War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (32 page)

Casualties among Klinter’s men were heavy; a section commander was down.

‘Totally exhausted, we fell back from the parapets and into the trenches. We lay on the ground as if we were dead, from the physical and psychological pressure.’

Having hardly gathered their composure, three hours later a further massive assault began. Ammunition this time sputtered to a desultory halt. There was nothing left. Onward came the earth-brown wall of Russian soldiery with barely 50m to go. ‘We clutched our spades and hand-grenades tighter,’ said Klinter, at the prospect of close hand-to-hand fighting. Suddenly a loud ‘whooshing’ sound sped over their heads. Anxious faces glanced skyward, attempting to follow the sound of this invisible displacement of air, in time to see high fountains of earth shooting up in the ranks of the Russians just ahead.

‘Again and again, howling rushes passed just over us. The enemy attacking waves were flayed, lacerated and smashed. Bodies and weapons were spun high into the air. Crushed people and pulverised equipments produced terror, panic – and then flight.’

The German supporting artillery had conserved what little ammunition it had for just such emergencies and delayed to the last possible moment. The line was held. Klinter said:

‘Half dead with exhaustion, we squatted down in our trenches, semi-intoxicated with feverish nerves. Slowly, very slowly we quietened down. Hunger and thirst afflicted us again.’

The enemy retired. After a short interval Klinter’s men received a brief break and some water. Later that afternoon, after an ammunition resupply the company was committed to an attack. There had been neither food nor rest.

The pursuit was carried out on foot in temperatures of 28°C, even in the shade. Before long the company was pinned down by fire behind a railway embankment. The men were at the end of their physical and psychological resources. Pressing bodies into the ground and intimidated by the sights and sounds of battle, ‘tongues were glued to palates swollen thick from dust, heat and thirst’. The realisation that they were trapped inside a strawberry patch dawned only slowly. At first one or two figures, and in time the entire company, were crawling around the embankment seeking out and hungrily devouring ripe strawberries. ‘And now,’ Klinter recalled, ‘the first laughter began to cackle out.’ Such an incongruous scene, even in such a bizarre setting, was not without a certain ribald appeal.

Their suffering was still not over. By 22.00 hours that night, the objective had been secured. As if by prearranged signal the thunderstorm, which had threatened throughout the sweltering humid day, burst upon them. ‘There was no cover and no tents; sweat-soaked, exhausted and now without rations for 72 hours,’ Klinter said, ‘the men stood in streaming rain throughout the pitch-black night.’ Defensive positions laboriously dug in this mud and slime were not completed until 03.00 hours. At dawn, having dried out, they marched back 14km to the village of Kraslawa, where their motorised transport had waited. The pursuit continued in lorries. Exhausted soldiers piled into the back of lurching and bumping transports and tried to sleep. Officers and drivers had to stay awake. At every halt the officers had to get out and scan the skies for Soviet aircraft;
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and with good reason.

Obergefreiter Jaeschke from the 18th Panzer Division recalled watching a dogfight from his Panzer column on the
Rollbahn
(the main road). The aircraft were ‘flying in such a wild mêlée,’ he said, ‘that one could not work out which side one was watching.’ Soon fat-bellied Russian biplanes began falling from the sky, burning and exploding in the fields on both sides of the column. At this point ‘they received an icy shock’. A German fighter exploded in the air while another, fully ablaze, crashed into the ground a few metres away from the
Rollbahn.

‘The burning fuel gushed out in a fiery flood across the road and caught an armoured half-track. The crewmen, poor devils, jumped out like living flaming torches onto the road. Another Messerschmitt lined up for an emergency landing ahead of us, but one of the thick-bellied beasts with a red star got behind the Me. and shot it into pieces just as it approached the ground.’
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Russian air attacks were a constant irritant. Leutnant Hubert Becker, an artillery officer with Army Group North and a keen amateur cine cameraman, filmed one such raid. ‘We were seriously harassed by Russian fighter-bombers,’ he complained, ‘which attacked our emplacement and shot us up.’ His men managed to shoot down an aircraft with small arms because they had no antiaircraft guns in support.

‘Immediately cheering burst out. We were overjoyed to have got this villain. It had not even been possible to go to the “John” – terrible eh! Sitting in your foxhole all the time [
enduring the strafing
] is hardly a bed of roses, so we fired by volleys, hoping to hit him.’

He filmed the blazing aircraft wreckage afterwards, including the mangled remains of the pilot. Screening the incident to postwar audiences raised a level of pathos inconsequent to those who had actually beaten off the air attack. ‘I looked at that scene feeling well pleased,’ Becker admitted, ‘at having managed to destroy a hornet … You see,’ he stated blandly, ‘it had been pestering us. He might have killed five men – really.’
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Hauptsturmführer Klinter’s SS ‘Totenkopf’ unit
,
meanwhile, still exhausted, spent the next night preparing a position in swampy woodland. There was little peace during the night because they received a warning order, requiring battle preparation, to conduct an attack which was to last the entire day. It finally succeeded when two Sturmgeschütz assault guns shot them onto the objective at dusk. Having endured three days of intense combat, there was at last an opportunity to rest. But as Klinter laconically pointed out, ‘if one wants sleep, and further, has managed to procure a quiet post in order to get it, then you can bet that position will most certainly be relieved’; and so it transpired. Elements of the 290th Infantry Division moved up to occupy the line the very night they could practically have achieved some sleep. A 10km return march ensued, stumbling over poor Russian roads in pitch darkness. There was still no food. After all their efforts over the previous few days the SS platoon commander complained: ‘what was the point of belonging to a fully motorised unit when one always had to march, and almost invariably when the vehicles were most needed?’ His was the sarcasm of a typical Panzergrenadier veteran:

‘Motorised transport is only there to make certain we poor Panzergrenadiers are brought up against the enemy more often than our fellows in the infantry divisions. Before and after battle we always have to march just as far and of course fight, so that we have the dubious advantage of being in action more often.’

At 03.00 hours they reached their trucks and half-tracks and set off, within the hour, to continue the pursuit in the direction of Opotschka. They were in action again by daylight.
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The cumulative grind of this physical and psychological toll had the same impact, marking the steady deterioration of the marching infantry formations. Klinter’s experience encapsulated the remorseless killing power of the German infantry. It was now to be applied against the Smolensk pocket.

As the motorised vanguards of Panzer divisions struck substantial Russian resistance, meeting engagements ensued. Infantry or Panzers would move up in combination while artillery and Luftwaffe air support was called forward to break up the crust of the opposition. Areas of stubborn resistance were simply bypassed and subsequently encircled to maintain the momentum of the advance. Armoured advance guards would wheel left and right of the discerned threat and attempt to come together at an identified point further east to close the pocket. The area enclosed was termed
der Kessel
(the cauldron), an apt description. Closing the pocket was a complicated and dangerous manoeuvre requiring the need to recognise and co-ordinate firepower with fast-moving Panzer units which were directed onto virtual collision courses. Timing and communication was all important. Coloured Very flares were often fired into the air as a crude verification of friend or foe. Confused fighting led to clashes between units on the same side – something that the fast-moving pace of battle made almost inevitable.

The formation of the Smolensk pocket, and the subsequent battles that were fought between 11 July and 11 August 1941 to close it, typified and illustrate the nature of the fighting being conducted at this point in the Russian campaign. The Bialystok and Minsk encirclement battles that started on 24 June ended only three days before the ring around the massive Smolensk
Kessel
coalesced. They had been tying down 50% of Army Group Centre’s fighting assets, 23 infantry divisions as well as Panzer and motorised formations. These units, mopping up final resistance, had to be pushed eastward in sufficient strength to embrace and crush the new enclave containing the largest Soviet force entrapped to date. On 18 July only seven German divisions were holding down 12 surrounded Soviet equivalents. The Russians not only sought to break out. They were also being reinforced by fresh units from the east, which sought to break in to extricate their own men.

Keil und Kessel
tactics were applied to achieve the German encirclement and destroy the Red Army in western Russia. The
Keil
(wedge) was the penetration hammered into the Soviet front by four Panzergruppen, one each to the north and south and two in the centre. Enemy forces were encircled within concentric rings to form
der Kessel
The first outer ring achieved by Panzer vanguards isolated the enemy before the Panzers then turning inward to establish dispersed security pickets (see pp.226–7). These were in effect ‘buffers’, whose role was to beat back enemy forays into the pocket. Heat was applied in a terminal sense to bring the cauldron to the boil by the foot infantry divisions marching up. On arrival they formed a second inner circle around the trapped Soviet units and squeezed. German infantry supported by artillery faced inwards, containing repeated Soviet attempts to break out, until the trapped units were inexorably worn down and liquidated. Motorised and Panzer formations meanwhile held the outer ring, simultaneously parrying enemy relief attacks while preparing to continue the advance east once the fate of the pocket was sealed.

Tactics, which had proved successful during the earlier western campaigns, proved inappropriate when applied to this fiercely stubborn and less compliant adversary in the east. Inadequacies in German defence doctrine, already identified by senior commanders after the victorious Polish and French campaigns, became apparent again. Although Blitzkrieg doctrine depended on ‘lightning’ advances supported by close Luftwaffe air support, ultimate success depended on how fast the marching infantry could cover ground before they closed with the enemy, and how effectively the Panzers could defend while waiting for them. Much of the fighting, apart from the skirmishing involved establishing pocket perimeters, became a matter of sheer infantry will-power to contain and destroy increasingly desperate cut-off Russian units inside. Robert Rupp, a motorised infantry soldier serving with Army Group Centre, encapsulated the nature of pocket fighting in a diary entry of 31 July. ‘One is concurrently defending during every attack,’ he wrote, ‘perhaps even more than when defending.’
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