Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (48 page)

The report concluded that, while these issues did not halt the advance of the panzer group, they did slow all
movement.

While Hoth's panzer group was breaching Soviet defences on the Dvina, to the south Guderian's forces were still closing up on the Dnepr, slowed by sabotaged bridges, sporadic enemy encounters and the usual terrain difficulties. In addition, Guderian conceded that ‘the panzer divisions after 16 days of uninterrupted fighting are somewhat exhausted’.
⁵⁵
Nevertheless, the panzer general was pushing his men as hard as ever, determined to force a crossing of the
Dnepr, which he complained on
8 July could have been achieved ‘about 3 days earlier’ against weaker resistance if Kluge had not withheld elements of his panzer group near Minsk.
⁵⁶
The vexing frustration existing between the two commanders was not alleviated by the elimination of the
Minsk pocket and the release of all Guderian's remaining forces. As the panzer and motorised divisions assembled along the western bank of the Dnepr on 9 July, Guderian ordered arrangements for immediate crossings along the length of his front. Kluge's opinion was neither asked for nor desired, and when he appeared at Guderian's headquarters the resulting clash was, according to Guderian, ‘exceptionally heated’.
⁵⁷
Kluge insisted that any attempt to cross the Dnepr must be supported by infantry and that Guderian must therefore await the arrival of
Weichs's
2nd Army. Guderian, however, would have none of this. According to his own testimony he believed that crossing the Dnepr would decide the campaign in 1941 and, after failing to convince Kluge of the need for an immediate attack, he simply stated that offensive preparations had gone too far to be cancelled. In the face of Guderian's inexorable obstinacy, Kluge was again reminded that his authority over him was largely token and thus, presented with a
fait accompli
, he grudgingly accepted Guderian's plan with the solemn warning: ‘Your operations always hang by a
thread!’
⁵⁸

Kluge was not the only one to have reservations about 2nd Panzer Group's crossing of the Dnepr. Nor was this just an example of a panzer-minded general in opposition to an infantry commander. Within Panzer Group 2 strong differences were beginning to emerge that stemmed from the constant demands being placed on the increasingly worn-out troops and equipment.
Geyer von Schweppenburg, the commander of the
XXIV Panzer Corps, asked Guderian to delay the attempt to cross the Dnepr until at least some of the infantry divisions could reach the river and support the attack, but Guderian dismissed the idea. Meanwhile, the commander of the
3rd Panzer Division, Lieutenant-General
Walther Model, had earlier had to disappoint his subordinates who were pleading for a 24-hour rest to regroup and refit. Model, who was later to rise to the rank of Field Marshal and develop a fearsome reputation as a ruthless commander, explained his decision in grave terms: ‘Every minute that we lose will cost us great losses later that we will not be able to afford…We must push forward now, otherwise we risk everything.’
⁵⁹
On 9 July Bock ordered 4th Panzer Army to direct
Guderian's rearward units towards the north to pass through the crossing made by Hoth.
⁶⁰
Guderian, however, remained a law unto himself and Bock's attempts to direct the course of operations within the panzer group were no more successful in disrupting Guderian's own plan than Kluge's had
been. Ultimately, Guderian's boldness would largely pay off with assaults across the river successfully conducted on 10 July to the north and south of
Mogilev (see
Map 5
). Yet the accomplishment was a qualified one. A direct assault by elements of
3rd Panzer Division on Mogilev proved a costly failure
⁶¹
and the
17th Panzer Division's attack near
Orsha was repulsed.
⁶²
Beyond these immediate setbacks, Guderian's success in pushing through on the weaker sectors of the front still left behind powerful enemy strongpoints that would cause havoc in the rear areas and further delay the infantry who would eventually have to deal with them. Outstanding among these was the fanatical resistance offered at Mogilev, drawing parallels with the Soviet garrison at
Brest and ultimately earning the Soviet Union's exalted distinction of ‘Hero City’. Such fortresses of the rear further exacerbated the drain on resources, as the increasingly exposed southern flank of the army group was now to be greatly extended. If there was an especially dark cloud on the German horizon, it was caused by the German command's wilful over-extension.

On 8 July, as Hoth was exploiting his breakthrough on the Dvina and Guderian's three corps were still advancing on the Dnepr
, Army Group Centre announced the end of the fighting near
Minsk. The remaining pocket around
Novogrudok had been eliminated by the infantry of
Strauss's
9th Army and Weichs's
2nd Army. However, even the official declaration to the troops hailing the success admitted that, of the 32 Soviet rifle divisions encircled, one-third had escaped albeit with a ‘reduction in their fighting strength’.
⁶³
The fact that these forces were now moving east as disparate mobile bubbles into the vulnerable rear area of the panzer groups, or holding up in the forests of Belorussia, appears to have been inconsequential to claiming a great success.
⁶⁴
Heusinger was representative of the OKH at the time in viewing the battle as a decisive blow in deciding the campaign.
⁶⁵
Yet as Major-General
Blumentritt, the 4th Panzer Army's Chief of Staff, wrote after the war:

There were not enough German troops available completely to seal off a huge encirclement such as that of Belostok–Slonim. Our motorised forces fought on or near to the roads: in the great trackless spaces between them the Russians were left largely unmolested. This was why the Russians were not infrequently
to break out of our encirclements, whole columns moving by night through the forests that stretched away eastwards. They always attempted to break out to the east, so that the eastern side of each encirclement had to be held by our strongest troops, usually panzer troops. Nevertheless, our encirclements were seldom entirely successful.
⁶⁶

In
Army Group Centre's official proclamation of 8 July the total number of prisoners captured was put at 287,704 men, with 2,585 tanks destroyed or captured and 1,449 guns taken.
⁶⁷
Time and again historians have quoted these figures to underscore the tremendous success of the German blitzkrieg in the summer of 1941, and while on the surface they do represent an impressive booty, it does not follow that the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse – indeed far from
it.

Map 5 
Dispositions of Army Group Centre 10 July 1941: David M. Glantz,
Atlas of the Battle of Smolensk 7 July– 10 September 1941

Figure 6.1 
Attempting to avoid the time-consuming delay of strengthening minor bridges tank commanders often risked crossings.

While
German offensive strength was increasingly waning, the Soviet Union was enacting the most remarkable mobilisation programme in military history. For much of the 1920s and 1930s the Red Army had developed an extensive system of cadre forces, which consisted of small numbers of active duty soldiers in peacetime, but could be rapidly expanded by reservists in wartime. To support this system the 1938 Universal Military Service Law extended the age of those obligated to serve in the army reserves to 50, and created many new military schools to accommodate the influx. By the eve of the German invasion, the Red Army possessed a mobilisation base of 14 million men. By the end of June, 5.3 million reservists had been called up, with further mobilisations following in succession.
⁶⁸
The cadre system allowed for an unheard-of rate of force generation, which completely outwitted German intelligence estimates, and disguised the real strength of the Soviet state. In July 1941 no less than 13 new field armies appeared and in August another 14 came into service. These new reserve armies were not as well equipped or as well trained as the professional armies they replaced, but as the German mobile forces weakened, more and more of the front settled down to positional warfare, allowing the new armies time to improve both. Thus, without attempting to trivialise the scale of the Western Front's military disaster in Belorussia, the fact remains that the Soviet Union's force generation scheme was able to replace its losses quickly and then dramatically expand the size of the Red Army.
⁶⁹
On 22 June 1941 the Red Army numbered 5,373,000 men; by 31 August, in spite of its losses, it had grown to 6,889,000 and by 31 December 1941 the
army had reached an estimated eight million men.
⁷⁰
After the war
Blumentritt also acknowledged the fundamental problem of latent Soviet military strength. Recalling the German offensive plans to cut off and destroy the Red Army before the Dnepr and Dvina Rivers, Blumentritt posed the rhetorical question: ‘But what if armies, millions strong, had not yet even been mobilized and only parts of the Red Army were in western
Russia?’
⁷¹

The
Soviet loss of tanks was more deeply felt as they were harder to replace and this added further strain to Soviet attempts to stop the German advance, although here too it has proved tempting for historians to overstate the extent of the German success. The Soviet Union's tank park at the start of the war numbered an incredible 23,767 tanks, but this reflected Soviet tank production since the 1920s and therefore included many that were obsolete on the modern battlefield. Some 15,000 tanks were of the older T-26 and BT series and estimates suggest that the great majority of these were in need of some form of repair.
⁷²
Added to this, the untrained crews, the severe lack of ammunition, fuel and spare parts, as well as the absence of supporting arms such as air cover, make it small wonder that Soviet tanks littered the battlefields, if they even made it that far.
⁷³
Accordingly, the apparently astounding German successes, often suggested by the sheer numbers of Soviet tanks destroyed, are better understood as a Soviet disaster waiting to happen. Put simply, inept Soviet planning and direction played a major role in handing the Germans their first major victory with the vast quantities of old and outdated equipment inflating the notion of an exceptional triumph. In reality, even in the absence of certain Soviet blunders, not much could probably have been expected from the great bulk of the Soviet mechanised arm. What was, however, of fundamental importance to the future of the war, was the production of new tanks and in this regard the Soviet leadership acted with astute resolve.

In the face of the unrelenting German advance, the
enormous evacuation of Soviet industry to the east in 1941 was indispensable in ensuring the economic durability of the Soviet Union. Accomplished with extraordinary speed and under the most adverse circumstances, which included aerial attacks from the Luftwaffe, hundreds of factories were
simply uprooted, transported into the interior and rapidly reassembled. The scale and complexity of such an undertaking is difficult to imagine, especially in the light of the national crisis overtaking the country, yet here post-war Soviet literature's propensity for grandiose superlatives such as ‘heroic’ and ‘historic’ seem justified.
⁷⁴
Between July and November, 1,523 industrial enterprises were moved to the Volga region, Siberia or Central Asia, amounting in total to some 1.5 million railway wagon-loads.
⁷⁵
Even more remarkable, the production of vital war materials actually increased in the second half of 1941, with official production quotes in some cases, such as tanks, being exceeded.
⁷⁶
Indeed the Soviet Union produced more tanks in 1941 than Germany
⁷⁷
and 66 per cent of these were of the newer T-34 and KV-1 variety.
⁷⁸
Soviet industry also turned out more aircraft and a great many more artillery pieces than Germany, helping to meet the most immediate needs of the
army.
⁷⁹