Theoretically, the Germans now had an additional 121 divisions available for commitment to the Eastern Front, almost doubling their order of battle. That included 1,030,000 men from France and the Low Countries, 500,000 from Italy, 300,000 from Scandinavia, and 500,000 from the Balkans,
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altogether 2.33 million. Practically, it would not be quite as impressive. At least half of these divisions were not first-class units, nor were they fully equipped or trained.
Zhukov’s appraisal of the German strength that would flow to the Eastern Front was exaggerated, but in truth it was still massive enough to give Germany a fighting chance. For any Germans and Russians, though, the parallels to 1917-18 were unsettling. The Germans had freed themselves of a two-front war in 1917 when the new Bolshevik government in Russia made a craven peace. The massive transfer of German forces to the Western Front had still not been enough to win the war, even in the last desperate gamble of the Ludendorff Offensives of 1918. Would history repeat itself in 1944-45?
A few of the more perceptive would argue that the last war’s analogy had broken down. In 1918 the flow of U.S. reinforcements to the Western Allies negated the new German strength transferred from the Eastern Front. In this war, the Soviets would have no reinforcement beyond what they already had—and the ongoing flood of Lend-Lease equipment and supplies. Still, it would be a race. If the Germans were to receive a vital reinforcement, it would be in a context not of a stalemated front in 1917-18, but of a crumbling front already reeling back from crushing Soviet blows. Hitler’s “hold or die” orders had already sacrificed huge numbers of German troops and infected the rest with an encirclement syndrome that corroded them with fear and panic. Even where troops had escaped, the retreat orders had often come too late. Vast amounts of supplies and irreplaceable heavy equipment in the army’s tail had been abandoned.
Rommel faced twin problems of incredible magnitude at the same time. He had to allocate and manage the flow of men and equipment east while at the same time staving off collapse of the Eastern Front. His first conclusion was that he could not do it all himself. He bypassed the senior officers of the army and appointed Speidel as chief of a combined staff of OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) and OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres). By doing so he put an end to the absurd division of power by which the OKH ran the Eastern Front and the OKW ran everything else. Speidel and he had worked hand in glove together in Normandy, and Rommel felt he needed someone he could trust and with deep experience of operations. Speidel was that man. If Rommel was the intelligent man of action, Speidel was the military intellectual of great operational and administrative ability. As chief of staff of the 18th Army in 1940, Lt. Col. Speidel had received the surrender of Paris. He served two years on the Eastern Front as an army chief of staff in von Manstein’s Army Group South. When Rommel assumed command of Army Group B in France in early 1944, he asked for Speidel, even though they had never met, because the army grapevine had carried only good things about his fellow Württemberger. More than a few observers commented that their relationship was similar to the “happy marriage” between Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the 1914-18 War.
If Rommel stopped to think about it, he would have concluded that the situation facing him would break down any man. His enormous self-confidence and energy had to come to grips with his equally powerful realism. For the first time, Erwin Rommel had to take account of his own limitations. To this point in his life his talents and experiences had served him well at every level of command. But each step had been a military one, and a largely operational one. The realms of politics, diplomacy, and national strategy had never been his concern or of much interest. Nor did he have General Staff training or higher education to fall back on. What he did have was good judgment and a talent for picking good subordinates and trusting them. Speidel was one. And now there would be many others.
A flurry of orders recalled to active duty a number of the brilliant army officers forcibly retired by Hitler—Field Marshals Erich von Manstein and Wilhelm von List, Gen. Hermann Hoth, and many others. A similar flurry went out relieving the officers whose primary qualification had been loyalty to Hitler. Adolf Galland was jumped up from General of the Fighters to command of the Luftwaffe,
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but the Kriegsmarine was left in the capable hands of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz. The competent fence-sitters and trimmers were retained. Generaloberst Heinz Guderian kept his position of Inspector General of Armored Forces. No one could reorganize and train the depleted Panzer arm better than he—especially now that he had something to work with. Albert Speer was also confirmed in office and given even more authority over Germany’s war production as the last of the party and service satrapies were abolished.
Rommel quickly realized that as a grand strategist, he was clearly outclassed by Stalin. An instinctive tactician and leader at heart, he now found himself thrust into the role of Hindenburg as supreme leader of the nation in war. And Hindenburg had failed. Also unlike Stalin, whose command and staff team had stabilized at a high level of efficiency, the German counterpart was in shambles. Hitler had purged it of men of character and filled it with sycophants and party loyalists. The anti-Hitler plotters had begun to squabble among themselves. Not only did Rommel need to get a grip on a war effort in free fall, but he had to suppress the Nazis and form a government as well. Then there had been Dachau and the horrific briefings on how deep the cancer ran. That filthy mess would have to be concealed while the fighting was still going on.
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The courts-martial would continue, but the German people would hear nothing. All in all, he would rather be back in the Western Desert, crawling up to an outpost line under fire to get a feel for the battle against his old, chivalrous British adversary.
Stalin was a realist. Soviet logistics played out sooner than expected by the middle of July, and even the mass of American trucks could not be everywhere at once. And the Germans had not cooperated. Since Stalingrad, he had become used to Hitler’s assistance to the Red Army. It had been all too easy to demolish German units that had been nailed to the ground by a Führer order. Now the rules seemed to have changed. The Germans eluded the grasp of his marshals everywhere, striking where they could and moving ever west, holding ground only to allow others to escape. Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, informed him that captures had fallen off dramatically since the initial encirclement of Army Group Center. But now the Germans had finally come to a halt and turned about on a front on the line Kaunas-Grodno-Brest-Lvov.
Army Group North had begun an immediate evacuation of the Baltics. German troops and hordes of refugees were flooding through into East Prussia and western Lithuania and being evacuated by sea from Courland. The sudden appearance of the Kriegsmarine in strength in the Baltic had beaten the Soviet Baltic fleet back into its bolthole in Leningrad and protected what the Germans had the black humor to call
unsere kleine Dunkirk
(“our little Dunkirk”). Although Soviet armies had fallen upon the retreating Germans, they were unable to halt the evacuation and had in turn been stung by German counterattacks. In a surprise move, the Germans had informed the Finns of their intention to evacuate the 20th Mountain Army from northern Finland. The Finns immediately began negotiations with the Soviets. Stalin would drive a hard bargain, and transfer his forces where they would be more useful.
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Stalin hoped the Germans would make the mistake of abandoning the Romanians as they had the Finns, but they had not. There was a different logic at work. In the north, Army Group North and 20th Mountain Army had extended the front enormously with no strategic gain. Army Group South (formerly Army Group South Ukraine), however, served very useful purposes. To have withdrawn from Romania would have opened the door for Soviet armies to flood through the Balkans and threaten the Germans on an enormous and porous front. By holding the line along the Dniester River, the Germans could anchor one flank on the Black Sea and the other on the Carpathian Mountains. Already, strong forces evacuated from Italy and the Balkans were heavily reinforcing Army Group South.
Intelligence reports were also painting a picture of massive German reinforcement and reorganization deep behind the front in Poland. Air reconnaissance was becoming especially difficult as Luftwaffe strength ballooned. Red Air Force bombing missions had suddenly become very expensive and had to be curtailed.
Along the entire front, German strength swelled. And the Germans dug. Belt after belt of antitank defenses echeloned in successive lines from in front of and behind the Vistula-Narew line to the west halfway across Poland. In front of Army Group Center the front ran on a Bialystok-Brest-Lvov line. Von Manstein personally chose its name, the “Loki Line.”
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Another, stronger line, the Scharnhorst Line, was begun thirty to forty miles east of the Vistula and Narew Rivers. A third belt, the Gneisenau Line, ran along the western banks of those rivers. Amazing results were achieved in two short months as every available German and most of the adult Polish population were put to work with spade, shovel, and bucket. Antitank weapons, still caked with French mud or Norwegian bracken, were sewn thickly to great depth, while all Panzer divisions disappeared from the front. New production flowed into the gashes of fresh earth. The growing defenses presented a deadly thicket of antitank weapons, machine guns, antitank ditches and obstacles, and mines—interlocking defenses in depth. Large armor concentrations were also growing in East Prussia, to the west of Warsaw, and elsewhere.
The GRU also reported a fundamental change in German organization. Many of the surviving German divisions in the East had become mere shells, having been kept in the order-of-battle simply because Hitler liked to see large numbers of divisions on his battle maps. The best of these units—especially the infantry divisions—were brought up to strength by breaking up garrison divisions from Scandinavia, France, and the Balkans and feeding their personnel into the experienced front-line formations. Göring’s pet Luftwaffe field divisions were also broken up, and their personnel reassigned to Galland’s reorganizing efforts or to army units. The creation of new units was halted immediately and personnel in these forming units were also sent to reinforce existing divisions. Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions were withdrawn from the front and grouped into strong reserve formations, where they were joined by formations arriving from other theaters. Everywhere, antitank defense in depth was stressed, with mobile formations held in reserve for counterattack.
The Western Allies continued to feed Stalin intelligence that filled in many of the blanks left by his own intelligence services. None of the information was encouraging. German fuel reserves were at their greatest since 1940. German synthetic fuel production was steadily increasing and could expect greater increases now that the bombing campaign had ended. Rommel’s victory in Normandy had forestalled the postinvasion “Oil Campaign” planned by the Allies to smash fuel production.
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In fact, the air campaign ended just as it began to inflict serious damage on German war production and the Reich air defenders. Now aircraft production could continue accelerating, quickly reaching 4,000 fighters (mostly Bf 109Gs and Fw 190s) in August, at the same time as the Luftwaffe sped up its training to produce more fighter pilots. An added bonus of the armistice was the return of thousands of air crew captured in the Battle of Britain and North Africa. There was also a wholesale conversion of the remaining bomber units to fighter commands as the aircraft became available. In fact, almost all of the resource-wasteful superweapon projects favored by Hitler were cancelled, expect for the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter. Galland would get the best out of the Luftwaffe’s new lease on life.
The armistice in the West kept on giving. The end of the bombing campaign also freed the Luftwaffe’s massive flak resources, which had been vainly attempting to fend off the rain of Allied bombs. The 100,000 flak troops from France joined the endless troop trains heading east, picking up hundreds of thousands more in Germany itself, swelling the flood of 88mm antiaircraft guns, which quickly began to thicken the front. Literally thousands of these superb guns were being sent east. Their dual-purpose capability as the ultimate antitank gun of the war further strengthened the German ground forces.
Another disquieting discovery for the Soviets was the reappearance of some of the best of the German commanders. Model had retained command of Army Group Center. List assumed command of Army Group North to shepherd it to safety in East Prussia, and Kleist took over Army Group North Ukraine. Unknown to Stalin, though, Rommel had invited von Manstein to assume operational command of all three army groups. It was obvious that these three groups would constitute the main theater of the war; it was absurd to control each from the newly reorganized OKW. Manstein’s advocacy of this very solution to Hitler had done much to ensure his relief. He flew to Warsaw immediately to begin putting his new headquarters together—Oberkommando Ost. Rommel had promised him his pick of staff officers. There was much to do.
Rommel had another meeting. Field Marshal “Smiling Albert” Kesselring was not smiling when he heard what Rommel offered—command of Army Group South. The two had had a stormy relationship during the African and Italian campaigns but remained grudgingly respectful. “And what have I done that I deserve to be saddled with more Latin allies?” Kesselring asked. Rommel broke out laughing. “Well, you know how to get the best out of them, and if that fails, you have had practice in disarming them.” Then, seriously, he said, “The main battle will be fought in Poland, Herr Feldmarschall, but the south must be held on its short Romanian front. If it fails, the entire Balkans will collapse, and we cannot cope with such an extension of our front. Nor can we afford to lose the Romanian oil fields. Trade space for time and bleed them, but do not abandon Ploesti.” When he left, Kesselring really was smiling. A natural optimist, he was already exploring the possibilities.