Chir River Battles
Dec 4-22 1942

Immediate Preliminaries:
19 November - 4 December 1942

by Russel H.S. Stolfi


In Operation Uranus, the Soviet high command exploited the untenable position of the German 6th Army by gripping it with several Soviet armies and simultaneously massing additional armies tailored to effect the first really successful Soviet operational advances of World War II -- the double envelopment of the Germans at Stalingrad.

Russian anti-tank guns and crews moving forward

On 19 November 1942, the Soviets attacked with the 5th Tank Army and the 21st Army (comparable with very strong German corps-level organization) to surround Stalingrad from the northwest. One day later, on 20 November 1942, the Soviets attacked with the 51st and 57th Armies of the Stalingrad Front to surround the city from the south.

Along the fronts of those armies, the Soviets launched powerful attacks with infantry divisions supported by army and front artillery and by independent tank regiments and brigades. For the deep operational advances to surround the 6th Army, the Soviets concentrated one operational level group with the 5th Tank Army and another with the adjoining (to the east) 21st Army to make the advance to Kalach in the rear of the 6th Army. The Soviet mobile groups included the 1st and 26th Tank Corps and 8th Cavalry Corps in the 5th Tank Army. The latter army advanced with the 1st Tank Corps up against the lower reaches of the left (north) bank of the Chir River where it would soon be joined by strong infantry and artillery forces.

On 23 November 1942, the Soviets completed the encirclement of the 6th Army by linking up at Sovetsky, 10 miles east of Kalach on the Don. [11]

At approximately the same time, elements of the 5th Tank Army came up against the lower reaches of the Chir in a weakened state, but facing virtually no German formations capable of serious resistance to an advance to the west. These elements of the 5th Tank Army sat tamely along the Chir River for approximately ten days while the Soviets concentrated on the airtight encirclement of the 6th Army, and then began to press westward to prevent relief of the Stalingrad pocket from the outside.

Between 23 November-4 December 1942, the Germans, coordinated largely by Colonel (later General der Panzertruppe) Walter Wenck, as newly appointed Chief of Staff of the 3rd Rumanian Army, frantically improvised defenses by scraping together Luftwaffe personnel, rear area army men, and combat soldiers returning from leave and hospital, into a thin defensive line. [12]

Given the Soviet preoccupation with Stalingrad and the energetic measures of Wenck, the situation between the Don and the Chir Rivers stabilized beyond expectation. [13]

Wenck notes, for example, that the only reserves he could count on were men in the stream of personnel returning from leave. [14] The Germans ingeniously organized film showings at traffic junctions that attracted stragglers and men returning from leave, who were then collected, reorganized, rearmed and sent back to the front. The Germans posted signs, lettered "to the fuel issuing point" that attracted vehicles in vast numbers, and solved the worst transport problems on the Chir front [15] by commandeering those vehicles. The situation remained critical along the first forty miles of the Chir northwest from its confluence with the Don, however, because the Germans there were able to organize only static posts of ad hoc units armed with small arms and mortars but few antitank guns and only a single piece of artillery. [16]

During this extraordinary period, paralyzed elements of the Soviet 5th Tank Army stood facing a line of static outpost manned largely by German rifle and machine gun squads filled by men, largely strangers to one another but held together by the formidable, mission- oriented discipline of the German Army.

In the middle of this period, on 27 November 1942, the hero of the piece, the 48th Panzer Corps, was miles away from the lower reaches of the Chir encircled in a small cauldron (German expression for a pocket or encirclement) northwest of Kalach, just east of the middle reaches of the Chir River. [17]

German tank hits a mine.

The 48th Panzer Corps, consisting of the 22nd Panzer Division and 1st Rumanian Armored Division, had been a weak mobile force backing up the 3rd Rumanian Army northwest of Stalingrad on 19 November 1942. Out of its full complement of 104 tanks, the 22nd Panzer Division had only 42 tanks (Panzer IIIs and IVs) in running order on the day of the attack. Out of its complement of 108 tanks, the Rumanian armored division had 10 Panzer IIIMs, 11 Panzer IVs, and 98 Panzer35(t)s, the latter aging Czech tanks with 37mm guns. [18]

The 48thPanzer Corps stood with 212 tanks (only about 110 of them in running order) in the path of the Soviet 5th Tank Army, and was overrun and surrounded by 27 November 1942. The panzer corps managed to fight its way out of encirclement and went into positions on the west bank of the middle reaches of the Chir River near Petrovka on about 29 November 1942 with the units under command barely able to defend themselves.

The Germans, now being reorganized under Field Marschal Erich von Manstein in the newly established Army Group Don (21 November 1942), immediately recognized the importance of the positions on the lower Chir River. By 27 November 1942, those positions lay closer to the 6th Army than any other German territory on the eastern front. They were also up against the right (north) bank of the Don and critically located to support a drive to relieve Stalingrad from along the left (south) bank of the Don.

Although the Chir line was closer to the 6th Army than the adjacent German units of 4th Panzer Army on the south bank of the Don, Manstein rejected the lower Chir River as the location from which to drive a relief force through to the encircled army because the rescue formations would have to cross the Don River in their drive toward Stalingrad.

Manstein needed the Chir salient to pin down powerful Soviet forces on the left flank of the 4th Panzer Army, and required German formations from the salient to join the panzer army as the planned advance developed. Manstein decided to move the 48th Panzer Corps headquarters to the lower reaches of the Chir River to hold the salient and everything that it represented to the potential successful relief of the 6th Army. With the failures of the German and Rumanian mobile force to halt the Soviet 5th Tank Army, however, Manstein ran into high level interference in the reorganization of his forces.

Because of the failure of the 48th Panzer Corps to halt the Soviet 5th Tank Army, Hitler personally dismissed the commanding general, Lieutenant General Ferdinand Heim and the chief of staff Colonel Friebe, leaving in place the operations officer (1a), Major von Ohlen. The German Army High Command appointed Colonel F.W. von Mellenthin as Chief of Staff on 27 November 1942, and, two days later after appropriate briefings, he arrived at the battle headquarters of the 48th Panzer Corps in Petrovka. Mellenthin came from 15 months of duty under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as intelligence officer (Ic) and assistant operations officer (Ia, assistant) in Panzerarmee Afrika.

With no combat experience in the Soviet Union whatsoever, he nevertheless proved to be a tower of steadiness and decisiveness in the Chir River battles. Lieutenant General Hans Cramer arrived at Petrovka on 30 November 1942 to be temporary commander of the panzer corps. Several days later on 4 December 1942, Panzer General Otto von Knobelsdorff arrived as permanent commander at Nishne Chirskaya at the confluence of the Chir and Don where the headquarters of 48th Panzer Corps had moved on the same day. Knobelsdorff was a flexible and broad minded man, well suited to meet the rapidly shifting crises in the salient. [19]

Chir River Battles Dec 4-22 1942

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