The Germans had been pressing the development of the Panther
vigorously, and by the winter of 1943-44 most of the troubles which
had plagued them during the battle of Kursk had been eliminated. Tank
for tank, the Panther was superior to the T 34/85—though
certainly not to an extent which made up for its scarcity. However,
the Russians were far advanced in their development of the Stalin,
which, although it weighed only forty-seven tons, was intended to
carry the new 122-mm. gun. The Stalin was based on the old KV
chassis, but with an improved hull front and larger turret. Although
it was not quite a match for the later models of Tigers, its mobility
and relatively low weight allowed it to keep up with the mass of
advancing armour, a feat which the heavy German machines often found
impossible and which forced them to operate independently.
Furthermore, by concentrating on gun
design
and chassis
development
the Russians were still managing to confine their
production to only two basic chassis, the KV and T 34—a happy
state of affairs, which continued until the end of the war.
By this time (the late autumn of 1943), too, the Red Army was
starting to draw dividends on the enormous volume of aid which was
flowing from the West, and particularly from the United States. After
the first rather haphazard deliveries of early 1942, the aid program
began to take on a rational shape and to play a very significant part
in maintaining the Soviet war economy. The Russians preferred to make
their own weapons, which were in almost every case superior to those
which the Allies were offering them, but would never have been able
to concentrate on weapons production to the extent that they did
without the American contribution of "soft" goods.
[Exceptions: a number of aircraft types, notably the Mustang, by
North American, and the Mitchell medium bomber. A larger number of
Dakota transports were also delivered, and the Russians made several
variants of these under licence.]
These included all kinds of material, from sheet steel to shoe
leather; clothing, blankets, tents, radio sets; enormous quantities
of canned food, iron rations (even fruit juice!) and first-aid packs.
Most important of all, perhaps, were the trucks—particularly
the White half-track—which began to put the Red Army infantry
on wheels for the first time in its history.
The Germans were thus faced with a dangerous and worsening
prospect. While their own numbers and firepower remained static or
declined, their enemy was gradually raising his strength in both
these respects. He was also improving his mobility, which was
allowing a deeper thrust and a longer momentum to his attacks. But
the real danger from the German side was the absence of coherent
direction at a strategic level. The separation between OKW and OKH,
between Zeitzler and Jodl, which had first made its mark on the
planning of
Zitadelle
, was now irreparable. The only effective
liaison between the two departments was through Hitler himself. There
was no overall plan to which the army group commanders could refer
and within whose framework they could operate at their discretion.
Even the flow of directives, which had been such a feature of 1941
and 1942, had slackened off, and their place had to be taken by a
succession of personal "conferences," usually quite
inconclusive, between Hitler and individual army group commanders.
For example, before he could get unqualified permission to retreat
to the line of the Dnieper, Manstein had to "confer" with
Hitler no fewer than seven times.
[The most important conferences were those on 27th August at
Vinnitsa, on 2nd September at Rastenburg (Kluge also attended this
conference), on 8th September (with Kleist) at Vinnitsa, and on 15th
September at Rasteuburg.]
During the period that Hitler was making up his mind, very little
could be done about fortifying the line, for neither the OKH Works
Department nor Koch, who controlled all the local resources, would
allocate materials or civilian labour for the purpose. Then, in the
last fortnight of the withdrawal, following Manstein's visit to
Rastenburg on 15th September, a perfect orgy of bloodshed and
confusion broke out as all the various Reich agencies started to
evacuate and to save what they could from the wreck.
OKH had ordered that a strip fifteen miles wide along the east
bank of the Dnieper was to be made a "waste zone" and
completely "sterilised" of buildings, water, utilities, and
of course, people. Meanwhile Goering, through the Four-Year Plan
officials, Sauckel through the GBA, and Bormann through Koch and
others of his nominees in the
Reichskommissariat
were all
trying, more or less independently of one another, to plunder what
they could, under a general edict that machinery, public buildings,
cattle, horses, and men of military age were not to be left to the
enemy "in a usable condition."
Yet when the Germans did get safely to the right bank of the river
they did not find themselves safe for long. The total length of
Manstein's front was nearly 450 miles. To protect this he had only
thirty-seven infantry divisions and seventeen Panzer and
Panzergrenadier
divisions, many of which had been reduced to
little more than regimental strength. The balance of his front was
further upset by Hitler's determination to hold bridgeheads at
Zaporozhe, Dnepropetrovsk, Kremenchug, and Kiev. The closing months
of 1943 passed, like the autumn, in a sequence of bitter local
battles, whose cumulative effect was to sap German strength almost
beyond repair.
In November, faced by a simultaneous threat to Kiev and/or
eruption from the Russian bridgehead on the lower Dnieper below
Kremenchug, Manstein finally managed to extract some reinforcements
from Hitler. These consisted of an infantry division and two refitted
Panzer divisions (the 14th and the 24th), two Panzer divisions from
OKH reserve (the 1st and
Leibstandarte
), and one new Panzer
division (the 25th). All these formations were committed before
Christmas 1943, but Russian pressure and their delays in arrival,
owing to the loss of the vital railway junctions west of Kiev,
prevented their ever being used as a mass. Minor tactical successes
were gained in the large bend of the Dnieper, but it proved
impossible to hold Kiev, and as the New Year came the German line in
southern Russia presented a perilously lopsided appearance.
The persistent lack of strategic appreciation which discolours
German deployment in the East for nearly eighteen months after
Zitadelle
must be Hitler's responsibility. Yet Hitler cannot
but have known what he was doing, or, rather, what he was intending
to do. The Führer was no Hapsburg buffoon who moved corps and
armies about according to the dictates of his digestion. Records of
his conversations when individual tactical problems were being
discussed (records which in every case were kept, and subsequently
quoted, by those whose interest it is to show Hitler in the worst
possible light) show him to be shrewd and rational. But in his
overall conduct of the campaign—or retreat, as it came to
be—Hitler seems to have been fighting alone, against the whole
of professional army opinion. Partly, of course, this was because of
his contempt for the General Staff. "No General will ever
pronounce himself ready to attack; and no commander will ever fight a
defensive battle without looking over his shoulder to a 'shorter'
line," Hitler complained at one of his conferences. Also, it
does seem as if Hitler preferred to regard the experiences of the
1941 winter as typical—as showing that the Russians could be
held and slowly worn down provided that sufficient "will"
was exerted—and the experiences of 1942 as being due (as many
Germans still claim) to "exceptional" circumstances, like
the positioning of the Rumanians on the flanks. Hitler was also
obsessed with the importance of space, although he seldom allowed his
commanders to make proper use of it in defence, and there is no doubt
that he deluded himself into believing that all was well by brooding
over the OKW wall maps and the immense Eastern territories they
showed remaining between the Red Army and the Reich frontiers, just
as he deluded himself by counting divisional "numbers" and
ignored the new quality of the Red Army by making comparisons with
1941, when its
nominal
superiority in numbers and tank power
had been almost as great.
Hitler also tended to rely too much on the military equation:
Space equals time. Privately he was already convinced that he was
fighting a defensive war. In December 1943, nearly a year before it
became Goebbels'
leitmotif
, he told Manstein that the
coalition would break up as a result of its own internal tensions.
And once it is realised that Hitler's strategic purpose was to create
conditions under which the coalition would lose heart at the apparent
impossibility of its task and the incompatibility of its separate
partners, then his determination to make it fight for every inch—even
where this was in contravention of strictly military principle—is
easier to understand. However, even in this aim, Hitler was not
entirely consistent. For just as in 1944 he estimated the Americans
as the weakest party to the Grand Alliance and denuded the Eastern
front to punish them in the Ardennes offensive, so in 1943 he was
prepared to thin out the East in order to accumulate behind the West
wall a strong enough force to throw them into the sea. Yet when
Guderian, who agreed with this strategy in principle, tried to
persuade Hitler that it could be followed with security only if the
Eastern front was first deliberately reduced in length as well as in
strength, Hitler would not listen to him.
This is all the more surprising when one remembers that of all the
generals, Guderian was the one whom Hitler respected most, and in
whom his trust endured longest.
[That is, of the "independent" generals. Keitel and
Jodl, Hitler regarded as "office boys."]
Guderian has described how the two of them had breakfast together
early in January 1944:
... at a small round table in a rather dark room. We were alone
. . . only his Alsatian bitch, Biondi, was there. Hitler fed her from
time to time with pieces of dry bread. Linge, the servant who waited
on us, came and went silently. The rare occasion had arisen on which
it would be possible to tackle and perhaps to solve thorny problems
...
But when Guderian tried to persuade Hitler to authorise an
immediate start on a line of heavy fortifications deep in Poland, he
found that he had "stirred up a hornets' nest." Hitler,
after claiming that he was "the greatest builder of
fortifications of all time," objected that the railway system
was inadequate to transport the materials which such a system would
require, on top of the needs of the front, "and, as usual,
bluffed by reeling off exact statistics which his listener was not
for the moment in a position to contradict." Guderian, with his
customary frankness, explained that he was thinking of establishing a
line as far back as the Bug and the Niemen, and as the rail
bottleneck began only after Brest-Litovsk this was not a valid
objection.
As this involved a phased withdrawal of between two and three
hundred miles, it is not surprising that Hitler refused to listen.
Next, the Inspector General doggedly pressed on to a subject which
every senior officer who could catch Hitler alone used to raise, and
which was even less welcome to the Führer than that of a major
withdrawal—namely, the appointment of a
generalissimo
who would have "supreme responsibility" for the East.
Hitler countered with the usual arguments, that it would be a slight
to Goering, that he could not get rid of Keitel, and so forth.
Neither man could come out in the open with his real motives—Guderian
that he believed Hitler's leadership to be disastrously incompetent,
Hitler that he did not trust the Army suf. ficiently to allow it
independence.
The result was that the two men parted with nothing achieved and
their relations, if affected at all, slightly poorer—though not
so much poorer, we may think, as they would have been had Hitler
known that Guderian had already tried to raise the "leadership
question" with two of the principals at the Führer's own
court.
Goebbels, whom Guderian had tackled immediately after the collapse
of
Zitadelle
, "had pronounced the problem a thorny one,
but had nevertheless promised to do what he could at an appropriate
time." (Actually, he never did anything.) Himmler, too, was
approached, but he presented an impression of "impenetrable
obliquity." (In fact, as has already been shown, and will later
be further demonstrated, Himmler agreed with Guderian, but preferred
to go about things in his own way.)
Jodl had been the most crushing of all. After listening without
comment he simply said, "Do you know of a better supreme
commander than Adolf Hitler?"
After a short breathing space in the middle of December, Vatutin,
Koniev, and Malinovsky all resumed their pressure, and Manstein, with
his reserves dissipated in the local counterattacks of the previous
month, was finding it impossible to keep a continuous front in being.
The German line was now stretched so taut that Soviet armour which
punctured it could roam where it liked in the rear areas. A Russian
account of the capture of Pyolichatka tells:
It was like a garage. Vehicles of all makes and all models were
lined up in close ranks on the streets, in the courtyards and the
cherry orchards. They had come from all the countries of Europe. From
large Demag seven-tonners which carried an entire mechanical workshop
to small Renault tricycles, from the luxurious Horch to old Citroens.
All were camouflaged in preparation for the road journey [i.e., the
retreat]. In the sidings were long strings of trucks loaded with
flour, salt, munitions, tanks, petrol. Before a grain elevator, a
train was loaded, ready to depart. The destination was written on the
trucks: Köln—Tilsit—Königsberg.