Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (86 page)

On
21 August the fighting around the Yel'nya salient began to ease off as the Soviet
24th Army regrouped and received reinforcements in preparation for a major offensive at the end of the month.
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Even in this period of relative quiet, the German
IX Army Corps defending the northern flank of the salient was so badly under strength that the engineers, desperately needed behind the front building roads, spent weeks fighting as infantry. The description of this period as ‘quiet’ is all the more remarkable for the rate of losses still being sustained. The
137th Infantry Division was losing over 50 men a day in local actions between 20 and 30 August, while the neighbouring
263rd Infantry Division lost 1,200 men between 20 and 27 August, equalling about 150 men every day.
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After a tour of inspection at Yel'nya, Halder was informed: ‘Troops very strained. Enemy artillery activity very unpleasant. Our munition use limited. Mines and wire absent.’
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At the end of August, the looming Soviet offensive finally struck with eight Soviet rifle divisions, two tank divisions and one motorised infantry division, backed by 800 guns, mortars and
multiple rocket launchers. The Soviet forces of Zhukov's
Reserve Front were organised into two shock groups to the north and south of the salient, and for the first time the whole offensive was co-ordinated with simultaneous offensives by
Western Front in the north at
Dukhovshchina and
Briansk Front in the south at Roslavl and
Novozybkov.
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On the first day of the offensive (30 August) the Soviets penetrated ten kilometres into Kluge's southern flank and Bock was forced to send two divisions (including the
10th Panzer Division) to restore the situation.
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Heavy fighting ensued, until finally on 2 September Bock decided to abandon the Yel'nya salient, claiming that it served no purpose and that divisions deployed there were simply ‘bled white’ over
time.
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Thus, after six weeks of the heaviest fighting and untold losses, the Yel'nya salient ultimately proved worthless – an appalling example of Army Group Centre's aimless strategic direction. As Franz
Frisch, who fought in those battles, later wrote:

Officially it was called a ‘planned withdrawal’, and a ‘correction of the front lines.’…But to me it was so much bullshit. The Russians were kicking us badly and we had to regroup…The next day – or maybe a few days later – we heard on the radio, in the ‘news from the front’ (
Wehrmachtsbericht
) about the ‘successful front correction’ in our Yel'nya defensive line, which was east of Smolensk, and the enormous losses we had inflicted on the enemy. But no single word was heard about a retreat, about the hopelessness of the situation, about the mental and emotional stagnation and numbness of the German soldiers. In short, it was again a ‘victory’. But we on the front line were running back like rabbits in front of the fox. This metamorphosis of the truth from ‘all shit’ to ‘it was a victory’ baffled me, and those of my comrades who dared to
think.
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Frisch was not the only German soldier to be shocked by the huge discrepancy between wartime propaganda and the reality of life at the front. Georg
Grossjohann, an officer who had been stationed in France during the first weeks of Barbarossa, wrote after the war:

When I was moved to the east [in the late summer of 1941] I was actually convinced that I would be too late to see action.
Reichspressechef
[German press chief] Dr Dietrich declared on the radio that all that was needed in Russia from that point in the late summer would be ‘police actions’. Well, I was taught differently when I arrived there…There was tremendous bitterness amongst the
infantry soldiers at the front over the misinterpretation and misunderstanding of the realities of their situation.
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In the late summer of 1941 images of long victorious advances into the open spaces of enemy territory belonged to propaganda reels of past wars. For the average German
Landser
the day-to-day reality of life on the eastern front had assumed a more frightening similarity to the torments of trench warfare. Corporal W.F. wrote on 22 August: ‘We have suffered greatly under the Russian artillery fire and we must live day and night in our foxholes in order to gain protection from shrapnel. The holes are full of water. Lice and other types of vermin have already snuck in.’
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Erich
Mende noted how it was impossible to dig down deep because after just 50 centimetres ground water was already appearing.
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Another soldier,
Harald Henry, wrote home in a letter on 18 August: ‘It would be no overstatement to declare “a dog wouldn't want to go on living like this”, as no animal could live lower or more primitively than us. All day long we squat under the ground, twisted in narrow holes, taking sun and rain with no respite and try to sleep.’
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If the living conditions were harsh, they were made worse by the terrors of combat which dominated life on the front. In another letter written only days later (22 August) Henry despaired at the mental anguish he was enduring.

Yesterday was a day so immersed in blood, so full of dead and wounded, so blasted by crackling salvoes, shrapnel from shells and groans and shrieks of the wounded, that I can not yet write about it…As if by a wonder I was drawn from the heaviest fighting in the afternoon and remain until now unhurt…At any rate my old non-commissioned officer Grabke and many other comrades are dead.
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Far from the triumphant announcements of unprecedented victories, the war in the east was only just settling down to a steady rhythm of murderous routine. As Theodor
Mogge, a non-commissioned artillery officer in 2nd Army, poignantly observed, ‘every day brought new victims’.
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By the end of August, after only nine weeks of war against the Soviet Union, German losses had reached 14,457 officers and almost 400,000 men. Statistically, slightly more than one man in every ten was now a casualty.
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Reserves from the Replacement Army were already marching
east to cover some of these losses,
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but manpower replacements were rapidly being exhausted and the war was only just beginning. The long bloody battles and soaring losses had a profound effect on the men who were reminded time and again of how cheap life was on the eastern front. Having already seen so much death on the march to Smolensk Siegfried
Knappe chose to accept his own death would result from the war.

I had to become fatalistic about it and assume that eventually it would happen to me and there was nothing I could do to prevent it…I knew that I was going to be killed or badly wounded sooner or later. The odds against my escaping unscathed were impossibly high, and I accepted my eventual death or maiming as part of my fate. Once I forced myself to accept that, I could put it out of my mind and go on about my duties.
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Just
as the infantry were enduring at first hand the trials of attritional warfare, so too was the Luftwaffe having to adapt to ever more extreme operational conditions. In past campaigns a hallmark of the Luftwaffe's success was its versatile ability to move forward with the army, and provide constant air support even as the axis of operations shifted from one front to another and the army penetrated ever deeper into enemy territory. This was initially true of the Luftwaffe's operations in the east too, but here the method quickly revealed a conspicuous fragility, which the unceasing fighting and depth of operations badly exacerbated. The forward airfields were poorly serviced, exposed to attack and severely under-supplied. The result was predictably calamitous, as one German officer observed: ‘The constant movement of flying formations, usually without adequate ground personnel, resulted in such bad servicing that a
Luftflotte
[Air Fleet] had often on a sector of about 400 km only 10–12 serviceable fighter aircraft.’
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As sectors of the German front rapidly became devoid of protective air cover, the Soviet air force was left an increasingly free hand.
Heinrici wrote on 9 August that one Soviet bomber attack had alone killed 90 horses and ‘a great many men’.
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The
7th Panzer Division's war diary for 22 August reported: ‘Throughout the whole day the enemy had complete air superiority. The division has until now heavy losses through bombing attacks.’
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On the same day the diary of the
3rd Panzer Division noted: ‘In the course of the afternoon there were constant, and at times costly, attacks on the division by
high flying bombers.’
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Lemelsen's XXXXVII Panzer Corps reported on 30 August: ‘Absolute enemy air supremacy. Up to midday a total of 69 bomber attacks.’ Days later the same panzer corps complained that the ‘Red air force is master of the skies. No fighter cover. Human and material losses due to bombing.’
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A tour of the front on 21 August by Field Marshal Erhard
Milch, the Inspector-General of the Luftwaffe, revealed that the airfields in the east were littered with scores, sometimes hundreds, of damaged aircraft.
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From an assessment of
Richthofen's VIII Air Corps it is not hard to see why. The VIII Air Corps had been transferred to Leeb's army group to aid the drive on Leningrad, but in just 12 days from 10 to 21 August the corps lost an astonishing 10.3 per cent of its aircraft to enemy action and had another 54.5 per cent of its aircraft classed as damaged but repairable. At the same time, 3.9 per cent of its flying personnel were killed, 5.7 per cent were wounded and 2.9 per cent were listed as missing, equalling a combined attrition rate of 12.5 per cent in less than two weeks.
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General Karl
Koller, the Luftwaffe's last Chief of the General Staff, described
Richthofen's high losses as ‘heartless’ and felt that ‘owing to his privileged position’ with
Göring and
Jeschonnek, Richthofen was untroubled by high casualties, always certain that he could count on an adequate flow of replacements.
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Yet owing to the Luftwaffe's incompetent management and wayward strategic direction, not to mention Germany's industrial bottlenecks, there was no appreciable increase in aircraft production to cover the heavy losses now being sustained.
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As a result, the Luftwaffe was seriously over-committed and beginning its long decline, as it attempted to maintain operations simultaneously in the east, the Mediterranean and against
Britain.

Just as Bock's army group was suffering from a critical lack of resources to deal with the excessive demands of its long front, so too were the two neighbouring army groups feeling the stress of over-extension.
In the south, following Rundstedt's victory at Uman, General Georg von
Sodenstern, the Chief of the General Staff of Army Group South, warned Halder on 10 August of the mounting difficulties confronting operations in the south. As Sodenstern explained, ‘the sudden change in the estimate of the situation’ was based less on an evaluation of the enemy
situation than ‘a revised assessment of the capabilities of our own troops. They are simply exhausted and have heavy
losses.’
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The following day (11 August) Halder recorded in his diary that the
6th Army was suffering a daily loss of 1,600 casualties, of which some 380 were deaths.
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In the
98th Infantry Division (belonging to the 6th Army) one regiment alone reported losing 1,200 men and 37 officers between 31 July and 10 August.
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Towards the end of August the motorised divisions of
Kleist's
panzer group were estimated to be at 50 per cent strength.
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Nor was it possible to provide the army group with the promised 12 supply trains a day; indeed on some days only half this number
arrived.
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In
Army Group North, over-extension increasingly slowed operations throughout August, but Leeb's offensive was buttressed by Hitler's Leningrad bias and this ensured him the support of first Richthofen's VIII Air Corps and then Schmidt's XXXIX Panzer Corps. Even with such external aid, the drive to cut off Leningrad was not achieved until 8 September and the following assault to break through to the city proved a costly failure. Supply trains were also well short of the required number in August, and while the ratio improved in September it was still less than the minimum needed.
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Further north, on the distant Finnish Front, the German
XXXVI Army Corps had been heavily engaged in a failed operation to cut the vital
Murmansk railway at
Kandalaksha. By 13 September the Corps' two divisions had together sustained 9,463 casualties and the
169th Infantry Division was judged no longer capable of holding even a defensive position.
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