Hitler's Colossal Display of Military Incompetence at Stalingrad

A Stalingrad is what happens whenever Austrian corporals start running things.

What could the Germans have done to save the Stalingrad Campaign? The short answer is practically anything different from what they actually did. The most obvious thing that Germany could have, indeed, should have done differently was to have avoided the leadership issues that beset her military command structure—which was all Hitler’s doing, of course. Failures of leadership exacerbated each and every other problem the Germans had.

One of the first inklings we have that a disaster named Stalingrad was waiting to happen is when we read Williamson Murray’s and Allan R. Millet’s analysis of the prelude to operation BLUE. “The target of the upcoming offensive, write the two historians, would be the Caucasus oil field, in order to cripple the Soviets and relieve the petroleum shortages that had plagued the Reich’s war effort.”[1] Okay, so far, so good—a legitimate strategic objective and, given the operational circumstances, a reasonable course of action. But then we read, “Stalingrad was also an objective …” (emphasis added).[2]

This indicates, as do so many of his decisions, that Adolf Hitler, the former Austrian corporal, as Churchill often described him, was clearly in over his head when it came to conducting military operations. The suggestion is that, with the Fuehrer, Stalingrad was an after-thought: that he was of two minds about what he wanted to accomplish in operation BLUE; that he could do two things at once and do both of them well. This, despite his dwindling resources, despite the setbacks of the previous year’s much heralded operation BARBAROSSA, despite the growing contention amongst his senior commanders, despite the sandy foundations of his government’s legitimacy—a fanatically misguided faith in German racial superiority—and despite his stubborn refusal to recognize that, in war, the enemy always has a say-so in what transpires. As Messrs. Murray and Millet put it, the fuzziness over the operational objectives—the “divergence of the [simultaneous] drives … east and … south” was producing a “malignant influence” over the Wehrmacht’s operations.[3]

Everything rises or falls on leadership; and, to make matters worse, there were other issues amongst Hitler’s senior officers. There was probably considerable jealousy towards Manstein—there usually is whenever a single officer is simply, and inarguably, more competent than his peers. But that was by no means all. “There was,” according to Murray and Millet, “in ordinate squabbling in the German high command.”[4] Bock, Halder, and Keitel were at each other. Somewhere between 9 and 16 July—in the middle of a major operation—Hitler fired Bock, his “overall field commander”—for the second time in less than a year! [5] That was still not all. If Hitler’s operational command of the German Army wasn’t bad enough for Germany, on 16 July the Austrian corporal relocated the command elements of the German high command (OKW) and the Army (OKH) “to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine” so that he could assume direct control of “both Army groups.”[6] This would be like President Obama, in addition to his duties and responsibilities as president, were to also name himself chief of staff of the U.S. Army as well as secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Unimaginable! In all this, by the way, Hitler was making the very same mule-headed mistakes he made in the wake of outcome of BARBAROSSA beginning to tip against him. To the Fuehrer, BARBAROSSA’s failure was his generals’ fault—not reality slapping him in the face—so he fired them and started running their commands himself—which is actually what he was doing anyway, which is exactly why they were failing. (He would do the same thing yet again, in 1944, as his “Atlantic Wall” crumbled and he began to lose Western Europe to the Allies).

Hitler could perhaps have spent a little less time taking in the air and scenery at Berchtesgaden, especially whenever major combat operations were in progress. (This tendency of his shows up again on D-Day when he was again at his mountain retreat and could not be reached for several hours—letting an opportunity slip by). There was an instance, early in the battle for Stalingrad, where Hitler, beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, decided to return to his headquarters in East Prussia, in Rastenburg. His travel took two days during which time he was “out of contact with the OKH,” his senior army commanders—in the middle of one of the most significant battles of the war.[7]

It would have helped things tremendously if Hitler had not gotten the Wehrmacht involved in hot wars on two fronts—not in Eastern and Western, which situation he wanted to avoid at all costs, but in Eastern Europe and North Africa. Think of the tremendous strain on his lines of communications. Field Marshal Jodl described it this way, when he was put in overall charge of the east—“The Wehrmacht was exhausted … the territory they had seized was more than could be held by the size of the army which occupied it.”[8]

Among other things that could have helped retrieve the situation, Hitler should not have sent Paulus’ 6th Army into the city. His attacking forces were of insufficient strength to overcome Soviet defenses. Of course, he had no idea of Soviet strength in and around the city because of the failures of his intelligence apparatus. At any rate, once the situation with Paulus in the city became known, Hitler should have authorized their withdrawal immediately … but retreat was anathema to Hitler. The decision to airlift continuous support to them until such time that they could effect a breakout only ensured that there would be no breakout, for the Luftwaffe was too under-resourced to bring off that kind of an operation.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 275.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 281.
[4] Ibid, 280.
[5] Ibid, 279.
[6] Ibid, 280.
[7] Ibid, 287.
[8] Nikolai Poroskov, “Stalingrad: The Battle that Broke Hitler’s Back,” Russian Life 45, No. 6 (2002), 34-44, http://search.proquest.com/docview/224002619?accountid=8289, (accessed 25 June 2012).