Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  As German units crept closer to Moscow, on the thirteenth seizing Kaluga and breaching the Mozhaisk defense line while the next day occupying Kalinin, a key city on the Volga about one hundred miles north of the capital, nascent panic began to spread in the city. Fearing the imminent loss of the capital, the Communist Party Central Committee and State Defense Committee made plans to destroy key installations and evacuate government agencies from the city, even as frantic efforts began to prepare defenses and recall reserve units. Evacuations began during the night of 15–16 October amid scenes of hysteria at rail stations. Signs of collective panic abounded as people looted shops and rushed to escape the city. Offices and factories stopped working amid proliferating rumors of an imminent surrender. Stalin seems even to have tried, via the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow, to initiate discussions for a negotiated peace with Germany, offering the cession of extensive territories in the western Soviet Union, but nothing came of the effort. Churchill and Roosevelt, fearing the danger of a Soviet collapse, both sent urgent messages to Stalin pledging support.36

  On the eighteenth, the Soviet dictator prepared to leave the capital but at the last moment was persuaded to stay by his military advisers. The next day, the State Defense Committee declared a state of siege in the Moscow region and decreed that any disturbances of public order would be punished by military tribunals. NKVD (Soviet Security Police) troops were also told to “shoot provocateurs, spies, and other agents of the enemy . . . on the spot.” At the same time, Zhukov ordered that extensive defenses be constructed in depth to slow the attacking Germans by forcing them continuously to break through new positions. Within weeks, 100,000 laborers—women, children, and factory workers—had constructed over two hundred miles of tank ditches and erected numerous tank obstacles. Zhukov also pioneered new methods of defensive fighting, emphasizing smaller units and the concentration of antitank guns and artillery at key points. By the twentieth, the crisis was surmounted; in retrospect, those few days in mid-October, which coincided with the faltering of the German offensive, were likely the most dangerous period for the Soviet regime. Stalin, however, quickly recovered his resolve, while German weakness limited any attempt to exploit the crisis. Still, the giant encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk had been catastrophic. In two weeks of fighting, the Germans had ripped through the Soviet defense lines, encircled or killed roughly a million men, and left the enemy, at least temporarily, with no strategic reserves to plug a gap three hundred miles wide.37

  Despite the Germans’ intention to move relentlessly in the direction of the Soviet capital, two factors—the beginning of the muddy season and fierce enemy resistance—hobbled their advance. A key qualifier in the optimistic German assessments of the situation had been that the sunny, dry late autumn weather continue. Beginning on 6 October in the southern sector, however, and on the seventh and eighth in other areas, the fall rains began, steady downpours that turned the roads into bottomless quagmires, stymied all movement, and prevented supply columns from reaching the front. Having expected the campaign to be over by mid-October, the OKH seems not to have taken the effects of the rasputitsa (lit., the time without roads), the wet period during the spring and fall when much of western Russia dissolves in water, into consideration. Ironically, despite efforts at the time, and ever since, to portray the weather as unusually bad, rainfall totals from mid-October through November were actually less than average. The Russian saying “in the autumn a spoonful of water makes a bucketful of mud” nonetheless proved devastatingly accurate. “The roads, so far as there were any in the western sense of the word, disappeared in mud,” remarked one officer, “knee-deep mud . . . in which vehicles stuck fast.” Ill versed in how to negotiate the unpaved tracks, German columns continued to drive through the same ruts, which only made the already poor roads worse. At the same time, the strain of grinding through the endless mud sent fuel consumption soaring and led to an alarming rate of vehicle breakdowns. Motorized divisions, mired in the mud and stretched over many miles, were unable to concentrate and vulnerable to attack.38 The Germans discovered, to their distress, that pursuit was impossible over muddy tracks without supplies, equipment, and fuel.

  Advance units had not outrun their supply lines; instead, provisions simply could not be moved forward. Any systematic delivery of supplies was impossible, both because of the rains and because the few paved highways were repeatedly broken on a daily basis by time-delay explosive charges that ripped holes ten yards deep and thirty yards wide. The Minsk-Moscow highway was so badly damaged that an entire infantry division had to be employed to make it serviceable again. “We can’t go on,” wrote one disgusted Landser. “There is no more gasoline and nothing is coming up behind us. . . . Rations still do not arrive and we sit in filth the entire day.” Complained another, “The so-called Rollbahn upon which we are marching is a sea of knee-deep mud. Vehicles sink up to the axle and in many places the morass is up to the bellies of the horses.” Thousands of trucks were stranded, while moving even five miles might take a day or two. In the Second Panzer Army, progress was reduced to a half mile per hour. The terrible roads and abysmal weather, moreover, led to fuel consumption three times that of normal, but the dismal state of the railways made it impossible to deliver extra quantities of fuel. Taxed to the limit, emaciated horses collapsed in the mire. “In some cases,” Bock observed, “twenty-four horses are required to move a single artillery piece.” Motorized supply, which was inadequate in any case, could no longer be maintained, nor, given the huge losses of horses, could the Ostheer move even by traditional means. The operational mobility of the troops had been reduced to the next laborious step.39

  At times in mid-October, temperatures dropped, and snow mingled with the rain. “We watched it uneasily,” admitted one Landser of the snow, for it meant the impending onset of winter. Bock, too, worried about the effect on morale since the question, “What will become of us in the winter?” was on everyone’s mind. Without heavy coats, soldiers stuffed “newspapers in the boots . . . between vest and shirt . . . round the belly . . . in the trousers . . . round the legs,” anything to preserve warmth. Constantly soaked, covered in mud, unable to dry their clothing or boots, susceptible to trench foot and other maladies in the near-freezing temperatures, covered in lice, exhausted, and with limited rations, the infantry endured wretched conditions as they struggled to advance. Many were so tired that they no longer bothered to seek protection when enemy shelling began. Others struggled in the wet, cold weather with hands frozen stiff. “My gloves were so wet I could not bear the ache any longer,” wrote Harald Henry. “My contorted face was streaked with tears, but I was in a trance-like state. I plodded forward, babbling incoherently. . . . All the others were in the same state.”40

  Some noticed a strange, and troubling, phenomenon: the foot soldiers were beginning to overtake the “fast” motorized divisions. As the arrival of supplies faltered, the pursuit of the Russians failed to deliver the expected results. “The beaten Russians seemed unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist,” noted one officer sarcastically. “During these weeks . . . the fighting became more bitter with each day.” With this realization, morale dropped alarmingly. “After four months,” concluded another officer, “one has had enough.” Confirmed Harald Henry, “We can’t take much more.” By late October, Army Group Center worried about the morale of soldiers “exhausted from marching in mud, rain and cold, and very much aware of the lack of an effective weapon to defend themselves against the heavy Russian tanks. In places the troops are not always capable of meeting the demands of battle.” Few at the front or at home now expected the war to conclude by the end of the year. Once again, German triumphs, as Bock admitted, were only partial successes that “mean[t] nothing”: “The splitting apart of the army group together with the frightful weather has caused us being bogged down. As a result, the Russians are gaining time to bring their shattered divisions back up to strength and bolster their defense.” The Ostheer was n
earing the limits of its endurance; for many men, the most important thing was no longer a strategic objective but simply finding shelter.41

  In a hauntingly familiar refrain, Bock’s hope that this time the cauldrons could be reduced quickly was dashed as well, for the Kesselschlachten at Vyazma and Bryansk proved, if anything, even more intense than in previous pockets, perhaps the hardest fighting of the entire eastern campaign. Once again, maneuver alone, which had induced the French to capitulate a year earlier, failed to produce a similar response from the Soviets, who doggedly fought on regardless of cost. The Germans trapped, then blasted Red Army units into splintered groups, but fighting raged for nearly two weeks, tying down some 70 percent of the army group’s divisions. In the process, blitzkrieg once more ground to a standstill amid irrecoverable losses. The Sixth Panzer Division, for example, which on 10 October still had over 200 tanks, was left with only 60 less than a week later. At the same time, the fighting at Mtsensk left the Fourth Panzer with 38 tanks, while on 16 October the Second Panzer Army as a whole had only 271 panzers. By early November, the Ostheer had lost over 2,000 of its original 3,580 armored vehicles but received only 601 replacements. The fighting power of a panzer division in Army Group Center had declined to just 35 percent of its normal strength. Vehicle losses had also assumed catastrophic dimensions. By now, most supply trucks had ground thousands of miles over dusty, then muddy, roads that caused numerous breakdowns. Reliance on low-grade motor oil led to numerous engine failures, while a chronic shortage of spare parts resulted in junking and cannibalizing of otherwise repairable vehicles. By mid-November, only 15 percent of vehicles in the Ostheer were still in good working order, a further 15 percent needed minor repair, while fully 40 percent required complete overhaul and had to be sent back to Germany. Raids by partisans added to losses, which often totaled a quarter or a third of trucks in supply columns. On 4 November, the Second Panzer Army noted, “There is not a single road . . . on which larger units can continue moving unhindered or that permits delivery of supplies to the fighting troops. . . . Operations have come to a standstill.” Less than a week later, it lamented, “Normal provisioning can no longer be guaranteed.”42

  Nor was it just the armored divisions that suffered heavy losses; the infantry, too, paid a very high price for success. In just a little over two weeks, Army Group Center lost roughly 50,000 men in savage fighting that unnerved even veteran troops, while, by mid-October, total losses stood at 277,000. German infantry withstood frantic enemy attempts to break out as, day after day, Soviet troops, amid nerve-shattering cries of “Hurrah,” launched desperate human-wave assaults against undermanned German positions. A confusing melee of savage one-on-one combat ensued as Landsers fought with anything available—pistols, spades, and grenades—to check the onslaught. As the infantry fought to the limit of its endurance, the commander of the Fourth Army, Kluge, believed that “the psychologically most critical moment of the campaign in the east” had arrived. German troops, lacking suitable clothing, struggling through impassable terrain, facing the prospect of surviving in winter with inadequate shelter, and confronting an enemy that showed no sign of capitulating, began to realize that an end to operations was unlikely. For many, expectations of victory turned into hopes for survival. The intense fighting and awful road conditions had caused the German advance to falter. “A success for the Russians,” Bock conceded, “whose stubbornness paid off.”43

  As Bock had feared, the Soviets also incorporated the effects of the rasputitsa in their defense plans. Zhukov, aware that the German advance could continue only on the paved main roads, concentrated his sparse forces on the key approaches to Moscow as well as using the rail lines that converged on the city to bring in a steady stream of reinforcements. By mid-October, then, the Russians resumed their customary ferocious counterattacks against a German advance weakened by the transfer of troops and the precarious supply situation. On the southern wing, when the Second Panzer Army resumed its offensive to the northeast on the seventeenth, it discovered in the vicinity of Mtsensk an “enemy as strong as ever . . . [that] put up unusually tough resistance.” Both the Second and the Fourth Armies, meanwhile, suffered from supply difficulties and steady enemy counterattacks that exhausted the troops and forced them to take sporadic defensive action. The Russian air force, operating from bases near Moscow, also became increasingly active, to the dismay of the advancing Germans. In the north, Reinhardt’s Third Panzergruppe (Hoth had in the meantime been appointed commander of the Seventeenth Army) faced fierce and unremitting enemy assaults that stalled its further progress, forcing Bock on the twenty-third to shelve all plans for an attack beyond Kalinin. On its left, the Ninth Army had taken Rzhev and sought to move north but, on the eighteenth, warned that it would not be able to continue the advance without extensive resupply, while, to its right, the Fourth Army faced similar problems after advancing through Mozhaisk. With the roads worsening in the wet conditions, with vehicles and horses stuck fast in the muck, and with the failure of the railways, the fighting units simply had insufficient supplies to advance. The OKH’s apparent fear that large numbers of Soviets were pulling back and insistence on forming special pursuit detachments to cut them off thus bordered on the fantastic. “The enemy,” Bock admitted, “has moved in new forces from Siberia and the Caucasus and has launched counterattacks.” The Germans were dealing not with a defeated enemy but with a determined opponent bent on defending the capital with all means at his disposal.44

  Faced with an advance on Moscow that had slowed to a crawl, Hitler sought a solution on the flanks, further dispersing German strength. On 28 October, he ordered the deployment of units from the Third and Fourth Panzergruppen in an effort to eliminate Soviet forces between the Volga and Lake Ladoga to the north, effectively writing off the bulk of the Fourth Panzergruppe from the attack on Moscow. At the same time, the Second Panzer Army was ordered not to advance eastward beyond Tula but to strike toward Voronezh on the Don, some two hundred miles to the southeast, in order to cut off strong enemy forces. Although Hitler believed that the right wing of the Fourth Army was strong enough to assume the tasks of the Second Panzer Army, on 28 October Kluge had to use his last remaining reserves and go over to the defensive in order to cover the growing gap in the German front. Although strategic fantasy reigned at the OKH, the hard fact was that, by the end of October, the Germans had run out of troops. The supply situation, the sheer exhaustion of the Landsers, and the miserable weather all made it impossible to continue the advance. His units out of fuel, doubtful that Hitler had read his reports on the bleak situation at the front, reduced to the absurd proposal that detachments equipped with machine guns mounted on horse-drawn panje wagons be employed as mobile combat teams, and driven “to despair,” on 1 November Bock ordered that “further advances should be temporarily suspended” until supply problems could be overcome. “Our losses,” he admitted in his diary, “have become quite considerable. In the army group’s area more than twenty battalions are under the command of lieutenants.” The attempt to smash the remainder of the Red Army in a quick battle, he acknowledged, had failed. If the enemy was to be beaten, a new, full-scale offensive would have to be launched, although the army group could not replace the heavy casualties it had already suffered, nor could the decrepit German supply system provide the necessary material help.45

  In his 21 August directive to the OKW, Hitler had stressed that the most important aim to be achieved before the onset of winter was not capturing Moscow but seizing the industrially and economically vital regions of southern Russia and the Caucasus. Even as the German troops creeping toward Moscow captured the world’s attention, then, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on developments to the south. Although the Kiev encirclement had ripped a hole in Soviet defenses, Army Group South anticipated problems and heavy fighting as it moved to the southeast to occupy the Crimea and establish positions for advancing into the Caucasus. The Eleventh Army, under Manstein, ran into stubborn Soviet resistance and suffe
red heavy losses in its late September attempt to seize the strongly fortified Crimean Peninsula. At roughly the same time, the First Panzergruppe, attacking from Dnepropetrovsk, made disappointingly slow progress, although it did take Zaporozhye on 1 October and by the eleventh had reached the Mius River north of Taganrog. To the north, the attack on the key industrial city of Kharkov further dissipated the strength of the offensive as once again the Germans sought to gain all their objectives simultaneously. Heavy rain, the onset of cold weather, exhaustion, vehicle breakdowns, and supply difficulties slowed all movements, causing Hitler to give priority to the attack on the Donets Basin. By 12 October, however, this drive too had stalled as a result of the now familiar combination of mud, inadequate supply, exhaustion, and stiff opposition.46

  With the southern sector of the army group almost immobilized, Hitler intervened on 14 October. Fearing that Soviet forces would escape across the Donets, he ordered the Seventeenth Army to send two divisions northward to cooperate with the Sixth Army in a new attempt to seize Kharkov. Since this would imperil the drive southeast into the Donets Basin and beyond into the Caucasus, opposition arose from Rundstedt, the army group commander, and the OKH. Following three days of wrangling, and after aerial reconnaissance revealed Soviet forces withdrawing from Kharkov, Hitler relented: Manstein would now renew his attack on the Crimea, and the First Panzer Army (formerly the First Panzergruppe) would drive on Rostov, while the Sixth and Seventeenth Armies would strike straight east to occupy all the territory up to the Don River, then establish bridgeheads across it in the direction of Stalingrad.47