The Second World War (73 page)

It was a tantalising choice. Stalin had not chosen to enter the Second World War; but he had chosen, even before it began, to profit from the tensions that brought it about. In the twenty-one months during which the war had raged while he stood on the sidelines, he had greatly profited from its unfolding. From his alliance with Hitler he had gained in turn eastern Poland, then – through the freedom the non-aggression pact had allowed him to attack Finland – eastern Karelia, then the Baltic states, finally Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Barbarossa had engulfed his country in the worst of the fighting brought on by the Second World War. By the summer of 1944, however, he could begin to consider again how best the Soviet Union might profit geopolitically from the war’s concluding stage. Stalin, even more than Hitler, was committed to a view of war as a political event. Between Barbarossa and Kursk the ‘correlation of forces’ had worked against him. Thereafter they began to operate to his advantage. Even as Hitler was laying the groundwork for his last offensive in the west, Stalin was considering where he might best seize the opportunities presented by the collapse of Hitler’s strategy in the east.

The disastrous Stalingrad campaign of 1942-3 left Hitler a debilitated and shaken man. Guderian, visiting him at his Ukrainian headquarters on 21 February 1943 on his unexpected reappointment to command as Chief of Panzer Troops, found him greatly changed since their last meeting in December 1941: ‘His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but lacked their former lustre, his cheeks were flecked with red. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure and was prone to angry outbursts and ill-considered decisions.’

His will to make decisions had also been weakened. In the year between the onset of the Battle of Moscow and the Russian encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad Hitler had exercised the
Führerprinzip
at its fullest. He had peremptorily dismissed generals who failed or displeased him and held the rest of the
Generalität
strictly obedient to his orders. Apart from the failure to advance boldly southward from Voronezh in July – and Bock had been sacked for that – his generals had done his will to the letter; that was precisely the problem. The triumphs of the 1942 campaign belonged exclusively to Hitler, but so too did the disasters, both the over-extension into the Caucasus and the defeat of Stalingrad. The consequent loss of twenty of the
Ostheer
’s divisions lay on his conscience, so that even two years afterwards he would confess to one of his doctors that his sleepless nights were filled with visions of the situation map marked with the positions occupied by the German divisions at the moment they were destroyed. The unspoken reproaches of his military intimates – Jodl and Keitel – were hard enough to bear; his self-recrimination was still more painful.

During the spring of 1943, therefore, in planning the
Ostheer
’s strategy Hitler conceded a freedom of action to his subordinates they had not known since his first exercises in command in 1940 and were certainly never to know again – although in other areas of policy he continued to make demands. Believing that Rommel lacked both ‘optimism’ and ‘staying power,’ he intervened heavily in the conduct of the battle against the Anglo-American armies in North Africa in the spring of 1943, releasing precious armoured units from his central reserve and requiring Goering to transfer air squadrons from Sicily to Tunisian airfields. He meanwhile hectored Goering’s subordinates about the worsening of the air war over Germany – Allied ‘round the clock’ bombing began on 25 February and heavy British or American raids on Berlin, Nuremberg, Essen, Bremen, Kiel and the Möhne-Eder dams followed in the next weeks. He demanded and got a measure of retaliation against Britain, commissioned Guderian to multiply German tank production and approved Goebbels’s programme for the promulgation of ‘total war’, outlined to him at a meeting with the Nazi Party’s Gauleiters at Rastenburg on 7 February. However, in the immediate direction of operations on the Eastern Front, his principal theatre of war-making, during the first half of 1943 he took a curiously tentative and indecisive part.

This was not to prove wholly to the
Ostheer
’s disadvantage. In Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, it had a battlefield commander of the highest quality, acutely sensitive to the tactical opportunities offered by the Red Army’s lumbering style of manoeuvre, yet strongly resistant to the psychological intimidation by which Hitler overcame the intellectual independence of his lesser generals. During February, however, in the aftermath of the Stalingrad surrender and his own aborted attempt to relieve Paulus’s Sixth Army, Manstein was discountenanced by an unexpectedly successful Soviet attack on the key city of Kharkov, west of the Don.

The Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad, and the subsequent disorder caused to the whole of the German southern front, had presented the Stavka for the first time with the prospect of seizing the initiative and throwing the
Ostheer
clean out of the Ukraine, Germany’s most valuable territorial acquisition in the Soviet Union. By the end of January a plan had been conceived for the Southern and South-West Fronts to advance as far as the line of the Dnieper, the third great river line beyond the Don and Donetz, by the spring thaw. Thereafter their neighbouring fronts would advance and swing north-westward to unseat Army Group Centre from the northern Ukraine and roll it back to Smolensk. The first and crucial move in the great offensive would be played by a Front Mobile Group, commanded by General M. M. Popov and consisting of four tank corps, which was to attack in the vanguard of Vatutin’s South-West Front and drive on Kharkov.

The Stavka plan was superficially well judged, for the Russian victory at Stalingrad had created three crises for the Germans. The Red Army’s advance from Stalingrad had thrown Manstein’s Army Group Don (renamed South on 12 February) back on to Rostov, the ‘gateway’ of the southern front. The enforced withdrawal of Kleist’s Army Group A from the Caucasus had carried it to the shore of the Sea of Azov, leaving a gap a hundred miles wide between his front and Manstein’s. Moreover, the continuation of Vatutin’s attack on the Hungarians defending Voronezh, north-west of Stalingrad, threatened after 14 January to detach Manstein’s northern flank from contact with Kluge’s Army Group B (Centre after 12 February). The opening stages of the Stavka’s offensive augured well for its success. Between 2 and 5 February Russian pressure on the lower Don was so intense that Hitler, at Manstein’s insistence, was forced to agree to the abandonment of Rostov, while a simultaneous advance from Voronezh on the upper Don brought Vatutin’s South-West Front to Kharkov on 14 February. A bitter battle for the city erupted, in which the population took part, and, despite the efforts of the elite I SS Panzer Corps (
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
and
Das Reich
divisions), the Germans were defeated and forced to abandon it on 16 February. As a result a gap nearly 200 miles wide yawned between Army Groups South and Centre.

The Stavka had, however, made two fatal miscalculations. One was to overestimate the Red Army’s capabilities. The other was to underestimate Manstein. ‘Both the Voronezh and South-West Fronts’, comments Professor John Erickson, the leading Western historian of the Great Patriotic War, ‘had done some prodigious fighting and covered great stretches of ground, following nothing less than a trail of destruction as retreating German units blew up bridges, buildings and airfields, tangled railway lines and damaged the few roads as much as possible.’ However, by mid-February the Popov spearhead, which had begun the offensive with only 137 tanks (no more than a single German Panzer division normally fielded), could put only fifty-three into action, while the so-called Third Tank Army of the Voronezh Front could find only six.

Vatutin’s decision on 12 February to ‘broaden’ the offensive, in accordance with the Stavka’s general directive, would therefore have been incautious even against a normally competent opposing commander who retained a modicum of tank reserves. Against Manstein – a supreme master of what both the German and the Russian armies called the ‘operational’ level of command – the broadening of the offensive was foolhardy. Even before the height of the crisis had been reached, Hitler had ordered seven divisions from France to his front, where he himself arrived to confer with Manstein on 17 February. The pretext was to oversee the unleashing of a counterstroke by Army Group South and to rally the
Ostheer
to the concept of ‘total war’, which Goebbels proclaimed to the German people in an inflammatory speech at the Berlin Sports Palace the next day. ‘The outcome of a crucial battle depends on you,’ Hitler wrote in an order of the day. ‘A thousand miles from the Reich’s frontiers the fate of Germany’s present and future is in the balance. . . . The entire German homeland has been mobilised. . . . Our youth are manning the anti-aircraft defences around Germany’s cities and workplaces. More and more divisions are on their way. Weapons unique and hitherto unknown are on the way to your front. . . . That is why I have flown to you, to exhaust every means of alleviating your defensive battle and to convert it into ultimate victory.’ In reality the counterstroke was not Hitler’s conception but Manstein’s. Not only had he extracted permission to launch it from Hitler during an urgent visit to Rastenburg on 6 February. He had also found the necessary armoured striking force – of a strength to make Popov’s look insignificant – by concentrating all available Panzer reserves under his reconstituted Fourth Panzer Army and positioning it alongside the First Panzer Army, in the neck of ground between the Donetz and the Dnieper across which Vatutin’s South-West Front was seeking to break its way into the German rear.

So dangerous was Vatutin’s manoeuvre, threatening as it did to cut off Army Group A in its bridgehead on the Asiatic shore of the Sea of Azov, that Hitler had actually granted permission for troops to be airlifted from it to join Manstein. Over 100,000 were to be sent in that way; but before they or any of the divisions alerted in the west arrived Manstein had struck. On 20 February his two Panzer armies mounted convergent attacks on the flanks of Popov’s Front Mobile Group, still advancing to the crossings over the Dnieper less than fifty miles away. The Russian higher command failed altogether to grasp the gravity of the changed situation. It urged Popov onward and on 21 February the General Staff even ordered Malinovsky’s Southern Front on Vatutin’s flank to join more actively in the offensive: ‘Vatutin’s troops are speeding on at an extraordinary pace . . . the hold-up on his left is due to the absence of active operations on the part of your front.’ In fact Popov was already threatened with encirclement, had begun to run out of fuel and was stopped in his tracks. By 24 February, when despite reinforcements he had only fifty tanks left, over 400 German tanks were operating against his left flank alone. By 28 February, when German tanks reached the banks of the Donetz, his group and much of the rest of Vatutin’s South-West Front were surrounded, and such units as escaped did so only because the river was still frozen.

The collapse of Popov’s offensive now allowed Manstein to unleash the second phase of his plan, for the recapture of Kharkov. The Fourth Panzer Army had now begun to receive the reinforcements sent from the west, including the SS
Totenkopf
Division (originally formed from concentration camp guards) which went to join
Leibstandarte
and
Das Reich
in I SS Panzer Corps. Their loss of Kharkov the previous month rankled savagely with these ideological warriors who, in formidable strength, opened their attack to retake the city on 7 March. By 10 March the northern suburbs were the scene of savage fighting, and two days later the city was effectively surrounded, together with numbers of Soviet units struggling to sustain the defence. Now the Germans threatened the Red Army’s centre with envelopment at exactly the spot from which they had hoped to begin the encirclement of Hitler’s. So dangerous did the situation suddenly appear to the Stavka that rather than send reinforcements to help their beleaguered formations at Kharkov they rushed them instead to the neighbouring Voronezh Front, south of Kursk, where they succeeded in holding a sector which was to become the southern face of what would soon be called the Kursk salient. With the commitment of these troops to the defensive rather than the offensive, the Soviet spring offensive of 1943 could be seen to have failed, like that which followed victory in the Battle of Moscow the year before. Some Russians had already foreseen that outcome. As Golikov, the commander of the Voronezh Front, had signalled to a subordinate at the height of the Red Army’s effort: ‘There are 200-230 miles to the Dnieper and to the spring
rasputitsa
there are 30-35 days. Draw your own conclusions.’

The
rasputitsa,
the twice-yearly wet season caused by the autumn rains and the spring thaw, which turns the dirt roads to quagmires and the surrounding steppe to swamp, had worked to Germany’s disadvantage in 1941 and 1942, delaying the advance on Moscow, into the Ukraine and on Stalingrad. Now it brought a welcome breathing space. With all the
Ostheer
’s reserves concentrated in the south, the Red Army was able to reopen a land route to Leningrad and to move against the force isolated since the Battle of Moscow in the northern Demyansk pocket – though not to prevent its escape. It was also able to sustain sufficient pressure on the Vyazma salient west of Moscow to persuade Hitler to sanction an uncharacteristic withdrawal to a short front, prepared in advance and called the ‘Buffalo Line’. However, while the wet season lasted, and despite the immense losses it had inflicted on the enemy – 185,000 among the Italians, 140,000 among the Hungarians, 250,000 among the Romanians and, by the Wehrmacht’s own reckoning, nearly half a million among the Germans – it could not find the strength to resume the offensive on any major sector.