The "intestinal disorders" of which Bayerlein had been
complaining in November were now rampant throughout the army; yet on
days like 10th December, when Guderian recorded the temperature as
falling to minus 63 degrees, it was death to squat in the open and
"many men died while performing their natural functions, as a
result of a congelation of the anus." Those who could still eat
had to watch "the axe rebounding as from a stone" off the
frozen horse meat, and the butter was being cut with a saw.
One man who was drawing his ration of boiling soup at the field
kitchen could not find his spoon. It took him 30 seconds to find it,
but by then the soup was lukewarm. He began to eat it as quickly as
he could, without losing a moment's time, but the soup was already
cold, and soon it would be solid.
There was no escape from this purgatory—save death itself.
For that old soldiers' standby, the self-inflicted wound, besides
being a capital offence, could mean only a slow death from exposure
and gas gangrene. Some men took their own lives with a hand grenade
held against the stomach, but even then the cold had the last word:
". . . the charred pulp . . . would be frozen solid in about
half an hour." Not surprisingly, the special medal which was
struck for those who took part in this first winter campaign in the
East was known as the
Gefrierfleisch Orden
, The Order of the
Frozen Meat.
Under the double impact of the blizzards and the ubiquity of the
Russian attack, the perils of Army Group Centre mounted hourly. Kluge
dared not withdraw his own divisions for fear of leaving the Panzers
on his flanks in complete isolation, yet the extrication of the
armour was proving virtually impossible; hundreds of tanks were
abandoned in the drifting snow, and the crews retreated, fighting as
infantry with their side arms; of the four divisions in Hoepner's
Gruppe
only one had a strength of more than fifteen tanks; on
Christmas Eve, Guderian had less than forty runners in his entire
command. German casualty returns for this period give some measure of
the impact of the cold on those exhausted soldiers. Out of over
100,000 cases of frostbite no fewer than 14,357—over the
strength of a division—were classified as "major" and
requiring one or more amputations; there were 62,000 "moderate"
(resulting in total incapacity, but without the necessity for
amputation), and 36,270 "light" (in which the patient could
be fit for action within ten days). Casualties from Russian action
averaged at just under 3,000 per day. This was less than the figure
at the height of the summer fighting, but its impact on the units
concerned was very much greater, owing to the fact that the system of
replacement drafts had broken down, together with the medical and
supply services above divisional level.
As despair gripped the German foot soldier and a trembling
paralysis afflicted his commanders, one man—the Führer—rose
to the occasion. Disregarding the recommendations of OKH, too busy
even to accept Brauchitsch's resignation, which the hapless C. in C.
offered on 7th December, Hitler communicated directly with his army
commanders from Rastenburg. His order of "No withdrawal"
has been ridiculed as doctrinaire and amateurish. In reality, it was
a principle which guided a ceaseless personal supervision of the
development of the battle, a scrutiny of the reports, a complete
mastery of the detail even of a regimental action. Hitler was the
only person who could keep a tight enough rein on the separate
commanders; to prevent them in their concern for their own armies to
imperil those on their flanks, and to galvanise the Luftwaffe into
maintaining an airlift to formations which had been cut off. By
proceeding from the first principle that not an inch was to be
yielded, Hitler won time for the concept of the
Igelstellen
—the
net of defended localities—to be put into practice. Commanders
who presumed to act on their own judgment soon found that Hitler's
assumption of the title of Commander in Chief was no mere propaganda
device. Hoepner, a trifle precipitate in pulling back the right flank
of his
Panzergruppe
, was publicly cashiered; Kluge and
Guderian had a race to the telephone to complain about each other,
which the Panzer commander narrowly lost, and he, too, was dismissed.
Thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were sent home in varying
degrees of disgrace. Even Keitel stood in jeopardy.
When Olbricht asked him how were the relations of OKW with the
Führer, the miserable Field Marshal replied, "I don't know,
he tells me nothing, he only spits at me."
We can now see that this winter crisis was no time for
professional orthodoxy. Any attempt to withdraw from its positions,
without fuel or serviceable vehicles, to retreat across the drifting
snow fields at a rate that could not be more than three or four miles
a day, would have resulted in the whole German Army being cut to
pieces. Better to stand and fight it out, relying on the innate
tenacity and discipline of the German soldier. The Red Army was
putting everything it had into this offensive—the few precious
T 34's that had been saved from the autumn production; every man it
dared to bring back from the Far East; every shell and bullet the
factories had sent out. But it had no power to achieve, nor did the
weather permit, a deep penetration in the manner of the summer
battles. In the few cases where the Russians succeeded in surrounding
their enemy they had neither the artillery to reduce them nor
sufficient strength in the air to prevent their revictualling by the
Luftwaffe.
The Russians' recovery and their winter offensive of 1941 remain
one of the most remarkable achievements in military history, but its
dramatic quality should not obscure the essential limitations in
material and talent which still confined the Soviet military machine.
Once it had failed to carry the day in the first shock of assault,
its chances of complete victory declined steadily along the immutable
scale of relative force available.
In the net result, although the Russians savaged Army Group Centre
without respite for three months, they never succeeded in any of the
major encircling moves they attempted and their territorial gains
were limited to a forty-mile belt at the approaches to Moscow. The
Germans managed to hold on to Rzhev, Vyazma, and Orel.
But if Hitler's policy saved ground, it was profligate in its
expenditure of talent. Crucified by the Russian winter, stripped of
its most eminent commanders, the Wehrmacht had altered out of
recognition from the days of June, and it was to carry the scars of
the experience to its grave. As for Hitler, it was his finest hour.
He had done more than save the German Army; he had achieved complete
personal ascendancy over its ruling class. Yet this ascendancy did
not ameliorate his dislike for the generals or his contempt for the
professional
mystique
with which they surrounded themselves.
Indeed, it aggravated the emotions to a degree which, sooner or
later, had to precipitate a dangerous crisis.
The Führer had become convinced, as he declared to Halder,
that "This little matter of operational command is something
that anyone can do."
BOOK II | Stalingrad
HITLER. The Russian is finished!
HALDER. I must say, it is beginning to look uncommonly like
it.
15th July, 1942
ten
| PLANNING AND PRELIMINARIES
In February 1942 the Russian offensive petered out. The
temperature rose, the days lengthened, and to the Wehrmacht the end
of its ordeal was in sight. The Red Army, although a few isolated
successes remained to it, like the capture of Velikiye Luki on 15th
February, was a spent force. The magnificent divisions of the Far
Eastern Command were skeletons of their December strength, exhausted
by three months' fighting in the worst winter for 140 years.
More serious, as the pace of the attack slackened, the Russians
had reverted to their old clumsy frontal tactics against the
Igelstellen
, so that by the end of the winter Zhukov's armies
were in almost as parlous a state as those of his opponent—with
the ominous corollary that his capital resources, in arms and trained
men, were very much less.
For both sides the crucial problem was that of interpreting their
enemies' intentions, and planning their own, for the full campaigning
season that would follow the thaw. At OKH the question had come up
for discussion as soon as it became plain that there was going to be
a 1942 campaign—that is, during late November, when the "final"
attack on Moscow started to run down. Blumentritt recalls that at
that time
A number of the Generals declared that a resumption of the
offensive in 1942 was impossible, and that it was wiser to make sure
of holding what had been gained. Halder was very dubious about the
continuance of the offensive. Von Rundstedt was still more emphatic
and even urged that the German Army should withdraw to their original
front in Poland. Von Leeb agreed with him. While other generals did
not go so far as this most of them were very worried as to where the
campaign would lead. . . . But with the departure of von Rundstedt as
well as von Brauchitsch, the resistance to Hitler's pressure was
weakening, and that pressure was all for resuming the offensive.
Blumentritt does not fix these discussions at any specific date,
and although the concept of the 1942 campaign got onto the planning
boards at OKH in November 1941, it is more likely that Blumentritt's
assessment is a symposium of opinions expressed to him by various
commanders after he became Deputy Chief of the General Staff (under
Halder) on 8th January, 1942, a time when the generals were competing
with one another to produce the most pessimistic forecast. Certainly,
once the front had been stabilised and it became possible to start
accumulating a strategic reserve, the majority of professional
opinion seems to have swung in favour of an offensive campaign that
summer. The dispute centered around its scope. Could Russia still be
knocked out of the war? Or was it wiser to limit the aims to reducing
her potential to such an extent that she would no longer present a
serious threat, to conduct an operation which would be, in terms of
grand strategy, defensive?
In retrospect most of the generals who survived claim that they
favoured a limited campaign and that anything more ambitious was a
"gamble." Yet this is no more than another example (in
which the Eastern campaign abounds) of the failure of the
Generalstab
to make correct appreciations at a global strategic level. It
regarded—on its own admission—the summer campaign of 1942
as a narrow tactical problem in isolation from the world events which
made it vital for Germany to win the war that year or be dragged
under by the industrial weight of the coalition which was ranged
against her.
The generals excuse themselves by complaining that they were never
allowed to sit in on the economic conferences at which the
requirements of wheat, manganese, oil, and nickel were discussed, and
that the Führer "kept them in the dark" about this
element of strategy. But this is demonstrably untrue. As will be
seen, Hitler stressed the economic factor behind all his decisions on
every occasion on which he argued with his military leaders. Nor were
they as ignorant of these as they are prone to claim.
There was a battle of opinion between Halder and him [Hitler].
The Intelligence had information that 600-700 tanks a month were
coming out of the Russian factories, in the Ural Mountains and
elsewhere. When Halder told him this Hitler slammed the table and
said it was impossible.
Yet if Russian tank-production figures really were at this level,
it was an argument for forcing rather than postponing the issue. It
is clear that the generals either completely misunderstood Hitler or,
as seems more likely, that they have since completely misrepresented
him, as in Blumentritt's judgment that
... he did not know what else to do—as he would not
listen to any idea of a withdrawal. He felt that he must do something
and that something could only be offensive.
In reality, Hitler had an absolutely clear idea of what he was
going to do. He intended to smash the Russians once and for all by
breaking the power of their army in the south, capturing the seat of
their economy, and taking the option of either wheeling up behind
Moscow or down to the oil fields of Baku. But instead of taking the
staff at OKH firmly by the lapels and instilling this objective in
them from the outset, the Führer was exceedingly circumspect—not
to say tortuous—in the dissemination of his strategic ideas. In
the result an operational plan was gradually evolved, but with Hitler
and the General Staff of the Army assuming different objectives. The
OKH plan accepted certain limitations of scope and ambition, while
OKW—where Keitel and Jodl must be assumed to have been in some
degree privy to Hitler's intentions—was always trying to graft
onto it greater strength and a wider sweep. These differences were
never reconciled, and their origins and history are important to an
understanding of the course of the Stalingrad campaign and its
disastrous climax.
The first draft plan prepared by OKH, in midwinter, when the Red
Army was making a painfully formidable impression, was for a limited
campaign in south Russia and consolidation of the line east of the
Dnieper bend, which would safeguard the manganese deposits at
Nikopol. The limitations of this plan were soon dropped in the
euphoria which followed on the spring recovery, but the one
"positive" measure for which it had provided—the
reduction of Leningrad and a junction with the Finns—remained
on the agenda, and was dutifully carried forward on each succeeding
plan. This, as will be seen, led to a serious diversion of available
force during the summer.