Up to this point, the Luftwaffe's task in the east had consisted
almost exclusively of operativ warfare in indirect or increasingly
direct support of the army. Indeed, Hitler's Directive No. 21 had
explicitly ordered attacks on Soviet "strategic" targets such as
arms manufacturers to be postponed until after the
Archangelsk-Volga-Astrakhan line would be reached. However, the
need to consolidate the Smolensk pocket, as well as the inability
of the German High Command to make up its mind concerning the next
objective, created some breathing space. Working day and night, the
Luftwaffe brought its ground organization forward, a task that was
already being made difficult by the operations of scattered Red
Army units as well as the first partisan forces . It was only about
250 miles from the Dnieper to Moscow, making it possible to mount a
series of raids against the Soviet capital. The first and largest
attack was launched on the night of 21-22 July and was carried out
by 195 bombers; of these, 127 reached their targets and dropped 104
tons of high explosives as well as 46,000 small incendiary bombs.
From then until 5 December-the day the final German attack on
Moscow opened-75 more raids were mounted, all by night and the
great majority by forces numbering fewer than 50 aircraft each. The
1,000 Soviet antiaircraft guns concentrated in the city, as well as
opposition from Red Air Force fighters, forced the Luftwaffe to
operate mainly by night. Even if their bombers had been capable of
accurately hitting their targets, which they were not, this was not
nearly enough to make an impression. The Soviets later put the
total number of dead at 1,088, comparable to the figure killed at
Rotterdam in the previous year but a small fraction of those
destroyed by the vast Allied raids on German cities later in the
war.
As for maneuver warfare, the raids on Moscow undoubtedly
constituted a wasteful diversion of effort away from the main task,
which was and remained the destruction of the Soviet armed forces.
However, it should be remembered that, owing partly to logistic
reasons and partly to the need to clear up the still-seething
Smolensk pocket, ground operations on the central front were almost
at a standstill at this time. While Luftflotte 2's attack aircraft
took part in preventing the Soviets from breaking out of the
pocket, its bombers were not very suitable for this task. They were
therefore used on other missions even if the value of those
missions proved disappointing in the end. When large-scale operativ
warfare was resumed late in August, the raids on Moscow continued
but were greatly reduced until they only represented a small
fraction of the German effort. To the Soviets, they were never more
than a nuisance, but they probably did tie down greater forces
committed to defending the city than were ever committed to
attacking it.
By the end of August, after almost a month of stationary
fighting, Army Group Center had its supply situation improved to
the extent that the railway supporting its southern flank now
reached the city of Gomel. This enabled Guderian's Panzer
Group 2, supported by the newly created Second Army, to start its
drive southward into the Ukraine, where it acted in conjunction
with Gen Ewald von Kleist's Panzer Group 1 coming up from Kiev. The
Germans thought they were operating against only the Soviet Fifth
Army; however, the entire enemy force consisted of parts of several
other armies as well, so that the operation took longer and yielded
far more prisoners and booty than originally expected. As usual,
the missions of Fliegerkorps II and Fliegerkorps V, supporting the
two panzer groups, were to gain and maintain air superiority,
isolate the pocket against counterattacks from the outside, and
attack the encircled Soviet forces until they laid down their
arms.
Beginning on 28 August, Fliegerkorps II supported Guderian's
crossing of the river Desna by blasting away at the Soviet
artillery positions on the other side. It next flew missions
against the Soviet railways on Guderian's exposed left flank while
using its dive bombers to blast a way for the panzers on their way
south, helping them to advance rapidly and preventing the bulk of
the Soviet forces from withdrawing. Simultaneously,
Fliegerkorps V launched attacks on roads and railroads in the
Romodan-Poltava area, prevented a counterattack by Soviet forces
coming from the Lubny-Lokhvitsa-Priluki-Yagotin area, helped the
army capture Kiev ("to be reduced to rubble and ashes," according
to Hitler's order), and in general bombed the encircled Soviet
forces, making them ready for surrender. The war diary of this
corps for the period is one of the few documents to survive the
war, making a quantitative analysis of these operations possible.
It shows that the forces of Fliegerkorps V flew 1,422 sorties
between 12 and 21 September alone, losing 17 aircraft destroyed, 14
damaged, nine soldiers dead, 18 missing, and five wounded. In
return, they dropped 577 tons of bombs and 96 cases of incendiaries
(presumably over Kiev) and destroyed 65 enemy aircraft in the air
and 42 on the ground. They also destroyed 23 tanks; 2,171 motor
vehicles; six antiaircraft batteries; 52 trains; 28 locomotives
(this apart from 335 motor vehicles and 36 trains damaged) ;
demolished one bridge ; and interrupted 18 railway lines. To the
extent that these figures mean anything at all, it seems that the
Schwerpunkt during this, as during all German mobile operations,
was on interdiction; this is indicated by the small number of tanks
destroyed as well as the absence from the list of major weapons
such as ground artillery.
Meanwhile, along the Dnieper on both sides of Smolensk, the
rebuilding of the railways and their conversion to standard gauge
was proceeding apace. Fliegerkorps VIII, its mission in the north
only half accomplished, was brought back under the command of
Luftflotte 2. Panzer Group 3 was taken from Army Group North and
returned to its original position on the left of Army Group Center,
where it was subordinated to the Ninth Army; these were thus the
same forces that had formed the northern arm in the battles of
Minsk and Smolensk. To compensate for the loss of Guderian, Hitler
ordered Gen Erich Hoepner's Panzer Group 4 to be used as well. In
this way, it operated under the command of Fourth Army at Roslavl
on the south flank of Army Group Center, where Guderian had
previously been. Meanwhile, Guderian himself was to create a third
prong by driving due north-northwest through Bryansk towards Tula.
The German forces now totaled 70 divisions, including four armored
and eight motorized; average actual strength was probably around 70
percent, up from 50 percent five weeks earlier. Opposing them were
83 Soviet divisions of the western theater, commanded by Gen Georgi
Zhukov. Its principal parts, from north to south, were the West
Front, the Reserve Front and, facing Guderian, the Bryansk
Front.
Guderian's offensive opened on 30 September, and the remaining
German armies following two days later. At first, the new offensive
promised to become as successful as anything in the past; on 10
October, forward units of Panzer Group 3 and Panzer Group 4 met at
Vyazma, trapping some 300,000 Soviet troops. Meanwhile, Panzer
Group 2 (now redesignated Second Panzer Army), operating in
conjunction with Second Army on its left, came up from the south
and succeeded in working its way behind Gen A. I. Eremenko's
Bryansk Front. At this time, the weather broke and the autumn rains
began. The entire countryside turned into a vast sea of mud that
prevented wheeled vehicles from moving at all and caused tracked
ones to move forward only slowly and at an enormous cost in
fuel.
As the offensive began, the Luftwaffe's raids on Moscow were
reduced in scale until they became of nuisance value only.
Luftflotte 2 went back to its usual role of interdiction behind the
front; on 4 and 5 October, it was able to achieve very good results
against Soviet rail transport, including the destruction of no
fewer than 10 trains loaded with tanks. However, when the weather
broke, it too found itself reduced to flying isolated sorties
against such targets as could still be identified. There were even
days when the entire air fleet, its ground organization suffering
grievously under the impossible conditions, was only able to get
one or two reconnaissance aircraft into the air. Red Air Force
resistance, favored by prepared airfields and short lines of
communications, was stiffening and had to be held down. Under such
circumstances, Fliegerkorps II was only able to achieve isolated
successes, such as preventing a bridge over the river Snopot from
being blown up until German armored units could arrive on the
scene. Farther to the south, it was all it could do to keep the
supply routes of Second Panzer Army open against the usual remnants
of Soviet forces that, though outflanked on the map and supposedly
defeated, had not been destroyed. In doing so, it suffered many
losses due to the bad weather.
The tremendous German success in the autumn battles had left
Hitler and the OKH in an optimistic mood. The double encirclement
at Vyazma and Bryansk had yielded as many as 350,000 prisoners,
though even this huge figure did not account for many Soviet forces
that had made good their escape on the southern part of the front.
The continuation of the offensive had originally been ordered for
17 November. However, a few days after this date, the weather
brought snow and fog with temperatures sinking to below zero
centigrade. Fliegerkorps II was taken out of the line and sent to
the Mediterranean, where the British had driven Rommel back from
Tobruk and were threatening Tripolitania. With them went the
commander of Luftflotte 2, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was
destined to spend the rest of his career commanding the German
forces in the Mediterranean theater. All that was left in front of
Moscow was Fliegerkorps VIII, whose commander, Gen Wolfram von
Richthofen, took over from Kesselring on 30 November. By this time,
the airfields used by the Germans were scarcely serviceable, and
the few units that were still able to advance at all were being
overwhelmed by the cold. On 8 December, faced by a massive Soviet
counterattack that threatened the flanks of Army Group Center on
both sides of Moscow, Hitler reluctantly ordered the offensive to
be abandoned.
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