The last German assault in Stalingrad

Some chronologies record under 12 November 1942 that the Red Army was “attempting to relieve Stalingrad at Kotelnikovo”. No such event took place. Stalingrad was not then besieged in a sense that would allow it to be “relieved”: General Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army was holding out in the ruins on the west bank of the Volga, supplied across the river from the other bank, and Kotelnikovo lies some 150 kilometres south-west of the city, far behind the German front. The entry most probably confuses two later events: on 12 December 1942 a German relief force for the encircled 6th Army set out from precisely the Kotelnikovo area, and Soviet troops of the Stalingrad Front beat it back over the following days. In mid-November something else was happening in Stalingrad: General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army was conducting its last great assault on the city, known by its German code name as Operation Hubertus. Begun on 11 November, it was halted for a day on 12 November – and meanwhile, unknown to the Germans, the Red Army was completing its preparations for a counter-offensive that a week later would change the course of the war.

“We’ve got it”

After the October fighting in the factory district, the 6th Army held nine-tenths of the ruins of Stalingrad. It had taken the Tractor Factory, most of the Barrikady arms works and part of the Red October steelworks, but the 62nd Army, cut into several pieces, still clung to a narrow strip along the river, in places only a few hundred metres deep, and in the north a separate group under Colonel Sergei Gorokhov was holding out in the settlements of Rynok and Spartanovka. Paulus’s infantry divisions had been bled white. Companies were down to a few dozen men, and the whole of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach’s LI Corps, which was conducting the fighting in the city, was short above all of experienced infantry and engineers.

Adolf Hitler, however, had no intention of giving way. At the end of September he had assured his audience in the Sportpalast that Stalingrad would be taken, and on 8 November, in his annual speech to the “old fighters” in Munich’s Löwenbräukeller beer hall, he spoke as though the city were already in his hands. He had wanted to reach the Volga at a particular place, at a particular city, he explained, “and, you know, we are modest: we’ve got it”. Only a few “quite small patches” remained; he himself did not want to take them by storm and create “a second Verdun”, preferring to do it with small assault detachments. These words, spoken on the very day the Allies landed in North Africa, tied his hands. Having publicly proclaimed victory, he could no longer allow a withdrawal from the city.

Pioneers to the Volga

The plan for the last assault was simple. Since the infantry was exhausted, pioneer battalions – German assault engineers trained to fight bunkers with demolition charges and flamethrowers – would go into the city. Five such battalions, each of about 450 men, were brought in from other armies, some of them by air. Together with the remnants of the 305th and 389th Infantry Divisions, this gave some 5,200 men, supported by assault guns and by General Wolfram von Richthofen’s aircraft. The objective was the strip between Barrikady and the Volga, held by Colonel Ivan Lyudnikov’s Soviet 138th Rifle Division and the neighbouring 95th Division, and the Red October steelworks, which the 79th Infantry Division was to attack. On the Soviet side, according to the American historian David Glantz, the defenders in this sector numbered less than half as many.

The attack began on 11 November after an artillery preparation that opened before four in the morning. Within the first few hours German assault groups broke through the positions of a regiment of the 95th Division and reached the Volga on a frontage of about 200 metres south of Barrikady. Further north the pioneers stormed two buildings that became symbols of the battle: the so-called Pharmacy and the “Commissars’ House”, in whose cellars Lyudnikov had his headquarters. When the fuel tanks by the river were taken, the 138th Division was cut off from the rest of the 62nd Army. By evening the division had about two thousand men left, and some of its regiments were down to a few dozen soldiers. Attacks in other sectors, including on the Red October works, brought only small gains. The pioneers’ losses were heavy, and the advance went metre by metre, from ruin to ruin.

On 12 November Paulus halted the assault to regroup his exhausted units. Chuikov, who had commanded the 62nd Army since September, meanwhile demanded counter-attacks to restore contact with Lyudnikov. The remnants of the 193rd and 95th Divisions recaptured some ground by the fuel tanks but could not break through to the encircled men. The next day, 13 November, the Germans renewed the attack. Pioneers with ladders climbed through the windows into the upper floors of the Commissars’ House and drove the defenders out of the cellars with grenades, demolition charges and petrol. Lyudnikov moved his headquarters into a ravine right by the river. His bridgehead shrank to a strip about 700 metres wide and 400 metres deep, later known as “Lyudnikov’s Island”.

Ice on the Volga

In those days the 62nd Army’s most dangerous enemy was not the pioneers but the river. In mid-November ice floes appeared on the Volga. Sheets of ice carried by the current crushed the boats and barges of the Volga Military Flotilla (PL), yet the river had not frozen hard enough to be crossed on foot – that happened only in the second half of December. For several weeks the crossings on which the army’s life depended worked only intermittently. Chuikov later wrote that ammunition and food were short and the wounded could not be evacuated to the left bank. Po-2 biplanes dropped supplies to Lyudnikov’s cut-off division at night, but many of the sacks fell on German positions or into the river. The defenders fought largely with captured weapons.

Hitler saw an opportunity in this. On 17 November he sent the 6th Army an order, which Paulus read out to his commanders: since the ice was hampering Russian supply, the moment should be exploited to reach the Volga at least at Barrikady and the Red October works. Further attacks on 14, 15 and 18 November took individual buildings – House No. 77, a few dozen metres of riverbank – but did not eliminate Lyudnikov’s Island. 18 November was the last day of the German offensive in Stalingrad. The 6th Army held some 90 per cent of the city, but the 62nd Army still kept several bridgeheads along the Volga, from Rynok in the north to the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan, and was still tying down Paulus’s best divisions in the ruins.

The calm before the storm

While the Germans were bleeding themselves white for the last buildings, preparations they failed to notice were under way north and south of the city. Since mid-September Georgy Zhukov and the Chief of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, had been working out the plan for a great counter-offensive, approved by Joseph Stalin. During this time Chuikov received only as many reinforcements as were necessary for the 62nd Army to survive – the rest of the reserves were massed on the flanks. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, thousands of guns and hundreds of tanks were moved across the Don and Volga crossings at night, under strict radio silence. Civilians were removed from the front-line zone, and defensive preparations were simulated on the middle Don.

German military intelligence detected some of these movements, especially opposite the Romanian 3rd Army on the Don: a report by the Foreign Armies East department of 12 November spoke of an attack on the Romanians expected soon. Its scale, however, was underestimated: a limited blow was expected, not an operation designed to encircle the entire 6th Army. The Romanians, stretched along a wide front with few anti-tank guns, asked for support, but the only reserve was the weak XLVIII Panzer Corps. Paulus, intent on the ruins of Barrikady, had also committed to the fighting in the city divisions that could have covered his flanks.

Place in the war

Operation Hubertus was the last act of the German offensive of 1942. A few days earlier Army Group A had come to a halt outside Ordzhonikidze in the Caucasus; now the 6th Army stood still in Stalingrad. Both had reached the end of their strength at the same time, at the end of long supply lines, with their flanks covered by weaker allied armies. The battle for the last few hundred metres of riverbank, fought for the prestige that Hitler had publicly attached to the city on the Volga, consumed the last reserves of infantry and engineers available to the 6th Army.

On 19 November 1942, a week after the day Paulus halted the assault, troops of the South-Western and Don Fronts struck the Romanian 3rd Army on the Don, and the next day the Stalingrad Front attacked south of the city – Operation Uranus had begun. On 23 November the pincers closed near Kalach-on-Don, and the 6th Army, which only a week before had been storming the Commissars’ House, found itself encircled. Lyudnikov’s Island held out – the 138th Division fought on there, cut off from the rest of the army, into the winter, and its defence became one of the legends of the battle. The German relief attempt, the one that the chronology entry mentioned above moves to 12 November, set out from Kotelnikovo only on 12 December and never reached the pocket. On 2 February 1943 the last units of the 6th Army surrendered in the northern part of the city, in the ruins of the factories they had fought over in November.