Ostkrieg (79 page)

Anticipating a bold Soviet stroke whichever way they decided to turn, neither the OKH nor Foreign Armies East initially paid much attention
to the possibility of a frontal offensive against the Belorussian balcony. Indeed, much spoke against it; an attacker here would have to fight through the endless forests and swamps of Belorussia just to reach the Vistula, almost five hundred miles to the west. In addition, an offensive north of the Pripet struck the Germans as implausible since, even if operationally successful, it would not likely be decisive in a strategic, war-winning sense. Moreover, the OKH misinterpreted the ability of Army Group Center to maintain its front through the winter as indicative of German strength and Soviet weakness. Instead, it resulted from a combination of factors that would be absent in the summer. The Germans had fended off Soviet attacks by using nimble, flexible defensive tactics reminiscent of World War I, in which defenses in depth were prepared so that, when faced with an attack, German forces could withdraw to rear positions, allowing the enemy to punch into air. Then, at the proper moment, counterattacks would snap the Germans back to their approximate original positions. In the summer, however, Hitler would insist on an inflexible, static defense of forward positions that would deny the use of such tactics. More to the point, German troops, dispersed thinly among scattered strongpoints that often could not maintain contact with each other, had neither the front strength nor the reserves necessary to contain enemy breakthroughs. In addition, a good bit of German defensive success in the center had been the result, as Evan Mawdsley put it, of the Stavka reinforcing success and starving failure. In the winter of 1943–1944, Soviet armies in other sectors, especially in Ukraine, had performed much better and, thus, had been given priority in men and equipment. Red Army forces in the center, achieving fewer results, had simply not been reinforced. With the focal point of the Soviet summer offensive in the center, however, this would no longer be the case.
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Ironically, however, despite the earlier Soviet willingness to gamble on large, war-winning offensives, and just as the Germans had begun to credit the Soviets with the ability to execute such operations, Stalin himself had decided that such grandiose schemes were beyond Soviet capabilities. Rather than summon its courage, then, in early spring 1944, the Stavka rejected both the Balkan and the Baltic solutions in favor of a third option: use the overwhelming Soviet preponderance in strength to launch a series of staggered offensives, starting from north to south, that would force the Germans to fight everywhere at once and, thus, be unable to concentrate their scarce resources. The initial blow would fall on the Finnish army in Karelia, to be followed in succession by attacks in Belorussia and in northern and southern Ukraine. In effect, there would not be a single Schwerpunkt, although the attack against Army Group
Center would form the main effort. Here, the Soviets hoped to pull off a complicated plan that envisaged, in rapid pincer movements, a quick initial encirclement of Vitebsk and Bobruisk, the German anchor positions at the northern and southern ends of the salient, even as mobile units moved quickly west in a deep envelopment centered on Minsk. Even then, Soviet forces were not to stop but to thrust beyond Minsk on either side, with forces on the right flank hoping to trap as much of Army Group North as possible, while the southern thrust, aided by units shoving through Kovel, would seize Brest-Litovsk before converging on Warsaw. This was not a typical Soviet mass attack across a broad front but one based on the German model that concentrated overwhelming force in key sectors to achieve a breakthrough, then aimed to exploit it through rapid movement to encircle and destroy the enemy defenders. Stalin, suspicious of overly complicated maneuver schemes, initially opposed the idea but was, ultimately, persuaded to accept it. An ambitious plan, although not the war-winning Baltic solution feared by the Germans, it proposed in one leap the liberation of Belorussia and a sweep to the Vistula.
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Given the serious German weaknesses and lack of mobility on the Ostfront, the key to Hitler's strategy of holding on in the east and striking in the west was to identify the Soviet Schwerpunkt correctly. Since the Ostheer had neither the mobility nor the operational reserve to pinch off a Soviet breakthrough and, thus, prevent it from turning into a catastrophe, all depended on blunting the Soviet attack at the outset and successfully defending German frontline positions. Since no reinforcements could be expected from the west until the defeat of the Western allies' invasion, the only chance for successful static operations was to identify correctly the Schwerpunkt of the enemy offensive and prepare adequate defenses and forces to counter it. Despite differences in opinion as to the ultimate direction of the enemy summer offensive, the OKH and Foreign Armies East could agree on at least one thing: regardless of whether the Soviets headed for the Balkans or the Baltic, the focal point of their attack would be Kovel. This assessment played into the hands of Field Marshal Model, the aggressive and predatory commander of Army Group North Ukraine, whose units defended the Kovel area, and who now saw a chance to strengthen his forces at the expense of his passive colleague to the north, Ernst Busch. Not surprisingly, on 20 May, Hitler yielded to Model's urging and ordered the powerful Fifty-sixth Panzer Corps transferred to Army Group North Ukraine. At one blow, Army Group Center thus lost 88 percent of its tanks, 50 percent of its tank destroyers, and 33 percent of its heavy artillery.
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While on paper what remained of Army Group Center still seemed a formidable force, in reality it was little more than a house of cards. Its four armies (the Third Panzer to the north at Vitebsk, the Fourth in the center defending Orsha and Mogilev, the Ninth to the south in front of Bobruisk, and the Second protecting the far right flank) theoretically possessed forty-seven divisions, but many of them were still in the process of being created or restructured, while others were simply burned out. Numerous security units were not even at the front but engaged in the rear fighting the partisans, who now numbered around 150,000. In reality, then, the army group possessed about thirty-four functional divisions, of which only twenty-nine were directly at the front. Of these, there existed a vast discrepancy between their nominal and their actual strength. On paper, these units numbered some 486,000 men, although only a bit over 336,000 if the Second Army, which was not initially involved in the attack in the Belorussian salient, is removed. Of these, roughly 166,000 were frontline combat troops who faced some 1.25 million Red Army soldiers massed for the first phase of the attack, giving the enemy a seven-and-a-half-to-one superiority in manpower. In total, the Soviets had assembled over 2.5 million men for the entire operation, a figure that swamped corresponding German totals.
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Just as serious was the almost complete lack of tanks; the great bulk of the Ostheer's panzers were in southern sectors of the front, while most new production had been sent to the west. The term
Third Panzer Army
was a complete misnomer, for example, since it had no actual battle tanks and only seventy-six assault guns. In fact, at the beginning of June, only a single large tank unit existed on the entire northern half of the eastern front (the Twelfth Panzer Division), and it belonged to Army Group North. Even with the addition of the Twentieth Panzer Division, which was dispatched from Army Group North Ukraine to Army Group Center just before the start of the offensive, the three armies facing the Soviet onslaught possessed only 118 battle tanks and 377 assault guns, as against an enemy force of 2,715 battle tanks and 1,355 assault guns—and these figures were for the first phase alone. For the second phase, the Soviets had a force of 1,126 tanks and 622 assault guns. The inferiority of German artillery proved just as marked (2,589 barrels against 24,383), but it was the discrepancy in aerial strength that made a mockery of Hitler's notion of static defense. Throughout the eastern campaign, the Luftwaffe had often intervened at critical moments to overcome army weaknesses and provide the margin of victory. Given the demotorization of the Ostheer and its almost complete lack of mobility (as noted above, the Third Panzer Army had no battle tanks but did have sixty
thousand horses), the Luftwaffe would again have to play a vital role if a defensive front was to be maintained. On the eve of the battle, however, Luftflotte 6 had only 602 operational aircraft, of which little more than a third were fighters or ground attack aircraft. Even these were limited in their activity because of chronic shortages of fuel and spare parts. As with ground forces, the Red Air Force enjoyed a staggering numerical advantage, with over four thousand fighters/ground attack planes. Across the board, then, the Soviets possessed a crushing material superiority—at the initial point of attack upwards of ten to one—that meant that they could achieve a breakthrough at any point they chose to mass forces. Amazingly, in the summer of 1944, they had mobilized a force roughly similar in size to that of the German invasion force three years earlier, but on a front a third the size; Bagration, in effect, was on a larger scale than Barbarossa. Since the Germans had only a fraction of the force available to the Red Army in 1941, this meant that Army Group Center, although perhaps capable of local resistance, would be unable to mount any mobile or operational defense. Nor, given the virtually complete absence of operational reserves, could it hope to launch a decisive counterattack to pinch off any enemy breakthrough. Moreover, it could not even envision a shortening of the front to escape the looming danger, given Hitler's absolute prohibition of tactical withdrawals and aversion to construction of river defense lines.
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Just at the time the Soviets were preparing a crushing offensive in the center, then, the Germans were playing into their hands by stripping the already outnumbered forces available to Army Group Center and sending them to Model's command. Traditional accounts emphasize a failure of German intelligence, but this was not really the entire story. In May and June, increased intelligence gathering, especially by individual armies, but also by Foreign Armies East, picked up urgent indications that the main blow might come north of Pripet and be directed at Busch's forces. Army Group Center headquarters, however, took these new estimates less seriously than did its counterparts at the front, nor could the changing assessment from Foreign Armies East, which warned of a series of Soviet attacks and increasing danger in Belorussia, alter the perceptions at the OKH and Army Group Center. They, and Hitler, continued to focus on Kovel as the likely Schwerpunkt.
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In any case, even had this information been embraced, it was too late; Army Group Center was far too weak to avert defeat, although, with more prescience, it might have avoided catastrophe. Moreover, Hitler's insistence on static defense and Busch's obsequiousness and blind faith both exacerbated the fundamental problem of German inferiority in
strength. With his fortified places order of 8 March 1944, Hitler had seemingly fallen victim to a Verdun mentality reminiscent of World War I and put exaggerated faith in the ability of strongpoints to stem “the Red flood.” Despite the sacrifice of some fortress troops at Kovel, Tarnopol, and Kamenets-Podolsky in March and April, the slowing of enemy momentum seemed to confirm his formula, thus reinforcing his determination not to yield—this despite the fact that the Soviet offensive ground to a halt largely because it simply ran out of steam and because of faulty command decisions, not because of the fortified places doctrine. Further compounding the problem was the Führer's insistence on designating so many cities as fortified places despite the fact that, in view of the extreme shortages of manpower and building materials, there existed no hope of ever actually making them strongpoints, nor would they likely ever be relieved if they were besieged by the enemy. In effect, since troops in areas designated as fortified places could be withdrawn only with his express approval, all his order did was to ensure that large numbers of men would be trapped in indefensible places. In a clear lose-lose situation, not only would the fortified places prove too weak to hinder Soviet momentum, especially since their advance forces had been told simply to bypass these areas, much as the Germans had done in 1941, but also the overstretched German defense would be denied the use of those forces trapped in the static positions to plug the holes in the front created by the Soviet attack.
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Nor could the commander of Army Group Center be expected to use his own judgment to save his men since any hope that the blindly loyal and obsequious Busch would challenge Hitler evaporated on 20 May. At a conference at Führer Headquarters, the field marshal had, in view of the growing evidence of a Soviet buildup, feebly attempted to make Hitler aware of the looming danger to Army Group Center. The Führer, however, flew into a rage, cutting Busch to the core with his acid remark that he had not known that he “belonged to those generals who were always looking to the rear.” Any inclination Busch might have had to confront Hitler vanished as he now endeavored to prove his absolute loyalty, going so far as to call a conference of his own army commanders on the twenty-fourth for the sole purpose of impressing on them the Führer's determination to hold the line at all costs. More damaging, he also informed them that they should curtail construction on rear lines of defense and concentrate only on holding the main battle line. Even though there had been some desultory preparation of defense lines based on various river systems (the so-called Bear, Tiger, and Beaver positions), both Busch and Hitler obstructed construction so consistently
that there were virtually no prepared, fortified posts at these positions, so any hope of orderly withdrawals to defensible positions in the face of Soviet pressure was an illusion. Still, even though Hitler's meddling was certainly counterproductive, it was as much a symptom of the problem as its cause. The Germans simply had too few resources and were too overstretched to have any really effective options left.
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