War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (38 page)

‘Day and night we have to live in shell holes and protect ourselves against shrapnel. The holes are full of water and lice and other vermin are already crawling out.’
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It might have been 1917. Another infantry Gefreiter from 256th Division complained, ‘it was better last year, by the beginning of July the war with France was already over and the first people were beginning to go on leave’.
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Common to many letters is recognition of the imperative to finish the campaign quickly in order to survive. Bernhard Ritter, a 24-year-old motorised infantry soldier, attempted to come to terms with the psychological toll the war was exacting by expressing his private innermost thoughts to his diary. He wrote on 19 August:

‘Which direction will the war cast us next? How will it go? We hope that another decisive battle will be fought soon and that we will be part of it.’

Ritter, like many front-line soldiers, sought to distance himself from the pain and anguish of losing friends in order to maintain emotional equilibrium. It was not easy. Ritter came across the graves of two former comrades in the rear. They had all ridden in the same vehicle. He subconsciously tried to rationalise his feelings of regret.

‘One understands the implications exactly. He was on my side, a fraction of a distance away – that one could feel totally and unsentimentally. It was the normal course of events, even if one hardly knew the other man.’

The graves would remain behind the advance. ‘One of the simple secrets of life that war teaches us,’ reflected Ritter, was that buried inside those plots ‘was something from our own souls’.
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Harald Henry, still enduring tortuous forced marches with Army Group Centre, wrote on 18 August:

‘It would be no overstatement to declare “a dog could not go on living like this,” because no animal could stoop to live any lower or more primitively than us. All day long we hack ourselves under the ground, crawl into narrow holes, taking sun and rain with no respite and try to sleep.’

He wrote another letter four days later, during the static ‘interregnum’ period, as the future strategic direction of the campaign was being discussed. ‘Yesterday was a day so immersed in blood, so full of dead and wounded, so blasted by crackling salvoes and shrapnel from shells and the groans and shrieks of the wounded, that I can no longer write about it.’ Casualties within Henry’s unit were high. ‘Old Unteroffizier Grabke and many other friends are dead,’ he said. ‘It was a miracle I was relieved from this heavy fighting in the afternoon and so far have not been injured.’
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The strategic implications of a change in the direction of advance were of no consequence to men who sought to survive the next day. Soldiers and families at home simply wanted the fighting to stop. ‘Is the Russian still not finished off?’ wrote a mother to her son at the front:

‘We had hoped you would be able to settle any doubts. My dear son! I have put in a few pieces of paper [
ie in the envelope].
Perhaps you haven’t got any writing material to give us at least a sign of life. Yesterday I got some post from Jos. He is OK. He wrote – “I passionately wanted to be part of the attack on Moscow, but now would now be more pleased if I could get out of this hellish situation.”’
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The Germans had underestimated their Russian opponents. This inability to finish off an apparently reeling foe formed the background to vacillating strategies. Nobody, it seemed, was able to identify a war-winning solution. The soldiers left it to the generals who in turn tended, with failure, to blame Hitler. There had been a misappreciation between the Russian national and ‘Soviet’ identity. Hitler assumed the innate ‘rottenness’ of the Soviet Bolshevik ideology would result in the rapid collapse of the regime. He and his generals preferred to apply the experience of 1917 to the outcome of the campaign. A more meaningful example was Napoleon’s experience of 1812.

German victory over Tsarist Russia during World War 1 and the treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was followed by further German advances into the Baltic states, Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine and Crimea. The Russian Army buckled under the strain of a two-pronged military and propaganda offensive that exacerbated tensions and disharmony in Imperial Russia. Many Wehr-macht officers and soldiers had served in this war, which presaged the total collapse of the Imperial Russian State. Although the successful methodology of its joint military-propaganda prosecution was not reapplied in 1941, generalisations were nevertheless made on its likely outcome based on World War 1 lessons.

The precedent of 1812 was arguably more significant. The fact that Russia did not surrender to Napoleon even after the capture of Moscow, before winter, had not escaped Adolf Hitler. It is debatable whether Moscow was so crucial to the survival of the regime. Stalin in his 3 July speech harnessed the emotive appeal of nationalist ‘Mother Russia’ to protect the homeland. ‘I see Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land’ against ‘the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of locusts,’ he said.
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Grigori Tokaty, a refugee White Russian teaching at Moscow Military Academy, recalled at this moment of crisis:

‘In that very situation something else appeared among us. The tradition of Borodino. Borodino is the place where Napoleon was defeated. This suddenly released feelings appearing from nowhere that helped to unite the people.’
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Dismantling Russian factories and relocating them further eastwards beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe suggested surrender was not imminent, whether Moscow fell or not. When the front was only 80km from Vitebsk in early July, 2,000 of 5,000 workers from the ‘Flag of Industrialisation’ textile factory were moved to Saratow, several hundred kilometres further east. During the journey, constantly dogged by air raids, the workers learned their city had been overrun by the German advance.
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Russian resistance remained unbowed. The only logical means of achieving victory must be to break her armies. The advance to the south decided by Hitler had the potential to achieve a gigantic encirclement operation that might result in the annihilation of several Russian armies. It was beginning to develop sinister parallels with the crushing victory achieved by Hannibal’s Carthaginians over Rome at Cannae in 216BC.

Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb’s Army Group North accelerated its rate of advance along the Baltic coast as Army Group Centre completed the destruction of the Smolensk pocket. General Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4, with three Panzer and three motorised divisions, provided the spearhead, flanked on the Baltic coast by Generaloberst von Kuchler’s Twenty-eighth Army to the left and Generaloberst Busch’s Sixteenth Army to the right. Crossing the River Dvina signalled the piercing of the old ‘Stalin Line’ that had run along the previous Latvian/Russian Border. The 1st Panzer Division reached Ostrov on 4 July. Pskov fell three days later, opening rail and road connections that led to Leningrad. Spectacular encirclements were not a feature of this advance because, unlike Army Group Centre, the Panzer spearheads had to negotiate difficult terrain – lakes, forests and rivers – from the very start. Even so, by mid-July Solzy and Novgorod had been taken, enabling the smallest of the three Army Groups to stand on the River Luga, the last remaining physical obstacle before Leningrad. It had achieved an advance of 750km by the time Army Group Centre occupied Smolensk. On 10 July Field Marshal Mannerheim’s Finnish Karelian Army invaded the USSR from Finland and began to advance south-east down the Karelian isthmus towards Lake Ladoga and Leningrad.

Army Group North battered its opposing forces so effectively and captured Lithuania, Latvia and most of Estonia so quickly that Soviet forces were denied freedom of manoeuvre. With the capture of Leningrad imminent Generalfeldmarschall von Leeb received instructions on 15 July that ‘the immediate mission is not to capture Leningrad but to encircle it’.

Generaloberst Reinhardt’s XXXXIst Panzer Corps broke into open country beyond the River Luga on 8 August in a move which seemed to presage a Soviet collapse. The Luga, 100km from Leningrad, was in effect the outermost ring of the city’s defence. Rolf Dahm, a radio operator in a German infantry division, commented:

‘As I see it today we had practically reached Leningrad almost without a fight. We moved forward from our jump-off attack positions and encountered virtually no resistance.’
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Between 14 and 18 August, however, Russian forces attacked following urgent prompting from Moscow. The counter-offensive was extravagant and poorly co-ordinated. Masses of cavalry, lorried infantry and inexperienced reserves were put into costly frontal attacks that did at least slow some of the momentum of the German advance. General Erich von Manstein’s LVIth Panzer Corps, prevented from reinforcing its sister XXXXIst Corps in the Panzergruppe, marched and counter-marched during three critical weeks of fighting across the dried-out marshes of the upper Ilmen river. Men and machines were exhausted.

The Luftwaffe, ranging far ahead of German mobile units, had been responsible for much of the success. Lieutenant J. Jewtuchewitsch’s Russian 64th Engineer Battalion, operating south of Leningrad, was totally intimidated by repeated air raids. Driven out of a barn by an early morning Messerschmitt Bf110 strafing attack, he saw the surrounding buildings soon enveloped in flames. ‘One tried to make oneself tiny,’ he later wrote, ‘completely invisible’ to escape the attention of the predatory aircraft. Pauses between strafing and bombing runs which continued nearby were occupied ‘with jokes and forced laughter, trying to convince each other we were not frightened’. They were. The platoon commander, Muschtakow, ordered them to run into nearby woods and take cover. Jewtuchewitsch and five men ran the gauntlet of a ‘rain of machine gun fire’ across an open field chased by a Bf110. Even inside the wood they did not feel safe. ‘The edges,’ Jewtuchewitsch described, ‘were raked with methodical persistence by bombs and machine gun fire.’ Having been blown from a depression by the force of a bomb blast, he heard a plaintive cry for help from Lissizyn, one of his soldiers, a few metres away. ‘Come to me, over here, over here,’ he shrieked. Jewtuchewitsch staggered towards the source of the screaming, concussed and disorientated from the explosion. He was confronted with the dreadful sight of his companion with no legs and a gaping stomach wound, ‘something which would remain long in my memory,’ he said. There was no option but to leave him behind. Rallying the survivors, he rejoined the battalion later that night. There was no rest, and at dawn the air attacks started again.
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At the beginning of September a determined German assault was mounted against Leningrad. Geography posed problems in encircling a city protected to its rear by the enormous expanse of Lake Ladoga. It would not be possible to close the northern side of the ring effectively. Extensive and concentric defence lines faced the direction of German attack. These were thrown around the city by the Leningrad command, which mobilised the city population to construct 1,000km of earthworks, 645km of anti-tank ditches and 600km of barbed wire entanglement linked by 5,000 pillboxes. Over 300,000 members of the Young Communist League and 200,000 civilian inhabitants, including as many women as men, achieved this extraordinary effort of labour.
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Stalin’s ‘Mother Russia’ appeal to elicit the population’s help in stemming the ‘Fascist horde’ was bearing fruit.

Von Leeb ordered an all-out assault on the city preceded by a triple-wave Luftwaffe bombing attack. Nine days of savage fighting followed, during which the attacking German divisions closed onto the three lines of the city’s defence. The 1st Panzer Division followed the left bank of the River Neva south-west into the city while 6th Panzer, straddling the main railway to Leningrad, pushed up from the south. Tank commanders suffered considerable casualties because, after weeks of mobile operations, they were slow to adapt tactics to unfamiliar wooded and urban terrain. Four successive commanders of the 6th Panzer Division became casualties during the first day of the assault.
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On 8 September Schlüsselburg was taken and the outer suburbs to the south of Leningrad occupied. With this, the city of nearly three million inhabitants, with its vital rail link to Tikhvin lost, was completely encircled and cut off.