Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (46 page)

On Army Group Centre's northern flank,
Leeb's
Army Group North was making better progress but, as the renowned General
Manstein, commander of the
LVI Panzer Corps, would later observe: ‘the enemy, though pushed back to the east, was still not destroyed – as was very
soon to become apparent’.
⁴
After the capture of the Latvian capital
Riga, Leeb was compelled to continue his drive to the east to support Bock's left flank, but also had to support a major offensive northwards up into
Estonia in order to cover his own left flank. Accordingly, the army group's width of front was rapidly expanding which, as the smallest of the three German army groups, would soon heavily tax its offensive momentum. The commander of Army Group North's
Panzer Group 4, Colonel-General Erich
Hoepner, wrote to his wife on 16 July of his dissatisfaction with the halted drive on
Leningrad: ‘The deciding cause remains our weakness…The number of divisions is as inadequate as their equipment.…The men are tired, the losses increase, the fallout rate of vehicles
rises.’
⁵

At
Army Group Centre the tussle over the allocation of forces between
Kluge and
Guderian was again embittering relations within 4th
Panzer Army. Guderian desperately wanted to continue his offensive onto the eastern bank of the
Dnepr, but on 5 July a surprise attack by the
3rd and
4th Panzer Divisions failed to break through the ‘strong enemy resistance’.
⁶
Guderian preferred to blame Kluge's intransigence about releasing forces from the rapidly shrinking encirclement near
Minsk, and
Bock noted the ‘visible dissatisfaction in
Panzer Group 2 with being under the command of [Kluge's] Headquarters, 4th Army’.
⁷
As was characteristic of his intractable nature, and in spite of the acrimonious confrontation with Kluge on 3 July where the panzer general had been threatened with dismissal, Guderian issued repeated orders to his forces to break off from the encirclement front and drive east. The result, Guderian observed in his memoir, was that ‘Kluge was simultaneously issuing contradictory orders by which all units were to remain in position about the encircled Russians and the advance eastwards was not to be resumed until further instructions were received.’
⁸
The idiocy of this state of affairs reflected the irreconcilable strategic divergence between Kluge and Guderian, which, beyond the negligent liability of both commanders for failing to ensure unified direction, also reflected the lack of clear strategic direction from above. The ongoing dispute exposed the unworkable command structure of 4th Panzer Army, for which Guderian (and to a lesser extend
Hoth) showed little respect, and left Kluge virtually
powerless to assert his authority. Apart from rescinding Guderian's orders, Kluge probably knew, as did Guderian, that he did not really have the authority to replace the panzer group commander, even though he was his nominal superior. Beyond the harmful message such an action would send, Guderian simply enjoyed too much support from above, not least from Hitler
himself.

On the evening of 5 July
Halder met with
Brauchitsch, who was returning from a visit to Bock's army group and told of the difficulties being experienced in the large, occupied area. In addition to the widespread insecurity, the population was taking to the roads in large numbers and the enormous number of
Soviet POWs was creating serious problems.
⁹
On the following day Bock wrote that one of his staff officers had encountered many thousands of Soviet POWs marching on the road south of Minsk unarmed, but also completely unsupervised. Under such lax conditions it was hardly surprising that the dense forests of
Belorussia were teeming with hostile enemy troops, a good number of whom had conceivably already been captured at some point. Reluctantly,
Bock concluded: ‘We have no choice but to leave divisions behind to clear and watch over the rear areas.’ In practical terms this meant that, apart from the three security divisions already designated for this purpose, a further two active service divisions were to be withheld for these duties.
¹⁰
Yet difficulties for German occupation forces behind the front were not just limited to rounding up stray Soviet soldiers and fighting off clandestine attacks. Two weeks after the invasion, the
45th Infantry Division was still heavily engaged at
Brest clearing the border fortress of its resilient defenders. Indeed, the Soviet garrison continued to hold out under the most extreme conditions until the last pocket of resistance was finally extinguished on 24 July – more than a month after the launch of Barbarossa.
¹¹
Scrawled on the walls of the bunkers around Brest are solemn declarations by many of the fortress's defenders; these might be taken as a collective epithet dedicated to its faithful garrison. Inscriptions read: ‘Things are difficult, but we are not losing courage.’ ‘We die confidently July 1941.’ ‘We die, but we defended ourselves. 20.7.41.’
¹²
‘I am dying but I do not surrender. Farewell Motherland.’
¹³
The fervent
resistance at Brest is only the best known example of many valiant last stands which tied down German troops and inflicted a hefty toll in
casualties.
¹⁴

On 6 July
Halder received the army's overall casualty figures spanning the period 22 June to 3 July. Illustrative of the intense fighting, in these first 11 days of the war the army's total casualties numbered 54,000 men, to which Halder added an additional 54,000 German soldiers who were listed as ‘sick’.
¹⁵
Losses to the field armies stemmed from three sources. First, those resulting from enemy action (killed and wounded); second, men missing in action including men taken prisoner and, third, those listed as sick. The problem is that most German casualty reports list statistics only for the first two categories and the number of sick is simply ignored. Depending on local conditions and the time of the year, the number of sick men could exceed the numbers of casualties caused by the enemy by a sizeable margin. Reports from the summer of 1941 very seldom made references to the number of sick men, disguising a hidden loss, repeatedly overlooked in assessments of combat strength.
¹⁶
By early July Barbarossa had already cost more soldiers than the total number of killed and missing men sustained throughout the six weeks of the 1940
western campaign (49,000).
¹⁷
Furthermore, in comparison to the Polish and western campaigns, Halder noted a rising percentage of casualties among officers. Up to this point officer casualties constituted 6.6 per cent of the total killed, 3.8 per cent of the wounded and 1.7 per cent of the missing.
¹⁸
With personnel losses already spiralling and the war only in its earliest phase, the importance of ending the war rapidly was again conspicuously underlined.

In many ways the first ten days of July 1941 constituted a race to the
Dvina and
Dnepr Rivers, as both Bock and
Timoshenko struggled to bring up enough strength to meet the opposing force. The rapid collapse of the
Soviet Western Front in June, and the ensuing chaos among his scattered and makeshift forces, put Timoshenko on the back foot in this race, but the German blitzkreig was also rapidly losing its momentum.
The
Soviet roads were the main impediment, accounting for far more destruction among the panzer and motorised divisions than the Red Army. Supporting the German advance into the Soviet Union were large numbers of civilian vehicles (trucks as well as motor-cars) pressed into service to offset the lack of motorisation within the army. Yet these did not have the ground clearance for such conditions and frequently bottomed out on the rutted and uneven roads, causing irreparable damage to the transmission and oil sumps. Civilian vehicles also had much weaker suspension that was prone to snap, quickly leaving a trail of wreckage behind the German advance.
¹⁹
Yet even the military vehicles suffered. Assigned to a panzer division,
Alexander Cohrs gave a striking description of the perilous roads his unit traversed on 5 July. After referring to ‘very bad roads, full of holes’, his diary continued:

Some [vehicles] tipped over. Luckily none in our company. After 18 kilometres of marching on foot I sat on an armoured vehicle. It tipped so much that it balanced on two wheels, while the other two temporarily stood in the air; still it did not tip over. Along the way was a moor where the vehicles had to make a big detour…one by one vehicles got stuck or even turned over, resulting in breaks and a slow tempo.
²⁰

On 6 July General
Heinrici, commanding three infantry divisions, wrote to his wife:

The compression of the troops [onto narrow avenues of advance] makes forward progress slower than we would like, to this must be added the unbelievable roads which increase the difficulties. Lord God this is a primitive country north of the Pripet marshes, forest, everywhere forest, between them kilometre wide swamps, where one can sink in up to the knee.
²¹

Alongside the inhospitable terrain, vast distances and dreadful roads, as of early July, bad weather created a new obstacle for the advancing German armies. As a result of rainfall, a report from Kluge's
4th Panzer Army on 6 July noted that the roads over the vast Beresina swamplands, extending from the west of Minsk to the Dnepr, were ‘exceptionally bad’ and ‘often bottomless’. The report continued that the motorised units were being ‘greatly slowed’ and that as many engineers and as much building strength be urgently brought forward.
²²
As
Hans von Luck of the
7th Panzer Division described:

After brief downpours of rain, they [the roads] turned into muddy tracks which were only passable in some places after engineers or off-loaded grenadiers had felled trees to make a wooden runway with the trunks. It was not so much our opponents that held up our advance as the catastrophic roads.
²³

Field Marshal
Kesselring, the commander of Army Group Centre's
Air Fleet 2, observed that the intermittent rain made the primitive roads much worse, and revealed ‘the real face of the Russian theatre’. Summing up the difficulty of movement in the east, Kesselring concluded: ‘even the fully tracked vehicles, including tanks, and most of all the supply services, had to rely on the arterial roads [which] helped to warn the troops of difficulties ahead’.
²⁴
On 7 July
Bock added: ‘It has been raining on
4th Panzer Army for two days. This has made conditions on the roads frightful and placed an unusually heavy strain on men and material.’
²⁵
At one point the sunken roads caused the
7th Panzer Division to struggle for two days to advance 90 kilometres.
²⁶

While the summer downpours caused many roads to simply disappear into the swamps, in other areas the thick mud quickly reverted to the army's other great encumbrance – dust. On 6 July
Wilhelm Prüller wrote in his diary:

The advance goes very slowly. Numerous obstacles keep slowing down our charge. You can't really call what we're on a road. It's better than this in the tiniest hamlet in Germany. And we're marching on a main road! The shoulders of the road are all muddy from the previous rain – you sink up to your knees – but in the middle of the road there's dust already…each vehicle [is] surrounded by an impenetrable cloud of dust.
²⁷

The same remarkable spectacle was observed by 4th Panzer Army's Chief of Staff, Major-General
Günther Blumentritt, who wrote after the war: ‘A vivid picture which remains of those [first] weeks is the great clouds of yellow dust…The heat was tremendous, though interspersed with sudden showers which quickly turned the roads to mud before the sun reappeared and as quickly baked them into crumbling clay once again.’
²⁸
The commander of the
XXXXIII Army Corps wrote on only the second day of the war: ‘Every step, every vehicle sends up an impenetrable cloud [of dust]. The march routes are marked by a yellow brown cloud, which
hangs for a long time like mist before the sky.’
²⁹
For man, machine and beast the dust proved a torment for the German advance. It was ironic that the very roads upon which the rapid German blitzkrieg depended were also a primary factor in slowing their drive to the east. For the infantry, one soldier wrote of the summer advance:

Our feet sank into the sand and dirt, puffing dust into the air so that it rose and clung to us. The horses coughing in the dust produced a pungent odour. The loose sand was nearly as tiring for the horses as the deep mud would have been. The men marched in silence, coated with dust, with dry throats and lips.
³⁰

In the early days of the campaign the fine dust of the Soviet Union proved more deadly to the German panzer and motorised divisions than the Red Army's counter-attacks. The dust soon overwhelmed the inadequate air filters and then infiltrated the engines, initially greatly increasing oil consumption, and ultimately immobilising the engines altogether. Yet, for all the danger the dust posed to the German mechanised forces, it remained as unavoidable as it was pervasive.
Claus Hansmann wrote that his motorised column drove ‘as if in a sandstorm’, and he observed how ‘the wheels churned up fountains of sand that blackened out the sun…The dust burnt in our nose and throat.’
³¹
Not surprisingly, the fallout rate among vehicles of every kind soon began to rise
alarmingly.