Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (58 page)

If Guderian was aware of the strain his forces were under, his orders did not reflect it. In addition to trying to pull the 18th Panzer Division off the encirclement front, he also sought to send a part of the
10th Panzer Division, still fighting its way to Yel'nya, towards Dorogobuzh. Yet, the division was so hard pressed in the battle for Yel'nya that the divisional commander, Lieutenant-General
Ferdinand Schaal, informed Vietinghoff's
XXXXVI Panzer Corps that only one of the two objectives could be undertaken. Vietinghoff's response denied the request to break off either attack, adding that the panzer corps itself was under strict orders to carry through both operations.
³⁶
As it quickly became clear that the 10th Panzer Division would be stretched thin even with one objective, Guderian eventually relented and on 20 July named Yel'nya the ‘main objective…
Dorogobuzh is extraneous’.
³⁷
After the war
Hoth looked on this decision with embittered resignation, writing in his memoir: ‘To Panzer Group 2 the taking of the heights at Yel'nya, for the later continuance of the advance eastward, appeared more important than the completion of the [Smolensk] encirclement.’
³⁸
Indeed, Guderian's flagrant disregard for prudence beggars belief given that his forces were clearly exhausted, unsupported by infantry, at the end of tenuous supply lines and facing increasing Soviet resistance from the east.
Kluge was so concerned that he even broached the topic of a general withdrawal of Guderian's line to the
Sozh River south of Smolensk.
³⁹
By 20 July Bock's patience was also at an end. ‘At the moment’, Bock wrote in his diary, ‘there is only one pocket on the army group's front! And it has a hole!’
⁴⁰
It was five days previously that Hoth's
7th Panzer Division had reached
Yartsevo and since then innumerable Soviet units had fled the German trap. Bock did not mince words in characterising Kluge's command as useless for not having taken a stronger line with Guderian and ensuring the closure of the pocket. As a result, Bock bypassed 4th Panzer Army altogether and sent a General Staff officer to Panzer Group 2, but as soon as he had captured Yel'nya, talk at the panzer group was centred on exploiting the success with further gains to the
east. It was immediately made very clear that this was not what mattered and that the sealing off of the Smolensk pocket was the panzer group's top priority.
Greiffenberg, Bock's Chief of Staff, also spoke with Guderian to further underline the army group's
instructions.
⁴¹

While Guderian and Kluge were procrastinating over closing the ring from the south,
Hoth had been asked to do so from the north by thrusting the 7th Panzer Division further south. Although Hoth was willing, his plans were quickly overtaken by intense pressure from Soviet attacks emanating from the east, preventing any chance of resuming the southward drive.
⁴²
As one former commander in the 7th Panzer Division noted: ‘The battles at Yartsevo lasted longer than we would have liked. The blitzkrieg seemed to be over…Resistance grew stiffer and stiffer.’
⁴³

The
7th Panzer Division's inability to break away from the front and regain freedom of movement was symptomatic of the paralysis gripping the whole of
4th Panzer Army. The enormous theatre of operations had forced a wide dispersal of Hoth and Guderian's limited resources and the marching infantry were still too far off to relieve them. This had not been foreseen as a problem because the panzer and motorised forces were supposed to have shattered all remaining Soviet resistance in the second phase of operations east of the great rivers. Yet, to the increasing dismay of the German command, there were still numerous Soviet formations holding together a ramshackle front beyond the main Soviet encirclement at Smolensk. What was worse, these forces showed themselves to be far from inert and exerted constant pressure on the German front from all directions. As Bock observed on 20 July: ‘[R]epeated attacks on the elements of Panzer Group 2…from the east, southeast and south. Panzer Group 3, too, has not only been attacked from inside the pocket, or from Smolensk and west, but from the east and northeast as well.’
⁴⁴
Bock was finding out the hard way how utterly erroneous German intelligence
reports had been – and the worst was yet to come.
⁴⁵
That Bock had an inkling of this is also reflected in his diary.

The assumption that is voiced here and there, that the enemy is not acting according to a plan, does not coincide with the facts. Given the energy that he has shown in the last few days, I think it doubtful that the enemy will allow the fighting here to cease when it suits us, even following the destruction of the forces almost encircled around Smolensk. If full freedom of action is to be won, then the forces which the enemy has brought up to the army group's front in recent days must also be destroyed.
⁴⁶

Even the more perceptive Bock did not yet fully appreciate just how much fight Timoshenko's
Western Front still had in it, and his stated intention to destroy this force by renewed offensive action only reflected a lack of understanding for the feeble state of his own
forces. Army Group Centre's ailing condition, compounded by increasing shortages and severe over-extension, was indeed serious and, as the advance reached its limit, the initiative temporarily passed to the
Stavka
who were able to take advantage of the strung-out German armies to plunge them into their first military crisis of the war.

Figure 7.2 
After weeks of hard marching, Army Group Centre's infantry arrived exhausted at the over-extended front of the panzer groups.

While the beleaguered Soviet
20th,
19th and
16th Armies fought for their lives inside the large pocket around Smolensk, the
Stavka
, under
Stalin's direction, decided the time had come for a major counter-offensive to relieve the nearly encircled formations and re-take Smolensk. Timoshenko's command was reinforced with the entire first echelon of the new Front of Reserve Armies (
29th,
30th,
24th and
28th Armies) that had been raised throughout June and July.
⁴⁷
On 20 July Stalin informed
Timoshenko of the offensive, stating: ‘Until now you have counted on help in the form of two or three divisions at a time, but nothing really has come of this. Therefore it is time to give up this practice and to begin to create a fist of 7–8 divisions with cavalry on the flanks.’
⁴⁸
With the backbone at last to deliver powerful attacks, a plan was devised by Marshal
Georgi Zhukov, the Chief of the General Staff, to launch simultaneous concentric blows against Army Group Centre from each of the four new armies.
⁴⁹
Unbeknown to the German generals, they had reached the high point of the summer blitzkrieg to the east.

The
rapidly expanding crisis on the army group's flanks and centre was debated by the generals as isolated questions of where to deploy the available forces, but this was really only a symptom of the underlying problem. At its root, Army Group Centre, like the whole eastern front, was already suffering from a debilitating lack of military resources, which
forced the juggling of units between crisis points and gave rise to increasingly bitter disputes among commanders. There were simply not enough resources to meet the mushrooming demands of the war, and this was bringing the whole advance to a sudden and dangerous halt before the completion of the second major encirclement. With units strung out over many miles, and aggressive Soviet counter-attacks growing in frequency and strength, the culmination of exhaustion, resource depletion and supply difficulties spelled the end of the German blitzkrieg. The next phase of the war was marked by an increasingly static German defence with the pooling of resources for limited
offensives. The initiative was only briefly lost and the German advances would later continue, but ending the war according to the timetable set out in the Barbarossa plan was doomed – the question was now whether the war could be won at all.

Crisis rising – the German command at war

As
the armies of Army Group Centre were still tightening the noose around the great pocket, Hitler, at his East Prussian headquarters, was again considering the next stage of operations once the battle of Smolensk had concluded. On 17 July Hitler returned to his preferred option of swinging Hoth's
panzer group north to cover Leeb's drive on Leningrad, and at the same time diverting Guderian's
panzer group south, along with strong support from
Weichs's infantry, to form a new pocket with Rundstedt's
Army Group South.
⁵⁰
Hitler expressed no interest in attacking
Moscow and, perhaps sensing that this might result in a dispute with the OKH, without bothering to consult them, he quickly proceeded to enshrine his strategic vision in a new war directive. However, it is perhaps more likely that Hitler was completely unaware of Halder's careful scheming and simply expected the OKH to support his new directive. Dated 19 July, War
Directive 33 formalised the divergent north/south thrusts by Bock's panzer forces with the drive on Moscow relegated to the remaining infantry on Bock's front – perhaps a frail concession to the OKH.

To Hitler's mind the conclusion of the battle at Smolensk would see the road to the east torn open leaving little opposition in front of
Army Group Centre and allowing the use of its armour to roll up the flanks of the Soviet armies still resisting in the north and south. Essentially the tone of the directive pointed to a war already won on the central front.
⁵¹
‘The second series of battles in the East has ended’, it proclaimed, with ‘
mopping up’ operations in
Army Group Centre required to eliminate the remaining resistance. Thereafter the next phase of the campaign would have to ‘prevent any further sizable enemy forces from withdrawing into the depths of Russia, and to wipe them out’.
⁵²
Even for a man so prone to delusional fantasies of aggrandisement, presenting the eastern front's military situation in such terms betrayed a remarkable departure from reality, reflecting both Hitler's exorbitant self-assurance and the excessive bias in information flowing through the high command. Timoshenko's
Western Front was still far from beaten and the Soviet high command was certainly not considering a headlong retreat eastwards. An example from the Italian diplomatic community plainly reveals just how differently the war's development was being viewed in circles uncorrupted by the German superiority myth. On 18 July
Ciano wrote in his diary:

Hitler went to war believing that the struggle against Bolshevism might lead the Anglo-Saxon countries to end the conflict. Von
Ribbentrop did not agree; in fact, he was convinced that
Churchill is ready to make an alliance even with the devil himself if he can only destroy Nazism. And this time he was right. Now the struggle is hard and bloody, and the German people, who are tired, wonder why. Frau Mollier used harsh terms. She said Hitler is a blockhead. In fact, the war is harder than the Germans had foreseen. The advance continues, but it is slow, and harassed by the very vigorous Soviet counterattacks. Colonel Amé and General Squero, who made a report on the military situation today, believe that the Russians will succeed in maintaining a front even during the winter. If this is true, Germany has started a haemorrhage that will have incalculable consequences.
⁵³

Just as Hitler was unswervingly fixated by victory,
Halder too remained defiantly optimistic in spite of a notable downturn in the confident mood at OKH. On 20 July Halder noted in his diary:

The gruelling battles involving some groups of our motorised forces, in which the infantry arriving from the west can only slowly become involved, together with the time taken on bad roads which restrict movement and the exhaustion of the troops who have been marching and fighting without rest, have dampened the spirits at high command. Nowhere is this better seen than in the thorough despair into which
Brauchitsch had been plunged. However there is really no call for this.
⁵⁴

While Halder appeared unperturbed by the military situation, the revelations contained within Hitler's new war directive were certainly of much greater concern to him. It is unclear exactly what Halder did in response to War Directive 33, as there is no mention of it in his diary on the date it was issued (19 July). Some form of discussion with Hitler, however, is not beyond the realm of possibility, given that only two days later on 21 July, during Hitler's visit to Leeb's
Army Group North, the issue of Hoth's panzers striking north was suddenly far less certain. As
Leeb wrote in his diary: ‘The Führer spoke of the
possibility
that Panzer Group 3 would turn to the north.’
⁵⁵
Furthermore, the OKW war diary for the same day (21 July) presented the northern operations as something to be decided upon ‘at the latest in 5 days’ and then concluded: