As August began, von Kleist massed his three Panzerkorps into a massive wedge, with a total of about 350 tanks, and pushed due south to Armavir. Advancing across the arid steppe of the Caucasus, von Kleist’s panzers encountered temperatures up to 40° C (104°F), which made water just as important for resupply as fuel. After advancing 100km, the 13.Panzer-Division captured Armavir on 3 August, while 3.Panzer-Division captured Stavropol on 5 August, which forced Malinovsky’s forces to continue their retreat toward Grozny. By 7 August, von Kleist’s armour was finally within range of its first objective – the oilfields at Maikop – and he directed the 13.Panzer-Division, SS-Wiking and 16.Infanterie-Division (mot.) to converge on the city. Although Soviet anti-tank guns put up a stiff resistance at the Laba River on 8 August and knocked out some of SS-Wiking ’s tanks, the 12th Army had no tanks left and could not stop the III Panzerkorps. Assisted by Brandenburg infiltrators dressed in Red Army uniforms, the 13.Panzer-Division fought its way into Maikop on 9 August and occupied the oil fields by the next day. The retreating Soviets had thoroughly sabotaged the pumping equipment and set the fields alight, meaning it would be up to a year before more than a trickle of crude oil might be available to the Wehrmacht – but Maikop would be abandoned in January 1943. Nevertheless, the occupation of Maikop did deprive the Red Army of 6.8 per cent of its crude oil supplies for the duration of the war – a not inconsiderable accomplishment.
By 10 August, von Kleist had Malinovsky’s forces on the run, with XXXX Panzerkorps pushing southeast down the main rail line to Grozny and Baku, while III and LVII Panzerkorps mopped up around Maikop. By this point, Malinovsky’s only armoured unit was Major Vladimir Filippov’s 52nd Tank Brigade – a low-quality unit equipped with a mixed group of forty-six T-34s, T-60s, Valentines and Lees. A total of 4,500 tankers who had escaped into the Caucasus after abandoning their tanks – a shocking indictment of the low state of morale and training in the Red Army’s tank units in mid-1942 – were sent to the Urals to reequip with new tanks.46 It was at this point that the Germans decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List was one of Hitler’s uninspired choices to lead his main effort in the 1942 campaign, since he had limited experience with armour – just the brief Balkans campaigns – and had completely missed the first year of the war on the Eastern Front. List brought an old-school, First World War mentality to his handling of Heeresgruppe A and he was concerned when von Kleist’s panzers went charging off toward Grozny and Baku, while leaving AOK 17 to clear out the Kuban and the coastline. He believed that Soviet forces in these areas posed a threat to his right flank, even though the 47th and 56th Armies had minimal combat strength remaining and just fifteen light tanks. Nevertheless, on 12 August List ordered von Kleist to divert both the III Panzerkorps and the LVII Panzerkorps to support a drive westward to Tuapse to cut off the two Soviet armies and clear the coast. During 12–18 August, SS-Wiking , the 13.Panzer-Division and the 16.Infanterie-Division were tied up in this ridiculous diversion, which consumed their limited fuel supplies on a secondary objective. List sent this collection of armour down a narrow road into the mountains, which was easily blocked – and they never reached Tuapse. Meanwhile, von Kleist continued toward Grozny with just 3.Panzer-Division and part of 23.Panzer-Division; even though the Wehrmacht had nineteen panzer divisions on the Eastern Front, the schwerpunkt aimed at the critical objectives of the entire summer offensive was reduced to less than two. List also diverted much of Heeresgruppe A’s limited supplies toward his efforts to clear the Kuban and the coast, leaving von Kleist’s spearhead to sputter for lack of fuel.
Nevertheless, on 15 August the 23.Panzer-Division managed to capture Georgievsk, 200km from Grozny, before its fuel began to give out. Heeresgruppe A managed to repair the rail line all the way from Rostov down to Pyatigorsk by 18 August, but it was a single-track line that could only handle very limited throughput. Given a respite from von Kleist’s pursuit, the Stavka sent reinforcements to the Caucasus, including the 10th Guards Rifle Corps, which enabled Malinovsky to build a more solid defensive line behind the Terek River. Once the German drive on Tuapse stalled, List finally allowed the III Panzerkorps to rejoin von Kleist’s advance toward Grozny, but the 13.Panzer-Division and 16.Infanterie-Division (mot.) ran out of fuel en route and were immobilized, then the OKH decided to transfer the latter unit to Heeresgruppe B. The XXXXIX Gebirgskorps was supposed to support von Kleist’s armour, but List diverted it westward to Sochi – which was never taken. Kleist made it to the Terek river with the 3, 13 and 23.Panzer-Divisionen by 23 August, but with only two infantry divisions of LII Armeekorps in support. While von Kleist had a 3–1 numerical advantage in armour over Malinovsky, the Soviet commander had considerably more infantry. By this point, Malinovsky had scraped together three OTBs to supplement Filippov’s 52nd Tank Brigade, but he had virtually no T-34s; rather, he had about forty-three Valentines, sixty-three Lees and a handful of T-60s.
Due to the difficulty of shipping T-34s from the Urals on the single rail line remaining into the Caucasus, Malinovsky’s forces were almost entirely dependent upon Lend-Lease American and British armour arriving through Persia. On the German side, von Kleist still had most of his armour since there had been relatively light combat in the Caucasus, and he was beginning to receive upgraded Pz.IIIL and Pz.IVG tanks. However, his fuel situation was abysmal and most of his air support had been stripped away as well.
Von Kleist realized that time was running out and he decided to try and get across the Terek River with the forces available. The 3.Panzer-Division managed to seize Mozdok on the northern side of the Terek on 25 August, but efforts to cross the wide river were repulsed. On the morning of 26 August, Generalmajor Erwin Mack, commander of the 23.Panzer-Division, and one of his battalion commanders, was killed by Soviet mortar fire while observing operations along the Terek.47 The river proved too wide, deep and fast-flowing to cross under fire and von Kleist was stymied. In desperation, Oberst Erpo Freiherr von Bodenhausen, commander of the 23.Panzergrenadier Brigade, was selected to lead a mixed armoured kampfgruppe toward Chervlennaya on the north side of the Terek, where the junction of the Baku-Astrakhan rail line ran. Von Bodenhausen succeeded in reaching the rail junction on 31 August – only 27km from Grozny – and briefly interrupted Soviet rail traffic from Baku (still 490km distant), but his force was too small to hold this exposed position and he fell back toward the main body.48 Von Kleist’s forces were completely out of fuel and he was not able to make another attempt to get across the Terek River until 6 September. The 13.Panzer-Division succeeded in finally getting across the river, but it was too late; Malinovsky’s forces had steadily been reinforced and his numerically-superior troops were too well dug in to budge. Hitler finally relieved List three days later and took personal control over Heeresgruppe A – surely one of his weirdest command decisions of the Second World War. While fighting would continue along the Terek River until early November, when the first snow arrived, von Kleist’s offensive had culminated and the front became static.
The Caucasus was the kind of campaign that the panzer divisions were designed to win, using bold maneuvers across flat steppes against a disorganized foe who lacked proper air, artillery or armour support. However, Hitler and the OKH failed to provide their main effort with the resources it needed to succeed. Reduced to only five fuel-starved divisions at the tip of his spear, von Kleist’s spearhead was stopped more by his own side than the Red Army. In the Caucasus, the Red Army lacked the material advantages in armour and artillery it enjoyed on other fronts. While von Kleist’s panzers failed to seize a significant amount of the oil resources of the Caucasus, they did come exceedingly close to interdicting two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s supply of crude oil. Oil was just as much the Red Army’s strategic center of gravity as it was for the Wehrmacht. Had von Kleist’s panzers reached Grozny and Baku, the Red Army would have likely found it difficult to provide fuel for the multi-front offensives of 1943–44.
