Hitler recognized, although he did not admit it, that the whole of the German position in southern Russia was now at risk. On the second day of the offensive, he ordered Field Marshal von Manstein to return to the south from Vitebsk to form a new Army Group Don. Manstein was the most admired strategist in the German Army and had worked successfully with Romanian forces in the Crimea.
In the physical absence of the Führer, the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht was paralysed. During 21 November, the day that Paulus and Schmidt abandoned their headquarters at Golubinsky when threatened by a column of Soviet tanks, Hitler’s chief adjutant, General Schmundt, was preoccupied with ‘alterations to the uniforms of officers and Wehrmacht officials’.
The Führer’s order to the Sixth Army to stand firm despite the threat of ‘temporary encirclement’ eventually caught up with Paulus when he reached Nizhne-Chirskaya. Paulus was also told to take under command all of Hoth’s troops south of Stalingrad and the remains of the Romanian VI Army Corps. The key part was: ‘Keep open rail lines as long as possible. Orders to follow on subject of resupply by air.’ Paulus, whose instinct was to consider withdrawal from the Volga to join up with the rest of Army Group B, was extremely reluctant to react to this abrupt decree until he felt that he had a better understanding of the overall situation.
He had flown to Nizhne-Chirskaya because the headquarters prepared there for the winter possessed secure communications with Army Group B and the Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg. But Hitler, on hearing of his arrival, suspected that he wanted to escape the Russians. He ordered him to fly back at once to join the rest of his staff at Gumrak within the encirclement. When General Hoth arrived early next morning, 22 November, he found Paulus angered and upset by Hitler’s insinuation that he had abandoned his men. Paulus’s chief of staff, General Schmidt, was on the telephone to General Martin Fiebig, the commander of VIII Air Corps. Schmidt re-emphasized that the Sixth Army urgently needed fuel and ammunition to break out, and Fiebig repeated what he had said the previous afternoon: ‘It’s impossible to resupply a whole army by air. The Luftwaffe hasn’t got enough transport aircraft.’
The three generals spent most of the morning assessing Sixth Army’s predicament. Schmidt did much of the talking. It was he who had spoken to General von Sodenstern at Army Group B the previous evening and heard details of the Soviet advance south-eastwards from Perelazovsky. Sodenstern had told him bluntly: ‘We have nothing to stop them with. You’ve got to help yourselves.’
During the discussion, Major-General Wolfgang Pickert, the commander of the Luftwaffe 9th Flak Division, entered the room. Schmidt, a classmate from staff college, called across with the favourite phrase of their instructor: ‘Decision with reasons, please!’ Pickert replied without hesitation that he intended to pull his division out at once.
‘We also want to get out,’ Schmidt replied, ‘but first of all we must form an all-round defence to form a defence line on the southern side where the Russians are attacking.’ He went on to say that they could not abandon the divisions on the west bank of the Don, and that Sixth Army would be in no position to break out for another five to six days. For the operation to have any chance of success, ‘we must have fuel and ammunition delivered by the Luftwaffe’. General Hube had already radioed that his tanks were about to come to a halt.
‘That makes no difference,’ Pickert retorted. He did not intend to lose a whole flak division with all its weapons. ‘The Sixth Army can never be supplied by air if we stay put.’ Schmidt did not disagree, but pointed out that they had little idea of the overall situation, nor did they know what reserves were available to higher command. He emphasized that the lack of fuel and horses meant that ‘more than 10,000 wounded and the bulk of heavy weapons and vehicles would have to be left behind. That would be a Napoleonic ending.’
Paulus, after his study of the 1812 campaign, was evidently haunted by the vision of his army’s disintegration, cut to pieces as it struggled to escape across the snow-covered steppe. He did not want to go down in history as the general responsible for the greatest military disaster of all time. There must also have been a natural temptation for Paulus, never renowned for an independence of thought, to defer decisions that were politically and strategically dangerous, now that he knew that Field Marshal von Manstein was about to take over. But Manstein, unable to fly down from the north because of the weather, was stuck in his headquarters train, delayed by partisan action.
Paulus had the instincts of a staff officer, not those of a battle-group leader reacting to danger. He could not countenance a breakout unless it was properly prepared and supplied, and formed part of an overall plan approved by higher command. Neither he nor Schmidt seems to have appreciated that speed was the decisive factor. They had failed utterly to prepare the heavy mobile force which offered their only hope of smashing the encirclement before it was in place. Now they failed to appreciate that once the Red Army consolidated its position, almost every factor, but especially the weather, would turn increasingly against them.
Much time had already been lost by sending tank regiments to the rear across the Don. With confirmation that morning of the loss of Kalach, they had to tell Strecker’s XI Army Corps and Hube’s XIV Panzer Corps to prepare to pull back to the east bank to join up with the rest of Sixth Army. At the end of the morning, Schmidt communicated the relevant orders to General Hube and to Colonel Groscurth, Strecker’s chief of staff.
At 2.00 p.m. that afternoon, Paulus and Schmidt flew back to the new headquarters at Gumrak inside the Kessel, or encircled area. Paulus brought along a supply of good red wine and Veuve-Cliquot champagne—a curious choice for someone supposedly planning to get out quickly. Once he reached the new Sixth Army headquarters by Gumrak railway station, he started to contact his corps commanders. He wanted their views on the Führer’s order, renewed that evening, to take up a ‘hedgehog’ defence and await further orders. ‘They all shared our view,’ wrote Schmidt later, ‘that a breakout to the south was necessary.’ The most outspoken was General von Seydlitz, whose headquarters were only a hundred yards away.
Paulus’s signal at 7.00 p.m. set out to paint a stark picture. ‘Army surrounded’ were his first words, even though the ring had not yet been sealed. It was a weak and badly structured signal, which did not follow the correct format. Most crucially of all, Paulus failed to propose a firm course of action. He asked for ‘freedom of action if it proves impossible to achieve all-round defence on the southern flank’.
At a quarter past ten that night, Paulus received a radio message from the Führer. ‘The Sixth Army is temporarily surrounded by Russian forces. I know the Sixth Army and your commander-in-chief and have no doubt that in this difficult situation it will hold on bravely. The Sixth Army must know that I am doing everything to relieve them. I will issue my instructions in good time. Adolf Hitler.’ Paulus and Schmidt, convinced despite this message that Hitler would soon see reason, began to prepare plans for a breakout to the south-west.
Hitler, on that evening of 22 November, was setting out with Keitel and Jodl in his special train from Berchtesgaden for Leipzig, from where an aeroplane would take him to Rastenburg. During the journey north, he halted the train every few hours to speak to Zeitzler. He wanted to check that Paulus would not be given permission to withdraw. During one of these conversations, the Führer told Zeitzler: ‘We’ve found another way out.’ He did not say that he had been talking on the special train again to General Hans Jeschonnek, the Luftwaffe chief of staff, who had already indicated, despite warnings from Richthofen, that an air-bridge to supply the Sixth Army might be possible on a temporary basis.