Engineers of Victory
Page 22
The successive and critical campaigns that form the centerpiece of the Russo-German War lie between roughly November 1942 and July 1944: Stalingrad, Kharkov, Kursk, and then the massive westward advance of Operation Bagration. The first was a bloodbath, even more a battle of exhaustion than the fight for Moscow had been. Stalingrad was a deliberately chosen duel between two very aggressive boxers; the hits and the pain were going to be great. So also were the chances of achieving a big win. While various comparisons can be made about the contemporaneous battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein, the most interesting difference may not be so much in the sheer size of the forces involved on each side as in the topographic breadth and thus in the operational opportunities. El Alamein, as we have seen, was fought in a very constricted space, from which neither side could make a flanking attack. By contrast, the choice of each combatant to fight at all costs for Stalingrad in late 1942 was not unlike the choice of France and Germany to endure a great, bloody battle over Verdun in 1917. It didn’t actually have to be fought there, and a new opening could be made on either flank—but the sheer commitment by both sides to winning this fight would not allow it. So an epic encounter took place around, across, above, and below Stalingrad.
Ironically, Stalingrad may have been the greatest example of a Kesselschlacht in history, except it was achieved against the German army. As the Wehrmacht’s forward units struggled to take the broken-down factories and streets on the city’s western side, gigantic Soviet armies arrived to strike from the north and the south, entrapping General Paulus’s entire Sixth Army and much else besides. This was an intensely personal battle of wills as well. Hitler drove his troops toward the symbolic city; Stalin held that attack off, then moved to encirclement. The Sixth Army had consisted originally of around 300,000 men; on January 31, 1943, to Hitler’s fury and contrary to his direct orders, the remaining 90,000 surrendered. Then the Soviets advanced through Kursk and Kharkov, albeit slowly, allowing the Wehrmacht the chance to pull their forces out of the Caucasus and thus to regroup. On the other hand, the Stavka was showing a much more sophisticated appreciation of how to feint against one enemy position, then strike obliquely against the real target. Not for nothing does Liddell Hart have particular praise for these advances, as confirmation of his theory of “the indirect approach.”25
It remains amazing that in early 1943 the German army could again launch a major strike eastward, taking advantage of the Russians’ need to regroup after a big offensive battle as they waited for the newly arrived U.S.-donated trucks to bring up gas, ammunition, tinned food, and spare parts from hundreds of miles in the rear. For a while, Germany enjoyed the advantage of much shorter front lines, which is to say that its extreme overstretch had now been trimmed to merely a serious overextension. And the commanders on the Eastern Front, Manstein especially, were to benefit from Speer’s revitalization of the Nazi economy and the arrival of the Tiger and then Panther tanks—in nothing like the numbers of Shermans and T-34s then being produced, but enough to make a serious impact upon the battlefield if employed in strong formations, which they were. By February 1943 the Leibstandarte, Totenkopf, and Das Reich armored divisions, each with several dozen new Tiger tanks, had been released from the central reserve and sent east, along with some fresh infantry divisions from France. All this, and the firm frost-encrusted ground that permitted the panzers to average 20 miles a day, allowed Manstein to unleash his faster forces upon the much-battered city of Kharkov, which fell on March 14, with his SS-Panzercorps eliminating 32,000 Soviet troops. The Red Army was pushed back to the Donets, and then an early spring thaw brought all serious campaigning to a halt. Both sides drew breath for the next round. Eight of the twenty Soviet tank corps had been mauled. Manstein became Hitler’s favorite and most trusted commander, at least for a while.26
This was not a bad record for a German army now into its fourth year of total war. Yet, as Robert Forczyk points out, while the Russian tank corps may have been mauled, they were not destroyed, and Manstein himself was now mightily impressed by the stubbornness and sophistication of Red Army defenses. What both sides needed was a three- to four-month breathing space, to rebuild, regroup, and wait for the steppes to warm up and dry out. The arguments in Berlin and Moscow about how to conduct the impending summer clash were serious and contentious, with, apparently, both dictators listening hard to their respective commanders. The Red Army’s most probable strike would be against the tempting Orel salient in the north, and the Wehrmacht’s against the equally tempting Kursk salient farther south. Each was assessing where to place the heavy tanks, where to put the bridging equipment, where to sow the minefields, and how to deploy its rather limited aerial striking capacity. In a way, it was like a massive chess game.
The Germans struck first, on July 5, 1943, against Kursk, with Manstein’s heavier forces (including panzer and panzer-grenadier divisions) cutting in from the south, while Hans von Kluge’s pincer attempted to drive in from the north. This is probably the culminating battle of the many blitzkrieg campaigns conducted by the Wehrmacht during the war, and the one that best showed its weakness. Immediately the German attackers found themselves encountering enormous strength-in-depth defenses, for Soviet military intelligence knew what was coming and the Stavka had pre-positioned additional armies for the counterattacks. The fighting was most bloody, with the high point being an all-day fight on July 12 between the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army and the II SS-Panzercorps around the village of Prokhorovka; later the conflict was described by Russian propaganda and subsequent Western authors as the greatest tank battle of all time. Probably it was, for the numbers committed to this single clash, especially from the Soviet side (about 800), were huge. What is more certain are two things: first, that the Russian armored losses were much, much greater; and, second, that nonetheless the Wehrmacht had to abandon the field because it simply could not get through. The “Manstein era” on the Eastern Front was over. Although the casualty figures are, as usual in this campaign, very vague and general, the best guess is that the overall Kursk campaign cost Hitler more than 50,000 troops and 1,600 tanks. Dozens of German army divisions were either destroyed or reduced to shells.27
Two days before the tank battle of Prokhorovka, the Western Allies landed in Sicily, which caused Hitler to turn his attention—and to direct many military units—to the Italian front. And on July 12 itself, the Red Army struck at the Orel salient in the north. From here on, one gets the sense of fatigue setting into the Wehrmacht: structures folding, fronts being abandoned (often despite the Fuehrer’s manic orders to stand fast), battle-hardened but weary units limping off the field with perhaps only one-quarter of their equipment left intact. And so, despite Manstein’s hope that the stupendous Kursk encounter had blunted the Russians’ offensive capacities, they kept on coming, this time in the north, in the south, and on the critical central front. Slowly the Wehrmacht’s many units were eased out of the Leningrad area, the Crimea, Smolensk, Kiev. The great Operation Bagration of June 1944 was not yet in sight, but the overall trend was clear: Soviet push, German resistance, then German pullback, then Soviet further push.
When, therefore, did the tide turn in the Ostfeldzug? One author has declared that the German failure to capture Moscow during the brutal winter fighting of 1941–42 was “the greatest battle of the war.”28 That conclusion certainly would have surprised Stalin and the Stavka, who were really disturbed by the immensity of the Nazi drive toward the Caucasus, the lower Donets basin, and Stalingrad itself in mid- to late 1942, well after they had held on to Moscow. Most historians today regard the massive defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad as the beginning of the end, the turn of the tide: John Erickson’s classic two-volume study of this epic contest is deliberately divided into The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin. There, among the shattered warehouses by the Volga and the factories and assembly plants of the once-impressive city of Stalingrad, the Nazi tide began to ebb. R. M. Citino’s important article “The Death of the Wehrma
cht” assures us that late 1942—El Alamein, the dreadful Caucasus battles, Stalingrad—marked the definite end of German lightning warfare.29
And yet, as we have seen, Manstein’s reinvigorated panzer armies came back in the spring of 1943 to smash the forward Soviet divisions and capture the entire Kharkov region. Perhaps this was a bid to persuade Stalin to agree to some sort of negotiated peace across east-central Europe, but while it was militarily impressive, it sparked no political response. So in July 1943 Hitler’s gigantic military machine launched an even greater assault to the east, Operation Zitadelle, to chop off the impertinent Russian armies lodged in the Kursk salient. It is telling that Erickson, despite the time division chosen for his two massive books, actually titled his chapter on the Kursk battle “Breaking the Equilibrium,” and that on Operation Bagration in summer 1944 “Breaking the Back of the Wehrmacht.” The full tide, he seems to suggest, turned rather later than the titles of his volumes imply and many other accounts maintain.
Some years ago, the great German expert on this campaign, Bernd Wegner, raised the question of whether it makes sense to search for a turning point at all. Was there in these middle years really any identifiable watershed—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk? That is, was there a battle at and after which the course of the war went inexorably in favor of the eventual winners?30 Perhaps the enterprise was simply doomed from the start. However deeply the Nazi extraction regime mobilized its own economy and plundered its conquered European space, possibly it never could match the fully mobilized resources of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Add in Germany’s declaration of war against the United States on the news of the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, and the odds became far worse.
It is clear that many of the leading German generals slowly came to hold this view, though it is also true that very few of them wished to cease fighting or to seem to contradict the Fuehrer. Proposing a withdrawal almost always risked Hitler’s fury. When in November and December 1941, after the first great advances through Russia and the Ukraine, Gerd von Rundstedt suggested that with the coming of winter plus the arrival of unknown numbers of Red Army divisions from the Far East, it would be wise to pull back, shorten the lines, and consolidate, he was dismissed. His name was the first on an increasingly lengthy roll call of wartime German generals fired by their master.g
For their part, divisional commanders were getting uneasy at the massive and growing defects in transport and supply. What was the point of panzer columns streaming through the Ukraine if they kept running out of fuel and ammunition, or if a tank that broke its caterpillar track (as so many did) was a hundred miles ahead of the repair crews? The Wehrmacht’s trucks were tied to the few, notoriously poor paved roads, and the vast numbers of horse-drawn wagons were painfully slow in dragging their way through the boggy paths that formed most of the country’s land infrastructure. The smarter German generals were also bemused by the smoke-and-mirrors act that Hitler and the OKW kept pulling, increasing the number of German divisions on the Eastern Front simply through reducing their original size and then creating new ones. Thus, in the interval between the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa, the ten original panzer divisions were doubled in number, but each one of them was halved in size, and much the same happened to the motorized infantry divisions, which were trimmed from three regiments each to only two.31 Perhaps this made those units more maneuverable on the battlefield and gave the army group commanders more flexibility, but the uneasy thought was that the Fuehrer was creating new divisions out of thin air, whereas the Red Army’s increases in numbers were real ones. (In total during the war, the Soviets conscripted thirty million men, of which they lost ten million, with still larger numbers of wounded.)
Finally, none of the Wehrmacht generals fighting the Ostfeldzug could be unaware of the fact that by 1942 the Third Reich was now engaged in a global war: they saw so many of their classmates from officer school deployed in Greece, the Balkans, North Africa, France, Norway … So Germany was fighting on three fronts, while the Soviet Union battled on only one. Paul Carell notes perceptively that the Allied invasion of North Africa, followed by Hitler’s order for the occupation of Vichy France in the crisis month of November 1942, occurred precisely at the time that the Stavka was about to order the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, yet this news of the Western Allies’ push into North Africa and the Mediterranean caused the OKW to hold back, for a while, some of their most effective fighting divisions from the Battle of Stalingrad.32 Germany could not be strong everywhere, and the Great Patriotic War cannot be described in isolation, even if Soviet writings tend that way. When the Western Allies invaded North Africa, they affected the Stalingrad battles; when they invaded Sicily, they affected Kursk. So a division such as the Leibstandarte, along with various air flotillas of the Luftwaffe, were being shuttled from front to front. This shuttling clearly couldn’t and didn’t fit into the theory of lightning warfare. And once the Ostfeldzug is placed in the context of a global struggle for power, we can see that it may indeed be misleading to speak of a certain battle, such as Moscow or Stalingrad, as the decisive turning point.33 It is perfectly feasible to argue that the war on the Eastern Front was decisive without having to argue that one particular battle was key to the whole struggle.
This brings us to the final conundrum about the German conduct of the Ostfeldzug, and indeed of the paradox of the “German way of war” after 1941. The whole point of the theory and practice of lightning war was precisely to avoid the static fighting and bloodbaths of the First World War. This newer sort of warfare would be different because fast-moving motorized forces would surprise an enemy’s line and drive through it, overrun his rear lines of communication, and force a surrender. But this concept of fast, clinical, and economical campaigning was totally contradicted by Hitler’s fanatical belief that the attack upon the USSR had to be a Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation), followed by the permanent occupation of gigantic tracts of arable land. It was also contradicted by the ghastly and fateful Nazi habit of shooting and starving prisoners of war, ransacking even small villages in the search for Communist Party members and Jews, and foolishly mistreating the millions of Ukrainians who originally turned out to welcome the German troops as liberators. (How might the war had gone with forty million Ukrainians on the Axis side?) Blitzkrieg was supposed to be clever warfare, and so it was in the 1939 Polish and 1940 French campaigns. As it was conducted on the Eastern Front, however, it was really stupid warfare. Thus, as one student of this war has noted, it may be that “the means and ends were in conflict from the beginning.”34
All this might suggest that the result of the war on the Eastern Front was a foregone conclusion. It was, clearly, the campaign of all the major struggles of the 1939–45 war where brute force is most in evidence; sheer numbers, plus weather and distance, are the determinants.35 Yet the problem solvers do have a vital role here. Some field commanders, support managers, scientists, and engineers responded to the stress of mass warfare in a cleverer way, and in the pages that follow we will provide examples. And the Red Army’s organizers had, in confronting the greatest blitzkrieg attack ever, figured out things better than those pursuing that particular form of warfare. The USSR did not win this epic contest solely because it poured more human beings into the fight than did its enemy. It won because it slowly developed means of stemming German armored assaults, reducing their core forces to shreds, then moving forward to regain the conquered lands. The Soviet Union—not unlike, say, the Americans in the Pacific—won its critical campaign because it was putting an assembly of weapons, tactics, and command structures into an overall tool kit that could not be broken. Understanding how the German form of lightning warfare came to a halt on the banks of the Volga and the wheat fields of Kursk requires further analysis.
The Curious Case of the T-34 Tank
The weapons, organizations, and techniques that helped the Red Army turn the tide on the Eastern Front were many, but in an order of significance th
at is much different from our generally held notions of which Soviet weapons brought the blitzkrieg to its defeat. The present author, like many military historians, has long assumed that the T-34 tank and its later improved variants such as the T-34-85 were by far the most effective weapons deployed in the Soviet counterattack. The assumption is understandable. The accolades for this armored behemoth are limitless. “The greatest tank of all time,” “the most versatile tank of the Second World War,” and “the weapon that shocked the Germans” are among the more common descriptions. As early as July 1941 OKW chief Alfred Jodl noted in his war diary the surprise at this new and thus unknown wunder-armament being unleashed against the German assault divisions.36 Paul Carell, in his postwar work “Hitler’s War on Russia,” admiringly recounts a startling confrontation between a lone T-34 and an advance group of Wehrmacht panzers and infantry at the battle around Senno on July 8, 1941:
T-34! Now it was the turn of the Central Front to experience that wonder-weapon.… “Direct Hit!” Sergeant Sarge called out. But the Russian did not even seem to feel the shell. He simply drove on. Two, three, and then four tanks were weaving around the Russian at 800–1000 yards’ distance, firing. Nothing happened. Then he stopped. His turret swung around.… This one was making for the anti-tank guns. The gunners fired furiously. Now it was on top of them.