Barbarossa (52 page)

[The best example of this, and ironically, Porsche's most enduring
memorial, is the Volkswagen car, which, although brilliantly original
in conception, required ten years of detailed development before it
became a commercial proposition.]

But as for designing weapons . . . that was another story. Indeed,
Hitler would have done better to design them himself. Porsche's plans
for a Tiger were quite impractical, and the Ordnance Office threw
them out, even though they came up
via
the hallowed house of
Krupp. But Porsche went to Hitler and persuaded the Führer to
allocate to him resources for a superheavy tank three times the size
of the Tiger, to weigh 180 tons. It was also decided to allow two
other engineers, Grote and Hacker, to draw up plans for a "land
monitor" of a thousand tons!

At the same time Hitler was under pressure from the artillery
branch to press with the development of self-propelled "tank
destroyers" (
Jagdpanzer
) and infantry-support guns
(
Stürmgeschütze
). The origins of this lay in the
obsolescence of the towed antitank gun (both the 37-mm. and the
50-mm. had been found valueless against the T 34) coupled with the
very natural fear among artillerymen that its disappearance from
service would result in a contracting of their own field of
authority. In the spring and early summer of 1942 a number of Czech
38-T tank chassis had been fitted out with 75-mm. guns and used with
success in antitank roles. At the time this had been conceived as a
temporary measure, but the crews and drivers had been taken from the
artillery, and when, like so many measures that are conceived as
temporary, it attained permanent establishment its origins kept it
within the artillery command structure.

Production of the
Jagdpanzer
was easier and quicker than
that of a tank, and Hitler saw in this a way of rapidly raising the
total armoured-vehicle strength figures. In this he was encouraged by
the artillery, which also persuaded him that the development of the
hollow-charge shell, with its superior powers of penetration, would
lead to a decline in the ascendancy of the tank.

The result of Hitler's persuasion was twofold, and each was to
have very serious effects on the battles in 1943. First, Dr. Porsche,
who was quick to sense which way the wind was blowing, revised his
design for a Tiger and "sold" it to Hitler. The new design
(known subsequently as the "Ferdinand," or at the front
itself as the "Elephant") had the appearance of a giant
Jagdpanzer
with a 100-mm. L 70 gun in a fixed mounting. It
had, in fact, all the disadvantages of the
Jagdpanzer
—narrow
field of fire, no secondary armament, restricted accommodation—and
the complications and expense in construction of a tank, including
100-mm. belly armour. At all events, Krupp got the contract for them,
and over ninety Ferdinands were produced. They were all committed to
action on the same day, and few weapons in modern war were to have so
inauspicious a beginning, or one that had such a disastrous effect on
the main operation.

Meanwhile the Henschel Tiger was proceeding through its
development stage, though suffering from the diversion of resources
to its Krupp cousin. An experimental battalion of Henschels was put
into battle on the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942 and showed
great promise in spite of unsuitable and swampy terrain. As a result
of this operation the 88-mm. L 71 was standardised in both Henschel
and Krupp versions, and so the Porsche design forfeited even the
paper superiority of a larger gun.

The second result of Hitler's persuasion by the artillery school
had been a gradual, but steepening, decline in the quantitative tank
strength of the Panzer divisons. From a maximum of four tank
battalions per division during the battle of France, the number had
fallen to three at the start of
Barbarossa
, and was currently
only two, with the third battalion being made up of the equivocal
Jagdpanzer
. Furthermore, the number of tanks in each all-tank
company had fallen from a nominal twenty-two to seventeen, and in
some cases to fourteen. This was partly due to the withdrawal from
service of the PzKw II's, the "tin coffins"; partly to the
fact that it was almost impossible to get new tanks allocated to old
formations—they were used to build up "fresh"
divisions; and partly to the reluctance of local commanders to allow
damaged tanks to go back as far as the main repair workshops in
Germany, and the bias toward attempting makeshift repairs in
divisional garages, which in turn led to a high proportion of tanks
being out of service.

The end result was that the Panzer divisions seldom had a strength
of more than a hundred tanks at any given time, and a more usual
figure was around seventy or eighty. In terms of sheer firepower
these figures might not have been so bad if the
Jagdpanzer
battalions had really been up to strength, but here the division of
authority between the armoured forces and the artillery produced the
expected result, and the majority of the
Jagdpanzer
seldom
found their way into the Panzer divisions proper, but were used to
stiffen the motorised infantry and the Waffen SS.

When this is added to the confused picture the German armaments
industry still presented in 1942—until the death of Dr. Todt
and his succession by Speer, Daimler-Benz was still making civilian
automobiles—it will be appreciated that the appointment of the
Inspector General was long overdue.

Guderian had not seen Hitler since December 1941. The Führer,
who had avoided a brush with Russian cavalry at Zaporozhe two days
before "seemed to have aged greatly. . . . His speech was
hesitant; His left hand trembled." But Hitler was bent on
ingratiating himself with Guderian just as he had with Manstein. The
Colonel General noted with satisfaction that ". . . my books lay
about on his desk," and that he was greeted with the same
apologetic, almost suppliant demeanour which the commander of Army
Group South had enjoyed at the time of his own visit. "I need
you," Hitler told Guderian. "Since 1941 our ways have
parted. There were numerous misunderstandings at that time which I
must regret." Hitler went on to say that he "had reread my
pre-war writings on armoured troops and had noticed that I had even
then correctly prophesied the course of future developments."

Sweet as these words must have sounded, the deeds which
accompanied them spoke even louder. For every power which Guderian
had asked for when the subject was broached by Schmundt was to be
granted him. The Inspectorate General, far from being a subordinate
department of OKH—an
Amt
—was to be answerable
neither to the Training Army (as orthodox military practice would
have required) nor subordinate even to the Chief of the Army General
Staff (as the accepted protocol between senior officers dictated),
but directly responsible to the Führer. Guderian was given the
powers and seniority of an army commander; control over all armoured
and mobile troops in the Army; a direct line to the Army Ordnance
Office and the Armaments Ministry; and most spectacular concession of
all, equivalent powers over tank forces attached to or manned by the
Waffen SS and the Luftwaffe.

The interview lasted little more than three quarters of an hour,
and Guderian withdrew to special quarters which had been set aside
for him at Vinnitsa, to enjoy the task of drawing up, as it were, his
own letters patent. One more private empire was to be carved out of
the disorderly agglomeration of private and departmental estates
which made up the Nazi war machine.

There was another aspect to Guderian's appointment. Hitler had
exploited the enthusiasm of a technical specialist to overcome the
traditional scruples of a Prussian staff officer at so flagrantly
bypassing the customary channels of command. The stiff-necked
unanimity of the generals would be shaken and their executive power
still further eroded by one of the Führer's own nominees. Hitler
must have been confident that professional jealousy, operating
through the OKH machine, would go some way toward balancing the
special powers he was conferring on the Inspector General—but
he can hardly have expected them to operate as soon as they did.

One reason for Guderian's having been given everything for which
he asked—as it was for the Führer's aged and shaky
appearance—was the continuing and (it must have seemed at
Supreme Command headquarters) irreversible deterioration of the
German southern front. The western wing of Army Group South was so
broken up by the continuing Russian pressure that on 13th February,
OKH had stepped in with some new command "boundaries." The
old Army Group B, over which Manstein had been attempting to exercise
control for the last month, was dissolved and its entire staff
organisation withdrawn to Germany. Its strongest component, the 2nd
Army, was transferred to Kluge, and the remnants were put into a new
force of fresh troops which was assembling at Kharkov, Army
Detachment Lanz.

General Lanz had three crack SS Panzer divisions in his command,
Leibstandarte
,
Das Reich
, and
Totenkopf
. But as
practical reinforcement for Manstein this force was valueless. There
was no direct signals link with Army Group South, nor, it seemed, was
the matter, of establishing one treated with any urgency by Lanz. It
soon became clear that the detachment was in fact a special body
appointed by Hitler to deny Kharkov to the Russians, without concern
for the development of the battle to its left or right.

That same week two more deep Russian penetrations had threatened
to lever open the position so lately and precariously established on
the Mius. A very large force of Russian cavalry, upward of three
divisions with some mechanised artillery, had pushed between the
Fretter-Pico group and the 17th Corps. Moving at night, and making
wide detours over the frozen ground to bypass the scattered pockets
of German resistance, the horsemen had emerged at Debaltsevo on the
main east-west railway some forty miles behind the "lines."
Here they had intercepted two trains of reinforcements for the 17th
Corps and put the occupants (literally) to the sword. Their presence
meant that the awkward Taganrog-Mariupol railway was the only supply
route left for the entire force defending the Mius River line.

Still more serious, a strong force of tanks, three mechanised
brigades from Popov's 1st Guards Army, had pushed up the frozen
valley of the Krivoi Torets (which the commander of the 40th Panzer
Corps, whose left flank the valley protected, had assured Manstein
was "impassable") and established itself at
Krasnoarmeiskoye, within tank-gun range of the main railway from
Dnepropetrovsk, along which travelled the fuel and ammunition for the
whole of the 1st Panzer Army, and the Hollidt and Fretter-Pico
Gruppen
. SS Viking was immediately committed against the
Krasnoarmeiskoye breakthrough, but its efforts were unavailing. OKH
apologetically explained that the division (which was composed of SS
volunteers from the Baltic and '"Nordic" countries) "had
such severe losses that there were no longer enough officers
available with command of the appropriate languages."

In the second week of February, then, Manstein's position was as
follows. He had no effective contact with his left wing, the bulk of
which, in Army Detachment Lanz, was tied to Kharkov, and the Russians
had virtually complete freedom of action across a fifty-mile stretch
of the Donetz on either side of Izyum. The effective strength of the
army group in the south and east had been divided into three by the
Russian penetrations at Krasnoarmeiskoye and Debaltsevo. On 15th
February the SS Panzer corps withdrew from Kharkov—in spite of
orders from Hitler, and from Lanz himself, that the city was to be
held to the last—and the gap between Kluge's right and the
first solid positions on Manstein's left flank had widened to over a
hundred miles.

Hitler can be forgiven for seeing in the apparent disintegration
of the whole southern wing the inevitable consequences of departure
from his principle of holding fast regardless. On the day following
the fall of Kharkov, Army Group South was warned to expect an
"immediate" visit from the Führer, and he arrived at
Zaporozhe, accompanied by Jodl and Zeitzler, on 17th February. This
was the closest that Hitler ever approached to the fighting line
throughout the war (until the fighting closed over his head in
Berlin, in 1945), and for three days he remained there, with only a
few anti-aircraft units and the H.Q. defence company between him and
the outriders of Popov's group. Packets of Soviet cavalry had already
filtered through as far as the north bank of the Dnieper, and on
Hitler's last day at Zaporozhe some T 34's approached to within gun
range of the airfield!

The real interest of the Zaporozhe conference was in the substance
of the argument between Hitler and Manstein that took place over the
three days. Hitler's great strength in disputation with his marshals
was twofold. First, an inspired talent for strategy on a grand scale;
the Norwegian campaign and the Ardennes plan of 1940 will stand to
his credit in perpetuity in military textbooks. Second, a remarks
able faculty for retaining figures and for tactical detail—the
rate of fire of a new mortar, the ammunition requirement of a
platoon, the rail capacity of a given network, even such minutiae as
the best way to site an 88-mm. gun. His familiarity with the small
change of tactical discussion allowed Hitler to talk on equal terms
with most of his commanders, and to attain an ascendancy over them
quickly even in their own expertise.

But although Hitler could plan a campaign and conduct a regimental
action, his ability as commander in the middle scale, that of
handling corps and armies—grand tactics—was less sure.
His first real experience had come in the winter of 1941, when he
dismissed Brauchitsch and plunged into the deep end, with the whole
German Army in a state of febrile emergency. Then he had
discovered—not by any rational process, but from the roots of
his own conviction—the solution. Hold fast, yield not a foot,
die where you stand. The coincidence of strategic requirement and
even despotic ordinance on this occasion has already been discussed.
But when Hitler applied the same formula to the predicament of Paulus
at Stalingrad, the result had been less happy. The Führer had
been shaken, he had been filled with remorse, and he had allowed
Manstein to adopt a different technique to deal with the new crisis
on the Donetz. And what was happening? Ground, it seemed, and
prestige with it, was being lost at an even greater speed. The front
had lost all cohesion. The fighting was "fluid," certainly,
and the current was against the Wehrmacht.