Ostkrieg (39 page)

Although in the north the Ninth Army and the Fourth Panzergruppe had managed, at the cost of very high casualties, to slow the Russian advance, to the south the enemy attack launched on 6 December had been more successful. By the seventh, the Soviets had taken Mikhailov, where panic erupted among German troops, and the next day punched through German lines. With his army under attack from three sides, Guderian began to pull his units back from Tula in order to prevent encirclement and with hopes of forming a coherent defense. Attempts to close the widening gap in his lines failed for lack of troops, vehicle breakdowns, the numbing cold, and deep snow that hindered all movement. By the tenth, the gap stretched to twelve miles; in desperation, Bock ordered the First SS Brigade, the 221st Security Division, and two police battalions withdrawn from the rear area and sent to the front. Guderian, with no more than forty panzers in his whole army, pleaded with Bock for more troops, but the latter had none to give. Hitler had forbidden the dispatch of any intact divisions to the front; only men returning from leave and convalescent battalions could be expected. After all, he told Schmundt, his military adjutant, he “could not send everything out into the winter just because Army Group Center had a few gaps in its front.” At the same time, a serious crisis faced the Second Army as Soviet forces broke through and drove in the direction of Livny. The Germans' attempt to seal the breach by attacking the Russian flanks failed, raising the worrisome possibility of a deep operational breakthrough toward Kursk and Orel that would cut their supply and retreat routes as well as those of the Second Panzer Army to the north. As a last resort, the divisional headquarters and two reinforced regiments from two infantry divisions in Army Group South were sent to the Second Army, but they would not arrive before the thirteenth or fourteenth.
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Only on the twelfth, with the entire front in danger of disintegrating, did Halder begin to realize the seriousness of the situation. When, in reply to yet another of Bock's reports about the untenable situation at the front, he persisted in doubting that the enemy could build on his success, he was shocked by Bock's response: “Of course they can! We cannot stop our troops running away as soon as they see a Russian tank!” Finally shaken to reality, Halder admitted that Germany faced “the most serious situation of the two [world] wars.” It was, he conceded, a question of the very existence of the Ostheer. With little hope that the army group could hold out, Bock emphasized the next day to Brauchitsch that key decisions had to be made that went beyond the military and that only the Führer could make.
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Despite the alarming reports from the front, Hitler had steadfastly resisted making a decision. In part, this resulted from his reluctance to give up his offensive plans for 1942; in part, it reflected the limits he faced since he could hardly afford a large-scale call-up of workers owing to the precarious situation of the labor market. He was also notoriously mistrustful of army reports and in any case evidently had not seen Bock's evaluation of the situation. Not until the fourteenth, when Schmundt confirmed Brauchitsch's report on the catastrophic state of affairs at the front, that, indeed, he saw no way of “getting the army out of this difficult situation,” did Hitler realize that he had to act immediately if Army Group Center was to be saved. He agreed to a straightening of the front at Klin and Kalinin and the withdrawal of Guderian's forces in the south, but no other retreats were to be made until rear defense lines had been prepared. After all, he stressed, only in a few places had there been deep penetrations. That same night, he ordered General Fromm, the commander of the Replacement Army, to mobilize what units he could—barely four divisions—and dispatch them to the front. The next day, he ordered that five divisions be sent from Western Europe, although, in order to expedite their movement, only “rifle bearers” were to be gathered and sent, while an additional four divisions would be made available from forces in the Balkans. At the same time, the home front was to be scoured for men who could be sent east for construction tasks. Since these transfers would take time, however, Hitler could see no alternative at the present but to hold the line and not retreat.
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With the German command system at odds—the generals continued to advocate retreat, while Hitler insisted that such a move made no sense if, at the end of it, the troops found themselves in the same situation but without heavy weapons and artillery—the Führer on 16 December asserted control. Having heard that day from both Bock and Guderian that their forces faced destruction without the speedy arrival
of replacements and supplies, Hitler that night made a decision based largely on Bock's earlier arguments, which, to the Führer, justified the “great gamble” of risking the loss of the army group: without prepared positions, and having abandoned most of their equipment, any withdrawal might well turn into a panicked rout. Hitler, who prided himself on his ability both to master and to profit from a crisis, now set out to resolve this one. That night, he issued his controversial
Haltebefehl
(order to hold out), which allowed Army Group North to withdraw to the Volkhov but then ordered “the front to be defended down to the last man.” He thus hoped to overcome the danger with an iron will and by seeing to the rapid transfer of all available units to the east. In a step toward the further Nazification of the army, he also demanded: “The commanders-in-chief, commanders, and officers are to take personal charge of forcing the troops into their positions to put up fanatical resistance. . . . Only with this style of leadership can the time required to bring up the reinforcements . . . be gained.” Since Hitler would now take all decisions personally, any withdrawal would require his approval, which meant a near-complete loss of autonomy for front commanders. In effect, he assumed direct command of the army itself. His stand-and-fight order, which at least provided clarity and removed the uncertainties of the situation, also stripped his generals of the flexibility and command initiative that had been the key to German operational success.
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Although, in retrospect, this decision has been much criticized by historians, at the time it likely seemed the only possible course of action. Withdrawal meant losing the heavy weapons and would not have halted the Russians in any case, while Bock himself worried about the very real possibility that, once begun, a retreat would turn into a disaster of Napoleonic proportions. Nor was a mobile defense a serious alternative, given the lack of vehicles, tanks, fuel, supplies, and the difficulty of movement on the snow-covered roads. As Bock and his army commanders had repeatedly pointed out, the only feasible solution lay in holding their positions and rushing reserves to fill the gaps. Hitler, then, was largely acceding to the advice of his generals, but with a new twist: not only had he taken command initiative away from them, but the order to stand fast would now be carried out in a rigid and uncompromising manner that meant the needless death of many Landsers. In the event, Hitler's intent to hold out up front until reinforcements arrived failed, not because it was inherently unreasonable, but as a result of the deficient German transportation system.
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The immediate result of the stand-and-fight decision was the removal of both Brauchitsch and Bock, neither of whom appeared to Hitler fit
to deal with the crisis. More consequential, since virtually all regarded Brauchitsch as irrelevant and no more than a messenger boy, was the fact of Hitler's assumption on the nineteenth of formal command of the army. Although Halder initially believed that he might profit from the new situation, he was quickly left in no doubt that the OKH would be little more than a transmission service for Hitler's wishes. On the twentieth, the Führer gave orders to Halder on how the war in the east should be conducted, emphasizing again that “a fanatical will to fight” had to be instilled in the troops by “all, even the most severe, means.” Every soldier, even those in support services, was to “defend himself where he is.” Otherwise, he noted, “a crisis of confidence in the leadership threatens to develop from every retreat.” Significantly, in order to retain a sense of assertive will and deny the enemy anything of value, the most brutal scorched earth policy was to accompany any evacuation of territory: “All abandoned farms were to be burned to the ground; prisoners and inhabitants were to be ruthlessly stripped of their winter clothing.” “There was,” he declared, “no reason that the troops should lose their sense of superiority . . . over this enemy.”
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That same day, in a remarkable five-hour meeting, Hitler rebuffed efforts by Guderian, who had flown to Führer Headquarters to get him to rescind the rigid Haltebefehl, dismissing his commander's concerns as exaggerated since he, too, had endured enemy break-ins in World War I. When Guderian indicated his intention to retreat, Hitler said that the troops should dig in where they stood. When the panzer commander pointed out that the earth was frozen to a depth of five feet, the Führer retorted that they would have to blast holes with howitzers, as was done in Flanders during the earlier war. To Guderian's observation that the loss of life would be enormous, Hitler pointed to the sacrifices made by Frederick the Great's soldiers. None wanted to die, Hitler noted, but like the great king, he stressed, he had the right to demand sacrifices from his troops. Guderian, he thought, was too close to the suffering of his men. “You are seeing events at too close a range,” he told the panzer commander. “You should stand back more. Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.” If Guderian had hoped to convince the Führer of the reality of the situation at the front, he failed dismally, for, in a strongly worded directive to Army Group Center, Hitler merely reaffirmed his order forbidding withdrawals.
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While Hitler and the German commanders were debating what to do in response to the crisis facing them, the Soviets, too, were pondering the situation. Zhukov's original idea had been to gain space in front of Moscow by driving back the German armored spearheads, something
that the Soviets had clearly accomplished. Although they had failed to destroy the bulk of the panzer forces, the near-total collapse of Army Group Center raised the possibility of an envelopment, but, since the Russians had planned for only a shallow operation, their initial momentum was petering out even as Hitler was making the decision to stand and fight. For the second phase of the counteroffensive, Zhukov still thought conservatively, hoping to drive the Germans back some 150 miles to the line just east of Smolensk from which Operation Typhoon had begun. Stalin and the Stavka, however, now filled with militant enthusiasm, were beginning to think in more ambitious terms—the complete encirclement of Army Group Center—but allowed Zhukov to proceed with his new round of attacks, which resumed on 18 December.
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By now, the appearance of a seemingly endless supply of enemy troops able to endure the harsh cold and supplied with clearly superior weapons began to frighten the German troops, as if they were fighting a superhuman force. Halder tried to contain what he termed “a numbers psychosis” by urging German intelligence to stress the often low quality of the new Soviet troops rather than their absolute number, but, to Landsers on the sharp end, this was scant comfort. With little winter clothing, short of food, fuel, and ammunition, bedeviled by equipment breakdowns and malfunctions in the awful cold, confronted with a warmly dressed opponent whose tanks, with their compressed-air starters and wide tracks, could not only run but also traverse the deep snow, many German soldiers were, little wonder, spooked by even the appearance of Russian troops. Nothing so demoralized the Landsers as the sight of their antitank shells bouncing off the thick armor of the Russian T-34s, but, in a bitter irony, even the antidote to this superiority was denied them. In the fall, the Germans had tested a new, vastly more effective hollow-charge shell (
Rotkopf
) that could penetrate Soviet armor, but Hitler had them recalled in November for fear that they would fall into enemy hands, be imitated, and then used against German tanks. Not until 22 December, after much pleading by his army commanders, did he release the Rotkopf ammunition. By that time, a report of Army Group Center indicated, a mood of fear, a feeling of defenselessness, and a general unwillingness to attack had so undermined fighting efficiency that even the admittedly poor-quality Soviet troops could not be repulsed.
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The renewed Soviet attacks had, by the twentieth, forced the entire Second Panzer Army to retreat again, a move strenuously opposed by Bock's replacement, Kluge, who ordered Guderian to hold his line at all costs. Guderian, with the connivance of Bock, had grown accustomed to ignoring or evading orders with which he disagreed. But, with Kluge,
that was to change. Even as he reported his suspicions to Halder that Guderian had lost his nerve and intended to retreat to the Oka, Kluge was confronted the next day with a Russian breakthrough of the Second Army in the area of Tim, which forced a withdrawal of the Forty-third Army Corps to the Oka. Although the withdrawal was approved by Hitler, Halder vehemently opposed the idea of disengagement, once again insisting, “If we hold out everywhere, everything will be over in fourteen days. The enemy cannot pursue these frontal attacks forever.” By the twenty-second, however, the breakthrough at Tim had spread further westward, and, by the twenty-fourth, the commander of the Second Army, Schmidt, had been forced to withdraw from Livny, even though such an action had been forbidden by Hitler. At the same time, the Second Panzer Army argued that these withdrawals forced it to pull back as well and asked permission to retreat to the Oka. Although Halder tentatively agreed to this, the mood between Kluge and Guderian, already hostile, intensified when the latter refused the former's order to send the Fourth Panzer Division to Sukhinichi to hold this vital rail and road juncture against a Russian advance. Guderian, in fact, had given further orders for his units to withdraw, and, when, on Christmas Day, Kluge learned of this, he took Guderian to task, then demanded his ouster. Hitler complied, removing Guderian from his post and replacing him with General Schmidt.
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