Hitler's Panzers (47 page)

Malinovsky proposed to regroup and rebuild his tired front. Stalin ordered him forward. The offensive resumed on October 29. When it stalled, Stavka authorized heavy reinforcements, including 200 tanks, and ordered Tolbukhin to close up on Malinovsky’s right. Through November and into December, the Russians fought their way forward on both sides of Budapest, cutting the rail line to Vienna on December 23 and beginning the siege of a city neither German nor Hungarian generals believed could be defended.

The panzers’ direct role in this process was limited. They had shot their bolt at Debrecen. Battle groups of a thousand men and a few dozen AFVs were merely drops of water on a hot stove. The men and the tanks that could have made up some of the autumn’s losses had instead been sent west to the Ardennes. In the face of Hitler’s insistence that Budapest be held to a finish, panzer commanders on the spot risked no more than minor movements.

THERE WAS A sidebar to the campaigns of 1944. On September 10 the 1st Byelorussian Front, resupplied and reinforced, mounted a major offensive north of Warsaw, aimed northwest at the Narew River. It was stopped by Viking and Totenkopf, who thereby played a crucial role in the Warsaw Uprising’s defeat; but on October 10 it resumed, extended on the left by the 3rd Byelorussian Front. By October 21, the Red Army had captured an undamaged bridge across the Angerapp River, in the heart of East Prussia. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of the T-34s until Friedrich Hossbach was given most of the armor in the sector and ordered to counterattack.

This was the same Hossbach who, as Hitler’s adjutant in 1937, kept the records that became the Hossbach Memorandum. An infantryman by branch, he had commanded 4th Army since mid-July. Now he had a worn-down 5th Panzer Division, the similarly attenuated Hermann Göring, and the newly organized Führer Grenadier Brigade. Together they amounted to around 100 tanks and assault guns. Not much seems to have been expected, but Hossbach was able to hit both flanks of the breakthrough simultaneously. Fifth Panzer went in from the north on October 21 with 22 tanks. Two days later they made contact with the Führer Grenadiers advancing from the south. The Soviets panicked, abandoning tanks and equipment in a rush to the rear the Germans lacked the strength to stop. Third Byelorussian Front, shut down for the winter. So did the campaign against East Prussia. But the future prospects of Army Group Center, were inescapably grim.

Just how grim was suggested at the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf—the site of the Angerapp crossing of October 21. Elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps held the bridgehead against counterattacks for about four hours, then withdrew. When German troops entered two days later, they found a scene that German propaganda described as a massacre, with hundreds of civilians raped, shot, and butchered. The actual events remain subjects of debate, with allegations of photos doctored, corpses brought in from elsewhere, numbers exaggerated. One recent scholarly investigation reports fewer than 30 verifiable murders, with lesser atrocities on the same limited scale.

These numbers have in turn been challenged. What is certain is that Goebbels and East Prussian Gauleiter Eric Koch used Nemmersdorf to inspire a spirit of resistance locally and nationally. What is also certain is that the Landser, foot- marchers or panzermen, had a winter to think about the story—and perhaps to remember other villages at other times, when the situation had been reversed. The victory rings on a Tiger’s gun barrel might move steadily toward the muzzle. An assault gun battalion might note its thousandth confirmed kill. But when Ivan came again, the fight would be to the finish.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
S HITLER’S VISION of kicking in Russia’s front door drowned in blood on the Eastern Front, France increasingly became a rest-and-recuperation zone for burned-out frontline units. Even the West’s supreme commander as of March 1942, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had received his appointment after being removed from his army group in Russia. A few weeks in France to absorb equipment and replacements, to forget the war as much as possible, was a dream that ran a close third to a long furlough or a million-mark wound. Simultaneously the “hero-thieves” of the replacement service staged comb-out after comb-out in the formations that watched the coasts. In 1942 and 1943, just about anyone who wanted to fight, who was able to fight, or who could conceivably be made to fight, was transferred eastward. Their replacements were the lame and the halt, the elderly and the invalid, whole battalions recruited from Russia’s Asian communities or from prisoners of war.

IN THOSE CONTEXTS, might the US-initiated projects for a full-scale landing in the spring of 1943 have caught the Wehrmacht at its lowest ebb? For a good part of 1943, High Command West had fewer combat-ready divisions than it possessed in 1942. It was absorbed in implementing Hitler’s September 1942 order to increase the coastal defenses by no fewer than 15,000 strong points. The archives include far more correspondence on details of the Führer’s blockhouse projects than on proposals for repelling a full-scale cross-channel invasion. The Allies’ Mediterranean initiatives drew attention southward. During 1943, the Germans in the West had so many immediate priorities that concern for a D-Day-type operation moved toward the bottom of the list by default.

But it did not disappear. The case for a 1943 invasion of northeastern Europe appears plausible only because of distractions themselves largely the product of Anglo-American initiatives in the Mediterranean. Almost from its creation, High Command West was convinced the Allies would eventually strike northwestern Europe in force. The only question was when and where the blow would fall. Without Operation Torch and its aftermaths, the Germans would have been free to concentrate on preparing for a major landing mounted from Britain. And D-Day was an operation that could only be undertaken once.

Britain’s moral and material capital was nearly exhausted, its fighting manpower so limited that the army sent to Northwestern Europe had to cannibalize itself, breaking up entire divisions to keep the rest operational. Failure, to say nothing of disaster, would have had incal culably negative consequences for the war effort of the island kingdom. The US was powerful enough to bear and recover from the material consequences of defeat on Europe’s beaches. The psychological impact was a different story entirely. June 1944 in England invites comparison in US military history with July 1863 in Pennsylvania. Both occasions generated a sense of participation in something Hegel might have called a world-historical event. Seen in this light, the cross-channel invasion was more than a military operation—too much more to risk its launching in anything but the most favorable circumstances possible.

As High Command West coped with the challenges generated by the Russian and Mediterranean theaters, the Atlantic Wall began taking on a life of its own. By mid-1943, particularly around the major ports, the Wall looked authentic, with trenches, ditches, and minefields, machine-gun nests, concrete strong points, and heavy artillery emplaced in what even to men who knew better seemed impregnable bunkers. The commanders on the spot, however, were not exactly sure what to do with it.

The defense of Western Europe had, by late 1943, become an army responsibility. The Kriegsmarine, defeated in the U-boat campaign, its remaining surface vessels penned in harbor, could do little more than conduct coast-defense operations with a mixed bag of small craft. The Luftwaffe’s attention had shifted to the Eastern Front and to the Reich itself. Staff and operational assignments to Air Fleet 3, responsible for Western Europe, were viewed as either dead ends or rest cures.

On October 25, 1943, Rundstedt submitted a comprehensive memorandum describing the challenges and requirements of a sector that in the next year could expect to become a major theater of operations. He sarcastically noted that he would be very glad if Hitler read this report despite his busy schedule. Otherwise the Führer might accuse his generals of failing to keep him informed should things go wrong, as he had done in December 1941. And there was a great deal to go wrong in the sectors allotted to High Command West.

Rundstedt argued from a paradox. The Atlantic Wall, conceived and ordered by Hitler as the main battle line, lacked the depth to hold by itself. On the other hand, abandoning the coast without a fight would sacrifice the advantage of the Channel as a moat. It would mean the loss of a heavy investment in fortifications. Above all, it would require staking the campaign on a mobile battle in northeastern France against an enemy whose strong point was a capacity for mobile warfare. Therefore, Rundstedt argued, the coastline must be defended to the last.

Rundstedt expected an invasion not much later than spring, 1944. He believed the Allies would land first in the Pas de Calais, then in Normandy and Brittany: sites offering the easiest passages, the shortest supply lines, and the closest locations to Germany’s frontiers. The Allies enjoyed air and naval supremacy. They already had as many divisions available for such an operation as Rundstedt could muster in his entire expanded theater. Most were first-class assault troops, young, sound of wind and limb, and equipped with the best American and British industry could provide.

Experience in both world wars showed that landings made in sufficient force would succeed. But a combination of local counterattacks to disrupt initial successes, supplemented once the Allied Schwerpunkt became apparent by the concentrated blows of a massed reserve, provided the window of an opportunity for defeating the invasion, or at least so bloodying the Anglo-Americans’ noses that they might reconsider their military and political options.

Success once more depended on the panzers. A Führer Directive of November 3 accepted most of Rundstedt’s basic propositions. For two and a half years, Hitler declared, the Reich’s energies had been directed against Asiatic Bolshevism. Now an even greater danger had emerged: the Anglo-Saxon invasion. In the east, space could be traded for time. Not so in the west. An Allied breakout from a successful landing would have prompt and incalculable consequences for the Reich. No longer could the west be stripped for the sake of other theaters. Instead its defenses must be strengthened by every means possible—above all its mobile defenses.

In October 1943, the Western theater had only around 250 armored vehicles—no more than a token against the thousands available to the Western Allies. Its half dozen mobile divisions were skeletons or embryos. The General Staff and the armored force were instructed to provide Panzer IV tanks and assault guns for the reestablished, replenished, and newly created armored formations ultimately responsible for defending northeast Europe.

Was Rundstedt, a man of advanced years and fixed opinions, the general to throw the Allies into the sea? In November 1943 the Führer sent Rommel, restored to health and underemployed commanding a shadow Army Group B, to prepare plans and suggestions for the best ways of meeting an Allied invasion. The appointment arguably reflected Hitler’s long-standing practice of establishing parallel systems for solving difficult problems. Rundstedt was familiar with that process, and pleased enough with the Führer’s newfound interest in the west, that he offered the newcomer full cooperation. Rommel recognized the awkwardness of his position and took pains to avoid stepping on his senior’s toes. But the army’s senior and junior field marshals were like oil and water. Rundstedt tended to let situations develop before he acted, all the while commenting on those developments with an irony that could alternately inspire admiration or fury in his associates. Rommel was a driver, accustomed to seeing every situation as an emergency, making snap decisions, and making those decisions work.

Rundstedt broke the fast-developing ice. On December 30 he made a formal proposal to make Army Group B responsible for the region most exposed to invasion: the Netherlands, Pas de Calais, and Normandy. Rommel applied his famous energy to the Atlantic Wall with good effect. The heart of his thinking, however, involved deploying the panzer formations so close to the coast that they could engage as the enemy crossed the beaches. Without the immediate help of mechanized reserves, the Field Marshal insisted, their air and naval supremacy meant the Allies were certain to get ashore somewhere. Undisturbed for any length of time, they would flank the defenders out of their fixed defenses and roll up the Atlantic Wall like a rug.

Rommel’s approach offered the advantage of employing the panzer divisions in ways grown familiar to their officers in Russia: counterpunch ing a tactically vulnerable enemy, with dash and tactical skill compensating for inferior numbers. It offered as well a closer link between the mechanized formations and the semi-mobile infantry divisions manning the Wall. As was the case with Model and Raus, Rommel’s plan made it less likely that the former would regard themselves as pawns for sacrifice. One of the reasons for the German infantry’s Homeric combat record on the Eastern Front was the widespread knowledge that surrendering to Ivan involved high levels of immediate risk and complete certainty of subsequent discomfort. Conditions of British or American captivity were so favorably mythologized that not a few prisoners taken during the D-Day campaign seemed surprised when their first meal did not include steak.

Rommel thought in wider terms as well. Repulsing the landings at the shoreline would buy military time that might be exploited politically. A decisive victory presented to the Führer by his favorite marshal might well prove an entering wedge for a negotiated peace. If not, there was always the German Resistance, whose plans and hopes for direct action against “history’s greatest warlord” were increasingly open secrets among those in the know at High Command West. Best evidence indicates Rommel was not directly involved in any conspiracies. He was, however, tactician enough to profit from any opportunities created by Hitler’s removal.