Barbarossa (16 page)

This monstrous awe-inspiring war of movement was but a few weeks
old. To say that the General Staff was bewildered would be to
overstate, but it is certainly true that its meticulous professional
competence left little room for the imagination required to cope with
such a gigantic opportunity. Besides Guderian and Hoth there were
many others who could have taken the Panzers through to Moscow. Some,
like Model, were in relatively junior positions; others, like Rommel
and Student, were elsewhere. Bock himself had the inclination, but
not the persuasive ability, to defy his colleagues and Führer.
But knowing what we do now of the strength of the Russian armies,
even at that time, and of the plans they themselves had prepared for
a riposte, it is by no means certain that such a thrust would have
succeeded. It would have been a gigantic gamble, about which the only
certain thing that can be said is that it would have ended the
war—one way or another.

Hitler's own attitude was, as so often, ambivalent. Before the
invasion he had assured Rundstedt that the Russian armies would be
destroyed west of the Dnieper. There is no doubt that he welcomed the
support of conventional opinion in his desire to halt the deep thrust
to the enemy capital insofar as this involved dividing, and thus
weakening, the counsels of the generals. But he seems to have had no
intention of accepting the reservations they advised. Rundstedt now
recommended a slowing down both in the centre and the Ukraine, and a
concentration against Leningrad, with the object of freeing the
Baltic and linking up with the Finns before winter. But at this stage
Hitler wished to avoid the "encumbrance" of the capital
cities, with their huge and hungry populations, and believed that by
dividing his strength between the north, where Leningrad was to be
"isolated" and "bypassed," and the south, the
Panzer armies would sweep around behind Moscow, cutting off the city
and the whole of Timoshenko's stubborn army. It was to be "Super
Cannae," the greatest battle of annihilation that the world had
ever seen. In this way, during the last week in July, both at OKH and
OKW, opinions were united in the view that the advance of Army Group
Centre should be slowed down. These opinions were not all arrived at
by the same process nor based on the same assumptions, but in unison
they represented a formidable weight. Nevertheless, within days of
the publication of Directive 33 the pressure of events at the front
was to make its appreciations obsolete.

To understand the fluctuations of opinion at OKW during the
following weeks, and the delays in execution which resulted
therefrom, it is necessary to study the course of the fighting in
detail. For at no time in the campaign is the interaction of
hesitation and lack of purpose at headquarters and opportunism at the
front so pronounced or its strategic consequences so important.

Guderian's army was advancing more or less due east, along three
separate axes. The most northerly of these ran from the Dnieper
crossings below Orsha, along the line Dubrovno-Lyady-Krasny-Smolensk.
This was under the 57th Corps with the 29th Motorised Division
leading the 17th and 18th Panzer. In the centre the 56th Corps
advanced from Mogilev through Mstislavl-Khislavichi-Prudki, with the
10th Panzer Division, SS
Das Reich
, and Guard Battalion
Gross
Deutschland
. To the south, up the winding valley of the Oster,
came the 24th Corps, with the 10th Motorised Division, the 3rd and
4th Panzer, and the cavalry division.

In fact, the degree of concentration was higher than is suggested
by the ratio of seven divisions to a starting line of sixty miles,
owing partly to the very high quality of training and equipment of
the units concerned, and also to the exceptional firepower and
mobility of the individual columns. Guderian's thrust was like a
three-pronged fork. Each prong was hard and sharp, but between them
was air. Miles and miles of flat steppe, grain and grass, "covered"
by the Luftwaffe and occasional patrols of armoured cars and
motorcycles. Here lay the seeds of trouble that might grow with
alarming suddenness if the Russian Army were to recover its balance
or one of the columns to suffer a check.

The original intention of the Russians had been to establish their
defensive line from Vitebsk south to the Dnieper, and then along the
left bank of that river as far as Kremenchug. To hold this position
they had assigned the fresh troops of the High Command reserve group
and placed them under Budënny. But the almost total
disintegration of their western front had compelled the
Stavka
to commit these formations piecemeal during the last days of June,
and formal recognition of this came on 2nd July with the assignment
of the whole of Army Group Reserve to the western front, where it was
placed under Timoshenko and the existing command structure dissolved.

Timoshenko struggled desperately to restore some order to the
chain of command along his shuddering, concave front. He sent his
Chief of Staff [Lieutenant General G. K. Malandin.] to take charge of
the right wing, retaining his own headquarters and responsibility on
the left, along Guderian's southeastern flank.

Far behind them Zhukov was scraping the barrel to form yet another
"Soviet reserve front" to protect Moscow along the line
Ostashkov-Rzhev-Vyazma. For nearly three weeks the pressure on
Timoshenko was too strong for him to recover his balance and
concentrate. It was a pressure that emanated as much from the
Stavka
as from the enemy, and that was heightened rather than relaxed by the
introduction of dual command and the appearance of Bulganin at his
headquarters on 16th July.

["A sign, as always, that the officer corps needed a touch of
the Party whip." (Erickson 603) The new instruction on military
commissars reinstated the commissar as "the representative of
the Party and the Government in the Red Army," bearing with the
commander full responsibility for the unit's conduct in battle. "The
Commissar was to warn the Supreme Command and the Government against
commanders and political workers [who are] unworthy of the rank ...
to wage a relentless struggle with cowards, the creators of panic and
deserters."]

Throughout the first two weeks of that month the melancholy tale
of squandered lives and equipment had continued. On 6th July the 5th
and 7th Mechanised corps had been thrown piecemeal against Hoth, and
were chewed to shreds in three days. On the 11th a personal message
from Stalin insisted on the "protracted defence" of
Smolensk, but four days later Lukin's 16th Army, entrusted with this
task on the "direct orders" of GOKO, had been smashed.
Around Mogilev the whole of the 13th Army (Lieutenant General
Gerasimenko) was trapped and annihilated. But the Russians were
fighting with a crude heroism that drew the admiration even of Halder
in his nightly record, and their "savage determination," of
which he would frequently complain, was contributing to a gradual
erosion of the Wehrmacht's own strength. The wear and tear on men's
nerves, as well as on weapons and machinery, was on an altogether
different scale from the "manoeuvres with live ammunition"
held in the West the previous summer. "We have had our turret
hatches closed for ten days," wrote a sergeant in the 6th Panzer
Division, "my tank has been hit seven times, and the inside
stinks to heaven." Another account describes the fate of two
Russian tanks which had succeeded in breaking out of an encircled
pocket but had then broken down. One was destroyed, and two of the
crew of the other were shot down as they tried to bail out and escape
on foot. This tank lay there, hermetically sealed and apparently
lifeless, for ten days, while the encirclement battle pursued its
course, but the Germans were concerned to find that

No supplies reached us without first receiving, during their
voyage, well-placed salvoes of artillery. We would change the times
of delivery, but this served to no purpose. Often our positions
themselves were heavily pounded. In the depth of night patrols came
through the forest to throw hand-grenades perfectly directed through
our gun-slits. We asked ourselves how the devil this was possible.

The mystery was only cleared up by chance. The intact tank had
been stripped of everything which was usable: tyres [sic] magnetos,
pistons, cables,
etc.
One day an army cook in search of some
equipment happened to force a gap through which to peer. Half
overcome by the stench which escaped from it, he saw two squatting
skeletons. We were able to get them out. Can anyone imagine the guts
of those two men, one of whom, a captain, had lost an eye—cloistered
up with a corpse among so much filth! Some provisions, which reached
them during the night, helped them to endure and, although they were
wounded, to send information to their troops by means of their
wireless set.

But if the strain on the Germans was novel and significant, on the
Russians it was critical. The High Command reserve had simply melted
away, leaving a rump of twenty-one divisions—all hurriedly
raised, and with only a sprinkling of trained officers and N.C.O.'s.
These units had drawn their equipment from depots in the Moscow
region at the beginning of July, and concentrated at Vyazma and
Bryansk for extended training. They were short of ammunition and had
a reduced complement of artillery—all of it horsedrawn (except
for the 160-mm. guns, which were drawn by agricultural tractors
pressed into service from the collectives). This lack of mobility was
accentuated by the shortage of armour. There were only two tank
units, [Termed tank "brigades," but in size rather larger
than a brigade, rather smaller than a division, strength about a
hundred tanks.] the 104th and 105th, and one motorised division, the
204th.

Moreover, of these only the 105th, at Vyazma, had a proportion of
T 34's.

[The divisions of these two reserve armies were the 64th, 53rd,
19th, 120th, 124th, 129th, 29th, 158th, 128th (Vyazma), and 132nd,
6th, 161st, 160th, 55th, 56th, 1st workers', 148th, 145th, 135th,
140th, 232nd, and 46th at Bryansk.]

This lack of mobility is also the most probable explanation for
the delay in committing these reserves to the battle, and for their
deficiency in armour. The original plan, a set-piece
counteroffensive across the Dnieper after the Germans had been
halted there, was modified after the crossings at Kopys and Mogilev
had fallen. Timoshenko then hoped to strike at the root of the German
salient, putting in the reserves at Stary Bykhov and Propoisk and
converging southward from Orsha with the very strong forces that were
grouped along the upper Dnieper between there and Smolensk.

But by the night of 16th July this plan, too, had been nullified
by the speed of the German advance. Hoth's breakthrough across the
Duna put the whole Smolensk army in jeopardy as he wheeled down to
converge on the northern prong of Guderian's fork, while in the south
the fall of Stary Bykhov and the advance of the Panzer screen to the
confluence of the Sozh and the Oster brought the 3rd and 4th Panzer
to the brink of the concentration area for the Bryansk army—at
Roslavl.

For the next week this race for position was to assume an
importance greater even than the course of the fighting in the breach
itself. The Russian foot, with some help from an egregious railway
system, and under regular attack from the Luftwaffe in daylight,
could average little more than twenty miles in a day; the German
tanks could do twice this distance, even against opposition. To be
able to deploy their full weight the twenty-one fresh Russian
infantry divisions were dependent on the railway junctions at Yelnya
and Roslavl, which allowed them freedom to switch along the southern
and eastern side of the German bulge. But on 18th July the leading
motorcyclists of the 10th Panzer, Guderian's central "prong,"
were in sight of Yelnya and had reached the right bank of the Desna,
a few miles to the southeast. All those Russians originally in their
path had been sucked into the vortex of the Smolensk
Kesselschlacht
to the north or left standing on the Oster, sixty miles to the west.

Now the threat to the cohesion of Timoshenko's army was very real.
That night and the following day in a shade temperature of 80 degrees
the Russian forced march continued. But on the evening of 19th July
only two divisions had got through Spas-Demiansk (nearly thirty miles
from Yelnya), and the 10th Panzer had entered the town in force,
after a twelve-hour battle against workers' battalions and a few
decimated regular units that made up the "garrison." The
effect of this spectacular advance was twofold. First, both opposing
commanders formed conclusions as to the state of the battle which,
although reasonable on the evidence before them, we now can see to
have been false; second, their action, following on these
conclusions, was to have an effect on the OKW appreciation of the
campaign which was disconcerting, retardatory, and ultimately fatal.

Guderian, whose resentment at being subject to Kluge's restraints
has already been illustrated, was now employing a variety of
subterfuges to give himself the excuse, or the opportunity, to
sidestep the orders of his army commander. But if he was to use the
whole of his Panzer army as a spearhead, then he badly needed some of
Kluge's infantry divisions, both to weld the fetters his tanks cast
around the Russian infantry and to defend the flanks of the salient.

There was one way of getting those infantry divisions—an
appeal to Bock over Kluge's head; but to back such an appeal Guderian
had to show more than a victory, he had to show an opportunity of
boundless scope, one in which days and hours were vital. Now, with
the second encirclement at Smolensk and the capture of Yelnya, he
believed that he had been granted this. He seemed, in fact, to have
brought about the very situation for which Bock and Halder, and
Brauchitsch himself, had been hoping.