It was now urgent for Manstein to get out of the Dnieper bend for
good and retreat at least as far as the line of the Ukrainian Bug.
But his mobile reserves had been worn down to extinction, and once
the German front began to break up of its own volition, a series of
ruinous encirclement battles took place whose outcome Manstein was
powerless to influence.
The largest pocket developed in the Kovel-Korsun area of the lower
Dnieper, in which SS Viking and the remnants of seven other divisions
were trapped. By using the last of his Panzers, Manstein managed to
drive a corridor through to the encircled men, but it was possible to
keep this open for only a few hours. Leon Degrelle, a Belgian with
the SS
Wallonia
Brigade, has described how
In this frantic race vehicles were overturned, throwing wounded
in confusion to the ground. A wave of Soviet tanks overtook the first
vehicles and caught more than half of the convoy; the wave advanced
through the carts, breaking them under our eyes, one by one like
boxes of matches, crushing the wounded and the dying horses . . . We
had a moment's respite when the tanks got jammed in the procession,
and were trying to get clear of the tangle of hundreds of vehicles
broken beneath their tracks.
For six miles the column struggled southeast under continuous
fire, dragging its wounded tail, to which the Russian tanks were
clinging. Then the Germans were halted by a river eight metres broad
and two metres deep. The artillery teams which had escaped
destruction plunged first into the waves and ice floes. The banks of
the river were steep, the horses turned back and were drowned. Men
then threw themselves in to cross the river by swimming. But hardly
had they got to the other side than they were transformed into blocks
of ice, and their clothes frozen to their bodies.
Some fell down dead. Most of the soldiers preferred to get rid
of their clothes. They tried to throw their equipment over the river.
But often their uniforms fell into the current. Soon hundreds of
soldiers, completely naked and red as lobsters, were thronging the
other bank. Many soldiers did not know how to swim. Maddened by the
approach of the Russian armour which was coming down the slope and
firing at them, they threw themselves pell, mell into the icy water.
Some escaped death by cling, ing to trees which had been hastily
felled . . . But hundreds were drowned. Under the fire of tanks
thousands upon thousands of soldiers, half clothed, streaming with
icy water or naked as the day they were born, ran through the snow
towards the distant cottages of Lysianka.
Still more serious than the defeat at Kovel-Korsun was the threat
posed by Vatutin and Koniev to the north. For on 5th February,
Vatutin had captured Rovno and begun to wheel his armour south toward
the upper Dniester and the foothills of the Carpathians. Once these
had been reached, he would have effectively severed Manstein's
command in two, with one half bunched in the traditional corridor
between the Carpathians and the Pripet Marshes and all the troops on
the Bug line dependent for victualling and refit on lines of
communication through Rumania.
All the tanks left to the army group were concentrated in the
north, where the two Panzer armies of Rauss and Hube were slowly
being compressed against the Carpathians.
[Colonel General Hoth, one of the most experienced Panzer leaders
in the German Army, and a man who had been continuously in action on
the Eastern front since 22nd June, 1941, was dismissed from the
command of the 4th Panzer Army after the fall of Kiev.]
But the expected lull which usually allowed a period of
recuperation during the thaw never materialised—largely owing
to the increased mobility of the Russian infantry in its tracked
American carriers—and by the middle of March, Koniev had
managed to separate the 4th Panzer Army from the 1st, and plunged
Manstein into his last crisis.
It is likely that Hitler had already decided to get rid of
Manstein. However, to his credit, Hitler stood by him until the
crisis (which was caused by Hübe's refusal to obey orders and
drive the 1st Panzer Army west) was over. Manstein had been summoned
to the Obersalzberg on 25th March. Hitler then accused him of having
"frittered away" his forces and of responsibility for "the
unfavourable situation in which the Army Group had landed."
Manstein, whose temper cannot have been improved by a telephone
call from his Chief of Staff, recounting that Hube was still refusing
to break out westward, defended himself "with some asperity"
and claims that, after the audience was over, he told Schmundt that
Hitler could have his resignation if he wanted it. That evening,
though, Hitler went over to Manstein's side against Hube, and even
consented to release an SS Panzer corps from the West so as to form a
task force for the rescue of the 1st Panzer Army. Emboldened by this,
Manstein promptly "followed up with one or two ideas of my own
on the future conduct of operations." This was probably the last
straw for Hitler. At all events, Manstein had been back at his
headquarters barely three days when Hitler's personal Kondor came to
take him back to Berchtesgaden. In the aircraft, somewhat
apprehensive, sat Kleist, who had already been picked up from his own
headquarters. After an uneasy flight the two field marshals were
shown into Hitler's presence that same evening (30th March) and the
Führer, with notable courtesy, and after presenting them with
swords to their Knight's Crosses, dismissed them.
Hitler told him (according to Manstein), "All that counted
now was to cling stubbornly to what we held . . . The time for
grand-style operations in the East, for which I had been particularly
qualified, was now past." Model, whom he had selected to take
over the army group, would dash around the divisions and get the very
utmost out of the troops.
Manstein's tart reply, "that the Army Group's divisions had
long been giving of their best under my command, and that no one else
could get them to give anything more"; his expressed conviction
that "what we had to pay for, first and foremost, was Germany's
failure to stake
absolutely everything
on bringing about a
showdown in the East
in 1943, in order to achieve at least 'a
stalemate"; and the way in which, in his memoirs, he uses Hitler
as a convenient sump in which to lay all the blunders of the German
Army in the East—these stand jointly in contrast with the
Führer's own realistic (and not ungenerous) assessment of
Manstein's abilities. In a conversation with Jodl, some time after
Manstein's dismissal, the subject came up by chance.
. . . It's just that there are two different talents. In my
eyes Manstein has a tremendous talent for operations. There's no
doubt about that. And if I had an army of, say, 20 divisions at full
strength and in peacetime conditions, I couldn't think of a better
commander for them than Manstein. He knows how to handle them, and
will do it. He would move like lightning—but always under the
condition that he has first-class material, petrol, plenty of
ammunition. If something breaks down ... he doesn't get things done.
If I got hold of another army today I'm not at all sure that I
wouldn't employ Manstein because he is certainly one of our most
competent officers. But there are just two separate talents . . .
Manstein can operate with divisions as long as they are in good
shape. (If the divisions are roughly handled I have to take them away
from him in a hurry, he can't handle such a situation.) That has to
be a person who works completely independent of any routine.
The dismissals of Manstein, Kleist, and Hoth were echoed by
certain enforced changes in the ranks of the
Kommissariat
. The
loathsome Koch, his Ukrainian kingdom extinct, had returned,
fulminating, to East Prussia. Kube, busy with his "blondies"
even while the sound of Russian gunfire was audible in the palace at
Minsk, had one night returned to his own bed, to find that the
welcoming shape of a hot water bottle was in fact an anti-personnel
mine. With legs and trunk blown to pulp, he died inside a half hour.
Lohse held on in Riga until the spring of 1944, though (as is
apparent from his correspondence) in an increasingly nervous
condition. Finally the signs of impending defeat and the possibility
of assassination proved intolerable, and he addressed a letter to
Rosenberg, announcing that he considered it "his duty to act
independently, in accordance with the Führer's wishes and his
own conscience." Lohse then had a nervous breakdown, and
disappeared into Germany. No one could find him (though he surfaced
promptly enough after the Bonn government had been constituted, to
lodge a successful claim for a civil service pension), and Koch was
despatched briefly, and somewhat reluctantly, to take his place.
In the weeks following Model's appointment the Russian offensive
in the western Ukraine gradually died away. The Soviet forces, after
nearly eight months of continuous forward movement, had at last
exhausted their momentum, and the
Stavka
reserves of men and
material were being directed to the Belorussian "fronts" of
Chernyakovski, Zakharov, and Rokossovski, in preparation for a
massive attack against the German centre, which was to carry the Red
Army to the banks of the Vistula.
The Russian offensive began on 22nd June, just over two weeks
after D-Day in the West, and was mounted by 118 infantry and 43 tank
divisions.
[These divisions, though they would have been near full strength
at the start of the attack, were still much below the (nominal)
strength of German ones. At a late stage 36 more divisions joined
them. On a comparative basis, the Russian strength was about four to
one in men and six to one in armour.]
By the end of the month Army Group Centre had been forced out of
its long-prepared defences and was streaming back across White
Russia, abandoning guns, vehicles, dumps of material, wounded, in its
haste to reach the old defences of the Polish border. Model was
transferred from Army Group South to try to stop the rout, but even
he could do little with the battered remnants which Busch had
bequeathed him. The Führer moved his headquarters from
Obersalzberg to Rastenburg, and in spite of the mounting danger in
Normandy, all reinforcements were henceforth directed to the East.
So now we come to the fateful month of July 1944, when the waters
were rising along the whole periphery of the Nazi empire, where
everywhere, in Speidel's words, ". . . the floodgates are
creaking," to the day, the 20th, of the
attentat
; a
climacteric in the history of the Third Reich of Hitler's relations
with the Army, and of the rational direction of the German war
effort.
The details of that dramatic affair are so well known, and have
been so often described, that it would be repetitious to present them
again here, save where they impinge on the direction of military
affairs.
[The best description is given by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett in his
masterly work on the German Army in politics—
Nemesis of
Power
. Another excellent account can be found in Chester Wümot's
The Struggle for Europe
.]
So we will do no more than allude to the failure to blow up the
telephone exchange at Rastenburg; the hesitation and scruples of the
plotters waiting in the Bendlerstrasse; the failure to shoot Fromm
and Renier, and to deploy the "loyal" (i.e., disloyal)
Berlin garrison immediately, and proceed straight to the appointment
of Germany's most brilliant soldier as Chief of the General Staff of
the Army.
The appointment was made by Hitler, whose manner less than
twenty-four hours after the
attentat
was one of "astonishing
calm." After their meeting Guderian walked over to the office
block assigned to OKH at Rastenburg and found things in a most
un-Prussian state:
I found the buildings empty. There was no one there to meet me.
After looking through various rooms I came across a private soldier
by the name of Riehl, sound asleep. I sent this splendid fellow off
to find an officer ... I then attempted to telephone to the Army
Groups in order to find out the situation at the front. There were
three telephones in the Chief of Staff's office, and no way of
telling what purpose each one served. I picked up the nearest one. A
female voice answered. When I said my name she screamed and hung up
on me . . .
It was an inauspicious opening to the final period of the
Wehrmacht's decline.
twenty
| Eastern Europe Changes Hands
The collapse of the 20th July plot illustrates a particular facet
of the German character—a deep-seated reluctance to act against
the established authority, an aversion toward usurping responsibility
or appearing to belong to a minority, regardless of right or wrong.
Those wasted hours at the Bendlerstrasse while Stauffenberg was
flying south! No one had the conviction, or the courage, to really
seize power with both hands, and to use it. Even the "winning"
side, Fromm and Remer, were fumbling and hesitant until they were
sure of the position.
But these defects of character (if such they are) can be seen also
as virtues in the days which followed. For as soon as the current of
authority and retribution began to flow outward from Rastenburg,
everything fell back into place. Resistance there was none; abject
confession was profuse. There is no better testimonial to the
discipline of the German Army, or to the callous efficiency of the
Nazi Party machine, than the way in which the Reich withstood the
multiple stresses of the last week in July 1944. At a time when the
Russian tide across Poland seemed unstoppable, when the floodgates in
Normandy were creaking under the rising weight of Patton's and
Bradley's armies, Germany was saturated by a wave of denunciation,
imprisonment, and murder. The breach between officers of the Army and
the SS (of every rank) came into the open with Bormann's order to the
Gauleiters to "ar-rest Army officers on suspicion [sic] as
practically the whole of the General Staff is in league with the
Moscow Free Germany Committee." Jodl, ever quick to disclaim
association with his own caste, endorsed a memorandum of Burgdorf's
from OKH to the effect that ". . . the whole General Staff
should be abolished." All the quasi-inde- pendent empires of the
Third Reich—the SS, the Gauleiters, the Labour Front, the civil
police, the Armaments Commission, the Propaganda Ministry, the Hitler
Youth—all had wavered momentarily as the tremor ran across
their foundations, yet in the shrill chorus of recrimination came to
realise that their very existence, even their prerogatives of
internecine quarrelling, depended on the life of the Führer.