Tank crewman Alexander Golikow’s last letter to his wife was found next to his corpse inside a knocked-out Russian tank on the Ostrov road.
‘I can see the road, green trees and colourful flowers in the garden through the holes in the tank.
‘Life after the war will be just as colourful as these flowers, and happy… I am not afraid to lay down my life for this… do not cry. You will likely not be able to visit my grave. Will there indeed be a grave?’(25)
Nobody knows. The only certainty is that the letter was recovered by German soldiers searching the shell-scarred hulk.
Chapter 9
Refocusing victory conditions
‘And now it seemed we were to turn away from our greatest chance to get to Moscow and bring the war to an end. My instinct told me that something was very wrong. I never understood this change in plans.’
The longest campaign
The day after Army Group Centre announced it had finally closed the Smolensk pocket, its commander received depressing news in the form of a new Führer directive. Von Bock confided bleakly to his diary: ‘the Army Group is being scattered to the four winds.’(1) Advance notice had been received four days before:
‘…which divides my Army Group into three parts. According to the instructions I am to divert one group of forces, including Panzer Group Guderian (Pz Gr. 2) south-east to Army Group South, a group without tanks is to go towards Moscow, and Panzer Group Hoth (Pz Gr.3) is to be diverted north and subordinated to (von Leeb’s) Army Group North.’(2)
Splitting the effort was anathema to a professional commander conditioned and trained to plan and ruthlessly adhere to a single aim. A disconnect between aim and reality had been evident in ‘Barbarossa’ planning from the start. The loose correlation between operational and logistic planning was based upon Hitler’s ideological premise that a ‘kick in the door’ would be sufficient to collapse the Soviet Union ‘like a house of cards’. ‘Barbarossa’ Directive Number 21 issued in December 1940 gave only a broad outline to the conduct of operations. It aimed to create a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the line between Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea and Archangel in the Arctic. Apart from the need to annihilate the main enemy forces, there was no absolute strategic plan or objective to which all operations were subordinate. Three primary invasion objectives were identified: the coal and iron fields of the Donets Basin in the south, the capital Moscow in the centre and Leningrad to the north. One army group was assigned to each, with Panzergruppen to spearhead the way. Few plans in practice survive their inception on crossing the start line, and focusing the continuation of effort is invariably the next problem.
The decisions faced by the Führer and his High Command at the beginning of August were unprecedented. No German campaign during this war had lasted so long. Obergefreiter Erich Kuby with the 3rd Motorised Division recalled a disgruntled infantry NCO muttering they were not ‘sprinting any longer as in the Polish autumn and French May (campaigns), they had been hard on the go for five weeks now’.(3) Blitzkrieg in the West and Scandinavia lasted six weeks, Poland was conquered in 28 days, the Balkans took 24 days and Crete was overwhelmed in 10.
An intangible and unremarked watershed was passed on 2 August. The Wehrmacht was used to success, often against heavy odds and suffering casualties, but quickly. Little attention was therefore paid to the passing of a milestone that was to be superseded by momentous events to follow. Victory in Russia, whatever the propaganda aspirations, was never seriously thought achievable in six weeks by rational planners. But the tempo was beginning to falter. Vacillation and indecision became increasingly apparent at the Führer’s headquarters. The Wehrmacht had indeed ‘kicked in the door’, but there was little prospect of the Soviet edifice collapsing. One German housewife writing to her husband at the front mused, ‘when one hears in the reports what losses the Russians have had already, one can hardly imagine how he has kept up the fight for so long’.(4)
General Halder made no mention in his diary at the six-week point that the campaign had exceeded the duration of the western Blitzkrieg. His only comment was that the logistic situation regarding shoes and clothing was ‘tight’. Winter clothing would require consideration alongside the ‘clamour for lost replacements’ by Panzer and infantry divisions. A considerable deficit had by now emerged between casualties and these replacements. Army Group South received only 10,000 reinforcements to compensate for 63,000 losses while Army Groups Centre and North were short by 51,000 and 28,000 men respectively.(5)
Six weeks into the campaign Generalfeldmarschall von Bock was lamenting the difficulties of holding the Smolensk pocket perimeter. ‘We are at the end of our tether just now trying to prevent Soviet units escaping,’ he wrote. It was a far cry from the euphoric conditions that had existed in France barely one year before. Von Bock observed a perilous situation, commenting on signs of increasing strain. ‘The nerves of those burdened with great responsibility are starting to waiver,’ he said. Victory might be near but a terrible price was already apparent. The VIIth and Vth Corps were ‘proud of their success’ but had ‘suffered considerable casualties, especially in officers’.(6)
The common perception among German soldiers was less that of pending victory, more a dawning realisation that the road ahead was going to be hard. One soldier in the 35th Infantry Division wrote home on 19 August:
‘Today is Sunday, but we didn’t notice. We are on the move again some 50km north-eastwards. At the moment we are part of the Army reserve – and high time – we have already lost 50 in the company. It shouldn’t be allowed to continue much longer otherwise the burden will be really heavy. We normally have four men on the [anti-tank] gun, but for two days at a particularly dangerous point, we only had two. The others are wounded.’(7)
The longevity of the campaign was developing a sinister parallel to Napoleon’s 1812 experience. A transport battalion Gefreiter presciently wrote, ‘If we ended up here in the winter, something the Russians would dearly have us do, it would not do us a lot of good either.’(8) Another infantry soldier with Army Group Centre complained the following day, ‘our losses are immense, more than in France’. His company had been fighting around the Moscow Rollbahn since 23 July. ‘One day we have the road, then the Russians, and so it goes on, day after day.’ Victory did not appear imminent. On the contrary, time and intense combat was corroding the courage of the soldiers, in particular pessimism regarding life expectancy.
‘I have never seen such vicious dogs as these Russians. Their tactics are unpredictable and they have an inexhaustible supply of tanks and material etc.’(9)
Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller, in a motorised infantry regiment accompanying the 9th Panzer Division with Army Group South, was dipping deeply into his courage bank at the six-week point. On 4 August his battalion lost four officers among 14 dead, 47 wounded and two missing, all within 24 hours.
At Temovka his captain was shot through the head just after he left his side to cross a street. His close friend Wimmer from another company was killed the same day. ‘I’m so sorry for his wife,’ Prüller wrote in his diary, ‘especially since she’s going to have a baby in October.’ Wimmer he remembered – and this was a ‘funny thing’– had always been ‘quite sure nothing would happen to him’. Next, Prüller’s friend Schober was struck by a grenade splinter which penetrated his head below the left eye. He fell ‘dead on the spot’ at a place Prüller had barely vacated. Two others had already been killed at the same inauspicious place and a third comrade also fell, all within the space of a few hours. Prüller’s diary entry that night encapsulated the lot of the German infantryman in the sixth week of the campaign. 350 men had perished in his battalion over five weeks. At this point the year before in France it had been finished. He wrote :