by John Keegan
The front that the Ostheer had drawn across western Russia in November, at the moment when its ‘final’ offensive against Moscow had been launched, had run almost directly north-south from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, bulging eastward between Demyansk, to Moscow’s north, and Kursk, to the capital’s south. By May it had assumed a much less tidy configuration. Because of the effect of Stalin’s winter counter-offensive, it no longer touched Moscow’s outskirts and was now also dented in three places. Between Demyansk and Rzhev an enormous bulge protruded westward, reaching almost as far as Smolensk on the Moscow highway, and a reverse loop enclosed a pocket around Demyansk itself which had to be supplied by air. South and west of Moscow another bulge nearly enclosed Rzhev and almost touched Roslavl, on the Smolensk-Stalingrad railway. At Izyum, south of the great industrial city of Kharkov, yet another pocket bulged westward to cut the line of the Kiev railway and impede entry to Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus. The Red Army’s sacrificial attacks of January to March had not lacked result.
Hitler briskly dismissed the danger that the two Moscow salients offered to his front. The Demyansk pocket, he calculated, cost the Red Army more to guard than it cost him to maintain; his occupation of the Rzhev re-entrant kept the threat to Moscow alive; and the Roslavl bulge was unimportant. As for the situation at Izyum, it would be resolved automatically by the opening of Army Group South’s drive past Rostov into the Caucasus. The outline of that offensive (codenamed ‘Blue’) was discussed by Hitler with Halder and OKH on 28 March 1942 and issued in greater detail as Führer Directive No. 41 on 5 April. It comprised five separate operations. In the Crimea, Eleventh Army, commanded by Manstein, would destroy the Russian army in the Kerch peninsula and then reduce Sevastopol, still holding out after five months of siege, by bombardment. Bock (who had assumed command of Army Group South after recovering from illness) was to ‘pinch out’ the Izyum pocket and enclose Voronezh on the Don in armoured pincers; he had nine Panzer and six motorised divisions for the task (as well as fifty-two less reliable Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak and Spanish divisions). Once that had been accomplished, Army Group Centre would drive down the Don and cross the steppe to Stalingrad on the Volga, joined by a subsidiary force advancing from Kharkov; finally its spearheads would drive into the Caucasus (as the Kaiser’s army had done in 1918), penetrate the mountain range between the Black and Caspian Seas and reach Baku, centre of the Soviet oil industry. To protect these conquests, Hitler intended to construct an impermeable East Wall. ‘Russia will then be to us’, he told Goebbels, ‘what India is to the British.’
The economic arguments for the operation were immeasurable. Hitler declared to his generals that a success in the south would release forces to complete the isolation and capture of Leningrad in the north. However, the point of ‘Blue’ was to capture Russia’s oil. Not only did Hitler need it for Germany (he confessed to intimates of nightmares in which he saw the Ploesti fields burning out of control from end to end); he also wanted to deny it to Stalin. The economic damage Barbarossa had already inflicted on the Soviet Union was immense. By mid-October 1941 the Ostheer had occupied territory (which it was to retain until the summer of 1944) where 45 per cent of the Soviet population lived, 64 per cent of the Soviet Union’s coal was extracted, and 47 per cent of its grain crops, more than two-thirds of its pig-iron, steel and rolled metals and 60 per cent of its aluminium were produced. The frontier evacuation of factories (of which 303 alone produced ammunition) behind the Urals had saved essential industrial capacity from capture, though at the expense of a grave interruption of supply; but the loss, even the impairment, of the oil supply would prove catastrophic, as Hitler well knew. The ‘General Plan’ of Führer Directive No. 41 stated quite baldly: ‘Our aim is to wipe out the entire defence potential remaining to the Soviets, and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important centres of war industry. . . . First, therefore, all available forces will be concentrated in the southern sector, with the aim of destroying the enemy before the Don in order to secure the Caucasian oilfields and the passes through the Caucasian mountains themselves.’
‘Blue’ opened as soon as the ground was hard enough to bear tanks, on 8 May, with Manstein’s attack into the Kerch peninsula of the Crimea. A week later it was over and 170,000 Russians had been taken prisoner; only Sevastopol, which would not fall until 2 July, still held out in the Crimea. Meanwhile, however, the main stage of ‘Blue’, codenamed ‘Fridericus’, had been compromised. A Russian counter-attack towards Kharkov, a main tank-building centre as well as a key industrial city, began on 12 May, anticipating Bock’s ‘pinching out’ of the Izyum pocket. In a panic he warned Hitler that ‘Fridericus’ would have to be abandoned for a frontal defence of Kharkov and, when Hitler dismissed the interruption of his plan as a ‘minor blemish’, retorted, ‘This is no “blemish” – it’s a matter of life and death.’ Hitler was unmoved: he repeated that the situation would resolve itself as soon as ‘Fridericus’ gathered weight and merely insisted that the launch date be advanced one day. Events proved him right. Kleist, commanding First Panzer Army, easily penetrated the Russians’ line north of their Kharkov thrust, joined up with Paulus’s Sixth Army south of Kharkov on 22 May and thus achieved yet another of the encirclements which had dismembered the Red Army the previous year. By the beginning of June 239,000 prisoners had been captured and 1240 tanks destroyed on the Kharkov battlefield. Then followed two subsidiary operations codenamed ‘Wilhelm’ and ‘Fridericus II’, which set out to destroy the Izyum pocket and the remnants of the Russian forces isolated by the Kharkov battle respectively. Both were over by 28 June.
That was D-Day for ‘Blue’ proper. It was to be mounted by four armies in line abreast, the Sixth, Fourth Panzer, First Panzer and Seventeenth, the first two armies subordinated to one army group, the second two armies subordinated to another. Bock continued to command Army Group South, and List, who had begun his rise in the Polish campaign, commanded the new Army Group A on the Black Sea sector. They were opposed by four Russian armies, Fortieth, Thirteenth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Eighth, lacking reserves because of Stalin’s belief that the principal German threat lay against Moscow. Fortieth Army was destroyed in the first two days; the other three were forced back in confusion. The southern steppe – the treeless, roadless, almost unwatered ‘sea of grass’ which the Cossack horsemen had made their own in their escape from tsarist autocracy – offered the army no line of obstacles on which to organise a defence. Across it Kleist’s and Hoth’s armour swept forward. Alan Clark has described the advance:
The progress of the German columns [was discernible] at thirty or forty miles’ distance. An enormous dust cloud towered in the sky, thickened by smoke from burning villages and gunfire. Heavy and dark at the head of the column, the smoke lingered in the still atmosphere of summer long after the tanks had passed on, a hanging barrage of brown haze stretching back to the western horizon. War correspondents with the advance waxed lyrical about the . . . ‘Mot Pulk’, or motorised square, which the columns represented on the move, with the trucks and artillery enclosed by a frame of Panzers.
However, the unexpected ease with which the Panzers had broken across the Donetz from Kharkov into the great grassland ‘corridor’ which stretched from that river a hundred miles eastward to the Don and led southward into the Caucasus now prompted Hitler to agree to a change of plan – disastrously, as it would turn out. Bock, worried that Army Group South might be attacked in flank as it proceeded down the Don-Donetz ‘corridor’, by Russian forces operating out of the interior towards the Don city of Voronezh, directed Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army to attack and capture the city. Paulus’s Sixth Army was to be left to march down the corridor alone, unsupported by tanks, and then leap across from the ‘great bend’ of the Don to the Volga at Stalingrad, which it was to seize and hold as a blocking-point, to prevent further Russian attacks mounted from the interior against the flank of the main body when it passed by to penetrate the Caucasus.
Hitler, still directing the Russian campaign from Rastenburg, now separated by 700 miles from the vanguard of the Ostheer, became anxious that in fighting for Voronezh Bock might waste both time and tanks at a moment when time lacked and tanks were precious. Accordingly he flew to see the general on 3 July but was reassured by Bock’s apparent promise that he would not embroil his striking force in close combat. By 7 July, however, it was clear that the promise would not be made good. Hoth’s tanks had been drawn into the fighting for Voronezh instead of breaking off the battle to join Paulus’s infantry in the march on Stalingrad, and looked to be engaged for some time to come. Peremptorily Hitler ordered them away, and on 13 July replaced Bock with Weichs as commander of Army Group South (now renamed B); but, as he would complain for months afterwards, the damage had been done. His generals’ hopes of repeating the great captures of the previous year had been reawakened by the success at Kharkov in May. However, in the Donetz-Don corridor the Red Army, commanded by Timoshenko, had grown wilier. At the Stavka, A. M. Vasilevsky had succeeded in persuading Stalin that ‘stand fast’ orders issued for their own sake were undesirable, since they served the Ostheer’s ends, and in extracting permission for threatened Russian formations to slip away out of danger. So they did, assisted between 9 and 11 July by a temporary fuel crisis in Army Group B which halted Hoth’s Panzers. Between 8 and 15 July, after three aborted encirclements between the Donetz and the Don, Army Groups A and B had captured only 90,000 prisoners – by the standards of the previous year a mere handful.
The heightening tension of crisis on the steppe front now prompted Hitler to leave Rastenburg for a headquarters nearer the centre of action. On 16 July OKW was transported en bloc to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, still 400 miles from the Don and isolated in a Rastenburg-like pine forest – malarial, as it turned out – but nevertheless handier for direct personal intervention by the Führer in the conduct of operations. From the Vinnitsa headquarters on 23 July he issued Führer Directive No. 45, codenamed ‘Brunswick’, for the continuation of ‘Blue’. It directed the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzer Army of Army Group A to follow the Russians across the great bend of the Don and destroy them beyond Rostov. Meanwhile the Sixth Army, supported by the Fourth Panzer Army, was to thrust forward to Stalingrad, ‘to smash the enemy forces concentrated there, to occupy the town and to block land communications between the Don and Volga. . . . Closely connected with this, fast-moving forces will advance along the Volga with the task of thrusting through to Astrakhan.’ Astrakhan lay in the far Caucasus, a land fabled even to Russians; to the Landsers tramping eastward, already 1000 miles from home in Silesia and 1500 miles from the Rhineland, it was a place almost at the end of the earth. Hitler’s imagination leapt effortlessly at such objectives and he remembered that German soldiers had campaigned as far as that in 1918; but in 1942 a vast space and a still unsubdued Red Army interspersed between his infantry columns and the fulfilment of his dream of empire.
‘Never contradict the Führer’
List’s advance southward with Army Group A at first went even faster and more smoothly than expected. Once across the Don, Kleist’s tanks raced over the Kuban steppe to reach Maikop, where the first oil derricks were seen on 9 August. The oilfield was wrecked but the Luftwaffe commander, Wolfram von Richthofen, whose Fourth Air Fleet was supporting the operation, was certain he could drive the Russians out of the Caucasus passes and clear a way through to the main oilfields beyond. A breakthrough was also important to secure possession of Tuapse, the Black Sea port through which the enemy could be supplied from Bulgaria and Romania. On 21 August, Hitler was brought news that Bavarian mountain troops had raised the swastika flag on the peak of Mount Elbrus, the highest point in the Caucasus (and in Europe), but the achievement did not please him. He wanted more tank advances, not feats of mountaineering. As the tanks reached the foothills of the Caucasus, however, the advance began to slow and Hitler vented his impatience against those around him, first Halder, then Jodl. Halder was in disfavour for other reasons: subordinate operations near Moscow and at Leningrad also failed in August, and Halder’s defence of soldiers consigned to carry out what he thought ‘impossible orders’ only inflamed Hitler’s rage against what he called ‘the last masonic lodge’.
Jodl, though no friend to Halder’s OKH, shared its understanding of the difficulties faced by the troops on the ground. When the reports of two emissaries he had sent to the Caucasus front failed to soften the Führer’s harshness towards List, Jodl himself went to visit Army Group A. He found the 4th Mountain Division stuck fast in a defile so narrow that it had no hope of breaking through to the Transcaucasus and its oil. The force advancing on Tuapse was equally blocked by Russian resistance and had no prospect of getting to the port before winter closed the passes. When he insisted to Hitler that List’s predicament was insoluble and incautiously indicated that the Führer had contrived the impasse, the result was an outburst of fury. Hitler, acutely sensitive to any implied slur on his powers of command and obsessed by the danger of repeating mistakes made during the First World War, declared that Jodl was behaving like Hentsch, the General Staff officer who had sanctioned the retreat from the Marne in 1914. He banished him and Keitel from his headquarters mess, installed stenographers in his command hut to take a verbatim record of his conferences so that his words could not be quoted against him, and dismissed List, assuming command of Army Group A himself on 9 September. He simultaneously sent the black spot to Halder, via Keitel, a man he chiefly valued for his widely remarked qualities of lackey and sycophant. On 23 September the army chief of staff left the Führer’s presence in tears, to be replaced forthwith by General Kurt Zeitzler. ‘Never contradict the Führer’ was Keitel’s advice to Zeitzler on the threshold of office. ‘Never remind him that once he may have thought differently of something. Never tell him that subsequent events have proved you right and him wrong. Never report on casualties to him – you have to spare the nerves of the man.’ Zeitzler owed his promotion mainly to his friendship with Schmundt, Hitler’s chief adjutant, but he was also a dogged infantry soldier with an impressive fighting reputation. ‘If a man starts a war,’ he retorted to Keitel, ‘he must have the nerve to bear the consequences.’ During the twenty-two months when he served Hitler as army chief of staff, there were to be repeated passages of blunt speaking between them. After Halder, a ‘swivel-chair’ soldier, in Hitler’s dismissive phrase, he brought a down-to-earth directness to the command conferences which Hitler found reassuring, and they were to rub along effectively even in the worst of crises.
Such a crisis was now in the making. Hitler’s allusion to the Battle of the Marne was not without point. Then the German army had overextended itself and the high command had taken too little note of the danger levelled by a strongly garrisoned city on its flanks. Now on the Volga a similar danger loomed. Army Group A, reaching southward towards the Caucasus, maintained – with difficulty – lines of communication 300 miles long which it lacked the strength to protect against Russian forces located in the steppe to its east. Army Group B, which had earlier dawdled down the Donetz-Don corridor, was now being drawn into a battle around Stalingrad, and all the signs indicated that Stalin was transforming the city into a formidable centre of resistance. The parallel between 1914 and 1942 was not exact. At the Marne the German army had been beaten because it failed to find the force to capture Paris on its flank. The risk posed in 1942 was that Hitler would overreact and, by concentrating too much force at Stalingrad, deny his armies in the mountains and the open steppe the means to defend themselves against an enemy counter-stroke. Such was precisely the operational outcome towards which Stalin and the Stavka were now groping their way.
The first inkling of the plan for a Russian counter-stroke had been disclosed to Winston Churchill by Stalin when the British Prime Minister visited Moscow on 12-17 August. The moment was a low point in Anglo-Soviet relations. Although the obstacle presented by Russia’s treatment of Poland had been partia
lly removed – by Stalin’s agreement the previous December to release his 180,000 Polish prisoners and transport them via Iran to form the ‘Anders Army’ under British command in Egypt – the Russians now had reason to reproach the British. After the massacre of convoy PQ17 in June, Britain had decided to interrupt the convoying of Soviet supplies to the Arctic ports. More critically, in Washington in July, the opening of the ‘Second Front’ had been definitively postponed from 1942 to 1943. These reproaches Stalin threw in Churchill’s teeth. He was also suspicious of Britain’s offer to help defend the Caucasus, where the local Muslims had been supported by a British army in an effort to secede from Russia in 1918 and were even now displaying a favour towards the German invaders which had prompted Beria to send secret police troops to the region. On the eve of the leaders’ parting, however, Stalin relented. Desperate for the sort of supplies only Western industry could provide – not weapons, which the Urals factories were beginning to produce in plenty (16,000 aircraft and 14,000 tanks in the second half of 1942), but trucks and finished aluminium – he confronted Churchill with his demands. To smooth the transition from accusation to supplication, he ‘let the Prime Minister into the immensely secret prospect of a vast counter-offensive.’
The outline of the plan was still vague. It was not to be clearly defined until 13 September, by which time the Battle of Stalingrad had been raging for three weeks. According to Russian calculations, its inception was even earlier than that. On 24 July, Rostov-on-Don, the sentry-box of southern Russia, had fallen to the German Seventeenth Army. Its tank-heavy neighbours, the First and Fourth Panzer Armies, broke eastward across the Don in the next six days and, while the First wheeled south to drive to the Caucasus, the Fourth turned north-eastward to support Paulus’s Sixth Army in the assault on Stalingrad. Resistance had been so slight that a sergeant of the 14th Panzer Division recorded that ‘many of the soldiers were able to take off their clothes and bathe [in the Don] – as we had in the Dnieper exactly a year earlier’. By 19 August the Sixth Army was positioned to begin the attack on Stalingrad as Hitler’s Fourth Panzer Army approached on a converging route. Stalingrad largely comprised a sprawl of wooden buildings surrounding modern factories in a strip twenty miles long on the west bank of the Volga, which was a mile wide at that point. Much of the city was destroyed in a day of bombing by the VIII Air Corps on 23 August. Through the smouldering ruins the Sixth Army pressed forward for the culminating advance to the Volga shore.