MAJOR DISASTER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 5 February 1944, Page 5

MAJOR DISASTER

NAZIS AT STALINGRAD ANNIVERSARY OF SURRENDER A year ago this week the climax was reached in one of the greatest tactical | disasters suffered by German arms, j writes the military correspondent of the “New Zealand Herald.” This was the surrender of Field-Marshal F. von Paul us and his Sixth German-Ru-manian Army at Stalingrad after they had been encircled for 70 days. For a few weeks before the event the surrender or annihilation of this army was as certain as anything can be certain in war, but the sheer drama of the actual closing of the battle caught the imagination. Alter their capture, German generals said the Sixth Army had numbered 330,000 when the Russian offensive began, November, 1942. By 10th January. 1943, it had lost up to 140.000 bj r 'Russian artillery and air and ground attack, and by hunger, frostbite and exhaustion. When the Russian “liquidation” offensive began on 10th January the army was of about 195.000. including reinforcing, engineer and police units. Between 10th and 31st , January more than 100,000 of these were killed and about 46,000 captured. SUPERIOR SOVIET STRATEGY Stalingrad was spectacular in the magnitude of the German wastage of men and material and in its marking of a turning point in the war, but it is questionable whether it was the decisive battle of the war as is sometimes suggested. The decisive battles in Russia were fought in 1941 when the Germans failed to smash the Russian armies, or to win the secondary objective of positions from which they might resume a campaign of annihilation in the following year. The brilliant tactics with which they broke into successive defence lines and captured territory were defeated by the superior and far-sighted Soviet strategy, which sought to preserve the Russian armies intact against the day when the German onslaught would have spent itself. That day came toward the end of 1942 at Stalingrad and the Caucasus. RESPONSIBILITY FOR GERMAN PLANS How far the plans which took the Germans to Stalingrad were those of the German General Staff and how far they were those of Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy is yet to be disclosed. Captain F. O. Miksche, a Czech writer whose contributions to military history are being favourably received, notes a prolonged and bitter struggle between the generals and the Nazi Party. He states that Field-Marshal Brauchitsch and Generals von Bock and Haider were sacrificed because they presumed to warn Hitler of fundamental errors in the Russian campaign. Captain Cyril Falls, in his latest book “Ordeal By Battle,” after commenting that the General Staff’s permeation and soaking in the thought of Clausewitz had stood them in good stead, adds: “Fortunately for the world, another philosophy has been contending with his: the arrogant, pretentious, rash, self-satisfied theories of National Socialism, accompanied by an inferiority complex, the whole equipment being thus rendered unbalanced and precarious.” Miksche draws attention to an old principle of war which says that the capture of territory is a result of but not the aim of a battle, and he says that this has been fully confirmed in Russia. The available evidence suggests that the German General Staff realised that the campaign could have been decided in the Ukraine or the Donetz Basin if the Germans had succeeded in completely smashing the Russian armies. The Russian strategy of withdrawal prevented this. IMMENSE SUPPLY DIFFICULTIES To quote Miksche again: “The deeper the German armies drove into the steppes, the greater the number of small detachments they had to leave behind to guard communications, and, with every increase in distance, transport difficulties became more complicated. For example, keeping the front at Rostov supplied with arms and munitions—taking the armament factories in the Ruhr as the base—meant a journey for railway rolling stock of over 200*0 miles there and back, which would take six weeks. “No less important was the fact that, the farther the Germans penetrated into Russia, the greater the length of their front line and the number of divisions retired to man it. The Germans reached Stalingrad in September, 1942. They had stretched themselves to the limit. They were without strategic reserve which might have enabled them to break the city's resistance, and they further weakened themselves by diverging toward the oilfields of the Caucasus. They were so so weak, also that they could not spare Rommel the five divisions which might have enabled him to continue to Cairo and Alexandria. SIXTH ARMY TRAPPED In November and December the Russians brought their strategic reserves into action. On 19th November they struck from the north-west and southwest of Stalingrad and enclosed the Sixth Army, which made great efforts to break the encircling arms. In the middle of December they ensured the success of the encirclement by a break through from the Middle Don on to the German axis of retreat, and they followed this up by a move westward beyond the trapped Sixth Army. The end of this army came with its surrender on 2nd February last fear. The present parlous position of the Germans is a result of Russian strategy of which Stalingrad was a part the whole being tied into the wider plan of Britain, America and Russia acting in concert.