Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [179]
Black fountains appeared all over the snow-covered steppe, obliterating the white scene. The bombardment was so intense that Colonel Ignatov, an artillery commander, remarked with grim satisfaction: ‘There are only two ways to escape from an onslaught of this character – either death or insanity.’ In an attempt to be nonchalant, General Edler von Daniels described it as a ‘very unpeaceful Sunday’ in a letter to his wife. The grenadier regiment from his division in the front line was in no mood for levity, finding itself extremely vulnerable in its hastily prepared positions. ‘The enemy munition reserves’, wrote their commander, ‘were so huge, that we had never experienced anything like it.’
The south-western protuberance of the Kessel, the ‘Marinovka nose’, defended by the 44th, 29th Motorized and the 3rd Motorized Infantry Divisions, was strengthened at the last moment by part of the 376th. Every regiment was desperately under strength. The 44th Infantry Division had to be reinforced with artillerymen and even personnel from construction battalions. Several tanks and heavy weapons were allotted to the sector. Just behind the pioneer battalion’s position were two self-propelled assault guns and an 88-mm antiaircraft gun. But in the bombardment, the pioneers saw their own battalion headquarters blasted to pieces. ‘Nobody came out,’ wrote one of them. ‘For an hour, a hundred guns of various calibres and Stalin Organs fired away,’ wrote a lieutenant in the same division. ‘The bunker swayed continually under the bombardment. Then the Bolsheviks attacked in terrifying masses. Three waves of men rolled forward, never flinching. Red banners were borne aloft. Every fifty to a hundred yards there was a tank.’
The Landsers, their fingers so swollen from frostbite that they could hardly fit inside the trigger guard, fired from shallow fox-holes at the riflemen advancing across the snowfields with long spike bayonets fixed. Russian T-34S, some carrying infantry like monkeys on the backs of elephants, lurched across the steppe. The high winds which cut through clothing had blasted away the snow, exposing the top of the colourless steppe grass. Mortar shells rebounded off the frozen earth and exploded as air bursts, causing far more casualties. The defences of the 44th Infantry Division were soon smashed, and its survivors, once in the open, were at the mercy of the enemy as well as the elements.
During the afternoon, the 29th and 3rd Motorized Infantry Divisions in the main protuberance of the nose started to find themselves outflanked. In the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, the replacement soldiers were apathetic. ‘Some of them were so exhausted and sick,’ wrote an officer, ‘and thought only of slipping away to the rear at night, that I could only keep them in their positions at pistol point.’ Other accounts suggest that many summary executions were carried out during this last phase, but no figures are available.
Sergeant-Major Wallrawe’s scratch company of panzer grenadiers, Luftwaffe troops and ‘Cossacks’ held out until ten o’clock on the first night, when they received the order to pull back because the enemy had broken past them. They managed to take up a position north of Karpovka station, but were soon pushed back again. ‘From this day on, we had neither warm bunker nor warm food nor any peace!’ wrote Wallrawe.
These weakened divisions, with little ammunition, stood no chance against the mass attacks of the Soviet 21st and 65th Armies, backed by the ground-attack aircraft of the 16th Air Army. The Germans had fortified Marinovka and Karpovka on the south side of the nose with pillboxes and gun emplacements, but this was of little use with the main thrusts coming from the bridge of the nose. German attempts to counter-attack with odd groups of their remaining tanks and weakened infantry were doomed. The Russians used heavy mortar fire to