Ostkrieg
Page 39
In late June, the operation that Hitler expected finally to end this “business in the east” began to unfold—two weeks late, beset by supply and transportation problems that hampered the assembly and deployment of the attacking force, and bedeviled by poor weather that worsened the already primitive road system. As originally conceived, Blue was an exceedingly complex operation designed to unfold in four successive stages, with success in each phase creating the condition for triumph in the next—with the intended result the destruction of Soviet forces west of the Don and cascading momentum that would propel German forces into the Caucasus. The operation would begin in the north, where Blue I aimed at seizing crossings over the Don River and the important transportation city of Voronezh, all the while trapping enemy forces and providing flank protection against Soviet counterattack. In the next phase, Blue II, German mobile forces would strike south from Voronezh along the Don while the Sixth Army launched an offensive from the area around Kharkov, with the spearheads to meet near the city of Millerovo. Again, if all went correctly, Soviet units would be herded together in another Kessel (pocket). At this point, Blue III dictated that Army Group South split in two, with Bock’s Army Group B advancing across the great bend of the Don River toward Stalingrad. Seizing the city itself was regarded as largely inconsequential; the important thing was simply to neutralize it as a center for armaments production and transportation. Only then, after a solid defensive line had been established, would Army Group A under List unleash the final stage of the operation, with Blue IV the key drive into the Caucasus to seize the vital oil fields and the passes over the mountains. Everything depended on the organization, coordination, and timely movement of forces across distances even greater than those covered by the central thrust the year before—and, above all, on speed since Hitler hoped to make up for the time lost in the preliminary operations by advancing the second and third phases of the operation.36
Beneath its complexity, Fall Blau betrayed a number of assumptions that should have given German generals pause to reflect on the prospect of success. In order to avoid the problems with large-scale encirclement operations experienced in the previous year, Directive No. 41 specified small, tight Kessels. Deep encirclements looked good on maps but had too often resulted in the mobile formations thrusting far ahead of the infantry, with panzer units being tied down, often for weeks, in fierce cauldron battles while large numbers of enemy troops managed to slip through the porous pockets. Smaller encirclements, both Hitler and many in the OKH believed, would allow the infantry to close faster, thus destroying a higher percentage of those trapped while allowing the panzers to move on. Certainly, much tactically spoke for this argument, but, at bottom, it meant a shift away from the flexibility and operational freedom that German commanders had traditionally enjoyed and from which much of their success had sprung. Instead, their actions would be monitored from Führer Headquarters, with Hitler increasingly micro-managing troop movements. Success now depended, to a great degree, on the Führer’s willingness not to attempt to seize everything at once, never a good bet. In addition, the stress on small pockets was an implicit recognition of German deficiencies in mobile formations, fuel, and supply capabilities. From mid-July 1941, German logistic problems had limited advances to about ten days and no more than a hundred miles, after which the attacking forces had to pause for up to a week to replenish their depleted fuel and ammunition stocks. In terms of logistics, little had changed in 1942. In effect, Hitler and the OKH were trying to make a virtue of necessity since the Ostheer increasingly lacked the vital strength to conduct “deep war.” Finally, as Hitler recognized, the ranks of the newly constituted units of the Eastern Army were rife with young, hastily trained draftees for whom it was crucial that the initial battles go well. “The operation must begin with success,” Hitler emphasized in late March; “young troops must not suffer any setbacks.” Success in short encirclements, however, depended not just on German skill but on Soviet cooperation as well.37
As intended, victories in the Crimea and Kharkov had done much to restore German confidence and morale, while the shaky Soviet performance rekindled inflated notions of easy triumphs leading to a quick seizure of the Caucasian oil fields. Still, a curious episode on the eve of Blau threatened the entire German operation and revealed deep suspicions between Hitler and the Army High Command that would lead to a permanent schism with profound consequences. On 19 June, Major Joachim Reichel, the chief of staff of the Twenty-third Panzer Division, had set out to reconnoiter the proposed route of march of his division, but his plane went off course and crashed behind Soviet lines. The pilot was killed immediately, and the major was shot trying to escape. Reichel carried with him a copy of a memorandum summarizing Blau I as well as a map showing corps and army objectives. A German combat patrol reached the wrecked plane two days later and found the bodies but not the documents, so the OKH had to assume, correctly, that they had fallen into enemy hands. Given the magnitude of this security breach, some in the High Command believed that the operation now had to be called off or significantly altered. Others, however, including Bock and Halder, argued that, given the time it would take for the information to work its way up the Soviet chain of command and the fact that deployment preparations were largely complete, the attack should go ahead as soon as possible.38
For the army command, then, the “Reichel Affair” was largely inconsequential and merely another reason to launch Blau I immediately. To Hitler, however, the matter ran deeper: it was yet another sign that the generals were flouting security, disobeying his orders, and undermining his leadership. The reason for this was not hard to see since this case closely resembled an incident in January 1940 in which plans for the invasion of France were similarly lost. Hitler thereafter had insisted on tight security controls over all operational plans. Only major headquarters were to receive copies, and plans were never to be taken by air near the front lines, restrictions specifically mentioned in Directive No. 41. These precautions, sensible though they were, directly contradicted a key aspect of the German tradition of command autonomy: staff officers had long shared the plans of adjacent or higher units in order to better coordinate and execute operations. This flow of information, and the flexibility it entailed, was regarded as vital for success in battle. Hitler, however, was furious at this obvious violation of both the spirit and the letter of his orders and demanded that the officers responsible be punished. In addition, on the twenty-fifth, he summoned Bock personally to the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) to report on the affair. Although the latter managed to persuade Hitler that there was no disobedience other than that of the dead Reichel, the matter hardly ended there. For days afterward, the OKW used the issue to conduct a campaign against the OKH, while the Führer continued to seethe and see conspiracies against his dictates; indeed, the issue festered in his mind all during the summer, exploding finally in the fall into a major command crisis.39
For their part, neither Stalin nor the Stavka seemed inclined to regard the lost plans as anything but part of a deception operation. Although Stalin was aware of German oil problems, he nonetheless insisted, as did Vasilevsky, that Moscow would again be the main objective of the anticipated German summer offensive. In the ultimate irony, Stalin, steeped in Communist ideology that regarded economic interests as paramount, ignored the obvious significance of oil for his enemy and, instead, focused on defending the political heart of the regime. Although the Germans had pushed elaborate deception measures designed to encourage this notion, Stalin needed little persuading. Indeed, as late as November, he still insisted that isolating Moscow from the hinterland was the main German objective and that the advance in the south was merely secondary. Despite his mistaken evaluation of the overall situation, however, he hedged his bets; since the Kursk-Voronezh area was regarded as a logical place for a German flanking attack on Moscow, on 23 and 24 June he ordered considerable reinforcements, including powerful tank formations, into the area.40
Two weeks late,
while fighting still raged at Sevastopol and against a backdrop of simmering tension among the German leadership, Blau I finally opened on 28 June. Remarkably, the attack achieved almost complete surprise; accompanied by overwhelming air support, German units broke through Soviet lines and began racing eastward. Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army advanced up to thirty miles in the direction of Voronezh on the first day, while, on the extreme left flank, Weichs’s Second Army also made good progress. With the Soviet defenders stunned by the speed and ferocity of the assault, about the only thing that slowed the Germans in the first few days was heavy rain. Even then, by 4 July, lead units of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the Don in numerous places, over one hundred miles from the start line, and advanced to the outskirts of Voronezh. To its left, the Second Army had also kept pace, although, alarmed at the rapid German advance and fearful that this important armaments and transportation center would fall to the enemy, Stalin ordered strong Soviet forces into position for counterattacks from the north. On the right, heavy rain delayed the Sixth Army’s attack until 30 June, but it, too, after overcoming initial resistance, met only relatively light opposition as it set out for the Don. Soviet forces seemed in disarray and, in places, to have dissolved. With German forces in the north already across the Don, Paulus’s troops in the south lunging eastward, and most of the Red Army defenders still west of the river, the Germans seemed poised once again to pull off a spectacular encirclement operation reminiscent of 1941. Doubts remained, however. “The actual picture of the enemy situation is not yet clear to me,” Halder admitted on 6 July. “There are two possibilities: either we have overestimated the enemy’s strength and the offensive has smashed him, or the enemy is conducting a planned disengagement . . . to forestall being irretrievably beaten in 1942.” In the event, the second assessment proved more accurate than the first as strong Soviet counterattacks at Voronezh delayed subsequent German advances and provoked a command crisis.41
To Hitler and Halder, reports that the enemy “was gone” evinced alarm since the goal of Blau I was the destruction of Soviet forces west of the Don. To their minds, the key now was speed—German mobile formations in the north had to be turned as swiftly as possible to the south to trap the Red Army before it could escape. Neither could understand what appeared to be Bock’s obsession with taking the city. The latter, however, faced an increasing danger: Soviet attacks on his left flank had grown steadily, while reconnaissance indicated enemy troops massing across the Don to the north. Bock was surprised to learn on the second that Hitler and Halder now placed no importance on the capture of the city and, instead, urged him to wheel his mobile units to the south. He was reluctant to do this as long as his left flank was unsecured and hung in the air, and, in any case, he thought that the bulk of the enemy facing the Sixth Army had already escaped. Fearful that the vital mobile formations would get bogged down in pointless positional fighting, Hitler flew to Army Group South headquarters at Poltava on 3 July to order Bock to leave the city alone. If anything, however, the meeting only further confused the issue. Confronted with the aloof and aristocratic field marshal, the Führer evidently lost his nerve and left the decision to Bock, who himself was confused. “Am I right in understanding you as follows?” Bock queried. “I am to capture Voronezh if it can be done easily. . . . But I am not to get involved in heavy fighting for the city?” Hitler confirmed this with a nod. Ironically, although Bock believed that his command autonomy had been confirmed, the Führer thought that he had made plain his preference for a move south.42
Since Hoth’s panzers reached the outskirts of Voronezh the next day and, despite erroneous reports that Soviet reinforcements had flooded the city, took it largely unopposed on the sixth, Bock likely felt confirmed in his actions. The damage, however, had been done. Reacting to the false reports, Hitler on the fifth exploded in rage at the field marshal’s incompetent leadership. Insisting that he had made it “emphatically clear” on the third that he placed no value on Voronezh, Hitler now ordered Bock to detach the Twenty-fourth Panzer and Grossdeutschland Divisions and send them to the south. On the morning of the sixth, however, the attacks on Bock’s left flank demanded by Stalin, but never anticipated in the plan for Blau I, began in earnest and continued with increasing intensity for the next week. Only with some difficulty, and primarily because of air supremacy, did the Second Army manage to stabilize the situation, although the northern flank of Blau would remain a source of concern since Hungarian divisions would eventually be responsible for its security. These onslaughts, combined with a shortage of fuel, meant that, much to Hitler’s fury, Bock’s mobile divisions were now tied down in the fighting around Voronezh. This not only threatened a crippling delay in German plans but also exacerbated the time pressure under which the Germans labored.43
The Führer’s anger at Bock’s allegedly poor handling of the situation merely obscured the deeper problems confronting the Wehrmacht. Soviet actions had again demonstrated that the Germans lacked the mobile forces necessary simultaneously to defend their flanks against determined assaults and to press an offensive, especially one plunging into the limitless realm of southern Russia. More troubling, not only did the Soviets already outnumber the Germans in men and tanks, but in the first days of July Stalin also finally accepted reality and ordered a flexible defense and strategic withdrawals in order to conserve strength. Although these evasive maneuvers often turned into headlong flight in which Soviet officers lost control of their units, the result was largely the same. Success in encirclement operations depended as much on Soviet as on German actions, a fact understood by Bock but unappreciated by those above him. “The Army High Command,” he noted bitterly on the seventh, “would like to encircle an enemy who is no longer there.” The next day, he underscored the consequences of Soviet withdrawal. The attempted envelopment, he judged, would “probably hit nothing”: “Operation Blue II is dead.”44
This latter judgment remained to be confirmed, but, clearly, Hitler and Halder were worried that Soviet forces were evaporating. On the seventh, Army Group South was, over the vigorous protests of Bock, split into two forces, while, on the ninth, Kleist’s First Panzer Army, now part of List’s Army Group A, launched Blue II two weeks earlier than anticipated. At a time when the situation called for the Germans to concentrate their power and act boldly, they now began the fatal dissipation of force that would characterize their summer operations. A major reason for this development was undoubtedly the continuing large-scale pullback by the Red Army, which rendered German plans obsolete. Kleist had no sooner sent his forces hurtling from Lisichansk, southeast of Izyum, across the Donets to the northeast than his orders were altered and then revised again. Soviet withdrawals clearly confounded German plans. On the evening of the eleventh, for example, the OKH ordered an inner encirclement centered on Millerovo involving forces from the First and Fourth Panzer Armies as well as the Sixth Army. Bock immediately protested this order, warning Halder early on the morning of 13 July that “annihilation of substantial enemy forces can no longer be achieved” at Millerovo. Instead, he argued that the main thrust should be sent farther east through the Morozovsk area and in the direction of Stalingrad. Given the often chaotic nature of Russian withdrawals, deep thrusts to the east, reminiscent of those the year before, might well have succeeded in trapping large numbers of the enemy. Given the catastrophic logistic system, any hopes for a dash to the east depended on a concentration of effort; already, a number of German units had been immobilized for lack of fuel. Despite Hitler’s criticism, the Fourth Panzer Army’s move to the south had been hindered more by a lack of fuel, for which the OKH was responsible, than by the field marshal’s intransigence.45
Nonetheless, the reaction to Bock’s proposal was swift and final: the OKH curtly informed him that his mission lay in the south, not the east, while Hitler, after fuming for days that Bock’s decisions at Voronezh had caused avoidable delays in sending mobile units south, on the thirteenth relieved the strong-willed field marshal of h
is command. That same day, the Führer issued an order that demanded that “a thrust be made as quickly as possible from the north” to seize “the crossings of the Don at Konstantinovka and Zymlyanskaya [east of Rostov] in order to prevent the enemy from pulling out into the region south of the lower Don.” In firing Bock and further marginalizing Halder, Hitler assumed increasing control over the day-to-day conduct of military operations, a quest for absolute authority that would have calamitous consequences. At the same time, and equally disastrously, he had abandoned the overall concept of Blue as a sequential operation in which each stage was vital for the success of the whole and, in its place, left only strategic confusion, with German columns apparently advancing aimlessly, often across each other’s line of march. Although these twin dictates are often regarded simply as examples of Hitler’s impulsive behavior, when combined with other decisions at roughly the same time, they reveal a pattern that shows the way in which time pressures had begun to affect his decisions.46