The encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad

On Sunday 22 November 1942, the fourth day of the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad, General Friedrich Paulus sent a signal to the headquarters of Army Group B that began with the words “Armee eingeschlossen” – “Army encircled”. That morning a Soviet advance detachment had captured intact the bridge over the Don at Kalach, the last major crossing in the rear of the Sixth Army. A day later, on the afternoon of 23 November, the tanks of two Soviet fronts met near the village of Sovetsky and the ring around the Germans at Stalingrad was formally closed. Over the next three days the decisions that sealed the fate of the encircled troops were taken: Adolf Hitler forbade a breakout, Hermann Göring promised to supply the army from the air, and the Sixth Army – known at headquarters from then on as “Fortress Stalingrad” – dug in on the steppe between the Don and the Volga.

The date of the encirclement is given in different ways. On 22 November Paulus himself reported that the army was surrounded, since its only route to the west had already been cut; historians, however, usually take the junction of the Soviet pincers on 23 November as the moment the ring closed.

Four days after the breakthrough

Operation Uranus began on 19 November. From bridgeheads on the Don north-west of Stalingrad, General Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front and General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Don Front attacked, followed on 20 November, south of the city, by General Andrei Yeremenko’s Stalingrad Front. The Romanian Third and Fourth Armies, stretched across wide sectors and short of anti-tank weapons, were broken within hours. Soviet tank and mechanised corps drove deep into the steppe, converging from north and south on a single point: the bend of the Don at Kalach, through which ran the roads and railway that supplied the Sixth Army.

Until the last moment Paulus did not know the scale of the attack. On 21 November, as Soviet tanks approached his headquarters at Golubinsky on the Don, the army staff had to abandon it. Paulus and his chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt, flew to Nizhne-Chirskaya beyond the Don, where a winter command post was being prepared – outside the future pocket. Hitler, who was then at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, regarded this as deserting the troops and ordered the commander to return to his army. On 22 November Paulus and Schmidt flew to Gumrak near Stalingrad, where a new headquarters was set up.

The raid on the Kalach bridge

The key to the encirclement was the road bridge over the Don a few kilometres from Kalach. Taking it intact would let Soviet tanks cross the river without waiting for sappers and pontoon ferries. The task went to General Aleksei Rodin’s 26th Tank Corps of the South-Western Front’s 5th Tank Army, which in three days had covered more than a hundred kilometres through the Romanian rear. Rodin sent ahead a detachment under Lieutenant Colonel Georgy Filippov, commander of the 14th Motorised Rifle Brigade: five tanks, an armoured car and two companies of motorised infantry in lorries.

The detachment drove up to the bridge at dawn on 22 November along the road as if it were friendly – headlights on, not firing a shot. According to some accounts, captured German vehicles led the column. The bridge was held mainly by rear-echelon and training troops, unaware that Soviet tanks were so close; the sentries took the column for a German one, or for a unit returning from exercises. Filippov’s men surprised the guard, seized the bridge and formed an all-round defence. They beat off German counter-attacks all day until the main body of the corps arrived, including the 19th Tank Brigade. The town of Kalach itself was taken on 23 November. For this raid Filippov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. The leading elements of General Andrei Kravchenko’s 4th Tank Corps, which were to close the ring from the west, also crossed by the captured bridge.

“Army encircled”

On the evening of 22 November Paulus sent from Gumrak a report to the commander of Army Group B, General Maximilian von Weichs, whose text is quoted in every study of the battle. In substance it ran as follows: the army was encircled; the whole Tsaritsa valley, the railway from Sovetsky to Kalach, the Don bridge there and the heights on the west bank of the river were, despite heroic resistance, in Russian hands; the southern front was still open; fuel would soon run out, and the tanks and heavy weapons would then be immobilised; ammunition was short and food would last six days. Paulus intended to hold the area between the Don and the Volga, and asked for supply by air and – most importantly – for “freedom of action” (Handlungsfreiheit) should it prove impossible to close the defence in the south. In practice this meant permission to abandon Stalingrad and break out to the south-west, towards General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army.

That same night a reply came from Hitler’s headquarters, as Hitler was leaving the Berghof by train for East Prussia. It said something quite different: the Sixth Army was “temporarily” encircled by the Russians; it was to form an all-round defence, hold its existing front on the Volga and its northern front, and would be supplied from the air; further orders would follow. Paulus was not given freedom of action. His staff nevertheless prepared for a breakout: some units began burning surplus stores, documents and equipment that would not fit on vehicles running on the last of their fuel.

The meeting at Sovetsky

At about 4 p.m. on 23 November, near the village of Sovetsky, some fifteen kilometres south-east of Kalach, scouts of the 36th Mechanised Brigade of General Vasily Volsky’s 4th Mechanised Corps, advancing from the south as part of the Stalingrad Front, saw tanks approaching from the north. It was the 45th Tank Brigade of Kravchenko’s corps. Because the agreed signal – green flares – had not been fired, they were at first taken for Germans and there was a brief exchange of fire in which several vehicles were damaged. Once the mistake was cleared up, soldiers of the two fronts fell into each other’s arms. The scene of the meeting was later re-staged for the newsreel cameras, and it was this version that entered the Soviet iconography of the battle.

On the same day the Romanian group cut off since 20–21 November around Raspopinskaya, west of the Don – the remnants of several divisions of the Third Army – capitulated. Its commander, General Mihail Lascăr, had rejected Soviet calls to surrender and tried to break out to the west; according to Soviet figures, some 27,000 Romanians were taken prisoner there.

In the first days the Soviet inner ring was thin and discontinuous, and its line was still being fixed. At the same time work began on an outer ring, in places some fifteen and in places several dozen kilometres beyond the inner one, intended to repel any relief attempt. The last German stragglers crossed the Don eastwards by 24 November and blew the bridges behind them.

“Der Kessel”

The Germans simply called the encircled area the Kessel – “the cauldron”. The word, taken from military jargon (a Kesselschlacht is a battle of encirclement in which the enemy is shut in as if in a cauldron), meant a space closed off by an enemy ring rather than – as some chronologies suggest – the fierce fighting itself, although in the soldiers’ everyday speech it soon came to mean a disaster from which there was no way out. The Stalingrad pocket measured about 50 kilometres from east to west and 35–40 kilometres from north to south, from the ruins of the city on the Volga to the bend of the Don. Most of it was bare, treeless steppe without shelter or fuel, cut by gullies (balkas).

Five corps were trapped in the pocket: the VIII and XI Army Corps, General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s LI Corps, fighting in the ruins of the city, and the XIV Panzer Corps of the Sixth Army, together with the IV Army Corps of the Fourth Panzer Army, which was placed under Paulus on 22 November – 20 German divisions in all, including three panzer and three motorised divisions. To these were added the remnants of two Romanian divisions, a Croatian infantry regiment, engineer, construction and medical units, Luftwaffe ground personnel, and several tens of thousands of so-called Hiwis (Hilfswillige) – Soviet prisoners and civilians serving the Wehrmacht as auxiliaries. Also left in the pocket were about a hundred tanks, several thousand guns and mortars and some ten thousand vehicles, many of them without fuel.

How many men were encircled

The number of men encircled is disputed. The Soviet Stavka itself initially underestimated it badly: Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who as Chief of the General Staff coordinated the operation on the spot, recalled that it was put at about 85,000–90,000 men, roughly a quarter of the true figure. The Sixth Army’s German ration returns from the turn of November and December spoke of some 250,000–280,000 people being fed (the figure most often cited is 275,000), including Romanians, Croats and auxiliaries. Soviet and Russian historiography usually gives about 330,000. The spread arises mainly from whether Hiwis, the wounded, rear units and soldiers who were on leave or in hospital outside the pocket when the ring closed are counted, and from the uncertainty of the German reports themselves.

The order: hold

On the evening of 23 November Hitler reached the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. That same day Paulus, after conferring with his corps commanders, who unanimously favoured a breakout, sent another report direct to Hitler. He wrote that the army faced annihilation unless it gathered all its forces for an attack to the south-west, and asked for permission to withdraw the divisions from the city and from the northern front. The request was backed by Weichs and by the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler.

Hitler refused. On the morning of 24 November his decision arrived, referred to in German records as the “Führerentscheid”: the Sixth Army was to hold its present Volga front and northern front at all costs and would be supplied by air. In headquarters orders and communiqués the encircled troops began to be called “Fortress Stalingrad” (Festung Stalingrad) – a term in keeping with the “not a step back” principle that Hitler had imposed on the army as early as the winter of 1941/1942 outside Moscow. The order is sometimes dated 23 November; Paulus received the first instruction to stand fast during the night of 22–23 November, but the final decision was taken on 24 November.

Behind Hitler’s decision lay political considerations and questions of prestige – Stalingrad, the city bearing Stalin’s name, had been a symbol of victory in his speeches, and withdrawing from the Volga would have meant admitting the failure of the summer offensive – but also the conviction that an encircled army could be kept alive from the air, as the Demyansk pocket had been in the winter of 1941/1942. There, however, some 100,000 men had been involved, and the Luftwaffe had had far more serviceable transport aircraft at its disposal than in the autumn of 1942.

Göring’s promise

In the first days of the Soviet offensive, in conversations with Hitler at the Berghof, the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, General Hans Jeschonnek, rashly gave assurances that supply from the air was possible, although he soon began to doubt it himself. The decisive word was Göring’s. According to Zeitzler’s account, written after the war, the Reich Marshal told Hitler that the Luftwaffe would supply the Sixth Army; Zeitzler claimed to have replied that this was impossible. The agreed minimum was about 300 tonnes a day – in practice, allowing for days when flying was impossible, about 500 tonnes on every flying day – while Paulus’s staff estimated the army’s needs at 600–750 tonnes. The commander of Luftflotte 4, General Wolfram von Richthofen, and his subordinates considered it unrealistic from the outset: there were not enough aircraft, there were only a few airfields in the pocket (the main one at Pitomnik), and in winter the steppe was swept by fog, blizzards and severe frost. As early as 24 November rations in the pocket were cut by half.

Seydlitz’s memorandum

The fiercest opponent of standing fast in the pocket was General von Seydlitz-Kurzbach. During the night of 23–24 November, convinced that the order to break out would come at any moment, he began on his own initiative to shorten his corps’ northern front. The 94th Infantry Division, withdrawing from its fortified positions, was caught in open ground by Soviet troops and suffered heavy losses; its remnants were absorbed into the neighbouring panzer divisions. In those same days Hitler, to whom Seydlitz had been presented as a resolute commander, made him directly responsible for the northern and eastern sectors of the pocket – unaware that he was the most ardent advocate of a withdrawal.

On 25 November Seydlitz submitted to Paulus a lengthy memorandum, dictated to his chief of staff. In it he argued that supply from the air would not meet even a small part of the army’s needs, that the army had ammunition and fuel for a few days, that relief would not arrive in time, and that the choice was simple: an immediate breakout to the south-west, or annihilation within a few weeks. If the Army High Command did not revoke the order to stand fast, he wrote, the commander’s conscience towards the army and the nation required him to assume for himself the freedom of action that the order denied him. Paulus passed the memorandum up the chain of command but could not bring himself to disobey the order. His chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt, believed the army should hold out and wait for help; Paulus, a staff officer by temperament reluctant to take independent decisions against Hitler’s will, accepted this view.

That day Hitler upheld his ban. It is often written that he once again demanded that Paulus “not capitulate”; in fact, at the end of November the dispute was not about capitulation but about breaking out of the pocket – capitulation was not raised until January 1943. In a personal message to the soldiers of the Sixth Army, delivered in the last days of November, Hitler assured them that he would do everything to free them. Meanwhile the pocket was stabilising: the Soviet armies of the inner ring, ordered to cut the encircled forces into pieces, met stiff resistance and switched to local attacks, while the Germans closed the gap in the south and east by moving panzer divisions from the northern front.

Manstein and Army Group Don

As early as 20 November Hitler had appointed Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the victor of Sevastopol, to command the new Army Group Don, which was to comprise the Sixth Army, the remnants of the Romanian armies and the Fourth Panzer Army. Manstein came from the front near Vitebsk and on 24 November, at Starobilsk, was briefed on the situation at the headquarters of Army Group B. His first assessment, sent to Hitler’s headquarters, did not support Paulus: Manstein judged that a breakout was not yet necessary if the army could be supplied from the air and if forces for a relief operation could be assembled at the beginning of December; a breakout should be treated as a last resort. This assessment strengthened Hitler in his decision. Army Group Don, formally created on 26 November with its headquarters at Novocherkassk, took over responsibility for this sector of the front on 27 November.

Place in the war

The encirclement at Stalingrad was the first time in the war that an entire German field army – and the largest in the Wehrmacht at that – had been trapped in a pocket. The Soviet plan, which Georgy Zhukov and Vasilevsky had been preparing since September, worked in less than five days, and the Battle of Stalingrad, until then a battle of attrition in the streets, changed its character: from now on the question was whether the Germans could rescue the encircled army. On the same 25 November on which Seydlitz was writing his memorandum, the Red Army launched Operation Mars near Rzhev, intended to tie down the forces of Army Group Centre so that they could not hurry south.

The decision of 22–24 November that the Sixth Army should hold on the Volga is regarded as one of Hitler’s most fateful mistakes. The airlift never reached the promised capacity: from the end of November to the beginning of February it delivered an average of about 100 tonnes a day, and the Luftwaffe lost nearly five hundred aircraft in the process. Manstein’s relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm (Wintergewitter), set out from Kotelnikovo on 12 December and came to a halt several dozen kilometres from the pocket when the Soviet offensive on the middle Don threatened the rear of the entire German south; Paulus did not break out to meet it – Hitler would not agree to abandoning Stalingrad, and the tanks in the pocket had fuel for a few dozen kilometres at most. Hunger, frost and disease wore down the encircled troops throughout the winter. In January 1943 Rokossovsky’s Don Front began the liquidation of the pocket; on 31 January Paulus, newly promoted to field marshal, went into captivity, and on 2 February the last units in the northern part of the city capitulated. Some 91,000 soldiers were taken prisoner; only about 6,000 of them returned to Germany after the war.