Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (42 page)

Beyond the immediate measures implemented at Timoshenko's
Western Front,
the Soviet Union as a whole, in contrast to Germany, was fully mobilising for a long and gruelling war. On 22 June 1941 the Supreme Soviet drafted most of its reservists born between 1905 and 1918 into the ranks of the Red Army, while an emergency labour decree conscripted all able-bodied men aged between 18 and 45 and women between 18 and 40, who were not already working, to build defences. On 24 June martial law was declared throughout the western part of the Soviet Union and on 26 June mandatory overtime of up to three hours a day was placed at the discretion of factory managers, while all leave and holidays were suspended.
¹⁸³
For the western regions already overrun by the Germans,
Stalin's first public address on 3 July called on the occupied Soviet people to: ‘[F]oment
partisan warfare everywhere, to blow up bridges and roads, damage telephone and telegraph lines, and to set fire to forests, stores and transport. Conditions in the occupied regions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all of his accomplices.’
¹⁸⁴

On 3 July when Guderian and Hoth's panzer groups officially continued their thrust for the Dnepr and Dvina, Germany clearly held the strategic initiative. It was not enough, however, just to dictate the course of the ongoing battles; the advantage had to be turned into a final victory capable of ending the war. To achieve this Halder had no recourse to substantial reserves of manpower or equipment and the intangible factor of time was equally irreplaceable. With the Soviet Union rapidly mobilising every aspect of its enormous military potential, Army Group Centre had to deliver on the hopes of its leaders and crush the remaining Soviet resistance in the second phase of its operations.

As the renewed offensive got underway on 3 July, orders for Hoth's panzer groups directed
Schmidt's XXXIX Panzer Corps towards
Vitebsk and Kuntzen's
LVII Panzer Corps
¹⁸⁵
to
Disna on the Dvina.
¹⁸⁶
To the south Guderian's advance was already in motion and on this day (3 July) Schweppenburg's
XXIV Panzer Corps penetrated as far the Dnepr at
Rogachev. The other two panzer corps advanced on a broad front to the north with Vietinghoff's
XXXXVI Panzer Corps heading towards the Dnepr at
Mogilev and Lemelsen's
XXXXVII Panzer Corps
¹⁸⁷
to
Orsha. As they set out eastward once again, the panzer and motorised divisions found themselves delayed more by the elements and the miserable Soviet infrastructure than the Red Army.
Wilhelm Prüller noted in his diary: ‘It's raining again. The rain is especially bad for us, an armoured division, because we can barely get through the bottomless mud of Russia.’
¹⁸⁸
In a report to the 4th Panzer Army,
Panzer Group 3 stated that, on account of the awful roads, speeds were seldom above 10 kilometres per hour.
¹⁸⁹
The bad weather and road conditions occasioned
Timoshenko a short window of opportunity, in which space could be traded for time, to build defences and summon reinforcements. The
Red Air Force also attacked German bridges across the
Beresina River with some success and, according to one Soviet pilot, destroyed nine bridges and delayed the advance of some German motorised units for up to three days.
¹⁹⁰
West of the Dvina and Beresina Rivers Panzer Group 3 also reported countless individual enemy strongpoints,
¹⁹¹
which would have to be dealt with later by the following infantry. Just as in the advance to
Minsk, the panzer groups newly-won rear area would have to remain a treacherous war zone, which was especially problematic given that the vast Belorussian countryside was still far from pacified. As
Bock noted on 3 July: ‘There is still shooting everywhere in the rear.’
¹⁹²

The lack of control in the rear areas contests the over-simplified representation in much of the secondary literature, that shows the extent of the German advance in the summer of 1941 by depicting the deepest points of the German penetration along the length of the eastern front with simple north–south lines on the map. In addition to disguising the war still to be won behind the main front, the use of such lines to portray the early weeks of Barbarossa also gives the false impression that the German advance was an uninterrupted north–south sweep through the Soviet Union, undertaken on a broad unbroken front. In fact, great swathes of land were entirely bypassed as the German armies advanced largely between or around the great forests and swamps of the western
Soviet Union, leaving much work to be done in the rear area and slowing the advance considerably as the distances grew greater.

While
the euphoria of an expected victory pervaded the halls of the OKH and OKW,
¹⁹³
the precise road to that victory was still unclear and it was this question that occupied discussion at the Wolf's Lair on 3 July. The future advance of Army Group Centre's two armoured groups beyond
Smolensk was identified as the key decision for the defeat of the Soviet Union and centred on three possibilities. An advance to the north-east towards
Leningrad, a further push eastwards on
Moscow or for the first time there was discussion of a drive south-east to the Sea of Azov. Hitler's role in this discussion is not specifically stated by the document, but the new consideration for a drive to the south-east was almost certainly his idea and was made dependent on the success of
Kleist's 1st
Panzer Group seizing
Zhitomir: ‘If that is not the case, a push on Moscow by weaker forces and an advance to the southeast by Kluge's
Panzer Army would be the best method of annihilation.’ It was also added, however, that the great distance from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov (1,150 kilometres) made an advance by Kluge's forces ‘questionable’.
¹⁹⁴

On the following day (4 July) Hitler reaffirmed his confidence in victory, informing his staff: ‘I constantly try to put myself in the position of the enemy. He has practically already lost this war.’ Hitler then again raised the question of what should be done once the so-called
Stalin-Line (on the Dvina and Dnepr rivers) had been broken through. ‘Turn to the north or to the south? This might be the most difficult decision of this war.’
¹⁹⁵
Significantly, Hitler made no mention of a further advance to the east and there is no indication that Halder or Brauchitsch received word of the new developments in Hitler's evolving strategic conception. To their minds Hitler's fixation was with Leningrad and this was to be kept in check by the strong advance of
Army Group North, which they hoped would dispel the dictator's desire to divert Bock's forces away from Moscow as the principal objective. Until now, however, there had been no indication that Hitler would consider a diversion to the south.

On 3 July the
Belostok pocket, the smaller of the two main encirclements in
Belorussia, was finally eliminated by elements of Strauss's
9th Army and Weichs's
2nd Army. The following day these forces were again marching east to support the panzer groups but, as Halder noted: ‘[T]he distance has grown so great, particularly behind Guderian, that
special measures will have to be taken to bridge the gap.’
¹⁹⁶
General
Heinrici noted on 8 July that the motorised divisions were 200 kilometres ahead of his infantry divisions.
¹⁹⁷
For the infantrymen this meant forced marches of punishing duration with little time for sleep or rest. The strain this caused the men was described by Heinrici on 11 July:

Yesterday one regiment marched 54, another 47 km. To do that once is possible. To do that having already had numerous marches of 30–40 km with more to come, that is something else, it makes it tremendous. To do it no one gets to sleep at night, rather it starts at 2 or 3 [a.m.] and lasts until the evening, sometimes 10 [p.m.].
¹⁹⁸

The individual accounts of the soldiers forced to endure this torment are even more explicit. On 30 June infantryman
Bernhard Ritter wrote that substantive rest periods were no longer to be had which, after ‘strenuous battles’ he declared were ‘urgently necessary’.
¹⁹⁹
On the same day another soldier,
Harald Henry, wrote home that in one day he had undergone a march of 44 kilometres, fighting a battle in the middle of it in which he was ordered to carry a 14-kilogram ammunition box cross country for almost three hours. ‘I was completely worn out’, he wrote, ‘exhausted to the last reserve.’
²⁰⁰
Four days later, Henry wrote home again of the terrible strain he was under after another march of 45 kilometres.

We're wet through all over, sweat is running down our faces in wide streams – not just sweat, but sometimes tears too, tears of helpless rage, desperation and pain, squeezed out of us by this inhuman effort. No-one can tell me that someone who isn't an infantry man can possibly imagine what we're going through here.
²⁰¹

Alexander Cohrs
wrote in his diary on 1 July that the demands of the march that day had led to the loss of three men in his company, one of whom died. Cohrs explained that the men were lost, ‘Not as a consequence of battle, but from exhaustion resulting from the exertions.’ Cohrs
then related the physical and mental rigours of the march, concluding: ‘Towards the end, when one is fighting painfully against collapse, one occasionally hears words of
suicide.’
²⁰²
Helmut Pabst complained that, ‘[t]his marching is more strenuous than action’.
²⁰³
Another infantryman, marching with Army Group North, talked of falling into what he called ‘a quasi-sleepwalk’. Watching the steady rhythm of marching boots in front of him he entered into a state of semi-consciousness, ‘waking only briefly whenever I stumbled into the body ahead of me’.
²⁰⁴
The adjutant to the divisional commander of the 7th Panzer Division recalled after the war that in the initial weeks of Barbarossa the ‘inhuman hardships’ of the infantry ‘made us feel sorry for them’.
²⁰⁵
Heinrich
Haape vividly described the conditions of the march.

With dry, cracked lips, red eyes and dust covered faces, the men marched eastwards with only one wish – to lie down for a few hours’ rest. But the march continued relentlessly over roads and tracks, through woods and open fields…Each man's war at this stage was circumscribed by the next few steps he would take, the hardness of the road, the soreness of his feet, the dryness of his tongue and the weight of his equipment. Beckoning him on was the thought of the next halt. Just to stop, to have no need to put one foot in front of the other for a few hours, was the dream of every man.
²⁰⁶

While marching constituted its own torments, Haape also alluded to a worse fate for the infantrymen – the so-called ‘push commandos’. Two or three sections of each company were selected for this purpose and were detailed to accompany their heaviest wagons. As Haape explained:

As soon as a wagon slowed down, the men would spring forward, grab the spokes and throw their weight forward to keep the wheels moving…The men stripped off their tunics and shirts. Sweat ran down their backs, the red dust settled on them and caked hard. One squad would be relieved from its push commando duties by another, and would find blessed relief in marching.
²⁰⁷

Even as the infantry divisions struggled desperately forward, they could hardly be expected to close the gap on the motorised units that were also pressing forward with all speed. Still, while the panzer commanders gave little thought to the slow and cumbersome infantry, the 9th
and 2nd Armies were in fact the backbone of the army group and would be urgently needed in a sustained contest with the Red Army. As
Alexander Stahlberg, an officer in the 12th Panzer Division, later observed: ‘Ultimately, even in 1941, the marching troops dictated our speed.’
²⁰⁸

On the evening of 3 July
Kluge spoke with his two new subordinates in the 4th Panzer Army,
Hoth and
Guderian, about the continuation of operations. Guderian, as might be expected, used the opportunity to press again for the release of all elements of his panzer group still engaged in reducing the remaining pocket west of Minsk. His request was backed by Hoth who added that the enemy had been observed retreating eastwards. Ultimately Kluge agreed to a limited release of panzers from the 17th Panzer Division but, probably with a view to the earlier ‘mix-up’, made it clear that the rest of the division could only be relieved of its duties with his express permission.
²⁰⁹

Figure 5.5 
A field conference on 8 July 1941 between Bock (left), Hoth (centre) and Richthofen (with back to camera). As Army Group Centre's advance east continued the field commanders, who received their instructions directly from the OKH, had no idea that Hitler intended to divert their attack away from Moscow.