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to build walls of frozen corpses behind which to hide from the elements. The freezing of the river speeded up once the temperature dropped to –15 Celsius in late November, but was not complete until 17 December. Before then, the ice floes made any river crossing impossible even for armoured boats, so the Sixty-second Army had to stay on short rations until trucks were able to cross the river. ‘We were going to have to fight on two fronts,’ recorded the Russian commander, ‘against the enemy and the Volga.’ With ammunition and food supplies dropping off dangerously, Chuikov recalled how the ‘ice-floes piled up and formed obstructions, and made a disgusting crunching noise which made our flesh creep and sent shudders up our spines, as if someone were sawing into our vertebrae’.58 Once the ice was thick enough, however, 18,000 trucks and 20,000 other vehicles crossed over to resuscitate the still-besieged Red Army.59 Meanwhile, the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the factory district continued unabated.

By mid-December, the dire position of the Sixth Army could only possibly be alleviated by Manstein coming to the rescue. His Army Group Don looked effective on paper, consisting of two Panzer divisions, one infantry division, Hoth’s headquarters and some Romanians, and it set out on 12 December to try to cross the 62 miles to the city in Operation Wintergewitte (Winter Tempest). ‘I have considered one thing, Zeitzler,’ Hitler said of Stalingrad at the Wolfschanze that same afternoon,

Looking at the big picture, we should under no circumstances give this up. We won’t get it back once it’s lost… To think that it would be possible to do it a second time, if we go back there and the matériel stays behind, is ridiculous. They can’t take everything with them. The horses are tired, and they don’t have any more strength to pull. I can’t feed one horse with another. If they were Russians, I’d say ‘One Russian eats up the other one.’ But I can’t let one horse eat the other horse.60

It is unclear whether he reached this conclusion on practical or humanitarian grounds. Talking of the heavy artillery in the city, especially howitzers, Hitler added: ‘We can’t replace what we have in there. If we abandon it, we abandon the whole purpose for the campaign. To think that I will come back here next time is madness… We won’t come back here, so we can’t leave.’

Manstein’s plan was for Paulus to break out once Hoth’s tanks came to within 20 miles of the perimeter. However, on 16 December Zhukov unleashed Operation Little Saturn to turn Hoth back. Once again, it was their allies who proved the bane of the Wehrmacht: the Soviet South-west Front destroyed the Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don, opening a 60-mile gap and allowing the Russians to attack Manstein’s right flank towards Rostov. The loss of Rostov would have cut off Kleist, who in November had been named commander of Army Group A in the Caucasus, so Hoth’s force was weakened to prevent this happening, thereby wrecking his chances of getting close enough to Stalingrad to prise the Sixth Army out.

On 19 December Manstein ordered Paulus to break out to the south-west, but Paulus now preferred to follow Hitler’s orders to stay put. (‘Dear Field Marshal,’ Paulus had replied in a postscript to an earlier request, ‘In the circumstances I hope you will overlook the inadequacy of the paper and the fact that this letter is handwritten.’61) Manstein’s under-strength divisions nonetheless got to within 35 miles of Stalingrad, but the whole momentum of Winter Tempest stalled when on 23 December Hoth’s armour was forced to halt on the River Mishkova, unable to make any further headway in the face of tough Russian opposition and the monstrous weather conditions. The irony of the operation’s codename was not lost on anyone. If Stalingrad was the turning point of the war, the halt on the River Mishkova was what prevented it from turning back again. By 28 December Manstein had to pull Hoth’s force back in order to prevent its encirclement.

Yet, even if Manstein had got the whole way to Stalingrad,