Hitler's Vikings Page 11
Fedor von Bock, recovered from his illness, was once again put in charge of an Army Group, this time South – its previous commander von Reichenau had taken over from von Runstedt, suffered a heart attack and then died when the plane flying him to hospital had crashed. He was pitted against some of the rising stars of the reborn Red Army; men like Konstantin Rokossovsky, Nikolai Vatutin and Andrei Yeremenko. Together these three men commanded some 20 Soviet Armies spread in a huge arc from the Taman peninsula in the west, through the recaptured ruins of Rostov and up to the industrial city of Voronezh. Against them von Bock had two newly-reorganised mini-Army Groups; B in the north commanded by the bespectacled aristocrat and magnificently named General Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von Weichs zu Glon, comprising Friedrich von Paulus’s enormous Sixth Army and Hoth’s excellent Fourth Panzer Army (the renamed Panzer Group 3), along with the Rumanian Third and Fourth Armies and the Italian Eighth Army. Army Group A in the south was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm List and had the wholly-German Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies, and Ewald von Kleist’s First Panzer Army (the old Panzer Group 1). In principle, the plan was simple. Drive east, and annihilate the Soviet armies between the Don and Donets rivers in a huge pincer movement, then turn south and capture the Caucasus. While it looked straightforward Case Blue was built on a foundation of sand. The distances that had to be covered were vast and casualties had been so enormous the previous year that massive responsibility was being placed on the ill-equipped, poorly-led and undermanned armies of Germany’s allies (the Hungarian Second Army would also be involved later on). The old campaigner Field Marshal von Runstedt described the force as an ‘absolute League of Nations army’, in which the Rumanian officers and NCOs were ‘beyond description’, the Italians ‘terrible people’ and the Hungarians ‘only wanted to get home quickly’. Regardless, the Wehrmacht was committed, and preparations went ahead for the attack.
The SS-Wiking upgraded
Along with all the other Waffen-SS field formations, the Wiking had been fully motorised since its inception. This already marked it out amongst the largely horse-drawn German Army, but the decision was taken in 1942 to upgrade the division further to ‘panzer grenadier’ status. Before the war this designation meant nothing in terms of extra equipment or capability, it was more of an honorary title. However, from 1941 onwards it became accepted practice to equip panzer grenadier units with an armoured battalion of their own. This utterly transformed their effectiveness. For the Wiking this meant the addition of three entire companies of Panzer IIIs with long-barrelled 50mm guns, some 66 tanks in all, along with one company (20 vehicles) of Marder IIs (the powerful 75mm anti-tank gun mounted on an old Panzer II chassis). Some of the Wiking’s artillery was made self-propelled as well. In effect, the division now had an armoured punch of close on a hundred vehicles.
The Wiking did not only receive a boost in its equipment table, but also among its ranks – the Finns had arrived in force. Supplied with French trucks from captured war stocks when they detrained at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, Collani had led his men east during the winter months to join up with the Wiking in its defensive positions on the River Mius. The journey was truly awful, with more than 60 per cent of the trucks breaking down on the way, unsuited as they were to the rigours of a Russian winter. With no transport the majority of the Finns had had to march hundreds of kilometres through the snow and so did not arrive until early January – but at least they were there and in one piece. The division itself was reorganising and the Finns arrival meant that Fritz von Scholz could bring his Nordland Regiment back up to strength by disbanding his old third battalion, by distributing the men to the remaining two and making the newly-arrived Finns his new third battalion. This was not all done safely in the rear but in the frontline, with the Finns taking up positions facing the Red Army’s 31st Guards Rifle Division. The ‘Guards’ designation indicated an exemplary unit and had been resurrected from Tsarist days to help motivate the men and it meant the Finns were facing a top notch outfit. In terms of bald numbers, a Red Army division was roughly equivalent to a Wehrmacht regiment – so the Finns were outnumbered almost three to one from the start. A few days after moving into the line, a Guards sniper shot dead the Finnish volunteer Onni Martkainen on 23 January 1942. He was the battalion’s first fatality of the war. Back up to complement, and with all the new kit, the SS-Wiking was earmarked as a spearhead unit in Kleist’s assault force.
The offensive would take the 2000 and more Scandinavian Waffen-SS men in the Wiking’s ranks to places few outsiders had ever seen. They would begin in the steppes of southern Russia, before sweeping south through more Cossack country, until finally reaching the snow-capped fastnesses of the high Caucasus mountains and the fiercely independent Muslim tribes that lived there. Where they reached would become the high water mark of the Third Reich’s empire, before they were sent tumbling back north in what the troops involved would disparagingly come to call the ‘Caucasus there and back offensive’ (Kaukasus hin und zurück).
The SS-Wiking drives to the south
Case Blue opened on 28 June, with von Weichs’s Army Group striking at the city of Voronezh, several hundred miles north of Rostov and east of Kursk. Two days later, Paulus’s Sixth Army initiated the next phase and thrust eastwards towards the far-off Volga River at Stalingrad. The Soviet response was to trade space for time and Timoshenko’s forces retreated east to avoid destruction. All of this though was a precursor to the main event, when on 13 July the long-awaited Wehrmacht offensive began in earnest with the 73rd, 125th and 298th Infantry Divisions crashing into their opposite numbers on the Rostov front. The STAVKA was caught off-guard, as it still believed that the main German effort would come from Army Group Centre. Unwilling to accept they had got it wrong, the southern Red Army formations were left unreinforced and at the mercy of the assaulting German divisions.
Backed up by strong artillery, the experienced German infantry soon began to tear holes in the Russian lines through which the armoured and motorised formations could pour. Through one such gap charged the Wiking’s panzer grenadiers along with the Slovak Fast Division, plus the 13th and 22nd Panzer Divisions. Riding hard, they entered Rostov itself on 23 July and surged towards the river. The Wiking’s new panzer battalion overran the city’s airfield, while the panzer grenadiers did the dirty work of street and house clearing. The fighting in the city was brutal, especially around the headquarters of the Soviet secret police, the dreaded NKVD, who were in Rostov in strength. The centre of the city had been turned into a deadly assault course, with strongpoints, mines, booby-traps, hidden bunkers and firing points. It took several days of savage hand-to-hand fighting to clear the city centre. Then a daring coup de main by a troop from the specially-trained Brandenburg Regiment secured the all-important road bridge over the Don to Bataysk. It cost the majority of the Brandenburgers their lives, but the way to the Caucasus was now open.
In recognition of the Wiking panzer battalion’s outstanding performance and his own bravery during the assault on the city, their 34-year-old Lorrainian commander Hans Mühlenkamp (already a German Cross in Gold holder from his time in the Das Reich) was awarded the Knight’s Cross on Felix Steiner’s personal recommendation. His citation read:
SS-Sturmbannführer Mühlenkamp, commander of SS-Panzer Battalion 5, as leader of an advanced detachment of the Division on July 22-23 1942, overran in a bold sudden attack after a hard fight, three lines of anti-tank ditches before Rostov. By 1430 hrs on July 23, he had broken into the western part of the city of Rostov. He cleared and occupied it, then pushed forward in a wide front up to the bank of the River Don. In the course of these battles Mühlenkamp destroyed 19 enemy cannons, 12 anti-tank guns and captured a large number of prisoners.
Through his daring and prudent handling of the unit he has contributed decisively to the breaching of the west and northwest fronts of the deeply-set anti-tank ditch positions before Rostov, forcing our enemy to flee in confusion bac
k across the Don. With that he has freed the way to Rostov and the Don for the infantry divisions advancing from the north and northwest. He has taken a decisive part in the capture of Rostov and created the conditions necessary for the crossing of the Don by the pursuing 73rd and 125th Infantry Divisions.
Oil, mountains and the Kuban steppe
With the crossing of the Don the Scandinavians of the SS-Wiking entered territory unlike any other in Europe. Before them stretched over 300 miles of the Kuban and Kalmyk steppes, criss-crossed by innumerable minor water courses, as well as the wide and deep Manych River. Beyond the plains were the Caucasus mountains themselves, the largest peaks in Europe, crowned by the eternally snow-covered summit of the 18,480-foot Mount Elbrus. The region was dirt poor but rich in oil; from Maikop in the west to Grozny in the east, the black gold flowed to Stalin’s war machine. Maikop alone produced two and a half million tons of oil annually (the Wehrmacht consumed 7,305,000 tons in 1942). If captured intact, the Caucasus fields would feed Hitler’s fuel-hungry armies all across Europe. The other major feature of the region was its military highways. The warlike hill peoples who inhabited the area, the Chechens, Ossetians, Dagestanis and others, had only been conquered by the Tsars in the previous century and had resented Russian rule ever since. The Russians had built two huge roads through the mountain passes so troops could move quickly to snuff out any trouble: the Ossetian Military Highway in the west from Kutaisi to Pyatigorsk in the north, and the Georgian Military Highway in the east shadowing the Caspian Sea from Grozny all the way south to Tiflis. These roads would be vital in the summer’s fighting.
Under the baking Caucasus sun, the Wiking forged ahead with the rest of von Kleist’s panzer force. It was the Berliners of General Breith’s 3rd Panzer Division who first got across the Manych River on 1 August, and in their wake came the Wiking. Striking ever south, Maikop fell to Major-General Herr’s 13th Panzer Division on 13 August, but they found the huge oil storage tanks ablaze and the oilfields themselves stripped of equipment and the wells capped with tonnes of concrete. Accompanying them down the western Caucasus, the grenadiers of the SS-Nordland took the railway junction of Kropotkin and surged across the Kuban River to establish a bridgehead on the southern side. They then turned southwest to try and take Tuapse on the Black Sea coast.
As impressive as the endless advance seemed, it was failing to achieve its objectives. Hitler had expressly set out in his Directive for Case Blue that the offensive wasn’t only about capturing the Caucasus and its oilfields, but crucially it also had to encircle and annihilate the large Red Army formations facing it. The Führer wanted another Kiev. The only problem was that the Soviets were learning. Stalin’s ‘hold and fight’ dogma of the previous year had been abandoned for the madness it clearly was. The STAVKA was now using Russia’s age-old strategy of trading space for time, luring an invader ever deeper into its endless interior and then, when they were at the very end of their supply lines, hit them hard. It was working. German infantry divisions were marching 30–40 miles a day, with the panzers doing even more, but the horizon was never reached. The Soviets would simply sit on a river line, force the Wehrmacht to deploy and carry out an attack. As soon as the pressure got too much, the Russians would just disengage and drive away, leaving the Germans and their allies to punch into thin air. Cities, towns and villages were not fought over; Krasnodar the Kuban Cossack capital with its 200,000 inhabitants fell on 11 August, followed the next day by the Kalmyk’s major town, Elista. But nowhere did the Wehrmacht fulfil its task and surround vast numbers of Soviet troops. They were always there, withdrawing in front of the Germans and heading ever closer to the mountains.
Elbrus ‘conquered’, but no more
Two months into the campaign though, and victory seemed in sight. If the Germans could sweep down the coast and take the ports of the Black Sea Fleet, they would turn the Sea into a ‘German lake’. Turkey would almost certainly come into the war on Nazi Germany’s side and could threaten the whole Middle East. Rommel, standing at El Alamein, could regroup and charge forward again as the British would be faced with a battle in their rear as well as to their front. In the East, if the Germans took the fabled city of Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, they would cut off all Red Army forces in the Caucasus. They could be supplied by boat of course, but the reality would be half a dozen Soviet Armies stranded in the high mountains. But these were big ‘ifs’. The Wehrmacht’s soldiers had already covered almost 500 miles, men and machines were weary and battered, and the under-strength invasion force was dangerously spread out.
They were not finished yet though, and as if to prove it, on 21 August a party of alpine jägers from the 1st and 4th Mountain Divisions, led by Captains’ Groth and Gämmerler, planted the swastika on the summit of Mount Elbrus. The Wehrmacht had conquered the highest peak in all of Europe. It was an incredible feat of mountaineering.
The steam was running out of Case Blue. Everywhere the Germans lacked the strength to reach their final objectives. They were 30 miles from Tuapse, 25 miles from the coast at Klydzh, and only 12 miles from Sukhumi, but it might as well have been the far side of the moon. The Red Army was fighting hard everywhere now, and the Wehrmacht had simply run out of aircraft, panzers, guns and men.
The SS-Wiking in the eastern Caucasus
As ever, Hitler blamed his generals and not himself for the failure. Field Marshal Wilhelm List was relieved of command at the beginning of September, as was Franz Halder, the Chief of the General Staff. From his headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the fighting, an exasperated Führer ordered the offensive to be renewed and Grozny taken. By now it was late September and autumn had arrived, but obedient as ever the First Panzer Army gathered its strength and attacked south. The SS-Wiking was shifted to the east to assist the offensive, and along with the 23rd Panzer Division and the 111th Infantry Division, the SS grenadiers advanced on the Georgian Military Highway. Von Scholz’s Nordland actually reached the road itself and cut it north of Grozny, but were overlooked by a feature denoted on German maps as Hill 711, near the village of Malgobek.
As long as the Russians held the high ground they could pour fire down on the hapless SS men. There was nothing for it, Hill 711 had to be captured. The Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Germans of the Nordland attacked again and again, leaving piles of their dead on the hillside, but were unable to take it. Finally, on 16 October it was the turn of the Nordland’s 3rd Battalion to go into the assault – it was time for Hans Collani’s Finns. When the rest of SS-Wiking went into action at Rostov back in July, the Finns had been rested at Mokryj Jelantschick until the first week of August. Only then had they rejoined their comrades in the Nordland and fought in the western Caucasus. Now they took up positions in their line of departure (usually in dead ground away from direct fire where troops could get themselves ready for an assault), and at H-Hour leapt forward into the teeth of the Soviet fire. In small knots, the three Finnish infantry companies leapfrogged upwards, covered by the heavy weapons of their 4th Company. In desperate fighting the Finns took the summit and sent the Russians tumbling backwards. There was no time for congratulations, as the Soviets counter-attacked immediately. This time it was the turn of the Waffen-SS to hold the high ground against an advancing enemy. Assault after assault was broken up by concentrated Finnish fire. Come nightfall, Hill 711 was still in the hands of Collani’s Finnish SS men, and Soviet resistance was broken. The toll was heavy. Hill 711 was rechristened ‘Killing Hill’ by its Finnish conquerors, with the battalion losing 88 killed and 346 wounded on its rocky slopes. With a further 80 men already in hospital, the battalion was almost wiped out. The arrival a month later of some 200 new volunteers, all combat veterans from the Winter War, was a great shot in the arm for the Nordland’s Finnish contingent. These new men would go straight into action, as the battalion fought alongside its Nordic cousins to hold off growing Red Army attacks across the entire divisional front. Indeed, on 4 December two of
them, Kalevi Könönen and Yrjö Pyyhtiä, held their machine-gun position unsupported for eight hours against furious Soviet assault. They were both awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and the prestigious Honour Roll Clasp for their bravery.
The end of the line
With Killing Hill in Finnish hands, the rest of III Panzer Corps broke across the Terek River, smashed four Red Army divisions, took 7,000 prisoners, captured Alagir and by 5 November had cut the Ossetian Military Highway. Victory was so very close. The advancing Germans were feted by the local Muslim peoples as liberators from the atheist communist yoke. Nalchik, the capital of the mainly Muslim Kabardo-Balkiar region, fell in early November and there were public celebrations in the streets. But this was where the advance stopped. The armoured divisions had barely a handful of panzers still operational, and those they had were running on fumes. Even worse, ammunition was desperately short. The men were exhausted, their boots were worn out, and as the temperature began to drop they had little warm clothing, it was just like the last winter.