Barbarossa (25 page)

During the night-time all fighting ceases. Men, animals,
weapons rest. Not a rifle shot breaks the damp nocturnal silence.
Even the voice of the cannon is hushed. As soon as the sun has set,
and the first shadows of evening creep across the cornfield, the
German columns prepare for their night's halt.

Night falls, cold and heavy, on the men curled up in the
ditches, in the small slit-trenches which they have hastily dug amid
the corn, alongside the light and medium assault batteries, the
antitank cannon, the heavy anti-aircraft machine guns, the mortars .
. . Then the wind rises—a moist cold wind that fills one's
bones with an immense numbing weariness. The wind that sweeps this
Ukrainian plateau is laden with the scent of a thousand herbs and
plants. From the darkness of the fields comes a ceaseless crackle as
the moisture of the night causes the sunflowers to droop on their
long, wrinkled stalks. All about us the corn makes a soft rustling
sound, like the rustle of a silk gown. A great murmur rises through
the dark countryside which is filled with the sound of slow
breathing, of deep sighs. Shielded from sudden attack by the sentries
and patrols the men abandon themselves to sleep. (There in front of
us, concealed amid the corn and within the solid dark mass of the
woods—over there, beyond the deep, smooth bleak fold of the
valley, the enemy sleeps. We can hear his hoarse breathing, we can
discern his smell—a smell of oil, petrol, and sweat.)

Between 15th and 17th August, Manteuffel and Wietersheim (with the
14th Panzer Corps) spread out along the Ingul, capturing Krivoi Rog
and reaching south as far as Nikolayev. Russian resistance on the
river was slight and, once again, suffered from the absence of
central direction. It was put up almost entirely by reservists and
troops from training areas east of the Don, who had been ordered to
Uman and now found their path blocked by the German tanks. Except
where the initiative of local commanders dictated otherwise, the
battles took the usual course of piecemeal and repetitive attacks by
the Russians which exhausted their own strength in a matter of hours.
The two Panzer corps rapidly forced a number of bridgeheads and drove
on into the bend of the Dnieper.

Meanwhile the imprisonment of the old "southwestern front"
mass at Uman had opened wide the Black Sea flank to the satellite
divisions in Schobert's army. The few remaining Russian units which
had escaped the trap were rapidly withdrawn into the Odessa
perimeter, and the Rumanians, with Hungarian cavalry, were able to
advance toward the Dnieper estuary almost unresisted. On 21st August
these forces had been stiffened by two German divisions from the 11th
Army and had succeeded in forcing the Dnieper above Kherson.
Immediately, with his southern flank secure, Rundstedt ordered the
Panzer forces to regroup in a northerly direction, pulling
Wietersheim back to the Cherkassy-Kremenchug region and directing
Manteuffel on to the northeastern corner of the Dnieper bend, between
Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhe. Within twenty-four hours the 3rd Panzer
Corps had crossed the Dnieper above Dnepropetrovsk, and moving
southward along both sides of the river, entered the town on 25th
August.

Now there was nothing between the German tanks and the whole basin
of the Donetz. They had achieved a breakthrough as complete as that
of Hoth and Guderian the previous month at Bialystok. All they
required, it seemed, was gasoline and the whole of southern
European—and indeed, Asiatic—Russia lay at their mercy.
On the day that Manteuffel captured Dnepropetrovsk the Russians blew
the Zaporozhe dam, one of the great "engineering masterpieces of
the Proletarian Revolution." This desperate gesture took out the
source of power for the industries in the Dnieper bend—the
majority of which had already been sabotaged by Khrushchev's wrecker
gangs—but had little more practical effect than to lower the
level of the river upstream and make its crossing easier for
Manteuffel's engineers. Nevertheless, at a symbolic level the
destruction of the dam underlined two things: the almost suicidal
sincerity of the "scorched-earth" policy and the fact that
the Russians had little expectation of reoccupying the Dnieper basin
for a very long time.

Unlike Bock, Rundstedt had no single objective whose capture
would, or ought to, finish the war. Was he to halt on the Donetz? On
the Volga? At the Caspian? There was no political or geographic goal.
The German commander had to confine himself to the terms of the
original
Barbarossa
directive, which had laid down the primary
task of "preventing the retreat of intact bodies of troops
toward the vast hinterland of Russia." To this end the commander
of Army Group South was now moving his armour not westward but
northeast. He knew that Guderian, too, had reversed direction, and
had fixed his eyes on the largest single prize of the Eastern front,
the huge, almost static garrison of Kiev, nearly three quarters of a
million strong, under orders from Stalin to "hold at all costs."

It took Kleist less than a week to re-form the 1st Panzer Army on
the south bank of the Dnieper, and during that period his
reconnaissance detachments were forcing a sequence of small
bridgeheads down the whole length of the river from Cherkassy to the
bend. This area was the responsibility of one weak Soviet Rifle Army,
the 38th, which had some divisional artillery, but no armour at all.
Budënny was keeping his strength bunched up east of Kiev, and
troop trains from Kharkov were still proceeding there, in conformity
with month-old directions which had never been superseded.

The front of the Soviet 48th Army was over 120 miles long, and it
was facing, in the last week of August, the Panzer corps of
Wietersheim and Manteuffel, two divisions from Kempf's 48th Panzer
Corps, and SS Viking. Some of the infantry from Reichenau's 6th Army
had already made their way around the Kiev bulge and appeared to the
west of Cherkassy, and with the collapse of resistance in the Uman
pocket, the whole of Stülpnagel's 17th Army was freed. On 22nd
and 23rd August an additional seven infantry divisions began to move
northeast toward Kremenchug and the embryo bridgeheads which had
already been won for them by Kleist's armour.

The Russians at Kiev, in contrast, were barely moving at all. Such
tanks as they had left in working order were immobilised by lack of
fuel. Artillery was plentiful, but many calibres were short of
ammunition and only horses were available to move them around.

[The 6th Army records the total inventory of captured material at
the close of the Kiev battle as tanks, 884; canon (sic), 3,714.]

The Germans, whose own speed of reaction was multiplied tenfold by
the mobility of their armour, roamed at will around the loose
perimeter of the Russian concentration, herding the bewildered Soviet
infantry like sheep dogs. Over his doomed command, still filling up
with men, though now shrinking in area, presided the imbecile
Budënny, a general in the worst tradition of 1914-18 whose
malevolent fatuity has no rival—even among those competitive
effigies of the Great War, Haig, Joffre, and Nivelle. There is some
evidence that at this late stage the
Stavka
considered the
possibility of withdrawing the southwestern front to Kharkov, or
even as far as the Donetz. Shaposhnikov favoured the latter course.
But Stalin preferred to stand and fight it out in front of Kiev, and
Budënny, who numbered among his limited gifts the ability to
divine Stalin's wishes, reported that he had "formidable
defensive positions at his disposal."

Although Stalin must carry the bulk of the responsibility for the
disastrous handling of the Red Army in the first months of the war,
it is no more accurate to saddle him with the whole blame than it is
to do so to Hitler, with the German Army, in the last. He had given
Budënny nearly a million men; it was not unreasonable to expect
this force, even if it could not hold the line of the Dnieper, to
give such an account of itself that the German attack might be
blunted—for that summer, at least. To draw back such an
enormous army in face of the complete air supremacy which Lohr and
Kesselring had established would have been perilous in the extreme.
Stalin also seems, as always in his career, to have considered the
political factor first. Habitually suspicious of army morale and
"loyalty," he was not yet convinced of the tenacity and
devotion the Army was showing in combat. It is always easier to
preserve morale in a static defensive battle than in a long retreat,
and there was the additional consideration that to yield up still
more territory would encourage the creation of "separatist"
movements in the occupied territories—Stalin's mind was too
Machiavellian to conceive the insensate brutality of the German
administration, too uneasily aware of the agrarian discontent which
could have blossomed into rebellion had the invaders given it but a
hint of encouragement.

Hence the decision to stand and fight it out at Kiev.

This decision might still have paid off had the huge army been
properly led. Timoshenko (who was eventually brought down to take
charge of the shattered remnants at the end of September) and Zhukov
(for whom the future held still more important tasks) could have
changed the course, if not (he outcome, of the battle. So indeed
might several of Budënny's subordinates like Kirponos or
Ryabyshev, had they been given the authority in time. But instead the
days slipped past, as they had at Uman in August, with the Red Army
in a state of fatal immobility.

Some idea of what might have been achieved under aggressive
leadership can be gauged from the exploits of the 2nd Cavalry
Division, which had found a weakly held sector of Reichenau's flank
and started out on a foray southwest of Kiev. Fortune smiled on these
bold horsemen, and they managed to avoid the attentions of the
Luftwaffe for over a week. In that period the 2nd Cavalry roamed the
marshy length of the Teberev, one of the tributaries of the Pripet,
falling upon isolated units of German infantry, who were marching
along in close order toward a "front" they believed to be
forty miles to the east. On the last day of August the Russian
cavalry had another stroke of luck, surprising the map depot of the
6th Army while it was in evening bivouac at a village just off the
main highway from Korosten to Kiev. One of the Germans who survived
has described the scene:

We had no proper sentries . . . just a few men strolling about
with their rifles slung over their shoulders, as the whole of 16th
Motorised was meant to be between us and the Russians. There was
quite a lot of fraternisation with the villagers; I remember that
some of them had never seen a lemon before. Then the inhabitants
began to withdraw to their houses ... we thought this seemed
peculiar, and soon the village was empty of Russians.

A short time afterwards there was the sound of horses, and ...
a dust cloud to the south. Some people said that it was a supply
column for one of the Hungarian divisions.

Then they were upon us ... like an American film of the Wild
West. . . sturdy little horses riding at a gallop through our camp.
Some of the Russians were using submachine guns, others were
swinging sabres. I saw two men killed by the sword less than ten
metres from me ... think of that, eighty years after Sadowa! They had
towed up a number of those heavy, two-wheeled machine guns; after a
few minutes whistles began to blow and the horsemen faded away; the
machine gunners started blasting us at very close ranges with
enfilade fire . . . soon tents and lorries were ablaze and through it
the screams of wounded men caught in the flames ...

But neither local victories such as this one nor the stubborn
valour of the Russian soldier in close combat could halt the
strategic development of Rundstedt's offensive. While Kleist was
building up his strength in the south Dnieper bridgeheads, Guderian
was driving two Panzer corps, the 24th and the 47th, at maximum speed
toward the Desna.

It is now clear that the wheeling of Guderian's
Panzergruppe
through 90 degrees, to drive due south into Budënny's rear, took
the Russians completely by surprise. The gap between the two
masses—Timoshenko's, exhausted by the fighting at Smolensk and
Roslavl, and Budënny's, crouching inert before Kiev—was
over 120 miles. Some degree of protection was still granted by the
remnants of the Russian 5th Army and the troops clustered around
Gomel—but only against attack from the west. Guderian's tanks
were striking down a longitude eighty miles in the rear of the 5th
Army, carving their way through a desolate region of deep forests,
log roads, and marshy scrub. Guderian was leading with two Panzer
divisions, following roughly parallel routes, but some thirty miles
apart. Each was commanded by a general who was later to achieve
particular distinction: the 3rd, under Model, "the Führer's
Fireman" of 1944; and the 17th under the unfortunate Ritter von
Thoma, who was to take command of the Afrika Korps when Rommel fell
ill at Alamein. As early as the third day of the march, after
covering sixty miles, Model captured the 750-yard bridge over the
Desna at Novgorod-Severski, and forced the last major natural barrier
between the
Panzergruppe
and Kleist.

Russian histories are still reluctant to allow Budënny (who
is alive) to carry his full share of the blame for the Kiev disaster.
Instead they attribute the prime responsibility to Kuznetsov and
Yeremenko (now dead), who commanded the troops along Guderian's
flank. But what did these forces amount to? Guderian's own situation
map for 31st August shows only nine Soviet infantry and one cavalry
division along the whole stretch between Roslavl and the Novgorod
bridge, and it can be reckoned unlikely that any of these were much
over brigade strength. Furthermore, the whole German force was
mechanised; the Russians, who had first to concentrate before they
could attempt to sever the German column, could move no faster than
the pace of a walking infantry man—no faster, that is to say,
than the armies of the Grand Duke at Tannenberg or, come to that,
than those of Darius or Hannibal.