INTRODUCTION
ORIGINS
INITIAL STRATEGY
THE PLAN
THE RAID
The Approach March, 16–23 December 1942
The Attack, 24 December
The German Reaction, 24 December
Last Stand, 25–27 December
Exfiltration, 28 December
ANALYSIS
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
At 1400hrs on 23 November 1942, Soviet troops from the 4th Mechanized Corps linked up with troops from the 4th Tank Corps near Kalach, completing the encirclement of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich von Paulus’ 6. Armee within the Stalingrad pocket. In just four days, the Soviet winter counter-offensive known as Operation Uranus had succeeded in reversing the Red Army’s desperate situation at Stalingrad and seizing the strategic initiative from the Wehrmacht. Inside the Stalingrad pocket, the trapped Axis force consisted of the 6. Armee, IV Armeekorps from 4. Panzerarmee and the remnants of the Romanian 4th Army, with a total of 256,000 German and 11,000 Romanian soldiers. The completion of the Soviet encirclement of Armeeoberkommando 6 (6th Army High Command; AOK 6) was an unprecedented catastrophe for Hitler’s Third Reich and the culmination of a decade of doctrinal development and experimentation in mechanized warfare by the Red Army.
Yet Hitler was resolved to save the trapped forces in Stalingrad, and immediately decided upon three counter-measures to mitigate the Soviet success. Firstly, he ordered the Luftwaffe to mount an airlift from a number of airfields outside the pocket in order to sustain the trapped forces. Secondly, he authorized the formation of Heeresgruppe Don (Army Group Don) under one of his most brilliant commanders, Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manstein, and tasked him to establish a new front on the Chir River with those forces not trapped inside Stalingrad. This new front line, built mostly out of extemporized units and the remnants of the Romanian divisions shattered by Operation Uranus, would provide the springboard for a relief operation known as Wintergewitter, which would be mounted in order to reestablish a ground link to AOK 6. Third, Hitler ordered the rapid transfer of significant reinforcements to von Manstein’s Heeresgruppe Don in order for him to be able to launch Wintergewitter within about two to three weeks. These reinforcements included the 6., 11., 17. and 23. Panzer-Divisionen. Hitler determined that with a bit of luck and determination, the Soviet ring around Stalingrad could be broken and the whole affair reduced to a temporary setback for the German conquest of the Soviet Union.
VASILY M. BADANOV (1895–1971)
After spending two years in a teacher’s seminary, Badanov enlisted in the Russian Imperial Army in 1915 and served in World War I. He distinguished himself in combat and quickly rose to command an infantry company. By 1916, Badanov received a commission as a reserve officer, but when the Russian Revolution erupted a year later, he was elected as people’s representative for his regimental committee. Soon thereafter, Badanov joined the Red Army and served both as a commissar and a staff officer in the campaign against Admiral Kolchak’s White forces in the Urals in 1919.
After the Russian Civil War, Badanov transferred to the OGPU secret police for nearly six years, and commanded a regiment in one of its divisions. (The OGPU was involved in suppressing internal political dissent and was responsible for the creation of the Gulag prison system.) In 1927, Badanov returned to the Red Army and went through a series of training assignments that eventually landed him a role as an instructor at Saratov in 1930, where the first Red Army tank school was forming. Badanov transferred to the new tank branch and was closely involved in the Red Army’s tank training programme of the 1930s. In 1937, he was commander of the Poltava Automobile Technical College, where tank maintenance was taught. Badanov managed to avoid the purges – his OGPU connections may have helped – and as war approached he sought to get a combat command.
At the start of the German invasion in June 1941, Badanov was assigned command of the 55th Tank Division in the 21st Army during the battle of Smolensk. However, this poorly equipped division had only a short combat career before it was disbanded due to heavy losses. In August 1941, Badanov was given command of the 12th Tank Brigade, one of the new tank units, equipped with KV, T-34 and T-70 tanks, and which served with the Southwest Front.
On 19 April 1942, Badanov took command of the newly formed 24th Tank Corps and spent the next few months preparing the formation for combat. Although Badanov accomplished his mission during the Tatsinskaya raid, and was awarded the Order of Suvorov 2nd degree for doing so, he apparently angered Stalin by retreating without authorization. Consequently, Badanov never received the Hero of the Soviet Union (HSU) award.
He remained in command of the renamed 2nd Guards Tank Corps until June 1943, when he took command of the 4th Tank Army. This formation was vastly larger than his previous command and had 37,000 troops and 652 tanks when it participated in Operation Kutuzov, the Soviet counter-offensive to retake the Orel salient in July 1943. Unlike the Tatsinskaya raid, Badanov’s tank army had to push forward against stiff German resistance and it suffered heavy losses. Badanov later led the 4th Tank Army during the Lvov–Sandomierz offensive in March 1944, until he was seriously wounded. After recovering from concussion, he spent the next two years in high-level training assignments.
Following the war, he commanded Soviet tank and mechanized forces in East Germany in 1946–1950 and retired in 1953. He later wrote his account of the Tatsinskaya raid in 1968, but it was typical of the politically influenced history produced in the Soviet era and was riddled with numerous errors and omissions.
On 24 November 1942 – the day after the Soviet link-up near Kalach – Generaloberst Wolfram von Richtofen’s Luftflotte 4 (4th Air Fleet) began an airlift to sustain AOK 6 in Stalingrad. Von Richtofen hastily assembled a force of transports and bombers at Tatsinskaya and Morozovskaya airfields to conduct the resupply operation. Although the Luftwaffe had only sufficient aircraft on hand to provide roughly one-eighth of the AOK 6 daily supply requirements, it had gained plenty of experience with aerial resupply operations in Russia during the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front. During February–April 1942, the Luftwaffe had successfully supplied nearly 100,000 German troops in the Demyansk and Kholm pockets for more than two months, until a ground relief operation succeeded in reaching them. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring – ignoring the effects of harsh winter weather and the larger scale required to keep open an aerial bridge to Stalingrad – assured Hitler that his Luftwaffe could sustain AOK 6 until a relief operation was launched. However, it would take several weeks for Manstein to gather his forces for Wintergewitter and, in the meantime, it was up to Luftflotte 4 to keep AOK 6 from crumbling.
On 30 November, Generalleutnant Martin Fiebig, the commander of VIII Fliegerkorps (VIII Air Corps), was made Luftversorgungsführer (air resupply leader) and he established his headquarters at Tatsinskaya airfield. The Germans had first occupied Tatsinskaya on 21 July and had begun improving the base even before Operation Uranus had created the necessity for an airlift operation. Although the 1,500m (5,000ft)-long grass runway was adequate under normal weather conditions, keeping the field clear of deep snow once winter arrived was a gargantuan and manpower-intensive task. It was also extremely difficult to keep aircraft operational in sub-zero temperatures, and required specialized warming trucks to pre-heat aircraft engines. Given the difficulty of keeping just these two primary airfields operational, Fiebig decided to concentrate all the available Ju-52 transport groups at Tatsinskaya and put them under the command of Oberst Hans Förster, while the He-111 and other bomber units pressed into service as transports were based at Morozovskaya. This was a risky but sensible decision, since it simplified logistical and maintenance support. Both airfields were located adjacent to the main east–west rail line supporting Heeresgruppe Don and supplies of fuel and ammunition could easily be trans-loaded from trains to the nearby airfields. When Fiebig made this decision in late November 1942, the nearest Soviet troops were more than 80km (50 miles) away from either airfield, so ground defence did not seem a priority. Heeresgruppe Don had formed Armee Abteilung Hollidt (Army Detachment Hollidt) to hold the area between the Chir and Don rivers, and although this sector was thinly manned there did not appear to be an immediate threat to the airfields.
The airlift got off to a shaky start and never came close to meeting AOK 6’s supply needs, but it did succeed in evacuating thousands of casualties from inside the pocket and providing a morsel of hope that somehow catastrophe could be avoided. Manstein gave Generaloberst Hermann Hoth responsibility for conducting Wintergewitter, but the promised reinforcements arrived more slowly than expected and only the 6. and 23. Panzer-Divisionen were available by the second week of December. Soviet attacks against Armee Abteilung Hollidt forced Manstein to keep 11. Panzer-Division to hold the Chir front. Nevertheless, Manstein recognized that he could no longer delay the relief operation if there was to be any chance of success and he was forced to begin Wintergewitter with the forces on hand. On 12 December, 151km (94 miles) southeast of Tatsinskaya, Hoth attacked with the two Panzer divisions of LVII Panzerkorps and initially made rapid progress towards Stalingrad. For a few days, it even seemed that Hoth might pull off a miracle and rescue at least some of the trapped AOK 6.
Unfortunately for the Wehrmacht, Operation Uranus was only the opening round in the Red Army’s winter counter-offensive in southern Russia. The Stavka had no intention of allowing either Wintergewitter or the Luftwaffe airlift to de-rail their plans for crushing the Stalingrad pocket and then driving on to Rostov. Four days after Manstein began Wintergewitter, General-leytenant (Lieutenant-General) Nikolai Vatutin’s Southwest Front began Operation Little Saturn against the Italian VIII Army on Heeresgruppe Don’s left flank. Spearheading Vatutin’s offensive, the 1st Guards Army and 3rd Guards Army committed three tank corps, one mechanized corps and nine rifle divisions against the thinly spread Italian forces and were able to achieve a number of breakthroughs by the second day of the offensive. Two tank corps – the 24th Tank Corps under General-major (Major-General) Vasily M. Badanov and the 25th Tank Corps under Major-General Petr P. Pavlov – were initially held in reserve. Once the Italian front was broken, Badanov and Pavlov were ordered to advance into the breach and to operate as independent mobile groups to strike deep behind enemy lines. Their objectives were the Luftwaffe airfields at Tatsinskaya and Morozovskaya, located 232km (144 miles) to the south.
We are at the dawn of a new epoch in military art, and must move from a linear strategy to a deep strategy.
– Georgy Isserson, Frunze Military Academy, 1933
Once the Red Army began to settle into the habits of a professional military force after the conclusion of the Russian Civil War, one of the first questions that its leadership began to address was what kind of forces it would need for future military operations. The Russian Army had always been offensively oriented. The Red Army adopted this ethos as well, but recognized that standard linear offensive methods had not worked well against the defence-in-depth tactics that appeared during World War I. Particularly vexing questions were how best to break a prepared enemy defence – which had been achieved on occasion in 1914–18 – and how to convert a breakthrough from a local tactical victory into a wider success that yielded decisive results.
Despite its many horrific consequences, the Revolution enabled a new cadre of revisionist Russian military thinkers to come into their own, and by the late 1920s they were proposing a radical re-think of Soviet military doctrine. These revisionists recognized that the Red Army needed more than just large infantry armies, and they aggressively advocated new tactics based upon tanks, mobile artillery and close air support. In 1929, Lieutenant-General Vladimir K. Triandafillov wrote The Character of Operations of Modern Armies, which first began to establish the concepts of glubokiy boy (Deep Battle) and advocated the formation of large tank units. Triandafillov also conceived of the breakthrough being achieved by a udarnaia armiia (shock army), consisting of up to 15 rifle divisions, reinforced with heavy artillery and tanks. Mikhail Tukhachevsky also contributed to the early development of Deep Battle theory and the promotion of mechanization in the Red Army.
Initially, Deep Battle was conceived as merely a tactical solution to breaking through a World War I-style defence, by coordinating artillery, tanks and airpower to achieve a powerful combat synergy, but initially the depth of penetration was envisioned to be only about 15km (9 miles). The Red Army formed its first experimental tank brigade in May 1930, and two years later the Soviets established two mechanized corps, each with 463 light tanks. However, the Red Army was uncertain about the best way to use tanks on the battlefield – a debate that was also occurring in other major armies.