Third Reich Victorious (28 page)

Orders written and briefed, Operation Dessau opened with a short, carefully planned artillery barrage just before sunrise on September 2. With few heavy guns and limited ammunition, the Turks and Germans could not afford the sort of massive bombardment that had become the norm on the Eastern Front. Instead they used willing local agents to pinpoint Soviet positions for sharp initial shellings to demoralize the green Russian troops and to cover the advance of their own infantry. In the center, XLIV Corps and the Turkish III Corps were generally successful, pushing through often disorganized Russian defenders to gain several key terrain features in the first few days. Near the Black Sea coast, the Turkish 3rd Army also achieved most of its initial objectives, infiltrating the Soviet lines with the help of sympathetic locals and overwhelming several critical defensive positions. The Turkish 2nd Army on the far right, however, was less imaginative in its tactics and made little progress at first. Similarly, the attacks of the weaker 4th and 5th Armies were tentative and slow against light British resistance on the Syrian and Iraqi fronts.

These early actions set the pattern for the next several weeks. De Angelis, with his Germans and Turkish III Corps pushed steadily ahead for the Tiflis valley, despite the frustrations imposed by difficult terrain, bad weather, and inadequate air support. The Turkish 2nd Army, however, managed only limited gains. Its attacks were poorly conducted and it received almost no assistance from the scarce Luftwaffe assets or its own air force. Furthermore, the Soviet defenders in the newly organized 71st and 72nd Armies knew the ground almost as well as the Turks and offered stubborn, effective resistance. Nonetheless, by the end of September, the Turkish VIII Corps was firmly ensconced south of Lake Sevan and occupied a thirty-five-mile deep corridor along the railroad toward Tabriz.

The surprise success was the 3rd Army’s attack on Batumi. Conceived as a diversionary move against a vulnerable objective, Orbay had only hoped to pin down Soviet reserves and draw attention away from the principal attacks farther south. Turkish tactics were reminiscent of the First World War, but their thrust overwhelmed the Russian 47th Mountain Division. Recently reraised in the Caucasus after being destroyed in the 1941 campaign, the division included many ethnic Turks who happily surrendered to their kinsmen at the first opportunity. As a result, the 8th Division of the Turkish X Corps entered the outskirts of the city on September 5 to considerable jubilation in Ankara.

Unfortunately for the Turks, the 8th Division immediately ran into more determined opponents. A Soviet naval infantry brigade, supplemented by ships’ crews and other hastily assembled personnel, made each building a fortress while the Transcaucasus Front rushed in reinforcements and a new commander for the 12th Army. The Turkish 8th Division was quickly consumed, and the 6th and 16th Divisions soon found themselves drawn into the maelstrom of Batumi, the “Stalingrad on the Black Sea,” as subsequent historians of the “Great Patriotic War” have dubbed it. By the end of September both sides were exhausted and the fighting temporarily degenerated into sniping and ugly skirmishes in the basements and alleyways of the ruined city. Efforts by the Turkish XI Corps to cut off the city to the east and self-sacrificing assaults by some of the army’s finest infantry battalions, however, eventually turned the tide and the city fell to the Turks in early October. Though costly for the Turks, the struggle for Batumi had also absorbed significant Soviet resources in manpower and munitions. As General Orbay bolstered the XI Corps with units drawn from the IV Corps and pushed north for Poti, therefore, he did so against an enemy that was rapidly approaching disintegration.

The loss of Batumi imperiled the entire Russian line of defense, to the north and only the exhaustion of the Turkish 3rd Army spared the Soviets an immediate catastrophe. With four of the North Caucasus Front’s armies in danger of being cut off, and the Black Sea fleet threatened with extinction, Stalin, however, faced a crisis. The dire situation was compounded by Army Group A’s successes. Although the 1st Panzer Army was stalled near Groznyy, the end of September saw the 17th Army finally overcome desperate Soviet opposition to capture Tuapse, trapping in the process more than 10,000 Russian Army and Navy personnel who had been unable to escape from the battle lines at Novorossiysk.

Map 9. Turkey’s War

While the Turks and Germans hammered at Russian defenses in the mountains, the Allies struggled to craft a coherent strategic response to this new threat. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Stalingrad was the first priority, but as the crisis in the south developed, Stalin adjured his top military advisers, “Don’t forget the Caucasus front.”
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The Soviet leader had no intention of abandoning the increasingly imperiled land link between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Beyond the loss of crucial oil resources and the destruction of the Black Sea fleet, such a retreat would have dealt a grievous psychological blow to the nation and the army, while encouraging the USSR’s many dissident populations. Moreover, it was by no means clear that the forces currently engaged could even be evacuated. Instead of retreating, Stalin therefore dispatched as many reinforcements from the Stavka Reserve as the requirements of the Stalingrad struggle and limited transportation capacity would permit. Units from central Asia and the Soviet occupation forces in Iran were also added, boosting combat power but stretching logistic support, especially for the formations facing the the 1st Panzer Army. Of particular importance was the arrival of the 53rd Army, assigned the task of preparing emplacements for a final defense of Baku as its sister army, the 58th, was to hold Makhachkala to the north.

Most sinister of the reinforcements were the numerous detachments of the notorious internal security troops (NKVD) and Lavrenti Beria himself, the chief of the secret police. With ruthless efficiency, Beria expunged any hint of anti-Soviet sentiment in the rear areas and, by his very presence, served as a menacing reminder to commanders of the consequences should they be perceived to fail in their duties. His intervention, however, was only partially successful. Where Soviet control remained, discontent was indeed contained, but the ethnic Turkic peoples became an important source of Axis intelligence and supplied large numbers of eager if untrained recruits for Ankara’s army. Moreover, Beria’s insistence on inserting him-self self into the Red Army’s command structures and tactical decisions only served to exacerbate the confusions and contradictions of an increasingly inchoate situation.

New approaches to the Western Allies indicated the degree of Moscow’s alarm. In 1941, Stalin had rejected any suggestion of British or American combat troops appearing on Russian soil. The critical situation of the Transcaucasus Front, however, forced the suspicious Soviet leader to reconsider. London, which had been planning such a move for more than a year under the code name “Velvet,” was prepared to comply, and Washington agreed to assist, even though the diversion of resources might endanger the American determination to invade Western Europe at the earliest feasible time. Despite the Japanese threat to India and a renewed offensive by Rommel timed to coincide with the opening of Dessau, every possible Allied plane and soldier was, therefore, tunneled to Syria, Iraq, and Iran as summer turned to autumn in the crisis year of 1942.

Herculean efforts by planners and logisticians, however, had only produced limited results when Churchill and Roosevelt decided to commit Allied forces inside the USSR. Though granted imposing titles, the British 9th and 10th Armies were hodgepodge mixtures of untried, partially formed units and battered veteran outfits recovering from the calamitous summer battles in the Western Desert. The British thus made extensive use of deception to inflate the strength of the forces arrayed on the Turkish frontier. Brigades were depicted as divisions and newly created formations were credited with full combat capability. When the 10th Indian Division shipped from Cyprus to Syria, for example, it left behind its 25th Brigade to defend the island as the “25th Indian Division.” Similarly, the green Polish corps training and organizing in central Iraq was touted as a powerful, battle-ready force of all arms. Owing to these deficiencies and the primitive transportation infrastructure in the region, the force Churchill sent to Baku in late September was initially limited to the XXI Indian Corps, with three infantry divisions (5th British, 5th and 8th Indian) and no appreciable armor component.

Churchill’s decision and Stalin’s acquiescence were prompted by the collapse of the Russian defenses around Tiflis. Weeks of punishing combat on the frontier had exhausted the men of Lt. Gen. F.N. Remezov’s 45th Army. They held on doggedly, however, until the first days of October when the two German divisions, leaving behind a thin screen to keep up appearances, slipped away to attack a weak sector of the Russian line. The 45th Army crumpled, and the German Jäger, sensing victory, pressed ahead against evaporating resistance. Fortunately for the Allies, XLIV Corps had almost no motor transport and the Russian 53rd Army had moved into position north of Baku several days before the German breakthrough. Furthermore, the Turks on the southern flank of the penetration, poorly supplied and weakened by attrition, could hardly dent the Russian defences. As a result, when the 97th and 101st Jäger Divisions crashed into 53rd Army, the Germans were at the end of a weak logistical chain through rugged mountains, poised for victory but near the end of their tether.

Though de Angelis was stretching his logistics to the breaking point, his men and their Turkish allies had already achieved a significant victory. By smashing in the back door of the Soviet defenses in the Caucasus, XLIV Corps and the Turkish 3rd Army had forced the Stavka to evacuate the remnants of the Transcaucasus Front’s 12th Army and four of the North Caucasus Front’s eight armies. Thousands of prisoners and tons of stores fell into Axis hands as the Soviet troops fled east along a narrow corridor under constant harassment by German artillery and the few available Luftwaffe aircraft. The Black Sea fleet ceased to exist, its sailors transferred to the Red Army or the scanty Caspian Sea flotilla. Bitterly fought rearguard actions and the rugged terrain held up the pursuers, and days would pass before the 17th Army cleared the final defenders out of Sokhumi and Poti, but the loss of Tiflis and the Black Sea coast dealt a dreadful blow to Soviet morale. The defeat in the south also paved the way for the 1st Panzer Army to renew its drive on Groznyy, which fell on October 14, and Makhachkala, which the 13th Panzer Division entered one week later after slicing through the incomplete field works hastily constructed by the 58th Army. The cover of the next issue of the Wehrmacht magazine,
Signal
, featured haughty and determined infantrymen standing watch on the shores of the Caspian Sea. In grim despair, Stalin demanded that the British launch an immediate counterattack.

A counterattack was indeed in preparation, but Russo-British friction, supply shortfalls, and transportation difficulties imposed what Stalin considered an unconscionable delay. In the meantime, the untried troops of the 53rd Army endured a vicious struggle with the XLIV Corps outside Baku as the German veterans strove to crush the defenders and win the city, with its oil. Finally, in the last week of October, with the 53rd Army near its breaking point, the XXI Indian Corps struck the German right flank with a powerful surprise attack. Led by the experienced Jats and Punjabis of the 9th Indian Brigade, the 5th Indian Division drove through rugged terrain to threaten the lone road and railroad constituting the German line of communications back to Turkey. Simultaneously, the British hit the German positions in front of Baku, but coordination problems with the local Soviet commanders deprived their attack of its full effect. Several days of seesaw fighting ensued before low ammunition stocks brought the British offensive to a halt. The Germans held, and the British withdrew to better defensive positions, the failure of the counterattack inflaming Anglo-Soviet acrimony. The German advance had been halted, but Allied offensive power was for the moment expended.

In the south, the Allied situation was somewhat brighter. An ad hoc command called the Northern Iraq Force (made up of the 6th Indian Division and some local levies) tied in with the Russians west of Lake Urumiah and threatened the left flank of the Turkish 5th Army. At the same time, III Corps dealt a heavy blow to the Turks northwest of Mosul, with the 31st Indian Armored Division making its combat debut by overrunning elements of the Turkish 64th Reserve Division while the Arab Legion Mechanized Brigade harassed the weakly held Turkish flank. On the 9th Army’s front, the XXII Corps lost some ground to renewed attacks by the Turkish 4th Army. Lt. Gen. W. G. Holmes, the 9th Army commander, however, refused to commit his reserves, preferring to preserve XXV Corps (8th Armored Division and 10th Indian Division) for a thrust he was planning to split the two Turkish armies. Perhaps most important, the RAF, by dint of good flying and extraordinary maintenance support, was able to clear the Turkish Air Force from the Syrian skies, exposing the ground troops and their logistics to incessant air attacks. These southern successes, however, were far from decisive and did not suffice to influence the fighting in the north.