- 2 days ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00In the autumn of 1942, only the grim resistance of the Red Army stood between Hitler and the conquest of the city which he sought above all others, Stalingrad.
00:30The End
01:00The terrible ferocity of the fighting in the ruined city has become a byword for savagery and tenacity.
01:11But the Germans had almost succeeded in capturing the city without street fighting.
01:16The German 6th Army could conceivably have won at Stalingrad, but only under one condition.
01:21That is, before or by September the 13th, 1942, they had managed to encircle outside the city of Stalingrad the two Soviet armies which subsequently defended the city, namely the 62nd Soviet Army and the 64th Soviet Army.
01:38But once that chance was missed, what happened was the two Soviet armies and the rest of Soviet defenders fell back on Stalingrad, and that was really the onset of the enormous cataclysmic battle which took place.
01:50Despite this heroic resistance, by October, the Germans occupied seven-eighths of the city.
01:58The Russian 62nd Army, under its newly appointed commander, General V. I. Zhukov, was penned back against the Volga River.
02:06However, battered ferries from the Russian-held east bank, running a gauntlet of bombs and artillery fire, kept the encircled defenders' lifeline in place.
02:18They were supplied with just enough food and munitions to continue the fighting.
02:25Nonetheless, in the third week of October, it seemed as if the Russians would finally be overrun.
02:30Only the inspirational leadership of Zhukov, rallying his forces from the thick of the action, and the Red Army's capacity to regain under cover of darkness, the strong points they had lost by day, prevented the fall of the city.
02:45The conditions in Stalingrad were unbelievably ghastly.
02:49In fact, this was a complete and utter orgy of horror.
02:52Stalingrad had been reduced to rubble by heavy German bombing.
02:55Therefore, you didn't have a front line.
02:57What you really had throughout the city, by day and by night, was constant, uninterrupted fire.
03:04Fire from the Soviet artillery, from rather heavier guns, but mostly small arms fire.
03:10And combat, really, man-to-man and hand-to-hand fighting.
03:13It wasn't a question of controlling a sector of the front.
03:16It was a question of controlling the room of a house, or a partial section of a house, or a piece of a road, or a piece of a building.
03:23It's generally regarded, I think, as one of the most horrendous battles in the history of the world.
03:27Both for its ferocity, also for its inhumanity, and also for these conditions which were quite unbelievably nightmarish.
03:35And got worse, of course, as the weather got colder.
03:40To add to the inhuman demands of their fighting, nature now added her own burden.
03:46During the first half of November, the Volga was blocked by ice.
03:50Without the ferries, the Russian position became almost intolerable.
03:55There was some relief, because the German Luftwaffe, hampered by snow,
04:01now flew only half the number of sorties it had managed at the outbreak of the battle.
04:05But this was still twice what the Red Air Force could achieve.
04:09Again, the German army came within a whisker of overpowering the Russian defences.
04:15After months of bloody house-to-house fighting of unimaginable horror,
04:21a final German attack was planned for November the 18th.
04:26But it was already too late.
04:31Behind the Russian lines, preparations were already underway for a counter-offensive,
04:36which would doom the Sixth Army's effort and spell the collapse of the whole German campaign in the South.
04:47As early as August, the German High Command had warned Hitler of the dangers of advancing Army Group A into the Caucasus,
04:54while simultaneously using Army Group B to attempt the capture of Stalingrad.
04:59German military resources were totally inadequate to safeguard the flanks of this double spearhead.
05:11A gap soon developed between Groups A and B, which was 200 miles wide and guarded by just a single division.
05:18Not only did Hitler ignore the warnings of his generals, which grew more raucous as the campaign developed,
05:29but he continuously weakened the flanks of the two groups by siphoning off forces to feed his ongoing obsession with capturing the city named after his deadly rival.
05:40As von Manstein wrote later,
05:46To leave the main body of the Army Group at Stalingrad for weeks on end was a cardinal error.
05:53It amounted to nothing less than presenting the enemy with the initiative,
05:58and it was a clear invitation for him to surround the Sixth Army.
06:02By the 19th of November, the Soviet counter-attack routed the Romanian troops to the north of Stalingrad,
06:12while 100 miles to the south, the Red Army overran a mixed German and Romanian force.
06:20The Soviet counter-offensive, which opened on the 19th of November 1942,
06:24came as a huge and catastrophic surprise to the Germans.
06:27There had been hints, they suspected that something was going on, but they didn't realize the scale of what was going to happen.
06:34The first thing that happened was, that is to the north of the Don, to the north of Stalingrad,
06:39several Soviet armies, including a tank army, fell on the German flank, but it wasn't a German flank.
06:45It was a flank manned by Romanians, by the Romanian Army.
06:49And at sight of this Russian advance hurtling upon them, the Romanians broke and fled.
06:55And that was the first northern wing of this encircling movement.
06:58Well, down to the south of Stalingrad, a second pincer movement then began,
07:03in equal strength and in equal force.
07:05So the Germans discovered, actually, that they were really fighting,
07:08virtually on two fronts, to the north and the south.
07:10On November 22nd, the two Russian armies met, and Stalingrad was encircled.
07:25Von Paulus, the inexperienced commander of the Sixth Army, requested that he be allowed to reform his troops and withdraw.
07:45During those first days of the encirclement, the Sixth Army had barely six days' rations of food and ammunition for only two days.
07:59Many of its artillery batteries were completely out of shells.
08:02The hope of salvation for the German Sixth Army rested on a rapid and speedy breakout.
08:09If they'd done that, there are many arguments to suggest that they would have escaped,
08:13they would have been able to move through a fairly thinly held Russian or Soviet line of encirclement,
08:19both to the north and the south, but they didn't.
08:21The orders were quite the opposite.
08:23The orders were A to stand fast, and the orders were then finally, of course, to move back into Stalingrad,
08:26which then proved to be the area and the place of their actual entombment.
08:32So once that chance was missed, then I think the situation became critical.
08:37And this can be proved by looking at the other part.
08:39When attempts were made to conduct a large-scale breakthrough operation from outside the Soviet ring,
08:45it became more and more difficult, and it became finally impossible.
08:48So unless the chance had been seized to move fast and move quickly and get out of that encirclement,
08:53to get away, then I think Sixth Army was inevitably and inescapably doomed.
09:01On the 26th, Hitler delivered a personal message to the beleaguered troops of Stalingrad,
09:07ordering them to stand fast and promising to do all in his power to support them.
09:12The problem of supplies was turned over to the Luftwaffe, which had so valiantly supplied the pocket of Demiansk the previous spring.
09:26Goering, its commander, was summoned before Hitler and agreed to guarantee 550 tons of supplies per day.
09:39Despite the scepticism of the Army Chiefs of Staff, the airlift began on the 25th of November.
09:45The results of the first days of the operation were ominous for the troops still fighting the Rats War among the cellars and ruins of the city.
10:02Only 65 tons were delivered on day one.
10:06The same quantities arrived on day two.
10:09On the third day, no supplies whatsoever reached the desperate German forces.
10:12The Luftwaffe had no safe landing ground in the vicinity of the Sixth Army.
10:23As the German perimeter of control around the city shrank under Russian pressure, this situation consistently deteriorated.
10:36Thick fogs made flying hazardous, if not impossible.
10:39Freezing temperatures meant that aircraft servicing became a torturous task for the German mechanics.
10:49Added to this, the Red Air Force was increasing its sorters, and the tactics of its pilots were sharpening as the conflict wore on.
10:57The airlift proved a fiasco, and the German troops began to starve.
11:04However, the airlift was only part of Hitler's strategy to relieve the situation in Stalingrad.
11:09Von Manstein was ordered to form a relief force to be known as Army Group Don.
11:19Its immediate objective was to bring the enemy attacks to a standstill and recapture the positions previously occupied.
11:26Von Manstein's strategy involved an attack by Army Group Don towards Stalingrad, and a breakout westwards by part of the Sixth Army.
11:39When both assault forces met, they would provide a corridor through which the remnants of the Sixth Army, still engaged in Stalingrad, could be withdrawn.
11:52Von Manstein's problems began even before his forces could attack the Russians.
12:05The reinforcements, which would give Army Group Don its only hope against vastly superior Russian numbers, failed to arrive.
12:12Worse, the Russian strength in the area was increasing. The Fourth Panzer Army was forced to launch the offensive alone.
12:29Against all the odds, by the 17th of December, Von Manstein had reached a position only 35 miles short of Stalingrad,
12:38forcing sections of the Red Army surrounding the city to break away from the siege to block the advance.
12:47By the 19th, the relief had gained another 5 miles and was just 30 miles from making contact with 6th Army.
12:57You can look at the Soviet-German war at that period, between 42 and 44, as a duel between Manstein and Zhukov.
13:05They were two very similar commanders. What was characteristic of them is they had an acute grasp of the strategic situation.
13:13The second thing, which made them very similar, by the way, they both had to deal with very difficult masters.
13:18Manstein had Hitler and Zhukov had Stalin.
13:21And although both Manstein and Zhukov had ideas of their own, they were not always actually free, well, take the Stalingrad situation,
13:28not entirely free to pursue the course of action which was militarily most sensible.
13:34And from that point of view, yes, there is a similarity between them.
13:38So as strategic analysts, if you like, and as strategic commanders,
13:42and perhaps the two commanders on the Eastern Front who were capable of handling not just a division, a corps,
13:47or even an army, but groups of army, I mean this enormous strategic command, this I think illustrates the nature of the commands which both of these men exercised.
14:00One manstein urgently requested Hitler to allow the Sixth Army to retreat towards him and bring the Russians under fire from east and west.
14:22Once the German forces met, then the 3,000 tons of supplies assembled behind the 4th Panzer Army could be pushed through to those retreating from the city.
14:38Faced with silence from Führer Headquarters, von Manstein himself gave the order for the breakout to begin.
14:47It would be a desperate gamble for the 6th Army.
14:50Only 100 of its tanks remained operational, and these held sufficient fuel for a journey of 20 miles or less.
15:04The physical ability of von Paulus' half-starved troops to mount any sort of mobile campaign was also questionable.
15:12Faced with these risks, and in possession of previous orders from Hitler to stand firm,
15:17von Paulus disobeyed the direct order of von Manstein, his superior officer, and did not attempt to break out.
15:30In doing so, he doomed the majority of the quarter of a million soldiers under his command to slow and painful death.
15:38One of the great arguments at the time for the so-called sacrifice of Paulus' Sixth Army in Stalingrad,
15:47that in fact it was doing something very noble and very important.
15:50In other words, it was actually holding back Soviet forces so they would not be able to advance further and cut off the other German army group which was operating in the Caucasus.
16:02In other words, it allowed the German armies which were in the Caucasus time to withdraw, time to fall back, time to escape an even bigger Soviet trap.
16:10That has a certain amount of force to it. That is perfectly true in the first part of the encirclement operation.
16:16But as time went on, and certainly by, let us say, mid-December, this argument had less and less force.
16:22First of all, because the Russians realized, from their point of view, they needed less troops to contain Stalingrad,
16:28and therefore troops are actually being released.
16:30And the second thing, the Russians were also developing plans themselves for a gigantic, a much huger, encirclement operation.
16:37So, in historical terms, yes, for a while, Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer did execute that particular role, and it was important.
16:49But as time went on, that kind of justification, if you like, for holding so many troops in this ghastly hellhole of Stalingrad,
16:57lost more and more justification, and finally, it really didn't have any effect at all.
17:01Events to the north and the south of the city now began to draw attention away from the plight of the army marooned in Stalingrad.
17:10Far more than the struggle for one city was now at stake.
17:13The issue was no longer the fate of a single army, but the entire southern wing of the front, and ultimately, of all the German armies in the east.
17:24By Christmas Eve, the Red Army was within striking distance of Rostov.
17:34Only two days earlier, Army Group A had begun its withdrawal from the Caucasus.
17:40Should the Russians reach Rostov before them, their retreat would be cut off.
17:44The ordinary German soldiers only gradually became aware of the magnitude of the disaster which was upon them.
17:57By the new year, the Fourth Panzer Army, having abandoned the Sixth Army to its fate, had withdrawn as far as Rostov.
18:04It provided the only effective barrier between the advance of Soviet forces and the capture of the city.
18:14By January the 7th, the Red Army was only 30 miles from Rostov, but remained slow to exploit its superiority.
18:21Hitler also remained slow to order a complete evacuation of the south.
18:30He waited until the 27th of January, when Army Group A seemed doomed to finally allow its retreat through Rostov.
18:44In Stalingrad, the situation of the Sixth Army had deteriorated rapidly throughout January.
18:49On the 8th, von Paulus was offered terms for a surrender by the Russians.
18:55Hitler refused to capitulate.
19:06German troops were collapsing from starvation and exhaustion.
19:10They were dying of exposure and some were committing suicide.
19:13Even when Army Group A had been withdrawn beyond Rostov and Sixth Army's continued resistance served little strategic purpose,
19:23Hitler refused to allow them to surrender.
19:25On January the 31st, he made von Paulus a field marshal.
19:34The following day, von Paulus surrendered.
19:38He became the first field marshal since the unification of the state to fall into enemy hands.
19:43This was the first time for 130 years that a German army had surrendered in the field.
19:54So historically speaking, it was a, if you like, a body blow at German prestige.
20:00The second thing was, of course, it had an enormous impact on the myth, if you like, or the image which Hitler projected of himself as being the great master planner and master strategist who had the Midas touch.
20:15He simply had to speak and everything would fall into place.
20:17I think the effect largely was more psychological, deeply psychological than in fact it was catastrophically military in that sense because the Germans were able to recover.
20:29But the profound sense of shock, which the surrender of an entire German army in the field for the first time affected the civilian population.
20:40It affected the high command of the German armed forces, by the way.
20:42It also affected the civilian morale at home.
20:46And it also had a profound effect on the morale of soldiers in the field.
20:49And from that point of view, the defeat at Stalingrad, I think, was most relevant and most important.
20:56And those effects, it's possible to argue, in fact never wore off.
21:01Announcing the disaster at Stalingrad to the rest of the forces in the east,
21:05the German high command requested that officers in the field read out the last message received by shortwave radio from the ruins of the tractor factory read October.
21:17We are the last survivors in this place.
21:21Four of us are wounded.
21:23We have been entrenched in the wreckage of the tractor factory for four days.
21:27We have not had food for four days.
21:30We have not had food for four days.
21:32I have just opened the last magazine for my automatic.
21:36In ten minutes the Bolsheviks will overrun us.
21:40Tell my father that I have done my duty and that I shall know how to die.
21:47Long live Germany.
21:49Heil Hitler.
21:59Stalingrad cost the Russians about 800,000 men.
22:03But what happened to the Red Army actually at Stalingrad and after Stalingrad,
22:09Stalin gave them a big boost.
22:11He did two things which were very important.
22:13He kicked out the commissars, the political officers.
22:15He demoted them and he turned the Red Army into a professional army.
22:19The second thing, he gave them lots of medals and lots of braid.
22:23They got a great deal of praise and I think what they also got as well was suddenly a greater confidence in their command.
22:29People like Rokossovsky, people like Zhukov, people like Vasilevsky, people like Vatutin.
22:33I mean these were commanders who knew their job and were able to do their job properly.
22:36And they also began to see the fact that what they were fighting with, by the way, was their own equipment.
22:4099% of the weapons, tanks, guns and aircraft used at Stalingrad were Soviet produced.
22:47So this sense of, I think, vindication of how they had behaved, they hadn't given up Stalingrad.
22:55This sense somehow that victory was a long, long, long way off, but it was vaguely, possibly imperceptibly discernible.
23:03The fact that they'd crushed a German army and destroyed a German field marshal.
23:08And the fact that their own army had, as I say, a sense of increasing professionalism was really very important to them.
23:15And morale, of course, was sky high.
23:17After Stalingrad, the full fury of the Russian counter-offensive was unleashed against the retreating Germans.
23:23The jubilant Russian forces now surged westward to bring the fight to the enemy.
23:31To the north of Voronezh, the Soviet attack had taken Kursk by the 7th of February.
23:40Kharkov fell on the 16th, despite the orders of Hitler that it be held to the last man.
23:45A major push southwards toward the Sea of Azov, and westward toward the river Dnieper, threatened to completely encircle the remaining forces of Army Group Don,
24:00and the section of Army Group A which had escaped from the Caucasus.
24:04The defeat at Stalingrad was catastrophic.
24:07At the front itself, it was a question of trying to hold this defensive force together.
24:13And that was their first job.
24:15But outside, the problem was really to re-establish a stable front in the south.
24:19The threat was that with the Russians virtually on the rampage, which is what it amounted to across large areas of steppe,
24:27that the whole of the German southern wing might be unhinged.
24:30The whole lot could just be shoved aside.
24:32And if the Russians had achieved their major strategic objective, it is quite certain,
24:36that the entire southern wing, not the southern front, the southern wing of the German armies in the east would have been unhinged.
24:43But it was left to a Field Marshal Mannstein, who was rushed in, if you like, as the fireman by Hitler, to begin to restore the situation.
24:50What he did, he very steadily built up what he intended to be a more stable and a more effective Don front.
24:58So the first job of stabilizing the southern wing, if you like, was completed.
25:03The second job was obviously to bring in reinforcements.
25:05And then the third thing was, which is very strange, but in a sense was for the Germans to think once again offensively.
25:12The numbers with which the Russians attacked, and the speed of their own advance, now proved their downfall.
25:19Crippled by lack of transport, bogged down in the early thaw and short of supplies,
25:24the Soviet thrust suddenly ran out of steam only 30 miles from the Dnieper crossing.
25:36Von Mannstein immediately seized this opportunity to methodically chop off the spearheads of the Russian attack and stabilize the German front.
25:44Only a month after being retaken by the Russians, Kharkov was once again in German hands.
25:59By the 19th of March, Belgorod, more than 50 miles northeast of Kharkov, was also retaken.
26:05The thaw was now in full flood, and the annual spring lull descended on the whole of the Eastern Front.
26:16For the German army, it marked the close of a disastrous winter campaign.
26:22The Caucasus had been lost, as well as a large section of the Donuts Basin and the strategic Don Bend.
26:29Sixth Army had been destroyed, four other Axis armies had been gutted,
26:36and Stalingrad now lay 500 miles to the west of the German lines.
26:44Yet, in the end, the German generals counted themselves lucky that the situation was not far worse.
26:51Once again, during the winter of 1942, the Germans had found themselves retreating,
26:56having come tantalizingly close to realizing their vicious objectives.
27:03It's easy to concentrate on Stalingrad,
27:05but it's also easy to forget there were other operations which were extremely important.
27:10The object of the Soviet High Command was not just the destruction of the German army in the south,
27:16the Soviet High Command was also intent in trying to destroy the German army in the centre,
27:19and also they had this extreme obligation of trying to relieve the pressure on Leningrad in the north.
27:24So you've got a very complex situation, as it were, almost a series of concertina relationships.
27:31One expands, the other contracts.
27:33Yes, it did have some effect.
27:35The intensity of the fighting was concentrated certainly in the south in 1942, late 1942, 1943.
27:42But it's interesting to notice that if you examine the Stalingrad operations closely from the Soviet point of view,
27:48you see the operation steadily moving northwards.
27:51They take the German 6th Army, then they move upward to the Italians, they take up the Hungarians,
27:55they're moving all the time up the front, that is in the northern direction,
27:59and they're also expanding to the south.
28:02In other words, it was a very complex strategic picture,
28:05but much, much, of course, depended on the outcome of Stalingrad.
28:07The twin failures of Stalingrad and the Caucasus were enormous psychological bombshells for German morale.
28:19The German army's belief in its own invincibility, dented by the retreat from Moscow,
28:26had now completely disintegrated.
28:27As supreme warlord, most of the blame for this lay squarely on the shoulders of adult Hitler.
28:37However, while the military tactics of Hitler were proving increasingly impossible for his generals to stomach,
28:45the political blunderings of the brutal and debauched administrators of occupied Russia
28:50were presenting them with a problem no less indigestible.
28:53For long stretches of the previous year, as many as 24 divisions of the German army
29:00had been diverted to attempting to suppress the growing menace of partisan sabotage.
29:10The rapid massacre of Soviet Jews, the indiscriminate torture and slaying of simple resistance,
29:16had totally backfired against the Reich commissars of the conquered territories.
29:20In May of 1942, the first attempt was made to coordinate the disparate bands of partisans,
29:30which had formed in response to the savage Untermensch policies of the German occupation.
29:35Republican and regional partisan headquarters were set up,
29:40and an official liaison between the movement and the Red Army was established for the first time.
29:45This meant that the activities of the partisans could now be directed against objectives of crucial importance to the overall military strategy.
29:59By 1943, the conditions of the Russian troops at the front had improved tremendously.
30:11The spring lull meant that soldiers who had gone for months without washing could now visit the steam baths which had been erected behind the lines.
30:19The break in the fighting gave the field's tailor shops the chance to repair damaged uniforms,
30:26sped up the delivery of the precious letters from home,
30:30and allowed the exhausted troops a much-needed period of rest and relaxation.
30:34While the conditions of the Russian soldiers continued to improve as the war went on,
30:43a lot of their German counterparts began to deteriorate.
30:47In fact, by the spring of 1943, the German army in the east was almost on the point of collapse.
30:54In March, the eastern front, still extending from Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south,
31:13was almost half a million men short of establishment.
31:16Divisional strength had been reduced from nine to six battalions,
31:23while the casualty rate among experienced officers and NCOs had been particularly high.
31:29Equipment levels were low.
31:32By February, only 500 German tanks remained serviceable,
31:36and most of these were still inferior to the Russians' T-34s.
31:39The situation in the Panzer Brigades became so desperate that Hitler was forced to recall General Heinz Guderian to active service.
31:51Guderian, one of the most able and audacious of the Panzer leaders,
31:56had been dismissed from his command in the winter of 1941,
32:00ironically, for withdrawing forces without permission.
32:03He was now charged with the responsibility for the future development of the armoured troops
32:11along lines that will make that arm of the service into a decisive weapon for winning the war.
32:17Guderian was encouraged by the continued upswing in the production of Panzer VI Tiger tanks,
32:2356 tons of well-armoured mobile artillery armed with a modification of the devastating 8.8cm anti-aircraft gun.
32:35The Tiger boasted a top speed of 23 miles per hour on the road.
32:40Combined with the PZKW-5 Panther,
32:45the Tiger gave the Germans qualitative parity with the Russians for the first time since the beginning of the war.
32:51The Panther, weighing 45 tons, was lighter and more mobile than the Tiger with a top speed of 34 miles per hour,
33:01while its 7.5cm gun possessed considerable penetrative ability.
33:09Improved assault guns and tank destroyers were also appearing.
33:13Taking into account the up-gunning of the Panzer Marks III and IV,
33:16the potential for Guderian was to supply these weapons in such quantities
33:21that their possession by experienced crews would offset Soviet numerical superiority.
33:26The new German tanks in which Hitler placed huge faith in the Tigers, the new Tigers and the Panther tanks,
33:36of course they were superior to the Russian tanks, certainly to the T-34.
33:42Even more important, of course, they were impervious to the fire of Soviet anti-tank guns.
33:46In 1943, Stalin was deeply, deeply concerned about the upgrading, the modernization and the refitting of the Soviet tank forces.
33:56And so you find from about the mid-summer, the summer of 1943,
34:01the appearance on the Eastern Front of large numbers of modernized German tanks, Tigers and Panthers,
34:07self-propelled guns and so on.
34:08And from the Soviet side, the same attempt to update and improve their armor.
34:13So the Russians improved the T-34-85.
34:16The second thing, they began to develop a much heavier tank,
34:19which later became, of course, the Joseph Stalin 1s,
34:22which were really very formidable heavy tanks indeed.
34:24But the problem from the Russian side was not just the tanks,
34:27the problem was that of anti-tank defenses.
34:30And they found the answer certainly increasing the number of anti-tank guns,
34:33but what they really did was to develop self-propelled guns with quite heavy calibers.
34:38And they actually were the instruments which took on the Tigers at the Battle of Korska in 1943.
34:44Guderian's need for time to reorganize and re-equip the panzer divisions
34:49mirrored the requirements of the German army as a whole.
34:54The idea of any immediate victory in Russia was now simply the stuff of rhetoric.
34:58Given the inability of the German army to defend its complete front,
35:06a draw could not be achieved by defensive tactics.
35:10The reverses to be imposed on the Red Army would have to be forced by a series of limited assaults.
35:16Von Manstein's counter-attacks, which had prevented complete disaster during the previous winter,
35:23had impressed Hitler.
35:24He was invited to put forward a plan for the crucial summer campaign.
35:29Von Manstein presented Hitler with two offensive alternatives.
35:35The first was to prepare for a Soviet assault,
35:40which would almost certainly be launched in the Ukraine and withdraw before it.
35:45Wheeling to the left, German forces would then mount a decisive attack on its exposed northern flank,
35:51encircling the leading spearhead of the Russian advance.
35:56The second alternative was to cut off the enormous Soviet salient,
36:01which had emerged to the north of Kharkov and to the south of Orel,
36:06a bulge extending 70 miles westwards from Kursk and measuring approximately 100 miles in width.
36:11Hitler chose the second alternative, despite the dilemma which it posed for the attacking forces.
36:21It was vital to attack before the Soviet generals got wind of the plan and could prepare defenses.
36:26It was also crucial to Von Manstein that the offensive be launched before the Russians recover from the losses incurred the previous winter.
36:37On the other hand, if the attack were to take place in mid-May, as Von Manstein insisted,
36:40German manpower and equipment might not be sufficient to ensure victory.
36:54Hitler's intention certainly was to strike the decisive blow on the Eastern Front.
36:59This was to destroy the Red Army completely, to destroy its armored forces, to break through, to take Moscow,
37:04and this was to be the final decisive blow on the Eastern Front.
37:10In terms of the force that the Germans assembled, in terms of their armored troops, in terms of their battle-tested,
37:18very professionalized, very capable divisions, if you look at it in terms of military statistics,
37:23then the chances were very much, I would have said, in favor of the German army.
37:28It had done it before, it could do it again.
37:30But this is not to say, of course, that that's the way the operation itself went.
37:37But in terms of the command, in terms of the competence, in terms of the armor, in terms of the experience,
37:42and indeed very possibly in terms of the German estimate of Russian capability in defensive actions.
37:49And remember, the Russians had never fought a major defensive action on the Eastern Front at all.
37:54Then the chances, I suppose, were reasonable, bordering perhaps on, perhaps, a gamble.
38:03Guderian was against the operation from the start, arguing that the new Panther and Tiger tanks must be held back
38:11until they were available in sufficient quantities to ensure a decisive success.
38:15Hitler postponed the date of the attack until July, in the hope that by then, the number of new tanks would tip the balance of firepower in Germany's favor.
38:28By now, Russian air force reconnaissance had improved to the point where Stalin's awareness of German dispositions was comprehensive and generally accurate.
38:42He had also managed to infiltrate German headquarters and was supplied with additional intelligence by his spy ring in Switzerland, codenamed Lucy,
38:51which had many high-level contact inside Germany.
38:55Stalin's knowledge of German preparations was so precise, he even knew the date chosen by Hitler for the launch of Operation Citadel.
39:05Kursk is a salient, it's very large, and it was a large arrow, really, sticking right into the German center.
39:13You had the northern face and the southern face, and across it you had the town of Kursk, of course, at the center of this.
39:18And the Russians, the Soviet command for the first time, decided to fight a major, a major, sustained, deliberate, defensive battle.
39:27They had never done this before. Stalin had no confidence in the Red Army fighting defensively.
39:31He always wanted the Red Army to fight offensively and offensively and offensively.
39:35No matter what the casualties were, what the losses were, the Red Army must always attack.
39:40And even on the eve of Kursk, he was tempted to try a preemptive Soviet first strike, as it were,
39:47and was dissuaded from this, partly by Zhukov and partly by others, who said,
39:52look, let us now proceed with the defensive measures we have put in trade.
39:57Stalin, advised by Zhukov, prepared patiently and thoroughly for the German advance.
40:03The Soviet lines consisted of six belts of defenders, composed of anti-tank posts, thick minefields, and 3,000 miles of trenches, supported by 3,000 tanks and 20,000 guns.
40:18The general Soviet system was this. They had really three lines of defences.
40:22The first line, of course, which was really to break up the German attack.
40:26The second line, which hopefully would, in fact, enable them to bring their anti-tank defences to bear.
40:32And the last line, of course, was really this was where the battle or the engagements would be conducted,
40:37and would break up and generally deflect the German attack as such.
40:42And this went all the way down from core level, indeed from army down to core, down to division, down to regiment, to battalion.
40:49Each had its own defensive sectors.
40:51So it really was a colossal undertaking, on a scale, I think, which really taxes the imagination.
40:57With every passing moment, the successful outcome of the Kursk offensive grew more necessary for Hitler.
41:03German morale, depleted by the failures at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus, was now further undermined by defeat in West Africa.
41:17Hitler's inability to adequately supply Rommel with men and materials led to disaster at Medanin in March,
41:25and the eventual collapse of the Axis African forces in May.
41:28By June, Southern Europe lay totally exposed to the threat of Allied attack.
41:35In Britain, the RAF and the American Air Force prepared to launch massive bombing raids against German industrial and civilian targets,
41:44as a prelude to invasion from the West.
41:46Hitler not only needed a victory at Kursk, he needed victory on a scale which would allow him the breathing space to fend off the enemies which were beginning to close around him.
42:03Anything less would prove a catastrophe.
42:06On the Russian side, for the first time, the Red Army would be prepared for a major German offensive.
42:21It was determined to make the most of its advantage.
42:24On July the 5th, 1943, as von Manstein and von Kluge approached the Kursk salient in a classic pincer movement involving one million men and 2,700 tanks,
42:38the death ride of the Panzers was about to commence.
42:42Hitler intended that Operation Citadel, the great attack on the Kursk salient in 1943, would be the decisive blow.
42:50He'd argued in 1941 that the Red Army was destroyed, which it wasn't.
42:55He argued again in 1942 that the Red Army was destroyed, which it wasn't, by the way.
42:59Here in 1943, Hitler was determined to deliver the coup de grace.
43:03This is what it was to be. It was to be the largest armoured operations in world history.
43:06A gigantic assembly of tanks and guns and aircraft, assault troops.
43:11And Hitler had placed enormous hopes upon it.
43:16It was, I think, meant to be a war-winning blow.
43:19It was meant to correct, if you like, the lingering impression of Stalingrad.
43:24It was to wipe that out.
43:26It was to afford the Germans something which was extremely important,
43:29which is to say it was intended to ensure that the German army retain the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front.
43:38This, under no circumstances, must pass to the Russians.
43:42Adolf Hitler was fully aware of the absolute necessity of success at Kursk.
43:48But when the roaring waves of German armour crashed into the salient in July 1943,
43:53the attack which the German army was about to unleash was already doomed to fate.
44:01The essence of von Manstein's strategy for the battle had been to exploit the mobility and tactical superiority of the German Panzer units.
44:11Instead, the German tanks drove confidently towards a grinding war of attrition,
44:17where the advantage lay squarely with the defenders.
44:25The effectiveness of a Russian defence limited the progress of von Kluge's 9th Army to an advance of some six miles.
44:33It was then ground to a halt by Rokossovsky's central front to the north of the Kursk salient.
44:39In the south, von Manstein's 4th Panzer army advanced 25 miles by the 10th of July and threatened to penetrate the Voronish Front under Marshal Batutin.
44:54Reserves from the steppes front had to be pumped into the battle to bolster the salient's defenders
45:00and prevent the 4th Panzer from breaking through into open country.
45:03The Germans had fallen into Zhukov's cunningly prepared trap.
45:10As Guderian acknowledged,
45:13by the failure of Citadel, we had suffered a decisive defeat.
45:19The armoured formations, reformed and re-equipped with much effort,
45:24had lost heavily in both manpower and equipment
45:28and would now be unemployable for a long time to come.
45:31There was the real prospect that they would never be rehabilitated in time to defend the Eastern Front.
45:39From now on, the Russians were in undisputed possession of the initiative.
45:47In the battle, of course, although it's a ghastly affair,
45:50what really staggered the German command was the speed with which the Russians moved from the defensive to the counter-offensive.
45:56On a very large scale, by the way, it was only a matter of about 4 days after the German defeat,
46:03that Konev's reserve steppes front was changed and was moving into action.
46:09So from every point of view, from defensive preparation to the actual conduct of the battle,
46:13and indeed the subsequent move to the counter-offensive was really quite an astonishing undertaking.
46:19the
46:27the
46:30the
46:35the
46:38the
Recommended
2:07
|
Up next
2:06
25:16
2:07
53:46
59:38
2:12
29:29
45:49
40:12
23:10
25:12
24:41
58:38
29:08
48:03
48:53
48:44
48:21
48:59
52:26
58:32
Be the first to comment