Ostkrieg (53 page)

As intended, victories in the Crimea and Kharkov had done much to restore German confidence and morale, while the shaky Soviet
performance rekindled inflated notions of easy triumphs leading to a quick seizure of the Caucasian oil fields. Still, a curious episode on the eve of Blau threatened the entire German operation and revealed deep suspicions between Hitler and the Army High Command that would lead to a permanent schism with profound consequences. On 19 June, Major Joachim Reichel, the chief of staff of the Twenty-third Panzer Division, had set out to reconnoiter the proposed route of march of his division, but his plane went off course and crashed behind Soviet lines. The pilot was killed immediately, and the major was shot trying to escape. Reichel carried with him a copy of a memorandum summarizing Blau I as well as a map showing corps and army objectives. A German combat patrol reached the wrecked plane two days later and found the bodies but not the documents, so the OKH had to assume, correctly, that they had fallen into enemy hands. Given the magnitude of this security breach, some in the High Command believed that the operation now had to be called off or significantly altered. Others, however, including Bock and Halder, argued that, given the time it would take for the information to work its way up the Soviet chain of command and the fact that deployment preparations were largely complete, the attack should go ahead as soon as possible.
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For the army command, then, the “Reichel Affair” was largely inconsequential and merely another reason to launch Blau I immediately. To Hitler, however, the matter ran deeper: it was yet another sign that the generals were flouting security, disobeying his orders, and undermining his leadership. The reason for this was not hard to see since this case closely resembled an incident in January 1940 in which plans for the invasion of France were similarly lost. Hitler thereafter had insisted on tight security controls over all operational plans. Only major headquarters were to receive copies, and plans were never to be taken by air near the front lines, restrictions specifically mentioned in Directive No. 41. These precautions, sensible though they were, directly contradicted a key aspect of the German tradition of command autonomy: staff officers had long shared the plans of adjacent or higher units in order to better coordinate and execute operations. This flow of information, and the flexibility it entailed, was regarded as vital for success in battle. Hitler, however, was furious at this obvious violation of both the spirit and the letter of his orders and demanded that the officers responsible be punished. In addition, on the twenty-fifth, he summoned Bock personally to the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) to report on the affair. Although the latter managed to persuade Hitler that there was no disobedience other than that of the dead Reichel, the matter hardly ended there. For days
afterward, the OKW used the issue to conduct a campaign against the OKH, while the Führer continued to seethe and see conspiracies against his dictates; indeed, the issue festered in his mind all during the summer, exploding finally in the fall into a major command crisis.
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For their part, neither Stalin nor the Stavka seemed inclined to regard the lost plans as anything but part of a deception operation. Although Stalin was aware of German oil problems, he nonetheless insisted, as did Vasilevsky, that Moscow would again be the main objective of the anticipated German summer offensive. In the ultimate irony, Stalin, steeped in Communist ideology that regarded economic interests as paramount, ignored the obvious significance of oil for his enemy and, instead, focused on defending the political heart of the regime. Although the Germans had pushed elaborate deception measures designed to encourage this notion, Stalin needed little persuading. Indeed, as late as November, he still insisted that isolating Moscow from the hinterland was the main German objective and that the advance in the south was merely secondary. Despite his mistaken evaluation of the overall situation, however, he hedged his bets; since the Kursk-Voronezh area was regarded as a logical place for a German flanking attack on Moscow, on 23 and 24 June he ordered considerable reinforcements, including powerful tank formations, into the area.
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Two weeks late, while fighting still raged at Sevastopol and against a backdrop of simmering tension among the German leadership, Blau I finally opened on 28 June. Remarkably, the attack achieved almost complete surprise; accompanied by overwhelming air support, German units broke through Soviet lines and began racing eastward. Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army advanced up to thirty miles in the direction of Voronezh on the first day, while, on the extreme left flank, Weichs's Second Army also made good progress. With the Soviet defenders stunned by the speed and ferocity of the assault, about the only thing that slowed the Germans in the first few days was heavy rain. Even then, by 4 July, lead units of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the Don in numerous places, over one hundred miles from the start line, and advanced to the outskirts of Voronezh. To its left, the Second Army had also kept pace, although, alarmed at the rapid German advance and fearful that this important armaments and transportation center would fall to the enemy, Stalin ordered strong Soviet forces into position for counterattacks from the north. On the right, heavy rain delayed the Sixth Army's attack until 30 June, but it, too, after overcoming initial resistance, met only relatively light opposition as it set out for the Don. Soviet forces seemed in disarray and, in places, to have dissolved. With German forces in the north
already across the Don, Paulus's troops in the south lunging eastward, and most of the Red Army defenders still west of the river, the Germans seemed poised once again to pull off a spectacular encirclement operation reminiscent of 1941. Doubts remained, however. “The actual picture of the enemy situation is not yet clear to me,” Halder admitted on 6 July. “There are two possibilities: either we have overestimated the enemy's strength and the offensive has smashed him, or the enemy is conducting a planned disengagement . . . to forestall being irretrievably beaten in 1942.” In the event, the second assessment proved more accurate than the first as strong Soviet counterattacks at Voronezh delayed subsequent German advances and provoked a command crisis.
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To Hitler and Halder, reports that the enemy “was gone” evinced alarm since the goal of Blau I was the destruction of Soviet forces west of the Don. To their minds, the key now was speed—German mobile formations in the north had to be turned as swiftly as possible to the south to trap the Red Army before it could escape. Neither could understand what appeared to be Bock's obsession with taking the city. The latter, however, faced an increasing danger: Soviet attacks on his left flank had grown steadily, while reconnaissance indicated enemy troops massing across the Don to the north. Bock was surprised to learn on the second that Hitler and Halder now placed no importance on the capture of the city and, instead, urged him to wheel his mobile units to the south. He was reluctant to do this as long as his left flank was unsecured and hung in the air, and, in any case, he thought that the bulk of the enemy facing the Sixth Army had already escaped. Fearful that the vital mobile formations would get bogged down in pointless positional fighting, Hitler flew to Army Group South headquarters at Poltava on 3 July to order Bock to leave the city alone. If anything, however, the meeting only further confused the issue. Confronted with the aloof and aristocratic field marshal, the Führer evidently lost his nerve and left the decision to Bock, who himself was confused. “Am I right in understanding you as follows?” Bock queried. “I am to capture Voronezh if it can be done easily. . . . But I am not to get involved in heavy fighting for the city?” Hitler confirmed this with a nod. Ironically, although Bock believed that his command autonomy had been confirmed, the Führer thought that he had made plain his preference for a move south.
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Since Hoth's panzers reached the outskirts of Voronezh the next day and, despite erroneous reports that Soviet reinforcements had flooded the city, took it largely unopposed on the sixth, Bock likely felt confirmed in his actions. The damage, however, had been done. Reacting to the false reports, Hitler on the fifth exploded in rage at the field marshal's
incompetent leadership. Insisting that he had made it “emphatically clear” on the third that he placed no value on Voronezh, Hitler now ordered Bock to detach the Twenty-fourth Panzer and Grossdeutschland Divisions and send them to the south. On the morning of the sixth, however, the attacks on Bock's left flank demanded by Stalin, but never anticipated in the plan for Blau I, began in earnest and continued with increasing intensity for the next week. Only with some difficulty, and primarily because of air supremacy, did the Second Army manage to stabilize the situation, although the northern flank of Blau would remain a source of concern since Hungarian divisions would eventually be responsible for its security. These onslaughts, combined with a shortage of fuel, meant that, much to Hitler's fury, Bock's mobile divisions were now tied down in the fighting around Voronezh. This not only threatened a crippling delay in German plans but also exacerbated the time pressure under which the Germans labored.
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The Führer's anger at Bock's allegedly poor handling of the situation merely obscured the deeper problems confronting the Wehrmacht. Soviet actions had again demonstrated that the Germans lacked the mobile forces necessary simultaneously to defend their flanks against determined assaults and to press an offensive, especially one plunging into the limitless realm of southern Russia. More troubling, not only did the Soviets already outnumber the Germans in men and tanks, but in the first days of July Stalin also finally accepted reality and ordered a flexible defense and strategic withdrawals in order to conserve strength. Although these evasive maneuvers often turned into headlong flight in which Soviet officers lost control of their units, the result was largely the same. Success in encirclement operations depended as much on Soviet as on German actions, a fact understood by Bock but unappreciated by those above him. “The Army High Command,” he noted bitterly on the seventh, “would like to encircle an enemy who is no longer there.” The next day, he underscored the consequences of Soviet withdrawal. The attempted envelopment, he judged, would “probably hit nothing”: “Operation Blue II is dead.”
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This latter judgment remained to be confirmed, but, clearly, Hitler and Halder were worried that Soviet forces were evaporating. On the seventh, Army Group South was, over the vigorous protests of Bock, split into two forces, while, on the ninth, Kleist's First Panzer Army, now part of List's Army Group A, launched Blue II two weeks earlier than anticipated. At a time when the situation called for the Germans to concentrate their power and act boldly, they now began the fatal dissipation of force that would characterize their summer operations. A major reason for
this development was undoubtedly the continuing large-scale pullback by the Red Army, which rendered German plans obsolete. Kleist had no sooner sent his forces hurtling from Lisichansk, southeast of Izyum, across the Donets to the northeast than his orders were altered and then revised again. Soviet withdrawals clearly confounded German plans. On the evening of the eleventh, for example, the OKH ordered an inner encirclement centered on Millerovo involving forces from the First and Fourth Panzer Armies as well as the Sixth Army. Bock immediately protested this order, warning Halder early on the morning of 13 July that “annihilation of substantial enemy forces can no longer be achieved” at Millerovo. Instead, he argued that the main thrust should be sent farther east through the Morozovsk area and in the direction of Stalingrad. Given the often chaotic nature of Russian withdrawals, deep thrusts to the east, reminiscent of those the year before, might well have succeeded in trapping large numbers of the enemy. Given the catastrophic logistic system, any hopes for a dash to the east depended on a concentration of effort; already, a number of German units had been immobilized for lack of fuel. Despite Hitler's criticism, the Fourth Panzer Army's move to the south had been hindered more by a lack of fuel, for which the OKH was responsible, than by the field marshal's intransigence.
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Nonetheless, the reaction to Bock's proposal was swift and final: the OKH curtly informed him that his mission lay in the south, not the east, while Hitler, after fuming for days that Bock's decisions at Voronezh had caused avoidable delays in sending mobile units south, on the thirteenth relieved the strong-willed field marshal of his command. That same day, the Führer issued an order that demanded that “a thrust be made as quickly as possible from the north” to seize “the crossings of the Don at Konstantinovka and Zymlyanskaya [east of Rostov] in order to prevent the enemy from pulling out into the region south of the lower Don.” In firing Bock and further marginalizing Halder, Hitler assumed increasing control over the day-to-day conduct of military operations, a quest for absolute authority that would have calamitous consequences. At the same time, and equally disastrously, he had abandoned the overall concept of Blue as a sequential operation in which each stage was vital for the success of the whole and, in its place, left only strategic confusion, with German columns apparently advancing aimlessly, often across each other's line of march. Although these twin dictates are often regarded simply as examples of Hitler's impulsive behavior, when combined with other decisions at roughly the same time, they reveal a pattern that shows the way in which time pressures had begun to affect his decisions.
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Although Hitler had undertaken operations in 1942 convinced that
he had a year in which to wrap up the eastern war, Molotov's visit to London and Washington in May and June and the Western allies' apparently solid commitment to a second front in 1942 profoundly disturbed him. The Anglo-Americans, he believed, would not tolerate a collapse of the Soviet Union; ironically, then, the likelihood of an early Allied landing in Norway or Northwest Europe increased with German success in the east. His window of opportunity apparently narrowing rapidly, Hitler decided to forestall any Allied intervention on the Continent. “The rapid and great successes in the east,” Hitler explained in an order of 9 July, “could face Britain with the alternative of either executing a major landing at once to establish a second front or losing Soviet Russia.” Nervous about just such a possibility, the Führer directed that the powerful First and Second SS Panzer Divisions (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich), which should have spearheaded the First Panzer Army's drive into the Caucasus, be transferred to the west. Two weeks later, he further ordered that the elite Grossdeutschland Motorized Division be prepared for transportation to the west. Finally, he also decreed, despite the drain on the Wehrmacht's meager fuel supplies, that the Channel and Atlantic coasts be developed into an “unassailable fortress” in order “to avoid the establishment of a second front.” There could, he declared to Speer and Keitel, be “only one fighting front.” A more accurate explication of the German dilemma was hard to imagine: by building up his defenses in the west, Hitler hoped to deter the Allies from launching a second front in 1942, but at a cost to what was most important, seizing the oil fields in the Caucasus.
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