Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  At roughly the same time, to the south, units of the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzergruppe of Army Group South had reached their assembly areas for the crossing of the Dnieper. In a series of engagements between 30 August and 2 September, the Seventeenth Army seized river crossings at Kremenchug. Although the original intention had been for these forces to continue to advance eastward once the river had been breached, the stiffening of enemy resistance and the realization that the Soviets were throwing units from other areas into the battle for Kiev caused a fundamental German reassessment. As it became clear that Stalin had ordered the Dnieper line to be held at all costs, the OKW now saw a chance to inflict a disastrous defeat on the Soviets. Already on 1 September, the chief of staff of Army Group South, General Sodenstern, had contacted his counterpart at the Second Army to the north in order to discuss the possibility of an encirclement of Soviet forces east of Kiev that would clear the way for the Moscow operation. On the sixth, the OKW ordered the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzergruppe to turn north and, in conjunction with the Second Army and the Second Panzergruppe, trap the bulk of Soviet forces gathering to the east of Kiev, while the next day Halder and Rundstedt conferred to hammer out the details of the destruction of all enemy forces in the Kiev-Dnieper-Desna bend. Although this meant that the mobile units of Panzergruppe 1 would be tied down in protracted operations in closing and holding the ring and, thus, would be unable to exploit a breakthrough to the east, the lure of a giant envelopment that would free the danger to the southern flank of the Moscow attack proved alluring. In the north, Guderian’s forces were to drive on Sumy, and the Second Army was to aim for Romny, while the southern wing would advance on Lubny.12

  While the Germans acted quickly to exploit the emerging opportunity, the Soviets obliged their enemy by putting their head further into the noose. Although Zhukov and others had from mid-August tried in vain to warn Stalin of the looming danger at Kiev, the Soviet dictator stubbornly insisted that the city, the ancient center of medieval Russia, the capital of Ukraine, and the third largest city in the Soviet Union, be defended. Stalin had more than historical or sentimental reasons for his seemingly irrational decision. He feared that the loss of the city, the political center of an area that had borne the brunt of his calamitous policy of collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, might touch off a process of internal disintegration of the Soviet system. Signs of decomposition, which even the notorious blocking units could not stem, had, indeed, become evident by early September in some Soviet units. The Soviet dictator also wanted to inspire the defenders of Leningrad and Odessa and was anxious as well to reassure nervous American and British leaders that the Soviet Union could survive the German onslaught. Stalin, too, regarded a German move on Moscow, given the importance of the city, as self-evident. He thus initially perceived Guderian’s attack as simply part of a typical German maneuver to encircle the capital rather than drive straight at it.13

  For Soviet commanders, unwilling to challenge Stalin’s orders and risk execution by ordering a withdrawal, events now unfolded as in a script they had seen but were powerless to alter. On 9 September, Guderian’s forces, fighting through stubborn resistance “in every village” in driving rain, crossed the Sejm and the next day reached Romny, where over the next two days they beat back violent Soviet counterattacks. After laboriously receiving fuel from trucks that had to be towed through the nearly impassable mud, Guderian’s forces, aided by the clearing weather on the twelfth, were able to drive on toward Lokhvitsa and a possible linkup with elements of the First Panzergruppe. The southern wing had been delayed in fierce fighting, but on 13 September its armored spearheads met those of the Second Panzergruppe at Lubny. Two days later, the 120-mile-deep trap, with sides 300 miles long, snapped shut at Lokhvitsa, snaring elements of five Soviet armies inside. Euphoric German newsreels, seeking to give their viewers a sense of the magnitude of the achievement, boasted that the pocket would encompass most of Germany, extending from Stettin in the north to Cologne in the west and Munich in the south. “The ‘Battle at Kiev,’ ” Bock exulted, “has thus become a dazzling success.”14

  Even now, however, the Germans were under no illusions: if they were to achieve a decisive victory, the Soviet forces had to be annihilated, a task, given previous experience, every Landser knew meant bitter fighting and heavy casualties. Having already marched hundreds of miles and engaged the Russians in seemingly unending battles, nearing the limits of their physical and psychological endurance, most men were left cold by the prospect of further wild combat with a trapped enemy desperate to break out. “Probably,” noted one such veteran, Günter von Scheven, “we will have to annihilate everything before this war is going to end.” Stalin’s actions reinforced this gloomy prediction: the Stavka forbade a breakout attempt and ordered Timoshenko, who had replaced the hapless Budenny, to hold Kiev. Not until the night of 17–18 September did a written order allowing the abandonment of Kiev arrive, but, by then, an orderly withdrawal proved impossible. The city fell to the Germans on the nineteenth, even as frantic fighting continued over the next few days as Soviet troops, often in desperate human-wave attacks, sought to break free. As German troops drove into the pocket, subpockets were created, which resulted in chaotic and frantic combat. Fearful losses on both sides resulted, with roadsides strewn with corpses and piles of bodies stacked before German positions. German soldiers, hungry, thirsty, fatigued, and stunned by the hand-to-hand fighting, were worn down by the remorselessly bloody process of reducing the Kiev pocket. In some German companies, losses ran to 75 percent, yet no end appeared in sight. “I have strong reservations,” one Landser despaired, “whether we will see an end to the war in Russia this year. . . . The land is too big and the Russians are not thinking of surrender.”15

  As in previous encirclements, this one was not airtight, and for days small groups of Red Army troops, including Budenny, Timoshenko, and Khrushchev, managed to escape the cauldron. Despite this, the Kiev encirclement was an unprecedented catastrophe for the Red Army, which had certainly experienced its share of disasters in the first three months of war. When the fighting ended on 25 September, the Germans had bagged some 665,000 prisoners, a very high proportion of whom had simply chosen to surrender rather than continue to fight. Four Soviet field armies, consisting of forty-three divisions, had ceased to exist, while the Soviet defeat cleared the way for Rundstedt’s forces to seize the important industrial city of Kharkov and advance into the rich economic areas of the Donets Basin and the Caucasus. Since Soviet replacements had to be sent from the center to cover the gap to the south, little protected Moscow from the southwest.16

  Guderian and his Second Panzergruppe now had the chance, supply permitting, to seize the capital in a concentrated thrust. The enormous losses suffered by the Red Army at Kiev and in the first three months of the war seemed to justify the German assumption that the attack on Moscow, Operation Taifun (Typhoon), could still succeed despite the lateness of the season. Guderian’s already exhausted and depleted forces, however, had been further worn down in the Kesselschlacht (battle of encirclement) at Kiev. Their casualties had been high, while, by late September, the Second Panzergruppe had only 33 percent of its armored vehicles in service. The gasoline situation remained precarious, while the redeployment of the Second Army and the Second Panzergruppe from the Kiev area, hampered by incessant rain and muddy roads, took much longer than anticipated. Army Group South’s pursuit to the east was hindered by the fact that it now had to give up significant forces to Army Group Center for use in Operation Typhoon. The great economic goals still lay up to three hundred miles away as the Germans were left to ponder once again the principal bugaboo of the campaign to date: the lack of sufficient forces to capture all the targets temporarily open to them. As with the other envelopments, the Battle of Kiev had been a great tactical triumph but had not resulted in decisive victory. Even as Bock conceded the success at Kiev, he noted ruefully in his diary, “But the main Russian force stands unbro
ken before my front and . . . the question is open as to whether we can smash it quickly and so exploit this victory before winter comes.”17

  The same dilemma, providing the necessary combat strength to achieve decisive success in an expanding theater of operations, played out to the north as Leeb’s forces lurched toward Leningrad. Hitler attached considerable importance to the capture of the city, not merely because it was the birthplace of Bolshevism, but more practically because control of the Baltic would ease the German supply situation and free up troops to be used elsewhere. Although Army Group North had achieved great operational success, Leeb was forced to the realization by late July that he simply did not have adequate forces to seize Leningrad. On 15 August, units of the Third Panzergruppe, including the Twelfth Panzer and the Eighteenth and Twentieth Motorized Divisions, were diverted from the center to the north. By throwing in all his available units, including his last reserves, Leeb was able to push through Novgorod and on the twentieth captured Chudovo, thus cutting the main rail line between Moscow and Leningrad. On the twenty-eighth, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, fell, while, on the thirtieth, the Twelfth Panzer Division reached the Neva River, further isolating Leningrad. The city, however, was well situated for defense as the western approaches were protected by the Gulf of Finland, the northern by the narrow Karelian Isthmus, the eastern by Lake Ladoga, and the southern by swampy ground difficult to traverse. By early September, steady rains and stubborn Soviet resistance ground the German advance to a crawl. On 8 September, the Germans managed to seize Shlisselburg, where the waters of Lake Ladoga enter the Neva, and Demyansk to the southeast, but persistent enemy counterattacks forced Leeb continually to regroup his forces.18

  The loss of Shlisselburg, however, meant that Leningrad could be supplied only via Lake Ladoga, which encouraged the German belief that the city was ripe for the taking. Three days earlier, in fact, Halder had remarked in his diary, “Leningrad: Our object has been achieved. Will now become a subsidiary theater of operations,” followed by the hope that the drive on Moscow could begin in eight to ten days. Since Hitler had no intention of taking the city in any case, preferring to subdue it through hunger and terror bombing, on 5 September he ordered the transfer of a number of mobile and air units from Army Group North to Army Group Center, to take effect on the fifteenth. The next day, reflecting his optimism that successes on the flanks had opened the way to Moscow as well as illustrating his awareness of the crucial time factor, Hitler issued Directive No. 35. “Within the limited time available before the onset of winter,” it stated, the enemy before Moscow should be wiped out by concentrating all forces, including those that could be freed from the flanks, for one last encirclement battle. Leeb immediately protested the loss of these units, and, since Halder realized that the attack on Moscow could not commence before the end of the month, he reluctantly allowed Leeb to keep them temporarily.19

  Over the next few days, Leeb won a number of local successes, but fighting in the north did not abate as Soviet counterattacks increased in intensity. Although the Fourth Panzergruppe began shifting units to Army Group Center on 15 September, Leeb managed to retain the three divisions of Schmidt’s Thirty-ninth Motorized Corps of the Third Panzergruppe. Leeb now faced the task of tightening the ring around Leningrad against stiffening enemy resistance with a significantly reduced combat force insufficient to fulfill the objectives assigned it. On 22 September, the Soviets launched a series of strong attacks against both the northern and the southern wings of the army group that inflicted such high losses on German forces that Leeb feared he would not be able to hold his positions. Schmidt’s forces had been so ground down that the Twelfth Panzer had only fifty-four tanks left, about a quarter of its normal strength, while the Eighteenth and Twentieth Motorized Divisions had been reduced to roughly 46 and 65 percent of their respective troop complements. Two days later, in fact, Leeb admitted to the OKH that the situation had worsened considerably and that he could no longer continue offensive operations toward Leningrad.20

  By the end of the month, stalemate had settled on the northern front. Leningrad was besieged, but the Germans had not closed the ring tight enough to allow effective artillery bombardment of the city or to cut it off completely from its hinterland. As a result, even the possibility of starving the city into submission—which at least had the advantage, Leeb noted coldly, that large numbers of people would die, “but at least not before our eyes”—seemed remote.21 Even though the city remained in mortal danger, the Germans had not been able to end the fighting in the north, which meant that large numbers of troops would not be available for operations elsewhere. September thus proved a frustrating month for the Germans. As at Kiev, an apparently great triumph had resulted in actual gains much less than those anticipated. Worse, the struggle would continue as the Wehrmacht sought the elusive decisive battle that would finally end Soviet resistance.

  Hitler intended that “final battle” to be the much-delayed assault on Moscow that Bock and Halder had advocated in August. Even as German forces completed the encirclement of Leningrad and pulled off the spectacular envelopment operation east of Kiev, the two fretted that time to force the decisive showdown was slipping away. The bitter arguments of July and August between Hitler and the OKH, the persistence with which Hitler promoted his ideas against the advice of the army leadership, and the flurry of often contradictory directives led to charges at the time, and ever since, that Hitler’s dilettantism and diversion of forces from the center caused the German defeat. Hitler’s views, however, were not as odd as they have been made to seem, nor were those of his advisers necessarily more incisive. Not only did Hitler’s ideas correspond more closely to the original Barbarossa plan, but the growing realization that Halder had subverted his wishes from the beginning, combined with the indecision of the hopelessly ineffective Brauchitsch, undermined his trust in both. Nor, given the economic and supply problems facing Germany, was his strategy of seizing the Baltic and the vital resources of Ukraine before launching an attack on Moscow without merit. Moreover, far from pursuing a defeated foe, as advocates of the thrust to Moscow imply, German commanders readily acknowledged that Soviet resistance was stiffening rather than slackening.

  Therein lay the cause of the mounting problems facing the Germans. The assumption that the Red Army could be defeated quickly and that the Soviet system would collapse like a house of cards had proved horribly wrong. The Germans had signally failed to destroy Soviet forces in the first weeks of the war, an omission Halder now sought to remedy by the capture of Moscow. Stalin, however, fully expected such a move and, thus, had prepared strong defenses to meet it. At the same time, Soviet forces in Ukraine posed an intolerable danger for the long, exposed southern flank of a thrust on Moscow and had to be eliminated before any attack on the capital. Nor did most in the German leadership really expect the capture of Moscow to trigger a collapse of the enemy’s will to resist, as had happened in France, hoping instead merely to gain favorable starting positions for the next year’s campaign. Stalin had long since mastered the crisis of the early weeks of the war and regained control of his system. Given the Soviets’ furious mobilization of their enormous resources as well as the promise of massive Western aid, the war would have continued even with the loss of Moscow. In any case, regardless of these other factors, a rapid drive toward the Soviet capital could not have taken place since German resources were already stretched to the breaking point. Without substantial reinforcements and resupply, Army Group Center was in September incapable of launching an offensive.22

  The continuous fighting since late June had taken an enormous toll on the Eastern Army. Since the Germans had assumed that the destruction of Soviet forces on the border would allow them to leap the three hundred miles to the Dnieper, then pause for a rest, they had gambled that a logistic system dependent on truck columns would suffice to provide the necessary supplies. In the event, however, Russian resistance, the absence of paved roads, persistent rains that turned even g
ood roads into muddy tracks, the wear and tear on machinery, constant congestion and traffic jams, and the higher-than-expected fuel expenditure produced a logistic nightmare. In the best of times, driving conditions were harsh, but the long distances to be covered meant that German truck columns had to snake slowly across decrepit roads day and night, their long lines vulnerable to attack by partisans. By the time the fighting at Smolensk had ended, Guderian’s Second Panzergruppe was 450 miles from its original base, barely within reach of motorized supply. The relentless Soviet counterattacks throughout July and August, moreover, not only denied Landsers the opportunity to rest but also resulted in a serious ammunition crisis. German transport capacity was so limited that a switch in priorities to munitions, however, necessitated a drastic cut in the supply of fuel and food rations. Expedients such as giving precedence in supply to the motorized units also backfired since this served only to increase the gap between them and the marching infantry. The supply situation with regard to tanks, motor vehicles, and fuel was so precarious, in fact, that on 11 September the quartermaster-general’s office warned that the strength of the Ostheer might be “insufficient to bring the eastern campaign to a conclusion in the autumn.” “A great reduction in the fighting power and mobility of the army, perhaps at the crucial moment,” might result unless drastic measures were adopted.23