Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (16 page)

The Soviet High Command let Timoshenko have whatever reserves were to hand. Parts of four Armies were sent into action on his front. With nine infantry divisions and three armoured formations Timoshenko attacked the Yelnya bend, which was at no time held by more than parts of four German divisions. It was the battle experience, the discipline and, above all, the stolid perseverance of the reduced German battalions and companies that proved decisive in this frightful battle.

The following is an account from the sector of the Motorized Infantry Regiment "Grossdeutschland," generally known as G.D.

First Lieutenant Hänert of 4th (Machine-gun) Company, 1st Battalion, G.D. Regiment, was in his foxhole, looking through his trench telescope. That was in front of the level-crossing at Kruglovka in the Yelnya bend. Russian artillery had been firing ceaselessly for the past three hours. All telephone lines were cut, and no runners or repair parties could leave their foxholes. Now the barrage was being stepped up. But it passed over the battalion's sector.

They are lengthening their range—that means they'll charge in a minute, Lieutenant Hänert thought to himself. And, true enough, there they were in his telescope. He stared in amazement: the Soviet troops were charging in close order, mounted officers in front and behind and on both sides of the uniformed earth-brown mass, like sheepdogs around a flock. Bent double, the Russians were pulling their low two-wheeled carts with their water-cooled heavy machine- guns, the Maksims. Infantry guns and anti-tank guns were also heaved into position on the double, including the dangerous 7-62-cm. field-gun known to the German troops as "Crash-boom" because with its flat trajectory the burst of the shell was heard before the sound of the firing.

That was the moment when the German artillery should have massively intervened. But the guns were firing only sporadically. For the first time since the start of the campaign there was a shortage of ammunition, because supplies had all but broken down. It was the first warning of things to come.

The Russians jumped into the ditch of a small stream and vanished from sight. A moment later they were coming up the bank—in front, the officers, who had now dismounted.

The men of First Lieutenant Rössert's 2nd Company, dug in to the right of 4th Company, looked out of their foxholes. The Russians were still 700 yards away. Now they were at 600 yards. "Why isn't Lieutenant Hänert opening up with his machine-guns?" the men asked Sergeant Stadler. "He's got his reasons," the sergeant grunted.

Hänert had his reasons. He was looking through his telescope. Now he could make out the faces of the Russians. But still he did not give the firing order. The sooner he ordered fire to be opened the sooner the Russians would go to ground and merely creep up under cover. Hänert knew from experience that the Russians must be crushed decisively with the first blow. Their infantry charges were made with a tenacity bordering on insensate obtuseness. Even if ten machine-guns mowed down wave after wave the Russians would come up again. They would cry "Urra!" and be killed.

What was the reason for that? The evidence of captured officers and NCOs supplied the answer. In the Red Army a commander was personally held responsible for the failure of an attack. Consequently he would drive his men time and again against the objective named in his orders. This is not to say that he would be indifferent to the loss of his men, but consideration for the individual is less important in the Soviet Army than in the armies of Western countries.

Advanced positions, strongpoints, or encircled units would be sacrificed without much hesitation if such a sacrifice yielded strategic advantages. From his first day as a recruit the Soviet soldier would be told: Action means close combat. For that reason he would seek out close combat. And he was particularly well trained for it. Bayonet practice took up most of a recruit's day. And the Russians were past masters of this gruesome business. They had also been drilled in firing from the hip. And as for handling the spade and the rifle-butt, they were every bit as good as the German assault companies. The Soviet Field Service Manual of 1943 says: "Only an attack launched with savage determination to annihilate the enemy in close combat ensures victory." It was in this spirit that the Russians made their charges.

Lieutenant Hänert, by the railway embankment of Krug-lovka, saw them coming. They were still 500 yards away. At last Hänert stood up and shouted, "Continuous bursts!" Like a thunderclap a storm of stuttering broke out. The

Russians went down. Past the dead and wounded of the first wave the second wave pushed forward—firing, leaping, using aimed fire with single rounds. And the Russians were excellent marksmen.

The grenadiers of 2nd Company had to push their heads out of their foxholes if they wanted to fire. And they must fire if they did not want to be killed by the Russians. But as soon as a head appeared anywhere the Russian snipers opened up with their excellent automatic rifles with telescopic sights. More and more weapons fell silent in the area of 2nd Company, "Grossdeutschland" Infantry Regiment, by the level-crossing of Kruglovka in the Yelnya bend.

But the last fifty yards defeated the Russians. Night fell. Russian artillery opened up again. The Russian guns killed many of their own men still alive on the open ground, which afforded no cover.

At midnight the pounding ceased. Rössert's and Hänert's men climbed out of their foxholes. There had been two men to each hole when the battle started. But from most of them only one man emerged now. They called for stretchers for the wounded and for the dead by whose sides they had crouched for hours, firing.

The battle was resumed at dawn. It went on for five days. Over hundreds of dead bodies the Russians pushed their way into the positions of 1st Battalion. The machine-gun 20 yards to the right of Sergeant Stadler was silent: the last gunner had got a bullet in his stomach, heaven knew how—probably a ricochet. Sergeant Stadler heard the sharp crack of a pistol: the lance-corporal had preferred this way out to the long and painful death of a stomach wound. Ten minutes later two Russians jumped into the foxhole. Stadler straightened up. He placed three hand-grenades in front of him. He pulled the pin of the first and flung it. Too short. The second hit the lip of the foxhole and showered it with fragments. The third grenade rolled right in. Like fireworks the machine-gun ammunition went up.

During the sixth night, on 27th July, the position by the railway embankment of Kruglovka was abandoned. The 2nd Company withdrew some 800 yards, to the edge of the wood. The Russians followed up. And the same thing began all over again. On 18th August the regiment was relieved by 263rd Infantry Division. The 2nd Battalion, 463rd Infantry Regiment, repulsed 37 Russian attacks in 10 days. On 25th August the reconnaissance detachment of 263rd Infantry Division joined the neighbouring 2nd Battalion, 483rd Infantry Regiment, in an immediate counter-attack against the enemy, who had penetrated into its positions on the fiercely contested "Crash-boom Hill." In this engagement Captain Orschler, commanding the reconnaissance detachment, was killed—the first member of the German Wehrmacht to receive the Gold Cross. On 29th August the companies of 15th Infantry Division dropped into the blood-drenched infantry foxholes. The battle continued. Three Soviet divisions were sacrified by Timoshenko on the northern sector at Yelnya alone. The Russian doctor in charge of the dressing station at Stamyatka, who was taken prisoner, stated that on the sector of 263rd Division he had tended 4000 wounded in a single week.

On the situation map spread out before Guderian in his headquarters bus at midnight on 22nd August 1941 these human tragedies were not recorded. All the map showed was the triangular pennants, representing the divisional headquarters of the 15th, the 292nd, and the 268th Infantry Divisions, and the black, square pennants of regimental headquarters. In front of the German lines the identified Soviet divisions had been entered. On 22nd August they numbered nine rifle and two armoured divisions.

Yet Guderian, who was continually on the move, and mixed with his men in the fighting line, knew what lay behind the entries made by his staff officers. "Pack up the map; I'll take it along with me to Borisov in the morning," Guderian said. "Good night, gentlemen."

And how did the other Panzer Group on the Central Front fare in the meantime—Colonel-General Hoth's Panzer Group, north-east of the highway?

In General Yeremenko's memoirs we read the blunt statement:

The recapture ot Smolensk proved impossible. The High Command therefore decided at the end of July to order the Twentieth and Sixteenth Armies, which were encircled by Hoth's forces north of Smolensk, to break out of the pocket. The divisions of these Armies had by then been reduced to no more than 2000 men. The whole of Twentieth Army had only 65 tanks and nine aircraft left.

That was the measure of Hoth's triumph. Like Guderian south of the Smolensk-Moscow highway, Hoth had ordered his divisions to keep going. He had reached the Vop, where his now exhausted forces came up against the Stalin Line, which had been fortified in a surprisingly short period of time. With parts of his motorized forces and the infantry divisions which followed behind he put a ring around Yeremenko's 15 divisions which were to have retaken Smolensk.

Yeremenko resisted desperately. He had to fight without supplies and to hang on where he stood. The Soviet High Command was pinning him down with relentless orders. Commanders who retreated had to face courts martial.

Soldiers who abandoned their positions were shot. The Soviet High Command was determined to recapture Smolensk at all costs. It was there that the German storm was to be broken. It was to become a dress-rehearsal for Stalingrad.

Moscow's determination was confirmed by the fact that, upon Stalin's personal command, a jealously guarded secret weapon was first employed here, although it was not yet in mass production and could not therefore be expected to play a decisive part. Yeremenko's account is most interesting on this point:

About mid-July I received a telephone message from headquarters: "It is intended to employ 'yeresa' in the battle against the fascists, A detachment armed with this new weapon will be assigned to you. Test the weapon and let us have your report on it."

'Yeresa' was the name for the first rocket-mortar batteries. Not even Yeremenko had known about them.

We tested the new weapon near Rudnya [Yeremenko reports]. The rockets streaked through the air with a terrifying whine. They, soared up like comets with a red tail and then exploded with a crash like thunder. The effect of the bursts of 320 rockets within a span of 26 seconds in a very limited area exceeded all expectations. The Germans ran away in panic and terror. Admittedly, our own troops withdrew likewise. For security reasons we had not informed them beforehand about the use of the new weapon.

The victims of this surprise were parts of Hoth's 12th Panzer Division. At first the effect on the troops was really terrifying. The German troops nicknamed the rocket mortar "Stalin's organ-pipes." The Russians called it "Katyusha"— Little Kate. Luckily, Yeremenko had only one unit. Thus the appearance of the howling Katyusha at Rudnya did not turn the tide of the battle, but it was another reminder of the technological capacity of the Soviets. It convinced the optimists in the German High Command of the need for caution --or, to put it differently, for haste.

Shortly before 1000 hours on 23rd August Guderian landed in his Fieseier Storch on the airfield of Borisov and drove over to Army Group headquarters. The cornmanders-in-chief of the Fourth, Ninth, and Second Armies had also just arrived —Field-Marshal von Kluge, Colonel-General Strauss, and Colonel-General Freiherr von Weichs. The visitor from the Mauerwald was expected at any moment: he was Colonel-General Halder, Chief of the General Staff.

He arrived towards 1100. He looked ill and seemed depressed. The reason was soon obvious to all. Halder announced: "The Fuehrer has decided to conduct neither the operation against Leningrad as previously envisaged by him, nor the offensive against Moscow as proposed by the Army General Staff, but to take possession first of the Ukraine and the Crimea."

Everybody was stunned. Guderian stood stiff as a ramrod. "This can't be true."

Halder regarded him resignedly. "It is true. We spent five weeks wrangling for the drive to Moscow. On 18th August we submitted a plan of attack. Here is the reply." He read from a sheet of paper:

"Fuehrer's Directive, 21.8.1941

"The Army's proposal for the continuation of operations in the East, submitted to me on 18.8., is not in line with my intentions. I therefore command as follows:

"(1) The most important objective to be achieved before the onset of winter is not the capture of Moscow but the seizure of the Crimea and of the industrial and coal-mining region on the Donets, and the cutting off of Russian oil-supplies from the Caucasus area; in the north it is the isolation of Leningrad and the link-up with

the Finns."

The order continued, under item 2, to list the strategic targets for Army Groups South and Centre, and, under item 3, contained the instruction to Army Group Centre to participate in the operations aiming at the destruction of the Russian Fifth Army by making available sufficient forces. Finally, it explained Hitler's plan for the continuation of operations after the battle for the Ukraine. This ran as follows: