Hitler's Brandenburgers

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Hitler's Brandenburgers Page 28

by Lawrence Paterson


  However, Kriegsmarine Black Sea strength was almost exhausted, the flotillas of various craft in a sorry state compounded by damage from Soviet fire and the elements. Their effective artillery support and transport capabilities were essential for the success of ‘Blücher’ and, as the inevitable Kriegsmarine offensive pressure slackened, Soviet submarines and aircraft gradually gained the upper hand. Nevertheless, during the night of 9 September, all of Novorossiysk harbour was finally under German control, tiny but fiercely resisting Soviet enclaves at Mount Myskhako the sole remaining enemy presence. While Novorossiysk harbour storage facilities had been destroyed, the main pier, coal yards and railway siding were intact and promptly requisitioned for naval use.

  Horlbeck’s men returned to Kerch after their missions and were not deployed again until 10 September in an attack on the coastal road that ran between Novorossiysk and Gelendzhik and which remained in Soviet hands. The Leichte Pionierkompanie Brandenburg had moved to the recently captured port at Anapa as a forward base and it was from there that they sailed for the raid intended to block the line of retreat for Red Army units falling back from Novorossiysk. However, the assault group encountered heavily armed small craft of the Soviet Baltic Fleet and were forced to return to Anapa without attempting their landing.

  In November Horlbeck was assigned a long-range reconnaissance mission, being ordered to make a landing behind enemy lines at the small promontory of Cap Penaj. From there the Brandenburgers were to conduct sabotage missions to the south at Gelendzhik, but as the date for the operation neared it became apparent that the regional military situation had altered and his orders were cancelled as unnecessary before the raid could be mounted. On 12 December, the Leichte Pionierkompanie Brandenburg was finally withdrawn from Anapa, which was under increasing pressure from enemy air attacks. Sailing to Kerch they suffered their most serious casualties after one of the Engineer Landing Craft carrying them struck a mine laid by Soviet motor torpedo boats (MTBs) and exploded, killing thirteen men. The survivors entrained in Kerch for the return by rail to Langenargen on the Bodensee.

  On the situation maps success in the Caucasus appeared to be tantalisingly close for Germany during early September. Elements of the 101st Jäger Division and SS ‘Wiking’ were less than 50km from Tuapse, and the eastern seaboard of the Black Sea as far as Sokhumi appeared to be on the brink of falling to the Wehrmacht. In North Africa Rommel’s forces stood facing the last Allied defences before Alexandria and a final advance on the Nile. The spectre of a direct German threat to the Middle East, possible Turkish entry into a war of Axis triumph and the subsequent linking-up with Wehrmacht troops in the Caucasus suddenly loomed large in the imagination. But, situation maps do not tell the full story of weariness, actual effective fighting strength or supply. The Axis military machine was, in fact, at the end of its tether, even if not yet fully aware of that fact.

  Far to the north – too far as events would soon demonstrate – on Monday 7 September, the German Sixth Army attacked and captured the Mamayev Kurgan, the dominant height overlooking Stalingrad. Within a week, Army Group B had begun the grinding house-to-house fighting to capture the city.

  Walther’s 1st Battalion had been leading the advance towards Stalingrad with small mobile groups that forged ahead to capture river crossings and transportation hubs while gathering information on retreating Soviet units. With regular restructuring of Wehrmacht units, the 2nd and 3rd Companies had been stripped from Sixth Army leaving just Hauptmann Babuke’s 1st Company attached to Army Group B and reaching the small town of Tsatsa and its namesake lake by 24 August, operating in the vanguard of the 29th Motorised Infantry Division south of Stalingrad. Sharp Red Army counter-attacks continued to cause casualties, Leutnant Peter Bachmann being killed that day and Unteroffizier Baron posted as missing: only fragments of his uniform were found and the NCO assumed to have been captured. Sleep was becoming a rare commodity at night as Soviet aircraft mounted harassing bombing raids under cover of darkness. On 28 August Babuke handed over command of the company to Leutnant Schulte as he was transferred back to Germany. The company’s situation report of the time makes grim reading:

  Sunday 30 August. Grab ‘Tarne’ clothes. At 0200hrs accompany Leutnant Hebler to a small village. Russians had come with Panjewagen in the night and had been captured. Large rocket launcher attack [Nebelwerferangriff]! 0700hrs with attacking spearhead … to attack in disguise and in enemy vehicles. Antitank fire. Hits on vehicle belonging to ‘Gruppe Fuchs’. Own tank flies into the air! Feldwebel Garling gets large splinters through his big toes! Down from the vehicle and into hedgehog position! Forstenhäusler killed. Reinecke and Kurz wounded. Start of the big battle! Ten aircraft attack despite fighters and Flak! Two of our own fighters. What the hell is going on!

  Monday 31.8 Drive all night across Russian line. ‘Stoi!’ Russian post! Is disarmed and taken. Prisoners, prisoners, even women. – At dawn, a strong breakfast in the farm with eggs, milk, cream and fresh bread. Get out quick!

  To the right of us Russian infantry attack with ‘Urrah!’ Buried by aerial and artillery bombardment. Rain in the night. Tents.5

  The 1st Company battled north alongside the 29th Motorised Infantry Division until by the middle of October they had reached the approaches to Stalingrad itself and halted at the Don Canal that linked that great river with the Volga. There they were taken out of the line as Fourth Panzer Army fought to contain and destroy Soviet units pinned with their backs to the Volga in Stalingrad’s southern suburbs. The company was then withdrawn completely, travelling by road to a military railhead and entraining for return to new quarters at the Erbgrossherzog-Friedrich-Kaserne, Freiburg im Breisgau.

  The Advance on Grozny

  With the Grozny oilfield firmly in Wehrmacht sights, the 3rd Company spearheaded attacks by the 3rd Panzer Division against the town of Mozdok sandwiched between the Lenin Canal and Terek River. After heavy fighting against three Soviet brigades a small bridgehead was thrown across the Terek, the 3rd Company being involved in the battle and joined by the 5th and 8th Companies of the 2nd Battalion, hurriedly thrown into the fray after travelling at full speed from the western battles.

  Leutnant Werner Lau led his 5th Company together with a Kampfgruppe from 13th Panzer Division in an attack on the 120m-long combined road and railway bridge west of Arik, invaluable for Soviet oil transport from Baku and Grozny to Rostov-on-Don. The bridge was wired with 4.5 tons of explosives and ready to be demolished. Lau led his men in Volltarnung, infiltrating alone ahead of his company and spending the night amidst Soviet reconnaissance troops. At dawn the following day the remaining Brandenburgers stormed the bridge using their disguise to get close enough to remove the demolition charges and kill all the defenders. Lau personally captured several bunkers single-handedly before the bridge was secured. He was justifiably recommended for the Knight’s Cross, which he finally received on 9 December 1942.

  Wehrmacht troops poured across the captured bridge to reach the planes beyond, though resistance was fierce and nearly suicidal from some Red Army units. Heavy minefields destroyed several vehicles of the 13th Panzer Division near Nizhniy Akbash and the division’s commander Generalmajor Traugott Herr was seriously wounded after being struck in the head by shrapnel from a mine explosion on 31 October and evacuated to Germany to recuperate. At the eastern end of the German line, units had reached as far as Chervlennaya before unrelenting Soviet air and land attacks forced them gradually back. Less than 25km from Grozny and 130km from the shores of the Caspian Sea, the Wehrmacht had reached the furthest east that they ever would in the Caucasus.

  In the records of the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) in Moscow are impressions that were taken by NKVD troops during the entire German campaign in the Caucasus. By November they recorded a new pessimism amongst Wehrmacht troops.

  According to the testimony of prisoners, the 23rd Panzer Division numbers no more than thirty-five tanks. Remnants of 13th Panzer Division has bee
n moved to the rear, obviously to re-form … At present [17 November] the enemy is on the road Ardon, Dzuarikau but has moved onto the defensive, awaiting reinforcements for action.

  The morale and political status of the enemy is negative. Heavy losses in the Caucasus, the tightening of war conditions and poor nutrition have led to a significant decrease in the mood of the soldiers. Amongst the soldiers of the enemy, there is talk about the difficult situation in Germany and a deterioration of living standards for their families. Soldiers say that winning the Caucasus is impossible, because Germany does not have enough strength left. Many German soldiers are sure that the war will end in the defeat of Germany.6

  Nonetheless German pressure continued. On 25 October, the 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions of III Panzer Corps mounted a renewed attack to capture Nalchik from the direction of Maysky with scattered Brandenburger companies attached. From the 1st Battalion came the 2nd Company, from 2nd Battalion the Battalion Headquarters plus 5th and 8th Companies and from the 3rd Battalion came the 11th Company. From the area of Baksan, Romanian and German mountain troops made a southward thrust in support. Preceded by strong Luftwaffe bombardment, principally Stuka attacks, the advance began against seven defending Red Army divisions. Fighting was fierce and brutal as the Axis forces battered their way to Nalchik. The fighting in the urban area was protracted and difficult as both panzer divisions swung south to make for Lesken and Chikola. The Romanian 2nd Mountain Division took control of Nalchik by 28 October after suffering 820 casualties in desperate house-to-house fighting. Over a thousand Soviet prisoners were taken and marched back to makeshift holding pens behind the lines and many of the passes leading into the Caucasus mountain range were now under Axis control. Leutnant Helmut Neugebauer and a party of men from the Brandenburg 10th Company were tasked with combing through the prisoner of war camps in search of volunteers for the regiment, having found ninety potential volunteers by 20 October. He, his men and new recruits were then transported to Düren to begin the formation and training of a new company, eventually to become the 8th Company, 3rd Regiment, Brandenburg Division in 1943.

  On 2 November, the German-Romanian attack was resumed after a brief pause. The Brandenburgers were concentrated for Operation ‘Darg Kokh’, named for the small municipality through which the axis of advance would pass. German forces had swept south following the bend of the Terek River as far as the outskirts of Vladikavkaz, capital city of the Republic of North Ossetia, while the 370th Infantry Division had stalled at Ekhotovo. The Brandenburgers’ 5th Company was tasked with blasting over the river and lancing east against Darg Kokh, combined with a battle group from the 13th Panzer Division and under the direct command of 2nd Battalion commander, Major Dr Jacobi.

  The company was ordered to seize and hold four road and rail bridges over the Terek until relieved. However, it was to be a costly failure. Of four separate assault groups, only Leutnant Steidl appears to have captured the bridge assigned to him, which carried the road that stretched from Ardon to Darg Kokh. After taking hold of one end against light resistance, he and his thirty men ran headlong into heavy fire from Red Army troops protected by bunkers on the far shore. Battling forward they cleared each position in hand-to-hand fighting and the defenders retreated in disorder, the bridge finally taken as the last Soviet troops ran. However, the lull that followed was brief as heavy artillery fire began falling around the small German bridgehead, Steidl clearly able to see troops reforming in the distance with newly arrived enemy tanks. The counter-attack, when it came, was relentless until only three of the Brandenburgers remained uninjured, grimly holding on and repulsing every enemy attack while awaiting promised reinforcements.

  Just as they were on the verge of exhausting their ammunition, a brief pause in the fighting allowed a runner to reach Steidl and he was ordered to retreat. The other attacks had failed with heavy losses and Steidl and the lightly wounded survivors who were mobile fell back by rushes. The bridge itself remained under artillery bombardment and appeared on the verge of physical collapse as the Brandenburgers retreated to prepare fresh defences in Ardon.

  They remained there for several days, fighting off occasional night attacks, though their enemy appeared unwilling to press their hard-won advantage. Losses to the company had been severe, not least the commander Major Dr Jacobi who had been wounded in the attack against the railway bridge across the Terek and subsequently died in hospital after his weakened body contracted jaundice. Hauptmann Gerhard Pinkert took command of what remained of the battalion, which suffered another grievous loss on 7 November, when veteran Oberleutnant Johann Karl Fürchtegott Zülch was also killed after being shot in the head by a sniper while observing enemy forces.

  On the Soviet side, the day that Zülch fell marked the beginning of their resurgence. Alexey Mikhailovich Buchukury had been drafted into the Red Army during August 1942 to protect his Ossetia homeland. A member of the 319th Rifle Division and then the 276th Georgian Infantry Division, he recalled:

  The Nazis were near Vladikavkaz. On 2 November 1942, Gizel’ was occupied. The fascists behaved as though they had already won. The town was constantly bombed, fired at from guns. Hitler’s aircraft flew over our position, dropping leaflets, the content just insulting words: ‘Surrender! Your days are numbered, resistance is futile, on 7 November, the town will be at our feet’ etc. etc. At lunch bombers appeared; day and night bombing our positions, attacking our trenches with their horrible howl, but we were well hidden, we had good bunkers, so there was almost no loss. Bombing and shelling continued every day from 30 October to 7 November 1942.7

  On that November day, the Wehrmacht finally conceded the battle in the south. Defeated in Vladikavkaz, the Wehrmacht began its retreat, though it fought for every metre of territory that the Red Army regained. Gizel’ was reoccupied by Soviet troops on 11 November, Oberleutnant Renner’s 8th Company being involved in the stubborn defence of the town. Soviet forces launched a counteroffensive and managed to interdict Axis communications on the Nalchik–Beslan–Ordzhonikidzevskaya and Nalchik–Alagir–Ordzhonikidzevskaya roads. This isolated a part of the III Panzer Corps still fighting in Ordzhonikidzevskaya only 50km west of Grozny, part of 13th Panzer Division trapped and encircled until relieved by Romanians of the 2nd Mountain Division on 12 November and continuing the retreat during the following night.

  The Brandenburger’s 1st Battalion had been reduced to a composite battlegroup of the 2nd and 4th (Light) Fallschirmjäger Company – designated ‘Kampfgruppe Walther’ – after Leutnant Schulte’s 1st Company had returned to Germany. On 16 December, the Fallschirmjäger commander Hauptmann Kürschner was severely wounded and replaced by the 1st Battalion adjutant Oberleutnant Hans Gerlach. Of 3rd Battalion, Major Franz Jacobi still maintained the 10th and 11th Companies in the Caucasus, the 9th returning to Mödling south of Vienna for transformation into a ‘Tropical Company’ and attachment to Koenen’s forces in North Africa. Hauptmann Horlbeck gathered the remains of the 5th and 11th Companies into his own namesake Kampfgruppe that defended Ardon allowing other Wehrmacht units to withdraw through the town. Meanwhile the 12th Company continued its anti-partisan operations near Smolensk and the Leichte Pionierkompanie Brandenburg was in action along the Black Sea coast.

  On 19 November 1943, the Red Army exploited the gap left between Army Groups A and B as they chased diverging objectives and launched Operation ‘Uranus’. While the German Sixth Army lay partially paralysed by the onset of winter and battle exhaustion in Stalingrad, the offensive broke through Romanian forces north of the city and the following day a second major offensive smashed Romanian lines to the south. By 23 November the two prongs of the Russian advance met at Kalach and the Sixth Army was surrounded in the rubble of Stalingrad.

  Fearing that the Soviet advance could isolate the entire Army Group A in the Caucasus and with the southern advance stalled before Grozny and beginning to ebb slowly back, Axis forces throughout the entire region were thrown onto the defensive with a strong Soviet att
ack expected against the Taman Peninsula. On 16 December, the Red Army launched Operation ‘Little Saturn’ that hammered Axis forces in the Ukraine, pushing them further away from Stalingrad and sealing the fate of the Sixth Army, while the German First Panzer Army was pushed steadily back towards Rostov-on-Don. In the Caucasus, the Seventeenth Army retreated towards the Taman Peninsula, Brandenburg units frequently employed as rearguards. Quite uncharacteristically, Hitler authorised his men to fall back into the Taman Peninsula not only to protect the eastern approaches to the Crimea but also to provide a potential launching point for renewed offensive operations against the Caucasus during 1943. Luftwaffe reconnaissance noted a steady build-up of Soviet forces in ports along the Black Sea and a fresh storm finally broke on 4 February 1943, when elements of three Soviet infantry brigades landed at the tiny Red Army enclave at Cape Myskhako that had defied attempts to remove it and were soon firmly lodged ashore inside an expanding beachhead.

  The high tide of Wehrmacht conquest had been unequivocally passed. In many ways ‘Case Blue’ had been doomed virtually from its conception. Adolf Hitler ignored advice from his senior commanders to maintain a single strong thrust against consecutive objectives and divided his Army Group South to chase diverging objectives simultaneously. The Wehrmacht had been unable to conquer the Soviet Union during 1941 on one continuous front; it was highly unlikely that, after suffering the grievous losses of the winter’s defensive fighting, they would achieve two separate parallel military ambitions. The depleted Wehrmacht was forced to rely more heavily than ever before on Hungarian, Romanian and Italian troops alongside their own on the Eastern Front. While elements of these armies were highly motivated and effective soldiers, they were generally less committed and qualitatively inferior to their German counterparts, many of whom were fresh recruits by 1942 and lacking the ability of their predecessors. By sending spearheads in different directions, Hitler opened the middle ground to Soviet counter-attack, which was what encircled the Sixth Army and forced a retreat from the Caucasus lest those southerly forces became cut off from the west, whereupon they could be destroyed piecemeal.

 

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