It is thus all the more curious to see the record of Guderian's
perpetual complaints about the inadequacy of his own strength and the
dangers to his flanks. As early as 26th August he had been explaining
to Paulus (at that time Oberquartiermeister I at OKH), [Deputy Chief
of Staff to Halder.] who was on a tour of the forward area:
. . . the enemy along our deep left flank is too strong to be
ignored ... he must be defeated there before we can pursue our
southward advance.
However, when Paulus repeated these remarks to Halder the latter
did nothing—a consequence which Guderian attributes to
the general animosity towards myself that reigned in those
quarters [i.e., the personal ill feeling between himself and Halder].
However, as Halder's attitude was based on more comprehensive
intelligence data than that of the Panzer commander, and as it was
borne out by the sequence of events, it is possible that it was less
subjective than Guderian claimed at the time.
In spite of this rebuff Guderian continued to make a nuisance of
himself to OKH. First he tried to get the cavalry division
transferred from the 2nd Army (under whose command it had been
operating since 27th July), drawing the rebuke: ". . . the
movements of Second Army are to be regarded as simply tactical";
next, a request that Vietinghoffs Panzer corps, which had been left
behind at Yelnya, should be sent down to stiffen the
Gruppe
;
Halder refused it. Two days later, though, the cavalry division was
transferred to Guderian, and he was told that Vietinghoff could spare
Gross Deutschland
and SS
Das Reich
, It appears that
this did not satisfy the Colonel General, for the next day he was on
the telephone, not to Halder but to Bock, insisting that the whole of
Vietinghoffs corps be sent south, together with the 7th and 11th
Panzer, and 14th Motorised, as he knew that these divisions "were
not committed at the time." This was hardly a tactful approach,
and it was aggravated by the fact that an intercept station of OKH
had listened in to the conversation.
"A positive uproar" resulted. Lieutenant Colonel Nagel,
the OKH liaison officer with Guderian's headquarters, was recalled to
the army group at Borisov, where as ill luck would have it,
Bfauchitsch had arrived to oversee the last stages of the
encirclement. Here he was dismissed, on the grounds that he was a
"loudspeaker and propagandist." The following morning
Guderian received a message to the effect that OKH was "dissatisfied"
with the handling of the
Gruppe
, and ordering him to contract
his front of operations by bringing the 47th Panzer Corps back across
the Desna. Guderian records:
. . . these orders were cast in an uncouth language, which
offended me.
It seems as if both Halder and Brauchitsch realised that the
Russian strength on Guderian's left was much feebler than he himself
professed to believe. They may have thought, too, that his demands
for reinforcement presaged some new independent action intended to
force their hand, like the origins of the Roslavl operation a month
earlier, which would also fatally handicap the next stage of the
offensive—which everyone at OKH now regarded as inevitable. At
all events, on 7th September, three days after the emission of the
"uncouth" orders, Brauchitsch saw Guderian at 2nd Army
headquarters at Gomel and told him that it was necessary to
contract the front of the Panzer advance because of the need to keep
as many divisions as possible fresh for the attack on Moscow,
scheduled for early October.
On 12th September, Kleist finally broke through the exhausted 38th
Army and debouched from his bridgeheads at Cherkassy and Kremenchug.
(This day, the same as that on which Reinhardt cracked the Leningrad
perimeter [pp. 147-48] can be reckoned the low point in the fortunes
of the Red Army for the whole war.) Model, whose 3rd Panzer Division
had been leading Guderian's thrust, was racing south, having emerged
from the forest and swampland of the Seim, and running on the dry
corn fields of the steppe. The Panzers made contact at Lokhvitsa on
16th September, and the outer ring was closed in the largest
encirclement achieved by either side in the entire campaign.
In the cauldron the Soviet confusion was total. Budënny
himself had been relieved by Stalin's order on the 13th and flown out
to a sinecure on the "reserve front." Without even the
semblance of a central command, the mass of surrounded men reacted to
the independent (and often contradictory) orders of their separate
corps and army commanders. Some accounts have it that Budënny
had ordered a withdrawal on 8th September, then rescinded it the next
day. Vlasov claims that he tried repeatedly to get Stalin to
authorise a withdrawal, but that this permission was only granted two
days after Model and Kleist had closed the ring, on 18th September.
[The Soviet Official History (Vol. 2, p. 107) quotes the text of
an appeal from the Military Council of the SW Front to Stalin, dated
the 11th September, 1941:
The Military Council of the SouthWestern Front considers that
in the present situation it is essential to authorize general
withdrawal of the front to a rear line.
The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal comrade Shaposhnikov,
on behalf of the
Stavka
of the Supreme High Command, in
response to this proposal, gave an order to withdraw two rifle
divisions from the 26th. Army and use them to liquidate the enemy who
have broken through from the Bakhmach-Konotop area. At the same time,
comrade Shaposhnikov indicated that the Stavka of the Supreme High
Command considers withdrawal of the forces of the SW Front to be
premature at present.
For my (sic) part, I presume that by now the enemy's intention
to envelope and surround the SW Front from the Novgorod-Severski and
Kremenchug directions has become fully apparent. To oppose this idea
a strong group of forces must be created. The SW Front is not in a
position to do this.
If, in its turn, the Stavka of the Supreme High Command is not
able at this time to concentrate such a strong group, then it is high
time the SW Front withdrew. The measure which the military council of
the front is to carry out, viz, the moving out of two divisions from
the 26th. Army, may be only a way of covering this. Besides, the
26th. Army is very much weakened. On 150 km. of front only three
rifle divisions are left.
Delay in withdrawal of the SW Front may lead to losses of
troops and great quantities of materiel . . .
Budënny. Khrushchev. Pokrovski.
This evidence could be cited by those who wish to exonerate
Khrushchev from responsibility for the Kiev disaster, but even the
llth September (less than 24 hours before the collapse of the 48th
Army at Kremenchug) was perilously late to start withdrawing,
especially under the conditions of total air superiority which the
Germans enjoyed.]
In fact, the Russians had neither the ammunition, the fuel, nor
the coordination to attempt a breakout. With a stubborn pride they
fought until what little they had was exhausted. In those last
chaotic days whole battalions would attempt mass counterattacks,
advancing with their last five rounds against the German artillery
that blasted them down over open sights. When the Germans came to
them, the Russians fought to the last, even with their teeth, as
Krylov had forecast. Stalin presided over their death, for specially
trained electricians had rigged up apparatus which played recordings
of his speeches to the defenders of key positions. Malaparte has
described how
During the fighting the words of Stalin, magnified to gigantic
proportions by the loudspeakers, rain down upon the men kneeling in
holes behind the tripods of their machine-guns, din in the ears of
the soldiers lying amid the shrubs, of the wounded writhing in agony
upon the ground.
The loudspeaker imbues that voice with a harsh, brutal,
metallic quality. There is something diabolical, and at the same time
terribly naïve, about these soldiers who fight to the death,
spurred on by Stalin's speech on the Soviet Constitution. By the slow
deliberate recital of the moral, social, political and military
precepts of the "agitators"; [The "agitators"
were junior commissars specially charged with the dissemination of
propaganda among the soldiers.] about these soldiers who never
surrender; about these dead, scattered all around me; about the final
gestures, the stubborn, violent gestures of these men who died so
terribly lonely a death on this battlefield, amid the deafening roar
of the cannon and the ceaseless braying of the loudspeaker.
After five days of slaughter the first surrenders began. By the
time that the area was pacified, over six hundred thousand men had
been sent into captivity.
[The Soviets deny the German claim that over 600,000 were captured
at Kiev. They say that the strength of SW Front before the start of
the Kiev battle was 677,085, and that 150,541 were brought out. Thus
they admit to losses of 527,000, including casualties in almost one
month of fighting, but deny that these taken prisoner at Kiev could
have come to much more than one-third of the German figure of 665,000
which may well have been inflated by inclusion of Opolchenye and
civilian males.]
Nearly one third of the Soviet Army, as it had been at the
outbreak of war, was eliminated. As they counted the spoils, the
Germans took pains in the categorising and recording of every item.
Photographers and artists crowded onto the battlefield, and have left
us an immense mass of documentation; great jumbled groups of charred
and gutted trucks, tanks blackened by fire, their armour rent and
twisted from 88-mm. shells. Enormous piles of small arms, rifles
stacked thirty or forty feet high, rows and rows of field guns, each
with the breech dutifully blown open with its last shot. In
profusion, too, are the pictures of the dead. In lines, in heaps;
stretched out and tranquil, huddled in agony; contorted, mangled, and
burned. Sometimes it is plain that they have died in combat. At
others, as the captions primly assert, as a result of "punitive"
measures. In sorting through this quantity of "record"
material so lovingly assembled, the sense of Teutonic sadism, of the
German exultation in violence and brutality, is overpowering.
Pictures are specially selected for their horrific character. Great
as the victory was, the Germans were at pains to make it seem even
more savage and merciless than its reality.
Of all the subjects none are more pathetic than the prisoners.
Those long, patient columns winding their way in hopeless dejection
across the cratered soil. In the eyes of the Russians there is that
dumb, oxlike resignation of men who have fought for their homeland
and lost. Can they guess what lies ahead of them? Deliberate
starvation, camps ravaged by typhus, a twenty-hour day of forced
labour at Krupp's under the stock whip of the SS? "Medical
experiments," torture, four years of contrived brutality of the
most horrifying and in-excusable kind. Did they with some intuitive
shudder realise that out of a given thousand less than thirty would
ever see their homes again?
But as we ask these rhetoric questions, let us pose one more. Did
the Germans, as they watched those black caterpillars wending their
exhausted path across the steppe, realise that they were sowing the
wind? The first reaping, more terrible than anything they had ever
experienced, was less than twelve months away.
eight
| THE START OF THE MOSCOW OFFENSIVE
At the end of September 1941, as the last shots died away in the
Kiev pocket and the hatches were battened down on the cattle trucks
carrying Russian prisoners westward, the Germans were vexed by a
continuing problem. The Bear was dead, but he would not lie down.
Russian losses will never be known with complete accuracy, but the
OKW estimate of two and a half million men, 22,000 guns, 18,000
tanks, and 14,000 aircraft was not a propaganda figure, but based on
an intelligence collation of all unit reports. It corresponded,
almost exactly, to the figure of Russian strength which these same
intelligence experts had prepared at the start of the campaign. What,
then, was holding the Red Army up?
The strategic objectives, such as they were, with which the
Wehrmacht had begun were largely fulfilled; for Leningrad had been
isolated and neutralised; the Ukraine had been opened to the German
economy as far as the Donetz—and denied to that of the
Russians. In the Bendlerstrasse work had already begun on a draft
"Occupation Planning Staff Study," which forecast the
withdrawal to Germany of about eighty divisions (of which half were
to be demobilised); the military government would keep at its
disposal
strong mobile forces in the principal industrial and
communication centres; each group, besides its normal occupation
duties, would be able to send out fast battle groups into the
unoccupied hinterland to destroy any attempts at resistance before
these could become dangerous.
Yet in the front line the prospects looked very different. The
German soldiers felt themselves deep in an alien land. The sameness
of the territory was broken only by the rivers. The Dnieper, the Don,
the Mius, the Sal, the Donetz, the Oskol, the Terek, the Sozh, the
Oster, the Desna, the Seim. Over all these the patient engineers of
the Wehrmacht had laid their bridges, by the banks of each their
comrades had been buried. Beyond each lay the enemy, always in
retreat, but always shooting. So often the day's fighting would end
with the Russians once again on the horizon, the T 34's with their
sinister hooded turrets just perceptible through Zeiss lenses, luring
them even deeper, it seemed, into the east. From their allies,
Rumanians and Hungarians who did not regard themselves as supermen,
disquieting sentiments began to infect the Germans fighting
alongside. That you had always to kill a Russian twice over; that the
Russians had never been beaten; that no man who drew blood there ever
left Russia alive. And every German, whatever part of the front he
fought in, noticed with an uneasy mixture of horror and admiration
the conduct of the Russian wounded.