To be sure, the German army’s defeat before Moscow meant
that Hitler’s belief in the fragility of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet
Union had been proved decisively wrong. Operation Barbarossa had signally
failed to achieve the aims with which it had set out in the confident days of
June 1941. After stemming the German tide before Moscow, the Red Army had gone
on to the offensive and forced the German army to retreat. As one German
officer wrote to his brother: ‘The Russians are defending themselves with a
courage and tenacity that Dr Goebbels characterizes as “animal”; it costs us
blood, as does every repulse of the attackers. Apparently,’ he went on with a
sarcasm that betrayed the German troops’ growing respect for the Red Army as
well as a widespread contempt for Goebbels among the officer class, ‘true
courage and genuine heroism only begin in Western Europe and in the centre of
this part of the world.’
The bitter cold of the depths of winter, followed by a
spring thaw that turned the ground to slush, made any fresh campaigning
difficult on any scale until May 1942. At this point, emboldened by the victory
over the Germans before Moscow, Stalin ordered a series of counter-offensives.
His confidence was further strengthened by the fact that the industrial
facilities relocated to the Urals and Transcaucasus had begun producing
significant quantities of military equipment - 4,500 tanks, 3,000 aircraft,
14,000 guns and more than 50,000 mortars by the start of the spring campaign in
May 1942. Over the summer and autumn of 1942, the Red Army command experimented
with a variety of ways of deploying the new tanks in combination with infantry
and artillery, learning from its mistakes each time. But Stalin’s first
counter-attacks proved to be as disastrous as the military engagements of the
previous autumn. Massive assaults on German forces in the Leningrad area failed
to relieve the beleaguered city, attacks on the centre were repulsed in fierce
fighting, and in the south the Germans held fast in the face of repeated Soviet
advances. In the Kharkov area a large-scale Soviet offensive in May 1942 ended
with 100,000 Red Army soldiers killed and twice as many taken prisoner. The
Soviet commanders had seriously underestimated German strength in the area, and
failed to establish air supremacy. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock,
back from his sick leave on 20 January 1942 as commander of Army Group South,
had decided that attack was the best form of defence, and fought a prolonged
and ultimately successful campaign in the Crimea. But all the time he remained
acutely aware of the thinness of the German lines and the continuing tiredness
of the troops, noting with concern that they were ‘fighting their way forward
with great difficulty and considerable losses’. In a major victory, Bock took
the city of Voronezh. The situation seemed to be improving. ‘I saw there with
my own eyes,’ wrote Hans-Albert Giese, a soldier from rural north Germany, ‘how
our tanks shot the Russian colossi to pieces. The German soldier is just better
in every department. I also think that it’ll be wrapped up here this year.’
But it was not to be. Hitler thought Bock dilatory and
over-cautious in the follow-up to the capture of Voronezh, allowing key Soviet
divisions to escape encirclement and destruction. Bock’s concern was with his
exhausted troops. But Hitler could not accept this. He relieved Bock of his
command with effect from 15 July 1942, replacing him with Colonel-General
Maximilian von Weichs. The embittered Bock spent the rest of the war in
effective retirement, obsessively trying to defend his conduct in the advance
from Voronezh, and hoping against hope for reinstatement. Meanwhile, on 16 July
1942, in order to take personal command of operations, Hitler moved his field
headquarters to a new centre, codenamed ‘Werewolf’, near Vinnitsa, in the
Ukraine. Transported from East Prussia in sixteen planes, Hitler, his
secretaries and his staff spent the next three and a half months in a compound
of damp huts, plagued by daytime heat and biting mosquitoes. Here too were now
located for the time being the operational headquarters of the Supreme Command
of the army and of the armed forces. The main thrust of the German summer
offensive was aimed at securing the Caucasus, with its rich oilfields. Fuel
shortages had played a significant role in the Moscow debacle the previous
winter. With typically dramatic overstatement, Hitler warned that if the
Caucasian oilfields were not conquered in three months, Germany would lose the
war. Having previously divided Army Group South into a northern sector (A) and
a southern sector (B), he now ordered Army Group A to finish off enemy forces
around Rostov-on-Don and then advance through the Caucasus, conquering the
eastern coast of the Black Sea and penetrating to Chechnya and Baku, on the
Caspian, both areas rich in oil. Army Group B was to take the city of
Stalingrad and push on to the Caspian via Astrakhan on the lower Volga. The
splitting of Army Group South and the command to launch both offensives
simultaneously while sending several divisions northwards to help in the attack
on Leningrad reflected Hitler’s continuing underestimation of the Soviet army.
Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder was in despair, his mood not
improved by Hitler’s obvious contempt for the leadership of the German army.
Whatever they thought in private, however, the generals saw
no alternative but to go along with Hitler’s plans. The campaign began with an
assault by Army Group A on the Crimea, in which Field Marshal Erich von
Manstein defeated twenty-one Red Army divisions, killing or capturing 200,000
out of the 300,000 soldiers facing his forces. The Red Army command had
realized too late that the Germans had, temporarily at least, abandoned their
ambition to take Moscow and were concentrating their efforts in the south. The
main Crimean city, Sevastopol, put up stiff resistance but fell after a siege
lasting a month, with 90,000 Red Army troops being taken prisoner. The whole
operation, however, had cost the German army nearly 100,000 casualties, and
when German, Hungarian, Italian and Romanian forces moved southwards they found
the Russians adopting a new tactic. Instead of fighting every inch of the way
until they were surrounded and destroyed, the Russian armies, with Stalin’s
agreement, engaged in a series of tactical retreats that denied the Germans the
vast numbers of prisoners they had hoped for. They took between 100,000 and
200,000 in three large-scale battles, many fewer than before. Undaunted, Army
Group A occupied the oilfields at Maykop, only to find the refineries had been
systematically destroyed by the retreating Russians. To mark the success of
their advance, mountaineering troops from Austria climbed Mount Elbrus, at
5,630 metres (or 19,000 feet) the highest point in the Caucasus, and planted
the German flag on the peak. Hitler was privately enraged, fuming at what he
saw as a diversion from the real objectives of the campaign. ‘I often saw
Hitler furious,’ reported Albert Speer later, ‘but seldom did his anger erupt
from him as it did when this report came in.’ He railed against ‘these crazy
mountain climbers who belong before a court-martial’. They were pursuing their
idiotic hobbies in the midst of a war, he exclaimed indignantly.’ His reaction
suggested a nervousness about the advance that was to turn out to be fully
justified.
In the north, Leningrad (St Petersburg) had been cut off by
German forces since 8 September 1941. With over 3 million people living in the
city and its suburbs, the situation soon became extremely difficult as supplies
dwindled to almost nothing. Soon the city’s inhabitants were starving, eating
cats, dogs, rats and even each other. A narrow and precarious line of
communication was kept open across the ice of Lake Ladoga, but the Russians
were not able to bring in more than a fraction of what was needed to feed the
city and keep its inhabitants warm. In the first winter of the siege, there
were 886 arrests for cannibalism. 440,000 people were evacuated, but, according
to German estimates, a million civilians died during the winter of 1941-2 from
cold and starvation. The city’s situation improved in the course of 1942, with
everyone growing and storing vegetables for the coming winter, half a million
more people being evacuated, and massive quantities of supplies and munitions
being shipped in across Lake Ladoga and stockpiled for when the freeze began. A
new pipeline laid down on the bottom of the lake pumped in oil for heating. 160
combat planes of the German air force were lost in a futile attempt to bomb the
Soviet communication line, while bombing raids on the city itself caused
widespread damage but failed to destroy it or break the morale of the remaining
citizens. Luck also came to the Leningraders’ aid at last: the winter of 1942-3
was far less severe than its calamitous predecessor. The frost came late, in
mid-November. As everything began to freeze once more, the city still stood in
defiance of the German siege.
Further south, a Soviet counter-attack on the town of Rzhev
in August 1942 was threatening serious damage to Army Group Centre. Halder
asked Hitler to allow a retreat to a more easily defensible line. ‘You always
come here with the same proposal, that of withdrawal,’ Hitler shouted at his
Chief of the General Army Staff. Halder lacked the same toughness as the
troops, Hitler told him. Halder lost his temper. He was tough enough, he said.
‘But out there, brave musketeers and lieutenants are falling in thousands and
thousands as a useless sacrifice in a hopeless situation simply because their commanders
are not allowed to make the only reasonable decision and have their hands tied
behind their backs.’ In Rzhev, Hans Meier-Welcker noticed an alarming
improvement in Soviet tactics. They were now beginning to co-ordinate tanks,
infantry and air support in a way they had not succeeded in doing before. The
Red Army troops were far better able than the Germans to cope with extreme
weather conditions, he thought. ‘We are amazed,’ he wrote in April 1942, ‘by
what the Russians are achieving in the mud!’ ‘Our columns of vehicles,’ wrote
one officer, ‘are stuck hopelessly in the morass of unfathomable roads, and
further supplies are already hard to organize.’ In such conditions, German
armour was often useless. By the summer, the troops were having to contend with
temperatures of 40 degrees in the shade and the massive dust-clouds thrown up
by the advancing motorized columns. ‘The roads,’ wrote the same officer to his
brother, ‘are shrouded in a single thick cloud of dust, through which man and
beast make their way: it’s troublesome for the eyes. The dust often swirls up
in thick pillars that then blow along the columns, making it impossible to see
anything for minutes at a time.’
Impatient with, or perhaps unaware of, such practical
problems, Hitler demanded that his generals press on with the advance.
‘Discussions with the Leader today,’ recorded Halder despairingly at the end of
August 1942, ‘were once more characterized by serious accusations levelled
against the military leadership at the top of the army. They are accused of
intellectual arrogance, incorrigibility and an inability to recognize the
essentials.’ On 24 September 1942, finally, Hitler dismissed Halder, telling
him to his face that he had lost his nerve. Halder’s replacement was
Major-General Kurt Zeitzler, previously in charge of coastal defences in the
west. A convinced National Socialist, Zeitzler began his tenure of office by
demanding that all members of the Army General Staff reaffirm their belief in
the Leader, a belief Halder had so self-evidently long since lost. By the end
of 1942, it was reckoned that one and a half million troops of various
nationalities had been killed, wounded, invalided out or taken prisoner on the
Eastern Front, nearly half the original invading force. There were 327,000
German dead. These losses were becoming increasingly hard to replace. The
eastern campaign had stalled. To try to break the impasse, the German army
advanced on Stalingrad, not only a major industrial centre and key distribution
point for supplies to and from the Caucasus, but also a city whose name lent it
a symbolic significance that during the coming months came to acquire an
importance far beyond anything else its situation might warrant.
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