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मुख्य Death of the Wehrmacht :The German Campaigns of 1942
Death of the Wehrmacht :The German Campaigns of 1942Robert M. Citino
A deft, lively, and highly readable history of the demise of the German way of war. As the allies found an antidote to the "shock and awe" approach of the Wehrmacht, the once mighty German army underwent an epic fall from remarkable operational victories to crushing operational defeats, forced to take on a defensive stance in a war it could never win.
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and For Hitler 1 the 942 was a key War World victories military, turning point of as an overstretched but Wehrmacht replaced lethal still II, German and huge brilliant gains with territorial stalemates and strategic retreats. In this major reevaluation of that crucial year, Robert Citino shows that the German army's emerging woes were rooted as much addiction to the "war of in its movement" enemy —attempts "short in and smash to campaigns— lively" as they were in Hitler's management of the war. the deeply flawed From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in Alamein to the catastrophic defeats at El and Wehrmocht Stalingrad, Death of the offers May an eye-opening new view of upon that decisive year. Building widely respected critique German Way of War, how campaigns the in The shows Citino of 1 his 942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/ German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a and decisive military victories tide turned against geared to quick coped when the it. Citino also reconstructs the generals' view of the German war and illuminates the multiple contingencies that might have produced more favorable results. In addition, he cites the fatal extreme aggressiveness of German commanders like Rommel and assesses how Erwin ihe German O DEATH OF THEWEHRMACHT MODERN WAR STUDIES Theodore A. Wilson General Editor Raymond J. A. Callahan Garry Clifford Jacob W. Kipp Jay Luvaas Allan R. Millett Carol Rear don Dennis Showalter David R. Stone Series Editors DEATH OF THEWEHRMACHT The German Campaigns Robert UNIVERSITY PRESS OF of 1942 M. Citino KANSAS — © 2007 by the University Press of Kansas All rights reserved Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 6604; 9), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and State University, Fort Hays State University, is operated and funded by Emporia Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Citino, Robert Michael, 1958- Death of the Wehrmacht cm. p. (Modern war : the German campaigns of 1942 / Robert M. Citino. studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1. 978-0-7006-1531-5 (cloth Germany. Wehrmacht : alk. paper) —History—World War, 1939-1945. World War, —Campaigns—Eastern Front. World War, 1939-1945— Campaigns Germany— History, Military— 20th century. North. 1939-1945 Africa, 2. 3. 4. I. Title. D757.C56 2007 94o.54'i343 — dc22 2007016881 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 The paper used waste. It is 3 2 1 in this publication acid free and meets the is recycled and contains 50 percent postconsumer minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39. 48-1992. OCT 1007 To my wife, Roberta. Fighter. Survivor. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction ix xiii i i. From Victory 2. The Wehrmacht Reborn: The Crimean Campaign 50 3. The Wehrmacht Reborn: 85 to Defeat: 1941 14 Annihilation Tobruk 4. Battering the British: Gazala and 5. Debacle: 6. Coming to a Halt: North Africa 7. Coming to a Halt: The Caucasus and 8. The End: 9. Conclusion: Notes The Summer Campaign The Death of the 116 152 193 El Alamein and Stalingrad Stalingrad 267 Wehrmacht 311 Bibliography Index 1942 Kharkov at 385 411 Two photograph sections appear following pages 182 and 258. 303 223 Illustrations Maps Map Map Map 2. Operation iy. concentric operations in Yugoslavia 24 Operation Marita: Bewegungskrieg in Greece, April 1941 3. Bewegungskrieg in the Kerch peninsula: Manstein's drive on i. May Kerch, Map 1942 29 73 Thrust and counterthrust in the Izyum salient: the battle of Kharkov, May 1942 101 Map 5. Operation Theseus: Rommel's plan for Gazala, May 4. 1942 Map 134 Operation Blue: 6. conceived) Map 7. Mackensen's 8. 10. 11. 1942 Map Map Mersa Matruh, June a surprise for the 90th Light 207 Last gasp in the desert: the Panzerarmee 1942 216 Operational chaos: the Wehrmacht's at Alam Haifa, 30, summer offensive, 255 12. Oil war: 13. End Army Group A's lunge into the Caucasus 229 of the line in the Caucasus: Mackensen's drive on Ordzhonikidze Map at 196 Alamein (Ruweisat Ridge): 9. First August Map Panzer Corps in Operation Blue, Smashing the center: the Panzerarmee Division Map ride: the III 179 26-27, 1942 Map offensive, 1942 (as 161 July 1942 Map German summer 241 Death of the Wehrmacht I: the Allied attack at El Alamein, October 1942 284 Map 15. Death of the Wehrmacht II: Operation Uranus, November 14. 1942 295 Photographs Young German infantry on the long march to the Don 183 German antitank gun in action against a Yugoslavian bunker near Prevalje 183 ix x Illustrations Yugoslav soldiers 184 German troops smashing their way into the Soviet Union, 184 Bewegnngskrieg 1941 The Germans would crown the successful fighting in the Crimea with the storming of Sevastopol 185 German assault troops on the north shore of Severnaya Bay, June 1942 185 Wehrmacht Belbek The two infantry enjoying valley, Sevastopol some badly needed down-time 186 1942 adversaries at Kharkov, in the May 1942 186 A well-drilled German machine gun team in position at Kharkov 187 General Erwin Rommel Figures 14 and 15. Forgotten armies Margin of survival 189 Margin of victory Rolling toward its June 1942 in the field in 187 188 189 doom 190 Figures 19 and 20. In a desert landscape lacking even rudimentary terrain cover, materiel losses were always going to be high 190 A hardy British Matilda tank The war of materiel 191 192 Operation Blue: German motorized column heading east 259 Operation Blue: SdKfz 251/10 halftrack of the XIV Panzer Corps on way to Stalingrad 259 Having crossed the Don and reached the Volga, German infantry found tougher fighting on the outskirts of Stalingrad than they had the 260 Father and son 260 General Friedrich von Paulus having expected of Stalingrad a word with his gunners outside 261 City fight in Stalingrad 261 The Wehrmacht conquers yet another factory in Stalingrad, although the battle for the city rages on 262 Plunging into the Caucasus 262, 263 The war of movement comes to a halt 263 Even within a war noted for its detailed photographic record, these images of German mountain troops in the Hochkaukasus are still striking The 264 death of the Wehrmacht 265 Memorial stone to the Afrika Korps in the Western Desert 265 Illustrations Death of the Wehrmacht. Final resting place of German mountain troops en route to the Black Sea port of Tuapse 266 The Wehrmacht's nemesis in the last years of the war: a U.S. M-4 Sherman tank with an apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition 266 xi Acknowledgments No book is truly written alone, and to acknowledge the fruition. Many many people want to take the opportunity I who years have passed since there, Professors Barbara my my projects to graduate years which University, but not the fondness with my mentors help to bring I recall at Indiana studying under and Charles Jelavich. All of my books are, in a sense, a tribute to the hands. My colleagues within the field also deserve recognition. Among the many whose education I received kindness, friendship, and scholarly advice I at their have re- ceived gratefully over the years are Dennis E. Showalter (Colorado Wawro (North Texas State), Richard L. DiNardo Corps Command and Staff College), and the formidably hos- College), Geoffrey (Marine James F. Tent (University of Alabama at Birmingham). I would also like to thank Gerhard L. Weinberg (University of North Carolina) and James S. Corum (U.S. Army Command and General Staff pitable College) for their expert advice in the preparation of this manuscript. A special thanks is also in order to Military History Institute (MHI) all those at the new U.S. in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Army The col- no more welcoming place in the profession than the MHI's reading room. The staff could not be more helpful to the visiting scholar: Conrad Crane, the director of the MHI, and Richard Sommers, the chief of patron services, have every reason to be proud. I would also like to mention archivist David A. Keough, who never fails to teach me something every time we talk, and chief librarian Louise Arnold-Friend, who must put in her share of twenty-five-hour days, based on the excellent condition of the materials I examined while I was there. I will confess that I was one of many who didn't think it would be possible to replace the old MHI, but my first five minutes in the new one dispelled any Luddite nostalgia I might have been harboring. Closer to home, my colleagues at Eastern Michigan University have given me more in the past two years than I could ever hope to repay, lection of materials found there is nonpareil, and there is XIII xiv Acknowledgments with James Holoka, Stephen Mucher, Ronald Delph, and deserving pride of place. wife Roberta and my And of course, to Mark Higbee my family—my wonderful daughters Allison, Laura, and Emily simply no words to thank you adequately for all the love. —there are DEATH OF THEWEHRMACHT Introduction Ponder for a moment military history. It is this dramatic scene from the pages of 1942, a year of fate for the German "Incredible," he muttered to himself, "absolutely ing." Marshal Fedor von Bock stood just southeast at his hilltop of Lozovaia, shaking his head at German army: overwhelm- observation post, the scene. The vista beneath him was one that few generals in history had ever been privileged to see: an entire enemy army surrounded in a tiny pocket few miles away. He focused his field glasses here, then there, flitting back and forth. The entire area couldn't have been more than two miles wide from east to east, perhaps ten miles from north to south, and every inch of it was seething with activity. Massed formations of dusty brown infantry, tank columns so dense you could probably walk from one vehicle to the other without touching the ground, guns of every shape and description all milling about, moving hither and yon without apparent plan or purpose. Above them thundered hundreds of Luftwaffe ground attack aircraft, Richthofen's boys: Stukas and 109s and Ju-88s, bombing and strafing and herding. With so many men and tanks, guns and horses, packed into such a tight space, they were an impossible-to-miss target. The airmen were probably licking their chops, he thought, and the same went for his gunners. As he surveyed the scene, he could just a — from all points of the compass into the helpless, writhing mass below him. There were explosions everywhere; every see artillery firing square inch of the pocket roiled with fire and smoke. He thought of a term he had learned so many years ago as a cadet in the War Academy: Kesselschlacht, the "cauldron battle." It was the perfect term to describe army being boiled alive. what was going on below: an entire enemy He remembered studying the campaigns of the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Blucher, and Moltke. They were the gamblers of their day: bold maneuvers, daring attacks from 2 Introduction flank and rear, battles of encirclement. And he remembered another word: Vernichtungsschlacht, the "battle of annihilation." There was a massive explosion in the killing fields below. Bock couldn't know it, but a single 500-pound bomb delivered from a Stuka had just struck a Soviet ammunition convoy. The exploboth primary and secondary had killed or wounded over sions — — 300 men. Were those screams he heard? Horses? Men? No matter. He was back to his reverie. He thought once more of those longago classes, the handsome, red-bound books. Der Schlachterfolg, they were called "Success in Battle." They contained the battles and operations of all the great German captains, and they were required reading in the first-year course. The great cavalry commander Seydlitz, slashing across the march route of the hapless French army at Rossbach and destroying it in an hour. Yorck crossing the Elbe River at Wartenburg into the rear of Napoleon's army, the maneuver that trapped the emperor and led directly to his defeat at Leipzig. Hadn't the king given him a new title after that one? Yes, he thought, "Yorck von Wartenburg." Best of all, Moltke's elegant maneuver at Koniggratz, coolly risking the destruction of one army while waiting for another one to slam into the Austrian flank. Bock had long ago memorized the details of every one of these battles, could recite their orders of battle, could still diagram each one on a chalkboard from memory. He was sixty-one, but he felt young again. Not one of those immortal battles, he suddenly realized, could rival what was happening beneath him at this very moment. For ease, for swiftness, for decisiveness, this might be the greatest victory in the history of the German army. "They'll be adding another name to that list," he chuckled. Maybe he'd even get a title, like old Yorck. He chuckled and rolled it from his tongue: "Fedor von Bock und Kharkov." At Marshal Bock's feet, an enemy army was dying. — The above scene may seem means anything to the means the turning point of strange. If 1942 informed student of World War II, it the war, the year of El Alamein and Stalingrad (and, in the Pacific, the year of Guadalcanal and Midway), the turning of the tide the "hinge of fate," in Winston Churchill's memorable phrase. It was the year in which the German army (the Wehrmacht) died and took German dreams of conquest along with it. But it was also a year that began with no fewer than five of the greatest victories in the long history of German arms: at Kerch, Kharkov, and Sevastopol in the Soviet Union, and 1 — 2 Introduction 3 Gazala and Tobruk in North Africa. Here the Wehrmacht wrote a new chapter in its already impressive resume of battlefield success. On the strategic level, things had turned sour for Germany in Deat Germany, already war with Great Britain, a conflict that it tried half-heartedly to end in the summer and fall of 1940, had done nothing but add enemies since then. In June 1941, with Britain still unconquered, it had launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union. The early weeks of the campaign had seen the Wehrmacht smash one Soviet army after another: at Bialystok, at Minsk, at Smolensk, and especially at Kiev. As summer turned to fall, Barbarossa became Operation Typhoon, the drive on Moscow. The Germans were within sight of the Soviet capital by December when the Red Army launched a great counteroffensive that drove them back in some confusion. The next day, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the German Fiihrer, Adolf Hitler, decided to join them in their war on America. Earlier in the year, Germany had been at war with Britain alone. Now, just six months later, it was at war with an immense and wealthy enemy coalition, which Churchill, with a nod to his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, dubbed the "Grand Alli- cember ance." 1941. at 3 The Grand Alliance controlled most of the world's resources. It included the preeminent naval and colonial power (Britain), the largest land power (the Soviet Union), and the globe's financial and industrial giant (the United States) Germany. Harnessing —more than enough potential power to smash that dominating power, however, proved to be The United had come into the war with only the barest idea of how it intended to fight it. It would become evident to all concerned that there was a world of difference between potentially beating Germany and actually defeating the Gera difficult thing. man army on a field States, in particular, of battle. The Problem: The German Way of War would prove to be harder than anyone could have imagined. If there was one army in the world that was used to fighting from a position of material inferiority, this was the one. Since the earliest days of the German state, a unique military culture had evolved, a German way of war. Its birthplace was the kingdom of Prus- Performing that sia. feat Starting in the seventeenth century with Frederick William, the Great Elector, Prussia's rulers recognized that their small, relatively 4 Introduction impoverished state on the European periphery had to fight wars that 4 were kurtz und vives (short and lively). Crammed into a tight spot in the middle of Europe, surrounded by states that vastly outweighed in terms of manpower and wars of attrition. a way fast could not win long, drawn-out start, Prussia's military problem was to find ended in a decisive battlefield vicstorm against the enemy, pounding had to unleash a and hard. The mans it to fight short, sharp wars that tory. Its conflicts it From the resources, it solution to Prussia's strategic problem was something the Ger- called Bewegungskrieg, the "war of movement." This way of war maneuver on the operational level. It was not simply tactical maneuverability or a faster march rate, but the movement of large units like divisions, corps, and armies. Prussian commanders, and their later German descendants, sought to maneuver these formations in such a way that they could strike the mass of the enemy army a sharp, even annihilating, blow as rapidly as possible. It might involve stressed a surprise assault against an unprotected flank, or both flanks. On sev- eral notable occasions, it even resulted in entire Prussian or German armies getting into the rear of an of any general schooled in the ally, a art. enemy army, the dream scenario The goal was Kesselschlacht: liter- "cauldron battle," but more specifically a battle of encirclement, one that hemmed in enemy forces on all sides before destroying them through a series of concentric operations. This vibrant and aggressive operational posture imposed certain requirements on German armies: an extremely high level of battlefield aggression and an officer corps that tended to launch attacks no matter what the odds, to give just two examples. The Germans also found over the years that conducting an operational-level war of movement required a flexible system of command that left a great deal of initiative in the hands of lower-ranking commanders. It is customary today to refer to this command system as Auftragstaktik (mission tactics): the higher commander devised a general mission (Auftrag), and then left the means of achieving it to the officer on the spot. It is more accurate, however, to speak, as the Germans themselves did, of the "independence of the lower commander" (Selbstandigkeit der Unterfiihrer). A s up a situation and act on his own was an equalizer for a numerically weaker army, allowing it to grasp opportunities that might be lost if it had to wait for reports and orders to climb up and down the chain of command. It wasn't always an elegant thing to behold. Prussian-German military history is filled with lower-level commanders making untimely commander's ability to size Introduction 5 advances, initiating highly unfavorable, even bizarre, attacks, and gen- — making nuisances of themselves at least from the perspective of the higher command. There were men like General Eduard von Flies, who launched one of the most senseless frontal assaults in military hiserally tory at the battle of Langensalza in 1866 against a dug-in Hanoverian 6 army that outnumbered him two to one General Karl von Steinmetz, whose impetuous command of the 1st Army in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 almost upset the entire operational applecart and General Hermann von Francois, whose refusal to follow orders almost de; 7 ; railed the East Prussian campaign in 1914. 8 Although these events are nearly forgotten today, they represent the active, aggressive side of German opposed to the more thoughtful, intellectual approach of Karl Maria von Clausewitz, Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, or Helmuth von Molkte the Elder. Put differently, these hard chargers in the field tended to elevate the strength of the commander's will over a rational calculus of ends and means. Indeed, although Bewegungskrieg may have been a logical solution to Prussia's strategic problem, it was hardly a panacea. The classic illustration of its strengths and weaknesses was the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Frederick the Great opened the conflict with a classic the tradition, as front-loaded campaign, assembling an immense force, seizing the by invading the Austrian province of Bohemia, and pounding the Austrian army in front of Prague with a series of highly aggressive attacks. Unfortunately, he also pounded his own army in strategic initiative the process. When the Frederick attacked Austrians sent an army to the relief of Prague, 9 it too, at Kolin. It may have been his own fault, or may have been due to an overambitious subordinate commander (a general named, of all things, von Manstein), but what Frederick init tended as an attack onto the Austrian right flank turned into assault against a well-prepared to 35,000. The a frontal enemy who outnumbered him 50,000 Prussians were mauled and retreated in disarray. Frederick was now in serious trouble. The Austrians were resurgent, the Russians advancing, if ponderously, from the east, and the French moving on him from the west. He retrieved the situation by some of the most decisive victories of the entire era. First he crushed the French at Rossbach (November 1757), where another ambitious subordinate, the cavalry commander Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz (who, like Manstein, would also have a namesake general in World War II), played the crucial role, actually maneuvering his entire cavalry force 10 across the march route of the French army. Then, at Leuthen in December, Frederick's keen gift for operational maneuver resulted in 6 Introduction the whole Prussian army dramatically appearing on the perpendicular against a weakly defended Austrian left flank and a shocked Austrian high command. Finally, in August 1758, he warded off the Russians at Zorndorf, a murderous and close-fought battle that saw him march his army around the Russian flank to attack it from the rear. Frederick had saved himself, for the moment, with classic examples of short, lively campaigns. But with his enemies refusing to make peace with him, the overall situation remained dire. The alliance facing him was huge and had many times his own number of men, cannon, and horse. His only way out now was to fight from the central position, holding secondary sectors with small forces (often commanded by his brother, Prince Henry ), rushing armies to whatever sector appeared most threatened in order to bring the enemy to battle there and crush him. Even while Prussia sat on the overall strategic defensive, however, the army's task was to remain a Well-honed instrument of attack. It had to be ready for pounding marches, aggressive assaults, and then more pounding marches. It couldn't destroy Frederick's adversaries, either singly or collectively. What it had to do instead was to land such a hard blow against any one of them France, let us say that Louis XV might well decide that seeking another round with Frederick wasn't worth the money, time, or effort, and therefore decide to drop out of the war. It wasn't an easy mission for the Prussian army, especially because the incessant attacks it launched in the first two years of the war had dulled its edge, with casualties among the officers and elite regiments being especially high. Prussia fought all its succeeding wars in similar fashion. It opened them by attempting to win rapid victories through the war of movement. Some, such as the October 1806 campaign against Napoleon, misfired horribly. Here the Prussian army deployed aggressively, far out on a limb to the west and south. It was an ideal spot to initiate offensive operations as Frederick the Great might have conceived them. Unfortunately, Frederick was long gone, his generals were in many cases well into their eighties, and they were now facing the Emperor of the French and his Grande Armee, two forces of nature in their respective primes. Prussia paid the price at the twin battles of Jena and entire clear 11 12 — Auerstadt. It was Bewegungskrieg of a sort. Unfortunately, — all of the Bewegung was performed by the French. Other Prussian campaigns succeeded beyond their commanders' wildest dreams. In 1866, General Helmuth von Moltke's dramatic victory at the battle of Koniggratz essentially won the war with Austria 13 Introduction just eight days after it began. 14 The main 7 action in the war with France was similarly brief. Prussian troops crossed the French border on August 4 and fought the climactic battle of St. Privat-Gravelotte two weeks later. Major operations in this war ended with an entire French army, and the emperor Napoleon III, bottled up in Sedan and smashed from all compass points simultaneously, perhaps the purest expression of the Kesselschlacht concept in history. The year 1914 was the major test for the Prussian (and now the German) doctrine of making war. The opening campaign was an immense operation involving the mobilization and deployment of no fewer than eight field armies; it was the brainchild of Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the chief of the General Staff until 1906. Like all German commanders, he had set a general operational framework (usually labeled, incorrectly, the Schlieffen Plan). What he most certainly did not do was to draw up any sort of detailed or prescriptive maneuver scheme. That, as always in the German way of war, was up to the commanders on the spot. The opening campaign in the west came within an inch of winning a decisive operational victory. The Germans smashed four of France's five field armies, nearly trapping the final one at Namur. They came far closer to winning the war than historians have generin 1870 15 ally assumed, but eventually came to grief at the battle of the Marne in September 1914. The failure at the Marne was the decisive moment of World War I. For German staff officers and commanders alike, it felt as if they had returned to the time of the Seven Years' War. All the ingredients were There was the same sense of being surrounded by a coalition of powerful enemies. There was the same sense that the army would there. had been before the bloodletting of that first autumn. Its new commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, went so far as to tell Kaiser Wilhelm II that the army was a "broken instrument" incapable of winning any sort of annihilating victory. Most problematic was the locking of the western front into trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, and a solid wall of backing artillery. This was no longer mobile Bewegungskrieg, but its exact opposite, what the Germans call Stellungskrieg, the static war of position. With both armies hunkered down in trenches and hurling shells at one another, it was never be as powerful by definition a as it war of attrition, and that was a conflict that Germany could never win. Germany's only hope lay opponents out of the war. Although the Germans Even now, however, there was in driving one of its a sense that 8 Introduction did indeed become experts at defensive war, warding off a nearly con- stant series of Allied offensives, they also launched repeated offen- own, attempting to restart the war of movement that German officers continued to view as normative. For the most part, these offensive operations targeted the Russians, although there were huge offensives in the west in both 191 6 (against Verdun) and 191 sives of their (the so-called Kaiserschlacht, or "Kaiser's battle," of the spring). were also large-scale offensives against the Italians at Caporetto in Romanians 1917. It is significant that in 1916 There and the the post-1918 profes- German army, the weekly Militar- Wbchenblatt, for example, spent almost as much time studying the Romanian campaign, a classic example of a rapid Bewegungskrieg, as it did the much sional literature of the 16 campaigns of trench warfare in the west. Those four long years of trench warfare exhausted the German army and eventually ground it down, but they did not change the way the German officer corps viewed military operations. It should be clear by now that the Wehrmacht's situation after 1941, ringed by powerful enemies who vastly outnumbered it, was nothing particularly new in German military history. There were unique aspects of this war, such as Hitler's vast plans for European and world empire, his racialism and eagerness to commit genocide, and the willing participation of the Wehrmacht itself in the crimes of his regime. On the operational level, however, it was business as usual. The Wehrmacht, its staff, and its officer corps were all doing what the Prussian army had done under Frederick the Great and what the Kaiser's army had done under generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. Until the end of the war, it sought to land a resounding blow against one of its enemies a blow hard enough to shatter the enemy coalition, or at least to demonstrate the price that the Allies would have pay for victory. The strategy failed, but it certainly did its share of damage in those last four years, and it retained enough sting to the very end to give British, Soviet, and American commanders alike plenty of prema- larger — ture gray hairs. Although launching repeated offensives in order to smash the enemy coalition failed in the end, no one at the time or since has been able to come up with a better solution to Germany's strategic conundrum. A war-winning strategy? Not in this case, obviously. The optimal one for a Germany facing a world of enemies? Perhaps, perhaps not. An operational posture consistent with German military history and tradition as it had unfolded over the centuries? Absolutely. Introduction 9 The Work Wehrmacht provided a characteristic answer to the question, "What do you do when the blitzkrieg fails?" by launching another one. The attempt to defeat the Soviet Union in a lightning campaign in 1941 had come to grief in front of Moscow, and the winter that followed was one of the worst periods in the history of the German army. In 1942, the It survived, but it suffered massive casualties (over 1 million) and losses equipment and weapons that it had still not made good the following spring. Despite the low manpower and poor supply situation, the high command Adolf Hitler, the staffs of the army command and armed forces command, and the chief of the General Staff, General Franz Haider immediately began planning for another offensive round in the Soviet Union. They chose the southern sector, aiming for the oilfields of the Caucasus, a strategic target whose seizure would provide Germany with the fuel it needed to fight a war of almost indefinite duration and permanently cripple the Soviet war economy. Along the way, the army would have to block Soviet reinforcements from arriving in the sector by either masking or seizing the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. Before this offensive, code-named Operation Blue, could begin, there also had to be certain preliminary operations: clearing Soviet forces out of the Crimea, for example, or cleaning up a number of jagged salients along the highly irregular front. For an army that had barely survived the previous winter, it was a full operational plate. So large were the demands that it would place on the Wehrmacht that the high command had no choice but to rely on the allied and satellite nations for much of its manpower: Italians, Hungarians, and especially Romanians. Although the mass of the Wehrmacht would be heading east this spring, a significant German force was already in contact with the British in North Africa. The "western desert" (as in "west of Egypt") was the highly unusual turf of General Erwin Rommel's Panzer armee. It, too, was a coalition force: a pair of German Panzer Divisions (grouped together into the Afrika Korps); the German 90th Light Division, a motorized formation especially equipped and trained for desert conditions; and a mass of Italian divisions, a few of them motorized (Ariete armored division, for example), but most straight leg infantry. As May dawned, Rommel's army was facing a much larger and better-equipped British 8th Army, ensconced in a toiigh defenin — — 17 sive position that stretched out into the desert south of Gazala. The 10 Introduction many ways unique, but Wehrmacht was marching off operational problems of desert warfare were in some things never change. Just to attack a much larger and Rommel react to as the wealthier adversary in Operation Blue, entrenched enemy that outnumbered him, by doing the characteristic thing: launching an offensive at Gazala, Operation Theseus, that would mark the apogee of so, too, did his situation, an his career. Death of the Wehrmacht is intended as a sequel to my previous book, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich. Where the former work covered 300 years of military history, this one roughly seven months in the operational life of the German army, starting with the decisions to launch Operations Blue and Theseus and ending with the destruction of the Panzerarmee at the will analyze battle of El Alamein and the encirclement of the German 6th at Stalingrad. It will operations in provide a detailed account of German Army military theaters during those fateful months, both in the all North African with an overview of the campaigns of 1941 in both the Balkans and in the Soviet Union, we will turn to the renewed fighting in the east, the launching of what 18 the Germans called the "second campaign." The action will begin in the nearly isolated peninsula known as the Crimea, where General Erich von Manstein would write another chapter in his own personal resume, first by smashing Soviet armies in the eastern Crimea in the highly mobile Kerch campaign, a decisive and improbable victory that is nearly forgotten today, and then launching a successful, although eastern and fronts. Starting bloody, assault on what was at the time the strongest fortress in the world: Sevastopol. From here, we move north. Operation Fridericus was one of the preliminary offensives to regularize the front in the east before the start of Blue. Directed at a sharp bulge jutting into the German lines between German-held Kharkov and Soviet-held Izyum (the "Izyum salient"), it was on the launching pad and ready to go when something unusual happened. The Red Army launched an offensive of its own, this one out of the Izyum salient toward Kharkov. It was a new model Soviet force, one that relied on tanks and more tanks, very different from the infantry horde that the Germans had come to expect from 1941. The clash of armor would be one of the largest in the war so far, and the result would be one of the greatest victories of annihilation in the history of the German army. Kerch and Kharkov, Rommel own grand offensive at Gazala. The situation seemed Just weeks after decisive victories at would launch his Introduction particularly unpropitious for an offensive. Manpower levels, 11 numbers — of tanks and guns, the inherent strength of the defense all these crucial factors tilted decisively toward the British. The Panzerarmee had something too: not only a skilled general, but a for seeking the operational-level opening, way of war that called one that scoffed at an "or- dinary victory" in favor of an annihilating one. Rommel's solution to the Gazala problem was simple: march mechanized army, in the dead of night and across a featureless desert, around the flank of his adversary. The British woke up to more than their morning tea: they found an entire tank army in the rear of their carefully constructed defensive line. When all was said and done, the 8th Army had been routed, Rommel had seized the fortress, Tobruk, that had eluded him the previous year, and the Panzerarmee was in Egypt, driving hard for Alexandria, the Nile River, and the Suez Canal. It was an amazing May, but everyone in the Wehrmacht planning circles knew that the main event was yet to come. Operation Blue began well and ended badly, a microcosm of German operations in both world wars. With no fewer than five German armies (along with three, and later four, from the satellite countries) involved in the initial thrusts, it was a complex plan over which Hitler and Haider alike were determined to maintain a firm grip. Above all, they wanted to avoid the operational chaos that had arisen during the drive on Moscow the previous fall, a factor that had played no small role in the German his entire failure. The success of the opening assault seemed to bear them out. Blue slashed through the Soviet lines within days, heading east toward Vo- ronezh and then swinging to the south, brushing the Don River with its sleeve on the left. The Red Army appeared to have been caught off balance. Most of its best formations were completely out of position, screening Moscow from the southwest against a thrust that never came. In front of the German assault, one Soviet formation after another simply vanished. Seen by some as a new, flexible operational ap- proach on the part of the Soviet army and by others as simple flight, it was probably something in the middle: an order to retreat from higher command echelons that got lost in translation by the time it had reached the common riflemen in the field. At any rate, it was a process attended by a sense of chaos all its From the German perspective, own. the Soviet flight, whether planned or spontaneous, was a development that threatened the entire operational sequence of Operation Blue. On two occasions, at Millerovo and then at Rostov, German armored pincers closed on what the high command 12 Introduction believed were large Soviet concentrations — and came up empty. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear, the Wehrmacht had fought a Kesselschlacht without the enemy being present. Analysis of the form German reaction to this failed maneuver scheme major portion of the book. It is a disturbing picture: a sequence of fired generals and a raving Fiihrer, hastily improvised operational plans, and in the background, a million-man army hurtling ever further from its bases of supply and communications. By September, it was stuck, with two strong arrowheads embedded firmly at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus, unable to reach its objectives and equally unable, or unwilling, to retreat. It was in southern Russia that Bewegungskrieg ground to a halt, giving way to the very type of war that the German army had historically tried to avoid: Stellungskrieg. At virtually the same time, the wheels at come off of Rommel's offensive as well, and he too found himself stuck fast against superior forces. The result in both theaters would be decisive and catastrophic defeat. After their promising starts, the German offensives of 1942 would give birth to twins: Stalingrad and El Alamein. In the course of this survey, we will attempt to answer some fundamental questions about the Wehrmacht. How does a military force configured, armed, and trained for the offensive war of movement and quick victory cope with a military situation that suddenly turns sour? will a How much much ers? responsibility does Hitler bear for the catastrophe? should be shared by the General Staff and the How commandand how much field How much was it the result of individual decisions, was the result of more impersonal, systemic factors, the complicated matrix of military culture, tradition, and history that comprise the German way of war? Indeed, how much of it was simply chance? Throughout, I have tried to refrain from argumentation that attempts to show "how the German army could have won at Stalingrad" or "what the Wehrmacht should have done to win the war." This is a history book. It does not offer a series of perfect plans for 1942 as if it could make any difference at this point; nor does it purport to be a manual of lessons learned. These approaches, which praise this decision as "correct" and that one as "wrong" with all the assurance of a sixteenth-century reformer parsing Scripture, are essentially ahistorical (as important as they may be to the training of soldiers and officers). They are akin to writing a history of the French Revolution that does nothing but tell Louis XVI how he could have avoided it. Operational history (that is, explaining what actually happened in the course of a campaign, and why) is complicated enough without spend- — 19 Introduction 13 ing time lecturing the historical actors on what they ought to have done. 20 Admittedly, there are times to split the offensive into two when it is hard not to. Hitler's decision parts in late July 1942 and head simul- taneously for Stalingrad and the Caucasus (Directive 45) is a classic example. Another was the decision, shared by all levels of authority, to Rommel Egypt with an unconquered Malta choking off his supply lines. In both cases, however, the Germans came within an ace of victory anyway. The short distances, in some cases only hunsend into Wehrmacht from its strategic objecCaucasus, and North Africa should give anyone dreds of yards, that separated the tives in Stalingrad, the still pause about treating 1942 as a foregone Conclusion. From Victory to Defeat 2941 In the opening years of World War II, the German army uncorked a run of victories that was quite unlike anything in living memory. In contrast to World War I, in which the front lines soon solidified and battlefield stalemate was the norm, this war saw the Germans move from one dramatic success to another. With their fearsome tank, or Panzer, formations as an apparently irresistible spearhead, and with a powerful air force (Luftwaffe) circling overhead, the Wehrmacht ran through, around, and over every defensive position thrown in its path. The opening campaign in Poland (which went by the operational name Case White) saw the Germans smash the Polish army in eighteen days, although a bit more fighting was necessary to reduce the capital, Warsaw. Equally impressive was the invasion of Denmark and Norway (which went by the operational name Exercise Weser), which saw two enemy capitals, Oslo and Copenhagen, fall on the first day to a combination of ground forces, seaborne landings, and paratroopers. Still, there were those among the European general staffs who took comfort in the fact that up to now, the Wehrmacht was beating up on 1 2 weaker, smaller neighbors. The great offensive in the West in May 1940 (Case Yellow) quickly disabused them of that notion. Here, the German Panzer formations met and smashed the cream of the French and British armies, destroying the former and booting the latter off the continent altogether in a hurried evacuation from one of the last ports still in British hands, Dunkirk. Even with most of the British army gone, the Germans took something like 2 million French, British, Dutch, and Belgian prisoners. Combined with the minimal nature of their own losses, Case Yellow was one of the most decisive military victories in history. 3 The next year continued the pattern. A lightning drive into the Bal- kans in April 1941 overran both Yugoslavia and Greece. 14 When a Brit- 5 From Victory to Defeat: 1941 ish army arrived to help defend the latter, the Germans drove it 1 from position to position, then off the mainland altogether, forcing their second forced evacuation in less than a year. The British destination this time was Crete, where they were hit by a true thunderbolt: Operation Mercury, the first all-airborne military operahapless foe into its 4 tion in history. It quickly seized the island monwealth defenders, who had from its British and Com- to evacuate again, this time to Egypt. Indeed, in the opening period of the war, it sometimes seemed like the evacuation had become the characteristic British military operation. Certainly no other army in the world had as much practice at it. German operations in World War II continues somehow novel, as an example of a new method of Analysis of these them as warmaking called to paint blitzkrieg, or "lightning war." Allegedly invented transformed warfare by mechanizing it. In place of the foot soldier and the cavalry, there were now machines, especially tanks and aircraft. In place of the trench deadlock that had characterized World War I were vast campaigns of breakthrough, encirclement, and maneuver. In fact, the word itself is in the interwar era, blitzkrieg is said to have 5 misnomer. The German army didn't invent it, and they hardly ever used the word outside of quotation marks. It was a term that seems to have been kicked around international military circles in the 1930s to describe any rapid and decisive victory, in contrast to the long, horrible war of attrition that had just ended. Even if they didn't invent the blitzkrieg, however, the Germans clearly did something in the interwar period. It had been a time of rethinking and experimentation for them, certainly, but we might say the same thing for all armies of the day. The British had invented the tank and were working on a radical Experimental Mechanized Brigade as early as 1928. Likewise, if there was one military force in the world that seemed obsessed with the possibilities of tanks, aircraft, and paratroopers, it would had to have been the Red Army. What distinguished the activity of the interwar German army (the Reichswehr until 1934, then renamed the Wehrmacht) was that it was not trying to discover anything new. It felt that it already had a workable wara 6 war of movement on the operational level. This is where the Germans saw tanks and aircraft as making their contribution. These new weapons had to be used on the operational level that is, in large units, from divisions on up. The result was the Panzer Division, a unit built around tanks but containing a full panoply of combined arms: infantry, artillery, reconnaissance, supply columns, bridging trains, and more, all of which had their mobility fighting doctrine: Bewegungskrieg, the 7 — Chapter One 16 raised to the level of the tank. A Panzer Division was more than any contemporary army could handle from 1939 to 1941. It could assault and penetrate, smash through into the clear, pursue, and destroy any defensive position or formation that tried to stop it, then reform and do it all over again. It wasn't a wonder weapon or magic bullet, but it certainly might have looked that way to a Polish lancer or a Belgian antitank gunner. As important 8 as the tank and the airplane was the Wehrmacht's highly command and control. Some of this hearkened German traditions, especially the notion of the inde- articulated system of back to older pendence of the lower commander, often referred to, incorrectly, as 9 Auftragstaktik, or mission tactics. Arising first out of the distinctive in which the king had only limited ausocial contract in old Prussia thority to intervene in the operations of his commanders, who were without exception of the noble, or Junker, caste it had evolved over — — the centuries into the distinctive characteristic of Prussian and von German command in the Helmuth modern field armies. In the eyes of Field Marshal Moltke, the victor in the wars of German unification, become far too complex to be tightly choreographed in advance. There were simply too many factors in play: huge forces, operations had complex weaponry, and massive supply requirements, not to mention the friction and fog that were simply part of war in any era. Under Moltke, the Prussian army prided itself on providing general missions to lower levels of command, then allowing the lower commander to devise the best way to carry them out. On all levels of command, or- ders were to be short, snappy, and to the point. Ideally, they were to be Prusso-German armies made more limited use of written orders than any other contemporary force. Finally, commanddelivered orally; the were encouraged to forgo maps, if their orders by pointing to the actual and to deliver terrain. The recipient was to listen, repeat the order out loud in the presence of his superior, and then go off and carry it out in the best possible way. On its face, the Prussian command system might seem to be a recipe for chaos, a free-for-all in which each division, corps, and army commander fought his own private war. In fact, there were two circumstances that worked in its favor. The staff system was the first. While on campaign, each commander had a chief of the General Staff at his side, an operational advisor and confidante. He was not a co-commander, and in fact the formation commander always bore ultimate responsibility for his own decisions and the performance of his unit. The chief of staff, however, was an elite officer who had been taught ers at all possible, 7 From Victory to Defeat: 1941 1 the art of war in a highly selective school with a murderously difficult Members of the staff tended to way and to dispense remarkably curriculum, the famous Kriegsakademie. see operational problems in a similar commanders with whom they worked. A second factor that made Auftragstaktik work was the highly aggressive nature of the Prussian-German officer corps. Throughout similar advice to the German military history, the officer corps's operational doctrine al- making a beeline for the nearest enemy force and launching an attack on it. It rarely meant slacking or lying down on the job. Prussia-Germany had fought dozens of campaigns since the seventeenth century, and virtually all of them saw the army on the operational offensive, seeking to strike a sharp and unsettling blow against its opponents. The "short and lively war" demanded most always consisted of one thing: such an aggressive posture. Frederick the Great was the exemplar, perhaps the most aggressive commander of the entire eighteenth century, and certainly was all one of the top ten of that complicated. all time. He "The Prussian army always didn't think war he once path through the Napoleonic wars, attacks," During Prussia's difficult there was Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, a septuagenarian oddball who wedded an innate battlefield drive and aggression to a visceral hatred of the French enemy. His art of war wasn't all that intellectual, either; his men nicknamed him Marschall Voi~warts (Gen10 eral Forward). During the wars of unification, Moltke may have been said. the brains of the army, its were army commanders doctrinal and administrative wizard. Its guts like army Frederick Charles, the Red Prince, outnumbered him two who one to get the battle of Koniggratz rolling in 1866. " World War II hard chargers like Guderian and Manstein look far less unusual when we examine attacked an Austrian that to Prussian-German warmaking from the perspective of the tongue duree. This spirit of aggression was not something that the German army invented one afternoon in 1935. The preference for the "short and lively" war; Bewegungskrieg (the war of movement on the operational level); an officer corps that was allowed to handle matters in the field as it saw fit, without a great deal of interference from above, and that paid for that privilege in blood, some of its own and a great deal belonging to the men under its command; tanks and aircraft working in close harmony, commanded and controlled by the modern miracle of radio communications these comprised the impressive and highly successful operational package the Germans brought to the table in the opening years of World War II. Like all military cultures, it was a unique combination of traits, a — 18 Chapter One "distinctive language" spoken only by the Wehrmacht, German military journal of the in all day, the Militdr Wochenblatt, put of Germany's wars, the main in Full Stride: 12 it. As —indeed, the only—question was whether Germany's adversaries could learn to decipher Bewegungskrieg as the leading it in time. The Balkans, 1941 war was a simple contest to see who could most completely humiliate an opponent in a first encounter, then the Wehrmacht would have won World War II, hands down. The Polish, Danish, Norwegian, French, Yugoslavian, Greek, British, and Soviet armies all learned this lesson the hard way. The first six armies did not survive to tell the tale, nor did the states they were called on to defend. British armies were smashed not just in their first encounter with the Wehrmacht (in If France), but also in the next three, as well (in North Africa, in Greece, and then again in Crete). Britain managed to survive the experience thanks to the presence of the English Channel, a sturdy water barrier that has stopped many would-be invaders since 1066. Finally, the Soviet army was hammered as hard as any military force in history during that first awful campaigning season, from June to December 1941. It was an utterly hapless performance that saw it sustain the incredible total of 4 million casualties in six short months, most of them prisoners lost in one massive Kesselschlacht after another. And finally, lest we forget, the U.S. Army's first meeting with the Wehrmacht, on an obscure hunk of Tunisian rock known as the Kasserine Pass, was a humbling experience that should have made all Americans happy for the existence of the Atlantic Ocean. The point is that first encounters with the Wehrmacht were inherently dangerous. This was an army that liked its campaigns frontloaded, meticulously planned, and designed for maximum impact. The corollary was that those who survived that first encounter had taken the best shot that the Germans had to offer. For the Wehrmacht, things were always going to go downhill after it delivered that first devastating blow. The advantage in sustainability was always going to lie with the Allies, especially after the entry of the United States into the war in 1941. As satisfying as it would be to blame the problem on individuals within the Nazi leadership, it was not due to poor planning on Hitler's part or to the General Staffs deep and documented disinterest in logistics. It was simply the way things were, the way they had been since the 1600s, and the way they would still be to- From Victory 19 Germany had survived World War II as a great military power. there was still a German General Staff, there would still be war- day, If to Defeat: 1941 if fighting doctrine based on landing a knockout punch early through aggressive, mobile operations. One of the classic examples of Bewegungskrieg in World War II was the German campaign in the Balkans in the spring of 1941. Here the 13 Germans fought the front-loaded campaign to perfection, with the German 2nd and 12th Armies launching two simultaneous operations into Greece and Yugoslavia on April 6. Operation Marita the invasion of Greece had been in the works for months, a response to the humiliating defeat suffered by the Italian army in its invasion of Greece in late 1940. Not only had the hardy Greeks stopped Italian forces at the border, but they also had gone on the offensive, driving into Albania and threatening to unhinge the entire Axis position in the Balkans. The invasion of Yugoslavia, by contrast, had been put together overnight, quite literally, as a response to a pro-Allied coup in Belgrade on the night of March 26-27, 1941. It was an improvisation, — — just the sort of thing that the Germans historically excelled at. The brief time span for conception and planning did leave a few loose ends here and there, and in nearly It is After fact, the undertaking would take place under the anonymous designation of Operation 25. easy to underestimate the significance of a campaign like all, given its population and resource advantages, this. Germany should have been able to beat the Greek army, or the Yugoslav army, or both at the same time, without breaking a sweat. We might say the same thing about the Polish campaign in 1939, or the invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940. Yet those who look at the Balkan campaign and see only a great power landing a hit on two of the war's weaker sisters miss the point entirely: the Wehrmacht's complete and rapid victory over the Greeks and Yugoslavs precisely mirrors the treatment it meted out in every first encounter of the war, without exception. Operation 25: Yugoslavia For centuries, the ideal of Prussian-German military operations had been the concentric attack, with converging columns coming at the defender from all directions and making it impossible for him to any sort of coherent position. In that sense, Operation 25 marks a culmination point in the German art of war. With Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria all safely in the Axis camp by this time, the establish Chapter One 20 attacking force of German and German- allied (Hungarian and Ital- be strung out over an immense crescent nearly 400 miles long, from Trieste on the Adriatic in the north to the BulgarianYugoslav border in the south. Moving from right to left, there was Italian 2nd Army, German 2nd Army under General Maximilian von Weichs (consisting of XXXXIX Mountain Corps, LI and LII Corps, ian) armies could XXXXVI Panzer Corps); Hungarian 3rd Army; an independent German XXXXI Panzer Corps; and, finally, 1st Panzer Group (Field and Marshal Ewald von Kleist). With the Italians and Hungarians having to be cajoled into doing anything more than occupying a place in the line, the heavy lifting was the task of the three German formations. Weichs's army was deployed in the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Styria, curling around the Slovenian-Croatian bend in northern Yugoslavia; XXXXI Panzer Corps was deployed in western Romania, near Timosoara; Kleist 's Panzer group lay far to the south, in western Bulgaria. The Schwerpunkt, or point of main effort, included no fewer than on the capital, Belgrade. On the right, XXXXVI Panzer Corps (2nd Army) would deploy in Nagykanizsa in Hungary, southwest of Lake Balaton. It would cross the Drava River into Yugoslavia, then wheel sharply southeast toward Belgrade. In the center, the independent XXXXI Panzer Corps under General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, including the 2nd S.S. Motorized Division, the Grossdeutschland Motorized Infantry Regiment, and the Hermann Goring Panzer Regiment, had the shortest hop to Belgrade, a straight shot heading almost due south. Finally, on the extreme left, 1st Panzer Group would send two corps (XIV Panzer and XI) across three mighty mechanized columns driving the Bulgarian border, head toward Nis, and then wheel sharply to the north. As always in German operations, the point of these multiple drives was not simply to seize the capital, but rather to threaten a strategic object that the Yugoslavs could not afford to lose therefore have to defend. As in the Franco-Prussian war ing in the general direction of the capital was the best confrontation with the enemy's main The Yugoslavs did what all field army. and would in 1870, driv- way to ensure a 14 of Germany's enemies had done in the two years of the war. They tried to defend every inch of the country's borders, establishing what the Germans called a "cordon position" (Kordonstellung). The 1st Army Group stood in the north, consisting of first Army in Slovenia, facing the German and Italian frontiers, and the 4th Army along the Hungarian border. The 2nd Army Group stood to its right, with 2nd Army along the Danube and 1st Army in the 7th From Victory to Defeat: 1941 21 An independent 6th Army deployed to the east, along the Romanian border, defending the district known as the Banat as well as the northern approaches to Belgrade. Finally, a 3rd Army Group (5th and 3rd Armies) had to cover an immense stretch of western part of the Vojvodina. southern Yugoslavia, with 5th Army along the Bulgarian border and 3rd Army standing watch against the Italians on the Albanian frontier. None of these "armies" was up to modern standards. They consisted, typically, of two to four weak infantry divisions, alry division or brigade. Reserve forces they are by definition in a with an attached cav- were grossly inadequate, cordon defense. The 3rd Army Group as in the south, for example, had a single infantry division in reserve at Skoplje, and the entire Yugoslav reserve consisted of three infantry divisions and one cavalry division. Although each army had some terrain feature in front of it (typically one of Yugoslavia's numerous rivers: the Drava, Sava, Morava, and Danube), the deployment offered no hope of operational maneuver. Strategic redeployment to respond to threats as they developed, always tricky in a linear defense, would simply be impossible in this case. Neither the road nor rail net would permit it. It is interesting to note that this was still the orthodox response 15 Wehrmacht's mobile operations. The Poles had done the same September 1939, stringing their armies in a cordon over 875 miles to the in long along the border with Greater Germany and Slovakia. The 16 French and British had also attempted a linear defense of western Europe in 1940, which was penetrated in three days. The Yugoslav army was not an insignificant force: it included seventeen active and twelve reserve infantry divisions, plus three cavalry divisions and a number of nondivisional brigades. When fully mobilized, numbered nearly it 10,000,000 men. Still, lining it up to defend 1,900 miles of border was to extend it far beyond its capabilities. To be fair, the Yugoslav supreme commander, General Dusan Simovic (who had also been one of the ringleaders of the coup that precipitated the German invasion), was faced with a number of equally bad alternatives. Analysts of the campaign both then and since have spoken of the advantages of a pullback from the borders and a concentrated defense of some central position, perhaps Belgrade itself, just of the Polish campaign tend to talk up a withdrawal to the river lines of the Narew, Vistula, and San. A cordon defense invited as analysts penetration and destruction by a mobile enemy, it is the almost complete absence of armor, antitank, or true, and given air assets in the Yugoslav military, it was made to order for the German approach of a high-speed mechanized Bewegungskrieg. But military historians need Chapter One 22 any strategy that advocates the immediate abandonment of over 90% of the national territory before a shot has even been fired is a nonstarter. It is a school exercise, in other words, utterly divorced to admit that from the reality of politics. No government in the modern era will ever do it, or could afford to. Moreover, the situation within Yugoslavia was not all propitious for the success of any strategy. The state was riven by ethnic tension. Neither the Slovenes nor the Croats could generate much enthusiasm about fighting for a Serb-dominated regime 17 which, in their opinion, treated them the urging of German propaganda broadcasts and leaflets, bers of Croats would desert once the shooting started. Operation 25 played out Under large num- like second-class citizens. fairly predictably, 18 given the balance of weaponry in play, and the imperatives of German doctrine. No campaign in Prussian or German history had a more pressing need It had been designed overnight, the to be wrapped up so quickly. formations fighting it had to be dragged hither and yon from across forces, the 19 Germany and the occupied territories into this remote and underde- veloped theater, and the Panzer units, at least, had to finish their business and then be ready for transfer to the east. Barbarossa was only months away. An army that habitually moved fast was about to kick the tempo up one more notch. The campaign opened with a massive early-morning bombing raid against a nearly undefended Belgrade. It was April 6, the Orthodox Eas- two and a half Operation Punishment, the Wehrmacht did something that many later military ventures have tried, yet none have been able to achieve: a "decapitation" of the enemy's command structure. The Luftwaffe came in three separate waves, some 500 sorties in all, flying mainly from bases in the Ostmark and western Romania. Not only did the Germans destroy the obsolete Yugoslav air force and Belgrade's weak antiaircraft screen, pound large chunks of the city into rubble, and kill thousands of civilians, they also destroyed the communication links between the Yugoslav high command and the field formations. It was an unprecedented event, an air power advocate's dream, that left virtually every operational unit in the army begging for direction and orders just at the moment that the Wehrmacht poured over the borter Sunday. In ders in strength. The Luftwaffe's losses amounted to just two aircraft. no exaggeration to say that Operation Punishment had won the Yugoslav campaign in the first twenty minutes. The raid, and especially the massive number of civilian deaths, would also be one of the war crimes included in the later indictment against General Alexander It is From Victory to Defeat: 1941 23 Lohr, commander of Luftflotte 4; he would be executed in Belgrade in i947- M The now began, as 1st Panzer Group crossed the borsouth on April 8. With XIV Panzer Corps in the lead and XI land campaign der in the headed for Nis. After breaking through the defenses of the Yugoslav 5th Army, the Germans took the city on April 9. As planned, the Panzers now wheeled north, driving rapidly along the valley of the Morava River toward Belgrade. Resistance was weak and getting weaker, and the high command soon decided 21 to remove 5th Panzer Division from the main drive on the capital. It peeled off in a southwesterly direction, making it one of the few formations to take part in both Operation 25 against Yugoslavia and Operation Marita against Greece. By April 12, 1st Panzer Group stood just 35 miles south of Belgrade; it was also deep in the rear of Yugoslav 6th Army, still deployed along the Romanian border. The second element in the drive on Belgrade was XXXXVI Panzer Corps, part of 2nd Army. The original schedule called for 2nd Army's attack to begin on April 12, which had then been moved up to April Corps 10. trailing, Kleist's forces Some analysts still see this as a deliberate staggering of the initial thrusts to further confuse the the main blow. 22 A better enemy leadership as to the location of explanation was the difficulty the Germans were having in transporting the assault formations into position. The Yugoslav border was immense, and the entire region was vastly underserved by road and rail. The 2nd Army, in particular, was still arriving in the theater when the bombers appeared over Belgrade. Nonetheless, there were a series of small attacks by German units as they deployed, often undertaken on the initiative of the local commander. These included the seizure of a road bridge at Bares and a rail bridge near Koprivnica. 23 Even before the start of formal hostilities, the sluggish Yugoslav response to these provocations, due no doubt to the large proportion of Croats in the Yugoslav 7th Army, the principal defender in this sector, showed the Germans that there was trouble in the en- emy camp. When XXXXVI Panzer Corps's actual attack opened on April 10, it blew a hole in the Yugoslav line almost immediately. Although most of the corps wheeled southeast to join in the drive on Belgrade, one division, the 14th Panzer, headed for the Croatian capital, Zagreb ("Agram" to the Germans). The drive on Zagreb was an epic in its own way. Rolling at top speed, moving so rapidly that it was out of radio communications with corps and army headquarters for much of Chapter One 24 GREATER GERMANY ADRIATIC SEA Map i. Operation 25: concentric operations in Yugoslavia. smashed through position after position, taking 15,000 prisoners, among them twenty-two Yugoslav generals. It reached Zagreb by nightfall after traveling almost one hundred miles since morning. It ended the day being feted by thousands of enthusiastic Croats who considered the arrival of the Germans as a day of liberation from Serb the day, it oppression. 24 on Belgrade was that of the XXXXI Panzer Corps. After crossing the Romanian- Yugoslav border south of Timosoara on April 11, Reinhardt's corps almost immediately broke The third motorized drive through Yugoslav 6th Army and raced into the clear. The relatively From Victory to Defeat: 1941 25 weak force, consisting of little more than the Grossdeutschland Regiment and 2nd S.S. Motorized Infantry Division, drove halfway to Belgrade in a single day, reaching Pancevo by nightfall and preparing itself for a drive on the capital the next day. Already, the Yugoslav situation had deteriorated to the point that General Simovic sent orders to his three army groups to "fight the enemy wherever you may be in contact with him in all directions, on your own initiative, without awaiting 25 special orders from higher command echelons." Even today, it is difficult to say which German force arrived first in Belgrade. With all three sending mobile detachments ahead of the main body in a headlong rush, even the German high command wasn't exactly sure. Elements of the 2nd S.S. Motorized Infantry Division (XXXXI Panzer Corps) crossed into the city on rafts over the Danube in the early evening of April 12; patrols of 8th Panzer Division (2nd Army) entered at about the same time from the north; and nth Panzer Division (1st Panzer Group) did the same from the south. Although none of these armored drives met with much opposition, they did have to negotiate some of Europe's most difficult terrain, and the exercise showed that there really isn't any such thing as "bad tank country" to a well-trained and aggressive armored force. Although sending flying armored columns into enemy territory might have been risky in a different context, here the principal problem was dealing with the hordes of Yugoslav soldiers wishing to surrender. With the capital in German hands and the Yugoslav front broken everywhere, and with Italian and Hungarian troops finally crossing the Yugoslav border, all that remained was the final pursuit. There was some fear on the part of the German command that remnants of the defeated army would retreat into the mountain fastness of the southern part of the country, in particular Bosnia. To counter the threat, the Germans now redirected virtually all their mobile formations toward a drive on Sarajevo. One pursuit group, spearheaded by 14th Panzer Division, moved in from the west; another, with 8th Panzer Division approached the city from the east. The city fell to these converging drives on April 15, the tenth day of hostilities, signaling the end of major operations. 26 An armistice would be signed on April 17. The Wehrmacht had overrun Yugoslavia in record time and with in the van, million-man army and taken at least 250,000 prisoners in this short campaign. Its own casualties were just 151 dead, 392 wounded, and 15 missing. The ingredients for the rout were obviease. It ous. had dismantled On German side, they included superior training and weapcommand of the air; and a high degree of mechanization, the onry; total a 26 Chapter One at least at the cutting edge. For the Yugoslavs, there was the lateness of the mobilization decree, which resulted in numerous units being overrun before they were fully prepared for combat; lack of air and armor; the decision to defend every inch of the country's long border; and, perhaps most importantly, the ethnic troubles especially in the Croatian territories. inside the country, One German staff officer called 27 Operation 25 more of "a military parade" than a campaign, and that is 28 in many ways a fair assessment of this "twelve-day war." Still, there is more to it than that. The conquest of Yugoslavia was a distilled form of the German way of war as it had developed over the centuries. As one German source put it, after the breakthrough along the border fortifications, the Yugoslav army was "smashed in the open field, held in place by German infantry forced-marching in the pursuit, overtaken and encircled by the mobile troops, broken down by uninterrupted attack from the air while on the march and during rail 29 transport." It was a "lightning victory" (Blitzsieg), one that displayed every aspect of the German operational package. The assembly of massive force; a plan that included a violent blow from the very outset in the form of the vicious for the land forces that air raids on Belgrade; emphasized shock, a maneuver scheme rapidity, and a concentric advance against a crucial objective in the enemy's heartland —these had been the ingredients of Bewegungskrieg at least since the days of Moltke. Given the gross imbalance of force, the Wehrmacht should have beaten the Yugoslav army and swiftly overrun the country; that much is obvious. But as Prussian and German armies had shown other armies in other times and places, when the war of movement was working as it should, it could make many a campaign appear to be a "military parade." There is one last aspect of the quick and almost painless victory in Yugoslavia that deserves mention, especially as German way it reflects on the of war. Despite the totality of the victory, this was a campaign with an extremely problematic aftermath. By the end of the operation, fighting had already broken out within Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats in Mostar and other parts of Dalmatia. With German forces being redeployed rapidly to the East and the land occupied by relatively small forces, there was no one to stop it, even if the Germans had wanted to. Moreover, a quick look at the math of the campaign (250,000 prisoners taken out of an army that numbered almost 1 million when fully mobilized) would indicate that large forces had indeed escaped the German net. The Germans had advanced so far and so fast that they left numerous loose ends. Yugoslav soldiers From Victory to Defeat: 1941 27 cut off from their units soon took to the mountains to form resistance Germans would bands, and the find themselves conducting an anti- partisan campaign for the rest of the war. among 30 There was no unanimity these groups about the kind of Yugoslavia they wished to recre- once they had liberated the country, and they would spend as much time fighting each other as fighting the Germans. Royalist Chetniks under Colonel Draza Mihailovic and the communist Partisans under Josip Broz, code-named Tito, would fight their own bloody war for the future of Yugoslavia, a tale outside our purview here. Nevertheless, there is something incomplete about a way of war that relies on the shock value of small, highly mobile forces and airpower, that stresses rapidity of victory over all, and that then has a difficult time putting the country it has conquered back together again. ate Operation Marita: Greece was more of the same in Greece. Here the Wehrmacht encountered not just another weak army of a second-rate power, but British and Commonwealth forces as well. Operation Marita met Operation LusIt tre, from North Africa the transfer of a British expeditionary force to the Balkans. fight the 31 Force W, as it was known, was utterly inadequate to Germans, comprising two divisions (2nd Australian), the 1st Tank Brigade (of New Zealand, 6th 2nd Armored Division), and a small commitment of airpower. One German commentator called it "a drop in the ocean by the standards of continental warfare." The commander of the expedition, General Henry Maitland Wilson, was placed in a nearly 32 impossible position; he had to thrust forward a small force against an onrushing Wehrmacht coming at him from all directions. The precise placement of the force was a thus a matter of crucial importance, as well as controversy, within the Allied camp. Essentially, the Greek supreme commander, General Alexander Papagos, wanted the British as far north as possible; Maitland Wilson preferred 33 Again, like the Yugoslavs, the Greeks were not at all enthusiastic about defending the country at the or relatively narrow waist, Mount Olympus, perhaps, or points south to stay as far south as he could manage. — any position that abandoned a large chunk of it to the invader. Indeed, Papagos was still thinking of the offensive, one last blow to shatter the Italians in Albania. The plan that eventually evolved was, worlds. If the as is typical, Germans had been advancing from the worst of both Bulgaria alone, then 28 Chapter One the deployment of Force W to a defensive position stretching north- west-southeast along the Vermion Mountains and Aliakmon River (it was called the "Vermion line," grandiloquently, because there were no prepared works there at all) might have made sense. The operational situation that Maitland Wilson encountered as he marched north, however, was far different. Once again, the Germans had planned a bold operational-level stroke, utilizing the mechanized formations of 12th Army. Although the infantry divisions of XXX Corps crossed the Rhodope Mountains into western Thrace and the XVIII Mountain Corps had the unenviable task of smashing through the well-fortified Metaxas Line along the Bulgarian frontier, 2nd Panzer Division would cross into Yugoslavia toward Strumica. From here it would wheel sharply south, pass just to the west of Lake Doiran on the Greek- Yugoslav border, then drive as rapidly as possible on the major port of Thessaloniki. Seizure of the city would be a strategic blow to the Greeks, cutting off their entire 2nd Army still fighting to the east. Simultaneously, however, there would be an even more dramatic stroke, a westward drive into southern Yugoslavia by XXXX Corps (9th Panzer Division, Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler S.S. Motorized Infantry Regiment, and the 73rd Infantry Division). The corps would drive toward the Vardar River between Skoplje and Veles, then, once again, wheel sharply south, passing through the Monastir Gap and crossing into central Greece from the north. This would result in a linkup with the Italians and the isolation of the Greek 1st Army still fighting in Albania. The Albanian campaign still accounted for the lion's share of the Greek army, some twelve infantry divisions, a cavalry division, and three infantry brigades. Morever, the German maneuver would also fatally compromise the Allied defensive position, outflanking Force no matter what line it happened to occupy. 34 And so it went. As in Operation 25, there was a signal moment at the W start of Marita. An April 6, was going up in flames, at virtually the same moment that Belgrade Luftwaffe raid on the port of Piraeus scored a direct hit on the 12,000-ton ammunition ship S.S. Clan Fraser. It exploded spectacularly, triggering secondary explosions all over the harbor and destroying much of the port itself, along with twenty-seven a docked there and a great deal of shore equipment. Windows were shattered seven miles away in Athens. Within hours, German forces were across the Greek border in strength. On the far left, XXX Corps had fairly easy going because much of the Greek force in isolated western Thrace had been evacuated when German troops first entered Buicraft 35 From Victory to Defeat: 1941 (Sal xxxx 2 29 Bulgaria CUb xvm fejxxx AEGEAN SEA IONIAN (T) Aliakmon Line SEA (T) Olympus Position (T) Thermopylae Line Map Operation Marita: Bewegnngskrieg in Greece, April 1941. 2. garia. In the center, XVIII Mountain Corps found the Metaxas Line, and the Greek infantry and gunners defending it, to be as tough as anything they'd yet encountered in this war. Losses were heavy here, with at least one regiment having to be pulled out of the line, but the attack on both sides of the Rupel Gorge, supported by massed artillery and nonstop attack by Stukas, finally chewed its way through the Greek wire, pillboxes, and concrete bunkers. 36 Metaxas Line soon became a moot point, however, as 2nd Panzer Division cut through light opposition to the west and reached Thessaloniki on April 9. In the course of its short hop south, The battle for the Chapter One 30 it overran elements of the Greek 19th Division that were just moving up into position. The Greek formation was ostensibly "motorized," which meant in this case possessing a handful of Bren carriers and 37 captured Italian tanks and trucks. The fall of Thessaloniki made the entire Greek force to the east superfluous, and 2nd Army surrendered to the Germans on April 9. The Schwerpunkt of this campaign, however, lay with Corps (General Georg Stumme). Jumping off at XXXX Panzer 5:30 a.m. on April 6, it encountered Yugoslav forces almost immediately (elements of the 5th Yugoslav Army). Brushing them aside, the mass of the corps reached its Stumme's lead forthat one day and had to perform a ma- objective (the line Skoplje -Veles) the next day. mations had made sixty miles in jor river crossing of the Vardar to boot. After passing through Prilep on April 8 and Monastir on April 9, the corps stood ready to invade Greece the next day. On April 10, XXXX Corps crossed the border, peeled off the 9th Panzer Division to link up with the Italians in Albania, and continued the drive to the south, toward the Greek town of Fiorina. 38 was not immediately apparent, but the drive on Fiorina and thence into central Greece had unhinged the entire Allied strategic position in the theater. Not only had the maneuver uncovered the communications of the Greek 1st Army in Albania, it had also inserted a strong mobile German force far into the rear of the original British defensive position along the Vermion line. Maitland Wilson could read a map. The news sent the entire Commonwealth force scurrying back down to the south from whence it had come, desperately trying to extricate itself from the jaws of two pursuing German pincers. Australian and New Zealand troops fought with their usual tenacity, and there was some gritty action of the rear guard variety, but on the operational It moved The Vermion position became the Aliakmon Line (April 11), which gave way to the Mount Olympus position (April 16) and then the Thermopylae level, the front line steadily southward. line (April 24), the last actually a original crescent-shaped defensive position stretching across central Greece from Molos in the east to the Gulf of Corinth in the south. The place-names make the after-action reports read like some lost essay by Herodotus, which lends the entire affair 39 a certain was a epic aura that it does not nightmare, carried out under attacks. It at all deserve. a In fact, the retreat nearly constant barrage of Stuka had been the same in Norway and Dunkirk, and now more of the same in Greece. it was From Victory to Defeat: 1941 31 Making good use of the difficult terrain and their 25-pounder guns, however, the Commonwealth rear guards did manage to hold up the Germans just long enough to allow the main body to escape, and that was no small feat. The Germans, for their part, managed to keep up the pressure only by sending light pursuit groups ahead of their main body. There certainly were not entire Panzer divisions in play during this portion of the campaign. But even the smaller pursuit groups found themselves limited by the difficulty of mountainous terrain. At one point they tried, unsuccessfully, to pass a column of tanks single the original European tactifile through the pass at Thermopylae 40 cal exercise, one might say. Even the most celebrated incident of the campaign, the April 26 airdrop onto the isthmus of Corinth by two battalions of the 2nd Fallschirmjager Regiment, failed to seal the deal. Indeed, it met with disaster when a lucky shot detonated charges on the canal bridge, dropping it and killing most of the German paratroopers crossing it, along with the German war correspondent film41 ing the seizure of the bridge. It did not matter one way or another. Most of Force was off the mainland by this time, having already been evacuated from Rafina and Porto Rafti in Attica or from Monemvasia and Kalamata in the Peloponnesus. Athens fell on April 27, and the onrushing Germans swiftly occupied the Peloponnesus on April 28 and 29. The fighting was over by April 30. General Wilhelm List's 12th Army had performed impressively. It had dismantled the Greek army and handed the British another humiliating defeat, driving them into another helter-skelter retreat and forcing them into yet another evacuation that saved the men only at the cost of abandoning virtually all of the equipment. Nor were Brit- — W ish manpower who had alike losses inconsiderable: 11,840 men out of the 53,000-plus embarked for Europe. Both had taken place under nonstop German originally retreat and evacuation air attack, Robert Crisp, armored commander, describes what it was like: for a large share of British casualties. a accounting South African From dawn to dusk there was never a period of more than half an hour when there was not an enemy plane overhead. It was the unrelenting pressure of noise and the threat of destruction in every hour which accentuated the psychological consequences of continuous retreat, from and turned so many men into nervous wrecks their driving seats and trucks at the first distant without stopping their vehicles who leapt hum—often —and ran from the roads . . . not Chapter One 32 running until the skies were clear and the explosions had ceased to echo in their minds. Then they would make their way slowly, fearfully, back and ride on for another few miles until the 42 next raid, or threat of a raid, set them running again. to stop In "tossing much Tommy from the continent," 43 German heavier than in the Yugoslav campaign, yet overall, especially as still losses had been startlingly light they were fighting against one of their great pow- er adversaries in this campaign: 1,100 killed and 4,000 wounded. The had been sustained by XXX Corps's frontal assault on the Metaxas Line, a venture that even some German analysts argued could have been dispensed with altogether. vast majority of the casualties Bewegungskrieg and Its Weaknesses The Balkan campaign was a classic demonstration of the German art of war. Once again, bold and rapid maneuver had led to decisive success. As we view the Wehrmacht standing on the eve of Barbarossa, however, it is Today, has it appropriate to discuss the weaknesses of the approach. become customary maneuver represented a to argue that the German focus on narrow, even crabbed vision of warfare, one German army at a serious disadvantage in both world wars. World War II saw German staff officers planning ever more elegant maneuver schemes, ones that may well represent the acme of the art, while their enemies did much, much more: mobilizing a major portion of the world's resources, easily besting Germany in the that placed the 44 manpower, technical innovation, production, and logistics, and winning a decisive victory in the shadow war of intelligence and battle of counterintelligence. Consider 45 this point: in World War II, the Allies actually cracked 46 German encoding mechanism, the so-called Enigma machine. They then spent the entire war deliberately underreacting to the inthe had gleaned from this coup, lest the Germans realize they'd been had and move to some new, more secure system. Even so, the Allies enjoyed as complete an intelligence advantage as any in military history. Likewise, the Allies employed an entire series of highly successful agents, from Richard Sorge in Tokyo to Juan Pujol Garcia to the "12 apostles" 47 dispatched by President Roosevelt to North Africa to prepare the ground for the Torch invasion. Even today, the story of Pujol Garcia seems to have been concocted by an overly imagina- telligence they From Victory to Defeat: 1941 33 Hollywood screenwriter. Code-named Garbo, he was ostensibly a German agent working in Britain, who fed false information to the very top of the Nazi intelligence chain, up to and including Hitler tive himself. For his intelligence reports before the Normandy invasion, he received the Reich's highest honors and decorations, including the 48 Iron Cross. The Germans managed nothing like a counterweight to Allied success in this area. Despite the Nazi reputation for fanaticism, the democracies and Soviet Russia were far more successful at produc- and women who were willing to go behind enemy lines and risk life and limb in the battle for information. The German military intelligence office, the Abwehr, by contrast, spent much of the war trying first to overthrow, and then to kill, Hitler. In this war, most of the true believers were on the side of the Allies. The Wehrmacht, in other words, was a military force that cared a great deal for concentric operations but very little for long-term planning. German military planners gave little thought at all to strategic concerns, at least as they have traditionally been conceived in the even rest of the world. Exactly how individual operational victories decisive ones would actually lead to the surrender of their enemies ing men — — received very little mans smashed four enemy Netherlands, Belgium, and France. or even to come May 1940, for example, the Gerarmies in short order and occupied the consideration. In to terms, Hitler When Britain refused to surrender, and the entire German leadership were completely at sea about how to proceed. The Wehrmacht, in a sense, had conquered its way into a strategic impasse. It knew it, and it spent the next year flailing around, searching for a way to move forward. The amount of paperwork generated by such indecision (shared by Hitler and the high command) was prodigious. In the year after Case Yellow, the staff produced plans for no fewer than fifteen major operations: Sea Lion (the invasion of England), Sunflower (the introduction of North Africa), Cyclamen attack on Greece), Felix (the German forces to Marita (an seizure of Gibraltar), Isabella (the occupation of Spain and Portugal), a possible invasion of Switzerland, operations against the Canary and Azore Islands, Operation 25 against Yugoslavia, Operation Mercury (the occupation of Albania), occupy Vichy France, and the establishment of 49 military missions to Romania and Iraq. It wasn't as if there was a lot of downtime in German planning circles during this period. All of this frenzied activity sat uneasily on top of planning the greatest operation against Crete, plans to in military history: Barbarossa. with a gigantic Nor are we talking about the Pentagon, bureaucratic hive churning out planning documents 34 Chapter One — by the bushel. German planning staffs were small tiny, in fact. The General Staff had always seen itself as the true German military elite, 50 and keeping itself small was part of the institutional ethos. Although wars are won or lost on the strategic level, the Germans were literally sitting in a conceptual prison. It was all operations, all the time. This was not an issue of trying to think outside the box. German staff officers might not have even been conscious of the fact that there was a box. Bewegungskrieg had worked well enough over the centuries; the Germans actually seemed unaware that there might have been viable alternatives to it. It had become a default setting. Barbarossa It is Union was the Here, a way of war axiomatic to say that the invasion of the Soviet ultimate test of operational-level Bewegungskrieg. win 51 campaigns in the cozy confines of western Europe, a prosperous region with a highly developed economy and communications infrastructure, found itself very far from home indeed. Here it faced a behemoth, one with room in which to retreat and a manpower pool that was, by German standards at least, limitless. Moreover, the road and rail net was utterly unsatisfactory for a mechanized army that relied so heavily on tanks and other vehicles. It would be untrue to state that planners on the German General Staff were unaware of any of these things. They also knew that the campaign would have to end before the onset of winter. At the same time, however, it was nearly impossible for most of them to conceive of failure. The war was approaching its third year, and no land force had yet come close to stopping them. Although the postwar memoir literature of the German generals is filled with misgivings over Hitler's decision to go east, there was in fact little debate over the wisdom of the move at the time. Most of the staff felt that the overthrow of the Soviet Union would amount to little more than a "sand table exer52 cise" a war game. In fact, the Red Army very nearly got the Yugoslav treatment. On June 21, 1941, over 3 million German and Axis troops crossed the Soviet border. Organized into three great army groups (North, Central, and South, heading for Leningrad, Moscow, and the Ukraine, respectively), they had managed to assemble beneath the radar of Soviet intelligence and to achieve not just strategic or operational surprise, but actual tactical surprise as well. As a result, the opening of Operathat had been designed to — short, sharp From Victory to Defeat: 1941 35 Red Army senseless, methodically encircling and destroying huge Soviet forces at Bialys- tion Barbarossa saw the Wehrmacht pound Germans fought tok and Minsk. In this opening phase, the huge swath of territory a as large as as close to the border as possible the endless depths of the country, and better than it did. world's largest The disaster has army was no it before The Great Britain. operational plan for Barbarossa called for destroying as Red Army the Kes- taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners and selschlacht to perfection, overrunning the it much of the could retreat into could not have worked much parallel in military history: the essentially destroyed and the richest portions of the world's largest country overrun. Although by well-practiced time the Germans had the entire thing this we must recognize how much of the drill, for their early triumphs has to literally, as the a the pile of intelligence lie at Stalin's feet. on his desk He down responsibility ignored, quite —from sources as diverse German — Moscow and Winston Churchill of on the border. With a network of intel- Yugoslav ambassador to massive to a buildup ligence agents abroad unparalleled in size and motivation (this was the communism was still a religion for many in the West), and steady stream of German deserters crossing the border before age in which with a the operation, Stalin should at least have been able to alert the units at the border to the imminent German blow. The only trouble was that the vozhd, or Boss, as he liked to be called, didn't believe any of it. all a plot, he swore with Germany, or —either a It was war western one to get him mixed up in a Nazi one to get him to move first and thus justify a German counterblow. "You cannot always trust the intelligence," he once snapped at General G. K. Zhukov, who was gingerly trying a to talk sense into him. unmoved, and 53 The evidence mounted, but Stalin remained punches in their reports, hesitating to tell him things that they knew would only anger him. When Richard Sorge, his spymaster in Tokyo, tried to tell him the truth, Stalin dismissed him as "a little shit." When the commissar for state security, Merkulov, passed on inside reports of Luftwaffe preparations for the impending attack, Stalin blew up. "Comrade Merkulov," he his aides learned to pull "you can send your 'source' from the headquarters of German 54 aviation to his ing mother." The Red Army not only had to fight the Germans in those early days, therefore, but also what one modern hissed, — own regime. The resulting level of confusion still boggles the mind. Communications between Moscow and the front broke down immediately, al- writer aptly calls the "staggeringly inept" nature of though perhaps it is more accurate to say that they its were never 55 really 36 Chapter One established. 56 Stalin's technological conservatism, shared by old civil war cronies like the greatly mustachioed cavalry officer Marshal Semen Budenny, ensured that the Red Army's communications net consisted almost entirely of cable rather German than radio. A relative handful of agents in the country were able to utterly disable it before the main body had even crossed the border. Likewise, it took months for something like a valid supply system to get up and running. Some Soviet soldiers in those terrible early days actually marched into battle with no food but anchovies, a particularly terrible thing in light of the heat and the lack of drinking water. 57 There is one moment that may stand as representative of the entire opening phase of Barbarossa: Soviet 8th Mechanized Corps trundling up the single road from Drogobych to Sambor and crashing into Soviet 13th Mechanized Corps, which was, unfortunately, moving from Sambor to Drogobych. The result, need58 less to say, was a traffic jam of epic proportions. They might still be there, sorting themselves out, if the Germans hadn't destroyed them both. As a result dizzying. of By now, all these factors, the initial German progress was the surprise air assault, launched in early morning had become almost obligatory. It did enormous damage. It destroyed hundreds of planes on the ground and made short work of the few disorganized patrols that managed to get into the air. After wrecking the Red Air Force, the Luftwaffe turned its attention to other targets, interdicting Soviet road and rail movement, pounding enemy troop concentrations and thoroughly disrupting command and communication facilities. As German ground forces advanced, they would, as always up to this point in the war, have the advantage of operating under an irresistible umbrella of air power. There was progress almost everywhere. Army Group North (Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb) blasted through the Soviet border defenses in the newly occupied Baltic states almost immediately and headed for Leningrad. With 4th Panzer Group under General Erich Hoepner acting as the armored spearhead, Leeb's army group actually covered half the distance to Leningrad within the first five days of the campaign. 59 Pride of place for the mobile formations has to go to LVI Panzer Corps, under General Erich von Manstein, which drove fifty miles into the Baltic states on the first day alone against thoroughly befuddled Soviet opposition. By the end of day 4, Manstein had not only covered the 185 miles to Dvinsk, but had seized the crucial bridges over the Dvina River there, one of the principal strategic barriers on the road to Leningrad. Manstein's neighbor on the left, the XXXXI hours of June 22, From Victory to Defeat: 1941 37 Panzer Corps, wasn't far behind. After fighting Soviet tanks north of Raseynyay soon after crossing the border, it closed up to the Dvina and established bridgeheads across it on June 30. Beyond Dvinsk lay the Ostrov-Pskov area, another 155 miles distant, the second intermediate position on the way to Leningrad. The Panzer spearheads captured Ostrov on July 4 and reached Pskov the next day. By July 14, XXXXI Panzer Corps stood on the lower Luga, with a bridgehead over the river at Sabsk. It was just 62 miles from Leningrad; it had covered 470 miles in three weeks. As ever, the point was not simply to seize the city, but to ensure that the Soviets would have to throw troops in front of it, which could then be subjected to a concentric attack in the classic style and destroyed. To that end, Leeb had his two other armies, the 18th (General Georg von Kuchler) and 16th (General Ernst Busch), hustling along to the left and right of Hoepner's Panzers, respectively. Throughout Barbarossa, the ability of the 126 German infantry divisions to keep up with their brethren in the tanks would play a crucial role. It was a murderous pace for the infantry and artillery, not to mention the 300,000 horses with which the Wehrmacht invaded the 60 Soviet Union. The Germans met even more dramatic success on the road to Moscow. Here, Army Group Center (Field Marshal Fedor von Bock) dealt out a series of hammer blows that would have felled virtually any army in the world except the one it happened to be facing. Bock was wielding a large bat indeed: the Schwerpunkt of the entire German effort in 61 the east, containing half the armor committed to Barbarossa. He had four large maneuver units in all: two armies (the 9th under General Adolf Strauss and the 4th