The Last Lion - Winston Churchill - Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Europe, World War II, Presidents & Heads of State, Great Britain, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9780316222143
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2012-11-05T13:00:00+00:00

By July 14, Hitler’s eastern army (Ostheer) had established its bridgehead across the Don at Voronezh, but it had taken Army Group B’s Fourth Panzer Division a week to take the city. The delay would prove costly as the seasons changed. Meanwhile, Paulus’s Sixth Army had kept to the original plan and wheeled south along the Don’s west bank. The Ostheer had now driven 140 miles farther than in the previous summer, yet the dawdling of the Fourth Panzer Army in Voronezh while Paulus raced south meant that Army Group B was being stretched thin. Stalin by then had rescinded his “stand firm” orders and was now allowing the Red Army to retreat before the Ostheer, which lessened the chances of entire Soviet armies being encircled and captured. As a result, although the Germans had captured more than 90,000 Soviet troops within the Donets Corridor since their victory at Kharkov, five times that many Russians had backtracked to fight another day. Still, by the first days of August, the Ostheer had driven another 150 miles. Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, fell, and with it the last direct Soviet rail links with the Baku fields. For Stalin, this was a personal affront; in 1908 he had robbed the Rostov — Moscow train in order to help the revolutionary cause. For the same cause he had robbed the Tiflis bank in his native Georgia, leaving three dead at the scene. Rostov and Georgia had been his stomping grounds. They were now Hitler’s.

Farther south, elements of Army Group A’s First Panzer Army reached Stavropol on August 5, one hundred miles from the foothills of the Caucasus. On the ninth, after racing across the Kuban Steppe, German panzers cruised to within sight of the oil derricks at Maikop. Far to the east-northeast, Army Group B, less Bock, whom Hitler sacked for dawdling at Voronezh, had resumed its offensive and had shot across the Don north of the great bend. Paulus’s Sixth Army was now heading full bore for the Volga, and Stalingrad. The question being asked in Moscow, London, and Washington was, would the Germans bypass Stalingrad or try to take it? In fact, on July 23, Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 45, an order Sir John Keegan described as the “most disastrous of all issued over his signature.” The Führer decreed that while Army Group A made for the Caucasus, Army Group B would take and hold Stalingrad. The city was of high strategic value to the Soviets, which is why Hitler had ordered it smashed in his April directive. Yet destroying a position is not the same as holding it. Stalingrad carried symbolic weight for Hitler, named as it was for his Bolshevik nemesis. In deciding to inflict a symbolic defeat on Stalin, the Führer had forsaken his Clausewitz.276

Stalin had allowed his troops to fall back since the Germans crossed the Don, but five days after Hitler issued his directive to take Stalingrad, Stalin issued one of his own; all available forces would be thrown into Stalingrad, and “not a step back” would be tolerated.

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