The Stalingrad airlift

By the middle of December 1942 the airlift to the Stalingrad pocket had been running for three weeks, and it was already clear that it would not live up to its promises. Luftwaffe transport aircraft took off from airfields on the Don and the Chir, flew some two hundred kilometres over the steppe and the Soviet lines, and landed inside the encirclement, mostly at Pitomnik airfield, to unload bread, ammunition and fuel and take out the wounded. Yet they delivered only part of what General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army needed: on average about a hundred tons a day, several times less than a quarter of a million men required to survive and fight. War chronologies speak of “meagre deliveries” – a phrase that captures the reality of mid-December well, when outside the pocket the German relief attack, launched the day before from Kotelnikovo, was under way.

The promise and the arithmetic

Supplying the army by air was a political decision, not the outcome of a calculation. When, in the days of the encirclement of the Sixth Army, Hitler forbade a breakout, he relied on an assurance from Hermann Göring that the Luftwaffe could manage. Post-war accounts mention a figure of 500 tons a day that the Reichsmarschall is said to have promised; the agreed minimum was about 300 tons. Paulus’s staff put the army’s needs at 600–750 tons a day and regarded 500 tons as the absolute minimum. Even 300 tons called for several hundred sorties every day: the Junkers Ju 52, the Luftwaffe’s standard transport aircraft, carried about two tons of cargo, and the Heinkel He 111 bombers pressed into service as transports even less.

Those who were to organise the airlift regarded it as impossible from the start. As early as 21 November the commander of VIII Air Corps, General Martin Fiebig, warned the Sixth Army’s chief of staff, General Arthur Schmidt, that supplying an entire army by air could not be done. His superior, the commander of Luftflotte 4, Colonel General Wolfram von Richthofen, recorded a similar view in his diary and tried in vain to convince Berlin of it; doubts soon assailed the Luftwaffe chief of staff, Colonel General Hans Jeschonnek, too, though he had initially judged the operation feasible. The airlift began on 24 November – on orders, and against the judgement of the experts.

Aircraft, airfields, weather

To gather the aircraft, the Luftwaffe stripped its flying schools and other fronts. In time the Ju 52s and He 111s were joined by obsolete Junkers Ju 86s, four-engined Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors taken from the Atlantic, and in January even the new and still immature He 177. The transport Junkers were based mainly at Tatsinskaya and the Heinkels at Morozovsk – both airfields some 200–250 kilometres from the pocket. The heavy aircraft landed at Pitomnik, the only airfield in the pocket able to handle traffic on a large scale; several field landing grounds were used in support, among them Gumrak, which became the pocket’s main airfield only in January.

The greatest enemy was the weather. Frosts of down to thirty degrees below zero, fog, blizzards and icing grounded the aircraft for days on end; ground crews warmed the engines with fires under tarpaulins, and in the first weeks more aircraft were lost in accidents than to enemy fire. There was a shortage of spare parts, heated hangars and trained mechanics. On top of this came Soviet countermeasures. The Red Army’s air force and anti-aircraft artillery organised blockade zones around the pocket: fighters hunted the transports along their routes, anti-aircraft guns were sited beneath the air corridors, and bombers and artillery pounded Pitomnik. The Ju 52s therefore flew in formation under fighter escort – or, in bad weather, singly and blind.

Results improved slowly. The best day of the whole operation fell during the relief attempt: on 19 December, according to German figures, some 290 tons of supplies reached the pocket, and over the three days of 19–21 December about 700 tons in all. But there were also days on which not a single aircraft landed. Over the whole period from 24 November to the beginning of February 1943 the average came to around 100–120 tons a day, depending on how it is calculated, and some 8,000–8,500 tons were flown in altogether. The aircraft carried out of the pocket – according to various figures – between about 25,000 and 35,000 wounded and sick, for whom this was the only way out.

Hunger in the pocket

Behind the shortfall in tonnage lay the misery of the troops. The bread ration was cut again and again, in December to 200 and then to 100 grams a day; the staple food became the meat of the thousands of horses the army had in its supply trains and infantry divisions. There was no fuel for the tanks and lorries, no firewood for the dugouts and no warm clothing; on the frozen steppe the men dug shelters into the sides of the gullies. In December the Sixth Army’s doctors began to record deaths that could be attributed neither to wounds nor to disease – the body’s utter exhaustion under hunger, cold and exertion. Dysentery, frostbite and lice spread. Soviet propaganda dropped leaflets promising prisoners food and warmth, but desertions were still few: the soldiers were waiting for the relief they knew of from orders and rumours, and listening for the sound of guns from the south.

The airlift and the relief

The fate of the airlift became entwined with the fate of the relief. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group Don, had from the outset treated air supply as a solution for a few weeks, until a corridor could be punched through. The heavy fighting of Operation Winter Storm on the Aksay and the Myshkova was to open the way for columns of lorries carrying several thousand tons of supplies, made ready behind the front. If the Sixth Army was to break out of the pocket to meet the relief force, it would need fuel that the airlift could not deliver – in the second half of December Paulus reckoned that his tanks could cover at most 20–30 kilometres. The inadequacy of air supply thus became one of the arguments against a breakout, and in the end against rescue itself.

Little Saturn

Three days later, on 16 December, the Red Army struck a blow that hit both the relief and the airlift. After the change of plans forced by Hoth’s attack, the Stavka had abandoned the great Operation Saturn, which was to have reached as far as Rostov, in favour of a cut-down version – Operation Little Saturn. The troops of General Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front – General Fyodor Kuznetsov’s 1st Guards Army and General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 3rd Guards Army – supported by the 6th Army of the Voronezh Front, attacked General Italo Gariboldi’s Italian Eighth Army and the remnants of the Romanian Third Army on the middle Don.

On the first day fog and stiff resistance by the Italian divisions slowed the attack, but on 17–19 December the front gave way. Soviet tank corps poured into a breach more than a hundred kilometres wide, while the Italian divisions of II and XXXV Corps, lacking motor transport and heavy anti-tank weapons, retreated on foot in the frost, often being surrounded in one village after another. Some of them were still fighting their way west, together with German units, in the last days of the year. Italian losses in December and January – killed, missing and captured – are estimated at several tens of thousands of men; Italian post-war figures speak of some 85,000 dead and missing in the whole winter campaign on the Don. The Alpine Corps on the northern flank held on until mid-January 1943.

The raid on Tatsinskaya

The furthest advance was made by General Vasily Badanov’s 24th Tank Corps. In five days it covered some 240 kilometres through the German rear, and at dawn on 24 December, Christmas Eve, it burst onto the airfield at Tatsinskaya – the main base of the Junkers supplying the pocket. The German command had forbidden the evacuation of the airfield until the last moment; aircraft began to take off only when Soviet tanks were already firing on the field. According to German figures more than a hundred aircraft managed to get away in the fog, but several dozen – at least 70, according to most Western studies – were destroyed or abandoned; Soviet reports gave figures several times higher. Badanov’s encircled corps fought its way back after a few days, losing most of its equipment; Badanov himself became the first recipient of the Order of Suvorov, 2nd Class, and his corps was given Guards status. Morozovsk was threatened too. The Luftwaffe had to move its transport bases to Salsk and Novocherkassk, further from the pocket, which cut the airlift’s already modest capacity still further.

Place in the war

The airlift continued to the very end of the battle. In mid-January 1943 Hitler sent Field Marshal Erhard Milch to the Don to improve the operation, but it was already too late: on 16 January the Red Army took Pitomnik, and Gumrak a few days later, after which supplies could only be dropped by parachute over the ruins of the city. According to the most frequently cited figures, the Luftwaffe lost some 490 aircraft over the whole operation – including 266 Ju 52s and 165 He 111s – and about a thousand airmen. Because instructors and training-school aircraft had also been committed, the loss hit the training of bomber and transport crews for many months.

The failure of the airlift in December closed the circle of decisions that had begun with Operation Uranus: Hitler had forbidden a breakout because he believed the army could be supplied by air, and when that proved impossible, a breakout was no longer feasible. Stalingrad became a warning against staking the fate of encircled troops on the promises of an air force – and at the same time proof of how badly Berlin overrated the capabilities of the Luftwaffe, already stretched between the Eastern Front, the Mediterranean and the defence of the Reich against Allied bombers. Little Saturn, for its part, opened a series of Soviet winter offensives that over the following weeks shattered the armies of Germany’s allies on the Don and forced the German forces to retreat from the Caucasus.