Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  Although Hitler had undertaken operations in 1942 convinced that he had a year in which to wrap up the eastern war, Molotov’s visit to London and Washington in May and June and the Western allies’ apparently solid commitment to a second front in 1942 profoundly disturbed him. The Anglo-Americans, he believed, would not tolerate a collapse of the Soviet Union; ironically, then, the likelihood of an early Allied landing in Norway or Northwest Europe increased with German success in the east. His window of opportunity apparently narrowing rapidly, Hitler decided to forestall any Allied intervention on the Continent. “The rapid and great successes in the east,” Hitler explained in an order of 9 July, “could face Britain with the alternative of either executing a major landing at once to establish a second front or losing Soviet Russia.” Nervous about just such a possibility, the Führer directed that the powerful First and Second SS Panzer Divisions (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich), which should have spearheaded the First Panzer Army’s drive into the Caucasus, be transferred to the west. Two weeks later, he further ordered that the elite Grossdeutschland Motorized Division be prepared for transportation to the west. Finally, he also decreed, despite the drain on the Wehrmacht’s meager fuel supplies, that the Channel and Atlantic coasts be developed into an “unassailable fortress” in order “to avoid the establishment of a second front.” There could, he declared to Speer and Keitel, be “only one fighting front.” A more accurate explication of the German dilemma was hard to imagine: by building up his defenses in the west, Hitler hoped to deter the Allies from launching a second front in 1942, but at a cost to what was most important, seizing the oil fields in the Caucasus.47

  Fear of an early second front, in turn, made a rapid seizure of the oil of the Caucasus even more imperative. On 11 July, Hitler thus issued orders for Manstein’s Eleventh Army, fresh off its triumph at Sevastopol, to prepare a crossing of the Kerch Straits, with the aim of facilitating the rapid seizure of the Maikop region and its vital oil fields. The target date of the operation, early August, in itself suggested that Hitler was already thinking of launching the push into the Caucasus before the Stalingrad operation was finished, reflecting the new time pressure under which he was acting. Just six days later, however, he suddenly reversed his decision and, instead, ordered the bulk of the Eleventh Army transferred north to the Leningrad front. Certainly, the fall of the northern city would have had a deleterious impact on the Soviets’ ability to continue in the war, but Hitler’s decision also reflected his belief that events in the Don area were proceeding so favorably that he could now launch simultaneous rather than staggered operations against the Volga and the Caucasus. This characteristic Hitlerian tendency to try to do everything at once stretched already thin German resources to the breaking point and largely ensured that none of the key objectives would be reached.48

  Even as on the sixteenth the Germans closed the pocket at Millerovo, which was, as Bock had predicted, “a blow into thin air,” they plunged ahead in the futile search for an annihilating battle, with the focus now clearly in the south on Rostov. As Landsers marched in suffocating mid-July heat, their progress easily charted by great clouds of dust thrown into the air, the combination of an overtaxed logistic system, terrain problems, and evasive actions by the enemy resulted in the capture of much territory but few prisoners. Although the Thirteenth and Twenty-second Panzer Divisions, supported by the Fifth SS Viking Division, reached Rostov on 23 July, furious resistance by NKVD security troops not only led to a four-day house-to-house struggle that presaged the later fighting at Stalingrad, but also enabled the bulk of Soviet formations in the area to escape across the Don. To the chagrin of both Hitler and List, the German thrust south had merely confirmed Bock’s prediction: the pincer operation had bagged only 83,000 prisoners. Taken together, Blau I and II had resulted in perhaps 220,000 Soviet deaths and 150,000 taken prisoner, certainly a damaging blow to the Russians, but nothing on the order of the previous year. Nor, given the change in Soviet tactics, had the Germans been able to annihilate the remaining vital strength of the enemy; the key story in 1942 was the survival, not the destruction, of the Red Army. Moreover, by committing the bulk of Wehrmacht forces to List, Hitler and the OKH had starved the Sixth Army of the resources it needed to advance quickly to the east. Bock had in mid-July correctly observed that Stalingrad was ripe for the taking, but only if adequate armored forces were available to do so. Valuable days had been lost in the planned thrust to Stalingrad, giving the Soviets time to strengthen the city. Although a victory, Blau I and II seemed to keen observers rather ordinary; despite impressive territorial gains, a lack of fuel and mobile units had allowed the Soviets to evaporate into the vastness of southern Russia. Time and space, as well as the Red Army, had become very real enemies.49

  Halder, in fact, had grown increasingly alarmed at the rapid reinforcement of both the Stalingrad and the Southern Fronts, which could mean only that the Soviets were determined to hold both the city on the Volga and the Caucasus. Upset by what he saw as the “meaningless” concentration of forces around Rostov, which merely “crammed” the area “with armor which has nothing to do,” and anxious about having to embark on the “battle of Stalingrad” even while fighting continued in the south, Halder attempted without success to convince Hitler of the need for a concentrated thrust to the Volga. Only then, with a free rear, secure flank, and adequate logistics, would the Caucasus operation be executed. Hitler, however, saw things differently. “The Russian is finished,” he told Halder breezily on 20 July, the next day expressing his conviction that the Germans, on the verge of seizing the Donets industrial region, severing the Volga supply line, and taking control of 90 percent of Soviet oil production, had dealt the enemy a fatal blow. This, along with an outburst three days later of “insane rage and . . . gravest reproaches against the General Staff” for its alleged negativity, pessimism, and caution, caused the head of the OKH to explode. “The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions,” he wrote angrily in his diary on 23 July, “and develops into a positive danger. . . . This so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding.” Halder’s objections, however, served only to rekindle the poisonous atmosphere of the previous winter. Convinced that the Soviets were fleeing for their lives and not, as Halder argued, conducting a planned withdrawal, Hitler saw in the swift seizure of Rostov proof that the enemy was incapable of mounting an effective defense west of the Volga or preventing a German occupation of the Caucasus.50

  Operation Blue had begun to fall apart almost immediately, a consequence of both German and Soviet actions. The experience of 1941 had proved significant for both sides. Determined to avoid the operational chaos of the latter stages of the 1941 campaign, and faced with insufficient economic and military resources, German planners disdained deep battles of encirclement, instead relying on Soviet forces to stay in place in order to conduct a rolling series of shallow encirclements. In the event, whether from sheer panic, a Soviet decision to withdraw into the vast expanse of southern Russia, or a combination of both, the initial German thrusts in the summer of 1942 netted few prisoners despite conquering much territory. The Wehrmacht found itself punching air. Moreover, when the Soviets did resist, as with their relentless counterattacks at Voronezh, the result was to upset the ambitious German timetable and delay sending vital mobile formations to the south. Rather than striking in depth to the east and trapping large Soviet formations against the natural line of the Volga, the Germans found themselves sliding ineffectually to the south in an operation that stretched their hopelessly overburdened supply lines to the breaking point. Almost from the beginning, then, the Soviet retreat rendered the operational plan for 1942 pointless.

  Hitler now, in late July, further compounded this increasingly unfavorable situation with his impatience and impetuosity. On the basis of his overly optimistic assessment, he attempted to do too much, too f
ast, in too many areas: he split the already overstretched German forces, dictated that they conduct operations simultaneously that had been planned sequentially, and ignored the threatening situation on the exposed German flanks. On 23 July, the same day that Rostov fell, Hitler issued Directive No. 45, which irrevocably severed the campaign into two partial offensives, to be conducted at the same time but in divergent directions. The main effort of the new operation lay with Army Group A, whose task was to destroy enemy formations that had escaped south across the Don, occupy the eastern coastline of the Black Sea, seize the oil facilities in the Maikop and Grozny areas, and penetrate to Baku. As a sign of Hitler’s overweening ambition, occupation of the passes across the Caucasus Mountains would create the prerequisite for a subsequent thrust into Persia and Iraq. Breathtaking as this vision was, it was to be accomplished even as Army Group B smashed enemy forces at Stalingrad, blocked the Volga supply line, and sent mobile formations down the river to its mouth at Astrakhan, all the while providing cover for the southern operation.51

  Ambitious can hardly describe the scope of this new operation; in addition to a war for oil, German forces were to establish as well the preconditions for waging a global conflict against the Anglo-American powers. If Hitler had asked the Wehrmacht to do too much with too few resources in 1941, he now compounded his strategic error by demanding that an even smaller force achieve truly grandiose aims. Although prone to ridiculing “the layman” (Hitler) for his clumsy direction of operations, Halder exploded in anger at his order not least because in Directive No. 45 he noted something more ominous than mere ineptitude. Already insufficient German combat forces were to be split, sent off in different directions, advance into territory that widened like a funnel, and rely for flank protection on undependable Axis troops—all while being supplied by a logistic system incapable of meeting the demands of even one operation. Serious deficiencies in fuel, in fact, meant that Army Group A, which had clear priority, could be supplied only at the expense of Army Group B. Entire convoys of trucks that had supplied the latter would now be shifted to the former, with the inevitable result that, in its advance toward Stalingrad, the Sixth Army would be seriously impaired in its mobility and striking power. At one point, in fact, fuel shortages left it immobile for over a week, even as the Soviets worked furiously to build defenses in the city. Just as worrisome, as both army groups drove to the east, they would advance further away from the railheads, with the result that precious gasoline supplies would have to be brought over increasingly long distances by trucks that themselves consumed much of the gas they were hauling. At the height of their success, German forces in the Caucasus would be receiving only a trickle of fuel.52

  Such obstacles might have been overcome if the Germans possessed a preponderance of force, but the opposite was the case. Army Group B faced an overall five-to-one disadvantage in tanks, but, since the bulk of its combat power lay in the Sixth Army, this left the Axis divisions on its flanks extremely vulnerable to a Soviet counterattack. Even Paulus, with fewer than three hundred tanks as against an enemy force of over twelve hundred tanks, lacked any clear superiority in his attempt to seize Stalingrad. Army Group A had sufficient force to carry out its initial advance into the Caucasus, but it, too, would eventually have to dilute its strength in moving into the vast area between the Black and the Caspian Seas. Baku, accessible by only two roads over the passes suitable for motor vehicles, lay some seven hundred miles from Rostov, which was itself roughly the same distance from Warsaw. This meant that a logistic apparatus initially designed for distances of around three hundred miles and straining to supply just one army group at twice that distance would have to keep two such forces equipped at distances of over one thousand miles in a region with few highways and a virtually nonexistent rail system. Finally, since the two army groups were on diverging axes, neither would be able to help the other as the campaign developed. Rather than concentrate their already insufficient forces on a single objective, Hitler’s order resulted in two armies acting independently of, and moving away from, each other, with each starved of the resources needed to accomplish its task.53

  With neither of their prerequisites achieved (the destruction of Soviet forces and the capture of Stalingrad), German forces nonetheless on 26 July thrust into the Caucasus (Operation Edelweiss). In the west, one arm of Army Group A struck south from Rostov with the goal of destroying the enemy south of the Don, rolling up Soviet defenses along the Black Sea coast, and seizing the city of Batum. This would not only aid a crossing of the Kerch Straits by German forces but also open the Black Sea ports to shipments of oil directly to Rumanian refineries as well as enable German supply to arrive by sea, a crucial factor in a mountainous area devoid of roads. In the middle, and on the left, German forces would seize the fertile Kuban region and the first (and least important) oil area around Maikop while driving across the Terek River and the key passes over the Caucasus to reach the vital oil fields at Grozny and Baku. Having accomplished this, they would then be in a position to spearhead a further assault into Persia and the Middle East.54

  The decisive stage of the war had been reached. For both sides it seemed to be all or nothing: German occupation of the critical oil fields would be as much of a blow to the Soviet ability to continue in the war effectively as it would be a significant boost to the Germans. The loss of the Donets Basin, an area that accounted for 40 percent of the Soviet population and a third of its gross industrial output, had plunged the country into another grave crisis. Although, as the year before, much of the industrial plant had been dismantled and sent east, the organizational and transport effort involved as well as the loss of numerous crucial raw materials temporarily sent economic production into a tailspin. Moreover, although the Soviets’ flexible defense had prevented a complete annihilation of their forces, recent withdrawals, with disorderly, panic-stricken troops throwing away their weapons, abandoning their equipment, and running for their lives, raised the nightmarish prospect of complete disintegration of the southern armies.55

  In response, on 28 July, Stalin issued Order No. 227, his famous “Not one step back” decree. In frank language, the dictator set out the reasons why withdrawal was no longer an option and what would happen to those who fled. The enormous demographic and economic losses, Stalin admitted, compelled utmost resistance: “From now on we are not superior to the Germans either in reserves of manpower or in stocks of grain. Further retreat means our end and that of our motherland. Every inch of ground which we yield henceforward strengthens the enemy and weakens our defense and country. . . . Unless our retreat is halted, we shall remain without bread and fuel, without metals and raw materials, without factories and railways. It follows, therefore, that it is high time to arrest our retreat. ‘Not one step back’ must henceforth be our most important slogan.” To fight such uncompromising warfare, the decree continued, the “strictest order and iron discipline” would be maintained: “Defeatists and cowards must be liquidated on the spot.” To give teeth to his words, Stalin authorized draconian punishments, such as penal battalions as well as the establishment of “blocking units,” whose task would be, “in the event of panics or unauthorized retreats, to shoot spreaders of panic or cowards.” In addition to abandoning the principle of flexible defense and restating his willingness to use the utmost brutality against his own troops, Stalin’s Order No. 227 was significant in that it appealed to the troops’ loyalty in unabashedly patriotic tones. Soviet patriotism was now merged with Russian nationalism; the heroes and legends of Russian history would be invoked to raise the morale of the troops and to save Stalin’s regime.56

  Soviet propaganda at the time also sought to stiffen resolve by invoking one other emotion: hatred of the invader. On 19 July, the army newspaper Red Star had published Konstantin Simonov’s poem “Kill Him,” which conjured images of German marauders murdering mothers, pillaging farms, and burning homes, then demanded:

  If you do not want to give away all that you call your countr
y,

  then kill a German . . .

  Kill a German so that he, and not you, should lie in the ground,

  Kill him so that the tears should flow in his home, not yours . . . ;

  Let his mother weep, and not yours . . . ;

  Kill him, kill him every time you see him.

  Simonov’s theme was taken up by Ilya Ehrenburg, whose article in Red Star on 13 August, “Kill the Germans,” dripped with hatred:

  Russia’s heart is bleeding. The enemy is trampling underfoot the rich fields of the Kuban. He can already smell the oil of the Caucasus. . . . The map seems drenched in blood. The country is crying in its agony: ‘Cleanse me of the Germans. . . .’ One cannot bear these fish-eyed oafs contemptuously snorting at everything Russian. . . . We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive. . . . Today there is only one thought: Kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth. . . . Then we can think again of life. . . . But now we must fight like madmen, live like fanatics. . . . The German is the screen standing between us and life. We want to live. And, in order to live, we must kill Germans. . . . But we must do it quickly, or they will desecrate the whole of Russia and torture to death millions more people.