Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (49 page)

In assessing the outcome of Germany's first great battle of encirclement on the eastern front, it is plainly apparent that the German military leadership over-estimated the effect their victory would have on the Soviet Union's capacity to maintain a coherent front. Conversely, the Germans failed to recognise and adequately reconcile the opposing demands of ensuring a tight perimeter around the eastern edge of the pocket, with the need to exploit their success through a rapid continuation of the advance. The root cause of the problem, evident even in the earliest stage of the war, concerned the lack of sufficient mobile forces to accomplish the tasks at hand. Consequently, when losses began to mount and the campaign proceeded towards new and more ambitious objectives over great distances, the spectre of over-extension loomed large.

‘The Russian is a colossus and strong’ (Adolf Hitler)

In the early days of July, while the army command was concerned with the day-to-day issues of the campaign,
Hitler was looking further ahead. His lack of enthusiasm for a continuation of the operation beyond the great rivers towards Moscow was well known to Halder and Brauchitsch, but the continued success of the campaign seemed to them the best guarantee
of ensuring a continued forward advance on all fronts. Yet, as early as 3 and 4 July, Hitler had expressed an interest in halting Kluge's panzer groups and using them to support the advance on the flanks.
⁸⁰
On 5 July
Jodl telephoned
Brauchitsch to request that the Army Commander-in-Chief meet with Hitler to offer his opinion on the northern and southern alternatives. Jodl also posed a number of questions relating first to the necessity and second to the feasibility of each operation. Perhaps sensing difficulties between the OKW and OKH over the issue, Jodl stressed to Brauchitsch the urgency of the army's involvement in the matter. The document in the OKW war diary concluded: ‘Given that the Führer's thoughts, and those of others, are heading towards an early turning of the panzer groups towards the northeast or south, General Jodl considers it necessary that the Commander-in-Chief of the Army promptly meets with the Führer for a discussion.’
⁸¹

The meeting took place at Hitler's headquarters on 8 July with
Halder accompanying Brauchitsch and both men making presentations before Hitler and his staff. Brauchitsch first summarised the latest tactical reports and then Halder outlined the army's assessment of the enemy situation and the progress of operations in the three army groups. The tone of Halder's presentation was typically upbeat, designed to instil confidence in the army's running of the war and ensure its continued hegemony in the field of strategic direction. Yet Halder also firmly believed that the German armies were now in an unassailable position to win the war. In evidence of this, Halder gave details of
Kinzel's latest intelligence report which noted that, of the 164 identified Soviet rifle divisions, 89 had been totally or largely eliminated. From the remaining 75 divisions, 46 were still opposing the German front, 18 were tied down on other fronts (14 in Finland and four in the Caucasus) and the last 11 divisions were probably still in the interior in reserve.
⁸²
Other elements of Kinzel's report noted: ‘The enemy is no longer able to organise a continuous front, not even behind strong terrain features…[Army Group] Centre, which was stronger from the beginning, now has a crushing superiority and can maintain it even if the enemy, as is expected, should bring up new units to that front.’
⁸³
In addition to encouraging an atmosphere of great confidence in the progress of the war, the buoyant optimism of Halder's report
⁸⁴
dismissed the urgency of making a definitive operational decision concerning Bock's panzer groups.
⁸⁵
The jubilant mood also
seems to have inspired in Hitler and Halder a brief measure of conciliation, allowing a glimmer of compromise previously inconceivable on the question of Moscow.

Hitler spoke of his ‘ideal solution’ to the continuation of the campaign in which
Army Group North was to accomplish with its own forces the tasks already assigned to it in the Baltic states and Leningrad.
Army Group Centre was charged with finishing off the last of the organised resistance along the over-extended Soviet front north of the Pripet marshes. This, Hitler stated, ‘would thereby open the road to Moscow’.
⁸⁶
Upon reaching their assigned positions east of Smolensk, Hoth could halt and then either render assistance to Leeb (if necessary) or continue eastwards with a view to investing Moscow. Guderian could be used to strike in a southern or south-eastern direction in co-operation with
Army Group South.

With the war proceeding so well, Halder too was suddenly much less concerned about Hitler's desire to turn Guderian's forces south. On the one hand, Halder was aware of Bock's increasingly exposed southern flank, but more importantly, he was sufficiently confident about the campaign's success that he foresaw no means by which the Red Army could obstruct his march on Moscow even without Guderian's forces. Indeed, Halder was already setting his sights well beyond the Soviet capital, writing in his diary that after the
battle of Smolensk ‘we shall block the railways across the Volga, occupy the country as far as that river and then, by means of armoured expeditions and aerial operations, destroy the remaining Russian industrial centres’.
⁸⁷
Obviously the misguided confidence evinced in the planning stages of the campaign continued unabated despite the dangerous warning signs plainly emerging as the reality of the campaign unfolded.

The degree of Halder's self-deception was evident even as he spoke of the great triumph in the east. In the course of his meeting with Hitler, Halder emphasised the urgency of tank replacements for the eastern front, to which Hitler made clear his desire to retain all new production in Germany for future missions ‘that will again extend over thousands of kilometres’. The result, Hitler stated, was that the tank losses suffered so far in the east ‘would necessitate an amalgamation of the panzer divisions’ with the surplus personnel being returned to Germany to outfit the new tanks. It was only at the end of the meeting when Halder pleaded ‘the urgent requirements of the front’ that Hitler conceded to the release of 70 Mark IIIs, 15 Mark IVs and the Czech tanks for use on the eastern
front.
⁸⁸

Halder's selective reading of the military situation in the east did not prevent others from drawing far more accurate conclusions about the progress of the war. The Italian foreign minister,
Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary on 9 July: ‘The German advance in Russia proceeds at a somewhat slower pace. Resistance is serious; I saw a set of documents sent by Goebbels in which this is clearly evident.’
⁸⁹
On the following day he continued: ‘From the Russian front news is quite serious; the Russians are fighting well, and, for the first time in the course of the war, the Germans admit withdrawing at two points.’
⁹⁰
Although the Italians tended to look at Germany's successes with a degree of resentful spite, Ciano's remarks were not merely the result of Italian scorn or pessimism. The Japanese naval attaché in Rome, Captain
Mitsunobu T
y
, expressed deep scepticism about the prospects for German military operations in the east, comparing it with Japan's mired war in China. Even if Moscow and the whole western industrial area of the Soviet Union could be conquered, T
y
argued that this would ‘not deliver the fatal blow’. The Soviets, he said, had developed the area beyond the Urals meaning the Germans would face ‘in the vast and barely accessible hinterland an enemy which will resort to the means of guerrilla warfare which tie down vast numbers of one's own troops without being able to bring about a decisive military victory.’
⁹¹
German diplomatic circles were also monitoring the situation in the east with growing unease. On 11 July Ciano recorded: ‘A meeting with Domberg. He is calm but not joyful. Losses in Russia are heavy, and the war may bring us big surprises. His wife is more sprightly than he, and she does not conceal her judgment of the situation. “This is a war,” she said, “that we cannot get away with.”’
⁹²
In his first diary entry since the outbreak of war former diplomat
Ulrich von Hassell wrote on 13 July that in spite of the suddenness of the German attack, ‘the struggle is much harder than had been expected’ and had resulted in ‘heavy losses among German officers’.
⁹³
Hassell also perceptively alluded to the dangers of Hitler's occupation policies, placing the Soviet Union under Nazi Gauleiters and rejecting the co-operation of anti-Stalinist Russians. The result he foresaw: ‘Stalin may yet succeed in forming a patriotic Russian front against the German enemy.’
⁹⁴

Having penetrated Timoshenko's defences along the Dvina and Dnepr, Guderian and Hoth pressed the attack forward across the breadth of their
front, causing
Bock to worry that the army group was not achieving a decisive concentration. The Field Marshal, therefore, directed an inquiry to 4th Panzer Army stating that the front was 250 kilometres wide and asking if it was possible to align their forces to give them greater strength and focus. The answer came back that this was impossible on account of road conditions, meaning that the panzer corps would have to remain dispersed and essentially isolated from one another by the sheer size of the operational theatre.
⁹⁵
The menacing difficulty of conducting deep operations into the immensity of the Soviet Union, a country which encompassed a staggering 22.4 million square kilometres,
⁹⁶
was one of the most striking oversights of the operational planning for a war in the east. To a large extent Bock's success hinged on eliminating major Soviet resistance west of the great rivers and the prospect of lunging further into the country, while still facing a formidable foe, entailed grave consequences. For good reason
Goebbels commented at the start of the war: ‘I am refraining from publishing big maps of Russia. The huge areas involved can only frighten our people.’
⁹⁷
Yet the sheer size of the Soviet Union could not help but impact on the soldiers who, according to one, entered into a ‘realm of eternal horizons, where the land is like the sea’.
⁹⁸
Such sentiments pervade the personal accounts of the soldiers, reflecting a sense of isolation, detachment, helplessness, melancholy and even despair. Liddell Hart cited the remarks of an unnamed German general: