Hitler's War on Russia by Charles Winchester

Author:Charles Winchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Hitler’s war on russia
ISBN: 9781849089906
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2011-07-14T21:00:00+00:00

Paulus rejected an offer to surrender on 9 January and directed that flags of truce were to be fired on in future. The next day the Russians attacked the western perimeter, where the defences, such as they were, stretched across the bare steppe. The perimeter was penetrated by tanks after a concentrated artillery barrage and, in temperatures of -30ºC, the German survivors fell back towards the city itself. There was no intermediate defensive line, nothing on which to build a new position. Pitomnik airbase was overrun on 16 January, leaving the small strip at Gumrak the 6th Army’s only contact with the outside world.

The renewed Soviet offensive overran the Hungarian 2nd Army in the Don Bend, destroying it in a series of battles around the small town of Voronyets. This was the blackest day in the history of the Hungarian Army: of the 270,000 men in the Hungarian forces there, 130,000 were killed, captured or posted missing. The Hungarians had significantly fewer anti-tank guns and artillery pieces than equivalent German units, and their First World War Schwarzlose machine-guns were prone to stoppages. Nevertheless, their own commander-in-chief, Gusztáv Jány, called them cowards; words that were thrown back at him in 1946 when he was tried and executed by the newly installed Communist regime. The Russian breakthrough in the Hungarian sector led to the capture of many of the airfields from which the Stalingrad airlift was being mounted. By mid-January 1943 the nearest German-held airfields were more than 200 miles from the city.

On 3 March 1943 the Nazi propaganda magazine Die Wehrmacht carried a colour painting on its cover, showing a determined band of German soldiers led by General Karl Strecker preparing to make their last stand in the snow-covered ruins of the Stalingrad tractor factory. The reality was terribly different. The German forces in Stalingrad suffered about 60,000 casualties in December and another 100,000 in January. On 22 January, Gumrak – the last airfield – was overrun, and a last Heinkel He-111 took 19 wounded soldiers to safety, although its elevator was riddled by Russian ground-fire as it took off. The Luftwaffe had evacuated 34,000 wounded during the siege, but that left tens of thousands of men to wait for death in conditions of indescribable horror. In the final days of Stalingrad, 6th Army signalled Army Group Don that it had so little food left, rations were no longer to be given to the wounded. The tiny quantities of sustenance available went only to the surviving fighters, who continued to resist until the end, inflicting heavy losses on their attackers and even delivering counter-attacks until 25 January.

Paulus capitulated on 30 January. The 6th Army had been split in two by the final Russian attacks, and Strecker’s 11th Corps, holding the tractor factory and Barrikady ordnance works, held out until 1 February. Its commander made one last radio call before surrendering. A party from Strecker’s headquarters broke out of the city as it fell, as did elements of the 71st Infantry Division and an unknown number of little groups.

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