Read Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 Online
Authors: Paul Carell
Hitler's clash with Jodl-The Chief of the General Staff and Field-Marshal List are dismissed—An obsession with oil— Panzer Grenadiers on the Ossetian Military Highway—The Caucasus front freezes.
ON 7th September 1942 the heat of the late summer lay heavily on the Ukrainian forests. In the airless blockhouses of the Fuehrer's Headquarters, known as "Werewolf," the thermometer rose to 30 degrees Centigrade. Hitler was suffering more than usually from the heat. It served to increase his anger at the situation between Kuban and Terek. All the reports from the "oilfield front" indicated that the troops had reached the limit of their strength.
Army Group A was stuck in the Caucasus and on the Terek. The valleys leading down to the Black Sea coast, above all to Tuapse, were blocked by the Soviets, and the Terek proved to be a strongly reinforced obstacle, the last obstacle before the old military highways to Tiflis, Kutaisi, and Baku.
We can't make it, the divisions reported. "We can't make it, we can't make it—how I hate these words!" Hitler fumed. He refused to believe that further progress was impossible on the Terek or on the mountain front merely because the forces were inadequate. He was putting the blame on the commanders in the field and on what he called their mistakes in mounting the operations.
For that reason Hitler had sent the Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, General of Artillery Jodl, to Stalino in the morning of 7th September, to see Field-Marshal List and to find out for himself why no progress was being made along the road to Tuapse. Jodl was to lend emphasis to Hitler's orders.
Late in the evening Jodl returned. His report triggered off the worst crisis in the German High Command since the beginning of the war. Jodl defended Field-Marshal List and supported his view that the forces were too weak for the objectives assigned to them. Like List, he demanded a radical regrouping of the front.
Hitler refused. He suspected Jodl of having allowed himself to be bamboozled by List. The general, irritable from the heat and his exhausting day, blew up. Furiously and in a loud voice he quoted to Hitler his own orders and directives of the past few weeks, which List had observed meticulously, and which had led to the very difficulties in which Army Group A was now finding itself.
Hitler was flabbergasted at Jodl's accusations. His most intimate general was not only in revolt against him, but was clearly questioning his strategic skill and blaming him for the crisis in the Caucasus and for the emerging bogey of
defeat on the southern front.
"You're lying," Hitler screamed. "I never issued such orders —never!" Then he left Jodl standing and stormed out of his blockhouse into the darkness of the Ukrainian woods. It was hours before he came back—pale, shrunken, with feverish eyes.
The extent to which Hitler had been upset by his encounter was shown by the fact that from that date onward he no longer took his meals with his generals. From then until his death he would sullenly take his meals in the Spartan solitude of his headquarters, with Blondi, the Alsatian bitch, as his only company.
But that was not the only reaction to Jodl's accusations. There were much more far-reaching consequences: Colonel- General Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, and Field-Marshal List were relieved of their posts. Hitler even decided to dismiss his devoted Generals Keitel and Jodl, and envisaged their replacement by Field-Marshals Kesselring and Paulus— a plan which unfortunately was not put into effect, since the appointment of generals with front-line experience would at least have avoided the disaster of Stalingrad.
In the end, however, Hitler did not part with his military aides Keitel and Jodl, who had served him for so many years. He merely ordered that in the future every one of his words, as well as every remark by any general at military conferences, was to be taken down in shorthand. Otherwise he clung stubbornly to his order that the attack on the Caucasus front must be continued. On no account would he renounce the main objective of his summer offensive. The oil of the Caucasus, Groznyy, Tiflis, and Baku, as well as the transhipment ports on the Black Sea, must be captured at all costs. The autumn of 1942 was to bring the German forces to the objectives of the Russian campaign, at least in the south.
Hitler's attitude was one of many indications of his increasing stubbornness also in the military field. This side of his character was presently to bring about the doom of the fighting front. In other ways Hitler's obsessions had been patent for some time.
In the economic field Hitler's obsession was oil. Oil to him was the element of progress, the driving force of the machine age. He had read everything that had ever been written about oil. He was acquainted with the history of the Arabian and American oilfields, and knew about oil extraction and refining. Anyone turning the conversation to oil could be sure of Hitler's attention. Goering was put in charge of the economic four-year plan because he was playing Hitler's favourite card—oil.
Typical of Hitler's attitude is an attested remark he made about an efficient civil servant in the Trade Policy Department of the German Foreign Office: "I can't bear the man—but he does understand about oil." Hitler's Balkan policy was based entirely on Rumania's oil. He had built into the Barbarossa directive a special campaign against the Crimea, merely because he was worried about the Rumanian oilfields, which he believed could be threatened by the Soviet Air Force from the Crimea.
Above all, Hitler's obsession with oil led him to neglect the most revolutionary scientific development of the twentieth century—atomic physics. There was no room left in his mind for understanding the decisive military significance of nuclear fission, discovered in Germany and first developed by German physicists. Here again it was evident that Hitler was essentially a man of the nineteenth not the twentieth century.
Every one of Hitler's
idées fixes
played its fatal part in the war against Russia—but most decisive of all was his obsession with oil. It dominated the campaign in the East from the start, and in the summer of 1942 it was this obsession that led Hitler to take decisions and make demands on the Southern Front which eventually decided the campaign of 1942, and hence the course of the war. One last glance at the oilfield front in 1942 will support this contention.
Army Group A was stuck on the northern and western edge of the Caucasus. But Hitler refused to acknowledge that German strength was at an end. He wanted to drive to Tiflis and to Baku over the ancient Caucasian military highways. He therefore ordered that the offensive must be resumed across the Terek.
Orders were orders. In weeks of heavy fighting the First Panzer Army attempted to extend its bridgehead over the Terek towards the south and the west, a step at a time. All forces were concentrated: LII Army Corps was reinforced with units of XL Panzer Corps and also received 13th Panzer Division from III Panzer Corps. It was this division which on 20th September succeeded in crossing the Terek south-west of Mozdok. On 25th September General von Mackensen launched an attack with the whole of HI Panzer Corps against Ordzhonikidze, on the road to Tiflis. While 23rd Panzer Division was slowly advancing with units of 111 th Infantry Division, the SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Viking," brought up from the Western Caucasus, pushed through farther south against the Georgian Military Highway. The ancient road to Tiflis was reached.
The combat group of the SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment "Nordland" arrived on the battlefield from the lower, wooded part of the Caucasus, and with it the "Viking" Division was able to force its way into the northern part of the Groznyy oilfields, and to block the Georgian Military Highway at two points. The keypoint known as Hill 711 was stormed, at heavy cost, by a battalion of Finnish volunteers fighting within the "Viking" Division, and was held against all enemy counterattacks. But would the troops have any strength left for the final push, for the last 60 miles?
Four weeks passed before III Panzer Corps had accumulated the necessary reserves in manpower, fuel, and replacements to launch a new—and as they hoped the final—attack.
On 25th and 26th October the Corps moved forward from its bridgehead on the western bank of the Terek in order to break through towards the south-east. The battalions fought stubbornly. An enemy force of four divisions was smashed and about 7000 prisoners were taken. Rumanian mountain troops blocked the valleys leading to the south. The 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions drove on to the south-east, and by a vigorous attack on 1st November took Alagir and cut the Ossetian Military Highway on both sides of the town. Major-General Herr's 13th Panzer Division, following up this bold armoured thrust, reached a point three miles west of Ordzhonikidze on 5th November.
By then the last remnants of strength were spent. Soviet counter-attacks from the north cut off the divisions from their rearward communications. To begin with, the First Panzer Army was unable to help, and in the teeth of opposition from the Fuehrer's Headquarters ordered the severed groups to break through backward. The most forward combat group of SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Viking" arrived in the nick of time to meet their old comrades-in-arms of 13th Panzer Division half-way, to get them out of the enemy trap and absorb them.
During the night of llth/12th November the 13th Panzer Division linked up again with Corps. In bitter fighting the 13th and the "Viking" beat off attacks by pursuing enemy units.
About the middle of November a break in the weather put an end to all attempts at restarting the operation.
On the right wing, in the sector of Seventeenth Army, the mountain troops had already abandoned the snowbound passes of the High Caucasus because supplies were no longer getting through. The infantry and Jäger regiments dug in. The attacks on the Black Sea ports, on the oilfields, and on Baku, Tiflis, and Batumi suffered shipwreck within sight of the objectives. The entire front was at a standstill.
Why?
Because the new Soviet tactics of evasion had foiled the boldly conceived pincer operations between Don and Donets. Because the Soviet commanders-in-chief had succeeded at the last moment in regaining control over their formations withdrawing from the Lower Don into the Caucasus. Because, finally, American supplies were reaching the battered Soviet Armies from Iran via the Caspian. The battle-weary German formations were too weak to break this last resistance. Here as elsewhere the German forces lacked the last battalion.
PART SEVEN:
Stalingrad
Kalach, the bridge of destiny over the Don-Tank battle in the sands of the steppe—General Hübe's armoured thrust to
the Volga—"On the right the towers of Stalingrad"—Heavy antiaircraft guns manned by women—The first engagement outside Stalin's city.
ANYONE studying the battle of Stalingrad is struck first of all by the strange circumstance that this city did not rank as a principal objective in the plans for the great summer offensive. In "Operation Blue" the city was only a marginal consideration. It was to be "brought under military control"—in other words, it was to be eliminated as an armaments centre and as a port on the Volga. That was a task for aircraft and long-range artillery, but not an assignment for an entire Army. The purpose could have been achieved equally well with bombs and shells; as a city Stalingrad was of no strategic importance. The operations of the Sixth Army were therefore designed, under the general strategic plan, to cover the flank of the Caucasus front and its important military-economic targets. For this task the capture of Stalingrad might be useful, but it was by no means indispensable. That this flank-cover assignment of Sixth Army should eventually lead to the turning point of the war and to a battle which decided the fate of the entire campaign was one of the tragic aspects of the disaster of Stalingrad. It shows how much the outcome of a war can be determined by accidents and mistakes.
In September 1942, when the main operation of the summer offensive, the battle in the Caucasus and on the Terek, was grinding to a standstill, encouraging news was arriving at the Fuehrer's Headquarters from the Stalingrad front. In a sector where the capture of the Don and Volga bends at Stalingrad was envisaged merely for the sake of flank and rear cover for the battle for the oilfields, progress was suddenly being made after weeks of crisis. On 13th September a report came in from Sixth Army that the 71st Infantry Division, belonging to LI Corps under General of Artillery von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, had penetrated the deeply echeloned fortified approaches of Stalingrad and stormed the high ground just outside the city centre.
On the following day, 14th September 1942, Lieutenant-General von Hartmann with parts of his Lower Saxon 71st Infantry Division broke through to the Volga after some costly street fighting past the northern of the two railway stations. Hartmann's assault squads, admittedly, represented only a thin wedge, but nevertheless the city had been pierced and the swastika flag was flying over the city centre. It was a gratifying success, and encouraged the hope that at least the Don-Volga operation would be victoriously completed before the onset of winter, so that, with flank cover ensured, the offensive could then be resumed in the Caucasus.
How did this gratifying success of 14th September 1942 come about? To answer this question we must cast our minds back to the summer, to the operation between Donets and Don, when during the second half of July the Sixth Army was advancing solitarily down the Don towards Stalingrad, while the bulk of Army Group South—the First and Fourth Panzer Armies—were wheeled southward by Hitler to fight the battle of encirclement of Rostov.
At the head of Sixth Army moved General von Wieter-sheim's XIV Panzer Corps. This was the only Panzer Corps under the Army, and consisted of 16th Panzer Division and 3rd and 60th Motorized Infantry Divisions. In the face of this mailed fist the Russians withdrew over the Don, towards the north and the east, in the direction of Stalingrad.
This retreat, undoubtedly ordered by the Soviet Command and envisaged by it as a strategic withdrawal, nevertheless turned into wild flight in the sectors of many Soviet divisions, largely because the order for the withdrawal came unexpectedly and was not clearly formulated. The retreat was poorly organized. Officers and troops were not yet experienced in these new tactics. The result was that the middle and lower commands lost control of their units. In many places there was panic. It is important to realize these circumstances in order to understand why this withdrawal was interpreted
on
the German side as a Soviet collapse.
Undoubtedly there were symptoms of collapse in many places, but the higher Soviet command remained untouched by this. The higher command had a clear programme: Stalingrad, the city on the Volga bend which bore Stalin's name, the ancient Tsaritsyn, was earmarked by the Soviet General Staff as the final centre of resistance. Stalin had reluctantly allowed his generals to withdraw from the Donets and the Don. But he now drew a line at the Volga.
"I order the formation of an Army Group Stalingrad. The city itself will be defended by Sixty-second Army to the last man," Stalin had said to Marshal Timoshenko on 12th July 1942. In a strategically favourable area Stalin intended to bring about a turn of the tide, just as he had done once before —during the Revolution in 1920, against the White Cossack General Denikin. All he needed was time—time to bring up reserves, time to build defensive positions along
the northern approaches to the city on the strip of land between Don and Volga, as well as along the favourable line of high ground stretching south of Stalingrad as far as the Kalmyk steppe.
But would the Germans allow the Red Army enough time to mobilize all its strength and re-form in the Stalingrad area?
Major-General Kolpakchi was then Commander-in-Chief Sixty-second Army. His staff officers stood at the Don crossings in the Kalach area, their machine pistols at the ready, trying to bring some sort of order into the flood of retreating Soviet regiments.
But the Germans did not come. "No more enemy contact," the Russian rearguards reported. Kolpakchi shook his head. He reported to Army Group : "The Germans are not following up."
"What does it mean?" Marshal Timoshenko asked his chief of staff. "Have the Germans changed their plans?"
The excellent Soviet espionage organizations knew nothing of a change of plan. Neither Richard Sorge from the German Embassy in Tokyo nor Lieutenant Schulze-Boysen from the Air Ministry in Berlin had reported anything about changes in the plans for the German offensive. Nor was there anything from the top-level agents Alexander Rado in Switzerland or Gilbert in Paris. Surely one of them would have uncovered something. For there was no doubt that there was still a leak in the German High Command. Indeed, the reports from Röss-ler, one of the Soviet agents in Switzerland, which quoted "Werther" as their source and which came from a well-informed official in the German High Command, proved that these channels of information were just then working very smoothly. There was therefore no indication that the Germans had changed their plans regarding the operation at Stalingrad.
But it was quite definite: the much-feared armoured spearheads of General Paulus's forces were not coming on. Soviet aerial reconnaissance reported that the German advanced formations had halted in the area north of Millerovo. The Soviets could not understand it. They never suspected the real reason for this halt: XIV Panzer Corps had run out of fuel.
Following the decision taken at the Fuehrer's Headquarters on 3rd July—the decision to push ahead with the Caucasus operation without waiting for Stalingrad to be eliminated—the major part of the fuel supplies originally earmarked for Sixth Army were switched round to the Caucasus front, since it was there that Hitler wanted to concentrate his main effort. A considerable proportion of the fast troops and supply formations of Sixth Army were abruptly paralysed as a result.
In this way the bulk of Sixth Army, in particular XIV Panzer Corps, remained immobilized for eighteen days. Eighteen days was a long time.
The Russians made good use of the time thus gained. "If the Germans are not following up there is time to organize the defence on the western bank of the Don," Timoshenko decided. Major-General Kolpakchi assembled the bulk of his Sixty-second Army in the great Don bend and established a bridgehead around Kalach. In this manner the vital crossing of the Don was blocked 45 miles west of Stalingrad. The fortified loop of the Don projected towards the west like a balcony, flanking the river to the north and south.
About 20th July, when the Sixth Army was once more ready to resume its advance, General Paulus found himself faced with the task of first having to burst open the Soviet barrier around Kalach in order to continue his thrust across the Don towards Stalingrad. Thus began the battle for Kalach, an interesting operation and one of considerable importance for the further course of events—in fact, the first act of the battle of Stalingrad.
General Paulus mounted his attack on the Kalach bridgehead as a classical battle of encirclement. He made his own XIV Panzer Corps reach out in a wide arc on the left, and the XXIV Panzer Corps, assigned to him from Hoth's Panzer Army, similarly on the right wing, the two to link up at Kalach. The VIII Infantry Corps covered the Army's deep flank in the north, while Seydlitz's LI Corps was making a frontal attack on Kalach between the two Panzer Corps.
The main brunt of the heavy fighting in the great Don bend was borne, above all, by the two Panzer divisions—-the 16th Panzer Division of XIV Panzer Corps and the 24th Panzer Division of XXIV Panzer Corps. The motorized divisions covered their flanks.
The East Prussian 24th Panzer Division under Major-General von Hauenschild received orders to cross the Chir and to wheel northward along the Don towards Kalach. It was opposed by strong forces of the Soviet Sixty-fourth Army, then still under the command of Lieutenant-General Chuykov.
The first attack with two Panzer companies and units of Panzer grenadier regiments did not, to begin with, get through the minefields behind which the Russians were well dug in. But on 25th July, towards 0330 hours, the 24th renewed their attack, and this time succeeded in dislodging the enemy from his well-established positions and in capturing the vital high ground west of the Solenaya stream.
The 21st Panzer Grenadier Regiment under Colonel von Lengerke repulsed dangerous Soviet attacks against the northern flank. In the afternoon there was a heavy cloudburst which made the attack increasingly difficult on the rain- softened ground. The weather, together with the Soviet 229th and 214th Rifle Divisions, which resisted stubbornly and furiously in their positions, made a surprise drive to the Don impossible.
On 26th July, at last, progress was made. The 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment punched a hole in the enemy lines on the Solenaya stream. Riding on top of light armour, the grenadiers drove on to the east. The break-through was accomplished.
The Panzer Grenadier Regiment and one Panzer battalion raced towards the Chir crossing at Nizhne-Chirskaya. At 1400 hours the spearheads reached the river and wheeled south towards the bridge. In street fighting that night the large village was occupied, and shortly before midnight the ford and the bridge over the Chir east of it were captured.
While the Panzer grenadiers were establishing a bridgehead on the eastern bank, tanks and armoured infantry carriers advanced through the enemy-held forest as far as the bridge over the Don. By dawn they had reached the huge river— the river of destiny for Operation Barbarossa.
Enemy attempts to blow up the bridge were fortunately unsuccessful. Only a small section was demolished, and that was soon repaired. Once again the 24th Panzer Division had seized an important bridge almost undamaged.
However, the drive over the river on to the narrow neck of land between Don and Volga, in the direction of Stalingrad, could not yet be attempted. First of all, the strong Russian force west of the river had to be destroyed, especially since the Russians had meanwhile concentrated two Armies east of the Don, against whom the weak armoured spearheads of the German Sixth Army could not possibly achieve any success single-handed.
On 6th August the last round opened in the battle for Kalach. An armoured assault group of 24th Panzer Division under Colonel Riebel, the commander of 24th Panzer Regiment, advanced from the Chir bridgehead and drove through the covering units of 297th Infantry Division northward, in the direction of Kalach. The objective was another 22 miles away.
The Russians resisted desperately. They realized what was at stake: if the Germans got through, then all their forces west of the river would be cut off and the door to Stalingrad would be burst open.
However, the "mailed fist" of the 24th battered a way through the Soviet defensive positions and minefields, repulsed numerous counterattacks by enemy armour, and escorted the unarmoured units of the division through the Soviet defensive lines, which were still intact in many places.
Then, in many columns abreast, the 24th Panzer Division roared forward in a wild hunt through the steppe, and at nightfall had reached the commanding Hill 184, just before Kalach, in the rear of the enemy.
Along the left prong of the pincers, in the sector of XIV Panzer Corps, the operation had likewise been going according to schedule.
Lieutenant-General Hübe's 16th Panzer Division from Westphalia launched its attack on 23rd July with four combat groups attacking from the upper Chir. A volunteer division of the Soviet Sixty-second Army offered the first furious resistance on the hills of Roshka. Mues's battalion drove right up to the enemy pillboxes and field positions with its armoured infantry carriers, the Panzer grenadiers on top of them. The enemy was kept down by machine-gun fire. The grenadiers leapt from their vehicles and flushed the Russians out of their dugouts with hand-grenades and pistols.