Hitler's Panzers (33 page)

Matters were little better in a general context. Erich von Manstein, who by now had an established reputation as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions, had been transferred from the siege of Sev astopol to the siege of Leningrad. Now he was handed command of a new Army Group Don and ordered to relieve Stalingrad. Manstein had Hoth and 4th Panzer Army. He was promised eleven divisions by mid-December. Three of them, formed from transferred Luftwaffe personnel, were close to useless. That meant—what else—primary responsibility rested with the panzers: three newly arrived divisions plus the 23rd.

Army Group Center provided 17th Panzer Division. It had been on the line most of the year, and seen its strength eroded in constant small-scale fighting. It suffered from comprehensive wear and tear. Eleventh Panzer Division had been in reserve since September. It was up to tank strength, most of its Panzer IIIs with the L/42; Balck was almost worth another division by himself. But 11th Panzer Division was immediately sent north to replace the broken 22nd along the line of the Chir River. Between December 8 and 22, the division virtually annihilated the Soviet 5th Tank Army, stabilizing the sector single-handed. It was an example of staff work, willpower, and tactical skill still legitimately cited as among the greatest divisional-level battles ever fought.

It also left 6th Panzer Division in the spotlight when Operation Winter Storm began on December 12, 1942. The division had been in France since May. Fully reequipped with German tanks, with one of its four infantry battalions in half-tracks and a fully rested Raus, the 6th fought to within 20 miles of Stalingrad by December 19. It was another virtuoso performance by a first-class formation and a top-flight general. It was not a blitz breakthrough in the style of 1941. On a single day the division’s panzer regiment did gain 40 miles. But the Russians were craftier, more sophisticated in defense. Raus husbanded his limited number of tanks, advancing by night, using dive bombers and artillery to blast the 6th forward, mounting a series of attacks by panzer grenadiers on foot, whose tactics evoked the storm troops of the First War more than the panzers of this one. When the Soviets counterattacked, the panzer grenadiers let them through, shot down their accompanying infantry, then took out the tanks with grenades and explosive charges: 1918 all over again. On December 19, 6th Panzer Division seized and held a bridgehead over the Mishkova River in the teeth of the 2nd Guards Army. Raus saw his way to Stalingrad open, paved by “iron will, coupled with bravery and a skilled conduct of operations.”

He was looking through blinders. Air support was minimal and unpredictable. The Luftwaffe had been dispersed more comprehensively than even the panzers, with already-weak groups and wings transferred and then reassigned in near-random fashion. Flank security on the ground was in the hands of a 23rd Panzer Division barely able to take care of itself. By the time 17th Panzer Division came up, its single panzer battalion had 30 tanks of all types. So many of its wheeled vehicles were disabled that one company in each motorized battalion was following the division on foot. Soviet counterattacks were increasing in strength and effectiveness across Hoth’s front. The 6th Panzer Division might in fact have retained enough fighting power to push a battle group forward to 6th Army’s perimeter. Less likely things had happened and would happen again. As early as the nineteenth, however Manstein concluded that such a corridor could not be held long enough either to reinforce or to evacuate the pocket.

The debate as to the precise responsibility for holding 6th Army on the Volga remains lively and venomous. Whatever the actual prospects of some combination of breakthrough and breakout at this late date, neither Manstein nor Paulus gave the order. They showed a corresponding absence of the moral courage that is a requisite for high command in any military system. The issue, however, was rendered moot by events on the ground. On December 16 the Soviets launched Operation Little Saturn, a less ambitious version of the original. The Italian 8th Army bought three days, and then splintered. As Soviet tanks and cavalry ran wild in the virtually undefended German rear areas, 2nd Guards Army began an offensive that pushed 4th Panzer Army’s slender spearhead back toward its start lines. The Germans’ attention refocused from the fate of Stalingrad to the survival of the entire south Russian sector.

Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of ripostes between January and March 1943, he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted a Soviet operation already compromised by Stalin’s overreaching, pushing Little Saturn and its successors beyond an already overstretched Red Army’s capacity to sustain them. These achievements would have been impossible without the High Command’s cold-blooded write-off of Stalingrad. Now hopelessly isolated, the garrison was expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible, for as long as possible. The endgame dragged on until February 2.

Meanwhile Stavka planned a major offensive toward Rostov, part of a new Stalin-devised grand strategic plan to drive the Germans back across the entire Eastern Front while the winter held, establishing an intermediate stop line extending from Narva to the Black Sea. From the first days of that offensive in late January, the Germans received an unpleasant tactical surprise. The Red Army was no longer following its familiar pattern of engaging German strong points and exposing themselves to paralyzing local ripostes by the panzers. Instead, they were masking the “hedgehogs” and driving past them deep into the German rear. That only reinforced Manstein’s conviction that to restore the German position in south Russia, it was necessary to restore operational maneuver. That in turn meant taking the risk of refusing to use mobile divisions as the core of ad hoc task forces to cope with what were becoming routine emergencies. It involved concentrating the panzers and the motorized divisions, using them in coordinated, multicorps operations focused on the Russians’ weak spots and institutional weaknesses. Operational maneuver, in short, meant returning to the basics tested in 1940 and applied in the summer of 1941.

In the contexts of January 1943, operational warfare had two immediate prerequisites. One was administrative: a united command in the southern sector. The entropy into which Operation Blue had fallen led to tunnel vision—every senior officer emphasizing his own problems, and addressing them without regard for the big picture. The second prerequisite was doctrinal: trading space for time. That concept is so closely associated with the by-now canonical ex post facto criticism of Hitler’s intransigent insistence on holding all ground at all costs that it is easy to overlook its relative absence in a practical sense from the “German way of war.” Prussia had been too small, the Second Reich too isolated, to make the concept viable in operational or strategic contexts; there was no space to exchange. Even tactically, the flexible approach of giving ground and counterattacking had required two years of total war and an increasingly desperate situation on the Western Front to take hold.

It was Manstein who not only understood the theoretical concept, but recognized its applicability on an unprecedented scale. It was also Manstein who had the intellectual force and moral courage to convince Hitler that operational exigencies overrode the strategic and economic arguments Hitler presented against them. With Soviet pressure increasing across the front, Manstein withdrew into the Donets Basin, north of Rostov, shortening the arc of his operational semicircle and concentrating his still- rebuilding mobile formations. The Russians in turn were outrunning their supply and overextending their communications. Forward units were living off the resources they carried for up to two weeks at a time. Their commanders’ contact with higher headquarters was increasingly tenuous—and initiative even at corps level was not a Red Army hallmark. But the prizes on the horizon encouraged Stavka to go a stage further. At the beginning of February, Operations Gallop and Star retook the city of Kursk and drove forward, toward the industrial center and transportation hub of Kharkov.

Manstein benefited when, on February 14, Army Groups B and Don were merged into the reborn Army Group South. That gave him two panzer armies with a near-ideal command mix. Hoth had the longest tenure in senior panzer command. Not merely seasoned, but marinated, he was wise in the ways of the Soviets and clear-eyed in evaluating the capacities of his own forces. Mackensen had taken over 1st Panzer Army on Kleist’s promotion, and his force and flair were still undiluted. Reinforcements were arriving steadily: men and vehicles for the veteran outfits beginning to see, if not exactly light at the end of the tunnel, then a chance of getting payback. Relief also came from some of the remaining best of the mobile divisions, Grossdeutschland and 7th Panzer; and a new player in the East, one with some fundamental differences in skills, equipment—and baggage: the SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser.

The question remained how best to use these resources. Not only did the Führer risk a little of Stalingrad by giving Kharkov’s defense top priority, some of Manstein’s subordinates were unwilling to give ground on Manstein’s proposed scale. Manstein in general receives correspondingly high marks for cool calculation in conceding the loss of Kharkov in order to lure the Soviets forward and into better position for the counterstroke he was preparing. His postwar memoirs are more sanguine than the contemporary mood at his headquarters. Manstein did not sacrifice the city in order to recapture it. He saw the loss instead as the unpleasant but acceptable consequence of the few days needed to convince a visiting Hitler of the advantages of concentrating real reserves for a real counterattack. The Führer was nevertheless considering installing a newer broom when a relatively lowly panzer corps commander disregarded a chain of orders and withdrew his men at the last minute from a situation he considered hopeless.

Kharkov’s loss was a major defeat in itself. In the wake of Stalingrad it seemed to prefigure disaster. The city fell on February 16. But next day 4th Panzer Army struck. Kharkov was retaken on March 14; Hoth’s spearheads were back on the Donets a few days later. Mackensen’s 1st Panzer Army covered Hoth’s right against the Soviet Southwest Front, cutting off and cutting up its overextended 5th Tank Army and reaching the Donets on February 28. Seventh and 11th Panzer Divisions proved a lucky combination, with Hans von Funck handling Rommel’s division like a master and Balck enhancing an already formidable reputation for coup d’oeil. The Luftwaffe played a vital role, mounting as many as a thousand sorties a day while shifting its emphasis between the two panzer armies. The weather for once worked in the Germans’ favor just as they reached the Donets, with the rasputitsa setting in and immobilizing Soviet reserves.

Otherwise the tactical and operational patterns of Manstein’s riposte are surprisingly familiar on both sides. He described a tennis player’s “backhand blow.” By this time Germans and Russians alike were more like boxers in the late rounds of a bruising fight: exhausted, punch-drunk, working more from memory than inspiration. The final version of the front line strongly resembled its spring 1942 predecessor. Strategic consequences were another, more complex story. Manstein’s success in restoring and stabilizing the southern sector of the German front has inspired assertions that Hitler and the High Command should have continued the offensive instead of throttling back and preparing for a climactic battle at Kursk. The obvious counter is that despite Manstein’s careful stewardship, the panzers were fought out by the end of March, needing rest and reinforcement before going anywhere. Stavka had responded by reinforcing the sector from other parts of the front, to a level that made continuing the attack an invitation to overextension.

To contextualize that sentence it is necessary to return in time and space to the other half of Operation Uranus. Mars had been delayed a month by heavy rains, giving the Germans time to prepare—and for once, intelligence accurately predicted something like the massive Soviet forces involved.

More useful for the Germans, paradoxically, was Mars’s timing. The attack began on November 24. And with the Stalingrad front collapsing, Hitler and the High Command were quite willing to allow early commitment of local reserves and “adjustments” of local front lines. The command team on the spot was also well suited to its responsibilities. Von Kluge had replaced Bock as CO of Army Group Center the previous year, and he had long expected an attack on his front. The sector hit hardest was held by Model’s 9th Army, and Model took justifiable pride in his defensive skills.

The Red Army’s initial commitment to Mars matched that to Uranus: 37 rifle divisions, 45 tank and mechanized brigades, plus dozens of independent artillery regiments: guns, howitzers, and the truck-mounted rockets veterans of the Eastern Front regularly described as the most terrifying of all Soviet weapons. They hit the Rzhev salient on both sides of its base. In some sectors penal battalions were in the first wave: men sentenced for a variety of military and political offenses, with at least a chance of pardon if they survived. Initially German strong points held. German panzers took heavy toll on their Russian counterparts. But numbers and courage wore down the determined defenders. More and more panzer grenadiers were being committed in sectors where original infantry garrisons were worn down by what seemed endless bombardment and assault.

Had the Soviets been able to get out of their own way, the German front might have broken from the attack’s sheer mass. Instead, traffic and supply problems slowed and constrained the Red Army columns just long enough. By November 28, 9th and 5th Panzer Divisions were in position not merely to hold the flanks of a narrow salient driven into 9th Army’s eastern flank, but to cut off elements of two tank corps at its apex. In the western sector it was the 1st Panzer Division, overcoming mud that immobilized even its light reconnaissance vehicles, which hung on along with elements of Grossdeutschland Division, then shifted into a series of local counterattacks in battle group strength—meaning whatever could be scraped together in the face of the latest Russian assault.