Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (72 page)

Victory at Smolensk? The paradox of a battle

On
5 August the great encirclement battle at Smolensk was officially declared by Army Group Centre to be over. To mark the occasion
Bock issued a grandiose order of the day to his troops, which read:

With the destruction of the Russian divisions cut off at Smolensk, the three-week ‘Battle at the
Dnepr and
Dvina and of Smolensk’ has concluded in another brilliant victory for German arms and German fulfilment of duty. Taken as booty were: 309,110 prisoners, 3,205 captured or destroyed tanks, 3,000 [artillery] guns, 341 aircraft. The numbers are not yet complete. This deed of yours, too, has become part of history! It is with gratitude and pride that I look upon a force that is capable of such an accomplishment. Long Live the Führer!
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Despite Bock's victorious proclamation being repeatedly accepted by historians as an appropriate verdict on the immense battle, the order disguises a far less favourable outcome, with the result that Bock's declaration can be more accurately understood as a simple piece of military propaganda. Bock's apparent ‘brilliant victory’ must of course be judged against its relative cost to Army Group Centre – which reveals a state of affairs far from brilliant. Indeed, within Bock's own command illusions
about the difficulties presented by the military situation
were diminishing. Two days before declaring the end of the battle, on 3 August, the army group's war diary began:

At the beginning of the 7th week of battle the army group stands with partially worn out units, limited munitions supply and without meaningful reserves, in a difficult and costly struggle to achieve the victorious end of the encirclement at Smolensk. The enemy is in number and material greatly superior. On the outer defensive front the bridgehead at Yel'nya is a deeply endangered flashpoint.
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Not only was the fighting extremely hard and bloody, but the results were not as encouraging as had been hoped. In spite of acknowledging the substantial quantities of captured weapons and equipment, the army group war diary admitted ‘prisoner numbers not as high as expected’.
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This was a fundamental admission given that the purpose of the vast encirclement was to carve out a massive hole in the Soviet front and eliminate the great bulk of the enemy facing Army Group Centre. As it was, the Soviet armies were either too far east to be caught in the pocket, or those that were managed to maintain enough cohesion to offer both fierce resistance and allow large elements to flee east through the narrow opening. Thus, the overall German operation, while rich in booty, obscured their failure to strike a decisive blow. They had failed in the Belostok–Minsk pocket and failed again in the Smolensk pocket.
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In the meantime, their motorised forces had suffered paralysing losses leaving the front stagnant and German plans in tatters. As
Blumentritt later wrote of these summer battles:

The great encirclement battles had led to the capture of huge numbers of prisoners and vast quantities of booty. But the results were not quite as satisfactory as they might appear at first glance. For one thing these great encirclements made very heavy demands on our panzer forces. For another, they were seldom entirely successful and large groups of the encircled enemy frequently slipped out of the pockets eastwards.
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Blumentritt was not alone in rendering this verdict.
Kesselring too identified the failure of Army Group Centre's large strategic movements. The operation at Smolensk aimed ‘to eliminate once and for all the Russian western army’ and while a victory of sorts was achieved, Kesselring admitted, it ‘brought no decision’. The main problem, in his opinion, was the inability to close the gap to the east, through which he guessed over 100,000 Soviet troops escaped to form the nucleus of new Red Army
divisions. Yet the operation itself was an exceedingly bold one, which Kesselring acknowledged was simply too much for the German Wehrmacht. ‘Our divisions, including the Luftwaffe, were simply overtaxed, at the end of their tether and far from their supply centres.’
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Expanding further, Kesselring addressed the fundamental problem undermining the very conception of German plans in the east.

[T]he panzer groups were too weak. Our strategic mechanised forces had to be proportionate to the depth and breadth of the area to be conquered and to the strength of the enemy, and we had not anywhere near this strength. Our fully tracked vehicles, including tanks, were not adequately serviceable. There were technical limitations to constant movement. A mobile operation 1,000 kilometres in depth through strongly occupied enemy territory requires vast supplies, especially if there is no chance of falling back on large and useful enemy stores. Our lines of communication and our airfields lay mostly in enemy threatened country, and were insufficiently protected.
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With such deep-seated difficulties, there was a degree of hopelessness in the German operations, which Kesselring also alluded to in his description of the early summer campaign:

So the word was: march and fight, fight and march, for almost a month and a half for a depth of nearly 500 miles, for part of the time inclement weather; frontal battles with the retreating forces and with new Russian divisions brought up from the back areas,…guerrilla bands that now made their appearance in greater strength, and with the low-flying, effectively armoured Russian ground-strafers which appeared in single formations of flight strength. Any normal hope of being brought out of the line for a rest, if only a short one, or of a regular re-equipment was just wishful
thinking.
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In spite of such seemingly intractable problems, by the end of the battle at Smolensk Bock and his fellow officers felt entitled to claim a great victory. By conventional military precedent few campaigns could boast such an impressive advance, undertaken in just six weeks, over countless battlefields strewn with the wreckage of huge enemy armies. Yet try as they did to cap these tumultuous weeks with a resounding stamp of victory, the rigours of this war were not to be played down or surreptitiously hidden. The British press were quick to pick up on the evident stalling of the German blitzkrieg with headlines pronouncing a Soviet victory
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and cartoons mocking Hitler after the ‘Blunting of the Blitz’.
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Churchill later noted that in this early period of the war, it was not particularly important where the eastern front lay, even if all the way to the Ural Mountains, so long as it continued to function as a front which continually devoured German strength. Indeed,
Churchill was unequivocal in his judgement about the Soviet Union's role in the war. ‘[H]istory will affirm that the Russian resistance broke the power of the German armies and inflicted mortal injury upon the life-energies of the German nation.’
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On the Soviet side, Marshal
Timoshenko's favourable summary of the battle of Smolensk to Stalin may well have been influenced by the fate of his predecessor (who was executed), but it convinced a sceptical
Stalin and bears out the facts. Timoshenko told Stalin: ‘I maintain that by the operations of these days we have completely upset the enemy offensive. The seven or eight tank and motorised divisions and two or three infantry divisions put into action against us have been deprived of offensive capabilities.’
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Even the German soldiers could hardly be expected to forget what they had been through in these first weeks of the eastern campaign, nor ignore the day-to-day reality of their lives at the front. On the same day that Bock's order was being read aloud to his troops, congratulating them on the brilliance of their victory, Hans
Meier-Welcker, an officer in the 9th Army, could only write home about the strength of Soviet artillery, the unremitting bombing and strafing attacks of Soviet aircraft and the strong Soviet patrols attempting to infiltrate his position each night. The war, he concluded, was now a ‘positional war like that of 1914/18’.
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Eleven days later when a letter reached Meier-Welcker from Germany talking of the ‘magnificent success of arms hopefully followed by peace’, he was not inclined to agree.
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Meier-Welcker perceptively foresaw that, unlike in past wars, victory was no longer to be wrung from a battle, but only from conquest – and that was still far from being achieved. Conversely, another soldier received a letter from Germany, dated 6 August, which referred to Bock's ‘special announcement’ and then continued: ‘One is always pleased when our troops achieve another success. At the same time, just as one can count to five, one can see that all this has cost many victims. Last year following the French campaign I never had such dark thoughts as I do now.’
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A personal letter from General
Heinrici to his wife seemed to confirm such dark thoughts.
On 3 August Heinrici wrote: ‘We wonder sometimes what the winter will bring. We will certainly have to remain here in Russia…So we will have to endure here a positional war along an enormous front.’ Heinrici then added sarcastically: ‘Wonderful
prospect.’
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By early August 1941 Barbarossa was in deep trouble and German claims of a definitive victory at Smolensk represented a greater propaganda success than an actual military one. In fact, given German operational objectives, the battle was hardly a victory at all. Yet this does not by default make the battle a Soviet victory. Post-war Soviet historiography eulogised the battle of Smolensk as a glorious German defeat by the Red Army; this was also an embellishment of the facts.
Zhukov's order on 20 July stipulated that counter-offensives by the
29th,
30th,
24th and
28th Armies were supposed to smash through German lines, relieve the nearly encircled remnants of the Soviet
19th,
20th and
16th Armies and re-take Smolensk.
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Instead, inexperienced Soviet commanders and critical shortages in heavy weaponry transformed much of the fighting into bloody frontal assaults, which wore down the German motorised formations, but at a cost of immense Soviet casualties. By the beginning of August some of the divisions in Timoshenko's
Western Front numbered only 1,000–2,000 men each.
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Thus, while one can claim that the Germans failed in eliminating the Western Front and, in the process, sustained crucial losses to their motorised forces, it is equally true that the Soviets failed to reach their stated objectives and suffered staggering casualties in the process. Indeed, the battle of Smolensk is perhaps best represented less in terms of a rousing victory for either side but rather as a defeat for both. Yet what remains decisive in coming to any conclusive verdict as to which side benefited the most – or suffered the least as the case may be – are the strategic ramifications of their respective failures. The Soviets lost appallingly, but could go on holding the line, while replacing their losses. The Germans lost less in terms of men and equipment, but these were catastrophic to their overall war aims, especially since Bock had still not broken Soviet resistance. Additionally, the three-week battle cost Germany irreplaceable time and the repairs to their motorised divisions would cost even more. At a minimum, Bock had to win a decisive victory at Smolensk, whereas Timoshenko really only needed to survive and go on maintaining a stout resistance. The victor was simply the side with the least to lose from their failure.

Without question, the carnage wrought at Smolensk and the volume of waste the attritional battles exacted exemplified the horrors of the
eastern front. In this initial period the fighting was characterised by two very different approaches, which also underscored two very different opponents. If the skilful German commanders thrust and jabbed their armoured divisions with dangerous precision, the Soviet colossus swung wildly with its hammer of armies. The end result of such savage combat was telling on both sides, but ultimately more so for the Germans. One German soldier who fought in World War II from 1939 until his capture in 1945 recalled: ‘The fighting around Smolensk in July and August was the heaviest and deadliest I saw during the
war.’
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If Bock's battle at Smolensk was, as he claimed, a great victory for Army Group Centre, it certainly did not resonate far enough to relieve the growing difficulties confronting the neighbouring two army groups. By early August,
Army Group North's forward progress towards Leningrad was becoming seriously complicated by the over-extension of its forces.
Leeb at least had the advantage that supply ships could follow his progress up the Baltic coastline, but these still had to be delivered considerable distances overland (especially to
16th Army) and the sunken marshlands took their toll on Leeb's
Grosstransportraum
with the highest fallout rate in the whole army (39 per cent).
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Most of Leeb's difficulties, however, stemmed from the increasingly large area in which he was operating, forcing a ceaseless dispersal of his front-line strength with every kilometre gained. As early as mid-July one of his two panzer corps was even encircled in a Soviet counter-offensive and had to commence a frantic fighting retreat, aided by air drops and a relief thrust by the
SS
Totenkopf
Division.
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Emerging from this four-day battle the
8th Panzer Division had lost 70 destroyed or damaged tanks from its remaining 150.
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As in Army Group Centre, it was the motorised divisions of Hoepner's
Panzer Group 4 that were suffering the most significant losses. Barely five weeks into the campaign, Leeb noted that 25 per cent of his panzer forces were total losses and another 25 per cent were in various states of disrepair. The SS
Totenkopf
Division and the
3rd Motorised Division were noted to have suffered particularly heavily, with the latter also recording 35 per cent casualties in officers. ‘Overall losses of Panzer Group 4’, Leeb concluded, were, ‘very heavy. The battle strength in fact seems to me to be substantially reduced.’
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