Battle Of Stalingrad

The Tide of the Second World War Turns Decisively in Favour of the Allies

On 22 June, 1941, on the very day that, in 1812, Napoleon had started his invasion of Russia, the German armies crossed the Soviet frontier. Having over-run Poland in 1939, occupied Scandinavia, crushed France and, early in 1941, successfully invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler had enlarged the war on a grand scale. His only setback had been that Britain had rejected his peace offer after the fall of France in 1940, defeated his Air Force and put an end, for the moment, to any possibility of invading the last country holding out against the Axis.

The invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, had been prepared and undertaken against the advice of many German generals. The German military mind was set against a war on two fronts; but Hitler did not consider that Britain constituted a second front by 1941, in spite of her vigorous activity in North Africa and the increasing help she was receiving from the United States.

The determination to conquer Russia and to annex most of the territory between the Vistula and the Urals was a fundamental part of Hitler’s policy. The German master-race must conquer territory in the East, territory held by inferior Slav races whose destiny was to return to slavery and who were to be permitted to live only in so far as they helped the German cause.

From the beginning, all Russians were treated much as the Jews had been; as a people to be used for labour purposes until they dropped and, if unfit for work, to be exterminated or allowed to starve. All the Nazi leaders spoke the same language about Russia as did Himmler when he said: “Whether the Slavs live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.” Such an attitude, which included the shooting of all Russian commissars (who were in fact part of the Soviet Army) was as some of Hitler’s advisers dared to suggest, one which lost Hitler any allies he might have found among Russians and particularly the Ukrainians, who hated the Stalin regime.

Stalin knew that the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 meant for Hitler nothing but a postponement of his world plans. But Stalin believed that the Pact gave Russia an opportunity of strengthening herself for the inevitable struggle, and this indeed it did. But he also thought that Hitler might well wear himself out in the struggle against Britain which would involve, in the long run, the United States. In 1941 Stalin took the view of many German generals that Hitler would be unwise to attack Russia so long as Britain had not been conquered.

In spite of information from many sources that Germany was concentrating more and more troops on Russia’s frontiers; in spite of an explicit warning from Churchill in May, Stalin continued to believe that his hour was not yet. A new Trade Treaty had been signed as late as January, 1941. Russia continued to keep up supplies for Germany of war materials and food until the invasion actually began; Germany continued to do the same. Stalin’s troops on the frontier were deliberately not kept on a war-footing, and so Russian units on the frontier were taken by complete surprise when, at 3.30 a.m. on 22 June, the German attack began, on a front of 1,500 miles, running from Petsamo in the Arctic to the Black Sea.

Hitler’s first successes were overwhelming. Profiting from surprise and immense air superiority, German armoured divisions pushed forward with apparent recklessness, driving deep wedges into the Russian front. The advance of the German armour prevented the orderly retreat of the Russian infantry before the main body of the Wehrmacht. By mid-August, the northern German army of Von Leeb had cut off hundreds of thousands of Russians on the Baltic coast and was approaching Leningrad; in the centre, the Germans were at Smolensk, an advance of five hundred miles; in the south, Von Runstedt had driven down the Dnieper valley where the great Dneprostroy Dam was situated and had reached the Black Sea. At the end of July the Wehrmacht generals began to think that Hitler was right after all, and Haider, the most opposed to the Russian campaign, wrote on 3 July after the first staggering successes:

“It looks as though the campaign against Russia has been won in a fortnight.”

But by mid-August the experienced German generals were already changing their minds. German intelligence had identified (three hundred and sixty Russian divisions, still more or less intact, whereas two hundred only had been counted on. Everywhere the Russians were resisting furiously and on all fronts there were counter-attacks which, if failing to stop the German advance, were disquieting; as the German armies advanced in the south and south-east towards the Crimea and the Caucasus and further north and north-west towards Leningrad, the front grew ever wider and Russian numerical superiority became more important.

Most important of all, the German generals held that, on account of German numerical inferiority, in a long war, or at any rate one which might be longer than Hitler expected, it was essential to take Moscow before the winter set in. This and this alone might lead Stalin to throw in the sponge.

Hitler, on the other hand, was wedded to the capture of Leningrad in the north and of Stalingrad in the south, with the consequent mastery of Russia’s oil regions and the Caucasus. If these two cities fell, his intuition told him that Russia would collapse. He deliberately weakened the German central army group and large Russian forces were able to concentrate between Smolensk and Moscow. At Kiev, in September, the Germans captured six hundred thousand prisoners in what Hitler claimed was the greatest battle in world history. But to Haider this victory was a blunder for it had been won at the expense of a dash on Moscow. It was not until 2 October, and all meteorologists predicted an early winter, that Von Brauchitsch was able to begin his head-on attack on Moscow. On 3 October, Hitler stated on the German Radio:

“I declare today, and I declare it without any reservations, that the enemy in the East has been struck down and will never rise again.”

By the end of October rain fell in torrents and the German tanks were bogged down; but the Germans were only forty miles from Moscow. By the beginning of November snow fell quickly; by mid-November it froze and the attack was resumed. By 2 December the advance guards of the German Fourth Army were in the suburbs of Moscow and in sight of the Kremlin. The Russian government had left Moscow, but Stalin remained behind. On 4 December he reviewed new bodies of elite troops held in reserve for a last-ditch defence, and on 5 December the Russians counterattacked the Germans in the suburbs, causing the whole German Fourth Army to withdraw some miles.

The Germans had failed to take Moscow. If the Japanese had been able to know the minds of the German generals they might have hesitated once more and cancelled the attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December. But the situation in Russia was difficult to understand, so great had the German successes been.

Hitler refused Von Brauchitsch’s request to allow the central army group to withdraw and take up a winter defence line; he took over himself the supreme command of the German armies in Russia. This was a fatal step for Germany; it did not appear so at first, for, although the German central army suffered heavy losses all the winter and great torture from the cold, it remained close to Moscow. In the spring of 1941, after a Russian offensive on all fronts had been kept within bounds, Moscow was still directly menaced and Leningrad still besieged. Sixty million Russians were now living and dying in territory held by the Germans.

In the spring Hitler’s “intuitive” conduct of the war still seemed likely to lead to victory. He made up his losses by huge drafts from Germany and by many new divisions from Rumania, Hungary and even from Italy. When he renewed his offensive in the early summer he no longer made the mistake of failing to concentrate on one objective. The great drive was to the south, Sebastopol in the Crimea fell. On 21 August the swastika flew on the highest mountain in the Caucasus, Mount Elbruz, and German troops had captured the great oil centres at Maikop. They had reached a point barely twenty-five miles from Grozny, the centre of the Caucasian oil-fields, and only a hundred miles from the Caspian Sea. Hitler might be able to advance further to Batoum, the great oil port, and to threaten the Middle East. But first he needed to take the great city of Stalingrad and from there to strike north along the Volga, roll up the Russian forces on the central front and take Moscow.

On 23 August the German armies were just north of Stalingrad; on the 27th they were fighting in the suburbs and the great and decisive battle began. Its first phase was to last until mid-November and, in Stalingrad itself, Russian and German infantry began to fight among the rubble a terrible three-months’ battle. On 8 November, Hitler declared Stalingrad to be in his hands and he declared on the radio that the end of the war with Russia was in sight. But this battle in Stalingrad was not to end in November: a few days after Hitler’s boastful outburst, the battle was to wear a very different look.

On 11 November, Hitler was at Berchtesgaden, his beautiful retreat high up in the Bavarian Alps, with Keitel, Jodl and his personal staff, still basking in the happy belief that Stalingrad was now captured and the great pincer movement north about to take place and the Russian central front to be destroyed.. That afternoon the Fuhrer’s peace of mind was destroyed by an alarming piece of news. A powerful Russian force had appeared and broken clean through the Rumanian Third Army which was protecting the north side of the great salient which the German attack on Stalingrad had made. It was followed by reports of strong Russian attacks, using thousands of tanks, on another Rumanian army which was defending the southern line of the salient.

The German Chief-of-Staff, Zeitzler, told Hitler that he should make an immediate withdrawal of the German Sixth Army, commanded by Von Paulus, which was fighting in Stalingrad. Hitler shouted down the telephone: “Never, never, never will I leave the Volga.” By 22 November, when Hitler was back in his war H.Q. in East Prussia, the Russian armies from the north and south had joined and surrounded Von Paulus and his two hundred thousand men.

Hitler recalled his most brilliant general Von Manstein from the northern front and put him in charge of a relief operation. He was to advance from the Don and break the blockade of the German Sixth Army. Von Manstein told the Fuhrer straight away that this operation could only succeed if Von Paulus was authorized to retreat towards the relieving German army and to abandon the attack on Stalingrad. Hitler refused. When the German relief force advanced, the full fury of Russian winter came into play, temperatures dropped to zero, snow piled up in huge drifts.

On 9 December the advance German units were within thirty miles of Von Paulus and the besieged troops could see the flares of their rescuers. Once more Zeitzler begged Hitler to sanction a partial withdrawal of the Sixth Army from Stalingrad and once again Hitler refused. Von Manstein’s forces were obliged to withdraw. By now Von Manstein needed every division he could scrape together to enable the German armies in the Caucasus to escape across the Don from their rash advance. An Italian division formed part of this once proud spearhead. Ciano, at Rastenburg, asked if the Italian losses had been heavy: A German staff officer answered: “No losses at all, they are running.”

On 8 January the Russians offered Von Paulus an honourable surrender. Von Paulus asked for leave to accept: it was contemptuously refused. Five thousand Russian guns opened fire on the besieged German army, now solely fed and supplied with arms by an air-lift which Goering had promised would be effective, but which failed lamentably. On 24 January the last airstrip held by the Germans in front of Stalingrad was lost: once more Hitler forbade surrender.

On 30 January, when Von Paulus told Hitler that final collapse was a matter of hours, the Fuhrer made Von Paulus a Field Marshal, remarking cynically: “There is no record in military history of a German Field Marshal being made a prisoner.” The starving, frost-bitten German soldiers were not cheered when they listened to Marshal Goering’s speech saying on 31 January: “A thousand years hence Germans will speak of this battle of Stalingrad with reverence and awe and will remember that in spite of everything Germany’s ultimate victory was decided there.”

Von Paulus surrendered, sitting dejected on a camp-bed in his bunker when Russians armed with tommy-guns crowded the entrance. Flying over the blood-spattered wreckage of the battlefield, a German reconnaissance plane radioed back: “No sign of the fighting at Stalingrad.” It was not at all an heroic end, for misery-had destroyed any possibility of heroism. By July Von Paulus and General Seydlitz had become leaders of a Free-German committee in Moscow and were calling on the German Army to eliminate Hitler.

In 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, a wave of hope had swept through Britain and the conquered countries of Europe. The first German successes somewhat dimmed this hope; but it still remained. In December, 1941, when the United States came into the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour, ultimate victory for the Allies appeared certain. But many grave disasters fell on the Allied cause in the Far East and in North Africa.

In 1942, when Hitler’s summer offensive in Russia looked ominous, a large British and Commonwealth Army was defeated in the Libyan desert by Rommel after a long war in which fortune had turned from one side to the other. The Germans re-took the important port of Tobruk, captured by the British in 1940, and drove General Auchinleck’s army back to the last defensive position, at El Alamein, before the Delta. Rommel and his Italian allies saw Alexandria and Cairo in their grasp; if the Germans could pour down from the Caucasus, the Middle East would be in Axis hands and victory certain.

During the autumn the British slowly reasserted their naval control over the Mediterranean, temporarily lost early in 1942, thus damaging vital supplies to Rommel’s army. At the same time reinforcements of men and tanks for the British poured into Egypt via the Suez Canal. General Montgomery took charge of the Eighth Army. Two attacks by Rommel, who knew that time was against him, were beaten off. On 2 November, the battle of El Alamein began in which, after ten days of attacks, Montgomery’s army broke the German-Italian force, and the Afrika Korps started on its retreat to Tunisia where most of it was captured, A little later the Anglo-American landings in North Africa took place and rapidly all North Africa passed into Allied hands.

So Stalingrad and El Alamein marked the last turn of the tide in the war. By May, 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, and shortly afterwards Mussolini was deposed. In Russia, the Germans, after the terrible defeat of Stalingrad, managed a counter-attack at Kharkov to hold the Russian onrush. But this was only for a moment. Hitler was now to be on the defensive for the rest of the war except for brief spasms such as the Ardennes counter-offensive which delayed for a few weeks the invasion of Germany from the West. On the Eastern Front the Russian steam-roller moved on relentlessly to Bucharest, to Budapest, to Warsaw, to Vienna, and to Berlin.