Ostkrieg

by Stephen G. Fritz

  For the first time, a German summer offensive had failed in its tracks and the attacking units been almost immediately forced onto the defensive, a situation, Goebbels noted laconically, to which the Germans “were not accustomed.” Material and manpower deficiencies, the delay in launching the attack, the absence of the element of surprise, the decision to attack the enemy’s strongest positions rather than seek the mobile operations that played to the Germans’ tactical strength, and, not least, the realization of their nightmare of a two-front war all contributed to the result. Still, Citadel can hardly be seen as any sort of turning point. Far from being the swan song of the German tank corps or the graveyard of the German army, as it is sometimes described, it resulted in astonishingly light German losses. For the entire operation, the Wehrmacht lost only 252 armored vehicles, as opposed to 1,956 for the Soviets, an astonishing 8-to-1 kill ratio; of those 252, only 10 were Tigers. Similarly, German aircraft losses totaled 159 to 1,961 for the Red Air Force, a 12-to-1 ratio. For the Luftwaffe, the invasion of Sicily meant the opening of a third front, which, combined with the costly defensive battles over Germany and occupied Western Europe, proved insurmountable. In July and August, for example, it lost 702 aircraft on the eastern front but 3,504 in the west and on the home front. In manpower terms, the Germans lost 54,182 casualties (11,023 dead and missing; 43,159 wounded) to 319,000 for the Red Army, a 6-to-1 ratio, amazing for an inferior force attacking into the heart of well-prepared and formidable defenses. If personnel losses are broadened to include dead, wounded, prisoners, and the sick, the Red Army lost, according to figures from Boris Sokolov, 1.68 million men as against 203,000 for the Wehrmacht, an 8.25-to-1 ratio. Nor were the materiel losses unsustainable. In July, German industry produced 817 new armored vehicles, three times more than lost at Kursk, with an increasing proportion the new Tigers and Panthers that enjoyed a considerable technical superiority over the T-34. While German casualties were costly, especially among the infantry, they were balanced by 89,480 replacements.86

  The reasons for these enormous discrepancies in losses are not hard to find. Certainly, the introduction of the Panther and Tiger tanks, as well as the improved Pz IVs, produced a genuine “tank shock,” a devastating qualitative advantage the Germans would enjoy for at least the next year. While the German tanks could penetrate the T-34’s armor at some considerable range, the Soviets were more likely merely to cause temporary damage that could be repaired. For all its undeniable improvement, the Red Army still lagged behind the Wehrmacht in training of tank crews, tactical efficiency, emphasis on Auftragstaktik, coordination of combined arms, and communication. The interaction of these factors could be quite lethal. Since in the Red Army, for example, only company commanders typically had a radio in their tanks, the German tactic of targeting that tank for initial destruction had cascading consequences. Soviet crews, trained only in rigid Befehlstaktik (command tactics) and, thus, lacking flexibility in decisionmaking and action, were left without direction as combat descended into chaos. As masses of Soviet tanks often simply maneuvered in a directionless manner, they became easy targets. In addition, too many Soviet commanders continued to throw their troops into battle with little concern for casualties and with inadequate preparation and planning, expecting the sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm the enemy. This was often the result, but at a horrendous cost borne by average Soviet soldiers. Still, Citadel had only two modest goals—to shorten the front to conserve forces and to weaken the Red Army sufficiently to forestall its summer offensive—yet had failed utterly at both. Even if it had been successful, it would have remained a largely meaningless tactical triumph, for the Germans could no more prevail in a material war now than they could in the war of attrition between 1914 and 1918. As in the Great War, they now also faced the grim reality of a two-front war.87

  If further proof were needed of this iron law of attrition, the Soviets supplied it on 12 July 1943. With the German offensive still in progress, the Red Army launched its long-awaited counterstroke against Orel, to be followed by offensives on the Donets-Mius and at Belgorod-Kharkov. More than a million fresh troops surged into battle, supported by 3,200 tanks and 4,000 aircraft, two to three times the number of the Stalingrad counteroffensive. Moreover, the numerical and material superiority of the Red Army was now so great that it could launch simultaneous offensives up and down the front, supported by partisan operations in the German rear. Smashing into the Second Panzer Army, which, until it received reinforcements (the Fifth and Eighth Panzer Divisions, with 234 armored vehicles), had no actual tanks of its own (and barely 100,000 troops), Operation Kutuzov spotlighted the German dilemma. Having pressed all available forces into the attack at Kursk, not only were other sectors thinly held (at the point of attack, the Russians had ten- to fifteen-to-one advantages in men and tanks), but the OKH also had no operational reserve and, thus, was forced to plug the holes opened by the enemy attack by pulling troops from other areas of the front. This, in turn, simply opened new holes, with the result that the panzer divisions found themselves being sent hither and yon as fire brigades to stamp out any conflagration that erupted. In this case, since the majority of units dispatched to aid the beleaguered Second Panzer Army came from the Ninth Army, Model on the thirteenth was given operational control of both. Regarded as a master of defense, the field marshal immediately halted the Kursk offensive and sent a number of units to the north to plug the dangerous gaps blasted open by the Soviets.88

  The worst was in the northwest. Having punctured German defenses at Ulianovo, Soviet units, if left unchecked, threatened to cave in the entire Orel salient, trapping considerable German forces. Despite their initial success, however, the Soviets proved unable to translate their break-in into an operational breakthrough. The Germans had constructed an extensive defense in depth in the salient, with the result that, in many areas, Soviet attacks breached a thinly held position only to lurch forward into a strongpoint, where their offensive momentum was shattered. The decisive role here was played by the German panzer units; within the first two weeks, the Soviet attackers had lost well over half their tanks. These local triumphs allowed the Germans to slow, if not stop, the enemy advance, a circumstance that forced Hitler to relent on his customary stand-firm orders. Model, on his own initiative, took steps to conduct an elastic defense, justifying his actions by claiming that they corresponded to the spirit of the Führer’s orders. Confronted with a series of faits accomplis, Hitler on 22 July validated Model’s actions. At the same time, work had begun on the Hagen position, a line of field fortifications at the base of the Orel salient designed to stabilize the situation and, by shortening the front, free troops both to form a reserve and to be transferred to Italy, which had assumed an “absolute priority” for the Führer.89

  On 1 August, then, Model’s elastic defense gave way to a skillful withdrawal executed under extraordinarily adverse circumstances, not least because German troops had been ordered to destroy infrastructure as they pulled back. The Russians not only kept up steady pressure on Model’s forces but also increased their activities elsewhere. Soviet partisans had already been active in the Orel area, in the last two weeks of July blowing up numerous rail lines in support of the offensive, but, on 3 August, over 100,000 partisans launched an extensive, coordinated operation aimed at nothing less than crippling supply into all of Army Group Center. The damage done to the rail network was so extensive that, from the fourth to the sixth, rail traffic was effectively halted. To restore order, already scarce German units had to be sent to the rear to fight the partisans. Then, on the seventh, the Soviets launched an attack to the north of the Orel salient against the Fourth Army that, although generally unsuccessful, forced Model to transfer units to his neighbor. Nonetheless, by 16 August, Model had completed his retreat to the Hagen position, where all Soviet attempts to break through were repulsed at such heavy cost that the Stavka had no choice but to end its assaults. Soviet casualties had been staggering. In little more than a month of fi
ghting, the Red Army lost, according to official figures, almost 430,000 men (112,259 dead and missing) and nearly 2,600 armored vehicles, numbers that are almost certainly too low. German losses totaled a little over 86,000 casualties (25,515 dead and missing) and perhaps 343 armored vehicles. Even taking the official figures, the Soviets’ losses ran at a ratio five to one and eight to one, respectively, against which their failure to achieve a decisive operational breakthrough, let alone the destruction of German forces in the Orel salient, must have been a bitter disappointment. For the Germans, the withdrawal to the Hagen position meant the freeing up of some nineteen divisions (eleven infantry, five panzer, and three panzergrenadier) for use elsewhere on the front.90

  That these divisions would be needed had been apparent since 3 August, when the Red Army opened its first summer offensive in the Belgorod-Kharkov area. Once again, the main goal was not just the destruction of German armies (in this case, the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf as well as the First Panzer Army and the Sixth Army, to be trapped against the Black Sea coast) but the shattering of the entire German position in southern Russia. As at Orel, the Soviets had assembled an overwhelming force of over 1 million men and 2,400 tanks supported by 1,311 aircraft. Ominously for the defenders, the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf were mere shadows of the units they had been in July, forced to transfer most of their tank strength to Model in the north. Together, they could muster between them only 237 operational armored vehicles, fewer than 800 aircraft (for all of Army Group South), and perhaps 175,000 men to fend off an enemy that seemed again to have arisen from the dead. With a ten-to-one advantage across the board, the Soviets opened the offensive in the early morning hours of the third with a massive three-hour aerial and artillery bombardment, followed by an assault of massed tanks that swept away the German defenders. On the first day, Soviet spearheads advanced fifteen miles, while, on the evening of the fifth, the Germans were forced to abandon Belgorod, a key pillar of their defense. By the seventh, the enemy had opened a thirty-mile gap between Hoth and Kempf and seemed, for the first time, in a position to exploit a real operational breakthrough.91

  The German leadership reacted with skill and alacrity to this new crisis. Not only were units transferred back to Manstein (the Fourth Panzer Army received the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, the Seventh Panzer, the Tenth Panzergrenadier, and Grossdeutschland Divisions, while Kempf was strengthened by the addition of the Third Panzer Division as well as the Third Panzer Corps with Das Reich, Totenkopf, and SS Panzergrenadier Division Viking), but plans made to pinch off the Soviet breakthrough. On 12 August, the Third Panzer Corps launched a counterattack and cut off and destroyed a number of Soviet units in a series of engagements in which the enemy again suffered appalling tank losses. In order to close the gap between them, the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, attacking from the north, and the Third Panzer Corps, moving from the south, struck simultaneously on 18 August and, by the evening of the twentieth, closed a weak ring around a large part of the Sixth Guards Army and the Twenty-seventh Army. Although the shocked Soviet units suffered considerable losses, the Germans proved unable to prevent many of the trapped forces escaping to the east.92

  Nor were they able to prevent the loss of Kharkov in the fourth and final battle for the key Ukrainian industrial city. The German forces defending the city were so weak—the two infantry regiments of the 168th Infantry Division, for example, had only 260 men between them, while the Sixth Panzer Division could boast of only six tanks—that Kempf had already warned that the city could not be held. For his crime of pointing to reality, Kempf was sacked on 16 August, with his unit renamed the Eighth Army. Still, without reinforcements, the new designation meant nothing, and Kempf’s replacement, General Otto Wöhler, quickly demanded that the city be evacuated. Hitler, fearing the loss of this prestige object, nonetheless ordered Kharkov “to be held under all circumstances,” prompting Manstein, pondering the loss of six divisions for vague political reasons, to comment, “I would rather lose a city than an army.” In the event, the field marshal got his wish, for, on the eighteenth, even the Führer bowed to reality and gave permission for the city to be abandoned, if necessary, although he urged that it be held for a few more days. On the twenty-second, faced with a catastrophic situation, Manstein finally gave approval to evacuate Kharkov during the night. The next day, enemy troops streamed into the ruined city as the prize of the offensive, but, with its seizure, their drive to the west largely ended.93

  The capture of Kharkov clearly demonstrated that the Soviets now held the initiative on the eastern front, but, as at Orel, the victory had been achieved at a savage cost, one that was even more painful when the meager results were tallied. The Red Army not only failed to crush a numerically far inferior German foe but also had not even come close to achieving the real goal of the offensive: the destruction of Army Group South. Stalin had expected to reach the German border by year’s end, something first accomplished a year later. The results were especially sobering considering the price paid: in twenty days, the Red Army had lost at least 255,000 (and perhaps as many as 500,000) casualties, among them 72,000 men killed, and almost 2,000 tanks against German totals of 10,000 killed and missing, 30,000 casualties, and some 230 armored vehicles, figures that left even Stalin fuming at the inexcusably large Soviet losses. Nor could a look at the totals for the entire Kursk salient operations of July and August have improved the dictator’s foul mood. In roughly fifty days of fighting, the Red Army lost, by its own admission, 863,000 men, of whom 254,000 were killed or missing, numbers that are almost certainly too low since a recent estimate by a Russian historian puts the figure at 1,677,000 casualties. In addition, the Soviets lost over 6,000 tanks—the Fifth Guards Tank Army alone was destroyed twice within two months—and 4,200 aircraft. The Germans’ losses seemed almost a pittance by comparison (170,000–200,000 total casualties; 46,000 dead; roughly 760 tanks and 524 aircraft destroyed), except that they could not afford even these numbers.94

  Although they had inflicted astonishing losses on the Soviets, the Germans were afforded scant comfort since they could not as easily make theirs good. The savage fighting in the Kursk salient had reduced some German units to virtual nonexistence. On 2 September, for example, the Thirty-ninth Infantry Division had a total of six officers and three hundred men. Tellingly, the great majority of Panthers and Tigers lost resulted not from actual combat but from mechanical failures and subsequent abandonment. The Soviets now controlled the battlefield; the Germans had lost the initiative on the Ostfront and never regained it. Still, Kursk did not destroy the German tank force; it was the long and bloody defensive battles, the unrelenting pressure of overwhelming numbers, following on Citadel that inexorably ground it down. At Kursk, Soviet leaders had hoped to absorb the initial German blow, wear the enemy down, then springboard into a counteroffensive that would sweep enemy forces away like an avalanche. Instead, the defender had suffered far more losses than the attacker; then, when the roles were reversed, the onrushing Red Army again sustained appalling casualties. Not just Stalin’s, but the entire Soviet system’s utter disregard for its own people was breathtaking. As long as troops remained to be sacrificed, the Germans would be ground down in senseless, frontal assaults to the bitter end. As Karl-Heinz Frieser has noted, in April 1945 the daily loss of tanks by the Soviets was higher even than at Kursk, a truly staggering indictment of the Stalinist system. Confrontation with the Moloch, however, induced a sense of despair in many Landsers. It was, confessed one, more than a feeling of hopelessness; rather, it was a sense that a world was going under, of “collective metaphysical despair.” Citadel meant a final reversal of roles: no longer the hammer, Germany had now become the anvil.95

  8

  Scorched Earth

  All through July and August, the continual hammer blows by the numerically superior enemy had put the German army on the defensive and threatened a breakthrough along the entire front. By late September, it had become clear that
the hopes of the spring had been dashed: the great offensive had been shattered; the U-boats proved unable to block the flow of American troops and materiel to Europe; the resource discrepancy between the warring sides continued to grow; the defection of its alliance partners left Germany isolated; and both troop and civilian morale had plummeted. Faced with such realities, the German leadership was forced to concede that “ultimate defeat was now likely unavoidable.” “With the fate of the German people at stake,” the only option left was to seek an armistice and immediate peace negotiations. The leader who voiced that sentiment, as Bernd Wegner has noted, was not Adolf Hitler in 1943 but Erich Ludendorff in 1918. Now, precisely twenty-five years later, thoughts turned back to the events of that fateful autumn. Although British intelligence analysts optimistically expected a repeat of the 1918 scenario, American assessments were more skeptical, seeing a German collapse as highly unlikely. In contrast to 1918, the Americans argued, the Nazi regime had at its disposal better material and agricultural reserves, suffered no debilitating morale crisis, and faced an Allied demand of unconditional surrender.1

  In Germany, too, thoughts of 1918 were not far from the surface. Although SD reports indicated that some circles in Germany yearned for just such a compromise peace, the obstacles were formidable. In practice, the unconditional surrender doctrine meant an end to his regime and, thus, gave Hitler an incentive to fight on, especially since, in conscious rejection of 1918, the Western allies explicitly refused any negotiations. Moreover, although Germany could no longer win the war, it might be able to stalemate it long enough to split the brittle Allied coalition. In any case, Hitler had long vowed, and continued to insist, that another November 1918 would never again happen. Finally, and perhaps of decisive importance, the realistic American report also stressed a key, but often overlooked, point: Germany had much more reason to fear Allied retribution than in 1918. Genocide now loomed as the ultimate barrier to any negotiated peace.2