Ostkrieg (40 page)

The removal of Guderian, however, did nothing to improve Kluge's position, for Russian advances so threatened the Second, Fourth, and Ninth Armies with envelopment that he informed Halder on 26 December of the necessity of withdrawing the entire army group. Halder countered with Hitler's warning that it would be impossible to hold out once the front started to move, but Kluge, surprisingly forceful, insisted that, with nothing to eat and no ammunition, his men could hardly be expected to fight, adding: “Whether the Führer likes it or not he will have to order a retreat. If supplies cannot be delivered, things will soon collapse. . . . The Führer will have to come down from cloud-cuckoo-land and . . . set his feet firmly on the ground.” Hitler, however, refused to accede to Kluge's demand, telling him that “one day the Russians will no longer have the strength to attack,” an assurance that did little to assuage Kluge since the number of German troops freezing to death exceeded the number of replacements. When, on the thirtieth, Kluge tried to make a case for retreat, Hitler accused him of wanting to “go right back to the Polish border.” Unlike his front commanders, Hitler stressed, he had to see things with “cool reason.” After all, he had experienced days of extended artillery fire in World War I and had continued
to hold on. When, in exasperation, Kluge replied that this was a winter war in Russia, with physically and mentally exhausted troops facing temperatures far below zero, Hitler ended the discussion by saying, “If that is the case, then it means the end of the German Army.”
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At dawn on New Year's Day, with temperatures hovering at –25°F and blanketed by waist-deep snow, with equipment inoperable, with tank and truck engines left idling so that vehicles that did not move still continued to consume precious fuel, and with the fate of Army Group Center hanging precariously on a few roads that could drift shut within hours, it was apparent to front commanders that, despite Hitler's latest ban on withdrawals, the lines could not be held much longer. By this time, according to OKH calculations, the Ostheer had lost over 830,000 men, or over 25 percent of its original strength, and, even if replacements could be found, weapons of all types were lacking. Even as Hitler stressed the need to hold out at all costs in order to buy time for the units being sent from the west, he seemed at last to have realized that he was dangerously close to losing his grip on the army group. The pullback of the Ninth Army against his will occasioned a wild outburst at OKH headquarters that the army command had been “parliamentarized” and that front commanders no longer had the courage “to make hard decisions.” Still, as the Germans began to discern that the Soviets now intended to encircle Army Group Center, a certain clarity descended on their defensive measures. Efforts at holding out everywhere in order to buy time now gradually gave way to a priority on holding key road and rail junctions and protecting vital supply lines.
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The precipitating event seemed to be a breakthrough in the Fourth Panzer Army's front that threatened the Twentieth Army Corps with encirclement. Hoepner in vain requested permission on 6 January for these units to be withdrawn since the OKH still believed that the Russians were at the end of their strength and the situation would soon ease. By the eighth, with the supply route to the corps cut, Hoepner once again demanded that Kluge allow him to pull these units out of the developing trap. Kluge did not dare make a decision on his own and, thus, referred the request to Halder, who indicated that he would have to get a decision from Hitler. Frustrated, and tired of waiting, just after noon on the eighth Hoepner ordered the army corps to break out. That same night, Hitler relieved Hoepner of his command and ordered that he be dishonorably discharged from the army. This, however, did nothing to improve the situation at the front, for the Fourth Army now faced similar pressure and that same day demanded permission to withdraw in order to protect its main supply route. As one commander summarized
the situation succinctly, “I cannot put a policeman behind every soldier.” Faced with the inevitable, Hitler now relented and granted the request.
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To the south, both the Second Army and the Second Panzer Army had managed unexpectedly to stabilize their sectors, although a bulge of some fifty miles between Sukhinichi (encircled since 29 December) and Yukhnov separated the latter and the Fourth Army. While forces from the Second Panzer Army were to attack the Soviet flank near Sukhinichi, the task of the Fourth Army remained keeping the supply route from Roslavl to Medyn open. To the north, the Ninth Army was to cut off the enemy penetration west of Rzhev. Significantly, none of these orders any longer contained a demand that the front be held unconditionally and inflexibly. Hitler's effort to maintain the stand-fast doctrine was now hopelessly at odds with reality. Since the reserves from Germany that he had counted on had not arrived in sufficient strength, permission for a withdrawal of Army Group Center could no longer be avoided.
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The growing pressure on the German front that forced it to retire resulted from a change in Soviet plans that, ironically, ensured German survival. Stalin, emboldened by success in front of Moscow and in line with Soviet military doctrine, now judged the time right for a general offensive by the Red Army to crush the entire German eastern front, despite the fact that the Russians had paid dearly for their limited victory. Repeating Hitler's mistake of overestimating his own striking power, and underestimating enemy resistance, Stalin failed to listen to his front commanders, who warned that the Germans, desperate and fighting for their lives, were increasingly difficult to expel and that their own strength was rapidly waning. Nor did he heed Zhukov's advice that the Red Army lacked the forces to carry out such a broad offensive and would be better served by concentrating all available means at the point where the enemy was already withdrawing in order to achieve a complete success in that sector. Zhukov also failed to convince Stalin that the Germans had recovered from their initial crisis and were no longer “demoralized.” Nonetheless, phase 3 of the counteroffensive opened on 7 January, when Stalin ordered the Red Army not only to encircle Army Group Center and cut off its supply and retreat routes, but also to raise the siege of Leningrad, clear the Crimea, and launch attacks in the south. These goals proved overly ambitious, given that Russian troops had been attacking continuously for a month and had not received sufficient replacements and supplies. Stalin, lured by the prospect of a grand counterstroke, thus dispersed his forces over too many objectives and frittered away a chance at a decisive triumph in much the same way the Germans had earlier. In the event, German armies not only would be
spared encirclement but also would be able to isolate and destroy overextended Soviet units.
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In the central sector, forces of the Kalinin, West, and Bryansk Fronts, attacking from Rzhev in the north and Sukhinichi in the south, hoped to trap German armies in an envelopment that would close on the main Moscow highway at Vyazma. The deep Russian breakthrough at Rzhev and heavy attacks on the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies opened a gap that the Germans found impossible to close—and that finally impressed on Hitler that it was only a matter of time before the entire army group front collapsed. Under pressure from events, therefore, on 15 January, Hitler rescinded his Haltebefehl and ordered Army Group Center to withdraw the Fourth Army and the two northern armies to a line east of Yukhnov, Gzhatsk, and Zubtsov and north of Rzhev that approximated the original Typhoon starting point the previous October. He insisted that this line be held at all costs while demanding that the gap west of Rzhev be closed, that the Fourth Army and the Second Panzer Army close the gap north of Medyn, that the Fourth Army keep the vital supply route between Roslavl and Yukhnov open, and that the Second Panzer Army relieve Sukhinichi. Aware of the possible ramifications of his first order to “pull back a major sector of the front,” Hitler insisted it be implemented in such a way that “the troops' feeling of superiority over the enemy and their fanatic will to do him the greatest possible damage must prevail.” Although Halder, too, worried about the psychological ramifications of the withdrawal on the troops, shortening the front freed units for counterattacks that sealed the worst gaps.
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In heavy fighting over the next two weeks, German troops managed to stabilize the situation in Army Group Center. By late January, the Ninth Army, now commanded by the energetic and able General Walter Model, had managed not only to close the gap at Rzhev but also to cut off elements of the Soviet Twenty-ninth Army that had broken through to the south as well as part of the Thirty-third Army near Vyazma. On the northernmost sector of the central front, attacks by the Fourth Shock Army south of Toropets, conducted through dense forests over trackless terrain with no flank support, in cold that reached –40°F, with few supplies and little intelligence on the enemy, posed no threat and dwindled to little more than localized fighting. To its right, on the Volkhov River in the sector of Army Group North, the Second Shock Army under General A. A. Vlasov penetrated the rear of the German Eighteenth Army but had its supply line cut and became isolated in the forest and marsh. It eventually capitulated in June. On the southern end of the army group's sector, the Twenty-fourth Panzer Corps, given the task of
breaking the enemy encirclement at Sukhinichi, caught the Soviets by surprise with its attack on 18 January and by the twenty-first had seized the town, giving Hitler hope that it could advance further to the east and cut off enemy forces along the supply route between Roslavl and Yukhnov. Because of heavy losses, temperatures that had now fallen to –44°F, and strong Soviet counterattacks on their flanks, the Germans abandoned the town on the twenty-eighth, but their action had forced Stalin to dispatch troops from the north, further dissipating his strength. The ragtag German forces, as the Soviets discovered to their dismay, could still strike back savagely.
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Even though the situation of the Fourth Army remained tenuous and Soviet partisans continued to threaten German supply lines, by the end of January both sides were spent. In some Soviet units, as few as ten men remained in companies and seventy in battalions, while artillery shells were being rationed to one or two shots per day per gun. As had the earlier German offensive, the Russian counterattack had ground to a standstill because of a shortage of men and materiel. The situation had so improved, in fact, that in mid-February Hitler could assure his army group commanders that the threat of a repeat of 1812 had been eliminated. Unfinished business remained, however, since in February German front maps showed a crazy quilt of German units (in blue) intermingled with Soviet forces (in red) in wild contortions, especially in the center, where German and Soviet salients jutted crazily to the east and west. In some sectors, front lines could not be drawn at all, while, in others, the Germans simply marked large areas
partisans
. Eyeing this convoluted front, with the need to shorten the line to conserve men as well as eliminate the peril to their supply routes, the Germans took action to repair the front that was self-evident.
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Soviet forces, too, were as dangerously snarled as the Germans, with some units trapped behind enemy lines, although Stalin did not view the situation pessimistically, instead seeing in it the possibility of inflicting further damaging blows on a reeling foe. Both sides were aware, moreover, that the spring
rasputitsa
, a much more elemental force than that in the autumn, would begin in late March. The bitter cold of the Russian winter, having frozen the earth to a depth of six or seven feet, would lock in much of the previous fall's rain. Several feet of snow and ice would then accumulate on top of the frozen surface. The spring thaw, however, worked from the top down, so that the melting of the winter snowfall resulted in large lakes of water sitting on top of the still-frozen ground. As the subsoil began gradually to thaw, the ground became sodden to a depth of several feet, creating a progressively deepening layer of watery
mud. In the generally flat terrain, the water had no place to drain until the ground completely thawed. The entire process might last as long as two months, and, for several weeks, the mud would be so deep that any movement on unpaved roads, except by Russian
panje
wagons, with their high wheels and light weight, would be impossible.
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As a result, both sides, locked in a deadly embrace, hammered away with increasingly ineffective body blows that served only to exhaust their remaining strength. The Stavka sought to mount offensives on either side of the central sector, with the hope of relieving the siege of Leningrad, further threatening German lines of communication, and disrupting any enemy buildup to the southwest of Moscow, which the Russians had incorrectly identified as the likely area for the main German advance in the summer. The Soviets achieved most success in the north, where they encircled considerable German forces around Kholm and Demyansk. Unlike the earlier pocket at Sukhinichi, the Germans refused to abandon Kholm and Demyansk; instead, the Luftwaffe mounted a major operation to supply the pockets by air. By holding on to these areas, not only did the Germans retain key strategic positions, but, if their forces at Demyansk and Rzhev could join hands, they would also trap many Soviet divisions in the Toropets salient. In the event, however, the Germans lacked sufficient force to unite the two pockets. Instead, they mounted a major effort to relieve Demyansk, driving a thin corridor to the pocket in early March. Ironically, the relief column was commanded by General Walter von Seydlitz, who would later be captured at Stalingrad and emerge as a key figure in a Soviet-sponsored anti-Nazi movement. Indeed, the relief of Demyansk and Kholm (achieved on 1 May) had a direct impact on the later disaster on the Volga since the successful resupply of the smaller pockets encouraged Hitler in the belief that the operation could be repeated on a much larger scale at Stalingrad.
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