Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (39 page)

Guderian
, however, was blinded to such problems and his post-war memoir similarly glossed over the incomplete nature of the encirclement, seeking only to crown his achievements up to Minsk as an outstanding success. Recalling the final days of June Guderian wrote: ‘The Russian forces, which had been in the Belostok area and had been attempting in vain to break through our encircling pincers, were now completely surrounded…The
foundations had been laid for the first great victory of the campaign.’
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The confident tone of these later reflections disguised a more genuine picture of the fighting which Guderian set down in a letter to his wife on 27 June. After describing the first days as ‘strenuous’ he wrote of the loss of several officers who had been close to him and the sadness this caused him. When he came to the subject of the Red Army he noted with a trace of grim resignation: ‘The enemy resists bravely and bitterly. The fighting, therefore, is very hard. One just has to put up with it.’
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By nature Guderian was by no means a pessimist and indeed in past campaigns he had been accused of viewing events from quite the opposite extreme. His letter simply related the character of the new war in the east, which possessed an element of fervent hostility and ardent fanaticism, unlike anything he had hitherto
witnessed.

By the end of June a similarly grudging acknowledgement of the Red Army's unexpectedly zealous resistance was taking root throughout some of the upper circles of the Wehrmacht and Nazi party, reflecting the dramatic contrast between the reality of the war and the elevated pitch of confidence that had consumed the German leadership prior to the launch of operations. In many cases this realisation was only just beginning to dawn and, although it would be too much to suggest that any yet doubted Germany's ultimate triumph, the shock of encountering genuine resistance was palpable. On 29 June
Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘The Russians are fighting bravely. Their command is functioning better than during the first few days.’
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On the following day he remarked:
‘In foreign countries our military situation is, if anything, being judged rather too optimistically, even by our enemies. They think our Wehrmacht capable of the most amazing achievements.’
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By 1 July, despite maintaining a general satisfaction with developments, Goebbels betrayed a telling sense of disquiet: ‘[T]he Russians are putting up more of a fight than one would have expected. Our losses in men and equipment are not completely
insignificant.’
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Echoing such sentiments,
Bock described the enduring problem of defeating the sizeable Soviet armies, which the swift breakthroughs to Minsk had by no means fully achieved. Unlike previous campaigns, where surrounded enemy units acknowledged their defeat and willingly gave themselves up, Red Army units did not,
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and the implications for Barbarossa were profound. Reviewing the course of events in his rear area on 28 June Bock observed:

Our losses are not inconsiderable. Thousands of Russians soldiers are sitting in the forests, far behind the front, some in civilian clothes…catching them all is impossible given the tremendous size of the area. 100km behind the front, at Siemiatycze, the
293rd Division is still fighting for a row of strongly-fortified bunkers, which have to be taken one at a time. In spite of the heaviest fire and the employment of every means the crews refuse to give up. Each fellow has to be killed one at a time.
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A report from
4th Army to the Army Group command noted the commencement of a planned ‘cleaning action’ on 29 June against what it expected to be ‘exceptionally tough and stalwart’ resistance in the forested areas of the pocket. The report also noted that the enemy was repeatedly attempting to escape through a series of uncoordinated attacks.
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Already on 26 June
Ernst-Günter Merten, a soldier in 4th Army, noted the difficulty of fighting in the densely wooded terrain.

These bloody Russian forests! One loses the overview of who is a friend and who is an enemy. So we are shooting at ourselves…The II company was encircled and came back with 55 men. ‘Worse than at Verdun!’ said Lieutenant-Colonel von
Löhneysen.
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This drag on German forward operations caused by intense Soviet rearward action was not unique to the large concentrations in the Belostok–Minsk pocket. The diary of the
3rd Panzer Division, which was surging eastward at the vanguard of
Schweppenburg's XXIV Panzer Corps well to the south of the main pocket, noted the danger of sending prisoners of war towards the rear and instead indicated that prisoners were to be held in forward collection zones and only dispatched to the rear under special guard.
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The turmoil in the division's rear area was simply too great. A former officer in the division explained how soldiers from headquarters and those ferrying supplies were often forced to fight like infantry, while it even became necessary to station tanks at 50–100 metre intervals in the most endangered areas to ensure the safety of unarmed vehicles.
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Such measures sapped the strength of the forward drive, while the insecurity added a major complication to the already hard-pressed supply columns. The diary of the quartermaster of the 3rd Panzer Division noted on 28 June that supplies were ‘very critical’, but that their efforts to alleviate the shortage were hampered by ‘very strong aerial and artillery activity’,
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indicating that bypassed Soviet units still employed heavy weapons and that the Soviet air force was still effective, at least in certain sectors, in spite of its immense losses in the opening days of the war. The diary also mentioned the destruction of many bridges in the rear area which forced the diversion of the supply columns onto ‘very bad overland roads’. As a result, the diary noted, the fluid advance of the division was being impeded.
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Renegade
Soviet units refusing to give up the fight in spite of finding themselves behind enemy lines and, in many cases, cut off from higher command were not the only menace confronting the army group's rear area. A report from 4th Army on 29 June described road conditions for the greater part of the dual carriageways as being ‘exceptionally bad’.
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In
practical terms this naturally slowed the tempo of the advance but, more worryingly, it was also having a shattering effect on the army's horses. Given the almost total reliance of the 4th and
9th Armies on horses for the movement of equipment and supplies, their well-being and good health represented a pivotal concern for maintaining the gruelling
pace of advance. Although the carnage of winter for the horses of Army Group Centre has long been recognised, the extremes of summer and its grim toll on the army's horse population have attracted less attention. Operation Barbarossa incorporated 625,000 horses.
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Of these, 4th Army commanded 130,000 and the smaller 9th Army
87,000.
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With the time-consuming delay of switching the Soviet Union's rail gauges to the European standard, the war began with the horse bearing the great burden of the German army's push eastward. The operational time constraints, and ever pressing demands of the panzer commanders for greater infantry support led to a punishing routine of exhausting marches, that, under the sweltering conditions, rapidly fatigued the horses and drained their strength. General
Heinrici, commanding the
XXXXIII Army Corps, wrote in a letter to his wife on 8 July: ‘Now we are a long way back [from the motorised divisions,] marching 30–35 kilometres every day, the horses hardly make it along the sand [roads], but we must go on.’
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Likewise, in only the second week of the campaign,
Heinrich Haape, a doctor in the 9th Army's 6th Infantry Division, described how captured horses were already being used to replace those that had begun the campaign. ‘My ambulance horses had been replaced; old Westwall [Haape's former personal mount] had dropped dead in the harness and the other had reached total exhaustion.’
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In the circumstances, long and frequent halts had to be made to water and rest the horses,
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but this cost precious time and could not always be guaranteed depending on the immediate demands of the individual unit. Accordingly, 4th Army informed the army group command on 29 June that the horse-drawn vehicles and, in particular, the heavy artillery were reporting ‘heavy losses in horses’.
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It was precisely these larger draft horses that proved most susceptible to the intense climate and rigorous demands of the campaign, but the problem remained a general one. The German army's horses were principally made up of stout breeds raised in the temperate climates of central Europe and unaccustomed to the searing conditions and dreadful roads of the east. The long hours of work soon took their toll and the heavy losses created new dilemmas for the army. On the one hand, the infantry divisions typically started the war with a quickly exhausted reserve of only about 150 horses. Since
transporting new steeds to their units usually meant marching them long distances to the constantly advancing front, the horses often arrived in correspondingly worn-out condition. Further complications concerned the availability of fodder. The army considered oats to be the best feed for its horses, but such crops were not widely sown in the Soviet Union. The substitute of green fodder, while widely available in the Soviet Union, took time to harvest in the amounts required and proved problematic to obtain on the constant march.
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Theodor Mogge
, a non-commissioned artillery officer in the
4th Army, recorded that the tempo of the campaign was ‘a great strain’ on the horses and ‘above all those pulling the artillery’. The availability of fodder was also highlighted by Mogge. As the army advanced further east, he noted that provisions for the horses could not keep pace and, as supplies of oats soon ran out, the horses were reduced to eating the straw from peasant houses. This, however, was no replacement for their usual diet, especially in the circumstances.
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On 30 June
Bock noted in his diary, ‘the horses are tired out – with these roads they should receive much more oats’.
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The statement echoed
Halder's blunt assessment of 29 June: ‘Horses very fatigued’.
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Beyond the harsh physical demands placed on the horses, the extension of the combat zone throughout the rear area presented the additional problem of losing horses in direct engagements with Soviet troops, or in some instances to Soviet aircraft which proved devastating to the long, strung-out
columns.
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In his memoirs
Hoth proclaimed the closure of the Belostok–Minsk pocket as a ‘battle of annihilation with few precedents in the history of warfare’.
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It is an assessment similar to that presented in
Guderian's memoir and repeated in countless military histories as a glowing example of the triumphant German blitzkrieg waged in the summer of 1941. While there can be no doubt that the encirclement of
Pavlov's
Western Front represented a calamity for the Red Army, it was by no means the one-sided victory commonly portrayed. The southern flank of the pocket haemorrhaged like an open wound for the Germans, with
Kluge unable to close it, and
Guderian unwilling even to recognise the problem. In addition, merely creating the vast pocket taxed German strength considerably, a factor that needs to be assessed in the fullness of the German operational plan, and not solely on the tally of encircled Soviet soldiers.
The battle was not an end in itself, but rather the first stage of the long march east, for which it was essential that the panzer forces retained their fluid mobility and at least partial infantry support. The strain of maintaining the equilibrium of arms was eased in this first period of the war by the close starting positions of the infantry and panzers. Yet now, as the panzer divisions raced away for their next big objective, leaving the mass of infantry, already far behind and with the stubborn remnants of the surrounded Soviet armies to deal with, Army Group Centre would split in two and face the dire consequences of this foreboding
development.

Complicating matters still further, the barely restrained antagonism between the principal commanders reflected their stark differences in operational thinking. This was destined to worsen with the increasing depth of operations and the correspondent thinning of German resources. Threatening to eclipse even this embittered divergence was the pending, although still dormant, strategic pariah of Moscow.

Straining the limits – Bock's race to the rivers

With the northern ring of the pocket comparatively secure,
Hoth was setting his sights on securing the
Dvina River as far down as the
Orsha corridor and closing the next big ring at
Smolensk. Yet there was concern within his panzer group that its southern counterpart,
Panzer Group 2, had not fulfilled its assignment of firmly preventing Soviet breakouts to the south-east.
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The ramifications of this failing were serious. At Hoth's headquarters it was believed that the mass of Soviet troops opposite their northern ring, that previously had largely failed to break through, were now proceeding south to take advantage of the opening.
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While in the short term this offered improved security for Hoth's continued advance, it ensured even greater problems for
Guderian; these would doubtless slow the latter's advance and ultimately affect Hoth through the delay caused to the right hook of the next operational movement centred on Smolensk. Yet such distant concerns were secondary to Hoth's immediate goal of resuming the advance as rapidly as possible with the bulk of his forces. To do this, he faced the same battle with higher command that Guderian had been waging. Hoth's sense of urgency was heightened by aerial intelligence that, as early as 26 June, had indicated the massing of Soviet forces in the Orsha region.
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Officially, however, the further advance of
the panzer groups was still prohibited and only ‘reconnaissance forces’ were to be sent east over the
Beresina and towards the
Dnepr.
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