Even before Sixth Army started to dig in on the steppe between the Don and the Volga, Vasilevsky had been discussing the next stage with the commanders of the South-West and Voronezh Fronts. He submitted his initial project to Stalin on the night of 26 November. The estimated start date for Saturn, allowing for redeployment and reinforcement, was 10 December. Stalin agreed, and told him to proceed. A more immediate preoccupation, however, had to be addressed first. This was the question of how Manstein would react to save the Sixth Army.
Stalin began to suffer from a characteristic bout of impatience. He wanted everything to happen at once—both Operation Saturn and the rapid destruction of the Sixth Army. He had already given orders for the 2nd Guards Army, the most powerful force in the Red Army, to deploy west of Stalingrad, ready for the attack on Rostov. But as Vasilevsky discovered in the first week of December, even with seven Soviet armies deployed against them, Paulus’s divisions were going to be much more difficult to destroy than they had imagined.
On 28 November, Stalin asked Zhukov for an assessment of enemy intentions. Zhukov sent his report the next day. ‘The trapped German forces are not likely to try to break out without help from a relief force from the direction of Nizhne-Chirskaya and Kotelnikovo,’ he wrote. His predictions proved accurate, but a close study of the situation showed that this was the only practicable choice. After sending his answer to Stalin, Zhukov discussed the situation with Vasilevsky, who had now been told by Stalin to focus his attention entirely on the reduction of the Sixth Army. The two generals privately agreed that they would probably have to postpone Operation Saturn and instead consider an Operation Little Saturn. The plan would be to crash into the rear and left flank of Manstein’s Army Group Don. This would bring any drive to relieve Stalingrad to an abrupt halt.
Manstein’s plan to rescue the Sixth Army—Operation Winter Storm—was developed in full consultation with Führer headquarters. (See Map 5.) It aimed to break through to the Sixth Army and establish a corridor to keep it supplied and reinforced, so that, according to Hitler’s order, it could maintain its ‘cornerstone’ position on the Volga, ‘with regard to operations in 1943’. Manstein, however, who knew that Sixth Army could not survive the winter there, instructed his headquarters to draw up a further plan in the event of Hitler’s seeing sense. This would include the subsequent breakout of Sixth Army, in the event of a successful first phase, and its physical reincorporation in Army Group Don. This second plan was given the name Operation Thunderclap.
Winter Storm, as Zhukov had predicted, was originally planned as a two-pronged attack. One thrust would come from the area of Kotelnikovo, well to the south, and around a hundred miles from the Sixth Army. The other would start from the Chir front west of the Don, which was little more than forty miles from the edge of the Kessel, but the continuing attacks of Romanenko’s 5th Tank Army against the German detachments along the river Chir ruled out that start-line. This left only the LVII Panzer Corps round Kotelnikovo, supported by the rest of Hoth’s very mixed Fourth Panzer Army, to relieve Paulus’s trapped divisions.
The LVII Panzer Corps, commanded by General Friedrich Kirchner, had been weak at first. It consisted of two Romanian cavalry divisions and the 23rd Panzer Division, which mustered no more than thirty serviceable tanks. The 6th Panzer Division, arriving from France, was a vastly more powerful formation, but its members hardly received an encouraging impression. The Austrian divisional commander, General Erhard Raus, was summoned to Manstein’s royal carriage in Kharkov station on 24 November, where the field marshal briefed him. ‘He described the situation in very sombre terms,’ recorded Raus. Three days later, when the first trainload of Raus’s division steamed into Kotelnikovo station to unload, his troops were greeted by ‘a hail of shells’ from Soviet batteries. ‘As quick as lightning, the panzer grenadiers jumped from their wagons. But already the enemy was attacking the station with their battle-cries of “Urrah!”’
Hoth was indeed glad to see the 6th Panzer Division. It had been refitted in Brittany, and was fully up to strength, with 160 long-barrelled Panzer Mark IVs and forty assault guns. The division soon had a chance to try out its new equipment. On 3 December, it became involved in a wild battle with the Soviet 4th Cavalry Corps near the village of Pakhlebin, seven miles north-west of Kotelnikovo. The panzer crews, exhilarated as their tank tracks crunched through the crust of ice in their outflanking armoured charge, cut off the 81st Cavalry Division, inflicting heavy losses. General Raus, pleased with the result, referred to the engagement as ‘the Cannae of Pakhlebin’. The arrival of Raus’s division confirmed Yeremenko’s suspicions that the Germans were about to strike north-eastwards from Kotelnikovo, yet Stalin still refused to transfer reserves to the threatened sector.
Also on 3 December, Hoth produced his proposal for ‘Winter Storm’, which began: ‘Intention: Fourth Panzer Army relieves Sixth Army’, but valuable time was lost. The 17th Panzer Division, which was to complete his strike force, had been held back, on the orders of Führer headquarters, as a reserve behind the Italian Eighth Army. In the end it did not join Hoth’s force until four days after the operation had begun. Hitler nevertheless insisted that no more time should be wasted. He was also impatient to discover how the new Tiger tank, with its 88-mm gun, would perform. The very first battalion to be formed had been rushed to the Ostfront and added to Kirchner’s force. On the evening of 10 December, the commanders received the ‘Order for the Relief Attack to Stalingrad’.
On 12 December, after a brief artillery bombardment, Hoth’s panzers struck north. The German soldiers inside the Kessel listened eagerly to the distant sound of fighting. Confidence seemed boundless. Excited rumours ran round the Sixth Army. ‘Manstein is coming!’ soldiers said to each other, almost like the Easter greeting of the Orthodox Church. For Hitler loyalists, the distant guns were proof once more that the Führer always kept his word.
Hitler, however, had not the slightest intention of allowing the Sixth Army to break out. In his midday conference at the Wolfsschanze, he told Zeitzler that it was impossible to retreat from Stalingrad because this would involve sacrificing ‘the whole meaning of the campaign’ and argued that too much blood had been shed. As Kluge had warned Manstein, he was still obsessed with the events of the previous winter and his order to Army Group Centre to hold fast. ‘Once a unit has started to flee,’ he lectured the army chief of staff, ‘the bonds of law and order quickly disappear in the course of flight.’
The Soviet commanders did not expect Manstein’s offensive quite so soon. Yeremenko immediately feared for the 57th Army, which held the south-west corner of the Kessel. Vasilevsky was at 51st Army headquarters with Khrushchev on 12 December when the news of the German attack was received in a radio signal. He tried to ring Stalin in Moscow, but could not get through. Not wanting to waste a moment, he contacted General Rokossovsky, the commander of the Don Front, and told him that he wanted to transfer General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army to the command of the Stalingrad Front to block Manstein’s offensive. Rokossovsky protested strongly, and to Vasilevsky’s dismay when he finally got through to the Kremlin on the telephone that evening, Stalin was angry at what he thought was an attempt to force him into a decision. He refused to give an answer and forced Vasilevsky to spend a very anxious night.