War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942
Page 40
Dr Paul Rohwedder recalled occasions when his field dressing station was overwhelmed by a sudden influx of casualties. ‘It was a tough mission,’ he said, describing the aftermath of one action, ‘a big burden on us, we buried 63 men. Most of them were dying as they came in.’ During such surges of activity, ‘we operated day and night’.
‘The contacts were short, you’d get masses of wounded then it was all over. We had 1,200 [casualties] inside 48 hours. That’s the sort of number you would get over six months in a big [peacetime] clinic. There were seven doctors and one pharmacist, the others were novices who had no idea and had to be trained. One had to improvise in order to do all that, and we did.’(6)
This pressure of work was not untypical. During a 12-day period in August 1941, the Ist Medical Company of the 98th Infantry Division dealt with 1,253 wounded near Korosten in Army Group Centre’s sector.(7)
The next stage of the medical evacuation process was transfer to a field hospital, either in the occupied areas or the Reich, where the wounded could recover and convalesce. ‘As the soldiers were as a rule tightly disciplined,’ explained Dr Rohwedder, ‘the hospital [with its comparative freedoms] was a big break for them.’ Morale would rise: ‘They were happy, feeling “now I’m in hospital someone will care for me”.’ Men still succumbed to their injuries, even this far along the chain. ‘There were certain nice phrases you’d use to notify the relatives,’ said Rohwedder, like ‘died peacefully, etc’. A patriotic sense of duty kept the doctor motivated. ‘In any war there will be associated losses,’ he mused long after the event. ‘That can be very painful, but as a doctor and a soldier – a patriot – you’ve got to stand that.’(8)
Medical Officer Peter Bamm described the medical evacuation chain as:
‘A grim conveyor belt which brought the debris of battle to a human repair shop. We could show no sympathy; we couldn’t afford to. We should soon have been exhausted and totally unfit for work.’
It was difficult to be completely divorced emotionally from what was going on. Caring for the wounded exacted an intangible and remorseless mental toll.
Leutnant Bamm treated a young soldier seriously wounded during a heroic action against a Soviet pillbox complex which captured the admiration of the whole regiment. ‘This story of unparalleled bravery by a handful of infantry,’ he said, ‘had become a legend in less than a day.’ One of the patients was a former student from a technical college in southern Germany, with hideous mutilations to both hands. He bore his detailed and painful examination ‘with stoic indifference’. Bamm found it difficult to suppress sympathy for such a poignant case.
‘To lose both hands! A student! And 22 years old. The thought flashed suddenly through my mind that he would never again be able to caress a girl’s body.’
Three days after the amputations the student’s clumsy inability to detonate a hand-grenade with his bandaged stumps resulted in a failed suicide attempt. Gangrene set in which meant the uninfected parts of the remaining arm had to be removed ‘in order to save the life that had become worthless to its owner’. Bamm handed over his patient when the unit moved on. He never saw him again. ‘The members of our operating group learned from this case,’ reflected the disheartened doctor, ‘that a hundred successful operations are valueless in the face of one such failure.’(9) Casualty statistics posed an emotional strain beyond measured shortfalls of battle strengths. They badly affected morale.
German officer casualties in the first five weeks of the campaign were extremely high and represented 5.9% of the total.(10) They could not be easily replaced. Officer training lasted 14–18 months. At platoon level, they were often replaced by veteran senior NCOs. An indication of the scale of losses can be gauged from the fact that a typical infantry division had 518 officers on its unit establishment. By the end of July, 2,433 had been killed and 5,464 wounded, an equivalent casualty rate of more than 15 divisions’ worth of officers. Nearly 15 more division equivalents were lost in August, but the figure fell to half of this – seven division equivalents – in September. On the eve of the Moscow offensive the Ostheer had lost one-third of its officer strength (a total of 37 division equivalents from 117 divisions) which had started the campaign.
These men represented the tip of the spear, the experienced elite of the combat arms: mainly infantry, artillery and Panzer. Many were at the height of their professional prowess, —commanders who had led in Poland, France, the Low Countries and the Balkans. It was these men who were required to think and act in the ‘operational’ dimension – leaders who took crucial decisions in terms of time and space, following Auftragstaktik (a mission-orientated command philosophy). German officers were schooled to achieve objectives while affording subordinates a high degree of freedom of action in their execution. A commander was given the requisite resources – Panzers, artillery or air support – to achieve a mission. How he did it was up to him. This style of command conferred an intrinsic advantage over Soviet commanders accustomed to receiving Befehlstaktik (detailed orders). Initiative in their case was circumscribed by painstaking control by senior commanders over its execution. Not only were resources granted, the commander was told in detail how to fulfil his mission. Auftragstaktik requires a commander to take independent action and apply creative judgement. Imaginative steps involving risk if necessary can be taken to achieve the desired goal. Time and again German junior officers applied tactical excellence in achieving encirclements or complicated tactical manoeuvres through joint co-ordination with other ground arms and the air force. Remarkable and surprising results were achieved against a more numerous foe. But there was a price to pay, and it was exacted by a fanatical enemy.
Officer deaths, particularly of those sharing the risks and stresses of their subordinates, magnified the sense of dismay felt by the troops when they fell. Experienced officers were important to fighting men who measured survival prospects against the life-span of proven commanders leading from the front. Veteran commander casualties influence tactical and operational flexibility, the very quality that confers battle-winning effectiveness. Officers were planners. They handled communications, the effective two-way passage of orders from above and below which produces success. Responsibility for synergising the effect of combined arms between tanks and aircraft, or infantry and artillery, or together, lay with them. Officers embodied leadership and direction through their very presence – important to men confused at the pace and direction of battle. A strong personality in control of events at the local level conferred the bedrock of stability and motivation needed to keep soldiers moving. Consequently it came as a shock, with repercussions at several levels, if they fell in battle. They were responsible for so much. Coping with the abrupt loss of a leader could cost momentum in the attack or reduce sustainability in defence. General Halder commented on ‘remarkably high officer casualties’ only three days into the campaign, compared to the ‘moderate’ losses of wounded and killed. In early July he remarked again on the higher proportion of officer casualties, which by then were 6.6% of total deaths compared to the previous experience of 4.85% in France and 4.6% in Poland.(11)
There is no logical reason for this beyond a spirit of sacrificial patriotism. Nazi ideology extolled group values over the individual. ‘You are nothing, Dein Volk [your people] are everything.’ Wagnerian mythology was pervasive in propaganda and documentary newsreels. Soldierly virtues were extolled through images of tight-lipped heroes against a backcloth of stirring music taken from film director Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and the 1936 Olympia documentary. Feldzug in Polen alongside Sieg im Westen glorified modern war, chronicling the campaigns in Poland and France. Blitzkrieg was presented through realistic and gritty campaign footage juxtaposed with victory parades in Berlin where the victorious troops were bombarded with flowers and bouquets by adoring females. The colloquial Blumenkrieg expression (literally a ‘war of flowers’) originated from these mass celebrations of success. Idealistic young officers became imbued with a
desire to match these epic precedents. As the new campaign was expected to be short, there would be only a fleeting opportunity to prove themselves. Many paid the ultimate price. Although the Alte Kameraden (veterans of previous campaigns) had gloried in public adulation, by the middle of August the war was assuming more a mantle of Wagnerian tragedy rather than triumph. Realisation dawned that the campaign would be no walk-over. Casualty levels assumed horrific proportions.
There was, in any case, a fine dividing line between courage and self-preservation. This is illustrated by an interview between Dr A. Stöhr, a wartime veteran and psychiatrist, and an infantry company commander, who described a typical experience in a ‘tight corner’.
‘I returned to my position having left battalion headquarters just as a Russian attack came in. My men were streaming back towards me in uncontrolled flight. I beat them back into their positions with the ornamental cane we used to carry at Wolchow [peacetime barracks]. We were able to repel the assault. Later, I and a number of soldiers were decorated for this successful defensive action.’
Subsequent remarks by the same officer reveal an insight of the imperatives that drive commanders and soldiers to acts of courage under duress. He admitted:
‘I would rather have joined my men in flight but as an officer I could not. This was due on the one hand to the likely [disciplinary] consequences, while on the other, I was frightened of being considered a coward. Later rationalising my conduct I realised I took this course of action because it was the most effective. We had far more chance of surviving in the position than in flight. It is probably likely, therefore, I hurled my soldiers back into their trenches out of fear of the consequences.’(12)
The commander of IIIrd Panzer Corps, General der Kavallerie Eberhard von Mackensen, believed the scale of officer casualties was undermining the effectiveness of his corps. Its ‘fitness for action,’ he claimed, was ‘only a fraction of what it had been before Kiev, for example’. Many of his officers, including numerous ‘combat leaders’, had perished. ‘In some cases it is more than half.’ Across the corps 25% to 35% of officers had been lost and over 10% of the soldiers. ‘Specialist’ casualties were having a significant impact upon his combat effectiveness. Von Mackensen explained, ‘that has a more profound effect on a motorised rather than infantry unit.’(13)
The ability to think on one’s feet during combat was expected, but to a lesser degree, from NCOs. These junior leaders were essentially trainers and movers of troops, commanding sections or squads of up to 10 men in the infantry, or a small element – a Panzer or artillery gun – in the other arms. Casualties often resulted in elevation to platoon command if there were no officers left. There was less of a leadership gulf between NCOs and soldiers compared to officers. NCOs provided the deputy commanders, but more often the ‘administrators’ preparing for combat. This involved making things work, feeding and caring for soldiers, with minor but cumulatively important supervisory tasks such as ammunition resupply, organising sentry rotations or controlling an important weapon or technical capability.
NCO losses were fearsome. One analysis of casualty figures in an infantry (Schützen) regiment with the 11th Panzer Division reveals 48 deaths prior to Operation ‘Taifun’, with 79 by the end of the year and 210 wounded. The effective full strength of a company would normally lie between 150 and 170 men. Intense periods of combat coinciding with peaks of fighting in July and August reveal the majority of casualties to have been NCOs and senior soldiers. Of 29 killed in July, all but one were within this category, as were 11 of 13 killed in August.(14) Numbers of wounded were on average three times that of fatalities.
A typical infantry division numbered 518 officers, 2,573 NCOs and 13,667 men. NCOs represented 18.8% of the whole. Evidence suggests – as in the case of Infantry Regiment 110 – that NCO casualties were much higher than soldiers. Even accepting a low estimate of 20% casualties of the whole, an interpretation of OKW casualty figures (see Appendix 2) suggests the manning equivalent of at least 13 divisions’ worth of NCOs had been lost in killed, wounded and missing by the end of July. In August 15 division equivalents were lost and nearly 11 in September. By the start of the Moscow offensive nearly 39 division manning strengths had become casualties or about one-third of all the NCOs (from 117 divisions) who had started the campaign. Therefore, about one-third of the veteran leaders of the Ostheer had perished even before the final offensive of the year. Such an abrupt changeover has implications for tactical flexibility and operational effectiveness. The blood-letting in the ranks was on an even grander scale.
Gerhard Meyer, serving in an artillery unit, claimed the battles around the River Dnieper crossings of 23 July ‘cost blood on blood’ in a ‘high priced to-and-fro of constant fighting around four positions’. His division was reduced to less than half its strength and 80% of the officers had perished. He wrote despairingly:
‘To believe, amidst the smell of decaying bodies, that this life has a beginning and end, and is the only purpose and reason for our existence is totally unacceptable. It seems idiotic to me that there is still no order in this world.’
Three weeks later Meyer reported ‘two-thirds of the division has now been rubbed out’, and his commander was wounded and had been captured by the Russians. The division was on the defensive.
‘As I traversed the dreadful “street of misery”, a straight track leading from the gun position to the administrative area on my way to wash, I noticed holes had already been freshly dug among the rows of graves to left and right.’
One of these holes was earmarked for his friend, a signals section commander, who had also come from Würzburg, his home town. They had been sitting together talking about old times when he got up to retrieve his coat spread out to dry 15m away. He ‘waved back to me’ Meyer said, ‘and at that moment was struck in the head by a shell splinter’. His battery commander, a father with three young sons, was also interred there. Meyer was reminded of ‘the old song about the blood-red dawn lighting the way to an early death, which became comprehensible for the first time’. He confided to his diary, ‘whoever is not a soldier would not understand’.(15)
Unteroffizier Robert Rupp, equally despondent, wrote in his diary on 12 July:
‘Many of the others seem particularly cheerless. I considered whether I ought to write a letter to Maria [his wife], so that it would be in my pocket should I never get to go home.’
Two days later the company dead were piled on a lorry, which had to be towed into their position because it had been disabled by a strike in the radiator. ‘H. was there,’ he noticed, ‘with his wedding ring on the finger.’ One of the Unteroffizier section commanders told him, ‘it looks like the whole of his squad had been taken out’. He had ‘three dead, four seriously wounded and the others were at least badly injured’. Morale was low; ‘everyone is very gloomy, very quiet,’ said Rupp. The dismal task of sorting through the possessions of the dead and wounded followed. Private things were separated from military. Shaving utensils and writing materials were shared out among the other soldiers because they were short. ‘It is sad work,’ he confessed. Pocket fighting had exacted a serious toll. The company was being led by a Leutnant one month later (normally a Major’s appointment). Another Leutnant was wounded within 24 hours of his arrival at the front. He had confided to one of Rupp’s friends that ‘the company commander insisted on senseless sacrifices, but I am not going to be considered a coward’. It was a particularly dismal incident. The company commander had been wounded in the leg and his company pinned down. ‘Wait here you cowards,’ he had called out. ‘If I could still run I would soon show you how to attack.’ Thirteen more men were wounded to prove him wrong. Even the company commander’s batman was shot in the stomach and another soldier through the nose. ‘One hundred and sixty-two men have been taken-out so far,’ said Rupp, ‘not including the sick.’(16) This meant that, taken from a company fighting establishment of 176, often in reality much lower, very few veterans survived from those w
ho had crossed the border on 22 June. These were depressing survival statistics.
There were approximately 16,860 soldiers in a German infantry division. By the end of July casualty figures reveal that the equivalent of 10 full divisions had been lost. August was even worse, with 11.6 divisions, and a further 8.3 divisions were removed from the order of battle before the end of September. The Ostheer was indeed ‘victoring itself to death’. Before the onset of Operation ‘Taifun’ at the beginning of October, nearly 30 divisions’ worth of casualties had been lost. This figure exceeded the entire strength of Army Group North’s 26 divisions, which had been sufficient to fight to the gates of Leningrad. These losses represented three-quarters of the size of Army Group South, now in the Ukraine, and three-fifths that of Army Group Centre in June.
Dry statistics do not encapsulate the full significance of the negative impact upon those remaining. Pressure was moral, psychological and physical, all cumulative in their effect. The moral and psychological character of the Ostheer was intangibly but perceptibly changing. Faith remained in the Führer’s ability to see the campaign through to a successful conclusion, but Feldpost letters written by educated and articulate soldiers were beginning to question the extent of the sacrifice relative to the value of the objective. One soldier, writing to his former schoolmaster, apologised for not answering his letters for two months. His ‘bad conscience’ was quoted as part reason.