That same day, in a remarkable five-hour meeting, Hitler rebuffed efforts by Guderian, who had flown to Führer Headquarters to get him to rescind the rigid Haltebefehl, dismissing his commander’s concerns as exaggerated since he, too, had endured enemy break-ins in World War I. When Guderian indicated his intention to retreat, Hitler said that the troops should dig in where they stood. When the panzer commander pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of five feet, the Führer retorted that they would have to blast holes with howitzers, as was done in Flanders during the earlier war. To Guderian’s observation that the loss of life would be enormous, Hitler pointed to the sacrifices made by Frederick the Great’s soldiers. None wanted to die, Hitler noted, but like the great king, he stressed, he had the right to demand sacrifices from his troops. Guderian, he thought, was too close to the suffering of his men. “You are seeing events at too close a range,” he told the panzer commander. “You should stand back more. Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.” If Guderian had hoped to convince the Führer of the reality of the situation at the front, he failed dismally, for, in a strongly worded directive to Army Group Center, Hitler merely reaffirmed his order forbidding withdrawals.14
While Hitler and the German commanders were debating what to do in response to the crisis facing them, the Soviets, too, were pondering the situation. Zhukov’s original idea had been to gain space in front of Moscow by driving back the German armored spearheads, something that the Soviets had clearly accomplished. Although they had failed to destroy the bulk of the panzer forces, the near-total collapse of Army Group Center raised the possibility of an envelopment, but, since the Russians had planned for only a shallow operation, their initial momentum was petering out even as Hitler was making the decision to stand and fight. For the second phase of the counteroffensive, Zhukov still thought conservatively, hoping to drive the Germans back some 150 miles to the line just east of Smolensk from which Operation Typhoon had begun. Stalin and the Stavka, however, now filled with militant enthusiasm, were beginning to think in more ambitious terms—the complete encirclement of Army Group Center—but allowed Zhukov to proceed with his new round of attacks, which resumed on 18 December.15
By now, the appearance of a seemingly endless supply of enemy troops able to endure the harsh cold and supplied with clearly superior weapons began to frighten the German troops, as if they were fighting a superhuman force. Halder tried to contain what he termed “a numbers psychosis” by urging German intelligence to stress the often low quality of the new Soviet troops rather than their absolute number, but, to Landsers on the sharp end, this was scant comfort. With little winter clothing, short of food, fuel, and ammunition, bedeviled by equipment breakdowns and malfunctions in the awful cold, confronted with a warmly dressed opponent whose tanks, with their compressed-air starters and wide tracks, could not only run but also traverse the deep snow, many German soldiers were, little wonder, spooked by even the appearance of Russian troops. Nothing so demoralized the Landsers as the sight of their antitank shells bouncing off the thick armor of the Russian T-34s, but, in a bitter irony, even the antidote to this superiority was denied them. In the fall, the Germans had tested a new, vastly more effective hollow-charge shell (Rotkopf) that could penetrate Soviet armor, but Hitler had them recalled in November for fear that they would fall into enemy hands, be imitated, and then used against German tanks. Not until 22 December, after much pleading by his army commanders, did he release the Rotkopf ammunition. By that time, a report of Army Group Center indicated, a mood of fear, a feeling of defenselessness, and a general unwillingness to attack had so undermined fighting efficiency that even the admittedly poor-quality Soviet troops could not be repulsed.16
The renewed Soviet attacks had, by the twentieth, forced the entire Second Panzer Army to retreat again, a move strenuously opposed by Bock’s replacement, Kluge, who ordered Guderian to hold his line at all costs. Guderian, with the connivance of Bock, had grown accustomed to ignoring or evading orders with which he disagreed. But, with Kluge, that was to change. Even as he reported his suspicions to Halder that Guderian had lost his nerve and intended to retreat to the Oka, Kluge was confronted the next day with a Russian breakthrough of the Second Army in the area of Tim, which forced a withdrawal of the Forty-third Army Corps to the Oka. Although the withdrawal was approved by Hitler, Halder vehemently opposed the idea of disengagement, once again insisting, “If we hold out everywhere, everything will be over in fourteen days. The enemy cannot pursue these frontal attacks forever.” By the twenty-second, however, the breakthrough at Tim had spread further westward, and, by the twenty-fourth, the commander of the Second Army, Schmidt, had been forced to withdraw from Livny, even though such an action had been forbidden by Hitler. At the same time, the Second Panzer Army argued that these withdrawals forced it to pull back as well and asked permission to retreat to the Oka. Although Halder tentatively agreed to this, the mood between Kluge and Guderian, already hostile, intensified when the latter refused the former’s order to send the Fourth Panzer Division to Sukhinichi to hold this vital rail and road juncture against a Russian advance. Guderian, in fact, had given further orders for his units to withdraw, and, when, on Christmas Day, Kluge learned of this, he took Guderian to task, then demanded his ouster. Hitler complied, removing Guderian from his post and replacing him with General Schmidt.17
The removal of Guderian, however, did nothing to improve Kluge’s position, for Russian advances so threatened the Second, Fourth, and Ninth Armies with envelopment that he informed Halder on 26 December of the necessity of withdrawing the entire army group. Halder countered with Hitler’s warning that it would be impossible to hold out once the front started to move, but Kluge, surprisingly forceful, insisted that, with nothing to eat and no ammunition, his men could hardly be expected to fight, adding: “Whether the Führer likes it or not he will have to order a retreat. If supplies cannot be delivered, things will soon collapse. . . . The Führer will have to come down from cloud-cuckoo-land and . . . set his feet firmly on the ground.” Hitler, however, refused to accede to Kluge’s demand, telling him that “one day the Russians will no longer have the strength to attack,” an assurance that did little to assuage Kluge since the number of German troops freezing to death exceeded the number of replacements. When, on the thirtieth, Kluge tried to make a case for retreat, Hitler accused him of wanting to “go right back to the Polish border.” Unlike his front commanders, Hitler stressed, he had to see things with “cool reason.” After all, he had experienced days of extended artillery fire in World War I and had continued to hold on. When, in exasperation, Kluge replied that this was a winter war in Russia, with physically and mentally exhausted troops facing temperatures far below zero, Hitler ended the discussion by saying, “If that is the case, then it means the end of the German Army.”18
At dawn on New Year’s Day, with temperatures hovering at –25°F and blanketed by waist-deep snow, with equipment inoperable, with tank and truck engines left idling so that vehicles that did not move still continued to consume precious fuel, and with the fate of Army Group Center hanging precariously on a few roads that could drift shut within hours, it was apparent to front commanders that, despite Hitler’s latest ban on withdrawals, the lines could not be held much longer. By this time, according to OKH calculations, the Ostheer had lost over 830,000 men, or over 25 percent of its original strength, and, even if replacements could be found, weapons of all types were lacking. Even as Hitler stressed the need to hold out at all costs in order to buy time for the units being sent from the west, he seemed at last to have realized that he was dangerously close to losing his grip on the army group. The pullback of the Ninth Army against his will occasioned a wild outburst at OKH headquarters that the army command had been “parliamentarized” and that front commanders no longer had the courage “to make hard decisions.” Still, as the Germans began to discern that the Soviets now intended to encircle Army Group Center, a certain clarity des
cended on their defensive measures. Efforts at holding out everywhere in order to buy time now gradually gave way to a priority on holding key road and rail junctions and protecting vital supply lines.19
The precipitating event seemed to be a breakthrough in the Fourth Panzer Army’s front that threatened the Twentieth Army Corps with encirclement. Hoepner in vain requested permission on 6 January for these units to be withdrawn since the OKH still believed that the Russians were at the end of their strength and the situation would soon ease. By the eighth, with the supply route to the corps cut, Hoepner once again demanded that Kluge allow him to pull these units out of the developing trap. Kluge did not dare make a decision on his own and, thus, referred the request to Halder, who indicated that he would have to get a decision from Hitler. Frustrated, and tired of waiting, just after noon on the eighth Hoepner ordered the army corps to break out. That same night, Hitler relieved Hoepner of his command and ordered that he be dishonorably discharged from the army. This, however, did nothing to improve the situation at the front, for the Fourth Army now faced similar pressure and that same day demanded permission to withdraw in order to protect its main supply route. As one commander summarized the situation succinctly, “I cannot put a policeman behind every soldier.” Faced with the inevitable, Hitler now relented and granted the request.20
To the south, both the Second Army and the Second Panzer Army had managed unexpectedly to stabilize their sectors, although a bulge of some fifty miles between Sukhinichi (encircled since 29 December) and Yukhnov separated the latter and the Fourth Army. While forces from the Second Panzer Army were to attack the Soviet flank near Sukhinichi, the task of the Fourth Army remained keeping the supply route from Roslavl to Medyn open. To the north, the Ninth Army was to cut off the enemy penetration west of Rzhev. Significantly, none of these orders any longer contained a demand that the front be held unconditionally and inflexibly. Hitler’s effort to maintain the stand-fast doctrine was now hopelessly at odds with reality. Since the reserves from Germany that he had counted on had not arrived in sufficient strength, permission for a withdrawal of Army Group Center could no longer be avoided.21
The growing pressure on the German front that forced it to retire resulted from a change in Soviet plans that, ironically, ensured German survival. Stalin, emboldened by success in front of Moscow and in line with Soviet military doctrine, now judged the time right for a general offensive by the Red Army to crush the entire German eastern front, despite the fact that the Russians had paid dearly for their limited victory. Repeating Hitler’s mistake of overestimating his own striking power, and underestimating enemy resistance, Stalin failed to listen to his front commanders, who warned that the Germans, desperate and fighting for their lives, were increasingly difficult to expel and that their own strength was rapidly waning. Nor did he heed Zhukov’s advice that the Red Army lacked the forces to carry out such a broad offensive and would be better served by concentrating all available means at the point where the enemy was already withdrawing in order to achieve a complete success in that sector. Zhukov also failed to convince Stalin that the Germans had recovered from their initial crisis and were no longer “demoralized.” Nonetheless, phase 3 of the counteroffensive opened on 7 January, when Stalin ordered the Red Army not only to encircle Army Group Center and cut off its supply and retreat routes, but also to raise the siege of Leningrad, clear the Crimea, and launch attacks in the south. These goals proved overly ambitious, given that Russian troops had been attacking continuously for a month and had not received sufficient replacements and supplies. Stalin, lured by the prospect of a grand counterstroke, thus dispersed his forces over too many objectives and frittered away a chance at a decisive triumph in much the same way the Germans had earlier. In the event, German armies not only would be spared encirclement but also would be able to isolate and destroy overextended Soviet units.22
In the central sector, forces of the Kalinin, West, and Bryansk Fronts, attacking from Rzhev in the north and Sukhinichi in the south, hoped to trap German armies in an envelopment that would close on the main Moscow highway at Vyazma. The deep Russian breakthrough at Rzhev and heavy attacks on the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies opened a gap that the Germans found impossible to close—and that finally impressed on Hitler that it was only a matter of time before the entire army group front collapsed. Under pressure from events, therefore, on 15 January, Hitler rescinded his Haltebefehl and ordered Army Group Center to withdraw the Fourth Army and the two northern armies to a line east of Yukhnov, Gzhatsk, and Zubtsov and north of Rzhev that approximated the original Typhoon starting point the previous October. He insisted that this line be held at all costs while demanding that the gap west of Rzhev be closed, that the Fourth Army and the Second Panzer Army close the gap north of Medyn, that the Fourth Army keep the vital supply route between Roslavl and Yukhnov open, and that the Second Panzer Army relieve Sukhinichi. Aware of the possible ramifications of his first order to “pull back a major sector of the front,” Hitler insisted it be implemented in such a way that “the troops’ feeling of superiority over the enemy and their fanatic will to do him the greatest possible damage must prevail.” Although Halder, too, worried about the psychological ramifications of the withdrawal on the troops, shortening the front freed units for counterattacks that sealed the worst gaps.23
In heavy fighting over the next two weeks, German troops managed to stabilize the situation in Army Group Center. By late January, the Ninth Army, now commanded by the energetic and able General Walter Model, had managed not only to close the gap at Rzhev but also to cut off elements of the Soviet Twenty-ninth Army that had broken through to the south as well as part of the Thirty-third Army near Vyazma. On the northernmost sector of the central front, attacks by the Fourth Shock Army south of Toropets, conducted through dense forests over trackless terrain with no flank support, in cold that reached –40°F, with few supplies and little intelligence on the enemy, posed no threat and dwindled to little more than localized fighting. To its right, on the Volkhov River in the sector of Army Group North, the Second Shock Army under General A. A. Vlasov penetrated the rear of the German Eighteenth Army but had its supply line cut and became isolated in the forest and marsh. It eventually capitulated in June. On the southern end of the army group’s sector, the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, given the task of breaking the enemy encirclement at Sukhinichi, caught the Soviets by surprise with its attack on 18 January and by the twenty-first had seized the town, giving Hitler hope that it could advance further to the east and cut off enemy forces along the supply route between Roslavl and Yukhnov. Because of heavy losses, temperatures that had now fallen to –44°F, and strong Soviet counterattacks on their flanks, the Germans abandoned the town on the twenty-eighth, but their action had forced Stalin to dispatch troops from the north, further dissipating his strength. The ragtag German forces, as the Soviets discovered to their dismay, could still strike back savagely.24
Even though the situation of the Fourth Army remained tenuous and Soviet partisans continued to threaten German supply lines, by the end of January both sides were spent. In some Soviet units, as few as ten men remained in companies and seventy in battalions, while artillery shells were being rationed to one or two shots per day per gun. As had the earlier German offensive, the Russian counterattack had ground to a standstill because of a shortage of men and materiel. The situation had so improved, in fact, that in mid-February Hitler could assure his army group commanders that the threat of a repeat of 1812 had been eliminated. Unfinished business remained, however, since in February German front maps showed a crazy quilt of German units (in blue) intermingled with Soviet forces (in red) in wild contortions, especially in the center, where German and Soviet salients jutted crazily to the east and west. In some sectors, front lines could not be drawn at all, while, in others, the Germans simply marked large areas partisans. Eyeing this convoluted front, with the need to shorten the line to conserve men as well as eliminate the peril to their supply routes,
the Germans took action to repair the front that was self-evident.25
Soviet forces, too, were as dangerously snarled as the Germans, with some units trapped behind enemy lines, although Stalin did not view the situation pessimistically, instead seeing in it the possibility of inflicting further damaging blows on a reeling foe. Both sides were aware, moreover, that the spring rasputitsa, a much more elemental force than that in the autumn, would begin in late March. The bitter cold of the Russian winter, having frozen the earth to a depth of six or seven feet, would lock in much of the previous fall’s rain. Several feet of snow and ice would then accumulate on top of the frozen surface. The spring thaw, however, worked from the top down, so that the melting of the winter snowfall resulted in large lakes of water sitting on top of the still-frozen ground. As the subsoil began gradually to thaw, the ground became sodden to a depth of several feet, creating a progressively deepening layer of watery mud. In the generally flat terrain, the water had no place to drain until the ground completely thawed. The entire process might last as long as two months, and, for several weeks, the mud would be so deep that any movement on unpaved roads, except by Russian panje wagons, with their high wheels and light weight, would be impossible.26
Ostkrieg Page 31