If the Russian production of tanks had in fact been running at
seven hundred per month, as Halder claimed, German prospects would
have been bleak indeed. But two of the main centres of tank
production, at Kharkov and Orel, had passed into enemy hands, as had
the majority of the component factories in the Donetz basin. The KV
factory at Leningrad was working at a reduced capacity, and the
output was devoted to local requirements. The celebrated factories
"in the Urals" (notably at Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk) were
only beginning to get into their stride in the spring of 1942, and
although the Soviet Official History claims a spectacular advance in
tank-production rates in the later part of the year it seems unlikely
that, in the first months at all events, it was any higher than the
German, and Russian actual front-line strength was certainly
inferior. In the carnage of that first summer the Red Army had lost
its entire tank park of nearly twenty thousand. The economy had been
reduced (taking 1940 figures as 100 percent) by nearly as disastrous
a proportion: coal by 57 percent, pig iron by 68 percent, steel by 58
percent, aluminum by 60 percent, and grain by 38 percent. Ignoring
the niceties of figures, which on either side are subject to some
distortion, it would be safe to estimate the total Soviet industrial
capacity as having been halved by German action in 1941. During the
first months of 1942 a number of tanks from factories in Britain and
the United States were delivered by the northern sea route to
Murmansk and over land from Persia. What happened to these deliveries
remains a mystery.
[Ogorkiewicz gives the totals as 5,258 from the United States,
4,260 from Britain, and 1,220 from Canada. The majority of these
deliveries were made during the summer and autumn of 1942 and 1943,
but it seems probable that at least 1,000 had been delivered by the
start of the 1942 campaign.]
The Russians, very understandably, rejected the majority as being
unfit for combat. (It is some commentary on the lag in Western tank
design that the only model produced which would have been any use in
the East, the Sherman, did not start coming off the production lines
until, by Russian standards, it was already obsolete. First
deliveries of the Sherman tank were not made until the autumn of
1942, by which time the T 34—to which it was inferior—had
been in full production for eighteen months, and the T 34/85 and the
Tiger were already laid down.)
A few British infantry tanks, both Matilda and Churchill types,
were used in the so-called "independent" (i.e., infantry
co-operation) brigades, where they were acceptable because of their
very thick frontal armour, and some American Honeys (a light, fast
tank with a 37-mm. gun) were identified by Kleist in the later stages
of the Caucasian fighting. But it would appear that the majority of
the Western tanks were distributed among quiescent or noncombatant
theatres like the Finnish front and the Far East, and played no more
than an indirect role in releasing home-produced tanks for the more
critical battles.
The severe shortage of armour and the evident clumsiness in
handling large masses which the first generation of Soviet commanders
had shown combined to influence the form of the new armoured units
which were built up during the spring of 1942. These were uniform
replicas of the
ad hoc
mixed groups which had been so
successful in slowing up the German advance the previous November and
had shown themselves adequate in the limited roles imposed by the
conditions of the winter counteroffensive. Styled "armoured
brigades," they consisted of two (sometimes three) tank
battalions with mixed KV's and T 34's, a motorised infantry
machine-gun battalion, a mortar company, and an antitank
company—armed mainly with 75-mm. L 46's, although production of
this gun was being phased out in 1942, and by the autumn of that year
all antitank companies had the 76.2-mm. L 30's. "Cavalry"
and "mechanised" brigades followed this pattern, but with
the proportion of tanks to mounted horsemen and truck-borne infantry
reversed, and often, owing to the shortage of armour, with the tank
component left out altogether. These formations were intended for an
offensive role, penetration and encirclement, but were in fact too
light to be able to achieve much on their own, and the technique of
coordinating them into corps was still not proceeding smoothly.
By the beginning of May the
Stavka
had accumulated about
twenty of these new tank brigades. There were also a number of
so-called "independent" brigades (independence in this case
meaning separation from the orthodox armoured formations), which were
placed under the command of the generals of particular divisions and
used in close infantry support.
Although the majority of the Far Eastern units had been expended
in the winter battles, the
Stavka
was able to draw again on
this source in February and March, when the extent of the Japanese
commitment in the Pacific and Indian oceans became apparent. In
addition, there were about half a million reservists with some
background training who had been recalled in the late autumn of 1941
but not yet committed to action. The mass of the "1921 and 1922
classes" were virtually untrained and without equipment, and
would not be ready until the end of the year. For the time being,
therefore, the Red Army was feeding drafts and new equipment into the
organisation of old and battle-tried units, in preference to the
creation of new armies (and in contrast to the practice of their
opponent). The fruit of this policy, and of a truly ruthless
discipline on the industrial front, where the factories were kept
going throughout the twenty-four hours, often without heating and
with windows and roofs blown in, was a strategic reserve of about
thirty reconstituted rifle divisions, in addition to twenty armoured
brigades of the type described above.
By the standards of the previous summer this was a negligible
quantity—barely sufficient, it might have been thought, to
bolster the remaining 160-odd formations that were strung out from
Leningrad to Taganrog. Yet the thrashing they had meted out to the
Germans during the winter, the poor state of individual German
prisoners, and the evident superiority in certain types of equipment,
notably tanks and gunnery, seem to have encouraged the Russians to
believe that the Wehrmacht was in a sorrier state than the facts
warranted. This belief was the stronger in proportion to the holders'
distance from the battlefield, and persisted at the
Stavka
long after the disappointments of its attacks in March had convinced
local commanders that the Germans were still formidable once they had
recovered their confidence.
There is still no evidence regarding the strategic disputations
which must have occupied the early spring in Moscow, and we do not
know who, if anyone, on the
Stavka
opposed the plan for a
triple offensive which was promulgated at that time. Certainly Stalin
was in favour, and the result—a fruitless dispersal of force,
which was barely adequate at the outset, and a ruthless prosecution
of operations long after their futility had become apparent—shows
all the marks of the dictator's personal interference.
Although the Soviet plan was based on a correct interpretation of
the German objectives, it chose to counter them head on rather than
by setting a trap of the kind which had worked so well in front of
Moscow, in the somewhat dangerous hope that striking first would give
the Red Army an advantage. Just as the Germans intended to subdue
Leningrad during the summer of 1942, so Stalin was determined to
relieve the town completely by breaking open the overland route
between Tikhvin and Schlüsselburg; and the counterpart of
Hitler's Caucasian ambitions was to be a sustained effort to
reconquer the Crimea. Most important of all, and involving the
commitment of practically the whole Soviet armoured reserve (and
certainly all the new T 34 and KV formations), was to be a pincer
attack by Timoshenko on the German positions before Kharkov. The
town, fourth city of the U.S.S.R., was to be captured, and with it
the whole communications system of the Germans in south Russia would
be upset, and their capacity to stage an offensive in that theatre
eliminated. The assumption of three distinct objectives, so widely
separated that pressure against one could have no effect on the
situation at another, was justifiable only where the attacker was
much the stronger army. The Soviet miscalculation of the relative
strengths brought disaster on all three projects and came near to
damaging the Red Army beyond possibility of repair—at least
during the summer of 1942.
The first of the
Stavka
spring offensives was launched in
the Kerch Peninsula of the Crimea, on 9th April. The failure of
Manstein's 11th Army to capture Sevastopol the previous autumn, and
successful sallies by the garrison during the winter, had encouraged
periodic attempts by the Russians to liberate the entire peninsula.
On 26th December bridgeheads had been established at Kerch and
Feodosiya, and although the latter had been bloodily eliminated by
Manstein on 18th January, a strong Russian force had remained across
the neck of the Kerch Peninsula, whence it made three separate and
costly efforts to break into the Crimea proper, on 27th February,
13th March, and 26th March. On each occasion Russian strength was
built up to a figure higher than the last, and each time it was not
quite enough to break through Manstein's positions, which were
themselves being reinforced. Finally, for the "Stalin offensive"
in April, the
Stavka
had released a quantity of armour, five
"independent" brigades. By that time, though, Manstein,
too, had been heavily reinforced with a Panzer division (the 22nd)
and a
lecht
division (the 28th), and the whole of Richthofen's
8th Air Corps of Ju 88's and
Stukas
, which were to be used in
a renewed assault on Sevastopol.
In the result the Russian strength was once again inadequate, the
attack was stopped dead in three days, and within a month Manstein
had cleared the whole Kerch Peninsula and could turn on Sevastopol.
In the final count the Red Army lost over a hundred thousand in
prisoners alone and over two hundred of their precious tanks. The
total Russian commitment in the Crimea since Christmas Day (excluding
the Sevastopol garrison) had come to over a quarter of a million men,
but largely owing to the piecemeal way in which they had been fed
into the mincing machine, they finished up without having achieved
anything more than a minor diversion.
At least the Soviet attacks in the Crimea had given Sevastopol
breathing space and drawn three German divisions down there. The
second of the
Stavka
offensives was an unredeemed failure.
Striking once again at the German positions on the Volkhov River, a
strong column, including two fresh Siberian divisions and led by one
of the most vigorous of the Red Army commanders, General Vlasov,
achieved a temporary penetration. But it was soon to discover that in
the May sunshine German confidence and tactical reflexes were very
different than when the thermometer was 40 below. Unable to enlarge
the flanks of his breakin, Vlasov was trapped in a narrow salient
under steadily mounting pressure. He got no support from his "front"
headquarters—only the habitual instructions to press the
attack—and after five days of fierce fighting the Germans
sealed off the neck of the Russian breakthrough and set about
reducing the encircled divisions. Vlasov was so disgusted by the
incompetence of the "front" command and by the useless
sacrifices which his picked force had to endure that he refused to
leave the pocket in an aircraft which was sent to fly him out.
Together with his staff he was captured by the Germans and was later,
as will be recounted, to play a strange role in the politics of the
Eastern campaign.
Now everything depended upon the centrepiece of the
Stavka
operations, Timoshenko's assault at Kharkov. Unfortunately, the
Russian plan, besides being highly unimaginative and predictable,
dovetailed fatally with a local offensive which Bock had ordered for
almost the same date.
Bock's objective was the elimination of the "Lozovaya
pocket," a salient which represented the high-water mark of the
Red Army's advance during the winter, and which protruded into the
German front to the southwest of the Donetz, at Izyum. At the
beginning of May, Bock had withdrawn the German forces masking the
western tip of the salient and replaced them with the 6th Rumanian
Army; he then proceeded to concentrate Paulus to the north, between
Belgorod and Balakleya, and Kleist to the south, at Pavlograd. It was
intended that these two armies converge against the base of the
Russian salient and cut it off, thereby straightening out the German
line along the Donetz River before the main offensive was launched.
But at the very moment when Army Group South was making its
dispositions Timoshenko, too, was on the move, and the bulk of the
Russian armour was trundling into the very "pocket" which
Bock intended to eliminate. The Soviet 9th Army, under General
Kharitonov, backed by the 6th Army, commanded by Gorodnyanski, was to
break out of the pocket and capture Krasnograd. Kharitonov was then
to drive on Poltava, while Gorodnyanski swung north, toward Kharkov,
and the northern pincer, composed of the Soviet 28th and 57th armies,
attacked from the bridgehead at Volchansk.
If the Germans had struck first they would have had a severe
shock, for Timoshenko had concentrated nearly six hundred tanks in
the Lozovaya pocket-—two thirds of his entire armoured
strength—and OKH, which seems to have been quite unaware of the
impending Russian attack, might have been forced into the gloomiest
reappraisal of the Red Army's firepower and tank strength. As it was,
Timoshenko forestalled Bock by about a week and started his offensive
on 12th May.