War and Remembrance (111 page)

But Stalingrad was not an objective of Case Blue. It became Hitler’s objective when he lost control of himself in September.

Near Stalingrad, the rivers Don and Volga converge in a very striking way. The two great bends point their V’s at each other over a forty-mile space of dry land. The first phase of Blue called for capture of this strategic land bridge, so as to block attacks from the north on our southern invasion forces; also, to cut the Volga as a supply route of fuel and food to the north.

At the
V
of the Volga, a medium-sized industrial town straggled along the bluffs of the west bank:
Stalingrad.
We did not need to occupy it, we needed merely to neutralize it with bombardment in order to dominate the bottleneck. Our general plan was to thrust two heavy fast-moving pincers along the two arms of the enormous
V
of the Don, thus trapping and destroying most of the Soviet forces defending south Russia. The first pincer, the Volga Force —jumping off first, since it had the longer distance to go — would march down the upper arm of the Don. The second, the Caucasus Force, would advance along the lower arm. They would meet between the rivers, near Stalingrad. After defeating and mopping up the trapped forces, these two great army groups would divide responsibilities for the second or conquest phase. The Caucasus Force would wheel south, cross the Don, and drive down to the Black Sea, to the Caspian, and through the high passes to the borders of Turkey and Iran. The Volga Force would defend the dangerous flank opened up all along the Don, which would be manned during our advance by three satellite armies: Hungarian, Italian, and Rumanian.

Here was the weak link in Blue, and we knew it. But we had already lost nearly a million men in the war, and we were near the limit of German manpower. We had to use these auxiliaries on the flanks while the Wehrmacht
struck ahead. But we did not plan that they should man the Don against a full assault by the Red Army. That happened only because the Fuhrer lost his head, and disrupted the timetable of the campaign.

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
In editing Roon, I have omitted Manstein’s conquest of the Crimea and Sevastopol, and the failure of Timoshenko’s May attack against Kharkov. These big German victories weakened Russia in the south, making Blue a much more promising operation. I have called “Army Group A”
Caucasus Force,
and “Army Group
8” Volga Force.
The technical Wehrmacht designations are hard to follow, especially as regroupings occurred in mid-campaign.
—
V.H.

(From “Hitler as Military Leader”)

… Supreme Headquarters is an edgy place during a campaign. One waits in a map room for developments, day after day. The war seems to drag and drag. Out in the field is reality: hundreds of thousands of men marching over fields and through cities, moving masses of equipment, coming under fire. In Headquarters one sees the same faces, the same walls, the same maps, one eats in the same place with the same elderly tired men in uniform. The atmosphere is strained and quiet, the air stale. There is a remoteness and abstraction about this nerve center of the war. The perpetual tension of deferred hope gnaws at the heart.

At our advance headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine all this was doubly true. “Werewolf,” as Hitler named the installation, was a crude compound of log cabins and wooden huts in the open pine country near the southern River Bug. Socially, there was no relief. Physically, we could go splash in the slow muddy river, if we cared to expose our naked skins to clouds of stinging insects. The weather was blazing hot and sticky, too much so for Hitler even to walk his dog, his only exercise.

We moved there in mid-July, at the height of the campaign. Hitler did not take the heat well, strong sunlight bothered him, and altogether it was an uncomfortable situation. His digestion was worse than ever, his flatulence a trial for everybody in a room with him. Even the dog, Blondi, was out of sorts and whiny.

But even before that, while we were still in our cooler and more comfortable compound in the East Prussian woods, he had already shown signs
of strain and instability, by his drastic change of plan for the Caucasus Force and for the Fourth Panzer Army….

(From
World Holocaust)

The faltering of Blue can be dated precisely to the thirteenth of July.

Hitler’s anxiety had been mounting day by day. He could not understand why we were not hauling in the hordes of prisoners that our great enveloping movements had yielded in 1941. Whether Stalin had learned at last not to order his troops to stand fast and be captured; or whether the southern armies were fading away before us in undisciplined rout; or whether the front was just weakly manned; or whether, finally, the Russians were resorting to their classic tactic of trading space for time, the fact was we were capturing Russians in the tens of thousands, instead of the hundreds of thousands.

On July 13, Hitler suddenly decided to divert the
entire eastward campaign away from the Stalingrad land bridge, southwest toward Rostov!
Thus he hoped, by a tighter enveloping move, to bag a supposed enormous Red Army force in the Don bend. The whole Caucasus Force wheeled off on this mission. He even peeled off the Volga Force’s panzer army, the doughty Fourth, and sent it clanking toward Rostov, too, although Haider bitterly opposed piling so much armor against one minor objective. The Volga Force slowed to a standstill, very low on gasoline, for the main supplies had to go to this adventure of catching Russians.

The huge power thrust captured Rostov and netted some forty thousand prisoners. But precious time had been lost, and the whole Blue plan was in disarray. The Caucasus Force and the Fourth Army were milling around Rostov, choking the transit arteries, and creating unimaginable difficulties in improvised organization and supply.

At this critical point Adolf Hitler sprang on our stupefied Headquarters his notorious and catastrophic Directive Number 45, perhaps the worst military orders ever issued. It abrogated the Blue plan altogether. A responsible General Staff would have analyzed, war-gamed, and organized such an operation for months, or even for a year. Hitler airily scrawled it all out in a day or two, and so far as I know, all by himself. If Jodl helped him with it, he never boasted of it!

In essence, Directive Number 45 consisted of three points:

1. A mere
   assertion
   (contrary to known fact) that the first aim of the campaign had been achieved: i.e., that the Red Army in the south had been “largely destroyed.”
   
2. The Volga Force was to resume the drive toward Stalingrad, with the Fourth Panzer Army rejoining it.
   
3. The Caucasus Force under List was to proceed southward at once, with additions to its original difficult task, such as securing the entire Black Sea coast.
   

This was Hitler’s last attack directive. It was at this point that we at Supreme Headquarters began to lose heart, though in the field things still looked rosy. Haider, the Army Chief of Staff, was scandalized. He noted in his diary — and he said baldly to me — that these orders no longer bore any resemblance to military realities.

The
conditions for
carrying out our summer campaign in any reasonable form had now melted away. Neither the upper bend of the Don, nor the crucial land bridge, had been secured. The Caucasus Force, the lower pincer of the Don phase, had been scheduled to move south
only
when the Don flank stretching to Stalingrad was secure. Now the two great forces were to separate and operate in different directions with unsecured flanks — leaving a constantly widening gap between them as they pursued diverse missions!

Moreover, the Blue plan had called for Manstein’s Eleventh Army, which had conquered the Crimea and captured Sevastopol, to cross to the Caucasus and support List in his drive. But Hitler, in his glee at the capture of Rostov, had decided that things were going too well in the south to waste Manstein there; and
he had ordered Manstein to take most of his army eleven hundred miles north to attack Leningrad!

Hitler’s numbered directives end with Number 51, dated late in 1943; but in fact, after this fatal Number 45, they trail off in defensive measures. This was his final wielding of the initiative. Lack of experience, and the strain of arrogating to himself all the political and military authority of Germany, had told at last on a high-strung temperament, a very adept mind, and a fearsome will. The order was madness. Yet only in our innermost HQ councils was the picture clear in all its folly. The Wehrmacht obeyed, and marched off into the remotest depths of southern Russia on two separate roads to its sombre fate.

With awesome inevitability, the tragedy now began to unfold.

The Caucasus Force performed wonders, marching across vast steppes blazing with midsummer heat, climbing to the peaks of snowcapped mountain ranges, investing the Black Sea coast, and actually sending patrols as far as the Caspian Sea. But it fell short of its objectives. What Hitler had ordered was beyond its manpower, its firepower, and its logistical support. The force stood still for as much as ten days at a time, for want of gasoline, and of supply trucks to bring up the fuel. At one point, with true Greek
irony, gasoline was even being brought to the Caucasus Force on the backs of camels! List’s great armies stalled in the mountains, harried by elusive tough Red units, and unable to advance.

Meanwhile, on August 23 the Volga Force, driving on toward Stalingrad, reached the riverbank north of the city, and the neutralization phase began with heavy air and artillery bombardment. Resistance was at first meager. For a day or two it looked as though Stalingrad might fall to a
coup de main.
But it did not happen. We were at a far stretch ourselves, and Stalingrad held against the first shock.