Stalingrad

Motorized Infantry Division was effectively wiped out. A lack of fuel forced the 3rd Motorized Infantry Division to abandon their vehicles and heavy weapons and retreat on foot through the thick snow. There was little hope of establishing a new defence line on the open steppe when soldiers did not have the strength to dig in.
    The Soviet 65th and 21st Armies pushed on towards Pitomnik, assisted by the 57th and 64th Army’s breakthroughs on the southern flank, where the 297th Infantry Division, including Mäder’s battle group, was forced backwards. Their right-hand neighbour, Edler von Daniels’s 376th Infantry Division, was cut off. Early in the afternoon of 14 January, Sixth Army headquarters signalled: ‘376 Infantry Division is destroyed. It is probable that Pitomnik airfield will only be usable until 15 January.’
    News of Soviet tank attacks now caused ‘panzer-fright’ in German ranks. There were hardly any anti-tank guns left with ammunition. Nobody had time to reflect on the way they had despised the Romanians for just such a reaction two months before.
    At this rather late stage in the battle, Hitler decided that the Sixth Army must be given more help to hold out. His motives were almost certainly mixed. He may have been genuinely shocked to find from Captain Behr how little help was getting through, but he must also have wanted to make sure that Paulus had no excuse for surrender. His solution – a characteristic move triggering great activity for little tangible result – was to establish a ‘Special Staff’ under Field Marshal Erhard Milch to oversee the air-supply operation. One member of Milch’s staff described this belated move as ‘Hitler’s excuse to beable to say that he had tried everything to save the soldiers in the
Kesse!’.
    Albert Speer accompanied Milch to the airfield, when he was setting off to take up his new role. Milch promised to try to find his brother and have him flown out of the
Kessel
, but neither Ernst Speer, nor even the remains of his unit, could be found. They had all disappeared, ‘missing presumed dead’. The only trace, Speer recorded, was a letter which came out by air, ‘desperate about life, angry about death, and bitter about me, his brother’.
    Milch and his staff reached Taganrog believing that they could achieve a great deal, but, as a senior Luftwaffe transport officer wrote, ‘One look at the actual situation was enough to convince them that nothing more could be done with the inadequate resources available’.
    The morning of 15 January, their first day of work, did not mark an encouraging start. Milch received a telephone call from the Führer demanding that the Stalingrad airlift be increased. As if to underline his efforts, Hitler that day awarded Paulus the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. At lunchtime Goering rang Milch to forbid him to fly into the
Kessel.
Fiebig then reported that Pitomnik had fallen to the Russians (in this he was slightly premature), and that the radio beacons in Gumrak had not yet been set up, which meant that transport aircraft should not be dispatched.
    The remaining Messerschmitt 109s flew out of Pitomnik soon after dawn the next morning, when the advancing Russians were in view. Those which diverted to Gumrak airfield landed to find heavy snow, which had not been cleared. At midday, Gumrak also came under artillery bombardment, and the Messerschmitts and Stukas there flew out of the
Kessel
for the last time on Richthofen’s orders. Paulus protested in vain.
    That day a battalion of the 295th Infantry Division surrendered en bloc. Voronov’s leaflet promising correct treatment of prisoners appears to have had some effect. ‘It was senseless to run away,’ the battalion commander said during his interrogation by Captain Dyatlenko. ‘I told my men that we would surrender in order to save lives.’ This captain, who had been an English teacher, added, ‘I feelvery bad because this is the first case of a whole battalion of German troops surrendering.’
    Another battalion commander who surrendered later, this one with the 305th Infantry Division in Stalingrad, spoke of the ‘unbearable conditions in our battalion’. ‘I could not help my men and I avoided meeting them. Everywhere in our regiment I heard soldiers talk of the suffering from cold and hunger. Every day our medical officer received dozens of frostbite casualties. Because the situation was so catastrophic, I considered that surrendering the