Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (66 page)

On 26th January came the expected large-scale attack against the northern front of 256th Infantry Division and the right-wing of XXIII Corps, where 206th Infantry Division was employed. There were many highly critical situations, retrieved only by supreme efforts of the dog-tired men.

In daytime Model would spend about an hour over his maps and the remaining ten hours with his troops. Wherever he appeared he had the effect of a battery recharging the spent energies of the unit commanders.

The unaccustomed temperature fluctuations caused the German troops extreme hardships. With the milder weather came blizzards. Then, abruptly, the thermometer dropped again to 52 degrees below zero Centigrade. The men cursed the Russian winter.

Nevertheless the Soviets were repulsed, compressed, and split up along the Rzhev-Olenino railway line. The Russian commanders sacrificed entire battalions in pointless counterattacks.

On 4th February the Westphalian 86th Infantry Division took the keypoint of Osuyskoye. Forty-eight hours later Thuringian grenadiers of 1st Panzer Division, riding in armoured infantry carriers, broke through to the railway line at Chertolino. There the foremost units of Combat Group Wietersheim linked up with the spearheads of Combat Group Zehender. The ring around nine Soviet divisions, representing the bulk of two Armies, was closed.

Kumm and his 650-strong regiment had meanwhile built themselves an improvised but serviceable position along the frozen Volga. Holes had been blasted into the ground with blasting cartridges and mines. Machine-gun positions and infantry dug-outs had been set up at regular intervals of 100 to 200 yards. It was a thin line, and Kumm had no reserves.

The Russians attacked ceaselessly. Day after day their formations grew more numerous. They were intent on getting through, on restoring contact with the cut-off divisions. It was at that point that the battle of Rzhev was being decided.

Kumm's headquarters were only half a mile behind the fighting line of 3rd Battalion. Every day Model called by Fieseier Storch, landing on the ice of the Volga. Or else he would come by jeep. On one occasion, when the vehicle had got stuck, he arrived on horseback.

On 28th January, just as Model was at Kumm's headquarters, men of 1st Battalion brought in a Red Army prisoner. He was a signaller from the headquarters of the Soviet Thirty-ninth Army. Such men had rarity value. They knew more than many a commander in the field.

The loquacious Russian reported that a large-scale attack was planned for the next day. He claimed that several Russian rifle and armoured brigades were all lined up for it. The break-through was to be achieved regardless of the cost, and the encircled Corps liberated.

Model left the headquarters, a worried man. "Obersturmbannführer, I'm relying on you," were his parting words to Kumm. And with a grin he added, "But maybe that Russian was leading us on."

The prisoner had not been leading them on. On the following morning the full-scale attack began. It came exactly at the earlier penetration point of the Soviet Twenty-ninth Army, where the wide tank-tracks marked out the road across the ice.

Kumm's regiment, though numerically small, was well equipped. In the foremost line was an 8-8-cm. AA gun. The Panzerjäger Company had 5-cm. anti-tank guns. The Heavy Company comprised a heavy and a light troop with infantry guns and two more troops equipped with 3-7-cm. anti-tank guns. Moreover, in the course of the fighting the Motorcycle Battalion of the "Reich" Division was placed under the regiment, as well as a battery of Assault Gun Battalion 189. Even so it was still a modest force compared with the mass of the attackers.

The Russians kept up their charge ceaselessly—by day and by night, throughout three weeks. But they committed a tactical mistake, a typical Russian mistake: they failed to concentrate their strength on a single major break-through. They omitted to form a centre of gravity. They flung in battalion after battalion, then regiment after regiment, and eventually brigade after brigade.

Anti-tank cover for the group resisting at Klepenino was provided by two Panzerjäger troops of Panzerjäger Battalion

561. The thirteen 5-cm. anti-tank guns under Second Lieutenant Petermann had destroyed twenty T-34s by 3rd February. On 5th February Second Lieutenant Hofer took over the antitank troop from the wounded Petermann. The ferocity of the fighting is shown by the fact that the crew of the gun outside Klepenino had to be changed three times within five hours. Two dozen shot-up enemy tanks lay in front of the position. The neighbouring gun had been crushed by a T-34. The infantrymen had to tackle the colossus with mines and demolition charges.

On the sixth day the Russians appeared in front of 10th Company with thirty light tanks. They advanced to within 50 yards of the positions. They halted. And then the whole armada opened fire at the infantry dug-outs and machine-gun posts. They continued pasting them from all barrels for a full thirty minutes. Then they drove back into the forest.

Silence and brittle cold hung over the plain. Two hours later a man crawled out of the shattered position of 10th Company back to battalion headquarters. He was helped in. He was Rottenführer [Rank in the Waffen SS equivalent to

lance-corporal.] Wagner. Seriously wounded, with frost-bitten hands, he tried to stand up in front of Bollert, the battalion commander, to make his report. But he collapsed, and reported lying on the floor: "Hauptsturmführer, I'm the only one left from the company. They're all dead." A tremor ran through him. A moment later there was no survivor of 10th Company.

There was now a gap in the front about two-thirds of a mile wide. The VI Army Corps rushed 120 men into the line— drivers, cooks, bootmakers, and tailors. Paymasters were in charge of platoons. Fine men, but wholly inexperienced in this kind of fighting. They moved into the positions of 10th Company. The Russians, after a sudden concentrated mortar bombardment, charged with shouts of "Urra." That was too much for the nerves of the men of the supply services. They simply took to their heels. They were picked off one by one like rabbits.

When dusk fell the Soviets were within 50 yards of Kumm's regimental headquarters at Klepenino. The small village originally had thirty houses, but only eight were left.

Hauptsturmführer [Rank in Waffen SS equivalent to major.] Holzer, the regiment's adjutant, had cut deep holes under the floor and sawn firing slits into the lower beams which formed the wall. From the regimental commander down to the drivers each man stood in his firing-pit, with carbine, machine-pistol or machine-gun. They were supported by an anti-tank gun and by the Panzerjäger Battalion 561, now fighting as infantry.

No matter how often they attacked, the Soviets never got closer than 15 yards. The words found in the operational reports were not a figure of speech, but the most literal appalling truth: "Outside Klepenino the dead were piled high in huge heaps."

Corps sent aid in the shape of an infantry regiment. But it was shot up by the Soviets while making a counter-attack. Its remnants were shared out among Kumm's battalions or else employed for flank cover. During the night of 7th/8th February the Russians eventually broke into 2nd Company's positions in battalion strength. Ferocious hand-to-hand fighting continued for four hours. The 2nd Company of the "Der Führer" Regiment was killed to the last man.

At that moment the Motorcycle Battalion of the "Das Reich" Division arrived at Klepenino. In addition, units of Assault Gun Battalion 189 and the Reconnaissance Detachment, 14th Motorized Infantry Division, under Major Mum- mert were rushed to Kumm's front.

A 21-cm. mortar was got into position in a patch of woodland, and the enemy who had broken into the "Russian grove" was pounded with it. That grove changed hands ten times. After the eleventh charge it remained firmly in the hands of Major Mummert's Reconnaissance Detachment 14.

Kumm's front on the northern edge of the great pocket held firmly. Relief brigades of the Soviet Thirty-ninth Army did not succeed in crossing the Volga. They bled to death. The killed were lying in their thousands in front of the German lines by the Volga bend.

In the meantime operations against the Soviet divisions encircled south and west of Rzhev continued. On 17th February the Combat Group von Wietersheim penetrated into the core of the last major Soviet pocket—in wooded country near Monchalovo—with tanks, Panzer sappers, and armoured infantry carriers of the reinforced 1st Panzer Division. The last desperate break-out attempt by 500 Soviets under the personal leadership of a general collapsed in the fire of the German combat group.

The battle was drawing to its close. The Soviet Twenty-ninth Army and major parts of the Thirty-ninth had been destroyed. Model, promoted Colonel-General on 1st February, had brought about a turn of the tide in the winter battles on the German Central Front. The ferocity of the fighting is revealed by two figures: 5000 Russians were taken prisoner; 27,000 lay dead on the battlefield. Six enemy rifle divisions had bled to death, four had been smashed, and nine more, as well as five armoured brigades, had taken heavy knocks.

German casualties, too, had been heavy. On 18th February, when Obersturmbannführer Otto Kumm reported at his divisional headquarters, Model happened to be there. He said to Kumm, "I know what your regiment has been through

—but I still can't do without it. What is its present strength?"

Kumm gestured towards the window. "Herr Generaloberst, my regiment is on parade outside." Model glanced through the window. Outside thirty-five men had fallen in.

Heavy and indeed appalling though the price was which Ninth Army had to pay for smashing the Soviet Armies which had broken through between Sychevka and the Volga bend, it was not too high if one considers that the fate of the whole of Army Group Centre was at stake. The deadly danger of encirclement which had threatened it from the north had now been averted. But what was the situation on the southern wing of the Army Group, where the divisions of the Soviet Tenth Army had driven through the breached German front between Belev and Kaluga and had already bypassed Su-khinichi in their attempt to reach the motor highway east of Smolensk, deep in the rear of Fourth Army, and thus cut the lifeline of Army Group Centre?

The stables and cattle-sheds of the Voin collective farm were deep in snow in the wide plain between Orel and Mtsensk. Major-General Nehring had established there the headquarters of his 18th Panzer Division, and Lieutenant Winter, in charge of his headquarters, had placed the tractors and combine harvesters, old Soviet lorries and German armoured infantry carriers, between the sentries and buildings of this former imperial estate in such a way that a veritable fortress had been created, a divisional headquarters 'hedgehog.'

This was a necessary measure because the winter war, with its swift and dangerous Russian penetrations and attacks by partisans, had made even the higher command headquarters potential front-line positions. These therefore constituted a system of fortified strongpoints between the thin German main fighting-line and the rearward areas.

Major-General Nehring had just returned from a visit to the front. His chief of operations, Major Estor, met him with the words: "The Commander-in-Chief urgently asks you to telephone him. Something's up. He wants you to ring him at once."

Nehring had himself connected with- Colonel-General Schmidt, Guderian's successor as C-in-C Second Panzer Army. It was a short conversation.

Schmidt said, "We need you. Would you come over tomorrow morning, please. It's an important matter." Major Estor's log entry of the telephone conversation is dated Tuesday, 6th January 1942.

On the following morning Nehring drove to Orel, a bustling base in the hinterland which had become a front-line town overnight. Colonel-General Schmidt was not there. He had driven over to General Kubier, who had been in command of Fourth Army since Christmas and who now found himself very hard pressed by the enemy.

Nehring was received by the Chief of Staff, Colonel von Liebenstein. First of all the colonel served him some heated- up chicken broth straight from the tin—a detail the general remembers to this day. It was most welcome after the drive through the frosty winter waste.

Without any preliminaries Liebenstein came to the point: "The situation in the gap between Belev and Kaluga is getting more and more critical. Unless something is done Fourth Army will be in serious danger." He pointed to the map. "These strong Soviet forces are already deep in Kubler's rear. Fourth Army headquarters in Yukhnov has already become the front line. We've got no reserves. True, General von Gilsa's 216th Infantry Division was switched by the High Command fronj France to Sukhinichi towards the end of December, because until then the first Soviet assault was being held by hurriedly scraped-up forces. But now units of Gilsa's division have been encircled by the Soviet Tenth Army. Gilsa is resisting desperately. His men are very well equipped and are a brave lot—but they are unaccustomed to such winter conditions and can only inadequately be supplied from the air. Gilsa already reports some thousand wounded. But if this last breakwater is washed away it will mean disaster."