Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (78 page)

The Chief of the General Staff was not happy about the plan. He was beset by doubts whether a major German offensive was justified after the heavy drain of strength during the winter. Many a dangerous crisis which the reader of the preceding chapters will already have seen liquidated was then, at the end of March, still causing anxiety to the German High Command and the General Staff of the Army. At that time too, General Vlasov's Army on the Volkhov had not yet been finally defeated. Count Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt with the divisions of his II Corps was still surrounded in the Dem-yansk pocket. "Operation Bridge-building" had begun, but had not yet been successfully accomplished. In Kholm, Scherer's combat group had not yet been relieved.

Even in the Dorogobuzh-Yelnya area, only 25 miles east of Smolensk, the situation was still critical at the end of March. There the Soviets were operating with units of their Thirty-third Army, the I Guards Cavalry, and the IV Airborne Corps. Farther north the Soviet Thirty-ninth Army and the XI Cavalry Corps were still holding the dangerous front-line prominence west of Sychevka.

But these were by no means all the worries in the mind of the Chief of the General Staff at the end of March. In the Crimea Manstein with his Eleventh Army was still immobilized before Sevastopol, and the Kerch Peninsula had even been recaptured by the Russians in January. But the situation was most critical of all at Kharkov, where heavy fighting had been going on since mid-January. The Soviet High Command was making a supreme effort to nip Kharkov off in a pincer movement. The northern jaw of the pincers had been held at Belgorod and Volchansk, but the southern jaw, the Soviet Fifty-seventh Army, had breached the German Donets front on both sides of Izyum over a width of 50 miles.

The Soviet divisions had already established a bridgehead 60 miles deep. The spearheads of the attack were threatening Dnepropetrovsk, the supply centre of Army Group South. Whether this Soviet penetration in the Izyum area would develop into a dam-burst of incalculable consequences depended on whether the two cornerstones north and south of the penetration point, Balakleya and Slavyansk, could be held. For the past few weeks these points had been held by the battalions of two German infantry divisions in what had already become a heroic saga of defensive fighting. On its outcome depended the entire future of the southern front. Slavyansk was held by the 257th Infantry Division from Berlin, and Balakleya by the 44th Infantry Division from Vienna.

In savage and costly engagements the Berlin regiments under General Sachs, and later under Colonel Rüchler, defended the southern edge of the Izyum bend. A combat group under Colonel Drabbe, commanding 457th Infantry Regiment, displayed such skill, valour, and self-sacrifice in fighting for miserable villages, collective farms, and small homesteads that even the Soviet operation reports—as a rule very reticent about German feats of arms—were full of admiration. The village of Cherkasskaya was typical of this kind of fighting. In eleven days Drabbe's group lost there

nearly half of its 1000 men. Some 600 defenders were manning an all-round front of 8
^a
/2 miles. Soviet dead actually counted in front of this village numbered 1100. Eventually the Russians took the village, but it had by then consumed the strength of five regiments.

Before leaving his headquarters for the "Wolfsschanze" in the afternoon of 28th March, Colonel-General Halder had asked for the operations report of 257th Infantry Division about the battle that had now been raging for seventy days. He wanted the division to be cited in the High Command communiqué: to date its regiments had repulsed 180 enemy attacks, and 12,500 Soviet dead had been counted in front of its lines. Three Soviet rifle divisions and a cavalry division had been mauled, and four more rifle divisions and an armoured brigade had taken a heavy toll. The German casualties, admittedly, also testified to the severity of the fighting: they amounted to 652 killed, 1663 wounded, 1689 frostbitten, and 296 missing—a total of 4300 men, half the total losses suffered by the division in ten months' fighting in Russia. That was Slavyansk.

The northern edge of the Izyum penetration, the Balakleya area, was held by the Viennese 44th Infantry Division, whose 134th Infantry Regiment was the successor of the famous ancient Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Regiment. The division under Colonel Debois held a front from Andreyevka through Balakleya and Yakovenkovo to Volokhov Yar. That was a line of 60 miles. And along those 60 miles an entire Soviet Corps was attacking, reinforced by armour and rocket batteries.

Here, too, the combat groups and their commanders were the inspiration of the resistance. The exploits of the combat group under Colonel Boje, commanding 134th Infantry Regiment, in the vital sectors of Yakovenkovo and Volokhov Yar, on the high bank of the Balakleya, whipped by icy winds, are among the most remarkable chapters of the war in the East.

The fighting hinged on villages and farms—in other words, on the troops' shelter quarters. In a temperature of 50 degrees below zero a house and a hot stove, offering as they did the chance of an hour's sleep, became a matter of life and death. The Germans clung to the villages, and the Russians tried to drive them out of them, because they too wanted to get away from their snowy fortifications, behind which they assembled for attack, to find a roof, a warm corner, and a few hours' sleep without the fear of freezing to death.

Once again the war centred around the most elementary requirements of life. Germans and Russians alike spent their last ounce of strength. For once the interests of the men in the line and those of the General Staffs coincided: both wanted Balakleya and the villages to the north which were being held by 44th Infantry Division—the former for the sake of the houses and the latter for reasons of strategy. If the cornerpost of Balakleya and the high ground commanding the road to the west were to be lost Timoshenko would be able to convert his penetration at Izyum into a large-scale strategic break-through to Kharkov.

But Balakleya held on, stubbornly defended by 131st Infantry Regiment under Colonel Poppinga. But, north of it, Strongpoint 5 of 1st Battalion, 134th Infantry Regiment, was attacked in such strength that it could not be held. The battalion resisted the Soviet tank attacks to the last man. Among those killed in action was First Lieutenant von Hammerstein, a nephew of the former Chief of the Army Directorate, von Hammerstein-Equord. Young officers like Hammerstein, ready for any kind of action or sacrifice, were typical of these terrible defensive battles. Together with the hard-boiled fearless old sergeants and corporals, they formed small fighting parties which almost invariably pulled off incredible exploits.

Thus First Lieutenant Vormann with remnants of 2nd Company smashed an entire Soviet battalion in a savage night engagement.

First Lieutenant Jordan, commanding 13th Company, personally lay in front of the Russian lines at Yakovenkovo night after night, directing the fire of his Infantry guns against enemy machine-gun positions on the hill, and one after the other putting them out of action. Vormann and Jordan are both buried at Stalingrad.

The ferocity of the fighting in the Balakleya sector is also shown by the fact that Colonel Boje himself and his staff were forced more than once to join in hand-to-hand fighting with pistol and hand-grenade. A Soviet ski battalion

eventually reached the crucial Balakleya-Yakovenkovo road on the southern flank of the combat group and established itself in huge ricks of straw. Boje threw in his last reserves to save his combat group from the mortal danger of encirclement. The Russians did not yield an inch. Even when their straw ricks had been set ablaze by Stukas they still fired their guns and defended themselves to the end.

The interesting thing about that terrible fighting was that the decisive rôle was invariably played by the individual. Altogether, the successful defensive battles fought by the German troops in the winter and spring of 1942 hinged very largely upon the individual soldier. He was—certainly still at that time—superior to his Russian opposite number in experience and fighting morale. This fact alone explains the astonishing feats performed by German troops, frequently depending entirely on themselves, all along the front from Schlüsselburg down to Sevastopol against a numerically and materially superior enemy.

The following instance of courage, sangfroid, and practical skill from the hotly contested Kharkov area is typical of many.

In March 1942 the 3rd Panzer Division was employed in that sector in the rôle of a fire-brigade on a continually threatened front. In the Nepokrytaya sector Sergeant Erwin Dreger with fifteen men of 1st Company, 3rd Rifle Regiment, was holding a front of a little over a mile. That, of course, was possible only because of the particular tactics thought up by Dreger and thanks to his men's nerves of steel—all of them Eastern Front veterans. From stocks of captured material Dreger had armed every one of them with a machine-gun, keeping three more guns in reserve, just in case. Inside the village, and along the edge of it as well as all over the ground outside, piles of captured machine-gun ammunition had been laid out so that the guns could be operated without a No. 2 to look after the ammunition-belts.

Dreger's men were spaced out in a wide arc, facing the corner of a patch of woodland from where the Russians regularly mounted their attacks. It was at that point—though, of course, neither Dreger nor 3rd Panzer Division realized it —that the Soviet forward detachments intended to launch their break-through. The date chosen by them was 17th March. Towards 1030 hours the Russians charged in battalion strength. Dreger with his machine-gun was in the middle —
i.e.,
at the most rearward point—of the arc. The Russians were getting closer and closer without a single round being fired. Dreger had given his men strict orders: "Wait for me to open fire." The spearheads of the enemy attack were within 50 yards when Dreger's "lead machine-gun" at last opened up. Although they were a hard-boiled lot, Dreger's men felt greatly relieved when at last they were permitted to fire. Since the enemy assault had aimed almost exactly at the centre of their defensive line it was possible to deal with it almost as if by envelopment. Under the effective fire from both flanks the Russian assault collapsed after twenty minutes. Whereas the Russians suffered very heavy casualties, Dreger's group had not lost a single man.

After an hour's pause the Russians directed pin-point artillery-fire at the machine-gun positions they had identified. But Dreger and his men merely laughed: needless to say, they had long abandoned their former positions and established themselves in new ones.

The Russians made five attacks within fourteen hours. Five times their battalion collapsed in the concentrated machine- gun fire of Dreger's group. Sixteen determined men were opposing an enemy who was about a hundred times superior to them in numbers.

Three days later, however, the war exacted the supreme price from Dreger too. He and his platoon had in the end been forced out of the village. But in a temperature of 30 degrees below the men needed a house, a room, or a cellar for a few hours during the night, to protect them from the icy wind. Dreger intended to recapture a collective farm by a surprise coup. He was caught by a burst from a machine pistol. His men dragged him behind a straw rick and made him comfortable. Dreger was tapping his icy fingers against each other as if to warm them. And while doing so he seemed to be listening into the still icy night. Softly the normally so undemonstrative man said to his comrades, "Listen —that's death knocking at the door." With that he died.

Colonel-General Halder did not know the story of Sergeant Dreger—but he was well acquainted on that 28th March with the operational reports sent in by 44th Infantry Division about the fighting at Balakleya.

On 13th February he had passed them on to Jodl for inclusion in the High Command communiqué. On the 14th the Viennese were cited for the first time. Six weeks had passed since then. The force of the Soviet assault had on the whole been broken by the astonishing resilience of the troops at the cornerposts of the Izyum bend. But even with optimism and confidence that this crisis, like all the rest, would soon be liquidated, there still remained the justified question: would it not be better to make a pause along the entire Eastern Front, including Army Group South, and to let the Russians attack and wear themselves out against the German defences until their reserves were gradually spent?

That was the question which Halder had been asking himself and his officers time and again while planning the 1942 campaign.

But Major-General Heusinger, the Chief of the Operations Department, had objected that this course of action would mean losing the initiative, and hence an unpredictable amount of time. And time was on the Soviet side. If they were to be forced to their knees at all, then the attempt would have to be made soon.

Halder had accepted this point. But in his opinion a renewed offensive should have been aimed at the heart of the Soviet Union—against Moscow.

But that was precisely what Hitler was stubbornly opposing. He seemed to have a positive horror of Moscow. Instead he had decided to try something entirely new after the unfortunate experiences on the Central Front in the previous year, and to seek the decision in the south by depriving Stalin of his Caucasian oil and by thrusting into Persia.