The Second World War (35 page)

Both armies made use of it to repair the losses that winter and the fighting had inflicted. The Stavka calculated that there were 16 million men of military age in Russia and that the strength of the Red Army could be raised to 9 million in 1942; allowing for 3 million already taken prisoner and a million dead, there would still be enough men to fill 400 divisions and provide replacements. Many of the divisions were pitifully weak, but a surplus was found to create a central reserve, while the evacuated factories behind the Urals had produced 4500 tanks, 3000 aircraft, 14,000 guns and 50,000 mortars during the winter months.

The Germans were also enlarging their army. In January the
Ersatzheer
(Replacement Army) raised thirteen divisions from new recruits and ‘comb-outs’; another nine were created shortly afterwards. For the first time women volunteers (
Stabshelferinnen
) were inducted to release male clerks and drivers to the infantry in January 1942, and volunteer auxiliaries (
Hilfsfreiwillige
) were also found among Russian prisoners, most of whom turned coat as an alternative to starvation. In this way the 900,000 losses suffered during the winter were made good, though a deficiency of 600,000 remained by April. It was concealed by maintaining divisions in existence even when their infantry strength had fallen by as much as a third; tank, artillery and horse strength had also fallen. By April the
Ostheer
was short of 1600 Mark III and IV tanks, 2000 guns and 7000 anti-tank guns. Of the half-million horses the army had brought to Russia, a half had died by the spring of 1942.

Hitler was nevertheless convinced that the force which remained sufficed to finish Russia off and was determined to launch his decisive offensive as soon as the ground hardened. While Stalin had persuaded himself that the Germans would strike again at Moscow – a blow he was certain would be weakened by Germany’s need to deal with a ‘Second Front’ in the west – Hitler had an entirely contrary intention. The point of the Kaiser’s final offensive into Russia in 1918 had been to take possession of its natural wealth. The wheatlands, mines and, now more important than ever, oilfields had always lain in the south. It was in that direction, into the lands beyond the Crimea, on the river Volga and in the Caucasus, that Hitler now planned to send the Panzers for the summer campaign of 1942, to recoup and add to the great economic conquests brought to Germany by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk twenty-four years earlier.

The front that the
Ostheer
had drawn across western Russia in November, at the moment when its ‘final’ offensive against Moscow had been launched, had run almost directly north-south from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea, bulging eastward between Demyansk, to Moscow’s north, and Kursk, to the capital’s south. By May it had assumed a much less tidy configuration. Because of the effect of Stalin’s winter counter-offensive, it no longer touched Moscow’s outskirts and was now also dented in three places. Between Demyansk and Rzhev an enormous bulge protruded westward, reaching almost as far as Smolensk on the Moscow highway, and a reverse loop enclosed a pocket around Demyansk itself which had to be supplied by air. South and west of Moscow another bulge nearly enclosed Rzhev and almost touched Roslavl, on the Smolensk-Stalingrad railway. At Izyum, south of the great industrial city of Kharkov, yet another pocket bulged westward to cut the line of the Kiev railway and impede entry to Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus. The Red Army’s sacrificial attacks of January to March had not lacked result.

Hitler briskly dismissed the danger that the two Moscow salients offered to his front. The Demyansk pocket, he calculated, cost the Red Army more to guard than it cost him to maintain; his occupation of the Rzhev re-entrant kept the threat to Moscow alive; and the Roslavl bulge was unimportant. As for the situation at Izyum, it would be resolved automatically by the opening of Army Group South’s drive past Rostov into the Caucasus. The outline of that offensive (codenamed ‘Blue’) was discussed by Hitler with Halder and OKH on 28 March 1942 and issued in greater detail as Führer Directive No. 41 on 5 April. It comprised five separate operations. In the Crimea, Eleventh Army, commanded by Manstein, would destroy the Russian army in the Kerch peninsula and then reduce Sevastopol, still holding out after five months of siege, by bombardment. Bock (who had assumed command of Army Group South after recovering from illness) was to ‘pinch out’ the Izyum pocket and enclose Voronezh on the Don in armoured pincers; he had nine Panzer and six motorised divisions for the task (as well as fifty-two less reliable Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak and Spanish divisions). Once that had been accomplished, Army Group Centre would drive down the Don and cross the steppe to Stalingrad on the Volga, joined by a subsidiary force advancing from Kharkov; finally its spearheads would drive into the Caucasus (as the Kaiser’s army had done in 1918), penetrate the mountain range between the Black and Caspian Seas and reach Baku, centre of the Soviet oil industry. To protect these conquests, Hitler intended to construct an impermeable East Wall. ‘Russia will then be to us’, he told Goebbels, ‘what India is to the British.’

The economic arguments for the operation were immeasurable. Hitler declared to his generals that a success in the south would release forces to complete the isolation and capture of Leningrad in the north. However, the point of ‘Blue’ was to capture Russia’s oil. Not only did Hitler need it for Germany (he confessed to intimates of nightmares in which he saw the Ploesti fields burning out of control from end to end); he also wanted to deny it to Stalin. The economic damage Barbarossa had already inflicted on the Soviet Union was immense. By mid-October 1941 the
Ostheer
had occupied territory (which it was to retain until the summer of 1944) where 45 per cent of the Soviet population lived, 64 per cent of the Soviet Union’s coal was extracted, and 47 per cent of its grain crops, more than two-thirds of its pig-iron, steel and rolled metals and 60 per cent of its aluminium were produced. The frontier evacuation of factories (of which 303 alone produced ammunition) behind the Urals had saved essential industrial capacity from capture, though at the expense of a grave interruption of supply; but the loss, even the impairment, of the oil supply would prove catastrophic, as Hitler well knew. The ‘General Plan’ of Führer Directive No. 41 stated quite baldly: ‘Our aim is to wipe out the entire defence potential remaining to the Soviets, and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important centres of war industry. . . . First, therefore, all available forces will be concentrated in the southern sector, with the aim of destroying the enemy before the Don in order to secure the Caucasian oilfields and the passes through the Caucasian mountains themselves.’

‘Blue’ opened as soon as the ground was hard enough to bear tanks, on 8 May, with Manstein’s attack into the Kerch peninsula of the Crimea. A week later it was over and 170,000 Russians had been taken prisoner; only Sevastopol, which would not fall until 2 July, still held out in the Crimea. Meanwhile, however, the main stage of ‘Blue’, codenamed ‘Fridericus’, had been compromised. A Russian counter-attack towards Kharkov, a main tank-building centre as well as a key industrial city, began on 12 May, anticipating Bock’s ‘pinching out’ of the Izyum pocket. In a panic he warned Hitler that ‘Fridericus’ would have to be abandoned for a frontal defence of Kharkov and, when Hitler dismissed the interruption of his plan as a ‘minor blemish’, retorted, ‘This is no “blemish” – it’s a matter of life and death.’ Hitler was unmoved: he repeated that the situation would resolve itself as soon as ‘Fridericus’ gathered weight and merely insisted that the launch date be advanced one day. Events proved him right. Kleist, commanding First Panzer Army, easily penetrated the Russians’ line north of their Kharkov thrust, joined up with Paulus’s Sixth Army south of Kharkov on 22 May and thus achieved yet another of the encirclements which had dismembered the Red Army the previous year. By the beginning of June 239,000 prisoners had been captured and 1240 tanks destroyed on the Kharkov battlefield. Then followed two subsidiary operations codenamed ‘Wilhelm’ and ‘Fridericus II’, which set out to destroy the Izyum pocket and the remnants of the Russian forces isolated by the Kharkov battle respectively. Both were over by 28 June.

That was D-Day for ‘Blue’ proper. It was to be mounted by four armies in line abreast, the Sixth, Fourth Panzer, First Panzer and Seventeenth, the first two armies subordinated to one army group, the second two armies subordinated to another. Bock continued to command Army Group South, and List, who had begun his rise in the Polish campaign, commanded the new Army Group A on the Black Sea sector. They were opposed by four Russian armies, Fortieth, Thirteenth, Twenty-First and Twenty-Eighth, lacking reserves because of Stalin’s belief that the principal German threat lay against Moscow. Fortieth Army was destroyed in the first two days; the other three were forced back in confusion. The southern steppe – the treeless, roadless, almost unwatered ‘sea of grass’ which the Cossack horsemen had made their own in their escape from tsarist autocracy – offered the army no line of obstacles on which to organise a defence. Across it Kleist’s and Hoth’s armour swept forward. Alan Clark has described the advance:

The progress of the German columns [was discernible] at thirty or forty miles’ distance. An enormous dust cloud towered in the sky, thickened by smoke from burning villages and gunfire. Heavy and dark at the head of the column, the smoke lingered in the still atmosphere of summer long after the tanks had passed on, a hanging barrage of brown haze stretching back to the western horizon. War correspondents with the advance waxed lyrical about the . . . ‘Mot Pulk’, or motorised square, which the columns represented on the move, with the trucks and artillery enclosed by a frame of Panzers.

However, the unexpected ease with which the Panzers had broken across the Donetz from Kharkov into the great grassland ‘corridor’ which stretched from that river a hundred miles eastward to the Don and led southward into the Caucasus now prompted Hitler to agree to a change of plan – disastrously, as it would turn out. Bock, worried that Army Group South might be attacked in flank as it proceeded down the Don-Donetz ‘corridor’, by Russian forces operating out of the interior towards the Don city of Voronezh, directed Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army to attack and capture the city. Paulus’s Sixth Army was to be left to march down the corridor alone, unsupported by tanks, and then leap across from the ‘great bend’ of the Don to the Volga at Stalingrad, which it was to seize and hold as a blocking-point, to prevent further Russian attacks mounted from the interior against the flank of the main body when it passed by to penetrate the Caucasus.

Hitler, still directing the Russian campaign from Rastenburg, now separated by 700 miles from the vanguard of the
Ostheer
, became anxious that in fighting for Voronezh Bock might waste both time and tanks at a moment when time lacked and tanks were precious. Accordingly he flew to see the general on 3 July but was reassured by Bock’s apparent promise that he would not embroil his striking force in close combat. By 7 July, however, it was clear that the promise would not be made good. Hoth’s tanks had been drawn into the fighting for Voronezh instead of breaking off the battle to join Paulus’s infantry in the march on Stalingrad, and looked to be engaged for some time to come. Peremptorily Hitler ordered them away, and on 13 July replaced Bock with Weichs as commander of Army Group South (now renamed B); but, as he would complain for months afterwards, the damage had been done. His generals’ hopes of repeating the great captures of the previous year had been reawakened by the success at Kharkov in May. However, in the Donetz-Don corridor the Red Army, commanded by Timoshenko, had grown wilier. At the Stavka, A. M. Vasilevsky had succeeded in persuading Stalin that ‘stand fast’ orders issued for their own sake were undesirable, since they served the
Ostheer
’s ends, and in extracting permission for threatened Russian formations to slip away out of danger. So they did, assisted between 9 and 11 July by a temporary fuel crisis in Army Group B which halted Hoth’s Panzers. Between 8 and 15 July, after three aborted encirclements between the Donetz and the Don, Army Groups A and B had captured only 90,000 prisoners – by the standards of the previous year a mere handful.

The heightening tension of crisis on the steppe front now prompted Hitler to leave Rastenburg for a headquarters nearer the centre of action. On 16 July OKW was transported
en bloc
to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, still 400 miles from the Don and isolated in a Rastenburg-like pine forest – malarial, as it turned out – but nevertheless handier for direct personal intervention by the Führer in the conduct of operations. From the Vinnitsa headquarters on 23 July he issued Führer Directive No. 45, codenamed ‘Brunswick’, for the continuation of ‘Blue’. It directed the Seventeenth Army and the First Panzer Army of Army Group A to follow the Russians across the great bend of the Don and destroy them beyond Rostov. Meanwhile the Sixth Army, supported by the Fourth Panzer Army, was to thrust forward to Stalingrad, ‘to smash the enemy forces concentrated there, to occupy the town and to block land communications between the Don and Volga. . . . Closely connected with this, fast-moving forces will advance along the Volga with the task of thrusting through to Astrakhan.’ Astrakhan lay in the far Caucasus, a land fabled even to Russians; to the
Landsers
tramping eastward, already 1000 miles from home in Silesia and 1500 miles from the Rhineland, it was a place almost at the end of the earth. Hitler’s imagination leapt effortlessly at such objectives and he remembered that German soldiers had campaigned as far as that in 1918; but in 1942 a vast space and a still unsubdued Red Army interspersed between his infantry columns and the fulfilment of his dream of empire.

List’s advance southward with Army Group A at first went even faster and more smoothly than expected. Once across the Don, Kleist’s tanks raced over the Kuban steppe to reach Maikop, where the first oil derricks were seen on 9 August. The oilfield was wrecked but the Luftwaffe commander, Wolfram von Richthofen, whose Fourth Air Fleet was supporting the operation, was certain he could drive the Russians out of the Caucasus passes and clear a way through to the main oilfields beyond. A breakthrough was also important to secure possession of Tuapse, the Black Sea port through which the enemy could be supplied from Bulgaria and Romania. On 21 August, Hitler was brought news that Bavarian mountain troops had raised the swastika flag on the peak of Mount Elbrus, the highest point in the Caucasus (and in Europe), but the achievement did not please him. He wanted more tank advances, not feats of mountaineering. As the tanks reached the foothills of the Caucasus, however, the advance began to slow and Hitler vented his impatience against those around him, first Halder, then Jodl. Halder was in disfavour for other reasons: subordinate operations near Moscow and at Leningrad also failed in August, and Halder’s defence of soldiers consigned to carry out what he thought ‘impossible orders’ only inflamed Hitler’s rage against what he called ‘the last masonic lodge’.