The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [299]
In January 1944 Hitler set a problem for OKH planners which threw light on the severe manpower problems that Germany was facing by then. Between the outbreak of war and late 1943 the standard German infantry division had consisted of three regiments totalling nine rifle battalions. Each regiment had twelve rifle and heavy-weapons companies, and a howitzer and anti-tank company, and the division itself also had a separate anti-tank and reconnaissance battalion too, which brought the average division size up to 17,000 men. In October 1943, however, divisions were reorganized to comprise three regiments of only two battalions each, bringing the average size down to 13,656 men. Yet only three months later Hitler was forced to ask OKH how divisions could be cut back to 11,000 men each, without its affecting firepower and overall combat strengths. The planners recognized that this was impossible, and put forward a compromise solution of divisions of 12,769 in size. This ‘1944-type’ infantry division had a higher proportion of combat to service troops – at anything up to 80 per cent – but the swingeing reductions in supply personnel and others were sorely felt. With Germany simply running out of soldiers by January 1944, while divisions still had to hold their sections of many miles of crumbling fronts, such demoralizing reorganizations were a potent foretaste of her coming disaster.
Manstein was attacked on the Dnieper on 29 January 1944 by the 1st Ukrainian Front under Zhukov and the 2nd Ukrainian Front under Konev, perhaps the best two Russian generals since Vatutin had been assassinated by Ukrainian nationalist partisans. A fierce struggle developed, called the battle of Korsun but scarcely heard of in the West; it lasted three weeks, during which two German army corps were cut off in a salient and were extricated by Manstein only at the cost of 100,000 casualties.19 The Russians then just moved on ahead, crossing the Bug and Dniester rivers. Such was its vast preponderance in both men and matériel that the Red Army could afford to engage the entire German force along a line, and then wait to see where the gaps appeared before striking again and again. Yet throughout this losing battle the Germans’ camaraderie and esprit de corps allowed them to continue to make withering counter-attacks, which any less resilient soldiers than the Russians could probably not have withstood. If Russian troops had broken and run in the way that Western troops sometimes did, for example in the opening stages of the battle of the Bulge, they would have been shot by the NKVD. ‘Who but us could have taken on the Germans?’ asked Konstantin Mamerdov, a Soviet soldier at this time.20 It was meant rhetorically, because the answer was: probably no one.
March saw Army Group South suffer a series of reversals, although these were not the fault of Manstein, who did the best he could under the thoroughly adverse circumstances. On the 4th his northern flank was battered by Zhukov, who over the next three days advanced 100 miles to the Warsaw–Odessa railway line. Nikolayev on the Bug fell on the 28th and two days later, on 30 March, Hitler dismissed Manstein, who in Basil Liddell Hart’s view, and that of many other military historians, had the finest strategic brain on the German – or perhaps any – side in the war. ‘You can almost look at the Soviet/German war during the period between 1942 and 1944 as a duel between Manstein and Zhukov,’ the distinguished historian of these campaigns John Erickson has stated. ‘It takes in Stalingrad, then Kursk and it all comes to a head in January and March 1944 when Manstein and Zhukov again duel in the Eastern Ukraine… These are the two striking, outstanding strategic thinkers, strategic planners, and strategic commanders of the first rank.’21 But whereas Stalin had the sense to retain Zhukov, Hitler dismissed Manstein, who had been pressing for the creation of