Even as Hitler was speaking these happy words, however, the operational wheels were falling off of Blue. The initial operational plan (Directive 41) had called for a very complex set of maneuvers designed to produce small but airtight encirclements quite close to the start line. Such clearly defined plans were necessary, Hitler felt, in order to give the young soldiers in his army an early taste of victory. He and his chief of the general staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, were also anxious to avoid the kind of operational chaos that had manifested itself during the drive on Moscow in 1941, when it seemed as if every German commander was fighting his own private war. Modern historians have a love affair with Auftragstaktik, but clearly it has its dangers, and both Hitler and Halder were determined to run a tighter ship this time.
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Unfortunately for them, the Soviet retreat, chaos and all, had knocked the air out of this idea from the start. The outcome of one army tethered to the tight plans of its high command and the other fleeing from the scene was a pair of what the Germans called Luftstossen—blows into the air—great German pincer movements that closed on nothing much in particular. It happened at Millerovo on July 15, and then again at Rostov on July 23. The amount of ground covered had been impressive; Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army, in particular, had driven from Voronezh all the way down to Rostov in a single month. In the end, however, the Wehrmacht had achieved little beyond eating through its already limited pile of supplies.
Hitler's response turned this puzzling misfire into an absolute catastrophe. "Directive 45" was a fundamental reworking of Operation Blue. The original timetable had called for smashing all the Soviet armies in the Don bend, taking Stalingrad as a northern flank guard for the army's drive into the Caucasus, and only then launching the drive into the oil fields. Now, less than a month into the operation, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to secure Stalingrad and the Caucasus at the same time. Historians usually identify this decision to launch a "dual offensive" as the great blunder of the campaign, with an army already running low on manpower and equipment trying to do everything at once, and it is hard to argue with the common wisdom.
The problems were evident early. The German drive into the Caucasus (Operation Edelweiss) received priority in terms of supply and transport, and was thus able to explode out of the box, lunging forward hundreds of miles and seizing one of the USSR's three great oil cities, Maikop; but the drive on Stalingrad (Operation Fischreiher, or "Heron") was a tough grind from the start. This imbalance led, within a week, to another reversal of priorities. Stalingrad was now the primary target. Edelweiss lost supply, air cover, and an entire panzer army, with Hoth motoring north to join Paulus. The entire Caucasus campaign was left in the hands of just two German armies, First Panzer on the left and Seventeenth on the right, with the Romanian Third Army holding the extreme right wing.
This was the moment that both halves of the dual campaign—the drive east to Stalingrad and the drive south to the Caucasus—came to a screeching halt. In German parlance, the freewheeling war of movement (Bewegungskrieg) suddenly turned into the static war of position (Stellungskrieg), just the sort of grinding attritional struggle that the Wehrmacht knew it could not win.
In the south, the Germans got stuck on the approaches to the high mountains, their two armies facing a solid wall of eight Soviet armies comprising the Transcaucasus Front (further divided into a "Black Sea Group" and a "North Group" of four armies apiece). In the north, Sixth Army reached Stalingrad at the end of September, its arrival punctuated by a Luftwaffe raid on the city that reduced much of it to rubble; Fourth Panzer Army joined it on September 2, and the Luftwaffe announced the coming of Hoth by smashing the city a second time, churning up a great deal of rubble, killing thousands more civilians, and nearly bagging the Soviet commander in Stalingrad, General Vasili I. Chuikov of the Sixty-second Army.
The two German armies had met and reestablished a continuous front directly in front of Stalingrad. Now was a time for decisions. In front of the Germans lay a great city, with a population of some six hundred thousand and a large heavy-industry base. Just a few months earlier, the Wehrmacht had suffered some seventy-five thousand casualties reducing the much smaller city of Sevastopol, the bloodiest encounter of the spring by a considerable margin. Stalingrad, moreover, presented an unusual set of geographical problems. Rather than a collection of neighborhoods radiating out of some central point, the city was one long urbanized area stretching along the right bank of the Volga for nearly thirty miles, as straight as a railroad tie.
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[...] History Roundup 08-31-2009 As we sit on the doorstep of the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe (Sept. 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland), I'm looking around at what has been going on in the Weider History network and around the Internet. Here are some of the goods, starting with a piece appropriately titled Death of the Wehrmacht. [...]
How the Allies eventually learned how to deal with the Wehrmacht is comparable to how Bonnie and Clyde were eventually dealt with. When the posse leader was told that he never gave them a chance, the leader replied, "They were too good to be given a chance."
[...] Death of the Wehrmacht [...]
The recently published third volume by Richard Evans, "The Third Reich at War", contains fascinating information which contextualizes this very good review article. Instead of offering a blow-by-blow account of the Russian campaign, Evans focuses upon the social and cultural themes which of course gave invasion of Slavic lands its barbaric nature. The barbarism practiced at literally all levels of the Germans involved in the campaign became one of the most important reasons why the Third Reich ultimately failed in such a spectacular and definitive manner.
While the Wehrmacht was making its easternmost advance in the Caucuses, on the western periphery of the Greater Reich there was mundane construction work. The result of this, however accelerated the demise of Germany by anywhere from 6 months to a year or more. Fixed fortifications were an anathema in the German doctrine of mobile warfare. From their own experience when fighting against them, the knew that they were vulnerable and could be bested, yet they pinned their hopes on the Atlantic Wall to stop Overlord. Circumstances in the Med caused them to buy into this even more. After all, hadn't the Germans almost thrown the Allies into the sea at Anzio? Germany's underestimation of what was going to thrown against them in the channel crossing was as glaring of an intelligence error as their miscalculation of Soviet military strength in 1941. Rommel had a clue, having dealt with the punishing allied air power in the Med, but even he couldn't comprehend that there was no way that the Panzers could throw the Allies back into the Sea-He was half correct in the positional defense measures he employed. Conversely, Runstedt half of being correct involved making the fight inland and out of naval gunfire range, but wrong in engaging with mobile forces. There were not enough panzer forces to cover both fronts, so Peter the east was robbed to pay Paul in the west. The Atlantic Wall forced the Germans into this situation. With no Atlantic Wall the sensible approach would be to mass the panzers in the east , where there was more natural tank country and room for a mobile elastic defense and counterattack oppurtunities. although the VVVS (Red Air Force) had improved , it had nowhere approached the USAAF or RAF in the damage it could do on ground targets. Panzer unit strength and mass could be maintained and not leached away by the constant shuttling-But now what avout the West?
Yes, what about the west,now with no Atlantic Wall and no major panzer formations….. German leadership could fall upon two previous experiences: their defensive measures of World War I, much of it on the same ground, and the fact that they should expect to be on the opposite end of what they experienced in 1940 in France. A series of defensive arcs, built around natural features and built up areas as strongpoints and festungs, manned with the volksgrenadiers, kreigsmarine coastal gunners and Luftwaffe flak and field units that otherwise would have been smashed or demolished on the coast would man these arcs, supported in key areas by higher echelon combat forces. The would be oriented to stop anyone using the road systems and bring Allied mobility to a crawl. These would be established in depth forming conectric arcs from the bocage to the Seine. In these regions to objective was to force a meat-grinder, infantry style war based on mines, mortars Mg 42s, anti tank guns and field artillery. Aside from STg and SP anti tank gun contingents there would not be a turreted German tank on this front The various lines would be able to absorb or make very time -consuming any Cobra or Goodwood type of operation and providing fewer targets for Allied Air Forces. This front secraemed out for Kesselring or a Heinrici as commander-The political implications next
Germany's only chance to survive involved splitting the alliance. To do that they would have to draw out the war as long as possible and force the Allies to pay too high of a price for unconditional surrender. The personalities and situations of the three major Allies had to be taken into account. Stalin, always suspicious that the west would make a separate peace and only fight "to the last Russian" Reading the intelligence reports and seeing that the German elite panzer units were arrayed against the Red Army in the east, while tha Allies were getting nowhere in France would only fuel his paranoia. The British and Commonwealth leadership would be aghast at refighting the same meatgrinder battles on virtually the same sites as they occurred in the Great War. It might cause them to ask FDR to rethink "unconditional surrender" Even DeGaulle may recoil at the prospect of large tracts of France turned into a moonscape for a second time. The pivotal element here is the US and FDR. 1944 was an election year. Would he take the chance and try to win the war by any means possible or play it safe until the election was over? Would Eisenhower and Bradley get impatient and plan ill-advised operations out of expediency? If 1944 turns to 1945 and the Allies haven't reached Paris yet, and if the Russians have been checked in the east, could it boil down to whether or not Paul Tibbetts will have Hiroshima as his target, or Magdeburg??
Thus, the surviving bunkers, flak towers and emplacements of the Atlantic Wall today serve as monuments to a rapid Allied Victory in Europe.
I was born in Sept 1942, nine months after Pearl Harbor and my father and grandfather followed the war news in Time magazine and on the radio with all its censored news reports. Guadalcanal in the Pacific and the German drive to Stalingrad and the vast Baku oil fields were often speculated upon by US and British reporters. See a book, "The Onslaught: The German Drive to Stalingrad" which can be found on some sites and in larger libraries. My Dad enjoyed it in the mid 80s.
Are we talking about 'blockade', a stifling of the mobility of German flexibility? I have two points I would like a comment on:
1. If in 1914-18 instead of charging headlong against machine guns and barbed wire, the allies had sat in their trenches building up more and more supplies and allowing the German Army to impale themselves and be cut to pieces, would such a strategy have worked? It certainly seemed to work for Cunctator against Hannibal: no engagement, just cut off supplies.
2. Do you think the same principles are transferrable to Chess? In short, blockade the centre, bring up the artillery, cut down the mobility of the opponent's pieces and either strike when the time is right or force the opponent to run out of time. This was the strategy employed by THE RUSSIAN World Champion Petrosian.