Chapter IX: Barbarossa vs. Nevsky, May-December 1942.
While the Pacific theatre saw a lot of action from late 1941 to spring 1942, the European theatre was inactive in the same timeframe, except for some minor battles in Italy. During this period, the United States Army Expeditionary Corps – composed of the US 2nd Armoured Division and the US 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions, totalling 35.000 troops – was deployed to Italy in April 1942. It was commanded by Major General George S. Patton and was nominally subordinate to the Allied Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (replacement of Wavell, who had been sent to command ABDAFCOM). In reality, Patton ignored Auchinleck routinely when he saw an opportunity for a victory. The original plan was to rotate large American units in and out of Italy to gain combat experience, but Patton objected and kept most of the forces he had started out with. Subsequently, his core USAEC became an elite force in the US Army that scored small but valuable victories. Brigade sized forces rotated between training areas in North Africa, guard duties at POW camps there, and the battlefields of Italy, slowly forming a veteran force. US troop strength also grew to 150.000 in four months.
In the meantime, the British stepped up their bombing campaign: they had conducted bombing raids against targets in Germany before, but even the largest of those had been two and a half times smaller than the attack on Cologne on the night of May 30th/May 31st 1942 (daytime bombings had proven much too costly). The Royal Navy refused to let Coastal Command aircraft to participate because they felt propaganda justifications were too weak against the real and pressing U-boat threat. “Bomber” Harris managed to get enough pupil pilots and flying instructors to crew the remaining aircraft. 1.047 bombers eventually took part in Operation Millennium, the first thousand bomber attack on Cologne.
A total of nearly 1.500 tonnes of bombs was dropped, two thirds of those being incendiaries, starting 2.500 fires across the city, of which 1.700 were classified as “large” by German fire brigades. 3.330 non-residential buildings were destroyed, 2.090 seriously damaged and 7.420 lightly damaged, making for a total of 12.840 buildings of which 2.560 were industrial or commercial buildings. The damage to civilian homes, most of them apartments in larger buildings, was also considerable: 13.010 destroyed, 6.360 seriously damaged and 22.270 lightly damaged. Additionally, 428 civilians died, 58 military personnel were killed, 5.027 people were listed as injured and 135.000-150.000 out of Cologne’s population of 700.000 fled. The cost to the RAF was only 43 planes and it would be the first of many thousand bomber raids. These were designed to hit German war production and break civilian morale, but they failed in both respects: the output of German industry in fact increased under the leadership of Minister of Armaments Albert Speer and the German people continued to support the war effort. There, however, was an effect: over one million soldiers would be assigned to air defence duties, more than 500.000 Germans would die because of the strategic bombing campaign, and the Luftwaffe would have to divide its attention over at least three fronts for the remainder of the war (the Eastern Front, Italy and Germany).
The increase in the production of weapons and ammunition had a reason: within days of the bombing of Cologne, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union that had been in the making for almost two years, kicked off (despite the urging of several of Hitler’s generals to postpone it indefinitely). It had been scheduled to start on Sunday May 17th 1942, but intelligence reports emphasized that most roads had been reduced to impassable sludge due to the rasputitza rains. Because the ground part of the German invasion would get irrecoverably stuck in the ocean of mud within five minutes, it was postponed by a week to May 24th. Weather reports indicated that heavy rains would continue to plague the western Soviet Union and Barbarossa was again postponed until May 31st. In the following days, however, the weather cleared up: a weather front came in from the southeast that brought clear skies and minimum daytime temperatures of 22 °C (72 °F), reaching a maximum of 31 °C (88 °F). It lasted for the entire month of June and the Russian steppes transformed from a giant tank trap to a highway for the Panzers. Red dust got everywhere and was a major annoyance, but not a serious hindrance to Barbarossa, which commenced on June 7th 1942. 3 million German and another 800.000 Axis troops (Finnish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Romanian and Yugoslavian, and a Spanish volunteer division) crossed the border in the largest military campaign the world had ever seen.
In the meantime, in November 1941, Stalin had summoned his defence minister Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, his best tank general Georgy Zhukov, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Marshal Semyon Budyonny, head of the air force Pavel Zhigarev, and People’s Commissar for the Navy Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov to his Kremlin office, known as “Stalin’s corner”. He informed them that by his top secret decree they formed the new General Staff, or Stavka, and that Zhukov was the new Chief of the General Staff, succeeding Kirill Meretskov. He reiterated a statement he’d made in a speech to graduates of military academies in Moscow on May 5th 1941: “War with Germany is inevitable.” Over the course of 1941, the Red Army had implemented reforms based on their embarrassing performance in the Winter War against Finland and after witnessing the success of German blitzkrieg tactics. They had also modernized their equipment and built thousands of T-34 medium and KV-1 heavy tanks. As Stalin witnessed how Germany failed to defeat and completely dislodge the Western Allies from the European continent, he believed this was the perfect time to strike. In the November meeting in his office, he ordered newly appointed Chief of Staff Zhukov and Stavka to plan a pre-emptive strike on Germany. The attack, codenamed Operation Nevsky, was to take place in June, after the autumn rains had subsided. Stalin also formed a the new People’s Commissariat for Armaments Production and appointed Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, to lead it. Fear and intimidation would be used to increase arms production, along with further exploiting the hundreds of thousands of Gulag inmates to their maximum potential (the Gulag was in fact the country’s largest employer).
Based on meteorological reports, the Red Army was to attack on June 12th 1942, as scheduled, and 3.500.000 troops started to deploy to vulnerable forward attack positions from late May. In the meantime, Stalin was warned that the Wehrmacht was doing the same thing, but he dismissed these reports. He didn’t believe Hitler would be stupid enough to start a war against him while also at war with Great Britain and now also the United States and not even in control of continental Europe yet, ignoring the history lesson that Germany should avoid a two-front war at all costs. Stalin’s gigantic misjudgement of Hitler’s character and motives meant that the massing vanguard of the Red Army – composed of three quarters of a million men and thousands of tanks – was caught in a colossal encirclement. Also, over 887 aircraft deployed to forward positions were destroyed in the first 24 hours by the Luftwaffe.
In total, 42 divisions were caught by Wehrmacht spearheads that cut through them and then threatened their rear while the Luftwaffe and German artillery attacked them relentlessly. German soldiers and commanders were quickly disillusioned, however, when it turned out during their initial encounters that their adversaries were anything but weak. Soviet soldiers provided fierce and competent resistance due to a mix of ideological conviction, being terrified of their own superiors (the political commissars in particular) and the immediate threat of an invasion of their motherland. Moreover, T-34 tanks proved superior to the Panzer IV, the most ubiquitous German tank by 1942, never mind the heavy KV-1: the Panzer IV could only penetrate the T-34’s armour at point blank range while 88 mm flak guns were needed for the KV-1. The newest version of the Panzer IV would have an elongated version of the 75 mm gun with greater muzzle velocity and therefore greater armour piercing capacity.
The German attack commenced at 3:30 AM June 7th and two days later, for lack of orders from a shocked and confused Stalin, Zhukov ordered the entrapped forces to fight their way out to lines further east. The Red Air Force and troops intended as follow-up for the initial invasion in Operation Nevsky launched an improvised counteroffensive to relieve their encircled comrades, suffering very heavy losses. Veteran Wehrmacht pilots ran circles around inexperienced Soviet pilots and they also had the most advanced machines. Even in this early phase of the invasion they noticed the sheer number of aviators and aircraft their opponent could bring to bear (Stalin said “great quantity is a quality in its own right”). Soviet ground forces also came with major numerical strength but incurred heavy losses due to their disadvantageous positions, but were able to survive (and they had inflicted more serious losses than the Germans had anticipated). Major Soviet formations were destroyed in cauldrons in the early frontier battles, particularly at Kaunas, Bialystok, Brest and Lvov. Out of 750.000 men, 300.000 were irrevocably lost in the frontier battles of the first ten days, destroying two fifths of the vanguard of Operation Nevsky, which had been snuffed out before it even began. A 40% loss was massive and a couple of divisions even suffered losses up to 80% in their escape attempt. Besides 300.000 men killed or taken prisoner, 200.000 men were wounded to various degrees, for a total of 500.000 casualties. Almost 15% of the entire Red Army invasion force had been put out of action in less than a month. Only a country the size of the Soviet Union could survive such catastrophic losses and continue to fight on to victory.
Zhukov ordered the Red Army to fall back to a line that followed the Dvina River, the Berezina River, then diverged south to the impassable Pripyat Marshes, then followed the western part of the Teteriv River and then followed the Southern Bug River. Lithuania, a large part of Byelorussia, and western Ukraine were abandoned between June and September in a phased, fighting retreat. Army Group North broke out and overran Latvia and Estonia, threatening Leningrad and being by far the most successful of the three German army groups. Army Group Centre advanced east and crossed the Berezina and also the Dnieper, but resistance from a numerically superior, well-equipped and motivated foe reduced the German advance to a snail’s pace. Army Group South didn’t do much better in its attempt to conquer eastern Ukraine after crossing the river Dnieper, taking the Ukrainian SSR’s capital of Kiev.
In the meantime, the Crimean Peninsula turned out to be a haemorrhage for the Germans: the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and the Red Air Force continued to supply the besieged troops at Sevastopol regardless of the cost. They also supplied the troops operating in the eastern Crimea through the harbour of Kerch, which was only 3.1 km away from the Taman Peninsula on the opposite side. Forces in the Crimea were reduced to two pockets where fighting was ferocious and Stalin, ignoring disproportionate losses, hung on to them to stir up patriotic sentiment: through propaganda Sevastopol and Kerch became symbols of defiance. In December 1942, the two pockets even launched simultaneous breakout attempts which very nearly succeeded in linking up, but they got stuck 30 kilometres from each other. They could actually hear each other’s gunfire, but by Christmas were exhausted and no reinforcements arrived to counter fresh German troops.
Behind the front, in the meantime, Nazi atrocities unfolded: as per the “Commissar Order” political commissars of the Red Army were executed upon capture to destroy the country’s ideological backbone. Not long thereafter, the SS Einsatzgruppen encouraged pogroms against Jews, which were particularly violent in the Baltic States. These were followed by indiscriminate mass executions of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen: this was known as the “Holocaust of Bullets” and killed one million people, culminating in the massacre of nearly 34.000 Jews in two days time in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev. The high dropout rate due to psychological problems motivated SS leader Heinrich Himmler to seek alternative methods. By October 1942 the SS deployed trucks that pumped poison gas or exhaust fumes into the back and that proved to be a much more effective way to conduct the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as it was called. Two months later the first gas chambers went into operation at a location personally selected by Himmler 80 km northeast of Warsaw, the city that had the largest Jewish ghetto in the entire Reich (with over half a million inhabitants crammed into a 3.4 square kilometre space). Upon becoming operational in December 1942, Treblinka killed more than a quarter of a million people and those select few who were left alive to work were subjected to humiliation, random cruelty, imprisonment, forced labour, starvation and a complete absence of medical care. The Polish Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, haphazardly smuggled in some supplies, proving unable to consistently aid the Jews in the ghetto.
After their invasion force had been caught with its pants down and got mauled, the Red Army had withdrawn in chaos, but by autumn 1942 they had reorganized. Despite furious offensives on Hitler’s orders, the frontline stabilized on a line running from Leningrad through Novgorod, Smolensk, Dnepropetrovsk to Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov. Given the numerical advantage it wasn’t surprising that the German advance grinded to a halt: they suffered half a million casualties up to September and could replace only 200.000 of them. Opposite 136 Axis divisions stood 280 Soviet divisions, with another 40 kept in reserve for possible action against Imperial Japan. After the damage that had been wrought by the enemy, however, Zhukov allowed Hitler to grind down his strength in futile offensives that produced negligible gains, with Stalin’s permission of course. In the meantime, factories in places like Leningrad, Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Orel, Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, Kharkov, Stalingrad and Rostov churned out massive quantities of tanks, artillery guns, rifles, machine guns, mortars and airplanes. The Red Army prepared for a major winter offensive.