Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (29 page)

Consider the numbers involved in the opening campaign of Operation Barbarossa and as it was waged from June 1941 into the spring and summer of the following year. Not including significant additions from satellite and volunteer military units from countries such as Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Finland, the German high command (OKW) sent around 110 divisions, including 14 fast-moving panzer divisions, eastward in the greatest invasion of all time; additional divisions waited behind for their turn to fight. The successive encirclement operations showed that blitzkrieg could work even across expanding battlegrounds: the defender’s air force was smashed on the ground, the forward lines buckled under heavy artillery and infantry attack, and then the panzer armies drove through at two widely separated points, wheeled toward each other, and closed the circle. When Smolensk fell in early August, 310,000 Soviet troops were captured; the seizure of Kiev in mid-September brought in no fewer than 600,000 prisoners, 2,500 tanks, and 1,000 guns; and the so-called Vyazma pocket, holding out to the west of Moscow, collapsed in mid-October when 670,000 surrendered, with 1,000 tanks and 4,000 guns.
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What could stop this continued attack, slaughter, and surrender?

First, the weather. In the summer months of 1941 the German assault took its usual form: the Luftwaffe wiped out the unready Red Air Force squadrons on the ground and then turned to help the panzers by strafing and bombing enemy troops; armored columns punched holes through the confused foe, wheeled together for the encirclement (and surrender), then, reinforced by fresh fuel and ammunition, struck farther eastward. But by October and November it had really slowed down. There was simply nothing that the Nazi blitzkrieg could do against the autumn muds, followed by the extraordinarily early onset of extreme frosts and snow—the coldest winter, ironically, since Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and with German troops still clad in summer uniforms. By the end of October, Army Group South was virtually out of fuel, diesel engines would not start, artillery was frozen, and soldiers
were crippled by frostbite. By the time spring came, the ground conditions only got worse, because of that notorious Russian weather condition called
rasputitsa
—the surface snow had now melted, but the resulting water could not drain away because the soil below was still deep frozen. Two feet of unfrozen soil quickly turned into a mud bath into which both the German and Soviet armies sank every spring during this great conflict. Some 500 miles from their starting point, with lines of communication difficult to sustain even in the best weather, the Wehrmacht really was literally stuck in the mud.

The second reason the Barbarossa assault faded was simply that the Red Army fought back—not well, not skillfully, not enough to throw back the onslaught, but sufficiently to slow it down. The Russians burned their own barns and bridges, destroyed or poisoned their wells, and pulled back their cattle and horses just as they pulled back their factories; the enemy would get nothing. Third, they would soon throw more troops into the fight, either the hastily assembled new divisions or the experienced cohorts being transferred from the Far East now that it was becoming more certain the Japanese would strike southward and not against Russia’s distant eastern provinces. There was probably nothing more frightening to a German soldier in December 1941 than to be lying exhausted and freezing in a trench west of Moscow and then to spot regiments of white-clad ghosts, the hardened troops from the Mongolian Front, advancing through the swirling snow.

In other words, while the Wehrmacht’s gains were immense—they had advanced 625 miles by December—they had not produced a breakthrough. From the first fighting until the last, the Germans, so superior in their tactical-operational skills, seem to have persistently underestimated the strength of the opposition. Their intelligence record here can only be described as abysmal, which is perhaps likely to happen when an army thinks of their foe as primitive—even when they faced a general such as Georgy Zhukov, who had badly hurt Japan’s Kwantung Army in Soviet-Japanese border fights two years earlier. Signals intelligence doesn’t seem to have helped, because the Soviets kept wireless messages to a minimum, and there were no spies to inform them of the many fresh divisions being raised and trained well behind Moscow. Thus, however hard the Wehrmacht hurt the defending forces in those early months, there turned out to be no endpoint, no culmination,
no collapse of France. A mid-August 1941 entry in the diary of Franz Halder, the army’s chief of staff, nicely captures this dilemma: “We underestimated Russia: we reckoned with 200 divisions, but now we have already identified 360.”
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Even if Soviet divisions were smaller in size than their Wehrmacht equivalents at this time, the numbers are breathtaking.

This was the story all through 1942 and into 1943: the Germans increased their efforts to encircle and then destroy the growing Soviet armies, but without success. All the German military language about breakthrough (
Durchbruck
) or encirclement (
Einkreisung
) suggests that the enemy’s lines were thinly held or could be outflanked. But a defensive position 1,100 miles long and 200 miles deep, full of broken bridges, poisoned wells, booby traps, and ruined crops—plus a climate of summer heat, autumn muds, winter snows, and then spring muds—was not a thin, fragile wall at all. The primitiveness of road communications in Russia and the endurance of local inhabitants long used to the harshness of their daily existence all worked against the invaders.

As in the Mediterranean theater, the Wehrmacht’s difficulties were compounded by Hitler’s repeated and disastrous alterations in the axes of attack after the early failure to take Moscow. Assuming that the siege of Leningrad (from September 1941 on) in the north would continue, even if always stalemated by the city’s fanatical resistance, the main strategic choice for the German high command was between a renewed thrust toward Moscow and a new offensive along the southern front toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. The debate among historians today over the merits of a German drive toward the enemy’s capital city versus a bold and wider stroke across the Don and the Volga is as fierce as the 1942 disagreements among the German generals; what is not in dispute is that Hitler’s follow-up directive that there should be both a Stalingrad offensive
and
a massive move toward Baku—that is, two offensives in the south—was an act of reckless and colossal overstretch. Among other things, how did one keep munitions streaming between, say, the factory in Leipzig and an outlier city in the Caucasus such as Grozny? How did one provide air cover all that way when the Luftwaffe was beginning to lose its critical fight against the RAF both in western Europe and in North Africa and the Mediterranean? Moreover, Germany was now going against a Stavka and its generalissimo who had
regained their nerve and were turning the campaigns over to professional generals—many of them much younger than their German equivalents.

The successive and critical campaigns that form the centerpiece of the Russo-German War lie between roughly November 1942 and July 1944: Stalingrad, Kharkov, Kursk, and then the massive westward advance of Operation Bagration. The first was a bloodbath, even more a battle of exhaustion than the fight for Moscow had been. Stalingrad was a deliberately chosen duel between two very aggressive boxers; the hits and the pain were going to be great. So also were the chances of achieving a big win. While various comparisons can be made about the contemporaneous battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein, the most interesting difference may not be so much in the sheer size of the forces involved on each side as in the topographic breadth and thus in the operational opportunities. El Alamein, as we have seen, was fought in a very constricted space, from which neither side could make a flanking attack. By contrast, the choice of each combatant to fight at all costs for Stalingrad in late 1942 was not unlike the choice of France and Germany to endure a great, bloody battle over Verdun in 1917. It didn’t actually have to be fought there, and a new opening could be made on either flank—but the sheer commitment by both sides to winning this fight would not allow it. So an epic encounter took place around, across, above, and below Stalingrad.

Ironically, Stalingrad may have been the greatest example of a
Kesselschlacht
in history, except it was achieved against the German army. As the Wehrmacht’s forward units struggled to take the broken-down factories and streets on the city’s western side, gigantic Soviet armies arrived to strike from the north and the south, entrapping General Paulus’s entire Sixth Army and much else besides. This was an intensely personal battle of wills as well. Hitler drove his troops toward the symbolic city; Stalin held that attack off, then moved to encirclement. The Sixth Army had consisted originally of around 300,000 men; on January 31, 1943, to Hitler’s fury and contrary to his direct orders, the remaining 90,000 surrendered. Then the Soviets advanced through Kursk and Kharkov, albeit slowly, allowing the Wehrmacht the chance to pull their forces out of the Caucasus and thus to regroup. On the other hand, the Stavka was showing a much more sophisticated appreciation
of how to feint against one enemy position, then strike obliquely against the real target. Not for nothing does Liddell Hart have particular praise for these advances, as confirmation of his theory of “the indirect approach.”
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It remains amazing that in early 1943 the German army could again launch a major strike eastward, taking advantage of the Russians’ need to regroup after a big offensive battle as they waited for the newly arrived U.S.-donated trucks to bring up gas, ammunition, tinned food, and spare parts from hundreds of miles in the rear. For a while, Germany enjoyed the advantage of much shorter front lines, which is to say that its extreme overstretch had now been trimmed to merely a serious overextension. And the commanders on the Eastern Front, Manstein especially, were to benefit from Speer’s revitalization of the Nazi economy and the arrival of the Tiger and then Panther tanks—in nothing like the numbers of Shermans and T-34s then being produced, but enough to make a serious impact upon the battlefield if employed in strong formations, which they were. By February 1943 the Leibstandarte, Totenkopf, and Das Reich armored divisions, each with several dozen new Tiger tanks, had been released from the central reserve and sent east, along with some fresh infantry divisions from France. All this, and the firm frost-encrusted ground that permitted the panzers to average 20 miles a day, allowed Manstein to unleash his faster forces upon the much-battered city of Kharkov, which fell on March 14, with his SS-Panzercorps eliminating 32,000 Soviet troops. The Red Army was pushed back to the Donets, and then an early spring thaw brought all serious campaigning to a halt. Both sides drew breath for the next round. Eight of the twenty Soviet tank corps had been mauled. Manstein became Hitler’s favorite and most trusted commander, at least for a while.
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This was not a bad record for a German army now into its fourth year of total war. Yet, as Robert Forczyk points out, while the Russian tank corps may have been mauled, they were not destroyed, and Manstein himself was now mightily impressed by the stubbornness and sophistication of Red Army defenses. What both sides needed was a three- to four-month breathing space, to rebuild, regroup, and wait for the steppes to warm up and dry out. The arguments in Berlin and Moscow about how to conduct the impending summer clash were serious
and contentious, with, apparently, both dictators listening hard to their respective commanders. The Red Army’s most probable strike would be against the tempting Orel salient in the north, and the Wehrmacht’s against the equally tempting Kursk salient farther south. Each was assessing where to place the heavy tanks, where to put the bridging equipment, where to sow the minefields, and how to deploy its rather limited aerial striking capacity. In a way, it was like a massive chess game.

The Germans struck first, on July 5, 1943, against Kursk, with Manstein’s heavier forces (including panzer and panzer-grenadier divisions) cutting in from the south, while Hans von Kluge’s pincer attempted to drive in from the north. This is probably the culminating battle of the many blitzkrieg campaigns conducted by the Wehrmacht during the war, and the one that best showed its weakness. Immediately the German attackers found themselves encountering enormous strength-in-depth defenses, for Soviet military intelligence knew what was coming and the Stavka had pre-positioned additional armies for the counterattacks. The fighting was most bloody, with the high point being an all-day fight on July 12 between the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army and the II SS-Panzercorps around the village of Prokhorovka; later the conflict was described by Russian propaganda and subsequent Western authors as the greatest tank battle of all time. Probably it was, for the numbers committed to this single clash, especially from the Soviet side (about 800), were huge. What is more certain are two things: first, that the Russian armored losses were much, much greater; and, second, that nonetheless the Wehrmacht had to abandon the field because it simply could not get through. The “Manstein era” on the Eastern Front was over. Although the casualty figures are, as usual in this campaign, very vague and general, the best guess is that the overall Kursk campaign cost Hitler more than 50,000 troops and 1,600 tanks. Dozens of German army divisions were either destroyed or reduced to shells.
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Two days before the tank battle of Prokhorovka, the Western Allies landed in Sicily, which caused Hitler to turn his attention—and to direct many military units—to the Italian front. And on July 12 itself, the Red Army struck at the Orel salient in the north. From here on, one gets the sense of fatigue setting into the Wehrmacht: structures folding, fronts being abandoned (often despite the Fuehrer’s manic orders to
stand fast), battle-hardened but weary units limping off the field with perhaps only one-quarter of their equipment left intact. And so, despite Manstein’s hope that the stupendous Kursk encounter had blunted the Russians’ offensive capacities, they kept on coming, this time in the north, in the south, and on the critical central front. Slowly the Wehrmacht’s many units were eased out of the Leningrad area, the Crimea, Smolensk, Kiev. The great Operation Bagration of June 1944 was not yet in sight, but the overall trend was clear: Soviet push, German resistance, then German pullback, then Soviet further push.