Stalingrad - Antony Beevor [34]
In the early spring of 1942, the divisions that were to perish at Stalingrad took little interest in staff gossip. Their immediate concerns were replenishment and rearmament. It said much for the professional resilience of the German Army (and much less for its sense of self-preservation) that memories of the terrible winter were virtually effaced as soon as spring and new equipment arrived. ‘Morale was higher again,’ remembered one commander, whose company at last had a full complement of eighteen tanks. ‘We were in a good state.’ They were not even greatly disturbed by the fact that even the long-barrelled version of the Panzer Mark III had only a 50-mm gun, whose shell often failed to penetrate Soviet tanks.
Although no announcement had been made within divisions, everyone knew that a major offensive would not be long in coming. In March, General Pfeffer, the commander of the 297th Infantry Division, said half-jokingly to a captain who was reluctant to be sent back to France for a battalion commander’s course: ‘Just be happy that you’re getting a break. The war will last long enough and be terrible enough for you to get a good taste of it.’
On 28 March, General Haider drove to Rastenburg to present the plans demanded by the Füihrer for the conquest of the Caucasus and southern Russia up to the Volga. He did not suspect that in Moscow, the Stavka was studying Timoshenko’s project for a renewed offensive in the area of Kharkov.
On 5 April, the Führer’s headquarters issued orders for the campaign to bring ‘final victory in the East’. While Northern Army Group, with Operation Northern Light, was planned to bring the siege of Leningrad to a successful conclusion and link up with the Finns, the main offensive – Operation Siegfried, renamed Operation Blue – would take place in southern Russia.
Hitler was still convinced of the Wehrmacht’s ‘qualitative superiority over the Soviets’, and saw no need for reserves. It was almost as though his removal of the army-group commanders had also effaced all memory of the recent failures. Field Marshal von Bock, the most rapidly reappointed, doubted that they had the strength to seize, let alone hold, the Caucasian oilfields. He feared that the Soviet Union was not running out of reserves as the Führer’s headquarters so firmly believed. ‘My great concern – that the Russians might pre-empt us with their own attack – ’he wrote in his diary on 8 May, ‘has not diminished.’
That same day, Bock welcomed General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, who had broken the Demyansk encirclement. Seydlitz, an artilleryman, was a descendant of Frederick the Great’s brilliant cavalry general, known in his youth for galloping between the sails of a windmill in full swing, but most famous for the great victory of Rossbach in the Seven Years War, where his massed squadrons carried the day. Walther von Seydlitz was also impulsive and, like his ancestor, he was also doomed to ill fortune and an embittered old age. Seydlitz had arrived that afternoon by air from Königsberg, where he had snatched a few days’ leave with his wife, before taking over command of LI Corps under Paulus. When he and his wife had said goodbye at the airfield, they never imagined, ‘that it was a farewell for almost fourteen years’.
Seydlitz went forward to Kharkov the next day. The city, he found,
had not been seriously damaged when captured. ‘The buildings mainly date from tsarist times,