The Stavka, however, was agreed that Voronezh, a vital communications centre, should be defended to the last. They knew that if they did not hold on there, and prevent the Germans advancing across the upper Don, then the whole of Timoshenko’s South-Western Front would be outflanked.
Voronezh was to be the first major battle for the recently mechanized 24th Panzer Division, which until the year before had been the Wehrmacht’s only cavalry division. Flanked by the Grossdeutschland and 16th Motorized Divisions, 24th Panzer Division charged headlong at Voronezh. Its panzer grenadiers reached the Don on 3 July, and secured a bridgehead on the far side. The following evening, panzer grenadiers from the Grossdeutschland captured the bridge on the main road to Voronezh in an audacious coup de main, before the Russians realized what had happened.
Hitler flew once more to Poltava, on 3 July, with his retinue, to consult with Field Marshal von Bock. He was again in triumphant mood with the capture of Sevastopol, and had just made Manstein a field marshal. ‘During the conversation’, wrote Bock in his diary, ‘the Führer took great pleasure in the idea that the English get rid of any general when things go wrong, and thus were burying any initiative in their army!’ The German generals present were forced to join in the sycophantic laughter. Although the Führer was clearly in exuberant form, he was also anxious not to allow the Soviet armies to escape, especially those south-east of Voronezh within the Don bends. It looked as if the town would fall rapidly.
Hitler then made a disastrous compromise decision. He allowed Bock to continue the battle for Voronezh with the one panzer corps already engaged, while sending the rest of Hoth’s army southwards. But the German forces left behind lacked the strength to achieve a rapid result. The Soviet defenders held out in ferocious street-fighting, where the Germans lost their main advantages.
More by happenstance than strategy, the fighting at Voronezh was part of a phase for the Red Army of concentrating defence on cities, not on arbitrary lines on the map. The new flexibility had allowed Timoshenko’s armies to pull back, avoiding encirclement, but they had already been so badly mauled that on 12 July a new army group command—the Stalingrad Front—was established by Stavka directive. Although nobody dared voice the defeatist suggestion that the Red Army might be forced back as far as the Volga, a suspicion began to grow that this was where the main battle would have to be fought. The most significant evidence was the prompt dispatch from Saratov of the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, whose five regiments came from the Urals and Siberia. Its divisional headquarters took over command of all local NKVD units and militia battalions, set up an armoured train detachment and two tank-training battalions, and took control of the river traffic across the Volga.
These seemed glorious days for German front-line regiments. ‘As far as the eye can see’, wrote an observer, ‘armoured vehicles and half-tracks are rolling forward over the steppe. Pennants float in the shimmering afternoon air.’ Commanders stood fearlessly erect in their tank turrets, one arm raised high, waving their companies forward. Their tracks stirred up dust and propelled it outwards like smoke clouds in their wake.
These days were especially intoxicating for young officers, racing to retake Rostov-on-Don. The recovery of their morale with the spring weather, the new equipment and the great success at Kharkov had laid to rest the nightmare of the previous winter. ‘It was almost as if we had two parts to our head,’ explained Count Clemens von Kageneck, a lieutenant in 3rd Panzer Division soon to win the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. ‘We were charging ahead exultantly and yet we knew that the enemy would attack again in the winter.’ They had also half-forgotten Russia’s ability, with its huge distances, extreme weather and bad roads, to grind down their modern machinery and force them back to the tactics and conditions of the First World War.
In the early months of the campaign, the infantry calculated carefully how far they had marched since they crossed the frontier on the morning of Barbarossa. Now they did not bother any longer. They tramped ahead, their faces caked with sweat and dust, at the ‘10-Kilometer-Tempo’ (six miles per hour) in an attempt to keep up with the motorized formations. Panzer commanders also seemed to forget that the artillery of most German divisions was still unmechanized, their plodding trace-horses coughing regularly in the dust-clouds, and gun crews swaying with fatigue on their backs. Yet technology and the flatness of the steppe brought one great advantage. Any wounded from the advance-to-contact engagements were rapidly evacuated by ‘Sanitäts-Ju’, a Junkers 52 converted into an air ambulance.
Struck by the limitless horizon and expanse of sky, and perhaps also influenced by the sight of vehicles swaying crazily in and out of potholes like ships in a heavy swell, the more imaginative saw the steppe as an uncharted sea. General Strecker described it in a letter as ‘an ocean that might drown the invader’. Villages became the equivalent of islands. In the sun-baked steppe, they also offered the most likely source of water. But a panzer commander might spot an onion-domed church tower in the distance, then on arrival, find beside it the rest of the village destroyed, perhaps with timbers still smouldering. Only the brick chimneys remained standing. The carcasses of horses and livestock lay around, their bellies swollen in the heat forcing their legs grotesquely in the air. Often, the only sign of life would be the odd cat, miaowing in the ruins.
In a village unscathed by the fighting, an old peasant might appear hesitantly, then snatch off his cap as if for a barin before the revolution, and hurry to draw water for the visitors. Some of the village women might meanwhile be driving their geese off into a nearby gully or copse, to conceal them, but they soon found that German soldiers had as good a nose as any Communist Party requisition group.
Soldiers did not just take turnips and onions from the fields, they raided almost every allotment or kitchen garden that they passed. Chickens, ducks and geese were the favourite spoils of war because they were so portable and easy to prepare for the pot. Clemens Podewils, a war correspondent attached to the Sixth Army, described in his diary the arrival of a combat group in one village on 30 June following a sharp skirmish. ‘Black figures jump down from tanks and half-tracks. Suddenly a great execution is carried out. The poultry, with bloody ruffs and beating their wings in a paroxysm, was carried back to the vehicles. The men jumped back on board, the tank tracks ground the soil, and the vehicles moved on again.’ The one thing which they did not bother to take from the locals that summer was their sunflower seeds, which German soldiers jokingly called ‘Russian chocolates’.
There is an unsettling disparity in many accounts, with no connection made between horrifying scenes and their own involvement. ‘A really small boy stood in our way,’ wrote a twenty-year-old theology student in a letter. ‘He no longer begged, he just muttered: “Pan, bread”. It was eerie how much sorrow, suffering and apathy could exist in a child’s face.’ Shortly afterwards, the same theology student turned soldier, just before his death, revealed the lyricism of an early nineteenth-century Romantic: ‘Germany, I have not yet used this word, you country of big, strong hearts. You are my home. It is worth one’s life becoming a seed for you.’
German allies looted with their own paradoxical notion of morality that it must be right to steal from Communists. ‘Our lads have stolen three jugs of milk,’ wrote a Hungarian corporal in his diary. ‘The women had brought the milk down to the basement, when our lads appeared with grenades and pretended to throw them. The women were scared and ran away, and our lads took the milk. We pray to God to help us in future as well.’