By the end of June, Russian resistance was broken and ninety thousand troops surrendered at Sevastopol. But Richthofen had little time to celebrate his latest triumph. He was now given command of the Fourth Luftflotte (Air Fleet)—the entire Luftwaffe force in southern Russia. With the Crimea in German hands, the plan was to make a two-pronged offensive: to the south into the Caucasus toward Baku, and on the northern flank to Stalingrad and the Volga. With Luftwaffe support, the German army advanced rapidly as the Russians retreated. By August they had driven hundreds of miles, encountering serious resistance only from the Russians defending Stalingrad.

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But the weaknesses of the German war machine again became evident. By 1942 Germany was losing the production battle, and aircraft manufacturing barely kept up with losses. The Luftwaffe training programs had not expanded enough and the air force faced a shortage of pilots and aircrew. The supply system barely worked, and Fourth Luftflotte units became short of planes, fuel, and parts as the advance continued. When the offensive started in July, Richthofen had only five hundred operational aircraft to cover a vast region; by fall he had perhaps half that many.

In the meantime, the German Sixth Army was bogged down in street fighting in Stalingrad and a whole army group was stuck in the foothills of the Caucasus. The thinness of the German front gave the Soviets a perfect opportunity to counterattack. In November Russian armies broke through the German lines north and south of Stalingrad and moved to encircle the two hundred fifty thousand men in Stalingrad. The sensible solution was to pull the Sixth Army out of Stalingrad immediately. But Hitler disliked giving up ground, and Göring promised the führer that the Luftwaffe could supply the trapped Sixth Army by air. Without consulting Richthofen, the decision to keep the Sixth Army in Stalingrad was made.

When he received the order to mount an airlift, Richthofen was virtually in a state of shock. There was no way that the Luftwaffe’s small transport force could do the job. As he went to confer with Manstein a staff officer heard him mutter, “Impossible…even to imagine such a thing….”

Battling bad weather and a strong Soviet fighter force, Richthofen tried to supply the army in Stalingrad. But failure was inevitable. On February 2, 1943, the Sixth Army surrendered. Meanwhile, Manstein and Richthofen managed to restore the front and slow the Soviet advance. A few weeks after the Stalingrad debacle the Germans struck back at the Russians, inflicting heavy losses and retaking Kharkov. On February 16, in recognition of his superb leadership in several campaigns, Hitler promoted Richthofen to the rank of field marshal.

Richthofen hoped to support Manstein’s forces in the planned offensive at Kursk, but a crisis in the Mediterranean now intervened. With the surrender of the Axis armies in Tunisia in May 1943, it was clear that Sicily was the next Allied target. And if the Allies landed in Sicily, the Italians would probably abandon their alliance with Germany. In mid-June Richthofen was ordered to Italy to take command of the Second Luftflotte.

He faced a nearly hopeless situation. By early July the Axis air forces in Italy were outnumbered five to one by the British and the Americans, and the German airfields in Sicily were so badly battered by Allied bombers that Luftwaffe attack units could barely operate. Richthofen had only one strategy to defend Sicily: “We can put every effort into attacking enemy shipping…if we are successful in disrupting the supply over the beaches we can make his ground units ineffective and vulnerable to counterattack by our forces.” Always the realist, Richthofen noted, “We can’t predict success with this strategy…but it’s the only strategy that offers a possibility of success.”

When the Allies landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, Richthofen’s airmen made their best effort against the massive landing fleet, but they had little success in the face of superior Allied air and naval power. In several days of attacks, the Luftwaffe sank only fourteen supply ships and two destroyers—not enough to delay the Allies. The Luftwaffe retreated to the Italian mainland to await the next Allied landings.

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