Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (43 page)

As
the two panzer groups set their sights on forging crossings over the Dvina and Dnepr rivers, they both reported on 4 July innovative new tactics on behalf of the Red Army. Instead of launching reckless, headlong counter-attacks, or obstinately attempting to hold every metre of ground, Soviet forces west of the Dnepr and south of the Dvina were primarily fighting rearguard actions while withdrawing to their fortified river crossings. In addition to hindering the German advance, the Soviet delaying actions won precious time to build up defences and assemble forces at the rivers, which, as the war diary of
Panzer Group 2 noted, were gaining strength ‘from day to day’.
²¹⁰
At
Panzer Group 3 a similar development was reported to 4th Panzer Army: ‘The enemy fights delaying actions while evading us on route to the Dvina, there in strong battle groups he prepares to defend the Dvina crossings.’
²¹¹
Although Timoshenko's Western Front was still threatened by a grave crisis, a learning curve in strategic direction was already establishing itself, even if the cost had been great. The main problem for
Timoshenko was rebuilding his shattered front along the river line and to this end
Stalin transferred four of the five armies from the
Reserve Front (19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd) to his command. These forces, like much of the Red Army, exhibited numerous command
and control failings and suffered shortages in a number of critical areas, but the German command was almost totally unaware of their existence and soon to be surprised at their
strength.
²¹²

On
4 July, in spite of its hardships, Hoth's panzer group secured a small bridgehead across the
Dvina near
Disna and Guderian another in the vicinity of
Rogachev. Recognising the danger, these bridgeheads were the subject of intense Soviet counter-attacks, which, in concert with stubborn resistance along the length of Panzer Group 3's front, brought its advance to a complete standstill by 5 July.
²¹³
Guderian's attack was faring little better and he reported to
Brauchitsch and
Kluge at a conference in Minsk on 5 July that: ‘As a result of personnel and material losses the momentum of the attacks by
3rd and
18th Panzer Divisions has been lost.’
²¹⁴
These
two divisions were spearheading his advance and Guderian maintained that, to restore the offensive, reinforcements had to be brought forward either from the encirclement front near Minsk or by the infantry relieving his forces from security and guard duties in the rear
area.
²¹⁵
Hoth's attack was facing the same difficulties, not only because of the tenacious resistance he was meeting, but from the cumulative loss of panzers he had suffered since the beginning of the campaign. On 4 July, after merely 13 days of action, Hoth reported that the overall number of combat-ready tanks in his panzer group had fallen to the alarming figure of just 50 per cent, while the uninterrupted march tempo and bad roads were claiming constant losses in trucks.
²¹⁶
In addition, the findings of General
Thoma's recent inspection tour of Panzer Group 3 noted that the German Mark I tank,
²¹⁷
far from assisting the German advance, was proving such a burden to the panzer troops that he recommended they all be pulled out of the line and returned to Germany.
²¹⁸
At Army Group Centre,
Bock too was taking stock of the toll the advance was taking on his forces. His diary for 5 July reads: ‘Casualties have in places been serious. Equipment, too, has suffered considerably from the uninterrupted fighting and the hair-raising roads. Among the infantry divisions it is the heavy
horses which are suffering the worst.’
²¹⁹
Expanding on this problem, a former officer of the
6th Infantry Division recalled in his memoir:

It had taken only twelve days of the campaign to show how completely unsuited was our transport to this type of country. The wagons were far too heavy for moving on these incredibly bad roads and tracks. Our beautiful well-bred horses were altogether too food-conscious and were not acclimatised…our German horses needed long rest periods, heavy meals – and food for them was rarely obtainable in quantity…They had been ideal for France, but were a hindrance for this campaign.
²²⁰

While touring the
IX and
XII Army Corps,
Bock added that the march conditions for the men were ‘made especially strenuous by the dust and heat and the frightful roads’.
²²¹
Just as Napoleon's
Grande Armée
of 450,000 men withered on its march to
Moscow even without sustained contact with the enemy, so too was Army Group Centre to lament the tyranny of distance and suffer its own rapid demise.

Figure 5.6 
Even in the summer months sudden downpours could turn the roads into a morass, slowing the advance.

Surveying the inordinate effort expended by Army Group Centre to traverse such great distances hastily with all the articles of war necessary for supplying and equipping well over a million men,
²²²
one is struck by the enormous dissipation of strength resulting from advancing across such a vast and inhospitable landscape. With many hundreds of kilometres still remaining in the advance, and an enemy by no means as badly beaten as the German command anticipated, winning the campaign was not only a race against time, but also a race against the German army's own exhaustion. For good reason the German operational plans had mandated the destruction of the bulk of the Red Army between the border and the great rivers. The consequences of this failure were compounded by the fact that the German command, from Hitler to his
generals, scarcely recognised the rapid over-extension of their forces as well as the growing threat posed by the second echelon of the Red Army. The numerous expressions of optimism in this stage in the campaign reveal the seriously ill-informed judgement of the German High Command and should not be uncritically accepted by historians as proof of the Wehrmacht's success in the early period of Barbarossa.

1
The new forward ‘Molotov Line’ was still at an early stage of construction in the recently occupied eastern part of Poland, but some of the materials were furnished from the old ‘Stalin Line’, which had been partly dismantled. The result was that neither line was adequately fortified (Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East
, p. 23). When the Germans attacked there were gaps of anywhere between 10 and 80 kilometres in the defences of the new Molotov Line and only 1,000 out of the 2,500 completed concrete emplacements were equipped with artillery; the rest had no more than machine guns. Alan Bullock,
Hitler and Stalin. Parallel Lives
(London, 1993), pp. 765–766.

2
David M. Glantz, ‘The Border Battles on the Bialystok–Minsk Axis: 22–28 June 1941’ in David M. Glantz (ed.),
The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front 22 June-August 1941
(London, 1997), p. 187.

3
‘Panzerarmeeoberkommandos Tagesmeldungen 21.6 – 31.8.41’, BA-MA RH 21–3/43, Fol. 11 (22 June 1941).

4
Ibid.

5
Franz Halder,
Kriegstagebuch: Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939–1942
, Band III:
Der Russlandfeldzug bis zum Marsch auf Stalingrad (22.6.1941 – 24.9.1942)
, ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Alfred Philippi (Arbeitskreis für Wehrforschung, Stuttgart, 1964), p. 5 (22 June 1941). Hereafter cited as: Franz Halder, KTB III.

6
‘3rd Pz. Gr. KTB 25.5.41 – 31.8.41’ BA-MA Microfilm 59054, Fol. 36 (22 June 1941). Further expressions to this effect by German officers are recorded in Anatoli G. Chor'kov, ‘The Red Army During the Initial Phase of the Great Patriotic War’ in Bernd Wegner (ed.),
From Peace to War. Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939–1941
(Oxford, 1997), pp. 425–426.

7
The XXXXIII Army Corps was made up of three infantry divisions, 131st, 134th and 252nd.

8
Johannes Hürter,
Ein deutscher General an der Ostfront. Die Briefe und Tagebücher des Gotthard Heinrici 1941/42
(Erfurt, 2001), p. 63 (24 June 1941).

9
The 167th Infantry Division was only subordinated to the XXXXVII Panzer Corps for the initial phase of operations.

10
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 1,
War Diary
, p. 224 (22 June 1941).

11
The 255th Infantry Division was only subordinated to the XXIV Panzer Corps for the initial phase of operations.

12
‘KTB 3rd Pz. Div. vom 16.8.40 bis 18.9.41’ BA-MA RH 27–3/14, p. 39 (22 June 1941). See also Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 5 (22 June 1941).

13
‘Kriegstagebuch 4.Panzer-Division Führungsabtl. 26.5.41 – 31.3.42’ BA-MA RH 27–4/27, p. 7 (22 June 1941).

14
Horst Zobel, ‘3rd Panzer Division Operations’ in David M. Glantz (ed.),
The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front 22 June–August 1941
(London, 1997), p. 241.

15
Sergei M. Shtemenko,
The Soviet General Staff at War 1941–1945
(Moscow, 1975), pp. 33–34.

16
Earl F. Ziemke,
The Red Army 1918–1941: From Vanguard of World Revolution to US Ally
(London, 2004), pp. 275–276.

17
Glantz, ‘Border Battles’, p. 200.

18
Franz Halder, KTB III, pp. 7–8 (23 June 1941).

19
Niepold, ‘Plan Barbarossa’, p. 70.

20
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 1,
War Diary
, p. 225 (23 June 1941).

21
Ibid., Fol. 2, p. 225 (23 June 1941).

22
Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 8 (23 June 1941).

23
‘KTB Nr.1 Panzergruppe 2 vom 22.6.1941 bis 21.7.41’ BA-MA RH 21–2/927, Fol. 31 (23 June 1941).

24
‘3rd Pz. Gr. KTB 25.5.41 – 31.8.41’ BA-MA Microfilm 59054, Fol. 52 (24 June 1941).

25
‘KTB 20th Pz. Div. vom 25.5.41 bis 15.8.41’ BA-MA RH 27–20/2, Fol. 14 (24 June 1941).

26
Ibid.

27
Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 9 (24 June 1941).

28
Walter Kempowski (ed.),
Das Echolot Barbarossa ’41. Ein kollektives Tagebuch
(Munich, 2004), p. 79 (24 June 1941).

29
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 3,
War Diary
, p. 226 (24 June 1941).

30
Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 9 (24 June 1941).

31
‘3rd Pz. Gr. KTB 25.5.41 – 31.8.41’ BA-MA Microfilm 59054, Fol. 52 (24 June 1941). For an informative individual insight into the extent of the guerrilla warfare from the beginning of the war, see Heinrich Haape in association with Dennis Henshaw,
Moscow Tram Stop. A Doctor's Experiences with the German Spearhead in Russia
(London, 1957), Chapter I, ‘Operation “Barbarossa”’.

32
Zobel, ‘3rd Panzer Division Operations’, p. 242.

33
Hürter,
Ein deutscher General an der Ostfront
, p. 62 (23 June 1941).

34
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 3,
War Diary
, p. 226 (24 June 1941).

35
Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 12 (24 June 1941).

36
Hoth,
Panzer-Operationen
, pp. 62–63; Bryan Fugate,
Operation Barbarossa
, p. 106.

37
‘Panzerarmeeoberkommandos Anlagen zum Kriegstagesbuch “Berichte, Besprechungen, Beurteilungen der Lage” Bd.III 25.5.41 – 22.7.41’ BA-MA RH 21–3/46, Fols. 80–81 (29 June 1941).

38
For a summation of the relationship between Hitler and Bock see Alfred W. Turney,
Disaster At Moscow: Von Bock's Campaigns 1941–1942
(Albuquerque, 1970), p. 10.

39
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 3,
War Diary
, pp. 226–227 (25 June 1941).

40
Ibid., Fol. 4, p. 227 (25 June 1941).

41
Franz Halder, KTB III, p. 15 (25 June 1941).

42
Ibid.

43
Fedor von Bock, KTB ‘Osten I’, Fol. 5,
War Diary
, p. 228 (26 June 1941).