In December 1942 he decided in the State Defence Committee to put Konstantin Rokossovski in sole command of the front. Stalin had until then been exercising a degree of self-restraint at planning sessions, and the surprised Zhukov fell silent. Stalin exclaimed: ‘Why are you keeping quiet? Or is it that you don’t have your own opinion?’ Zhukov, who had spent weeks assembling a command group at Stalingrad, pointed out that these commanders, especially Andrei Yeremenko, would take offence. But Stalin had made up his mind: ‘Now is not the time to be offended. Ring up Yeremenko and tell him the State Defence Committee’s decision.’10 Yeremenko indeed took it badly, but Stalin refused to speak to him. The plan and the personnel were at last in place. The fighting around Stalingrad had reached a peak of intensity. The city had been turned into a lunar landscape; hardly a building remained intact. Ammunition and food were running out. The icy Volga winter made conditions hardly bearable for soldiers on both sides: frostbite and malnutrition affected many of them. Soviet forces, however, were somewhat better supplied than the Germans and their allies. Hitler had failed to remedy the problem of stretched lines of communication. Unmistakably the Red Army had the edge.
Hitler was altogether too casual about the difficulties in Stalingrad until Paulus had been cut off by Konstantin Rokossovski’s Don Front and Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front. Paulus’s only option was to attempt a break-out; but Hitler, who thought that the Luftwaffe would keep German forces supplied until such time as Manstein could make a crushing advance, overruled him. Zhukov and Vasilevski had anticipated all this. They filled the gap between Paulus and Manstein with a mass of armoured divisions. From this position they intended to deliver two strategic blows. Operation Saturn aimed to retake Rostov-on-Don while Operation Circle would complete the closure of Stalingrad and the destruction of Paulus’s forces. This dual scheme was too ambitious. It allowed Manstein to stabilise his front and threaten the Soviet besiegers of Stalingrad. By themselves Zhukov and Vasilevski might have reacted more flexibly. But they had Stalin looking over their shoulders. Once he had the scent of victory, he could not contain himself. The result was that the Reds were needlessly fighting to the point of exhaustion — and the Germans were given a second chance.
Yet Soviet forces regrouped. Manstein failed to smash down their defences, and Rokossovski was able to turn his divisions on Paulus. The Wehrmacht experienced the fate it had customarily meted out to its enemies. German soldiers had been convinced by Nazi propaganda that they were going to fight a rabble of
Other war leaders might have gone down to witness some of the action. Stalin resolutely stayed put in Moscow. The reality of war for him was his conversations with Zhukov, his inspection of maps and the orders he shouted down the telephone line at frightened politicians and commanders. He neither witnessed nor read about the degradation among Paulus’s forces. They froze and starved and caught rats and chewed grass and tree bark for food. The end was approaching, and Paulus was invited to surrender. The street fighting pinned him deep into the city. Hand-to-hand combat continued until Paulus gave himself up, and on 2 February 1943 German resistance ceased. Stalingrad was a Soviet city again. The German losses were greater than in any previous theatre of the Second World War: 147,000 of them had been killed and 91,000 taken captive. The Red Army had lost still more men. But it had gained much more in other ways. The myth of the Wehr-macht’s invincibility had been discredited. Hitler had visibly lacked basic skills of generalship. Whereas Soviet citizens had once doubted whether the Red Army could win the war, now everyone thought it might have a chance.
