Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (73 page)

Along with its sharp decline in offensive strength, the geographic expansion of the front forced the army group to sustain offensives both northwards into
Estonia as well as eastwards to cover Bock's left wing.
The swamps and sunken roads in these regions added further difficulties even in the absence of rainfall. Whole columns became stuck fast in knee-deep mud and overtaking resulted in some vehicles disappearing almost completely into the treacherous marshes. On one day the men of the
6th Panzer Division laboured all day among swarms of insects and searing heat only to advance two kilometres per hour.
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The army group also had to contend with a resurgent enemy, which caused the offensive to falter. In the first two weeks of Barbarossa Leeb's front had advanced some 450 kilometres, yet over the next month he struggled to manage another 120 kilometres, leaving him still 100 kilometres short of Leningrad with long, exposed flanks.
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While Leeb concentrated his forces to reach Leningrad, he acknowledged on 31 July that defending the eastern flank was ‘impossible’ as it now extended 360 kilometres.
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Two days later in a meeting with
Brauchitsch, Leeb sketched out his over-extended front and told the Commander-in-Chief of the Army that he needed 35 divisions to meet his commitments, but had only 26.
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Like Bock, Leeb desperately sought forces wherever he could find them and ordered the rear-area security divisions closer to the front.
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He also lobbied hard for the return of four infantry divisions which had previously been transferred to
Bock's 9th Army.
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The situation remained critical and on 3 August the
32nd Infantry Division was left holding a line from
Toropez to
Staraia Russa – no less than 150 kilometres long.
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Reflecting the increasingly critical situation,
Hoepner, the commander of Panzer Group 4, wrote to his wife on 15 August: ‘As a result of the overall supply situation and the cold the campaign
must
be
ended
by the end of
September.’
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Clearly, Army Group North was beset by many fundamental problems that were now endemic across the vast breadth of the eastern front. Leeb's forces could barely reach
Leningrad, to say nothing of storming the great city, and covering their long right wing would still be cause for major concern. Obviously, if a decisive blow against the Soviet state was to be struck anywhere, it would not come from Leeb's army
group.
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Figure 8.4 
From the beginning of the war in the east the German armed forces wilfully participated in the war of annihilation. Public hangings were a common reaction to partisan activity.

In the
Ukraine Rundstedt's
Army Group South faced the largest concentration of Soviet forces and with only one panzer group at his disposal,
the advance lagged far behind that of Bock and Leeb. On 5 July
Rundstedt wrote to his wife that on account of the heavy fighting and terrible roads only slow progress could be made.
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In addition, heavy rains had a catastrophic effect on movement with mud and dust alternating to slow progress and spoil the engines of the motorised columns. Curzio
Malaparte, an Italian journalist travelling with the German armies in the south, observed:

The road, if this species of cattle-track may be so described, is covered with a thick layer of dust, which with every breath of wind rises in dense red clouds. But in places, where the clayey soil has failed to absorb the rain-water, where a stream crosses the track, the sticky, tenacious mud grips the wheels of the lorries and the tracks of the tanks, which sink slowly into the
Buna
as into quicksand.
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Denied rapid movement, an encirclement of the enemy forces was not initially possible as the Soviet command enacted a frustrating mixture of
withdrawals and obstructing counter attacks. A dissipation of strength to the flanks was also inevitable, especially to the north where the 6th Army was vigorously attacked from the
Pripet marshes, forcing Halder to release reserves to help cover the lines of supply.
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The fighting in this sector was extremely bitter and within just 11 days the
98th Infantry Division alone lost 78 officers and 2,300 men.
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In spite of its difficulties the focal point of the attack, led by Kleist's
Panzer Group 1, penetrated the defensive
Stalin Line on 5 July, whereupon new objectives for Army Group South were worked out. Here Hitler and
Halder were able to agree that a sharp turn of the armour to the south and a large scale encirclement of enemy forces west of the Dnepr should have priority. A secondary task was to be a deep bridgehead over the Dnepr near
Kiev. Rundstedt argued for a rapid assault with elements of Kleist's panzer group to seize Kiev directly, but this was overruled owing to the apparent risk and a lack of infantry support.
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Unlike the armoured thrusts in the two northern army groups, where a measure of freedom was achieved, Kleist's movement was continually dogged by enemy resistance and threats to his flanks. At the end of July Halder alluded to ‘weeks of grinding at the Russian front in the Ukraine’.
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One soldier, Gottlob
Bidermann, wrote of the early weeks of the summer advance:

Our lines of supply became more strained with each day's advance, and as our momentum slowed to a crawl we continued to experience ever-increasing sporadic shelling…The Russian rearguard elements continued to withdraw before us, attempting to burn many of the few mud and straw huts in our path and always leaving an ever-present cadre of snipers, who slowly extracted a deadly price from our ranks at the cost of their own lives…The depth of our penetration into the Soviet Union began to take its toll, and ammunition rationing served as a first indication of the shortages that we were to encounter with disastrous results in future battles.
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By the first week of August Kleist's panzers manoeuvred and fought against stubborn resistance to link up with General Carl Heinrich von
Stülpnagel's
17th Army and trap the Soviet
6th and 12th Armies in the
Uman encirclement. Coming only days after the end of Bock's battle at Smolensk, Uman was trumpeted as another outstanding German victory.
Yet, after more than six weeks of heavy fighting, the Uman pocket had netted just 103,000 Soviet prisoners,
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one third of what Bock had taken in the Belostok–Minsk pocket a month before
. Far from eliminating Soviet resistance west of the Dnepr and freeing the road to the east, the Germans found themselves with significantly reduced combat strength, little time remaining and an unbeaten enemy digging in on the Dnepr. To make matters worse, the second objective, to force a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnepr, had still not been achieved. In a letter to his wife on 12 August, Rundstedt wrote: ‘How much longer? I have no great hope that it will be soon. The distances in Russia devour
us.’
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According to most accounts, by the end of the first week in August each of the three German army groups stood apparently victorious over their opposing Soviet Fronts, while plans were afoot for further advances. What is insufficiently recognised is that, operating in such vast areas, over-extension was inevitable forcing local commanders to disperse their strength and making it more and more difficult to achieve concentration for the next offensive. With the Soviet line still being doggedly held everywhere, increasing stretches of the German front passed over to defensive warfare, while strength was pulled from wherever it could be found for more limited offensives along narrower areas of the front. Only in the earliest weeks of the campaign did all three German army groups advance simultaneously and thereafter resource depletion brought combined forward operations to an abrupt halt. This heightened the importance of the strategic dispute between Hitler and Halder as Germany's shrinking offensive strength had now to be used for a final decisive blow.

In 1941 Germany's two most prominent strategic allies were
Italy and
Japan, who together had signed the
Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940 as a collective deterrent to hostile action, chiefly by the United States, against any member state. Despite the profession of unity, there was not much practical substance to their alliance, with each nation set on pursuing its own interests and almost no attempts being made at a genuinely co-ordinated strategy. It is, therefore, not surprising that
Hitler's first official notification of his intention to wage war on the Soviet Union was given in the hours before Germany launched its invasion. Hitler's unbounded confidence in the success of Barbarossa had precluded the need to request any active participation by these allies in the war against the Soviet Union, although Hitler had been trying for months to persuade Japan to seek expansion in Southeast Asia.
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Not only was Hitler
hoping to gain an ally in the war against Britain, but he hoped this would also distract American attention from Europe by threatening a war in two oceans.
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The Japanese government's desire for access to vital raw materials to sustain its long war in
China had made further expansion a priority, and the riches of Southeast Asia were eyed keenly by the powerbrokers within the navy. Alternatively, the Japanese army had long favoured a northward strike into the Soviet Union and the launch of Barbarossa had presented a seemingly golden opportunity to realise these plans. The army wanted to annex
Northern Sakhalin and the
Kamchatka Peninsula, but a sphere of influence up to Lake Baikal and even a demilitarised zone from Lake Baikal to
Novosibirsk were also projected.
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The army's preference retained less political support with its only senior representative being the Japanese foreign minister,
Yosuke Matsuoka. At the Imperial Conference on 2 July, chaired by Emperor
Hirohito, decisive steps were taken to pursue the navy's southern offensive with an immediate occupation of southern Indochina. Matsuoka was subsequently dumped from the cabinet, but war with the Soviet Union was not yet completely ruled out, although this was now made very much conditional on the success of German operations.
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An imminent collapse of the Soviet Union would reduce the risks of a Japanese intervention while ensuring them a lucrative share in the spoils.

In
Berlin Hitler's previous ambivalence to Japanese intervention against the Soviet Union was now replaced with appeals for Japanese action. In mid-July Hitler told General
Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, that the ‘destruction of Russia’ should, in his opinion, be the ‘political life's work of Germany and Japan’. Meanwhile the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria was continually being reinforced, reaching a strength of 700,000 men.
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On 16 July Oshima was given a tour of 4th Panzer Army from which he returned favourably impressed at the progress of German operations.
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The second half of July, however, proved a major disappointment for the hawks within the Japanese army who had hoped that a decisive German victory would
provoke a reversal in policy towards the northern alternative. Instead Bock's front was stalled east of Smolensk and the other army groups were achieving little more success. The much hoped for blitzkrieg was becoming increasingly doubtful and must have reminded the Japanese of their own bitter experiences with the Red Army in the summer of 1939 at
Khalkhin-Gol.
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As
Bock observed on 25 July in his diary: ‘The Japanese are taking the opportunity to establish themselves in
Indochina, but in contrast they are only lukewarm about the hoped-for attack on Russia! Neither one nor the other surprises me.’
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Japan's occupation of southern Indochina, undertaken at the end of July, was intended as a first step towards alleviating its economic difficulties, but this was promptly rebuffed in a spectacular reversal, when the
United States,
Britain and the
Dutch East Indies together instituted an economic embargo against Japan. The implications were dire indeed and, with major military commitments in China, the embargo represented economic strangulation. At this point Japanese strategic intentions finally became clear. There would be no easy victories in the north against the Soviet Union and the primacy of seizing economic objectives in the south now won over even hardliners in the army. On 4 August the Japanese government affirmed not to involve itself in the German–Soviet war
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and on 6 August, the day after Bock's victorious proclamation to the troops of Army Group Centre, the Kwantung Army was ordered to avoid any border incidents with the Red Army.
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Indeed, Japan's naval attaché in Moscow, Captain Takeda
Yamaguchi, reported on 11 August that German plans for a swift victory in the east were unrealistic. ‘If the war is conducted according to such plans, it will undoubtedly be lost.’
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If there was a window of opportunity for Hitler to gain direct Japanese military assistance against the Soviet Union, it had now passed. However, the Germans were not informed of Japan's intentions and, with conditions worsening on the eastern front, the secretary of state in the foreign office, Ernst Freiherr von
Weizsäcker, concluded at the end of August: ‘aid from Japan more necessary than previously thought’.
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Interestingly, thanks to Stalin's expert Japanese spy network, with such
well placed agents as Richard
Sorge and Ozaki
Hotsumi, top level information regarding Japanese intentions was passed back to Moscow. These reports also confirmed Japanese concerns over the stunted success of the German armies and gave
Stalin confidence enough to start moving elements of his
Far Eastern Front to the European theatre. The redeployment began in June and continued throughout the summer and autumn – bringing a total of 1,700 tanks, 1,800 aircraft, 15 rifle divisions and three cavalry divisions to the west.
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