Episode 20 - Paulus receives a shocking briefing as ice floes drift down the Volga

General Paulus’ Sixth Army has fought its way right up to the edge of the Volga River.

Russian positions had been reduced to a few pockets of stone, seldom more than three hundred yards deep bordering on the right bank of the Volga. The Krasny Oktyabr or October plant as its also known had fallen to the Germans who had paved every foot of the factory floor with their dead.

The Barrikady plant was half lost, the Germans were at one end of the foundry facing the Russian machine guns in the now extinguished ovens at the other. The defenders of the Tractor Factory had been broken into three groups by constant German attacks.

These islands of resistance were now almost impossible to dislodge as the German’s discovered.

The Sixth Army is exhausted. Alan Clark in his book on Barbarossa points out that they were as raddled and spent as had been Douglas Haig’s divisions at Passchendaele exactly a quarter of a century before during the First world war.

You’d have to say there was an implacable madness that had seized all parties in this conflict. The Russians in the city were fighting to the death as there was no-where to go east of Stalingrad. It was all open steppe and losing this city was not just symbolic. They would have been pushed all the way to caucuses – at least that’s what many Russians soldiers believed.

But Stalin and his generals were cooking up a nasty surprise for the Germans. That would follow within a few weeks.

If the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B had the strength, the correct course would have been to strike at Voronezh up the Don River and lever the Don Front away from close to Stalingrad. The German left flank was in a particularly weak condition and striking further north would have caused the Russians to move reinforcements closer to Voronezh which was also closer to Moscow.

But hindsight is always an inexact science isn’t it? The Wehrmacht was desperately extended on a front which had almost doubled in length since the start of the Summer campaign. The Russians meanwhile were building their forces and it was at this point that they had the stronger army.

It was in this dangerous position that the weaker armies, the Sixth and the Fourth Panzer, continued to rely on initiative rather than pure-blooded military strategy. Once the German momentum was lost, they were on extremely perilous ground. There were two clear future strategies as the cold of winter descended on the southern steppe.

First would have been an orderly withdrawal to defensive positions and tightening of the front. There were obvious places to do this – the Chiur River and the Mius River.

The Second was pretty much part of German ideology. Continue attacking because whomever was last standing, won the battle. Stalingrad had turned into Verdun or Passchendaele .