Army Group Center’s July Battles
Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Führer, and Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, the Third Reich’s premier fighting force in the East, had every reason to be proud of the victories Bock’s army group achieved during the first five weeks of the Soviet-German War. In the wake of the spectacular victories it achieved during the first ten days of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Army Group Center seemed to replicate these feats once again in July. Having destroyed three Soviet armies (the 3rd, 4th and 10th) outright during the initial phase of the Barbarossa campaign, during the first two weeks in July, Bock’s army group pierced the defenses of five more Soviet armies (the 13th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd) along the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers with astonishing ease. Then, without pausing to take a breath, Bock’s forces drove boldly eastward, brushing aside yet another Soviet army (the 16th), seizing Smolensk, and encircling the remnants of Soviet 16th, 19th, and 20th Armies north and northeast of the city.
While the infantry of Army Group Center’s Fourth and Ninth Armies, helped by a handful of panzer and motorized divisions, contained and attempted to destroy the Soviet forces it encircled in and around Smolensk during the final two weeks of July, most of Hoth’s and Guderian’s Third and Second Panzer Groups held four more newly-created Soviet armies (the 29th, 30th, 19th, and 24th) at bay along his army group’s “eastern front,” northeast and southeast of the city. Simultaneously, Strauss’ Ninth Army, with part of Hoth’s panzer group, protected the army group’s northern flank by seizing Nevel’. Weichs’ Second Army and part of Guderian’s Second Panzer Group pressed Soviet forces arrayed along the army group’s southern flank back to the Rogachev and Zhlobin region and the Sozh River.
Thus, in an astonishingly brief period of just over three weeks, Bock’s forces smashed the Red Army’s second strategic echelon defenses along the mighty Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and captured Smolensk, the historical eastern gateway to Moscow. While doing so, they captured as many as 300,000 Red Army soldiers and inflicted grievous losses on Timoshenko’s Western Front. By any measure, this was indeed a Herculean feat. At this point, the German command, if not the entire world, expected nothing short of a rapid German advance on Moscow and a resounding victory in yet another Blitzkrieg-style German war.
Appearances, however, often deceive, and this was the certainly case in late July 1941. Although the initial month of Operation Barbarossa was replete with German victories, it also produced German disappointments, some of which were far from trivial. The most ominous and disheartening of these disappointments was the discrediting, if not the outright destruction, of several key German assumptions regarding the nature and future course of the war. Foremost among these false assumptions was the firm German belief that the Soviet Union and its Red Army would inevitably collapse if the Wehrmacht could destroy the bulk of the Red Army west of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers. Yet, even though Bock’s army group accomplished this goal in spectacular fashion, the assumption proved patently incorrect. After destroying three Soviet armies and part of a fourth by the end of the first week of July, when Bock’s forces reached the rivers which were supposed to signify total victory, they instead encountered another five Soviet armies willing and able to fight. Quite naturally, the Germans then altered their assumption slightly by rationalizing that the defeat and destruction of this “row of armies” in the Smolensk region would produce promised victory. Clearly it did not. In fact, after deploying one “row” of armies along the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and another east of Smolensk, the Red Army would subsequently raise and deploy three more “rows” of armies along the Moscow axis later in the summer and fall of 1941.1 Mesmerized by an assumption that proved false, the Germans engaged and defeated two of these rows in October and November 1941, only to be defeated themselves at the gates of Moscow in early December by the third row.
Another key German assumption regarding the war in the East was that Blitzkrieg-style war that had produced easy victory in the West would result in equally spectacular victory in the East. It did not, primarily because the “eastern kilometer” differed fundamentally from the “western kilometer.” In short, operationally and logistically, the Wehrmacht proved unable to conduct sustained Blitzkrieg war in such a vast and underdeveloped theater of military operations. In particular, this assumption proved false by mid-July, after which the Wehrmacht was forced to conduct virtually all of its offensive operations in ad hoc fashion, by advancing in distinct offensive “spurts,” followed inevitably by extended periods of time necessary to rest, refit, and resupply its forces.
The final false German assumption regarded the Red Army itself, in particular, its officer cadre and soldiers. This assumption, which was rooted firmly in Nazi ideology and racial theories, maintained that, inherently, Soviet officers and soldiers could not or would not fight on a level commensurate with their German counterparts. By late July, combat itself gave this assumption the lie. While Red Army soldiers did indeed surrender or defect by the hundreds, tens if not hundreds of thousands more fought, often in suicidal fashion, and died in the face of German invasion so that hundreds of thousands more would prevail. Thus, midst the enthusiasm born of numerous spectacular victories, intelligent and perceptive German officers and their soldiers had every reason for reflection and dismay by late July 1941.
All of these things notwithstanding, the Soviet political and military leadership and the Red Army’s officers and soldiers too faced unprecedented and daunting trials during July 1941. By every standard of measure, the fighting in July produced catastrophe after Soviet catastrophe and a seemingly endless series of major crises. Writ large, the Red Army lost up to a third of its peacetime compliment during the first five weeks of war, perhaps as many as 1.5 million officers and soldiers, a figure that would rise to almost 3 million by the end of August 1941. Thus, deprived early on of its best-trained soldiers, increasingly over the summer, it would have to make do with partially-trained reservists and largely untrained conscripts raised from across the vast extent of the Soviet Union. This left the Red Army with no choice but to educate and train its officers and soldiers during the course of combat. The long roster of destroyed armies replaced by new armies rising phoenix-like over time only underscored the scope of these disasters.
Compounding and often exacerbating this situation, the Red Army’s officer corps, which was itself replete with “political” generals and generals who had survived the purges of the late 1930s only to find themselves commanding in war at levels well above their competence, experienced a literal “purge by combat.” This Darwinian process saw the incompetent perish with their soldiers, quite literally, by their own hand. Conversely, and perhaps surprisingly, the July fighting also proved that, among this vast officer corps of mixed quality, there were many generals who proved their competence in combat and, as a result, knew how to fight and survive. Interestingly enough, in addition to the famed General Zhukov, other generals, such as Konev, Rokossovsky, and Kurochkin, would survive the July battles to lead entire fronts in the victorious conquest of Berlin in April and May 1945.
In short, despite the many defeats, crises, and problems the Red Army experienced and endured in July 1941, by month’s end Stalin proved able to identify and employ a solid nucleus of “fighting” generals. It was through the Herculean if not desperate efforts of these senior commanders, together with the stoic endurance of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers, that the Stavka was able to convert defeat and retreat into resolute defense and vigorous counteroffensive.
Army Group Center’s August Battles
On the surface, at least, as well as in the pages of most histories of this period, the fighting in Army Group Center’s sector during the first three weeks of August 1941 was notable, first and foremost, for the dramatic victories Bock’s forces recorded at the beginning of the period and the equally imposing victory they won at the end. During the first week of August, for example, Bock’s army group recorded two cardinal successes. First, the infantry of Ninth and Second Armies finally liquidated the Smolensk encirclement, ostensibly swallowing up the forces of three Soviet armies and restoring a solid front east of the city. Second, and virtually simultaneously, Armeegruppe Guderian’s XXIV Motorized Corps abruptly interrupted the bothersome counteroffensive by Timoshenko’s “Operational Groups” by crushing Group Kachalov’s forces in the Roslavl’ region. Within ten days, Guderian’s forces then wheeled southward across the Sozh River, beginning what would become a seemingly endless series of bold dashes by Guderian’s panzers and the infantry of Weichs’ Second Army, which ultimately culminated in the capture of Gomel’ and a crisis within the Soviet High Command as a genuine threat materialized against Kiev from the north.
At the other end of this three-week time spectrum, in the third week of August, Hitler, over Bock’s strenuous objections, required Army Group Center to unleash yet another successful blow against Timoshenko’s Western Front. This time, a sizeable proportion of Third Panzer Group’s armor, in the form of Group Stumme, which Army Group Center secretly regrouped to its left wing, struck a devastating blow in the Velikie Luki region against Ershakov’s unsuspecting 22nd Army. Attacking by surprise, in only a week’s time, the forces of Group Stumme shattered and decimated the attacking 22nd Army, captured Velikie Luki, liquidated half of Ershakov’s army in a pocket southeast of the city, and, with scarcely a pause to catch its breath, began driving eastward to threaten Toropets and Toropa, forcing Maslennikov’s 29th Army to weaken its offensive by dispatching forces to stave off disaster on the Western Front’s right wing.
Thus, during the first three weeks of August, Army Group Center eradicated the bulk of three armies (16th, 19th, and 20th) from the Red Army’s order of battle in the Smolensk region, destroyed a fourth (28th) in the Roslavl’ region, decimated a fifth (22nd) in the forests around Velikie Luki, forced a sixth (21st) to abandon Gomel’, and compelled a seventh (29th) to weaken its role in the Western Front’s planned counteroffensive in late August and early September. Underscoring the impressive scale of these victories, Bock’s army group killed or captured more than 40,000 Red Army soldiers northeast and east of Smolensk, roughly 90,000 in the Gomel’ region, and another 60,000 Soviet soldiers in the Roslavl’ and Velikie Luki regions. By any measure, the figure of over 190,000 soldiers and officers eliminated from the Red Army was indeed an impressive count.
As dramatic as these German victories were, several other grim realities proved these victories were deceptive, at least in part. First, although the Western and Central Fronts’ loss of more than 190,000 troops in just three weeks time was indeed lamentable, these losses paled in comparison with the well over 400,000 men the Red Army’s Western Front had suffered during the roughly six weeks since war began. In fact, despite these losses, the Soviet mobilization system tapped into its mobilization pool of more than 10 million men, generating 800,000 men by the end of June and another 600,000 men in July, and perhaps almost as many in August, dispatching over half of these men to the Western, Reserve, and Central Fronts operating along the Western (Moscow) axis. During this period, the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO) mobilized and fielded rifle divisions numbered from 250 to roughly 316 in July and from 317 to 384 in August, as well as the 100-series of tank divisions in early August, and roughly half of these divisions went to fronts operating along the Western axis. As poorly trained and equipped as most of these divisions were, their combat employment demonstrated the old adage that “quantity has a quality of its own.”
Furthermore, and more important, as the records cited in the study clearly indicate, despite the Red Army’s plethora of problems, the generals and colonels who survived the first six weeks of war to command armies and divisions in August 1941, men such as Konev, Liziukov, Iushkevich, and tens of others, were indeed learning how to fight the German Heer, Europe’s most accomplished army.
Second, although Timoshenko’s Western Direction Command and the Western, Reserve, and Central Fronts indeed suffered dramatic defeats during the first and third weeks of August, sandwiched in between was a major counteroffensive orchestrated by Timoshenko which inflicted serious harm on Bock’s Army Group Center, first, in terms of combat losses, but even more significantly, in terms of German confidence and morale. Even if the most of the armies carrying out Timoshenko’s counteroffensive in mid-August failed to achieve operational, much less strategic, success, they did score unprecedented tactical victories that genuinely hurt Bock’s army group. This applied in particular to the attack by Konev’s 19th Army along the Vop’ River, which decimated the German 161st Infantry Division and severely damaged 28th and 5th Infantry Divisions, and, for the first time in the war, defeated a major counterattack by German 7th Panzer Division. To a lesser degree, it also applied to the attacks by Khomenko’s 30th Army, which, while disjointed, inflicted costly casualties on 106th Infantry Division, to the slow but damaging assaults by Maslennikov’s 29th Army along the Western Dvina River, which sorely damaged the German 26th and 6th Infantry Divisions, and to the ferocious though futile assaults on El’nia by Rakutin’s 24th Army, which, while unsuccessful, inflicted grievous losses on SS “Das Reich” Motorized Division, XX Army Corps’ 15th, 268th, 292nd Infantry Divisions, and IX Army Corps’ 263rd and 137th Infantry Divisions.
The situation along German Ninth Army’s front east of Smolensk was indicative of the problem and the increasing frustration in higher German command circles. After reporting on 3 August that Ninth Army Corps’ VIII and V Corps “suffered considerable casualties, especially in officers,” during the encirclement battle at Smolensk, on 12 August, the army group’s commander, Bock, confided to his diary, “If the Russians don’t soon collapse somewhere, the objective of defeating them so badly that they will be eliminated will be difficult before the winter.”2 The situation on the front east of Smolensk had become so desperate by the end of the third week in August that Bock wrote:
It [my eastern front] can’t hold much longer the way things look now. I am being forced [by Hitler] to spread the reserves which I have so laboriously scraped together for the hoped for attack behind my front just to have some degree of security that it will not be breeched.
If, after all the successes, the campaign in the east now trickles away in dismal defensive fighting for my army group, it is not my fault.3
Of course, this reflected Bock’s discomfiture over Hitler’s insistence over clearing Army Group Center’s flanks before marching on Moscow.
Making matters worse for Bock, as well as other the other commanders of German army groups, they lacked the reserves necessary to replace their losses. For example, on 2 August Halder informed his diary that Army Group Center had lost 74,500 men and received only 23,000 replacements since the first day of the Barbarossa invasion. As a result, by this time, it was experiencing a manpower deficit of 15,000 men in Ninth Army, 30,000 men in Second Army, 4,000 men in Third Panzer Group. Later still, on 28 August he recorded that the panzer divisions in Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups were operating with average daily tank strengths of 45 percent, with 7th Panzer Division the lowest at only 24 percent strength.4 In the case of many of these divisions, they had suffered most of these losses (as well as staggering losses in panzer-grenadiers) in late July and early August, while operating along the outer encirclement ring at Smolensk, in isolation from supporting infantry divisions.
If Army Group Center’s panzer divisions and, in particular, their motorized infantry forces, suffered a high proportion of the army group’s casualties during the second half of July, in August it was the turn of the army group’s infantry divisions. Thus, with most of Hoth’s panzers absent, operating toward the north, and most of Second Panzer Group’s panzers driving toward the south, Ninth and Fourth Armies’ infantry divisions ended up defending against Timoshenko’s fierce and persistent assaults east and northeast of Smolensk and against Zhukov’s attacks in the El’nia region. It was here that as many as ten infantry divisions saw their strength dwindle and their combat rating fall from “strong” and “medium strong” to “weak” or even “exhausted.”
It was this bloodletting east of Smolensk and at El’nia which gradually persuaded Hitler to undertake his “cat and mouse game” with Timoshenko, that is, to cease his costly eastward advance and instead deal with the threats to Army Group Center’s northern and southern flanks. Hitler’s decision to do so was clearly rooted in his frustration at Army Group Center’s failure to liquidate the Smolensk encirclement in what he considered timely fashion. It was only reinforced by the agonies experienced by and damage inflicted on Hoth’s and Guderian’s panzer divisions as they struggled to hold the outer encirclement lines east of Smolensk against increasingly powerful and frenzied Soviet counterattacks, as well as Guderian’s seemingly easy victory at Roslavl’. It was further reinforced in mid-August by the continued “bloodying” of German infantry divisions east of Smolensk and at El’nia, coupled with another easy victory by Guderian’s panzers along the Sozh River and at Krichev.
All of this provided both context and impetus for the game Hitler played with Timoshenko’s Western Front after mid-August. Reluctant to tempt fate by driving straight on Moscow through what appeared to be the strongest Soviet defenses, instead Hitler decided to follow the path of least resistance and cost by striking the flanks of Soviet defenses along the Western axis. By the end of the third week of August, despite significant opposition from Bock, Guderian, and other senior officers, Hitler’s decision was paying significant dividends, first and foremost, because the Fuhrer had won the game. By this time, Guderian had not only collapsed the Central Front but was also threatening to separate the Reserve Front from the Southwestern Front defending the approaches to Kiev. At the same time, and at minimal cost, Third Panzer Group’s Group Stumme had demolished the right wing of Timoshenko’s Western Front by savaging the Soviet 22nd Army and forcing 29th Army virtually to end its participation in the Western Front’s ambitious counteroffensive.
In turn, the apparent favorable outcome of Hitler’s gambit in the third week of August provided context and impetus for what was about to occur in the last week of August and early September. From Timoshenko’s perspective, despite the German victories on his front’s left and right wings, the main direction commander, as well as his masters in Moscow, in late August still firmly believed the ultimate outcome of the summer campaign would be decided in the Smolensk region. If Hitler’s calculated risk to strip the Moscow axis of his armor by dispatching the army’s group’s two panzer groups to its flanks facilitated the tactical successes the Western Front achieved east of Smolensk by 24 August, perhaps, the Stavka reasoned, persisting in a strategy of striking Army Group Center’s almost tank-less “eastern front” in late August and early September could produce future operational and even strategic success.
Based on these judgments, and with Stalin’s and the Stavka’s complete approval, when the last week of August began, Timoshenko began orchestrating a new and expanded counteroffensive, this time with the forces of three fronts instead of two, and with reinforcement provided by the Stavka. In turn, this new counteroffensive would determine, once and for all, the strategy Hitler would employ to achieve the objectives set forth in Plan Barbarossa.