Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (50 page)

The spaces seemed endless, the horizons nebulous. We were depressed by the monotony of the landscape, and the immensity of the stretches of forest, marsh and plain. Good roads were so few, and bad tracks so numerous, while rain quickly turned the sand or loam into a morass.
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On 8 July
Harry Mielert lamented the ‘endless space in which we feel after all eerily insecure’.
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Another soldier,
Bernhard Ritter, wrote of the internal conflict this caused:

We must protect ourselves against it, must overcome it, to reach our goal, which this country with all its features attempts to prevent. It is the embodiment of the ‘without a goal’, the infinite, the never to be able to achieve one's objective. In
this country I am always in a conflict between the necessity of overcoming it and feeling its essence.
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Willy Peter Reese
wrote of the ‘boundless, the ungraspable, the overwhelming quality of this soil’, which, he concluded, ‘we eyed doubtfully, and were afraid of, and could not bear as if the daemon and the spirit of Russia preserved the land from such unsolicited, unqualified visitors’.
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Perhaps the most vivid observation was offered by
Siegfried Knappe, who alluded to the despair of endless distances and the implications for waging a war in such a country:

Everything seemed to blur into uniform grey because of the vastness and sameness of everything. We traversed treeless plateaus that extended as far as the eye could see, just one vast open field overgrown with tall grass. We encountered grain fields of unimaginable vastness that sometimes concealed Russian infantry. Fields of sunflowers stretched for kilometer after weary kilometer. In other places we encountered immense forests that were like jungles in the density of their tangled underbrush. We struggled through marshes in Byelorussia that were as large as two German provinces…

Nothing could have prepared us for the mental depression brought on by this realization of the utter physical vastness of Russia. Tiny little doubts began to creep into our minds. Was it even possible that such vast emptiness could be conquered by foot soldiers?
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Beyond the draining psychological ramifications of fighting on into the vast Soviet hinterland, the difficulties of the infantry in having to manoeuvre on foot greatly reduced their flexibility in dealing with Soviet counter-attacks, as well as their ability to provide timely assistance at trouble spots. This placed all the more importance on the motorised and panzer divisions maintaining their mobility but, in
Hoth's estimation, this was already coming to an end. Assessing the situation on 11 July Hoth foresaw hard fighting over the coming days, including counter-attacks from Soviet panzer divisions, to which he rendered the judgement: ‘Hereby the mobility of our motorised divisions will succumb.’ In Hoth's opinion the only chance of maintaining his panzer group's offensive was to finally break through Soviet defences.
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The extent of the problem was just as pressing in Panzer Group 2.
Guderian recalled that there were ‘the dense clouds of dust put up by our advancing columns [that had] endured now for weeks on end [and]
was equally hard on men, weapons, and engines. In particular the cylinders of the tanks became so clogged that their efficiency was considerably affected.’
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In these conditions fuel consumption dramatically increased with supplies usually sufficient for 100 kilometres only reaching 70 kilometres on Soviet roads. The need for extra fuel further burdened the increasingly overstretched supply system with the daily requirement rising from an original estimate of 9,000 tons to 12,000 tons by only 11 July. Not only were the roads ruining the engines, but the long distances and heavy loads were taking their toll on the tyres of the trucks which were unable to withstand the abrasion of the sandy tracks. For a long time rubber had been in seriously short supply and there were few replacement tyres to be found, but as of 10 July the OKH informed the armies that no more tyres were to be supplied.
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If the harsh Soviet terrain had exacted a severe toll on the German motorised and panzer divisions in their advance to the great rivers,
Blumentritt later recalled that even worse was to come as they continued further east. Referring to the drive beyond the Dnepr and Dvina, Blumentritt told Liddell Hart after the war:

It was appallingly difficult country for tank movement – great virgin forests, widespread swamps, terrible roads, and bridges not strong enough to bear the weight of tanks. The resistance also became stiffer, and the Russians began to cover their front with minefields. It was easier for them to block the way because there were so few roads.
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If the hinterland of the Soviet Union was troublesome for the tracked vehicles, the wheeled transport, according to Blumentritt, had an even harder time. Unlike the panzers, the heavily laden supply columns possessed no overland capabilities and were therefore bound to the abysmal road network irrespective of sand, dust or mud.
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As
Wilhelm Prüller noted in his diary on 11 July: ‘When I see even at this time of the year how our vehicles, after it's rained a little, can barely make the grade, I just can't imagine how it will be in autumn when the rainy period really sets in. We're fighting in a solid mass of dirt.’
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Blumentritt also alluded to the problem of summer downpours and the effect these had on the pace of the advance: ‘An hour or two of rain reduced the panzer forces to stagnation. It was an extraordinary sight, with groups of them strung out over a hundred mile stretch, all stuck – until the sun came out and the ground dried.’
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The size and strength of bridges was another critical weakness of Soviet infrastructure which had a detrimental effect on the swift movement of Bock's panzers. According to one post-war study written by German officers, the eastern theatre was marked by an ‘almost complete absence of solidly constructed bridges’. The simple wooden bridges that did exist (often no more than fords across small streams or brooks) often needed reinforcing by engineers before the tanks could cross and in many cases these simple constructions were destroyed by fire during the Soviet retreat.
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Complications also arose from the poor quality of German maps which were on a scale of 1:100,000 and were described by one former officer as ‘too old and almost of no use’.
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Another officer told of brown printed maps dating as far back as 1870 with just the Smolensk–Moscow highway highlighted in violet ink.
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Not surprisingly, units collided on roads, became lost and missed their objectives by large distances, leading to much unnecessary fuel consumption, lost time and wear and tear on the vehicles. Captured Soviet maps could not immediately be issued to the subordinate units because few could read the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and so these had to be overprinted with German names that did not always help readability. A further complication arose from the fact that, within a very small area, there could be three villages all bearing the same or a similar name.
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Alexander Stahlberg, an officer in the 12th Panzer Division, described the Soviet maps they were issued with as ‘fit only for use as lavatory paper’. He thought it ‘irresponsible’ to issue such maps to a panzer division and noted that the roads were ‘sloppily penned’ and ‘not at all accurately plotted’.
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Beyond problems of accuracy,
William Lubbeck added that there were too few to go around.
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Even General Staff officers, like Blumentritt, complained that the maps he dealt with ‘in no way corresponded to reality’. On these maps the main roads were marked in red and appeared to be numerous, encouraging a deceptive confidence in what was to come. The reality, however, was often nothing more than sandy tracks, for which Blumentritt criticised the intelligence service for being ‘badly at fault’.
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For all of Halder's optimism in assessing Army Group Centre's prospects for success, the fact remained that
Timoshenko was still managing to co-ordinate a ramshackle front opposing Bock's advance, as well as mustering new forces for renewed counter-offensives. Nevertheless, Halder placed little worth in the continuing Soviet opposition which he portrayed as ‘broken divisions’ being fed by ‘totally disorganised masses of men’ without officers or NCOs. ‘Under these conditions’, Halder concluded, ‘it is clear that the front, which also has no reserves left, cannot hold out much longer.’
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Curiously, in contrast to the Red Army's infantry divisions, Halder saw the Soviet motorised units as a far more enduring problem owing to their ability, as he saw it, to almost always escape encirclement. He even envisaged the possibility that the Soviets might carry on the war with two or three large armoured groups assisted by smaller subsidiary groups. On the same day (11 July) Colonel Ochsner reported back to Halder after a visit to Hoth's and Guderian's panzer groups and stated that the panzer troops had suffered heavy losses in men and material and that all the men were tired. Ochsner also commented that the Red Army was well led and ‘fought fanatically and determinedly’.
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The relative harmony between Hitler and the OKH expressed in their meeting of 8 July was already becoming strained by 12 July. Now that the great rivers had been crossed, Hitler was becoming impatient for the triumph over the Red Army which he had been led to believe was soon at hand. Yet it was not only the motorised forces of Army Group Centre that were suffering from the arduous affects of campaigning in the east. By 12 July
Leeb's smaller Army Group North was also feeling the paralysing effects of distance, dispersal, and substantial losses. After a visit to Hoepner's
4th Panzer Group, Leeb wrote in his diary of ‘heavy losses’ and concluded: ‘If further attacks are to be conducted at this pace we will soon reach a state of exhaustion.’
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The slowing pace of operations in Army Group North was leading Hitler to renew his advocacy for a northward turn by elements of Hoth's panzer group, namely the
19th Panzer Division.
Halder was reluctant to make any such diversion of forces, although his intelligence confirmed the increasing strength of Soviet forces on Bock's northern and southern flank.
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Thus, while in his response to Hitler he conceded that operations might well have to be conducted to the north and south of Army Group Centre, he
stressed ‘that the prerequisite for either move is that Hoth and Guderian break through towards the east and thereby achieve operational freedom’. Clearly, Halder favoured securing his road to Moscow before diverting his strength to the flanks and Heusinger was already working on a compromise plan aimed at seizing
Velikie Luki, which Halder hoped would cut off Soviet forces in front of Leeb's right flank, while still allowing for the intended drive on
Smolensk. A similar solution was adopted to clear Guderian's southern flank with joint operations envisaged towards Yel'nya in the north and
Roslavl in the south.
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Although Halder's new plan was calculated to alleviate Hitler's concerns and deal with the threat to the army group's flanks, the great distances involved and the dispersed objectives proved the plan was unmistakably a product of Halder's misplaced confidence in the demise of the Red Army. From Velikie Luki in the north to Roslavl in the south, the army group would be stretching its front to some 300 kilometres in width, while simultaneously supporting a major offensive in the middle of its front at Smolensk. The dilemma for the German command was, from this point on, to become an increasingly acute one, although Halder's diehard faith in the success of the campaign prevented a timely realisation of the army's dire predicament. As
Army Group Centre's advance to the east continued ahead of its two neighbouring army groups, its flanks became dangerously extended. Even if Strauss's and Weichs's infantry had been far enough forward, their respective
9th and
2nd Armies did not possess sufficient strength to cover the long flanks as well as support the panzer groups in the vanguard. Thus, Halder sought an offensive solution to clear the flanks and align the front, but in doing so he demonstrated his serious over-estimation of German offensive strength and a corresponding under-estimation of Soviet opposition. The result would push the motorised and panzer divisions beyond their offensive capacity, costing valuable strength and irreplaceable
time.

Map 6 
Dispositions of Army Group Centre 13 July 1941: David M. Glantz,
Atlas of the Battle of Smolensk 7 July– 10 September 1941