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Stuck in Trafic: The 's Failure iScnot tU T. Srinbisian

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STUCK IN TRAFFIC: ’S FAILURE IN URBAN RUSSIA

By SCOTT T. SINISI

A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2018 Scott T. Sinisi defended this thesis on November 19, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Jonathan Grant Professor Directing Thesis

George Williamson Committee Member

Michael Creswell Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... iv Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ...... 22 Chapter Two: IN THE WEST ...... 34 Chapter Three: WAR IN THE EAST ...... 55 Conclusion ...... 76 Bibliography ...... 81 Biographical Sketch ...... 84

iii ABSTRACT On June 21 st , 1941, the German Army, along with contingents from its allies, invaded the

Soviet Union in what was codenamed . Although it won massive tactical and operational victories in the summer and fall of 1941, it failed to reach the objectives set for it by the end of the year, and was ultimately drawn into an unwinnable of attrition beginning in the winter of 1941.

This paper seeks to add to the study of why Barbarossa failed by tracing an ongoing pattern of crucial delays in the operations of the Wehrmacht throughout the early stage of the

Second whenever it was forced into urban warfare. Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, was the primary tactical and operational doctrine of the Wehrmacht, premised around speed, mobility, and avoidance of enemy strongpoints, formed in direct response to the attritional stalemate of the First World War. Blitzkrieg campaigns relied on constant motion of the attacking armored spearheads and intricate timing of the various elements of the attacking forces, both of which were fatally disrupted if the attacking forces found themselves forced into an environment for which they were not fundamentally suited, such as a . This paper proposes that a clear pattern can be seen of this disruption occurring beginning in the German campaigns in and the West, and that it contributed in a significant way to the ultimate failure of Operation Barbarossa. The effect was comparatively minimal in the former cases due to the relatively advanced state of their road networks, which allowed German forces to bypass strongpoints, but the primitiveness of the repeatedly forced them into fights they were expressly designed to avoid.

iv

INTRODUCTION

The early victories and eventual defeat of in the Second World War had their roots in the trenches of the First. In that war, the armies of both sides entered the conflict in the belief that it would be fought in the exact same style as the of the previous centuries, and blithely ignorant of the potential of new technology such as the machine gun and heavy . Following the Battle of the Marne in August 1914, both Germany and its Allied opponents ordered their forces to dig long systems of trenches in whatever positions they currently happened to be in. Unable to cope with the static defenses they were now faced with, the high commands of both sides spent nearly the entirety of the next four years attempting to break through the enemy lines by means of endlessly repeated frontal assaults. Some had benefit of massive artillery support and some did not, but they all ended the same way: with the attacking slaughtered by machine guns and the utter failure of the attack. With neither side able to gain any ground, the First World War devolved into a war of attrition, in which the loser would be the side that ran out of cannon fodder first. In this respect, Germany could not hope to compete with Britain, France, their overseas colonies, and the combined. Exhausted, the Kaiser abdicated in 1918 and Germany surrendered to the militarily crippling and seemingly humiliating terms of the .1

Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”, was the German response to the problems posed by static defenses and attritional warfare such as they had encountered in the First World War. Although it faced resistance from senior officers when it was first introduced, the advantages of the

1 Marc Trachtenberg , “Versailles Revisited,” Security Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2000), 191-205.

1 system, propounded by a few zealous adherents, soon made themselves apparent, and the

elite units of the German Army were remade to better fight this new form of war. In its purest

form, blitzkrieg doctrine called for the usage of all arms of the army—armor, motorized

infantry, artillery, and —to punch through enemy lines at their weakest point

in one overwhelming blow.2 The combined forces would then make use of the superior mobility given them by motorization to run amok in the rear areas of their foe, deliberately avoiding any areas where they could be slowed down and leaving the enemy armies to wither without supplies and eventually be mopped up by trailing infantry divisions. , the

German responsible more than any other for this new doctrine, explicitly stated this in his 1936 book Achtung Panzer:

“Does one want to storm fortresses and permanently reinforced positions with them or does one want to employ them in open country in a strategic sense with a view to carrying out and outflanking operations?..... Does one want to attempt to quickly resolve an imposed war of defense by a large scale, concentrated operation of the main means of attack on the ground or does one want to bind these means of attack, having, in principle, renounced their inherent capability for rapid, wide-ranging movements, to the slow course of the infantry and artillery battle and thereby conceding from the very outset the rapid decision of the battle and the war?”3 In Guderian’s new system, quickly picked up and advocated by other rising stars in the German

Army such as , were not to be shackled to any sort of slow moving forces such as heavy artillery or infantry divisions. With their entire purpose being to stay in constant motion and not get bogged down at any point, the average German panzer division contained no more than perhaps a or two of motorized infantry, not nearly enough to

2 While blitzkrieg was never officially codified as the governing doctrine of German operations and strategy in manuals, many of its guiding principles, such as the emphasis on mobility and initiative by the local commander, were. 3 Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer!, trans. Christopher Duffy (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1992), 164.

2 seize a well defended strongpoint or . As noted in the quote above, this did not particularly concern Guderian—panzer divisions were supposed to bypass urban areas, not smash through them.

This system of warfare proved to be devastatingly effective when applied in Poland and

Western Europe in the first two years of the Second World War. Poland was never expected to defeat the German Wehrmacht, not by the Germans, not by its allies, and not by its own high command. Yet it was expected to hold the Germans off for at least a period of several months.

Against blitzkrieg, it crumbled in less than four weeks. The results of this new form of warfare were even more astonishing in the West. The French, British, Belgian, and Dutch armies were all systematically picked apart and destroyed by roving columns of German tanks. Although it would be about a month and a half from the opening of the German at the beginning of to the final of France in the middle of June, the campaign had in all meaningful ways been decided in the first week; the rest, with a few very specific and very salient exceptions, was merely slaughter.

The exceptions, where British and French troops (mostly the former) fought the

Germans to a standstill long enough to delay them for a significant period of time, all came in built-up areas. These delays were only significant in hindsight: British troops in Dunkirk and other Channel ports were able to tie down vastly superior German forces, and thus contributed greatly to the near total evacuation of the BEF, and many French troops besides. At the time,

German generals, although aware of how unsuited in general their army was for the task of digging enemy troops out of an urban area, dismissed the few isolated incidents in the Western campaign as just that—isolated incidents without greater meaning going forward, just as they

3 had dismissed the ability of to hold out for two and a half weeks when the rest of

Poland collapsed in mere days. The survival of the BEF, while seen as a frustrating setback, surely would not make any difference in the overall outcome of the war, and the primary blame for it lay with the decision by Hitler and a few select generals to stop the panzers for a few crucial days, not the inability of the panzers to efficiently work in narrow city streets.

When the Wehrmacht turned against the Soviet Union, it saw initial success at least as impressive as it had in the West. The vast majority of the was sliced into pieces within a few miles of the border and annihilated. Vast swathes of territory fell into German hands, including all of and the Baltic States, most of Ukraine, and forty percent of

European Russia.4 By October, Leningrad was besieged, and panzer columns were closing in on

Moscow. Yet neither city fell. The Soviets successfully threw back the German forces from

Moscow, and eventually freed Leningrad from the . In the south, the Wehrmacht had not even fully conquered the Crimean peninsula, with the city of holding out well into 1942, when according to the original timetables they should have conquered the

Mountains and reached the by December. 5 Operation Barbarossa, the German of the Soviet Union, did not achieve a decisive result in the first year of the war, its entire purpose, and therefore failed.

There are numerous reasons for this failure, many of which have been discussed in nearly every possible way in the seventy-three years since the end of the Second World War. 6

4 , Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia (Charleston, SC, USA: Tempus Publishing, 2001), 210. 5 , Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3. 6 A full treatment of the numerous reasons for Barbarossa’s ultimate failure that have been offered by the scholarly community would cover multiple massive volumes in itself. They include, but are not limited to: an

4

Among these is the fact that German blitzkrieg was designed to work in the confines of Western

Europe, and simply could not cope with the markedly different conditions in the Soviet Union.

Vehicles and men, designed and trained in the mild conditions of Central and Western Europe, could not handle the extreme weather of the Russian steppe. The distances at play in the USSR stretched German units beyond their capabilities, enabling Soviet forces to escape the traps and that blitzkrieg relied upon. The Soviet road and rail system was so utterly primitive in comparison to European infrastructure that it was practically impossible to get any supplies to front line units, and even more importantly, practically impossible to move the units themselves (except, ironically, in winter, when other problems presented themselves).

A discussion of the appalling state of the Soviet road and rail network in academia is usually limited to the extremely ramshackle state of the roads themselves. 7 To be sure, this was quite significant in its own right. Of the roads in the Soviet Union, the vast majority were nothing more than crude dirt tracks, formed by the repeated movement of livestock and peasants along the paths of least resistance over the centuries. These trails were barely suitable for even light vehicle traffic in the best of times. During the spring and fall, the rainy seasons in Russia, they would become oceans of mud that could swallow a man on foot, let alone a . During summer, they let off clouds of choking dust that could foul and break down

inherent resiliency in the structure of the Red Army, one of the primary arguments of David Glantz’s Colossus Reborn (University Press of Kansas, 2005); the diversion of troops into the Balkan campaign of spring 1941, a theory advanced by William Shirer in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Simon & Schuster 1959); and Hitler’s interference with in the fall and winter of 1941, a favorite of the German generals cited in this paper, particularly Guderian. 7 As with the overall causes of the German defeat, a survey of writers who treat Soviet infrastructure in this way would fill volumes. Some examples include: David Stahel in Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), David Glantz in Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia (Charleston, SC, USA: Tempus Publishing, 2001) and Frank Ellis in Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015).

5 engines within seconds. Supplying combat units over these tracks was nearly impossible, leading German offensives to be delayed for lengthy periods of time. 8 On the defensive, troops would often be forced to abandon perfectly good positions when they ran out of early, or be unable to abandon an untenable position because the way out was impassable. It cannot be doubted that this had a large impact on the outcome of the campaign in the East, and historians usually leave the role of the roads at that.

Yet if the academic community looked just a bit closer, they would find another aspect of the terrible Soviet road and rail network that had even larger consequences for the success or failure of Operation Barbarossa. A key part of the success that the German army had enjoyed in Poland and Western Europe was the ability to avoid large concentrations of enemy forces, bypassing them and leaving them to be mopped up by the trailing infantry. To do this, the panzers relied on quick coordination among themselves and with air and ground reconnaissance units, locating enemy defenses and finding alternate routes around them. 9

These alternate routes were almost always smaller back roads that provided a detour away from the city or hill that the enemy had transformed into a strongpoint, or perhaps a way to attack from the flank or rear.

In Poland and the West, these alternate routes were capable of handling the traffic of a panzer division. Even the worst roads in Western Europe could measure up, with a little bit of

8 The Russian rainy season, or rasputitsa , and its effect on Russian roads, is at least briefly mentioned in nearly every work on the subject, though it features more prominently in some than in others. Salient examples include the three mentioned in note 7, as well as David Stahel’s Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 214. 9 Larry Addington, The Blitzkrieg Era and the German General , 1865-1941 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 16.

6 preparation and planning: the greatest factor in the belief of the French high command that the

Ardennes was impassable was the supposed paucity of its road network, and the poor quality of the few roads there were. 10 Instead, the Wehrmacht proved that even the worst roads in

Belgium and France were suitable for needs. In the Soviet Union, they most certainly were not. Thus, the German Wehrmacht’s advancing units were confined to the few paved roads that existed in the country. These were poorly put together themselves—the Germans estimated that the only road in the entire Soviet Union that was built to European standards was certain sections of the Minsk-Moscow Highway—and worse, they existed only as direct point-to-point connections between major population centers. 11

This in turn meant that the rapier of the German army, which was meant to engage in rapid of movement in open country, was instead channeled along very specific routes into repeated urban conflicts, the precise scenario it was designed to avoid. The cost and delays imposed by this unique facet of warfare in the Soviet Union, which German blitzkrieg tactics were uniquely unsuited to deal with, proved to be a significant factor in the failure of Operation

Barbarossa in 1941.

The three chapters comprising this thesis will be divided chronologically, each serving to illustrate specific themes in the development of the blitzkrieg doctrine, how it interacted with urban warfare in the West and East, and how this interaction eventually contributed to the

German failure to produce the intended quick decision in Operation Barbarossa. Chapter One

10 Ronald Powaski, Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 22. 11 MS # T-7, A.D. Max Bork, Comments on Russian Railroads and Highways , p. 13, WWII Foreign Military Studies, 1945-54, RG 338, NARA, Washington, D.C., Fold 3, https://www.fold3.com/image/1/160235490, date accessed, July 6, 2018.

7 will serve to trace the development of the unique German way of mobile warfare in the prewar period. In particular, it will seek to establish whether the potential for combat in urban/fortified areas influenced the development of the blitzkrieg doctrine, and if so, what steps were taken to deal with that potential.

The historiography relating to the development of blitzkrieg and the German armored forces is vast and well developed, with, as a rule, consensus on major point such as who was primarily responsible for it all. That Heinz Guderian was one of the central figures in the development of the German panzer forces and the doctrine they followed has never truly been in question. But there has been debate amongst the scholarly community regarding just how central he was: whether he truly earned the title “The Father of Blitzkrieg”. Beginning immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War, the predominant view among historians and military theoreticians was that Guderian, and the few officers directly connected to him either as sympathetic sheltering seniors or converts in a close circle of friends, was the equivalent of the lone prophet in the wilderness: stubbornly preaching the truth in the face of massive opposition from the old guard, stuck in the ways of the past. 12

This view, perhaps unsurprisingly, has its roots in Guderian himself. The greatest reason he was able to catch Hitler’s eye and have so much success in the design and creation of

Germany’s first panzer divisions, above all others, was his ability to draw attention to himself and his sheer fanaticism in his cause. It is therefore no surprise that he continued this habit

12 Addington, The Blitzkrieg Era 12.

8 after the war, stating in his own autobiography and telling any historian who would listen that he had been the greatest moving force of all in the creation of blitzkrieg. 13

Nearly every historian in the immediate aftermath of WWII listened. Notables such as

Kenneth Macksey were much impressed by Guderian’s contribution to the early theoretical development of German armored warfare, writing glowingly of his “prodigious writing in military journals” and the reputation he won “for clear exposition on controversial matters of immediate interest in the contemporary debate surrounding the reasons for Germany losing the last war.” 14 The general academic community and popular culture followed suit, and for the next forty-odd years, Heinz Guderian was consistently credited as being the indispensable man in the creation of Germany’s blitzkrieg warfare.

As is usual when there is consensus on a particular issue in the scholarly community, someone eventually rose to challenge the established view. In this case, that someone was

James Corum, who in 1992 published a book entitled The Roots of Blitzkrieg: and German Military Reform . As the title indicates, The Roots of Blitzkrieg primarily focused on

Hans von Seeckt, and the impact that he had in the formation of what would become Hitler’s

Wehrmacht. Every aspect of the , from high level strategic doctrine to unit composition at every level to the precise methods of troop training and Seeckt’s influence on all of it, was exhaustively covered. In this area, making up the vast majority of the book, Corum did not contribute anything particularly new, save for the sheer detail of it all. It had been nearly

13 Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader , trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 24, 26, 29-32. 14 , The Tank Pioneers (New York: Jane’s, 1981), quoted in James Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 138-139.

9 universally accepted since nearly the moment the guns fell silent in 1945 that Seeckt had been the driving influence on the development of the Wehrmacht.

Approximately halfway through, however, in his chapter on “The Development of

German Armored Doctrine”, Corum made some controversial claims. First and foremost among them was the that the influence of Heinz Guderian had been grossly overrated by military historians. According to Corum, “If Guderian had been a modest man and never written a word about himself, he would have gone down in history as an excellent general, a first-rate tactician, and a man who played a central role in establishing and developing the first panzer divisions. But Guderian was far from modest.” 15 Guderian’s role as the driving influence behind the actual formation of the first panzer divisions, as seen in the above quote, was too obvious to be ignored. But all the other work he did in the 1920s and 1930s, both theoretical and practical, Corum dismissed as inconsequential. He responded to the claim of Kenneth

Macksey that Guderian had written prodigiously in military journals by pointing out that

Guderian had only written five signed articles for the Militar Wochenblatt , the premier German

Army journal, in the period 1922-1928. 16 He praised Achtung Panzer! as a “brilliant and original work”, before immediately undercutting his praise of its originality by calling it the natural product of “a long evolution of armored thought that relied heavily on the work of previous armored theorists”, such as Ernst Volckheim and the Austrian Ludwig von

Einsmannberger. 17 Corum further accused Basil Liddell Hart of deliberately inflating both

Guderian’s influence on the development of German armor and blitzkrieg and his own influence

15 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg 138. 16 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg 139. 17 Ibid.

10 on Guderian, in an effort to make it seem as if he, Basil Liddell Hart, was indirectly responsible for the German successes of 1939-1941. 18

There was some truth in all of Corum’s claims, which few historians denied: Guderian was certainly not the only German general in the 1920s and 1930s that thought about the role that armor and a more mobile style of warfare might play in conflicts of the future, and Liddell

Hart was widely known to be determined to play up his own role in history. Beyond that, however, Corum’s theories simply do not bear much weight. To begin with, Corum’s charge that Liddell Hart deliberately inflated the influence Guderian had on the development of

German armor and the blitzkrieg doctrine, more specifically, that “Liddell Hart also emphasized

Guderian’s role in The German Generals Talk ”, is false by any objective measure. 19 In the first

89 pages of that book, Guderian’s name is mentioned precisely twice: once in passing, in the context of naming him as being among the younger officers who took a direct hand in the creation of Germany’s armored force (which he indisputably was), and once in the context of discussing his role as Hitler’s last Chief of the General Staff. 20 Page 90 begins Liddell Hart’s chapter on “The Rise of Armour”, and in this chapter, where surely if Heinz Guderian’s role in the creation of Germany’s panzers would be emphasized anywhere it would be here, he is mentioned precisely once by Liddell Hart speaking as Liddell Hart. 21 Guderian is called the most famous of the original German tank leaders, an uncontroversial statement if there ever was

18 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg 138, 141. 19 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg 138. 20 Basil Liddell Hart., ed. The German Generals Talk (New York: Quill, 1979), 23, 60-63. 21 Liddell Hart , German Generals 90.

11 one. All other mentions of him in the chapter are in quotations of other German generals such as Ritter von Thoma. Emphasis of his role, this surely is not.

Corum’s other major pieces of evidence equally do not hold up well to close inspection.

Rather than Guderian, he proposes that the key figure in setting the stage for the development of blitzkrieg and the German armored forces was Ernst Volckheim. Volckheim was undoubtedly a more prolific writer than Guderian during the 1920s, and his theories regarding tank design were undoubtedly proven to be correct by the experiences of the Second World War. But to say that he had a greater influence than Guderian on the development of German armored formations and doctrines is patently ludicrous, based on the evidence Corum himself presented. Volckheim never held any command or staff positions in any of the organizations involved in actually creating motorized and mechanized units during the early 1930s. His only contributions, at the end of the day, were journal articles published in the 1920s, and while that in itself would not have precluded him from having had a massive influence (Basil Liddell Hart primarily advanced his theories through various journal articles), none of his theories regarding tank design were implemented in the tanks Germany went to war with, or in the way it planned to fight and kill other tanks. The only major theory he was an adherent of that was reflected in

German doctrine was that tanks were solely meant as a supporting arm of the infantry—hardly apparent in German fighting forces at the outset of the war either, although it did place him in line with the majority of the German High Command. On that note, Corum’s contention that

Guderian did not face resistance from the most senior generals in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht in the mechanization process is similarly supported by flimsy evidence. The most Corum has to offer on that score is that Guderian may have been too dismissive of General , who

12

Corum notes, “authored Army Regulation 300, the primary tactical manual of the German Army in World War II”. 22 Corum also gives primary credit to Beck, not Guderian or Hitler, for the creation of the first three panzer divisions.

In summary, it is little surprise that Corum’s views on Guderian and the development of blitzkrieg, while controversial and noteworthy, did not convince many. In the twenty six years since the publication of The Roots of Blitzkrieg , the majority of academic scholars, as Samuel

Mitcham in his 2008 books The Rise of the Wehrmacht: The German Armed Forces and World

War II, Volumes I and II , continue to adhere to the same line of thinking that has dominated the field since the end of the Second World War: that Heinz Guderian was the prime mover and indispensable man behind both the development of Germany’s armored branch and the doctrine that dictated how they would be used.

Chapter Two will discuss the successes enjoyed by the German Wehrmacht during the early phase of the Second World War, from the in September 1939 until the

Fall of France in May-. The chapter will place particular emphasis upon the successes enjoyed by the Wehrmacht when employed in the manner for which it had been specifically built, that is, as a mobile force for the purposes of encircling and bypassing enemy strongpoints and rather than attacking them directly. In those rare cases where the German Army was forced to directly enter into urban combat, the reason for the exception will be examined, as well as the consequences (if present) on the larger outcome of the campaign in question and

22 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg 140.

13

German awareness of the inherent threat that such combat presented to their operations in future.

The German general F.W. von Mellenthin, in his memoirs published after the war, brushed aside the invasion of Poland with a chapter of only a scant few pages, saying that “the disparity of forces in this campaign was so overwhelming that there are no useful lessons to be found for the student of tactics or strategy.” 23 This attitude is instructive for two reasons. First, as elaborated on in greater detail in Chapter 2, it was one that was evidently shared by nearly all of von Mellenthin’s fellow German commanders, to the Wehrmacht’s cost. But equally as important for the field of , it is one that seems to have been nearly uncritically accepted by Western historians after the war. Accounts of the Polish campaign are generally limited to a few paragraphs, a chapter at most, in the typical historical account of the beginning of the war, and these exist for no more purpose than to give context to the really important events of six months later.

This is not to say there are no secondary sources, of course. On the contrary, there are quite a few—in Polish and German. What primary sources there are on the topic are similarly in

Polish and German, save for the memoirs of those German generals that were translated and cared more about the topic than von Mellenthin. When Stephen Zaloga cowrote his account of the campaign in 1985, he spent the first two paragraphs of the introduction singling out the comparative paucity of Western scholarship devoted to the topic, both in quantity and in

23 F.W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 3.

14 quality. 24 Coverage of the Polish campaign tends to touch on the same points again and again: the total triumph of blitzkrieg tactics, the utter obsolescence of the Polish Army and even more so the Polish Air Force, the awe-inspiring but utterly futile gallantry displayed by the Polish forces in the short campaign. In illustration of the last point, accounts will often paint a picture of Polish hussars charging German panzers with lances lowered and banners streaming in the wind; a German propaganda piece that has become firmly ensconced in the mainstream historical narrative. Although studies of Poland in the Second World War have increased in number in the thirty three years since Zaloga and Victor Madej wrote their account of the campaign, the vast majority of them deal with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the

Warsaw Rising of 1944, apparently vastly more interesting topics to modern historians than the of 1939.

It is no great exaggeration to say that the invasion of the West in 1940 is one of the most written about subjects in all of military history. Historians and soldiers have pored over just about every facet of the campaigns which collectively mark the greatest victories of Adolf

Hitler and , from the tactical aspects of the various battles in Belgium, and

Northern France, to the political decision making process of the various leaders on each side, to everything in between. The reasons why France collapsed in such a spectacular process have been discussed ad nauseam, ranging from a moral sickness infecting the entire nation post-

WWI (one of several explanations offered by Alistair Horne), to a simple incompetence on the part of senior generals (the explanation preferred by junior French generals and colonels at the

24 Steven Zaloga and Victor Madej, The Polish Campaign 1939 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1985), 1.

15 time such as Adelphe Goutard). 25 Various aspects of the German victory, ranging from their innovative use of airborne forces to the precise impact of the decision to halt the panzers outside of Dunkirk, and the saga of the British Expeditionary Force, have all had volumes written about them.

Given this mountain of material, the size of which would take a decade to make a dent in if one did nothing else, it is only natural that the urban fighting which took place in these campaigns should have been at least touched upon at some point, and indeed, it has been. The discussion of the of Calais and Boulogne in General Julian Thompson’s Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory , published in 2008, is perhaps the best case scenario. In that book, the battle for each city is given a full chapter’s worth of discussion, and the final page of the chapter on Calais contains Thompson’s analysis of the consequences of the two sieges on the rest of the campaign, including the delay imposed by the lack of two thirds of his and all of his heavy and medium artillery on Heinz Guderian’s effort to reach Dunkirk before the British did. 26

As noted, this is the best case scenario for the treatment of urban fighting in the campaign of 1940, and it is found almost nowhere else that is readily available. In the case of

Calais and its sister city Boulogne, the typical treatment varies in length from a few pages to a few paragraphs in studies of the larger 1940 campaign. Ronald Powaski, in his Lightning War of

2003, gives four pages total to the attacks on both cities, although one page is mostly taken up by the account of a Stuka squadron attacking a British flotilla in the English Channel. 27

25 Alistair Horne, To Lose A Battle: France 1940 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1969), 14, 17-18; Adelphe Goutard, The , 1940 (New York: Ives Washburn Inc., 1959), 22. 26 Julian Thompson, Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory (London: Pan Books, 2009), 145-173 27 Powaski, Lightning War 54-57.

16

Acknowledgement and analysis of the critical role played by these cities in delaying the German advance upon Dunkirk is limited to a single paragraph. This is vastly better than Alistair Horne’s

To Lose A Battle , published in 1969, in which a single paragraph was devoted to the entirety of the two sieges—and one sentence to acknowledging that crucial resources were used in the two sieges that would otherwise have been employed in an attack on Dunkirk. Adrian

Wettstein’s otherwise excellent chapter “Urban Warfare Doctrine on the Eastern Front” in the larger 2012 book Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front , nearly the only English language source that gives detailed information on the battles for Rotterdam and Dnipropetrovsk, does not mention

Calais or Boulogne at all.

Even this is a wealth of information, however, when compared with the German of the Netherlands. This is understandable: the country as a whole offered organized resistance against the Germans for a mere five days, and the delay posed to German forces at

Rotterdam would in the end pose no real threat to their advance south into Belgium. To most historians, a detailed study of the conquest of Holland would be similarly pointless to one of the conquest of Denmark, taken in a single day without a single German death. The only topic to do with the Dutch that is generally given more than the treatment of a few throwaway sentences is the bombing of Rotterdam, acknowledged as one of the very first instances of terror bombing in the war, and the first in the West. As with the conquest of Poland, sources dealing directly with the fighting in the Netherlands are only available in the language of the country attacked

(Dutch in this case), such as D. A. Van Hilten’s article “A Rotterdam en mai 1940” from 1948, or in German, such as Hans-Adolf Jacobsen’s article “Der deutsche Luftangriff auf Rotterdam”

17 from 1968. For those readers only competent in English, sources are for the most part limited to inference from the short descriptions given as context for the bombing of the city.

Chapter Three covers the first six months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

While the entire course of the war on the Eastern Front during the Second World War is sometimes referred to as Operation Barbarossa, that moniker properly refers only to this time frame. The initial invasion saw the most clear-cut German success of any period during the struggle with the Soviet Union, but failed to take any of its ultimate objectives or force a decision in the conflict before the onset of winter drove (German) operations to a halt. The role played by urban fighting, including its greater-than-previous occurrence in this compared to the others that the Wehrmacht had engaged in, and the consequent delays that it imposed upon the German advance, will be examined, along with the impact had on the ultimate failure of Barbarossa.

The historiography of urban fighting during the course of Operation Barbarossa is rather odd, in that there has been significant coverage and analysis devoted to one example, that of the of Sevastopol, whereas the numerous other incidents of city combat (and they are numerous, particularly in comparison to what the Wehrmacht had faced in its prior campaigns), are essentially only touched upon in primary sources, save for the occasional aside in paragraph form. Even Sevastopol has only a scant few books devoted to it, the most recent and notable being Robert Forczyk’s Where The Iron Crosses Grow , published in 2014. More typical by far are cases like Moscow To Stalingrad: Decision In The East , part of the Army Historical Series published in 1987. There, a single chapter was devoted to the entirety of the

18 in 1941, before moving on to more conventional topics such as the Soviet winter counteroffensive against Center.

Yet even a full chapter is positively extravagant treatment compared with the paucity of secondary sources for other notable incidents of urban warfare during Barbarossa. Most information regarding the battles for Mogilev, , and Liepaja are to be found in primary sources (Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Leader , the memoirs of the commanding general of the

Coastal Army, and archival documents hosted online respectively). As noted above, the battle for Dnipropetrovsk is hardly discussed anywhere in English sources in detail, and (a true rarity) only in passing in German ones as well. The sole readily available source for this is Adrian

Wettstein’s chapter “Urban Warfare Doctrine on the Eastern Front.”

Many scholars more brilliant than I have spent the last three quarters of a century discussing why the greatest military campaign in the history of the world turned out the way it did, and undoubtedly they will continue to do so for decades more to come. None of them that

I could find, with the partial exception of Wettstein, assigned the Wehrmacht’s unpreparedness for urban warfare a high place on the list of reasons why it failed in the Soviet Union. 28 To a large extent they were justified in this. I do not pretend to have suddenly discovered the reason why Barbarossa failed after seventy-three years of benighted floundering before me, nor even one of the top three. Yet even the limited research I did hinted at an undeniable pattern emerging of consistent German failure whenever confronted with an urban environment,

28 Adrian Wettstein. “Urban Warfare Doctrine on the Eastern Front.” In Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: , Genocide, and Radicalization , edited by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, 45-65. Rochester, NY, US: University of Rochester Press, 2012. 45.

19 beginning with their very first campaign of World War II against a hapless opponent and continuing to rear its head against deadlier and deadlier opposition. Time and again, strong

Wehrmacht forces were delayed for days in a campaign where every day counted. This

(comparatively brief, and hampered by the author’s limited resources and procrastination) paper discusses no less than five cases of this occurring. Numerous more instances, such as the battle for Vitebsk, are briefly mentioned in the sources, but not covered in enough detail in

English language sources to bring into the paper. Even taken together, these delays likely had only a small effect on the progress of the German advance, hence the likely reason for so many scholars overlooking them; but even a small effect can have large consequences.

Finally, a brief mention should be made of the primary sources used in this paper. As with the secondary sources, many of the most useful primary sources such as army, corps, division, and -level war diaries are exclusive to their native language. Consequently, the primary sources directly cited fall into two main categories: memoirs of various generals

(mostly German), and studies on various topics written by German generals for the US Army after the war hosted in online archives. The former, of course, have notorious tendencies to be biased in things such as blaming Hitler and the SS for all atrocities and military mistakes that occurred on the German side during the war, or inflating their own accomplishments at the expense of their peers. Erich von Manstein’s memoir is particularly notable for this. Yet they serve well enough. Inflate his own accomplishments a general might, but if he states that his troops were stonewalled at a particular city for a significant period of time, there is little reason to disbelieve him. The mere fact of a significant delay is what is essential. The other major category, the postwar studies, is a similar source of illustrative facts. The German generals

20 assigned by the US Army to each study had each had firsthand experience with the subject matter they dealt with (hence the usefulness as a primary source)—Max Bork, for instance, helped plan the logistical elements of Operation Barbarossa, and thus was in a position to know how severely the terrible state of Soviet infrastructure was underestimated by German planners. There are also a few primary sources I managed to acquire that do not fall into either category, the major example being Heinz Guderian’s landmark Achtung Panzer!, in one of its many post war English translations. This book is useful both as a source and as a notable historical event in and of itself, marking as it does the formal codification of what would become known as the blitzkrieg doctrine.

21

CHAPTER ONE

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLITZKRIEG

The First World War, to the extent that it is remembered by the population at large and by academics who do not study it in detail, is remembered as a bloody mess where soldiers repeatedly charged across cratered morasses of mud and into the teeth of machine guns and artillery. That was, indeed, how the vast majority of the war in the West was conducted. It was not, however, how it began.

The armies of every major power that went to war in 1914 were products of the waning years of the nineteenth century and the wars they had fought therein. For Britain, France, and

Germany, those wars had been brushfire colonial conflicts in Africa and Asia, where heavily outnumbered European soldiers triumphed over native by means of vastly superior technology. The last major European war, the Franco-Prussian War, was forty years in the past.

Foremost among the pieces of new technology that allowed colonial soldiers to win in these conflicts was the machine gun, which wreaked havoc upon native warriors at places like

Omdurman in 1898, where a young Winston Churchill saw his first action. It is no exaggeration to say that the great colonial empires of the second half of the nineteenth century would not have been possible without this new, groundbreaking technology.

Yet in one of the more stunning examples of arrogance to be found in the annals of military history, the general staffs of every major belligerent in the First World War utterly dismissed the lessons to be found in colonial warfare regarding changing technology. For guidance on how the next war would be fought, the generals instead looked to the last major

22 conflict fought on European soil: the previously noted Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. That war had been decided essentially in the Napoleonic style: with grand, sweeping movements of large formations of men in open country. The only involvement of in it had been the fortress of Sedan, where French Emperor Napoleon III had been trapped with his entire army, utterly useless, while the Prussians overran Paris. 29

Consequently, the lesson both the victorious Germans and the defeated French applied to their armies, and attempted to employ in the field in the First World War, was that static fortifications were useless and engendered a defeatist spirit in the troops. The French army in the years before the outbreak of went so far as to severely limit the development of any artillery pieces with barrels larger than 75mm in caliber, since heavy artillery of that type could not up with the swift offensive they expected to engage in. 30

Initially, the First World War played out much as the generals of both sides expected it to: that is, as a war of movement. The French charged forward into Alsace and Lorraine, the border provinces of the country that had been conquered by the Germans in 1871, and the traditional invasion route for either country seeking to attack the other. The Germans, anticipating that the French would do this, instead chose to violate Belgian neutrality in what was known as the “Schlieffen Plan”, and come sweeping down from the north towards Paris.

German soldiers were within a scant few miles of the French capital when they were stopped, barely, along the line of the River Marne. 31

29 Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 3. 30 Horne, The Price of Glory 13-15. 31 Horne, The Price of Glory 18.

23

And then… nothing happened. The Germans were unable to break through to Paris, the

French and their British allies were unable to throw them out of the territory they had already conquered. Each side dug in in the positions it currently held. The hasty pits initially dug in 1914 would, over the next four years, evolve into an immensely complex web of warning trenches, reserve trenches, , communications trenches, and main lines of resistance on both sides that stretched almost uninterrupted from the English Channel to the Swiss border.

The generals on both sides, confronted with this stalemate, elected to try and break it through simple means. A sector would be chosen to attack in. Then, a massive artillery would begin, lasting anywhere from a day or two, to in the most impressive cases, several weeks. This would often inflict significant casualties on the defenders, and damage their trenches, but it would never eliminate them entirely. Then, the attacking infantry would go

“over the top” with fixed bayonets, and would inevitably be mowed down by however many machine guns had survived the . This same basic pattern held for all attacks made by both sides until the final days of the war. 32

The Western Allies were hard hit by the massive casualties this style of warfare entailed-

France would lose such a high percentage of her young men that she would not truly recover until more than fifty years later- but in the immediate strategic picture of the First World War,

Germany was hit even harder. 33 Unlike Britain and France, Germany could not count on

American aid at the climax of the war. The losses she suffered crippled the war effort, and

32 Michael Howard, “Men against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914,” International Security 9, no. 1 (1984): 43-45. H Horne, To Lose A Battle 7.

24 when fresh American forces arrived in 1918, they easily overwhelmed the exhausted army of the Kaiser.

The victorious Allies imposed the highly controversial Treaty of Versailles on Germany.

Among its various provisions were strict guidelines on what the new, supposedly less threatening German Army was supposed to look like. For starters, it was forcibly reduced to a size of no larger than ninety six thousand men and four thousand officers; taking into account the size of the country, little more than a glorified police force. All military academies, from the

General Staff Academy to the most basic military schools, were banned by the Allies. To prevent Germany from building any trained reserves of men, every enlisted man had to serve for a dozen years, and officers had to commit to twenty five. Even Germany’s stockpile of ammunition was severely restricted. Germany was also forbidden to possess any tanks or military airplanes, both of which had been introduced onto the battlefield relatively late in the

First World War. 34 All of these limiting factors would play an important role in the development of blitzkrieg.

Exhausted though it was at the conclusion of the First World War, the German Army still numbered many times more than one hundred thousand men. All armies downsize after wars, but in this case the cuts to both the enlisted ranks and officer corps were ruthless. The army was reduced to a fraction of its former size. Such drastic cuts could easily have crippled the efficiency and skill that first the Prussian, then the German Army had been known for for centuries, and might well have if it were not for the genius of one man: Hans von Seeckt.

34 Samuel Mitcham Jr, The Rise of the Wehrmacht: The German Armed Forces and World War II, Volume 1 (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), 9.

25

During World War I, Seeckt never commanded any troops directly himself, but distinguished himself greatly in a variety of staff positions, most notably as one of the leading planners of the Battle of Gorlice, a crushing German victory on the Eastern Front, and as the head German advisor to the Ottoman army. When the war ended, he had advanced from the rank of lieutenant colonel to lieutenant general, and found himself heading the reorganization committee that was tasked with bringing the German Army in line with the Treaty of Versailles.

By 1920, he had parlayed this position into a near-dictatorial control over the German Army, and would retain this level of authority for the next six vital years.

While not the “Father of Blitzkrieg” (that title, deservedly, goes to Heinz Guderian, with honorable mention to several other contemporary officers who made the adoption of his theories possible), Hans von Seeckt laid the groundwork for Guderian’s later work. He, nearly alone of the senior German Army officers immediately post WWI, saw how Germany’s army had been rendered inherently incapable of breaking through the static fortifications it faced by its own unwieldiness. It was Seeckt who first began reorganizing the German Army specifically to engage in mobile warfare.

Like submarines, which Germany was also forbidden to have by the Treaty, tanks and airplanes were seen by the victorious Allies as potentially decisive in any future wars, and therefore crucial to keep out of German hands. Unlike submarines, the Germans had not made any serious attempt at utilization of tanks, and had always lagged behind the Allies in aircraft. Seeckt began the process of changing this. He used his near-dictatorial control over the German Army to begin the process of motorization and truck transportation (instead of foot

26 or horse drawn) in specifically chosen units. 35 Equally important, he saw control of the air and close cooperation of ground and air forces as essential components of any successful offensive.

Therefore, he overruled his personal staff specifically to make sure nearly two hundred former

German pilots would be among the officers retained in the new, shrunken German military. 36

But the fact remained that Germany could not openly train with tanks and airplanes or experiment on new designs within its own borders, for fear of being caught by Allied inspectors.

So in perhaps his most important move, Seeckt reached out to the other pariah nation of

Europe, a place completely free of prying French and British eyes: the Soviet Union. 37

After a period of extended haggling, the Soviets allowed Germany to build a major airbase at Lipetsk and a tank school at Kama, both in in the general vicinity of the Caspian Sea. Both of these facilities would be absolutely crucial to developing the vehicles and doctrine that would later form key components of blitzkrieg. At Lipetsk, which opened in

1924, the first building blocks of what would later become the were laid. The pilots who would later become the first officers and flight instructors in the Luftwaffe were trained there, and Germany was able to begin experiments in designs for modern warplanes. 38 Even more important, at least in terms of the development of blitzkrieg, it was at Lipetsk that the first experiments in air-ground cooperation were carried out: how pilots could communicate with the land forces and receive target designations from them, how best to strike chosen targets, and so on. 39

35 Mitcham, Rise of the Wehrmacht 50. 36 Mitcham, Rise of the Wehrmacht 14. 37 Ibid. 38 Mitcham, Rise of the Wehrmacht 18. 39 Ibid.

27

Kama, which was intended to do for tanks what Lipetsk was doing for airplanes, did not open until 1929, three years after Seeckt had been removed from power. Nevertheless, in its few brief years in operation, it proved an important testing ground for what would become the

Panzers I and II, the workhorses of the Wehrmacht during the opening years of the war. It also produced multiple German officers who would play major roles as panzer leaders in the Second

World War, such as Ritter von Thoma, as well as Germany’s first armored warfare theoreticians, who with their first firsthand experience of actual tanks in action (as opposed to wooden dummies mounted on motorcycles), began to formulate their own theories of how armored warfare might work in the next war. 40 Of these, the most notable, if only for how strikingly prophetic his theories of tank design would prove to be, was a man named Ernst Volckheim.

Volckheim’s major theoretical contribution was the idea that the primary purpose of a tank was to kill another tank, rather than waiting for artillery of various kinds to do the job, and that to that end all tanks must be armed with the biggest and best gun practical, even if this came at the cost of speed and mobility to some extent. 41 While this idea was not put into practice with the tank models that Germany went to war with in 1939, the Tiger and other such beasts of the late war would vindicate Volckheim in the matter.

Seeckt was unceremoniously fired in 1926 for lying to the defense minister, who by that point had begun to become alarmed by the amount of power he held over the armed forces.

He would never hold a major position in the military again, but the path he had started the

German military down would be the one it stayed on right up to the bitter end of the Second

40 Liddell Hart, German Generals 91. 41 Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg 128.

28

World War. Seeckt was not completely modern in every respect—his experiences in World War

I had left him convinced that horse would be a vital arm in the wars of the future, and it was thanks to him that a relatively huge proportion of the German military when Hitler took power was composed of horse cavalrymen. 42 He went so far as to say that “the days of cavalry, if trained, equipped, and led on modern lines, are not numbered,” an outlook which would be proved manifestly false in World War II. 43 Yet without him, the German Army would, at the very least, have started down the path of motorization much later than it did. Given how high a proportion of German soldiers still relied on horses or their own feet when the war started as it was, it can be safely said that this would have been disastrous for the formation of any kind of mobile army.

Indeed, had it not been for the motor transport introduced by Seeckt, the

Kraftfahrabteilung , it is entirely possible that the Father of Blitzkrieg himself may never have gotten his start. Heinz Guderian had served in the First World War as first a lieutenant, then a captain, one among tens of thousands. He passed an abbreviated version of the General Staff course considered mandatory for any German officer with aspirations to higher rank during the last year of the war, and was assigned to a volunteer division fighting Communists in Estonia in the immediate aftermath. During this anti-Bolshevik campaign, and during World War I,

Guderian served as an officer in Jaeger units, or elite German . When his volunteer unit was unceremoniously recalled to Germany immediately upon the suppression of the

Communist threat in Estonia, Guderian protested very loudly and angrily. This borderline

42 Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 50. 43 Liddell Hart, German Generals 16.

29 insubordination earned him a transfer to what was considered a backwater punishment posting: the 7th Bavarian Motorized Transport Battalion. 44

This would prove to be a match made in heaven (or hell, given the consequences it would later have for Europe). No sooner had he arrived in Munich, where the battalion was stationed, than he immediately fell in love with the possibilities of not just motor transport, but also tanks. Guderian spent his next few years, both with the 7th Transport Battalion, then at the

Inspectorate of Transport Troops in Berlin, preaching to anyone who would listen that panzer warfare was the way of the future. When the sympathetic head of the Inspectorate, one

General von Tschischwitz, was given command of an infantry division and replaced with a man who thought the only worthwhile use of motor transport was hauling flour, Guderian transferred to Tschischwitz’s division as a staff officer. 45

Tschischwitz did not use Guderian in the day-to-day menial work that occupied the rest of his staff. Instead, Guderian was given massive leeway to develop his new theories on mobile, armored warfare, and it was in this period that he, on his own initiative, translated the writings of foreign authorities on armored warfare such as Basil Liddell Hart, JFC Fuller, and Charles De

Gaulle into German. 46 While these men were largely ignored in their own countries, Guderian took their theories and incorporated them into his own developing one.

In 1926, the Inspector of Transport Troops who had thought trucks and motor vehicles useful only for hauling supplies was replaced by a more forward thinking officer, and in 1927

44 Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 52. 45 Guderian, Panzer Leader 21. 46 Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 53.

30

Guderian returned to the office. 47 From this position, he was able to influence the beginnings of German tank development: the tank school at Kama in the Soviet Union that Seeckt had negotiated for finally opened, and German officers began to be sent there to qualify on the new vehicles. Once again, Guderian did not stay at the Inspectorate long: another general came in that frowned upon his theories of armored and mobile warfare, and Guderian was again transferred out in 1930, only to be transferred back in the following year. 48

The early 1930s mark the period when what would become blitzkrieg crystallized into a full-fledged doctrine in Guderian’s mind. The foreign writings he had read and translated in the late 1920s generally fell into two categories. The majority advocated the usage of tanks essentially as they had been used in the First World War; that is, in small groups of ten or fewer in a given area, designed to batter a way through enemy defenses for the infantry to move through and exploit. Guderian dismissed this out of hand, noting that such tactics had inevitably failed to produce any sort of lasting breakthrough in WWI due to the failure of the infantry to hold up their end of the arrangement. 49

The second category, on the other hand, had more potential. A handful of theorists such as Britain’s JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart and France’s Charles De Gaulle argued that armored units did not need to stop moving forward once a breach in enemy lines had been achieved, but could continue the attack on their own. Hart recognized the vulnerability of tanks when it came to holding ground that they had taken or attacking over broken or rough terrain, and suggested

47 Guderian, Panzer Leader , 22. 48 Guderian, Panzer Leader , 24-25. 49 Guderian, Achtung Panzer! , 66, 126-127

31 combining tanks with motorized infantry to solve this difficulty. 50 Guderian went one further.

He envisioned a panzer division that contained all the major combat arms: tanks, self-propelled and towed artillery, motorized infantry, combat engineers, and signalmen. 51 This force would be capable of breaking through or bypassing a defensive network like the ones German forces had faced in World War I, and sustaining operations in open country after that.

Guderian’s theories regarding the composition of the hypothetical panzer division, their strengths and weaknesses, their coordination with tactical close air support, and their employment in a new style of mobile warfare were condensed into a single relatively thin book called Achtung Panzer!. Published in 1936, it was in essence the Bible of blitzkrieg. All important factors in how the German Wehrmacht would seek to wage the Second World War were contained in the book, along with in depth analysis of why armored units failed in the First

World War.

Achtung Panzer! would go down along with Mein Kampf as books that would have saved the Allies a great deal of trouble if they had bothered to read them. Just as , having never read Hitler’s book, blithely refused to consider the possibility that the German dictator was bent on European conquest until it was far too late, so did British and French generals, never having read Achtung Panzer!, completely dismiss the possibility that Germany’s new panzer divisions and mobile warfare could be effective against a well trained and equipped modern army until, again, it was far too late. 52 While Guderian had read a great deal of British

50 Guderian, Achtung Panzer!, 140-142. Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 53-54. 51 Guderian, Achtung Panzer!, 188-198. Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 54. 52 John Ruggiero, Hitler’s Enabler: Neville Chamberlain and the Origins of the Second World War (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), 13.

32 and French literature discussing tanks and their possible employment in offensive breakthroughs in the years before the publication of his book, nobody in the West bothered to translate Achtung Panzer! until after the Second World War.

By contrast, Achtung Panzer! was quite widely read in Germany itself, although by the time of its publication Guderian had for all intents and purposes won his fight to create panzer divisions. As early as two years prior, when German troops were still oftentimes reduced to using cardboard facsimiles in place of actual tanks during training, Guderian had managed to scrape together what he saw as the necessary components of a panzer division (motorcycle reconnaissance troops, motorized infantry, antitank units, and of course, panzers) in order to give a demonstration of the potential of such a unit to himself. It worked beautifully; the Fuhrer was extremely impressed, famously exclaiming “That’s what I need!

That’s what I want to have!” 53 It was almost entirely due to Hitler’s support that the first three panzer divisions were formed in 1935, as well as a centralized Panzer Troops Command.

53 Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 56. Guderian, Panzer Leader 30.

33

CHAPTER TWO

WAR IN THE WEST

No one, save perhaps the Polish population, actually expected Poland to defeat

Germany. The Polish industrial base was simply too small, the army too underequipped and undertrained, the air force so small as to be practically nonexistent, the terrain along the

German border too poorly suited for a defensive battle. The plans of the Polish general staff in the event of a German attack, in the wake of the British and French guarantees of their country, amounted to “hold out through the winter of 1939-1940 and wait for the Western Allies to attack Germany.” This was generally considered feasible by the military staffs of Europe. No less an authority than the German general Erich von Manstein was of the opinion that Poland could have held out for a significant time if it had withdrawn all of its forces east of the Vistula

River as soon as Germany invaded. 54

Poland did not withdraw their forces behind the Vistula in the event, instead choosing to stay and fight the Germans on the border. The Poles had legitimate reasons for this, attempting to buy time to complete the full mobilization of their forces, delayed by last minute

Allied maneuvering. 55 But legitimate reasons or no, the strategy of frontier defense spectacularly backfired, and the end results shocked Europe. In less than three weeks from the outset of the campaign, Poland had been wiped from the map by German forces. The intervention of the Soviets in the last couple of weeks to finish the Poles was entirely gratuitous. Polish casualties were more than six times the number suffered by the Germans.

54 Erich Manstein, Lost Victories (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982), 41-44. 55 Zaloga and Madej, The Polish Campaign 25.

34

Although the famed story of Polish cavalrymen charging German panzers and getting massacred for their troubles that forms the indelible image of the campaign in the popular eye was German propaganda, the Polish army was still wholly outclassed as well as outnumbered. 56

Poland had no answer for the maneuverability and firepower of the Wehrmacht’s new panzer divisions, coupled with constant close air support from the Luftwaffe. The first true test of

Heinz Guderian’s new way of mobile warfare had delivered on its creator’s promises. 57

However, even in a campaign which, more than any other Germany would fight in the

Second World War save perhaps the of Denmark and Holland, was a one-sided rout from start to finish, there were moments that would prove ominous in hindsight. The most notable of these was what happened when the Germans finally reached the Polish capital of

Warsaw. 58

On September 9th, only eight days after the beginning of the invasion, German tanks belonging to the Fourth Panzer Division arrived at Warsaw. 59 This was the first time in the

Second World War that the Wehrmacht encountered the obstacle of an urban area defended by determined forces, and its reaction proved to be indicative of a pattern that it would follow in nearly all similar situations throughout the war. Flush with victory and convinced that Polish troops could not stand against them, the tanks of the Fourth Panzer launched an immediate attack on the city, unsupported by any notable formations of infantry. 60 The result, too, proved to be prophetic. They were promptly halted by improvised barricades, then hammered at point-

56 Zaloga and Madej, The Polish Campaign 13, 30. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 45. 60 Ibid.

35 blank range with every the Polish garrison could muster. 61 This garrison had swollen considerably in the week since the beginning of the German attack, as Polish units shattered in the field fell back on the capital, and would actually continue to grow during the course of the

German siege as more units infiltrated through the Wehrmacht’s lines. 62 In yet a third way, then, Warsaw would prove prophetic for the later experiences of the Wehrmacht with urban fighting in the course of the war.

By the time the Germans realized their mistake and hastily retreated, they had lost over twenty tanks and other armored vehicles. 63 They tried again the next day, and were met with the same bloody and embarrassing result, even more severe than the first repulse. The Thirty

Fifth Panzer Regiment, leading the attack on the 10th, began the day with 120 tanks and armored vehicles. By mid-afternoon, it only had fifty seven still fit for combat. 64 Almost two weeks passed before the Germans tried a third attack, in which time they encircled and cut off the city, and then left it alone while continuing to destroy the Polish Army in the open field. 65

Finally, on September 23rd, an intense bombardment by artillery and airplanes began.

Designed as much to shatter the of Polish soldiers and as kill them, the bombardment reduced much of Warsaw to flaming ruin and lasted for two days. On the 25th, the assault began and lasted for four more days before the city was finally declared secure by the Germans. 66 Even then, the Germans did not militarily seize the entirety of the city, though

61 Ibid. 62 Zaloga and Madej, The Polish Campaign 139. 63 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 45. 64 Richard Hargreaves . Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The German Invasion of Poland 1939 . London: Pen & Sword Books, 2008. 147. 65 Ibid. 66 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 45-46.

36 they were slowly and steadily pushing forwards at the time of the garrison’s surrender. Rather, the exhaustion of food and water supplies within the parts of Warsaw still held by the Poles, exacerbated by Hitler’s refusal to allow the evacuation of Polish civilians, forced the city to sue for terms. 67

A force of Polish soldiers who were undertrained and underequipped compared to their foe, attacked from all sides in a city that had been pounded mercilessly by heavy fire and cut off from supplies, had managed to defy the Germans for twenty days. During that time, the Polish

Army had attempted its own counteroffensive on the Bzura River, to the northwest of Warsaw, and the Fourth Panzer Division had been sent to help stop it. It proved completely ineffective in that role of mobile warfare, for which it had been expressly created, solely because of its losses in two days of street fighting in Warsaw. 68

The blitzkrieg had been designed by Guderian specifically to avoid static defenses and built up areas. Warsaw was the first concrete evidence, if any had been needed, that the new

German system of mobile warfare was fundamentally unsuited to operate within such areas.

Yet in the glow of their overall crushing defeat of Poland, this first warning went unnoticed. The

Polish armies had been met on the border and quickly destroyed, and the campaign had already been decided by the time the first panzers reached Warsaw.

The blitzkrieg would not be unleashed again for another eight months. Throughout the fall and winter of 1939-1940, an impatient Hitler attempted to launch the invasion of France and the Low Countries no less than seventeen times, but was persuaded each time by his

67 Zaloga and Madej, The Polish Campaign 141. 68 Zaloga and Madej, The Polish Campaign 135.

37 advisers to postpone it for various reasons. The only action German forces saw during this interlude (known variously as the “Phony War” or “Sitzkrieg” for how calm the Western Front was during this period) took place in Operation Weserubung, the invasions of Norway and

Denmark. Although they were easily as successful as the invasion of Poland had been (Denmark capitulated in a single day without a single German death), Weserubung was from start to finish an operation led by the German Navy (the ). No panzer division was deployed in

Denmark, where the nonexistent resistance made them entirely unnecessary. Nor were they used in Norway, where the ruggedness of the terrain and the fact that the entire invasion force had to be deployed via ship, straining the Kriegsmarine’s transport capacity to the limit, made their usage both pointless and impractical. 69

Instead, all ten of the Wehrmacht’s panzer divisions were husbanded for the upcoming invasion of the West. Originally called Case Yellow (the Wehrmacht had a habit of naming important operations after colors, such as Case White for the invasion of Poland or later in Russia), the German plan for the invasion of the West was, originally, handled by the seniormost generals in the OKW, Brauchitsch and Halder. These officers deeply opposed Hitler’s decision to allow a war with the West, believed that Germany could not possibly defeat Britain and France, and hence were highly unenthusiastic about the task of drawing up plans for an invasion of France. What they eventually came up with was essentially a rehash of the

Schlieffen Plan of 1914. 70 The German Army, under this plan, would put its main weight on its right, with driving through northern Belgium in the region between Liege and

69 Powaski, Lightning War 29. 70 Powaski, Lightning War 48.

38

Maastricht. Army Group B would, in theory, smash through the Belgian, French, and British defences in Belgium and descend through the flat plains of the French-Belgian border area onto

Paris, just as the Kaiser’s army had been supposed to a quarter century before. 71

Had this plan been executed, it would have played directly into the Allies’ hands. 72

Always prepared to fight the last war, the French had based their entire strategy throughout the 1930s on countering a German advance through northern Belgium. In the event of a war breaking out with Germany, the French strategy was to move almost their entire field army into

Belgium, backed up by the Belgian Army and the BEF, to meet the German advance head on while relying on the to cover the German border itself. Only two armies, composed of France’s weakest and most unreliable troops, would be left in France itself. 73 One would be on the Maginot Line, and the other would be facing the .

This region of forest covers eastern and southern Belgium, Luxembourg, and part of eastern France. The French high command believed it to be impenetrable to tanks and mechanized vehicles, and so did not bother to defend the exits from it. In reality, while the

Ardennes is rough terrain by the standards of long civilized Western Europe, it was still eminently traversable by all sorts of vehicles, as Basil Liddell Hart had noted on a trip through the region in 1928. The ground was dry, the hills gentle and rolling. The road network, by the standards of France or western Belgium, was sparse and poorly maintained, but still more than adequate for sustained heavy traffic, and it is hard to find any other fact that as clearly

71 Manstein, Lost Victories 98-101. 72 Liddell-Hart, German Generals 112. 73 Horne, To Lose A Battle 120, 122-123.

39 illustrates the difference between the state of infrastructure in Western Europe compared to that in the Soviet Union. 74 In short, the Germans would have dearly loved to have dealt with

“wildernesses” of this kind in less than a year’s time on the Eastern Front.

Despite knowledge of the Allies’ intentions, and of the weakness of the forces facing the

Ardennes, the highest levels of German command were slow to alter their plans to take advantage of it. In fact, they would not have done so at all had it not been for a collection of four people, none of whom were on the General Staff: General Erich von Manstein, at that point merely the Chief of Staff of ’s Army Group A, Adolf Hitler himself, and a pair of lowly Luftwaffe captains. 75

Manstein was the first to realize the weaknesses inherent in Case Yellow, and the first to recognize that the Ardennes offered the best possibility for bypassing French defenses and conducting a mobile war. Starting in the fall of 1939, almost as soon as the Polish campaign had ended, and continuing into the winter, he badgered the General Staff to consider shifting the main weight of the German attack to a thrust through the Ardennes, what he termed a “sickle cut” to the sea that would trap the bulk of the Allied armies in Belgium and leave the French heartland exposed. Von Brauchitsch, Halder, Keitel, and the rest at first dismissed Manstein’s arguments, then became increasingly angry as he would not leave them alone, instead becoming more and more outspoken and borderline insubordinate. 76 Finally, when Manstein attempted to bypass the General Staff and put his ideas for an Ardennes offensive directly on

74 Powaski, Lightning War 22. 75 Powaski, Lightning War 2. 76 Liddell Hart, German Generals 114. Manstein, Lost Victories 116, 119-120.

40 the desk of Hitler, he was transferred from his prominent position on an Army Group staff to the command of a nice, out of the way infantry corps. 77

Manstein needn’t have gone to such lengths, because Hitler worked his way towards the idea of an Ardennes offensive quite on his own. At the very first briefing meeting for Case

Yellow, Hitler’s first remark upon the conclusion of the briefing was “But that is just the old

Schlieffen Plan again. You won’t catch the enemy with that twice running.” 78 Although the

Fuhrer was not nearly so vociferous as Manstein was, he began bringing up the idea of an offensive through the Ardennes more and more often as the winter of 1939 progressed. Hitler was never one for the nuts and bolts of actually planning an operation, however, and when the senior generals insisted that an attack through the Ardennes was not practical, he deferred to them. 79

That changed on January 10, 1940. A pair of Luftwaffe captains, Erich Hoenmanns and

Helmut Reinberger, were flying a small plane from Munster to Cologne. This in and of itself would not have been a particularly unusual occurrence, had it not been for the fact Reinberger was attached to the planning staff of the Second Air Fleet, and was carrying detailed plans for nearly every important troop deployment and movement for Case Yellow in a briefcase on his lap. Naturally, a series of freak accidents (first sudden thick clouds caused Hoenmanns to lose his bearing, then he accidentally turned off the engine) occurred and forced the pair to inside Belgium. 80 As soon as they realized where they were, Reinberger attempted to destroy

77 Ibid. 78 Powaski, Lightning War 49. 79 Manstein, Lost Victories 119-120. 80 Powaski, Lightning War 3-5.

41 his plans, but was not fast enough. The pair were apprehended by Belgian police, who saved enough of the documents to realize their importance, and within thirty-six hours translated copies of the orders for Case Yellow were in the hands of the French, Belgian, and British high commands. Shortly thereafter, the Germans also got wind of the incident.

The “Reinberger Incident”, as historians would later dub it, had very different effects on the two camps. The Allies took it as proof that their plan to meet the Germans head on in

Belgium was sound, and descended even further into complacency. The Germans, on the other hand, were thunderstruck. The second thing Hitler did upon receipt of the news (the first was to call for Reinberger and Hoenmanns’ deaths in absentia and order their wives thrown in prison) was order the revisal of Case Yellow. 81 Conveniently, it was at this point that he finally came into direct contact with Erich von Manstein, who managed to arrange for a personal meeting with Hitler via Hitler’s adjutant, Colonel Schmundt.

The meeting, on February 17, proved to be extremely productive. Manstein was able to provide a detailed plan for his proposed attack through the Ardennes, and Hitler formally endorsed it the next day to Brauchitsch and Halder. With that, Case Yellow was abandoned in favor of the new plan, dubbed Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut).

Sickle Cut was vastly different from Case Yellow in more ways than just where the main weight of the attack was supposed to fall. The plan of Manstein and Guderian also showed key philosophical differences with the plan conceived by the senior generals of the “old school”.

Where Case Yellow had been designed for a methodical advance culminating in the seizure of

81 Powaski, Lightning War 33.

42 bases and other key points in the Low Countries with which to threaten Britain, that is, limited objectives, Sickle Cut aimed for an immediate decision and total victory. 82 The plan that

Manstein presented, and that was enacted by the Wehrmacht in its invasion of France, was simultaneously intricate and vague, relying above all on speed and timing in its execution. Army

Group B, under Fedor von Bock, was to invade the Netherlands and Belgium under roughly the same route that the main effort would have followed under Case Yellow. Bock’s task was, in essence, to conquer the Low Countries fast enough to confirm the Allies in their known belief that his army represented the main German attack, yet slow enough to give them time to move the bulk of their forces up to oppose him. 83 Once they had, Bock needed to keep enough on them to prevent them from redeploying troops south to face Gerd von Rundstedt’s

Army Group A, coming through the Ardennes. Rundstedt, for his part, was to reach the Meuse

River in the vicinity of the city of Sedan within no more than four days after Bock had begun his offensive, and cross it with his panzers within five days. After that, they were to break out west in the direction of the English Channel. 84 Ideally, the Allied armies would be trapped in Belgium and destroyed, and both Britain and France would sue for peace.

When the German invasion of the West began on May 10, 1940, this intricate plan worked nearly to perfection. The armies of Britain and France poured into Belgium in accordance with their own prewar plans, and were soon heavily engaged with Bock’s Army

Group B, which slowly pushed them back. The Allies might well have been able to fight Bock to a standstill in Belgium, however, had Rundstedt and the panzer generals below him such as

82 Manstein, Lost Victories 100, 103-105. 83 Addington, The Blitzkrieg Era 96-98. 84 Ibid.

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Guderian and Hoth not ripped a gaping hole through the thin French line at Sedan and burst free into undefended country. Forced to retreat by the danger to their southern flank, the

Allied armies in Belgium were soon pinned against the sea and either surrendered or evacuated to England. The remaining Allied armies (almost entirely French, with the exception of one lone

British division that had somehow ended up on the Maginot Line) surrendered shortly thereafter. 85 The campaign was, on its face, the ultimate vindication of German blitzkrieg and mobile warfare, with the Wehrmacht having obtained the quick and total victory it needed.

This was not to say the advancing panzers faced no delays or disruptions whatsoever in their victorious romp; it was just that, for the most part, those they did encounter were irrelevant in larger strategic picture, and thus dismissed by an exuberant German High

Command in the afterglow of its victory. Falling into this category are the battles of Rotterdam and Calais. One delay would prove to have a great strategic impact indeed: the built-up countryside around the city of Dunkirk, incorporating several small towns such as Nieuport,

Furnes, and La Panne, would prove crucial in allowing heavily outnumbered and outgunned

British and French troops to delay the Germans long enough for the successful evacuation of the BEF and thousands of French troops besides. In the heady days after the French surrender, however, the Germans assumed the war to be almost won, and did not look too closely at the lessons of Dunkirk except to assign blame to each other for allowing it to happen.

The Netherlands, unlike Belgium, had been left unmolested by Germany in the First

World War. Given that seizing the country would present no advantage to Germany whatsoever

85 Julian Thompson. Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory . London: Pan Books, 2009. 274.

44 in a war against France, and less of one in a war against England than would be gained in the inevitable attack against Belgium, Dutch leaders hoped to be able to maintain their neutrality in the event of a second European war as well. Not that they had much of a choice: Holland fielded an army of eight divisions, just over a third of what Belgium could muster, and less than one fifteenth of what Germany would send to war against the Western Allies in May 1940. 86

Unfortunately for the Dutch, Hitler did not feel like being as magnanimous as the Kaiser had. Von Bock’s Army Group B was ordered to conquer the Netherlands with part of its strength, including one of its three panzer divisions, before returning its full focus to the push south against the Allied armies. On May 10, 1940, large elements of Army Group B poured over the Dutch border. Within a matter of hours, the eastern provinces of Friesland and Gelderland had been swallowed up with minimal resistance, and the Germans pushed west towards the major population centers on the coast of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam. They were well on schedule to take the country quickly and redirect troops back to the south. 87

However, unfortunately for the Germans, the character of the Netherland’s geography changed drastically as they neared the coast, becoming much more congested and urban.

Knowing the inherent danger that such terrain presented to the armored spearhead of the 9th

Panzer Division rolling towards the coast, the Germans resorted to the same tactic that defined their operations in all such terrain in the early stage of the war: a quick lightning strike to seize the key points in the city before any defenders could react, thus allowing the panzers to rush through the city and overwhelm any defenses before they could be set up. To be fair, this tactic

86 Powaski, Lightning War 28, 66. 87 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 48.

45 had paid dividends for the Germans on numerous occasions in the war to this point. It had worked countless times in Poland (though not in Warsaw). It had worked in Norway and in

Denmark; it had ended the resistance of the latter country before it had even began. It famously worked when tried on the same day as the attack on Rotterdam, on the Belgian fort of Eben Emael ninety-two miles to the southeast. There, a handpicked platoon of German paratroopers were dropped in gliders directly on top of the fort in gliders and blew up its artillery emplacements before the defenders knew what had happened.

A quick lightning strike had not, however, worked in Warsaw, where the attempt of the first panzers on the scene to take the city in a quick rush had been unceremoniously repulsed.

That example was far more relevant to a potential assault on Rotterdam than any other available to the Wehrmacht to that point, in that Rotterdam and Warsaw were both major cities. Even Eben Emael, a massive fortress, had not presented anything like the same challenges for a potential attacker.

Nevertheless, not for the first time or the last, the Germans attempted a lightning strike to seize the city and avoid the possibility of a serious fight. In the case of Rotterdam, the

Wehrmacht planned to achieve this by landing two platoons of infantry in floatplanes on the

Maas River at the city’s heart. These ninety men, having landed right next to their targets, would then seize all key bridges over the river and hold them until relieved by a larger force, around one thousand strong, landed by air at Waalhaven Air Base outside the city. 88 This force

88 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 48-49. Powaski, Lightning War 80-81.

46 in turn would hold the bridges until relieved by the main forces of the Fifteenth Army. The

Fifteenth would then finish the conquest of Holland, and move down the coast into Belgium.

In a rare instance for the Germans on a day when seemingly everything else for them, all along the front, went perfectly, the attack on Rotterdam was a complete fiasco. The German assault force successfully landed in the Maas River, and were immediately brought under fire by Dutch naval gunboats armed with 75mm artillery. The ninety men of the initial landing force

(later reinforced to around 120) did manage to seize some of their target bridges, but not all of them. Even when reinforced by the force from Waalhaven Air Base, the Germans could not take every bridge in the city that they had intended. Instead, the Dutch slowly forced the Germans off the bridges that they had seized in the initial assault, until the entire German assault force was trapped in a cluster of buildings at the end of one of the bridges. 89 Although the Dutch could not quite muster the firepower and strength to finally crush the invaders, the Germans were sealed off, did not fully control a single bridge, and for all intents and purposes had failed in their objectives. 90 With the expected relief forces of the Ninth Panzer Division and Fifteenth

Army held up further to the east, the Dutch had forced a stalemate, which for the Germans was as good as a defeat.

What finally broke the deadlock, and salvaged the situation for the Germans, was not conventional military force, but terror. Just as they had in Warsaw, the Germans resorted to a massive aerial attack upon the city’s civilian population in order to cow its defenders into surrender, or at least in this case the threat of one. Since the Dutch were not Slavs, and

89 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 48-49. Powaski, Lightning War 98. 90 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 48-49.

47 therefore were worthy of common courtesy, the Germans prefaced their bombardment with both a demand for surrender, and a warning of the bombing that would occur if the Dutch did not give in. The Dutch defenders, aware that they could not hold off the main German effort indefinitely but also aware that the French and British had elected to move elements of their army into Holland in accordance with their “Breda Plan” and that every second they held out might potentially bring those reinforcements closer, stalled for time. The commander of the

Rotterdam garrison, one Colonel Scharroo, replied to the German demand for surrender with a piece of bureaucratic obfuscation that would make any modern politician proud: he refused to even consider any terms of surrender unless they bore the personal signature of the German commander. The German envoy thus had to run back to his headquarters, obtain the signature, and return to Colonel Scharroo, who only now began to consider the German offer. Although his stalling had been meant to gain time, both to delay the German bombing and to give the

Allies that much more time to come to the city’s relief, Scharroo’s tactic failed, because the

German bombers had taken off simultaneously with the original German offer of surrender. 91

Despite German attempts to wave them off, the Luftwaffe bombers dropped more than a hundred tons of bombs on the heart of Rotterdam, igniting a firestorm that killed over nine hundred civilians, rendered almost eighty thousand homeless, and burned down more than twenty five thousand buildings. 92 Although, ironically, the actual Dutch military forces in the city were almost completely unscathed, horror at the destruction and pressure from civilian leaders forced Colonel Scharroo to capitulate in short order. 93 He had neutralized the German

91 Wettstein “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 49, Powaski, Lightning War 100-103. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid.

48 attempt at a swift coup de main and delayed their attempts to link the assault troops with the main body of the Fifteenth Army for four days, but had no answer for a display of overwhelming force.

Rotterdam, coupled with Warsaw, established the beginnings of a pattern for the

German armed forces. Blitzkrieg was designed first and foremost to avoid the potential bloody quagmires of urban areas. However, should they be presented with no alternative but to go through a built up area, the Wehrmacht would attempt to apply the same principles that consistently worked for them in the open field: speed, surprise, and precision. However, when what worked against an isolated fortress or a sleepy border inevitably failed in the heart of a major city, the German armed forces would turn to something very typical of their

Nazi leaders: terror. Massive destruction aimed at the civilian population, or even the threat of it, would in theory break both the defender’s will to keep fighting and the civilian population’s will to support them in that fight, and more importantly would spare the Wehrmacht the need to involve its troops in a protracted fight that was inherently antithetical to their training and tactical and strategic doctrine.

On occasion, however, the Wehrmacht would be forced to fight a foe that either did not have a civilian population to worry about or did not care about said population’s welfare, and had taken shelter well enough amongst the urban setting to be able to continue to fight through a heavy bombardment. Such a situation was almost nonexistent in the West in 1940.

But there was at least one instance in which the Germans had to dig out an enemy from a major city head on, without the ability to even attempt their preferred quick strike.

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The city of Calais sits on the Continental side of the narrowest part of the English

Channel: on a clear day one can see the white cliffs of Dover in England from the beach. As befitting a place so close to Britain, the city has historically been heavily influenced by it. It was an English possession beginning in the days of William the Conqueror and lasting for another four hundred years, when it was the very last English foothold on the Continent to be taken by the French. In 1940, Calais formed an important part of the supply lines for the British

Expeditionary Force operating in Belgium. Britain mobilized in a very slow, haphazard, and inefficient way in the Second World War (as opposed to her ally France, which mobilized so efficiently that her munitions industry ground to a halt for a lack of skilled workers), and when war broke out in September of 1939 could only muster two divisions for immediate service on the Continent. By May of 1940, when the German offensive began, that number had grown to ten divisions (which still was a poor comparison to the twenty two Belgium was fielding, let alone the hundred plus of both France and Germany). New formations were being sent to

Europe piecemeal as soon as they were raised and equipped. In certain cases, they were sent cross-Channel before they were even equipped.

One such case was that of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment. This unit, assigned as a component formation of the 1st Armored Division, left the port of Dover on May 22nd to reinforce the 1st in France. 94 Their tanks had left via the port of Southampton three days earlier. When the 3rd RTR arrived in Calais, they found their tanks missing, the 1st Armored

Division nowhere near the port, and the Germans bearing down on them. Nor was the case of

94 Thompson, Dunkirk 158-160.

50 the 3rd RTR unique among the British units in Calais, or even the most egregious. The 1st

Queen Victoria’s Rifles, for example, was a motorcycle reconnaissance battalion that arrived in the city on May 22nd without any of its motorcycles, without any three inch mortars, no lethal ammunition for the light two inch mortars it did have, and with a third of its men armed only with pistols. 95 The 30th Brigade, consisting of the 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps and 1st Rifle

Brigade, arrived in Calais a day later than the 1st QVR and 3rd RTR, with its commanding officer, a Brigadier Nicholson, taking charge of the defense of the city. This unit wasn’t quite as disastrously disorganized as the two formations that had preceded it into the city, but

Nicholson’s troops were still missing a great deal of equipment. A third of their antitank guns had been left on the docks in England and replaced with wireless radio trucks meant for a unit in the main body of the BEF in Belgium. 96 None of their field or medium artillery made it to

Calais. What equipment was loaded onto the transports was chaotically arranged, with personal gear needed by the soldiers on the heavy equipment ships and heavy equipment on the personnel ships. Sorting out this mess in the harbor at Calais took significantly more time than it would have had the equipment been arranged properly.

Time was something the Calais garrison did not have. When the 30th Brigade arrived in the city, the lead elements of the German 1st Panzer Division were only three miles from the city center and had already cut the roads leading northeast to Dunkirk and southwest to

Boulogne. 97 At first, the Germans had no intention of actually attacking Calais. The forces in the immediate area fell under the command of the XIX , commanded by none other

95 Ibid. 96 Thompson, Dunkirk 162-163. 97 Thompson, Dunkirk 163.

51 than Heinz Guderian himself. Guderian, the primary creator of blitzkrieg doctrine, was perfectly aware of the inherent dangers of assaulting an urban area like Calais, which not only boasted thick clusters of houses along narrow, winding streets, but even had a massive fortress designed by the famous French military engineer Vauban at its very heart. Initially, therefore,

Guderian contented himself with merely sealing the port off, believing, in his own words, that

“there was no particular urgency about capturing this port.” 98 Calais was to be taken at his leisure after a period of prolonged terror bombardment. The reinforcement of the city over the two day period of May 22nd-23rd by the British changed matters, however. The forces in the city, while not an existential threat to his panzers, were strong enough that they could not be left unmolested while the attack on the main body of the BEF at Dunkirk proceeded. In addition, if the British had managed to move two brigades into the city in just two days, even more troops might be sent in until Calais did become an existential threat.

Therefore, Guderian ordered his 10th Panzer Division to come out of reserve and attack the city, instead of aiding the 1st Panzer Division in the attack on Dunkirk itself. The initial attack on the afternoon of May 24th was able to gain only a small lodgement in the southernmost part of the city before being stopped cold. In the words of the 10th Panzer’s war diary, “enemy resistance from scarcely perceptible positions was, however, so strong that it was only possible to achieve quite local success.” 99 That same night, after only half a day’s fighting, 10th Panzer reported to Guderian’s corps headquarters that fully half of the tanks in the unit were casualties. This, despite the British defenders being hampered by a failed attempt

98 Guderian, Panzer Leader 116. 99 Thompson, Dunkirk 165.

52 to convoy rations to Dunkirk that morning that only succeeded in getting half of their own tanks blown up, as well as the French troops responsible for covering the western half of the city surrendering as soon as the first shots of the battle were fired.

To give the 10th Panzer some much needed help, Guderian was forced to strip the heavy artillery from both the 2nd Panzer Division, which was in the process of a similar fight to the southwest at Boulogne, and the 1st Panzer Division, which was the only one of his three divisions actually pursuing the objectives he wanted and attacking the BEF itself at Dunkirk. 100

Under cover of bombardment from every medium and heavy artillery piece in the XIX Panzer

Corps, as well as significant help from the Luftwaffe, the 10th Panzer Division was able to slowly but steadily push forward through Calais. The city finally fell late on the evening of May 26, with the capture of Brigadier Nicholson in the heart of the Citadel, the massive 17th century fortress at the heart of the downtown area. His soldiers were slowly isolated into pockets that ceased fighting only when they ran out of ammunition, the last (composed of a single company of the

1st QVR) surrendering at 1700 hours local time on the 26th.

On the face of it, Calais’ fall after only three days would seem to be an example of blitzkrieg working just fine, even in the cramped confines of a city. Yet closer examination of the fighting here, as at Warsaw and Rotterdam before it, reveals several of the same trends continuing to plague the Wehrmacht. Just as at Warsaw, a heavily outnumbered group of soldiers managed to stymie the initial assault of a German panzer division. Although the 30th

Brigade was not nearly so poorly trained as the defenders of Warsaw had been (its two

100 Guderian, Panzer Leader 116-117.

53 constituent formations were some of the very few in the British Army that had received constant training throughout the 1930s), they were very nearly as ill-equipped. 101 The aforementioned mix ups in transportation aside, constant problems with miscommunication plagued the Calais garrison during their very brief stay in the city. Nearly half of their tanks were lost on the morning of the 24th in a lunatic attempt to convoy rations to Dunkirk ordered by the British High Command, and most of the remainder were blown up by their own crews in a misinterpretation of an order to “leave nothing valuable for the enemy.” 102 Yet despite this, the Calais garrison succeeded in tying down an entire panzer division away from the main action at Dunkirk as well as the heavy and medium artillery of the entire corps that it was a part of, and inflicting heavy casualties upon both that division’s motorized infantry contingent and its tanks. If one is tempted to dismiss this achievement by virtue of how brief it was, one should remember that these three days were some of the most crucial of the entire campaign, as the

Germans sought to take Dunkirk before the vast majority of the BEF could reach it and begin evacuating. Had the 10th Panzer Division, and all the XIX Panzer Corps’ artillery, been available in this push, it may well have succeeded. The defense of Calais thus serves as yet another example of urban warfare imposing critical delays on German operations, leading to the ultimate failure to attain their strategic objectives.

101 Thompson, Dunkirk 170. 102 Thompson, Dunkirk 163-164, 167.

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CHAPTER THREE

WAR IN THE EAST

On June 21st, 1941, over three million men of the German Wehrmacht and the armies of Germany’s allies poured across the western border of the Soviet Union. Their ultimate objective was the conquest of the USSR up to a line running from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to on the Caspian Sea (the Communist native leadership of the country could keep unpopulated Siberia). To successfully bring this about, the Axis forces would be required to both destroy the existing armed forces of the Soviet Union, the largest in the world at that time, and to deal such a blow to the USSR’s manpower reserves and industrial capacity that it could not feasibly recover. In addition, this mammoth task, seemingly impossible in and of itself, needed to be accomplished by the end of 1941. The German economy, after two and a half years of open war, was still essentially geared towards civilian production. Germany simply could not sustain the effort of a war against the Soviet Union on a long term basis with any real hope for victory. If a knockout blow was not delivered against the Red Army and the nation fielding it before winter fell, Operation Barbarossa would have failed.

Despite the enormity of the task facing it, in the first few weeks of Barbarossa the

Wehrmacht seemed well on its way to success to most outside observers. More than 80 percent of the entire peacetime Red Army, concentrated on or near the border (Soviet strategy firmly believed that any war would only be fought on foreign soil), was enveloped, trapped, and crushed within the opening months of the war. Almost three and a half million Soviet soldiers

55 were killed, wounded, or captured, and more than twenty thousand tanks were lost. 103 The devastation was even worse in the air. Nearly the entire Red Army Air Force was annihilated on the ground in the first few hours of the attack, with only a scant few poorly trained pilots able to get their obsolescent machines aloft (where they were promptly shot down). The Red Army had been eviscerated in the opening months, and the sheer amount of territory falling into

German hands as a result was astounding. The Wehrmacht was advancing eastward at a truly astonishing pace.

Yet, according to the timetable laid down by the OKH in the planning for Barbarossa, it was not nearly fast enough. The original plans had called for Moscow to have been taken by the beginning of September; after two months of fighting, Army Group Center was perhaps two thirds of the way there. 104 was closing in on Leningrad, but still not near enough to strike directly at the city or potentially link up with Finnish forces closing in from the northwest. It was worst of all in the south; had not even cleared the

Crimean Peninsula, let alone reached the River or the Caucasus, and the port city of Odessa still festered untaken far in the rear. 105 Not one of the three Army Groups had actually taken their slated objectives for September when the month ended. Hitler and his generals had left the Wehrmacht deliberately unprepared for winter: the Soviet Union had been thought sure to fall long before snow and cold became an issue. As autumn fell over the steppe with the Soviets

103 Glantz, Barbarossa 210. 104 Glantz, Barbarossa 84. 105 Glantz, Barbarossa 117.

56 still far from defeated, each delay became more and more catastrophic to the chances of winning the war with one quick blow in 1941.

This simple fact—that the Wehrmacht’s failure to seize its objectives in accordance with the strict timetable of Operation Barbarossa ultimately doomed the whole campaign—was quickly noted by historians and generals alike almost as soon as the war ended, and has become an accepted fact in the historiography of the Eastern Front in the decades since. Where the academic community differs is in the explanation for how, precisely, the German army came to lag so far behind in its goals. It has been argued numerous times that the German intervention in Greece and Crete to aid Mussolini in the spring of 1941 delayed the start of the invasion sufficiently to doom any chances of success. William Shirer in his great work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was one of the first to advance this line of argument.106 The impact of that book in turn led to a number of other historians taking it up, such as Frank Ellis.107 There is a certain amount of merit to this view. The preparations for the Balkan offensive and need to supply the troops deployed there did indeed cause some disruption in the much greater preparations for Barbarossa, particularly in the area of Army Group South. However, Army

Groups Center and North were almost entirely unaffected by the Balkan campaign, and none of the troops used in the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece had been intended for participation in the first wave of Barbarossa in any case. For this reason, most historians have discounted this theory.

106 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 829-830. 107 Frank Ellis, Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler’s Invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Empire (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 387.

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Leading scholars of the modern profession, such as David Glantz, have also argued that the unique nature of the Soviet Union’s geography was anathema to the Wehrmacht, and this theory has found much more favor. 108 Usually this means the vast distances of the endless steppes, the nearly nonexistent roads either covered in a choking dust that fouled engines and lungs, or else hip-deep morasses of mud that made movement nearly impossible. Yet the primitive roads of the Soviet Union were not just primitive in their construction, but also in their greater scope. The road network within Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and the other Soviet states existed as simple connections between populated centers, routes from point A to point

B. 109 There were few to no detours or alternate paths. The many rivers that cut through the region invariably had a town or city surrounding the bridges that spanned them. Where in

France or Belgium or Poland an enterprising panzer commander might have found a way to bypass an urban center with good reconnaissance, or at worst attack it from the rear before its defenders could adjust, in the USSR there were often few options but to smash head on into the crucial towns guarding road junctions or river crossings. The Germans were quite aware of the primitiveness of Soviet infrastructure during their planning for Barbarossa, but in yet another example of the hubris that pervaded the OKH, the detrimental effects that the poor roads would have on their own forces were not considered. Instead, the roads were only seen as another factor that would insure German victory, by preventing the Soviets from escaping

German encirclements. 110

108 Glantz, Barbarossa 212-213. 109 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 52-53. 110 David Glantz & Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 31-33.

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Urban areas also played into another of the Soviet Union’s key strengths in these dark days. With the wholesale destruction of nearly all of the trained soldiers in the Red Army in the first weeks of the war, the Soviets were left scrambling to scrape together something credible that could slow or stop the German advance. Apart from the stragglers of shattered units and the occasional intact brigade or division that had miraculously survived, the answer was the opelchenie: a word with a history in Russia going back to Napoleon’s time. Both in 1812 and

1941, vast hordes of ordinary citizens were mobilized into the ranks of the army. With almost no training, oftentimes simply given rifles and sent into battle straight from their civilian lives, these men (and sometimes women) stood no chance whatsoever against German panzers and in open country. In a city, they were similarly doomed to defeat. However, the inherent defensive advantages offered by a large urban area meant that even without training and scant equipment, they might at least exact a toll with their sacrifice. Whether that took the form of delaying the Wehrmacht for a few hours or stopping them cold for weeks, killing a few score Germans or several thousand, urban areas allowed the (the Soviet High Command) to maximize the limited resources it had immediately available. As major landmarks and centers of railway lines, cities also served as collection points for the remnants of Soviet units that had been destroyed in the cataclysmic fighting on the frontier. As these men straggled in, they would be sent onward to the east via rail to join one of the reforming units of the Red Army, if this was viable. If it was not, they would stiffen the backs of the opelchenie, providing hard won expertise in the struggle to delay the onward rushing panzers.

In dozens of cities and towns across the Soviet Union, these ad hoc units fought to stall the Germans. In most, their efforts won only a few hours or half a day for the cause (which

59 nonetheless had an eventual cumulative effect). In some, the Germans were delayed for a week or more, providing a real and immediate effect in buying time. In a few cases, however, Soviet defenders managed to hold out against the odds, tying down vastly superior Axis forces, for truly remarkable lengths of time.

The most famous of these was the port city of Odessa. Located on the northwest shore of the , quite close to the Romanian border, Odessa was (and remains to this day) the second largest city on the Black Sea coast after Constantinople. While, in a rarity on the Eastern

Front, it was not a necessary road junction for further eastward progress, its size and potential position as a Soviet beachhead deep in the Axis rear nevertheless made its capture vital.

Therefore, the Luftwaffe bombed the city multiple times on the opening day of the war.

However, the Axis did not directly attack Odessa on the ground for almost a month and a half.

The reason for this can be found in Soviet prewar plans. Soviet doctrine in case of a war with a

European power (most probably Germany) revolved around the idea of carrying the fight to the enemy, whose populace would inevitably rise up to greet the arrival of their proletarian liberators. The main blow in this case would be dealt in the south to take advantage of favorable terrain and to quickly sweep into the lands of brother Slavic peoples. In the unlikely event that the enemy struck first and was not immediately repulsed, Soviet High Command believed that the incredibly resource-rich Ukraine would be their primary target. In either case, of the three sectors (North, Center, and South), Army Group South faced the heaviest opposition, with the highest proportion of modern equipment such as the KV-1 heavy tank and the T34 medium tank. While the Soviet commanders in the south were not any brighter or more experienced than their brethren to the north (as well as having to deal with an exposed

60 flank as the northern Soviet armies were savaged and thrown back), the sheer power of the

Soviet forces facing them meant that Army Group South made the slowest initial progress of the three German efforts. There were even abortive incursions into Romanian territory by the

Soviets in the opening days of the war, though quickly removed by the Axis forces. 111

As a result, Odessa did not come under direct assault until August 5th, despite having been under regular aerial attack since the first day of the war on June 21st. This delay proved crucial in the city’s defense, allowing the construction of antitank ditches and prepared fighting positions in the city and its immediate outskirts. The city and its immediate environs were placed under the control of the newly formed Maritime Army. Further contributing to the defense of the city was the fact that the 14th Corps, which had been defending the coastal area of the Romanian border, was able to withdraw more or less intact and in good order when

German progress to the north began to threaten its flank. But of the three infantry divisions that had formed the 14th Corps-- the 150th, the 51st, and the 25th-- two were quickly transferred northwards in attempts to plug gaps elsewhere. 112 Only the 25th remained under the command of the Maritime Army. In addition to this division, the Maritime Army also had control over a newly formed and halfway trained cavalry division, a regiment of reservists, an air defense brigade, some NKVD border guards, the training staff of an infantry school, and the

Red Fleet ships based in the port. 113 In addition to these men, who were at least part of the regular in one way or another, the Maritime Army also raised eight

111 N. I Krylov, Glory Eternal (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 19. 112 Krylov, Glory Eternal 29, 38. 113 Krylov, Glory Eternal 29.

61 battalions of opelchenie from the city’s seven districts and the railway marshaling yards. 114

There was not a single tank in the entire army, and this ad-hoc collection of men numbered roughly thirty four thousand men in total. Because of the proximity to their border, the vast majority of the Axis forces arrayed to take the city were Romanian, troops of their .

Elements of the German also served as reinforcements for the Romanians, combining to form a total force of approximately one hundred and sixty thousand men. 115

Thus, the Axis forces outnumbered the Soviet defenders by a factor of almost five to one.

Although both sides would receive reinforcements over the course of the siege (for the Axis at no point gained naval supremacy over the Black Sea, allowing the Soviets to move troops in and out by sea), the ratio would remain consistently lopsided in favor of the Axis.

This overwhelming preponderance of numbers prompted the Romanians to attempt to take Odessa with a quick surprise attack, as the Germans had done at Warsaw and Rotterdam earlier in the war. Consequently, on August 10th a cargo plane carrying sixteen men armed with submachine guns suddenly landed on Odessa’s main airfield in a brazen attempt to capture the airfield for the insertion of more troops in the heart of the city’s defenses. The Soviets, ever alert for treachery, had placed a full battalion in defense of the airfield, who quickly and unceremoniously erased the intruders. 116 When this failed, along with several other coup de main attempts, the Romanians and Germans resorted to brute force and attempts to overwhelm the city with sheer numbers. This worked about how one might expect: by August

24th, after two weeks of nearly constant fighting, the Romanians had taken almost thirty

114 Krylov, Glory Eternal 53. 115 Krylov, Glory Eternal 62. 116 Krylov, Glory Eternal 65.

62 thousand casualties and were still stuck on the city’s main defensive line. However, the

Romanians did succeed in taking the town of Belyayevka, containing the pumping station that drew most of the city’s fresh water from the Dniester River. Although the Soviets sank no less than fifty-eight wells inside the city limits in an attempt to compensate for this loss, the severe rationing of water would be a significant factor in making the city untenable. 117 The other major factor was the continuing advance of German armies elsewhere in the Soviet Union. By the beginning of October, they had seized almost the entirety of the Crimean Peninsula, bringing the city of Sevastopol under siege. Sevastopol was the other major base for the Soviet

Black Sea Fleet and its position relatively close to Soviet territory in the Caucasus meant that there was still a realistic chance of the city being relieved. Odessa, in contrast, was now hundreds of miles behind Axis lines, with the situation for its defenders worsening daily.

Accordingly, on October 1st, the Stavka ordered the evacuation of Odessa, transporting its defenders under cover of darkness by sea to Sevastopol to reinforce the defenders there over the course of two weeks. During this time, the Romanians kept up the pressure, finally taking the city on October 16th, 1941. It was the definition of a pyrrhic victory. The clumsy, brute force tactics had kept Axis forces that were desperately needed elsewhere tied down in the rear of the main area of operations for seventy-three days and cost almost ninety thousand casualties by the time the city fell. 118 The delay and losses inflicted on the enemy proved to be of enormous benefit to the Soviets.

117 Krylov, Glory Eternal 121. 118 Krylov, Glory Eternal 267.

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The city of Sevastopol has been the central hub of the Russian Black Sea Fleet since the late 1700s. The city grew exponentially in size with the aid of a crash building program for the navy, and its strategic location proved crucial in supporting the campaigns of Suvorov against the Turks. The Black Sea Fleet based in the city, and its commanding location, ensured that

Sevastopol was the single most important factor in Russia’s dominance of the Black Sea. Odessa was larger and more economically important, and Rostov was more sheltered, but Sevastopol was the heart of Russia’s southern navy. When Great Britain and France actually came to blows with Russia in 1853 over Russia’s near hegemonic status in the area, their campaign to reduce

Russia’s influence centered on the Crimean Peninsula and Sevastopol, their overriding objective being to destroy the Russian fleet based there.

The fortifications built by the Russians to keep the British and French out of Sevastopol, and those built by the Crimean Turks to keep out the Russians before that, still existed in 1941.

Although they could not stand up to modern heavy artillery, even an obsolete is better than none, and these were placed in key locations. Having finally begun to gain ground after they were initially halted by the formidable Soviet forces facing them, and having left a substantial portion of their strength to besiege Odessa, Army Group South now needed to secure the . This would fulfill three main strategic objectives for it. First, it would deprive the Russian Black Sea Fleet of its main base and the only one within a day’s sail of Odessa. This would force all resupply convoys heading west to be at sea during the day, thus making them vastly more vulnerable to air attack. Without the supplies provided by these convoys, Odessa would quickly fall, in turn releasing the Romanian and portions of the German 11th

Army besieging it- troops that were desperately needed at the front. Second, the small

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Peninsula jutting from the eastern side of the Crimean Peninsula offered a vital route into the

Caucasus with its vast oilfields, Army Group South’s ultimate objective. Without Kerch and the

Crimean Peninsula, the Germans would have to go around the , cross the mighty

Don River (most likely by fighting through the city of Rostov), and then battle through the

Caucasus Mountains themselves, the tallest in Europe. With Kerch, the Germans needed only to hop a tiny strait of perhaps two miles to bypass all of that (as well as preventing the Soviets from doing the same in a westward direction). Finally, the air base at Sevastopol provided

Soviet aircraft with just enough range to reach the Romanian oilfields at Ploesti: with Europe under blockade and the Soviet Union now hostile, these were Germany’s only source of oil and no threat to them could be tolerated for even a moment. 119 Therefore, the Germans had no practical choice but to divert troops south and seize the Peninsula.

The Soviet 51st Army, created on the spot by the Stavka when the Crimea came under threat, was rather more well provided for than the Coastal Army at Odessa was. Where the Coastal

Army consisted of two infantry divisions and whatever odds and ends its staff could scrape up from the local area, the 51st Army mustered two regular Red Army infantry divisions, two reserve rifle divisions, four full divisions of opelchenie, a regiment of tanks, and operational command of the entire Black Sea Fleet. This gave Fyodor Kuznetsov, the army commander, a total of almost ninety five thousand men plus the fleet. 120 In addition, Sevastopol and the

Crimean Peninsula were both nearly perfect for defense. Sevastopol was well protected by ravines, hills, and fortifications both a century old and modern, while the entrance to the

119 Robert Forcyzk, Where The Iron Crosses Grow: The Crimea 1941-1944 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 41. 120 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 43.

65 peninsula from the north formed a narrow chokepoint of only three miles at the Isthmus of

Perekop. But the Axis forces approaching the city were not undertrained and incompetently led

Romanians, either. The 11th Army contained eight veteran divisions, including the elite SS

Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler division, and a smattering of smaller units thrown together in improvised formations. 121 More important even than the units in the German army, however, was its commander. On September 12th, Eugen Ritter von Schobert, the man who had commanded the 11th Army since the beginning of the invasion, was killed in a plane crash. Five days later, Hitler personally appointed Erich von Manstein as Schobert’s replacement. 122

On September 12th, the same day as their commander’s death, scouts from the SS

Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler arrived at the Perekop Isthmus to find that the Soviets had fortified it to the point of near impenetrability. 123 Due to Schobert’s death and the time it took Manstein to arrive, the 11th Army was without leadership for five days, time the Soviets used to strengthen their defenses further. When Manstein finally took command on September 17th, he searched for a way to break into the Crimea without battering straight through the Soviet defenses, a way to retain the speed and mobility of blitzkrieg and avoid a task his soldiers were not equipped for. Upon finding that there was no alternate way in, Manstein halted the corps he had sent to continue the attack into the eastern Ukraine and strip it of all its artillery in order to have a chance of breaking through the Soviet defenses. In addition to halting the eastward attack, it took an additional week for the artillery to arrive and move into position. 124

121 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 62. 122 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 44. 123 Ibid. 124 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 49.

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The German attack, launched on September 24th, was successful at breaking into the

Crimea but only at the cost of 2641 casualties, including 1100 on the first day of the attack, and five days of exhausting combat. 125 It was this German success, now directly threatening

Sevastopol, which prompted the evacuation of Odessa. 126 The veterans of the Coastal Army boosted the Soviet strength in the Crimea by another eighty thousand men. However, incompetence on the part of the Soviet commanders-- first Kuznetsov, then his replacement, the Red Navy’s Vice Admiral Levchenko-- shattered the strength of the 51st Army and Coastal

Army with piecemeal and unsupported counterattacks. The Germans poured through the secondary defensive positions the Soviets tried to establish on October 23rd and began to fan out. Manstein quickly occupied almost the entirety of the Crimea in only slightly more time than it had taken him to gather forces for his initial assault on the Perekop Isthmus. 127 It was only when they reached the outer limits of Sevastopol on November 9th that the Germans came to a halt. The defenses of the city were far too strong for them to attempt to immediately assault, and they began to siege the city, which was now defended only by the Coastal Army

(the 51st Army having been pinned at the end of the Kerch Peninsula and annihilated). It was not until November 11th that the Germans attempted any attack at all. Their troops were exhausted and undersupplied, and despite the Soviet defenders also being exhausted and undersupplied, the inherent defensive advantages of the city and its environs gave them a massive advantage. The half-hearted German attacks were easily squashed, and Manstein decided that the only way to take the city was a well-planned major offensive supported with

125 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 50-53. 126 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 54. 127 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 60.

67 superior firepower. This took more than a month to organize, during which time the Russian winter descended upon Manstein’s troops outside the city as surely as it did those outside

Moscow. Indeed, it was the perilous situation of Army Group Center’s troops that forced

Manstein to launch his assault on December 17th; Hitler wanted Sevastopol taken once and for all, so that its troops could be released to ensure that the gains around Moscow were not lost to Soviet counteroffensives. 128 Manstein responded with a furious attack that pushed into the main line of defense in the city’s , but was completely halted by New Year’s Eve. 129 By this point, German troops had been stonewalled at Sevastopol for two months, and the end was nowhere in sight. The Coastal Army was defending Sevastopol with the same tenacity that it had shown at Odessa, with regular reinforcements and supplies from the Caucasus delivered by sea. Over the next several months, the Germans failed to make any progress against

Sevastopol in part because Soviet diversionary landings in early January 1942 that attempted to retake the Kerch peninsula, in part because their own forces were overstretched and exhausted, but more than anything else because the defenses of Sevastopol were simply too great to have any hope of overcoming without significant reinforcements. It was not until June of 1942 that Manstein got all the equipment he needed to finally crack the city open: in particular, what was literally the heaviest artillery the German Wehrmacht had to offer. Several

280mm, a 420mm, and the behemoth 800mm “Dora” railway gun all opened fire on Sevastopol on June 7, 1942, along with massive air support from the Luftwaffe. 130 This finally allowed

German troops to enter the city, but the Soviets defended it so fiercely that almost another

128 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 86. 129 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 97. 130 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 149.

68 month would elapse before Sevastopol finally, after so long, fell. When the city was pronounced secure on July 4, it marked the end of an almost eight month period in which the

German 11th Army had sat outside of Sevastopol, eight months where they had been desperately needed to repel Soviet counterattacks elsewhere on the Eastern Front and to provide striking power for the Wehrmacht’s own summer offensive. 131 Although the heroic

Coastal Army was completely destroyed with the fall of Sevastopol, it had singlehandedly tied down multiple Axis armies since the preceding August. It had also managed to inflict thirty five thousand casualties on the 11th Army during the final battle for the city alone, to go with those the Germans had suffered over the course of the siege and previous failed offensives as well as those the Romanians had suffered at Odessa. Even with the fall of the city and the destruction of its defenders, the 11th Army had been so savaged by the fighting that it was useless for deployment anywhere else on the front until replacement men and equipment had arrived. 132

By any measure, the Siege of Sevastopol must be seen as an overall for the

Soviets, even with the loss of almost all of its defenders.

Another key example of urban combat delaying the German advance, still in the area of

Army Group South, was the city of Dnipropetrovsk. The city had been a major beneficiary of

Stalin’s industrial Five Year Plans during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, and its population had exploded to over five hundred thousand. German maps of the city and its environs, dating to World War I, were useless. However, the city contained the only crossings over the major river for a significant area (hence its name), and the Germans had no

131 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 148. 132 Forcyzk, Iron Crosses 213.

69 choice but to attempt to take it. Reverting to their standard approach in such circumstances, they attempted to seize the city and its bridges in a lightning surprise attack on August 25th,

1941. Although the Germans managed to take most of the west bank before the Soviets could muster anything other than minor resistance, all but one of the bridges in the city were demolished before they could be secured. The last bridge, a small pontoon bridge big enough to allow trucks to cross but not tanks, was successfully seized by the Germans, who managed to get a force of infantry across and seize the area of the city immediately around the end of the bridge. 133 They could get no further, however. Ferocious resistance by the Soviets turned the few blocks surrounding the pontoon bridge over the Dnieper into a hellish meatgrinder, as the

Soviets sought to erase the bridgehead with artillery and airstrikes and the Germans attempted to push out and seize the rest of the city. 134 The result of this battle of attrition was an extremely bloody stalemate that lasted for a full month and led to very heavy casualties for those units involved: two divisions, the 60th and the 198th, had over two thousand casualties between them in just a week of fighting. 135 In short, this was precisely the scenario that Heinz

Guderian had wished to avoid with his doctrine of blitzkrieg. Dnipropetrovsk did not finally fall until the end of September, when after a two week pause the Germans brought in no less than twenty five battalions of artillery from across Army Group South and obliterated both the

Soviet artillery that had been shelling the pontoon bridge and most of the defenders who had kept their bridgehead in check. Even then, the fight to secure the eastern bank was stiff and bloody.

133 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 54. 134 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 54-55. 135 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 58.

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Guderian himself found his progress frustrated on multiple occasions during Barbarossa by city fighting. The father of blitzkrieg commanded an armeegruppe (a German term indicating a unit larger than a corps but smaller than an army) of panzers during the initial invasion, as a component part of Army Group Center. Unlike Army Group South, Center benefited both from weaker opposing Soviet forces and from being the main focus of the German effort, with the result that its forces made the most immediate progress of the three German Army Groups.

Guderian’s forces quickly ripped through the opposition in the opening days of Barbarossa, with

Soviet forces too disorganized to put up much defense. However, this changed upon reaching the cities of Rogachev and Mogilev. The latter, in a similar manner to Dnipropetrovsk, had benefited greatly from the Five Year Plans and was a hub for the Soviet manufacture of silk; both held crucial crossings over the river Dnieper in Army Group Center’s line of advance. 136

Soviet reinforcements rallied to both cities, with three Red Army divisions taking up positions in

Mogilev, and when German advance units arrived on July 2nd, 1941, they were greeted warmly.

The usual German attempt to seize the critical points in the city with a lightning strike failed, also as per usual, and Guderian backed off. His panzers had advanced so far ahead of their support that it would take the marching infantry divisions a full two weeks to catch up. 137 In the meantime, the Soviet commander, Timoshenko, took advantage of the delay to launch a full- fledged counterattack, which though repulsed severely shook the Germans. 138 Even once the

German infantry arrived and surrounded the city, on July 20th, it took a full week of fighting for

136 Wettstein, “Urban Warfare Doctrine” 52. 137 Guderian, Panzer Leader 167. 138 Guderian, Panzer Leader 176.

71 four infantry divisions to clear the built up area of its outnumbered defenders. In all, Mogilev held up Guderian’s advance for almost a month.

Like Army Groups Center and South, Army Group North was forced to engage in far more urban combat in the first few months of Barbarossa than its soldiers had experienced in the entire war up to that point. Where South was assigned to the conquest of the Ukraine and eventually the Caucasus with its rich oilfields, and Center was given the task of taking Moscow itself, Army Group North’s job according to the master plan for Barbarossa was the conquest of the Baltic States and the city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg under the czars and in modern times).

It was also supposed to link up with the Finns, who declared war on the Soviet Union the same day as Barbarossa began in revenge for their defeat in the a year and a half previously. Since, in theory, this was the easiest task of the three, Army Group North was also assigned the smallest force, with one panzer group compared to Center’s two, and two armies compared to South’s four (though to be fair much of South’s infantry strength was made up of troops from Germany’s allies, whose quality was suspect), for thirty two divisions in total. 139

Still, the Soviet forces facing Army Group North were also the weakest on the whole front.

When North launched its attack on June 21st, the three panzer divisions comprising its sole panzer group, backed up by two infantry divisions, were opposed by a single understrength

Soviet rifle division. 140 In point of fact, the Soviet units directly in the path of the German onslaught in the area of Army Group North mustered only twenty three divisions, along with six

139 Werner Haupt, Army Group North: The Wehrmacht in Russia, 1941-1945 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1997), 18. 140 Haupt, Army Group North 21.

72 mechanized brigades. 141 This unit, and the few others like it which the Soviets were able to throw into North’s path, disintegrated almost immediately under its assault. As elsewhere, those Soviet soldiers who survived the German onslaught were either quickly taken prisoner or straggled rearward to be assembled into ad hoc units in the region’s urban centers. It was in

Army Group North’s area, more than anywhere else during Operation Barbarossa, that the capacity of such groups, barely more than rabble to slow down the German advance would be felt. Where in the Ukraine or Belarus, there were coherent Soviet forces even in June and July of 1941, the Baltic States really had very little else.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been forcibly annexed into the Soviet Union in the late fall and winter of 1939, just prior to the USSR’s invasion of Finland and after it had helped

Germany finish off Poland. In fact, part of the price Hitler had paid for Stalin’s aid against the

Poles had been acceding to the Soviet domination of the Baltic States in the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Prior to that, however, they had been independent capitalist countries for nearly two decades, and as a consequence had a far higher percentage of paved or at least reasonably well cared for unpaved roads than did Russia itself. 142 But even here, in the area of the Soviet Union with the best infrastructure, the actual amount of roads and bridges were pitifully sparse. Thus, for instance, in the zone of advance of the German Sixteenth

Army, there was only one bridge across the Nieman River. It happened to be located directly in the heart of Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania. 143 Similarly, the Dvina River in Latvia was crossable at only three points: in the cities of Riga (the national capital), Dvinsk, and

141 Ibid. 142 Bork, Comments on Russian Railroads 6. 143 Bork, Comments on Russian Railroads 9.

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Jekabpils. 144 The first two were major centers in Latvia, the third a relatively minor town but still a built up area and a potential stumbling block for German forces if the Soviets were to contest the bridge there, which they did. Even aside from the bridges, there were very few to no alternate routes offering the possibility of bypassing any of the various towns and cities in the

Baltic States, as German planners were aware even before the invasion. According to

Lieutenant General Max Bork, it was thought that the main roads up until the Dvina River would be fairly decent, but the secondaries unsuitable for any heavy traffic (such as tanks), and past the Dvina even the main roads would become suspect.145 The German historian Werner Haupt, who fought in Army Group North as a private, concurred after the war, saying flatly “The arterial roads in the Baltic States are not usable for operations.” 146

An instructive example of the sort of incremental delays that could be imposed on the advance of Army Group North can be found in the fight for the city of Lipau. Lipau, also known as Liepaja, is one of the chief ports of Lithuania. After the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States it had become a notable base for the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and thus was a priority target for Army

Group North. On June 25th, four days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, German forces reached the town and began to encircle it, having torn through the weak Soviet forces on the frontier. Liepaja was defended by the Soviet 67th Rifle Division, as well as a collection of stragglers from Soviet forces defeated on the frontier in the days prior. 147 While this was, on

144 Ibid. 145 Haupt, Army Group North 36. 146 Haupt, Army Group North 10. 147 MS # T-17, A.D. Kurt Brennecke, Army Group North, Advance to Leningrad, 1941 , p. 24-28, WWII Foreign Military Studies, 1945-1954, RG 338, NARA, Fold 3, https://www.fold3.com/image/1/160534832, date accessed, September 16, 2018

74 the surface, a reasonable force for the defense of a single medium-sized port, it should be noted that a Soviet rifle division was, on average, understrength compared to its German or

Western Allied counterpart. The 67th became even more understrength, when, like so many other Soviet units in the summer and fall of 1941, it was ordered by its immediate superiors to make a suicidal counterattack against the nearest German forces. This it did, attempting to break out against the German troops just outside the city, only to be repulsed and chased back inside Liepaja’s limits after suffering heavy casualties. 148 It took three days for the Germans to clear even the shattered remnants of the 67th Rifle Division from the city, and just as in Calais, they proved unable to do so without the liberal application of overwhelming firepower. The war diary of the 291st Infantry Division, the German unit leading the effort to clear and secure

Liepaja, outright stated that it was only possible with the aid of heavy field howitzers. 149

148 Ibid. 149 Haupt, Army Group North 37.

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CONCLUSION

The early successes and eventual failure of the German Army in the Second World War had their origin in its early successes and eventual failure in the First. Both sides in that war utterly failed to fully appreciate the potential of modern weaponry, particularly machine guns and artillery, to devastate large masses of infantry in the open maneuvering and attacking in the fashion of their predecessors a century before. The carnage that ensued when the proud armies of August 1914 attempted to overcome machine gun nests with shock and cold steel led to the complete abandonment of any semblance of a war of maneuver within a few short weeks of the outbreak of fighting, at least in the West. In the East, maneuver and mobility remained, and German forces used them to shattering effect to smash the Russians again and again, until finally the Tsarist state imploded in revolution and anarchy and withdrew from the war in humiliating conditions in 1917. But the West remained mired in bloody, futile stalemate for four long years, consuming unimaginable quantities of men in a static war of attrition as

Germany attempted to outlast France, Britain, Belgium, and eventually the United States. Such a task was simply impossible, even for a nation that before the war had been the most populous, most industrially productive, and most powerful nation in Continental Europe.

Germany could not keep up in the slugfest that World War I devolved into, and consequently was eventually beaten into submission by the Allies and forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles.

Among the Treaty’s provisions was the severe limiting of Germany’s military in nearly every aspect possible. The navy was reduced from the Kaiser’s mighty High Seas Fleet to a force barely capable of performing coast guard duties in the Baltic, the air force was outright banned, and the army was limited to a force of no more than 96,000 enlisted men and 4,000 officers

76 that was forbidden to deploy tanks, heavy artillery, or chemical weapons. Like the navy, the new postwar German Reichswehr was intended by the victorious Allies of being capable of nothing more than internal policing duties and manning border checkpoints. 150

The hard core of staff officers that the Reichswehr retained, led by General Hans von

Seeckt, saw it differently. To these men, the limitations of the Treaty of Versailles were only temporary, and at some point in the relatively near future Germany would likely be faced with another major war. In order to win that war, which would likely once again come against Britain and France or failing them one of their close allies on the German border, Germany could not afford to get caught in a brutal war of attrition as she had in 1914-1918. Any future war

Germany engaged in would have to be won via speed and maneuver, bringing back the conditions that she had won the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 in, that she had defeated the Russians on the Eastern Front in WWI in, and that had very nearly allowed her to defeat

France in 1914 before the trenches were first dug.

Hans von Seeckt laid the doctrinal and training foundations for what would later become known as blitzkrieg, emphasizing motorization and mobility in the slowly rearming

Reichswehr, secretly opening an experimental tank training ground at Kama in the Soviet

Union, and insisting that allowances be made for close coordination between ground forces and air support. All these and many more actions of Seeckt’s were designed to create a force capable of winning quick, decisive victories in war through means of quickly puncturing an enemy’s static fortifications, quickly maneuvering to encircle his forces, and destroying his

150 Mitcham, The Rise of the Wehrmacht 23.

77 armies in the field without getting hung up on any terrain features that might pose a fatal delay and allow the contest to devolve into a war of attrition.

Under Seeckt, a group of younger officers devoted to the ways of this new kind of warfare began thinking and theorizing about how best to carry out mobile warfare under modern conditions. Several of these men made important contributions, but the most important was an officer named Heinz Guderian. Guderian added to Seeckt’s vision of mobile warfare the tank, which the older officer had essentially ignored in favor of the horse cavalry which had helped him win victories on the Eastern Front in World War I. The tank (panzer in

German) exemplified both the strengths and weaknesses of mobile warfare—it was excellent on the attack in open country, swift and deadly. But it was uniquely vulnerable when slowed down, particularly in built up urban areas, which Guderian, in his landmark book Achtung

Panzer specifically cautioned tank commanders to avoid. This book, along with Guderian’s nigh fanatical preaching of the new blitzkrieg doctrine, finished the work Seeckt had begun and transformed the German Army by the outbreak of the Second World War into a finely tuned instrument, designed to slice through enemy defenses at their weakest point, bypassing anything that might slow down the constant offensive.

When World War II in Europe officially began in September of 1939, the new German doctrine seemingly worked to perfection. Although no serious observer had expected the

Germans to lose to the Poles, neither had anyone expected them to conquer Poland in less than three weeks. Yet that was exactly what happened. The Polish armies had stood and fought the

Germans in the open field, and they had been sliced to pieces. The German high command did not see any particular need to take tactical or operational lessons from the Polish campaign;

78 they had just thoroughly crushed the enemy in a total rout, after all. The French and British, for the most part, did not study it too deeply either; the Poles (in shades of the pre-World War I mentality) had been too backward in comparison with modern Western , who surely had nothing to fear from this newfangled German method of war. Neither side, therefore, paid attention to the subtle warning of Warsaw, where troops as undertrained and underequipped as those in the rest of the Polish Army stubbornly defied the Germans for eighteen days.

There were several more warnings of the ability of cities to delay and derail the crucial timing of the blitzkrieg when Germany turned against France and the Low Countries in May of

1940, but they were no more heeded than that of Warsaw had been. Rotterdam held up

German paratroopers and a panzer division for four days, and might’ve held for more had the

Germans not resorted to a terror bombing of the city center. Calais and Boulogne held only for a couple of days each, but even that was enough to fatally weaken the efforts of the

Wehrmacht to cut the British off from their evacuation port at Dunkirk. The Germans still won a crushing victory in the campaign, on ideal terrain for mobile armored warfare against foes that were either too small in number to matter (the British, Belgians, and Dutch) or too demoralized to mount an effective resistance (the French). This was taken as proof of the superiority of their new doctrine.

The invasion of the Soviet Union proved otherwise. The incredibly poor infrastructure of the USSR compared with Poland and Western Europe channeled the panzers repeatedly into urban areas garrisoned by large numbers of particularly determined foes. Even the quickest battles to overcome these obstacles, such as at Liepaja, delayed the advance as long as Calais had. In some cases, such as at Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa, the cities held out for weeks or

79 months, tying down German and other Axis forces that were desperately needed to bolster the advance toward key objectives. Ultimately, the delays mounted, the blitzkrieg that was so reliant on timing fell more and more behind until it eventually bogged down for good in the snows of winter, and Operation Barbarossa failed.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Scott Sinisi was born on September 13, 1993. He received a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of South Carolina in December 2015.

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