Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Case Blue proper was to start on 28 June, but before that von Manstein, having destroyed the Red Army’s attempt to recapture the Crimea from the Kerch peninsula, launched his final attack on Sevastopol. On 3 June a devastating artillery bombardment began, followed by an attack by the infantry supported by Stuka dive-bombers of the Luftwaffe’s VIII Air Corps commanded by General of Flyers Baron Wolfram von Richthofen, a fourth cousin of the first-war air ace Manfred, the Red Baron. The defence was fanatical – and with their backs to the sea and no hope of relief, the Russian soldiers had little option – but by 3 July it was all over with the destruction of two Soviet armies and the capture of yet more guns, tanks, aircraft and 90,000 prisoners. Manstein, with an infantry army, had done a brilliant job, without excessive casualties, and was duly promoted to field marshal, but, instead of sending his Eleventh Army to one of the southern army groups, A or B, where it could have made a real difference, Hitler sent it off to Army Group North, to assist in the capture of Leningrad. In fact, Leningrad was of little strategic significance and did not need to be captured – for, if it was, the Germans would then become responsible for the population, which was already near to starving – and, besides, Army Group North was already doing a perfectly good job of neutralizing the city.

  Case Blue was very nearly compromised before it was launched when, on 19 June, the pilot of an aircraft carrying a staff officer of 23 Panzer Division, Major Joachim Reichel, became lost, strayed over the Soviet lines and was shot down. With Reichel were the complete operational orders for Blue, which were passed on to the two Red Army front commanders, Timoshenko and Golikov, and ultimately to Stalin. Inevitably, on the German side there was the most almighty fuss that escalated rapidly from division to corps to army to army group and back to Berlin. Should the operation be rewritten or even cancelled altogether? In the event, nothing changed and the Germans proceeded with Case Blue as planned, not least because any redeployment of troops would take so much time that it would risk running into winter. Meanwhile, both Red Army commanders and Stalin remained convinced that the main German objective for 1942 was Moscow, and that Blue was either a feint, a diversionary attack or deliberate misinformation, a view reinforced by deceptive measures carried out by Army Group Centre, under the not very originally named Case Kremlin, which were designed to make the Russians think that it was about to attack Moscow frontally. The wretched Reichel was beyond the reach of German military justice, but the divisional commander, the corps commander and his chief of staff were not, and they eventually found themselves accused of breaching security regulations and playing the starring role at a court martial presided over by Reichsmarschall Göring. The divisional commander, Major-General Baron Hans von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, was found not guilty, but the commander of XXXX Motorized Corps, General of Panzer Troops Georg Stumme, and his chief of staff were found guilty and sentenced to five years’ fortress detention (imprisonment). As a result of representations by the army group commander, von Bock, they were both pardoned, and Stumme was sent off to North Africa to command the DAK.

  In June 1942, when Case Blue was duly launched, the German army worldwide had 234 divisions of various types. Of these, 179, or just over three quarters, were on the Eastern Front and, of the twenty-six armoured divisions, nineteen were on the Eastern Front. In late June 1942 Colonel-General Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the German army (although, unknown to himself, for only another three months), received a paper on the Red Army from Lieutenant-Colonel (General Staff) Reinhard Gehlen, who headed Foreign Armies East in OKH. Gehlen’s department relied on air reconnaissance, interrogation of prisoners, examination of captured equipment and data, analysis of operations and secret intelligence from disaffected Russians. In a remarkably frank report, Foreign Armies East predicted that the Red Army would attempt to preserve its combat strength into 1943 to permit American Lend-Lease assistance to become effective. Its elements would withdraw where necessary to avoid German encirclement and would deal with German advances by attacks on their flanks mounted from the Russian interior. As for manpower, whatever losses the Red Army might sustain in 1942, it could replace them by the winter by calling up those born in 1924. Even if Case Blue was entirely successful, thought Gehlen, the Russians’ determination to resist would be unbroken, and, although still qualitatively inferior to the Germans, they would have considerable superiority in men and equipment. During the coming winter of 1942 the Red Army would try to so weaken the German army that it would be incapable of another summer offensive in 1943. It was a remarkably accurate, prophetic even, assessment and it appears that Halder, worn out with constant arguments and having to deal directly with Hitler without the buffer of a military commander-in-chief, never showed it to his Führer, despite agreeing with most of its contents. It would have made little difference: Case Blue had already started and Hitler was not going to be put off, whatever the army might say.

  Phase One of the 1942 offensive was launched on 28 June as planned, by Group Weichs, commanded by Colonel-General Maximilian von Weichs with his own Second Army, Fourth Panzer Army and the Hungarian Second Army, which struck from north-east of Kursk towards Voronezh. This was what the Russians were expecting, albeit they thought it the preliminary to a drive to the east of Moscow, and the Bryansk Front had been massively reinforced. Reinforced or not, it initially made little difference. The spearhead of Group Weichs, Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, advanced thirty miles on the first day with Second Army covering their left flank and the Second Hungarian Army their right. The Hungarians were initially in trouble owing, as Weichs said, to the inexperience of their commanders despite the bravery of their men, but by 4 July the Germans were over the River Don. Stalin ordered Fifth Tank Army to counter-attack. The number of the latest Russian T-34 and KV tanks now appearing was a worrying sign, but they were committed piecemeal and handled ineptly, and with the able support of the Luftwaffe the Germans were able to beat them off. By 7 July, Voronezh was in German hands, but this time the number of prisoners taken was far less than expected – the Soviets were learning, and pulling their men out before they could be surrounded. Now for Phase Two. On 9 July, Army Groups A and B became operational. Army Group A was commanded by the sixty-two-year-old Field Marshal Sigmund von List, and consisted of First Panzer Army, Eleventh Army (actually in the Crimea and on the way north, so not available) and Seventeenth Army (the Romanian Third Army with four German infantry divisions). The army group included three armoured and one motorized German divisions, the Viking Division of the Waffen SS manned by Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish and – surprisingly perhaps, as they were not ‘Aryan’ – Walloon volunteers, the whole stiffened by Balkan Germans, and a Slovak motorized division. Field Marshal von Bock commanded Army Group B with Fourth Panzer Army, Second Army, Sixth Army, the Hungarian Second Army and, not yet operational but on the way, the Italian Eighth Army. In the army group were four armoured and three motorized divisions.

  Now came more arguments between the men on the ground and OKH and Hitler in the rear. The original plan for Case Blue was to secure the jump-off line – Rostov to Stalingrad – before thrusting south into the Caucasus. Hitler now considered that the two could be done simultaneously, with Army Group B dealing with Stalingrad and the Volga while A, augmented by Fourth Panzer Army, headed south. Army Group B’s commander, von Bock, was unhappy and was considered by Hitler to have got bogged down around Voronezh and to have been dilatory in sending Fourth Panzer Army (three armoured, one motorized, three German and four Romanian infantry divisions) to Army Group A. Von Bock had already ignored orders from on high and now Hitler had had enough. As he said to his army adjutant, Schmundt, he respected the field marshal but could only work with those who obeyed orders to the letter. Von Bock was persuaded to retire on health grounds on 15 July, being replaced by Colonel-General Maximilian Freiherr von Weichs, who was to clear the River Don and advance to the Volga and Stalingrad.

  The problem now was that the German army in the East had been given a s
plit aim – capture Leningrad in the north, and block the Volga, take Stalingrad and at the same time capture the Caucasian oil fields in the south. As the southern two army groups diverged – B west and A south – the German logistics machine was simply unable to supply both. Hitler decreed that priority was to go to Army Group A as the oil fields were more important than Stalingrad, and von Weichs found that much of his motor transport was taken away, and he only received fuel when the needs of Army Group A had been met. By the end of July the River Don had been mainly freed of Soviet units, except for three bridgeheads on the west bank which still held out, and OKH (actually Hitler) had decided to return Fourth Panzer Army for the thrust to the Volga. The bridgehead at Kalach, on the bend in the Don opposite Stalingrad, had to be cleared before the army could advance to the Volga, and Sixth Army was ordered to deal with it. Sixth Army had fourteen German infantry divisions, two armoured and two motorized divisions, three Italian divisions and a Croat brigade. It was commanded by General of Panzer Troops Friedrich Paulus.

  Paulus had been von Reichenau’s Chief of Staff when the latter had commanded Tenth Army in the invasion of Poland. He had then been Halder’s deputy Chief of the General Staff at OKH, and, when in December 1941 von Reichenau had been appointed to the command of Army Group South, he had recommended Paulus as his successor at Sixth Army. Paulus had little experience as a commander, but he was a highly efficient and very effective staff officer. The original plan for Barbarossa, before it was watered down by OKH and tinkered with by Hitler, had been largely his, and in it he had been adamant that the Russians must not be allowed to retreat into the interior but must be cut off by encirclement and envelopment battles. These battles should, he added, include the capture of Moscow and be completed by October 1941, before the roads turned to mud. The German army had duly obliged, trapping one Russian army after another in pockets and effectively eliminating them. But the deadline of October 1941 set by Paulus had not been met, Moscow had not been captured, and the war in the East had not yet been won.

  As it was, Paulus now headed for Kalach, although progress was slow for his horse-drawn infantry and made slower by the frequent halts his armoured units had to make as they waited for fuel to come up. In the first week of August, Sixth Army reached Kalach, and by 11 August it had roundly defeated the Soviet First Tank and Sixty-Second Armies but taken far fewer prisoners than had been the norm – the Russians abandoned their tanks and equipment, but the men escaped across the Don to be refitted and fight another day. Now Stalingrad and the Volga were only fifty miles away, but the army was exhausted and out of fuel. Meanwhile, on 23 July 1942, von List’s Army Group A stormed Rostov on the Don and took almost a quarter of a million prisoners – the last time the Russians would allow such numbers to be encircled and captured – and then prepared to head for Baku and the oil fields. But even though he had priority for fuel, List faced all sorts of problems. After Rostov he had lost Fourth Panzer Army, which had been returned to Army Group B, and his remaining armoured formation, First Panzer Army, was down to 400 tanks. He had 750 miles to go from Rostov to Baku and he faced two Russian fronts and an increasingly effective Soviet air threat. Despite all this, and resupply difficulties which were only marginally less than those of Army Group B, progress was initially good. The infantry of Seventeenth Army covered thirty miles a day, in sweltering temperatures of 35ºC. Of itself, this is not remarkable: a fit infantry soldier carrying the usual load of thirty or forty pounds’ weight plus his weapon and ammunition can easily march thirty miles a day. What made this a near-incredible feat was the ability to get the impedimenta of an infantry army – stores, ammunition, rations, water, medical units and the like – to cover the same distance, which would be pretty good for a motorized army, never mind one moving on foot and in horse-drawn wagons. They crossed the Kuban River, and on 10 August captured Krasnodar, the regional capital, while Kleist’s tanks penetrated as far as Maikop, an oil-producing region, to find that the Russians had set light to the wells and installations before withdrawing. On 22 August soldiers of XXXI Mountain Corps, part of First Panzer Army, raised the German flag on top of the 18,500-foot-high Mount Elbrus. Army Group A had advanced 300 miles from Rostov in under a month. It was as far as it would ever get.

  On the day after the Reich standard first flew above the highest mountain in the Caucasus, the advance units of Fourth Panzer Army reached the suburbs of Stalingrad. Getting there had been a quartermaster’s nightmare: vehicles bringing up fuel used most of it themselves just to get to the army, and even camel trains were pressed into service to get supplies up the two armies heading for the Volga. If the armoured and motorized units of the Ostheer had not been spread all over the Eastern Front, trying to achieve too much at the same time, then the Germans would have taken Stalingrad by the methods that they had trained for and had practised so well in the war so far – encirclement of the city by crossing the Volga north and south, cutting it off and starving it into submission. As it was, there were not sufficient mobile units to do this, and if the city was to be taken, then it could only be done by frontal assault. By September, when the Germans had closed up to the Volga, they were holding a front of 2,000 miles. In the north was Army Group North, still besieging Leningrad; then Army Group Centre, which was on the defensive opposite Moscow and about 100 miles from it; then Army Group B, holding positions from north of Voronezh along the Don and then across to Stalingrad and down the Volga; and finally Army Group A, which had penetrated deep into the Caucasus. With such an enormous frontage, the Germans had no option but to make maximum use of the allied contingents, inferior to German soldiers though they might be. Army Group B’s front had the German Second Army in the north, then, coming south, the Hungarian Second Army, the Italian Eighth Army, the Romanian Third Army, the Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army opposite Stalingrad, and the Romanian Fourth Army.

  The Russian defence of Stalingrad is often described as fanatical, although it might be more accurate to say it was determined come what may. The original commander of the garrison, General Lopatin, was convinced that the city would fall, so he was removed on 11 September. Commissar Nikita Khrushchev appointed General Vasily Chuikov to command the Sixty-Second Army in and around Stalingrad. In many ways the cartoon figure of a Russian officer, Chuikov was absolutely loyal to Stalin – thereby surviving the Great Terror – and obeyed orders to the letter; he consumed alcohol as if prohibition was just round the corner and, while not necessarily particularly intelligent, had all the cunning of the Russian peasant that he was. Stalin and the Stavka had not been impressed by the hasty defence of Rostov followed by a scuttle back to Stalingrad and various draconian orders were issued, threatening everything from the execution of the offender’s relatives to permanent exile for those whose withdrawal was considered premature. The number of men transferred to penal battalions – essentially suicide squads used for everything from human mine-clearing to hopeless frontal attacks, and including naughty officers now serving as private soldiers – doubled and shootings by firing squads with or without sentence of court martial leapt up.

  Stalingrad, originally Tsaritsyn, was renamed in honour of a Civil War battle in which the White Russians, spearheaded by a handful of British tanks, were defeated by the Bolsheviks supposedly directed by Comrade Stalin. It was a long, narrow industrial city on the west bank of the Volga, about eighteen miles from north to south and about three miles from west to east. In the centre and three miles west of the Volga was the airfield, and slightly south of that and a mile from the Volga was the main railway station. Running north from there were the Red October steel works, the Red Barricade ordnance factory and the Dzerzhinsky tractor plant (which actually made T-34 tanks). The first German assault took place on 13 September and stormed up the western slope of Hill 102 as Chuikov’s headquarters hurriedly evacuated the eastern side. The railway station was captured and then lost to counter-attack and then recaptured. Over the next few days, the largely wooden residential buildings were destr
oyed by fires started by both sides’ shelling, and fighting went on around the concrete buildings that survived, through cellars and amongst the rubble.

  In Berlin, Colonel-General Halder had now finally had enough and resigned, being replaced as Chief of the General Staff by Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, the son of a vicar from Cossmar-Luckau in Prussia and, at forty-seven, eleven years younger than Halder. This was an extraordinary appointment to the most senior staff appointment in the whole German army: Zeitzler was an accomplished staff officer but his experience was limited to being Chief of Staff of a panzer army and very briefly in an army group headquarters, and, as a recently promoted major-general, he was far too junior to have the respect of the senior levels of the army. All this, however, suited Hitler very well. He had already browbeaten Field Marshal Keitel, the chief of OKW, into submission, and he wanted someone as chief of the general staff of OKH who would obey orders without question. Now the only senior officer in Hitler’s entourage who was prepared to argue with him was General of Infantry Alfred Jodl, Director of Operations at OKW, and Hitler had plans to replace him with Paulus, just as soon as the latter had conquered Stalingrad.