The Second World War by Gordon Corrigan

Author:Gordon Corrigan [CORRIGAN, GORDON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780857891358
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2010-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

12

THE RUSSIAN WAR

NOVEMBER 1942–JUNE 1944

All summer, refugees had been pouring into Stalingrad from the west, some driving their animals in front of them, some on bicycles, some on horses, some, mainly party administrators, in cars and lorries, but most on foot. By the time the Germans had closed up to the Volga, the population within the city had swollen to an estimated 1.5 million from a pre-war total of 400,000 and Stalin forbade the Red Army from evacuating them, a stance he did not reverse until the late summer, when he accepted that the presence of useless mouths that had to be fed was an intolerable burden on the defence of the city. All through the summer and autumn, the Red Army had been building up its strength from the vast and seemingly inexhaustible pool of manpower that was the Russian population, and by the summer the enormous losses of 1941 had been all but replaced. These new brigades and divisions were not fed into Stalingrad, however, where Chuikov received only the reinforcements necessary to prevent a complete collapse, but instead they were trained and equipped for the massive counter-blow that the Stavka had been planning.

The Germans had little warning of what was to come. Some indications that the Russians might attempt an attack on the Romanian Third Army on Sixth Army’s left flank were countered by stationing XXXXVIII Panzer Corps behind it, but this was a corps in name only: its two German armoured divisions had just seventy-seven tanks between them and the forty-one belonging to 22 Panzer were unreliable because, during the period of immobility due to severe fuel rationing, mice had got inside the vehicles and chewed through their electrical wiring. The corps’s other division, the Romanian 1 Tank Division, had 103 tanks but 40 of them were Czech light tanks and virtually useless against Russian armour. The Germans had bitten off far more than their available manpower could chew, and the launching of the drive into the Caucasus before Stalingrad was taken, the inability of Hitler to listen to military advice and sanction a closing down of the attack on Stalingrad, the vastly over-extended supply lines, the demands of Leningrad, the need for security in the rear areas and a failure by German industry, efficient though it was, to replace vehicle losses all conspired to put the German Eastern Front in a precarious state as the winter of 1942/43 approached.

With four Army Groups, North, Centre, A and B, the Germans were trying to hold nearly 2,000 miles of a front that ran from Leningrad in the north to Stalingrad on the Volga, then south and west across the Caucasian front to the Black Sea at Novorossiysk. Sixth Army opposite Stalingrad had twenty divisions, six of them supposedly armoured or motorized, but most of their tanks and many of their other vehicles had been removed on the grounds that, as the taking of Stalingrad was now a matter of street fighting by the infantry, the vehicles were not needed and not having to provide fuel for them eased the logistic problem.

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