Ostkrieg (56 page)

Tempers had been strained at the Werwolf complex at Vinnitsa ever since the Führer had arrived in mid-July, to be confronted with stifling heat (often surpassing 100°F) and mosquito-infested surroundings. Clearly uncomfortable in the heat, impatient with the slow progress of operations, and increasingly paranoid about his food, water, and even oxygen, Hitler was already in a feverish state. When Jodl, who seldom stood up to his domineering boss, gathered his courage and reported that List had faithfully followed all directives given to him and had not engaged in insubordinate behavior, the Führer exploded in an “indescribable outburst of fury.” By siding with List, Jodl had implicitly criticized Hitler's own conduct of operations and placed the blame for any failures squarely on the Führer. This alone would have been enough to set Hitler off, but the deeper problem lay in the calendar: time was running out. For weeks, Hitler had been subject to alternating moods of euphoria and frustration. On 19 August, for example, he had boasted privately to Goebbels that operations in the Caucasus were going extremely well, that he still expected to seize the oil regions of Grozny and Baku and, once these had been taken, to burst through to the Middle East. Just three days later, however, he flew into a rage at news that mountain troops had planted a German flag on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe. Speer claimed that he had seldom seen Hitler so enraged, and for days afterward he fumed at the pointless stunt of “these mad mountaineers” who had wasted valuable time and resources when he was concentrating everything on taking Sukhumi. It was, Speer said, as if Hitler believed these few men had ruined his entire operational plan.
⁶⁵

With that observation, Speer hit the crux of the matter. By early September, Hitler had evidently come to the realization that the goals for
1942, especially reaching the vital Caucasus oil regions, were not likely to be achieved. For the second time a throw of the dice had failed and with it any reasonable chance of a favorable outcome to the war. Believing that his generals had again failed him and deliberately sabotaged his orders, he now demonstratively separated himself as much as possible from their presence. After past contretemps, Hitler had always made small conciliatory gestures to those around him, but this blowup seemed to mark a psychological watershed. Warlimont was shocked by the intense hatred on Hitler's face, as if he realized that his last gamble had been lost. He now reduced contact with his closest entourage to an absolute minimum: he ate alone, withdrew to his windowless hut, where the two daily military briefings were held “in an icy atmosphere” and which he would leave only at dusk, refused to shake hands with his generals, demanded to see all the directives he had given to Army Group A, and ordered a verbatim record kept of all situation conferences to eliminate further malicious distortions of his words. Although he quietly dropped any further plans for an offensive in the western Caucasus Mountains, he nonetheless dismissed List on 9 September, with hints that other changes were to follow. These seem to have involved a reorganization of the OKW, where, following the capture of Stalingrad, Jodl and Keitel were to be replaced, respectively, by Paulus and Kesselring.
⁶⁶

In the event, however, the fallout from Hitler's displeasure settled on the OKH, where Halder's situation had become increasingly untenable. Relations between the two had hit rock bottom on 24 August when Halder, in a criticism that Hitler could not have missed, complained that soldiers were being sacrificed because their commanders lacked the authority to make even the most basic decisions to deploy them more sensibly. At that, Hitler exploded in withering ridicule of his army chief. “What can you tell me about troops, Herr Halder,” he mocked, “you who even in the First World War only sat in the same swivel chair, you, who don't even wear the black wound badge.” Deeply humiliated, the chief of staff must have known that his days were numbered, but the final break did not come until a month later, on 24 September, when Hitler finally sacked him. Halder's nerves, the Führer said, were used up, and his too had suffered from their confrontations. With that, Halder's long service to Hitler ended, and with his departure came a downgrading of the position of chief of the General Staff. Halder's successor, Kurt Zeitzler, was an outsider, a young and energetic officer with the reputation of being a Nazi who could be expected to be compliant to the Führer's wishes. The process of turning the army into Hitler's tool had been completed. But his desire to have as his new OKH chief a man who was more
than just professionally competent, who was, instead, fired with a “fanatical faith in the idea” and the “fervor of a National Socialist credo,” was itself an implicit admission of impending defeat.
⁶⁷

At the beginning of August, Hitler had prophesied that the next six weeks “would be decisive for the outcome of the war.” By mid-September, the balance sheet, as even the normally optimistic Halder could see, was clearly unfavorable: the Red Army, far from being destroyed, was increasing its strength while the Germans could not make good their losses; the Caucasus operation had stalled; heavy fighting had erupted in Stalingrad; Soviet forces were threatening German positions in the north; and, in North Africa, Rommel's offensive had petered out at El Alamein. The second culmination point of the war had been reached, and Germany's time had run out. Hitler's late July decision to split the offensive, which Halder had been unable to prevent, had been crucial. Until now, German tactical superiority had been able to offset Hitler's poor operational decisions, but the overall strategic implications of this blunder could not be remedied: given the time factor and the powerful coalition being arrayed against it, the Wehrmacht could not now hope to overcome the disaster on the Volga that would likely result from the Führer's decision.
⁶⁸

Indeed, other actions by Hitler at the time suggest as much. On 8 September, he issued a Führer order on “fundamental tasks of defense” that, in its stress on holding the line “under all circumstances,” mirrored Stalin's “Not one step back” decree. A few days later, he ordered an east-west exchange of battle-weary divisions for the purpose of their rehabilitation, another implicit signal that the war in the east would not be over by winter. On 14 October, finally, he directed all forces, except those battling inside Stalingrad and pushing toward Grozny, to prepare winter lines of defense, an explicit admission of failure. “This year's summer and fall campaigns,” he announced, “excepting those operations underway . . . , have been concluded.” Once the Soviets decided to withdraw their forces rather than squander them in encirclement battles, there had been little the Germans could do, given their deficiencies in manpower, mobility, and fuel. Hitler, according to his army adjutant, Schmundt, saw no end to the war in Russia and was “at the very end of his tether”: “He hates everything that is field gray . . . and is longing for the day when he could cast off his tunic.” The great operational victories of the spring and summer had yet to be converted into a strategic triumph; whether such could be achieved in the Caucasus or along the Volga remained to be seen.
⁶⁹

Deadlocked in the western Caucasus, List's operations now shifted
their center of gravity east to the Terek River region, where German forces once more raised hopes of the decisive breakthrough to the oil fields beyond. The Terek, a swiftly flowing river 100–250 yards wide with steep, rocky banks, protected the key targets: Grozny, Ordzhonikidze, and the Ossetian and Georgian Military Roads. These latter, the only two routes through the mountains capable of carrying heavy military traffic, were especially important since their capture would raise the possibility of a swift thrust through the mountains to the great prize: the rich oil fields of Baku. Kleist's mobile divisions had reached the Terek at Mozdok in late August, and in the first week of September managed to punch out bridgeheads across the river in a few spots, but fierce enemy resistance, the transfer of units elsewhere, and a lack of fuel forced them to halt attacks.
⁷⁰

By October, Kleist concentrated all available units of the First Panzer Army along the Terek in the hope of waging one last breakthrough battle. Leading off the attack on 25 October, the Third Panzer Corps forced its way across the river, punched a hole in Soviet defenses, and cut off enemy forces at Nalchik. The panzer divisions now wheeled to the southeast and over the next few days crossed numerous swiftly flowing rivers as they skirted the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. By the twenty-ninth, they had reached the Ardon River, at the head of the Ossetian Military Road. The Twenty-third Panzer Division seized Alagir, thus closing the road, on 1 November, while that evening spearheads of the Thirteenth Panzer were only ten miles from Ordzhonikidze on the Georgian Military Road. With the tantalizing prospect of opening the route to Baku, the Germans redoubled their efforts, while, equally frantic at the threat facing them, the Soviets put up increasingly stiff opposition. Facing ferocious resistance every inch of the way, battling the cold and swirling snowstorms over treacherous roads that did not suffice for resupply, let alone movement, and easy prey for enemy air attacks, Kleist's forces struggled forward. By the third, a handful of German battalions had battled to less than two miles from the city, but now gains were being measured in yards rather than miles. On the sixth, little more than a mile from the city, the Germans had their hopes crushed by a Soviet counterattack that forced a retreat. Transport difficulties and partisan attacks had now forced almost half of all supply trains to the Caucasus temporarily to a halt: too weak to pursue any further offensive operations, the Germans had lost the initiative, which now passed over to the enemy. A crossing of the eastern Caucasus was no longer in the offing, a reality Hitler had implicitly accepted in early October when he ordered the refineries and oil storage facilities at Grozny, Saratov, Kamyshin, Baku, and Astrahkan,
once the key objective of the campaign, to be bombed. Over a thousand miles from the German border, with just a few company-strength battalions sputtering forward, and a mere mile from the objective, the drive to the oil fields had finally failed and with it the Caucasus campaign.
⁷¹

The propaganda images became familiar to Germans in the summer of 1942: scenes of tramping soldiers, their deeply bronzed faces and arms caked in dust, marching into the never-ending horizon of the Russian steppe against an apparently nonexistent foe; tanks raising enormous clouds of dust as they fanned out over the trackless expanse, commanders erect in their turrets, urging their compatriots on; German troops entering Cossack villages being greeted as liberators. While these images were not completely inaccurate, they failed to tell the whole story. While they had recovered much of their morale and spirit in the victories of the spring and early summer, these Landsers also knew that sooner or later the Russians would resist furiously, that the endless daily marches brought them no closer to trapping their elusive foe, that the blazing heat, lack of water, and insufficient supplies sapped their strength and left them vulnerable to dysentery, typhus, and typhoid fever, and that the enemy had largely destroyed anything of value in this sparse region.
⁷²

The Germans very likely could have seized Stalingrad in late July if they had possessed the ability to do so. That they did not. At the time, the two German panzer corps under Paulus's command had a total of perhaps 200 tanks, against a Russian figure of 1,289. Moreover, while a large Soviet buildup around Voronezh threatened the German left flank, the bulk of its panzer units were, just as Halder had complained, tangled in a great armored knot around Rostov. In addition, Hitler's decision to split the offensive on 23 July meant that the bulk of available fuel and supplies had been redirected to Army Group A, effectively paralyzing the Sixth Army for days. Its mobility impaired, unable to concentrate its scattered units, and suffering a perilous shortage of ammunition and fuel, the Sixth Army had to wait in frustration as the enemy made good use of the respite. Not only did the Soviets strengthen their defenses west of the Don, but, beginning on the twenty-fifth and continuing for the next few days, they also launched a series of counterblows. Although these were hasty and uncoordinated, the very frenzy with which they were undertaken halted the German forward progress and inflicted not insignificant losses in men and material. On the twenty-seventh, Halder noted in his diary that “the battle of Sixth Army west of the Don is still raging with unabated fury,” while the next day he worried, “Due to lack of fuel and ammunition, Sixth Army was unable to attack.” By
the thirtieth, the note of concern had risen visibly in Halder's entries, the OKH chief now writing anxiously, “A wild battle is raging in Sixth Army sector inside the Don bend west of Stalingrad. . . . Sixth Army's striking power is paralyzed by ammunition and fuel supply difficulties.” Although Weichs, the commander of Army Group B, succeeded in a late July telephone call to Hitler in getting priorities rearranged in his favor, valuable time had been lost. Stopgap logistic measures such as using JU-52 transport planes to bring fuel and ammunition to forward units helped restore some mobility but were hardly feasible in the long run.
⁷³

Just a week after the issuance of Directive No. 45 (which might well be subtitled “Too much, too few, too far”), its great fault became clear: in demanding that German forces do everything at once, it effectively stripped each army group of the ability to achieve its objectives. Having now decided that taking Stalingrad was vital, in contrast to the original view that it was a secondary goal that need only be neutralized, Hitler found to his great frustration that his forces could not seize it in a rapid thrust. Both Weichs and Paulus, in fact, doubted that the Sixth Army had the strength to attack the city at all, a point seemingly confirmed by the unrelenting Soviet counterattacks. On 29 July, they communicated their concerns to Major Engel, Hitler's adjutant, stressing that “for the battle of Stalingrad not enough infantry is available,” that their “forces [were] too weak in relation to their tasks and that . . . counterattacks could no longer be mastered with the forces available.” Hitler now realized that, if the Sixth Army's stalled advance was to be got going again, it would have to be reinforced, inevitably at the expense of Army Group A. On 31 July, then, he put Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army, then striking into the Caucasus, under the control of Army Group B in order to support the Sixth Army's attack from the south while also redeploying the Italian Eighth Army to the Don River as flank protection, thus freeing German divisions for the attack to the Volga. The commitment to taking Stalingrad having been made, there could now be no turning back. Hitler had denuded the Caucasus operation of the forces it needed to succeed, so, for military, political, and psychological reasons, conquering the city on the Volga was an absolute necessity.
⁷⁴