Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [18]
Once Rundstedt’s mobile forces had finished at Uman, they continued, veering to the south of Kiev. The First Panzer Group then swung north, joining up with Guderian’s divisions, whose sudden strike down from the central front took the Soviet command by surprise. The danger of a terrible trap became plain, but Stalin refused to abandon Kiev. He only changed his mind when it was far too late. On 21 September, the encirclement battle of Kiev ended. The Germans claimed a further 665,000 prisoners. Hitler called it ‘the greatest battle in world history’. The Chief of the General Staff, Haider, on the other hand, called it the greatest strategic mistake of the campaign in the east. Like Guderian, he felt that all their energies should have been concentrated on Moscow.
The advancing invaders, overrunning one position after another, suffered a confusion of emotions and ideas as they gazed with a mixture of disbelief, contempt and also fear on the Communist enemy, who had fought to the last. The piles of corpses seemed even more dehumanized when charred, and with half their clothes stripped from them by the force of a shell blast. ‘Look closely at these dead, these Tartar dead, these Russian dead,’ wrote a journalist attached to the German Army in the Ukraine. ‘They are new corpses, absolutely brand-new. Just delivered from the great factory of the Pyatyletka[five-year plan]. They are all the same. Mass-produced. They typify a new race, a tough race, these corpses of workers killed in an industrial accident.’ Yet, however compelling the image, it was a mistake to assume that the bodies before them were simply modern Communist robots. They were the remains of men and women who, in most cases, had reacted to a sense of patriotism that was somehow both spiritual and visceral.
4
Hitler’s Hubris: The Delayed Battle for Moscow
‘The vastness of Russia devours us,’ wrote Field Marshal von Rundstedt to his wife just after his armies had successfully completed the Uman encirclement. The moods of German commanders had started to swing between self-congratulation and unease. They were conquering huge territories, yet the horizon seemed just as limitless. The Red Army had lost over two million men, yet still more Soviet armies appeared. ‘At the outset of the war’, General Haider wrote in his diary on 11 August, ‘we reckoned on about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.’ The door had been smashed in, but the structure was not collapsing.
By mid-July, the Wehrmacht had lost its initial momentum. It was simply not strong enough to mount offensives in three different directions at once. Casualties had been higher than expected – over 400,000 by the end of August – and the wear and tear on vehicles far greater than predicted. Engines became clogged with grit from the dust clouds, and broke down constantly, yet replacements were in very short supply. Bad communications also took their toll. The railway tracks, which were a slightly broader gauge, had to be relaid, and instead of the highways marked on their maps, the armies found dirt roads which turned to glutinous mud in a brief summer downpour. In many marshy places German troops had to build their own ‘corduroy roads’ of birch trunks laid side to side. The further they advanced into Russia, the harder it was to bring supplies forward. Panzer columns racing ahead frequently had to stop through lack of fuel.
The infantry divisions, which composed the bulk of the army, were marching ‘up to forty miles a day’ (but more usually around twenty), their jackboots roasting in the summer heat. The Landser, or infantryman, carried about fifty-five pounds of equipment,