In that single discussion, the entire complexion of the war in the east had suddenly changed.
Chapter 8
Manstein sat in his headquarters in Rostov, staring at the map. This must be what they are doing this very moment at OKW, he thought. They are standing there around the map table, with Hitler probably drawing in new front lines as he is given to do these days. In their minds, this is a simple readjustment of the front, but it may not be welcomed or wanted by the forces of Orenburg. I must take the liberty of getting a firm order of confirmation before something happens here that we may come to regret. And yet, I can already hear what Hitler will say. He will be so full of himself that we have finally delivered the Kuban and eliminated the last of Sergei Kirov’s forces in this region, that he will simply order the nightmare to begin.
Should I set this order concerning Maykop aside and fly to Berlin immediately? Perhaps I could talk some sense into the Führer. Even as he thought that, he knew it might only be a waste of his time and energy. Once Hitler had his mind made up on something, he was immovable. Yet he had shown uncharacteristic flexibility of late. He finally allowed Model to fight his way out of the Voronezh pocket, and some of those divisions were put to very good use here. His sudden reinstatement of Operation Merkur, and this new attack into Syria and Iraq have produced startling results.
Yet the aim of all those operations is clear, just as it is for Edelweiss. He wants the oil, and he is no longer inclined to wait for Volkov to ship it to him. He has been emboldened by our many recent successes on the battlefield, and now he sees the Wehrmacht as invincible. So he will stop at nothing. Halder could not restrain him, nor will Zeitzler, and I do not think he will even listen to my advice on this matter.
Even as he thought this, Manstein knew that he had been quietly preparing for renewed operations into the Caucasus for the last three weeks. Virtually every mobile reserve division in Armeegruppe South had already been sent over the Don through Rostov and into the Kuban. 17th and 18th Panzer Divisions had been pulled out of the Taman, and 17th Army had been moved to the Kuban bend area to occupy all the crossing sites: Kropotkin, Kazanskaya, Labinsk. The 29th Motorized had been sent to back 3rd Panzergrenadiers, and now his elite Grossdeutschland Division was concentrated at Tikhoretsk.
To restore some mobile reserve behind his long defensive front along the Donets, Manstein pulled 22nd and 23rd Panzer Divisions off the line, replacing them with reserve infantry divisions that had been rehabilitating at Kharkov. Lastly, he told Steiner to free up one of his three remaining SS divisions by making any prudent adjustment to his front that he deemed necessary. The division pulled into reserve was the battle hardened 3rd SS Totenkopf.
If this nightmare begins, he thought, then I will fight it north and east of the Kuban River. All those fast motorized divisions will break through and go right for Stavropol, the city the Soviets had called Voroshilovgorad. That move flanks Armavir on the Kuban, seizes a major railhead city, and then from there we simply drive south to Nevinomyssk and cut the main rail line to Groznyy and Baku. That isolates everything Volkov has in the Maykop region, and also opens the road east and south to the real prize fields at Groznyy and Baku, for I have little doubt that I will soon be ordered there. That is all of 700miles as the crow flies from Rostov, farther than our drive to reach this headquarters.
Yet the price for this is war with the Orenburg Federation. Is that oil worth the cost in blood? Our lines run parallel to Volkov’s from the Black Sea all the way up to the Don bend where we just made that minor adjustment by pulling back to the Chir. This front is the only point of contact with Orenburg. All the rest of his troops are still facing down the Soviets along the Volga, but will they stay there? What if both sides had all those units free to use against us? Yes… that is the real nightmare behind all of this. Six more Soviet armies, and Volkov’s 1st, 4th, and 6th armies could be freed up for operations, and if this happens there can be no operation against Leningrad when the winter finally relents.
He shuddered inwardly, knowing the chaos that would bring to the entire war in the east. I could take the Caucasus if Hitler orders it, he thought. It took us only one month to destroy four Soviet Armies in the Kuban. I would go right through these troops from Kazakhstan and a fast offensive, with sufficient mobile forces, will probably not be stopped anywhere forward of Groznyy. However, if Volkov manages to mend fences with Sergei Kirov…. then we get the nightmare. My troops may very well be in Baku when that happens, but something tells me they will not stay there long….
The outcome of the war was on a razor’s edge that was now 48 hours wide. OKW secretly signaled all armies in the field bordering troops of the Orenburg Federation to make ready for offensive operations. Planes and messengers were dispatched to Rostov to brief Manstein directly, where he learned that all his assumptions and misgivings were about to become grim reality. It was too late, he knew, to attempt a direct appeal to Hitler to rescind those orders, and so he bowed to the inevitable, signaling Hörnlein in the Grossdeutschland Division a single pre-arranged Codeword—Edelweiss II.
The seconds ticked off, their sound becoming louder and louder with each passing moment, and then, on the 28th of March, 1943, they finally resolved to the booming sound of artillery fire. Germany had now opened yet another new war front in the deep south of the Caucasus. Now the panzers would advance in to the rolling steppes replete with sunflowers, abundant grain only now emerging from beneath the last of winter’s morning frost, and of course, the oil. It was a vast new frontier, desolate in many places where the dry balkas would creep through desert salt pans, past the old buried bones of previous generations that were gathered in telltale mounds. Eventually the desert would give way to the marshy shores of the far Caspian Sea, and to the south, the land would rise sharply to the towering heights of Gora Elbrus, King of the Great Caucasus Range.
Volkov’s armies had held forth in that region for decades, once holding all the terrain to the line of the River Don, and glaring at the Soviet river forts at Rostov. Sergei Kirov’s 1940 offensive had pushed them all the way back to the Kuban and beyond, with Maykop switching hands twice, finally recovered by Volkov’s late 1941 counterattack. Yet the German army did not fight like the Soviets of 1940 and 1941. Its infantry hit hard, and was backed by good artillery and Stug battalions. Its panzers moved like steel chariots.
After years of simply minding his static borders with Soviet Russia, Ivan Volkov finally had his war. He would soon come to understand the meaning of the proverb that Ribbentrop had handed him—Might makes Right.
One minute after the deadline dictated by the Führer, the guns of Fredrik de Gross, Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm opened fire on the Georgian defenders of Tuapse. From the sea, the German 132nd Infantry Division was lifted from the Kerch area for an assault, while the inland side of the port was attacked by the 97th Jaeger Division. Tuapse fell that morning. As did Hill 69 near that small oil field, where the Stug Battalion of Ott’s 52nd Korps had ground its way up the slope. The Orenburg 38th Division was driven back on the flanks by 339th Infantry, and the Germans controlled the area by dusk.