bunches of flowers. The sun shines, the sky is blue. We keep peering upwards by force of habit, but see only passing clouds. We think the Germans have at last been stopped and won’t try to go any further – they’ve learnt their lesson on the approaches to Moscow.’
Kalinichenko hoped too much, too soon. Though the Russians had mass, and could replace their horrific 1941 losses, they still lacked the combat power and logistical support to sustain deep penetrations. The New Year offensive by five fronts or army groups, personally directed by Stalin, petered out even before the spring thaw arrested movement. The Germans held their line south of Leningrad, maintaining the threat to the city; they moved to cut off the Volkhov front and destroy Second Shock Army. Its commander Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov was captured, and subsequently raised a Cossack ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for the Nazis.
In the Crimea, the Germans blocked the western exit from the Kerch peninsula, trapping a vast Russian army, then counter-attacked. Between 8 and 19 May, Manstein achieved another triumph, shattering the Crimean front and taking 170,000 prisoners. Seven thousand survivors took refuge in limestone caves until the Germans blasted the entrances with explosives and pumped in gas. Lt. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt, who became a Wehrmacht army commander, wrote of the Russians rather as he might have described wild beasts he could not respect, but grudgingly feared:
Eastern man is very different from his Western counterpart. He has a much greater capacity for enduring hardship, and this passivity induces a high degree of equanimity towards life and death…Eastern man does not possess much initiative; he is accustomed to taking orders, to being led. [The Russians] attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a Western man would be a starvation diet…Close contact with nature enables these people to move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor of the cold…The Siberian, who is partially or completely Asiatic, is even tougher…The psychological effect of the country on the ordinary German soldier was considerable. He felt small and lost in that endless space…A man who has survived the Russian enemy and the Russian climate has little more to learn about war.
Manstein favoured bypassing the fortress of Sevastopol, but Hitler insisted on its capture. The 1,350-ton 800mm giant siege gun ‘Big Dora’ was brought forward, utilising enormous labour because it could move only on twin railway tracks. Franz Halder dismissed Dora, an example of wasteful Nazi industrial effort on prestige weapons, as ‘an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but quite useless’. Its seven-ton shells and 4,000-strong crew contributed much less to the capture of the city than the dogged efforts of Manstein’s infantry. The defenders were also pounded from the air. A Luftwaffe dive-bomber pilot, Captain Herbert Paber, wrote: ‘One explosion next to another, like poisonous mushrooms, shot up between the rocky hideouts. The whole peninsula was fire and smoke – yet in the end thousands of prisoners were taken even there. One can only stand amazed at such resilience…That is how they defended Sevastopol all along the line…The whole country had to be literally ploughed over with bombs before they yielded a short distance.’
When the city finally fell on 4 July after a siege of 250 days, the NKVD’s units were among those which escaped, after massacring all their prisoners. The dreadful losses in the Crimea were attributed to the incompetence of the Soviet commander, Stalin’s favourite Lev Mekhlis, who rejected pleas for units to be allowed to dig in as a symptom of defeatism. The only redeeming feature of the disaster was that Mekhlis was sacked. Sevastopol cost the Germans 25,000 dead and 50,000 tons of artillery ammunition. The attackers were again impressed by the stubbornness of the resistance.
Meanwhile further north, as the ground dried out after the thaw, on 12 May Gen. Semyon Timoshenko launched a thrust by South-Western Front towards Kharkov, which failed disastrously. Yet again, a German counterattack encircled the Russians, and yet again Stalin refused to permit a retreat, causing the loss of more than a quarter of a million men. The army commander and some of his officers shot themselves rather than accept captivity. The survivors were driven eastwards in rout. One man said, ‘We wept as we retreated. We were running anywhere to get away from Kharkov; some to Stalingrad, others to Vladikavkaz. Where else would we end up – Turkey?’
Hitler’s confidence revived: he dismissed Germany’s losses in the previous year’s fighting, and accepted the view of Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, Eastern Front intelligence chief, that Stalin’s reserves were exhausted. By August, German weapons output would regain full momentum, following a disastrous July 1941 decision, rescinded only in January 1942, to cut arms and ammunition production in anticipation of victory. It was extraordinary that Hitler retained the loyalty and obedience of his officers after the strategic madnesses of the previous campaign and the privations of winter. In the Crimea in January 1942, an embittered German soldier itemised his diet: one hot meal a day – cabbage soup with potatoes in it – half a loaf of bread every second day, some fat, a little cheese and hard honey.
Yet even on such fare, the Wehrmacht remained a formidable fighting force. Most of Germany’s generals, in the dark recesses of their souls, knew that they had made their nation and its entire army – it was a myth that only the SS committed atrocities – complicit in crimes against humanity, and especially Russian humanity, such as their enemies would never forgive, even before the Holocaust began. They saw nothing to lose by fighting on, except more millions of lives: it deserves emphasis that a large majority of the war’s victims perished from 1942 onwards. Only victories might induce the Allies to make terms. Hitler’s April directive for the summer operations called for a concentration of effort in the south; the objectives of Operation Blue were to destroy the Red Army’s residual reserves, seize Stalingrad and capture the Caucasian oilfields.
Stalin misjudged German intentions: anticipating a new thrust against Moscow, he concentrated his forces accordingly. Even when the entire Blue plan was laid before him, after being found on the body of a Wehrmacht staff officer killed in an air crash, he dismissed it as disinformation. But Russia’s armies remained much stronger than Hitler realised, with 5.5 million men under arms and rapidly increasing tank and aircraft production. Criminals and some political prisoners were released from the gulag’s labour camps for service – 975,000 of them by the war’s end. Berlin estimated Russia’s 1942 steel output at eight million tons; in reality, it would attain 13.5 million tons.
The first phase of Blue, expected to take three weeks, began on 28 June with an assault towards the Don. Against Stalin’s armies, Hitler deployed 3.5 million Germans and a further million Axis troops – Italians, Romanians, the Spanish ‘Blue’ Division dispatched by Franco as a goodwill gesture – with spectacular initial success. When Pravda correspondent Lazar Brontman arrived in Voronezh, three hundred miles north-west of Stalingrad, at first he found the city relaxed and secure in its remoteness from the enemy. He was amused one evening by the droll spectacle of scores of women in the park dancing with each other in the absence of male partners. Women also policed the city: Brontman observed that they directed traffic more efficiently than men, but used their whistles too much.
Within days, however, the mood darkened dramatically. Further west the Russian line broke, precipitating yet another headlong retreat. German bombers began to pound Voronezh’s streets, ‘ironing the city without meeting resistance’, and prompting a great exodus of fugitives. Profiteers who owned vehicles charged desperate people three, four, five thousand roubles for the privilege of a ride eastwards. One by one, the city’s factories and government offices shut down. When its inhabitants learned that the Germans were only thirty miles away, Brontman wrote that Voronezh was ‘psychologically prepared for surrender’, and indeed the city was overrun a few days later.
The advancing panzers were delayed by rain and mud more than by the Red Army, and in early July reached their initial objectives. Stalin mandated the only authorised Russian strategic retreat of the war: when the Germans continued their advance east beyond Voronezh, they found themselves attacking empty space. Russian forces escaped from an intended envelopment at Millerovo, prompting Hitler to sack Bock for the second time, then splitting
