Chapter I: Case Blue and the Fall of Stalingrad, May-November 1942.
Lo and behold my newest creation.
Fallen on the March
Case Blue (Fall Blau in German) was the Wehrmacht’s codename for its plan for a 1942 strategic summer offensive to take place between June and November. The operation was a continuation of Operation Barbarossa, intended to knock the Soviet Union out of the war, and involved a two-pronged attack against the oil fields of Baku as well as an advance in the direction of Stalingrad along the Volga, to cover the flanks of the advance towards Baku. The operation was divided in two parts. First, the Germans would have to advance to the Volga to defend the flanks of the second phase, which would be the invasion toward the Caucasus. This would be a vital victory for the Germans. Not only was there oil, but the area north of the Caucasus also produced grain, cotton and heavy farm machinery, while the Caucasus region itself also produced coal, peat as well as nonferrous and rare metals like manganese, resources that were of immense importance to Hitler and his war effort.
The elements of the plan were laid out in Führer Directive No. 41: the capture of Leningrad, holding actions for Army Group Centre and the capture of the Caucasus region by Army Group South commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. The First Panzer, the Seventeenth, the Third Romanian and the Eleventh Armies, were tasked with the Caucasus campaign. First, however, the Second, Fourth Panzer, Sixth, Second Hungarian, Fourth Romanian and Eighth Italian Armies were assigned to the Volga Campaign. Air Fleet 4 (Luftflotte 4) consisted of over 1.600 aircraft, which provided air support under the command of Alexander Löhr and later Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen (a cousin of WW I’s infamous Red Baron). In the meantime, Stalin believed German preparations in the south were merely a ruse and believed that Moscow would be their primary goal. Therefore Soviet preparations in the south were not what they could have been.
The Germans unleashed their forces on June 28th 1942, with the Fourth Panzer Army commanded by Hermann Hoth starting its drive toward Voronezh. The Red Army withdrew chaotically, enabling a rapid German advance and restoring the Wehrmacht’s confidence. The Luftwaffe provided close air support and successfully contained the Red Air Force through air superiority operations and interdiction attacks against airfields and Soviet defences. The Luftwaffe sometimes acted as a spearhead, sometimes concentrating as many as a hundred aircraft on a single Soviet division. They destroyed 783 Soviet aircraft in 26 days for only 175 aircraft lost on the German side.
By July 5th, forward elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the river Don near Voronezh and became embroiled in the battle to capture the city. Stalin and the Soviet command still expected the main German thrust in the north against Moscow, and believed the Germans would turn north after Voronezh to threaten the capital. As a result, the Soviets rushed reinforcements into the town, to hold it at all costs and counterattacked the Germans’ northern flank in an effort to cut off the German spearheads. Major General A.I. Liziukov, in command of the 5th Tank Army, managed to achieve some minor successes when it began its attack on July 6th, but was forced back to its starting positions by July 15th, losing about half of its tanks in the process. Although the battle was a success, Hitler and Von Bock, commander of Army Group South, heatedly argued over the next steps in the operation, more so because of continued Soviet counterattacks that would tie down Hoth’s forces until July 13th.
On July 7th Hitler fell ill with a severe migraine while his irritable bowel syndrome acted up again as well and he postponed all decision making for 48 hours. He summoned his quack of a physician Theo Morell who diagnosed Hitler with gastroenteritis and prescribed harmless antibiotics. To make the migraine go away, however, he gave Hitler an opiate and not just any opiate, but heroin. During this time, Goebbels became aware that the Fourth Panzer Army and the Sixth Army were in a position to capture Stalingrad fairly easily. Recognizing an excellent propaganda opportunity for what it was, he telephoned Hitler, first to inquire about his health and to stress what a morale boost the capture of Stalin’s city would be. Hitler was usually ready to listen when it came to maintaining a high morale because he was aware that morale problems contributed to Germany’s defeat in World War I (though he could not openly admit this, since it conflicted with his almost religious faith in the “stab in the back” myth).
The Führer ultimately decided against splitting up Army Group South and sending the Fourth Panzer Army to assist in the Don crossing, where it wasn’t needed anyway.[1] Instead Hoth and Von Paulus’s Sixth Army were to take Stalingrad and the necessary fuel was allocated to that operation. It had become a top priority for Hitler. The defending forces, particularly the 62nd and 64th Armies, were still forming and not nearly ready to stop the German onslaught. The attack commenced on July 17th and Red Army soldiers bravely fought in delaying action, most notably at Kotelnikovo and Kalach-na-Don where their resistance reached desperate levels. They fell on July 21st and July 23rd respectively. Stalin, acting as People’s Commissar of Defence, issued Order No. 227 in response to the threat to the city named after him and this order was summarized by one line: “not one step back.” On the 24th he ordered the weak 62nd and 64th Armies to counterattack to retake Kalach-na-Don and Kotelnikovo, but these counterattacks were met with a hail of bombs dropped by the Stukas of Air Fleet 4. The counterattack had failed miserably less than a day later.
On July 25th Hoth, with permission from Hitler, intercalated a 24 hour break to recuperate and make final preparations for the assault on Stalingrad. The Germans finally captured the city fairly intact on July 29th 1942. Stalin ordered the 62nd and 64th Armies to hold the city no matter the cost and – as a result of their fear of reprisals if they did abandon the city – a pocket of resistance continued to resist in a few city districts. They held out for four more days until August 2nd, when their positions were overrun and these two formations were annihilated. Their commander, Vasily Chuikov, was captured by the Germans and he featured in Goebbels’s bombastic newsreels. Hitler visited the city a few days later, which was covered extensively by newsreels as well, and by “popular decree” Stalingrad was renamed “Hitlerstadt” (Hitler City), adding insult to injury for Stalin. It became another city on a long list of Soviet cities that had fallen on the march to the Wehrmacht.
The German offensive continued. Germany’s logistical situation had improved markedly due to the fall of Stalingrad. The Germans now shifted from transporting most of their supplies by road and rail to sending supplies down the river Danube into the Black Sea and up the Don River all the way to Voronezh. The Germans wouldn’t have to worry about transhipments anymore. Moreover, this way they no longer had to worry about partisans harassing their logistics. Moreover, the risk of naval or aerial attack was minimal, mainly because the Luftwaffe could use its air superiority to down any Red Air Force bombing raids and pummel the Black Sea Fleet if it ventured into open waters. Between Kalach-na-Don and Stalingrad, a distance of 80 kilometres there was a railway, albeit on Soviet gauge, and Army Group South’s commander Von Bock started to keep trains going up and down. That and control of all the airfields around Stalingrad, turned the city into a major supply base on the Volga and put Astrakhan within full supply support range.
The Sixth Army remained in Stalingrad, facing north-westward because that was the only place an attack could come from. The south was covered by the German offensive in that direction while from the east there were no roads and no railroads to support an army as far east as Orenburg, some 1.000 km away. That left the north as the only viable option for Soviet attempts to retake the city, something the Germans realized all too well. When Stalin woke up to the news that the city that bore his name had fallen to the Nazis, he was infuriated and demanded an immediate counteroffensive to retake it. His generals pleaded with him to let them attend to more important things, like attacking the flanks of the Fourth Panzer Army advancing down the Volga and divert the enemy’s attention away from the Caucasus oilfields. Stalin remained adamant in his position that recapturing Stalingrad and cutting the Volga would cut the Germans in the Caucasus off from resupply and force them to withdraw. He erroneously viewed the city as a linchpin. The result would make the Rzhev meat grinder look like a playground scuffle and was even more lopsided in favour of the Germans.
The still forming Don Front under Lieutenant-General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had withdrawn to Saratov to allow the Red Air Force to cover his supplies, was ordered to carry out a totally premature counterattack. It was known as Operation Uranus. The 1st Guards and the Fourth Tank Army spearheaded the ill-fated offensive, which commenced on August 10th, and they were met with a blizzard of bombs dropped by the Stuka dive bombers of the Fourth Air Fleet before they even made contact with the Sixth Army. Out of 800.000 men 170.000 men were killed, 280.000 were wounded and 2.500 tanks were lost and, by the time the offensive ended on September 8th, the Red Army was no closer to retaking Stalingrad (the Germans had suffered around 40.000 irrecoverable losses). A second and larger offensive toward Stalingrad, known as Operation Saturn, took place between September 23rd and October 21st. This time, out of 1.1 million men, 210.000 were killed and 320.000 wounded while 2.800 tanks were lost (the Germans incurred only about 65.000 irrecoverable losses). Bloody fighting continued between Saratov and Stalingrad as Stalin foolhardily continued to pour men and resources into it, to no avail. Stalin’s titanic ego had led him to sacrifice half a million lives in the vane pursuit of recapturing “his city” before the year was out. He completely burned up his forces this way.
In the meantime, the Fourth Panzer Army was ordered to advance further down the Volga to Astrakhan and then down the Caspian coast towards Baku. It was supplied by boats that followed its advance down the river Volga and, as the advance continued southward, made their deliveries to two dozen small ports along the Caspian coast. Secondarily, it was also supported by Ju 52 transport planes flying out of the captured airfields around Stalingrad. Hoth advanced south toward the Caucasus essentially unopposed, capturing Astrakhan on September 2nd, until they hit the rear of the 44th Army (a subordinate unit of the Transcaucasian Front under Dmitri Kozlov) commanded by Major General Ivan Yefimovich Petrov on the Kuma River. His forces, limited in flexibility by Stalin’s counterproductive no-retreat orders, tried to prevent the Germans from crossing the river Kuma and failed, suffering horrendous losses in their attempt. This was all the less surprising considering the poor supply situation of the Transcaucasian Front: with the Volga cut off, this meant supplies to Kozlov’s forces had to be delivered through a single track railroad through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and then by boat across the Caspian Sea to Baku. Along the coast the mountains before Baku didn’t really start up before the Dagestan ASSR capital of Makhachkala, and therefore it was captured fairly easily on October 16th. After constructing an airfield there, the Germans pretty quickly put a stop to Soviet traffic on the Caspian Sea. Some E-boats stationed at Astrakhan further contributed to that.
Meanwhile the First Panzer, the Seventeenth, the Third Romanian and the Eleventh Army joined in on the Caucasus campaign soon after, advancing along the Black Sea coast toward Majkop and Grozny, receiving supplies through a plethora of Soviet port towns. Attempts by the Black Sea Fleet to interdict supply runs largely ended in failure. With the Fourth Panzer advancing toward Baku while most of the Transcaucasian Front was preoccupied with the much larger force advancing toward Grozny, it risked being surrounded. If the Fourth Panzer reached Baku, then they’d be to the rear of the Transcaucasian Front and the latter would be sandwiched between it and the four armies coming from the north. Kozlov felt he had no other choice but to order his forces to retreat into Iran across the Caucasus Mountains. The order was given the day that Makhachkala fell. The force that reached Tabriz, however, was only nominally the Transcaucasian Front. The amount of forces that actually made it across the mountains wasn’t much bigger than a field army, the majority having been lost to German attack, the hostile conditions and lack of supplies. By late November 1942, Baku was in German hands. The oilfields had been set ablaze by the retreating Soviets, making night time look like day.
[1] This is the PoD
Fallen on the March
Chapter I: Case Blue and the Fall of Stalingrad, May-November 1942.
Case Blue (Fall Blau in German) was the Wehrmacht’s codename for its plan for a 1942 strategic summer offensive to take place between June and November. The operation was a continuation of Operation Barbarossa, intended to knock the Soviet Union out of the war, and involved a two-pronged attack against the oil fields of Baku as well as an advance in the direction of Stalingrad along the Volga, to cover the flanks of the advance towards Baku. The operation was divided in two parts. First, the Germans would have to advance to the Volga to defend the flanks of the second phase, which would be the invasion toward the Caucasus. This would be a vital victory for the Germans. Not only was there oil, but the area north of the Caucasus also produced grain, cotton and heavy farm machinery, while the Caucasus region itself also produced coal, peat as well as nonferrous and rare metals like manganese, resources that were of immense importance to Hitler and his war effort.
The elements of the plan were laid out in Führer Directive No. 41: the capture of Leningrad, holding actions for Army Group Centre and the capture of the Caucasus region by Army Group South commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. The First Panzer, the Seventeenth, the Third Romanian and the Eleventh Armies, were tasked with the Caucasus campaign. First, however, the Second, Fourth Panzer, Sixth, Second Hungarian, Fourth Romanian and Eighth Italian Armies were assigned to the Volga Campaign. Air Fleet 4 (Luftflotte 4) consisted of over 1.600 aircraft, which provided air support under the command of Alexander Löhr and later Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen (a cousin of WW I’s infamous Red Baron). In the meantime, Stalin believed German preparations in the south were merely a ruse and believed that Moscow would be their primary goal. Therefore Soviet preparations in the south were not what they could have been.
The Germans unleashed their forces on June 28th 1942, with the Fourth Panzer Army commanded by Hermann Hoth starting its drive toward Voronezh. The Red Army withdrew chaotically, enabling a rapid German advance and restoring the Wehrmacht’s confidence. The Luftwaffe provided close air support and successfully contained the Red Air Force through air superiority operations and interdiction attacks against airfields and Soviet defences. The Luftwaffe sometimes acted as a spearhead, sometimes concentrating as many as a hundred aircraft on a single Soviet division. They destroyed 783 Soviet aircraft in 26 days for only 175 aircraft lost on the German side.
By July 5th, forward elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the river Don near Voronezh and became embroiled in the battle to capture the city. Stalin and the Soviet command still expected the main German thrust in the north against Moscow, and believed the Germans would turn north after Voronezh to threaten the capital. As a result, the Soviets rushed reinforcements into the town, to hold it at all costs and counterattacked the Germans’ northern flank in an effort to cut off the German spearheads. Major General A.I. Liziukov, in command of the 5th Tank Army, managed to achieve some minor successes when it began its attack on July 6th, but was forced back to its starting positions by July 15th, losing about half of its tanks in the process. Although the battle was a success, Hitler and Von Bock, commander of Army Group South, heatedly argued over the next steps in the operation, more so because of continued Soviet counterattacks that would tie down Hoth’s forces until July 13th.
On July 7th Hitler fell ill with a severe migraine while his irritable bowel syndrome acted up again as well and he postponed all decision making for 48 hours. He summoned his quack of a physician Theo Morell who diagnosed Hitler with gastroenteritis and prescribed harmless antibiotics. To make the migraine go away, however, he gave Hitler an opiate and not just any opiate, but heroin. During this time, Goebbels became aware that the Fourth Panzer Army and the Sixth Army were in a position to capture Stalingrad fairly easily. Recognizing an excellent propaganda opportunity for what it was, he telephoned Hitler, first to inquire about his health and to stress what a morale boost the capture of Stalin’s city would be. Hitler was usually ready to listen when it came to maintaining a high morale because he was aware that morale problems contributed to Germany’s defeat in World War I (though he could not openly admit this, since it conflicted with his almost religious faith in the “stab in the back” myth).
The Führer ultimately decided against splitting up Army Group South and sending the Fourth Panzer Army to assist in the Don crossing, where it wasn’t needed anyway.[1] Instead Hoth and Von Paulus’s Sixth Army were to take Stalingrad and the necessary fuel was allocated to that operation. It had become a top priority for Hitler. The defending forces, particularly the 62nd and 64th Armies, were still forming and not nearly ready to stop the German onslaught. The attack commenced on July 17th and Red Army soldiers bravely fought in delaying action, most notably at Kotelnikovo and Kalach-na-Don where their resistance reached desperate levels. They fell on July 21st and July 23rd respectively. Stalin, acting as People’s Commissar of Defence, issued Order No. 227 in response to the threat to the city named after him and this order was summarized by one line: “not one step back.” On the 24th he ordered the weak 62nd and 64th Armies to counterattack to retake Kalach-na-Don and Kotelnikovo, but these counterattacks were met with a hail of bombs dropped by the Stukas of Air Fleet 4. The counterattack had failed miserably less than a day later.
On July 25th Hoth, with permission from Hitler, intercalated a 24 hour break to recuperate and make final preparations for the assault on Stalingrad. The Germans finally captured the city fairly intact on July 29th 1942. Stalin ordered the 62nd and 64th Armies to hold the city no matter the cost and – as a result of their fear of reprisals if they did abandon the city – a pocket of resistance continued to resist in a few city districts. They held out for four more days until August 2nd, when their positions were overrun and these two formations were annihilated. Their commander, Vasily Chuikov, was captured by the Germans and he featured in Goebbels’s bombastic newsreels. Hitler visited the city a few days later, which was covered extensively by newsreels as well, and by “popular decree” Stalingrad was renamed “Hitlerstadt” (Hitler City), adding insult to injury for Stalin. It became another city on a long list of Soviet cities that had fallen on the march to the Wehrmacht.
The German offensive continued. Germany’s logistical situation had improved markedly due to the fall of Stalingrad. The Germans now shifted from transporting most of their supplies by road and rail to sending supplies down the river Danube into the Black Sea and up the Don River all the way to Voronezh. The Germans wouldn’t have to worry about transhipments anymore. Moreover, this way they no longer had to worry about partisans harassing their logistics. Moreover, the risk of naval or aerial attack was minimal, mainly because the Luftwaffe could use its air superiority to down any Red Air Force bombing raids and pummel the Black Sea Fleet if it ventured into open waters. Between Kalach-na-Don and Stalingrad, a distance of 80 kilometres there was a railway, albeit on Soviet gauge, and Army Group South’s commander Von Bock started to keep trains going up and down. That and control of all the airfields around Stalingrad, turned the city into a major supply base on the Volga and put Astrakhan within full supply support range.
The Sixth Army remained in Stalingrad, facing north-westward because that was the only place an attack could come from. The south was covered by the German offensive in that direction while from the east there were no roads and no railroads to support an army as far east as Orenburg, some 1.000 km away. That left the north as the only viable option for Soviet attempts to retake the city, something the Germans realized all too well. When Stalin woke up to the news that the city that bore his name had fallen to the Nazis, he was infuriated and demanded an immediate counteroffensive to retake it. His generals pleaded with him to let them attend to more important things, like attacking the flanks of the Fourth Panzer Army advancing down the Volga and divert the enemy’s attention away from the Caucasus oilfields. Stalin remained adamant in his position that recapturing Stalingrad and cutting the Volga would cut the Germans in the Caucasus off from resupply and force them to withdraw. He erroneously viewed the city as a linchpin. The result would make the Rzhev meat grinder look like a playground scuffle and was even more lopsided in favour of the Germans.
The still forming Don Front under Lieutenant-General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had withdrawn to Saratov to allow the Red Air Force to cover his supplies, was ordered to carry out a totally premature counterattack. It was known as Operation Uranus. The 1st Guards and the Fourth Tank Army spearheaded the ill-fated offensive, which commenced on August 10th, and they were met with a blizzard of bombs dropped by the Stuka dive bombers of the Fourth Air Fleet before they even made contact with the Sixth Army. Out of 800.000 men 170.000 men were killed, 280.000 were wounded and 2.500 tanks were lost and, by the time the offensive ended on September 8th, the Red Army was no closer to retaking Stalingrad (the Germans had suffered around 40.000 irrecoverable losses). A second and larger offensive toward Stalingrad, known as Operation Saturn, took place between September 23rd and October 21st. This time, out of 1.1 million men, 210.000 were killed and 320.000 wounded while 2.800 tanks were lost (the Germans incurred only about 65.000 irrecoverable losses). Bloody fighting continued between Saratov and Stalingrad as Stalin foolhardily continued to pour men and resources into it, to no avail. Stalin’s titanic ego had led him to sacrifice half a million lives in the vane pursuit of recapturing “his city” before the year was out. He completely burned up his forces this way.
In the meantime, the Fourth Panzer Army was ordered to advance further down the Volga to Astrakhan and then down the Caspian coast towards Baku. It was supplied by boats that followed its advance down the river Volga and, as the advance continued southward, made their deliveries to two dozen small ports along the Caspian coast. Secondarily, it was also supported by Ju 52 transport planes flying out of the captured airfields around Stalingrad. Hoth advanced south toward the Caucasus essentially unopposed, capturing Astrakhan on September 2nd, until they hit the rear of the 44th Army (a subordinate unit of the Transcaucasian Front under Dmitri Kozlov) commanded by Major General Ivan Yefimovich Petrov on the Kuma River. His forces, limited in flexibility by Stalin’s counterproductive no-retreat orders, tried to prevent the Germans from crossing the river Kuma and failed, suffering horrendous losses in their attempt. This was all the less surprising considering the poor supply situation of the Transcaucasian Front: with the Volga cut off, this meant supplies to Kozlov’s forces had to be delivered through a single track railroad through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and then by boat across the Caspian Sea to Baku. Along the coast the mountains before Baku didn’t really start up before the Dagestan ASSR capital of Makhachkala, and therefore it was captured fairly easily on October 16th. After constructing an airfield there, the Germans pretty quickly put a stop to Soviet traffic on the Caspian Sea. Some E-boats stationed at Astrakhan further contributed to that.
Meanwhile the First Panzer, the Seventeenth, the Third Romanian and the Eleventh Army joined in on the Caucasus campaign soon after, advancing along the Black Sea coast toward Majkop and Grozny, receiving supplies through a plethora of Soviet port towns. Attempts by the Black Sea Fleet to interdict supply runs largely ended in failure. With the Fourth Panzer advancing toward Baku while most of the Transcaucasian Front was preoccupied with the much larger force advancing toward Grozny, it risked being surrounded. If the Fourth Panzer reached Baku, then they’d be to the rear of the Transcaucasian Front and the latter would be sandwiched between it and the four armies coming from the north. Kozlov felt he had no other choice but to order his forces to retreat into Iran across the Caucasus Mountains. The order was given the day that Makhachkala fell. The force that reached Tabriz, however, was only nominally the Transcaucasian Front. The amount of forces that actually made it across the mountains wasn’t much bigger than a field army, the majority having been lost to German attack, the hostile conditions and lack of supplies. By late November 1942, Baku was in German hands. The oilfields had been set ablaze by the retreating Soviets, making night time look like day.
[1] This is the PoD
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