The Second World War (30 page)

There was almost no shift or expedient at which Stalin would not grasp in this supreme crisis of the Soviet state to assure its survival – as well as his own. In September he decreed the creation of new units of ‘Guards’, quintessential symbols of the
ancien régime
; in 1917 Guards officers had had the skin stripped from their hands in revolutionary hatred of the white gloves they had traditionally worn. Now Stalin decreed that regiments, divisions, even armies which resisted the Germans most stoutly should add ‘Guards’ to their titles. New distinctions were meanwhile created for heroes and victors, named after the generals who had fought Napoleon: the Orders of Kutuzov and Suvorov. Old distinctions of rank were soon to be revived, including the ‘shoulder boards’ which had been torn from officers’ uniforms in 1917. Even the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, persecuted and vilified for two decades, was suddenly restored to esteem as the servant of ‘Mother Russia’, a matriarch resurrected by the autocrat who had violated her children without pity in the era of collectivisation and the purges.

But with the carrot went the stick. The ‘dual authority’ of the commissars was restored on 16 July; on 27 July an order sentencing nine senior officers to death was read out to all officers and men. The condemned included the signals officer of the Western Front and the commanders of the Third and Fourth Armies and of the 30th and 60th Rifle Divisions. Others were shot in secret, or simply committed suicide rather than face the executioners of the NKVD; its ‘Special Sections’ (how terrible a meaning did ‘special’ acquire in the Second World War – ‘special leader’, ‘special command’, ‘special treatment’, all spelt death to the defenceless and disfavoured) were deployed in the rear of the fighting units to shoot deserters and menace with machine-guns those who even thought of quitting their posts.

Yet the difficulty of sustaining resistance grew greater with every day of combat. On 10 July three fronts had been set up – North-Western, nominally commanded by Voroshilov, Western, under Timoshenko, and South-Western, under Budenny – to correspond with the three German army groups attacking them. This was a rational means of bringing under command the reinforcements and supplies which the GKO was mobilising for the defence. In July 1941, however, new men and equipment were scarcely to be found; while existing units and weapons were being consumed like chaff in the furnace of battle. By 8 July, OKH reckoned it had destroyed 89 out of 164 Russian divisions identified; as a running check on that estimate, Army Group Centre was able to show that it had captured 300,000 prisoners, 2500 tanks and 1400 guns (the majority with their crews dead about them, so tenaciously did the Russian gunners fight). Stalin himself counted 180 divisions committed to battle, out of 240 mobilised; he hoped eventually, if Hitler would allow him the time, to raise 350. At present, however, replacements were being used up as soon as found: during the Smolensk encirclement battle (4-19 July), Army Group Centre’s fourth, another 310,000 prisoners were taken, along with 3200 tanks and 3100 guns. Russian industry, suddenly thrown into high gear, was producing 1000 tanks a month (and 1800 aircraft) but losses exceeded these figures.

As Army Group Centre completed its destruction of the Soviet Sixteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Armies in the Smolensk pocket, Army Group North was accelerating its rate of advance along the Baltic coast towards Leningrad. Lakes, forests and rivers had impeded Leeb’s spearheads at the outset. Although he had only three Panzer divisions at his disposal and he achieved no encirclement as spectacular as Bock’s, by 30 June Army Group North had occupied Lithuania and secured bridgeheads across the lower reaches of the Dvina where the Stalin Line was supposed to run. Racing through it, Panzer Group 4 arrived at Ostrov, on Latvia’s pre-1940 frontier with Russia, and ten days later stood on the Luga, only sixty miles from Leningrad and the last major water obstacle outside the city.

Army Group South had initially made slower progress than Centre and North. Commanded by Rundstedt, who had directed the great breakthrough across the Meuse thirteen months earlier, it consisted of two disparate blocs, a northern
masse de manoeuvre
of German infantry led by the five armoured divisions of Panzer Group 1, and, to the south, the allied contingent formed of Romanian and Hungarian divisions, equipped with inferior French weapons supplied during the years of the Little Entente. The satellite divisions’ mission was to cross the rivers Dniester and Bug and capture Odessa and the Black Sea ports, while the German infantry and tanks marched deep into the steppe towards Kiev, capital of the Ukraine and founding city of Russian civilisation. Rundstedt’s vanguards passed easily through the Soviet frontier defences, swamping the fortifications of Przemysl, which had sustained siege for 194 days in 1914-15. It then ran up against a major concentration of Soviet force belonging to the South-Western Front, under the direction of one of Stalin’s best generals, Kirponos, whose political commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, the future First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, with the outstanding General K. K. Rokossovsky as one of his tank commanders. The South-Western Front was particularly strong in armoured formations – it contained six mechanised corps – and had a high proportion of the T-34s in service. Kirponos determined to deal with Rundstedt’s
Blitzkrieg
in absolutely correct fashion, by pinching the spearheads of Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 between concentric attacks mounted by the Fifth and Sixth Armies; Fifth, operating out of the impenetrable marshes of the Pripet, had a firm base for its thrust; Sixth, whose positions were in the open steppe, did not. Although both armies pressed their attacks, their pincers never met and Kleist pushed between to capture Lvov (as Lemberg the Austrian capital of Galicia until 1918, then a Polish city until 1939) on 30 June. The commander of the garrison was General A. A. Vlasov, who managed to fight his way out on this occasion; a year later he would fall into German hands near Leningrad and defect, to set up the ‘Vlasov Army’ of anti-Stalinists. His loyalty to the regime may have been shaken during the evacuation of Lvov, when the local NKVD massacred its Ukrainian political prisoners rather than let them be liberated by the Germans.

Kirponos persisted in his efforts to mount ‘pinching’ operations against Kleist’s Panzers on 29 June and 9 July; but the power of the Panzers and the flail of the Luftwaffe kept Rundstedt’s spearhead moving forward, increasingly constricted within a narrow axis of advance, to be known as the ‘Zhitomir Corridor’, but reaching inexorably towards Kiev. On 11 July Kirponos held a command conference at Brovary, only ten miles east of the city. It was there decided that the Fifth and Sixth Armies – shadows of their former selves, despite constant reinforcement and re-equipment – should continue to hack at the approaching Germans. He was counting on the arrival of two new corps, LXIV and XXVII, to lend weight to their efforts, though, according to Professor John Erickson, what he had heard disturbed him: ‘short of weapons, horse-drawn guns, disorganised staffs, no wireless sets; [in XXVII Corps] only one division had a commander.’ As the military soviet of the South-Western Front dispersed from the conference, in gloom approaching despair, the headquarters came under heavy German air attack. Kirponos had already glimpsed the danger to which his failure to pinch off Kleist’s penetration of his front exposed Kiev, and indeed his whole command: Panzer Group 1’s advance now constituted one arm of a counter-pincers; should the Germans bring down tanks from the north, from Bock’s Army Group Centre, a second pincer arm would be created and he, his men and the whole of the Ukraine would be enveloped within it.

The same thought was simultaneously exercising Hitler. He and the army high command had differed in their view of how the Russian campaign should be fought from the moment of initial planning a year earlier. Their differences had been significantly reconciled in the Barbarossa directive of December 1940. But OKH, and particularly Halder, still believed that the Russians’ fighting power could best be overcome by driving headlong at Moscow, while Hitler was above all anxious to seize as much Russian territory as possible in one gulp, devouring the Russians defending it in giant encirclements on the way. His confidence as a commander, however, was rapidly increasing. He had left the conduct of the Polish campaign to his generals, and had largely been talked into the Scandinavian invasions by Admiral Raeder. Before and during the campaign in the west he had given his generals orders but had also suffered from severe attacks of indecision and second thoughts, notably outside Dunkirk. Since the inception of Barbarossa, however, he had found an increasing certitude. It was in the fullest sense his war, it had started triumphantly, and as its course developed he grew overbearing in its direction. ‘The Führer’s interference is becoming a regular nuisance,’ wrote Halder on 14 July; a little later, he enlarged on this theme:

He’s playing warlord again and bothering us with such absurd ideas that he’s risking everything our wonderful operations so far have won. Unlike the French the Russians won’t just run away when they’ve been tactically defeated; they have to be defeated in a terrain that’s half forest and marsh. . . . Every other day now I have to go over to him [Hitler’s headquarters and those of OKH, though close to each other at Rastenburg in East Prussia, were separate entities]. Hours of gibberish, and the outcome is there’s only one man who understands how to wage wars . . . if I didn’t have faith . . . I’d go under like Brauchitsch [the army C-in-C] who’s at the end of his tether and hides behind an iron mask of manliness so as not to betray his complete helplessness.

Hitler’s differences with Halder and OKH emerged into the open on 19 July when he issued a new Führer Directive, No. 33, outlining his conception of the next stage of operations. It laid down that Army Group Centre’s two Panzer groups, 3 (Hoth) and 2 (Guderian), were to be diverted from the drive on Moscow to co-operate respectively with Leeb and Rundstedt in their advances on Leningrad and Kiev. A supplement, issued on 23 July, rammed the point home. The drive on Moscow was postponed until mopping-up operations around Smolensk had been completed. In amplification of this order, Brauchitsch issued orders to Army Group Centre which Guderian was called to hear at a conference at Novi Borisov on 26 July. There he was directed to take his tanks off the Moscow road and lead them southwards to destroy the Soviet Fifth Army on the fringe of the Pripet Marshes.

Guderian was outraged. His divisions had been reduced by heavy fighting and long traverses of roadless country to 50 per cent of their tank strength. On the other hand, his leading elements, which had already advanced 440 miles in six weeks, stood only 220 miles from Moscow and, in the period of dry weather that could be guaranteed before the coming of the autumn rains, might certainly be led to reach the capital. As he had been promoted to the status of army commander at Novi Borisov, he was also now independent of Kluge (for whom he nursed a reciprocated antipathy) and so answerable directly to Bock, whose views coincided with his own. With Bock’s acquiescence, in which OKH tacitly joined, he therefore embarked on a delaying operation to frustrate Hitler’s reordering of the Barbarossa strategy. It took the form of involving his Panzer group (renamed Panzer Army Guderian) in a battle for the town of Roslavl, seventy miles south-east of Smolensk, where the roads to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad met. His purpose was to entangle his forces so deeply with the Russian defenders that the justification for their diversion to assist Rundstedt would be overtaken by events and so allow him to proceed towards Moscow as originally ordered.

Guderian’s disguised insubordination almost worked. His argument for heightening the pressure at Roslavl was validated by the appearance of Russian reserves in that sector, sent to Timoshenko by Stalin from the training units and hastily embodied militias which were now his only source of fresh troops. Moreover, Hitler had had second thoughts. In Führer Directive No. 34, issued on 30 July, he postponed the diversion of Army Group Centre’s Panzer groups to assist their tank-poor neighbours and arranged to visit Army Group Centre on 4 August to assess its situation for himself (a dangerous excursion, did he but know it, for its headquarters was the focus of the ‘military resistance’ which would strike against him in July 1944). Hoth, commanding Panzer Group 3, accepted the Führer’s arguments for going to the assistance of Leeb on the Leningrad axis. Bock and Guderian resisted his arguments for joining Rundstedt. There followed what has been called a ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ during which Guderian edged southwards but attempted to retain the bulk of his striking force on the Moscow road.

The ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ (4-24 August), which may well have spared Stalin defeat in 1941, was characterised not only by slow German progress on all fronts but also by a succession of changes of mind. On 7 August, OKW and OKH conferred, and Jodl and Halder were able to persuade Hitler of the need to resume the advance on Moscow, which resulted in Führer Directive No. 34A. Three days later he took fright at renewed resistance on the Leningrad front and insisted that Hoth’s tanks depart immediately to Leeb’s assistance. The Führer, Jodl told Colonel Adolf Heusinger, the OKW operations officer, ‘has an intuitive aversion from treading the same path as Napoleon; Moscow gives him a sinister feeling.’ When the whole chain of command – Brauchitsch, Halder and Heusinger at OKW, Bock at Army Group Centre, Guderian as Bock’s principal field commander – demonstrated that it was continuing to prevaricate, Hitler, who had recovered his sense of how the campaign was unfolding, lost patience. He repeated his orders that Army Groups North and South should proceed to their objectives and dictated a letter to Brauchitsch accusing him of a lack of ‘the necessary grip’. Brauchitsch suffered a mild heart attack. Halder, who had urged him to resign when the letter arrived, did so himself ‘to stave off an act of folly’. It was refused; Hitler, now as later, treated offers of resignation as acts of insubordination. Halder nevertheless felt that ‘history will level at us the gravest accusation that can be made of a high command, namely that for fear of undue risk we did not exploit the attacking impetus of our troops.’ Bock, in his diary, echoed his frustration: ‘I don’t want to “capture Moscow”. I want to destroy the enemy’s army and the bulk of that army is
in front
of me.’ Both left it nevertheless to their subordinate Guderian to confront the Führer with the boldest statement of their anxiety. Overcome by Guderian’s exposition of what he believed to be the strategically correct path, when Halder visited Bock’s headquarters on 23 August Bock telephoned Schmundt, Hitler’s Wehrmacht adjutant, with a request for Guderian ‘to be granted audience’, while Halder agreed to take him back to OKW in his liaison aircraft.