Barbarossa (37 page)

Accordingly, Timoshenko had been ordered to hold the two "hinges"
at either end of his front, at Voronezh and Rostov, and to
allow—indeed, he had no option—the Germans to burst
through the "gates" between, trading space for time across
the Donetz basin and the large bend of the Don. When the German
offensive broke on 28th June, its force, however, took the Russians
by surprise. Paulus' Panzer divisions reached the Don on either side
of Voronezh on 5th July, and at that time the
Stavka
still had
no means of knowing whether they would force a crossing and swing
northward to take Yelets and Tula, in the rear. A new "Voronezh
front" was created forthwith out of the debris of Golikov's
divisions and some of the meagre
Stavka
reserve and put under
Vatutin, who was himself responsible directly to Moscow, and not to
Timoshenko.

At this point Russian resistance, although still very patchy and
disorganised, began to take effect on German planning. During the
second week of July the only regions where there was any heavy
fighting were at Voronezh and south of the Donetz, where the pit
heads and slag heaps of the mining basin gave some protection for
infantry trying to hold up armour. Between, in the broad corridor of
land that separated the parallel course of the Don and the Donetz,
over a hundred miles across at its narrowest point, the Red Army was
barely functioning at all. A correspondent with the
Völkischer
Beobachter
described how

The Russian, who up to this time had fought stubbornly over
each kilometre, withdrew without firing a shot. Our advance was only
delayed by destroyed bridges and by aircraft. When the Soviet
rearguards were too hard-pressed they chose a position which enabled
them to hold out until night. ... It was quite disquieting to plunge
into this vast area without finding a trace of the enemy.

Bock wanted to "deal with" Vatutin before he extended
his own flank too deeply into this yawning void, and proposed to use
Weichs and a part of Paulus' army to do so. On a textbook
appreciation this was, of course, absolutely correct policy.
Furthermore. Bock had had personal experience in the summer of 1941
of the delays and frustrations that could follow from leaving large
Russian forces undisturbed on his flank. Had Bock been allowed to do
what he wanted, there can be little doubt that the whole course of
the German campaign in south Russia (and therefore of the war itself)
would have been very different. Yet he was prevented from doing so,
and dismissed from his command, after a dispute of which the details
remain obscure to this day. It does seem as if the disintegration (as
it appeared) of the Russian forces in the Don corridor had come as a
surprise to Hitler, as it had to many of his generals. At OKW the
Führer was in a happier mood than at any time since the fall of
France.

On the telephone to Halder he showed none of the pettiness and
apprehension which had characterised his inquiries the previous year.
"The Russian is finished," he told His Chief of Staff on
20th July, and the latter's reply, "I must admit, it looks like
it," reflected the prevailing euphoria at both OKW and the High
Command of the Army. And following on this conviction OKW took two
steps which were to have a radical effect on the development of the
campaign. The first was a redirection of Hoth and the 4th Panzer
Army; the second, the issuing of a new directive redefining the
objectives of the army group.

Originally, under the terms of Directive No. 41, Hoth was to have
led Paulus to Stalingrad, then handed over the "block" to
the 6th Army and withdrawn into mobile reserve. But after the
campaign got under way, Bock's anxiety concerning Russian strength at
Voronezh had led him to recommend holding back the bulk of the 6th
Army for an attack on the Russian position there and send Hoth on a
dash to Stalingrad alone. OKW now decreed that Hoth was not to march
on Stalingrad at all, but to swing southeast and "assist in the
early passage of the lower Don"; Paulus could manage Stalingrad
on his own—provided that the army group stood on the defensive
from Voronezh to the Don bend. When Bock was dismissed, the two army
groups within his huge "south" framework became
independent, and were assigned independent—and
diverging—objectives. Directive No. 45, dated 23rd July,
promulgated:

Army Group 'A' [under the command of List] is to advance
southward across the Don, with the aim of taking possession of the
Caucasus with its oil resources;

Army Group 'B' [under the command of Weichs] is to attack
Stalingrad, smash the enemy concentration there, take the town and
cut off the isthmus between the Don and the Volga.

In spite of the progressive weakening of Russian resistance this
order was received with some alarm of OKH as it amounted to a very
considerable widening of the strategic scope of the operations. There
was no longer any escape clause about "closing the Volga with
gunfire," and the Caucasian objectives were no longer confined
by Maikop and Proletarskaya, but included the whole oil-bearing
region. By carrying through the change in two stages—first
dismissing Bock and altering the order of priorities on the Don, then
creating the two "new" army groups—Hitler had
cleverly circumvented the opposition of OKH. Yet an interesting
question remains:

Why was there not a more concerted protest at the dismissal of
Bock? The spokesmen of the conservative wing of the German Army have
not been slow to attribute the blame for all the Wehrmacht's
misfortunes to Hitler, and the fact that they keep silent over such a
classic and far-reaching blunder as the diversion of Hoth and the
failure to take Voronezh appears odd. Under interrogation,
Blumentritt disclaimed any inside knowledge of the affair, and
confined himself to asserting that ". . . there was never any
intention of pushing bevond Voronezh and continuing this direct
easterly drive. The orders were to halt on the Don near Voronezh and
assume the defensive there as cover to the south-eastward
advance—which was to be carried out by the 4th Panzer Army and
the 6th Army."

The critical decision was plainly that the 4th Panzer Army should
alter course. And here it seems that OKH
was
persuaded this
was desirable—even though for a different reason from Hitler's.
For Pau'us in his papers clearly conveys the impression that the
diversion of Hoth was first conceived with the possibility of cutting
off the Russian divisions which were holding up Kleist's tanks and
the 17th Army in the Donetz basin. Within a few days of the original
order to Hoth, though, the Russians' resistance to Kleist in the
Donetz basin had withered away and their troops were pulling out as
fast as they could. The possibility of cutting off any large body was
ruled out as it looked as though Kleist would arrive at Rostov no
later than Hoth himself.

In the result the two Panzer armies arrived at the Don crossings
together—a prodigious sledge hammer, as it had now become, to
crush the tiniest of snails. For the Don crossings were virtually
undefended. Timoshenko's troops had been hustled out of one position
after another in the course of their retreat, and those who had not
been trapned west of Rostov had already left the Don behind and were
filtering up the valley of the Manych or making their way due east
into the Kalmyk steppe, where the broken-up country and
balkas
of the Yergeni Hills would afford them some cover. Kleist, who was
particularly free with comment on how operations in other theatres
should have been conducted, claimed after the war, "The 4th
Panzer Army . . . could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the
end of July, but was diverted to help me in crossing the Don. I did
not need its aid, and it simply got in the way and congested the
roads that I was using." A sergeant with the 14th Panzer
Division has described how

We got to the Don to find most of the bridges down, but very
little sign of the enemy. The heat was stifling . . . the whole
length of the right bank was smothered in dust clouds as more and
more vehicles beean to pile up there. Russian resistance was so
slight that many of the soldiers were able to take off their clothes
and bathe—as we had in the Dnieper exactly a year ago. Let us
hope that history does not repeat itself!

We were there for two days while the engineers were working. We
suffered a good deal of attention from Russian aircraft, they would
come over singly and in pairs at dusk, and at first light when the
Luftwaffe
was absent. In places Russian artillery was quite
strong . . . they could be heard at night moving the guns into
position, and would bombard us when the sun rose ... its flat rays
from the east showed our positions in detail, but made it difficult
to spot their muzzle flashes.

As the two Panzer armies extended their flanks in an effort to
find an intact bridge and a crossing point that would allow them to
build up a bridgehead undisturbed, they soon overlapped and then
became seriously intermingled. Kleist got across the Don with his
light forces as early as 25th July, but traffic congestion and
difficulty in bringing up fuel supplies prevented his getting many of
his tanks across until 27th July. It was not until 29th July that
Hoth got his first Panzers across at Tsimlyanskaya, and by then his
orders were changed again—he was to send only one division
southeast to cover the gap between himself and Kleist,and lead the
mass of the 4th Panzer Army northward through Kotelnikovo, across the
Aksai River, to take Stalingrad on its unprotected southern side.

[This division, the 16th Motorised, was sent to Elista, where it
remained, undisturbed by anything more violent than light patrolling
activity for six months. As will be seen, its presence became a
source of considerable friction between the various commanders
concerned during the critical periods after the Russian
counteroffensive. (See Ch. 14.)]

Once he was across the Don, Kleist's advance accelerated at a
tremendous pace. On 29th July he captured Proletarskaya (the original
stop line on the old OKH plan); two days later he forced his way out
of the Manych gorge and entered Salsk, sending one column down the
Krasnodar railway to cover the left flank of the 17th Army and
another directly across the steppe toward Stavropol, which fell on
5th August; Armavir on the 7th, and Maikop, where the first Russian
oil derricks could be seen, on 9th August.

But things were turning out rather differently for Paulus in his
march down the Don corridor. Although Russian resistance was
negligible until the Germans reached the Chir River, the
distance—over two hundred miles—and the fact that only
Wietersheim's Panzer corps was completely mobile, meant that the 6th
Army got badly strung out and would have little prospect of mounting
a successful attack "off the march" if it should encounter
serious resistance. On 12th July the
Stavka
had promulgated a
new "Stalingrad front" and was filling it up with divisions
out of the Moscow reserve as fast as the railway system would allow.

[Commanded by Timoshenko until 22nd July, when Gordov was
appointed.]

For three weeks a race of the kind familiar from the summer of
1941, between the attacking columns of the enemy and the urgent
concentration of the defender's reserves, was on—and this time
the Russians won, although by a very slender margin.

General Chuikov, who was ultimately to emerge as one of the three
or four vital personalities who inspired and directed the battle of
Stalingrad, was at that time in command of the reserve army which was
dispersed around Tula. This force consisted of four infantry
divisions, two motorised and two armoured brigades, and must have
represented a substantial proportion of the remaining
Stavka
reserve. Some idea of the urgency (not to say confusion) and of the
stress of their journey on the Russian railway system can be derived
from their movement order, which specified detraining at no fewer
than seven different stations. On his arrival Chukov was given
instructions so vague as to convince him that ". . . Front H.Q.
obviously possessed extremely limited information about the enemy,
who was mentioned only in general terms." And as these orders
would have involved Chuikov's men in an immediate forced march of 125
miles, he protested:

to carry them out in the time given was impossible, as parts of
the Army which were to carry out these tasks had not yet arrived. The
Chief of Staff replied that the instructions had to be carried out,
but then he thought it over and proposed that I should call in to see
him the following day.

Next morning, however, he did not appear at H.Q., and no one
was able to tell me when he would be there. What was I to do? I went
to see the officer in command of the operations sections at Front
H.Q., Colonel Rukhle, and showing him that it was impossible to carry
out the instructions according to schedule, asked him to report to
the Front Military Council that the 64th Army could occupy its line
of defence not earlier than July 23.

Colonel Rukhle immediately, without reporting to anyone, with
his own hand altered the date for the occupation of the line of
defence from July 19 to July 21. I was astounded. How could the
officer in command of operations, without the knowledge of the
Commander, change the date of the operation? Who was in command of
the Front?

It is plain from Chuikov's account that the "race"
between Paulus and the Stalingrad front was more than a matter of
concentration and deployment. The key problem was that of reviving
the faltering morale of the Red Army. Could the arrival of the young
commanders and fresh troops from the reserve armies restore cohesion
to the battered flotsam of Timoshenko's old army, now being swept up
by the rising tide of Army Group B in the Don bend? The Soviets'
tactics of 1942 had been to retreat when their flanks were pierced,
to give ground rather than lives, to avoid the ruinous encirclement
battles of 1941. But these conditions—the long withdrawal
across a burning homeland—are the most difficult in which to
preserve morale, particularly among a relatively primitive and
imperfectly trained body, as the bulk of the