Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (85 page)

Warlimont's and Heusinger's plans were both presented to Hitler on 18 August, the same day on which Goebbels arrived at the Wolf's Lair. By this stage Hitler was already absorbing the implications of the unfavourable international developments, which, in addition to the escalating demands of the war, allowed him to recover his inner resolve over future strategy. Accordingly, if the latest submissions by the generals generated any doubts at all in the dictator's mind, they were short-lived. More likely, Hitler was not at all surprised, or pleased, by yet more submissions in favour of Moscow. This he may have rejected as simply the wrong strategy under the circumstances, or he may have even seen through Halder's ploy and suspected that the army was attempting to
manipulate him by deliberately over-estimating German strength to gain approval for the army's plans. In any case, Hitler's mind was now made up and with the lines drawn for one last showdown, the army commanders would finally be forced to accept who really controlled events on the eastern front.

It is instructive of the muddled procedures within the German command that strategic possibilities were debated with such vigour in spite of a near total disregard for operational realities. A major operation towards Moscow
was questionable not just for the demands it would place on the worn-out motorised divisions; even the most superficial assessment reveals that a further push to the east would first require large stockpiles of supplies to service the army over the long distances to come. As it was, in mid-August the
9th and
2nd Armies were living hand to mouth, unable to spare any ammunition for future operations, while the supply of fuel, oil and lubricants was likewise insufficient and did not take account of the worn state of the engines which greatly increased consumption.
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Maintaining even these inadequate levels of supply, the trucks of the
Grosstransportraum
were being ruined on long journeys that should have been bridged by the railroads. Any hope of a renewed offensive would have to depend on an improvement in the railways for which
Wagner's promises never matched reality.
In August Army Group Centre needed at least 24 trains a day just to cover day-to-day consumption; in the first half of the month barely half that number arrived.
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Thereafter Wagner promised an increase to first 30 and then 35 trains a day to establish adequate magazines for the next stage of the advance, but in practice only about 18 trains a day came through.
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Transporting sufficient supplies to the eastern front was the main problem, but distributing them to the forward units was also a major challenge, especially in the case of
Schweppenburg's XXIV Panzer Corps which was attacking away towards the south. Although the distances covered in the advance were not large, the over-extended supply system still had great difficulty keeping up over the terrible roads. On 18 August, the diary of the
3rd Panzer Division's Quartermaster-General stated: ‘The forward advance of the division is so fast that the columns are not able to
keep pace.’
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On the following day (19 August) a Soviet counter-attack caused mayhem in the rear areas by cutting across German supply lines. Schweppenburg's corps then informed Guderian's headquarters that fuel shortages and flagging offensive strengths did not allow for the capture of
Novozybkov, an important town to the east of Gomel.
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When pressed to continue the attack on 20 August, Schweppenburg's corps replied that
3rd Panzer Division was almost without fuel, the
10th Motorised Infantry Division had lost, and had to leave behind, many trucks on the bad roads, and the
4th Panzer Division was still too far to the north.
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The war diary of 4th Panzer Division also states that on the same day (20 August) oil supplies were ‘very tight’ and that the division did not expect any substantial supplies for the coming two to three days. Furthermore, the number of serviceable tanks was reported to have sunk to just 44 machines, only 26 of which were Mark IIIs (20) and Mark IVs (6).
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Accordingly, in spite of the support of the 17th Panzer Division, which was covering the eastern flank of Schweppenburg's corps against heavy enemy opposition at Pochep,
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the corps restated that a further advance towards Novozybkov was simply not possible.
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Bock recorded in his diary on 20 August: ‘Guderian informed me that he was no longer able to take Novozybkov because XXIV Panzer Corps was at the end of its
tether.’
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Clearly, supply difficulties and declining combat strengths were inadequate for sustained offensives like those undertaken in the early weeks of the campaign. It is also apparent that, in contemplating an offensive towards Moscow, the army high command repeated its pre-invasion mistake of ignoring the immense logistical constraints under which its armies would labour. Indeed, the enforced halt of Army Group Centre throughout September still only allowed for a partial stockpiling of resources for the later advance on Moscow (Operation Typhoon), and this did not include any of the winter equipment that would shortly be required in vast
quantities.
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As the offensive in the south was desperately struggling for modest territorial gains, further north Bock's front was staggering under the
weight of wide dispersal and repeated enemy attacks.
Hoth was concerned that his panzer group, already reduced by the dispatch of forces to the north, was too widely spread and subordinated to four separate command posts supporting
9th Army. Hoth wanted a unification of command and, owing to the losses in men and tanks, a concentration of all available forces; otherwise, he warned, a breakthrough of the Soviet front could not be achieved anywhere.
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He was soon in a position to have his way.
Strauss's ailing health allowed Hoth to replace him temporarily as commander of 9th Army.
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In spite of his new found freedom of action, Hoth could not ignore the perpetual state of crisis which gripped his long front. On 17 August Timoshenko's heavily reinforced
19th Army, under General Ivan
Konev,
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struck the
German V and
VIII Army Corps, forcing them back and, over the coming days, exerted major pressure on the German front around
Dukhovshchina.
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By 20 August, the raging defensive battles had left the
161st Infantry Division so exhausted that Hoth reported to Bock he would have to commit the
7th Panzer Division to stabilise the front. Bock was wary of Soviet strength and urged Hoth to also commit the
14th Motorised Infantry Division – Hoth's last reserve. Hoth, however, did not want to wait for it to arrive and ordered the 7th Panzer Division to attack alone.
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The result was a debacle. The 7th Panzer Division's attack ran into two fortified Soviet lines and was promptly beaten off with a loss of 30 tanks.
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In spite of the immense pressure being exerted against 9th Army and the disappointing results of the refitting period, Hoth was determined
not to give up the planned offensive against
Velikie Luki, preferring an offensive solution to try and regain the initiative and force the Soviets onto the back foot. The offensive had been set for 21 August, but this was delayed a day owing to bad weather. The offensive was undertaken by
Kuntzen's LVII Panzer Corps with the attack spearheaded by the
19th and
20th Panzer Divisions, supported by the
XXXX Army Corps. The attack enjoyed immediate success and by 26 August the Germans had captured Velikie Luki with 34,000 prisoners and more than 300 guns,
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but
Bock was all too aware that limited offensives like this were not going to achieve the destruction of the Red Army, nor was it adequately alleviating the pressure on his front. He wrote in his diary on 24 August:

This is the seventh or eight time in this campaign that the army group has succeeded in encircling the enemy. But I’m not really happy about it, because the objective to which I have devoted all my thought, the destruction of the enemy armies, has been dropped. [By this point Bock had learned that the offensive towards Moscow would not take place.]
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Continuing on 25 August Bock added:

[P]erhaps we will overrun the Russians in front of my northern wing and thus get things going to the point that at least the pressure on my eastern front is relieved. It can't hold much longer the way things look now. I am being forced to spread the reserves which I so laboriously scraped together for the hoped for attack behind my front just to have some degree of security that it will not be breached. If, after all the successes, the campaign in the east now trickles away in dismal defensive fighting for my army group, it is not my fault.
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While Hoth was able to provoke a new crisis in the north for Soviet forces, it did not prevent more heavy assaults against the 9th Army which by 28 August worried Bock enough to consider ordering Hoth's
panzers to strike south and come to the aid of the beleaguered 9th Army's left wing. Bock also contemplated a major withdrawal of
9th and
4th Army resulting in the loss of Smolensk.
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This did not come to pass, but it demonstrates the dire state of affairs in Army Group Centre, and the effect of the seldom discussed defensive battles which hammered the German front and exacted numerous casualties from the already weakened infantry divisions. It may well be added that these Soviet attacks were only achieved at a correspondingly high cost to the Red Army,
but while they were often extraordinarily bloody affairs their cumulative effect, since the third week of July, in bludgeoning the German blitzkrieg to a halt and plunging German forces into a sustained state of crisis should not be under-estimated.
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On 22 August Kluge's
4th Army was again reinstated between 2nd and 9th Armies,
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but unlike the old 4th Panzer Army, Kluge's new army was made up of infantry divisions with extremely limited armoured support. As the static warfare took hold,
Blumentritt (Kluge's Chief of Staff) commented on the ebb and flow of activity from the middle of August to the end of September.

Without any considerable armoured support, we were reduced to trench warfare along the Desna, which made very heavy demands on the troops. The Russians attacked violently and over and over again succeeded in breaking through our thinly held lines. Tank units had to be called in to make good the damage. This taught us that in modern warfare infantry requires armoured support not only in the attack but also in the defence.

When I say our lines were thin, this is not an understatement. Divisions were assigned sectors almost twenty miles wide. Furthermore, in view of the heavy casualties already suffered in the course of the campaign, these divisions were usually under strength and tactical reserves were non-existent.
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The problem, which was all too apparent to the infantry, if not sufficiently so to their higher commanders, was that there were nowhere near enough mobile units to back up the strung-out infantry. The result was a greatly increased level of attrition, constantly grinding down the infantry divisions in thousands of small nameless battles along the front. Describing one such encounter in late August, Heinrich
Haape wrote:

Under cover of early morning mist two regiments of Russians burst through the thinly-held lines of our neighbouring Regiment 37 and penetrated as far as their regimental battle-post…the 37th regimental commander had fallen as well as ten other officers; eight more officers were severely wounded and more than two hundred N.C.O.s and men had been killed.
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Another soldier from
9th Army serving in the
35th Infantry Division wrote home on 19 August of the worrying toll the fighting was having.

At the moment we are part of the Army reserve – and high time – we have already lost 50 men in the company. It should not be allowed to continue much longer otherwise the burden will be really too heavy. We normally have four men on the [anti-tank] gun, but for two days at a particularly dangerous point, we only had two. The others were wounded.
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On 20 August a report from the 2nd Army's
267th Infantry Division stated that in the preceding six days the division had lost around 1,000 men and that, since the start of the war in the east, the division had suffered some 2,700 casualties. In the
LIII Army Corps (to which the 267th Infantry Division belonged) losses by 22 August totalled 192 officers and 5,500 men.
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At the beginning of the war the average German infantry division consisted of about 17,000 men.
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By the end of August 1941 casualties affected the divisions as follows: in 14 divisions losses exceeded 4,000 men; in 40 divisions over 3,000; in 30 divisions over 2,000 and in 58 under 2,000.
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