While these SS killing operations gained momentum, the German army’s advance slowed in late July, and the first signs of trouble began to surface. Despite their breathtaking gains, the Germans were slowly confronting some disquieting realities. Their rapidly advancing forces had outdistanced their supplies and were encountering serious logistical difficulties. Tanks broke down and replacement parts were inadequate; ammunition and fuel were in short supply. Russian and German railways operated on different gauges, and German supply trains were forced to halt and reload their cargo into Russian trains before proceeding farther east. It was a time-consuming process, and progress was slowed even more by partisan attacks, which were becoming a constant threat. Roads were also not what German intelligence had expected. Routes that appeared on maps as highways proved to be narrow, stone-paved trails, while secondary roads were often little more than sandy cattle paths that turned to mud in wet weather.
German planners believed that they had appreciated the physical immensity of the land, but when the Wehrmacht actually plunged into the seemingly infinite vastness of western Russia, it produced a profoundly unsettling psychological impact on the troops. As one German infantryman recalled, upon entering Ukraine “we came into a land of unending horizons. Endless wide steppes and grain and sunflower fields bordered our way toward the east.” Marching for days in the sweltering summer heat—once they covered sixty kilometers in less than a day—they passed through a trackless landscape of deserted huts, burned-out tanks, overturned trucks, and “endless columns of Russian prisoners in ragged brown uniforms trudging in the opposite direction.” It was a world of “dust, mud, burning heat, thunderstorms, and an endless open space with only occasional clusters of sparse trees stretching to the horizon.”
Russian troops and their equipment were also not what the German High Command anticipated. The Germans launched Barbarossa under the assumption that Russian equipment, though plentiful, was largely obsolete or of inferior quality. In many respects this proved true, but unhappy surprises nonetheless awaited the troops. While the German infantry walked, one Landser (infantry soldier, or GI in American usage) recalled, “we were astonished at how well motorized the Soviet army was, as our own artillery was represented primarily by horse drawn equipment reminiscent of World War I.” More ominous, Halder noted without comment the arrival of a new Russian heavy tank on the battlefield. It was the first appearance of the T-34, which would prove to be the most advanced and effective tank in the Second World War.
The biggest surprise, however, were the Russian troops themselves. They had been utterly routed; the Blitzkrieg was working as if by textbook, and yet the Russian soldiers didn’t seem to understand that they were beaten. They fought tenaciously, even when there was little or no hope of survival, inflicting in the process heavy losses on the Germans. Although the Soviets were suffering horrendous casualties, so, too, was the Wehrmacht. By the close of July, German losses already exceeded casualties suffered in the entire Western campaign—and German forces had not yet achieved their primary operational objectives.
As the front moved deeper into the limitless Russian landscape, thousands of scattered enemy troops were left behind. Many stragglers and small units dissolved into the forests and swamps, suddenly reappearing to launch hit-and-run attacks far behind German lines. They struck supply trains and support units, and disrupted communications, creating for the Germans an eerie sense of vulnerability, surrounded in a strange, hostile environment where dangers lurked everywhere around them.
On the last day of August a German map depot of the Sixth Army was settling into evening bivouac at a village just off the highway leading from Korosten to Kiev. They were far behind the front lines, secure and comfortable, fraternizing with the villagers. At dusk, the Russians began to withdraw to their homes, leaving the streets virtually deserted. Then came the sound of “thundering horses and a dust cloud rising to the south.” Suddenly, one German soldier recalled, “they were upon us . . . like an American film of the wild west . . . sturdy little horses riding at a gallop through our camp. Some of the Russians were using sub-machine guns, others were swinging sabers. I saw two men killed by the sword less than ten meters from me . . . think of that, eighty years after Sadowa! [the pivotal battle of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866]. They had towed up a number of those heavy two-wheeled machine guns; after a few minutes whistles began to blow and the horsemen faded away; the machine gunners started blasting us at very close ranges . . . soon tents and lorries were ablaze and through it the screams of wounded men caught in the flames.”
As unnerving as these partisan attacks were, Hitler reacted to them with characteristic ferocity. When Stalin issued an appeal to the soldiers of the Red Army on July 3 to engage in partisan warfare, Hitler welcomed it as an opportunity to escalate the violence. “This partisan warfare gives us an advantage by enabling us to destroy everything in our path. . . . In this vast area, peace must be imposed as quickly as possible, and to achieve this it is necessary to execute even anyone who doesn’t give us a straight look.”
Despite increasing and better organized partisan attacks, the impressive string of German victories continued through the late summer of 1941. In the last weeks of July Smolensk fell to Army Group Center. During the month-long battle the Soviets suffered staggering casualties, including the loss of 300,000 prisoners and some 3,000 tanks and guns. That victory appeared to open the path to Moscow, which Hitler seemed at last to consider. By this point, all discussion of the elimination of the Soviet Union as a preliminary step to the ultimate battle with Britain had ceased. The war against Russia was all-consuming. A coup de grâce against Moscow seemed in order. But in early August, Hitler diverted Rundstedt’s forces to the south toward Kiev. While the generals lamented this diversion, the results were spectacular. Army Group South took 100,000 prisoners in the Uman pocket near Kiev, and inflicted 700,544 casualties on the overmatched Red Army. In the fighting in and around Kiev, five Soviet field armies were annihilated. It was, Hitler declared, “the greatest battle in world history,” and cemented his self-proclaimed status as “the greatest field commander of all times.”
Hitler was in high spirits. He talked excitedly about putting the economy back on a peacetime footing and transferring several divisions of the Eastern Army to Western Europe. He felt vindicated in his battle with the generals. But the generals, while satisfied with their success in these operations, continued to harbor serious reservations. Hitler floated blissfully above all difficulties, but the Wehrmacht’s spectacular victories in June and July masked a set of increasingly serious problems. The Soviets were suffering almost incomprehensible casualties, but in the process were inflicting heavy losses on their German enemy. On July 20, Halder had to acknowledge that “the costly battles involving some groups of our armored forces, in which the infantry divisions arriving from the west can take a hand only slowly, together with loss of time due to bad roads, which restrict movement and the weariness of the troops marching and fighting without a break, have put a damper on all higher headquarters.”
By August, German losses had reached alarming levels, and the severely battered Red Army still showed no signs of collapse. Halder had to admit that “the whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,” who consistently prepared for war, he added with no trace of irony, “with that utterly ruthless determination so characteristic of totalitarian states.” At the outset of the war, “we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. Their divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put up another dozen.”
The Germans were beginning to feel the alarming effects of a glaring manpower shortage. Planning had been for a short war, and little thought given to the question of replacements or resupply. Although the number of divisions deployed on the Eastern Front increased by 43 to
179—impressive as Hitler studied the situation map—many were divisions in name only. The number of troops in the Eastern region had actually declined by 750,000 men since the outset of the campaign. Some companies consisted of no more than seventeen men; corporals were pressed into command positions, and replacements could not adequately fill the gaps. The huge German losses sustained in the first year of the Russian campaign would reach close to 1,300,000 men (excluding the sick), or 40 percent of the Eastern Army’s overall manpower of 3,200,000. “Certainly,” Halder grimly acknowledged in late November, “the army, as it existed in June 1941, will not be available to us again.”
Still, Hitler remained confident. “If the weather remains half way favorable,” he boasted to Goebbels, “the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.” But as the Russian campaign unfolded, Hitler’s constantly shifting priorities, his interference in day-to-day operations, and his frightful indecisiveness contributed to growing resentment among his commanding generals. Halder complained that Hitler’s “perpetual interference in matters the circumstances of which he does not understand, is becoming a scourge which will eventually be intolerable.”
Direction of the campaign was shifting from the Army High Command to the OKW, with Hitler as its leader and the compliant Alfred Jodl as chief operations officer. Many army commanders, especially in the OKH, were insistent that the time had come to position their available forces for what they had long considered a decisive war-winning push on Moscow. To them it had grown increasingly obvious that the Wehrmacht could no longer sustain three separate offensives but must marshal its resources for a concentrated drive on the Russian capital. The key to success, the generals believed, lay in Army Group Center, whose operations, they assumed, would now be directed toward Moscow.
But Hitler was still determined to deprive the Red Army of essential resources in the Baltic and in the Ukraine, and in mid-August Brauchitsch and Guderian approached Hitler directly to make the case for a concentrated drive on Moscow. Hitler remained intransigent. On August 21 Jodl, who increasingly acted as a mere liaison between Hitler and the Army High Command, relayed a message from the Führer to his nervous generals, in which Hitler stated unequivocally that army proposals for “future strategy in the East were not in accord with his views.” His message then repeated that the most important objective of the campaign was not Moscow and emphasized that “it was more important, before the onset of winter, to reach the Crimea and the Donetz basin in the south and cut off Russian oil supplies from the Caucasus area.” Meanwhile, Army Group Center was to halt, assuming a defensive posture, while two of its armor groups were sent to reinforce Army Group South and Army Group North. Moscow remained a distant third in Hitler’s thinking.
Halder no doubt voiced the reaction of the Army High Command when he slammed—albeit in private—“the absurdity of Hitler’s orders.” They would, he warned, result in “a dispersal of [German] forces and bring the decisive operation to a standstill.” The situation “created by the Führer’s interference is unendurable. . . . No other but the Führer himself is to blame for the zigzag course caused by his successive orders.” After a frustrating period of waffling on the proper strategic course, Jodl explained that the Führer “has an instinctive aversion to treading the same path as Napoleon. Moscow gives him a sinister feeling.” Trying to reassure the increasingly frustrated army commanders, Jodl argued lamely that “we must not try to compel him to do something which goes against his inner convictions. His intuition has generally been right. You can’t deny that.”
After dawdling through much of August, unable to decide on the next phase, Hitler at last, in early September, agreed to a direct assault on Moscow. He had by no means abandoned his view that the key to victory lay in the economic strangulation of the Soviet regime, but the campaigns in both north and south had not yielded the decisive victory he anticipated, and with winter bearing down on them, the seizure of Moscow, as his generals had maintained all along, might provide the rapid conclusion he desired. It was a race against time. The new operation got under way on September 3, and the Wehrmacht surged forward with a string of dramatic victories reminiscent of June. In mid-October forward elements of the 10th Panzer Division were seventy miles from the western fringes of Moscow, and on October 19 a state of siege was declared in the city. In the first week of December German reconnaissance patrols claimed that they could see the spires of the Kremlin in the distance.
But it was a different Wehrmacht now. Its equipment was in disrepair, fuel and food stocks low, casualties were high and replacements insufficient. The once-powerful Luftwaffe was severely degraded, a result of poor logistics and severe weather that greatly impeded air operations. Of the more than three thousand planes available at the launch of Barbarosa, only one thousand remained by the end of July, and only five hundred were operational by the late fall. The overtaxed troops were also suffering from low morale. Weeks of almost continuous combat had ground them down. Already in mid-August a grim report from Army Group South warned that recent Russian successes were less the result of a “change in the enemy situation as a revised assessment of the capabilities of our own troops. The plain truth is that they are exhausted and have suffered heavy losses.” That sense of growing pessimism was also beginning to be noticeable on the home front. “The hope for a quick collapse of Bolshevism has given way to a conviction that the Soviet Union cannot be defeated by the offensive war in its current form but by a war of attrition whose distant end is not yet in view.”
In October the offensive was slowed by weather, first by heavy rains and mud, then dense snow in November, and then howling blizzards in December. And always the bitter, implacable cold. German forces were ill prepared for a winter war. In November, with temperatures plunging to five, ten, fifteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit, equipment froze; engine blocks cracked; fires had to be lighted beneath the tanks to start their engines; coffee froze in mugs; even basic bodily functions became a torment. The Russians had executed a scorched-earth policy on the approaches to Moscow, leaving the advancing Germans in their lightweight summer uniforms little shelter, forcing them to huddle in shallow trenches to escape the frigid winds. German troops stuffed their uniforms with paper for insulation; they stole odd bits of clothing from the local population; many wrapped their boots in newspaper and rags. In late November the temperature dropped to −49 degrees Fahrenheit, and by Christmas 100,000 men had become casualties of frostbite—more than were lost to combat wounds.
In October, before the Russian winter set in, Wehrmacht commanders had pressed Hitler to issue a public appeal to the German people to donate winter clothing—caps, gloves, overcoats, sweaters—for the troops. But Hitler refused, fearing that such a move would signal that the war would go on through the winter, something his generals already knew. When, in January 1942, the regime finally issued a call for donations of winter clothing, a surprised German public responded with patriotic zeal, but troubling questions were raised: Why had the regime waited so long? people wondered. Surely, the call would have been more effective if it had been issued in September or even October. Why hadn’t the army anticipated this? The Gestapo reported a slump in German morale on the home front, caused by the unexpectedly long and deadly campaign in the East and by relentless British bombing of western German cities.
Outfitted with winter gear and undeterred by the severe weather, the Red Army launched furious local counterattacks, inflicting heavy casualties on the weary German troops. Still, the German offensive, called Operation Typhoon, struggled forward. But it was severely hampered by losses in the officer corps. During the first two years of the war 1,253 officers were killed in action; between the launch of Barbarossa in June 1941 and March 1942 the number skyrocketed to 15,000, the highest rate coming among junior combat officers.
Hitler refused to credit such ominous reports and increasingly dismissed advice from his top military commanders. On one occasion, when confronted with alarming figures on Russian t
ank production, Hitler flew into a titanic rage and ordered the officer who had compiled these “defeatist” numbers to be silenced. Halder, who was present at that meeting, remarked that when Hitler “went off the deep end—he was no longer a rational being . . . he foamed at the mouth and threatened me with his fists. Any rational discussion was out of the question.” If an action failed, whatever the cause, it was because the commanders in charge failed to follow his orders. Angered at Brauchitsch’s foot-dragging failure to execute his orders, Hitler relieved the general of his command in November and assumed leadership of the army himself. Frustrated by the slow advance of Army Group South, he also dismissed General Rundstedt, the conqueror of Rostov, at the beginning of December for his apparent inability to hold the city. Both men were highly respected officers, and their dismissal was greeted with concern within the military establishment and the German public. Hitler’s assumption of command of the army, which completed the Nazi hold on the military, was greeted enthusiastically on the home front but with unmistakable undertones of worry that the situation on the Eastern Front was far more serious than officially communicated.
Hitler would hear no bad news. As Field Marshal Eric von Manstein, hero of the campaign in the West and now commander of the Eighth Army in the south, observed, “Hitler was . . . disinclined to accept any reports out of hand or minimized the assertions about the enemy’s deficiencies and took refuge in endless recitations of German production figures.” When that failed to make the desired impression, he fell back on what for him was the key to victory: will, his will, Hitler believed, “had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier for the correctness of his decisions to be confirmed and the success of his orders ensured.” Such a belief in his “mission,” Manstein concluded, made him “impervious to reason” and led him “to think that his own will can operate even beyond the limits of hard reality.” There was simply no place in Hitler’s world for even a whiff of failure, and any attempt to pierce the bubble of his delusional imagination was doomed to failure.
The Third Reich Page 63
