Hitler's Panzers (29 page)

Had it been available, 3rd Panzer Army might well have been too much for the hard-tried Ivans. But instead of enveloping the Mozhaisk Line’s nearly open left flank, its divisions were advancing through the mud in the wrong direction. The veteran 1st Panzer Division covered 50 miles in five days to take Kalinin on October 14—but it was moving extrinsically, away from Moscow, as ordered.

Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army managed to scrounge enough fuel and ammunition to send XXIV Panzer Corps toward Tula on October 29. In fact the spearhead was a battle group formed from the 35th Panzer Regiment, brought up to 80 tanks by giving it most of the corps’s runners, a rifle company in half-tracks attached from 3rd Panzer Division, and several truck-mounted companies of the Grossdeutschland Regiment. Commanding the mixed bag was Colonel Heinrich Eberbach, a scar-faced veteran of World War I and among the best of the third-generation panzer leaders emerging from Barbarossa. The one available road to Tula began disintegrating immediately, with maximum speed falling to ten or twelve miles per hour: low-gear driving that was itself an extra strain on overworked trucks. The Russians had blown the bridges and laid minefields everywhere. Eberbach’s task force nevertheless advanced 50 miles in five days, and on October 30 he sought to take Tula by storm. The garrison, a mixture of local militia and NKVD troops, threw the Germans out and back in desperate fighting and bought time for reinforcements to pin 2nd Panzer Army in place outside the city till mid-November.

The battle for Tula highlighted the frontline consequences of long-term overextension throughout Army Group Center. It was not merely a matter of wrestling more supplies forward. The mobile units were declining in effective, deployable strength to a point where commanders were not merely halting units but cannibalizing them. It was common practice to strip out men and vehicles to form ever-weaker spearheads that might still be able to move but found it increasingly difficult to fight, even against the kind of amateur opposition initially faced in Tula. The shock, it might be said, was too small to create awe—and the confusion on which the panzers had depended since 1939.

The Germans had two choices. One was to go into what amounted to winter quarters, comprehensively refit, and prepare for another offensive in 1942. Kluge was already implementing that approach on his own initiative, tightening the 4th Army’s lines and shifting de facto to the defensive. The alternative was to make one last, absolutely final try for Moscow before winter began in earnest. The distance was so close. The army had come so far. Von Bock urged pushing on. The High Command concurred—and convinced a more or less dubious Hitler.

The mind-set can be ascribed to ambition. Halder, Bock, Guderian, and their subordinates were concerned, not to say obsessed, with their personal places in history. Linked to that, though not as often noted, were stress and fatigue. Living conditions had been primitive even in headquarters. Leading from the front meant taking risks. Guderian was not the only senior officer who had faced Soviet fire, and it impugns no one’s courage to say that experience is never shrugged off. The operational environment, in short, was anything but conducive to balanced judgment and cold reason in the pattern of the elder Moltke.

The senior staff officers’ conference held at Orsha on November 13 declared the situation extremely serious and criticized the notion of another large-scale offensive. Halder’s response that it was necessary to trust to “soldier’s luck,” and his later statement that “these battles are less a question of strategic command than a question of energy” seem, in hindsight, at best a desk general’s heroic vitalism, and at worst, hubris in the classical Greek sense. But Halder was no fool. The Russians had repeatedly conjured armies from resources just as repeatedly described as exhausted by German intelligence. What might they achieve given even four uninterrupted months?

Experience and myth alike, moreover, taught what a Russian winter meant for soldiers—especially a winter spent in the open. Neither the military nor the political leadership had concerned itself with providing winter clothes and equipment for a campaign expected to be finished by autumn. Now coats, gloves, and scarves were collected haphazardly—many extorted from Europe’s Jews—and piled up at railheads, taking priority behind fuel and ammunition. Eventually the survivors of the winter of 1941-42 would receive a medal. Its wearers dubbed it the
Gefrierfleischorden
: the frozen meat medal.

When the ground began freezing, there was a certain rejoicing from generals to privates. “Now [we] can afford to take risks,” Bock declared. Instead the panzers lurched forward, measuring progress as much by the onset of winter as by desperate Soviet resistance. Tank crews lit fires under engines in the morning to thaw them enough to turn over. More and more vehicles already held together with spit and tape gave up the ghost. Aircraft had been withdrawn to Reich and the Mediterranean; all that remained was VIII Air Corps with fewer than 100 fighters and 200 strike aircraft—paper strengths heavily eroded by fuel shortages and frozen engines.

Reinhardt swung south, captured Klin, and reached the Moscow-Volga Canal on November 27, but was promptly ejected from the small bridgehead. The panzer army went over to the defense on November 30, supplies, men, and equipment exhausted by determined Soviet defenders. Guderian made a final attempt to envelop Tula, and on December 2 also shifted to the defense under heavy Soviet pressure and recurring blizzards. Hoepner’s attack ground to a halt within sight and sound of Moscow. Its frontline units had no food, no gasoline, no ammunition, and almost no one left in the ranks able to pull a trigger. On the evening of December 1, a reconnaissance patrol reached the train station at Khimki—twelve and a half miles from Moscow: the closest the Germans would get. It might as well have been a hundred and twelve.

On December 5, with the temperature at 25 degrees below zero, the Red Army counterattacked. Its rear echelons disintegrating, Army Group Center fell back. Panzer Army 3 fought itself to near destruction covering Bock’s left. Sixth Panzer Division expended the last of its 35(t)s and most of its other vehicles, converted its transport to local farm wagons, and reorganized what remained of its panzer regiment as a provisional infantry battalion.

Hitler’s immediate responses were to issue a general “no retreat” order, and declare war against the US. The latter decision was the least debated; Hitler had to ask where Pearl Harbor was. The former decision reflected Hitler’s fear that the army might unravel completely if subjected to the strain of a long retreat. Guderian responded by flying to Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. Met with a “hard, unfriendly” stare, for five hours he made the case for local withdrawals and a flexible defense. Hitler recommended using heavy artillery to blast foxholes into the frozen ground. Guderian described the likely result as so many washtubs. The conversation declined from there. On December 26, Guderian was relieved of command.

Hoepner was next among the senior panzer officers to feel the axe. On January 8 he ordered what was left of a hard-pressed infantry corps to pull back while the option remained. Hitler screamed of an idiotic decision, of criminal betrayal, of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Hoepner was relieved of command, denied a pension, and refused authorization to wear his uniform in public. In farewell, he announced that his behavior was based on responsibility to God and duty to his army and his people.

This was the same general who in May 1941 spoke of defending against “Jewish Bolshevism” as justifying a “battle for existence” against the Soviet Union. Panzer Group 4 had not merely implemented Hitler’s order to shoot political commissars out of hand. Hoepner’s command had been highly praised by the commander of Einsatzgruppe 4 for its close cooperation in “special missions.” Comment might seem superfluous—except that Erich Hoepner became active in the military opposition to Hitler, and was executed on August 8, 1944. He died hard, at the end of a strangling rope in Plötzensee prison.

Other senior generals were dismissed at the same time, including all three army group commanders. They provided the scapegoats deemed necessary to focus blame away from the Führer, “the greatest warlord of all time.” In fact the Red Army was years away from possessing the capacity to mount a sustained, coordinated offensive at any season, much less the depths of winter. The Germans gave ground under pressure, but were able to hold the roads and control the supply centers. By the end of February, they had more or less restored local stability along the front. On both sides, staff officers returned to their drawing boards. First sergeants counted the dead. Neither was underemployed.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
ERE THE GERMANS defeated in Operation Barbarossa and the Battle for Moscow, or were the Russians victorious? The best answer to both is yes. The Soviet Union and the Red Army fought back from the beginning, mobilizing resources and developing skills to save their capital, frustrate the invasion, capture the initiative, demonstrate blitzkrieg’s limits, and begin the still- continuing process of discrediting the myth of an inherently superior German way of war. That is no mean list of accomplishments in six months against any opponent, much less the Wehrmacht.

THE LONG LIST of specific German mistakes can be conveniently grouped under two headings: comprehensive overextension and comprehensive underestimation. Both reflected the general sense of emergency that had informed Hitler’s Reich from the first days of its existence. Time was always Adolf Hitler’s chief enemy. He was convinced that only he could create the Thousand-Year Reich of his visions, and to that end was willing to run the most extreme risks.

Hitler’s generals, especially the panzer generals, shared that risk-taking mind-set and accepted the apocalyptic visions accompanying it. That congruence shaped Barbarossa’s racist, genocidal nature. From the campaign’s beginning, terror and murder followed in the wake of the panzers. That was worse than a crime. It was a mistake antagonizing broad spectrums of a population that could have been mobilized to work for and with the conquerors, and in some cases act against the Soviet system. To behave differently would have required Nazis to be something other than Nazis—and, perhaps, generals to be something other than generals, at least when confronting Slavic/Jewish Bolsheviks.

The army would have been constrained to recast its institutional mentality. However intense the antagonism between the Führer and his commanders may have become in later years, in 1941 they possessed a common vision in which choices and priorities were unnecessary. Germany’s weaknesses in numbers, equipment, and logistics were sufficiently daunting that reasonably prudent military planners would have advised against the entire campaign to the point of resigning. But partly through their own history, and partly through years of exposure to National Socialism, Germany’s soldiers had come to believe in the “Triumph of the Will.”

It is an overlooked paradox that the failure to reach Moscow may have averted a German catastrophe. Stalin proposed to continue fighting even if Moscow fell, calling on resources from the Urals and Siberia. Aside from that, capturing the city with the resources available—if it could be done at all—would have involved heavy losses, losses that would fall disproportionately on the mobile troops who would be first in and expected to do much of the heavy work. Comparisons with Verdun once again circulated in the armored force. And should the swastika fly over the Kremlin, Army Group Center would be forward-loaded at the far end of a long salient vulnerable to systematic counterattacks, containing a tenuous supply line exposed to constant harassment from a developing partisan movement. Operation Typhoon’s outcome preserved the cadres—or the skeletons—of the panzers to anchor the defense during the winter and prepare for another try in the spring.

They did both well. In January 1942, 18th Panzer Division used its last dozen tanks as the core of a 50-mile thrust into Soviet-occupied territory to rescue an infantry division that had been surrounded for a month. In 6th Panzer Division, Erhard Raus pragmatically employed a series of local counterattacks as tactical training exercises for replacements. Was this heroic professionalism or wishful thinking? Or more like magical thinking, the kind of insanity defined as doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results? In 1807 and again in 1918 the Prussian/German army had responded to defeat with comprehensive self-examination. In 1939 Hitler’s army had responded to victory by an internally initiated tune-up. Nothing remotely similar happened during the winter of 1941-42. Especially for the panzers, whatever energy remained after replacing losses was devoted to improving existing systems.

That situation invites explanation in terms of desperation. As late as the end of February, total tank strength was down to around 150—for the entire Eastern Front. It was not a figure encouraging detached speculation on better ways of war. But even at this relatively early stage, a process of selection was taking place in the regiments and divisions. Eighth Panzer Division’s CO Erich Brandenberger was an old gunner, as calm in demeanor as he was quick to react to emergencies. Heinrich Eberbach took over 4th Panzer—no surprise after his success in making the most of small numbers on the road to Tula. Hans Hube’s loss of an arm in the Great War had not kept him from rising to command of the 16th Motorized Division, staying with it when it was converted to tanks, and building a reputation as a brilliant tactician. Hermann Balck, marked as a comer for his work in France, had been on staff duty during Barbarossa, but would make his mark beginning in May commanding 11th Panzer Division.

One cannot speak of a common personality type in officers who came from everywhere in the prewar army. Some were religious; some were skeptics; some were casually Gottglaubig—the Nazi term for nondenominational. Some were deliberately muddy-boots; others took conscious pains with their grooming. What these officers and their contemporaries similarly marked out for high command was pragmatism. They were hands-on problem-solvers who maximized the material they were given and did their best in the situations they confronted. “I’ll try, sir” was not an acceptable response in the panzer force that emerged from the rubble of Barbarossa. There was no try—only do, or do not.