Hitler turned his back on Manstein now, hunched over the map table, his eyes narrowed with a mix of anger and pain. His miracle worker had come with the same proposal that Keitel and Jodl had pedaled. More withdrawals. They wanted to simply hand the enemy back everything that was won in those long hard months of the summer offensive. He would not allow it, and seeing that Hitler was adamant, Manstein pursed his lips, then saluted and turned to leave.
Halder watched him go, knowing that the war had, in that moment, crossed some unseen line. It was not something that could be seen on the map like the penciled in lines of the various fronts. It was something darker, more shadowed, more ominous; a turning point where he could feel that his long managed control of these events was now slipping from his grasp, and that of all the other Generals at OKW. Manstein had always been able to influence Hitler to see reason. Now even he seemed powerless to intervene.
As he watched Manstein stride off, without so much as another word, a thought came to him like the cold December wind, and he felt it for the first time, in spite of the warm fire on the hearth across the room. We could lose this war. We could lose it all. Hitler will make an end of all our best efforts, and hand us one impossible situation after another. At least Manstein has Steiner, a strong hand at the point of greatest crisis. Let us hope that is enough, because if we do lose Model’s Army….
He did not want to think about that. The cold in that line of thinking was enough to freeze the blood in his veins, as it would be now for all those troops if Manstein’s prediction were to materialize.
If Fedorov had been there, he might have seen how the lines of fate were now twisting around those of Model’s front. Manstein had avoided the debacle at Volgograd. He had correctly and wisely extricated Steiner’s Korps from the cauldron in which he sat himself down. Neither Steiner, nor Paulus, were now fighting anywhere near Volgograd. But the shape of that pocket where Model’s 2nd Panzerarmee now sat looked strangely like the one that had formed around Paulus between the Volga and the Don. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Chapter 35
Hitler’s understanding of how war was fought was in no way like that of Manstein. The Führer wanted any hard won ground held tenaciously. He clung to major cities on a point of honor, endowing them with a significance they might not truly hold in a military sense. That was certainly the case for Volgograd at that moment, and also Voronezh. Hitler Believed it was his stand fast order the previous winter that had saved the day, and kept the burned out warrens of Moscow under his control. Now he would apply the same stubborn method to this crisis.
For Manstein, the vast space of Russia was the perfect proving ground for his concept of the mobile war. That space was to be yielded whenever it might be necessary to permit his forces to move and concentrate where they were most needed. He would even invite the enemy to advance, knowing that every mile they went took them farther from their own source of supplies, created flanks that they would have to man and guard, and presented him with numerous opportunities for a counter thrust. To master the situation, he now wanted to see Model’s army used in a mobile role, not to simply sit there like a dull iron anvil and be hammered upon by the Russians. He knew that even the hardest metal could be broken in such a situation. That was what anvils were made for, to burn, break, bend, or shape metal, or in this case to destroy it.
Model’s ability to hold as he had thus far was entirely dependent on that slender corridor for supplies, and now the Soviets were doing everything possible to choke it closed. It was as if the red army had both hands on their enemy’s neck, trying to choke the life out of him, while Steiner desperately tried to break that grip. Yet as he tried to attack up that corridor, he was met with heavy pressure on both the left and right. Two of his divisions were trying to hold back the southern pincer on the line of the Oskol River, leaving him Leibstandarte and Das Reich, along with the rebuilt 24th panzer Division from Odessa that Manstein had quietly ordered forward seven days ago, again without permission.
The arrival of both Grossdeutschland Division and the Brandenburgers created a noticeable shift in the balance of that struggle. These elite formations were fiercely competent in the attack, implacable on defense, and they had unshakable morale. Looking around the front for anything else he could find, Manstein saw that he had but one card left to play—Hermann Balck.
11th Panzer Division had been in reserve on the Chir front where it had been so instrumental in the defense there. Now he would commit this last mobile reserve, its place taken by two light armored units provided by Volkov. On the 29th of December, the last train from the south came whistling into the station at Prokhorovka, and the troops, tanks and vehicles of Balck’s divisions began to disembark and assemble.
General Balck raised the collar on his trench coat against the wind, tightening the fit of his gloves. Winter again, he thought. Another enemy offensive, and another crisis. We rule the summer, but when General Winter arrives, he is a most formidable foe. Well, my division is rested, lean and trim; ready for another fight. But this does not look like the dance I was hoping to attend. Steiner has thrown the SS right into the teeth of this enemy advance, and right between the two arms of the bear. We should have folded the line back south of Belgorod and the upper Donets, massing Steiner at Kharkov. Then they would have to come over another 100 kilometers, and supply themselves the whole way. That’s when we hit them.
Yes, it would mean leaving Model well behind enemy lines, for a time, but he had a stout heart, and can hold ground like no one else in the army. But Manstein doesn’t want to lose that army. Being so close at hand, I can see why he turned Steiner loose. Now we see what those troops are really made of. Yet things are quite different this time, are they not? We chased them half way to perdition in the summer, and now I have been racing from one crisis point to another since mid-October.
That same day a new Soviet Army was identified on the front, the 3rd Guards. It had been building up at Tambov for the last six months, built from the burned out remnants of divisions that had fought and died in the struggle against Operation Barbarossa. The men that remained were veterans three times over, and formed the hard kernel of each new division. It followed the line of attack of the northern pincer, but reaching Kursk, it suddenly turned east towards Stary Oskol. The Bear had a fish by the tail, and it wanted to take another good bite. Unfortunately, Model’s 2nd Panzerarmee was that fish. That army, with five or six fresh rifle divisions, was enough to punch through. Model was now completely cut off, and those crucial three days that might have saved his army had slipped away.
The Grossdeutschland Division was attacking to the left of the rail line in the corridor, and the Brandenburgers were to the right. Like a pair of heavy linesmen, they were grinding their way forward, and slowly pushing the enemy back. What they needed now was a good halfback to break through and race on up that line to Stary Oskol. There, Model, being no fool, had massed all his mobile divisions in an effort to break out.
That halfback was Hermann Balck.
It was not the sort of attack he preferred to make, a desperate fourth down and two. He would much rather have his division on open ground, for broken field running was his specialty. That said, he had two strong divisions on his flanks, and so Balck formed up his shock groups, leading with Hauser’s Recon Battalion backed by the 15th Panzer Regiment, and then following up with his Panzergrenadiers. They would smash right into the 55th Guard Rifle Division, with the 17th Guard Tank Brigade on its left.