Episode 27 - Little Saturn steamrolls the Italian 8th Army
General Hoths’ 6th Panzer division is about to roll into Myshkova where he would be joined by the 17th Panzer Division. They had started Operation Winter Storm on the 12th December in a last ditch push to save the Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad and by the 14th had made good progress. The Russian force guarding the approach route was the 51st Army but it had been reduced to about half its strength since the break-through in November where they’d been part of the Red Army that had enveloped General Paulus and at least 200 000 men inside the Kessel – to the west of Stalingrad. He was surrounded and Field Marshal Manstein was trying to help him break out by breaking in. The problem was, Manstein had no means of knowing what was in Paulus’ mind. At some point he hoped the trapped General would order the Sixth Army to move towards him and crush the Russians between their two pinces, allowing, hopefully most of the Germans to escape West. But Paulus was awaiting Hitler’s order – and Hitler was determined the Sixth Army was going nowhere. So by the 14th the Panzers were making good progress = the ground was hard and although tanks slip and slid, it wasn’t the cruel thick mud they were facing but sub-zero conditions which made the going easier. At first sight the steppe to the south west of the Kessel appeared flat, but that was deceptive. It was criss-crossed by a network of both deep and shallow gullies, a bit like the wadis of north Africa, or part of the veld in South Africa. The snow had drifted into these gullies and the Russians were lying in wait here. Sometimes up to a battalion in strength and with a full component of heavy weapons. The Russian cavalry kept its horses in these gullies during the day, sheltered from the freezing winds and rode out at night when the air was still to harass the German flanks along with mortar and machine-gun fire. At times, most likely at night or at dawn, isolated groups of T-34s would attack the columns forcing a halt for a few hours. The sky was iron-grey and the overcast ceiling was five hundred feet, effectively grounding von Richthofen’s Luftwaffe. In the rear of this approaching army were the engineers struggling to keep up – it was a soft tail of around 800 trucks, lagging behind its armoured carapace as historian Alan Clarke put it. After four days of fighting Manstein’s soldiers were still on the way to Stalingrad but the attack slowed to a snail’s pace. Around the village of Sogotskot for example, the 6th Panzer had been forced turn west in an attempt to out-flank the enemy. The Russians had prepared a vast network of rifle pits that made it impossible for the tanks to advance. After point-blank firing into these pits, panzers were put to flight by T-34s which arrived at twilight. On the 16th December a hard and bitter wind began to blow from the north east. Everything was rimmed with frost, telegraph lines, stunted trees, the debris of war, corpses, burned out tanks, shattered trucks, horse carcasses. The ground froze so hard that footsteps began to sound like soldiers were walking on metal. The sunset that night was described as intensely beautiful, a vivid red while the white landscape turned a kind of arctic blue. IN Stalingrad late that afternoon every Russian along the Volga shore that day had heard a wonderous sound – a crashing noise that led to 62nd Army commander Vassili Chuikov bolting from his cave to witness a glorious sight. An enormous wave of ice was pushing down past Zaitsevski Island, smashing everything in its path.
