the surprise, admittedly, of some of Paulus’s staff)—the Soviet defences had been entirely smashed. And Paulus knew that he was the architect of this great German victory. During this long summer Paulus had been granted an extraordinary degree of all-encompassing success.
He knew that a number of men in Berlin—men whose opinion mattered to him—were waiting impatiently for what would come next. His eyes half-closed, he imagined his coming triumph: back in Berlin after the glorious conclusion of this eastern campaign, he would step out of his car, climb some steps, walk through to the lobby and in his simple, soldier’s uniform, walk past a crowd of the high and mighty, of important officials and generals on the Berlin staff.
There was just one thing that still troubled him. He needed another five days—five days at the most—but he was being ordered to begin the operation in two days’ time.
Then Paulus’s thoughts turned to Richthofen and his extraordinary belief that ground forces, during an attack, should be subordinate to air forces. The man’s arrogance was unbelievable.
Richthofen’s easy victories in Yugoslavia and Africa must have gone to his head.28 And as for his insistence on wearing a soldier’s side cap and his plebeian habit of relighting an extinguished cigarette instead of lighting a new one . . . Not to mention his voice, and the way he could never let a colleague finish what he had to say, and his love of offering explanations when he should, rather, be listening to explanations given by others . . . It seemed that Richthofen had much in common with the ever-fortunate Rommel, that lucky dog whose popularity was inversely proportional to his knowledge, his capacity for thought and his understanding of military culture. And then, most galling of all, there was Richthofen’s free and easy way, a habit he seemed to have made into a principle, of ascribing to his 4th Air Fleet successes achieved by the laborious work of the infantry.
Rommel, Sepp Dietrich and now this Richthofen—all of them upstarts, ignoramuses, heroes of the day, posers corrupted by successes that had come all too easily to them. Men who certainly knew how to advance their own political careers but who knew little else. Men who had not even begun to think about military matters when he himself was already graduating from the academy.29
And Paulus went on looking at his map, which showed the vast mass of Russia pressing down on him, threatening the left flank of his 6th Army.
Richthofen arrived, looking preoccupied. There was dust all over him—under his eyes, on his temples and around his nostrils; it was as if his face were covered in grey lichen. On his way to Paulus’s HQ he had met a tank column, evidently moving towards the assembly area. The tanks were going at full speed, the air was full of their grinding and clanking, and the dust they raised was so dense and impenetrable that they might have been huge ploughshares, lifting the earth itself into the air. Billowing around them was a dense reddish-brown sea, and only their turrets and gun barrels were visible. The tank men looked exhausted—somewhat hunched, peering sullenly out of their hatches, gripping their metal edges to steady themselves. Rather than wait for this steel column to pass by, Richthofen had ordered his driver to pull off the road and continue across the open steppe. On arriving at Paulus’s HQ, he had gone straight to his office, without even washing.
Paulus, who had the thin hook-nosed face of a thoughtful hawk, got up to greet him. After a few words about the heat, the dust, the congestion on the roads and the diuretic properties of Russian watermelons, Paulus handed Richthofen a telegram from Hitler. In practical terms the telegram was relatively unimportant, but Paulus was secretly smiling to himself. Richthofen leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the table, and carefully read the telegram through; he was, no doubt, thinking not about its literal meaning but about its deeper implications. Hitler had chosen to discuss with Paulus, the general commanding the 6th Army, questions relating to the deployment of reserves that, in principle, were subordinate to Weichs, Paulus’s immediate superior. One phrase indicated a certain dissatisfaction with Hoth, commander of the 4th Panzer Army deployed to the south of Stalingrad; Hitler clearly shared Paulus’s view that Hoth was moving too slowly and incurring losses as a result of his excessive caution. And then came a few lines that Richthofen was sure to find very annoying indeed: since the 6th Army were to play the main role in the coming operation, Richthofen’s air fleet was to be under Paulus’s command, not that of Reichsmarschall Göring and his Luftwaffe.
After reading the telegram, Richthofen carefully placed it in the middle of the desk, as if to say that such documents are not subject to debate or criticism but must be acted upon without further discussion. “The Führer does not only determine the general course of the war,” he said. “He even finds time to manage the deployment of individual divisions.”
“Yes, it’s astonishing,” said Paulus, who had heard more than a few complaints from colleagues about the Führer stripping them of all initiative, making it impossible for them even to change the sentry outside an infantry battalion command post without his personal authorization.
They spoke about the successful crossing of the Don near Tryokhostrovskaya. Richthofen praised the work of the artillery and heavy mortars and the courage of the soldiers of the 384th Division, first to set foot on the east bank of the Don. This crossing had created a bridgehead for the impending advance on Stalingrad of one panzer division and two motor infantry divisions. By dawn all these divisions would be in position; it was their movement north that had delayed Richthofen.
“I could have done all that a couple of days ago, but I didn’t want to alert the Russians,” said Paulus. He smiled and added, “They’re expecting an attack from the south, from Hoth.”
“Yes,” said Richthofen. “But I think they can wait a few more days.”
“I need five days,” said Paulus. “What about you?”
“My preparations are more complex, I shall ask for a week. After all, this will be the knockout blow,” said Richthofen. “Weichs keeps hurrying us on. He wants to impress, to win further promotions. But we’re the ones who’ll be taking the risks.”
He bent forward over a plan of Stalingrad and, running his finger over the neatly drawn squares, explained just how the city was to be set on fire, how much time would elapse between successive waves of destruction, what bombs he would drop on residential areas, river crossings, the harbour and the factories, and how best he could prepare the key area—the northern suburbs where, at a predetermined hour, Paulus’s heavy tanks and motor infantry were to surprise the Russians. He asked Paulus to give him as precise a timing as possible.
So far, the discussion between the two generals had been constructive and detailed, and neither had so much as raised his voice. But Richthofen went on, sometimes with a degree of detail that Paulus found infuriating, to speak about the logistic complexities of the impending air raid; he spoke at extraordinary length about the methodology for co-ordinating a convergent attack from dozens of airfields located at different distances from the target. Not only did the flight paths and flight times of hundreds of aircraft of different designs and speeds have to be synchronized with one another, but they also had to be co-ordinated with the progress of heavy and lumbering tanks. All this was an attempt on Richthofen’s part to score a point in the long-running covert rivalry between the two generals. They did not disagree openly, but each was well aware how he constantly irritated the other. The problem, as Paulus saw it, arose from Richthofen’s unshakable belief that it was to the air force that Germany owed her remarkable victories and that the role of ground forces had been merely to consolidate this success.
The generals were deciding the fate of a huge city. Among their concerns were the possibility of ground or air counter-attacks and the strength of the Soviet anti-aircraft defences. They were also concerned about the opinion of Berlin: How would their respective achievements be assessed by the General Staff?
“You and your air corps,” said Paulus, “provided magnificent support for the 6th Army two years ago, when it was under the command of the late Reichenau during the invasion of Belgium. I hope that your support for my Stalingrad breakthrough will be no less successful.”
His apparent solemnity was belied by his eyes, where there was a hint of mockery.
Richthofen looked at him and said bluntly, “Support? Who do you think supported whom? Most likely, it was Reichenau supporting me. And as for Stalingrad, who knows? It may be your breakthrough, or it may be mine.”