A World at Arms (85 page)

On its own, the German Army Group in the north, after completing the destruction of the Soviet 2nd Shock Army in July discussed in
Chapter 5
, had developed several similar projects, but of these only one was eventually carried out. The relief route to the Demyansk pocket was so narrow and so frequently under water that in anticipation of a second
winter campaign some new steps were clearly necessary. Hitler would not authorize a withdrawal from the pocket, which he saw with some justice as a key part of the German Army Group Center’s posture of threatening a renewed offensive against Moscow. The alternative was a local operation to widen the corridor, and in the last days of September and early October, 1942, the Germans were able to carry out such an operation.
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The major German effort in the north, however, was to be Operation “Nordlicht” (Northern Lights) against Leningrad. During the summer, the big siege guns that had been used against Sevastopol were moved to the other end of the front, along with some additional heavy artillery. Soon after, five of the divisions which had been in the Crimean campaign followed them north. The argument of the commander of Army Group North, Field Marshal Georg von Kuechler, that the seizure of the Leningrad area and the establishment of a firm land connection to Finland were not the simple operation Hitler imagined them to be, produced not added divisions but the appointment of von Manstein and the air force general who had worked with him, General Wolfram von Richthofen, to run operation “Nordlicht.” Having cracked Sevastopol, they were the obvious team to crack Leningrad.
^d

Before this attack could begin, however, the Red Army launched its own offensive. The Volkhov Front under General Meretskov had been preparing an attack of its own designed to break open land communication to Leningrad. Attacking on August 27, before the Germans could start “Nordlicht,” the Russian forces broke into the bottleneck which the Germans held east of the city. The fighting was so fierce, and the prospect of the Volkhov Front breaking through to the Leningrad Front so immediate, that one by one the German divisions from the Crimea scheduled for “Nordlicht” had to be thrown into the battle. Dissatisfied with the way the fighting was going, Hitler placed Manstein in charge of it. A German counter–attack cut off the Soviet units which had broken into the bottleneck while a break–out attempt from Leningrad across the Neva river was also beaten off.

The Soviet attempt to relieve the siege had been defeated in a month’s fighting by the Germans. By the end of September, the Volkhov Front was back where it had started after suffering close to 50,000 casualties. The Germans, however, had suffered heavy casualties themselves but that was not all. The divisions, equipment and supplies which were supposed to carry out operation “Nordlicht” had been consumed in the defense of the bottleneck. There would be no German offensive against
Leningrad in 1942 at all, and hence also no attacks further north to cut the railway from Murmansk. All summer the Russians had sent supplies into Leningrad by ship across Lake Ladoga, evacuating civilians on the return trip. In the coming winter, they would again use an ice road across the frozen lake. Manstein received a new assignment elsewhere.
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On the central portion of the Eastern Front, both sides had very large forces, and at the end of July, Zhukov’s West Front launched a major offensive to collapse the German 9th Army line east and south of Rzhev. For the Red Army, success in this offensive would have meant ending a threatened new offensive toward Moscow; for the Germans, holding on to Rzhev was essential to maintaining any credible threat of a renewed advance on the Soviet capital. All through August and most of September the bitter fighting raged, going first in favor of the Russians and later against them. Zhukov himself was called away by Stalin at the end of August to lead the counter-attacks against the Germans driving into Stalingrad,
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but the offensive ground on after his departure. When the fighting died down, the Russians had reclaimed an area roughly 15 by 50 miles, but they had been unable to dislodge the Germans from Rzhev or to cut the railway to it.

Casualties on both sides had been very heavy in this fighting as well, but here too a Soviet offensive operation, although not successful in reaching its main objective, had as a significant by-product the spoiling of a planned German offensive. The Germans had hoped to launch a major operation of their own to crush the Soviet forces in the great bulge around Sukhinichi and to clear the main north–south railway at Kirov where the Russian winter offensive had cut it. The Soviet offensive against Rzhev, by absorbing most of the available German reserves, reduced this project to a minimal operation of no strategic significance. If in 1942 the Red Army was not yet able to launch major successful summer offensives of its own, it had certainly found a way to keep the Germans from carrying out even limited offensive operations on two-thirds of the Eastern Front.
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By the summer of 1942, the fighting in the East was no longer confined to the front lines daily marked on the maps in Stalin’s and Hitler’s headquarters and anxiously followed, even if not quite so accurately, by governments and ordinary people around the globe. In the area behind the German front lines, guerillas, generally referred to as partisans, were playing a significant role in organizing resistance to the invader.
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On the assumption that no enemy forces would be allowed to penetrate the territory of the U.S.S.R., no significant preparations for that contingency had been made before June 1941, but within days of the German invasion, the government called on the population overrun by the Germans
to resist. Small partisan groups began to be organized in the late summer and fall of 1941, generally centered around party and police (NKVD) activists, local officials from the administration, Machine-Tractor Stations, or state or collective farms, or army officers who had escaped capture in the encirclement battles. These leaders collected Red Army stragglers, especially from the great battles on the central part of the front, into small bands which in the early months of the war generally hid out in the forests and were more concerned with survival than resistance. As it became increasingly obvious that the overwhelming majority of Russian prisoners of war were going to be shot or allowed to die of starvation and disease, some made successful efforts to escape while being moved or in makeshift holding areas, and these escapees also tended to join the partisans.

As long as the German army was advancing rapidly in 1941, what minimal resistance activities the partisans engaged in was more a nuisance than a threat for the invaders. The woods and marshes which provided shelter for the partisans were being left further and further behind the front; and while they could quite easily pick up discarded infantry weapons on the vast battlefields nearby, the small partisan bands would clearly be no match for the Germans once they had won against the Red Army. But the Germans did not win, and that produced a whole series of changes in the situation. First, it meant that the winter crisis at the front obliged the Germans to send to the front lines as reinforcements many of the rear area security troops whose primary function had been the protection of the German army’s lines of communications and the maintenance of order in the rear areas. Although these Security Divisions, as they were called, consisted of low categories of troops commanded by elderly, invalided, or incompetent officers, in the desperate situation the German army faced in the winter of 1941–42 anybody in uniform who could carry a rifle was needed. This obviously relaxed the hold of the Germans on the vast areas they had occupied.

Secondly, the breaks through the German front by the Red Army enabled the latter to open routes of contact to the partisans, routes over which officers and supplies could be brought to them. Furthermore, the slow revival of the Red Air Force and the German need to concentrate its planes on ground support operations at critical points on the front meant that where and as the Soviet Union used small airplanes in single flights to drop or even land officers and critical supplies to the partisans, such flights were most unlikely to be intercepted by the German air force. Soviet inspectors and organizers could be sent in and out. The occupied territories, in other words, had neither a solid wall nor a solid roof.

Perhaps more important than these tactical factors was the overwhelming military–political one that the Soviet system was clearly going to stay, not vanish. The partisans were the local arm of a continuing system, not the remnants of a disappearing regime. They could and did begin conscripting men and women in the villages, they could count on far more support than before, and, above all, they could remind all the Red Army stragglers from the 1941 battles who had made quiet new homes for themselves that their military obligation was still in effect. Only by service in the partisan movement could they expect to redeem themselves in the face of questions about their performance in battle.

In a few months in the winter of 1941–42, the partisan movement grew from a few thousand, scattered in tiny bands, to a substantial force, disparate but significant, enrolling at least a quarter of a million members by the spring of 1942 and growing thereafter by volunteers and conscripts, with these latter categories slowly constituting an ever–increasing proportion of the total as compared with the Red Army stragglers.

It must not be thought that this movement grew evenly in the whole area occupied by the Germans. There were almost none in most of the lands annexed by the Soviet Union under the terms of its agreement with Germany, the northeastern portion of Poland being the sole exception at this time. In the open agricultural area of the central and southern Ukraine there was in effect no place for partisans to hide. While there were small underground movements in some of the cities, and partisans did operate in the mountains and caves of the Crimea, the small bands organized in such open areas, as well as the Northern Caucasus seized by the Germans in the summer of 1942, were generally hunted down by the Germans fairly quickly.
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It was in the wooded and swampy areas further north, the northern Ukraine, Belorussia, and the portions of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) behind the fronts of the German Army Groups Center and North that the partisan movement flourished. Here they came to control large portions of the rural areas, issuing their own newspapers, punishing any suspected of collaboration with the Germans, collecting intelligence for the Red Army and government or providing a haven for those who did this. They acted generally as the long arm of the Soviet government, reaching back into areas nominally now under German control and reminding the population that the Soviet government was coming back, and probably quite soon. On a continent where, with the exception of Poland and Yugoslavia, most of the conquered peoples were quietly cooperating with the conqueror, those living in the occupied Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were reminded that big
brother was watching, not from Moscow or some government in exile, but from a camp just outside the village.

The areas in the central portion of the occupied territories which offered the best terrain for the partisans also furnished a base from which roving partisan bands could be sent into areas which, as experience quickly showed, were not so suitable for guerilla warfare. This meant primarily the central belt of the Ukrainian SSR, an area about which the Soviet government was in any case very much concerned because of its nationalistic tendencies.
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The dispatch of several partisan bands on what were really showing-the-flag expeditions from the main partisan area into the Ukraine must be understood as a means of reminding the population that Soviet power would be restored there as well as in all the territory temporarily under the control of others.
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And as will become quickly apparent, the Soviet government could always depend upon the Germans to provide new recruits for the partisan movement.

The military activity of the partisans was quite limited in 1941 and 1942. They attacked small German outposts, made the occupying forces uneasy by occasional raids on villages, and obviously interfered with any effective administration of the occupied area. Their most important military actions from the perspective of the Red Army were their attacks on German communications, especially the railways. They rarely tried to blow up the critical bridges, but repeated cuts in the railway tracks were a serious nuisance for the Germans, who found themselves more and more forced by the lack of adequate security forces to abandon most of the countryside and concentrate on defense and patrolling along the railway lines. Not until 1943 and 1944 were the partisans sufficiently well organized and supplied to conduct systematic strikes against the railways in a manner coordinated with Soviet offensive operations at the front, but the early signs of such dangers were becoming evident in 1942.

The German anti-partisan operations were on the whole both unsuccessful and counter-productive. The exception was operation “Hanover” in the area of Army Group Center described in
Chapter 5
; in that case the partisans fought alongside the Red Army regulars and were defeated with them. The Soviet casualties in that instance were in fact for the most part actually partisans, and subsequent Soviet efforts to revive the movement there failed.
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In essentially all other anti-partisan operations, German army, SS and police units swept through previously designated areas, slaughtered thousands of civilians, burnt as many villages as possible, and once in a great while killed a few partisans. The latter for the most part usually escaped or hid out, only to resume activity
afterwards, generally supported more than before by the population who had just received a demonstration of German pacification methods.

If the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians provided a major impetus for recruitment into the partisan movement in the main areas of partisan activity in the north and center, another German policy served the same function further south. As will be clear from the review of Germany’s occupation policy in the next chapter, in 1942 the Germans instituted a large-scale program of forced labor recruitment in the Ukraine. This was not a matter of requiring the local people to work in their home area, clearing snow, rebuilding roads, or bringing in a harvest for the Germans to confiscate. Instead, they began seizing and deporting people by the tens of thousands to factories in Germany. This program–and the news which trickled back of the wretched treatment accorded such workers–drove thousands into the partisan movement in those areas of the Ukraine where earlier it had been difficult for the partisans to establish themselves. The cycle of violence escalated as the Germans responded to the increase in partisan activity; in the bloody confrontation between the cruelty of the occupier and the determination of the partisans, the Soviet regime increasingly created the basis for the return of the Red Army and Soviet power in territories which the maps showed to be nominally under German control.