Willy could smell victory with that rubber nose of his, and he knew what the Russians were attempting to do. His lead regiment, the 33rd Motorized, stopped at the end of the day on October 15th, only 75 miles north of the Don. Just south of that were the bridgeheads that Zhukov had fought so stubbornly for, from which he had also launched his abortive Operation Mars. The armies massed there now included 2nd, 3rd and 4th Shock Armies, portions of the 24th Army, Volga Front Reserve units, and numerous independent rifle and tank corps that were now formed into the Don Army Group under Rokossovsky, a formation that had never been so named in the old history. The Rock had moved north at Zhukov’s order, turning over his command in the Donets Basin to another man.
The pieces on the board were different, but the game was still the same. This was the one strategic front that allowed the Soviets to attack. The divisions there, over 80 strong, had been resting, resupplying, and were waiting for the snow to herald Zhukov’s planned Operation Uranus.
Eberbach was through that gap, heading south toward those 80 plus divisions, while over his right shoulder, 36 more divisions were trying to withdraw to avoid encirclement that he alone was now striving to complete. No thought was given to what all those enemy units might do in response to his incursion. Willy Rubber Nose had the wind at his back, gasoline siphoned from his brother divisions, and he was heading south, a typical example of the audacity with which the Germans would conduct their mobile operations.
Hitler was delighted. All he could see were the arrows being drawn on the map to indicate the farthest on point of that advance. No one told him that, even at that moment, Katukov was dancing like an expert swordsman, executing a maneuver that would have made Hermann Balck proud to witness. He extricated his 1st Special Rifle Corps from its bridgehead containment operation, turning those positions over to the retreating rifle divisions. Then he made a night march on the road east through Kalach, a full 60 kilometers to Manino, where he ran head on into Eberbach’s 33rd Motorized Regiment. These two adversaries had fought the previous year on the road to Tula, and now they met again.
By dawn on the16th the Germans found themselves surround by the entire Corps, and the infantry adopted a defensive stance, its advance completely halted. Its fate would be sealed, for the mass of all those divisions withdrawing from Kirov’s first balloon was now forming a new line, and some were pushing up the rail line from the south. Hitler was reading his map, but it was lying to him. Things were not entirely as they seemed.
The German envelopment was quickly running out of steam, and grinding to a halt. Eberbach’s impudence had been answered by Katukov’s Special Rifle Corps, where Dimitri Lavrienko was still with Katukov’s force, and they had the very latest tanks Kirov’s factories could deliver. The two Guards Divisions took the 33rd Motorized Regiment in a vise, and then 4th and 11th Guards tank brigades went through them like knives. The Cavalry division finished off any that remained alive on the battlefield, the hardy Cossacks galloping through the sodden ground, sabers flashing. The regiment ceased to exist, Manino was retaken, and Eberbach, his HQ some 30 kilometers north, decided to call a halt to his premature encirclement. He was smart enough to know trouble on a battlefield when he found it, and radioed back to Model that it would be inadvisable for him to continue.
“But you told me you had already taken Manino,” said Model. “Push on to Kalach.”
“We did take Manino, but we just lost it, along with the entire 33rd Motorized Regiment! They’re gone.” There was a moment of silence on the line. Then Eberbach composed himself and continued. “We need to consolidate and reconnoiter. Something is going on. They brought up reinforcements from the south.”
“Alright, perhaps you are correct,” said Model. “The Infantry is finally moving up to relieve Hoth on the north shoulder of the breakthrough zone. That will put some fresh life in the offensive. He’ll take the lead while we reorganize and resupply. These rains are going to become sleet and snow soon, and I don’t have to tell you what the winter was like last year.”
“Lucky for me that the frostbite couldn’t do anything to this rubber nose of mine,” said Eberbach. “Tell Hoth to move quickly. They’re planning a counterattack. I can smell it.”
Eberbach’s nose, what was left of it after taking a bullet years ago, did not betray him. By dawn the Russians sent his men up in the wake of Eberbach’s cautious withdrawal, a cold storm blowing in on the point of the German breakthrough. They were aiming to seal the breach, and buy that time Zhukov desperately needed so he could unleash another storm to the south in Operation Uranus.
Like a fullback seeing trouble ahead, Model would now throw the ball laterally to Hoth, who was already forming up the first of two shock columns of his own, centered on his fresh 12th Panzer Division. Everything was in motion again, the long months of stalemate broken by the mass, shock, and speed of the German attack at Voronezh. Now it would be answered by another attack, born before its time, and hoping to redeem the laurels Operation Mars had first delivered, until Hermann Balck appeared on the scene to work his military magic and halt the advance. This time, Balck’s 11th Panzer Division was far away, down near Rostov where he had consolidated his position to wait for infantry support. It was no good sending his panzers into the urban mass of Rostov. That was work for infantry, and he had been promised the fresh 336th Division, but it was slow in coming.
Near Volgograd, Steiner’s troops had finally reorganized for the next phase of the operation. The road they were on ran directly east into the new quarter of the city renamed Novo Kirovka, and then up to Mamayev Kurgan. That height dominated the center of the city, serving as an artillery observation point. Shelled almost daily by Volkov’s guns across the river, that was most hazardous duty, and observation details would trudge grimly up each night, waiting for dawn to peer through the morning haze and smoke. Their job was to observe the cross-river town of Krasnolobodsk, where elements of Volkov’s Guard Corps manned fortified bunkers all along the river. The morning artillery duel went off like clockwork, and Mamayev Kurgan would invariably receive a five-minute barrage.
Known as the Hill of Blood, the battles fought there in the old history left fragments of metal and human bone embedded in the ground for decades after. There, in modern times, two huge statues stand on that hallowed ground, one bearing the clarion call to battle: “Rodina Mat’ Zovyot! The Motherland Calls!” The woman, representing Mother Russia herself, stands all of 53 meters, wielding a sword that extends another 33 meters, reaching high overhead. The tip of that blade extended up to a height that doubled that of the statue of Liberty bearing her torch in New York Harbor and the history it commemorated was yet to be written in these altered states—the misery and madness that the world once called the Battle of Stalingrad.
That morning, General Eric Manstein had left his rear area headquarters at Morozovsk to come visit Steiner’s forward HQ at Surovinko, a town on the River Chir, about 50 Kilometers west of Kalach Bridge. The spearheads of Steiner’s attack, the Brandenburgers and Grossdeutschland, were already 40 kilometers east of that bridge, and now a conference would be held to determine the plan of attack on the city.
“At this stage of the operation,” said Manstein, “we were to have pulled out your entire Korps and the city fight should be turned over to the infantry.”