Armor and Blood Read online

  Stalin and his high command, Stavka, responded by launching a series of offensives against German Army Groups North and Center and committing more of their steadily increasing reserve forces to successive offensives around Voronezh. These were not mere counterattacks, but parts of a systematic effort to regain the strategic initiative secured in December 1941 and now apparently slipping away. That effort was frustrated by consistently poor execution, operationally and administratively, at subordinate levels. Compensating by micromanaging only compounded the problem. The Germans consistently got within Red Army decision/implementation loops and just as consistently surged forward.

  The problem was that they were surging to nowhere in particular. Instead, the offensive was pursuing two objectives simultaneously rather than sequentially, as in Blue’s original conception. This was no simple manifestation of Hitler’s unfocused, dilettantish interference in command decisions. Soviet pressure on the attack’s left flank was convincing the German high command as well as the Führer that for the Caucasus and its oil fields to fall, Stalingrad must be not merely blockaded and screened, but captured.

  The result across the offensive’s front was an increasing division and diversion of German forces, in particular the panzer and motorized divisions, which were barely sufficient for Operation Blue had it gone as expected. In the Caucasus sector, Soviet resistance combined with dust, broken terrain, fuel shortages, and unreplaced losses in men and tanks to halt the Germans well away from the oil fields of Grozny and Baku by the end of September. A final desperate German lunge only delayed the inevitable retreat. At the same time, Stalingrad developed into a magnet and a killing ground for German forces sacrificed to the high command’s conviction that maintaining the initiative was better served by continuing into the city than enveloping it and blocking the Volga with air and artillery.

  On August 26, Stalin bit a bullet of his own and appointed Zhukov his deputy supreme commander. Zhukov typified a new generation of Red Army generals: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything to crush the Germans, and not inhibited by threats from either front or rear. He shared his superior’s conviction that Stalingrad must be held—but in a strategic context. The summer of ripostes was over. Since September, Stavka, urged on by Zhukov, had been developing plans for a decisive winter campaign involving two major operations. Operation Mars would be launched in mid-October against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the front of German Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. It would be followed in two or three weeks by Operation Jupiter, an attack in the Bryansk sector, to the south, intended to link up with Mars and shatter Army Group Center. Operation Uranus would begin in mid-November and commit large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed by Operation Saturn, which would finish off whatever remained of the Germans in Stalingrad and leave those in the Caucasus isolated, ripe for the picking.

  Described for years in Soviet literature as no more than a diversion, Mars was in fact a complement to Uranus, a double penetration intended to put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was, to say the least, an ambitious strategy for an army still reeling from the seismic shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold. Hold the Red Army did, in an epic defense that reduced the city to a wilderness of rubble, smoke, and ash. Two graffiti on the remnants of a wall told the story. One read “Here Rodimtsev’s Guardsmen stood to the death.” Below it was a coda: “They stood, and defeated death.”

  On November 19, the tide turned. Stavka had held its hand for a month, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. Two tank-headed sledgehammers struck the Romanian armies holding the flanks of the Stalingrad salient. A million men, a thousand modern tanks, fourteen hundred aircraft, fourteen thousand guns—all of it went undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures and by its own belief that the Soviets were as locked into Stalingrad as the Germans were. On November 23, the Soviet spearheads met fifty miles west of Stalingrad.

  The resulting catastrophe might well have metastasized except for an overlooked German victory to the north. Operation Mars, the other half of Operation Uranus, was delayed a month by heavy rains and began only on November 24. German intelligence for once accurately predicted something like the massive Soviet forces involved.

  Had the Soviets been able to get out of their own way, the German front in the East might have broken from the attack’s sheer mass: thirty-seven rifle divisions, forty-five tank and mechanized brigades, and dozens of independent artillery regiments. Instead, traffic and supply problems slowed the Red Army columns just long enough for the Germans to mount a series of counterattacks that cut off Soviet tank spearheads and stabilized the front.

  With his reputation, perhaps his position, and possibly his neck at stake, Zhukov brought together the offensive’s senior commanders on November 28 for counseling and admonition. The attack resumed with predictably renewed vigor the next day, featuring everything from tank attacks to cavalry charges. The weather grew more bitter in the first days of December. This year, however, the Germans were well supplied with winter clothing and had learned how to use trees and drifts to keep from freezing. The Landser, the foot soldiers and tankers, held—just barely, but it was enough. The Red Army stood down in mid-December. Soviet casualties exceeded two hundred thousand men, half of them dead. Over eighteen hundred of the two thousand tanks committed had been lost. Grimly, the Germans reported fewer than five thousand prisoners: quarter was neither asked nor given in most times and places in the Rzhev salient.

  The historian David Glantz correctly describes the original strategic plan for Mars as too ambitious and Zhukov as too stubbornly optimistic to modify it. Operationally and tactically, however, Rzhev was a watershed. This was the last time in a major sector that the Red Army made the adolescent mistakes characteristic of its post-Barbarossa reconstruction: poor tank-infantry-artillery cooperation, inflexibility at all command levels, a tendency to reinforce failure at the expense of exploiting success. Rzhev, seen from a Soviet perspective, resembles the French offensives of 1915 in the Champagne and the British experience on the Somme a year later: a high learning curve imposed by an instructor charging even higher tuition.

  On the other hand, Operation Uranus, the attack at Stalingrad, threatened to eviscerate the entire German position in Russia. The suddenly threatened forces in the Caucasus were too involved in their own withdrawal to assist the now surrounded Germans in Stalingrad. No significant reserves were available elsewhere in Russia or anywhere else under Nazi rule. The garrison’s faint hopes ended definitively on December 16, when the Soviets responded to their initial success in that sector by launching a modified version of Operation Saturn. “Little Saturn” belied its name: it involved thirty-six rifle divisions, over a thousand tanks, and five thousand guns and mortars. As Soviet tanks and cavalry ran wild in the virtually undefended German rear areas, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein made a decision. One of Germany’s outstanding experts on armored war, Manstein had been given command in the Stalingrad sector because earlier in the Russo-German War he had earned a reputation as a troubleshooter from Leningrad to Sebastopol. By December 19, it was clear to him that Stalingrad could not be relieved. The best hope of salvaging the situation involved sacrificing territory—most of the territory, in fact, gained during the entire summer campaign.

  For Manstein, that was the necessary first step in restoring the maneuver warfare that was the German army’s great strength—and by now perhaps the Third Reich’s best hope. That restoration had two immediate prerequisites. One was administrative: a united command in the southern sector. The second prerequisite was doctrinal: trading space for time on levels and to degrees unheard of in the Prussian/German military experience. Manstein recognized the latter’s applicability on an unprecedented scale, and he had the intellectual force and the moral courage t
o convince Hitler that operational exigencies overrode the strategic and economic arguments presented against them. As a result, Hitler authorized a single Army Group South under Manstein’s command.

  Encouraged by Little Saturn’s initial success, the Soviet high command decided to extend the offensive toward Rostov. This was part of a Stalin-devised grand strategic plan to drive the Germans back across the entire Eastern Front while the winter held and establish an intermediate stop line extending from Narva to the Black Sea.

  With Soviet pressure increasing across the front, Manstein oversaw a fighting retreat on a shoestring into the Donets Basin, north of Rostov, shortening the arc of his front while simultaneously preparing a counterattack as the Russians outran their supply and overextended their communications. Forward units were living off the resources they carried for up to two weeks at a time—acceptable for food, less so for fuel and ammunition. Soviet commanders’ contact with higher headquarters was increasingly tenuous—and initiative even at corps level was not a Red Army hallmark. But the prizes that seemed within reach encouraged Stavka to go a stage further.

  At the beginning of February, Russian Operations Gallop and Star retook the city of Kursk. Red Army spearheads drove forward, toward the industrial center and transportation hub of Kharkov, where they launched a counterattack. Hitler insisted on giving the city’s defense top priority. And now some of Manstein’s subordinates were unwilling to continue conceding ground on Manstein’s scale. Manstein as a rule receives correspondingly high marks for a second major act of cool calculation: conceding the loss of Kharkov in order to lure the Soviets forward, into a better position for the counterstroke he was preparing.

  Manstein did not sacrifice the city in order to recapture it. He saw the loss instead as the unpleasant but acceptable consequence of the few days needed to convince a visiting Hitler of the advantages of concentrating real reserves for a real counterattack. The Führer was dubious enough to consider dismissing Manstein. When Kharkov fell on February 16, the city’s loss seemed to prefigure disaster in the wake of Stalingrad. But the next day Manstein struck, two panzer armies in tandem catching the Soviets off balance. By February 28, the Germans were back on the Donets and a Soviet retreat was turning into a rout. Kharkov was retaken by the SS Panzer Corps, newly arrived in Russia on March 15 after four days’ hard fighting. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, played a vital role, mounting as many as a thousand sorties a day while shifting its emphasis between the two panzer armies. The weather also worked in the Germans’ favor just as they reached the Donets, with the spring thaw, the rasputitsa, setting in and immobilizing Soviet reserves.

  The Germans took pride in their comeback, and Kharkov did cost the Red Army half a dozen tank corps and ten rifle divisions destroyed or mangled. Soviet casualties were around eighty thousand. But by Eastern Front standards, both were bagatelles easily made up. For Stavka, and for the field commanders, Kharkov’s consequences lay in what did not happen. The defeat did not shake Russian confidence that the initiative had passed to the Red Army. “Next time!” became an unspoken watchword.

  Manstein’s performance between December and March was considerable. Drawing from commanders, staffs, and soldiers the best they had left to give, he achieved a reversal of fortunes that had seemed inconceivable and remains a lodestone to historians and aficionados of maneuver war. “Miracle” is still widely used to describe the event; “genius” is a familiar appellation for its architect. Manstein compared his approach to a tennis player’s “backhand blow”: a difficult shot, but one that when made effectively can mean game, set, and match. Close examination of the sequence of events suggests a better athletic metaphor might be that of a scrambling quarterback in U.S. football—an improvised response to pressure by a defense, avoiding a tackle while looking for an opportunity to reverse the situation.

  Manstein’s success in restoring and stabilizing the southern sector of the German front has inspired arguments that Hitler and the high command should have continued the offensive instead of throttling back and preparing for a later climactic battle. The obvious counter is that despite Manstein’s careful stewardship, his army group was fought out by the end of March, needing rest and reinforcement before going anywhere. Indeed, both Germans and Russians were like boxers in the late rounds of a bruising fight: exhausted, punch-drunk, working more from reflex than calculation. The Eastern Front’s fighting line on April 1 strongly resembled its spring 1942 predecessor and accurately reflected the state of play. The game, however, was far from over. “Strongly resembled” does not mean “identical.” The Red Army had driven a hundred-mile bulge around the city of Kursk into the German lines during the winter fighting. The salient’s reentrant, German-held, was just to the north, around Orel. On a large-scale map, the two resembled a large, upside-down S. It was the kind of anomaly no staff planner was likely to ignore.

  II

  The armies that drew apart snarling in the spring of 1943 had changed significantly from those that confronted each other at the start of Barbarossa. The Red Army was still in the process of recovering from two disconnects. The most fundamental was institutional. From its early revolutionary days under the guidance of Leon Trotsky, the army had been seen as a major instrument for creating the New Soviet Man. Free from the snares and delusions of the past, this archetype was to be materialist and collectivist in his essence, eager to sacrifice himself for the Soviet system and for Communist ideology. Military service would facilitate and concretize this transformation while simultaneously creating an instrument of war and revolution that would showcase Soviet power and deter Soviet enemies.

  Reality was far more pedestrian. Initial concepts of building this army around a core of class-conscious proletarians foundered with the simultaneous military and industrial expansions inaugurated by the five-year plans that began in 1925. The conscript intakes were increasingly composed of poorly educated peasants with negative cultural memories of military service under any system. Ethnic and regional frictions further induced entropy down to platoon level. “Nationalist in form; socialist in content” became in practice another empty slogan.

  These tensions were exacerbated by a pervasive scarcity. From barracks to dispensaries to latrines, facilities were comprehensively swamped; everyday life was marginal even by czarist standards. Shortages of uniforms, weapons, and equipment could not be made good by an economy that, especially before the mid-1930s, had more of a civilian emphasis than is generally recognized or conceded. The result was a collective malaise, informed by an attitude of nichevo, which created a culture of minimal compliance: the antithesis of ideological hopes and expectations. Nichevo is usually translated as “never mind” and is presented as a trope of passivity. It incorporates as well a strong element of “F——it; don’t mean a thing”—what the British Army called “bloody-mindedness” and punished as “dumb insolence.”

  The situation could not be changed by an officer corps whose professionalization was consistently retarded not only by the crosscurrents of Communist Party demands, but by a significant sense that a commission was a route of upward mobility in the Soviet order and that in a continuing environment of scarcity, officers deserved special treatment and special privileges. At regimental levels, the officers never set a comprehensive example—never became a bridge between the conscripted lower ranks and the Soviet system. Nor did the noncommissioned officers (NCOs) develop as a facilitating body between men and systems in the Western fashion.

  Stalin’s Great Purge of the late 1930s did not spare the Red Army. Recent statistics indicating that less than 10 percent of the officers were actually removed overlook the ripple effects, in particular the diminishing of the mutual rapport and confidence so important for the kind of war that the Germans brought with them and that the Soviets proposed to wage. In response to substandard performances in Poland and Finland, the Red Army restored a spectrum of behaviors and institutions abolished after the Revolution of 1917, designed collectively to intr
oduce more conventional discipline and reestablish the authority of officers and senior NCOs. These changes did not sit well with the “reluctant soldiers” of the rank and file. Nor did they fit well on officers who were themselves profoundly uncertain of their positions.

  One result was a significant decline in training standards already mediocre. Western images shaped largely by German myths describe the Russian soldier of World War II as a “natural” fighter, whose instincts and way of life inured him to hardship in ways foreign to “civilized” men. The Red Army was in fact based on a society and a system whose hardness and brutality prefigured and replicated military life. Stalin’s Soviet Union was a society organized for violence, with a steady erosion of distinctions and barriers between military and civilian spheres. If armed struggle never became the end in itself that it was for fascism, Soviet culture was nevertheless comprehensively militarized in preparation for a future revolutionary apocalypse. Soviet political language was structured around military phrasing. Absolute political control and comprehensive iron discipline, often gruesomely enforced, helped bridge the still-inevitable gaps between peace and war. But in the summer of 1941, too many officers and men, active soldiers and recalled reservists, were ignorant of such basics as minor tactics and fire discipline. They would fight—but too often did not know how.

  That disconnect was replicated at the levels of doctrine and planning. For the emerging Soviet Union, war was not a contingency but a given. The external class enemy, the capitalist states surrounding the USSR, sought its destruction from their own objective dynamics. Preparing for war, total war, was a pragmatic imperative, implemented in a context that defined war as a science. Marxism-Leninism, the USSR’s legitimating ideology, was a science. The Soviet state and Soviet society were organized on abstract, scientific principles. Studied systematically and properly applied, these principles made it possible to anticipate the consequences of decisions, behaviors—even attitudes. War making too was a science. The application of its objective principles by trained and skilled engineers was the best predictor of victory.