The first defeat of the Wehrmacht in the USSR. history and us
A lot has been said about the factors that contributed to the victory of the USSR over Germany, much less attention is paid to the reasons for the defeat of the Wehrmacht. We note the main mistakes of the Third Reich, which are referred to by German historians and generals.
Hitler's incompetence
Most German historians claim that the defeat of Germany was not so much due to individual strategic mistakes, but because of the adventurism of political and military plans.
Hans Adolf Jacobsen notes that "the political goal pursued by Hitler far exceeded the effectiveness of the military and economic means at his disposal."
Hitler, as the main culprit of the defeat in his memoirs, is also called by German military leaders. So, General Walter Challe de Beaulieu writes about the “uncertainty of the strategic goal at the beginning of the war” and about the “flurence of the Fuhrer between Moscow and Leningrad”, which did not allow building on the success of the first months of the war.
On the one hand, the desire of the German generals to relieve themselves of all responsibility for the lost war is understandable, but on the other hand, one cannot ignore the role that Hitler played in the preparation and deployment of the war against the USSR. Note that after the failure near Moscow, the Fuhrer assumed sole command of the Wehrmacht.
Muds and frosts
Military historian and Major General Alfred Filippi noted that the German generals foresaw the likelihood of hostilities in off-road conditions and mudslides and prepared divisions for this. For example, in the infantry division of the first wave, horses were the main traction force: according to German data, their number was approaching 5 thousand.
But at the same time, the degree of motorization was high - 394 cars and 615 trucks, 3 armored personnel carriers and 527 motorcycles.
The plans of the German armies were already violated by the first thaw, which, based on Guderian's notes, lasted from October 7 to November 4, 1941. The German generals note that after the success at Kyiv they were ready to march on Moscow, but "many formations got stuck in a quagmire, which allowed the Russians to strengthen the defense."
To no lesser extent, the advance of the Wehrmacht was slowed down by unusually severe frosts for the Germans, which engulfed the European part of the USSR already at the end of November 1941. The cold affected not only the soldiers, but also weapons and equipment. Guderian noted in his memoirs that grease froze in rifles, machine guns and machine guns, hydraulic fluid thickened in the recoil devices of guns, and the brake system of cars did not function in the cold.
Human resources
Already in August 1941, General Franz Halder wrote that Germany had underestimated the strength of Russia. This is not about superiority in manpower - it did not exist at the beginning of the war - but about the unparalleled dedication with which the Red Army fought and the Soviet rear worked.
The great miscalculation of the German command was that it could not foresee the ability of the USSR, under the conditions of the most severe pressure of the war, to mobilize human resources and in a matter of months restore the losses of almost half of the agricultural and two-thirds of the industrial capacities.
It is important that the Soviet Union devoted all its resources to the fight against the enemy, which Germany could not afford to do. True, Guderian noted that the High Command of the Third Reich made a miscalculation in the distribution of divisions in theaters of war. Of the 205 German divisions, only 145 were sent to the East. According to the German general, in the West, primarily in Norway, Denmark and the Balkans, 38 divisions turned out to be superfluous.
During the war, another mistake of the German command came to light in the distribution of armed forces. The number of the Luftwaffe contingent was over 20% of the total number of soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht. Moreover, out of 1 million 700 thousand Luftwaffe military personnel, approximately 1 million 100 thousand people were directly related to aviation - the rest are auxiliary personnel.
Scale of the war
A distinctive feature of the military conflict between Germany and the USSR is its huge scale. From the autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1943, the length of the Soviet-German front was never less than 3800 km, while the German armies had to go through the territory of the Soviet Union about 2 thousand km.
Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist admitted: “We did not prepare for a protracted struggle. Everything was built on achieving a decisive victory before the onset of autumn. The reason for the failures in the East, according to the field marshal, was that the German troops "were forced to overcome vast spaces, not having the proper flexibility of command."
Von Kleist is echoed by a military historian, former Major General Kurt von Tippelskirch, who sees the main reason for the defeat of the German army in the fact that its forces were "meanly wasted by useless resistance in an unnecessary place and at an inconvenient time, as well as fruitless attempts to capture the impossible."
Mistakes of the German generals
Albeit with great reluctance, but still the German military leaders admit their grossest strategic miscalculations, which ultimately led to a failure on the Eastern Front. Let's take a look at four of the most important.
1. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt calls the choice of the initial disposition of the German troops the first strategic mistake. We are talking about the gap between the left and right flanks of Theodor von Bock's armies, formed due to the impenetrable Pripyat swamps. As a participant in the First World War, Rundstedt was well aware of such a danger, but neglected it. Only the fragmentation of the Red Army units then saved Army Group Center from a flank attack.
2. The German command admits that the summer campaign of 1941 began without a clearly defined goal and a unified view of the offensive strategy. The General Staff did not determine the direction of the main attack, as a result of which Army Group North got bogged down near Leningrad, Army Group South slowed down its advance near Rostov, and Army Group Center was completely thrown back from Moscow.
3. Catastrophic mistakes, according to German historians, were made during the attack on Moscow. Instead of switching to temporary defense of the positions reached in November 1941 in anticipation of reinforcements, the Wehrmacht sent the main forces to capture the capital, as a result of which German troops lost more than 350 thousand people in three winter months. The offensive impulse of the Red Army was nevertheless stopped, but at the same time the German army significantly reduced its combat capability.
4. In the summer of 1942, the German command sent its main forces to the Caucasus, thus underestimating the possibility of resistance by the Soviet troops near Stalingrad. But the city on the Volga is the most important strategic goal, capturing which Germany would cut off the Caucasus from the "Great Land" and block access for the USSR military industry to Baku oil.
Major General Hans Doerr noted that "Stalingrad should go down in the history of wars as the greatest mistake ever made by the military command, as the greatest disregard for the living organism of its army, ever shown by the leadership of the state."
Albeit with great reluctance, but still the German military leaders admit their grossest strategic miscalculations, which ultimately led to a failure on the Eastern Front. Let's take a look at four of the most important.
1. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt calls the choice of the initial disposition of the German troops the first strategic mistake. We are talking about the gap between the left and right flanks of Theodor von Bock's armies, formed due to the impenetrable Pripyat swamps. As a participant in the First World War, Rundstedt was well aware of such a danger, but neglected it. Only the fragmentation of the Red Army units then saved Army Group Center from a flank attack.
2. The German command admits that the summer campaign of 1941 began without a clearly defined goal and a unified view of the offensive strategy. The General Staff did not determine the direction of the main attack, as a result of which Army Group North got bogged down near Leningrad, Army Group South slowed down its advance near Rostov, and Army Group Center was completely thrown back from Moscow.
3. Catastrophic mistakes, according to German historians, were made during the attack on Moscow. Instead of switching to temporary defense of the positions reached in November 1941 in anticipation of reinforcements, the Wehrmacht sent the main forces to capture the capital, as a result of which German troops lost more than 350 thousand people in three winter months. The offensive impulse of the Red Army was nevertheless stopped, but at the same time the German army significantly reduced its combat capability.
4. In the summer of 1942, the German command sent its main forces to the Caucasus, thus underestimating the possibility of resistance by the Soviet troops near Stalingrad. But the city on the Volga is the most important strategic goal, capturing which Germany would cut off the Caucasus from the "Great Land" and block access for the USSR military industry to Baku oil.
Major General Hans Doerr noted that "Stalingrad should go down in the history of wars as the greatest mistake ever made by the military command, as the greatest disregard for the living organism of its army, ever shown by the leadership of the state."
At the beginning of April 1945, the final phase of the defeat of German fascism began. The Red Army was preparing to storm Berlin, and the allies, according to the plan agreed with Stalin, were moving in their direction.
They were waiting for a lot of interesting and terrible finds.
Position of the Wehrmacht
The German forces, greatly reduced, without an orderly supply, immobile due to lack of fuel, became even more incapacitated due to the stoppage of tanks and heavy guns. In addition, they did not have air support.
Therefore, despite the order of the Supreme High Command to provide "fanatical resistance", the Germans could not resist the superior enemy forces.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Lieutenant General George Patton, commander of the 3rd Army; Lieutenant General Omar Bradl), Commander of the 12th Army, and Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, Commander of the 1st Army, are talking at an airfield in Germany
American soldiers supported by M4A3 Sherman medium tanks of the US 12th Armored Division near Krautosheim in Germany.
Soldiers of the 403rd Regiment of the 76th Infantry Division of the United States pass through the village of Hupperath, Germany
Crew of 105-mm howitzer M2A1 from the 33rd Field Artillery Battalion of the 1st Infantry Division of the United States is shelling German positions near the city of Erftstadt, Germany
Jeep "Willis" with captured officers of the Wehrmacht at the tank M5 "Stuart" from the US 4th Panzer Division in the city of Hersfeld, Germany.
A young German prisoner captured in the city of Ubach (Ubach) in Germany.
A group of young captured German anti-aircraft gunners "flakhelfers" captured by units of the 9th US Panzer Division
In desperation, the Germans began to throw even their children into the hell of war.
Released Soviet prisoners of war from the camp in Eselheide, Germany.
About 30,000 Soviet prisoners of war died in camp No. 326 Eselheide.
In April 1945, the camp was occupied by units of the 9th US Army, about 9 thousand remaining Soviet prisoners of war were released from German captivity.
In addition, they had to bear a heavy moral burden - the German troops were now fighting on their own land, they saw the suffering and victims of the civilian population, the terrible, daily intensifying destruction of their cities and villages.
The consistently implemented strategic plan of the Western Allies to win a decisive victory in the North German Plain, with Berlin as the main goal, the German command could not oppose any adequate measures.
Thus, the Ruhr industrial region was isolated as a result of two breakthroughs - at Wesel and Remagen, and here the remaining formations of Army Group B were surrounded. They received a direct order from Hitler to remain surrounded and fight to the last. Thus, these troops dropped out of the command of Field Marshal Model (who later found the only way out of the situation - suicide). Now the last battles were going on in Germany - from one section of the broken front to another there was a fairly rapid advance of the allies to the Elbe.
Dwight Eisenhower recalled:
“During the offensive of the 1st Army in the Harz mountains, more than 15 thousand enemy soldiers and officers were cut off. They stubbornly defended themselves until April 21. The terrain in the mountains is very rugged.
During the week, fierce battles continued in order to eliminate the encircled grouping, as well as to repel attempts by other German units to free the troops surrounded in the Harz. Even further north, Simpson's 9th Army advanced at the same pace as the other troops of the 12th Army Group.
By 6 April, the 9th Army had crossed the Weser, secured a bridgehead, and thereafter rushed towards the Elbe, which it reached just south of Magdeburg on 11 April.
The next day the 2nd Armored Division of this army captured a small foothold on the east bank of the Elbe, ten miles down the river. The capture of a second small bridgehead by units of the 5th Armored Division of the 13th Corps north of Magdeburg was thwarted by the enemy, who blew up a bridge across the river.
It seemed that the enemy in this sector of the front was ready to give up all the territory west of the Elbe, but fiercely resisted any attempts to force the river.
The Germans immediately counterattacked the bridgehead of the 2nd armored division, which, under pressure from the enemy, was abandoned on April 14. Even further south, the 83rd Division undertook a crossing over the Elbe.
In the north, battles unfolded on the Weser-Ems Canal, in the mountains of the Teutoburg Forest, on the Weser River, in the mountainous regions of Taunus and Hesse, on the Fulda River and the Werre River, in the Thuringian Forest, on the Sahl River, in the Harz Mountains, on the Aller River.
But the resistance was ineffectual.
In the south, there were battles on the Upper Main and the turn of the Neckar River, in the Raue-Alb region and on the Upper Rhine - where the 19th Army had created a front covering the Black Forest.
The emerging division of the German troops in the West into northern and southern groups, which began due to the unrestrained onslaught of American tank forces, became more and more distinct.
Ruhr boiler
The forcing was successful and hostilities began on the other side.
After concentrating on the bridgehead of the main forces of the 21st Army Group, the allied forces launched an offensive around the Ruhr from the north. The British 2nd Army advanced on the Bremen direction in order to create an external encirclement front, occupied Munster and Osnabrück on April 3, and the American 9th Army attacked Lipstadt, which it captured on April 1.
At the same time, the troops of the 12th Army Group, almost without resistance, were rapidly advancing north. On April 1, the 1st American Army joined in Lipstadt with units of the 9th American Army, completing the encirclement of the Ruhr group, which consisted of 18 divisions - a total of about 325 thousand people.
American military personnel in a Willys MB army vehicle drive past German vehicles abandoned on the side of a road in Germany
German 20 mm FlaK 38 (20 cm FlaK 38) automatic anti-aircraft guns, broken and abandoned on a city street in Germany.
Captured Soviet tank KV-2, which was used by the Germans during the defense of Essen, a city in western Germany, and was re-captured - this time by the Americans.
English medium cruising tank A34 "Comet" (Comet) Mk.1 from the 11th armored division "Taurus Pursuant" on the march near the city of Wesel (Wesel) in Germany.
American light tank M5A1 "Stuart" of the 9th US Army on Reindalen Street in Germany.
American tank M4A3 (76) "Sherman", lined and burned on the streets of Neumarkt, Germany.
The German command tried to break through the encirclement in the area of Hamm and Siegen, but these attempts were unsuccessful. The encircled troops were completely demoralized. In addition, there was an acute shortage of military equipment and weapons, ammunition and various types of supplies.
Nevertheless, the fascist German leadership decided to hold the Ruhr in order to tie down the American-British troops here and prevent them from being used on other sectors of the front.
Omar Bradley wrote:
"I allocated 18 divisions to eliminate the Ruhr "sack". For 18 days the enemy stubbornly defended himself in the Ruhr, and we fought our way through the doomed cities that were densely dotted with the Ruhr basin."
Hitler's treasure
On April 7, in the salt mines south of Mühlhausen, soldiers of the 90th Division of the US Army discovered the gold reserves of the German Reichsbank: 100 tons of gold bars and a huge amount of foreign currency.
General Dwight Eisenhower, accompanied by Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, inspects art and other treasures looted by the Nazis in Europe and hidden in a salt mine in Germany.
Omar Bradley wrote:
“Happy that we managed to escape from this stench, we settled in several planes and headed for the village of Merkers on a strafing flight, where we landed. In this village, three days ago, the 90th division opened an underground cache in which the last gold reserves were stored Reich The cache was discovered by accident.
One evening during the curfew, a military police soldier detained two women. They explained that they were going for the midwife. The soldier went with them, intending to see if they were cheating. As they passed the salt mines, one of the women pointed to the entrance to the mine and said:
"That's where the gold is hidden." The next day, the cache was opened. The military police found in it gold bars worth 100 million dollars and 3 billion Reichsmarks.
In addition, in this cache, equipped at a depth of more than 600 meters from the surface of the earth, in a dry salt mine, 2 million dollars were hidden in banknotes and a slightly smaller amount in English, Norwegian and French currency.
Eisenhower and I descended into the mine in a cage operated by a German worker. Once in the mine, we saw bags with the black seal of the Reichsbank. Each bag contained two 25-pound gold bars. The keeper of the cache explained to us that the 3 billion Reichmarks stored here were the last reserve of Germany.
Terrible finds
But not only gold had to be found by the advancing forces of the anti-Hitler coalition. They liberated the concentration camps and saw with their own eyes the wild horror of what was happening there.
The first of the death camps liberated by the Allies was Orduff.
Since 1871, the area east of Ohrdruf has been used by the army for exercises. In 1906, the Reichstag ordered the construction of a bridgehead and barracks, which began in 1908.
In 1941, Nazi Germany established a prison for Soviet prisoners of war on this territory.
The Ohrdruf camp (Au?enkommando Ohrdruf S III) was established in November 1944 as a subdivision of Buchenwald to hold prisoners forced to build bunkers, tunnels and mines. In the period from November 14, 1944 to January 15, 1945, Ohrdruf was an independent camp, independent of the leadership of Buchenwald.
On January 30, 1945, a thousand prisoners were taken out of the Bergen-Belsen camp, many of whom died.
On April 2, 1945, about 9,000 prisoners were sent on a 51-kilometer "death march" to Buchenwald. Leaving the camp, the guards tried to burn 3,200 corpses at the stake, since there was no crematorium in Ohrdruf.
Three days later, on April 5, the 4th US Panzer Division entered the concentration camp. Ohrdruf was the first liberated camp where survivors were found.
US Army Major John R. Scotti and a medical captain at the bodies of prisoners of the Ohrdruf concentration camp (Ohrdruf).
A week later, Ohrdruf was visited by Generals Patton, Bradley, and future US President Dwight Eisenhower, who described what he saw in his diaries as a severe shock.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other American officers at Ohrdruf concentration camp shortly after the camp was liberated. As the American troops approached, the guards shot the remaining prisoners.
American generals George Patton, Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower in the Ohrdruf concentration camp at the fire, where the Germans burned the bodies of prisoners
American generals (from right to left) Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton watch a demonstration of one of the methods of torture in a concentration camp, typical German pastimes.
In his book War As I Knew It, General Patton claims that he, Eisenhower, and Bradley later learned that the man in the striped concentration camp torturer was actually one of the camp's executioners.
Patton notes that the man was killed by other inmates the day after their visit.
Bradley recalled:
"Ike was still pale from Ohrdruf's visit, and George poured him a whisky.
"I can't understand how the Germans got to this point," Ike said. “Our soldiers would never have been able to abuse bodies like the Germans did.
“Not all Hans can stomach it,” Deputy Chief of Staff Patton cut in. - Somehow we led all the inhabitants of a German town through one of the concentration camps. Returning home, the mayor and his wife opened their wrists.
"Well, that's the most encouraging thing I've heard," Ike said. “It shows that some of them are not all lost yet.”
The generals inspected the gallows, mass graves and the salt mine, which kept the secret stock of gold of the Third Reich.
When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, first visited the death camp, he ordered that a huge amount of photographs be taken of what he saw there. Then he ordered to notify the local German population, to collect the inhabitants from the nearby villages, to lead them on foot through the entire camp and to involve the bodies of the prisoners in the burial.
"Fix everything you see," said Eisenhower.
A former prisoner of the Buchenwald concentration camp shows the bodies of prisoners to Allied officers from the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes.
The corpses of prisoners in the courtyard of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp (Nordhausen). Pictured on the left are American soldiers.
American military police and civilians stand near a trailer with the bodies of concentration camp prisoners located in Germany.
End of the Battle of the Ruhr Sack
Meanwhile, the catastrophe of the German troops in the Ruhr pocket was approaching.
Field Marshal Kesselring tried, on the orders of the Supreme High Command, to keep the region of the Harz mountains, for which he created a new army headquarters under the command of General Lucht.
By order of the Supreme High Command on April 10, the situation that had arisen was taken into account:
US Army tankers in an M4A3(76)W Sherman tank drive past the dead German soldiers of a tank destroyer unit. US 84th Infantry Division, Hanover area, Germany.
M4A3(75) Sherman tanks of the US 9th Panzer Division near Westhausen, Germany.
American tank M4A3E8 HVSS "Sherman" of the 10th armored division on the street Rosswalden (Rosswalden) in Germany.
The southern part of the theater of operations was held with the help of the remaining formations of the 7th, 1st and 19th armies.
The former commander of Army Group X (Colonel General Blaskowitz) was tasked to gain a foothold in the "Holland Fortress" and fight there to the end. The 5th Panzer Army was defeated in the Battle of the Rhine and in the encirclement of Army Group B in the Ruhr industrial region.
Von Melettin wrote:
“Most of the troops of Army Group B were now surrounded between the rivers Ruhr and Sieg. It was hard to imagine a more depressing situation. Fog crept over the frozen ground, and the gloomy ruins of the cities of the Ruhr made up a suitable scenery for the last action of this tragedy.
Huge mountains of coal and slag, broken buildings, twisted railroad tracks, destroyed bridges - all this created an ominous picture. I have seen battlefields more than once, but none of them looked as terrible as the huge industrial region of the Ruhr in the last days of the existence of Army Group B.
At 5:00 am on April 6, the US 18th Airborne Corps launched its attack on the Sieg River. The Americans ran into stubborn resistance, and as a result of the fighting they were detained a few kilometers north of the river.
Once again, the 12th Volksgrenadier Division proved to be excellent in battle. However, on the eastern flank, the 3rd American Corps, advancing against the exhausted units of the 15th Army, quickly advanced, and soon we lost contact with our left neighbor. As a result of fierce fighting in the northern part of the pocket, Duisburg fell on April 10.
On the afternoon of April 9, the Americans entered Siegburg, and on April 11, the American 13th Armored Division had already begun an offensive from the city in a northerly direction. The 3rd Parachute Division fought heroically, and anti-aircraft guns installed in positions east of Cologne destroyed about 30 American tanks. By the evening of April 11, the Americans reached the outskirts of Berg Gladbach.
On April 13, resistance in the northeastern part of the pocket ceased, and the remnants of the 183rd Infantry Division were surrounded in Gummersbach. With the attack of the 3rd American Corps on Hagen through Ludenscheid, the entire boiler on April 14
was cut into two parts; The 5th Panzer Army and the 63rd Corps were isolated in its western half. Now there was no question of organized resistance - we were able to hold out only in separate strongholds.
Hitler still cherished the hope of holding his own.
By order of the Supreme High Command (in mid-April), Lukht's army was to remain in the "Harz Fortress". Wenck's new army was in the process of being formed roughly in the area between Berlin and Halberstadt.
According to Hitler's plan, she was to first remove the blockade from the "Harz Fortress", and then advance on the Ruhr industrial region to liberate the encircled divisions of Army Group "B".
The idea remained just that—events moved faster. The formations of the Wenck army partially took part in the battles in the "Harz fortress", but basically they were required east of the Elbe. The situation was desperate. The Western allies had already approached the Elbe, and the Red Army was approaching Berlin and Dresden.
Robert Myers (left) and Sgt. Spradling of the 275th Infantry Regiment next to a destroyed German 88mm FlaK 18 anti-aircraft gun near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
The opera house in Frankfurt am Main and the 40 mm Bofors L / 60 anti-aircraft gun with a Stiffkey sight, belonging to the 3rd US Army, standing next to it, in May 1945.
In the south, the 1st and 19th Armies retreated to and beyond the Danube (between the upper reaches and Regensburg), while the 7th Army held on to the upper Mulde River with a front to the west. She was, in accordance with the situation, placed under the command of Army Group Center Schörner.
The 1st and 19th armies were still trying to resist in separate areas on the Danube with a front to the north, on Lech, on the Isar, and finally on the Inn with a front to the west. Each defensive line, one way or another, still broke through from the flanks.
According to the order, the armies eventually withdrew to the Alps (approximately from the area south of Salzburg to the Allgäu) and were to hold the "Alps fortress", from which, in fact, only the name remained. In the valleys of the Alps, there were mainly supply units and weak remnants of combat units without tanks, heavy guns and without supplies. In the Alpine valleys, the troops and the local population would begin to starve within a few weeks.
But all this was already useless.
An American M4 Sherman tank from the US 1st Army drives along the autobahn in the direction of Kassel past a group of surrendering German soldiers.
German soldiers surrender to the American 10th Armored Division at Trier. In the foreground is a medium tank M4A3 (105). On the right in the picture are American trucks GMC CCKW 353.
American soldiers at the Browning M1917 machine gun on the street of a town in Germany. In the background on the right is the silhouette of an American M4 Sherman tank.
Soldiers from the US 10th Armored Division search German POWs in Konken, Germany.
On April 15, the troops of the 1st American Army, having expanded the formed corridor, turned to the west and east in order to accelerate the liquidation of the group. On April 17, the commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Walter Model, gave the order to stop resistance and shot himself.
Eisenhower wrote this:
“At the same time as all these operations in the north, equally decisive events were unfolding in the south. The main direction was the advance to the southeast, down the Danube valley to Linz in order to connect with the Russian troops in Austria.
Since Bradley's offensive in the center had achieved its intended objectives, we could single out Patton's 3rd Army for the offensive along the Danube Valley, while the 6th Army Group directed all its efforts to capture areas of a possible Nazi stronghold in the south and west.
To make sure that Devers' troops advanced quickly, we allocated the US 13th Airborne Division to him for use at the discretion of the army group's leadership.
However, Devers' troops advanced so quickly; that there was no need to use the 13th Airborne Division, and it turned out that it turned out to be the only American division that arrived in Europe, but did not participate in the battles.
The advance of the 3rd Army down the Danube began on 22 April. The enemy tried to defend at Regensburg, but the 3rd and 20th corps quickly captured the bridgeheads on the opposite bank of the Danube to the east and west of the city and rushed down along the river. The 11th Armored Division of the 12th Corps rushed forward and on May 5 accepted the surrender of the German garrison at Linz, Austria.
As the main body of the 3rd Army moved down along the Danube, Patton was given the 5th Corps from Hodges' army for reinforcements. Patton promptly sent him east to Czechoslovakia. On May 6, the corps captured Pilsen. In this area, Russian troops were rapidly approaching from the east, and again there was a need to establish coordination between the parties.
By agreement, we sent American troops to occupy the Pilsen-Karsbad line, while the boundary line in the south of Czechoslovakia was established at the line of the České Budějovice-Linz railway and from there along the Enns river valley.
The final major offensive of Patch's 7th Army began on 22 April. The 15th Corps of this army, which was on the right flank, moved down the Danube and then turned south to capture Munich, the very city from which the Nazi movement began. He was captured on 30 April. On May 4, the 3rd division of the same corps captured Berchtesgaden.
Other troops occupied Salzburg. The enemy's defenses fell apart everywhere.
On April 22, the 21st and 6th Corps of the 7th Army crossed the Danube and moved towards the "national redoubt". On May 3, the 103rd Division of the 6th Corps occupied Innsbruck and advanced further towards the Brenner Pass. There, on the Italian side of the border between Germany and Italy, this American division met the 88th division of the American 5th Army, advancing from Italy.
My words of a year and a half ago that I would meet with the soldiers of the Mediterranean theater of operations "in the center of the enemy camp" came true.
By the end of April, the main goals were achieved in all sectors of the front, or their achievement in the coming days did not raise any doubts.
On April 14, the troops of the 9th and 1st American armies joined at Hagen, thereby dividing the German group into two parts.
Eisenhower wrote:
"" The German troops in the "Ruhr pocket" were commanded by Field Marshal Model. At first, he tried to break out of the encirclement by launching an offensive in the north, but was defeated. A similar attempt to the south also ended in failure. And now the German garrison in the Ruhr had no choice but to surrender.
Bradley's troops continuously squeezed the encircled enemy, and on April 14, as a result of a strike undertaken by the Americans, the encircled group was divided into two parts. Two days later, the eastern part ceased resistance.
On April 18, the entire remaining garrison capitulated. At first we thought that we would capture about 150 thousand in the Ruhr. In fact, 325 thousand were captured, including 30 generals.
We defeated twenty-one divisions and captured a huge amount of booty. Hitler must have hoped that the Ruhr would be as stubbornly defended as Brest, but eighteen days after its encirclement, the garrison surrendered; the number of prisoners turned out to be even greater than we took at the last stage of the fighting in Tunisia almost two years ago.
Bradley quickly regrouped his forces for an offensive to the east. By the time the Germans surrendered in the Ruhr, some of the head units of Bradley's troops had already reached the Elbe, one hundred and fifty miles from Kassel. Bradley's troops advanced on a broad front. In the south, the 3rd Army advanced towards the borders of Czechoslovakia and the city of Chemnitz.
By April 14, she had reached the area. To the left of Patton's army, the 1st Army went on the offensive on April 11 and advanced rapidly, meeting only disorganized resistance.
On April 14, the 3rd Armored Division from Collins' 7th Corps reached Dessau, practically reaching the Elbe. This corps, starting its combat path with a landing on the Normandy coast, soon captured Cherbourg and then fought through the whole of North-Western Europe from the French coast to the Elbe River.
American troops occupied the cities of Magdeburg and Düsseldorf. The German troops surrounded in the Ruhr completely ceased resistance. About 317 thousand German soldiers and officers were captured by the Allies.
In central Germany, large Allied forces crossed the Weser and the Werra. The Germans did not have a solid front line. The 7th Army of the Wehrmacht fought desperate defensive battles, not having enough forces.
In southern Germany, a large grouping of Allied troops reached the Würzburg area.
On both sides of the Neckar were allied forces advancing to the southeast. There was the 1st Army of the Wehrmacht until that time managed to keep in touch with other troops, the 19th Army was still on the Rhine.
At the same time, the advanced units of the 3rd American Army entered the territory of Czechoslovakia from the west.
As a result of the Ruhr operation, the last major German grouping on the western front was destroyed. The Ruhr was the most important military-industrial region of Germany, on which Germany's ability to continue the war depended, and its loss caused dire consequences for the Wehrmacht.
Two German soldiers surrender to units of the US 6th Armored Division in western Germany. On the left in the foreground is an American M4A3 (76) Sherman tank.
German prisoners of war at the assembly point in the 7th US Army sector in western Germany
A column of captured German soldiers follows parts of the US 10th Panzer Division in the Oberammergau area
The defeat of the German army group "B" in the Ruhr caused the collapse of the entire German Western Front, organized resistance ceased, as a result of which the Allied armies began to quickly move east and operate freely in Germany, meeting only a little resistance from the Germans in some places
The complete collapse of the western front of the Wehrmacht was carried out. It only remained to solve the problem with individual parts of the collapsed front
A chapter about the battle near Moscow from the book Stalin's Wars by the British historian Geoffrey Roberts, which was published simultaneously in the USA and Great Britain (J. Roberts, "Stalin's Wars", Yale University Press, New Haven and London). This is not the first British author about the Great Patriotic War. A few years ago, his study “Stalingrad. The battle that changed history." The chapter is large in volume, and we offer it in presentation.
The battle for Moscow began with two terrible disasters. In early October, seven Soviet armies fell into a German trap near Bryansk and Vyazma. Three fronts defending the approaches to Moscow - Bryansk, Western and Reserve - suffered terrible damage. Lost 64 rifle divisions, 11 tank brigades and 50 artillery regiments.
Confessions of the Nazis
Fedor von BOK,
Field Marshal, Commander of Army Group Center 12/7/1941.
A terrible day... In a staggeringly short time, the Russian has again brought the defeated divisions to their feet, thrown new ones from Siberia, Iran and the Caucasus into the threatened sectors of the front, and seeks to replace their lost artillery with a multitude of rocket guns. In contrast, the strength of the German divisions, as a result of continuous fighting, was reduced by more than half; the combat effectiveness of the tank troops became much less even ... The desire to defeat it (that is, the USSR. - Ed.) With a short assault "was worth the maximum use of all forces." But this was a delusion, and now the army group is forced to go on the defensive under the most difficult conditions.
From a war diary
Walter WARLIMONT,
Lieutenant General, Deputy chief of staff of the operational leadership of the OKW (Hitler's headquarters), together with Jodl, chief of this headquarters, developed a plan for attacking the USSR - the plan "Barbarossa"
The first conclusions were made in OKW Directive No. 39 (dated December 8, 1941). In it, the army was ordered to completely abandon "all major offensive operations and go on the defensive"; the reasons cited were “severe winter weather coming unexpectedly early and consequent difficulties in resupplying”; in fact, it was simply an official recognition of the situation that the enemy had imposed on us a few days earlier ... From a strategic point of view, the new instructions were nothing more than an acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of the Hitlerite military plan drawn up in July 1940 (that is, the plan “ blitzkrieg).
From the book "At Hitler's Headquarters"
Heinz GUDERIAN,
colonel general,
commander of the 2nd tank army
The attack on Moscow failed. All the sacrifices and efforts of our valiant troops were in vain. We have suffered a serious defeat, which, due to the stubbornness of the high command, led to fatal consequences in the coming weeks.
I was visited by Richthofen (Field Marshal of Aviation. - Ed.). We talked for a long time face to face and found that we have the same view of the current situation. ... We underestimated the strength of the enemy, the size of his territory and the severity of the climate, and now we have to pay for this.
From book
"Memories of a Soldier"
Kurt von TIPPELSKIRCH,
infantry general, commander of the 12th Army Corps of Army Group Center, then commander of the 4th Army
The attack on Moscow failed, the goal of “defeating the Soviet Union through a fleeting military operation” failed. Moreover, the Russians brought in far from all their forces to stop the offensive. Now they saw that the time had come to strike themselves... Before Hitler had time to think about the far-reaching consequences of an unsuccessful campaign against the Soviet Union, a Russian counter-offensive fell upon the German army. The strength of the Russian strike and the scope of this counter-offensive were such that they shook the front for a considerable distance and almost led to an irreparable disaster.
From book
"History of World War II"
Adolf Gitler
Didn't the Russian infantryman fight badly in the First World War? And now he fights like a lion!.. Now one can no longer even think about victory.
In conversation with Jodl, December 1941
This blow, according to Roberts, surpassed in every respect the defeats suffered by the Red Army in June, August and September 1941.
This defeat is partly due to the numerical superiority of the Germans. Army Group Center consisted of a million people, 1700 tanks and self-propelled guns, 14 thousand artillery pieces and 950 aircraft. The Soviet defending troops had 800 thousand people, 782 tanks and 545 aircraft. The Soviet troops, weakened in the August and September battles, did not have time to either dig in properly or create a defense in depth. As always, there were operational miscalculations, but the simple truth was that the Germans fought and maneuvered better. It was this, together with superiority in manpower and technology, that brought them success. And now the Soviet capital was under direct and immediate threat.
Stalin reacted to the worsening martial law by ordering Zhukov to fly from Leningrad to Moscow on October 5, and on October 10 he appointed him commander of the Western Front. On October 5, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command ordered the formation of 10 reserve armies east of Moscow. During the battle for the capital, about 100 divisions were transferred to the central sector of the huge front, including 9 divisions from the Far East.
Despite the concentration of forces, plans were developed for the evacuation from Moscow, and on October 15 they began to implement them. The first to be evacuated to Kuibyshev were diplomatic missions and foreign correspondents, people's commissariats for foreign affairs and defense. Most of the staff of the General Staff was transferred to Arzamas. They mined part of the city to blow it up if necessary.
All this, Roberts believes, were precautionary measures, they were taken not because they expected the fall of Moscow, but they gave rise to rumors and panic among a part of the population, which began to leave the city at their own peril and risk. Nervous tension was relieved after A. Shcherbakov, who headed the city committee of the party, spoke on the radio. He assured that Stalin would remain in the capital. Despite all the descriptions of the so-called “big drape”, the vast majority of Muscovites did not flinch in the face of the impending German threat. In October-November, five divisions of the militia fought the enemy. And half a million citizens dug anti-tank ditches and built anti-tank barriers on the outskirts of Moscow.
When Zhukov took command, the defense passed along the line of Mozhaisk. Zhukov immediately decided to create a second line, closer to the city. By the end of October, the Germans broke through or bypassed the Mozhaisk line and approached Moscow from the northwestern and southwestern directions and pressed the defenders in the center. By mid-November, the Germans were separated from the city by 70 km, but they were never able to make the final push. It was at this moment that Stalin decided to make his own, and perhaps decisive, contribution to the salvation of Moscow. The next anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was approaching, which was always marked by a speech by the party leader and a military parade on Red Square. On November 1, Zhukov recalled, Stalin called and asked if the situation at the front would allow the anniversary to be celebrated as usual. Zhukov replied: the Germans are not in a position to launch an offensive with the main forces in the next few days. The ceremonial meeting on November 6 took place at the Mayakovskaya metro station (Zhukov was on it.).
Roberts calls Stalin's report a masterful one. And he singles out the following points in it: although the Germans stood at the gates of Moscow, although a serious danger loomed over the country, the first months showed that the plan for a “blitzkrieg” had failed. Stalin explained this by three reasons: Hitler failed to involve either Great Britain or the USA in the general coalition against the USSR; the calculation of the Nazis on the fragility of the Soviet system and rear, on interethnic conflicts did not materialize; the Germans underestimated the strength of the Red Army, hoping that they would advance unhindered into the interior of the country.
Stalin stressed that the German invaders were waging a war of extermination against the peoples of the USSR and, in particular, the great Russian nation and its culture were under the threat of destruction. The defeat of Hitler, he argued, was inevitable, since the USSR-Great Britain-United States coalition, the most powerful economic union, would produce more engines, which would decide the fate of the war. “Modern war,” he said, “is a war of motors. The war will be won by whoever has the overwhelming majority in motor production.”
Concluding his report, he said that the Soviet Union was waging a just war, fighting for the liberation of the enslaved peoples of Europe and the peoples of the USSR.
The next day there was a parade on Red Square. “The great liberation mission fell to your lot,” Stalin said, addressing the soldiers standing on the main square of the country. - Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war. Let the courageous image of our great ancestors - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov inspire you in this war. May the victorious banner of the great Lenin overshadow you.”
What was striking about the report and this speech, Roberts notes, was the complete absence of any reference to the Communist Party. Lenin was mentioned among other names of the heroic pantheon of Russia. Of course, the author writes, Stalin "did not write off" the party; not at all, it remained the main instrument of the general mobilization of forces in the war. Silence about it in the report meant this: he counted on such patriotic unity, which goes far beyond the confines of party members.
The report and speech on Red Square were published in the Soviet press. In the days that followed, military censorship studied millions of letters to and from the front and noted a significant rise in the mood of the people. For example, they reported from Leningrad: workers, managers and representatives of intellectual labor say that these speeches inspire confidence and bring clarity to the prospects for war: the inexhaustible reserves and power of the USSR guarantee the complete demolition of German fascism, and the help of the USA and Great Britain, which Stalin spoke about, accelerate the defeat of the aggressors.
In mid-November, the Germans resumed their offensive and in several places approached the capital. The Soviet defense caved in, but did not concede key lines, for example, the city of Tula. Finally, the Headquarters allocated reserves to cover the gaps in the defense and finally stop the Germans. In early December, the offensive of the Wehrmacht completely fizzled out. The fatigue of the German troops, supply difficulties due to stretched communications, winter weather - all this played a role. But the Stavka's reserves became the decisive factor. They were sufficient not only to defend the capital, but also for the offensive. And Zhukov was already ready to launch his counterattack.
On November 30, Zhukov presented Stalin with a plan for a counteroffensive near Moscow. And five days later, the operation began. Zhukov planned strikes against the enemy forces enveloping Moscow from the north and south in order to drive them back from the Soviet capital. Stalin was full of enthusiasm on the eve of the counteroffensive. “The Russians have been to Berlin twice, and there will be a third time,” he told Vladislav Sikorsky, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile, on December 3.
By mid-December, the Germans were pushed back 100-200 miles (150-300 km) from Moscow. On December 16, the commander of Army Group Center, Fedor von Bock, turned to Hitler so that he would give permission for the retreat. Hitler refused, ordered to “stand still”, forbade any waste, demanding fanatical action, and this may have saved the Wehrmacht from defeat at that time.
The second summer campaign of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front
The war occupied half the world.
Ston is worth the second summer.
Girdled the front of the country.
Somewhere Ladoga. And somewhere
Don - and the same on the Don.
Somewhere bombs trample the city,
Sinking on the sea ships ...
Somewhere tanks climb into the mountains,
Trouble moved to the Volga.
(A. Tvardovsky)
After the winter collapse of the Wehrmacht near Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942. on the blitzkrieg it was possible to put an end to it. It soon became clear to military professionals and diplomats that the war was also lost with the blitzkrieg. So, in November 1942, after the beginning of the Anglo-American landings in Africa, Ribbentrop told Hitler: “I ask you to immediately grant me the authority to start peace negotiations with Russia through Madame Kollontai in Stockholm, even if most of the lands occupied in the East are returned.” Hitler turned purple, jumped up and ordered Ribbentrop not to even mention it (1). Apparently, from that moment on, Ribbentrop's star began to set. Even earlier, in November 1941, Hitler was approached with similar proposals by the commander of the reserve army, General Friedrich Fromm, who considered the situation hopeless by the autumn of 1941. greatly appreciated, but since Hitler had established a strict system of separation of powers of individual departments, it was completely useless to address him with political questions that did not directly relate to his opponent's own sphere. It was almost impossible to influence Hitler's political decisions, just as it was impossible to understand his logic, because, as Raeder wrote in his memoirs, "Hitler was a great master of both dialectics and bluff" (3) .
Rumors about the difficulties of the war on the Eastern Front, based on letters from front-line soldiers, quickly spread throughout Germany, determining the mood of the German people. For the first time since the beginning of the war, it became clear that the personal impressions of soldiers are more effective than propaganda. At the first difficulty, Hitler showed a complete lack of understanding of the nature of military difficulties and an inability to show elasticity in the face of inexorable facts. So, General Hans von Sponeck for the withdrawal of troops from the Crimea on December 29, 1941 (he saved the troops from encirclement) was sentenced to death by an officer's court headed by Goering - as the highest-ranking army officer - was sentenced to death (4). The execution was replaced, however, by 7 years in prison. After July 20, 1944, on the orders of Himmler, Sponeck was shot.
Also a difficult test for the Wehrmacht was the case that took place on the segment of the Army Group North.
On January 12, 1942, Field Marshal von Leeb turned to Hitler with a request to withdraw the corps of General Walther von Brockdorf-Allenfeldt from Demyansk II, which was threatened with encirclement. Hitler refused, and on February 8
In 1942, after the swamps and small rivers froze, which prevented the free movement of German troops on the flanks, the Soviet troops closed the encirclement ring - 100,000 German soldiers ended up in the boiler, and Leeb, feeling guilty for not insisting on his own, resigned, which was accepted. The German soldiers surrounded in the Demyansk Cauldron were able to be supplied with everything they needed from the air until the moment of release, in which the Waffen-SS troops played the main role. Soviet troops held the blockade of the Demyansk pocket from February 8, 1942 to April 24, 1942. For the first time in military history, a corps of six divisions numbering about 100 thousand people - almost an army - was successfully supplied by air. About 100 planes flew into the boiler and flew back daily (5) . The battles for Demyansk went on for more than a year - until the spring of 1943. Six German infantry divisions of the 2nd Corps under the command of General Count Brockdorf-Allenfeldt did not allow the Red Army to break through from Lake Ilmen to the south and west and thus saved Army Group North from destruction (6) . Only in January 1943 did the systematic withdrawal of the troops of the 16th Army from the Demyansk pocket begin. The commander of the 16th Army, Ernst Busch, managed to withdraw the troops without significant material losses - the Soviet troops took only two French howitzers as trophies. For successful actions, Hitler promoted Bush - on October 12, 1943, he became commander of the Army Group Center instead of the wounded von Kluge. On October 21, Field Marshal Bush became the 274th Wehrmacht soldier awarded the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross (7). Impressed by this success, on April 25, 1943, Hitler established the Demyansk Shield badge, which became a very prestigious award. Accordingly, when the 6th Army was blocked near Stalingrad, Hitler was sure that the Demyansk experience could be repeated. Nevertheless, the organizational victory of the Luftwaffe near Demyansk was pyrrhic - the losses of aircraft, which were so needed in other sectors of the front, were extremely high (8) .
In the spring of 1942, Hitler said: "We avoided the fate of Napoleon, deceiving fate, we did what Napoleon could not do 130 years ago" (9) . On April 26, 1942, in the Reichstag, Hitler stated that Napoleon fought in Russia at 25 degrees below zero, and he, commander Hitler, at -45 degrees, and once even at -52 degrees. (10) German soldiers suffered greatly from the difficulties of the Russian winter, especially in the third military winter for the Germans: up to February 20, 1942, about 50 thousand cases of frostbite were noted. It is no coincidence that the German medal "For the winter campaign of 1941" (black metal cross with a scarlet ribbon) German soldiers called "frozen meat".
Initially, it did not reach the general German public that the war in the East had acquired a different character; The Germans were alarmed by only two events: the change in leadership of the ground forces and the beginning of the collection of winter things for the front. The fact is that as early as November 18, 1941, Goebbels announced that warm clothes for soldiers on the Eastern Front were ready for shipment and were already being loaded into wagons. At the same time, he complained only about the sluggishness of transport workers and the lack of rolling stock. And suddenly, unexpectedly for everyone, on December 21, Goebbels announces that warm clothes and Christmas gifts should be collected for front-line soldiers. From that moment on, the Germans began to attach more importance to the letters of front-line soldiers about the lack of supplies (11) . The resignation of Brauchitsch from the post of head of the OKH was not commented on by the German press, but the Germans saw something wrong in the fact that his name was not mentioned, and that Hitler did not thank him for his service. Many Germans, as the SD reported, even saw a connection between the collection of warm clothes and the resignation of Brauchitsch, who allegedly could not really provide the Wehrmacht with everything necessary. Confidence in Hitler, however, was still complete, and soon the bewilderment caused by the changes subsided (12), and in the working environment (among former communists and social democrats), as the SD reported, the belief prevailed that the removal of "reactionary" generals was undeniable progress. In other words, Hitler was able to find scapegoats and even earn the sympathy of the people in the process. However, another SD report said that the Germans still expected Hitler to explain about the winter supply shortages and the reasons for the dismissal of the generals (13) . But Hitler, showering the dismissed generals with gifts, did not comment on the reasons for the resignations. Also, the German inhabitants were confused by the fact that at the funeral of Reichenau in January 1942, the Fuhrer had a friendly conversation with Generals Rundstedt and von Bock - it was not clear who, in fact, was to blame for the German failures on the Eastern Front? (fourteen)
March 15, 1942 - on the holiday of the Memory of Heroes - Hitler spoke on the radio; The SD reported that the following passage of the Fuhrer made the greatest impression on the listeners: “Today we already know with complete certainty that the Bolshevik hordes, which we could not break last winter, will be destroyed in the coming summer” (15) . The Germans considered that if the Fuhrer had not been sure of his words, he would never have risked speaking in such a way (16).
Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front showed some improvement in mood when spring came and reinforcements began to arrive. It got warmer, the days got longer; the end of the hard trials of the Wehrmacht seemed to be looming. In general, after a harsh winter, the fighting spirit of the Wehrmacht was surprisingly quickly restored. The SD reported that the opinion spread in the highest military circles that "if we were listened to more, then there would be no military catastrophe." The resignation of some generals in the troops was perceived positively: “thank God that Hitler drove out the mediocre generals who are to blame for our troubles” - this thought was repeated in many letters from the front. The SD also reported that any criticism of the military leadership gave in to the person of Hitler - it was a subconscious taboo for the soldiers and for all Germans, because otherwise it would have been necessary to recognize the fallacy of Germany's choice and the unjustification of the victims (17) . This was reinforced by the fact that the Soviet offensive on a broad front in February 1942 was extremely unsuccessful: it was not prepared financially; Soviet troops suffered unthinkable losses: until April 1942, the Red Army lost 1.8 million soldiers (18) . As the pace of the offensive weakened, the Soviet command returned to the previous clumsy tactics of frontal strikes against operational centers of defense, so that by the end of winter the Red Army found itself in almost the same difficult situation as the enemy’s army, but the Germans had more weapons resources and trained soldiers. A connoisseur of the history of war N.G. Pavlenko noted that by the beginning of May 1942 the forces of the belligerents on the Eastern Front were approximately the same (19) .
By 1942, the Wehrmacht had three weak points.
First, he needed to make up for the losses. This could be done, since there were still 5 million men liable for military service in Germany. Hitler, however, did not allow them to be drafted: he believed that Germany lacked workers, not soldiers. The Luftwaffe had a clear surplus of personnel, but it was not possible to achieve their transfer to the ground forces. Instead, at the end of the summer of 1942, twenty Luftwaffe divisions were formed for ground operations, but they did not have sufficient combat experience, and their combat value was significantly lower than that of the infantry divisions of the Wehrmacht. The creation of these ridiculous formations was a concession to the claims of Goering, who sought to expand his own competencies; he longed for leadership not only in aviation, but also in ground forces. As General Mellenthin wrote, these units were well manned and well armed, but their training was completely inadequate. The Luftwaffe officers did not understand the principles of ground combat and did not have the appropriate experience. The creation of Luftwaffe field formations was absolutely pointless. For this nonsense, the soldiers paid with their lives, since the losses in these units were significant (20) . If at the beginning of the Eastern campaign the Wehrmacht had 3.2 million soldiers, then on July 1, 1942, the Wehrmacht already had 2.8 million (21) . On the main (during the summer campaign of 1942) direction, the Wehrmacht strike force consisted of 900 thousand soldiers against the Bryansk, Southwestern and Southern fronts with a total number of 1.7 million soldiers (22).
Secondly, the Wehrmacht lacked weapons and the ability to continuously supply troops. Although by the middle of 1942 the Germans had about 3 thousand tanks on the Eastern Front, this was not enough to complete 24 tank divisions (initially, Hitler insisted on forming 36 divisions with the same number of tanks). In addition, each motorized division, according to the staffing table, was supposed to have a tank unit. There were not enough trucks, carts, horses - in 1941, the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front was more mobile than in 1942. By the summer campaign of 1942, Army Group South had nine new tank divisions, seven motorized and 52 infantry divisions, - but this is at the expense of the troops of the Army Groups "Center" and "North", practically suitable only for positional warfare. And for her, these troops were poorly equipped, and there were few of them. In the ten tank divisions of these army groups, there were almost a third of the regular number of tanks, and the "motorized" divisions were sometimes equipped only with bicycles. As for the ordinary infantry divisions of both army groups, they lacked weapons and soldiers; they were only halfway up to staffing levels.
Thirdly, the situation with ammunition and material support became more and more alarming. The OKH calculated that there would be enough fuel on the Eastern Front only until September 1942, and taking into account the distances and the condition of the roads, this crisis could come even earlier (23) .
To fully appreciate the significance of the second German summer campaign in Russia, it is necessary to recall the objectives of the first campaign. They did not consist in the conquest of the entire Soviet Union, but in the extermination of its defenders. The strategic goal was tactical extermination. This strategy failed, because the speed of advance was slow, and the space was huge, the resistance was the same, and the readiness of the Soviet leadership to sacrifice their soldiers was immeasurable. If the strategy of annihilation had not succeeded under the favorable conditions for the Germans in 1941, how could it have succeeded under the less favorable conditions of 1942? Hitler understood this, therefore, instead of a strategy of crushing, he applied a strategy of economic attrition, hitting the material basis of the power of the Soviet armed forces. It was necessary to deprive the Soviet Union of the Donetsk industrial region, Kuban grain and Caucasian oil (24).
In the spring of 1942, Hitler had very clear intentions of crushing the Red Army once and for all, destroying the Soviet troops in the south, and then deciding whether to turn the Wehrmacht in a direction east of Moscow or send it to the oil fields of Baku. Hitler could not continue the war on the same scale as in 1941, since Germany was experiencing enormous difficulties in maintaining the size of its army at the level of 7-8 million soldiers. At the same time, the Soviet Union, despite the huge losses in 1941, increased its armed forces by almost 50% by 1942 (from 7 to 11 million). By the time the Soviet offensive began in the winter of 1942, the Germans had practically no reserves to cover the southern sector of the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union, on the contrary, was able to prepare forces in the amount of 90 divisions for the operation near Stalingrad. Most of them were fresh and fully equipped with connections (25) .
By April, a scheme had been devised to seize the Donets Basin, making Stalingrad an important strategic target. But for Hitler, Stalingrad was only the first step - in the future, he wanted to turn north and cut off the communications of the Soviet troops defending Moscow. At the same time, he provided for the direction of "reconnaissance groups" further east, to the Urals. At the same time, he admitted that an operation of this magnitude was possible only if the Red Army suffered an even greater defeat than last summer. Halder claimed that the entirety of these plans was not known to the OKH; on his maps, the line ran along the Volga near Stalingrad (26).
As for the fighting spirit of the Wehrmacht, it was at the same level as in the previous year. However, no army could have survived the terrible winter without suffering irreparable moral damage.
One of the German veterans of the Eastern Front wrote in his diary on the eve of the 1942 campaign: “Oh, of course, we were heroes. At home, everything was the best for us, all the newspapers were full of stories about us. Eastern front! There was something about those words when you said you were going there... as if you were confessing that you had a terminal illness. You were surrounded by such friendliness, such forced cheerfulness, but in your eyes there was that special expression, that animal curiosity with which they look at the doomed ... And deep down, many of us believed in this. In the evenings we often talked about death. Each of us was waiting for some narrow-eyed Mongol sniper. Sometimes the only important thing seemed to be that our bodies were taken to the Reich so that our children could come to the grave.
Among the factors that undermined the combat morale of the Wehrmacht was the lack of new weapons comparable to the new modifications of the T-34 or the Katyusha multi-barrel rocket launcher. The German infantry went into battle, armed almost the same as last summer, only the number of submachine gunners in the companies increased.
For the German panzer divisions, the most important change was the inclusion of 88-mm guns in their battalions. It was called the "anti-aircraft battalion", but was brought into the state due to the anti-tank potential of the famous universal gun. The motorcycle battalion was eliminated, but sometimes the infantry battalions were equipped with half-tracked armored personnel carriers. The arrows in them were called "Panzergrenadiers" (Panzergrenadier); then this name was extended to all infantry attached to tank divisions. A more powerful 75-mm cannon was installed in the T-IV tanks, which allowed them to fight on equal terms with the T-34 (28) . It is interesting to note that not only the Germans, but also our Western allies lagged behind the USSR in tank building. On this occasion, the English historian Geoffrey Hosking wittily remarked: “A planned economy works better in conditions of improvisation than in conditions of planning itself” (29) . In the first months of 1942, American and British tanks arrived under Lend-Lease, but Western tank building, by all standards, lagged so behind Soviet and German that these tanks were distributed to those places where hostilities were not fought. More or less suitable for the Eastern Front, the American Sherman tank began to arrive there in the fall of 1942, when the superior T-34 was produced for 18 months, and the Tiger was already ready for mass production. A number of British tanks "Matilda" and "Churchill" were used in brigades operating in support of the infantry; there they took root because of the very thick frontal armor. Kleist noted that in the Caucasus, his soldiers saw on the Soviet side several "hani" - American light high-speed tanks with a 37-mm cannon (30) .
As for the development of the military situation in 1942, in April the thaw began, and all hostilities ceased. Only in the Crimea, Manstein's 11th army pushed back the Soviet troops in the Kerch region and began to prepare for the assault on Sevastopol.
The most critical situation for the Wehrmacht was developing near Kharkov, where heavy fighting had not subsided since mid-January. The Soviet command at any cost sought to wrest Kharkov from the enemy by bilateral coverage from the north and from the south. This maneuver was quite risky. During the offensive, the northern wedge of the Soviet troops got stuck near Belgorod and Volchansk, and the southern one (the 57th Soviet army) was able to break through the German front on the Donets to a width of 80 km and threatened Dnepropetrovsk, the supply center of Army Group South. 257th Infantry Division from Berlin and 44th Infantry Division from Vienna (former Austrian Guard Regiment Hoch- und Deutschmeister) from the last forces they kept Slavyansk and Balakleya; the fate of Army Group South essentially depended on them. The chief of the General Staff, Halder, was constantly interested in reports from the 44th division's sector (31). On a stretch of 100 km, the 44th division held the offensive of an entire Soviet corps, advancing with the support of tanks and batteries of rocket launchers. The fighting was exceptionally fierce, also for the reason that the possession of a settlement with a warm hut and a stove in severe frosts was a matter of life and death. More importantly, if the Germans had lost ground near Balakleya, Timoshenko's troops would have been able to secure a large-scale breakthrough to Kharkov. Oberleutnant von Hammerstein, nephew of General Hammerstein, the former head of the personnel department of the German General Staff (32), who was dismissed by Hitler for anti-Nazi beliefs, died in the battles near Balakleya.
All the successful defensive battles fought by the Wehrmacht in the winter and spring of 1942 were won thanks to the stamina of the German soldiers. At that time, the German soldiers were superior to the Soviet soldiers both in experience and morale. By the beginning of March, the Soviet advance on Kharkov began to fizzle out. For the German leadership, the question arose: would it not be better to pause the fighting on the entire Eastern Front, including the sector of Army Group South, - let the Red Army attack, exhausting itself and gradually depleting reserves. The head of operations of the OKH, General Geisinger, believed that such an approach would entail a loss of initiative, as well as a loss of time working for the enemy. Chief of the General Staff Halder agreed with this approach and suggested that the main attack be aimed at Moscow. Hitler objected to this direction: it seems that he was afraid of the fortified positions of the Soviet troops in front of Moscow. He wanted to find a solution in the south, depriving the Soviet Union of Caucasian oil. A certain role in this was assigned to Rommel, who, after the defeat of the British troops in Ghazal and Tobruk, had to move towards the Persian Gulf in order to block the most important land bridge for Lend-Lease supplies, and also to interrupt (at least from the south) oil supplies to USSR. That is why the summer campaign of 1942 began with a large German offensive on the southern sector of the Eastern Front.
In the summer of 1942, Timoshenko's troops were originally planned to be crushed at the bend of the Don in order to create a springboard for the subsequent offensive on Stalingrad and the Caucasus - not earlier than 1943. 33 But as the plans were being developed, the appetites of German strategists (including Hitler) began to grow.
The plan for the summer (1942) campaign of the Wehrmacht was presented to Hitler by Halder at the end of March 1942 and was codenamed "Blau" ("Blue Plan"); according to him, the scheme of actions was to occupy the quadrangle Voronezh - Saratov - Stalingrad - Rostov by an offensive along two parallel straight lines in the north along the Kursk - Saratov line, and in the south - along the Taganrog - Stalingrad line. Under such a cover, Hitler planned to cross the Caucasus to Baku (34). One army group advanced from Kursk, and the other from Taganrog; then both wedges were to join west of Stalingrad, encircling the Soviet troops between the Don and Donets. The second part of the "Blau" plan provided (after the completion of the first) an offensive in the Caucasus to the oil fields of the USSR. April 4, 1942
Colonel General Jodl submitted to Hitler a draft directive for the Blue Plan. It began with a brief overview of the situation, a listing of individual operational tasks and provided considerable freedom of action to the commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Bock, with regard to the practical implementation of a gigantic operation. But after the crisis of the winter of 1941, Hitler lost faith in the loyalty of the generals and refused to sign the draft, saying that military orders should be more specific (35) .
Jodl began to object, but Hitler took the papers from him, saying that he would do everything himself. The next day, Directive No. 41 of April 5, 1942 appeared. It became the second most important document (after the Barbarossa plan) that determined the course of the war. In this directive, the goal of Operation Blau was called the destruction of enemy forces in the bend of the Don, followed by the capture of the oil resources of the Caucasus and overcoming this mountainous barrier. According to this plan, Stalingrad was an intermediate goal, and the Caucasus was considered the main one. About 100 divisions of the Axis countries were concentrated in the south to implement grandiose plans. They were opposed by 120-140 Soviet divisions. The Soviet strategic reserve was concentrated between Moscow and Voronezh, where Stalin expected the main blow; these expectations were wrong. The Soviet command did not guess the intentions of the Germans and believed that the attack on Stalingrad was an attempt to cut off the flank of the Moscow direction. Too many Soviet soldiers were concentrated on the Central Front and too few in the south.
The directive in its final form was a cross between a combat order, a fundamental decision, a regulation on the practical implementation of tasks, and security measures.
In the preamble to the directive, Hitler made a bold statement: “The winter battle in Russia is drawing to a close. The enemy suffered very significant losses in manpower and equipment. In an effort to develop what at first appeared to be a success, during the course of the winter he used up most of the reserves earmarked for further operations. As soon as the weather and terrain permit, the German troops, having superiority over the enemy, must again seize the initiative in order to dictate their will to the enemy. The goal is to destroy the manpower left at the disposal of the Soviets to continue the resistance and, as far as possible, deprive them of a vital military and economic potential. Based on this task, Hitler proposed: “Continuing to adhere to the original main line in the campaign in the East, in the center of the front we need to temporarily choose the tactics of containment ... at the same time, concentrating all available forces for the main operation in the southern sector in order to destroy the enemy on the Don , subsequently take possession of the oil fields of the Caucasus region and cross the Caucasus ”(36) .
The key problem of this major operation was the left flank stretched along the Don. To eliminate the threat rooted in this, Hitler made a decision that predetermined the death of the 6th Army at Stalingrad - he ordered the Hungarian, Italian and Romanian armies to be brought into position, which were not well equipped for such operations. The big problem was that Manstein's 11th army could not immediately take part in the offensive on the Volga and the Caucasus, since it was connected by Sevastopol: three Soviet armies - the 47th, 51st and 44th - blocked the exit from the Crimea to Kerch Peninsula. The operation to break through the 11th Army into Kerch was called the Bustard Hunt; it began on May 8, 1942.
In front of the 11th Army in the Kerch direction was an enemy twice its size; besides, the Soviet troops entrenched themselves in well-thought-out defensive positions. On May 8, 1942, Manstein struck at the Crimean Front on the Kerch Peninsula. 296 thousand Red Army men defended themselves against 150 thousand advancing Germans and Romanians. As a result, the Germans captured 170 thousand Red Army soldiers, as well as large trophies - 1133 guns, 258 tanks and 323 aircraft. The Wehrmacht lost 7,500 men (37).
Manstein was preparing a breakthrough on the southern flank to reach the rear of the defending Soviet troops - it was a very bold plan: five infantry and one tank division against three Soviet armies. But even with this balance of power, he was able to succeed. One of the participants in the Kerch battle wrote: “I was on the Kerch Peninsula in 1942. The reason for the shameful defeat is clear to me. Complete distrust of the commanders of the armies and the front, tyranny and wild arbitrariness of Mekhlis, illiterate in military affairs. He forbade digging trenches so as not to undermine the offensive spirit. Moved heavy artillery and army headquarters to the very front line. Three armies stood at a front of 16 km, divisions occupied 600–700 m along the front; nowhere and never have I seen such saturation with troops. And all this was mixed into a bloody mess, was thrown into the sea, and perished only because the front was commanded not by a commander, but by a madman ”(38) . On May 8, the Germans broke through positions on the left wing of the Crimean Front. On May 10, the breakthrough from the south ended in complete success - the 22nd Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht went to the rear of the Soviet 51st Army, and on May 11 it also cut off the 47th Soviet Army. Ten Soviet divisions turned out to be in the cauldron; it was not possible to evacuate them from the Kerch Peninsula. 170 thousand Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner.
On the morning of May 17, 1942, Manstein was in Kerch. He went ashore. In front of him lay the sea - the Kerch Strait - and behind it Taman - the approaches to Asia, the gates of the Caucasus (39).
In the summer of 1942, the Soviet leadership greatly overestimated its capabilities - Stalin planned three operations at the same time: ousting the Germans from the Crimea (April 9, the Soviet offensive began on the Kerch Peninsula), releasing Leningrad (Vlasov's 2nd shock army launched an offensive in May) and the capture of Kharkov ( operation began on May 12). As a result, all three designs failed; everywhere there were huge losses. The Germans managed to obtain the most important cartographic material from the cartographers of the 2nd shock army of Vlasov, cut off by the Wehrmacht - during the entire war they were no longer able to obtain such a number of topographic maps of the territory of the Soviet Union from the western borders to the Urals. The booty was sent to Berlin, and soon the commanders of the front-line units of the Wehrmacht received fresh detailed Soviet maps (40) .
The most important plan, requiring the use of almost the entire tank reserve, was Timoshenko's attack on Kharkov. Military historian N.G. Pavlenko described Stalin's order to carry out an offensive operation with the aim of capturing Kharkov as an adventure, which was not objected to, trying to please the dictator, S.K. Timoshenko, N.S. Khrushchev and I.X. Bagramyan (41) . It so happened that it was near Kharkov with the onset of spring that the Germans wanted to start their summer campaign. The plan of the commander of Army Group "South" von Bock was simple - the 6th Army from the north, the 17th Army and the 1st Panzer Army were to cut off the Soviet troops on the Izyum ledge. The operation was codenamed Friedrich. Timoshenko's troops, on the contrary, had the goal of building on winter successes and recapturing Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye from the Germans with five armies. In the event that Kharkov was captured by the Soviet troops, the Germans would have lost a huge supply base - a base on which an enormous amount of cargo had accumulated. In addition, railway and motor roads to the lower reaches of the Dnieper ran through Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye - there were no more crossings to the Black Sea.
The Germans planned an offensive for May 18, but Timoshenko was ahead of them - on May 12, he began an operation to cover the 6th army of Paulus near Kharkov from the north and from the south. The northern wedge of the Soviet offensive was the 28th Army, which included sixteen rifle and cavalry divisions, three tank and two mechanized brigades. Only six German divisions opposed the northern wedge (XVII and LI army corps of generals Karl Hollidt and von Seidlptz-Kurzbach. The southern wedge of the Soviet offensive around Kharkov was the 6th and 57th Soviet armies. In this direction, half a dozen German and Romanian infantry divisions, which did not have tanks, found themselves under pressure from the vastly superior forces of the Red Army.42 The weak combat effectiveness of the Romanians, which was rumored in the Soviet army, was actually a myth - and Manstein and other German officers were skeptical about the professional qualities of the Romanian officers, to arm the Romanians, but the Romanian soldiers were spoken of as hardy and persistent in battle (43).
General Paulus was able to stop the northern Soviet wedge 20 km from Kharkov, but the southern one (from the Izyum ledge) swept away everything in its path. On May 16, Soviet cavalry approached Poltava, where von Bock's headquarters were located. The catastrophe of the German defense seemed imminent. In this difficult situation, von Bock decided on a very risky step - he ordered the start of Operation Friedrich, but "with one arm", with one wedge, since Paulus's army was embroiled in fierce defensive battles in the north. On May 17, von Kleist's army group launched an attack from the area south of Izyum, "cutting" the Soviet southern wedge advancing forward. At that moment, when on May 17 the strike force of the Kleist tank group went on the offensive against the Soviet troops of the 57th and 9th armies, it was necessary to immediately stop the offensive of the Soviet troops on Kharkov, but Stalin rejected this proposal (44) . Even on May 19, when Kleist took Izyum and the Soviet troops were in a semi-encirclement, the command of the Southwestern Front - S.K. Timoshenko, I.S. Khrushchev and I.X. Bagramyan - they simply stated this fact in a combat report to Stalin and did not offer anything, although it was obvious that the troops needed to be deployed and try to withdraw from the encirclement. This was convincing evidence that the front command had come to terms with the approaching catastrophe (45) . After the German tanks broke through the defenses of the Southern Front and began to cut off the Soviet troops, Timoshenko - instead of throwing his tank reserve against the Germans - sent it to reinforce the advancing units, which themselves went into the "boiler". On May 23, the encirclement closed (parts of the German 6th Army and the 14th Panzer Division united); 240 thousand soldiers were captured, the trophies were also great - 2026 guns and 1249 tanks. The Germans lost about 20 thousand killed and wounded (46) .
Near Kharkov, the Soviet troops were not lucky - they launched an offensive against the German group, which was in full readiness and was waiting for the enemy to attack. Now Timoshenko had no choice but to deploy his troops and break through to the east. Will the thin walls of the German pocket be able to hold back the onslaught of Soviet divisions? The decisive phase of the operation began; Timoshenko's troops had to break through at any cost - the Donetsk front was only 40 km (47) . Stubborn battles began in order to break out of the German encirclement, but on the third day the onslaught of the Soviet troops began to subside. By that time, the commanders of the 6th and 57th armies (generals A.M. Gorodnyansky and K.P. Podlas) died on the Barvenkovsky bridgehead. In the Kharkov cauldron, the soldiers of the Red Army, mainly attacking at night, tried to break through the encirclement for almost a week. But the ring slammed firmly shut, and thousands of Red Army soldiers perished in the light of German flares. Whole ramparts of dead bodies arose near the German trenches. Only one of the 10 Red Army soldiers of the 6th and 57th armies who fell into the "Barvenkovskaya mousetrap" managed to escape. Paulus became the hero of the Nazi press. The Fuhrer awarded him the Knight's Cross and sent him a congratulation, in which he expressed "admiration for the success of the 6th Army, which managed to defeat the numerically superior enemy" (48) .
The Germans had never won such a victory - being on the verge of defeat, they achieved tremendous success within a few days. Victory reports sounded in the ears of German soldiers - Kerch and Kharkov, two encirclement battles and two victories. The German army in the East again proved its absolute superiority over the enemy. Now the Wehrmacht sought to recapture Rostov-on-Don from the Red Army. The morale of the Wehrmacht was very high, which was facilitated by its successes, good weather and the entry of new types of weapons into the troops. The horrors of last winter were forgotten for a while. “We all suffered from a split personality,” recalled Count Klemens von Kageneck, a lieutenant in the 3rd Panzer Division, who soon received the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves. “We moved swiftly and even joyfully forward, but at the same time we knew that in winter the enemy would again go on the counteroffensive.” The Germans have almost forgotten that Russia, with its vast expanses, harsh climate and bad roads, can grind all their modern equipment and force a maneuverable army back to the tactics of the First World War. In a letter home, General Strecker described the Russian open spaces as "an ocean capable of swallowing up anyone who dares to enter it" (49) .
In the May events near Kharkov, to an even greater extent than in the operations of 1941, Stalin's incompetence, the slavish obedience of the command of the Southwestern Front and the lack of will of the Chief of the General Staff A.M. Vasilevsky. With an undoubted operational talent, he was mortally afraid of contradicting Stalin (50). On the whole, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, created in the USSR at the beginning of the war, and its intermediate bodies in the form of the main commands of the directions, acted extremely incompetently almost throughout the first period of the war. The fear of initiative and responsibility dominated the Soviet commanders of all levels, and high moral and political qualities and personal courage could not replace operational skills and the ability to quickly make the right decisions. Naturally, eyewash flourished under such conditions: Soviet commanders of all ranks belittled their losses, German exaggerated; the highest headquarters did not have objective information and set impossible tasks for the troops.
Zhukov clearly defined the position of military power in the USSR during the war years: "The Headquarters is Stalin, the GKO is Stalin, the Politburo is Stalin." The members of the Headquarters never met, Stalin did not take into account the members of the Headquarters. The rate was a fiction of the collegiate leadership. So, Vasilevsky, being the chief of the General Staff, was not a member of the Stavka (51).
In the art of war, victories are considered outstanding, which are obtained with little blood and skill, and not by numbers. This approach is based on the just conviction that human life, even in spite of war, is the highest value. Otherwise, the war loses its meaning ... Military historian N.G. Pavlenko noted that superiority is usually viewed from two sides: quantity and quality. Each of the parties to a certain extent compensates for the other. Thus, poor armament is compensated for by its greater quantity than that of the enemy, and the weakness of troop training is compensated by their numbers. If, however, one of the sides surpasses the other in many qualitative indicators (troop training, command level, quality of military equipment), then even a significant numerical superiority of the other side in terms of forces and means will not give the desired result. Until the end of 1942, the struggle on the Soviet-German front usually unfolded with the qualitative superiority of the enemy. If in some way the Red Army was superior to the enemy (for example, the T-34 tank), then this advantage was often negated by the low level of training of tank crews and shortcomings in command and control. The tank formations of the Red Army prepared in such a hurry that the practice of driving for many drivers amounted to several hours. They did not know how to fix even the slightest technical malfunctions in tanks, so many vehicles were lost already on the way to the battlefield (52). On the other hand, Wehrmacht Lieutenant General Erich Schneider noted that the Red Army used mortar weapons very skillfully - the 122-mm mortar took on the bulk of the tactical tasks that were usually solved by divisional artillery in the Wehrmacht. Following the Soviet model, in 1944 the Germans created mortar battalions, which became a real nightmare for the Allies after the opening of the Second Front (53) .
Another proof of the qualitative military superiority of the Germans was the great battle for Sevastopol that began on June 5, 1942 and lasted 27 days. Manstein's plan called for five days of artillery preparation; never again during the Second World War did the Germans use such massive artillery preparation. In addition to conventional and rocket artillery, the Germans used three giant special-purpose guns in Sevastopol - Gamma (420 mm, projectile weight 923 kg), Thor (600 mm, projectile weight 2200 kg) and Dora (800 mm, projectile weight projectile 4800 kg), which were created to destroy the fortresses. "Dora" could fire up to three shots per hour. She stood on two double rails, and was guarded by two air defense divisions. In total, 4120 people were employed in servicing the Dora. Fire control and combat work was carried out by one major general, one colonel and another 1,500 military personnel (54). The 88-mm guns of the 18th anti-aircraft regiment played a particularly large role in the assault on Sevastopol; their fire was very effective. During the battles for Sevastopol, the batteries of this regiment fired 18,787 shots.
Sevastopol was defended by seven rifle divisions, one dismounted cavalry division, two rifle brigades, three naval brigades, two regiments of marines, and tank battalions - a total of 101 thousand people. The defenders of Sevastopol had 600 artillery pieces and 2,000 mortars. Forty heavy naval guns stood in the famous casemates of the fortress. Manstein had seven German and two Romanian divisions. During the third assault, the Germans managed to establish an effective blockade of Sevastopol from the sea with the help of aircraft. Not a single Soviet transport sent with cargo for the besieged city returned. The Soviet fleet turned out to be helpless against aircraft and, in fact, abandoned the city to its fate (55) .
July 3, 1942 Manstein's 11th Army took Sevastopol; 90 thousand people were taken prisoner. Crimea became German. In the future, Manstein had to occupy higher positions, but the command of the 11th Army became the pinnacle of his career. The operations of the 11th Army in the Crimea entered the history of military art and are deservedly considered examples of the defeat of a numerically superior enemy solely through skillful command and control of troops. The successes of the 11th Army influenced the course of events on the Eastern Front: the summer offensive of the Wehrmacht in 1942 would not have taken place if the 11th Army had not covered the left flank of the Wehrmacht advancing towards the Volga (56) .
After Sevastopol, Manstein's 11th Army could take part in the implementation of a grandiose plan - in an attack on Stalingrad and the Caucasus, but by an unexpected order from Hitler, the 11th Army was transferred to Leningrad. The transfer of the army, along with siege artillery, to 2,000 kilometers took two months.
Upon arrival, the 11th Army was involved in heavy fighting with Soviet troops that had gone on the offensive on the Volkhov Front. Under such conditions, the Germans had nothing to think about capturing Leningrad (57) .
Despite the noted successes of the Wehrmacht (Kerch, Sevastopol, Kharkov), skepticism spread among the German public - it seems that the war will never end. SD informants reported that even political jokes began to lose their last vestiges of humor: they became vicious (58) . On the other hand, according to the same SD, after the successes of Army Group A in the bend of the Don, the number of Germans who believed in the death of the Soviet Union before the end of the year increased. These overly high expectations worried Hitler and Goebbels. Goebbels ordered that propagandists and newspapermen should not be ahead of developments (59). Hitler, on the other hand, was convinced that by the end of the summer of 1942, the Red Army was completely exhausted and bled dry. The losses of the Soviet side were actually terrible: on the southern flank, the Germans captured about 500 thousand Soviet soldiers; in July alone, the Red Army lost 4,000 tanks (60). But Hitler was wrong - Soviet resources were by no means exhausted.
On June 28, von Bock's offensive began: three German armies (2nd Weichs, 4th Panzer Gotha and 6th Paulus) defeated the Soviet front on both sides of Kursk. From the very beginning, the Soviet troops were inferior to the German ones in numbers; the lack of tanks made it impossible to mount even local counterattacks. Of the four armies that resisted the German onslaught, the 40th Army, which suffered the main blow of the Goth tank army, crumbled in 48 hours. The 13th Army of the Bryansk Front was hastily withdrawn to the north. Two other Soviet armies - the 21st and 28th - retreated east in complete disarray. To top it off, there were no swamps and forests on the southern flank of the Eastern Front, which in the battle near Moscow allowed even small groups of Soviet fighters to delay the enemy. During this triumphant period for the Wehrmacht, the Nazi attitude towards the Slavs reached its peak. In Germany, the magazine "Underman" was published, consisting of photographs that showed the repulsive appearance of the eastern enemy; the general title read: "Under the Tatars, Peter or Stalin - this people was born for the yoke" (61) .
On June 1, 1942, at a meeting in Poltava, Hitler hardly mentioned Stalingrad. First of all, he was interested in the oil fields of the Caucasus. "If we do not capture Maykop and Grozny," he declared, "I will have to stop the war" (62) . At this stage, Hitler was interested in Stalingrad only insofar as it was necessary to destroy the military factories located there and gain a foothold on the Volga. Operation Blau was supposed to begin with the capture of Voronezh. Then it was planned to encircle the Soviet troops west of the Don, after which the 6th Army, developing the offensive against Stalingrad, would ensure the security of the northeastern flank. The Caucasus was supposed to be occupied by the 1st Panzer Army and the 17th Army.
On June 28, 1942, the von Weichs army group launched an attack on Voronezh. Hitler did not tell von Bock that Army Group South should bypass Voronezh, he only told him that he did not insist on taking the city. Von Bock hesitated, unsure of what sequence to proceed. He made a mistake in assessing the Soviet forces in Voronezh: it was overrun with troops (63) . German radio hastened to report the capture of Voronezh on July 7 (on this day, Weichs' tanks and motorized infantry approached the city). The battle for Voronezh was the baptism of fire for the 24th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht, which a year ago was the only cavalry division in the German army. Her "Panzergrenadiers" on July 3 reached the Don and captured a bridgehead on the other side of the river. Von Bock, Hitler left one tank corps, and sent the rest of the tank formations south to Goth's army. As a result, the German troops remaining at Voronezh lost the main striking force that would have allowed them to achieve a quick victory. The defenders of the city were able to impose street fighting on the Germans, which went on for another ten days (64) .
On July 31, 1942, the OKW reported: “German, Romanian and Slovak units crossed the lower reaches of the Don on a front 250 km long and defeated the enemy troops defending in this sector. Motorized units and forward detachments of infantry and mountain chasseur divisions are on the heels of the retreating enemy in complete disorder and have already blocked the path to retreat by parallel pursuit. The number of prisoners and trophies is constantly growing, but with such a rapid advance it still cannot be counted ”(65) .
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