The Third Reich at War (81 page)

Here the Soviet generals launched a counter-attack, with the aim of encircling and destroying the German forces. The leading Soviet tank general Pavel Rotmistrov sent in fresh forces, advancing up to 380 kilometres from the rear in a mere three days with more than 800 tanks. Keeping some in reserve, he sent 400 of these in from the north-east, and another 200 from the east, against the battle-weary German forces, who were taken completely by surprise. With only 186 armoured vehicles, a mere 117 of them tanks, the German forces faced total destruction. But the Soviet tank-drivers, tired after three days’ driving and perhaps also fired up, as Red Army troops often were, by liberal doses of vodka, failed to notice a massive, 4.5-metre-deep anti-tank trench dug not long before by Soviet pioneers as part of Zhukov’s preparations for the battle. The first lines of T-34s fell straight into the ditch, and when those following on finally saw the danger, they veered aside in panic, crashed into one another and burst into flames as the Germans opened fire. By the middle of the day the Germans were reporting 190 wrecked or deserted Soviet tanks on the battlefield, some of them still burning. The number seemed so unbelievable that a senior general arrived personally to verify it. The loss of so many tanks enraged Stalin, who threatened to have Rotmistrov court-martialled. To save his skin, the general agreed with his commanding officer and with the senior political commissar in the area - Nikita Khrushchev - to claim that the tanks had been lost in a vast battle in which more than 400 German tanks had been destroyed by the heroic Soviet forces. Stalin, whose idea it had originally been to send Rotmistrov’s forces into the fray, was obliged to accept their report. It became the source of a long-lived legend that marked Prochorovka as the ‘greatest tank battle in history’. In reality it was one of history’s greatest military fiascos. The Soviet forces lost a total of 235 tanks, the Germans three. Despite all this, Rotmistrov became a hero, and today a large monument marks the site.
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The missing German tanks had disappeared in response to a redeployment order by Hitler. The rapidly deteriorating situation in the Mediterranean, and above all the Allied landings in Sicily on 10 July 1943, convinced the German Leader that it was necessary immediately to withdraw key forces from the Eastern Front, and above all the tank divisions that were taking part in Operation Citadel, and transport them to the Italian peninsula to prepare to defend it against the looming Allied invasion. Manstein still believed it would be possible to pull a limited success out of the Kursk offensive, particularly in view of the heavy Soviet losses. But on 17 July 1943 the tank commanders received the order to withdraw. Manstein and other generals bitterly reproached Hitler in later years for allegedly throwing away the prospect of victory. But the fact was that the fiasco at Prochorovka made little real difference to the overall balance of strength at Kursk. The losses sustained by the German forces in the battle as a whole were relatively light: 252 tanks against nearly 2,000 Soviet tanks, perhaps 500 artillery pieces against nearly 4,000 of their Soviet counterparts, 159 airplanes as against nearly 2,000 Russian fighters and bombers, 54,000 men compared to nearly 320,000 Russian troops. Far from being the graveyard of the German army, as it has sometimes been described, the battle had only a relatively minor impact. It had, to be sure, demonstrated that the Tiger and Panther tanks were far superior to the T-34. But this made little difference; they were simply too few in number compared to their Soviet counterparts. The aims of Operation Citadel had been limited and modest. But it had failed. Its failure convinced many German soldiers that there would be no reversal of fortune after Stalingrad. For the first time, a German summer offensive had been repulsed, not least because a two-front war was now in progress.
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This was far from being the end of the Battle of Kursk. On 12 July 1943, while the German offensive was still in progress, the Red Army launched its counter-blow. More than a million fresh troops were thrown into the battle, along with 3,200 tanks and self-propelled guns, 25,500 artillery pieces and grenade-throwers and nearly 4,000 aircraft. Together with the forces already fighting in defence, this meant that the numbers involved on the Soviet side were now overwhelming and unprecedented: more than two and a quarter million men, of whom just over one and a half million were combat troops; 4,800 tanks and self-propelled guns; and 35,200 artillery pieces. This was more than twice the size of the victorious Red Army force at Stalingrad. The numerical superiority of the Red Army was so great that it could still afford to open fresh offensives in other sectors of the Eastern Front at the same time, backed by a massive partisan operation in the German rear that tied down large numbers of German troops. The Red Army, advancing on a broad front instead of following the classic principle of trying to punch through the German lines and surround the enemy in an encircling manoeuvre, sustained horrific losses. By the time the counter-offensives were over, on 23 August 1943, it had altogether lost approximately 1,677,000 men dead, wounded or missing in action against the Germans’ 170,000; more than 6,000 tanks in comparison to the Germans’ 760; 5,244 artillery pieces compared with perhaps 700 or so on the German side; and over 4,200 aircraft against the Germans’ 524. All in all, in July and August 1943, the Red Army lost nearly 10,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, the Germans just over 1,300.
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The profligacy of Stalin and his generals with the lives of their men was breathtaking.

Yet the Germans were far less able to sustain their much smaller losses. On 2 September 1943, Otto Ẅhler, a German infantry general, confessed:

While we were forced to adopt the most difficult tactics of conserving our ammunition, the enemy could command unlimited munitions for his artillery and grenade-throwers. He thinned out our ranks to such an extent that it was no longer possible to preserve the m[ain] c[ombat] l[ine], but only to construct it from security groups linked by patrols . . . The 39th I[nfantry Division] only had 6 officers and around 300 men in the fight this morning . . . The commanders reported to me that over-tiredness had led to such apathy amongst the troops that draconian measures were not leading to the desired effect at the moment, and neither the example set by the officers nor ‘gentle encouragement’ had any success.
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The German generals were forced to retreat. Hitler was furious, and issued a stream of orders to hold the line. But the situation was impossible, and even Hitler’s favourite commander, Walter Model, disregarded his Leader’s wishes and carried out a series of tactically skilled withdrawals that managed to reduce German losses. As the Soviet troops advanced on Kharkov, Hitler ordered the town to be held at all costs: Manstein and Werner Kempf, his commander on the spot, told him it was not possible. Hitler reacted by dismissing Kempf, but his replacement said the same thing, and Hitler was forced to agree to the evacuation of the city. As the German troops withdrew from the Kursk battlefield, they left behind a scene of apocalyptic devastation, a ‘battlefield’, as one German soldier described it, ‘upon which every tree and shrub was torn to shreds, the area was covered in wrecked artillery pieces, burned-out tanks and shot-down planes . . . Pictures of the end of the world, the experience of which threatened to drive to despair the men it affected, unless they possessed nerves of steel.’
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III

The months between the Battle of Kursk in July-August 1943 and the Normandy landings in June 1944 have sometimes been called the ‘forgotten year’ of the war.
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The generals were well aware of their desperate situation, and repeatedly asked Hitler for freedom of action so that they could use the vast open spaces of the steppe to perform large-scale tactical movements, hoping to cut off advancing Soviet armies and destroy them. To Hitler, however, this seemed merely an excuse for a cowardly retreat, and as time went on he became ever more insistent on holding the line. This meant, increasingly, that German withdrawals were not integrated into any overall strategy, and took place suddenly, in reaction to the threat of encirclement by Soviet armies. Too often, German army units abandoned their position in panic flight instead of planned withdrawal.
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Throughout the whole period, the German forces were in almost permanent retreat, burning and destroying everything as they went. One young infantryman described the scene to his wife at home, as his unit withdrew across the Dnieper:

On the other side of the river everything has been burning fiercely for days already, for you must know that all the towns and villages in the areas that we are now evacuating are being set ablaze, even the smallest house in the village has to go. All the large buildings are being blown up. The Russians are to find nothing but a field of rubble. This deprives them of every possibility of accommodating their troops. So it’s a horrifyingly beautiful picture.
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Troops were possessed by a kind of lust for destruction, as this letter suggests, often leading to a breakdown in discipline and the mass looting of buildings before they were burned to the ground. Burning buildings signalled only too clearly to the advancing Soviet troops where the Germans were going, and the work of destruction wasted time and resources that might have been better spent on organizing defensive lines. Increasingly, troop units retreated on their own without waiting to be told to, as soon as their situation began to look critical.
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Nevertheless, the German armies held together against the reckless assaults of the Soviets, whose repeated frontal attacks caused them to suffer five times the losses of their opponents, sometimes more. Superior intelligence, the preparation of strong points and defence in depth enabled key parts of the front to hold the line again and again before they were overwhelmed by superior numbers and forced to retreat.
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What kept German soldiers fighting one losing battle after another? Increasingly, they felt they were fighting for Germany rather than for Hitler or for Nazism. Fear and loathing of the ‘Bolshevik hordes’, of Soviet ‘subhumans’, made them more than willing to kill and destroy. The very recklessness of their enemy cheapened life more than ever. The nearer the retreat got to the borders of Germany itself, the more desperate became the fight to save it, independently of the soldiers’ own allegiance to the principles of Nazism. At the same time, the nationalist beliefs that sustained the troops had become ever more strongly infused over the previous decade with the ideology of Nazism. It filled them with its contempt for Slavs, its assertion of German superiority and, crucially, its willingness to use violence in the pursuit of its aims.
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The intermingling of Nazism with a more traditional kind of nationalism was strongest amongst the youngest and most junior troops, and weakest in the older generations, which meant above all the top ranks of the officer corps. The majority of the generals, born in the 1880s, were nationalists of the traditional kind. They had grown up in the reign of the last Kaiser, when they had belonged unthinkingly to the ruling caste of officers, aristocrats, senior civil servants, Protestant churchmen, university professors and conservative businessmen. Many had lived in rural districts or small towns, and mixed only with the families of other officers or members of the local elite. Particularly if they came from East-Elbian Prussia, they were likely to have cast their eyes fearfully towards the looming colossus of ‘half-Asiatic’ Russia. The long military training through which they had passed had confirmed their conservative, monarchist and nationalist values just as it cut them off even further from the rest of society. Characteristic in this respect was Gotthard Heinrici, a general unusual only in the assiduity with which he kept a journal and the colourful detail in which he described what he saw and experienced. Born in 1886 in Gumbinnen, on the Polish border, he had enrolled as a military cadet in 1905, fought in the First World War and made his way up through the ranks in a typical alternation of staff and operational positions between the wars, becoming a Lieutenant-General in 1938, a full General in June 1940, and a Colonel-General on 1 January 1943. Heinrici had lived his entire life within the confines of the military elite, with no real knowledge of, or contact with, the rest of German society. His whole world had collapsed in November 1918, like that of other members of the Wilhelmine elite. He blamed the defeat on a Jewish-socialist revolutionary conspiracy on the home front and, not surprisingly, supported the Kapp putsch, hoped for the downfall of the Weimar Republic and longed for a war of revenge against Germany’s enemies. Suspicious at first of what he regarded as the vulgar radicalism of the Nazis, he was won over by Hitler’s support of rearmament and his suppression of Social Democracy and Communism. Heinrici was no Nazi ideologue, but he did come to admire Hitler, and stuck to the regime out of an innate conformism and a sense of patriotic loyalty. He supported Hitler’s aim of achieving European dominance for Germany and using it to challenge the British Empire and the United States for global hegemony, though, unlike Hitler, he remained sceptical as to whether this could be achieved. What comes through in his diary is not only his exemplary concern for the well-being of his troops, whose privations he made sure he shared, but also his narrow-mindedness, which would admit of no priority greater than the military. His casually expressed but deep-rooted prejudices against Jews and Slavs were entirely typical of his caste. His loyalty to Hitler and to his own ideas of Germany was to keep him fighting almost to the very end.
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