Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [128]
Even that would be a useful service, for the Russians were now running rampant over the southern front. The pursuit was up, and the Germans went reeling back from the Don, back across the Donets. By late January, Army Group A was cut off from the main forces, its communications having to go back through the Crimea. Army Group B had gone back 250 miles, and Manstein’s Don Group was hard put to hold Rostov.
In Stalingrad seven Russian armies slowly strangled 6th Army. The perimeter got smaller and smaller; by late January it was a mere ten miles across. German soldiers sat down to write their last letters home, letters which on arrival in Berlin were seized by the authorities and analyzed to see how well the German soldier stood up under adversity. On the 23rd the Russians captured the last airstrip. Then they cut the remaining Germans into two pockets; the southern one was overrun on the 30th, and Paulus surrendered with it. On February 2 resistance ended; twenty-two divisions, reduced from more than a quarter of a million to a mere handful of 80,000 men, were left to march off into captivity. Hitler raged and fulminated: the “cowards” who surrendered should have had the decency to shoot themselves. The Verdun of World War II was over; the Russian steamroller so fondly envisaged in World War I had become a reality at last.
The great struggle for Stalingrad was only the most dramatic of the battles in Russia in 1942. All along the line, from northern Finland to the Black Sea and beyond, the two massive armies were locked in a fight whose magnitude defies ready comprehension. All through the campaigning season the Germans had pushed eastward, and the Russians had pushed back. Stalingrad had provided the great break, and in the early months of 1943 Russian tenacity finally paid off. In January they had attacked toward Leningrad and at the cost of more than a quarter of a million casualties they had opened a corridor through to the city. The long siege was ended at last; Leningrad had survived to take its place with Stalingrad among the epics of the Great Patriotic War. In November of 1942 the Reds had mounted an immense offensive against Rzhev, west of Moscow; it broke down with huge casualties, but they came back again in February, forcing the Germans out of a salient a hundred miles wide by a hundred miles deep. The space and distances covered were enormous; the Rzhev salient was nearly as big as the whole of German East Prussia. In the south the Germans viciously counterattacked the oncoming Soviets around Kharkov, and the momentum engendered by the Stalingrad offensive was finally lost. Manstein inflicted enormous losses on the Soviets once more, and by the time the rains came in March and the blessed or cursed mud arrived, the lines were back roughly where they had been a year ago, at the start of the great 1942 offensive. A whole year, and millions of casualties, and it was all for nothing.
The Russians now had a four to one superiority in men; they were receiving large amounts of Lend-Lease matériel from the United States and Great Britain; and they were gaining increasing air superiority over the front, as more and more Luftwaffe units became absorbed in countering the Anglo-American air bombardment of Germany. Short of a miracle, there was no way the Germans were going to stem the tide of military power massing to the eastward. In 1918, after the failure of their spring offensives on the Western Front, Ludendorff had asked Hindenburg what to do; the old field marshal had burst out, “Do! What to do? Make peace, you idiot!” Adolf Hitler did not believe in making peace; he believed in miracles.
The Germans lacked troops and material for a straight defense of their