by John Keegan
Yet the difficulty of sustaining resistance grew greater with every day of combat. On 10 July three fronts had been set up – North-Western, nominally commanded by Voroshilov, Western, under Timoshenko, and South-Western, under Budenny – to correspond with the three German army groups attacking them. This was a rational means of bringing under command the reinforcements and supplies which the GKO was mobilising for the defence. In July 1941, however, new men and equipment were scarcely to be found; while existing units and weapons were being consumed like chaff in the furnace of battle. By 8 July, OKH reckoned it had destroyed 89 out of 164 Russian divisions identified; as a running check on that estimate, Army Group Centre was able to show that it had captured 300,000 prisoners, 2500 tanks and 1400 guns (the majority with their crews dead about them, so tenaciously did the Russian gunners fight). Stalin himself counted 180 divisions committed to battle, out of 240 mobilised; he hoped eventually, if Hitler would allow him the time, to raise 350. At present, however, replacements were being used up as soon as found: during the Smolensk encirclement battle (4-19 July), Army Group Centre’s fourth, another 310,000 prisoners were taken, along with 3200 tanks and 3100 guns. Russian industry, suddenly thrown into high gear, was producing 1000 tanks a month (and 1800 aircraft) but losses exceeded these figures.
As Army Group Centre completed its destruction of the Soviet Sixteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Armies in the Smolensk pocket, Army Group North was accelerating its rate of advance along the Baltic coast towards Leningrad. Lakes, forests and rivers had impeded Leeb’s spearheads at the outset. Although he had only three Panzer divisions at his disposal and he achieved no encirclement as spectacular as Bock’s, by 30 June Army Group North had occupied Lithuania and secured bridgeheads across the lower reaches of the Dvina where the Stalin Line was supposed to run. Racing through it, Panzer Group 4 arrived at Ostrov, on Latvia’s pre-1940 frontier with Russia, and ten days later stood on the Luga, only sixty miles from Leningrad and the last major water obstacle outside the city.
Army Group South had initially made slower progress than Centre and North. Commanded by Rundstedt, who had directed the great breakthrough across the Meuse thirteen months earlier, it consisted of two disparate blocs, a northern masse de manoeuvre of German infantry led by the five armoured divisions of Panzer Group 1, and, to the south, the allied contingent formed of Romanian and Hungarian divisions, equipped with inferior French weapons supplied during the years of the Little Entente. The satellite divisions’ mission was to cross the rivers Dniester and Bug and capture Odessa and the Black Sea ports, while the German infantry and tanks marched deep into the steppe towards Kiev, capital of the Ukraine and founding city of Russian civilisation. Rundstedt’s vanguards passed easily through the Soviet frontier defences, swamping the fortifications of Przemysl, which had sustained siege for 194 days in 1914-15. It then ran up against a major concentration of Soviet force belonging to the South-Western Front, under the direction of one of Stalin’s best generals, Kirponos, whose political commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, the future First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, with the outstanding General K. K. Rokossovsky as one of his tank commanders. The South-Western Front was particularly strong in armoured formations – it contained six mechanised corps – and had a high proportion of the T-34s in service. Kirponos determined to deal with Rundstedt’s Blitzkrieg in absolutely correct fashion, by pinching the spearheads of Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 between concentric attacks mounted by the Fifth and Sixth Armies; Fifth, operating out of the impenetrable marshes of the Pripet, had a firm base for its thrust; Sixth, whose positions were in the open steppe, did not. Although both armies pressed their attacks, their pincers never met and Kleist pushed between to capture Lvov (as Lemberg the Austrian capital of Galicia until 1918, then a Polish city until 1939) on 30 June. The commander of the garrison was General A. A. Vlasov, who managed to fight his way out on this occasion; a year later he would fall into German hands near Leningrad and defect, to set up the ‘Vlasov Army’ of anti-Stalinists. His loyalty to the regime may have been shaken during the evacuation of Lvov, when the local NKVD massacred its Ukrainian political prisoners rather than let them be liberated by the Germans.
Kirponos persisted in his efforts to mount ‘pinching’ operations against Kleist’s Panzers on 29 June and 9 July; but the power of the Panzers and the flail of the Luftwaffe kept Rundstedt’s spearhead moving forward, increasingly constricted within a narrow axis of advance, to be known as the ‘Zhitomir Corridor’, but reaching inexorably towards Kiev. On 11 July Kirponos held a command conference at Brovary, only ten miles east of the city. It was there decided that the Fifth and Sixth Armies – shadows of their former selves, despite constant reinforcement and re-equipment – should continue to hack at the approaching Germans. He was counting on the arrival of two new corps, LXIV and XXVII, to lend weight to their efforts, though, according to Professor John Erickson, what he had heard disturbed him: ‘short of weapons, horse-drawn guns, disorganised staffs, no wireless sets; [in XXVII Corps] only one division had a commander.’ As the military soviet of the South-Western Front dispersed from the conference, in gloom approaching despair, the headquarters came under heavy German air attack. Kirponos had already glimpsed the danger to which his failure to pinch off Kleist’s penetration of his front exposed Kiev, and indeed his whole command: Panzer Group 1’s advance now constituted one arm of a counter-pincers; should the Germans bring down tanks from the north, from Bock’s Army Group Centre, a second pincer arm would be created and he, his men and the whole of the Ukraine would be enveloped within it.
The question of Moscow
The same thought was simultaneously exercising Hitler. He and the army high command had differed in their view of how the Russian campaign should be fought from the moment of initial planning a year earlier. Their differences had been significantly reconciled in the Barbarossa directive of December 1940. But OKH, and particularly Halder, still believed that the Russians’ fighting power could best be overcome by driving headlong at Moscow, while Hitler was above all anxious to seize as much Russian territory as possible in one gulp, devouring the Russians defending it in giant encirclements on the way. His confidence as a commander, however, was rapidly increasing. He had left the conduct of the Polish campaign to his generals, and had largely been talked into the Scandinavian invasions by Admiral Raeder. Before and during the campaign in the west he had given his generals orders but had also suffered from severe attacks of indecision and second thoughts, notably outside Dunkirk. Since the inception of Barbarossa, however, he had found an increasing certitude. It was in the fullest sense his war, it had started triumphantly, and as its course developed he grew overbearing in its direction. ‘The Führer’s interference is becoming a regular nuisance,’ wrote Halder on 14 July; a little later, he enlarged on this theme:
He’s playing warlord again and bothering us with such absurd ideas that he’s risking everything our wonderful operations so far have won. Unlike the French the Russians won’t just run away when they’ve been tactically defeated; they have to be defeated in a terrain that’s half forest and marsh. . . . Every other day now I have to go over to him [Hitler’s headquarters and those of OKH, though close to each other at Rastenburg in East Prussia, were separate entities]. Hours of gibberish, and the outcome is there’s only one man who understands how to wage wars . . . if I didn’t have faith . . . I’d go under like Brauchitsch [the army C-in-C] who’s at the end of his tether and hides behind an iron mask of manliness so as not to betray his complete helplessness.
Hitler’s differences with Halder and OKH emerged into the open on 19 July when he issued a new Führer Directive, No. 33, outlining his conception of the next stage of operations. It laid down that Army Group Centre’s two Panzer groups, 3 (Hoth) and 2 (Guderian), were to be diverted from the drive on Moscow to co-operate respectively with Leeb and Rundstedt in their advances on Leningrad and Kiev. A supplement, issued on 23 July, rammed the point home. The drive on Moscow wa
s postponed until mopping-up operations around Smolensk had been completed. In amplification of this order, Brauchitsch issued orders to Army Group Centre which Guderian was called to hear at a conference at Novi Borisov on 26 July. There he was directed to take his tanks off the Moscow road and lead them southwards to destroy the Soviet Fifth Army on the fringe of the Pripet Marshes.
Guderian was outraged. His divisions had been reduced by heavy fighting and long traverses of roadless country to 50 per cent of their tank strength. On the other hand, his leading elements, which had already advanced 440 miles in six weeks, stood only 220 miles from Moscow and, in the period of dry weather that could be guaranteed before the coming of the autumn rains, might certainly be led to reach the capital. As he had been promoted to the status of army commander at Novi Borisov, he was also now independent of Kluge (for whom he nursed a reciprocated antipathy) and so answerable directly to Bock, whose views coincided with his own. With Bock’s acquiescence, in which OKH tacitly joined, he therefore embarked on a delaying operation to frustrate Hitler’s reordering of the Barbarossa strategy. It took the form of involving his Panzer group (renamed Panzer Army Guderian) in a battle for the town of Roslavl, seventy miles south-east of Smolensk, where the roads to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad met. His purpose was to entangle his forces so deeply with the Russian defenders that the justification for their diversion to assist Rundstedt would be overtaken by events and so allow him to proceed towards Moscow as originally ordered.
Guderian’s disguised insubordination almost worked. His argument for heightening the pressure at Roslavl was validated by the appearance of Russian reserves in that sector, sent to Timoshenko by Stalin from the training units and hastily embodied militias which were now his only source of fresh troops. Moreover, Hitler had had second thoughts. In Führer Directive No. 34, issued on 30 July, he postponed the diversion of Army Group Centre’s Panzer groups to assist their tank-poor neighbours and arranged to visit Army Group Centre on 4 August to assess its situation for himself (a dangerous excursion, did he but know it, for its headquarters was the focus of the ‘military resistance’ which would strike against him in July 1944). Hoth, commanding Panzer Group 3, accepted the Führer’s arguments for going to the assistance of Leeb on the Leningrad axis. Bock and Guderian resisted his arguments for joining Rundstedt. There followed what has been called a ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ during which Guderian edged southwards but attempted to retain the bulk of his striking force on the Moscow road.
The ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ (4-24 August), which may well have spared Stalin defeat in 1941, was characterised not only by slow German progress on all fronts but also by a succession of changes of mind. On 7 August, OKW and OKH conferred, and Jodl and Halder were able to persuade Hitler of the need to resume the advance on Moscow, which resulted in Führer Directive No. 34A. Three days later he took fright at renewed resistance on the Leningrad front and insisted that Hoth’s tanks depart immediately to Leeb’s assistance. The Führer, Jodl told Colonel Adolf Heusinger, the OKW operations officer, ‘has an intuitive aversion from treading the same path as Napoleon; Moscow gives him a sinister feeling.’ When the whole chain of command – Brauchitsch, Halder and Heusinger at OKW, Bock at Army Group Centre, Guderian as Bock’s principal field commander – demonstrated that it was continuing to prevaricate, Hitler, who had recovered his sense of how the campaign was unfolding, lost patience. He repeated his orders that Army Groups North and South should proceed to their objectives and dictated a letter to Brauchitsch accusing him of a lack of ‘the necessary grip’. Brauchitsch suffered a mild heart attack. Halder, who had urged him to resign when the letter arrived, did so himself ‘to stave off an act of folly’. It was refused; Hitler, now as later, treated offers of resignation as acts of insubordination. Halder nevertheless felt that ‘history will level at us the gravest accusation that can be made of a high command, namely that for fear of undue risk we did not exploit the attacking impetus of our troops.’ Bock, in his diary, echoed his frustration: ‘I don’t want to “capture Moscow”. I want to destroy the enemy’s army and the bulk of that army is in front of me.’ Both left it nevertheless to their subordinate Guderian to confront the Führer with the boldest statement of their anxiety. Overcome by Guderian’s exposition of what he believed to be the strategically correct path, when Halder visited Bock’s headquarters on 23 August Bock telephoned Schmundt, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, with a request for Guderian ‘to be granted audience’, while Halder agreed to take him back to OKW in his liaison aircraft.
Arriving in time to make the onward journey to the Rastenburg evening conference (Hitler had recently instituted a timetable for meeting his staff officers at noon and midnight), Guderian was greeted by Brauchitsch with the news: ‘I forbid you to mention the question of Moscow to the Führer. The operation to the south [the Kiev attack] has been ordered. The problem now is simply how it is to be carried out. Discussion is pointless.’ Guderian grudgingly obeyed, but in the course of the confrontation dropped so many hints about the ‘major objective’ on Army Group Centre’s front that Hitler eventually raised it himself. Given his chance, Guderian launched into an impassioned plea for sustaining the drive on Moscow. He was heard out; Hitler had a special regard for the Panzer pioneer, which had recently been reinforced by his acceptance of Guderian’s warnings of Russia’s unanticipated tank strength. However, when the general had spoken, the Führer went on to the offensive. His commanders, he said, ‘know nothing about the economic aspects of war’; he explained the necessity of seizing Russia’s southern economic zone from Kiev to Kharkov, and emphasised the importance of capturing the Crimea, from which the Soviet air force menaced Romania’s Ploesti region, still the main source of Germany’s natural oil supply. Since the other officers present made it clear that they supported the leader, and Brauchitsch and Halder had pointedly not accompanied him, Guderian felt obliged to desist from opposition. The only concession he extracted was that his Panzer group should be committed to support Rundstedt in its entirety and allowed to return to the Moscow axis as soon as the battle for Kiev was won. Halder and Brauchitsch were loud in recriminations to his face when he returned to OKH from OKW, and Halder vilified him to Bock on the telephone during his homeward flight to Novi Borisov. But the die was now cast. After nearly three weeks of inertia, the Ostheer was to resume the attack with a full-blooded offensive into the black-earth region of the south. Whether it could then complete its thrust towards Moscow would depend on the seasons. The descent of the cold weather was only two and a half months distant and then Generals January and February would be fighting on Stalin’s side.
Stalin, however, was already planning a counter-offensive. On 16 August he had created the Bryansk Front, under A. I. Yeremenko, to close the gap which had appeared between the Central and South-Western Commands (temporary headquarters superior to fronts). To this new front he consigned as much of the new Soviet equipment as could be spared, several T-34 tank battalions and some batteries of Katyusha rockets (‘Stalin organs’ the Germans called them) which fired eight fin-stabilised projectiles with very large warheads. With these weapons and two new armies, the Thirteenth and Twenty-First, Yeremenko attempted to counter-attack into the gap which yawned between Rundstedt’s armoured spearhead, supplied by Kleist’s Panzer Group 1, and Guderian’s Panzer Army, approaching from the north. He was simply putting his head into a trap. Kleist had already pulled off a successful encirclement of 100,000 Russians at Uman on 8 August. The converging Panzer groups now stretched out their pincers to enclose the much larger Russian concentration around Kiev. Guderian, who offered an exposed flank eventually 150 miles long as he beat his way southward from the Moscow axis, was vulnerable to a Russian slicing stroke; but his 3rd and 17th Panzer Divisions, led by thrusting young generals, Walter Model, a future army group commander, and Ritter von Thoma, who was to make his name in the desert against the British, brooked no opposition. They drove forward and on 16 September joined hands with Kleist’s tank
force at Lokhvitsa, a hundred miles east of Kiev. It would take another ten days, during which the Second and Fourth Air Fleets saturated the pocket with bombs, to close all the gaps in its walls through which escaping handfuls of Russians managed to filter. However, on 26 September it had been securely enclosed and 665,000 Russian soldiers were prisoners within it – the largest single mass ever taken in an operation of war before or since. Five Russian armies and fifty divisions had been destroyed, uncounted thousands killed; they included Kirponos, mortally wounded in an ambush close to his final command post at Lokhvitsa on 20 September.
The aftermath of the Kiev encirclement yielded the worst of the spectacles which horrified even the hardest-hearted among the German conquerors, as the captives were marched back across the steppe to the wholly inadequate prisoner cages in the rear. ‘We suddenly saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us,’ recorded an eyewitness. ‘From it came a subdued hum, like that from a beehive. Prisoners of war, Russians, six deep. . . . We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, then what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching towards us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of will to live enabled to obey the order to march? All the misery of the world seemed to be concentrated there.’ Nearly 3 million Russians had now been taken prisoner and of these half a million would die, of lack of shelter or food, in the first three months of the approaching winter.