“Febig and his officers were furious. One could always recapture an airfield, but if the transport aircraft were lost, than so was the Sixth Army. They had no ground troops to defend ‘Tazi’, as the Luftwaffe called it. All they could do was to divert seven flak guns to cover the road, and prepar all servicable aircraft for take-off in the early hours of the morning. There were so many that this did not prove easy. ‘Around the runway it looked like chaos,’ noted
Richthofen’s chief of staff, who was present. ‘With engines running, one could hardly understand a single word.’ To make matters worse, there was a fairly thick mist, cloud was down to 150 feet and light snow was falling.”
This was the activity at the Tatsinskaya airfield after word of the approach of Major-General Vasily Mikhailovich Badanov’s 24th Tank Corp. was recieved.
“108 Ju-52 trimotors and 16 Ju-86 trainers were saved, but the loss of 72 aircraft represented roughly 10 percent of the Luftwaffe’s total transport fleet.”
Can you imagine standing there in the mist and snow with all those engines running?