Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (62 page)

The Russians have plenty of manpower and I don't believe that we could pursue the new policy to the point where the enemy cracks and the way is again clear for large scale operations. In my view, these ideas mark the beginning of a decline in our previously dynamic operations and a readiness to throw away the opportunities offered to us by the impetus of our infantry and armour.
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Halder's sceptical questioning of Hitler's latest contribution to the war in the east did nothing to mend the rift between the two men, and consequently Halder's attempts to re-engage Hitler on the importance of Moscow were abruptly dismissed without Hitler offering any rationale for his position.
¹³⁰
As a result, Halder's mounting exasperation at Hitler's overbearing interference in the military campaign caused him to blame every hindrance on Hitler's baneful influence, but in truth, even without the internal troubles of the German command, Operation Barbarossa was already in serious
trouble.

Figure 7.4 
Upon reaching the line east of Smolensk Army Group Centre had to repel desperate counter-attacks against its thinly held front.

The paralysis caused by spreading its resources too thinly gripped Army Group Centre and was also being felt in the neighbouring two army groups, which led to calls for greater concentration of resources against a unified objective. During a visit by
Paulus to
Army Group North on 26 July the armoured commanders of
Panzer Group 4 (
Hoepner,
Manstein and
Reinhardt) all agreed that the terrain between Lake Ilmen and Lake Peipus on the approach to Leningrad was in no way suited to armoured warfare.
¹³¹
Due to this assessment and the undiminished enemy resistance,
Leeb judged the further advance of Manstein's
LVI Panzer Corps to be ‘very unfavourable’. By contrast General Reinhardt's
XXXXI Panzer Corps was better placed, but was momentarily halted with heavy losses.
¹³²
Confronting such difficulties, Manstein did not mince words in his report to Paulus:

I put him in the picture about the battles we had fought to date and pointed out how run-down our panzer corps had become in country which was most unsuitable for the use of armoured troops…The losses of our corps’ three mobile divisions already amounted to 6,000 men, and both the troops and the equipment were being subjected to excessive strain…I told Paulus that in my opinion the best thing to do would be to withdraw the entire Panzer Group from an area where a rapid advance was almost out of the question and to use it against Moscow.
¹³³

Yet unlike his decisive role in shaping German strategy in 1940, Manstein had no access to Hitler and would be at the serious disadvantage of arguing against Hitler's favoured conceptions, as opposed to confirming them as he had done the year before.

If there was one man who was to prove an indispensable ally to
Halder in arguing the case for Moscow it was
Jodl. Exactly how much influence he exerted is difficult to gauge, but Jodl's stance is probably as significant for the arguments he advanced as the office he represented. The well-known rivalry between the OKW and the OKH undoubtedly added weight to their common cause when, for once, they found themselves on the same side, rather than vying for Hitler's favour. The exception to this was
Keitel, but as the eastern front was the sole theatre outside the mandate of the OKW he possessed no direct responsibility and, accordingly, involved himself little in the dispute except to refer the complaints of the generals back to Hitler. Keitel's own position was, predictably, never in any real doubt given his notorious devotion to Hitler, but for that same
reason his opinion was scarcely
sought.
¹³⁴
In
Warlimont's account, Jodl was the key figure inside Hitler's headquarters backing the cause of the OKH, so that the opposition to Hitler was now a unified chorus of central figures in the OKW, the entire OKH and practically all the relevant field commanders.

Either in the scheduled discussions or alone with
Hitler, Warlimont claimed that Jodl ‘found a soft spot and took the next opportunity to speak out in favour of the attack on Moscow’.
¹³⁵
This took place on 27 July when Jodl confronted Hitler with arguments centred, not on the importance of capturing the Soviet capital, as Halder had emphasised, but on his conviction that it was only here that the remaining strength of the Red Army could be found and defeated. This approach wisely took up Hitler's own reasoning that the enemy had to be destroyed where it was found.
¹³⁶
Typically, Hitler countered with his now familiar arguments emphasising the economic importance of the
Ukraine and Caucasus,
¹³⁷
but Jodl's vocal intervention in the debate proved a vital ingredient. ‘On the following day’, Warlimont wrote, ‘probably under weight of new unfavourable situation reports coming in from [Army Groups] Centre and North, he [Hitler] suddenly appeared ready to give up his large-scale operations in the south.’
¹³⁸
The true extent of Jodl's role in swaying Hitler remains in question, but he certainly contributed an influential voice to the opposition against Hitler's
plan. The effect on the German dictator was not always obvious from his unfailingly steely facade in the daily situation reports, and his unequivocal language with the generals, but in fact the burden of indecision about what to do next was gnawing at him.

On
28 July during a short walk with his army adjutant, Major Gerhard
Engel, and his chief military adjutant, Colonel Rudolf
Schmundt, Hitler gave a rare insight into his private thoughts. According to Engel, Hitler confided that he was not sleeping at night because he was ‘not yet clear about some things’. Expanding on this further, the Führer revealed that he was torn between political and economic objectives in the Soviet Union. Political objectives necessitated the capture of Leningrad and Moscow, while economically he needed to secure his
Lebensraum
in the
south, ‘where honey and milk
flow’.
¹³⁹
The next day (29 July) on a visit to Panzer Group 2, Schmundt too revealed to
Guderian Hitler's indecisiveness over how to proceed with the war. Leningrad, Moscow and the Ukraine were the three objectives under consideration, but according to Schmundt no final decision had yet been reached. In his memoir Guderian professed to have urged Moscow to
Schmundt, ‘with all the force of which I was capable’.
¹⁴⁰

Not
only was Hitler grappling with the strategic direction of the campaign, but also its projected timing. Shortly after the launch of Barbarossa, Hitler told the former German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner Graf von der
Schulenburg, that he expected to be in Moscow by 15 August and to have won the whole campaign by 1 October.
¹⁴¹
Both estimates were now clearly unattainable and the issue of time was becoming an increasingly urgent problem in the impasse over how to win the eastern campaign. The breaking point in Hitler's tough outward resolve to follow his own strategic vision came on 28 July when he abruptly announced to his staff that owing to the developing situation over the last few days, ‘above all the appearance of strong new enemy formations before the front and the flanks of Army Group Centre’, it had become necessary to reassess the launch of large-scale operations as outlined in
Directive 33a.
¹⁴²
In essence, the rapidly changing character of the war in the east, which had slowed the German blitzkrieg to a halt, had forced Hitler to waver on the feasibility of ordering further wide ranging operations against an opponent who was clearly far from beaten. Instead, Hitler now insisted that the ‘most urgent task’ of Bock's army group was to clear the southern flank around
Gomel – an operation reflecting his commitment to the doctrine of smaller
encirclements.
¹⁴³

While Directive 33a was no longer the guiding principle of German strategy, Hitler remained very much undecided about the new strategic direction of the campaign and, for this reason, he probably did not wish to inform the army commanders of their potential opportunity. Thus, in spite of
Brauchitsch being present for at least part of the meeting on 28 July, it seems Hitler only informed the Army Commander-in-Chief of the urgent need to resolve the situation at Gomel on Bock's southern
flank. Evidence that
Brauchitsch did not yet know of Hitler's shifting deliberations on Directive 33a comes from his encounter with
Halder that evening, upon returning to the OKH. From Halder's diary there is not a word of relief at the apparent modification of
Directive 33a. Instead, Brauchitsch only seems to have related the substance of Hitler's order for the Gomel operation which infuriated Halder, who wrote in disgust about the ‘absurdity of the operations now ordered. They are leading to a dispersal of our forces which will bring the deciding operation towards
Moscow to a standstill.’
¹⁴⁴
Halder then confided in a letter to his wife his true feelings about Hitler's ruinous meddling:

He is playing warlord again and proposing such absurd ideas, that he is putting in question everything our splendid operations have won so far. The Russian won't simply go away, like the French, when he has been operationally beaten. He has to be killed one at a time in a country that is half forest and marsh. This takes time and his nerves [Hitler's] won't stand it. Every few days I have to go there. Hours of empty talk with the result that there is only one man who knows how to wage wars. I am on the brink of despair, because I can predict exactly where this nonsense will end. If I didn't have my faith in God and my self assurance, I’d be like Brauchitsch, who is at the end of his tether and hides behind his rank so as not to betray his inner helplessness.
¹⁴⁵

Barely five weeks into a war that was supposed to be the decisive blitzkrieg campaign to secure hegemony in Europe against an inferior opponent, the demands of the conflict were overwhelming the army, and the German command was expending as much energy fighting within itself as addressing the problems of the front. On 29 July
Heusinger noted that together with Halder he had ‘to fight against much resistance, particularly against the ideas of the Führer’.
¹⁴⁶
It all boded very ill for the outcome of the war, but like so many fundamental aspects of Barbarossa, the German command had to learn its lessons the hard way, often at the expense of time and strategic confusion.

On the battlefield at
Army Group Centre a different lesson was being learned, which underscored the dangers of over-extension and resource depletion. Here, however, the price was paid in blood and the loss of irreplaceable equipment.
Bock himself was still grappling with the dawning realisation of what it meant to wage war against the Soviet colossus and his diary for 26 July reflects his burgeoning astonishment.

It turns out that the Russians have completed a new, concentrated build-up around my projecting front. In many places they have tried to go over to the attack. Astonishing for an opponent who is so badly beaten; they must have unbelievable masses of material, for even now the field units still complain about the powerful effect of the enemy artillery. The Russians are also becoming more aggressive in the
air.
¹⁴⁷

Bock was not overstating the matter. As many sectors of Germany's extensive eastern front were settling into the first stages of positional warfare, the Soviets revealed their preponderant advantage in artillery with an unremitting rain of fire that was quickly to become the bane of the German infantryman up and down the line.
Making its first appearance in July 1941 was the experimental Soviet BM-13
Katyusha
multiple rocket launcher (later dubbed by the German soldiers ‘Stalin's organs’). This new weapon delivered 320 132mm rockets in a ten-second barrage. The effect was devastating and the weapon was soon moved into mass production.
¹⁴⁸
One soldier who had fought in Poland, France and later Italy described his first experience of the Katyusha battery as ‘the most terrible and shocking thing I have ever encountered’.
¹⁴⁹
Observing the first usage of the new
weapon at Rudnya near Smolensk, Marshal
Andrei Yeremenko recalled: