Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (91 page)

The Soviets were completely taken by surprise. They had not expected the strongly defended township to be attacked from the rear and from the side. Their entire attention had been focused forward, towards the dam. Tank's men quickly rolled up the rearward positions of the Russians.

By the time the Soviet commander had reorganized his defence and drawn up his men with their backs to the dam the first German tanks and armoured infantry carriers of Lorried Infantry Battalion Wellmann were already roaring over the narrow roadway along the top of the dam.

Manych-Stroy fell. Wellmann's battalion got across the dam unscathed. The Manych had been conquered: the last major obstacle on the road to the south, towards the Caucasus and the oilfields, had been overcome.

In the morning of 2nd August the 3rd Panzer Division thrust through as far as Ikituktun [Now Puslikinskoye.] with the Combat Group von Liebenstein, while the Group Pape established a bridgehead at Pregatnoye. Geyr von Schweppenburg's XL Panzer Corps and, on its right, General von Mackensen's III Panzer Corps were now fighting in Asia.

The bold crossing of the Manych and the opening of the door to the Caucasus were supplemented by an equally bold and successful operation by the 23rd Panzer Division from Baden-Württemberg. They wiped out a strong and cunningly positioned Soviet ambush which had seriously threatened the German flank without anyone even suspecting the danger.

At the Sal crossing near Martynovka, Timoshenko had placed an entire motorized Corps in an excellently camouflaged ambush, complete with many tanks.

Major-General Mack was advancing behind the 3rd Panzer Division, driving with his reinforced Motor-cycle Battalion 23 towards Martynovka, which had been reported by German aerial reconnaissance to be "only lightly held."

Mack's attack was launched at the very moment when the Russian Corps was moving into position. Mack instantly realized the danger. He tied down the enemy by frontal attack, surrounded him in a bold operation with the reinforced 201st Panzer Regiment of the Combat Group Burmeister, and in the early hours of 28th July struck at the rear of the Russians, who were completely taken by surprise.

In confused tank duels, often at such extremely short range as 20 or 30 yards, the Russians' T-34s were knocked out and their anti-tank guns smashed. The 9th Company, 201st Panzer Regiment, alone, the first German unit to penetrate into Martynovka, destroyed twelve T-34s and six T-70s, as well as several anti-tank and infantry guns. Captain Fritz Fechner immobilized several T-34s by means of 'sticky bombs.'

The tank battle of Martynovka was the first operation for a long time in which superior tactical leadership and skilful operation of tank against tank succeeded in pinning down a major Soviet formation and annihilating it. Altogether seventy-seven enemy tanks were destroyed and numerous guns captured.

While the grenadiers and tanks of the 3rd Panzer Division were pursuing the retreating Soviets along the Manych river through the Kalmyk steppe in a scorching heat of 50 degrees Centigrade, past huge herds of cattle, past curious camels and dromedaries, Hitler was sitting in his stifling-hot blockhouse at his Ukrainian headquarters near Vinnitsa, looking at his large situation map. General Jodl was making a report.

The subject under discussion, however, was not the successful operation on the Manych, reported in the High Command communiqués, but the nasty situation in which the Sixth Army was finding itself in the great Don bend.

General Paulus, admittedly, had reached the Don with his northern and southern attacking force, but the bridgehead at Kalach, which controlled access to the narrow strip of land between Don and Volga, was not only being held by the Soviets, but in fact being turned into a springboard for a counter-offensive.

Lieutenant-General Gordov, the Soviet Commander-in-Chief of the "Stalingrad Front," had already lined up four Soviet Armies—the Twenty-first, the Sixty-second, the Sixty-third, and the Sixty-fourth—as well as two Tank Armies in the process of formation—the First and the Fourth—in front of the German Sixth Army.

The Soviet Fourth Tank Army had begun to encircle Paulus's XIV Panzer Corps. General von Seydlitz-Kurzbach's LI Army Corps on the southern wing was already in serious trouble. The entire Sixth Army was beginning to be paralysed by a shortage of ammunition and a total lack of fuel.

Hitler's decision to push ahead simultaneously with the operations against the Caucasus and against Stalingrad had meant that supplies too had had to be divided. And since the greater distances had to be tackled in the south, the Quartermaster-General of the Army General Staff, General Wagner, had given the Caucasus front priority in fuel- supplies. Many motorized long-distance supply columns originally destined for Sixth Army were redirected to the south.

By 31st July Hitler was at last compelled to realize that his optimism had been unfounded. He could no longer shut his eyes to the fact that the strength of Sixth Army, impaired as it was by serious supply shortages, was no longer sufficient to take Stalingrad against the strong Soviet opposition.

On that day he therefore decreed yet another change of plan. The Fourth Panzer Army—though stripped of XL Panzer Corps—was detached from the Caucasus front, put under Army Group B, and moved south of the Don towards the north-east, in order to strike at the flank of the Soviet front at Kalach, before Stalingrad.

It was a good plan, but it came too late. The dispatch of Fourth Panzer Army changed nothing as far as the dissipation of forces was concerned. The units which Hitler was taking away from Army Group A merely weakened that Army Group's offensive striking power against the Caucasus; as a reinforcement for Army Group B these units were too few and arrived too late to ensure an early capture of Stalingrad. Two equally strong Army groups were advancing in divergent directions, at right angles to each other, towards objectives which were a long way from each other. The most acute problem, that of supplies, became completely insoluble because the overall operation continued to lack a clear centre of gravity.

The German High Command had manoeuvred itself into a hopeless situation and had allowed itself to become dependent on the opponent's decisions. In the Stalingrad area the Soviets were already dictating the time and place of the battle.

The Fuehrer's Directive of 31st July demanded that on the Caucasus front the second phase of Operation Edelweiss was now to begin—the capture of the Black Sea coast. Army Group A was to employ its fast formations, now grouped under the command of First Panzer Army, in the direction of Armavir and Maykop. Other units of the Army Group, the Army-sized combat group Ruoff with General Kirchner's LVII Panzer Corps, were to drive via Novorossiysk and Tuapse along the coast to Batumi. The German and Rumanian mountain divisions of General Konrad's XLIX Mountain Corps were to be employed on the left wing across the high Caucasian passes to outflank Tuapse and Sukhumi.

To begin with, everything went according to plan—with absolutely breathtaking precision. On the day when the new Fuehrer Directive was issued the III and LVII Panzer Corps also made a big leap forward in the direction of the Caucasus. General von Mackensen with the 13th Panzer Division, newly placed under his command, took Salsk on the same evening. Advancing across several anti-tank ditches, the division on 6th August gained Kurgannaya on the Laba, and the 16th Motorized Infantry Division took Labinsk.

In the evening of 9th August Major-General Herr's 13th Panzer Division stormed the oil town of Maykop, the administrative seat of a vast region of oilfields. Fifty aircraft were captured intact. The oil storage-tanks, however, had been destroyed and the plant itself paralysed by the removal of all key equipment.

Progress was also made by XLIX Mountain Corps and by V Army Corps, which had forced a crossing of the Don east of Rostov. By 13th August the divisions took Krasnodar and forced a crossing of the Kuban.

The advance of LVII Panzer Corps proceeded equally successfully. After a rapid southward thrust through the Kuban steppe the Panzer Combat Group Gille of the "Viking" SS Panzer Grenadier Division, and Combat Groups "Nordland" and "Germania" behind it, were deployed along the northern bank of the Kuban.
The
Panzer Group Gille crossed the river; the group under von Scholtz put across at Kropotkin and swiftly established a bridgehead, thereby clearing the road to the southern bank of the Kuban for the Army-sized Combat Group Ruoff.

The "Viking" Division was then turned south-west, in the direction of Tuapse, at the head of LVII Panzer Corps. Under the command of General of Waffen SS Felix Steiner, the Scandinavian, Baltic, and German volunteers who were grouped together in the "Viking" Division penetrated into the north-westerly and south-westerly part of the Maykop oilfields.

During the first few days of August 1942 the fast formations of Army Group A were thus sweeping along their entire front through the Kuban and Kalmyk steppes in order to engage the elastically resisting and slowly withdrawing Russian divisions before they reached the Caucasus, and in order to prevent them from escaping into the mountains and there establishing a new defensive line.

Signaller Otto Tenning, who was then driving in the command car of the point battalion of 3rd Panzer Division, has given the author the following report: "The next place we came to was Salsk. For our further advance through the Kalmyk steppe orders were that we must not fire at enemy aircraft. In this way the Russians were to be prevented from making out the position of our most advanced units, since through the raised clouds of dust it was probably impossible from the air to tell friend from foe. I was detailed with my scout car to 1st Company and was doing a reconnaissance with Sergeant Goldberg. We were cautiously approaching a small village when the recce leader suddenly spotted something suspicious and sent a radio signal: 'Enemy tanks lined up along the edge of the village.' To our surprise we discovered a little later that these supposed tanks were in fact camels. There was much laughter. From then onwards dromedaries and camels were: no longer anything unusual. Indeed, our supply formations made a lot of use of these reliable animals."

The advanced formations of 3rd Panzer Division reached the town of Voroshilovsk on 3rd August. The Russian troops in the town were taken by surprise, and the town itself was captured after a brief skirmish towards 1600 hours. A Russian counter-attack with tanks and cavalry was repulsed.

The advance continued. Men of the "Brandenburg" Regiment went along with the forward units, always ready for special assignments. Rumanian mountain troops too were included in the formations under 3rd Panzer Division. The native Caucasian population was friendly and welcomed the Germans as liberators.

There simply is no denying the fact that entire tribes and villages readily, and, indeed, against the wishes of the German High Command, volunteered to fight against the Red Army. These freedom-loving people believed that the hour of national independence had come for them. Stalin's wrath, when it struck them later, was terrible: all these tribes were expelled from their beautiful homeland and banished to Siberia.

The faster the advance towards the Caucasus was gaining ground the clearer it became that the Russians were still withdrawing without any great losses in lives or material. The German formations were gaining territory—more and more territory—but they did not succeed in savaging the enemy, let alone annihilating him. A few upset peasant carts and a few dead horses were all the booty lining the route of the German advance.

In order to cover the increasingly long eastern flank of the drive to the Caucasus, General Ott's LII Army Corps with lllth and 370th Infantry Divisions were wheeled eastward on a broad front and deployed towards the Caspian. Elista, the only major town in the Kalmyk steppe, feu on 12th August.

Meanwhile the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions continued to move southward. The Kalmyk steppe lay parched under a scorching sun. The thermometer stood at 55 degrees Centigrade. A long way off, in the brilliantly blue summer sky, the troops saw a white cumulus cloud. But the cloud did not move. The following day, and the day after, it was still in the same spot. It was no cloud. It was Mount Elbrus, 18,480 feet high, with its glistening glaciers and its eternal snow

— the greatest mountain massif of the central Caucasus.

"How many miles have we done to-day?" Colonel Reinhardt, the commander of 421st Infantry Regiment, asked his adjutant. First Lieutenant Boll looked at his map, on which the routes of advance of 125th and, next to it, 198th Infantry Divisions—forming V Corps—were marked. He measured off the distance. "Forty miles, Herr Oberst."

Forty miles. That was the distance the infantry had marched that day. Under a searing sky, through the treeless Kuban steppe. On the march the columns were enveloped in thick clouds of greyish-brown dust. Only the heads of the horsemen showed above it. The farther south they advanced the looser the connection became between individual regiments. Only the distant trails of dust indicated that somewhere far to the right and far to the left there were other marching columns similarly advancing to the south.

In the shade of his command car Reinhardt studied the map. "Absolutely terrifying, those distances," the adjutant observed.

Reinhardt nodded. His finger moved across the map to the Kalmyk steppe. "Kleist's tanks are no better off either."

Indeed, they were no better off. The XL Panzer Corps— since 2nd August subordinated to First Panzer Army—had taken Pyatigorsk with 3rd Panzer Division on 10th August and Mineralnyye Vody with 23rd Panzer Division, and had thus reached the foot of the Caucasus. The last great obstacle still ahead was the Terek river. Would they be able to cross it and then gain the high mountain-passes by way of the Os-setian and Georgian Military Highways?