seven
| SLAUGHTER IN THE UKRAINE
In contrast to their efforts to break the Russian northern flank
and reduce Leningrad, the Germans' operations in the south were
dazzlingly successful. All the objectives Hitler had outlined in
Directive 33 and enlarged on at various conferences with the
commanders were achieved. The Pripet Marshes were cleared; the
Dnieper bend was occupied; the river itself was crossed by tank
spearheads which drove deep into the Donetz basin; and the industrial
complex of the Ukraine was denied to the enemy, either through
dispersal or seizure. Above all, the mass of the Red Army in the
south was battered to pieces in a colossal "annihilation battle"
which cost the Russians nearly a million casualties.
Yet the operation remains essentially, because strategically, a
failure. It did not win the war for the Germans, and today we can see
that it was not necessary, even as a prelude to such a victory.
Indeed, the Ukrainian campaign went far to lose Hitler the war, in
that its conception and pursuit denied him all chance of subduing the
Russians before the winter—and thereby for another six months,
until the high summer of 1942.
The reasons for this are varied and disputable. But the most
compelling of them all is to be found in the mundane field of service
and logistics. The very scope of the Germans' success, the depth and
force of their tank drives, and the tireless manner in which they
forced the pace had thrown a severe and cumulative strain on the
machines they were using. The task of converting the Russian railway
system to the European gauge was barely started—at the
beginning of August, Halder complained that there were only six
thousand kilometres converted in the whole of the occupied
territory—and the "tank transporter" concept (the
practice of carrying the tanks on truck-drawn trailers to save wear
on their tracks) was in its infancy. The result was that the Panzers
were moving everywhere under their own power, and after two months of
fighting they were in urgent need of attention. Engines, driving
gear, track sprockets and grousers, even secondary moving parts like
the turret traversers, were all in need of attention, choked by the
dust and dangerously overstressed on the endless bad going.
Guderian's first reaction on being told the new plans for his
Gruppe
(a round march of over six hundred miles) had been grimly prophetic.
"I doubt if the machines will stand it," he said, "even
if we are unopposed."
The Russian front in the south had begun to give way at the
beginning of July, when Kirponos, with his tank strength exhausted,
had been levered off the Rovno-Dubno-Ternopol axis and forced back at
a pace, which daily gathered momentum, into the wide-open spaces of
the Ukraine proper. At the same time the Balkan satellite armies
which had been ranged along the Prut under Schobert were prodded into
action, and began to move slowly into Bessarabia and the area of the
"Odessa Military District." The effect of these
developments was that the active front in the south more than trebled
its length at the very moment that the frontier armies were beginning
to give way.
On 10th July the
Stavka
had fused the two commands [The
southern and southwestern (Odessa M.D.) "group."] and
placed them under a new hand—that of Marshal of the Soviet
Union S. M. Budënny, who brought as his Commissar, charged
specially with the "organisation" (i.e., the evacuation) of
industry, Lieutenant General N. S. Khrushchev.
Khrushchev we know. Since that day in 1941 much has been written
about him, and at this stage there is nothing that need be added save
to point to the link between his appointment and the position of an
old friend, Anastas Mikoyan, on the supreme "Evacuation Soviet,"
which had nationwide authority in all matters pertaining to the
evacuation of industry. Khrushchev's own tireless energy and resource
must be reckoned the inspiration behind one of the most substantial
(though least publicised) of the Soviet achievements in 1941—the
wholesale dismantling and removal to the east of nearly one quarter
of the country's industrial capacity. But Khrushchev's talents were
ill complemented by those of his military colleague.
It is hard to see any positive quality which rendered Budënny
eligible for this vital command—unless it is that certain
paysan rusé
cunning which, allied to his jovial
mediocrity, had kept him out of trouble during the purges (with
Voroshilov he had been the only Marshal to survive)—and only
too easy to detect in his career that fortuitous combination of luck
and circumstance which brought him to preside over one of the most
disastrous land battles in history.
Budënny had been a sergeant major in a cavalry division (not
the Cossacks, although later he did not object to a myth asserting
this). In 1917 he had joined the "Regimental and Divisional
Revolutionary Committee," and after a number of vicissitudes
found his way to Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad), where he had met up with
Voroshilov. With Stalin and Yegorov (who was to go under in the 1937
purge) he formed the 1st Red Cavalry Army. Two years later, in the
war against Poland, he had shown singular clumsiness in his handling
of even divisional-size units, failing to coordinate with
Tukhachevski's attack on Warsaw and being forced into a humiliating
retreat. With the exception of a punitive cavalry mission against the
Georgians in 1920, Budënny did not hold an active command until
the outbreak of war although, benefiting from Stalin's precept that
"reliability" is more desirable than aptitude, his ascent,
through a succession of staff appointments, had been rapid.
With his love of the cavalry charge, his handle-bar moustaches,
and mahogany-butt revolvers hanging at his waist, Budënny
resembles nothing more than a Slavic synthesis of Foch and
Patton—with the talents of neither and a taste for
self-indulgence which, if either of those two great commanders
possessed it, has been mercifully kept from posterity.
[As First Deputy Commissar for Defence in 1940, Budënny had
visited the lately annexed province of Bessarabia, where a party was
given in his honour at the distilleries at Kishinev. Toward the close
of festivities a canvas screen was ripped off the largest vat, which
had been filled with red wine to a depth of one and a half metres.
Inside were a number of naked girls desporting themselves in the warm
red liquid. Without further ado Budënny and his aides threw off
their clothes and joined the nymphs in the pool. The bacchanalia
gathered momentum until another guest, disgruntled at being unable to
climb into the vat, fired a long burst at it with a tommy gun; three
of the occupants were injured, and the wine ran out of the holes and
onto the floor of the distillery. The orgy then moved to more
comfortable quarters at the back of the building.]
Here, indeed, was an unhappy choice to oppose Rundstedt, one of
the coolest brains on the German General Staff, and Kleist, one of
its most vigorous Panzer commanders.
But Budënny still had something which both his colleagues at
Leningrad and in the centre had already dissipated—numerical
superiority. Stalin's decision that Kiev was to be held at all costs
had given top priority in the allocation of men and equipment to the
southern sector, and the more highly developed railway system in the
Ukraine speeded their concentration (it was at Kiev station that
Halder had first noted the practice of dumping the rolling stock and
sending the engines back alone).
The configuration of the railways had resulted in two major
concentration areas, the first at Kiev itself and the second, drawing
reinforcement up the southern route Nikopol-Krivoi Rog, from the
Crimea and Azov districts, at Uman. Between these two Budënny
disposed of a million and a half soldiers, or more than half the
active strength of the Red Army at this time. But even had this force
been directed by a commander worthy of its latent strength and
unencumbered by the rigidity of
Stavka
interference, the
Russians would have been hard put to match Rundstedt's speed once he
had broken up Kirponos' armour in the frontier battles. Feeling the
weight of the Russian infantry deploying in front of Kiev and daily
appraised by the Luftwaffe of its rate of increase, Rundstedt decided
to force his armour through to the south and take the option of
wheeling either to the Dnieper or the Black Sea. The German commander
knew that neither of the concentrations, at Uman or Kiev, had
sufficient tank strength to menace his flanks, and that once Kleist
had broken through, the Panzers would be able to roam at will. What
was urgent was to breach the Russian line before the new masses of
infantry and artillery could be defensively deployed.
On 12th July, Kleist had completed his concentration of all three
Panzer corps at Zhitomir, and within the next three days he had
driven the Russians off the vital twenty-mile stretch of the
Berdichev-Kazatin railway, entering both towns on the night of
15th-16th July. This effectively severed the north-to-south
communications of Budënny's front and enforced a
de facto
reversion to the division (between "southern" and
"southwestern" theatres) which his appointment, still less
than a week old, had been intended to eliminate. The only solution
for the Russians was a strategic withdrawal, deep into the Dnieper
bend, with their flanks hung on Kiev and Odessa. Lengthening the
front would have presented no problems to Budënny, who each day
was putting more of his freshly mobilised forces into readiness, but
it would have faced Rundstedt with a difficult choice: whether to
press into the empty but menacing salient between Odessa and the
Dnieper or to revert to a frontal assault on Kiev, an operation which
promised to be costly and protracted.
Indeed, for a few days it seemed as if the Russians might have
opted for this course, because on 16th July, after hearing of the
fall of Berdichev, Budënny ordered Tyulenev to evacuate Kishinev
and bring all his forces back behind the Dniester. But such action
was already long overdue, and the Marshal's failure to appreciate the
real gravity of the situation is corroborated by his order (on 17th
July) that Tyulenev was "to assemble his reserves and
concentrate them in the Uman area." Another week passed while a
strange paralysis seemed to have gripped the Russian command. Men and
guns poured into Uman, the region itself, like the vortex of a
tornado, enjoying a sinister calm. But on the fringes of the
concentration area the storm warnings were sounding with terrible
urgency. Reichenau was driving due east from Kazatin with his
motorised corps, including the SS Adolf Hitler and Viking; Stülpnagel
had widened the breach by capturing Vinnitsa and Shmerinka, and
thereby deprived the armies at Uman of any chance of success in a
move northwestward; and most serious of all, all three Panzer corps
of Kleist's
Gruppe
were racing eastward, Manteuffel leading,
toward Belaya Tserkov and the Krivoi Rog railway.
Kleist entered Belaya Tserkov on the evening of 18th July, and the
expected Russian counterattack, staged by six infantry and two
cavalry divisions of the 26th Army, had heralded itself with frantic
radio conversations
en clair
between the formations concerned
all day on 19th July. When the Russian attack started on the 20th, it
followed the traditional pattern, a three-minute artillery barrage
followed by waves of infantry, as much as twelve in succession. Here
and there a few tanks accompanied trucks, crammed with soldiers,
which simply drove flat out at the German positions until stopped by
a direct hit.
[Some measure of the Russian tank losses in the southern theatre
so far can be derived from the fact that up to the start of the
battle of Uman the Germans claimed to have destroyed 2,287. Yet in
the final "count" of prisoners and material in the pocket
they only claimed an additional 317. For the 26th Army's
counterattack it is doubtful if more than about 50, of all types,
were operational.]
With all chance of surprise gone, the Russian attack was broken up
in a matter of hours. The progress of the 1st Panzer Army was barely
affected.
[Nonetheless, Soviet sources claim that these counterattacks held
up the 1st Panzer Army for several days and allowed the 6th, 12th and
18th Russian armies to escape encirclement.]
Within five days Kleist had reached Novo-Ukrainka, and on 30th
July, Manteuffel's leading tanks burst into Kirovgrad; over a hundred
miles
southeast
of Budënny's mass. With German tanks
straddling the railways in his rear, Budënny could no longer
save the armies at Uman by a retreat to the Ingul. His only chance
was a withdrawal down the Bug to Nikolayev. Yet another five days
passed, with no move by the Russian commander.
Meanwhile, thirty miles south of Uman, Schobert's 11th Army, with
two Hungarian divisions, had succeeded in forcing its way across the
Bug at Gaivoron. Frenzied Russian counterattacks and extravagant
artillery barrages prevented the mixed assault group from making
progress in a northerly direction, and the Russians claimed a
victory, but in fact Schobert's spearhead had another target. With
two motorised divisions and the Hungarian cavalry he side-stepped the
weight of Russian fire before Gaivoron and moved rapidly down the
left bank of the river to Pervomaisk. Here, on 3rd August, Schobert
made contact with the outriders of Wietersheim's 14th Panzer Corps,
which Kleist had turned due south, at right angles to his main axis
of advance. A noose had been tied around the whole of the Uman
concentration.
For five days the infantry divisions of the 11th and 17th armies
marched in concentric arcs across the steppe, beating out thirty or
forty miles a day, with their guns and equipment trailing behind in
patient horsedrawn convoys, until by 8th August the noose had become
a ring of steel, filled out with artillery and broad enough to trap
all but the smallest groups of stragglers. And already the centre of
gravity had moved hundreds of miles due east, carried on the
clattering treads of Manteuffel's Panzers, to the banks of the Ingul,
where Budënny should have been making his stand. This period was
the high peak of
enjoyment
for the German soldiery. The war
was exciting and victorious. Malaparte's description of an evening
halt conveys the romance of that drive across the Ukraine: