The relief atempt fails

Hundreds of T-34 tanks at a time were thrown into battle each day by the Soviets before they were knocked out. Inside the pocket, Paulus refused to order Thunderclap. He perhaps did not realize that there were no more panzer reserves available if LVII Panzer Corps failed, or maybe he feared his starving troops were not up to fighting on the open steppe. Whatever the reason, the moment was lost. After a huge Soviet attack on its bridgehead on 24 December, LVII Panzer Corps could hold out no more. Two days later it was ordered to fall back on Kotelnikovo. It left behind almost all of its tanks and thousands of dead. The 17th Panzer Division could only muster one anti-tank gun and eight operational tanks. Battalions were reduced to a few hundred men able to fight. Every battalion commander was either dead or wounded.

Meanwhile, as the 6th and 11th Panzer Divisions of XXXXVIII Panzer Corps moved westwards to plug the gap in the front created by the collapse of the Italians, they surprised a Red Army guards tank corps that had just seized a Luftwaffe airfield at Tatsinskaja. The two German divisions trapped the Russians between armoured pincers, neutralizing the threat to Rostov for the moment.

German withdrawal from the Caucasus

The frontline only held for a matter of days before the Soviets were attacking again. LVII Panzer Corps stood firm, but all around chaos and confusion reigned. Even the arrival of the 7th Panzer Division from France with 105 Panzer III and 20 Panzer IV tanks was not enough to stabilize the front. At the end of December, Hitler gave Manstein permission to withdraw from the Caucasus, freeing up the First Panzer Army with its 3rd Panzer Division, 16th and 26th Motorized Divisions and the Wiking Division for action farther north. The Führer, however, insisted that the 13th Panzer Division stay in the Caucasus to hold the Kuban Peninsula. The 11th Panzer Division had to fight a determined rearguard action to the east of Rostov in mid-January to allow the First Panzer Army to move northwards, into the Ukraine itself.

The end at Stalingrad

Through December and into January 1943, the Sixth Army struggled to survive in Stalingrad. Within hours of the failure of Operation Winter Tempest, the Red Army launched a series of massive offensives aimed at destroying the Sixth Army once and for all. By this time the 100,000 or so German soldiers now alive in the pocket were so frozen and starving that they were in no position to move out of their improvised bunkers in the ruins of Stalingrad. Göring's much vaunted airlift was barely able to fly in 101 tonnes (100 tons) of supplies a day. The Luftwaffe was, however, able to bring out 30,000 wounded Germans. The airlift was put out of action for good on 22 January when the Soviets overran the last German-held airfield in the pocket.

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