Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [123]
On December 8, Hitler approved an Army high command order placing the forces in Russia in a defensive position. For the next ten days the commanders were free to maneuver, shorten their lines, and improve their situation by falling back to defensible positions. Then Hitler got angry; large amounts of equipment were being abandoned to the cold and the enemy. He stepped in and fired his Chief of the General Staff, von Brauchitsch, and took over supreme command himself. He had had enough of the generals with their subtly superior ways and their foolish ideas that military requirements took precedence over the dictates of Nazi ideology. The withdrawals were to stop; there would be no more retreat; units would fight where they were, and there they would stay. Within a month all three army group commanders were fired and replaced by men who realized what a command from the Fuehrer really meant. On Christmas Day, Hitler fired Guderian too, for allowing a retreat without permission from his master. When General Hoeppner made a snide remark about “civilians” in high places, Hitler dismissed him as well.
Firing generals was one thing, stopping the Russians was another. It was all right to issue standfast orders from Berlin or East Prussia, but the troops in the field, ill equipped and on half rations, kept on falling back. The Russians launched massive attacks in the Crimea, and the Germans there were hard put to contain them. They broke through the center of Army Group South’s front and created a large salient in the German line. Up north they very nearly surrounded large numbers of Germans fighting around Demyansk; Hitler ordered them to hold on, and the Luftwaffe began supplying them by air, setting a precedent for what might happen later.
The worst news was in front of Moscow. The Reds broke the Germans both north and south of the city and drove them back nearly 200 miles. Rage as he might, there was nothing Hitler could do about it; eventually he had to agree that there might be “limited” retreats on the front. Ninth Army of Army Group Center ended up in a huge sack, but the Russians were not quite able to close the neck of it. The Germans organized all-around defense positions which they called “hedgehogs,” and inflicted such heavy losses on the Soviets that even they began to feel they were running out of bodies. By late February they were played out, and the lines stabilized at last. Hitler claimed that it was his policy of no retreat—slightly modified—that prevented complete disaster and utter rout. He may have been right; on the other hand, his generals and critics claimed that his orders cost the Wehrmacht immense casualties, and that in the end the Germans were back on the more or less defensible line they had wanted to retreat to anyway. As March rains came on and the front dissolved in mud, the Russians could feel they had gained breathing space at last. Their greatest accomplishment may have been their forcing Hitler into supreme command where he was free to make mistakes.
Little could be done by either side through April and into May; the mud forced both Russian and German to wallow about cursing. All either could do was make plans for the coming campaign, which both recognized had become a life-and-death struggle. A process of stabilization which neither immediately recognized was now taking place. The Germans, with their economy still not fully geared to war, were becoming weaker. The Wehrmacht of 1942 was poorer than that of 1941; its tank formations had fewer vehicles, many of its infantry battalions were down almost to half-strength. This attrition continued as the war made increasing demands on Hitlerian Germany. Eventually, Albert Speer replaced Goering as economic dictator, but his genius was applied too late to reverse a trend apparent in 1942. Between Hitler’s amateurish meddling in development and the great overextension of German responsibilities, their problems grew until they