Operation Winter Storm begins

At dawn on Saturday 12 December 1942 a German attack set off north-eastwards from the area of Kotelnikovo on the Kurmoyarsky Aksay river, aiming to break the Soviet ring around Stalingrad. The operation bore the codename Wintergewitter, known in English as Winter Storm. For three weeks the Battle of Stalingrad had been fought with the roles reversed: on the Volga General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army was trapped, sealed in a pocket by the Soviet Operation Uranus, which had begun on 19 November – only a few days after Paulus had launched his last great assault on the ruins of the factory district. Bled white in the street fighting, its panzer divisions out of fuel and its infantry on starvation rations, the army could no longer break the ring on its own. Between the start line and the southern edge of the pocket lay – depending on how one measures it – some 120 to 160 kilometres of snow-covered steppe.

It is often described as a “major operation”. That was how it was conceived, but not how it was carried out. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had counted on two thrusts and several panzer divisions; in the end the attack was launched by a single panzer corps with two understrength panzer divisions and weakened Romanian units on its flanks – by German reckoning about 50,000 men and 230–250 tanks and assault guns, against an enemy several times stronger across the whole area.

The pocket and the relief plan

When the encirclement closed on 22–23 November, the pocket held – according to various estimates – between 250,000 and over 300,000 German, Romanian and Croatian soldiers, along with several tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners and volunteers in German auxiliary service (Hilfswillige). As early as the days of the encirclement of the Sixth Army, Adolf Hitler had forbidden a breakout and, relying on a promise from Hermann Göring, decided to supply the army by air. Command of the threatened sector passed to Manstein’s newly formed Army Group Don, with its headquarters at Novocherkassk. Its task was to “restore contact” with the Sixth Army.

From the outset Manstein understood this task differently from Hitler. For Hitler the relief was to open a corridor through which the Sixth Army would receive supplies and reinforcements, after which it would hold its positions on the Volga as a “cornerstone” of the front for the 1943 campaign. Manstein was convinced that the army could not be held through the winter, and his staff prepared a second stage: once contact had been made, the Sixth Army was, on the codeword Donnerschlag (“Thunderclap”), to abandon Stalingrad and withdraw step by step through the corridor to the south-west. This second plan never received Hitler’s approval.

Forces smaller than intended

The original concept called for two thrusts. From the south, from Kotelnikovo, General Friedrich Kirchner’s LVII Panzer Corps of Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s group was to attack, and from the west – from the bridgehead on the Don near Nizhne-Chirskaya, only a few dozen kilometres from the pocket – XLVIII Panzer Corps of General Karl-Adolf Hollidt’s group. This second thrust was wrecked by the Soviet attacks on the Chir river, mounted from 30 November by General Prokofy Romanenko’s 5th Tank Army. The 11th Panzer Division, earmarked for the relief, spent the whole of December sealing one breach after another on the Chir and destroying Soviet tank brigades, but it could not set out for Stalingrad.

That left Hoth’s group to carry out the relief. Its core was General Erhard Raus’s 6th Panzer Division, brought by rail from France – fully equipped, with some 160 tanks. The 23rd Panzer Division, withdrawn from the Caucasus, had only a few dozen. The 17th Panzer Division, promised to Manstein, was held back by the Army High Command as a reserve behind the Italian sector and reached the battlefield only on 17 December. The flanks were covered by divisions of the Romanian Fourth Army, decimated in the November disaster. Air support came from IV Air Corps of Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen’s Luftflotte 4 – according to German figures, about 180 aircraft of all types. The date of the attack, first set for 8 December, kept slipping until the frost came and the steppe hardened.

On the Soviet side, the outer ring of the encirclement in the south-west was held by General Nikolai Trufanov’s 51st Army of General Andrei Yeremenko’s Stalingrad Front – according to Western studies, about 34,000 men and 77 tanks stretched along a broad front, supported by the 4th Cavalry Corps, worn out by the November fighting. The Soviet command expected a blow from the Chir rather, along the shortest route to the pocket, and the attack from Kotelnikovo took it by surprise in both direction and timing.

The first days of the attack

On 12 December the tanks of the 6th Panzer Division broke through the positions of the 302nd Rifle Division and advanced several dozen kilometres during the day – as much as 60, according to some studies. By evening the German spearheads stood on the Aksay (the Yesaulovsky Aksay), while the 23rd Panzer Division advanced more slowly on the right flank. Yeremenko reported to Moscow that the rear of the 51st Army was under threat and asked for reinforcements.

On 13 December the Germans crossed the Aksay and moved onto the hills around the village of Verkhne-Kumsky, through which ran the only convenient road north to the Myshkova river. There they clashed with General Vasily Volsky’s Soviet 4th Mechanised Corps and the 13th Tank Corps, thrown in against the relief force. Volsky had fewer than a hundred serviceable tanks, half of them light T-70s, and his corps had not made good its November losses. Even so, the tank battle for Verkhne-Kumsky went on, with pauses, from 13 to 19 December: the village changed hands several times, German anti-tank guns knocked out Soviet tanks attacking across the open steppe, and Soviet infantrymen and gunners, outflanked from several directions, held out in the gullies and buildings. The 6th Panzer Division suffered heavy losses; its war diary called the fighting for the village decisive for the fate of the pocket. On 18 December Volsky’s corps was given Guards status (as the 3rd Guards Mechanised Corps) – a reward for halting the German tanks for several days.

The Soviet response

Hoth’s attack forced the Soviet command to change its plans. As early as the night of 12–13 December the Stavka representative, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, demanded that General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army be sent south – the strongest Soviet formation in the area, some 90,000 men in three corps, until then earmarked for reducing the pocket and for the great Operation Saturn. After some hesitation Joseph Stalin agreed on 13 December. Malinovsky’s army marched on foot across the steppe, through frost and blizzards, and over the following days took up positions on the northern bank of the Myshkova. At the same time the Stavka cut back the Saturn plan: instead of a thrust on Rostov that was to have cut off the entire German southern wing, the South-Western Front was to smash the Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don on 16 December and break through into the rear of Army Group Don. Thus Little Saturn was born.

On the Myshkova

On 17 December the 17th Panzer Division of General Frido von Senger und Etterlin arrived on the battlefield, weakened by its long march. Only with its help did the Germans break the resistance at Verkhne-Kumsky on 19 December, and during the night of 19–20 December the spearhead of the 6th Panzer Division seized the bridge over the Myshkova at the village of Vasilyevka and established a bridgehead on the northern bank. It was now – according to the most often cited figure – about 48 kilometres from the southern edge of the pocket; figures in the literature range from about 35 to 55 kilometres. At night the soldiers in the bridgehead could see signal flares on the horizon above the Sixth Army’s positions. But Malinovsky’s fresh divisions were already waiting on the northern bank, and for three days the 23rd Panzer Division tried in vain to widen the bridgehead.

The Donnerschlag that never came

The relief could succeed only if the Sixth Army came out to meet it. On 19 December Manstein sent an officer of his staff, Major Eismann, into the pocket to persuade Paulus, and that same day ordered the Sixth Army to begin an attack southwards as soon as possible to meet Hoth; the codeword Donnerschlag – the abandonment of Stalingrad – was, however, to be given only by separate order. Hitler gave no such consent – at most he agreed to a thrust in which the army would hold on to the city, which, given its strength, was unrealistic.

Paulus and his chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt, replied that the army needed several days to prepare, that its tanks (fewer than 70 serviceable) had fuel enough for 20–30 kilometres, and that the starving infantry could not cross the steppe in a blizzard without supplies; nor were they willing to act against Hitler’s explicit prohibition. Manstein, for his part, although – as he claimed in his memoirs – he favoured a breakout, did not order Paulus to defy the prohibition on his own responsibility. The dispute over who was to blame for the missed opportunity, and whether the opportunity existed at all, continues to this day: Manstein blamed Hitler and Paulus’s indecision; Paulus’s defenders point out that the field marshal was shifting onto him a decision he did not wish to take himself; and many historians doubt whether the weakened army could have covered several dozen kilometres through the positions of the 2nd Guards Army.

The end of the relief

In the end the fate of the operation was decided elsewhere. From 16 December Little Saturn was shattering the Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don, and Soviet tank corps were driving into the rear of Army Group Don, towards the airfields supplying the pocket and towards Rostov. On 23 December Manstein ordered Hoth to give up the 6th Panzer Division to the threatened sector and go over to the defensive; the attack was halted. On 24 December the 2nd Guards and 51st Armies went over to the counter-offensive, threw Kirchner’s weakened corps back across the Myshkova and the Aksay, and on 29 December took Kotelnikovo. By the end of the year the Sixth Army was once again more than a hundred kilometres from the nearest German troops, and in January that distance grew further.

Place in the war

Winter Storm was the only attempt to come to the aid of the Sixth Army from outside. Its failure sealed the fate of Paulus’s army: from then on it could only hold out and wait for the end, which came in late January and early February 1943. The battle on the Aksay and the Myshkova also showed that the Red Army could now not only encircle but also defend the ring against a relief force, moving its reserves faster than the Germans expected. For Manstein the December fighting was the start of a winter campaign in which his priority was to save the southern wing of the front and the line of retreat for the troops in the Caucasus.