Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (53 page)

Wagner's sudden acknowledgement of Army Group Centre's logistical limitations did not mean that solutions were any easier to come by as all available resources were already being utilised to sustain the fragile supply system
. Nor did it mean that there was any perceptible change in the practices of the OKH; they were simply responding to the steadily rising cries for help from the field units. In essence, one might say they only became aware of how deep the hole was when they fell to the bottom of it. Guderian's
Panzer Group 2, for example, complained on 15 July that the supply situation was becoming more and more difficult as a result of the distances, bad roads and insecure rear areas. Such factors, the panzer group's war diary concluded, ‘are what make an eastern campaign such a special case. All considerations and tactical actions are dependent to a great degree on this. Operations that do not take this into account are condemned to failure.’
¹⁷³
On the following day (16 July) the panzer group's Quartermaster-General was more specific in his criticism. ‘Fuel is especially lacking. The supplies arrive only sparsely, above all the railway situation is by no means enough.’
¹⁷⁴
Combined with the abysmal planning for the provisioning of the army, the poor road conditions exacerbated the problem by instituting more demands on the supply services while at the same time weakening their ability to carry out such requests.
An entry from the war diary of the 3rd Panzer Division's Quartermaster-General made clear that stocks of tyres, on which the truck-based supply system depended, were ‘extremely limited’ and in fact consisted of only one sixth of the total
requirement.
¹⁷⁵

In Hoth's
Panzer Group 3 the same difficulties were also hampering its ability to sustain operations further east. On 15 July the
20th Panzer Division was at the forefront of the German charge into the Soviet Union, but its war diary talked of ‘the greatest worry’ being the consumption of fuel which had ‘drastically surged’.
¹⁷⁶
Part of the problem for Hoth was that the terrain north of
Vitebsk was less favourable to mechanised warfare with the landscape dominated by swamps, lakes and woods, and punctuated by rolling hills which extended down to
Smolensk.
¹⁷⁷
On 14 July General
Schmidt, even after having travelled along countless Soviet roads, described 20th Panzer Division's route as simply ‘unbelievable’.
¹⁷⁸
Further north the
19th Panzer Division, after having been restricted to the Disna bridgehead from 4 July to 12 July, was at last making headway on the army group's northern flank.
¹⁷⁹
Yet Bock's concern that his forces had become too weak to attempt such a far-reaching operation was soon confirmed by the nearly impassable terrain, to say nothing of enemy resistance. On 14 July the war diary of the
LVII Panzer Corps recorded that the 19th Panzer Division's forward march ‘suffered greatly throughout the day because of the indescribable road condition…In places the vehicles must be pulled or pushed separately through the deepest sand, which results in hold ups of hours on end.’
¹⁸⁰
The problem was that every mile of difficult terrain for the front-line units was a further mile the seriously over-extended supply columns would also have to traverse between the distant railheads and the forward depots. Added to this was the ever threatening security situation in the expanding rear areas, which the exposed and badly armed supply columns were poorly disposed to counter.

By the middle of July the security situation in the army group's rear area was dire. As the large Soviet forces concentrated along the great rivers were bypassed by Bock's swift moving motorised divisions, the Soviets found themselves cut off to the east but in many places unchallenged,
leaving them in the veritable eye of the German storm. One front had largely passed them by but the following infantry had not yet arrived. Thus, the panzer group's supply columns still had to run the gauntlet of this treacherous area over terrible roads and makeshift river crossings because the Soviets still defended the major centres where the infrastructure was at least somewhat better. Even where the Germans had forced their crossings and continued on to the east, there was scarcely any such thing as a secured area and it was soon realised that this would not change until the mass of Soviet forces had been rooted out of their fortified river front positions. In the meantime, however, the flow of supplies was threatened with strangulation and this led to some disagreement at the lower levels on the virtue of continuing the advance. The Quartermaster-General's diary for the 3rd Panzer Division reported:

The supply situation does not permit a further advance to the east. The Quartermaster-General's section reported this to the general [Lieutenant-General Walther Model] and his staff, nevertheless the general ordered a further thrust eastward…The supply route of the division is extremely bad and insecure, enemy elements in the forests on both sides of the
highway.
¹⁸¹

This worrisome situation was common to both panzer groups and also troubling to
Bock, who was equally mindful that the OKH and Hitler were keen to embark on new operations on the flanks, which Bock recognised was beyond his army group's strength. On 15 July he telephoned
Brauchitsch and told him: ‘I have the impression that there is a fundamental difference in the assessment of the situation between the Army High Command and the army group.’ He then went on to detail the strength of Soviet forces attacking his southern flank from
Gomel, the presence of Soviet strongholds in his rear at
Mogilev and
Orsha on the Dnepr and
Polotsk on the Dvina, and another group he reported was operating north of
Gorodok. In addition, the large area in the triangle between Smolensk–Orsha–Vitebsk contained, according to Bock, between 12 and 20 enemy divisions. Thus Bock cautioned that while the crossing of the
Dnepr was a favourable development: ‘One must be careful not to take the overall situation there too lightly based on local impressions. A victory has not yet been won!’
¹⁸²

Brauchitsch's response was one of indifference. He insisted that the planned battle of Smolensk be brought to a conclusion, while at the same time ‘guarding the southeast flank’ and conducting the northern operation to assist Leeb's forces, ‘in accordance with the directive issued by me’. As if deaf to Bock's pleas for a curtailment of the operation, at the
end of the meeting Brauchitsch made the astonishing observation that ‘by and large, the views of the army group and of the Army High Command coincided!’ Perhaps Brauchitsch thought that Bock had momentarily lost his nerve and was overstating the danger, yet, immediately after issuing his instructions which merely restated the standing orders agreed upon by Hitler and Halder, Brauchitsch unexpectedly expressed to Bock his own grim outlook regarding further operations beyond Smolensk. With surprising frankness, Brauchitsch told Bock:

A continued drive to the east by the panzers after the capture of the area around Smolensk is out of the question…We must be clear that after taking the area around Smolensk a continued advance by the entire body of infantry is no longer possible for reasons of supply. We will have to make do with a sort of ‘expeditionary corps’, which together with tanks will have to fulfil far-reaching
missions.
¹⁸³

Clearly there was a paradox in the army's understanding of the war
. Army Group Centre was reaching the limit of its advance, mobility within the motorised divisions was sharply declining, panzer losses were rapidly mounting and the Red Army, far from being beaten, was in fact fielding numerous new armies further east. The end of the blitzkrieg was already in sight and the so-called ‘expeditionary corps’ were a fanciful substitute, grossly inadequate for carrying through the planned operations to distant objectives. Yet none of the military professionals, not even Bock who seemed to possess the clearest head, could see how menacing the signs really were. Certainly none were yet talking of failing to win the war or worse – being bogged down in a slogging positional war over the winter. Interestingly, Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the military intelligence and counter-intelligence department of the OKW, visited Bock on the evening of 17 July, for which Bock's only comment was: ‘he fears the worst’ (‘
er sieht schwarz in schwarz
’).
¹⁸⁴
Five days earlier on 12 July
Weichs wrote home to his wife that the operational situation was cause for ‘some worry, because the Russian was fighting far better than we anticipated’. He then went on to express the hope that the Red Army would not escape behind Moscow or the winter period would not be ‘entirely simple’.
¹⁸⁵
Further afield, the Italian dictator
Mussolini was likewise airing grave reservations about the war. As
Ciano recorded on 16 July:

The Duce [Mussolini] is not convinced as to the course of events in Russia. The tone of his conversation today was distinctly pessimistic, particularly as the
Anglo-Russia alliance makes Stalin the head of a nationalist Russia. He is afraid that Germany is facing a task that is too much for her, and will not reach a complete solution of the whole problem before winter, which always reveals a lot of unknown factors.
¹⁸⁶

In
attempting to compile an accurate appraisal of the war on the eastern front in the summer of 1941, no aspect is more elusive or shrouded in ambiguity than the war being fought behind the front by cut-off Red Army units or newly established partisan brigades.
¹⁸⁷
A central problem in drawing any general conclusions from this aspect of the conflict is the variety of factors which influenced the insurgents' success and varied from region to region according to population, geography or presence of occupation forces. The clandestine nature of the fighting and presence of irregular forces also left far fewer records with which to reconstruct the events taking place. For a number of years western scholars have been keen to downplay the often wildly exaggerated mythology spawned by Soviet histories which encouraged the impression of a spontaneous national revolt against the German invasion.
¹⁸⁸
Accordingly, western studies have been at pains to point out the inauspicious beginnings of the partisan movement and have emphasised their diminutive contribution in the early period of the war.
¹⁸⁹
It is by no means the intention of this study to seek a reinterpretation of this conclusion, but in addition to the already formidable difficulties confronting the German blitzkreig in the east, the importance of rear-area engagements in slowing or wearing down the all-important motorised and panzer divisions should not be under-estimated. Most commonly, the contribution of partisan forces did not result from conventional attacks on front-line forces, but rather from attacks on the vulnerable supply columns following in the rear. The Quartermaster-General for
Panzer Group 2 reported on 16 July that the supply difficulties resulted from ‘frequent obstruction of the roads by insurgent enemy elements’.
¹⁹⁰

A cause for some confusion in our understanding of the early partisan movement is one of definition. Strictly speaking it is impossible to talk of the partisan movement as a unified entity. Political objectives varied so much that, while some groups pursued nationalist aspirations against both German and Soviet regimes, others cared little for any higher authority and distinguished themselves only as opportunist gangs striking whatever target promised the most lucrative booty. Even among those groups committed to fighting the German occupation, there were radical differences in the vigour with which this resistance was conducted as well as in ability to carry out planned actions. The better organised and more centrally controlled partisan forces, in the form we commonly understand them from 1942/43, hardly existed in the early months of the war. The tide of fierce resistance in the rear areas was instead largely carried out by the countless thousands of Soviet soldiers cut off behind the German advance and determined to continue resisting.
¹⁹¹
Whether one chooses to acknowledge these forces as ‘partisans’ or not (those that were not killed, captured or able to fight their way back to Soviet lines often formed the nucleus of partisan detachments) they played a pivotal role in striking at one of the German army's weakest links in the vacuum of security that existed behind the German motorised divisions.
¹⁹²
On 16 July
Halder noted: ‘In the area passed through by Hoth and Guderian countless battle-worthy enemy groups are forcing our motorised divisions to form fronts in all directions. Even west of the Dnepr enemy groups are resurging.’
¹⁹³
Another German officer alluded to the problem of dealing with
POWs in a forward unit and the subsequent danger this posed to the rear area.

During our advance we took a lot of prisoners. We sent them back, but had not too much control over whether they arrived at the collecting points. (You could not detach a full APC [armoured personnel carrier] with six men to guard three or four prisoners.)