‘What did I know of our front situation? We sat in our vehicles shrouded in clouds of dust with parched throats and dry lips. We strove to look far ahead because the countryside was as flat as a table. Nothing interrupted the eye.’
Driving by night, in columns, was even worse. Mutterlose noticed the driver:
‘…was having a bad time of it now. His primary concern was the vehicle ahead of us, whose tail-lights were not functioning. Hans sat far forward hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes drilling through the darkness. Sometimes we could not see a thing because of all the dust, other times there was just a silhouette of the vehicle in front.’
Mutterlose clambered onto the running board and attempted to remedy the problem by steering the driver through signals and shouts. The inevitable happened. ‘Suddenly, I noticed the vehicle ahead of us had stopped.’ He screamed ‘Halt!’ but it was too late. As the lorry skidded into the one in front, Mutterlose was catapulted into the road. ‘In the silence that followed I could only hear the trickle of radiator water running out into the dirt.’ This ominous sound was the precursor of the driver’s nightmare: to be left behind alone by the road. The SS column drove by, guided around the crippled truck by flashing torch-light. A long lonely vulnerable night followed until they received a tow into a nearby village for repair. They were promptly ambushed by a group of cutoff Russian soldiers. The truck was blazing furiously by the time they were rescued by another German unit, which had also detoured to resolve its repair problems.(8)
Incidents such as these, combined with other frictions, could make life unbearable and fray nerves. Haphazard resupply had a negative impact on morale. Feldwebel Max Kuhnert vividly recalled a dark march by night, chilly and pelting with rain. The soldier’s tent-sheets had not kept them dry. An offer of hot tea, brought up by resupply with a rum included, ‘was music to our ears’.
‘It was a total disaster and an everlasting shame to our regimental field kitchen staff. Nobody could drink the stuff; not only did it smell evil, but it tasted revolting. Those clots. They had put tobacco instead of tea in the kettle, which was a very large one at that, to hold some 30–40 litres. Then they had put sugar in it, and the precious rum. For quite some time nobody forgot those agonising minutes of disappointment and anger.’(9)
Even before the Grosstransportraum reached its 500km practical limit of operations, it was clearly labouring under cumulative pressures made worse by time and distance. Under the prevailing technical conditions of 1941 even the Wehrmacht, a moderately modern and certainly innovative force, remained dependent upon rail transport for strategic reach – just as their predecessors had in 1917.
‘Barbarossa’ planning was not decisively influenced by the existing road and rail network, but the need to keep operations supplied did influence route consideration. The initial concentration of divisions for the invasion could be achieved only by intensive use of the rail network in German-occupied Poland. Surprise was achieved by transporting the Panzer and motorised divisions last, a tangible indicator of the coming invasion if they had been moved prematurely. Once the offensive began, the fundamental problem was that Russian railways did not conform to the German gauge. Only the railways had the strategic logistic carrying capacity to reach beyond the 500km ‘trip-wire’ point.
Ideological arrogance leading to an illogical deduction of Russian weakness encouraged German planners to assume the Führer’s ‘kick in the door’ would suffice to bring down the Soviet Union like a stack of cards. A decisive victory was anticipated within the 500km belt immediately to the east of the border. Eisenbahntruppen (railway troops) therefore neglected to spend the winter of 1940 exercising the conversion of Russian railways to standard European gauge and were not adequately prepared. Priority was given to the more pressing task of extending the Polish network in anticipation of the German concentration. This resulted in an over-capacity, which was ironically applied to assist in the ‘Final Solution’ extermination of European Jewry. Even when the invasion began, railway troops had low transport priorities. Equipped with inferior and captured French and English vehicles, they were not able to keep up with the advance. Only one-sixth was motorised and two-thirds had no vehicles at all. They were poorly supplied with fuel by the army groups, and their signals and communications assets could only stretch to 100km.(10) Their numbers were not appropriate to the immense demands they faced. In recognition of this they were supplemented in early July with men from the German Reichsbahn (national railways).
As the army groups penetrated the Russian hinterland, the railway troops worked feverishly to restore damage and convert lines to the German gauge. By 10 July 480km had been completed but only about one-tenth of the load capacity required was reaching the army groups.(11) Russian rail-track was lighter than German variants and supported by one-third fewer sleepers, which prevented running heavy locomotives over converted track. Soviet locomotives were larger, their water stations further apart, and many had been destroyed. Russian coal, it was discovered, could not be burned efficiently in German engines without German coal or petrol additives. Damage to signal equipment and rolling stock, bridges and engine sheds, and the elementary point that one double track can carry more capacity than two single ones, reduced German logistic planning figures to theoretical aspirations.
Resupply bottlenecks occurred at the exchange-transfer points between German and Russian railway gauges. A ‘catastrophic’ situation developed at Schaulen in Army Group North‘s area on 11 July, when instead of an anticipated three-hour turn-round, some trains took 12, 24 or even 80 hours to unload. Hopeless congestion resulted. Some trains were actually ‘lost’ in the confusion. Army Group North calculated it needed 34 trains per day (carrying 450 tons each) to meet operational requirements. The maximum achieved on only exceptional occasions was 18. Ninth Army, serving with Army Group Centre, complained it was receiving only one-third of its daily entitlement of trains in early July.(12)
The majority of Soviet division deployments on the eve of war had, by necessity, been by train. Gabriel Temkin, serving in a Russian labour battalion shortly after the outbreak of war, had experienced the German Blitzkrieg through Poland at first hand. He noticed the difference in effect of Luftwaffe attacks on the Russian rail network:
‘In Poland the Luftwaffe had managed in the first few days, if not hours, of the war to disorganise the railway transportation system completely. This was not the case in Russia, fortunately. Because of the distances here (in Russia) and the lack of an alternative transportation system – there was little movement of supplies by trucks – having a functioning rail system was a sine qua non for the Red Army to retain its fighting ability.’
After air attacks, railway soldiers immediately cleared the debris and completed rudimentary repairs so that ‘trains were moving again, slowly, stopping quite often, but moving’. German logistic pressures were insignificant compared to those experienced by Russian armies enduring bottlenecks under relentless air attack the whole time. In addition, the Soviet rail network was engaged in the migration of whole factory complexes complete with workers. These were transported eastward as countless troop trains moved west. Temkin remarked that his mail continued to arrive from his fiancée even ‘during this chaotic time’. Despite being slow and sporadic the military postal service continued to deliver to the front. ‘The trains were moving,’ Temkin emphasised, ‘the freight cars often damaged and half-burned but moving.’ In the face of seemingly endless military reverses Temkin pointed to the value of small achievements: ‘to me it was an encouraging sign,’ he said.(13)