Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (46 page)

Five more KV-2 monsters appeared. And out of the mist near Malaya Kabosi came three KV-1 s heading straight for Sergeant Oehrlein's tank, No. 613, Russian infantry, who had been riding on top, jumped down and advanced in line

abreast. The leading KV fired its 15-cm. gun. Direct hit on Oehrlein's tank. The sergeant was slumped over the edge of his turret, seriously wounded. Stoves ran across. Right and left of him Soviet infantry were charging. The German pickets around Malaya Kabosi were withdrawing. In the mist it was almost impossible to tell friend from foe.

Together with Oehrlein's gun-layer, Stoves first of all dragged the driver, the most seriously wounded man, over to Sergeant Gulich's tank, which was standing behind a small shed, giving covering fire with its machine-gun. Then they ran back again. They lifted Sergeant Oehrlein out of the turret. They also tried to get the badly wounded radio operator out, but this proved impossible. They could not get to him. Out of the mist, like spectres, came the Russians. Urra!

Second Lieutenant Stoves quickly secured all hatches with the square-shanked key. They would get the radio operator out when they made their counter-attack later. Until then the Russians had better be kept out of the tank. At that moment the gun-layer cried out in pain. He had been hit in the arm.

"Come on, man, run," the lieutenant shouted at him. The gun-layer, a medical student, held his damaged arm with his other hand and raced off into the mist. Stoves got the unconscious Oehrlein on to his shoulder and hurried away with him.

Right and left Soviet infantrymen were charging past with fixed bayonets. Evidently they regarded the Panzer lieutenant as one of their own men—probably because of the padded Russian jacket he was wearing.

Stoves managed it. He reached his tank, which was still providing cover against the west, well camouflaged behind the shed. A Medical Corps armed infantry carrier arrived, took charge of Oehrlein, the driver, and also the gun-layer, and drove off again. The scene was still shrouded in swirling mist —it was like a witch's cauldron.

The 1st Company, 113th Rifle Regiment, meanwhile had suffered something very like an attack of panic. It withdrew from the Malaya Kabosi crossroads. The infantry guns had long left the spot, and so had the anti-tank gun. Twenty- five yards from the shed a KV-1 crawled past Second Lieutenant Stoves's tank, No. 611. It exposed its broadside. Get him! Lance-corporal Bergener, the gun-layer, got him. A second shell put the next Russian out of action. Stoves's tank was excellently camouflaged. Now it crept cautiously to the corner of the wooden shed. A third and fourth KV were coming down the road. Their commanders were nervous and uncertain where the deadly fire was coming from.

Bergener was lying in wait. "Fire!" Too short. "Again!" The second shell hit the Russian straight on the gunshield. The fourth tank, which hurriedly tried to turn about, received a hit astern.

At that moment Stoves saw Sergeant Bunzel's tank falling back, pursued by a KV. Bunzel could not fire at him: his gun had received a hit. Stoves's gun-layer, Bergener, saved Bunzel. He shot up his pursuer. It was the fifth Soviet tank put out of action that day.

By now the Russians had located the dangerous German. Anti-tank rifles were cracking; crash-boom shells were bursting close to the shed. "We're leaving!" Stoves commanded. In a small spinney they met Bunzel's tank, No. 612. He reported: "Cannon damaged, but both m.g.s in order."

Thirty yards farther back was Gulich's tank, No. 614— somewhat the worse for wear. At the edge of a ditch near by a machine-gun party was in position. Stoves skipped across to them. He found Captain von Berckefeldt, his steel helmet askew on his head. "A fine mess," he observed drily. "To start with, my men skedaddled because of the heavy tanks. But my lieutenant is just rounding them up again. We'll be on the move again in a minute."

Stoves returned to his tank. The engine came to life with a whine. Cautiously they drove back to the crossroads, to Oehrlein's tank, to get the radio operator out.

Twenty minutes later First Lieutenant Darius, commanding the 6th Panzer Company, caught his breath sharply. Over the air came the hoarse voice of Stoves's radio operator: "Second Lieutenant Stoves has just been killed when our tank was hit."

What had happened? A KV-1 had scored a direct hit on the super-structure of tank No. 611 at a range of 400 yards. The splinters had torn open the lieutenant's head and face. Covered with blood, he had collapsed in the commander's

seat. But death had not claimed him yet. Five weeks later the lieutenant was back with his regiment. But by then it was no longer outside Leningrad.

The 1st Panzer Division went on to take the suburb of Aleksandrovka, the terminus of the Leningrad tramway's south- western line, seven and a half miles from the city centre. Then, on 17th September, the Panzer Corps was withdrawn from the front—"for employment elsewhere." It was to be employed at Moscow.

The force before Leningrad had thus been deprived of its mailed fist. Although the great objective seemed within arm's reach, the infantry divisions nevertheless came to a standstill —96th and 121st Infantry Divisions in front of the legendary Pulkovo hills, where in the civil war of 1919 the White regiments had similarly been halted in their attempts to recapture Red Leningrad.

The combat-hardened 58th Infantry Division was in Uritsk, shelling targets in the centre of Leningrad with its medium artillery. The men in their trenches along the coastal road could see the smoking chimney-stacks of the Leningrad factories only four miles away. The industrial plants and shipyards were working round the clock, producing armaments— tanks, assault boats, and shells. Thirty Soviet divisions were herded together inside the city. But they were not through yet. Though quite ready now to put an end to the fighting, they were being granted a respite and time to get over their panic.

It was incredible. What was behind this incomprehensible decision?

The plan for Operation Barbarossa stipulated clearly: Following the destruction of the Soviet forces in the Minsk- Smolensk area the Panzer forces of Army Group Centre will turn to the north, where, in cooperation with Army Group North, they will destroy the Soviet forces in the Baltic areas and then take Leningrad. The directive said quite clearly: Only after the capture of Leningrad is the attack on Moscow to be continued. This plan, strategically speaking, was entirely correct and logical, especially in its pin-pointing of the centre of gravity of the campaign, and in its intention of making the Baltic available as a supply route as soon as possible and of accomplishing a link-up with the Finns.

Disregarding this clear plan, Hitler changed his mind after the fall of Smolensk. Why?

The Army High Command and the generals in the field were urging him to take advantage of the unexpectedly rapid collapse of the Soviet Central Front and to capture Moscow, the heart, brain, and transport centre of the Soviet Union. But Hitler was reluctant. For six weeks the tug-of-war continued and precious time was lost. In the end Hitler neither stuck to his plan of taking Leningrad first nor gave the green light for the attack on Moscow. Instead, on 21st August 1941, he chose an entirely new objective—the oil of the Caucasus and the grain of the Ukraine. He ordered Guderian's Panzer group to drive 280 miles to the south and, jointly with Rund-stedt, to fight the battle of Kiev.

That battle was won. Indeed, it was a tremendous victory, with over 665,000 prisoners and the annihilation of the bulk of the Russian forces on the Soviet Southern Front.

This victory in the Ukraine misled Hitler into assuming that the Soviet Union was on the verge of military collapse— an error which led him into further disastrous decisions. At the beginning of September he ordered the German armies in the East to attack Moscow after all—in spite of the advanced season—and to capture it. At the same time the offensive was to be continued in the south against the Caucasian oilfields and the Crimea. Leningrad, on the other hand, was to be encircled and starved into surrender.

Clausewitz, the preceptor of the Prussian General Staff, once stated that in an offensive operation one can never be too strong, either generally or at the decisive spot. Hinden-burg, in a lecture at the Dresden Military Academy, paraphrased this: "A strategy without a centre of gravity is like a man without character." Hitler disregarded these axioms. He believed that with the forces available he could take Moscow as well as the Caucasus before the end of the year and force Leningrad into surrender by the stranglehold of infantry encirclement.

Since the sealing-off of Leningrad required no armoured forces, and since, on the other hand, the attack on Moscow had to be mounted quickly in view of the approaching winter, Hitler on 17th September withdrew Hoepner's Panzer Group and all bomber formations from the Leningrad front. This order came at the very moment when one last effort

would have meant the capture of the city.

The decision to go over to a siege at Leningrad was no doubt largely due to the attitude of the Finns. Field-Marshal von Manner heim, the Finnish Commander-in-Chief, had certain scruples about crossing the old Finnish frontier in the Karelian Isthmus and attacking Leningrad. True, he was prepared to drive across the Svir east of Lake Ladoga once the Germans had reached Tikhvin, but he was against any Finnish attempt to conquer Leningrad. From his memoirs it is clear that the Marshal did not wish to involve Finnish troops in the almost certain devastation of the city. Man-nerheim adhered to his principle of a "war of active defence" and opposed any war of conquest.

Whatever the reasons, Hitler's decision not to take a city strategically and economically as important as Leningrad was a crime against the laws of warfare. This crime was to be heavily paid for later.

From a military point of view the fall of Leningrad and the Qranienbaum [Now called Lomonosov.] pocket would have meant the disarming of nearly forty Soviet divisions. Equally important would have been Leningrad's elimination as an armaments centre. The city's tank factories, as well as its ordnance and ammunition plants, continued to turn out their products undisturbed right through the war, and to supply the Red Army with vital armaments. The fall of Leningrad, moreover, would have freed the German Eighteenth Army for other operations, whereas it was now condemned to guard duty outside Leningrad until 1944.

Finally, Leningrad would have been of inestimable value as a supply base for the German Eastern Front. Unimpeded by partisans, supplies could have been routed through the Baltic. The link-up with the Finns, moreover, would have given a different turn to the fighting in the Far North, for Petrozavodsk and for the allied supply base of Murmansk, where no progress was being made at all for the simple reason that the available forces were insufficient.

Instead of all these patent advantages the German Command gained nothing but severe 'drawbacks by deciding not to take Leningrad. The Soviet High Command was being positively invited to try to relieve the city from outside and, simultaneously, to keep up break-out attempts from within. The desperate attempts of the Soviet Fifty-fifth and Eighth Armies to break the German ring at Kolpino and Dubrovka were the most outstanding battles in the prolonged costly fighting for the spiritual metropolis of the Red revolution. That fighting continued for more than two years.

But by far the most serious error of the German Command lay in the fact that Leningrad was encircled in the summer only. The big natural obstacles, such as lakes, river courses, and marshes, which during the summer were as good as actual parts of the German siege forces, became excellent lines of communication and huge gaps in the encircling ring in winter, the moment Lake Ladoga and the Neva froze over. Through these gaps supplies and reinforcements could be brought in right through the winter months.

Moreover, towards the east, Leningrad still had a 50-mile-wide corridor all the way to Lake Ladoga so long as the Finns did not cross their old frontier in the Karelian Isthmus. As a result, Zhdanov, the Defence Commissar, was able to build the "Road of Life" over the ice of Lake Ladoga—including a motor highway and a railway branch line connecting with the Murmansk railway. Along this lifeline on ice the city was being supplied from the lake's eastern bank. Suddenly Leningrad was no longer sealed off: the German encirclement had been breached by "General Frost."

In order to close this wintertime gap, Army Group North mounted its extensive Tikhvin operation. This aimed at including Lake Ladoga in the siege front and sealing off Leningrad east of the lake. The Finns were to drive across the Svir from the north and to link up with the German Sixteenth Army east of the lake. The XXXIX Panzer Corps under General Rudolf Schmidt was to use four mobile divisions for a thrust into the almost pathless northern Russian tayga which the German Military-Geographical Records described as "virtually uncharted."

On 15th October the Corps with 12th and 8th Panzer Divisions, as well as 18th and 20th Motorized Infantry Divisions, moved off from the Volkhov bridgeheads of 126th and 21st Infantry Divisions, crossing the big river to the east. Its first objective was Tikhvin. There the last rail connection from Vologda to Leningrad was to be cut and the advance continued as far as the Svir, where the link-up was to be effected with the Finns. That link-up would have completed the encirclement of Leningrad, including Lake Ladoga.