A World at Arms (60 page)

The victory attained by the Red Army and the disaster suffered by the German army in the first ten days after December 5 led to new decisions of far-reaching significance on both sides of the front, decisions which, in a manner neither Hitler nor Stalin could have anticipated, interacted with each other. On the German side, the possibility of the army being totally routed, driven into a demoralizing general retreat on the scale of Napoleon’s catastrophe, and losing most of its equipment in the process, led Hitler to order the German Army Group Center to hold in place, risking a loss of the whole force. What reinforcements could be found would be rushed forward on whatever trains could be spared from the higher priority assigned to carting Jews to be slaughtered in the occupied territory; but with no prepared lines to fall back on and no way to salvage the heavy equipment, the German units at the front had to fight where they stood, even if the lines were broken.

Simultaneously with a series of strenuous efforts to find reinforcements, there came a whole series of changes at the top. One of the generals fired in early January, the Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd Panzer Army General Hoepner, had saved two surrounded corps and was not only replaced but was to have been tossed out of the army and deprived of his pension.
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The laws which prevented these latter steps without a court martial enraged Hitler sufficiently that after the stabilization of the front in April he would summon the Reichstag for a session to cancel any law or regulation protecting the rights of German citizens.
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In this one field National Socialism attained its objective of completely substituting arbitrary power for any and all restraints on government authority. But by the time Hoepner was dismissed, a whole host of other major changes had been made.

On December 19 Hitler accepted the resignation of the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army; at the same time or soon after, many others were also relieved. All three Army Group commanders and a row of army commanders were replaced. Hitler evidently intended to replace the Chief of Staff of the army, General Halder, as well, but changed his mind.
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The position of von Brauchitsch Hitler decided to take over himself; the other positions were filled from within the army’s higher
ranks. Such massive replacements of high-ranking officers who had in many instances become well known in Germany because of their prior role in the war hardly helped morale at home. The news of Japan’s attack and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States was quickly followed by big news of victories in East Asia, but these temporary diversions now gave way to bad news from the Eastern Front, almost immediately followed by a general appeal to the population for donations of warm winter clothing, especially furs, for the troops. Here the German population could get a first really clear picture that things had gone drastically wrong.
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For the German troops the new orders and commanders meant a desperate struggle to hold on. A case can be made for the view that the as yet unshaken confidence of the soldiers in Hitler contributed to their rallying to him as the new Commander-in-Chief of the army and halted what might otherwise have been a collapse of morale.
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But the new Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Center, von Kluge, could no more halt the Red Army than his predecessor could. In bitter fighting, the Germans were steadily driven back with heavy losses in men and materiel. Some reinforcements reached the front, but never as much as promised; the retreats did not shorten the lines sufficiently to make subsequent defense easier; and the temporary holding out of isolated German units did not keep the Russians from pushing forward. If by the end of January a badly battered Army Group Center survived, though in a most complicated front line, several factors contributed to this temporary stabilization as opposed to the total disaster which had repeatedly looked imminent.

One element was undoubtedly the ability of experienced German higher officers. A second was the desperate cohesion of small units caught up in a defeat but holding together for survival. A third was the narrow margin of Red Army superiority; although the Germans always reported overwhelming Russian strength, the reality was rather different. The inexperience and rigidity of Soviet officers also contributed to the Germans being able to hold on, but the most important contribution from the Soviet side was almost certainly the decision of Stalin to try for an exceedingly ambitious general counter-offensive in the hope of smashing the whole German front, instead of concentrating all available resources on the sector in the middle where the chances for a truly major further victory were probably greatest.

In mid-December, even as the German defeat before Moscow was being
justifiably celebrated in Soviet public announcements, Stalin called for major offensive operations on
other
sectors of the front.
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Now that the Red Army had retaken Tikhvin on December 9, a large-scale effort was to be mounted to relieve Leningrad and encircle a major portion of the German Army Group in the north, and in addition big drives were to be launched into the Ukraine as well as the Crimea, even as thrusts into the deep flanks of the German Army Group Center were supposed to cut it off in a huge encirclement similar to those which the Germans had so effectively carried off in the summer and fall. Success in these operations would tear the guts out of the German army and assure the rapid liberation of all the territory they had seized since June. The newly mobilized and rebuilt formations available to the Stavka were to be employed in these thrusts; it looked to Stalin as if the strained and exhausted German army could be sent reeling by hard and essentially simultaneous blows on all major segments of the front. The morale of the Soviet home front was certainly being lifted by the freeing of cities earlier taken by the Nazis.
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Rejecting the contrary advice of several Red Army commanders, Stalin ordered this series of offensives to begin in the first ten days of 1942. In the north, an attack by the 2nd Assault Army opened a narrow corridor through the German line along the Volkhov river. Cut off once, reconnected to the main Soviet lines, and cut off a second time, this army could not be effectively reinforced; and even sending in one of Stalin’s favorite and ablest commanders, General Andrei Vlasov, who had distinguished himself in the defense of Moscow, could not save the 2nd Assault Army from later destruction. Vlasov himself would be captured in the summer and make a futile effort to establish an army out of prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans for an independent non-Stalinist Russia.
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On the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland the Russians were able to open a land bridge between Leningrad and the Independent Coastal Group cut off around Oranienbaum since the preceding fall. Further south, the Red Army tore open the junction between the German Army Groups North and Center, driving deeply into the rear of the latter, and also isolating a small German force in Cholm and a larger one with almost 100,000 soldiers around Demyansk. But the Germans managed to hold both “islands” in bitter fighting and with supplies brought by the air force until in the spring both garrisons were relieved by pushes from the remaining German front. This success of sorts may well have inclined Hitler to over-estimate the possibility of air supply for an isolated force, disregarding the fact that both held far fewer troops and were much closer to German air bases than the Stalingrad pocket later
in 1942.
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In the spring of 1942, however, the holding of these areas appeared to have vindicated the tactics of the winter battle and to leave behind a projection of the front which offered at least the appearance of an opportunity to close the gap to the German Army Group Center still holding at Rzhev.
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Here, too, the Germans had managed to hold on to a key position, clearing the threatened connecting route south to Vyazma on the main railway and road to Smolensk. With his forces worn down by the exertions of the December counter-offensive, and deprived of the needed reinforcements by the efforts at strategic blows in the north and south, Zhukov’s forces dented and drove back but could neither surround nor crack the front of the Army Group Center.
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A massive breakthrough into the southern portion of this front by forces led by General Belov and supported by several large airdrops–the largest Soviet parachute operation of the war-still did not have the power needed to cut off the German 9th and 4th Armies as intended. Soon Belov’s own forces, and the partisans associated with them, were themselves cut off and, very much like the 2nd Assault Army in the north, largely destroyed by a German operation in late May 1942.
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Further south the Soviets were able to seize and hold on to the vital town of Kirov, thus cutting the main north–south railway from Vyazma to Bryansk, but beyond forcing the Germans back from the southern approaches to Moscow had not been able to attain the more spectacular goals established for them by the Stavka. A drive across the Donets around Izyum designed to cut off the Germans holding Kharkov to the north, destroy the German armies (17th and 1st Panzer) to the south, and at least reach the Dnepr, was held by the Germans in a bulge. A Soviet spring offensive further north together with the bulge were destroyed in a major German operation in late May, 1942.
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The German troops which had been forced out of Rostov were able to hold a front along the Mius river; it took some hard fighting–and the replacement of the German Army Group commander soon followed by the death of his successor–but here both sides were matched in exhaustion. On the Crimean peninsula, German efforts to complete its conquest by taking the great naval base of Sevastopol were countered by a Soviet amphibious operation across the Kerch Straits, which retook the eastern portion of the Crimea. Here, too, additional Soviet landings and offensive operations were eventually held by the Germans.
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A jagged front marked the failure of the German effort to defeat the Soviet Union in a quick campaign in 1941 and of the Soviet hopes of crushing the German invaders in a wide–ranging strategic offensive in the first weeks of 1942. Stalin had underestimated the resilience of the
German forces and, in trying for too much at once, had led the Red Army to a major victory but without destroying the German army.

Both sides now looked ahead to the 1942 summer campaign. Most of Stalin’s senior advisors urged a defensive posture while the Soviet Union rebuilt its military power. It seemed to them to make sense to integrate into the army the weapons now coming off the assembly lines of the old and the relocated factories in greater numbers, to retrain and reorganize the army units mauled in the heavy winter fighting, and to allow the Red Air Force to rebuild its squadrons. Offensives, in their eyes, could be launched effectively in the fall, assuming that a new German summer offensive would be held.

Like his military leaders, Stalin believed that the 1942 German summer offensive would come on the Central front against Moscow. This opinion was apparently reinforced by the obvious closeness of the German lines to the Soviet capital–about 80 miles–and the desperation with which the Germans had successfully held on to Rzhev, a place with no visible importance to them except in connection with a new offensive toward Moscow. In addition, the impression that the German effort would come there was so effectively reinforced, as far as we can tell, by a carefully worked out deception operation,
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that all signs of a very different plan for 1942 provided by both Soviet intelligence and the Western Powers were dismissed as erroneous.
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Unlike the military leaders, however, Stalin did not consider it wise to await the blow and ordered a series of offensive operations in the spring, hoping thereby to disrupt the German plans. Of these attacks only a small one in the far north and a large one in the Kharkov area materialized before the German summer offensive. On the Litsa river front before Murmansk, a Soviet attack in late April 1942 was halted after minimal gains and with very heavy losses.
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In the Ukraine, Timoshenko began a major offensive toward Kharkov on May 12. Not only was this attack held by the Germans but a few days later they crushed the bulge at Izyum left from the Soviet winter counter-offensive. This double disaster cost the Red Army about half a million dead, wounded, and prisoners; it was not an auspicious way to begin the year.
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Most Germans still looked to the future with confidence.
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There were exceptions. The air force’s chief of construction and development, the famous flier Ernst Udet, committed suicide on November 17, 1941.
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In the same month, the Commander-in-Chief of the replacement army, General Fritz Fromm, and the head of construction and
armaments, Fritz Todt, urged Hitler to make peace,
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while the chief of armed forces intelligence, Admiral Canaris, told Fromm on March 20, 1942, that the war could not be won.
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But Hitler himself thought otherwise. He had recognized that the campaign in the East would continue into 1942 earlier than most.
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Major projects were undertaken to try to rebuild the German army, though it could never regain its strength of the summer of 1941. Hundreds of thousands of German workers were transferred from industry to the army; instead of the anticipated reduction in the number of divisions–so that the air force and navy could be built up to fight England and the United States-there might have to be an increase.
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The workers drafted from industry into the army were to be replaced by Russian prisoners of war, but, as will be discussed subsequently, most of these had either been murdered or starved to death. Hitler was very much aware of this; along with the concern lest German soldiers surrender more readily, this was one reason he rejected all efforts to have the International Red Cross look after German and Russian prisoners of war.
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Eventually a huge slave labor program involving civilians from the occupied Eastern territories would be instituted instead. In any case, the time for a relaxed home front in Germany was over, and the armaments industry had to be geared up. The new directive on the armament program issued on January 10, 1942, marks German recognition of the fact that the whole concept of a Blitzkrieg, a lightning war, had failed.
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