The fighting in the great bend of the Don

War chronologies record under 1 August 1942 that the Germans “continue their successful march on Stalingrad”, and under 12 August that “fighting intensifies as the Germans approach Stalingrad”. Both sentences describe the same month-long stage of Operation Blue: the fighting in the great bend of the Don, in the steppe between the Don and the Volga and on the southern approaches to the city. The first, however, needs a qualification. On 1 August itself the 6th Army of General of Panzer Troops Friedrich Paulus was standing still: after a week of heavy fighting at Kalach-on-Don it had run out of fuel and ammunition, and on 2 August the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted in his diary that for lack of supplies it had gone over to the defensive. Other forces were advancing rapidly at the time: the 4th Panzer Army of Colonel General Hermann Hoth, which had just turned back towards Stalingrad from the south, and Army Group A, which was heading for the Caucasus.

August 1942 was the month in which the German offensive won its last great victory in open country in this direction. It was also the month in which the Red Army, at an enormous price, bought itself time to prepare the defence of the Volga.

Crisis in the Don bend

At the end of July the Soviet Stalingrad Front of Lieutenant General Vasily Gordov was defending a broad bridgehead on the western bank of the Don in front of Kalach. It was held by the 62nd and 64th Armies, new, poorly trained armies brought forward from the Stavka reserve. On 23 July the 6th Army attacked them straight off the march. Its northern wing broke through the front of the 62nd Army and in the area of Verkhnyaya Buzinovka encircled two rifle divisions and a tank brigade; the so-called group of Colonel K. A. Zhuravlev, head of the army’s operations department, held out in the pocket for almost a week, and on 1 August about 5,000 of its men broke through to their own lines. In the south German divisions crossed the Chir and pushed back the flank of the 64th Army, which until the beginning of August was under the acting command of Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov.

The Stavka’s answer was counter-attacks by two new tank armies, formed in haste from the headquarters and remnants of the 38th and 28th Armies, which had been shattered in July. On 25 July, in the presence of the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the 1st Tank Army of Major General Kirill Moskalenko attacked north-west of Kalach, and a few days later the 4th Tank Army of Major General Vasily Kryuchenkin. Between them they had several hundred tanks, but they went into battle piecemeal, without reconnaissance, without air cover and without cooperation with the infantry. The German air force dominated the steppe, and the 6th Army’s anti-tank guns and tanks destroyed the Soviet brigades one after another. The Germans claimed to have destroyed more than 600 tanks in the last days of July; Soviet figures confirm heavy losses, though not on that scale.

The counter-attacks did not throw the Germans back, but they did halt them. The 6th Army, which since the 4th Panzer Army had been diverted to the lower Don had too few tanks and even less fuel, used up its ammunition stocks in the tank battles. As early as 30 July Halder noted that the 6th Army’s striking power was “paralysed” by difficulties with the supply of fuel and ammunition. At the turn of July and August Paulus had to wait almost ten days for rail transport and lorry columns, supported by Luftwaffe transport aircraft, to replenish his stocks.

Hoth turns towards Stalingrad

The 6th Army’s standstill led Adolf Hitler to reverse a decision taken less than three weeks earlier. On 31 July he ordered the 4th Panzer Army to turn back from the lower Don, where after the capture of Rostov it was crowding the roads together with Kleist’s panzer army, and to head for Stalingrad, this time from the south-west, along the railway line from Tikhoretsk. Hoth’s army was placed under Army Group B but given only one panzer corps; the rest of its forces went to the Caucasus.

The blow struck the weakest sector of the front. The Soviet 51st Army stationed there had four rifle divisions and two cavalry divisions on a front 200 kilometres wide. On 2 August German tanks entered Kotelnikovo, where the Siberian 208th Rifle Division, detraining from its trains, came under fire before it could deploy. On 3 August the German spearheads reached the Aksai River, and a few days later Abganerovo and Plodovitoye, where the outer ring of Stalingrad’s fortifications began. To stop them the Stavka formed Chuikov’s operational group and then threw in the 57th Army of Major General Fyodor Tolbukhin and the 64th Army, commanded from 4 August by Major General Mikhail Shumilov.

The front at Stalingrad, by now some 700 kilometres long, was too long for a single command. By a directive of 5 August the Stavka divided it in two. The northern part, with the 62nd, 63rd and 21st Armies and the 4th Tank Army, remained Gordov’s Stalingrad Front. From the southern part the South-Eastern Front of Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko was formed on 7 August. The boundary between them ran through the city itself, which immediately gave rise to disputes over reserves. On 9 August the Stavka therefore placed the Stalingrad Front under Yeremenko, and on 13 August formally entrusted him with command of both fronts; Gordov became his deputy. Nikita Khrushchev was a member of the military councils of both fronts.

The Kalach pocket

By 4 August Paulus’s mobile divisions again had enough fuel to cover about 50 kilometres. Paulus set the attack for 8 August, but at the demand of Hitler, who feared that the Russians would manage to withdraw behind the Don, he brought it forward by a day. Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of Luftflotte 4, concentrated almost all the aircraft at his disposal over Kalach.

At dawn on 7 August the XIV Panzer Corps attacked from the north and the XXIV Panzer Corps from the south, both along the Don, against the flanks of the bridgehead of the 62nd Army, commanded since the beginning of August by Lieutenant General Anton Lopatin. On the evening of 7 August or the morning of 8 August (sources differ as to the time) the spearheads of the 16th and 24th Panzer Divisions met on the hills west of Kalach. The pocket held the main forces of the 62nd Army – according to various studies, from four to eight rifle divisions – and part of the 1st Tank Army. The bridges over the Don were destroyed or in German hands. The encircled troops tried to break out in small groups and to swim the river. According to Russian studies, of the 181st Rifle Division, which had numbered about 13,000 men before the battle, about a hundred reached the left bank. The withdrawal of the remnants was covered by the 23rd Tank Corps, which had 20 tanks left.

By 11 August the German infantry had cleared the pocket. German reports spoke of 57,000 prisoners, a thousand tanks destroyed or captured and 750 guns. The literature most often gives about 50,000 prisoners, and historians consider the number of tanks in particular to be inflated. Some of the encircled divisions fought on until mid-August, and individual groups made their way east for many days. The 1st Tank Army was disbanded, and from 17 August its remnants were used to rebuild the 62nd Army.

It was the last great encirclement that the Wehrmacht managed to carry out on the Eastern Front. It was not, however, a repetition of the pockets of 1941. The main forces of the Stalingrad Front, though bled white, managed to cross to the eastern bank of the Don and occupy the outer ring of defences there. The Germans too suffered heavy losses, especially in infantry, and the whole operation took almost three weeks rather than the few days envisaged in July.

The fighting intensifies

After closing the pocket Paulus still had to clear the so-called small bend of the Don in the north, where Kryuchenkin’s bled-white 4th Tank Army stood. Despite its name it had few tanks at the time and fought like an ordinary infantry army. On 15 August, after a two-hour artillery and air preparation, German divisions attacked it in the direction of Sirotinskaya and in the first day advanced between 12 and 20 kilometres. Tanks reached the army’s command post, and it lost contact with its subordinate units. Three divisions were encircled, and others were left with 700–800 men each. On 17 August the remnants of the army withdrew behind the Don. In the north, however, the 1st Guards Army, freshly arrived from the reserve, held on to the bridgehead at Kremenskaya; its divisions had gone into action before their formation was complete. This small bridgehead was to play an important part in November.

On 12 August, the day that chronologies associate with the “intensification of fighting”, Colonel General Vasilevsky flew to Stalingrad for the second time as representative of the Stavka. South of the city Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army attacked yet again at Abganerovo and at the “74th kilometre” station, where the 64th and 57th Armies, with tanks dug in up to their turrets, held it for several days. The Soviet command threw everything it had to hand into the Stalingrad area. Between 1 and 20 August the Stavka sent fifteen rifle divisions and three tank corps there.

On 19 August Paulus issued the order to attack Stalingrad itself. The 6th Army was to strike due east from the Don, reach the Volga north of the city and then take it from the north, while the 4th Panzer Army would attack from the south. On the night of 20/21 August the infantry of the LI Army Corps under General of Artillery Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach crossed the Don in assault boats at Vertyachy and Peskovatka. Within a day the engineers had built pontoon bridges, and on 22 August the tanks of the XIV Panzer Corps under General of Infantry Gustav von Wietersheim crossed into the bridgehead. By the end of the day the bridgehead was some 45 kilometres wide. Soviet counter-attacks by divisions of the 62nd Army and the 4th Tank Army failed to eliminate it. In the south Hoth, short of fuel and troops, shifted his panzer divisions further east and on 20–21 August took Tinguta station, but again became stuck in front of hills defended by the 57th and 64th Armies.

“Not a step back!”

The fighting in the Don bend was the first in which Order No. 227, signed by Joseph Stalin on 28 July, applied. The order, read out in every company in the last days of July and at the beginning of August but not published in the press, openly admitted that after the loss of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and the Donbas the country had far fewer people, less grain, metal and fewer factories than before, no longer had superiority over the Germans in either manpower or grain, and that further retreat meant ruin. It forbade withdrawal without orders and required every front to form between one and three penal battalions (of up to 800 men) for officers and political workers, and every army between five and ten penal companies for privates and junior commanders. Behind unreliable divisions there were to be blocking detachments, three to five in each army, each of 200 well-armed soldiers, with the right to shoot “panic-mongers and cowards” on the spot.

On the Stalingrad front the blocking detachments began operating in August. According to an NKVD report from the autumn of 1942, by mid-October they had detained more than 140,000 soldiers along the whole Soviet-German front who had become separated from their units. The vast majority were sent back to the front, several thousand were arrested or sent to penal units, and more than a thousand were shot. Historians assess the significance of the order differently. Some emphasise that it restored discipline in an army that had been retreating in disorder in July. Others point out that the ban on retreat and counter-attacks “at any cost” multiplied losses, and that soldiers fought out of a mixture of coercion, patriotism and hatred of the invader, which the war only deepened.

Meanwhile in the Caucasus

Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Army Group A was meanwhile advancing across the Kuban steppe almost unhindered. The shattered armies of Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s North Caucasian Front were falling back into the mountains. On 5 August the Germans took Voroshilovsk (Stavropol); on 9 August the tanks of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army entered Maykop, and on 12 August the 17th Army took Krasnodar. The retreating Russians had wrecked the Maykop oilfields so thoroughly that the Germans were unable to restart production. On 21 August a detachment of mountain troops under Captain Heinz Groth from the 1st Mountain Division and the 4th Mountain Division planted German flags on the summit of Elbrus. Propaganda made much of it; Hitler was furious at the waste of forces on an objective of no military value. On 25 August Kleist took Mozdok on the Terek. The oil of Grozny and Baku, however, was still far away, and fuel for the tanks was arriving ever more slowly, because the whole logistic effort and most of the air force were now going to Stalingrad.

Place in the war

The August victories in the Don bend opened the way to the Volga for the 6th Army. On 23 August the XIV Panzer Corps crossed the steppe between the rivers in a single day and reached the Volga in the northern suburbs of Stalingrad, while the Luftwaffe reduced a large part of the city to ruins. From that day the battle was being fought for Stalingrad itself. At the beginning of September the flanks of the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army joined up, and the 62nd Army, commanded from 12 September by Chuikov, was pinned against the river.

The battle in the Don bend had another side, however. The American historian David Glantz points out that historians long paid it little attention, partly because Soviet historiography was reluctant to single out this string of defeats as a separate episode. It cost the Red Army two tank armies and most of the 62nd Army, but it held up the 6th Army for almost three weeks, which the Stavka used to bring new divisions to the Volga. It also exhausted the German infantry, which was later lacking in the street fighting. The bridgehead at Kremenskaya, which the Germans had failed to eliminate in August, became in November one of the starting points of Operation Uranus. On 23 November the Soviet pincers closed near Kalach and Sovetsky, in the same steppe in which the 6th Army had won its last great victory of encirclement in August. This time it was the 6th Army itself that was trapped in the pocket.