War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (53 page)

Luftwaffe Luftflotte 2 HQ, located in woods near Smolensk, was considerably reinforced in anticipation of the coming offensive. The VIIIth Fliegerkorps was moved from the Leningrad front at the end of September and attached to the left wing of the gathering Panzer spearheads to support Panzergruppen 3 and 4. The latter was also reinforced by the IInd Flak Corps configured in the ground role. Only Flak artillery calibres were capable of dealing with Soviet heavy tanks with some certainty. The Ist Flak Corps was placed on the right wing to support Fourth Army and Second Panzer Army. In addition to the relocation of the VIIIth Fliegerkorps, 1StG, 77StG and 26JG, formerly committed in the Kiev area, arrived at airfields in Army Group Centre’s area of operations. Once again Luftflotte 2 was positioned to support the army group with massive sortie rates. Meanwhile the ‘Legion Condor’, KG53, began to attack installations in the greater Moscow area from the night of 1 October. Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commanding Luftflotte 2, described the envisaged concept of operations:

‘Our air-ground support fighters, following a practice which had already become axiomatic, were to blast a path for the army divisions. Our heavy bombers were to seal off the battlefield to the rear.’
⁽²²⁾

As with the Panzers, the Luftwaffe air situation had changed. There would be no unexpected pre-emptive attack. The front now stretched from Leningrad to the Black Sea, having expanded from 1,200km at the beginning of the campaign to a width exceeding 2,000km. Prior to the Kiev encirclement, OKW had calculated respective air strengths (from fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft) to be 1,916 German aircraft against 1,175 Russian. Soviet factories had been steadily making good the damage meted out by the Luftwaffe’s surprise June air-strikes. A comparison of relative operational strengths on 6 September reveals a German 7% shortfall of bomber and dive-bomber strengths, and an almost 2:1 inferiority of medium- and long-range fighters. The figure was based on an assessment of 1,710 Soviet combat and 1,230 training aircraft, with a further 350 ready in factories. Creative accounting was applied by German planners, who assumed a best case figure of 40% for operational Russian aircraft availability.
⁽²³⁾

German letters from the front, supported by diary and eyewitness accounts, testify to the frequency if not lethal impact of constant Soviet air raids up to and including successive Russian defeats at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev. These were not confidence-building features during the run-up to the final autumn offensive. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring confided:

‘Preparations for a fresh assault were pushed on from 15 September with coldly calculated ardour. My old friend from Metz days, General Hoepner, commanding Panzergruppe 4 – apparently impressed by the lack of success of Army Group North [
at Leningrad
] – had little confidence.’
⁽²⁴⁾

Kesselring observed that the successful Kiev encirclement battles and optimistic expectations of Operation ‘Taifun’ encouraged OKW to anticipate success. Commanders’ doubts, he commented, were to some extent allayed ‘by the spirit of the front-line troops’. OKW was pinning its last offensive hopes on the almost mythical ability of the German soldier to snatch victory from apparently impossible conditions. They had yet to lose a campaign. There was total faith in their capability to master this last test. The
Ostheer,
however, had changed its intrinsic character since the heady opening days of ‘Barbarossa’.

By the third week of the Russian campaign total casualties had exceeded those of the entire French Blitzkrieg in 1940. Officers were perishing during the initial period at the rate of 500 per week (524 died between 22 June and the beginning of July), with 1,540 officer casualties occurring in the first seven days of the offensive. This figure represented the combined officer establishments of three German infantry divisions.
⁽¹⁾
At the end of July, even before the end of the battle of Minsk, almost 17% more German soldiers had died in Russia than in France. Total losses were 181,000 killed, wounded and missing, compared to 154,754 for the entire French operation. By the end of September the Germans had lost 518,807 casualties, or over three times the losses suffered during the six-week French campaign.
⁽²⁾

Despite having inflicted three to four million casualties on the Russian army, the cost – at over half a million men – was sufficient to have a fundamental impact on the structure of the original
Ostheer.
The Wehrmacht was achieving a Pyrrhic victory. As early as 11 July, the 18th Panzer Division had been reduced to 83 operational tanks representing 39% of its initial start state. It lost 2,279 men, 13.3% of its strength, in almost 20 days. By the end of the month this figure was approaching 20% and required two Panzer regiments to combine to form one with only 600 men in its two battalions. The division commander ominously warned such losses should not be allowed to continue,
‘Wenn wir uns nicht totsiegen wollen
’ (‘if we do not intend to victor ourselves to death’).
⁽³⁾
A succession of such victories between June and the beginning of October was affecting the very fabric of the
Ostheer.
Already seriously injured, the losses of officers, NCOs and men were burning out the seed corn of Blitzkrieg.

The horror of becoming a casualty was all-pervasive. All-encompassing shock is the premier emotion engendered as a projectile tears through vulnerable human tissue. German medical doctor Peter Bamm, serving in an infantry division with Army Group South, described the impact:

‘A man – a human being – is wounded. In the split second in which he is hit he is hurled out of the fighting machine and has become, in an instant, utterly helpless. Up to that moment all his energy was directed forwards, against an enemy… But now he is thrown back on himself: the sight of his own blood restores him to full self-awareness. At one moment he was helping to change the course of history: at the next he cannot do anything even for himself.’

Following shock there is pain and fear. The wounded were often condemned to lie unattended for hours during intensive fighting before they could be recovered.

‘Hours afterwards night falls. Grey fear envelopes him. Will he bleed to death? Will he be found? Is he going to be hit again? Are the Germans retreating? Will he be captured by the Russians?’
⁽⁴⁾

If fortunate, the casualty will be dragged or carried back to a shell crater or primitive dug-out where the company aid post offers the first possibility of medical assistance. The regimental medical officer might apply a bandage, a splint or a tourniquet, or give an injection to ease pain. Afterwards the soldier would be laid down somewhere to await the arrival of an ambulance, which would take him to a field dressing station, the next stage in the evacuation chain.

Soldier Erhard Schaumann described the process for those who had not survived this far. ‘You’d take half the [metal ID] tag [snapped in two halves, part for the unit and the other left on the man], and that meant the Feldwebel could notify the relatives.’ Corpses were buried ‘wherever you had a chance, beside a railway or in the woods, and quickly, to prevent epidemics breaking out’. Every soldier was equipped to do this. ‘We all had a little spade,’ he said, ‘on the back of the belt-order.’
⁽⁵⁾
Those surviving treatment were carried further back to ambulances. A long crowded journey would follow, squashed together with other wounded in semi-darkness, punctuated by the sound of groans. The next time the stretcher was lifted would be into the glare of a hospital theatre lamp prior to surgery.

Dr Paul Rohwedder recalled occasions when his field dressing station was overwhelmed by a sudden influx of casualties. ‘It was a tough mission,’ he said, describing the aftermath of one action, ‘a big burden on us, we buried 63 men. Most of them were dying as they came in.’ During such surges of activity, ‘we operated day and night’.

‘The contacts were short, you’d get masses of wounded then it was all over. We had 1,200 [
casualties
] inside 48 hours. That’s the sort of number you would get over six months in a big [
peacetime
] clinic. There were seven doctors and one pharmacist, the others were novices who had no idea and had to be trained. One had to improvise in order to do all that, and we did.’
⁽⁶⁾

This pressure of work was not untypical. During a 12-day period in August 1941, the Ist Medical Company of the 98th Infantry Division dealt with 1,253 wounded near Korosten in Army Group Centre’s sector.
⁽⁷⁾

The next stage of the medical evacuation process was transfer to a field hospital, either in the occupied areas or the Reich, where the wounded could recover and convalesce. ‘As the soldiers were as a rule tightly disciplined,’ explained Dr Rohwedder, ‘the hospital [with its comparative freedoms] was a big break for them.’ Morale would rise: ‘They were happy, feeling “now I’m in hospital someone will care for me”.’ Men still succumbed to their injuries, even this far along the chain. ‘There were certain nice phrases you’d use to notify the relatives,’ said Rohwedder, like ‘died peacefully, etc’. A patriotic sense of duty kept the doctor motivated. ‘In any war there will be associated losses,’ he mused long after the event. ‘That can be very painful, but as a doctor and a soldier – a patriot – you’ve got to stand that.’
⁽⁸⁾

Medical Officer Peter Bamm described the medical evacuation chain as:

‘A grim conveyor belt which brought the debris of battle to a human repair shop. We could show no sympathy; we couldn’t afford to. We should soon have been exhausted and totally unfit for work.’

It was difficult to be completely divorced emotionally from what was going on. Caring for the wounded exacted an intangible and remorseless mental toll.

Leutnant Bamm treated a young soldier seriously wounded during a heroic action against a Soviet pillbox complex which captured the admiration of the whole regiment. ‘This story of unparalleled bravery by a handful of infantry,’ he said, ‘had become a legend in less than a day.’ One of the patients was a former student from a technical college in southern Germany, with hideous mutilations to both hands. He bore his detailed and painful examination ‘with stoic indifference’. Bamm found it difficult to suppress sympathy for such a poignant case.

‘To lose both hands! A student! And 22 years old. The thought flashed suddenly through my mind that he would never again be able to caress a girl’s body.’

Three days after the amputations the student’s clumsy inability to detonate a hand-grenade with his bandaged stumps resulted in a failed suicide attempt. Gangrene set in which meant the uninfected parts of the remaining arm had to be removed ‘in order to save the life that had become worthless to its owner’. Bamm handed over his patient when the unit moved on. He never saw him again. ‘The members of our operating group learned from this case,’ reflected the disheartened doctor, ‘that a hundred successful operations are valueless in the face of one such failure.’
⁽⁹⁾
Casualty statistics posed an emotional strain beyond measured shortfalls of battle strengths. They badly affected morale.

German officer casualties in the first five weeks of the campaign were extremely high and represented 5.9% of the total.
⁽¹⁰⁾
They could not be easily replaced. Officer training lasted 14–18 months. At platoon level, they were often replaced by veteran senior NCOs. An indication of the scale of losses can be gauged from the fact that a typical infantry division had 518 officers on its unit establishment. By the end of July, 2,433 had been killed and 5,464 wounded, an equivalent casualty rate of more than 15 divisions’ worth of officers. Nearly 15 more division equivalents were lost in August, but the figure fell to half of this – seven division equivalents – in September. On the eve of the Moscow offensive the
Ostheer
had lost one-third of its officer strength (a total of 37 division equivalents from 117 divisions) which had started the campaign.

These men represented the tip of the spear, the experienced elite of the combat arms: mainly infantry, artillery and Panzer. Many were at the height of their professional prowess, —commanders who had led in Poland, France, the Low Countries and the Balkans. It was these men who were required to think and act in the ‘operational’ dimension – leaders who took crucial decisions in terms of time and space, following
Auftragstaktik
(a mission-orientated command philosophy). German officers were schooled to achieve objectives while affording subordinates a high degree of freedom of action in their execution. A commander was given the requisite resources – Panzers, artillery or air support – to achieve a mission. How he did it was up to him. This style of command conferred an intrinsic advantage over Soviet commanders accustomed to receiving
Befehlstaktik
(detailed orders). Initiative in their case was circumscribed by painstaking control by senior commanders over its execution. Not only were resources granted, the commander was told in detail how to fulfil his mission.
Auftragstaktik
requires a commander to take independent action and apply creative judgement. Imaginative steps involving risk if necessary can be taken to achieve the desired goal. Time and again German junior officers applied tactical excellence in achieving encirclements or complicated tactical manoeuvres through joint co-ordination with other ground arms and the air force. Remarkable and surprising results were achieved against a more numerous foe. But there was a price to pay, and it was exacted by a fanatical enemy.