Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (8 page)

By the end of August, Army Group South had closed up the Dnepr along its entire length, except for the Irpen position occupied by Sixth Army west of Kiev. Although many Red Army forces had escaped, the Battle of the Dnepr bend netted another 90,000 POWs, 481 guns and 206 tanks – a smaller version of Uman. Believing a fighting withdrawal through the western Ukraine had only resulted in disaster at Uman, Stalin resolved to hold on to eastern Ukraine. On 5 August, he replaced Zhukov as Red Army Chief of Staff for pointing out the inherent weakness of the Kiev position. Sensing which way the wind blew,
three days later Kirponos told the generalissimo he could hold the city. Now the Battle of the Dnepr bridgeheads began.
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The first German bridgehead did not last long. On 19 August, 9th Panzer won a foothold across the river at Zaporozhe, only to lose it to a Soviet counterattack. Then it was the turn of 13th Panzer. Early in August, it had attempted to capture bridges between Kremenchug and Krujkow, only to find them in ruins. The next crossing downstream was Dnepropetrovsk, an industrial city of half a million, defended by three rifle divisions. After three days of fighting through three successive defensive lines, the division entered the city on the morning of 25 August, and it was in German hands by nightfall. Retreating Soviets had destroyed two of the city’s bridges, but the 13th Panzer managed to cross the third, artillery damaged, 1,400m-long floating bridge and establish a presence on the east bank. A day later, 60th Motorized joined it there, and within a week SS Viking and 198th Infantry Divisions also occupied the bridgehead. Red artillery and CAS pounded von Mackensen’s men from three sides. The Luftwaffe saved the day and the situation stabilized, although life in the exposed salient remained very dangerous.
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German bridgeheads over the Dnepr were essential for the next phase of Barbarossa.

While the army group chief of staff anticipated an upcoming battle at Poltava, the German high command had bigger plans. By the end of August, Hitler had finally prevailed over his generals and committed the Ostheer to a massive battle of annihilation around Kiev. Guderian’s Second Panzer Army would be coming south following the successful completion of the Battle of Smolensk. Von Kleist would keep up Army Group South’s end of the bargain by attacking northward from the Dnepr. Von Rundstedt preferred to launch his assault from somewhere closer to Kiev than Dnepropetrovsk. With that in mind he ordered Seventeenth Army to create bridgeheads near Kremenchug. The Seventeenth actually created two, one at the city proper (31 August–2 September) and another nearby at Derievka (29 August–4 September) and either repaired or built bridges at each. Immediately, the Germans reinforced, and the Soviets attacked them. The skies above all the bridgeheads were full of aircraft of both sides. Responsible for the defense of the Dnepr was the 38th Army, guarding 200km with 7 rifle divisions made up of 40,000 men. To take heat off the Dnepropetrovsk and Kremenchug sites, von Rundstedt ordered a decoy attack upstream at Cherkassy. This move alarmed Budenny, who began to organize a counterattack. While he was doing this, von Kleist turned over significant portions of the Dnepropetrovsk defense to infantry, and by 10 September had quickly shifted much of First Panzer up to Kremenchug. On the 12th, von Kleist’s panzers came flying out of Kremenchug.
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The Battle of Kiev had begun in earnest.

Budenny saw these developments right in front of his eyes. He argued with the Red Army’s new Chief of Staff, Marshal BM Shaposhnikov and requested permission to withdraw to the Psel River. To this, Stalin had the following reactions on 11 September: order Kirponos to stand fast and relieve Budenny. Marshal SM Timoshenko took the old cavalryman’s place with only a couple of hours before the assault to prepare. Rain fell hard those days, and von Kleist only had 331 panzers (53 percent of what he had on Barbarossatag) in Kremenchug with which to attack, but it would not be a fair fight. The 297th Rifle Division took the worst of it on the 11th, and since all Soviet reserves were arrayed against Guderian, very few faced von Kleist. After crossing the Dnepr at night and following preparatory fire by artillery and Nebelewerfer, the XLVIII Panzer Corps took the lead. On 12 September, with 16th Panzer on the left, 9th on the right and 14th right behind, they covered 70km. The 2nd Battalion, Panzer Regiment 2, captured the 38th Army headquarters and commander Major General NV Feklenko escaped only by jumping out of a window. The Luftwaffe contributed with its Fliegerkorps V and the II Flak Corps. On 14 September, Shaposhnikov instructed Kirponos, ‘You must fulfill comrade Stalin’s order of 11 September’, in other words, the Southwest Front must stand and die. Fanatical resistance in Lubny by NKVD troops did their part to slow XLVIII Panzer Corps. On the next day, 15 September, with 16th Panzer leading the way as it often did, First Panzer Army fought its way into Lokhvitsa and a rendezvous with Guderian coming down from the north. Only on the 18th, 72 hours after it was too late, did Stalin’s written permission to retreat from Kiev arrive. With his staff, trying to escape history’s greatest encirclement battle, Kirponos died a hero’s death southwest of Lokhvitsa.
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With the invaluable assistance of the Second, Sixth and Seventeenth Armies, von Kleist and Guderian had encircled two–thirds of a million Red Army soldiers and killed and wounded hundreds of thousands more in a trap the size of Belgium. For the first and only time in the Nazi–Soviet War the Ostheer outnumbered the Soviets on the battlefield.

The final attack on Moscow, which the Soviets had been expecting for nearly two months after the Battle of Smolensk, and which most German generals had been anticipating for nearly a year, began with Operation Typhoon. Von Kleist promptly lost XLVIII Panzer Corps to Guderian. Von Rundstedt considered First Panzer Army to be so broken that he requested OKH limit its movement to no farther than the Don River. Halder replied in the negative, that future operations required bridgeheads east of the river. The field marshal asked OKH to clarify its priorities: either the Crimea or the Don River crossings? Hitler’s answer was typical: he wanted both. Von Kleist received his new mission,
Rostov. The Soviets had not been idle after Kiev either, and their defenses south of Dnepropetrovsk demanded significant German efforts to overcome.
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With his panzer army weakened by the loss of the panzer corps and concentrated on a narrow breakthrough front, von Rundstedt’s infantry armies, Sixth, Eleventh and Seventeenth, assumed ever lengthier portions of the front line. While von Kleist was otherwise occupied executing the Kiev Kessel, the 9th and 8th Armies combined to attack Eleventh Army between its Berislav bridgehead and Melitopol. Von Manstein, Eleventh’s new commanding general, managed the immediate crisis about the time First Panzer had reassembled in the Dnepropetrovsk bridgehead preparatory to continuing eastward. Von Rundstedt saw an opportunity to entrap more Soviet armies so redirected von Kleist to the southeast. He sent XIV Panzer out of the Petrikovka bridgehead held by the CSIR while III Panzer broke out of Dnepropetrovsk proper. Coming down the Dnepr, First Panzer took Zaporozhe from the east on October, by which time the danger to the rear of9th and 8th Armies became apparent to the Soviet high command. On the next day therefore, they tried to disengage from von Manstein’s men but it was too late. The SS Leibstandarte had already penetrated between the two Soviet armies and was racing toward a rendezvous with von Kleist. With XIV Panzer on the right, III Panzer in the center and CSIR covering the left flank, First Panzer had all the advantages. Two fighter and one Stuka Gruppe flew CAS overhead. On 7 October, near Osipenko, his forces linked up with the Leibstandarte, ending the Battle of the Sea of Azov and closing the trap on 06,000 more POWs, 766 guns and 2 2 tanks. Lieutenant General AK Smirnov, commanding 8th Army, fell in combat and the Germans buried him with honors.
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To von Rundstedt, it seemed that the way to the Donbas and Rostov lay wide open.

At this point, weather and logistics conspired to slow the panzer army and give the defenders a much–needed breather. Between 6–11 October, heavy rains and cold delayed the Germans. Then, even before the Sea of Azov battle had concluded, logistics began to hamstring Barbarossa again. The closest railhead remained at Pervomaisk, but many Dnepr bridges were down and various river ferries were not an adequate substitute for a functioning railroad. Foraging parties of the 125th Infantry Division called themselves ‘Rindvieh Abteilung 125’ (Cattle Detachment 125). In order to keep von Kleist advancing, army group consolidated what trucks it had and dedicated them to First Panzer. All other units came to a stop and lived off the land. Red Army forces were ‘fighting without any enthusiasm and running away’, yet the Germans could not exploit this situation. The fuel shortage grounded the Luftwaffe as well, so only single-engine aircraft could fly. By 11 October, III Panzer had made it as far as Taganrog on the Mius River. Two days later, even the panzer army
ground to a halt. On the 17th, as 13th and 14th Panzer Divisions reached the Sambek River, north of Rostov, the panzer army described the supply situation as ‘catastrophic.’ Finally, three days later, III Panzer received some fuel and could begin to inch eastward. By 22 October, 13th Panzer reached the Tuzlov River, north of Rostov. But the damage had been done, First Panzer and the rest of Army Group South were too spread out and the Soviets had used the pause to improve their defenses.
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The weaknesses of the Wehrmacht’s serendipitous logistics planning had come home to roost: foraging and ‘living off the land’ will only take a modern army so far.

During the fuel crisis, the marching and horse-drawn elements of First Panzer moved as fast as the motorized. In many cases, ‘pursuit detachments’ consisted of Landsers using panje carts. Von Kleist had received the CSIR as partial compensation for the loss of XLVIII Panzer, and the latter was assigned the twin missions of maintaining contact with Seventeenth Army to the north and of capturing Stalino. Divisions Celere and Pasubio led the way, with Torino bringing up the rear as usual. Alongside marched XLIX Mountain Corps, one of the fastest leg-infantry outfits in the Ostheer. On 18 October, von Kleist ordered the assault on Stalino for the 20th. The attack went off after some delays and the city fell by the end of the month. Months’ supplies of diesel fuel were captured. However, keeping communications with Seventeenth Army proved to be a much more difficult matter. The Italians attacked northeast and took Gorlovka on 2 November, but the Seventeenth remained dozens of kilometers away. Simultaneously, on the panzer army’s southern flank wet weather and resistance by the 9th Army slowed III and XIV Panzer Corps after some initial gains a few days earlier. Von Kleist lost most of his air support on 12 November, when Kampfgeschwader (KG) 54 and most of KG 55 left the Russian theater for Belgium.
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On 3 November, von Brauchitsch visited Army Group South headquarters in order to ‘knock the lead out of’ von Rundstedt’s command. The logistic situation was extremely dire, the first rail traffic over the Dnepr was still days in the future. Von Kleist’s men did receive some aerial resupply into the airfields of Mariupol and Taganrog. In the words of a III Panzer Corps soldier, German troops simply wanted some food and to hear their own artillery for a change. The Army Commander in Chief told his astonished audience that the high command still expected First Panzer to take the Maikop oil region ‘at all costs this winter’. By the 13th, the first frost hit the southern theater, making the roads useable but at a cost of hard-to-start engines and cold men (temperatures were —22° C). Von Kleist planned his assault on Rostov for 17 November. Using a ‘grand tour’ maneuver, he would swing in a wide counter-clockwise arc and take the city from the north and northeast. The III Panzer Corps
(13th and 14th Panzer, 60th Motorized, Leibstandarte) would play the role of Schwerpunkt on the inside track, while XIV Panzer (16th Panzer, SS Viking, Slovakian Motorized Division) covered von Mackensen’s left on the outside track.
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First Panzer’s last attack of Barbarossa began with the usual spectacular success. Under CAS offered by KG 27 and Stukageschwader (StG) 77, it broke through the 56th Independent Army with minimal delay. Prepared defenses and 100 tanks at Bolshoy Sala could not hold the 14th Panzer, von Mackensen’s vanguard. As he had also long planned, Timoshenko coincidentally began his own counterattack on the 17th, mainly hitting SS Viking. His 37th Army had only mass in his favor: thousands of drunken frontovicki (front-line soldiers) without training or heavy weapons and no CAS of their own. The Soviet attack petered out by the 19th. Not so with First Panzer, which kept advancing on the ‘gateway to the Caucasus’. The final lunge by III Panzer began at 0600 hours, 20 November, when it crossed the Sultan Saly River, just northeast of Rostov. With 14th Panzer and Leibstandarte in the lead, the Germans captured the airport by 1230 hours and the city center by that afternoon. By Barbarossa’s standards, men and booty captured represented a paltry amount. However, the entire German chain of command, from Hitler to von Mackensen was excited to have cut Soviet communications with the south. On that same day, the OKH issued another nonsensical order to von Kleist: move on Maikop immediately.
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Literally and figuratively, the First Panzer Army dangled at the end of a long tether. Its dangerously exposed spearhead in Rostov anticipated that at Stalingrad, almost to the day a year into the future, complete with shaky Hungarians and Italians guarding its flank. Timoshenko had been planning to resume his counteroffensive and on 22 November, Stalin told him that the German occupation of Rostov had altered nothing: the attack would go off as scheduled. Von Kleist’s advance into the city had exaggerated German vulnerabilities present the last time Timoshenko attacked, just days earlier. Now, however, the panzer army was even more dispersed and the gap to Seventeenth Army even larger. Sensing his vulnerability, on the same day Stalin told his marshal to attack, von Kleist planned to evacuate Rostov in favor of the better defensive terrain in the Mius River valley. Prodded by von Brauchitsch, on the 23rd, von Rundstedt countermanded that idea. On 25 November, the first Soviet attacks hit Leibstandarte.
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