Hitler's summer pause 1941

One is still putting the chariot before the horses : the aim of Typhoon was to finish the SU,how? In the way of Barbarossa : by forcing the Soviets to commit their remaining forces to defend Moscow;if there was no battle of Briansk/Wyazma, future would be very grim for Germany ;after defeating the last Soviet forces,which ,they hoped would result in the collaps of the SU,the Germans would advance to the east,as far and as fast as possible,but the AA line was no longer possible .Moscow would be avoided,because the Germans had no longer time/manpower to fight in Moscow/to encircle Moscow . They hoped simply that as a deus ex machina,suddenly Moscow would swarm with swastika flags while communists and Jews would hang on the lamp posts .There would be no battle of Moscow, because such a battle would indicate that the SU had not collapsed and that Typhoon had failed;as usual the Germans started from the most rosy assumption .

All would depend on the strength of the available Soviet forces and the Soviet losses for Briansk/Wyazma indicated that the SU was not on its last batallion;this is also corroborated by the fact that 6 weeks after having lost 500000 men at Briansk and Wyazma,the SU was able to start a big offensive with more than 1 million men .

The situation on 29 september (Typhoon minus 1 ) was the same as the situation on 21 june (Barbarossa - 1 ) :for the Germans to have a (very small ) chance of success,the Soviets had to do what the Germans wanted them to do and they had to be very weak : if there were only 100000 men remaining to defend Moscow west of the city,there was a chance for Typhoon to succeed,but there were 500000 and east of Briansk and Wyazma 1 million more,and if the B/W forces (100000/500000,whatever ) had retreated to Moscow,or east of Moscow, Typhoon was doomed to fail before it started .

As for Barbarossa, everything depended on the intentions and strength of the Soviets .

 

It is a case of the Germans definitely being lulled by their experiences in France, Denmark, Norway, etc: the collapse of the political will in the face of the speed of modern warfare. Without the organisation of the political center, then there couldn't really be any co-ordinated resistence.

The sheer size of the defeats inflicted upon the Soviet Union, were truly of such scale that no non-Autocratic government could have withstood them. As such was well beyond anyone's comprehension at the time, even the Soviets. Somehow, they scraped through that first 6 months.

Just as the panic on the streets of Moscow show, there was a chance that the Soviet State would self-implode under the pressure exerted by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Soviet citizens are neither infallible nor free of self-doubts. That the USSR didn't collapse, is an enormous credit to the ordinary citizens.Had those citizens called up not appeared in the numbers they did; had they shirked their duty (easy to do for a young man in the Soviet expanse of land) once it become clear how hard and fast the Germans were advancing, nothing Stalin or Zhukov could do would save the situation. But young men continued to answer the call, even when the Germans reached Rostov, the outskirts of Leningrad, and stood a few score miles from Moscow.

 

I believe unless the Soviet Union collapsed as Hitler believed they would then Barbarossa could never succeed.

With hindsight everyone knows the Soviet people were willing to defend themselves and keep going and therefore their massive mobilization would ultimately defeat Germany.

My input on this thread has been that I believe if after the resupply pause at Smolensk the Germans had resumed the attack on Moscow they could have captured the city and I've said why I think so. I also believe that due to it's logistical importance that the loss of it would have made it difficult for the Soviets to deploy their newly mobilized armies effectively.

If AGS still exists even with Guderian not driving south to meet them then how does Bock have a million men attacking his southern flank? 3 German armies, one of which was already over the Dniepr would still be attacking the Soviet South Western Front. 6th Army was 18 miles from Kiev. To my mind SW Front is retreating over the Dniepr and then across the northern Ukraine toward Kharkov. It's not attacking. And if it tries to while being attacked by AGS it's going to hasten it's own disintegration as it retreats across the north Ukraine.

Also if the Germans are in empty useless Moscow dodging booby traps and time bombs (like they did in Kiev) and awaiting a Stalingrad how are the Soviets going to move those millions of freshly mobilized troops to encircle and destroy them? It takes the Moscow logistics resources to deploy and support those newly created armies and it's precisely that capacity that the Soviets would have just lost with the loss of Moscow. They'd have to be launching their forces from Gorkhy and Saratov. Otherwise how do they supply them? How do they move up the second and third waves to sustain the attacks?

The Germans survived in December 41/January 42 due to Soviet ineptitude. AGC would have been liquidated in Dec 41 if it had been attacked the way 6th Army was attacked in Nov 42. But the Soviets had had to learn over 1942 how to pick critical breakthrough areas and sustain offensives. In Dec 41 they attacked everywhere, never sustained success and ended up shunting the Germans back a hundred miles by sheer resources (manpower) and at huge cost. They were never able to cut out and liquidate the Germans.
But the problem for them is if Moscow falls they don't just have their ineptitude to deal with but no logistical capability either when compared to what they actually had historically when they launched their counter offensive. They have fresh forces arriving all the time but a desperate race now to develop other smaller cities infrastructure in order to be able to use them.

That's why I believe AGC would have hung on to Moscow and that it would have been the next winter that they would have lost it.

But anyway the point I've argued is just that I think the Germans could have taken and held Moscow (for about a year) while I know many think they could not have, or at least could not have held it. So agreeing to disagree is all that's left there I guess.

On the larger question of the success of Barbarossa I agree it depended n the Soviets quitting and therefore Germany was going to lose. But I've always believed that. Invading Russia (just like declaring war on the US) was suicide by Hitler.

 

1) You are overestimating the logistical significance of Moscow

2) It is not so that,if Moscow was captured, the Soviets would be obliged to launch an offensive to liberate Moscow : they could launch offensives north/south of Moscow.

3) It is very unlikely that an earlier advance to Moscow would have resulted in the capture of Moscow ,given what we know of the weaknesses of the Ostheer in the second half of august : what if the advance resulted in the encirclment of the city and a Stalingrad avant la lettre ? This would prevent a German advance east of Moscow . The Soviets always had the choice : sacrifice Moscow to save their armies or sacrifice their armies to save Moscow(both choices would have bad results for the Germans)while for the Germans it was Moscow or the Red Army.

 

I would recommend as a good source "Operation Barbarossa and Germany's defeat in the East " (by David Stahel) .

On page 391, Stahel mentions an excerpt from the Diary of Bock from 12 august !"If the Russians don't soon collapse somewhere,the objective of defeating them so badly that they are eliminated will be difficult to achieve before the winter".This was the opinion of Bock after less than 2 months of fighting .And on page 282 is given the combat readiness of PzG 3 on 21 july (after one month of fighting ) :combat ready 42 %,under repair 31 %, total losses 27 %and on P 316 for PzG 2 (on 29 july) :combat ready 29 %,total losses/under repair :71 % .

The combat readiness of PzG 2 was on 2 september only 25 %,for PzG 3 it was 41 % .(PP 420 and 421 ) .

 

Bock's statement doesn't seem surprising. They'd gone from Brest to Smolensk and inflicted massive losses and the Soviets were still dumping fresh armies straight in front of them. Seems a legitimate concern for Bock to express. It's what the whole fight between Hitler and the generals had been about since Smolensk fell... how do we force a decision? Unknown to them all it didn't matter which choice they made they were going to lose the war.


As for the strength of the Panzergruppes, they had driven 450 miles at high pace fighting massive pitched battles to eliminate Soviet forces at Minsk, Bialystok and Smolensk. That is one hell of a month of movement and fighting. It's not really a surprise if their operational strength is a lot lower than when they started. The Field Repair workshop units in each Panzer division would have been working overtime to lift the percentage of runners. Some tanks would have been total write offs while others had from a few days to a couple of weeks repair work needed. It was a constant battle between the rate at which vehicles came in for repair due to damage or breakdown and the rate at which repaired vehicles came out of the repair unit and returned to readiness. When fighting was intense the repair shops would fill to overflowing, when it slackened they'd begin to get on top of the job and the number of runners in the Panzer battalions would rise. I'm sure Stahel must have talked about it in his book? After all without that constant repair work to resuscitate their runner strength the Panzers would never have even resumed the offensive at all. I wonder what readiness Panzergruppe 3 had on 25 August when they resumed offensive operations.

If Panzergruppe2 had only 25% of it's original tank strength running on 2 September then that is an incredible combat performance by that force. After all they were by then a week into driving south to link with Panzergruppe1 east of Kiev and wipe out the entire Soviet South Western Front. If runner strength really was that low then the forces they had already smashed through in that week must have been pathetic and the threat to AGC southern flank must have actually been almost irrelevant.

 

Typhoon failed in the OTL,essentially because Germany could no longer replace its losses, something the SI could do and even more than that .

I am convinced that,if in the ATL,Typhoon was not delayed by first going south,and was started a month earlier (end august), it also would have failed, for the same reasons :at the end of august,Germany could not replace its losses (200000 men in august)while the SU was replacing its losses .In august the Ostheer had lost 569 tanks and had received only 9 replacements .The "ersatz " manpower"
was going to the east only from 10 september on .

 

I suppose the later german offensives failed after for all russians it was clear, that there was no future for them under german occupation. Therefore a collapse of the Red Army was no option for everyone in Russia. Resistance was strengthened, for the russian soldiers there was only the choice between a possible, honourable death for Mother Russia or a humilating death as a slave for german Nazis.

And without a collapse, Barbarossa couldn't work, no matter if Moscow would be chosen as the target in the autumn or the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was not France with its smaller population and territory, which could be overwhelmed in weaks without a possibility to recover.

I still think that from a pure military point of view, the german Wehrmacht performed very good given the available equipment. Tactics and level of training were far superior and even short crisis were overcome most of the time, failures were rare (Operation Polarfuchs, Sewastopol were examples). But conquering a huge territory with only 3 Mio men against 100 Mio people, a lot of them capable of becoming soldiers when needed, was impossible.

Or only possible when the Russians had enough of Stalins dictatorship, the Gulags, the starvations etc. and could opt for a better regime.

How the Nazis wanted to control huge Russia when captured was always a miracle for me. Probably they planned to kill most of the potential dangerous people.

 

the german choice was an assault on Moscow with resulting losses or sending their tank forces east of Moscow with few connecting roads and limited infantry support to hold the flanks.

 

The German idea was to make a lot of ranches for the top Nazi leaders and kill most Russians. The rest would serve as taking care of the ranch and animals, and top nazi and his family. The higher the rank, the bigger the area and number or slaves.

 

I read that early in the war the Germans would have sent the tanks for repair in Germany?! Don´t know when this changed or how true it is in the end.

 

3 Oct 1941: Guderian Captures Orel
In the south Second Panzer Group (Guderian) broke through the Bryansk Front and captured Orel on 3 Oct (Braithwaite, 2006). The German advance penned the Bryansk Front into two pockets. They fought on until 16-17 Oct.
[SIZE=12.8000001907349px]http://balagan.info/timeline-of-the-battle-for-moscow-1941[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12.8000001907349px]------------------------------------[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12.8000001907349px]Actually some of the time used to build the defensive line was lost due to the fact that the attack by Guderian from the southern flank surprised the Red Army and led to the massive pocket in Vyazma.[/SIZE]
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7 Oct 1941
Germans captured Vyazma (Jones, 2009). When the 7th Panzer Division of Third Panzer Group (Reinhardt) and 10th Panzer Division (Fischer) of Fourth Panzer Group (Hoepner) linked up east of Vyazma they trapped four armies, including 24th and 32nd with most of the Moscow Volunteer Divisions (Braithwaite, 2006).

 

I've read that in the optimistic early days of Barbarossa, a lot of soldiers dreamed of a farm in the East as compensation for their effort. But that wish disappeaed when summer was over and Russia turns into a muddy and later frozen nightmare. During the offensive in 1942 the german soldiers didn't like the extreme heat in the summer and the cold in the winter and didn't know why they should conquer a country so far away from their home.

 

The colonization was a non sequitur : if it succeeded, it would ruin the Altreich, if it failed : dito ,if it was tried:idem .To be successful, millions of Germans had to leave Germany and this would ruin German society and economy .Hitler was fascinated by the colonisation of the West and the stories of Karl May(who never left Germany ),but he forgot that the colonisation of the West was made possible by the arrival of million of migrants,and that after WWI there were no million of migrants to colonize the east . He was to late .

 

These millions of migrants should be produced in Himmlers Lebensborn facilities later.

 

Exactly. it wasn't a plan with a three month return on investment for the shareholders.

 

Too true, it was proclaimed a 'Thousand Year Reich' after all at its inception. If you delve deeply in Hitler's writing's he bemoaned the loss of prime Aryan stock to immigration of Deutsche Volk to other countries, especially to the New World. There were some comments that these were the most energetic blood lines who were willing to pick up stock and start from scratch in a far away place. There was hope that these people would vote with their feet and return to the Fatherland to help expand the Reich. Historically small numbers did, what might have happened had Germany secured 'open' land can only be speculated upon.

 

After WW1 the number of children in Germany was small. Thet makes it harder to create ranch leaders. However, they could make massive areas to be ruled, and also make some Nordic people as Aryan people , too. But then again, If I recall correctly, it was Hitler´s plan to make the Urals first and start making the slavs into slaves. Also Hitler had plans to make Europe German, so he had plans to send the people in the Netherlands to the East, but I have only read about these plans as spoken.