The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [300]
Manstein’s command of Army Group South – from early April 1944 renamed Army Group North Ukraine – was given to Model, who had been in command of Army Group North only since January and who was also promoted to field marshal, at fifty-three the youngest after Rommel. Kleist, who had been forced back into Romania by Konev and General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front, was dismissed as commander of Army Group South Ukraine, and replaced by the brutal and unpopular Ferdinand Schörner on the same day that Manstein was sacked. Kleist diagnosed Hitler’s mentality at that stage as ‘more of a problem for a psychiatrist than for a general’. Speaking at Nuremberg, he gave the standard line that ‘I’m just a plain soldier and not given to analysing temperaments. He was the chief of state and I accepted that as enough.’23 He claimed to have suggested that Hitler give up the supreme command back in December 1943, and was sacked after ‘a very severe argument’ on 29 March 1944, and that ‘When Hitler shouted [at] me, I shouted twice as loud.’ True or not, he did diagnose an interesting trait of Hitler’s that others mentioned too, and which must have been dispiriting to those who worked closely with him, namely that ‘If you talked for two hours and you thought that finally you had convinced him of something, he began where you started just as if you had never said a word.’24 Such self-centredness and utter certainty in his own will and destiny might have been necessary to Hitler in becoming Führer, but it served his country – and thus ultimately himself – badly when it came to fighting a world war, which his enemies proved was done better according to a collegiate format than a dictatorial one.
A classic example of this phenomenon came on 8 March 1944 when Hitler promulgated an order embodying his concept of ‘fortified localities’. Instead of retreating and remaining as part of the overall front line, he ordained that troops should defend themselves in cities and towns and be supplied by the Luftwaffe until they were relieved:
Fortified localities are intended to discharge the same functions as fortresses in the past. German army commanders therefore must allow themselves to become encircled, and in this way tie down the largest possible number of enemy forces. In this way they will also play a part in creating the prerequisite for successful counter-operations… The Commandants of the fortified localities should be selected from the very toughest soldiers, if possible of general’s rank.25
Although this strategy was attempting to make a virtue out of a necessity in some places, its main effect was simply to prevent troops from giving up untenable areas and staying within the main body of the army when a front collapsed. While it might have worked as a desperate measure in medieval times, in modern warfare it allowed precisely the mass encirclement that had led the Soviets to such a series of disasters during Barbarossa three years earlier. A Soviet disinformation campaign could not have put out instructions more helpful to their cause than this.
April 1944 – a month when the Luftwaffe was down to 500 combat aircraft on the Eastern Front, versus 13,000 Soviet warplanes – saw Marshal Fedor Tolbukhin clearing the Germans from the Crimea, with the fall of Sevastopol on 19 May, at a cost to the Reich of nearly 100,000 men.26 The Russians had reached the Dnieper in January, but by April they were over the Dniester and Prut rivers, into Romania and Poland and threatening the borders of Hungary. Odessa was evacuated