Winter Tempest in Stalingrad

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The attempt to relieve Stalingrad fell short due to stubborn Soviet resistance and the Germans’ indecision within the besieged city.

By Pat McTaggart

Stalingrad–Stalin’s City–the industrial center on the Volga River, attracted German and Soviet divisions in the latter part of 1942 like a magnet draws metal shavings. During the heady days of that summer, the men of General der Panzertruppe Friedrich von Paulus’ vaunted Sixth Army had sensed nothing but victory in the air. As summer dwindled into fall, however, their air of confidence was replaced by a growing sense of uncertainty and futility.

Grim hand-to-hand fighting had erupted in Stalingrad in September, and no relief was in sight. The once-powerful divisions of the Sixth Army had been severely mauled during savage house-to-house combat within the city. By early November, the great city was like a twisted, stinking corpse, full of smoldering ruins and unburied dead. Tens of thousands had already died in Stalingrad. There was little left standing to fight for, and those buildings still intact were under constant fire. Still, the Germans had orders to take the city, while the Russians had strict orders to prevent its capture. As winter approached, many of the Germans–and Soviets as well–must have been asking themselves why they were fighting and dying for such a worthless piece of real estate.

The answer was quite simple. They were dying to fuel the egos of two men–Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Hitler, who had originally planned a vast breakthrough into the oil-rich Caucasus, had become fascinated with the possibility of capturing the city that bore Stalin’s name. All the operational plans so carefully made for the German offensive in southern Russia in 1942 had been drastically altered by the Führer’s obsession. Stalin also saw the battle for the city as a matter of honor. The Germans, he decided, would be stopped and defeated at the city that bore his name.

Once the Sixth Army reached Stalingrad, the battle had developed into small-unit actions that pitted the professionalism of the Germans against the tenacity of the Soviets. Paulus had two panzer divisions, two motorized divisions and 17 infantry divisions under his command as he approached the city in August 1942. By mid-September, however, the battle for the city proper had begun, and the German armored and mechanized units proved to be totally unfit for the street fighting that followed. Special engineer formations had to be called in to help eliminate pockets of enemy resistance within the city. The engineers suffered heavy casualties, but they gradually helped the German infantry take control of most of Stalingrad. The Soviets, however, always managed to ferry enough troops across the Volga to prevent a total takeover of the city.

Paul Böttcher, a member of the 24th Panzer Division, described his feelings during that fall: “We were the victors and, as we headed towards Stalingrad, we thought that we would capture the city in a few days. That was a mistake. The Russians that defended the city were brave, dogged and tough. We had heavy losses in men and equipment. The Russians had half-finished tanks, which they dug into the ground to fire at us. They fought us to the last man.”

With winter fast approaching, the Sixth Army’s parent formation, Army Group B, was dangerously overstretched. The German commanders were forced to call upon their Italian and Romanian allies to fill the gaps, especially to the northwest and southeast of Stalingrad. The troop shortage had been caused by Hitler’s all-or-nothing policy of capturing both the Caucasus oil fields and Stalingrad, which soon became a recipe for disaster.

The Red Army had learned much in the 1 1/2 years since Hitler had first sent his armies thundering into the Soviet Union. Incompetent Soviet generals had, for the most part, been replaced by cool professionals. The situation in and around Stalingrad presented those men with their first opportunity to show that they were able to level the playing field against the German invaders.

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