The Wehrmacht's Last Stand

The German Campaigns of 1944-1945

Robert M. Citino

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700630387, 9780700624942
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624959
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

By 1943, the war was lost, and most German officers knew it. Three quarters of a century later, the question persists: What kept the German army going in an increasingly hopeless situation? Where some historians have found explanations in the power of Hitler or the role of ideology, Robert M. Citino, the world’s leading scholar on the subject, posits a more straightforward solution: Bewegungskrieg, the way of war cultivated by the Germans over the course of history. In this gripping account of German military campaigns during the final phase of World War II, Citino charts the inevitable path by which Bewegungskrieg, or a “war of movement,” inexorably led to Nazi Germany’s defeat.

The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand analyzes the German Totenritt, or “death ride,” from January 1944—with simultaneous Allied offensives at Anzio and Ukraine—until May 1945, the collapse of the Wehrmacht in the field, and the Soviet storming of Berlin. In clear and compelling prose, and bringing extensive reading of the German-language literature to bear, Citino focuses on the German view of these campaigns. Often very different from the Allied perspective, this approach allows for a more nuanced and far-reaching understanding of the last battles of the Wehrmacht than any now available. With Citino’s previous volumes, Death of the Wehrmacht and The Wehrmacht Retreats, The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand completes a uniquely comprehensive picture of the German army’s strategy, operations, and performance against the Allies in World War II.

1

In the Cauldron: The Battle of the Korsun Pocket

Introduction

It is January 30, 1944—the start of another bad day in the middle of a hard winter. German soldiers stand in a forest clearing, somewhere southeast of the Ukrainian hamlet of Korsun.¹ They have just received news of disaster.

* * *

location undisclosed—January 30, 1944. The clock says 2:00 p.m. The thermometer? Well, let’s just call it cold. A small group of German infantry—Landser in the vernacular, “ground pounders”—stand huddled around a map table in a small forest clearing.

“Damn it,” the captain shouts, “we have to get out of here now!”

He slams one meaty fist down on the table, sending the map flying. He is big, raw, and fearless and has a Knight’s Cross to prove it, the coveted Ritterkreuz. His men don’t see him as much of a talker, and most of what he does say can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

But now, a tap seems to open and the words pour out of him in a torrent. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he yells again, “while we’re still close to friendly lines, and our horses and equipment are in good shape!” He pauses, looks around at the others. “It’s life or death.” He is shouting now. “We can do it! One battle, one march, and we’re out of here!”

The captain is done talking. He has used up his quota of words for the entire month. Silence. No one answers. Somewhere in the distance, a machine gun barks. Theirs? Ours? The men stand there rooted, eyes cast down. He has said everything there is to say. Every single Landser standing around the table knows exactly what the big man is talking about.

Two days ago, Russian attacks south of the Dnepr River drove into their deep right flank and linked up with another Russian column coming around their left. They are cut off, trapped, encircled. They all know the word: Kessel, the German word for “cauldron” or “kettle.” They don’t need to read a map. They can feel it.

They are trapped in a filthy, freezing mud hole, and if they don’t get out of here soon they are all going to die.

* * *

The German Army and the Kesselschlacht

Throughout European military history the battle of encirclement—Kesselschlacht—had been a German specialty.² Early monarchs like Frederick William (the Great Elector of Brandenburg) or Frederick the Great of Prussia had always maneuvered aggressively to attack the vulnerable flank of adversaries. They had succeeded as often as not, in victories at Warsaw in 1656, Fehrbellin in 1675, Hohenfriedeberg in 1744, and Leuthen in 1757.³ In the decades following the Napoleonic military revolution, the Chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, went one step farther, planning campaigns involving widely separated armies, often hundreds of miles apart, deploying them on the arc of a great circle, advancing concentrically, and aiming them at a central point. The goal was to find and fix the main body of the enemy army in place with one or two armies, while the remaining one crashed into its flank or rear. While no campaign ever unfolds completely to plan, Moltke had also succeeded—at Königgrätz against the Austrians and at Sedan against the French—in crushing his enemies both times and creating a unified German Reich in the process.⁴

World War I had seen them at it again, attempting a super-Kessel of all French forces in the west during the opening days of the conflict. The world knows that operational conception as the Schlieffen Plan, but in fact no hard-and-fast plan existed.⁵ Rather, the Germans opened the war conducting business as usual, with separate field armies operating independently and seeking targets of opportunity on which they could close concentrically. They came within an ace of winning that campaign, bludgeoning four of France’s five armies and nearly trapping and destroying the French 5th Army at Namur in late August 1914. The German commanders closed the jaws of their pincer just a mite too slowly, however, and the French had managed to slip away. The German misfire at Namur—not the more famous Battle of the Marne—was the decisive event of the failed campaign in the west. The Germans were able to take some consolation by events on their Eastern Front, however. On virtually the same day they were meeting frustration at Namur, they trapped, encircled, and destroyed a Russian field army at the battle of Tannenberg.⁶

In the opening two years of World War II, the German army fought its aggressive way of war, now made immeasurably more effective by the addition of modern tanks and aircraft, nearly to perfection. The German Panzer formations smashed the first eight enemy armies they met (Polish, Norwegian, Danish, French, Dutch, Belgian, Yugoslav, and Greek), and the world had to introduce a new word, blitzkrieg (“lightning war”), to describe what it was seeing. The Wehrmacht mauled a ninth adversary, the British army, which survived only by a hurried evacuation under fire from Dunkirk, the last European port still in its possession in the 1940 campaign. When British forces returned to the continent, landing in the Balkans to help defend Greece, the Germans mauled them again, and once again they survived only to beat a hurried evacuation under fire, this time to the island of Crete. Here they were the victims of a massive German airborne assault, Operation Mercury, and they had to evacuate again, this time back to Egypt. The tenth enemy was the Soviet Red Army, which in the first six months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, suffered the shocking total of 4 million casualties, 3 million of them taken as prisoners of war in one giant Kesselschlacht after the other: Bialystok, Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Bryansk, and Vyazma.⁷ The Wehrmacht met its eleventh adversary—the US Army—on an obscure rock formation in Tunisia called Kasserine Pass in February 1943, and it, too, was a humbling experience for the victim, with the US II Corps, comprising much of America’s fighting strength in the North African theater, handled very roughly.⁸

In all these German victories—still an impressive and improbable achievement these many decades later—the operational package was more or less the same. German mechanized columns—tanks, mechanized infantry, and self-propelled artillery closely supported by Stuka dive-bombers—made breeches in widely separated sectors of the defender’s line, drove deep into his rear areas, then wheeled in a pincer maneuver (Zangenbewegung), linked up, and encircled him. The point was not merely to surround the foe or starve him into submission. A Kesselschlacht was not a siege. Establishing a ring around the hostile force was merely the necessary preparation to attacking him from widely separated compass points, chopping up the encirclement into smaller portions, and finally smashing him. “Concentric (konzentrisch) operations,” German commanders called this phase of the fight.⁹

If things went well, the Kesselschlacht was brutal, quick, and inexpensive, certainly cheaper than pushing the opponent back in a bloody frontal assault, then having to do it again when the defenders reestablished a cohesive line a few miles up the road. Historically, the Germans sniffed at the latter as an “ordinary victory,” a slugfest that failed to solve anything.¹⁰ An ordinary triumph was, by definition, the herald of a longer war. Long wars inevitably turn into wars of attrition, however, and a war of attrition was the one thing that Germany, situated in a difficult neighborhood in Central Europe ringed by powerful enemies who could outman and outproduce it, did not believe it could afford. The war of movement ending in a Kesselschlacht was not so much a choice, then, as a necessity, a constraint imposed by circumstances of time, space, and resources.

Scholars and military buffs alike may argue about the precise turning point of World War II. In many ways, this is a fool’s errand. Such a great global conflagration can hardly have turned on a single, discrete event. The German failure to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk certainly had its long-term implications, but it hardly set the Allies on the road to victory. General G. K. Zhukov’s 1941 Moscow counteroffensive gets us closer: it not only ended the German threat to the Soviet capital once and for all, it smashed Army Group Center, inflicting hundreds of thousands of German casualties, and shattered the Wehrmacht’s reputation for invincibility—one of its strongest assets in those early war years.¹¹

Seen through the long-term lens of German military history, however, only one campaign punches all the buttons: a big defeat, mass casualties, a great hole rent in the German position on the eastern front that the Wehrmacht would never really be able to mend, and a battle that marked a shift in the German war in the Soviet Union from a strategic offensive to a strategic defensive. It was a Kesselschlacht, only this time in the wrong direction and with the roles reversed. That battle was at Stalingrad.¹² As Soviet armored spearheads drove in the flanks of the neighboring armies and met up at Kalach-on-the-Don, the German 6th Army still fighting inside Stalingrad found itself in a position that was historically unique for German armies. It was not merely defeated: defeats had happened many times before, at places like Hochkirch, Jena, the Marne, and Amiens. But as the commander of the German 6th Army, General Friedrich Paulus, sat down to write his dispatch that evening, he probably realized how strange his words sounded. His message was as chilling as the winter wind just then beginning to blow across the Volga River. Armee eingeschlossen, he began. The 6th Army was surrounded. For the first time in history, a German army sat inside the cauldron.¹³ And it died there.

Defeat in the Ukraine: The Soviet Offensives of 1943

The debate over Paulus’s decisions within the Stalingrad Kessel will never end.¹⁴ He might have attempted a breakout early but didn’t. Indeed, lacking much in the way of mechanized transport or even horses, and with hardly any fuel for his Panzers, a breakout would have involved a mass infantry charge across a flat plain against well-supplied Soviet opposition, and it almost certainly would have resulted in a great slaughter. Instead Paulus sat, insisting that he was only following Hitler’s orders to defend Stalingrad and fight to the last man. Then again, he might have surrendered in December when his situation had become hopeless as food, water, and medicine were running out inside the cauldron. By January most of his men were so sick that by the time he did give in (in the first days of February 1943), they died in droves in their first weeks in Soviet captivity. But what Paulus did or did not order was almost beside the point. The German High Command tried to supply the pocket from the air, but it was too large and the air assets too meager even to come close. It tried to launch a relief attempt from outside the pocket, Operation Winter Storm, but could barely assemble much more than a single Panzer division for the attempt. With a breakout, and relief from the outside, proving to be a chimera, Paulus had few good options. Sometimes, in particularly painful military situations, there really is nothing to be done.

The defeat and destruction of a German field army in a campaign of maneuver—one capped by a Kesselschlacht, no less—was a milestone. Even the apparent recovery in the winter campaign of 1942–1943, culminating in Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s “backhand blow” (Schlag aus der Nachhand) against the Soviet armies hurtling toward the Dnepr and the recovery of Kharkov, could do little to hide the fact.¹⁵ As a major offensive force on the Eastern Front the Wehrmacht was done, a fact confirmed by the collapse of Germany’s one major offensive that year, Operation Citadel (Zitadelle) against the Kursk Salient. Despite its brawny historical reputation “as the greatest tank battle of all time,”¹⁶ Citadel was in fact an utter fiasco for the Wehrmacht. It turned into an operational misfire that chewed up what was left of Germany’s armored reserves that year and gave the Soviets a strategic opening to launch a full-on counteroffensive in the Ukraine—an entire slew of offensives, in fact. Starting in the summer with attacks on the Orel Salient (Operation Kutuzov)¹⁷ and Belgorod (Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev),¹⁸ Soviet tank armies tore open great chunks of the German line and sent the entire defensive front on the southern wing reeling in reverse.

Even an obstacle like the mighty Dnepr River didn’t stop the Soviets. Exhausted German soldiers, who had been withdrawing in the face of superior forces for months as summer turned into fall—and who expected to find succor behind the river—some sort of “eastern wall” (Ostwall), concrete bunkers, gun emplacements, a cup of hot coffee, anything at all—were sorely disappointed when they arrived to find . . . nothing. “The disappointment of the troops was gigantic,” wrote General Nikolaus von Vormann, commander of the 23rd Panzer Division, “and it was a shocking thing to see.”¹⁹ Vormann himself had be...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. In the Cauldron: The Battle of the Korsun Pocket
• 2. In the Mountains: The Battle for Italy
• 3. On the Beach: Normandy and Beyond
• 4. In the Middle: The Smashing of the Central Front
• 5. In the West: The Campaign in France
• 6. On the Run: The East
• 7. On the Run: The West
• 8. The Last Battle
• 9. Five Minutes Past Midnight
• 10. The Last Stand
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover