The Eastern Front 1941-43 Read online

  James Holland

  * * *

  THE EASTERN FRONT 1941–1943

  with illustrations by

  Keith Burns

  Contents

  The Eastern Front 1941–1943

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Operation BARBAROSSA was launched early on 22 June 1941, just a few weeks after the invasion of Crete, and was the largest clash of arms the world had ever seen. Germany had amassed more than 3 million men, a colossal number, yet in truth Adolf Hitler’s forces were not really ready for a campaign on this scale. Hitler had originally intended to invade the Soviet Union once France and Britain had been defeated and Europe subjugated; as a veteran of the defeat of the First World War, he understood the danger of fighting on two fronts and overstretching Germany’s meagre resources.

  Yet Britain had not been defeated, and hovering in the background was the United States, with its huge economic potential and open hostility to Nazi Germany. Already Germany was running short of vital supplies, but especially food and oil, and plundering the Soviet Union now seemed the best chance of making up these shortfalls. Hitler was confident of success – after all, Germany had recently defeated mighty France in six weeks, while the Red Army had been given a bloody nose by lowly Finland during what was known as the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40.

  The trouble was, the Soviet Union was more than ten times the size of France and the Low Countries, and Germany had a force that was only slightly larger than that of the previous year when Hitler attacked in the west. What’s more, he had only 30 per cent more panzer forces, the German elite units that had been the spearhead of victory in France. As in France, most German troops were to advance into Russia on foot and by horse. The difference was that the attack front for BARBAROSSA was some 1,200 miles long.

  German troops advance into the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

  Nothing less than complete annihilation of the Red Army would do, and really this had to be achieved within 500 miles – the effective range within which the Germans could operate with the kind of speed and weight of force needed before their supply lines became over-extended and their advance ground to a halt. This was a tall order even for an army full of confidence and flushed with victory. The invasion was also to be conducted with brutal violence. ‘The upcoming campaign,’ Hitler told his commanders, ‘is more than a mere contest of arms. It will be a struggle between two world views.’

  The General Staff of the Wehrmacht – the German armed services – had already put together a plan to take the farmlands of the Ukraine. This would mean starving some 20–30 million Soviet citizens, but Nazi Germany viewed it as a war of survival so this was considered regrettably acceptable. The Soviet leadership and intelligentsia were also to be exterminated. Hitler told his generals they had three months to win this victory, after which they would then turn back west and deal with Britain once and for all.

  To begin with, all seemed to go spectacularly well, helped by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s curious refusal to accept any warning sign of an imminent attack – and despite massive German build-up along the border in former Poland. In fact, BARBAROSSA had been the world’s worst-kept secret.

  Overwhelming force along what was initially a 500-mile front gouged out huge chunks of Soviet territory in the first fortnight of battle as the German armies swept forward, while above, the Luftwaffe hammered the Red Army’s air forces. The Baltic States were swiftly overrun in the north, while in the centre much of former Poland was swept aside. Once again, the German armies seemed unstoppable.

  Stalin appeared to have been briefly frozen with panic but quickly recovered. On 30 June he formed a war cabinet, the People’s Commissariat of Defence (GKO), and the next day spoke to the people, appealing to their patriotism. At the same time, the security services were united under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and ordered to clamp down even harder on defeatism and deserters, and to ensure there was no slackening of the struggle for survival.

  Meanwhile, Hitler now began meddling in military matters despite having no qualifications for such high-level interference. On 19 July, he ordered that Leningrad in the north and the Ukraine in the south were the priorities and that his two precious panzer groups, currently pushing towards Moscow, should be sent to help with these drives once Smolensk, 360 miles south-west of the capital, had been crushed. The Soviet capital would be left to the Luftwaffe even though there were nothing like enough bombers to do the job.

  Four days later, he changed his orders again, now demanding that the Luftwaffe support the southern drive and also the Finns, who were advancing against Leningrad in the north. He thought this would deter the British from intervening in the Arctic. At the time there was no possible way in which Britain could mount such an operation, something that was glaringly obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of planning. Moscow was barely bombed at all.

  Another directive was issued on 30 July and yet another on 12 August as Hitler obsessed over his flanks and the slowing up of their advance. By this time, the Red Army was starting to regain its balance, while the Germans were reaching the limits of their lines of supply.

  German Heinkel 111 bombers attack Moscow.

  Günther Sack was a young anti-aircraft gunner attached to the German 9th Division in Army Group South in the Ukraine. In the second week of July his team suffered a puncture on their gun carriage, which held them up, then on 15 July their truck broke down with a seized engine. Then the trailer broke again, so that it wasn’t until the end of July that they finally caught up with the rest of the division. His and his crew’s experience was a common one.

  Meanwhile, a further 5 million men had been called up to the Red Army. The Soviets had been horrifically mauled in the opening stages of BARBAROSSA but they had not been completely defeated. Far from it. ‘We very soon had to accustom ourselves,’ wrote Hans von Luck, an officer in the 7th Panzer Division, ‘to her almost inexhaustible masses of land forces, tanks, and artillery.’

  The German advance was once again increasingly dependent on her railway network, but the Soviet Union operated on a different gauge. This meant changing the tracks as they moved east, because Stalin had also ordered a scorched earth policy as the Red Army fell back. All factories, bridges, farmland and infrastructure were to be destroyed so the Germans could not use it. On 24 June, Stalin had also ordered the establishment of a Soviet – or council – for Evacuation. The vast bulk of the USSR’s industry was to be moved lock, stock and barrel to the Urals, some 600 miles east of Moscow. By the beginning of August this was already well under way.

  The Germans continued to win victories – and capture more prisoners than they could cope with. This meant many Soviet POWs soon starved to death, as there was already a shortage of food for the German troops without having to feed many more prisoners than they had expected. Word of the poor treatment of prisoners soon spread, and increasing numbers of Soviet soldiers now evaded capture and began to organize themselves to operate behind the lines as partisans. This further hindered the German supply lines to the front.

  The Black Sea port of Kiev in the south was captured by the Germans on 19 August. It was another massive victory – but not massive enough. Hitler now agreed that the main effort should be focused on Moscow, but this involved an enormous redeployment of forces, which took time – too much time, and a precious resource of which they were running short. Operation TYPHOON was launched on 30 September, three and a half months after the invasion had begun. And by this time, it had begun to rain.

  Another 750,000 Soviet men were captured, but Moscow was still a long way off and the rain soon turned the rough roads to mud. Vehicles increasingly broke do
wn or became stuck. Fuel could no longer be supplied in the quantities required. Casualties were mounting and manpower was running short. Replacements of men, machines and spare parts could not be found or delivered in the numbers needed. What made the Wehrmacht special was the speed with which it operated. But when it slowed down, it was not quite so special after all.

  Soviet prisoners of war trudge into captivity.

  None the less, huge swathes of territory were now in German hands. In Moscow, the Soviet leadership was struggling to control the crisis. Although the German advance was slowing, by October they were just 120 miles from the capital. Civilians were ordered to help build an extra defence line, while General Georgi Zhukov was brought in to defend the city with massive reinforcements of troops. At the same time, more industry and even state archives were sent east to the Urals.

  The Germans continued to close on the city, but rain had now given way to snow and a dramatic drop in temperatures for which they were simply not equipped. Only in the Luftwaffe had anyone thought ahead and ordered winter clothing. The army had none at all. Sixty miles from Moscow, Hans von Luck faced a Soviet counter-attack with Russian troops on skis and wearing white camouflage. ‘We sensed catastrophe,’ he wrote, ‘and thought of Napoleon’s fate.’ Back in 1812, Napoleon’s French army had been decimated by the freezing Russian winter.

  Others feared the same. Colonel Hermann Balck visited the front in November and discovered panzer divisions operating at just a tenth of their strength in both men and machines. He was deeply shaken. Fritz Todt, the Armaments Minister, was horrified to learn that German tanks and vehicles were freezing up and unable to move while Soviet tanks could still operate in the extreme cold. With unusual frankness, he told Hitler at the end of November that the war against the Soviet Union could no longer be won.

  Meanwhile, despite the vast losses suffered so far, General Zhukov was preparing to defend Moscow with no fewer than 1.25 million men, 7,600 guns and nearly 1,000 tanks. What’s more, an incredible 2,593 industrial operations had been relocated in the Urals since June, along with 1.5 million railway wagons and much of the Soviet industrial workforce.

  German troops advanced to within 30 miles of Moscow. Stalin and the GKO still feared the worst, but by this time most of the attackers were frozen, half starving and all but broken. On the night of 4/5 December, as temperatures plummeted further to minus 35, the Red Army counterattacked, catching their enemy completely off-guard. Suddenly it was the Germans who were on the back foot.

  Six months earlier, Germany had had one enemy – Great Britain – but by the middle of December 1941 faced Britain, the Soviet Union and now the United States, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan was an Axis partner and on 11 December Hitler declared war on America. By this time Nazi Germany was short of money, food, coal, oil and other vital resources necessary for war. In 1918, Germany had signed an armistice because it had run out of money and could no longer win. That moment had arrived again now, as men like Fritz Todt understood.

  Hitler, however, refused to accept this and responded by sacking a number of highly experienced and brilliant commanders such as Field Marshal Heinz Guderian. He also fired the head of the army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and made himself Commander-in-Chief instead. This would mean more micro-managing and more rigid control. A key feature of the German Army’s success had always been freedom of movement and the right of commanders to make swift, on-the-spot decisions. With Hitler directly in charge, there were now barriers to such rapid decision-making.

  Moscow remained as out of reach as ever.

  Meanwhile, to the north, Leningrad, Russia’s second city, had been under siege since September. A major German objective, the city stood on a 30-mile-wide isthmus between the Baltic and Lake Ladoga. Finnish troops were pressing south from the north and had captured two thirds of the lake’s shores, while the Germans were now within 10 miles of the city, having crossed the River Neva to the south, and had also reached the lake. The only lifeline to the city for the defenders was across the southern part of Lake Ladoga and via the railheads of the towns of Volkhov and Tikhvin on the far side.

  The Germans planned to pound Leningrad into the dust with artillery and bombing. The starving civilian population would be deported east, the defending troops destroyed, and then the city would be levelled with demolition charges. There was to be no mercy.

  German troops took Tikhvin on 9 November, but Leningrad was still grimly holding out. With the lake now frozen over, a passage was created across the ice from the far shore to the city; it was known as the ‘Road of Life’. Even so, nothing like enough supplies were getting through. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were dying from a combination of starvation, water shortage and disease, their bodies often left where they died. The survivors were eating birds, then cats and dogs, then rats and even dead humans.

  There were still large numbers of Red Army troops, however, and on 9 December, as the German attackers froze, they recaptured Tikhvin and then pushed the enemy back along a 90-mile stretch. The terrible siege, though, was still far from over.

  The streets of Leningrad during the brutal siege.

  ‘An interesting question is what are the Russians capable of doing in the spring?’ noted Colonel Hermann Balck in his diary on 3 March 1942. ‘One thing is clear,’ he added, ‘if we can grasp the initiative again, they will be finished.’

  This was what worried the Soviet leadership, despite the catastrophic winter for the Germans and despite Red Army troops continuing to push German forces back along a wide front since December. Stalin and the GKO faced a tricky dilemma. Winter would soon be over and the traditional summer campaigning season would be upon them. The Germans would then, unquestionably, resume the offensive. Despite saving Moscow and holding on in Leningrad, and despite making some gains since then, the Red Army’s situation remained perilous. Losses had been enormous, the relocation of war industry to the Urals had hampered the speed of production, and they were still learning lessons about how best to turn the tide against the enemy invaders. Manpower was not limitless, even in the Soviet Union. Nor could the will of the people to keep fighting be necessarily assured, despite totalitarian Communist rule. The conundrum facing the Soviet leadership was whether to go on the defensive and build up strength, or to strike first and try to upset the inevitable German offensive plans in the process.

  At the urging of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, Stalin decided to attack. A bulge in the line had been formed around the town of Izyum, south of the key city of Kharkov. By attacking north out of the salient and south from the north of Kharkov on 12 May 1942, they hoped to encircle the city and with it the German Sixth Army.

  Stalin and Marshal Timoshenko.

  Unfortunately for the Soviets, the Izyum offensive was a disaster, as the Germans defeated the northern thrust and severed the salient, cutting off and encircling the main Red Army assault in turn. Another 240,000 Soviet prisoners were taken, along with 1,200 tanks and 2,600 guns. For Stalin and the GKO, the disaster could scarcely have been worse. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister, was sent to Britain then America to plead with the Allies to launch an offensive against Germany in the west as soon as possible. The possibility of the Soviet Union being completely defeated loomed heavily for Stalin and the GKO.

  Meanwhile, in the skies, Luftwaffe fighter aces continued to rule. Men like Bubi Hartmann, Gerd Barkhorn and Günther Rall were amassing hundreds of aerial victories, using their superior skill, experience and machines to blow the Soviet air forces out of the sky.

  Despite this dominance, however, the problems confronting the Germans had not gone away, as the newly promoted Major-General Balck discovered when he arrived at the front to take command of 11th Panzer Division. After BARBAROSSA, 11th Panzer had been reduced to a few battered remnants and even after rebuilding over the winter was still operating at only 60 per cent strength. They were far from alone, and the enormous scale of the Eastern Front, with ongoing shortage
s of food, oil and just about everything else, meant that Operation BLUE, the planned German drive south to the oilfields of the Caucasus, would be launched with less than they had had the previous summer and with longer lines of communication that would only get longer. What’s more, the cream of German manpower had already gone, most of her finest young men obliterated by a year of fighting in this vast, unforgiving country.

  Bubi Hartmann (top), Günther Rall (left), and Gerd Barkhorn (bottom).

  Nor was Operation BLUE the only German effort. Capturing Moscow had been abandoned for the time being, but Hitler had not given up hopes of taking Leningrad and General Erich von Manstein was planning to launch a renewed attack at the end of August.

  The suffering of those in Leningrad is hard to comprehend. Over a million had perished since the siege had begun, but the onset of spring and then summer had seen the ice on Lake Ladoga melt. By July, over a million tons of supplies had been shipped across the lake to the city, while more than half a million civilians had been evacuated and some 310,000 troops brought in, along with large numbers of guns and ammunition.

  In a striking act of defiance, it was these guns, along with those of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, that were able to silence German artillery early in August to allow the first performance in the city of Dmitri Shostakovich’s newly composed Seventh Symphony, ‘Leningrad’. To all those who braved going out to hear this incredible concert, the Leningrad Philharmonic played in perfect unison with the Russian guns. Miraculously, not a single German shell fell nearby. The event, broadcast around the world, was a stunning propaganda victory that struck a vital chord for Soviet patriotism.