Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (30 page)

When, therefore, did the tide turn in the Ostfeldzug? One author has declared that the German failure to capture Moscow during the brutal winter fighting of 1941–42 was “the greatest battle of the war.”
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That conclusion certainly would have surprised Stalin and the Stavka, who were really disturbed by the immensity of the Nazi drive toward the Caucasus, the lower Donets basin, and Stalingrad itself in mid- to late 1942, well after they had held on to Moscow. Most historians today regard the massive defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad as the beginning of the end, the turn of the tide: John Erickson’s classic two-volume study of this epic contest is deliberately divided into
The Road to Stalingrad
and
The Road to Berlin
. There, among the shattered warehouses by the Volga and the factories and assembly plants of the once-impressive city of Stalingrad, the Nazi tide began to ebb. R. M. Citino’s important article “The Death of the Wehrmacht” assures us that late 1942—El Alamein, the dreadful Caucasus battles, Stalingrad—marked the definite end of German lightning warfare.
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And yet, as we have seen, Manstein’s reinvigorated panzer armies came back in the spring of 1943 to smash the forward Soviet divisions and capture the entire Kharkov region. Perhaps this was a bid to persuade Stalin to agree to some sort of negotiated peace across east-central Europe, but while it was militarily impressive, it sparked no political response. So in July 1943 Hitler’s gigantic military machine launched an even greater assault to the east, Operation Zitadelle, to chop off the impertinent Russian armies lodged in the Kursk salient. It is telling that Erickson, despite the time division chosen for his two massive books, actually titled his chapter on the Kursk battle “Breaking the Equilibrium,” and that on Operation Bagration in summer 1944 “Breaking
the Back of the Wehrmacht.” The full tide, he seems to suggest, turned rather later than the titles of his volumes imply and many other accounts maintain.

Some years ago, the great German expert on this campaign, Bernd Wegner, raised the question of whether it makes sense to search for a turning point at all. Was there in these middle years really any identifiable watershed—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk? That is, was there a battle at and after which the course of the war went inexorably in favor of the eventual winners?
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Perhaps the enterprise was simply doomed from the start. However deeply the Nazi extraction regime mobilized its own economy and plundered its conquered European space, possibly it never could match the fully mobilized resources of the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Add in Germany’s declaration of war against the United States on the news of the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, and the odds became far worse.

It is clear that many of the leading German generals slowly came to hold this view, though it is also true that very few of them wished to cease fighting or to seem to contradict the Fuehrer. Proposing a withdrawal almost always risked Hitler’s fury. When in November and December 1941, after the first great advances through Russia and the Ukraine, Gerd von Rundstedt suggested that with the coming of winter plus the arrival of unknown numbers of Red Army divisions from the Far East, it would be wise to pull back, shorten the lines, and consolidate, he was dismissed. His name was the first on an increasingly lengthy roll call of wartime German generals fired by their master.
^g

For their part, divisional commanders were getting uneasy at the massive and growing defects in transport and supply. What was the point of panzer columns streaming through the Ukraine if they kept running out of fuel and ammunition, or if a tank that broke its caterpillar track (as so many did) was a hundred miles ahead of the repair crews? The Wehrmacht’s trucks were tied to the few, notoriously poor paved roads, and the vast numbers of horse-drawn wagons were painfully slow in dragging their way through the boggy paths that formed
most of the country’s land infrastructure. The smarter German generals were also bemused by the smoke-and-mirrors act that Hitler and the OKW kept pulling, increasing the number of German divisions on the Eastern Front simply through reducing their original size and then creating new ones. Thus, in the interval between the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa, the ten original panzer divisions were doubled in number, but each one of them was halved in size, and much the same happened to the motorized infantry divisions, which were trimmed from three regiments each to only two.
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Perhaps this made those units more maneuverable on the battlefield and gave the army group commanders more flexibility, but the uneasy thought was that the Fuehrer was creating new divisions out of thin air, whereas the Red Army’s increases in numbers were real ones. (In total during the war, the Soviets conscripted thirty million men, of which they lost ten million, with still larger numbers of wounded.)

Finally, none of the Wehrmacht generals fighting the Ostfeldzug could be unaware of the fact that by 1942 the Third Reich was now engaged in a global war: they saw so many of their classmates from officer school deployed in Greece, the Balkans, North Africa, France, Norway … So Germany was fighting on three fronts, while the Soviet Union battled on only one. Paul Carell notes perceptively that the Allied invasion of North Africa, followed by Hitler’s order for the occupation of Vichy France in the crisis month of November 1942, occurred precisely at the time that the Stavka was about to order the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, yet this news of the Western Allies’ push into North Africa and the Mediterranean caused the OKW to hold back, for a while, some of their most effective fighting divisions from the Battle of Stalingrad.
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Germany could not be strong everywhere, and the Great Patriotic War cannot be described in isolation, even if Soviet writings tend that way. When the Western Allies invaded North Africa, they affected the Stalingrad battles; when they invaded Sicily, they affected Kursk. So a division such as the Leibstandarte, along with various air flotillas of the Luftwaffe, were being shuttled from front to front. This shuttling clearly couldn’t and didn’t fit into the theory of lightning warfare. And once the Ostfeldzug is placed in the context of a global struggle for power, we can see that it may indeed be misleading to speak of a certain battle, such as Moscow or Stalingrad, as the decisive
turning point.
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It is perfectly feasible to argue that the war on the Eastern Front
was
decisive without having to argue that one particular battle was key to the whole struggle.

This brings us to the final conundrum about the German conduct of the Ostfeldzug, and indeed of the paradox of the “German way of war” after 1941. The whole point of the theory and practice of lightning war was precisely to avoid the static fighting and bloodbaths of the First World War. This newer sort of warfare would be different because fast-moving motorized forces would surprise an enemy’s line and drive through it, overrun his rear lines of communication, and force a surrender. But this concept of fast, clinical, and economical campaigning was totally contradicted by Hitler’s fanatical belief that the attack upon the USSR had to be a
Vernichtungskrieg
(war of annihilation), followed by the permanent occupation of gigantic tracts of arable land. It was also contradicted by the ghastly and fateful Nazi habit of shooting and starving prisoners of war, ransacking even small villages in the search for Communist Party members and Jews, and foolishly mistreating the millions of Ukrainians who originally turned out to welcome the German troops as liberators. (How might the war had gone with forty million Ukrainians on the Axis side?) Blitzkrieg was supposed to be clever warfare, and so it was in the 1939 Polish and 1940 French campaigns. As it was conducted on the Eastern Front, however, it was really stupid warfare. Thus, as one student of this war has noted, it may be that “the means and ends were in conflict from the beginning.”
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All this might suggest that the result of the war on the Eastern Front was a foregone conclusion. It was, clearly,
the
campaign of all the major struggles of the 1939–45 war where brute force is most in evidence; sheer numbers, plus weather and distance, are the determinants.
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Yet the problem solvers do have a vital role here. Some field commanders, support managers, scientists, and engineers responded to the stress of mass warfare in a cleverer way, and in the pages that follow we will provide examples. And the Red Army’s organizers had, in confronting the greatest blitzkrieg attack ever, figured out things better than those pursuing that particular form of warfare. The USSR did not win this epic contest solely because it poured more human beings into the fight than did its enemy. It won because it slowly developed means of stemming German armored assaults, reducing their core forces to
shreds, then moving forward to regain the conquered lands. The Soviet Union—not unlike, say, the Americans in the Pacific—won its critical campaign because it was putting an assembly of weapons, tactics, and command structures into an overall tool kit that could not be broken. Understanding how the German form of lightning warfare came to a halt on the banks of the Volga and the wheat fields of Kursk requires further analysis.

The weapons, organizations, and techniques that helped the Red Army turn the tide on the Eastern Front were many, but in an order of significance that is much different from our generally held notions of which Soviet weapons brought the blitzkrieg to its defeat. The present author, like many military historians, has long assumed that the T-34 tank and its later improved variants such as the T-34-85 were by far the most effective weapons deployed in the Soviet counterattack. The assumption is understandable. The accolades for this armored behemoth are limitless. “The greatest tank of all time,” “the most versatile tank of the Second World War,” and “the weapon that shocked the Germans” are among the more common descriptions. As early as July 1941 OKW chief Alfred Jodl noted in his war diary the surprise at this new and thus unknown
wunder
-armament being unleashed against the German assault divisions.
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Paul Carell, in his postwar work “Hitler’s War on Russia,” admiringly recounts a startling confrontation between a lone T-34 and an advance group of Wehrmacht panzers and infantry at the battle around Senno on July 8, 1941:

When three of these mastodons were unexpectedly stuck in a swamp and abandoned by their crews, Guderian himself came to examine them. It is reported that he walked away silently, thoughtful and long-faced.
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Until the much heavier German tanks joined the war, the Wehrmacht’s Mark III and Mark IVs were at a distinct disadvantage—at least on a one-to-one basis.

The impression, and the consequent legend, of the T-34 as a stunning battlefield conqueror was reinforced by the testimony of defeated German generals after the war. Panzer leaders such as Friedrich von Mellenthin said, “We had nothing like it,” and Ewald von Kleist declared it to be “the finest tank in the world.” Guderian somberly noted: “Up to this time we had panzer superiority, but from now on the situation was reversed.… Very worrying.” The author of the study that records those statements goes on to add, “Who could be better judges?” This view was also very strongly (and perhaps more convincingly) reinforced by the testimonials of the Red Army tank crews themselves. Finally, and for obvious propaganda purposes, the Soviet Union in later years could point to the T-34’s success as a symbol of socialist ingenuity and national industrial strength. This tank’s acclaimed power certainly convinced a large number of Western historians, not to mention a long list of foreign defense ministries that purchased it well after the Second World War was over—as late as 1996, variants of the T-34 were in service in at least twenty-seven nations.
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It is likely that captured German generals would have had a good reputational reason to praise a weapon they themselves never possessed, and that post-1945 Soviet propaganda might have had an even better reason to extol the Red Army’s great instrument of war. Even if we may discount those sources, however, there remains the indubitable fact that whole tank armies of T-34s confronted the Wehrmacht’s powerful panzer groups at Kursk in 1943, and that eventually it was the depleted German divisions that limped away from the field. And it was also the case that the powerful forward thrusts of the Red Army from summer 1944 onward, culminating in the eventual seizure of Berlin, were spearheaded by fast-moving and enormous columns of Soviet armor. But none of that later history means that the T-34 was a wonder weapon, something in a class of its own as soon as it appeared on the battlefield
in July 1941. The blunt fact was that the early T-34s had masses of design flaws, were highly unreliable in battle, and suffered from the “on-off” attitude of Stalin and the Stavka toward building main battle tanks in the late 1930s. The development of this imperfect yet potentially great fighting machine thus has many features of the parallel history of the B-29 Superfortress bomber and the P-51 Mustang fighter (see chapters 5 and 2, respectively).

But this case was, arguably, even worse, given the length of the time the tank had been in development. For example, even the most enthusiastic of its Western admirers admit to its poor turret design and to the scarcity of radios.
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Moreover, when Operation Barbarossa commenced, the Red Army possessed only about a thousand of these newer tanks, the battalion crews had not trained in them, and even when they got to the fighting they were scattered up and down the front individually and thus lacked the concentrated punch of a German panzer column. They also did not work with Soviet infantry, thus having no cover on their flanks, and they quickly ran out of fuel.
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Finally, all the production and updated design schemes were badly disrupted by the German invasion and the desperate need to shift entire factories from around Leningrad and Kharkov to the distant Urals (the Voroshilov Tank Factory No. 174, for example, went from Leningrad to Omsk, more than a thousand miles away). By September 1942, even the famous production lines at the Stalingrad Tractor Works had to cease working as the German divisions closed in. Perhaps these were just early teething problems, sorted out by the fighting at Stalingrad in 1942 or at the latest by the 1943 Kursk battles. But the catalog of the T-34’s defects was much longer—and longer-lasting—and its actual battle performance in the middle years of the war was uneven. While it did eventually become a great weapon on the battlefield, at the very least the time frame of its road to success needs to be shifted.