So when Hitler saw Manstein at Zaporozhe, he told him immediately
that the retreat must stop—as from that day. Kharkov must be
recaptured immediately. (The SS Panzer divisions must surely be ready
by now?) Lanz was to be dismissed, and a frontal attack mounted. The
penetrations by Popov and the cavalry group must be repelled at once.
Of course Viking had been unable to do more than contain Popov. Was
not one exhausted SS division grossly inadequate for such a vital
assignment? Again, Manstein was always grumbling about his need for
more reinforcements—but more than half his forces and three
quarters of his armour were not even engaged! The 4th Panzer Army had
been out of action for a fortnight. The 1st Panzer Army was leading
with only one division.
It is not recorded what Zeitzler and Jodl said, if they were given
the chance to say anything, but it seems likely that they were
brought along only to support the Führer's strictures. Yet
Manstein was unperturbed. Of course the situation was grave, he told
Hitler, but in its very fluidity lay the germs of success. For the
Russians could not simply drive due west through the Kharkov gap. For
what objective would they be aiming—Kiev? Lvov? They had
neither the supplies nor the mobility nor the strength in support to
get there. They
must
, Manstein lectured his audience, be
intending to wheel southward and attempt to force the army group back
against the Black Sea. Yet Zhukov's chances of bringing off a second
encirclement were quite different from November of the previous year.
Then it had been the Russians who were attacking from their own
starting lines, with their dumps accumulated over the weeks, and the
Germans who were exhausted, fought to a standstill at the far end of
uncertain communications. Now the Russians were worn out, their tanks
had travelled hundreds of miles, the country behind them was ravaged
and desolate, and within weeks would be rendered almost impassable by
the thaw. When their spearhead lunged, as it must, toward the
crossings of the upper Dnieper, then Hoth would be let loose again;
then the three SS divisions could play their rightful role as
avengers, and strike southeast to meet the 4th Panzer Army, catching
the Russian armour in a noose. There would just be time to inflict
this defeat before the thaw started, and in its wake Kharkov would
fall "like a ripe apple." Thus during the thaw, the
six-week respite when the better part was an impenetrable morass, the
cohesion of the Wehrmacht could be restored.
sixteen
| THE "CONSOLIDATION PERIOD"
In the last days of February the Russian offensive touched high
water mark, and although the edge of the tide continued to creep
forward in places the ebb force, as Manstein had predicted, had
already begun. The front had moved over two hundred miles to the west
in less than three months, and as they withdrew the Germans
devastated the whole countryside and razed the towns.
The Germans had burned villages down to the ground, laid low
the orchard trees, trampled on the cultivated fields, effaced every
sort of evidence of human occupation. In the farms they had taken the
ploughs, reapers, mowers, made a pile of them and then blown them up.
It was the Russians' first experience of an offensive war of
movement on a large scale, and they were finding it very different
from the fluid fighting of 1941 and 1942, when they had been falling
back toward their dumps and railheads; when the forward troops had
always been travelling to meet, instead of away from, supplies and
reinforcements. The weather, the devastated communications, and their
own inexperience in maintaining the traffic density required to
support a deep penetration on a narrow front had combined to force a
dangerous dispersal of effort on the Russian advance, which had
broken down into four separate groups.
In the north, the two armies which had captured Kharkov, Rybalko's
3rd Tank Army and Kazakov's 69th, plodded westward, clashing
intermittently with the Kempf detachment. South of Kharkov two more
Soviet armies, the 6th and the badly exhausted 1st Guards, were
strung out down the long corridor they had opened between Izyum and
Pavlograd, with their leading cavalry and a few stranded tanks
reaching as far as the Dnieper near Zaporozhe. Still farther to the
east the Popov group was in league around Krasnoarmeiskoye, with only
fifty tanks left as runners out of four corps. Xwo other groups lay
behind the German lines, the cavalry divisions at Debaltsevo and some
infantry which had forced their way across the Mius at Matveyev.
At the beginning of the month, when both armies were almost "out
on their feet" and the Germans seemed in the worse state, the
risks of this dispersal were justified. If the Red Army could keep up
the pressure until the thaw (went the
Stavka
calculation),
then, in that quiet period, the Germans would straighten their line
according to the normal dictates of military prudence and the many
Soviet salients won in the last weeks would merge into a spectacular
territorial gain. Manstein's remarkable coolness in thinning out his
front to well past the accepted danger limit, in order to conserve
his remaining armour, was something for which no allowance had been
made.
For five days Hoth's two corps, the 48th and 57th Panzer, moved
northwest to the line of the Krasnoarmeisk railway, while below
Kharkov the SS Panzer corps completed its assembly. On 21st February,
Hoth began to attack the Popov group and the left flank of the 1st
Guards Army, and on the 23rd the SS began their drive southeast.
Under this converging pressure the exhausted Russian armies began to
disintegrate and retreat in an easterly direction in individual
units. The appearance of the Tiger, with which SS
Das Reich
and
Gross Deutschland
had lately been equipped, was a further
blow to Russian morale. Hitherto the only gun which could cope with
the T 34 under all conditions had been the 88-mm.; but it suffered
from vulnerability in a static role and while being manoeuvred into
position. Now, mounted in an armoured turret, and on tracks so broad
that it could travel where even the T 34 hesitated, it marked the end
of the Russian tank's role as the undisputed queen of the
battlefield.
Within a week the German pincers had closed with a meeting between
the SS and Hoth's tanks. The Germans' shortage of infantry made it
impossible for them to seal the pocket completely, and many of the
Russian soldiers slipped away on foot or horseback to cross the still
frozen Donetz at unguarded points. The Germans claim to have counted
23,000 Russian dead on the battlefield and to have captured 615 tanks
and 354 guns, but they took only 9,000 prisoners.
But if many of the Russians had escaped, they were in no position
to block the continued advance of the combined Panzers and SS.
Manstein at first toyed with the idea of forcing an immediate
crossing of the Donetz and driving up the line of the Kupyansk
railway, which would place his armour some eighty miles
east
of Kharkov, then rejected the plan in case he should be stranded by
the thaw. Instead he ordered a closer pincer on the town, sending
Gross Deutschland
around to the north with a reinforced Kempf
detachment and the combined force of Hoth and the SS to attack the
town from the south and rear. After some days of hesitation the
Stavka
acknowledged (indeed, perhaps overestimated) the
severity of Manstein's counterstroke, and its one concern became to
avoid a repetition of the Kharkov disaster of the spring of 1942.
Kharkov was evacuated by the Russians on 13th March, and Belgorod
three days later. The southern fronts of the Red Army were reformed
behind the melting Donetz, and Manstein had succeeded in bringing the
Germans back to almost exactly the same line from which they had set
out the previous summer.
Few periods in World War II show a more complete and dramatic
reversal of fortune than the last fortnight in February and the first
in March 1943. The German Army had done more, it seemed, than
demonstrate once again its renowned powers of recovery; it had
demonstrated an unassailable superiority, at a tactical level, to its
most formidable enemy.
It had repaired its front, shattered the hopes of the Allies,
nipped the Russian spearhead. Above all, it had recovered its moral
ascendancy. Already OKH began to consider, and the
Stavka
to
contemplate with apprehension, a fresh German offensive in the
summer.
With this in mind, and confident in a new, relaxed relationship
between himself and his generals, Hitler had acceded to a request
from Kluge that he pay a visit to the headquarters of Army Group
Centre.
It was nearly two years since the Führer had visited the army
group, [ See Ch. 4.] but the personnel at headquarters had changed
little—save for the substitution of Kluge for Bock. In 1941 a
few of these young officers were toying with a harebrained scheme for
abducting Hitler. In March 1943 these same officers were still there,
but older and wiser, they had evolved a scheme altogether more
systematic and more violent. The whole weight of the conspirators'
machine, with all its ramifications in OKH departments and in the
field, was to go into their attempt, whose failure must be reckoned
one of the great tragedies of World War II.
All the conspirators were now agreed that Hitler must be
assassinated. "Deposition," or some other such formula, was
no longer practical, not only because of the physical difficulties it
presented, but because no officer of the General Staff having active
command would consider taking sides until "the living Führer,"
to whom he was bound by oath, had ceased to exist. Yet the only
element in the state which had sufficient force to kill Hitler and
deal with his bodyguard was the Army; and the only section of the
Army where this was really feasible was Army Group Centre, at
Smolensk. Another difficulty had vexed the conspirators, but they
believed they had found the answer. This was the problem of taking
over the central administration at Berlin in the period of confusion
which would follow the Führer's death.
For they now realised that even if a
coup
were successful,
in the dark forests of Russia it would carry no more menace to the
Nazi regime in Berlin than did the revolt of a Byzantine legion to
the court of Imperial Rome. But by the beginning of 1943 plans had
been prepared by Oster (now a general) and Ulbricht, who was Chief of
the
Heeresamt
on the staff of the Home Army, for a
simultaneous take-over by the army in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. All
that was required, Ulbricht told Tresckow in February, was the
"Flash."
Tresckow had been working on the conscience of the nervous and
malleable Kluge ever since the Field Marshal's appointment to the
command of the army group. Kluge had inherited Schlabrendorff as his
A.D.C. from Bock, and the young major, while browsing in his
superior's files, had turned up a letter from Hitler referring to a
large check, and a building permit, which the Führer had
bestowed upon Kluge in October 1942. Schlabrendorff immediately told
Tresckow, and the two joined in exerting spiritual blackmail on the
miserable Field Marshal, which inflamed his troubled conscience and
accentuated his habitual indecision. That winter they had even
persuaded Kluge to meet Goerdeler, and the learned doctor travelled
to the front (with papers provided by the Abwehr) and delivered a
long and persuasive discourse on the aims of the conspirators and the
necessity of eliminating Hitler.
That Kluge in fact invited Hitler to Smolensk with the intention
of assassinating him seems very unlikely. More probable is the
traditionally ambivalent attitude of the General Staff: If the Führer
went unscathed, a "normal" visit would do Kluge and his
interests no harm (Kluge cannot have been relishing the unusual
attention which had lately been lavished on Manstein); if the coup
were successful, then not only would he emerge as Commander in Chief,
but he would arrive there with his honour unsullied. Indeed, there is
some doubt whether Kluge even took the risk of personally inviting
Hitler at all. Tresckow claims that he suggested it to Schmundt, who
persuaded Hitler.
Once the Führer's plans were known, the first stage of the
"Flash" operation began. Admiral Canaris, with his (as it
seems) customary disregard for what was probable or prudent, summoned
a "Conference of Intelligence Officers" at Army Group
Centre. Kluge appears to have put a brave enough face on this, but he
cannot have felt too happy to see Canaris' aircraft disgorge a
veritable posse of anti-Party figures on Smolensk airfield less than
a week before the date fixed for Hitler's arrival. One of them,
General Erwin Lahousen, had brought with him a batch of special
British time bombs with three different types of fuses, in case
direct means of "execution" should fail. And fail, of
course, they did—because of Kluge's last-minute change of
heart.
The original plan had been that Hitler was to be shot by
Lieutenant Colonel Freiherr von Boeselager and his fellow officers of
the 24th Cavalry Regiment, a crack unit billeted at Smolensk at that
time. Boeselager claimed that all the men of this unit were reliable
and that they would be able to overpower the SS bodyguard. But no
sooner had Canaris and his colleagues left, with the plans for the
Berlin end of the conspiracy perfected, as they thought, to dovetail
with the projected
attentat
at Smolensk, than Kluge lost his
nerve. He could not authorise Boeselager's action, Kluge told the
shattered Tresckow,
at this time
, because neither the German people nor the
German soldier would understand such an act ... we ought to wait
until unfavourable military developments made the elimination of
Hitler an evident necessity.