History of the Second World War (85 page)

This is the natural method for an army which is limited in mobility but possesses a general superiority of force. It is all the more suitable when and where the lateral communications are too sparse to make it possible to switch reserves quickly from one sector to another to back up a particular success. As it means breaking into a fresh front each time, the cost of this ‘broad’ exploitation tends to be higher than with a ‘deep’ exploitation. It is also less likely to be quickly decisive, but the end may be surer, provided that the army which applies it has an adequate balance of material superiority to maintain the process.

In that offensive process the Russian losses were naturally heavier than the Germans’, but the Germans lost more than they could afford, following the costly failure of their own offensive. For them attrition spelt ruin. Hitler’s unwillingness to sanction any long step-back retarded their retreat but hastened their exhaustion.

In September the thinning of their front, and the diminution of their reserves, was reflected in an acceleration of the Russians’ pace of advance. Skilful commanders such as Vatutin, Koniev, and Rokossovsky, were quick to take advantage of weak spots in the wide front. Their momentum was helped by the ever-increasing flow of American trucks. Before the end of the month the Russians had reached the Dnieper not only at its great easterly bend near Dnepropetrovsk, but along most of its course as far up as the Pripet river, beyond Kiev. Crossings were quickly made at a wide range of points, and bridgeheads established. That was ominous for the Germans’ chances of being able to rest and reorganise behind the shelter of that wide river-barrier, which military spokesmen had incautiously described as their ‘winter line’. The ease with which crossings had been gained by the Russians was helped by their commanders’ skill and boldness in exploiting the potentialities of space. The important bridgehead established around Kremenchug, south-west of Poltava, owed much to Koniev’s decision that, instead of concentrating his effort on one line, crossings were to be made at a wide range of points — eighteen altogether on a stretch of sixty miles. The ‘unexpectedness’ of this calculated dispersion was increased by the way that the crossings were made under cover of fog. Similar methods enabled Vatutin to gain a series of footholds north of Kiev that were subsequently linked up.

The fundamental factor in the situation was, however, that the Germans no longer had enough troops to cover the whole of their front even when thinly spread, and had to rely on counterattack to prevent the expansion of enemy footholds. That was bound to be a precarious policy when their own reserves were so scanty, and the attackers’ so numerous.

Three hundred miles to the north of Kiev the Germans abandoned Smolensk on the 25th, and had been squeezed out of Briansk a week earlier. They were falling back slowly on the chain of bastion-towns that stretched along the upper Dnieper — Zhlobin, Rogachev, Mogilev, and Orsha, to Vitebsk on the Dvina.

In the far south they evacuated their bridgehead in the Kuban, and withdrew across the Kerch Straits into the Crimean peninsula, which itself was now in danger of being isolated by the Russian tide on the mainland. Kleist had received orders to bring his forces back from the Kuban to take over the sector between the Sea of Azov and the Dnieper bend at Zaporozhye. The decision was taken a fortnight too late. By the time his troops began to arrive in their new positions in mid-October, the Russians had broken through at Melitopol, and the whole sector was in a state of flux.

After the initial crossings of the Dnieper, that sector was relatively uneventful during the first half of October, while the Russians were bringing up reinforcements, accumulating supplies, and building the bridges to carry them forward. Most of these were pile or trestle bridges, and they were quickly constructed from trees felled near the site of the crossing. The Russians were masters in this art of improvising bridging — like Sherman’s troops in the march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Four days was the average time required for a bridge to span this great river, and carry the heaviest transport.

While attention was focused on Kiev, where the storm was expected to break, the next phase opened with a stroke almost midway in the long stretch between the Dnieper bend and Kiev. Koniev suddenly burst out of the Kremenchug bridgehead — south-west of Poltava — and drove a massive wedge southward across the baseline of the great salient. There were few German troops there to meet him at the outset, but Manstein quickly switched reserves thither and slowed him down, thus gaining time to withdraw the imperilled German forces within the bend. These helped to hold up the Russians outside Krivoi Rog, seventy miles south of their jumping-off line and midway across the salient.

But the collapse south of the Dnieper bend was part of the price, since Manstein had been compelled to draw off troops from that sector before Kleist’s troops arrived to replace them. Exploiting the penetration at Melitopol, the Russians swept across the Nogaisk Steppe to the lower reaches of the Dnieper, in the first week of November, cutting the exits from the Crimea and isolating the enemy forces that remained there.

Results, however, did not fulfil the optimistic assumptions that a ‘million men’ had been trapped east of the Dnieper. Only 6,000 prisoners were taken in the two fastest days of the pursuit, and the bulk of the German forces — which was far less than the imagined scale — had tune to withdraw across the Dnieper. Altogether only 98,000 were claimed by the Russians during the whole four months since the campaign opened, and over half of these were wounded. A remarkable inconsistency, though few Allied commentators remarked it, was revealed in the simultaneous Russian claim that 900,000 of the enemy had been killed and 1,700,000 wounded in the same period. For in any breakthrough a large part of the wounded usually fall into the attacker’s hands, and the more severe the defeat the smaller the proportion that can be evacuated. More remarkable still was Stalin’s statement on November 6 that the Germans had lost 4 million men in the past year. If that had been true, or even half true, the war would have been over. It had still a long course to run, but it was running down.

In the last half of October little news came from the Kiev sector, but the Russians were extending their bridgehead north of the city until it formed a wide springboard — wide enough for a powerful outflanking stroke to be mounted. This was launched by Vatutin in the first week of November. It found soft spots in the now widely overstretched frontage, penetrated westward through these, then swung inwards to cut the roads out of Kiev, and took the city from the rear. The Germans once again succeeded in slipping out of the trap, leaving only 6,000 prisoners in the Russians’ hands, but they were incapable of stemming the Russians’ onrush, as most of the panzer divisions had been drawn southward by Koniev’s thrust in the Dnieper bend.

On the day after the capture of Kiev the Russian armoured forces reached Fastov, forty miles to the south-west. That was a stroke at pursuit-pace. After overcoming opposition on that line, they drove on sixty miles in the next five days to capture Zhitomir junction on the one remaining lateral railway east of the Pripet Marshes. Then they spread northward and on the 16th captured Korosten junction. At that moment the German resistance was on the verge of a breakdown, and that might have brought early fulfilment of Stalin’s declaration of the 6th that ‘victory is near’. For Manstein had no reserves at hand.

In this emergency he told Manteuffel, the dynamic commander of the 7th Panzer Division, to collect such units as he could find to add to his own remnant, and deliver an upper-cut from Berdichev with this scratch force. Daringly handled on a zig-zag course, Manteuffel’s light stroke succeeded brilliantly, piercing the Russians’ flank and recapturing Zhitomir by a night attack on the 19th, after which it drove on to Korosten. The distribution of the force in a number of small armoured groups, moving wide, had helped to magnify the impression of its strength. They darted between the Russian columns, and cut across their rear, striking at headquarters and signal centres, so that they spread a paralysing confusion along their track.

In an effort to develop the opportunity thus created, Manstein now launched a definite counteroffensive against the still invitingly large Russian salient west of Kiev. He was helped by the arrival of several fresh panzer divisions from the West. The plan was for a pincer-stroke — by an armoured thrust from the north-west aimed at Fastov and a converging thrust from the south. The former was delivered by Balck’s panzer corps of three divisions, including Manteuffel’s. But Vatutin’s advanced troops had now been reinforced by an increasing volume of artillery and anti-tank guns, poured across the Dnieper bridges, as well as by reserve divisions. The German counteroffensive achieved no such striking results as the initial riposte. It looked more dangerous on the map than it was on the ground. For it no longer enjoyed the advantage of surprise to compensate its limited strength, and was further handicapped by bad weather. Early in December it faded out in the mud. During the lull that followed Vatutin massed his armies for a further drive with mounting weight.

The most apt comment on the situation was provided unconsciously by Hitler when, to mark his appreciation of Manteuffel’s saving stroke, he invited the latter to spend Christmas with him at Angerburg, and then said — ‘As a Christmas present, I’ll give you fifty tanks.’ That was the best reward Hitler could conceive, and a big one relatively to his resources. For the strongest and best favoured panzer division existing only had a strength of 180 tanks, and few exceeded half that figure.

The northern stretch of the German front had also been subjected to severe and prolonged strain during the autumn. But here repeated Russian offensives had failed to crack the line in front of the upper Dnieper to which the Germans had withdrawn after evacuating Smolensk. The Russians’ frustration here was due to the inherent power of modern defence combined with the fact that they had less room for manoeuvre than in the south, and also made their aim too obvious.

In these battles the air forces played an insignificant part, being curbed by snow and ice. This limitation relieved the defence of the overhead pressure that might have multiplied the tremendous odds against them on the ground. While it also restricted the defenders’ air reconnaissance the latter were able to deduce the likely direction of the Russians’ main thrust-point, and to confirm it by a vigorous use of raiding patrols.

The brunt of the attack was borne by Heinrici’s 4th Army, which with ten depleted divisions held the hundred mile front between Orsha and Rogachev. The Russians delivered five offensives against it between October and December, each lasting five or six days, with several renewed efforts every day. They employed some twenty divisions in the first offensive, when the Germans had just occupied a hastily prepared position comprising a single trench-line. They employed thirty divisions in the next offensive, but by that time the Germans had developed their defences. The subsequent offensives were made with some thirty-six divisions.

The main weight of the Russian assault was concentrated against Orsha, on a frontage of a dozen miles astride the great Moscow-Minsk highway. As a thrust-point it had obvious advantages for supply and potential exploitation. But its obviousness helped the Germans to concentrate in meeting it. Their defensive methods here are worth study. Heinrici used 3½ divisions on this very narrow sector, leaving 6½ to cover the remainder of his extensive front. He thus had a fairly dense ratio of force to space at the vital point. His artillery was almost intact, and he concentrated a mass of 380 guns to cover the crucial sector. Controlled by a single commander at 4th Army Headquarters, it was able to concentrate its fire at any threatened point of the sector. At the same time the Army Commander made a practice of ‘milking’ the divisions on the quiet part of his front in order to provide one fresh battalion daily, during the battle, for each of the divisions that were heavily engaged. This usually balanced the previous day’s loss, while giving the division concerned an intact local reserve that it could use for counterattack. The drawbacks of mixing formations were diminished by working a system of rotation within the divisions — which now consisted of three regiments, each of two battalions. For the second day of battle the reinforcing battalion would be the sister of the one that was brought in the day before, and was accompanied by the regimental headquarters; after two more days a second completely new regiment would be in the line; and by the sixth day the original division would have been relieved altogether and have gone to hold the quiet sector from which the replacement had been drawn unit by unit.

These repeated successes of the defence against numerical odds of over 6 to 1 were a remarkable achievement. They indicated how the war might have been spun out, and the Russians’ strength exhausted, if the defensive strategy had matched the tactics. But the prospect was wrecked by Hitler’s insistence that no withdrawal was to be made without his permission, and his accompanying reluctance to give such permission. Army commanders who used their discretion were threatened with a court-martial, even in cases where it was a matter of withdrawing a small detachment from a dangerously isolated position. The veto was pressed so hard that juniors were still worse paralysed, and it came to be said that battalion commanders did not dare ‘to move a sentry from the window to the door’. With parrot-like reiteration the Supreme Command recited ‘every man must fight where he stands’.

That rigid principle had helped to bring the German Army through the nerve-crisis of the first winter in Russia, but it became fatal in the long run — when the German troops had overcome their acute fear of the Russian winter, but were more and more short of the forces with which to fill the Russian spaces. It cramped the essential flexibility of the commanders on the spot in slipping out of reach, regrouping their forces and fulfilling the principle ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’.

The disastrous results of rigidity had been registered on the southern front in 1943. In 1944 they were to be repeated in the north, in the very sector where the German defence had previously proved so hard to overcome.