A World at Arms (90 page)

Having himself made Stalingrad the symbol of the 1942 offensive, Hitler had elevated the fight for the city to enormous public attention. The insistence that the German army hold rather than break out only reinforced this aspect of the situation. The crushing defeat administered by the Red Army to the German army at Stalingrad was therefore a major blow to Hitler’s prestige–a matter of vast importance in a dictatorship–at the same time as it greatly enhanced the position of Stalin and the Red Army. The public in the Soviet Union was, of course, kept aware of the desperate fight for the city on the Volga, but around the world as well, attention had been drawn to this epic struggle. Few could be found outside the most restricted circle of specialists who had ever heard of Cholm and Demyansk, and even fewer in subsequent years remembered these places and their relief, but everywhere Stalingrad had been in the public eye for months, and the victory of the Red Army there symbolized at the time and thereafter what to most was the great turn of the tide on the Eastern Front.

The dramatic events at Stalingrad hastened the process of change in the relations of the dictator to the military in both the Soviet Union and Germany. This subject has been clouded in both cases by post-war distortions only recently giving way to more objective analysis. In the Soviet Union, the role of the Great Patriotic War, as it is called, in the self–definitionsof the society has produced various official theses which change from time to time; in the German Democratic Republic, ideological posturing dominated study of the war; and in the Federal Republic of Germany, the effort to “prove” that all the mistakes were made by Hitler and all the atrocities were committed by the SS obscured the realities of the conflict. It is, however, clear that the great victory reinforced Stalin’s willingness to listen to and rely on the professional military, whose growing experience and self-confidence now appeared justified by success. He dominated them but was more inclined to listen to their views.

Hitler’s inclination to distrust the military leadership was reinforced by the great defeat. He had always resented his dependence on a professional higher officer corps whom he needed for the wars he expected to fight but whom he hoped to replace at the earliest opportunity with men
ideologically more attuned to National Socialism. He had assumed the powers of the Minister of War in February 1938; in December 1941 he had also taken over the position of Commander-in-Chief of the army. He continued to find most of the higher officers complaisant but not sufficiently enthusiastic about National Socialism, and he was more and more inclined to interfere in tactical details. It is by no means certain that his directives were in general any less unrealistic than those recommended by most of the generals; but he now relieved them with greater frequency while pushing up into the higher ranks those whose dedication to extreme National Socialist views made them more congenial to his way of thinking and acting, men like Guderian, Schörner and Model in the army and Dönitz in the navy. Most of the others were kept in line by their self–identification with the German war effort, hopes for promotion and decorations, concern for their soldiers, and a vast secret program of bribery involving practically all at the highest levels of command.
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STROKE AND COUNTER-STROKE ON THE EASTERN FRONT, JANUARY–MARCH 1943

Even before the final stage in the grisly drama at Stalingrad had been reached with the surrender of its emaciated garrison and bemedalled generals, the progress of “Small Saturn” had also obliged the Germans to make new decisions about Army Group A, still stalled in front of its objectives in the Caucasus. Having neither seized the Grozny oil fields (to say nothing of those at Baku) nor cleared the Black Sea coast, the German 17th and 1st Panzer Armies risked being cut off if the Red Army reached Rostov. Manstein repeatedly asked for units from 1st Panzer to be transferred to his command so that he could stem the southern thrust of “Small Saturn,” but these transfers were made only on a small scale and always too late to make much difference. The basic decision Hitler made was to pull back portions of the 1st Panzer Army into the southern Ukraine to hold open a route of retreat for the supplies and rear area troops of Army Group A, but to have 17th Army hold its front. This decision would make it possible for the Red Army to liberate a large stretch of the area seized by the Germans in 1942, but leave open the possibility of new choices and internal German frictions later.

This new set of decisions was forced on the Germans by a new Soviet offensive, a fact which underlines the extent to which the initiative in the war on the Eastern Front had shifted to the Soviet high command. A major Red Army offensive by the northern section of the Southwest Front crushed the 2nd Hungarian Army and the adjacent portions of
the German 2nd Army to the north and 8th Italian Army south of the new large hole torn into the Axis front.
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The political impact of this disaster on Hungary as well as of the earlier destruction of Romanian and Italian units on those Axis satellites is reviewed later in this chapter; it is the immediate military effect which must be examined first.

The determined and successful Soviet offensive against Army Group B, combined with the Stalingrad Front’s assault against Army Group Don, threatened to destroy both German Army groups and simultaneously to cut off the portions of Army Group A still in the Caucasus, though retreating from there, partly under pressure, partly according to plan. The Red Army was not only liberating vast areas and important cities like Kursk and Kharkov, but its spearheads were approaching the Dnepr river near Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye. The Germans had to decide how to cope with the disappearance of still another satellite army from their order of battle, enormous losses of their own men and materiel, and a tactical situation which threatened catastrophe for the whole southern portion of their front. The decisions reached and the arguments over them reveal a great deal about German strategy and aims at this point in the war; similarly, the reaction of the Russians to the German implementation of these decisions sheds significant light on Soviet policy in mid-war.

Hitler decided on three major steps. First, he would authorize more of 1st Panzer Army to pull back across the lower Don to be utilized by Manstein in a series of moves, urged by the latter, to redeem the situation by a counter-offensive. This, however, first required that considerable territory be evacuated rather than fought over so that units could be extricated in good order, reorganized, and assembled in systematic preparation for an offensive into the flank of the Soviet advance. Second, the beginnings of reinforcement of the Eastern Front from the West, already under way as a result of the defeat at Stalingrad, would be both increased and accelerated, a decision now easier to make since the season ruled out any cross-Channel invasion for some months and this was an obvious time for Germany to take advantage of its interior lines of communication. Third, Hitler decided that the other army which had been fighting in the north Caucasus area, the 17th, should pull back but was not to assist in the restabilization of the front in the area north of the Sea of Azov. Instead, it was to establish a defensive perimeter holding the portion of the North Caucasus east of the Crimea with its back to the Sea of Azov, the Kerch Straits and the Black Sea, which was given the designation “Goth’s head position” (Gotenkopfstellung), also referred to as the Kuban bridgehead.

Each of these three decisions deserves comment. The last, that of
holding a bridgehead in the North Caucasus, is especially important in the light it sheds on the long-term perspectives of the Germans on the Eastern Front in the early months of 1943. While most of Hitler’s military advisors appear by this time to have anticipated no more than some sort of stalemate, the Fuhrer still thought of great victories ahead; it is only in this divergence that the arguments over the Kuban bridgehead make sense. The generals wanted 17th Army pulled out, the area east of the Kerch Straits evacuated, and the units freed by this action utilized to assist in the stabilization of the southern portion of the Eastern Front and the defense of the Crimea. Hitler, on the other hand, was still thinking of new great offensives in the East. These would involve the need to seize the Caucasus oil fields, and for such an operation a bridge–head across the Kerch Straits would provide the best possible base.
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In the end, the practical implications were of no great moment. Whether 17th Army would have helped the German southern front in the Ukraine more than the release of Red Army units facing it could have helped the Soviet forces fighting there will never be known. Soviet advances on the north shore of the Sea of Azov threatened to cut off the German-Romanian garrison on the Crimea in August 1943; and under these circumstances Hitler, after consulting the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu, gave the order to evacuate the area still held by the German 17th Army. Over a four week period in September-October 1943, the whole army was transferred to the Crimea with relatively little interference from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. If this ended all theoretical possibilities of a German offensive toward the Caucasus, the real threat had long since passed with the crushing defeat of Germany’s 1943 summer offensive on the Eastern Front and the great Soviet advance across the Ukraine.
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Hitler’s other two decisions had made their impact on the front in the interval between the decision to hold and later to evacuate the Kuban bridgehead. As the Red Army stormed back into the Donets Basin in January-February 1943, driving the Germans back through key industrial areas they had seized the preceding summer, the most critical question was whether Hitler would allow von Manstein the necessary leeway to pull back his scattered units to the old Mius river line, which had been held in the winter of 1941–42, while reorganizing for a counter-offensive against the Red Army advancing on Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye on the Dnepr, over 150 miles further west. On February 6 Hitler agreed to the withdrawal. Perhaps the experience of discovering himself vulnerable to capture by the Red Army when in Zaporozhye for a conference with von Manstein on February 17 and 18 helped persuade the Fuhrer that a slightly different style of leadership might help, and he allowed
von Manstein to carry out a project rather different from those of the preceding campaign.
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For the new operation, several divisions from Western Europe were to be sent East to be added to the heavily armored and manned divisions of the Waffen SS, the armed formations of the SS. Fanatical in spirit, favored over the regular army in delivery of weapons, and not always particularly obedient, these contingents were in the process of becoming a kind of fire–brigade for critical points at the front. Von Manstein would get to use them in Germany’s last major tactical success on the Eastern Front in World War II.

The possibility of launching an effective counter–attack was, to a major extent, a result of Red Army inexperience in the exploitation of its own successes. As the initial breakthroughs on the front, north and south of Stalingrad in November 1942 had not been followed up quickly by a determined exploitation, so the repeated ripping open of the Axis front on the upper Don had not led to concerted and carefully coordinated offensives. In the process of advancing, the Red Army had liberated major industrial centers like Kharkov and Voroshilovgrad, but it had not wedged open the front sufficiently to force the German army back to the Dnepr river. Repeatedly the Red Army was on the verge of decisive victories on the Mius, near Slavyansk, and on the road to Dnepropetrovsk, but at the last moment the German defenders barely held. It must also be remembered that in the depth of winter the armies of the Voronezh and Southwest Fronts had moved forward literally hundreds of miles, and were now coming to the end of the offensive strength with which they had started their attacks. The combination of desperation and experience still worked in favor of the German army, but it should have been obvious to the leaders of the latter that this would no longer always be the case.

The German counter-offensive ran from February 19 to March 17, 1943.
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In a series of swift armored blows from south to north just east of Dnepropetrovsk and in the Donets area, the two panzer armies of Army Group South smashed into the Soviet spearheads. The 4th Panzer Army’s assault units, primarily SS divisions, destroyed the advance forces of the Soviet 6th and 1st Guards Armies and pushed northwards, retaking Kharkov and Belgorod before halting and being halted. Further east, the German 1st Panzer Army was able to cut off and destroy much of the Soviet armored force commanded by General Popov, who had misjudged the situation and could rescue only small portions to hold the lower Donets line. When the front settled down as all were immobilized by the spring thaw in late March, only the great westward bulge around Kursk to the north remained of the areas beyond the starting line of the 1942 German summer offensive which the Red Army had freed in the
winter offensive; otherwise the two sides were back essentially where they had been a year earlier.

But this was true only in a tactical sense; a great deal had changed, first because of the enormous and conspicuous Soviet victory at Stalingrad, second because of the German rally in February-March, and finally because the basic military position of both combatants on the great front had altered in fundamental ways. The nature and implications of these three changes will form most of the balance of this chapter, but the winter operations on the northern and central segments of the Eastern Front need to be summarized first; in their respective ways, both serve to underline how the situation in the East had changed from the preceding year.

As previously mentioned, German plans for offensives in the north in 1942 had all foundered when Soviet attacks on the ring cutting off Leningrad had forced abandonment of German hopes of seizing that city, but had also failed to break the ring. The Red Army now planned a new attempt, prepared with great care and precision. In a week’s bitter fighting from January 12 to 19, the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts chewed their way through the northern extremity of the German siege lines, clearing a narrow land corridor on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. The siege had been broken; and while the land bridge to the great city was narrow and still under German artillery fire, its practical and symbolic importance was immense. The practical significance lay in the greatly increased ability of the Soviet Union to move people and supplies in and out of the city in all seasons. The symbolic significance lay in the great boost the victory provided for Soviet morale even as it demonstrated to the Finns that the German cause to which they had so unwisely tied themselves was obviously a losing one, not only in the steppe areas of the Soviet Union many hundreds of miles to the south but on their own doorstep.