Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (79 page)

Rommel's Africa Army played a part in this plan. The "desert fox," who was just then preparing his offensive from Cyrenaica against the British positions at Gazala and against Tobruk, the heart of the British defence of North Africa, was to advance right across Egypt and the Arabian Desert to the Persian Gulf. In this way Persia, the only point of contact between Britain and Russia, and after Murmansk the greatest supply base of US help for Russia, would be eliminated. Moreover, in addition to the Russian oilfields the very much richer Arabian oilfields would fall into German hands. Mars had been appointed the god of economic warfare.

Halder's car stopped at the barrier at Gate 1 to Special Area I of the "Wolfsschanze," Hitler's Headquarters proper. The guard saluted. The barrier was raised. Along the narrow asphalted road the car drove on into Hitler's forest stronghold. The low concrete huts, with their camouflage paint and bush-planted flat roofs, lay perfectly hidden among the tall beeches. Even from the air they were impossible to make out. The whole area, over a wide radius, was hermetically sealed—protected by barbed-wire obstacles and belts of minefields. There were road-blocks on all roads. The small branch railway had been taken out of service and was now being used only by Goering's diesel coach plying to the Air Marshal's battle headquarters in the Johannisberg Forest near Lake Spirding, south of Rastenburg.

Colonel-General Jodl once remarked that the "Wolfs-schanze" was a cross between a concentration camp and a monastery. It certainly was a Spartan military camp, differing from ordinary military establishments only in that Hitler turned night into day, working until two, three, or even four o'clock in the morning, and then sleeping until all hours. Whether they liked it or not, his closest collaborators also had to adapt themselves to this rhythm.

Halder drove past the information office of the Reich Press Chief. On the right were the radio and telephone exchange of the camp, and next to it Jodl's and Keitel's quarters. On the left of the road were the quarters of Bormann and the Reich Security Service. On the farthest edge of the forest was Hitler's hut, surrounded by one more high wire fence.

Together with his Alsatian bitch Blondi, this wire fence was the last obstacle outside Hitler's Spartan hermitage in the Rastenburg forest.

For that conference on 28th March Hitler had invited only a small circle, only the most senior leaders of the armed forces—Keitel, Jodl, and Halder, and half a dozen other top-ranking officers of the three services. They were standing or sitting on wooden stools around the oak map-table. Hitler sat in the middle of one of its long sides; the Chief of the General Staff occupied one of its narrow sides.

Halder was given leave to speak and began to develop his plan. Its code name was "Case Blue." Originally it was to have been called "Case Siegfried," but Hitler no longer wanted to commit himself by choosing invincible mythological heroes as patrons for his military operations since the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had let him down.

Hitler kept interrupting Halder with all kinds of questions. The conversation time and again went off at a tangent, but after three hours Hitler eventually gave his consent to the basic outline of the plan. This then was the scheme: Act 1: Two Army Groups to form a huge pair of pincers. The northern jaw of the pincers to advance from the Kursk- Kharkov area down the middle Don to the south-east, while the right jaw of the pincers drives rapidly eastward from the Taganrog area. West of Stalingrad the two jaws to meet, enclosing the bulk of the Soviet forces between Donets and Don, and annihilating them. Act 2: Advance into the Caucasus, that 700-mile-long range of high mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian, followed by the conquest of the Caucasian oilfields.

Map 25.
By means of Operation Blue, the summer offensive of 1942, Hitler hoped to force the decision on the southern wing. West of Stalingrad the Soviets were to be surrounded by a gigantic pincer operation, and a thrust was then to be launched into the Caucasian oilfields.

It was noon when Halder left the "Wolfsschanze" to drive back to the Mauer Forest. He was weary and depressed, full of doubts and irritated by Hitler's know-all manner. But he nevertheless felt that he had won Hitler over for a plan that was at least practicable—a plan which used the German forces economically and which went for the objectives on the southern front a step at a time, with clearly defined strong points. If it came off, Stalin would lose the entire Caucasus,

including Astrakhan and the Volga estuary—in other words, the overland as well as the shipping link with Persia. The southern objective of "Operation Barbarossa" would thus have been reached.

All that remained was to formulate the project into a clear directive for the separate branches of the armed forces.

Seven days later, on 4th April 1942, Colonel-General Jodl submitted his draft directive. The Armed Forces Operations Staff had solved the problem in the traditional German Staff manner: they had begun by briefly outlining the situation, by listing the objectives as separate "tasks," and, in this way, leaving considerable freedom to the Commander-in- Chief Army Group South, Field-Marshal von Bock, as to the actual execution of the vast operation. That had been a General Staff tradition for 130 years, from Scharnhorst to Schlieffen and Ludendorff.

But this High Command draft of "Operation Blue" was shot down almost at once. During the critical situations of the past winter Hitler had lost faith in the loyalty of his generals. Commanders-in-Chief and Corps commanders had often left no doubt that they were obeying his orders unwillingly. Following Brauchitsch's spectacular departure, Hitler had himself assumed supreme command of the Army, and he was not prepared now to have his authority diminished by "elastically framed tasks."

When he had read the draft he refused to give his consent. The plan, he argued, was leaving the Commander-in-Chief South far too much freedom of action. Hitler was not having any elastic directives.

He demanded detailed instructions. He wanted to see the execution of the operation laid down minutely to the last detail. When Jodl demurred Hitler took the papers out of his hand with the words: "I will deal with the matter myself." On the following day the result was available on ten pages of typescript—"Fuehrer Directive No. 41 of 5th April 1942," Alongside Plan Barbarossa, Directive No. 21, this new directive became one of the crucial papers of the Second World War, a blend of operational order, fundamental decisions, executive regulations, and security measures.

As this directive was not just the plan for another gigantic military campaign, but also the detailed time-table leading to Stalingrad—a document, in fact, which already contained in itself the turning-point of the war—its most important passages are worth quoting here.

Right in the preamble we find a bold claim: "The winter battle in Russia is drawing to its close. The enemy has suffered very heavy losses in men and material. In his anxiety to exploit what seemed like initial successes he has spent during this winter the bulk of his reserves earmarked for later operations."

Proceeding from this thesis, the Order went on: "As soon as weather and ground conditions permit the German Command and the German forces, being superior to the enemy, must seize the initiative again in order to impose their will upon the enemy. The aim is to destroy what manpower the Soviets have left for resistance and to deprive them as far as possible of their vital military-economic potential."

This is how Hitler saw the execution of the plan: "While adhering to the original general outline of the campaign in the East, the task now is for the centre of the front to hold back temporarily . . . while all available forces are concentrated for the main operation in the southern sector, with the objective of annihilating the enemy on the Don and subsequently gaining the oilfields of the Caucasian region and the crossing of the Caucasus itself."

On the detailed execution of the campaign the directive stated: "It is the first task of the Army and Luftwaffe after the period of mud to create the prerequisites for the execution of the main operation. This entails the cleaning up and consolidation of the entire Eastern Front and the rearward military areas. The next tasks will be the clearing of the enemy from the Kerch Peninsula in the Crimea and the capture of Sevastopol."

A key problem of this extensive operation was the long flank along the Don. To avert the threat resulting from it Hitler took a fatal decision which did much to precipitate the disaster of Stalingrad. This was what he ordered: "As the Don front becomes increasingly longer in the course of this operation it will be manned primarily by formations of our Allies. . . . These are to be employed in their own sectors as far as possible, with the Hungarians being farthest north, then the Italians, and then, farthest to the south-east, the Rumanians."

So much for grand strategy and theory. As for the practical execution, this was to start with "Operation Bustard Hunt" in the Crimea. In his book
The Most Important Operations of the Great Fatherland War
the Soviet military historian Colonel P. A. Zhilin has the following to say about the situation in the Crimea in the spring of 1942: "The stubborn fighting of the Soviet troops and the Black Sea Fleet yielded us much strategic advantage and foiled the calculations of the enemy. The German Eleventh Army, tied down in the Crimea, could not be used for the attack against the Volga and the Caucasus."

That is entirely correct. And just because it was of such importance to the Soviets to keep Manstein's Eleventh Army immured in the Crimea, Stalin had mobilized a formidable force for this task.

Three Soviet Armies—the Forty-seventh, the Fifty-first, and the Forty-fourth—with seventeen rifle divisions, two cavalry divisions, three rifle brigades, and four armoured brigades, were blocking the 11-mile isthmus of Parpach, the passage from the Crimea to the Kerch Peninsula. Kerch in turn was the springboard to the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and hence into the foothills of the Caucasus.

Every mile of this vital neck of land was being defended by approximately 16,000 men—more than nine men to each yard.

The Soviet forces were established behind an anti-tank ditch 11 yards wide and 16 feet deep which ran across the entire width of the isthmus. Behind it extensive wire obstacles had been erected and thousands of mines laid. Masive girder-like structures, made of rails welded together like bristling hedgehogs, protected machine-gun posts, strong- points, and gun emplacements. With water on both sides of this 11-mile front, all possibility of outflanking was ruled out.

"So that's where we are to drive through, Herr Generaloberst?" asked Manstein's driver and general factotum, Fritz Nagel, after looking through the trench telescope at the observation post of 114th Artillery Regiment, which offered a good view of the Soviet positions.

"Yes, that's where we've got to drive through, Nagel." Manstein nodded. He pushed his cap back and once more pressed his eyes to the telescope through which he had just let his sergeant have a look.

Fritz Nagel was always welcome at all headquarters. A native of Karlsruhe, he had been Manstein's driver since 1938. Whenever Manstein drove to the front Nagel was behind the wheel. He was calmness personified, and had more than once handled dangerous situations. Several times he had been wounded. But Manstein himself had never even been scratched: Nagel was a kind of talisman.

Manstein had driven out to the forward O.P. of 114th Artillery Regiment, in the sector of 46th Infantry Division, in the northern part of the front across the Parpach Isthmus, in order to have another look at the Soviet system of defences.

"Any other news?" he asked the commander of 466th Infantry Division. "Nothing special, Herr Generaloberst," Major- General Haccius replied.

"Well, good luck then, the day after to-morrow." Man-stein nodded. "Come on, Nagel; we're driving home." The day after to-morrow—8th May, D-Day for "Bustard Hunt," the code name for the break-through to Kerch.

If one is dealing with an enemy three times one's own strength and established, moreover, in a cleverly constructed defensive position, one can dislodge him only by courage and cunning. Manstein therefore based his plan on cunning.