Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The Germans were holding a front of 1,200 miles. It was a vast, almost unimaginable distance to the soldier on the ground, and the Soviet regime had not collapsed, Moscow had not been captured and it was now clear that the war would go on into 1942. The German army would have to spend the winter in defence in the open, but they were in absolutely the wrong place to do so. The Staff College solution in such a situation is to withdraw to positions that can be defended, and which may already have been prepared for defence, shorten the line, replenish and wait for the weather to improve. Alas for the Germans, there were no prepared positions behind them, the priority for supply had been fuel and ammunition and there were no defence stores – timber, wire, cement, aggregate – to build any defences, nor were there the stores to build accommodation for the troops, nor was there any winter clothing, except for the Luftwaffe.

  Then, on 4 December, the Russian counter-offensive began over a 300-mile front. Zhukov had husbanded his reserves, refusing to commit them in the defence of Moscow, and they not only had winter clothing but also the first few sub-machine-guns of the war. Russian commanders had little experience of offensive tactics and their lack of modern communications precluded the sort of wide encircling sweeps practised by the Germans. Their soldiers were uneducated, many had received only rudimentary basic training and most were appallingly bad shots. They were, however, stoical, tough and very brave, whether from genuine patriotism or the knowledge that a firing squad awaited them and their families if they were not. As most Russian attacks at this stage of the war were simple and frontal, the answer was to equip the infantry soldier with a weapon that did not need complicated machine tools to manufacture, was simple to operate and maintain, and would produce a high volume of fire at short range. Hence the introduction of the PPsh-41, known as the Shpagin after its inventor, which would eventually become a standard weapon of all arms of the Red Army. Although it would not come into full production until well into 1942,afewwere manufactured in Moscow in late 1941 and issued to the troops for the December counter-offensive. Provided that supplies of ammunition could be maintained, it was the ideal weapon for a peasant army fighting at close quarters.

  The Russians advanced through snow that was three feet deep, supported by plentiful artillery and the feared Katyushas, multiple rocket-launchers mounted on trucks. The Germans lacked air support because the cold made starting aircraft engines a long and laborious process, and, even when aircraft did finally get into the air, the impact fuses on German bombs would not detonate in the snow, whereas those on Russian artillery shells would. The wings of the German encirclement were pushed back – they would not now meet behind Moscow – and in the centre the men of the Wehrmacht retreated stubbornly. In Hitler’s eyes a retreat was unnecessary: the German army should stand its ground where it now was. When the generals disagreed, the sackings continued: on 12 December, Field Marshal von Bock was relieved of his command and replaced by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge; on 19 December, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, worn out by interminable arguments with the Führer in which his professional judgement was constantly disparaged, resigned as Commander-in-Chief of the German army, and Hitler appointed himself to replace him – not bad for an ex-lance corporal. On Christmas Day, Colonel-Generals Guderian and Hoepner, commanders of Second and Fourth Panzer Armies (as all the panzer groups were now titled) were told to clear their lockers – Hitler particularly had it in for Hoepner, who had withdrawn despite the Führer’s orders not to, and wanted him cashiered from the army without pension. It was soon clear that the army would not stand for that and Hoepner got his pension.

  In his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, Hitler insisted that the army stand its ground and defend where it now was. The advice of the military was that the front had to be shortened to defend against another expected Soviet offensive. Hitler, however, maintained that a limited offensive by the Russians to drive the Germans back from Moscow was one thing, an attack right along the whole front was quite another and, anyway, the Red Army was in no state to launch it. So the German army started to dig in – impossible in the frozen ground without explosives – and back at home the propaganda minister, Goebbels, launched a winter relief campaign to collect warm clothing for the troops. The populace responded with a will and huge amounts of garments were collected. Inevitably perhaps, the better items were siphoned off by rear-area troops and the quantities reaching the fighting troops were barely adequate.* It was unfortunate for the German army that in the event Hitler was right and, despite the difficulties and the suffering, the no-retreat order was the correct one. Hitler, of course, had been right about the Ardennes offensive in 1940, against the advice of his closest military advisers, and being right again in the winter of 1941–42 only convinced him that his instincts were a better guide to the conduct of war than the professional opinions of his generals. In many instances, Hitler would be proved right again, but far too often he would be disastrously wrong, to the extreme detriment of his soldiers’ chances of survival. The expected Russian offensive all along the front did, however, come.

  The success of the defence of Moscow – in that the Germans did not capture it and were forced to withdraw – now encouraged Stalin to believe that the tide had turned and to order attacks all along the front, from Leningrad in the north to the Crimea in the south. In vain, Zhukov protested. Stopping the Germans and pushing them back over a front of 300 miles when they were on the end of a very tenuous supply chain and the Red Army could call on virtually the whole of the air force to support it was one thing, but launching an offensive over a frontage of 1,200 miles with a largely untrained army was quite another. Stalin, however, had his way and on 5 January 1942 the advance began. It quickly ran into trouble. In the north, a new front, the Volkhov Front, was formed, commanded by General Meretskov, who had been arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the NKVD in January 1941 and then, as no one could remember what he had been arrested for, released and restored to his former rank in September. In an attempt to lift the siege of Leningrad, where Soviet historians claim that half a million of the inhabitants died of starvation and disease during the winter, the Twenty-Sixth Army was renamed Second Shock Army. Shock armies were supposed to have extra artillery and be trained as storm troops to carry out sudden and devastating attacks, and Second Shock Army did succeed in driving a salient deep into Army Group North. The trouble about salients is that they are all too easy to nip off, and this is exactly what Army Group North did in March, just after Meretskov had sent his deputy, Andrei Vlasov, in to assess the situation in the salient. In May, once the thaw had finished and the mud had dried up, the Germans attacked the surrounded Soviet army, which surrendered at the end of June.

  In the centre, the temperature fell to –25ºC in January. The fighting was intense and even insignificant hamlets became the scenes of major battles as both sides struggled for anything that would give them some shelter from the weather. Russian horsed cavalry units broke through the German lines and penetrated far to the rear, where they remained a nuisance until the spring, and two Soviet armies, Twenty-ninth and Thirty-Third, also succeeded in driving through the German defences, but they were surrounded and cut off, then eliminated once the weather improved. Fortunately for the Germans, the weather hampered the Soviet air force too and the few roads the German engineers managed to keep clear of snow were hardly ever attacked. For its part, the Luftwaffe was hard pressed to provide support to the army and could mount only token air raids on Moscow; it was also unable to attack the railway convoys taking Russian industrial plant off into the interior. Inevitably, some German units were themselves cut off but managed to hold out, supplied by the Luftwaffe, until after the thaw. Such success was welcome, but it only encouraged the Germans to believe that their air force was capable of much more than it actually was. Supplying six divisions under General Walther von Seydlitz – a direct descendant of Frederick the Great’s general – as they held out for two months was one thing. Supplying an entire army, as the Luftwaffe w
ould have to do at Stalingrad, would prove quite another.

  Meanwhile, in the south, Field Marshal von Reichenau went for a run on 12 January 1942, returned to his headquarters, suffered a massive heart attack and died on 17 January. He was replaced by the now rehabilitated, albeit only briefly, Field Marshal von Bock. Also in Army Group South, Colonel-General von Schobert, commanding the Eleventh Army, had been killed on 12 September 1941 when his Storch reconnaissance aircraft crashed in a minefield. General of Infantry Erich von Manstein, previously commanding LVI Armoured Corps in Army Group North, took over and was promoted to colonel-general on 1 January 1942. Ordered to take Rostov and to clear the Crimea, he persuaded von Bock that he could not do both. Rostov was now made the objective of Colonel-General von Kleist’s First Panzer Army, which, with Eleventh Army, was told to take the Crimea. Apart from the usefulness of the Crimea as a base from where the Luftwaffe could destroy or neutralize the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Hitler considered it to be the ‘German South’ of the expanded Greater Germany. It was to be cleared of its existing population, Russians, Ukrainians and Tartars, settled by ethnic Germans and linked by autobahn to Germany proper as Gau Gotland. By the end of September 1941 Manstein had captured the Perekop, the narrow isthmus connecting the Crimea to the mainland, and by the end of October he had destroyed two Soviet armies, taken 160,000 prisoners and was besieging Sevastopol, the Soviet naval base on the south-west corner of the Crimea. In his memoirs Manstein recalls sheltering behind a British grave marker on the Balaclava heights from the 1854 British siege of the port. Manstein hoped to take Sevastopol in December but the Russians mounted an amphibious landing on the Kerch peninsula, on the extreme east of the Crimea, and he had to divert troops to contain that. He held the Russians along the neck of the peninsula while still maintaining the siege, but it was a close-run thing. In May 1942, once the weather made movement possible, he launched a surprise attack on the Soviet forces in Kerch and, well supported by the Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive-bombers, routed two armies, taking 170,000 prisoners. Now he could concentrate on Sevastopol.

  The optimists in the German high command could be reasonably satisfied as they surveyed the military situation in the East in the spring of 1942. They had not taken Moscow, nor had they captured Leningrad, and they had suffered a defeat when they took and then lost Rostov on the River Don in November 1941, but they had taken the Crimea and survived a winter that they had neither expected nor prepared for, and they had stopped a Soviet offensive all along the front, inflicting yet further huge casualties on the Red Army. On the debit side, their logistics chain had only just held. The Germans had a bewildering plethora of load-carrying vehicles, all needing different spare parts and with different servicing schedules, but, with the better weather, resupply would become much easier. Losses had not been made good, however. On 21 April, at a conference in Berlin to discuss plans for 1942, Colonel-General Halder pointed out that, between 1 November 1941 and 1 April 1942,the Ostheer (German Army in the East) had lost 900,000 men, killed, wounded, missing and sick, but had received only 450,000 replacements. Between 1 October 1941 and 15 March 1942, 74,183 wheeled vehicles and 2,340 tracked vehicles had been destroyed or rendered useless, while only 7,441 wheeled and 1,847 tracked vehicles had been delivered. Of the horses, 179,000 had been lost and only 20,000 received.49 The pessimists also noted that the United States was now in the war, and the longer that the war went on, the more her industrial might would be brought to bear. They were, of course, to be proved entirely correct.

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  The increasing viciousness of the war in Russia was to be mirrored by developments in Germany itself. On 20 January 1942, the day the Soviets launched their counter-attack in the Ukraine, a conference was held in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, chaired by SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RHSA, an amalgam of the German criminal police, the Gestapo and the security services. Heydrich appeared to be the archetypical Aryan German: tall, blond, blue-eyed, an excellent horseman and a qualified pilot, he was aged thirty-eight in 1942.Too young for the First World War, Heydrich had joined one of the Freikorps in 1919 and then the German navy in 1922. He was considered a promising young officer but his naval career was cut short in 1931, when he was required to resign for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman’* after he was reported as having been more than just good friends with the daughter of a shipyard owner, without having the slightest intention of making an honest woman of her. Heydrich then joined the NSDAP and the SS. Himmler was impressed by him and his rise was rapid, particularly after his participation in the Night of the Long Knives when the SS removed the threat to the party and the armed forces posed by Röhm’s SA.

  The purpose of the Wannsee Conference, attended by fourteen senior civil servants and police officers, was to decide upon a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed Europe, was longstanding, but once the NSDAP came to power in 1933 it became government policy. Beginning with the boycott of Jewish shops and professionals, by 1940 it had escalated to the removal of citizenship and then forced‘resettlement’ in the East. Hitler said that ‘citizenship is determined by race: a Jew cannot be a German’, but there were problems of definition here: a Semite is a member of an identifiable race, which includes Arabs, whereas Judaism is a religion. Some Jews are certainly Semitic, but very many are not and, in twentieth-century Europe, were not. Jewishness is conferred through the mother (a woman knows with certainty who her children are – a man does not) and the conference spent much time debating who was a Jew and who was not. Was someone who had one Jewish parent a Jew? Or one Jewish grandparent? What about someone who had married a Jew? Did someone with obvious Aryan physical features but who was a Jew by religion qualify? Could conversion to Christianity absolve one from being a Jew? And so on and so forth.

  No reference was made in the minutes of the meeting to the killing of Jews – rather, euphemisms such as ‘resettlement’ and ‘work camps’ were employed – but there can be little doubt that, even if a deliberate policy of extermination was not specified at Wannsee, the likelihood that many Jews would die as the result of forced labour was accepted without question. In practice, of course, Wannsee formalized the killing of Jews. The Germans calculated that there were 11 million Jews in Europe to be dealt with, although some of those, such as the estimated 334,000 in Britain and Ireland, were beyond their reach, at least for the time being. There were 5 million in the USSR and, apart from the 3 million in the Ukraine and a few in the Baltic States, the rest would have to wait until Russia was defeated. There were 58,000 in Italy, yet despite Mussolini’s instructions that they were to be handed over to the Germans, the Italian Army was deliberately obstructive, and the 9,000 in Spain and Portugal were safe, at least until Franco entered the war, which he never did. The Danes and the Dutch were reasonably successful in hiding or disguising their Jews, whereas the Vichy French regime was all too willing to hand over its own (there were 700,000 in unoccupied Vichy France, compared with 165,000 in the occupied part of the country).50

  As it turned out, the Germans were to prove remarkably successful in eliminating such European Jews as they could get at, and while the statistics are uncertain, a conservative estimate is that they probably did away with 5 million and, as figures for the USSR are even more vague, it could be many more. In less than ten years, the Germans under Hitler had moved from boycott to mass murder, a grim progression that had an inevitably brutalizing effect on all who, actively or passively, were connected with it.

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  Regardless of what was, or was not, formalized at Wannsee, the Russian war had not been brought to a satisfactory conclusion in 1941 and so the plans for it now had to be re-examined. Both OKH and OKW were convinced that it would be in the East that the war would be won. Although Hitler still maintained that the capture of Leningrad, Moscow and the Caucasus remained objectives of the war, he accepted that all three could not be prosecuted simultaneously. In his Directive Number 41,issuedon
5 April 1942, he ordered that the aim now was the destruction of the defence capabilities of the Soviet Union and the removal of her sources of energy.

  The first priority of Case Blue, as the 1942 campaign was titled, was to break into and take the Caucasus, which would enable Germany to exploit the oil fields there and deprive the Russians of them. The Caucasus is that neck of land 500 miles from west to east and 1,000 miles north to south that lies between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east. Today, the southern border of the Russian portion of the Caucasus borders on Azerbaijan and Georgia, but in 1942 those republics and Armenia to their south were part of the USSR and the border was with Persia (now Iran) and Turkey. In the area north of the Caucasus between the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, both now independent republics but then part of the USSR, flow two mighty rivers, the Don and the Volga. The Don rises 150 miles south of Moscow and flows south through Voronezh and Pavlovsk before turning south-east and east until it is sixty miles from the Volga and Stalingrad. It then flows south for 120 miles before finally turning south-west and flowing into the Sea of Azov near Rostov. It is that great bend in the Don that provides the jump-off area for an attack south into the Caucasus and/or an attack east towards the Volga and Stalingrad. The Volga rises in the interior of Russia and flows 500 miles east of Moscow and then west-south-west to Stalingrad, where it switches course ninety degrees, flowing south-east until it empties into the Caspian Sea at Astrakhan.Army Group South was ordered to annihilate the Soviet forces on the north and west sides of the river Don and then capture or at least bring under artillery fire the important industrial and communications centre of Stalingrad so that its factories were rendered ineffective and river traffic along the Volga halted. Having thus created a jumping-off line, the army would turn south into the Caucasus and take the major oil fields around Maikop, Ordzhonikidze and Baku on the Black Sea, whence before the war came 75 per cent of the USSR’s oil.