Operation Winter Storm

Operation Winter Storm (German Unternehmen Wintergewitter) was the only serious attempt to break through from outside to the German 6th Army, encircled at Stalingrad as a result of Operation Uranus. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of the newly created Army Group Don, committed to it the LVII Panzer Corps of General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army. On 12 December 1942 the corps set out from Kotelnikovo north-eastwards across the empty, snow-covered steppe, along the railway line to Stalingrad. After a week of the heaviest tank fighting of that winter, its spearheads reached the Myshkova river – between about 35 and 50 kilometres from the southern edge of the pocket, depending on the calculation. They got no further.

The fate of the relief was sealed by two decisions taken on the other side of the front: the transfer of the strongest Soviet reserve army, Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army, into Hoth’s path, and the offensive on the middle Don which from 16 December shattered the Italian 8th Army and threatened the rear of the whole of Army Group Don. On the German side, the fate of the 6th Army was sealed by what was not done: the order to break out of the pocket to meet the relief force was never given. The dispute over who bears the responsibility for this – Hitler, Friedrich Paulus or Manstein himself – continues among historians to this day.

Name and dates

The code name Wintergewitter means “winter thunderstorm”, usually rendered as “Winter Storm”. The plan had a second, closely linked part: on the code word Donnerschlag (“Thunderclap”) the 6th Army was to abandon Stalingrad and break out of the pocket with all its strength to the south-west, to meet Hoth. This second phase was never set in motion.

The operation is taken to have begun on 12 December 1942, when the LVII Panzer Corps went over to the attack. Historians date its end in different ways. On the evening of 23 December Manstein ordered that the 6th Panzer Division be taken from Hoth and transferred to the River Chir, which in effect called off the relief; this date can be regarded as the end of the operation. Some studies, especially German ones, end the operation on 24 or 25 December, when the units left on the Myshkova went over to the defensive and began to withdraw. Soviet and Russian historiography treats the same fighting as part of the so-called Kotelnikovo operation: its defensive phase (12–23 December), in which General Andrei Yeremenko’s Stalingrad Front held off the relief, and its offensive phase (24–31 December), in which it threw the Germans far back to the south-west. That second phase was a direct consequence of Winter Storm.

Background

On 23 November 1942, after four days of Operation Uranus, the Soviet armoured pincers met at Sovetsky, east of Kalach-on-Don. Trapped in the ring were the whole of the 6th Army, part of the 4th Panzer Army and the remnants of Romanian units – between about 250,000 and 330,000 men, according to various estimates. The pocket measured some 50–60 kilometres from east to west and 30–40 kilometres from north to south; its eastern edge was still formed by the ruins of Stalingrad, where only a few days earlier the last German assault had been under way.

From the very first days the generals of the 6th Army argued for an immediate breakout to the south-west, before the Red Army could strengthen the ring. Hitler forbade it. On 22 and 24 November he ordered the 6th Army to defend “Fortress Stalingrad”, basing his decision largely on the assurance of Hermann Göring that the Luftwaffe would supply the encircled troops by air. It was an illusion from the start: by its own calculations the army needed some 600–700 tonnes of supplies a day, but throughout the encirclement it received on average fewer than a hundred. The fuel in the pocket was enough for ever shorter tank movements, the ammunition for ever rarer shots, and the soldiers’ rations were cut every few days.

To retrieve the situation, the German Army High Command (OKH) created Army Group Don by an order of 20 November, wedged between Army Group B, fighting on the middle Don, and Army Group A, which had been standing in the Caucasus since the summer. Manstein, summoned from near Vitebsk, took command on 27 November at Novocherkassk. Under him were the encircled 6th Army, Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army (in practice a headquarters with a handful of troops) and the shattered Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies. The task Hitler set him was to restore contact with the 6th Army and hold Stalingrad.

On the Soviet side, the success of Uranus exceeded expectations. The Stavka, which had expected to encircle about 90,000 men, discovered that there were several times as many in the pocket. Seven armies held the inner ring, and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who coordinated the fronts at Stalingrad on behalf of the Stavka, had at the same time to build an outer ring and prepare further blows. The most important of these was to be Operation Saturn: a great offensive on the middle Don towards Rostov, which would cut off not only Stalingrad but also the whole of Army Group A in the Caucasus. The fresh, heavily reinforced 2nd Guards Army was earmarked for Saturn.

Plan

From the outset Manstein judged the situation more soberly than Hitler’s headquarters, although his first reports – of 24 and 28 November – did not demand an immediate breakout: he considered that the 6th Army could wait for relief for some time, provided the air force delivered at least a minimum of supplies. He originally planned two attacks. The main one was to be launched by Army Detachment Hoth from Kotelnikovo, east of the Don, some 120 kilometres from the pocket. The second, a supporting attack, was to be made by the XLVIII Panzer Corps of Karl-Adolf Hollidt’s Army Detachment from the bridgehead at Nizhnechirskaya, where the Chir flows into the Don, only about 40 kilometres from the ring.

Nothing came of the second attack. From 30 November the Soviet 5th Tank Army attacked the German positions on the Chir, and the XLVIII Corps, with General Hermann Balck’s fresh 11th Panzer Division, spent the whole of December putting out one Soviet breakthrough after another instead of advancing on Stalingrad. The promised reinforcements – infantry divisions and three poorly trained Luftwaffe field divisions – arrived late or not at all. The order for Operation Wintergewitter, issued on 1 December, therefore entrusted the whole task to Hoth.

Under the order, the LVII Panzer Corps was to break through along the Kotelnikovo–Stalingrad railway and establish contact with the 6th Army. Once the spearheads had come close enough, the 6th Army was to strike out towards them from the south-western sector of the pocket, open a corridor and let columns carrying fuel, ammunition and food pass through it – while still holding Stalingrad. In case holding the city proved impossible, the staff of Army Group Don prepared a second phase, “Donnerschlag”: a gradual withdrawal of the 6th Army from the whole pocket to the south-west, sector by sector. Hitler agreed only to the first variant. He would not hear of abandoning Stalingrad.

The date of the attack, originally set for 8 December, was postponed because the divisions were slow to assemble: the 23rd Panzer Division, brought from the Caucasus, was arriving by rail and over roads turned to mud by the thaw, while the 17th Panzer Division was being held in reserve beyond the Don on Hitler’s orders. The Germans were also waiting for frost to harden the steppe. On 10 December Manstein informed Paulus that the relief would set off the next day; in the end Hoth attacked on 12 December, without waiting for the 17th Division.

Forces

The core of the relief force was the LVII Panzer Corps under General der Panzertruppe Friedrich Kirchner. Its strongest division was General Erhard Raus’s 6th Panzer Division, brought from France, rested and fully equipped: according to most sources it had some 160 tanks (mainly Panzer IIIs and IVs) and several dozen assault guns. General Nikolaus von Vormann’s 23rd Panzer Division, worn out by the fighting in the Caucasus, had only a few dozen tanks. General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin’s 17th Panzer Division, with some 50–60 tanks, joined only on 17 December. At the start of the attack the corps therefore had about 230 tanks; its flanks were covered by the Romanian VI and VII Army Corps from the shattered 4th Army, and it was supported from the air by IV Air Corps. The heavy Tiger tanks that were to reinforce the attack did not reach the front before it was over. German studies put the strength of the whole relief force at about 50,000 men; the Soviet figures – more than 70,000 men and 500 tanks and assault guns – are clearly inflated.

Facing it was General Nikolai Trufanov’s 51st Army of the Stalingrad Front: weakened in November, numbering according to Soviet figures about 34,000 men and fewer than a hundred tanks, and stretched across a wide sector of steppe. Behind it stood General Vasily Volsky’s 4th Mechanised Corps and the 13th Tank Corps, neither of which had been brought back up to strength after Uranus, and the exhausted 4th Cavalry Corps. The decisive factor, however, proved to be the reserve: Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army – three corps (two guards rifle corps and the 2nd Guards Mechanised Corps), by most estimates about 90,000 men – the strongest army the Stavka then had in the south.

Course of the operation

12 December: the advance from Kotelnikovo

The attack began at dawn on 12 December. The 6th Panzer Division advanced on the left flank, along the railway, and the 23rd on the right, slightly to the east. The blow took the Soviet command by surprise, as it had expected an attack later and from the Chir rather than from Kotelnikovo: the two divisions broke through the first line of the 51st Army, scattered the 302nd Rifle Division and in the course of the day advanced, according to German reports, several dozen kilometres. By evening the 6th Division stood on the Aksai river, the last serious obstacle before the Myshkova. In the pocket the soldiers of the 6th Army heard that “Hoth is coming”; in German letters from those days the hope of getting out before Christmas returns.

News of the attack reached Vasilevsky while he was at the headquarters of General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Don Front, where the two men were discussing the use of the 2nd Guards Army to liquidate the pocket. Vasilevsky decided that the army must be sent into Hoth’s path immediately and telephoned Stalin. Rokossovsky was opposed, and Stalin – according to Vasilevsky’s memoirs – took a long time to answer; only during the night of 12–13 December did he agree to transfer the 2nd Guards Army to the Stalingrad Front. The consequences were serious: the Stavka had to scale Saturn down to the more modest Little Saturn, aimed not at Rostov but at the rear of Army Group Don, and to put its start back to 16 December. Malinovsky’s divisions had some 150–200 kilometres to cover across the snow-covered steppe; they marched mostly by night to avoid the German air force.

13–19 December: the battle of Verkhne-Kumsky

On 13 December the 6th Panzer Division forced the Aksai at Zalivsky and took Verkhne-Kumsky, a village on the most convenient road north, amid steppe cut by snow-filled ravines. The same day Volsky’s 4th Mechanised Corps attacked it, supported by the 13th Tank Corps and infantry. The biggest tank battle of the operation had begun. For six days the village and the surrounding hills changed hands several times. Soviet tank brigades, with T-34 and light T-70 tanks, ran into well-sited German anti-tank guns and suffered heavy losses, but kept on attacking; the infantry, dug into the ravines and surrounded, would not surrender. German veterans of the 6th Division later recalled the fighting of 18 December as the hardest they had ever been through.

The battle cost the Germans what they needed most: time and tanks. By 15 December the 6th Panzer Division was already reporting the loss of several dozen vehicles (some of them repairable), while the 23rd Division, attacking on the eastern flank, was making slow progress. On 17 December the 17th Panzer Division at last arrived and went into action on the left flank. On 18 December Stalin redesignated Volsky’s corps the 3rd Guards Mechanised Corps for its defence of Verkhne-Kumsky. A day later the Germans finally broke the resistance and set off towards the Myshkova – but during those six days the first of Malinovsky’s divisions had managed to reach its northern bank.

19–23 December: on the Myshkova

On the evening of 19 December a battle group of the 6th Panzer Division under Colonel Walther von Hünersdorff burst into the village of Vasilyevka in a night attack and captured an intact bridge over the Myshkova, forming a small bridgehead on the northern bank. This was the furthest point the relief force reached. It was separated from the southern edge of the pocket by between about 35 and 50 kilometres, depending on how individual authors measure it; the figure most often given is 48 kilometres. From the bridgehead, it is said, the signal flares above the encirclement could be seen at night.

The same day a decisive exchange took place between the staffs, invisible from the battlefield. On 19 December Manstein sent his intelligence officer, Major Hans Eismann, into the pocket to persuade the 6th Army command to prepare a breakout, and in the evening he asked the Army High Command for permission for Donnerschlag. He himself ordered the 6th Army to begin Wintergewitter – that is, to attack towards Hoth – with the proviso that Donnerschlag might follow immediately afterwards. The 6th Army command – Paulus and his chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt – replied that the army needed several days to prepare and that its tanks had fuel for 20–30 kilometres at most; they regarded setting off before making direct contact with Hoth as condemning the army to destruction on the steppe. Hitler, through the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler, upheld the ban on abandoning Stalingrad. Manstein did not take upon himself the responsibility of issuing the order in defiance of Hitler.

Meanwhile, on the Myshkova, the 2nd Guards Army entered the battle in full strength. From 20 to 22 December the 6th, 17th and 23rd Panzer Divisions tried to widen the bridgehead at Vasilyevka and to the east of it; contact with the bridge was broken several times, and Soviet counter-attacks fell on the flanks of the corps. The LVII Corps, which had started with about 230 tanks, was by now down to a few dozen. A snowstorm set in, and the temperature fell to fifteen degrees or more below zero.

Little Saturn and the end of the relief

The outcome, however, was decided by what was happening some 150 kilometres or more to the north-west. On 16 December the troops of General Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front and of the left wing of the Voronezh Front launched Operation Little Saturn. After two days of heavy fighting the 1st and 3rd Guards Armies and the 6th Army broke the front of the Italian 8th Army on the middle Don, and Soviet tank corps drove deep to the south, towards Millerovo, Morozovsk and Tatsinskaya – the airfields from which the aircraft supplying the pocket took off. A gap more than a hundred kilometres wide was opening in front of Army Group Don, and behind it lay Rostov, through which ran the communications of the whole German southern wing, including Army Group A in the Caucasus.

Manstein had nothing with which to close it. On the evening of 23 December he ordered Hoth to give up the 6th Panzer Division, the strongest in the corps, and send it across the Don to the lower Chir, into the Morozovsk area. Hoth protested, arguing that after regrouping he could still break through further, but the order stood. The same evening, in a teleprinter conversation, Paulus asked Manstein whether he was authorised to begin Donnerschlag; Manstein replied that he could not give such authorisation that day. The relief was over. The 17th and 23rd Panzer Divisions, left on the Myshkova, went over to the defensive, reduced to a few dozen tanks between them.

The Kotelnikovo counter-offensive (24–31 December)

On 24 December, Christmas Eve, the 2nd Guards Army and the 51st Army went over to the attack. The blow fell on Kirchner’s weakened corps and on the Romanian units on its flanks, which quickly gave way. Within a few days the Germans had been pushed back from the Myshkova beyond the Aksai, and on 29 December General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 7th Tank Corps took Kotelnikovo – the starting point of the whole relief operation; for this the corps was redesignated the 3rd Guards Tank Corps. On 31 December Soviet troops took Tormosin, west of the Don. In the course of a week the Germans were thrown back 100–150 kilometres, and the remnants of the 4th Panzer Army continued to retreat south-west towards Zimovniki and the Manych.

On the same day that the counter-offensive began, on the middle Don, General Vasily Badanov’s 24th Tank Corps broke into the airfield at Tatsinskaya, the main base of the airlift, and destroyed several dozen transport aircraft on the ground – from a few dozen to about seventy, according to various sources; most of the aircraft managed to take off under fire at the last moment. Badanov’s corps was then cut off and fought its way back to its own lines with difficulty, but the airfield had been lost, and the distance between the 6th Army and the nearest German units grew day by day. The hope of relief from outside was extinguished.

The breakout controversy

The question of whether the 6th Army could have saved itself in the days when Hoth stood on the Myshkova is one of the most debated in the history of the Battle of Stalingrad. The most influential version was put forward by Manstein himself in his memoirs, Verlorene Siege (Lost Victories, 1955). He laid the blame above all on Hitler, who had refused to allow Stalingrad to be abandoned, and also on Paulus and Schmidt, who – in his view – had not dared to break out of the pocket despite the chance he had created for them. He maintained that he had done everything possible.

Later scholars, notably the German military historian Manfred Kehrig, author of the standard monograph based on the records of Army Group Don and the 6th Army (1974), and English-speaking historians such as David Glantz, have judged this version critically. They point out that Manstein himself never issued the Donnerschlag order on his own responsibility, although as Paulus’s superior he could have done so; that his reports of late November did not call for an immediate breakout; that Hoth’s spearheads never came close enough for the 6th Army to link up with them, while the fuel in the pocket was enough for 20–30 kilometres at most; and that the starving infantry, without horses or vehicles, would have had to fight its way through the positions of several Soviet armies, including the fresh 2nd Guards Army, in snowstorms and bitter frost. Some authors believe that an attempt to break out in the last days of December would have ended in a massacre on the steppe and saved at most a part of the soldiers; others consider that even such an outcome would have been better than what actually followed.

Paulus’s defenders stress that he was a general brought up to obey, that he had an explicit prohibition from Hitler and received no unequivocal order from Manstein, and that his staff soberly judged the army incapable of marching. His critics reply that when the lives of more than 200,000 men were at stake, an army commander could and should have acted on his own initiative. Manstein himself later advanced a further argument: by continuing to fight, the 6th Army tied down seven Soviet armies that might otherwise have cut off Army Group A’s line of retreat from the Caucasus. Many historians regard this argument as reasoning after the event, but accept that the resistance of the pocket did indeed make it easier for the German forces to withdraw through Rostov in January 1943.

The Soviet view of these events, set down in Vasilevsky’s memoirs, emphasises instead the soundness of the decision to send the 2nd Guards Army to the Myshkova and the tenacity of the 4th Mechanised Corps at Verkhne-Kumsky, without which – as Western authors also acknowledge – Hoth would have had a much better chance of reaching the pocket.

Losses

The exact losses of the two sides in this operation cannot be established, since neither the German nor the Soviet returns separate it from the wider fighting in the southern sector of the front. The LVII Panzer Corps lost most of the roughly 230 tanks with which it had begun the attack – some destroyed outright, some damaged and impossible to recover during the retreat; the 6th Panzer Division, the strongest division of the relief force, had only a few dozen left after two weeks of fighting. The panzergrenadier infantry and the Romanian divisions covering the flanks also suffered heavy losses. The figures given in Soviet literature – more than 40,000 killed and wounded and almost all the equipment – also cover the counter-offensive at the end of December and are considered inflated by Western historians.

Soviet losses were also very high. The 4th Mechanised Corps and the 13th Tank Corps lost most of their tanks at Verkhne-Kumsky, and the divisions of the 51st Army, which took the first blow, were badly bled. The Russian statistical returns (the study by Grigori Krivosheev’s team) give no separate figures for the fighting against the relief force; they include them in the losses of the whole Stalingrad offensive operation of 19 November 1942 – 2 February 1943, which according to these figures cost the Red Army some 155,000 killed and missing and more than 330,000 wounded and sick.

Significance

The failure of Winter Storm sealed the fate of the 6th Army. It was the only moment at which relief from outside and a breakout from the pocket could have met; after 23 December there were no longer the forces, the fuel or the airfields to give it a chance. Hunger set in within the pocket: the bread ration fell to a few dozen grams a day, the soldiers ate the last of the horses, and frost and disease killed more and more men. On 10 January 1943 Rokossovsky’s Don Front launched Operation Ring, and between 31 January and 2 February the remnants of the 6th Army surrendered. Paulus, promoted to field marshal on the eve of the surrender, went into captivity together with more than 90,000 soldiers, of whom only a few thousand returned home after the war.

The operation also had consequences beyond Stalingrad itself. To stop Hoth, the Stavka had to cut Saturn down to Little Saturn, and Rostov – the key to cutting off Army Group A – remained in German hands for the time being. At the end of December, when the relief had collapsed and Soviet tanks were already on the lower Chir and around Tatsinskaya, Hitler finally had to agree to withdraw his troops from the Caucasus; in January 1943 the 1st Panzer Army passed through Rostov before the Red Army could take it. Manstein stabilised the front in the south and in February–March 1943 dealt the Red Army a counter-blow at Kharkiv, but the German initiative in the east was by then largely a thing of the past.

For the Red Army, the fighting at Verkhne-Kumsky and on the Myshkova was an important experience: the Soviet command showed that it could rapidly shift a whole army to a threatened sector while continuing to mount further offensives, without loosening its grip on the ring. For the Wehrmacht, Winter Storm became a symbol of the illusions of the winter of 1942 – the belief that the Luftwaffe could feed an army from the air and that a few panzer divisions could break through the steppe to the pocket against overwhelming enemy superiority. It was on this belief that Hitler based his decision to hold Stalingrad; its collapse in those December days on the Myshkova meant that the 6th Army was lost.