All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [190]
Kalinichenko hoped too much, too soon. Though the Russians had mass, and could replace their horrific 1941 losses, they still lacked the combat power and logistical support to sustain deep penetrations. The New Year offensive by five fronts or army groups, personally directed by Stalin, petered out even before the spring thaw arrested movement. The Germans held their line south of Leningrad, maintaining the threat to the city; they moved to cut off the Volkhov front and destroy Second Shock Army. Its commander Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov was captured, and subsequently raised a Cossack ‘Russian Liberation Army’ for the Nazis.
In the Crimea, the Germans blocked the western exit from the Kerch peninsula, trapping a vast Russian army, then counter-attacked. Between 8 and 19 May, Manstein achieved another triumph, shattering the Crimean front and taking 170,000 prisoners. Seven thousand survivors took refuge in limestone caves until the Germans blasted the entrances with explosives and pumped in gas. Lt. Gen. Gunther Blumentritt, who became a Wehrmacht army commander, wrote of the Russians rather as he might have described wild beasts he could not respect, but grudgingly feared:
Eastern man is very different from his Western counterpart. He has a much greater capacity for enduring hardship, and this passivity induces a high degree of equanimity towards life and death … Eastern man does not possess much initiative; he is accustomed to taking orders, to being led. [The Russians] attach little importance to what they eat or wear. It is surprising how long they can survive on what to a Western man would be a starvation diet … Close contact with nature enables these people to move freely by night or in fog, through woods and across swamps. They are not afraid of the dark, nor of their endless forests, nor of the cold … The Siberian, who is partially or completely Asiatic, is even tougher … The psychological effect of the country on the ordinary German soldier was considerable. He felt small and lost in that endless space … A man who has survived the Russian enemy and the Russian climate has little more to learn about war.
Manstein favoured bypassing the fortress of Sevastopol, but Hitler insisted on its capture. The 1,350-ton 800mm giant siege gun ‘Big Dora’ was brought forward, utilising enormous labour because it could move only on twin railway tracks. Franz Halder dismissed Dora, an example of wasteful Nazi industrial effort on prestige weapons, as ‘an extremely impressive piece of engineering, but quite useless’. Its seven-ton shells and 4,000-strong crew contributed much less to the capture of the city than the dogged efforts of Manstein’s infantry. The defenders were also pounded from the air. A Luftwaffe dive-bomber pilot, Captain Herbert Paber, wrote: ‘One explosion next to another, like poisonous mushrooms, shot up between the rocky hideouts. The whole peninsula was fire and smoke – yet in the end thousands of prisoners were taken even there. One can only stand amazed at such resilience … That is how they defended Sevastopol all along the line … The whole country had to be literally ploughed over with bombs before they yielded a short distance.’
When the city finally fell on 4 July after a siege of 250 days, the NKVD’s units were among those which escaped, after massacring all their prisoners. The dreadful losses in the Crimea were attributed to the incompetence of the Soviet commander, Stalin’s favourite Lev Mekhlis, who rejected pleas for units to be allowed to dig in as a symptom of defeatism. The only redeeming feature of the disaster was that Mekhlis was sacked. Sevastopol cost the Germans 25,000 dead and 50,000 tons of artillery ammunition. The attackers were again impressed by the stubbornness of the resistance.
Meanwhile further north, as the ground dried out after the thaw, on 12 May Gen. Semyon Timoshenko launched a