A World at Arms (82 page)

A second factor which led the Germans to look to the southern segment of the front was the prospect of very significant material and strategic objectives within their reach. The seizure of the oil resources of the Caucasus would have a triple impact on the war. It would relieve the shortage of petroleum products which was hampering the German armored forces, hindering the German navy, and immobilizing the Italian navy even as it made Germany less dangerously vulnerable to the effects of any air attacks on her synthetic oil works and the Romanian oil wells. Secondly, the converse of this was, of course, that of depriving the Soviet Union of a very high proportion of its oil resources. Even if her allies could replace some of this, it would necessarily be at the expense of other weapons and supplies they could have sent instead. Finally, a German force in the Caucasus would be poised for an operation the following year into Iraq and Iran from the north, collapsing the Allied position in the Middle East, turning that region’s oil resources from Allied control to the Axis, offering a real opportunity for a meeting with the Japanese and in any case severing the southern supply route of the Western Allies to the Soviet Union. The fact that along the road to such splendid prospects the Germans would seize those portions of the important industrial region of the Donets basin still under Soviet control, as well as the rich agricultural region of the north Caucasus, only made this whole direction more inviting, even mouth-watering.

One other operation appeared to the Germans to be important for 1942, the seizure of Leningrad. The success of the Russians in supplying the city in the winter across the frozen Lake Ladoga and the refusal of the Finns to attack it from the north made it obvious to Hitler that only a major assault could end the siege, create a secure line at that end of the front, and provide a land connection to his Finnish ally. Such an operation, in turn, would provide the base for a new effort to cut the connection between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies via Murmansk. The problem with the Leningrad project, however, was that there were no troops available for it and no adequate air and artillery support even if the troops could be found.

The solution that Hitler and his staff came up with was, to put it mildly, on the bizarre side. He decided, not surprisingly, that this operation could not be launched simultaneously with the main offensive in the south. But since that offensive involved two preliminary operations, the clearing of the Crimea and the elimination of the Izyum pocket, the army engaged in the former would thereafter be sent to seize Leningrad
while the forces used for the latter were simply to continue eastward as part of the main offensive operation in the southern sector. What this anticipated in practice was that during the time when Germany’s most important 1942 offensive in the East was under way in the south, the divisions of one of its armies would be on the trains, moving behind the long front across all the supply routes of the other armies from the southern to the northern end of the main front.
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Two further comments are called for by the German plan for the 1942 offensive. One concerns an internal contradiction; the second its major aim. Although it was assumed that the forces of Army Group South would be adequate for the conquest of the Caucasus, which necessarily included the whole Russian Black Sea coast, even without the German 1th Army in the Crimea which was scheduled to take Leningrad, Hitler did not draw the obvious conclusion from his own confidence, namely that in such an event there would be no need for a preliminary campaign to clear the Crimea. Once the Germans took over the Soviet Black Sea coast,
any
Soviet forces left on the Crimea would be doomed anyway. Rather than risk leaving Soviet units to vegetate on the East and West ends of the Crimea, the Germans decided to attack both in sequence, eventually deciding to clear the eastern end before concluding the siege of Sevastopol at the western end with a massive assault.

The second point which merits noting is the absence of any major emphasis on the city of Stalingrad in the planning for and early stages of a campaign that came to be associated in the eyes of contemporaries and all later observers with the name of that city. There is a curious irony in the fact that the place whose name will always be associated with one of the great battles of World War II was largely ignored by the Germans beforehand and renamed Volgograd by the Soviet Union afterwards.

The situation of the Soviet Union was in some ways very difficult but in others was better than that of the Germans. Casualties in the great offensives of the winter had been heavy, and in the spring were exceptionally numerous. The replacements were in many cases either older or younger; so many of the survivors of the 1941 battles had been squandered in uncoordinated attacks of January, February and March 1942. The total strength of the army appears, nevertheless, to have risen in the first half of 1942 to about five million men, of whom the majority
were in front-line units facing a German army of about three and a quarter million and some 700,000 of the latter’s allies.
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In spite of the loss of territory with its industrial and mining resources and of the manpower of the occupied territory, the Soviet leadership, partly as a result of getting its evacuated factories back into production, partly by a far more drastic shifting of industrial capacity to war production than the Germans ever accomplished, had increased the production of tanks and guns and maintained the output of planes. In all three categories the Soviet Union was not only turning out more than the Germans but in some fields, especially that of the larger tanks, was making better ones. The Germans were continuing to underestimate Soviet strength and production, while the Soviets were apparently over–estimating the Germans’.
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If the Soviet Union endured major defeats in the early stages of the summer offensive it was because of Stalin’s misreading of German intentions. Soviet intelligence had accurately discerned that the major offensive would come in the south toward the Caucasus and was likely to be followed by an effort to cut the railway from Murmansk; operations against Moscow and Leningrad were expected to
follow,
not precede the main blow.
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As mentioned in
Chapter 5
, the Western Powers were also convinced that Germany would strike for the Caucasus first. Stalin, however, was certain that the main blow would come in the center. His insistence that the Germans would place their emphasis on an offensive to take Moscow mayor may not have been reinforced by the German deception operation designed to convey this impression, but in any case it was in front of Moscow that the Red Army concentrated its major forces and its main reserves.
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To make matters worse for the Red Army and easier for the Germans, grossly incompetent military leadership brought major disasters on the Russians in May. Marshal Timoshenko launched a badly conceived offensive to seize Kharkov which in a way played into the hands of the Germans who were already planning to eliminate the Izyum bulge further south. Unable to direct the offensive properly, Timoshenko did not break it off quickly enough, and German spearheads thrust into the rear of his advance as well as of the Izyum bulge. The result was one of the great German victories and terrible Russian defeats of the war; about 100,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives and over 200,000 were made prisoner by the end of May. The Germans had their ready position for the main offensive while the Soviets had lost heavily.
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On the Crimea, the Germans had decided to clear the eastern end of the peninsula before making another assault on Sevastopol. At the eastern extremity of the Crimea, the Russian army had substantial
superiority in troops and weapons; the terrain gave the Germans little opportunity for maneuver. What evened the odds was the incompetence of the Soviet commanders, Dmitriy T. Kozlov and Lev Z. Mekhlis, and a massive air support operation ordered by Hitler over the objections of the air force staff. In a series of sharp blows, Manstein’s 11th Army attacked and destroyed the Crimean Front (Army Group) in the period May 8–20. A jab around its south flank broke the front lines and the Soviet Front commander never regained full control of the situation. Most of the soldiers of the twenty–one Soviet divisions were killed or captured; only a third of the 300,000 Red Army soldiers escaped across the Kerch Strait to the North Caucasus to fight again.
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If the very risky operation against the Crimean Front had gone smoothly for the Germans, the following assault on the great fortress of Sevastopol took not eleven days but thirty (a particularly striking contrast to the quick fall of Tobruk on two days of those thirty). The Germans moved up to the siege perimeter a vast array of artillery. Beyond the standard heavy artillery of the German army, they brought in 14 inch howitzers and enormous mortars of 17 and 21 inch diameter. As if that were not enough, a monster 31
inch railway gun firing a 7-ton shell was hauled in to assist in the destruction of the fortress.
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The whole operation therefore began under an artillery barrage reminiscent of World War I and included an assault landing across Severnaya Bay, the water inlet north of the city. In a bitter, grinding battle the Germans battered their way through the fortifications, took the city, and seized the peninsula projecting westward south of Sevastopol. By July 5, Manstein could stage a victory parade having taken the great fortress and some 90,000 prisoners. While only a small number from the garrison, including most specialist personnel, had been evacuated by air and submarine, the whole operation cost the Germans very heavy casualties most likely close to 100,000-and a great deal of time.
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The Soviet commander Oktyabrskiy was among those evacuated, but his soldiers had made the Germans pay a high price. As the huge siege guns were loaded up for the long trip to the Leningrad front and the surviving soldiers of 11th Army rested a little before also heading north, the big offensive was beginning to roll.

The German plan for the offensive in the south anticipated a series of phases. First an attack toward Voronezh, then a turn southward down the Don river to meet an attack headed east from Belgorod. This in turn would be followed by another attack south down the Don river. The theory was that in this way all Soviet forces west of the Don would be destroyed. The major striking force of the German army would then head south into the Caucasus. Since there were not enough troops to
cover the approximately 450 miles of Don frontage which would be left unguarded as the Germans headed south, her allies were to provide the needed units. By the fall of 1942, 24 Romanian, 10 Italian and 10 Hungarian divisions were in the East,
¹⁰
the majority of them in three armies on the Don with the Italian 8th Army separating the Hungarian 2nd in the north and the Romanian 3rd in the south, lest they fight each other instead of the Russians.

At the last moment a German officer flying with key documents on the planned offensive crashed in Soviet territory, but Stalin took these maps and papers to be a plant. On June 28, the Germans struck toward Voronezh, crashing through the Soviet defenses, forming a bridgehead across the Don, seizing the city and then heading south. The attack further south also pushed through rapidly and joined the spearhead from the north, but the result was not what the Germans expected. The Russians had not fought as effectively as in prior months and some Soviet units were trapped, but this was no repetition of the 1941 encirclements. The same thing happened with the next blow. The German armor from the north pushed toward Millerovo, a city between the Don and Donets rivers which was also the objective of an attack from the west, but once again the meeting spearheads caught a small, not a huge, haul of prisoners. And when, in a third such massive pincer operation the German units with the exception of the 6th Army (which still headed eastward) converged on Rostov and the lower Don, they found the bulk of the Soviet forces gone and the bridges blown.
^b

The great changes in the 1942, as contrasted with the 1941, operations were several. It was not only that the Red Army leadership had learned a great deal in the hard school of battle and that the Germans had been unable to make up for their losses of the year before. More important was the altered leadership styles of Hitler and Stalin. Both were changing the higher commanders as before, Stalin still more frequently than Hitler, but there was one major divergence. Hitler, who had become accustomed to more and more direct interference into the details of tactical operations in the winter crisis of 1941–42, continued with this procedure. In fact, in order to exert more immediate control over the operation, he moved in mid-July from his field headquarters in East Prussia to a new headquarters near Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, where the officers and secretaries could still smell the lightly buried corpses of the Jews who had been slaughtered after working on its construction.
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