According to my dad, who was a Transportation Command officer with a battalion of trucks in Stalingrad, no. He said November of 1942 was really the end of the war.

He had seen the secret reports by the Army and Navy that Germany was out of fuel, and that the Romanian fields could not keep up. Neither could synthetic fuel; he was for a time an engineer working on that, not the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process, but the Bergius process from coal (he was occasionally attached to the Organization Todt for construction projects). He said there was no time to build factories for that, and they were incredibly vulnerable in spite of the “fire walls” that had been built around the synfuel plants.

In meantime, by the end of 1942 the tanks were worn down—they had simply traveled too many miles; the Army did not have tank transporters other than rail. His trucks (pictured) had started out as sterling in the drive through France, when he was under Rommel, but were beaten up and lacking spares by 1942. He had to cannibalize parts, so that many tanks left alone gradually had most of their parts missing (pictured). Many of his mechanics and drivers by then were Ukrainians, resulting in

language problems (not for him, he spoke Russian). Spare parts and fuel, which he was supposed to transport, were pitifully low, and the cold was so bad that motor oil was freezing. He even

had to scrounge for fuel for his command vehicle (pictured) and the two T34s (pictured) he “owned” to pull his trucks out of the winter snow and endless autumn

mud (pictured)

.

Food in Stalingrad (pictured) was in such short supply (even for officers) that he started smoking cigarettes to kill the hunger pangs. Medicine was non-existent, and the wounded were often just left on stretchers in the cold to die. Artillery pieces were limited to 10 shots a day, essentially nothing; in contrast, the artillery fire from the Soviet side was nonstop, especially the Katyushas (pictured). And morale was not good—German soldiers were looking at the Soviet people around them and wondering what the hell they were doing there. Watching the long lines of refugees (pictured) was heartbreaking, as were the long lines of hastily dug roadside graves (pictured)

.

Even worse, they had little sleep or rest, and were walking around like zombies, according to him.

The whole aim of Operation Edelweiss, a radical right turn away from Moscow and drive south toward the Caucasus, was a desperation move to get fuel. The incredibly long distances involved could not be sustained by either men or machines, and they had outpaced their supply lines. The idiot(s) at HQ were clueless about logistics, he said.

Even the units he supported were inflated—he had a hard time figuring out what Tables of Equipment he was supposed to supply, as many divisions were closer to battalions, and Corps had the same number of tanks as a division at the beginning of the war. So he was moving empty trucks to support paper divisions.

He barely got out of Stalingrad alive, on 20 November, the last day before the Soviets closed in. He got out (highly against Hitler’s directive) because my mom was assistant to his boss’s boss, a 3-star general, who agreed to send a telex to get him moving. He called my mom (pictured on her car, next to a Ukrainian farmhouse—note the blacked-out headlights and the pockets in the car doors) to ask her to get the general to place a personal phone call to his Colonel. With much grumbling, the general did so. The phone call arrived at 08:00 (he was waiting for it to arrive), dad left at around 10:00, and crossed the bridge over the Don that afternoon; the Soviets seized that bridge later that night and closed the encirclement by the next morning. Two days later, at 10:00, the telex arrived at his former Colonel’s HQ. He told me to never forget the lesson: do NOT trust one-way communications.

His calculations showed that German losses could not be replaced, and the other Axis forces in the area were not much help. The Italian and Romanian units above and below Stalingrad had brave fighters but lousy equipment, and also had little fuel and were on near-starvation rations, exacerbated by the shortage of transport vehicles to carry supplies.

He had tremendous respect for the Soviets, BTW, including Ukrainians on both sides of the fence, and the incredibly tough soldiers from the far Eastern provinces. He said they could keep fighting day after day with only pockets full of sunflower seeds to sustain them. Same for the equipment— much as he loved his MP40 as a graduate mechanical engineer, he also had a PPsh41, because the one was accurate as hell but would jam in dusty situations, whereas the other would keep working forever. After the war was over he took a Volga River trip through the area and talked and drank with and apologized to many former enemies, often with a lot of tear-shedding.

In any case, he had wide experience of the situations across the front, since he was not organic transport of one unit but was attached to various units from Leningrad all the way below Stalingrad. By the end of November, 1942, he said (and filled in with a lot of detail on his original classified maps), the war was over, all but the shouting, and it was an unimaginable tragedy to continue it.