Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (54 page)

In the grey dawn of 5th December, as the initial Russian artillery bombardment made the relieved pickets of 87th Infantry Regiment run for cover by the Yakhroma, Soviet regiments were already charging the forward lines of 36th and, next to it, 14th Motorized Infantry Divisions between Roga-chevo and the southern edge of the Volga reservoir. A Soviet ski battalion broke through in the sector of 36th Motorized Infantry Division and thrust towards the West. The Russians were imitating German Blitzkrieg tactics.

At noon on 7th December—
i.e.
, forty-eight hours later— the Soviets appeared in front of General Schaal's Corps headquarters at Bolshoye Shchapovo, four miles north-east of Klin. Staff officers, runners, and clerks snatched up their carbines. Three armoured cars, a few 2-cm. self-propelled AA guns, and two anti-tank guns of the Corps' escort party fired round after round. The general himself was lying behind a lorry with his carbine, firing aimed single rounds. The chief of operations led an AA combat detail into action and sealed off the northern entrance to the village with two machine-gun sections. In the evening a tattered company of 14th Motorized Infantry Division arrived from the punctured front line and immediately took up position to check the Russians. Shortly afterwards Colonel Westhoven, the commander of 1st Rifle Regiment, arrived on the scene, having hurried ahead with his combat section; soon after midnight he was followed by the bulk of 2nd Battalion, 1st Rifle Regiment, coming from Belyy Rast.

The following morning at 0830 hours the Russians attacked with tanks. Had the last hour of Corps headquarters struck? The first tank broke into the German lines on the northern edge, coming from Selchino. Two regiments of infantry, supported by strong artillery units, moving towards the south-west, bypassed Shchapovo. Just then the noise

of battle came from the left flank: Colonel Westhoven was attacking with units of 1st Panzer Division. The foremost tanks of 25th Panzer Regiment, 7th Panzer Division, also arrived in the nick of time, and, led by Lieutenant Ohrloff, struck at the enemy's flank. The Russians were caught off balance. Their infantry fell back and suffered heavy casualties. Corps headquarters were moved to Klin.

At Klin General Schaal received more bad news. The enemy had succeeded in making a deep penetration at the juncture between 36th and 14th Infantry Divisions. Strong formations had pushed through the breach, bypassing Klin in the north; they had blocked the Corps' supply route and turned towards Klin via Yamuga. Only one road was left to 3rd Panzer Group —and that was seriously threatened. If the enemy succeeded in blocking it the whole Panzer Group would be threatened with disaster. It would be cut off. The men would have to try to break through on foot, leaving all vehicles and heavy weapons behind. About noon on 8th December this danger became acute. The Soviets took Spas- Zaulok, and subsequently Yamuga, five miles north of Klin.

The Thuringian 1st and the Viennese 2nd Panzer Divisions —two of the three founder members of the German armoured forces, the third being the Berlin 3rd Panzer Division, then still on Guderian's part of the front—were Schaal's last hope. They were to save the situation and keep open the vital road of retreat towards 3rd Panzer Group's new interception line, the Lama position. The 1st Panzer Division, most of which was still holding a switch line around Nikolskoye on the Rogachevo—Moscow road on the morning of 7th December, was pulled out by General Reinhardt and dispatched to Klin.

Map 15.
The defensive battle of Klin.

There was a growing danger that this traffic junction, so vital to the withdrawal of the motorized formations, might be lost even before the division got there, but this was averted on 8th December by an attack with hurriedly assembled emergency formations under the command of Colonel Kopp. The Panzer Engineers Battalion 37 seized and held Maydanovo on the northern edge of the town. In this way the worst danger had been met for the moment. The defence of the northern edge of Klin was immediately organized and continued to be strengthened, to make sure the town was held until the arrival of the first units of 1st Panzer Division. Major-General Siry was in charge of these operations.

It was a difficult task because the Soviets knew quite well what was going on. General Schaal reports: "Encouraged by the German retreat, excited by the picture they found along the routes of the German withdrawal, and urged on by the orders of the Soviet High Command, the Russians fought very stubbornly and bitterly. Moreover, in their advance— some of them on skis, but the great mass on foot or with light vehicles, supported by T-34s—the Russians had nearly all the advantages of the terrain on their side. In this heavily wooded and difficult ground the heavy and clumsy German motorized units were confined almost entirely to hard roads. More and more the fighting turned into a series of close combat engagements in which the normally so successful co-operation of the different German service branches was no longer possible, so that, as a result, the Russians were usually superior to us."

In spite of these difficulties the combat groups of the reinforced 1st Panzer Division, together with combat groups of 5th and 2nd Panzer Divisions, succeeded in keeping open and covering the road of retreat from Klin to the west, in dislodging such enemy forces as had made penetrations, and in ensuring —though only with supreme efforts and at heavy cost—the withdrawal of four mobile divisions and parts of several infantry divisions. At this point General Schaal decided that an end had to be put to these desperate stopgap operations. He therefore conceived a daring plan designed to gain some breathing space for the Corps and Panzer Group, and to enable them to recapture the initiative.

The idea was to foil the enemy's intentions by several swift counter-attacks. Colonel Hauser, commanding 25th Panzer Regiment and known throughout 7th Panzer Division as a man of verve and initiative, was to be given every tank available in the Corps area, as well as the fifty-odd tanks promised by Army Group, with orders to break out of the switchline east of Klin, mop up the enemy divisional headquarters identified and located by radio reconnaissance between Yamuga, Spas-Zaulok, and Birevo, attack the Soviet artillery from the rear and put the guns out of action, and then, having spread chaos and confusion, to return inside the German defensive ring.

Everything was got ready for this counter-attack.

Meanwhile two combat groups of 1st Panzer Division mounted a relief attack towards the north. First of all the combat group Westhoven dislodged fairly strong enemy forces south of Kirevo. Next, on 9th December, towards 1030 hours, the combat group von Wietersheim, with Motorcycle Battalion 1, half a dozen Mark 111 tanks under Second Lieutenant Stoves, and supported by Artillery Battalion Born, made a thrust along the Kalinin highway towards Yamuga. At first the operation made good progress. In spite of their numerical superiority the Russians did not stand firm, but gave ground. They left 180 dead, 790 prisoners, and a large quantity of heavy weapons, including three T- 34s, behind on the battlefields around Yamuga. The village itself, however, could not be retaken by the Germans.

Towards evening 1st Panzer Division took back the combat group to the northern edge of Klin and there organized itself for defence. Enemy formations following up the movement were repulsed in hand-to-hand fighting. During the night of 9th December 1st Panzer Division headquarters were given the overall command over the defence for Klin. General Krüger defended the town until 14th December. The moment had now come for "Operation Hauser."

Everything was ready—the last tanks of 1st and 7th Panzer Divisions, a tank company of 2nd Panzer Division, and about twenty-five tanks of 5th Panzer Division. At that moment a report came in from the right wing, to the effect that the enemy had broken through in the area of 4th Panzer Group, in the sector of 23rd Infantry Division. General Kuznetsov's First Striking Army had launched the southern prong of its attack against Klin. It became obvious that the Soviet First and Thirtieth Armies intended to link up west of Klin and to trap 3rd Panzer Group and any other operational troops inside the Klin bulge.

Action stations! Only a vigorous and immediate counterattack with armour could save the situation. Bitter though the decision was, Schaal had to switch the combat group Hauser to the south-east in order to avert the imminent danger.

In the early morning of 12th December the German tanks moved off to the south-east. A sudden break in the weather had caused the thermometer to shoot up to within a few degrees of freezing-point. The winter sunshine on the road together with the worn tank-tracks made it a very slippery journey. Nevertheless the force succeeded in intercepting the Russians, relieving scattered German formations, and bringing back various groups still holding out in the broken front line into the safe shelter of 3rd Panzer Group's switchline around Klin.

The defence of the town of Klin proper, where thousands of wounded still remained in spite of continuous evacuation, was in the hands of three
ad hoc
formations. Initially the town had been kept open for the withdrawing divisions by hurriedly organized emergency formations under Colonel Kopp and Lieutenant-Colonel Knopf, with sappers, road- building details, a few anti-tank and anti-aircraft sections, three self-propelled guns, Luftwaffe ground staff, workshop mechanics, and a few repaired tanks. During the next few days, however, every available man was roped in for active defence—including along the northern outskirts twenty-five drummers of the band of 25th Panzer Regiment, employed as infantry under their band-leader. Presently the mixed combat groups Westhoven, von Wietersheim, and Caspar were fitted in along the northeastern and north-western edges of the town. Klin by then was under Soviet artillery bombardment, and fires were burning everywhere.

On 13th December Panzer Group, with Hitler's approval, ordered the abandonment of the positions east of Klin. Everything into reverse—all along a single road, the road through Klin.

Since the night of the 13th the eastern edge of the town had been held by the reinforced 14th Motorized Infantry Division with combat groups of 2nd Panzer Division and Colonel Mauser's group. Just outside the northern part of Klin, west of the town, 1st Panzer Division was covering the great withdrawal route against furious Soviet attacks from the north. Time and again it cleared the road, and thus ensured the removal of the last few thousand wounded and of the heavy material. Under cover of these operations the Klin bulge was evacuated about noon on 14th December. But while the fighting troops in the line were making superhuman efforts, the retreat of the supply troops and scattered units became a veritable tragedy.

General Schaal records his personal recollections as follows :

Discipline began to crack. There were more and more soldiers making their own way back to the west, without any weapons, leading a calf on a rope, or drawing a sledge with potatoes behind them—just trudging westward with no one in command. Men killed by aerial bombardment were no longer buried. Supply units, frequently without officers, had the decisive say on the roads, while the fighting troops of all branches, including anti- aircraft artillery, were desperately holding out in the front line. The entire supply train—except where units were firmly led—was streaming back in wild flight. Supply units were in the grip of psychosis, almost of panic

—probably because in the past they had only been used to headlong advance. Without food, shivering with cold, in utter confusion, the men moved west. Among them were wounded whom it had been impossible to send back to base in time. Crews of motor vehicles unwilling to wait in the open for the traffic jams to clear just went into the nearest villages. It was the most difficult time the Panzer Corps ever had.

How was that possible? How could panic exist so closely behind the disciplined and indeed heroically fighting troops in the forward lines?

The answer is simple enough. The German Wehrmacht had never learned the principles and methods of retreat. The German soldier regarded retreat not as a special type of operation, to be bent to his will, but as a disaster imposed by the enemy upon him.

Even in Reichswehr days the practising of withdrawals had been looked upon askance. Somewhat contemptuously it used to be said: One does not practise withdrawals; it merely teaches the men to run away.

Later, after 1936, even elastic resistance was deleted from the training programme. 'Attack' and 'holding' were the only two techniques taught to the German soldier. As far as fighting retreats were concerned, the Wehrmacht went into the war unprepared. The cost of this omission was heavy. At Klin it had to be met for the first time.