Read Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 Online
Authors: Paul Carell
By the morning the average combat strength of the German companies was reduced to fifty to sixty small-arms. In the sector of 1st Battalion there were only three peasants' houses left where the men could warm themselves a little. The horses stood out in the open. Their eyes were feverish, and they were shaking with cold.
Yeremenko was angry to find a single German regiment holding up his advance to Andreapol and Toropets and denying him access to the coveted supply-dumps. For that reason he now employed the 249th and 332nd Rifle Divisions in an outflanking operation. On 14th January the Russians struck at the rear of 189th Regiment. They smashed supply columns in the Lugi and Velichkovo area. They blocked the supply routes. They overran the dressing stations and field hospitals. They closed the trap.
At 1800 hours Colonel Hohmeyer ordered the break-out from the encirclement. In a sudden concentrated bombardment of Velichkovo and Lugi the artillery spent its last shells. Then the companies charged. The date was 15th January.
Since llth January the men had had no proper sleep and on only two occasions hot food.
Lugi was retaken by 1st Battalion. Soviet counter-attacks with tanks were stopped by Second Lieutenant Klausing at the edge of the village. Only in the church did a Soviet machine-gun post hold out. Its fire blocked the road. One of its victims was Second Lieutenant Gebhardt. His platoon was shot up.
A lance-corporal, anonymous to this day, worked his way through the ruined nave of the church and by climbing up to the organ-loft finished off the machine-gun with three hand-grenades.
But it proved impossible to retake Velichkovo. The reinforced 2nd Battalion was pinned down in the centre of the village and slowly wiped out.
By 16th January only a few remnants survived of 189th Infantry Regiment. The Russians once more burst into Lugi with five tanks, overran the regiment's sledge column, blocked the railway embankment in their rear, and presently stood before Andreapol.
Colonel Hohmeyer gave the battalions
carte blanche
to fight their way back to Toropets through the woods. It meant a march of over 30 miles. The colonel himself rode out on horseback to reconnoitre. It was a ride into eternity. He did not return; he died somewhere in the snowy wastes outside An-dreapol, like most of the men of his regiment.
Hohmeyer was posthumously promoted major-general.
Lieutenant-Colonel Proske also set out on horseback with two officers in order to reconnoitre a way to slip through. None of them returned.
With small combat groups the officers and NCOs tried to penetrate through the deep snow of the forests. But only one detachment of 1st Battalion succeeded in completing the frightful trek to Toropets. They had set out with 160 men.
Forty of them reached their destination on 18th January.
"The German 189th Infantry Regiment left behind on the battlefield 1100 dead," Yeremenko reports. One thousand one hundred dead.
With Colonel Hohmeyer's units smashed, the road was open for Yeremenko to his first objective—the huge supply- dumps in Toropets. The rearward German formations of 403 Local Defence Division with their few captured enemy tanks and police units were unable to hold the town. Five Soviet crack regiments were making an encircling attack. On 21st January General Tarasov seized the Toropets supply-dumps undamaged. For the first time since the beginning of their offensive Yeremenko's soldiers had adequate supplies of food.
After the break-through at Toropets there was no continuous German front left along an 80-mile stretch, between Velikiye Luki and Rzhev. It was the most humiliating and the most dangerous moment experienced by Army Group Centre since 6th December 1941. Three Soviet Armies—with Yeremenko's Fourth Striking Army well in front with four rifle divisions, two rifle brigades, and three ski battalions—-were reaching out for the great victory which, Stalin hoped, would bring the destruction of the German Army Group Centre and hence the turning-point of the war.
In this situation General von der Chevallerie, commanding LIX Corps, was ordered to seal the Vitebsk gap with three divisions. It was an easy order to give—but of the three divisions not one had arrived in Russia in its entirety. The bulk of all these divisions was still en route from France to the Eastern Front—the 83rd Infantry Division from Northern Germany, the 330th Infantry Division from Württemberg, and the 205th Infantry Division from Baden. The only units within reach were remnants of the 416th Infantry Regiment of the Berlin-Brandenburg 123rd Infantry Division who had gone through the hell of Lake Seliger.
General von der Chevallerie and the advanced personnel of his Corps headquarters in Vitebsk had been working feverishly since 20th January to get his units into Russia. It was a race against time.
General Yeremenko's 249th Rifle Division and units of 358th Rifle Division were meanwhile advancing from Toropets towards Ostrovskiye and Velizh, both of them important road junctions on the Dvina and the last obstacles on the road to Vitebsk, the main supply and food base of Army Group Centre.
Lieutenant-General Kurt von der Chevallerie could do nothing else but send his units into action in driblets, as it were, as they arrived in the East, straight from their trains, to halt Tarasov's regiments. The feats performed by these German battalions, who were hurled straight from the mild French winter into temperatures of 40 to 50 degrees below and expected to avert the disaster threatening Army Group Centre— which, in fact, they did avert in months of fierce fighting— surpass all comprehension.
With his combat groups Chevallerie defended the crucial points in the gap between Ninth and Sixteenth Armies, until, at the end of January 1942, Third Panzer Army took over behind him. The names of the villages have become savage memorials to the winter battles—Demidov, Velizh, Kresty, Surazh, and Rudnya. The men from Northern Germany, Swabia, Baden, and Brandenburg made these gutted villages into breakwaters against which Yeremenko's waves crashed and were held back.
The fiercest fighting was for Velizh and Kresty. There a combat group under Colonel Sinzinger, commanding 257th Infantry Regiment, with units of 83rd Infantry Division, was offering stubborn resistance to the Russians. The men
from the Lüneburg Heath, from Schleswig-Holstein, from Hamburg and Bremen, spent the nights in their tents at 25 to 40 degrees below, without straw and without camp-fires. In daytime they worked their way through chest-deep snow. They were cut off. They counter-attacked and fought their way out. They fought their way forward and they fought their way back again. But they did not cease resisting.
Facing them were four Soviet divisions and units of three rifle brigades, trying at all costs to get via the road junction of Rudnya to the Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow motor highway in order to sever the lifeline of Army Group Centre.
They did not succeed. The Soviet offensive petered out in the face of the unexpected opposition of LIX Corps. Yere- menko undisguisedly names the reasons for the failure of his full-scale offensive: the Soviet High Command had underestimated the German troops' powers of resistance in winter warfare under Siberian conditions. It had thought the German divisions to be utterly exhausted. Stalin thus made the same mistake as Hitler had made before Moscow. The Soviet High Command had underrated its opponent and overrated its own strength.
Inadequate supplies of ammunition, fuel, and foodstuffs, the shortage of officers, the poor training of the troops, and unexpectedly heavy casualties had made the Soviet troops battle-weary. Yeremenko's Guards, the 249th Rifle Division, numbered only 1400 men at the end of January 1942, according to his own figures. On 9th January the division had joined action with 8000 men.
Even the most stringent orders from the Soviet High Command were unable to drive Yeremenko's Fourth Striking Army to its envisaged strategic objective—Vitebsk. It just could not make it.
The two Armies on Yeremenko's flanks, the Third Striking Army on the west and the Soviet Twenty-second Army to the east, likewise failed to reach their objectives of Velikiye Luki and Yarzevo on the Smolensk—Moscow motor highway. General Purkayev's Third Striking Army was stuck before Kholm, where the German combat group Scherer was holding out in all-round defence, halting the Russian divisions. General Vos-trukhov's Twenty-second Army did not get past Belyy, where units of the Hessian 246th Infantry Division were holding out unshakably.
Thus the most dangerous thrust of the Soviet winter offensive against the German Army Group Centre, the drive into the rear of its Ninth Array, had failed. The outer prong of the Russian pincers, designed to bite deep behind the German front, had been broken.
The supply-dumps of Sychevka—"What have you brought with you, Herr General?"—A regiment holds the Volga bend
—"I am the only one left from my company"—Stalin's offensive gets stuck—Sukhinichi, or the mouse in the elephant's trunk—A padre and a cavalry sergeant—Spotlight on the other side: two Russian diaries and a farewell letter.