Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (61 page)

And what meanwhile was the situation on the right wing, in the area of Count Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt's II Army Corps?

On 9th January there erupted across Lake Seliger a Soviet large-scale attack which, in concentration of forces and momentum, surpassed anything previously known. Four Russian Armies, the Twenty-second and Fifty-third Armies, as well as the Third and Fourth Striking Armies, charged across the frozen lake with approximately twenty divisions and several dozen independent armoured and ski brigades.

They pounced upon the weakly held 50-mile sector of a single German division, the 123rd Infantry Division from Brandenburg, and its right-hand neighbour, the 253rd Infantry Division, the wing division of Army Group Centre.

The main impact of the blow fell upon the 123rd and shattered the front of the Brandenburg regiments. In vain did its left-hand neighbour, the 32nd Infantry Division from Pomerania, come to its aid with whatever forces it could spare. It was of no use: the 123rd Infantry Division was swept aside.

What were the Russians after? The two Striking Armies had not been sent into battle in order to operate on the narrow strip of land between the two lakes: they had different strategic objectives, going far beyond the two German Corps on the Lake Ilmen front.

The attack of the Soviet Fifty-third Army, on the other hand, was directed exclusively against the German lines between the two lakes. Having broken through, the Soviet forces swiftly wheeled towards the north-west in order to link up with units of the Soviet Eleventh Army coming down from the north, thus encircling most of the German X Corps and all of II Corps.

At the centre of the pocket which was thus taking shape, on the commanding Valday Hills, stood the little town of Demyansk, until then unknown and unimportant. This little town was to go down in military history as the site of one of the strategically most important battles of encirclement—the "battle of the Demyansk pocket."

For more than a year—until the spring of 1943—fierce and savage fighting continued for the virgin forests, swamps, and miserable villages of the Valday Hills, the region where Volga, Dvina, and Dnieper have their sources, the watershed of European Russia. Under the command of General Count Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt six German infantry divisions of II Corps resisted a vastly superior enemy force—cut off though they were from the main German front, relying entirely on themselves, and most of the time only scantily supplied from the air. They prevented the Soviets from breaking through to the south and west, and thus saved Army Group North from annihilation.

What then was the task of the remaining three Soviet Armies which, on that 9th January, had likewise swept over the crushed remnants of the German 123rd Infantry Division on Lake Seliger? What was their strategic objective? What was the purpose pursued by the Soviet High Command with its offensive? The aim of the operation was bold and far- reaching. The Third and Fourth Striking Armies and the Twenty-second Army were to drive deep into the hinterland of the German front and cause the whole of Army Group Centre to collapse. The offensive, therefore, had been conceived as the strategic consummation of the Soviet winter battle.

The man who was to accomplish this grand project was Colonel-General Andrey Ivanovich Yeremenko, Commander- in-Chief of the Soviet Fourth Striking Army. He was the same man whom Stalin had repeatedly employed at crucial points of the Central Front during the German summer offensive, as a daring improviser and a saviour in critical situations. Now Yeremenko was to have his revenge for his defeats.

His task was to break through at the most sensitive point of the German Eastern Front—the junction between Army Groups Centre and North—to separate the two Army Groups, and to destroy the German Central Front, which was already reeling under the Soviets' heavy blows. The Vitebsk area, 175 miles from Yeremenko's starting-line on Lake Seliger, was the strategic objective.

The plan of the Soviet High Command sprang from Stalin's confident belief that, the earlier winter battles south and north of Moscow had so badly mauled the German Armies that only a
coup de grâce
was needed now.

General Yeremenko, to-day a much-decorated Marshal of the Soviet Union, is the first Soviet commander in the field to have published an exceedingly interesting, and at times astonishingly critical, account of his campaign, including the operation of his Fourth Striking Army, under the title
Towards the West.
It will be of interest to view this decisive phase of the war in the East also through the eyes of a commander of the other side.

In mid-October 1941 General Yeremenko had been caught by a German fighter bomber in the battle of the Bryansk pocket. Just before he could dive into a forester's hut he had been hit by a few bomb-splinters. Severely wounded, he had been flown out of the pocket. Until the middle of December he had been in a military hospital in Kuybyshev. On 24th December he had been summoned to Stalin. The Generalissimo had received him in his underground headquarters in the Kremlin. This is how Yeremenko describes the interview:

"Tell me, Comrade Yeremenko, are you very touchy?" Stalin asked. "No, not particularly," I replied.

"You won't be offended if I put you temporarily under Comrades who until recently were your subordinates?"

I replied that I was prepared to take over a Corps or any other post if the Party considered this necessary and if I could serve the mother country in this way.

Stalin nodded. He said this measure was necessary in order to solve a most important task. He considered me the right man for it.

In the course of this conversation Stalin then explained to Yeremenko what it was all about. As an experienced

commander in the field the colonel-general was to take over the newly raised Fourth Striking Army, a crack unit, a kind of Guards Army, which, moreover, enjoyed the same privileges as Guards units. The officers received pay and a half and the men double pay, and they had better rations than other formations.

Nothing can show more clearly the importance which Stalin attached to the tasks of the Fourth Striking Army than the fact that he entrusted with its command one of the best Soviet military leaders, a man with the rank of a colonel- general, although Kurochkin, the Commander-in-Chief of the North-western Front, under whom the Fourth Striking Army would come, was only a lieutenant-general.

Yeremenko was given all conceivable powers for raising, equipping, and supplying his Army. When Stalin dismissed his general in the Kremlin bunker he left him in no doubt that the operation of the Fourth Striking Army was to become the "culmination of the Russian winter offensive." The hopes of the Supreme Commander, the General Staff, and the mother country rested upon Yeremenko's shoulders.

To capture booty is an old-established and legitimate practice of war. Anything belonging to the enemy forces becomes the prize of the victor. More than once Field-Marshal Rommel had made his Afrika Corps mobile by means of lorries and fuel captured from British stores. English corned beef from Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck's well- assorted desert food-dumps often provided a welcome change from blood sausage and pork, just as the fragrant Virginia tobacco of the 10,000,000 navy-cut cigarettes captured in Tobruk's storehouses acted as a great morale booster for the German "desert foxes."

But to base a decisive offensive on the assumption that the troops' grumbling stomachs must be filled with food captured in enemy dumps was something quite unprecedented.

It was Colonel-General Yeremenko's contribution to military history. In his account of the operation of his Fourth Striking Army he writes:

An efficient preparation of our offensive by the rearward services would have required the stockpiling of major quantities of food in the immediate neighbourhood of our zone of operations. Instead, the staff of the North- western Front 'relieved' us of whatever supplies we had laboriously obtained. We had to share our foodstuffs with our right-hand neighbour, the Third Striking Army, which had practically no rations whatever.

That was bad enough. But worse was to come.

"After ten days," Yeremenko writes, "our own supplies had been used up." Some divisions did not even have one day's rations at the beginning of the offensive. The 360th Rifle Division, for instance, was one of these. In its war diary we find the following entry under 8th January: "Division has no rations." The identical entry is found in the diary of 332nd Rifle Division on the following day. On the day of the offensive itself, on 9th January, the men of nearly all divisions went without breakfast. They went into battle on empty stomachs. The 360th Rifle Division was eventually given the dry bread earmarked for 358th Division, so that the troops should at least have a mouthful of bread on the evening of the first day's fighting.

How was this disastrous food-supply situation to be coped with? How could entire armies fight and conquer in 40 degrees below if they had nothing to eat? Even Guards Corps and crack divisions needed bread and could not live by slogans alone. Yeremenko hit on the solution. He instructed his divisions: "Get your rations from the Germans!" The capture of field kitchens, supply columns, and food-stores became the most important military task. War reverted to its archaic form.

The extent to which the taking of booty influenced strategic decisions is made clear by Yeremenko:

From the interrogation of prisoners and the reports of our scouts behind the German lines we knew that there were large supply-dumps with huge quantities of foodstuffs in Toropets, since that town was a major supply base of Army Group Centre. This fact was of decisive importance to us. Here we had a chance of obtaining food supplies both for my own Army and our neighbour Army.

Major-General Tarasov, commanding 249th Rifle Division, was given the task of taking Toropets by a swift encircling action and seizing the dumps undamaged. The plan came off.

We captured approximately forty food stores containing butter and other fats, canned meat and fish, various concentrates, flour, groats, sugar, dried fruit, chocolate, and much else besides. The dumps simply became our own army stores: only the personnel changed. These supplies fed our Army through a whole month. The success of the Toropets action was of great importance to our operations. I felt very proud when I reported it to General Headquarters.

Yeremenko's details about his valuable booty are quite correct—but his account of the fighting shows a little doctoring. Toropets was not taken by just one division. Yeremenko employed the 249th Rifle Division, two rifle brigades—the 48th and the 39th—as well as units of 360th Rifle Division, to overcome the German defenders of the town. These consisted of 1200 field security troops, one regiment of 403rd Local Defence Division, one company of cyclists, and one platoon of Panzerj ägers of 207th Local Defence Division. These forces were joined, in the course of the fighting, by the remnants of the smashed 416th and 189th Infantry Regiments, as well as by a few dozen men from Fegelein's overrun SS Cavalry Brigade. This pitiful force was, of course, unable to stand up to Yeremenko's powerful steam-roller, nor was there any time to destroy the huge dumps at Toropets.

Almost equally sensational as the information about the supply situation of the Soviet Armies during the winter offensive of 1941—42 is the glimpse we are allowed by Colonel-General Yeremenko of the military preparations and the training of the force which was to win the palm of victory on the Central Front:

The information which the staff of our Army Group had sent me about the enemy's position seemed to me unreliable. I thought it doubtful that the Germans—as our Army Group maintained—should still possess a second defensive system with strongpoints and fortified field positions in deep echelon. I established that during the past two months not a single prisoner had been brought in from the sector of the German 123rd Infantry Division west of Lake Seliger. Immediately upon my arrival at Army headquarters I therefore gave orders to the 249th Rifle Division to carry out reconnaissance in strength and to bring in prisoners. The division discharged this task in an exemplary fashion. Within five days I possessed data about the enemy's system of defences and his units. No second line of defence was found to exist over a depth of 8 to 12 miles.

This instance illustrates the importance of information given by prisoners. The Soviets were past masters at getting what they wanted even from German soldiers determined to say nothing. The old-established right of a prisoner to refuse information had lost all practical significance in the German-Soviet war—on both sides.

Yeremenko attached great importance to having his formations undergo really tough training for winter warfare in forest country. To this end he had thought out a truly Draconian but effective method. He would order his divisions, complete with their commanders and officers, just as he found them, to spend four days in the dense forests in midwinter—without accommodation, without field kitchens, and without food supplies. They were not allowed to light any fires, even though the temperature was 30 to 40 degrees below. During the day there were military exercises under realistic conditions, and in the evening there were lectures. Melted snow and two handfuls of dried millet were the troops' daily rations.

No other Army in the world could make this kind of demand on its soldiers. But through the centuries this has always been one of the secrets of the Russian Army. It is unequalled in the endurance of hardships, and is still capable of fighting under such primitive conditions as would mean certain disaster for any Western Army. Naturally, the winter weather with its extreme frost was no kinder to the Soviet weapons and equipment than to those of the Germans, but the Russians were good at improvising. They made themselves independent of their frozen-up technical equipment.