Stalingrad

prepare bridging equipment and boats, as if for an offensive.
    Troop activity in other sectors was concealed by the construction of defences, which gave the opposite impression to plans for an offensive. The approach marches of formations for Operation Uranus were made at night, with troops hiding up during the day, a difficult task on the bare steppe, but Red Army camouflage techniques were remarkably effective. No fewer than seventeen false bridges were constructed over the Don to attract the Luftwaffe’s attention away from the five real ones, over which crossed the 5th Tank Army, the 4th Tank Corps, two cavalry corps and numerous rifle divisions.
    South of Stalingrad, the 13th Mechanized Corps, the 4th Mechanized Corps, the 4th Cavalry Corps and supporting formations – altogether over 160,000 men, 430 tanks, 550 guns, 14,000 vehicles and over 10,000 horses – were brought across the lower Volga in batches at night, a difficult and dangerous operation, with the ice floes coming down the river. They had to be camouflaged by dawn. The Red Army could not of course hope to conceal the forthcoming operation entirely, but, as one historian put it, their ‘greatest feat was in masking the scale of the offensive’.
    In the early autumn of 1942, most German generals, although they did not share Hitler’s conviction that the Red Army was finished, certainly considered it close to exhaustion. Staff officers, on the other hand, tended to take a more sceptical view. When Captain Winrich Behr, a highly decorated officer from the Afrika Korps, joined Sixth Army headquarters, Lieutenant-Colonel Niemeyer, the chief of intelligence, welcomed him with a much more sombre assessment than he had expected. ‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘come and see the situation map. Look at all the red markings. The Russians are starting to concentrate in the north here, and in the south here.’ Niemeyer feltthat senior officers, although concerned by a threat to their lines of communication, did not take the danger of encirclement seriously.
    Paulus and Schmidt, who saw all of Niemeyer’s reports, thought his concern exaggerated. Both generals expected quite heavy attacks with artillery and tanks, but not a major offensive deep into their rear, using the German’s own
Schwerpunkt
tactics. (After the event, Paulus seems to have fallen into that very human mistake of convincing himself that he had seen the true danger all along. Schmidt, however, was quite frank in his admission that they had gravely underestimated the enemy.) General Hoth, on the other hand, appears to have had a much clearer view of the threat posed by an attack from south of Stalingrad.
    Most generals back in Germany were convinced that the Soviet Union was incapable of two offensives, and Colonel Gehlen’s assessments, although deliberately delphic to cover any eventuality, continued to point to an attack against Army Group Centre as the most likely area for the main winter offensive. His organization had failed to identify the presence of the 5th Tank Army on the Don Front opposite the Romanians. Only a signals intercept shortly before the offensive pointed to its involvement.
    The most striking aspect of this period was the apparent assumption by Paulus and Schmidt that, once Sixth Army staff had passed back their reports, nothing more could be done since the threatened sectors were outside their area of responsibility. This passivity was entirely contrary to the Prussian tradition, which regarded inactivity, waiting for orders and failing to think for yourself as unforgivable in a commander. Hitler, of course, had set out to crush such independence in his generals, and Paulus, who was by nature more of a staff officer than a field commander, had acceded.
    Paulus has often been blamed for not disobeying Hitler later, once the scale of the disaster was clear, but his real failure as a commander was his failure to prepare to face the threat. It was his own army which was threatened. All he needed to do was to withdraw most of his tanks from the wasteful battle in the city to prepare a strong mechanized force ready to react rapidly. Supply and ammunition dumps should have been reorganized to ensure that their vehicles were kept ready to move at short notice. This comparatively smalldegree of preparation – and disobedience to Führer headquarters – would have left the Sixth Army in a position to defend itself effectively at the crucial moment.
    Hitler had decreed in