* With the return of good weather in the spring of 1942, the Germans were ready to retake the offensive in the East. Hitler's priority was the capture of the oil fields of the Caucasus, and after a crisp mopping-up operation to capture Sevastopol in Crimea, the Germans punched through the southern regions of the Soviet line and drove East rapidly.
* The Red Army's attacks of December 1941 had been performed for limited objectives, and in early January Stalin decided to follow up with a general counteroffensive, consisting of five coordinated thrusts up and down the line that would throw the Germans out of the USSR. The plan had been created at Stalin's order by Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, the chief of the Red Army's general staff. Shaposhnikov, incidentally, was something of an anomaly in Stalin's military family, an ex-Tsarist officer who had survived the purges. Furthermore, for whatever mysterious reasons, Stalin treated him with a level of respect he rarely granted other generals, calling him familiarly "Boris Mikhailovich", and not raising his voice even when he and Shaposhnikov disagreed on some matter.
Shaposhnikov presented the plan to senior Red Army generals in Stalin's office at the Kremlin on the evening of 5 January. Stalin asked Zhukov for comments, and Zhukov replied that the plan was unrealistic: the Red Army lacked the resources to sustain such a broad offensive and would suffer excessive casualties for little gain. That was a particularly strong statement coming from Zhukov, who had little squeamishness over losses. Zhukov instead advocated limited and focused actions as resources allowed.
Stalin ignored the advice, saying the offensive would go ahead anyway. Zhukov was annoyed at the whole farce and complained to Shaposhnikov after the meeting. Shaposhnikov, who had constructed the plan against his own better judgement, replied: "It was foolish to argue. Koba had already decided. The directives have gone out to almost all the fronts, and they will launch the offensive very soon."
"Well then, why did Stalin ask me to give my opinion?!"
"I just don't know, old man, I just don't know." They both really knew it was just Stalin toying with his underlings.
The offensives went forward as Stalin ordered on 10 January 1942, and they came to ruin just as Zhukov had predicted. As the Red Army advanced, casualties and material losses sapped the momentum of the offensive, and Soviet supply lines through rough territory grew longer while German supply lines grew shorter. Paratroop drops deep into German-held territory proved ineffectual at best, disastrous at worst. The Germans had built defenses anchored around key cities that could be kept supplied, and these "hedgehogs" withstood Red Army attacks. Almost 100,000 Germans had been encircled at Demyansk, but for ten weeks they were resupplied by air until a German relief column punched through in April. The success of the Demyansk air resupply operation would have unfortunate consequences for the Wehrmacht later.
The Soviet offensive faded in February, to die out in March. Overextended Red Army forces were surrounded and wiped out; paratroop units, initially dropped to help spearhead attacks and then sent in to try to retrieve the situation, were badly chewed up without having served any good purpose. The Soviet Union had wasted great numbers of men and piles of equipment that would be desperately needed in the spring. The only compensation was that the Red Army had pushed the Germans hard and made them suffer as well.
* Despite the bloody failure of the grand offensive, Stalin wanted to try again immediately, convening a meeting in late March where Shaposhnikov outlined a scheme involving no less than seven coordinated attacks all up and down the line. Zhukov and others protested that resources were lacking; that it would be wiser to focus on one or a few fronts, and perform "active defense" in the others, simply probing the Germans with limited attacks to keep them off-balance and to prevent them from shifting forces to other parts of the line.
Stalin mocked Zhukov's proposals as half-measures; then relented far more than anyone expected. He decided that there would be three offensive thrusts: one in the north to relieve Leningrad, one in the south to relieve Sevastopol, and one in the center to retake Kharkov. In the other four sectors, the Red Army would perform "partial offensives", which amounted to active defense operations.
The Leningrad offensive hardly got off the ground. The Second Shock Army, which had attempted to block the German drive on Leningrad, had been isolated by the Wehrmacht during the winter fighting, and the Red Army ended up being diverted by attempts to relieve the trapped men. On 21 March, Stalin had sent Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov to take command of the Second Shock Army and lead them to safety. Vlasov had distinguished himself during the fighting in the fall and winter, but he was unable to perform a breakout; the Germans would finally mop up the remnants of the Second Shock Army in late June, inflicting a loss of almost 100,000 men on the Red Army, the majority of them killed in action. Vlasov was captured by German troops in a farmhouse. Embittered, he signed up with the Germans to lead a force of equally disaffected ex-Soviet troops, the "Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Armiya (ROA / Russian Liberation Army)", against the USSR.
The attack to relieve Sevastopol failed as well. The Red Army jumped off in April from their lines in the Kerch Peninsula, on the eastern shore of Crimea -- only to find that the Germans in front of them had been reinforced. The offensive, which was poorly led and organized in the first place, was halted in its tracks within days.
The drive on Kharkov seemed to go well at first. Marshal Timoshenko was in command and was enthusiastic about the operation. The winter fighting had produced a salient into German lines around the town of Izyum, on the west bank of the Donetz to the southeast of Kharkov, and Timoshenko used the salient as a springboard to attack on 12 May with 640,000 men and 1,200 tanks. The troops went forward, feeling confident, as massed Soviet artillery hammered the German defenses. When the soldiers advanced through the lines, they found no German corpses; many were still naive enough time to interpret that as evidence the enemy was on the run. The Germans had in fact been caught off-balance -- but they rarely stayed off-balance for very long.
The Red Army reached the outskirts of Kharkov on 17 May. However, Timoshenko had to call a halt, since he was outrunning his supply lines and was also beginning to rightly suspect he was walking into a trap. German resistance was uncharacteristically and suspiciously light, and prisoners had been captured who were from units not known by Soviet intelligence to be in the area; it seemed wisest to dig in and consolidate the gains. The next day, Stalin ordered that the offensive drive continue. Timoshenko's political commissar, Nikita Khrushchev, called the Kremlin to protest, but it did no good.
It was too late anyway. The German Army Group South was now under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Reichenau had suffered a heart attack after going for a run in bitterly cold weather in mid-January; he might have survived, except that the aircraft being used to cart him off to a hospital crashed. Even before the beginning of Timoshenko's offensive, Bock had been massing forces to pinch off the Izyum salient, and though the Germans had been originally surprised and thrown back by the attack, they were ready and eager to respond. The 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus was to drive into the salient from the north while the 1st Panzer Army under General Ewald von Kleist struck from the south. The offensive, codenamed Operation FREDERICUS, was to jump off on 18 May.
Although the 6th Army had been forced to yield ground to the Soviets and was fighting a difficult defensive battle, FREDERICUS went forward on schedule on 18 May, with the First Panzer Army driving into the flank of Timoshenko's force after a heavy artillery barrage. Paulus managed to shuttle 6th Army tanks northeast behind his line of defense and begin the other half of the pincer movement on 19 May. Soviet troops fought desperately to keep the trap from snapping shut, but elements of the German First Panzer Army and the 6th Army linked up at the on the Donets on 22 May, closing what was later called the "Barvenkovo Mousetrap", after a town in the area. By the end of the month, it was all over. 70,000 Red Army soldiers had been killed, 200,000 taken prisoner, with only 22,000 escaping. The entire Soviet defense of the south was correspondingly weakened.
One Red Army soldier who could speak German and was captured recalled later that he overheard two SS officers chatting, one saying: "It's a shame Marshal Timoshenko is not present to see all of this. The Fuehrer has reserved a medal for him, the iron cross with oak leaves, to thank him for making such a big contribution to German victory."
BACK_TO_TOP* The failure of Soviet counteroffensives in early 1942 did not go unnoticed in the West. With the spring promising to be difficult for the USSR, Stalin sent Molotov to London and Washington DC in mid-May to see what help could be obtained. The foreign minister traveled in a Petlyakov Pe-8 four-engine bomber, flying over occupied Denmark at altitudes too high for German fighters, to arrive in Scotland on 20 May.
Molotov took a train to London, where he signed a treaty with Britain that essentially reaffirmed agreements made the previous July, and carefully evaded saying too much about the arrangement of the postwar world. Molotov's major purpose was to push for a second front against the Nazis, however. The British were not enthusiastic about the idea, seeing no way to take any such action in a serious way over the short term, pushing Molotov to talk the matter over with President Roosevelt.
Molotov flew on to Washington DC, where he spoke with Roosevelt and senior US officials. The president did try to discuss postwar arrangements; he made little progress on that matter -- Molotov being much more concerned about a second front, a landing on the European continent in the near future that would "draw off 40 German divisions." American military chiefs were thinking about a major landing in Europe in the spring of 1943, an operation that would be codenamed ROUNDUP -- but given lack of resources, particularly shipping and landing craft, there was no way to do much except perform a diversionary attack in 1942, almost certainly an inadequate and suicidal one at that.
There was planning for such a sacrificial operation, codenamed SLEDGEHAMMER, and the president promised Molotov that "we expect the formation of a second front this year." US Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall was not happy about this promise and hedged on it to Molotov. In addition, although the president insisted that America would indeed open up a second front in 1942, Roosevelt also told Molotov that building up for such an operation would mean reduction in Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. The foreign minister was not happy about that at all, though clearly the Soviets couldn't have it both ways.
Molotov went back to Moscow in early June. The discussions were seen as constructive, with many details hammered out on Lend-Lease -- though the British and Americans had been careful to avoid any commitments on postwar boundaries in the East, while Molotov had been careful not to press them very hard on such matters. However, Molotov knew it was unlikely there would be a second front in France in 1942, and in fact Molotov said in the course of a set of interviews conducted late in his life that Stalin realized it was impractical. Shipping Soviet troops and materiel across the USSR in trains was one thing; hauling American forces across the Atlantic while fighting German U-boats was another, and Koba knew it.
Molotov's comments in the interviews were mostly regurgitations of antique Stalinist propaganda, but the cynicism in Molotov's remarks about the Soviet attitude toward the USSR's Western allies had a ring of truth, saying that he simply wished to pressure and embarrass them: "What scoundrels you are! You say one thing and do another!"
In hindsight, SLEDGEHAMMER was a fantasy. The shipping and landing craft needed to pull it off were simply not available. Such forces as could be committed to SLEDGEHAMMER at the time would have been completely outnumbered and easily crushed by the 25 second-string German divisions already occupying France, without any real inconvenience to Nazi operations in the East, and with considerable penalty to further Allied action in the West. It might have seemed unjust, even cynical, for the Western Allies to leave Hitler be while the Wehrmacht assailed the USSR, but it was the simple reality: they were doing all they could, and they couldn't do everything.
Ironically, although the British regarded SLEDGEHAMMER as an absurdity -- and simply humored the Americans on the matter, much to their annoyance when they got wise -- Churchill was aggressive by nature, and was determined to find some way to take action given the limits of resources. For the moment, the British were pushing for an Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, the operation being codenamed GYMNAST at the time, to later be renamed TORCH. American generals were not very enthusiastic, thinking it a diversion from a more direct attack on the Reich, but Roosevelt was enthusiastic. He had good reason to be so, since it was what could actually be done; it would give the Allies an advantage on the strategic chessboard, in particular weakening Axis control of the Mediterranean; and it would give green American troops experience to take on more ambitious operations. However, it was clear that British and Americans could do little to draw off Nazi pressure on the USSR in the coming months of war in the East.
BACK_TO_TOP* Hitler had been worried by the failure of his Wehrmacht to knock out the Red Army in 1941 and the reverses of December 1941. Now that America was in the war, Germany faced combinations of enemies on two fronts. Hitler knew that he had to achieve final victory in the Soviet Union in 1942, or he was likely to lose the war. The success of FREDERICUS greatly encouraged the Fuehrer, with Hitler proclaiming: "The Russian is dead!"
Stalin's fumbled offensives of winter and spring of 1942 suggested that the Soviets only had the advantage when the weather was in their favor. The Red Army had demonstrated that its leadership still left much to be desired and that its troops, though tough, were raw and lacked fighting skills. On the other hand, the German Army had consolidated their positions and supply lines during the winter. New equipment -- such as Panzer IV tanks with long-barreled guns that could deal more effectively with Soviet armor, and the formidable Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter -- was being delivered in numbers. With the weather warming and the roads drying out, both Hitler and his soldiers had good reason to believe they could turn the tables back on the Soviets, even give them a final knockout.
The operation was already in advanced stages of preparation when the Germans cleaned out the Izyum salient. The main objectives of the new offensive, codenamed Plan BLUE (BLAU), were to extend German control over Ukraine beyond the Volga, seize the mineral resources of the Don Basin, and in particular grab the oil wealth of the Caucasus in the form of the oil production centers at Grozny and Baku. Hitler saw BLUE as part of a grand campaign, in which Army Group South under Bock would drive through the southern USSR into the Middle East, while Rommel's Afrika Corps would crush the British in Egypt and then sweep north to meet the other prong of the huge pincer moving down through the Caucasus. The Third Reich would obtain all the oil it needed to stay in business indefinitely, while the Soviet Union would be rendered helpless.
Some of Hitler's generals warned him that the German Army was weaker now than it had been a year before. There had been substantial losses of men and equipment during the winter fighting, and there had been particular losses of horses, which the infantry divisions relied upon for supply. The German Army's transport capability had been inadequate a year earlier, at the beginning of BARBAROSSA, and it was in worse shape now. German industry had been unable to make good losses in equipment.
Hitler acknowledged these criticisms to an extent, weakening other sectors to build up his forces in the south, and squeezing his allies for all the troops he could get. By June, dozens of divisions from Hungary, Rumania, and Italy were flowing into the region. Even volunteers from Spain joined up, to form what became known as the "Blue Division", fighting in the siege of Leningrad. The Spaniards were notoriously fearless, though they had little concept of formal military discipline and never saw eye to eye with the Germans on such matters. However, most of the rest of the foreign units were not useful for offensive operations, and were simply assigned to hold the line in quiet sectors while German troops moved forward.
Having looted other fronts to obtain offensive forces, Hitler was making a big gamble on a throw of the dice. If BLUE failed, the Reich would have depleted its best reserves. Equipping the offensive was troublesome, thanks to Germany's lack of manufacturing capacity. In the summer of 1941, Hitler had been so confident of beating the USSR that he had emphasized construction of U-boats and planes to defeat Britain. Shifting production back to building tanks and other weapons for the army took time, all the more so because of the inefficiency of the clumsy, backbiting Nazi bureaucracy.
BACK_TO_TOP* While the German Army was preparing to begin BLUE, it was winding up of the most brutal sieges of the war. Since the fall of 1941, the German 11th Army and the Rumanian Third Army had been hammering at the Soviets surrounded in Sevastopol. The terrain was rocky and rugged, favoring the defense, the Soviets had set up three lines of fortifications, and they had also heavily reinforced the garrison. The Axis forces had performed their initial attack on the Sevastopol lines on 30 October 1941, capturing the Balaklava Hills in the southeast against fierce Soviet resistance. A second push began in mid-December and made progress, but had to be called off because of the pressure of Soviet counteroffensive efforts elsewhere.
The Germans wanted to finish off Sevastopol before putting BLUE into motion. The task was assigned to General Erich von Manstein and his 11th Army. The first thing he had to do was clean out the Red Army presence on the Kerch Peninsula, which would then allow him to deal with Sevastopol without interference.
Manstein called the first phase Operation BUSTARD HUNT, a "bustard" being a well-known European game bird. The peninsula was linked to the rest of Crimea by an isthmus 18 kilometers (11 miles) wide, and the Red Army had heavily fortified the line, with a wide water-filled antitank ditch backed up by minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes. BUSTARD HUNT went forward on the morning of 8 May 1942, with German artillery and Luftwaffe Stuka dive-bombers trying to soften up the Soviet defenses while sappers cut paths through the obstacles.
The initial German attacks were driven back, but Manstein was undisturbed, since they were only meant as diversions anyway and were not being pressed hard. While the Soviets were distracted, German assault teams in boats landed behind Red Army lines on the south shore and promptly unhinged the defense. Soviet troops took panic and fled eastward, pursued by German panzers. Many managed to escape over the straits to the mainland, but by 17 May Manstein could report the capture of 170,000 prisoners and large amounts of equipment. All that was left was mopping up.
It was yet another disaster for the Red Army. The commander of the Soviet forces in the region, General D.T. Kozlov, had proven inept, as had Deputy Defense Minister Lev Mekhlis, who had fired off continuous unhelpful orders that did much to make matters worse. Khrushchev later said in his usual colorful way that Mekhlis managed to reduce the People's Commissariat of Defense to "a kennel of mad dogs". Stalin sacked both Kozlov and Mekhlis as well as a number of other senior officers associated with the fiasco, but apparently none were shot.
* Now Manstein could begin the second phase of his campaign, Operation STURGEON, the actual capture of Sevastopol. The citizens and soldiers in Sevastopol had spent the winter hunkered down in underground installations and caves to protect themselves from German artillery and bombers. They created an underground society, manufacturing weapons to carry on the fight. A correspondent of PRAVDA, the state newspaper, reported how little girls dressed up potato-masher grenades and played with them as dolls.
The defenders had been feeling optimistic, believing they would be relieved, but the humiliating rout of Soviet forces on the Kerch Peninsula crushed their hopes. The Luftwaffe had been effective in sinking shipping on the Black Sea, and there was little hope of resupply or evacuation.
Manstein knew Sevastopol would be a very tough nut to crack, and so he accumulated 1,300 pieces of artillery to crush Soviet defenses. Large numbers of field guns, prominently the excellent 88-millimeter antiaircraft gun that the Germans had learned also excelled as a heavy antitank gun and as general-purpose artillery, would smash the Soviets when they made a stand, and heavy siege artillery firing massive Roechling concrete-penetrating shells would break up major fortifications. The most powerful of the heavy guns included the 60-centimeter (24-inch) "Karl" mortar; the comparable "Gamma" mortar; and the monster 80-centimeter (31.5-inch) "Dora" railroad gun.
On 2 June 1942, the bombardment began and continued for five days, with the Luftwaffe contributing bombing raids to the storm. On 7 June, seven German and two Rumanian divisions went forward. Many of the attackers believed that the defenders had been pulverized, but they encountered fierce resistance. It took the Germans two days to break the first line of Soviet defenses, and then they focused on the strongpoints of the second defense line.
It then took the Germans until 28 June to reduce the second line, with the defenders fighting back stubbornly, continuing to struggle on in the ruins even when the strongpoints had been shattered by the heavy artillery. Isolated in the final strongpoint of the second line of defense, a set of caves built into the Zapun Heights, the Soviets detonated their ammunition dump -- killing themselves and the thousands of civilians hiding in the caves instead of giving up.
After that, it was only a matter of time. The Soviets fell back towards the Khersones Peninsula, land's end at the southwest corner of the city, fighting stubborn rearguard actions. Some officers and wounded were removed at night by submarine, but the troops stayed and fought with no hope of rescue. Manstein wrote later: "Whole masses of them rushed at our lines, their arms linked to prevent anyone from hanging back. At their head, urging them on, there were often women and girls of the Komsomol, themselves bearing arms." They were torn to shreds. Coming from the Soviet media, such stories might have been dismissed as the usual overblown propaganda; coming from Manstein, there was little doubt that he was telling the complete truth.
The defenders were doomed. The fighting died out on 3 July 1942, after 247 days of siege. Manstein reported capturing 100,000 prisoners and vast quantities of equipment. However, the defense had been heroic, and the Germans had suffered badly. Martyrdom was still not much consolation to the Soviets when the Germans seemed to be invincible once more. With the fall of Sevastopol, the Germans were able to release 200,000 of their own troops for the great offensive to the East, which was now already in motion.
* While the Germans closed in for the kill at Sevastopol, forces had moved into line in preparation for the beginning of BLUE, scheduled for 28 June. Hitler had 72 divisions available for the offensive, 54 of them German. 9 of the German divisions were armored and 7 were mechanized. 8 more divisions were on the way and would be used as a strategic reserve. Half of the Luftwaffe operating in the East was to support the operation.
The forces were split into northern and southern arms. The northern arm was to be under the command of Field Marshal von Bock. Part of his forces were being built up in the region around Kursk, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) north of Kharkov. The German 4th Panzer Army, supported by the German 2nd Army and the Hungarian 2nd Army, was to advance toward Voronezh, a rail and river transport center on the upper Don.
Two days after the start of this initial drive, Bock's heaviest force, the German 6th Army under Paulus, was to move out from its positions near Kharkov, advance across the Donetz, and move in support of the 4th Panzer Army in its drive. The objective of this two-pronged offensive was to swallow up Soviet forces along the front.
Once Voronezh was taken and the Red Army forces in the area dealt with, the German defensive line would be extended to the city to block any Soviet drive from the north, while the offensive continued southeast along the Don, performing a second encirclement operation and then falling on Stalingrad on the Volga to the east. This effort would ensure the destruction of Red Army forces in the region and the construction of a defensive front along the Volga that would protect German gains to the south.
Those gains would be achieved by the southern arm of the offensive, which was being built up to the west of the lower reaches of the Donetz. These forces were to be under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm von List -- though at the last minute, Hitler would get rid of List and take formal command himself. Once the northern arm of the offensive had secured the flanks, the German 1st Panzer Army would move across the lower Donetz, seize Rostov, and then move south towards the Caucasus. The 1st Panzer Army would be supported by the German 17th Army, and would have the Italian 8th Army as a reserve.
BACK_TO_TOP* The Red Army high command knew that the Germans were about to begin a major offensive of some sort; while the front lines were quiet, Soviet soldiers kept busy digging in to prepare for the blow. Stalin believed that the Germans intended to renew their drive on Moscow. There was a major salient to the northwest of the city between Vyazma and Demyansk, left over from the Soviet winter offensive and clearly vulnerable. If the Germans decided to pinch it off, they would also likely move forward to the city itself at the same time.
The Germans encouraged this belief through a well-planned deception operation named Operation KREMLIN (KREML). German divisions on the Moscow front went through the motions of preparing for an offensive, with nobody but the most senior brass aware that nothing was to come of it, while the Luftwaffe stepped up reconnaissance flights over the sector and phony orders were circulated through radio traffic. The Soviets bit on the bait. In the centralized Soviet system, all control was strongly concentrated in Moscow, and so the city was of absolute political importance. Stalin accordingly granted the defense of Moscow the highest priority, to the detriment of other fronts.
The Soviet defense all along the line was organized into a loose association of eight individual fronts. The "Northwest", "Kalinin", and "Western" Fronts protected Moscow, and contained over half the available frontline strength of the Red Army. Further south were the "Bryansk" and "Southwest" Fronts, which contained a fifth of the Red Army's strength. Since these two fronts were clearly threatened, Stalin had deployed two tank armies into locations where they could move to block a breakthrough pushing towards Moscow.
The "Southern" and "Caucasus" Fronts completed the line to the south, but they were dangerously weak, containing only a tenth of the Red Army's strength. The only saving grace was that Stalin had ordered the fortification of the cities of Rostov, Stalingrad, and Saratov as back-up defenses. Ten armies were also being created to act as a reserve, positioned well in the rear along the entire Soviet line.
Hitler had an anxious moment a little over a week before things were scheduled to jump off. On 19 June, Major Joachim Reichel, a German officer of one of the 6th Army panzer divisions involved in BLUE, decided to fly to 17th Corps headquarters in a Fieseler Storch light utility airplane to confirm details of the operation. Reichel was carrying a short document that provided an outline of major elements of BLUE. The document had been written by Lieutenant General Georg Stumme, commander of the 6th Army's 40th Panzer Corps, to brief his division commanders. It was a clear violation of the Fuehrer's orders, who insisted that all instructions be transmitted verbally.
The Storch got lost, drifted across enemy lines, and was fired on. A round punctured its fuel tank, the aircraft being forced to land. Reichel wasn't missed until that night, and then Stumme, in a frenzy, ordered the missing plane tracked down. A German patrol found it in no-man's-land. There were two bodies buried next to the Storch, and everything of value or interest had been removed from it. The Germans could only assume the worst; in fact Reichel's document did make its way to Timoshenko and from there to Stalin. Its capture seemed suspiciously convenient and Stalin, not unreasonably, judged it an attempt at deception -- though reconnaissance flights did confirm a German buildup as described in the paper.
Still, Hitler had no way of knowing that the Soviets hadn't believed the document. He was furious and heads rolled over the incident. Stumme took the worst punishment, five years in prison, but Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, who presided over Stumme's court-martial, asked the Fuehrer for clemency in the light of Stumme's excellent service record. It was granted and Stumme was sent to North Africa, where he would suffer a fatal heart attack in combat at El Alamein in October.
BACK_TO_TOP* Since there was no evidence of any serious Soviet preparations to deal with BLUE, the clock ticked away for the offensive on schedule. The Germans were expecting great success, with a fast advance and the capture of entire Soviet armies through encirclement operations. The Red Army had been too clumsy to escape such traps in the past, and Hitler believed that they would continue their tradition of defeat.
However, although the Red Army was still no match for the Wehrmacht in terms of leadership and training, the Soviets were in better shape than they had been the previous summer. Thanks to the efforts of the factory workers who had been transplanted to the Urals, plenty of equipment was reaching the front lines, indeed Soviet war production was outstripping German war production.
Red Army soldiers were provided with large numbers of PPSh submachine guns, a crude weapon with short range, but reliable and usable with little training. There were still plenty of the old but effective WWI Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles, ugly and intimidating-looking with their long bayonets, available for infantry and snipers; and the standard light machine gun, the Degtyarev DP with its flat round drum magazine and conical muzzle flash suppressor, was an excellent weapon. Medium T-34 and heavy KV tanks were now available in quantity, leading to the formation of large tank and mechanized formations, as was refined and heavier artillery to build up massed batteries.
Red Army infantry were still not anywhere the equal of their German counterparts. Soviet troops were as a rule very tough, able to operate effectively in the worst conditions and often willing to fight to the death, but they lacked tactical flexibility, being inclined to simple-minded and costly massed charges. When things went badly, they tended to herd together for a sense of security, which just made them better targets.
Training doctrine had been modified in an attempt to de-emphasize the glorious, stupid, and suicidal theatrics promoted by state propaganda and top-down directives in favor of professional and effective infantry tactics, based on the ugly but indisputable premise of combat -- thoroughly understood by the Germans -- that it is much less desireable that soldiers to die for their country, than it is for them to kill for it. However, instilling tactical finesse in the Red Army was, from top to bottom, an uphill struggle, and Red Army doctrine would always emphasize adherence to the overall battle plan at the expense of tactical flexibility.
The troops were not always very well supplied or equipped, but interestingly, the troops and the officers were issued fairly generous rations of vodka, and some Red Army veterans said that in battle they would drink to dull their fear. It should be realized that the practice of getting courage out of a bottle was not unknown in other armies. Soviet soldiers also did not usually drink themselves to the point where they could no longer function effectively in combat, since anyone who did so would face the wrath of his comrades.
Soviet artillerymen were fairly skillful, and were becoming more so with experience, able to lay down heavy and accurate barrages. They were particularly fond of the Katyusha barrage rocket for its ability to generate a crushing and intense barrage as a prelude to a ground assault. Soviet combat engineers were excellent, able to turn towns and forests into fortresses that made every use of terrain and were very hard to crack. They were masters of "maskirovka (masquerade / concealment and deception)", building bridges that could be sunk during the day and raised at night, or bridges that lay just below the surface of the water, making them difficult to spot.
As proven by the December offensive, the Red Army could move and operate under conditions that immobilized the Germans. Soviet horse cavalry might have seemed laughably outdated; the Germans certainly thought so at first, and the Red Army had learned the hard way that it was useless for attacks on well-armed German infantry who could mow down dashing cavalry charges with machine guns. However, horses were a resource available to the Red Army in quantity, and horses were irreplaceable for getting around in terrain where no wheeled or even tracked vehicle could go. Horse cavalry could be used for scouting, and horse cavalrymen could dismount and fight just as effectively as any infantry, showing up in places where they were least expected. They had many shaggy Siberian Kirkhil ponies that could tolerate very harsh weather. The Germans found Soviet cavalry a painful nuisance. The Red Army not only retained horse cavalry, it was built up.
The ground forces were backed up in the air by the Red Air Force, the VVS, which was organized in "air armies" that were focused on battlefield support. Although with the return of good weather the Luftwaffe had been able to regain general air superiority, the VVS was rebuilding strength. Fighter pilots who had survived the initial onslaught learned better tactics; though the Polikarpov I-16 was clearly inferior to German fighters, it was also agile, and skilled I-16 pilots were racking up fair scores of kills. More modern aircraft were increasingly available in quantity, including the sturdy Shturmovik; the agile Yakovlev Yak-1 fighter, still not quite the match for the German Messerschmitt but a big step forward; the American Bell P-39 Airacobra; and the trim, fast Petlyakov Pe-2 twin-engine light bomber.
Soviet industry was working hard to improve on the designs and pour them out in quantity. Although the VVS still suffered from rigid and obsolete tactical concepts, new ideas were starting to spread through the organization, and was striving to bring up its standard of professionalism. An American general who visited the USSR on Lend-Lease business at about this time was given a tour of a forward air base. Conditions there were primitive, with the aircraft using a sod runway and facilities based on log and earth and tents, but all of it was superbly camouflaged, and the visitor found everything being done crisply by the numbers.
The officers who led the troops on the ground and in the air were also not the equal of their German counterparts, but they were improving as well. Command structures had been simplified from the early days of the war in the East to reduce bureaucratic overhead, and there had been an emphasis on buildup of brigade-sized instead of larger units because of the shortage of officers with experience in handling such large units. Overall, Soviet officers had a generally good grasp of how to move and supply troops under difficult conditions, as well as the skills of concealment and deception. Red Army officers were hindered by a system that discouraged initiative and which had eliminated the best among them. However, many officers who had been sacked or had managed to survive in the Gulag were put back into service, and the authority of their sometimes troublesome "shadows", the political commissars that looked over their shoulders, was being trimmed back.
The commissar system had actually been abolished back in 1940, but Stalin decided to re-instate it in July 1941, after the Nazi invasion, to ride herd on the officer corps. After the fiasco on the Kerch Peninsula in May 1942, which owed much to the bungling of Mekhlis and other officials in the defense commissariat, the word went down from the top that the role of the political commissars was not to control combat officers, but to help them get their jobs done. In October 1942, this modified role would be formalized by Decree 307 that defined political commissars as "political deputies" to the officers, but the commissars had got the drift well before that. In Stalin's land, sensitivity to the shifting wind was a survival skill.
Stalin craved control and loosened the leash on the officer corps only reluctantly, but it had become obvious that the choice between having military officers or political commissars running things was the choice between winning or losing the war. Although the political commissars found out after their effective demotion that they were not held in much respect by the rest of the Red Army -- it is an interesting comment on human nature that anyone of them could have been surprised -- the new arrangement actually proved, on the whole, an asset to the Red Army.
The political commissars -- working through their lieutenants, the "politruks" or "political officers", and their flunkies in the ranks, known as "komsorgs" -- not only handled the indoctrination of the troops and ensured that they acted as good Communists, they filled the role of chaplains as well, helping soldiers to resolve personal problems or difficulties back home, and arranged sports matches and entertainments. Their duties also included inspiring the men in combat, and many political commissars were killed in action.
There was, in short, some cause for Soviet optimism in the fighting that was certain to break out somewhere along the front as summer approached. There were still causes for fear as well, and what actually would happen remained to be seen.
BACK_TO_TOP* Plan BLUE began on schedule on 28 June, only a few days more than a year after the initial invasion of the Soviet Union. The 4th Panzer Army led a drive into the Soviet Bryansk Front, which was comparatively strong. The attack began with a heavy artillery barrage, supported by well-planned air strikes into the Soviet rear. The Luftwaffe 4th Air Fleet had received priority for aircraft to support the offensive and quickly gained battlefield air superiority.
The Germans plunged through the Soviet line. This initial assault was followed up by the drive of the German 6th Army into the weaker Southwest Front, which advanced just as rapidly. In fact, the advance was too rapid. The Red Army was doing little or nothing to contest the advance. That was totally unlike the Soviets, and many German troops found it odd. What troops find odd, they instinctively find it unsettling and potentially dangerous as well.
Timoshenko was actually falling back as fast as he could. Having discovered that the papers captured from Major Reichel's Storch were true and not a deception, the Kremlin knew what the German plan really was. Stalin was now doing what he should have done a year earlier: abandoning an indefensible line, and falling back to a better position for a stand. Since the immediate objective of the northern arm of the German assault was Voronezh, the Red Army would fight a delaying action there, buying time for forces to concentrate at Stalingrad, which would be turned into a fortress on which the Germans might hopefully smash themselves to pieces.
Some German generals quickly realized what was going on; General Paulus received suggestions that the plan be modified to send strong elements of his 6th Army due east to the Don in order to cut off the fleeing Red Army. Paulus, a competent staff officer who was reluctant to improvise in the field, did not want to disrupt a complicated plan like BLUE and ordered that 6th Army continue northwest to link up with the 4th Panzer Army.
However, it was very apparent that the Red Army had slipped out of the trap; on 3 July, Hitler flew to Bock's field headquarters and gave him authorization to abandon the drive on Voronezh and turn southwest. The result of this change in plans lent some credibility to the reluctance of Paulus to make serious changes to a major offensive in mid-stream. Bock ordered forces to go east and cut off the Soviets, bypassing Voronezh; and then, on finding out his forces were close to the city, changed his mind on 4 July and ordered its capture anyway. Since the Red Army was on the run, seizing Voronezh wouldn't be too much trouble, and then the offensive columns could continue east.
Or so Bock believed. In fact, as mentioned, the Red Army had every intention of putting up a fight for Voronezh, and the place was full of Soviet troops. They were feeling stubborn and cranky, and didn't give up the city until 13 July, with the survivors withdrawing in some approximation of good order across the Don. The Germans captured few prisoners.
* On that same day, 13 July, Hitler returned to Bock's headquarters and, impatient with the progress of the offensive, ordered a major rearrangement of BLUE. Although the southern arm of the offensive was originally supposed to wait until the northern arm had secured the flanks, Hitler ordered it to go ahead at once as it was essential that the oil fields of the Caucasus be seized immediately. In addition, the Fuehrer ordered that Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army be sent south to assist. The changes in BLUE up to this time had been causing some confusion, but the reorganization all but threw the plan to the winds. Bock protested and was immediately sacked, to be replaced by General Maximilian von Weichs. 4th Panzer was sent south. Since it had to travel a long distance, that meant it took precious fuel and supplies away from the 6th Army, rendering it immobile for the moment.
To the south, Kleist and his 1st Panzer had jumped across the lower Donetz into the Soviet Southern Front and pushed on towards Rostov. The Germans reached the city on 22 July. The Red Army had been ordered to perform a delaying action in the city to buy time for withdrawal of forces southwest to a defensive line that was then being built in great haste. NKVD troops and engineers ordered to defend Rostov had been working on a double line of defenses when the Germans arrived. The defenders did not try very hard to hold the incomplete outer line, and the Germans entered the city with no great difficulty.
If any German soldiers thought the lack of resistance meant they would have no trouble capturing Rostov, they quickly found out they were very wrong. Once they were well inside the city they found themselves in a deadly maze of barricades and tank obstacles, littered with mines and devious booby-traps, while Soviet troops tossed gasoline bombs -- "Molotov cocktails" -- on tanks from rooftops, and snipers picked off German troops from the windows of buildings. The NKVD men fought to the death, and the Germans found that if they didn't guard their own wounded, the enemy would sneak out of the shadows and kill them with knives or entrenching tools or bricks or whatever else was handy.
The Germans divided the core of the city into four sectors, then methodically cleaned the sectors out, first smashing them with artillery, following up with a line of assault troops across to sweep up Soviet resistance. A secondary line of troops followed behind to clean up anything the first line had missed. The job was finished 24 July -- good time considering the difficulty of the task, but still more delay than the Germans could afford. In any case, the Germans then began to sweep southeast towards the Caucasus.
* By that time, the two arms of the offensive had been designated "Army Group A", in the south, and "Army Group B", in the north. To the north, Army Group B continued to drive east, encountering very little resistance. As before, many German officers found this disturbing. Hitler interpreted the lack of resistance to mean that the Red Army was on its last legs. Others suspected it meant the Soviets were not the easy prey they had been.
In reality, the withdrawal of Soviet troops in front of the German offensive was by no means entirely orderly. Performing a combat withdrawal is not trivial -- it is regarded as one of the most difficult of all combat operations -- and Timoshenko and his staff hadn't done a very good job of organizing it. Some units fell back in good order, others in a state of panicked flight. Many Soviet troops were so unfamiliar with the concept and practice of a strategic withdrawal that they simply assumed the Red Army had been routed once more, and behaved accordingly.
The movement of Soviet troops east was funneled into the Don bend, where the river changed its direction of flow from southeast to southwest. There was a critical bridge at Kalach, directly west of Stalingrad, and officers armed with submachine guns went to the bridge to intercept troops withdrawing east and get them into some sort of order. Everyone was expecting the Germans to show up at any moment.
Time passed and no Germans appeared. In fact, the 6th Army was all but out of gas and had to pause, as it turned out for more than two weeks, before their supply situation improved. For whatever reasons, Timoshenko decided that this was an opportunity to make a stand on the west side of the Don, and put the better part of several armies on the far side of the river.
On the face of it, a superficial glance at a map of the region around the Don bend suggests a dangerous trap, and that was what it turned out to be. Paulus might not have been good at improvising but he was skillful at conducting a setpiece battle, and when he finally got fuel he launched a pincers movement that snapped shut on 8 August, trapping over 70,000 Soviet prisoners. The Germans found it just like the good old days. Timoshenko was not arrested and remained in uniform, but he would never call the shots again.
There was really nothing in front of Paulus to block a further move to Stalingrad, but he spent two more weeks mopping up around Kalach and waiting for Hoth to return. 4th Panzer's trip south had been a waste of time. Kleist had no particular need for the reinforcements, and so Hoth found himself going back north again -- less one of his two panzer corps that had still been ordered to remain in the south. The Germans didn't move across the Don in force until 21 August, setting up 22 pontoon bridges to support the drive. Paulus was confident, believing that he could simply walk into Stalingrad, but the Soviets had been given precious breathing space.
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