Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  On 19 February, Popov’s leading tanks were only ten miles from Zaponezhe on the Dnieper, and then Manstein struck. In a masterly example of what war should be, he sent his tanks hammering into the Russian flanks with the Luftwaffe once more doing what it did best: acting as reconnaissance and airborne artillery and knocking out Soviet tanks from the air. The motorized infantry followed and in four days Manstein had completed a classic double envelopment of the Russian forces, now strung out and having huge problems in resupplying themselves so far from their start point. On 14 March, Kharkov was recaptured by the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division of the SS and by 24 March the battle was over. The Red Army had abandoned 6,000 square miles of newly captured territory, had lost around 23,000 killed with 615 tanks and 354 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. By now all Russian soldiers knew the likely fate of becoming a prisoner of the Germans, and only 9,000 prisoners were taken this time – many soldiers tried to make their way back to the Russian lines as individuals or small groups and many perished in the attempt. With the failure of a Soviet attack on Army Group Centre, halted on 18 March with the Luftwaffe’s ground-attack aircraft again playing a leading role, the front was now stabilized, and, although the Germans had withdrawn from the Caucasus and abandoned Rostov, and Army Group Centre had abandoned Rzhev, it had also been considerably shortened, throwing up some German formations to create a mobile reserve.

  Army Groups B and Don had now been subsumed into Army Group South, commanded by Manstein. Elsewhere, in Army Group North’s area, the Russians had managed in January to force a land corridor about six miles wide through to Leningrad, along which they swiftly built a railway. Leningrad had never been entirely cut off from the USSR, as there was now a pipeline across Lake Lagoda, but, although the corridor was within German artillery range, it did allow sufficient supplies to be brought in to the city to enable it to continue to withstand the German siege. In short, the Eastern Front was now back more or less where it had been before the summer offensives of 1942, although north of Voronezh the Russians had driven 200 miles into the German lines and created a salient 100 miles from north to south around the town of Kursk. Here would be played out what is often claimed to have been the greatest armoured battle in history, and what was the last opportunity for the Germans, if they could not now win the war on the Eastern Front, at least to create a climate where a negotiated peace – or, as Manstein put it, a draw – might be achieved.

  As major movements by either side drew to a halt in the mud of the spring thaw of 1943, the German planners knew that strategically they were in trouble. Tunisia was not expected to hold out much longer, and, once that went, a landing in Europe was a certainty. Despite increased use of forced labour in Germany and the combing out of men in reserved occupations, the armed forces were nearly a million men short of establishment. If a landing in Europe took place, then the obvious place to reinforce that theatre from was the East, but troops could not be taken away from there as long as the threat of a major Soviet offensive remained. Colonel-General Guderian had just been appointed Inspector General of Panzer Troops with a brief to rebuild and re-equip that arm, and he recommended a defensive posture on the Eastern Front while the reconstitution took place, but despite the shortening of the front there were not enough formations in the East to maintain static defence. Manstein for his part suggested a mobile defence, the sort of operation that the German army was good at, with localized attacks to keep the Red Army from massing the troops needed for a major offensive.

  In the end, the decision was part political and part military. Hitler badly needed a victory to reassure his now very wobbly allies, and the Wehrmacht needed to destroy the Soviets’ ability to mount a major offensive so that troops could safely be released for the expected Anglo-American landing in Europe. From the German viewpoint, the Kursk salient was not only a threat as the obvious place from which the Soviets could launch an offensive against Army Group South, but also an opportunity: if it could be bitten off, then not only would very large numbers of Red Army men and equipment be destroyed, but the front could also be straightened, thus reducing the number of men needed to defend it. The important thing was to do it quickly, for the window between the ground drying up sufficiently to allow armour to move and the likely date of an invasion of Europe was small. The Germans were not, of course, to know that under British pressure the Allies had abandoned plans for a landing in France in 1943 and were intending to go for Sicily and Italy instead.

  The Russians, too, were well aware of the significance of the Kursk salient, and even before the thaw ended they were bringing up troops to launch an offensive from it as soon as the ground dried up. Then, as their own intelligence, reports from partisans moving between the lines and information from the British (the Russians were not told that this was from Ultra, nor even that Ultra existed), indicated that the Germans were intending to attack the salient, the Russian generals argued with Stalin that to take the Germans on in a mobile battle by trying to get the Russian offensive in first would be futile: what the Red Army should do, argued Zhukov, would be to let the Germans attack and wear down their armour in a battle of attrition, and then, when their panzer and motorized divisions were exhausted, go over to the offensive against a fatally weakened enemy. Stalin agreed.

  The original German plan, Fall Zitadelle, or ‘Case Citadel’, was largely Manstein’s, although it was soon taken over by OKH and Hitler. It had Army Group Centre’s Ninth Army, commanded by Colonel-General Walter Model and with four panzer and fourteen infantry divisions, nipping out the northern end of the salient’s neck, while Manstein’s Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf,* with altogether five panzer, ten infantry and four panzer grenadier (three of them Waffen SS) divisions, would deal with the south. In total, there would be 2,700 tanks and assault guns available and in support 1,800 aircraft, fighters, bombers and dive-bombers, for it was essential that the Luftwaffe obtained early air superiority to allow the armour to move. Had the operation gone ahead in May, which it could well have done, then it might have turned into another great Manstein triumph, but delay followed delay, as more armour was moved up and new vehicles designed to counter the Russian T-34s and to deal with enemy strongpoints, a lesson learned from Stalingrad, were brought into service. Among the new vehicles were 200 of the new Mk V Panther, a tank specifically designed to counter the T-34, and 104 of the Mk VI Tiger, itself a heavy tank that had originally been designed for defence. The Panther had a 75mm gun, sloping armour and wide tracks to cope with snow and mud, while the Tiger boasted an 88mm gun, one adapted from the highly successful anti-aircraft gun often used in the anti-tank role, and sufficient armour to stop anything except a high-velocity round at point-blank range. There were also a variety of new assault guns and self-propelled anti-tank guns, and the SS even had one company with captured Russian T-34s. All in all, it was the most powerful force the Germans had ever assembled for a single operation.

  Within the salient, the Russians had two fronts – Central and Voronezh – consisting of nine armies and two tank armies, and these were backed by a third reserve front – the Steppe – of another five armies and a tank army. In accordance with their plan to wear down the German armour, they constructed a series of concentric defensive belts, extending for up to 100 miles behind the front lines. Huge numbers of civilian labourers were drafted in to dig trenches, construct anti-tank ditches, create concrete bunkers and lay mines. The idea was to use the minefields, a mixture of anti-tank and anti-personnel devices, to channel the German armour into killing areas where they would be taken on by 6,000 anti-tank guns supported by 20,000 field artillery pieces and mortars and over 900 Katyusha rocket batteries as well as dug-in machine-gun posts to take on the supporting German infantry. Each position was supported by at least two others and the emphasis was on defence in depth, so that, if the Germans broke through one belt, they would immediately run up against another. The 3,500 Russian tanks and assault guns would either be dug in as static anti-tank g
uns or held back for counterattacks when the time was ripe. They would be supported by the Red Air Force with 2,700 aircraft.

  As time wore on and more and more delay was imposed on a start date for Zitadelle, both Model and von Manstein, whose idea it first was, began to doubt the wisdom of the operation. They knew that they could not conceal the build-up of troops and vehicles north and south of the salient, and that the Russians had had ample notice to reinforce and prepare their defences. When Hitler ordered the attack to begin on 5 July, the Russians were ready and their own artillery opened up before the German preliminary bombardment, which did not begin until 0430 hours, an hour later than intended. In the north the attack was led by the infantry, in the south by the armour, and initially all went reasonably well with the Germans breaking into the first line of defence and Russian counter-attacks being beaten off. In the air the Luftwaffe kept the Red Air Force at bay, the Stukas acted as airborne artillery and the fighters destroyed numbers of Russian vehicles on the ground. Then, as the Russians had planned, combat drag began to tell as the German tanks penetrated the minefields. The mines did not destroy many tanks but by blowing off a track they immobilized them, and, although the Germans were very good at swift field recovery and repair, the momentum slowed down as the numerical superiority of the Red Air Force began to tell. When German armour faced Russian armour in the open, the Germans won, largely because their guns had a greater effective range, but after the first day the Russians did not expose their armour and left it to the mines and the anti-tank screen to do their work for them. Casualties of men and vehicles on both sides began to mount, and the enormous quantitative superiority of Russian artillery – 20,000 tubes against half that number – began to tell. By 12 July, Model’s northern prong had penetrated twelve miles into the salient but was now bogged down; it was still twenty-five miles from Kursk and casualties were mounting. Worse, on that same day, 12 July, the Russians launched an offensive of their own against the Orel salient, a mirror image of that at Kursk and just fifty miles north of it. Model had to rapidly detach one of his panzer divisions to bolster the defences of Orel and could do no more against Kursk. In the south Manstein had made better progress. He had pushed twenty-five miles into the salient and had got through the last Russian defensive belt. He was still forty miles from Kursk but he was now engaging the Russian mobile reserves. While his own losses in both men and armoured vehicles were high, he had inflicted massive casualties on the Russians and was optimistic about the outcome. The next day Hitler summoned von Manstein and Model to his East Prussian headquarters. The Führer was rattled: the Allies had landed in Sicily, Germany’s southern flank was in danger and all the evidence was that a major Russian offensive was in the offing. When OKH reported that von Kluge was adamant that Army Group Centre could not continue to attack south owing to the Soviet push against Orel, Hitler accepted that Zitadelle was finished – although, true to form, he used the phrase ‘suspended’ rather than ‘at an end’. The German armour had done its best, but too much reliance had been placed on the Panther tank. It was beautifully designed but had been deployed far too early, before full troop trials had evaluated it, and many of them broke down or overheated. The Tigers had done rather better but were not well suited to offensive operations and the Russian decision to go for a wearing-down operation relying on mines and anti-tank guns had overcome the Germans’ ability to manoeuvre and had brought the Wehrmacht to a halt, despite Manstein’s advice that the battle should continue. It was the last occasion on which the Germans held the initiative on the Eastern Front.

  * * *

  Despite the failure of Zitadelle, the German army in the East was still very much in being: Russian claims of the numbers of German tanks destroyed were hugely exaggerated and the Red Air Force did not by any means have it all its own way. The panzer divisions were not annihilated and while the Germans lost around 650 tanks and self-propelled assault guns at Kursk, these were replaced from German factories relatively quickly and at the end of the month there were still around 2,000 tanks in the Ostheer. But the Germans could not increase that number: they could not match Russian industrial production, helped by Western aid, and the Russian ability to replace their enormous losses in manpower. Particularly menacing was Soviet artillery. At the beginning of the war, this had been a badly handled arm with out-of-date equipment; now it was not only competently handled and increasingly sophisticated technically, but there was masses of it and the number of guns and batteries continued to increase at a rate that far outstripped the Germans. Even so, when the Russians launched their diversionary attack on the Orel salient, they came up against solid defences that the Germans had had plenty of time to prepare, and, although the two armies defending it, Ninth and Second Panzer, could not hold, they were able to withdraw westwards at their own pace, inflicting massive casualties on the attackers, who took Belgorod on 4 August and Orel on 5 August, by which time Ninth Army had established itself on the Hagen Line, previously prepared defensive positions along the north–south road east of Bryansk. For once, Hitler had not objected to the withdrawal of Ninth Army – indeed, by withdrawing II SS Panzer Corps to be redeployed to Italy, he accelerated it. Manstein’s view, according to his ADC, was that to defend Italy was nonsense: what the Germans should do was to withdraw all forces from Italy and go into defence in the Alps, thus freeing up more divisions for the East.73

  Now began the battle for the Ukraine in the south, where von Manstein, insistent that the army must be in secure well-prepared defensive positions before the winter, finally received permission to abandon the Donnets basin and withdraw to the River Dnieper, while Army Group Centre slowly gave ground and in the north the Germans held out south-east of Leningrad against the attempts by two Guards armies to rupture the front. On 13 August the Russians were in the suburbs of Kharkov and Manstein’s efforts to fight a mobile defence were blocked by Hitler’s insistence that the city must be held. The six German divisions defending Kharkov inflicted horrific losses on the attackers, who had resorted to human wave frontal assaults, but in the end numbers told and on 22 August, when it was clear that the Red Army intended an encirclement of the city, Manstein ordered a withdrawal on his own authority as he then (rather unfairly) sacked the army commander, General Kempf. On 15 September, Army Group South began its withdrawal to the Dnieper and on Army Group Centre’s front the Russians took Smolensk on 24 September, again at frightful cost. As both army groups pulled back, handing the Russians off with local counter-attacks, a scorched-earth policy was instituted. Anything that could possibly be of value to the advancing Russians was removed or destroyed. No buildings could be left for them to use as billets or as forming-up places, roads and airfields were cratered and crops still standing burned. As the Russian policy was to conscript all men and most women of military age once they recovered an area, the population too was removed. Manstein in his memoirs claims that this was done in as humane a manner as possible, and Major-General von Mellenthin, Chief of Staff of XXXXVIII Panzer Corps, is adamant that, although the very survival of the army group was at stake, the policy was carried out with as much decency as the situation allowed.74 Other sources suggest that those Jews and party members not killed out of hand by the SS were deported as forced labour. In areas where the Germans, going the other way, had executed large numbers in 1941 or 1942, efforts were made to destroy the evidence and in some cases mass graves were dug up and the bones scattered. As this sort of work was thought to be too distressing for even the General SS Einzatzgruppen, much of it was delegated to locally employed Russians, some of whom were then despatched by a bullet in the back of the head so that they could not tell of what they had done.

  Once Army Group South had withdrawn west of the Dnieper, the Crimea, occupied by Seventeenth Army, was cut off. The Germans evacuated the Kuban peninsula, across the Strait of Kerch, but they hung on in the Crimea itself – it had well-developed airfields from which the air defence of the vital Romanian oil fields could be mounted and could b
e supplied by the German navy across the Black Sea. A Russian airborne assault to the south of Kiev failed when the attacking troops were dropped into the middle of a German division of which the Red Army was unaware, but on 6 November the Germans evacuated Kiev and the Russians took Zhitomir and Forosten and cut the rail link between Army Groups South and Centre. A counter-attack by Manstein with XXXXVIII Panzer Corps, of whose men there were few left who had been serving with the formation a year before, restored the situation but Fourth Panzer Army’s attempt to retake Kiev failed. Hitler suspected that Fourth Panzer had been too cautious, and, when Manstein ordered that army to withdraw from a salient south of Kiev to avoid being cut off, Hitler took the opportunity to sack its commander, Colonel-General Hoth, who was replaced by General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck.