Read Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 Online
Authors: Paul Carell
But the battle also yielded another prize of supreme military importance, even though perhaps less spectacular and known at the time only to a few experts. Preliminary interrogation of captured staff officers had revealed that the Soviet offensive on the Volkhov was superbly equipped in every respect—and that included the map material of a large cartographic office specially set up for this offensive. But where were the maps? The vast battlefield was closely searched, but no trace was found.
Eventually a second lieutenant was tracked down who had been on the staff of the cartographic office. The lieutenant talked. He led the German experts to a small river and told them to divert the water at a certain point. And there, buried in the river-bed, were the maps of the Soviet cartographic office. Just as the Western Goths once buried their King Alaric under a river, so the Soviet head of the cartographic office had hidden three lorry-loads of exceedingly valuable maps in the river-bed and then ordered the waters to be led back to their original course again. It was the most important cartographic find made by the German forces in the whole war. The cache contained Russian maps from the western frontier of the Soviet Union to well beyond the Urals. The prize was sent to Berlin, and before long
the troops on all fronts were supplied with the latest Soviet maps.
PART FIVE:
The Ports on the Arctic Ocean
The Murmansk railway-Offensive on the edge of the world-General Died reaches out for Murmansk—Across the Titovka and Litsa—No roads in the tundra—An error costs the Finns their victory-Mountain Jägers in the Litsa bridgehead.
THE very first drafts for "Operation Barbarossa" list a surprising objective—Murmansk. This little-known place was named alongside the great strategic objectives like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Rostov. What was so important about Murmansk? It was a port and a railway station on the windswept roof-top of Europe, on the Arctic Ocean north of the Arctic Circle, in the same latitude as the vast glaciers of Greenland, some 600 miles away from civilization.
In the summer of 1941 Murmansk had 100,000 inhabitants. For three months of the year there was scorching summer, and for eight months there was deep winter and polar night. All around was desolate tundra, without a tree or a shrub. Why then was this godforsaken town listed alongside the great objectives in the secret drafts for "Operation Barbarossa"? Why was Murmansk named in the same breath as the capital of the Communist empire, or Leningrad, or the industrial Donets region, or the Ukrainian grain area, or the Caucasian oilfields—all of them objectives aimed at by entire Army Groups, Air Fleets, and Panzer Armies, and considered worthy of the most savage battles in history?
"Under every sleeper of the Murmansk railway a German lies buried," the Lapps used
to
say. Like all legends, this one should not be taken too literally—although it is not so very far from the truth.
Between 1915 and 1917 some 70,000 German and Austrian prisoners-of-war were employed in these virgin forests, swamps, and Arctic tundra between St Petersburg and Murmansk in the building of a railway originally started in 1914 with convict labour. The hardships of the prisoners-of-war defied description. During the short scorching summer they were mown down by typhoid, and during the eight months of the Arctic winter they were killed by cold and hunger.
Within twenty-four months 25,000 men died. Every mile of the 850-mile-long line cost twenty-nine dead.
When Adolf Hitler received General of Mountain Troops Eduard Dietl at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin on 21st April 1941 he did not show him the balance-sheet of the lives lost in the construction of the Murmansk railway, but calculations showing the number of freight trains carrying goods, armaments, and troops along the Kirov railway—as the Soviets had named the line—between Moscow and the Arctic Ocean.
General Dietl, the hero of Narvik, the general commanding the "Mountain Corps Norway," had known about Directive No. 21, "Operation Barbarossa," since the end of December. Like most of the generals, he too had been taken aback when he first saw the secret paper. But being an obedient soldier he had got down to work to prepare for his tasks for D-Day. These tasks, according to the directive, were as follows: "The 'Mountain Corps Norway' will firstly secure the Petsamo [Now Pechenga.] area with its ore-mines, as well as the Arctic Ocean road, and subsequently, in conjunction with Finnish forces, advance to the Murmansk railway and cut off overland supplies to the Murmansk area."
For three and a half months Dietl and his four staff officers, whom he had taken into his confidence, had been working on these tasks. Now, on 21st April, one day after the celebration of his fifty-second birthday, Hitler was anxious to know how the plans for this part of the operation were progressing. At that time neither he nor Dietl had any inkling of the importance the Murmansk railway was to gain for the Soviet war economy in later years. They did not suspect that American convoys would sail into the Arctic Ocean once Germany was at war with Russia, to unload their supplies of military aid at Murmansk.
To Hitler at that time the railway was a line of communications along which Stalin was rapidly able to switch major contingents of troops, artillery, aircraft, and tanks from Central Russia to the Soviet-Finnish frontier on the Arctic Ocean in order to snatch from Germany the vital nickel-mines of Pet-samo and the ores of Narvik.
That was Hitler's nightmare. That there was another, far greater, possibly decisive danger lurking behind the Murmansk railway he did not see at the time—or certainly not in its full implications. Yet he, or any of his strategists, should have been able to predict it.
When the Tsar hurried the construction of the railway in the First World War he did so not in order to conquer Norway or seize the nickel of Petsamo, but in order to put to use the only ice-free port of his empire, the only port from which Russia had unrestricted contact with the world's oceans. In the whole of the giant Russian empire Murmansk is the only ice-free port with free access to the Atlantic.
True, Archangel on the White Sea also has a port which communicates with the open sea, but although it is situated farther south than Murmansk, it is closed by ice for three months in the year. And Vladivostok, the "ruler of the east," as its name suggests, is likewise subject to freezing up for about a hundred days. Besides, it is situated at Russia's backdoor, and 4350 miles away by rail from European Russia. The ports on the Black Sea are blocked by the Bosphorus, and those on the Baltic by the strait between Denmark and Sweden. Murmansk therefore is Russia's only open gateway to the world. The remote town owes its importance to a freak of nature—the Gulf Stream. Some of its warm waters wash through the 750-mile-wide gap between Greenland and Norway, where the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans meet. These warm water masses from the Gulf Stream prevent the Norwegian fjords from freezing up, and the very last scrap of warmth from the sun-drenched Gulf of Mexico makes sure, before being swallowed up by the Arctic Ocean, that the Kola Bay does not freeze up even in the severest Arctic winters with temperatures of 40 or 50 degrees below zero Centigrade.
That was why the Tsar built a railway from St Petersburg to the fishing village of Murmansk. And in 1917, when America entered the war against Germany on the side of Russia, the Murmansk railway became the shortest and the most important all-the-year-round supply-line between the USA and Russia.
The map-room at the Reich Chancellory was flooded with April sunshine. The large windows into the garden were open. From this very room the sovereigns of the old Europe had once gazed out on the greenery of the fine old trees. For Hitler's map-room in the old Reich Chancellory was the same salon where in 1878 Bismarck's Congress of Berlin was sitting to curb Russia's hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula.
As General Dietl entered the room on 21st April General Jodl had just submitted to Hitler the draft of the High Command communiqué. Hitler was wearing his old-fashioned nickel-gilt glasses. He read through the text and made one or two alterations. Victories—everywhere victories. In Greece the German divisions were in headlong advance to the south via Larissa; at Metsovon mountain troops were crossing the Pindus Mountains, chasing the retreating British. In North Africa Rommel's regiments had breached the Tobruk defences at Ras-el-Madaur and were now fighting at the Halfaya Pass, half-way to Cairo. Three days earlier the Yugoslav Army had surrendered. Yugoslavia had been over- run in only eleven days. In Greece the end was imminent. Nothing was impossible for the German soldier!
Hitler took off his spectacles and welcomed General Dietl. He was fond of this plain Bavarian hero of the Mountain Troops, the popular conqueror of Narvik. Major Engel, the High Command ADC, spread out a 1:1,000,000 map of the Finnish-Norwegian area.
"Have you made good progress with your preparations?" Hitler asked. "We haven't got much time left." Without waiting for a reply he walked over to the map-table, put his glasses on again, and bent over the map. With complete confidence, as though he had never done anything else but plan major military operations, he began to lecture:
"Murmansk is the most dangerous deployment centre of the Russians in the extreme north. The harbour and railway have a considerable capacity, and the town and its airfields are probably held in strength. It would take Stalin only a very short time to dispatch a few additional divisions to Murmansk and mount an attack against the West. Murmansk hasn't been extended for nothing. In 1920 it was a dump with 2600 inhabitants, and to-day it has 100,000. Our aerial reconnaissance has revealed gigantic railway installations, enormous quays, factories, exit roads—in short, a modern fortified centre, a dangerous strongpoint in the thinly populated territory along the Arctic Ocean."
Hitler had warmed to his subject. He placed the index finger of his right hand at Murmansk and that of his left on Petsamo. "The distance to the nickel-mines is only 60 miles."
He stabbed another point on the map. "And from Petsamo to Kirkenes on the Varanger Fjord is only another 30 miles. To have the Russians in this area would be disastrous. Not only should we lose the nickel ore which is indispensable to our steel manufacture, but it would also be a heavy strategic blow to the whole of our Eastern campaign. The Russians would be on the Arctic Ocean road, the transport lifeline of Northern Finland. It leads deep into the rear of the Finnish front and right to Sweden's back-door. To have the Russians on the Varanger Fjord would mean a most serious threat to the Arctic Ocean and to our ports in Northern Norway."
Hitler straightened up, took off his glasses, and looked at Dietl. "All that depends on your Mountain Corps, Dietl. We must eliminate this danger at the very beginning of our Eastern campaign. Not by waiting, but by attacking. You've got to manage those ridiculous 60 miles from Petsamo to Murmansk with your Mountain Jägers, and thus put an end to the threat."
"Ridiculous 60 miles," had been Hitler's words. They are fully attested. But then who can blame him for his optimism, considering the High Command communiqué he had just signed?
General Eduard Dietl was amazed, not for the first time, at the way this former corporal managed to outline grand strategic designs and operational problems. But he was far from happy. To him the 60 miles from Petsamo to Murmansk did not look ridiculous at all. In his forthright way he voiced his opinion to Hitler. Step by step he took him through the results of the research work done by his staff officers.
"My Fuehrer," he said in his engagingly simple manner, "the landscape up there in the tundra outside Murmansk is just as it was after the Creation. There's not a tree, not a shrub, not a human settlement. No roads and no paths. Nothing but rock and scree. There are countless torrents, lakes, and fast-flowing rivers with rapids and waterfalls. In summer there's swamp—and in winter there's ice, snow, and it's 40 to 50 degrees below. Icy gales rage throughout the eight months of Arctic night. This 60 miles of tundra belt surrounding Murmansk like a protective armour is one big wilderness. War has never before been waged in this tundra, since the pathless stony desert is virtually impenetrable for formations. Unless, of course, roads are first built, or at least cart-tracks, so that the men and—what's more difficult—the beasts of burden can be kept supplied. But if I am to do all that with my own forces, then it must be at the expense of my fighting formations—and my two mountain divisions are not all that well equipped technically as it is. In fact, my officers use the term 'economy kit.' We haven't got enough tractors, we haven't got enough mules, we haven't got enough mobile artillery, and each division has only two regiments."
Anyone else talking to Hitler like that would have fared badly. But Dietl could afford to do so. He argued soberly and without bombast, and now and again interlarded his language with Bavarian sayings. The purpose of his arguments— which had been supplied to him by his efficient chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel von Le Suire—was to get Hitler to drop his idea of attacking the town and fortress of Murmansk and persuade him to defend the strategically and economically vital Petsamo area instead. In Dietl's opinion the Murmansk railway should be cut farther south, in country more favourable for military operations.
"It may well be that the Russians will attack," Dietl continued his line of thought, his finger moving on the map from Murmansk to Petsamo. "For them an attack is easier than for us. Their supply base lies directly behind their front, and their railway runs practically into the battle zone, whereas we have to bring up every shell, every loaf of bread, every bundle of hay, and every sack of oats either by the enormous sea-route from Hamburg and the Baltic ports, via Kirkenes, or from Rovaniemi along the 375-mile-long Arctic Ocean road to Petsamo, and from there first by lorry, then by horse-drawn cart, then by mules, and eventually by human carriers. But if we can cut the Russians' railway at any point at all they will be just as badly off as ourselves."
Hitler was much impressed by Dietl's exposition. He realized that the elimination of Murmansk did not necessarily entail a direct attack. Its lifeline could be severed at any other point of the 850-mile railway. In that case its terminus at Murmansk would simply wither away. And the fine ice-free port would become worthless because it would have lost its rearward exit.
"Leave me your papers," Hitler said thoughtfully. "I'll think it over." The matter was left open when General Dietl took his leave. Hopefully he reported the outcome of his interview to his staff.
Three weeks later, on 7th May 1941, Hitler's decision came by courier via the Army Commander-in-Chief Norway, Colonel-General von Falkenhorst. The decision was neither one thing nor another, but a poor compromise. Hitler was ordering the Army in Norway, now put in charge also of operations in Northern Finland, to attack the Murmansk railway at three points: Dietl's Mountain Corps was to move with two divisions from Petsamo against the town and port of Murmansk; XXXVI Corps was to strike at the same time with two infantry divisions via Salla towards Kandalaksha, some 220 miles farther south, and cut the railway there. Finally, another 93 miles farther south, the Finnish III Corps was to advance via Kestenga towards Loukhi, also with two divisions, and seize the railway there. Six divisions were being employed at three different points.