ELEVEN
THE REST AT KIROVOGROD WAS ALL TOO BRIEF, AS THE division was called back into action. A forced march—always a strain on tanks and soft-skinned vehicles—took 16th Panzer to the bridgehead at Krementshug to take part in the major encirclement battle of Kiev. Once again Graf von Strachwitz’s battalion led the advance. Supported by Stukas, his tanks fought through ever-increasing Russian resistance. General Hube accompanied the lead tanks in his armoured personnel carrier (APC) as they rolled along the flat featureless countryside. Any opposition was quickly put down and the tanks pushed on while the infantry mopped up. Several tanks and APCs were destroyed in skirmishes with the retreating Russians as von Strachwitz pursued them closely. His battalion caught a Russian column as it marched towards them, with raking high-explosive and machine-gun fire destroying Russian guns, towing tractors, trucks and carts. A KV-2 heavy tank was at the rear of the column. The Germans’ rounds failed to penetrate the Russian tank’s armour. Luckily the Russian tank’s retaliatory rounds missed the Panzer Graf’s tank, though it did damage a Panzer III. Von Strachwitz knew they needed an 88mm gun, but none were in the vicinity. There were however combat engineers, roaring forward in their APC. Without hesitation they leapt out, clutching explosive charges and mines. The Russian fired his main gun in their direction but missed, then the engineers were on him, placing their charges with deft movements. With a flash of flame and smoke the Russian tank blew up, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
Von Strachwitz then pushed his battalion towards Lubny, often overtaking Russian convoys and destroying them on the move, leaving behind a long trail of smashed trucks, cars, artillery pieces and anti-tank guns. The German infantry then retrieved any prisoners and usable booty from the smoking, blackened remains when they passed. The road was muddy from recent rains, which slowed but did not stop the tanks. Soviet anti-tank guns were a constant menace. The Soviet tanks with their high profiles were usually seen early enough, but the anti-tank guns, low to the ground and carefully concealed, were far more difficult to spot, usually only seen after they had fired. The Graf constantly searched for them, looking not just for the guns but for possible ambush sites where a gun was likely to be. Often something that looked out of place or not just quite right would reveal a lurking gun. His ability in spotting these dangerous opponents meant that it could be taken out with a high-explosive round before it could fire, saving his battalion from many casualties.
During its advance on Lubny, 16th Panzer blazed a trail of destruction extending over 80 kilometres. Its tanks, artillery and infantry destroyed or captured 600 trucks, 70 guns, 20 tractors, three aircraft, and took over 1,500 prisoners.1 A large part of the mayhem was due to von Strachwitz and his panzers as they pushed their way forward.
Hube’s division hit Lubny on 13 September, not long after Stalin had replaced the hapless Marshal Budenny with Marshal Timoshenko. The town was heavily defended by fanatical NKVD troops, workers’ militia and antiaircraft units. It was also continuously receiving reinforcements, mainly supply service troops seeking to escape the encirclement of Kiev.
The 3rd Company of Engineers captured the bridge over the Sula in a surprise attack, while Nebelwerfer rocket projectors sent salvo after salvo of screaming smoke-trailing rockets, into the town. The divisional artillery added their weight of fire into the town as the engineers stormed on to take the outlying suburbs. Behind them came the infantry of the 2nd Battalion, 64th Regiment. Savage street fighting quickly developed as the NKVD troops preferred to die than yield any ground. Supported by the civilian militia, who were often forced to fight at gunpoint, the Russians opened fire from the roofs and windows of houses, and barricades in the streets. The division’s panzer regiment was then sent in to provide close fire support for the hard-pressed infantry.2 The panzer battalions attacked from different directions. Von Strachwitz’s panzers blasted the houses with high-explosive shells while their machine guns fired into the windows to suppress the opposition. Whole buildings collapsed in smoke, dirt and flying rubble as the Russians were ferreted out of their strongpoints. They scurried from one building to another, firing as they went. The German tanks crashed through the barricades firing their machine guns and crushing the defenders with their tracks. Petrol bombs and grenades were hurled at the tanks but caused only minimal damage. The German combat engineers went into the houses to clear the enemy from the cellars using flamethrowers. Yet the Soviets held grimly on, yielding nothing, dying where they stood.
On 14 September Hube had to send in the 79th Infantry Regiment, a final reinforcement, which proved too much for the Russians. The city finally fell to the Germans that afternoon. The dead and dying, many horribly burnt, littered the streets. Brown Russian uniforms tangled together with grey-green German uniforms. Fires fed on the timbers of burning houses, while smoke rose into the sky in long grey plumes, as von Strachwitz pulled his tanks out of the rubble-strewn streets to rearm and refuel.
General Hube sent his reconnaissance battalion to meet General Model’s 3rd Panzer Division from General Guderian’s Panzer Group 2, which was coming south from Army Group Centre to close the ring around Kiev. But the Russians, realising their predicament, launched several formations to hold back Guderian’s and von Kleist’s closing spearheads. Model, with a single regiment flung forward, was struggling to reach Pokhvitsa but had managed to narrow the gap between the two approaching pincers to some 70 kilometres. He sent forward a detachment under Lieutenant Wartmann, which fought its way through to finally reach Lubny, meeting the 2nd Company of 16th Panzer’s engineer battalion to effect the link up and formally close the ring, 260 kilometres east of Kiev. Within the German encirclement were five Soviet armies with 50 divisions.3
Stalin had ordered Kirponos to stand his ground. Stavka (the Soviet High Command) could not send any relief force as all available reserves were needed to defend Moscow. Supplies were also not getting through, making the Russian position untenable. Stalin’s decision doomed over 600,000 men to death or captivity.
The Germans now proceeded to compress the ring and wipe out the trapped Russians. Initially the resistance was fierce, with the Russians storming the German lines on foot, or on whatever vehicles they had, often resulting in their wholesale slaughter. Nevertheless at times they managed to break through, albeit with heavy casualties on both sides. Other times the Russians made their escape singly or in small groups, most staying in the area to form the partisan bands which would cause the Germans so much trouble later on. They would find succour from the Ukrainian villagers, who, brutalised by the German occupation forces, were only too glad to help them. Conversely, there were many Red units—exhausted, hungry, short of ammunition and angry at being abandoned—who surrendered, and the numbers of those surrendering increased as the ring slowly contracted.
The fighting before and during encirclement took a steady toll on the German forces with many infantry companies reduced from a peak strength of some 160 to 16–30 men. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 was particularly hard hit, suffering 32,000 casualties in three months. Overall the German Army had lost 460,169 men up to September.4 Officer casualties were particularly high, with sergeants now commanding platoons and sometimes companies, and lieutenants commanding battalions. Even field marshals and generals were not spared combat as Field Marshal von Reichenau wrote to General Paulus: “I led the assault for three kilometres, quite literally, not only with the first wave, but as the leading man in it.”5 He led the assault because there were no officers left alive and the attack was faltering, but this took nothing away from his courage, panache and motivation. Von Strachwitz could take comfort in the fact that he was not alone at the sharp end when field marshals were leading assaults.
The Panzer Graf’s main problem was a shortage of operational tanks. His tanks were all too often undergoing repair, and the major workshops were a long distance from the front. This involved long transport delays in shipping tanks by rail or special trailers, and on occasion his tanks would be stuck in sidings to make way for trains carrying urgently needed ammunition and fuel. This meant that very often his battalion could be reduced to fewer than 20 tanks, sometimes to below a dozen. Later in the war the repair and maintenance facilities were moved well forward, with the divisional repair companies being located near the regimental headquarters, and company repair facilities were greatly improved. It meant a much quicker turn around in tank repair, with repairs often being carried out at some risk near to, or at the front.
Overall the final tally of the Kiev encirclement resulted in 665,000 Russian prisoners, 3,718 guns destroyed or captured and 884 armoured fighting vehicles destroyed.6 This would be the largest number of prisoners taken during the war. It was a major defeat for the Russians, and certainly justified Hitler’s decision to send Guderian south. Hitler’s sycophantic generals—Keitel, Jodl, and up to a point, Halder—were now even further convinced as to Hitler’s intuition and that it should not be opposed. All this would have fateful consequences for Hitler’s hubris and future decisions. With the great victory of Kiev accomplished, Hitler now gave the approval for Operation Typhoon, the seizure of Moscow.
While the mopping up around Kiev continued,7 General Hube was ordered to take his 16th Panzer Division south to cut off Russian forces still defending the southern sector of the Dnieper River. Once more Graf von Strachwitz pursued the retreating Russians, often overtaking them to circle around and attack them more effectively from the rear. The Soviets never knew when and from where he would strike next. The Russians were engaged at Novo-Moskovsk on 29 September, Kamenovatka on 1 October Seminovka on 3 October, Verchne Yokmak on 5 October and Pologi on the 6th.8 On the same day von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 was renamed the 1st Panzer Army.
By the end of September von Kleist had completed the destruction of the Red forces in the Kiev cauldron, and with the Russian Dnieper defences overwhelmed he turned south towards the Sea of Azov. He then struck at the rear of two Russian armies who were in the process of attacking the German Eleventh Army under its new commander, von Manstein.9
The 16th Panzer was heavily engaged fighting the trapped Russian Eighteenth Army around Andreyebka. Here the Panzer Graf pushed himself and his men remorselessly. Once again he rampaged across the front and rear of the enemy. He penetrated as far as their artillery positions, surprising the Russians at dawn before they could man their guns. High-explosive shells blew the guns apart while the panzers’ machine guns chattered their deadly crescendo amongst the panic-stricken gun crews. Supply trucks flamed, ammunition exploded, tracers streaked over the ground, targeting the fleeing Russians. In a short while it was all over, and his tanks moved back to refuel, rearm and then repeat the process all over again. During one of these actions, his own tank was disabled and he had to transfer to another, to continue leading his battalion in the attack.
In this wild melée spread along the Nogay steppe, the Russian Eighteenth Army was smashed. By 10 October over 65,000 Russians were marching dejectedly into captivity. They left behind 672 guns and numerous burnt-out and disabled tanks. The Soviet commander Lieutenant General Smirnov was killed in the fighting, and General Hube had him buried with full military honours, saluting him personally at the graveside. Two days later 16th Panzer Division was ordered to advance to Rostov on the River Don.
The terrain would have been unfavourable in any situation, but now winter set in early. It was to be one of the coldest winters for decades and the German Army was unprepared. The men’s uniforms were threadbare and their standard overcoats were totally inadequate for the Russian winter, let alone for a severe one. The cold caused more casualties than combat that winter with 250,000 frostbite cases of which thousands required amputation,10 and caused untold suffering. Even when winter clothing became available, temperatures of -20°C were difficult to manage and fight in. During periods of retreat the Germans didn’t have warm bunkers or shelter and spent a great deal of time living and fighting out in the open. Soldiers wore as many layers of clothing as they could and scarcely removed them, creating ideal conditions for lice, which added to their discomfort.
Vehicles were difficult to keep mobile and fires had to be lit underneath them as their oil froze, or their engines had to be kept running using precious fuel. Weapons wouldn’t fire as breech blocks froze, with light guns having to be kept indoors when possible, fires lit under barrels, and rifle bolts kept in pockets. Often soldiers would strip their weapons free of any oil or grease in order to use them. Von Strachwitz’s panzers all had narrow tracks of 36–40cm which meant they often sank into the snow, and got stuck because of their limited ground clearance. The narrow tracks also made travelling through the mud more difficult. (Later German tanks, the Tiger and Panther, had wider tracks of 52/72cm and 66cm respectively.) Meantime, the division’s mobility ebbed away. Fuel, food and ammunition were only trickling through and had to be severely rationed. It was a new situation for the German Army and for von Strachwitz it was a disaster. Food he could do without, at least for a while, but without fuel he was helpless. The advance ground down to a crawl, then stalled completely. The Graf moved among his troops, cajoling, encouraging, urging his men on, making light of the cold with wry humour and barely felt optimism. It cheered his men but didn’t much improve the overall situation.
Hube’s division was fighting alongside the Waffen SS Panzergrenadier Division “Viking.” Viking was unusual, as it contained a mixture of German, Danes, Norwegians, Finns and later Estonians, and was a hard-fighting elite division.11 While Hube’s men were struggling with the mud, cold and lack of supplies, they were hit by ten Russian divisions.12 They called for help from SS “Viking” but Viking had its hands full fighting near Rostov, and was also out of fuel.13 So 16th Panzer was on its own. A ferocious battle for its very survival now took place, with Russians and Germans engaged in hand-to-hand combat for villages and farm buildings that could provide shelter from the bitter cold. The lack of fuel, exacerbated by the muddy conditions, curtailed von Strachwitz’s battalion’s movements.14 Ammunition also being scarce, he couldn’t deliver the Russians his normally swift and powerful blows. It was now a matter of fighting them off in order to just stay alive. The German MG-34 light machine guns came into their own against the Soviets’ now-familiar massed infantry attacks. Firing at 900 rounds per minute they ripped the Russian ranks to shreds, with the machine guns of von Strachwitz’s tanks adding to the weight of fire. But as soon one assault collapsed, the Russians launched another. With seemingly endless manpower, the Russians were literally climbing over the bodies of their comrades. The initial attackers were often from the penal battalions. They were expected to die, but in so doing would expose where the German machine and infantry guns were located and any weak points. It was a near-run thing but Hube’s men broke every attack. Their valiant efforts defeated, the Russians were forced to withdraw, having suffered enormous casualties.
Not all Soviet formations fought with such grim, almost suicidal determination. In what was still a characteristic of the campaign so far, many units gave up without a fight, killing their commissars and officers to ensure that their surrender would not be opposed, as Graf Engelhardt-Ranzow, serving with SS Viking, related in his diary during the fighting around Rostov: “The Russian officers and Commissars have fled or been shot by their men. The soldiers surrender by the company. We don’t have enough men to watch over them or interrogate them, so we tell them to keep moving west.”15
The 16th Panzer took Golodajewka on the Mius against only slight resistance. The Russians in the meantime regrouped on the high ground east of the Mius. Von Kleist ordered 16th Panzer to attack from its bridgehead at Golodajewka towards Agrafenowka. Behind them SS Viking would cross the Mius then turn north to guard the northern flank. The 1st Panzer Army commenced its attack on 5 November with Hube’s 16th Panzer Division making good progress. The Russians gave way before its tanks, but then closed ranks against the following German infantry. Savage mopping-up operations took place. On their flank SS Viking was attacked by a formation of 600 Cossack cavalry by mistake. The commander thought Viking was a Russian unit and got too close to withdraw, so had to order an attack. The mistake cost him 300 dead.16
On 11 November 16th Panzer linked up with units of Viking, after defeating strong enemy formations between Darjewka and Astachowo. Meanwhile Viking itself was under extreme pressure from Russian attacks. The XIV Panzer Corps—to which 16th Panzer belonged—ordered Lieutenant Colonel Sieckenius’ panzer regiment to be attached to SS Viking’s operational control. Knowing Viking to be a superb fighting formation with excellent esprit-de-corps, neither Sieckenius nor von Strachwitz had any real objection to this, beyond the fact that they would have preferred to stay with their parent unit. Besides, von Strachwitz was himself a member of the SS. At this stage of the war, army formations were always glad to have Waffen SS units as neighbours, as they were not only well equipped but were less likely to give way under pressure, and so expose their neighbour’s flanks. A reliable neighbouring unit was a necessity for continued survival.
To assist Viking, Sieckenius ordered his two battalions into an immediate counterattack against Lilienthal where Red infantry had succeeded in making a penetration. The German panzers swiftly drove the Russian infantry back, but then came up against a large force of T-34s. The Germans were heavily outnumbered, as Sieckenius’ regiment was one in name only. Grouping his two battalions together he could only muster one woefully under-strength battalion.17 Von Strachwitz in effect commanded a reinforced company. The strongest tank they had was a Panzer IV with a short-barrelled 75mm gun, not really a match for a T-34.
The Russians, well aware of their superiority in numbers and weaponry, were eager to give battle. A tank engagement followed, with the Germans trying to rapidly close the range to where their inferior guns would be effective, and the Russians trying to prevent them from closing, engaging them at long ranges, blowing up one German tank after another as they moved forward. As von Strachwitz’s panzers closed in, the Russians withdrew a short distance to engage at long range again. Finding it impossible to effect a breakthrough, the Panzer Graf called off his attack.
The Russians attacked the flank of 1st Panzer Army at Zimitanka, leaving it in a precarious position. It had no option but to withdraw to the Rusloff River. During the night of 22 November, 16th Panzer began its own withdrawal. Lack of fuel meant every prime mover had to tow several other vehicles. The divisional engineers left behind minefields and booby traps to delay the pursuing Russians. A rearguard provided by SS Viking and a corps antitank gun battalion with Marder III self-propelled anti-tank guns held up the Russians sufficiently long enough for the German corps to withdraw behind the Tusloff and occupy the west bank. However this left von Strachwitz and the 16th Panzer Regiment, which had been attached to Viking, still east of the Tusloff.
General von Wietersheim, the corps commander, visited Sieckenius at his regimental command post, and together the two men discussed a counterattack. After weighing up the odds, von Wietersheim decided against it. Attacking the enemy entrenched on the high ground would have resulted in too many casualties, while the forces available were too weak to ensure success. Instead, the Germans beat off several more Soviet assaults, after which Sieckenius’ regiment was finally allowed to return to its parent division.
The west bank of the Tusloff was not a viable long-term defensive position as its winding course required far too many troops to defend it, while at some places it was no obstacle at all. Von Kleist therefore decided on a withdrawal to the Mius River, which had a high west bank offering better defensive possibilities. This withdrawal, made without Hitler’s permission, so enraged Hitler that he ordered Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group South, to be sacked. This was the beginning of a pattern that would last the remainder of the war.
Hube’s division took up its defensive positions on the Mius near Matayev where it set up a strong defence line covered by extensive minefields. His men had barely dug themselves in when the Russians commenced their massed attacks. The minefields caused enormous casualties in the first waves, but this was of no consequence to the Russians, who had sent out the expendable penal battalions first in order to clear a path through the minefields.18 The failure of these attacks brought about a lull in the fighting as the Russians regrouped to consider their options.
The 16th Panzer’s tank battalions were now sent for much need refitting and reorganisation to Stalino-Makeyvka where the rear supply base was located. The move could not come soon enough for the Graf’s battalion. His men were exhausted to the point of numbness and the few tanks they had left were in a sorry state: it was a battalion in name only. The regiment’s second battalion was in no better shape, so there was very little of the regiment for Rudolf Sieckenius to command. During the move to Makeyevka, numerous trucks got stuck in deep snowdrifts and had to be towed out by tractors, meaning that the occupants often had to spend the night exposed to the cold until help could arrive. The fighting against the Russians may have waned, but the fight continued against the biting winter cold, snow and ice.
At Makeyvka there was some rest at last for the tank crews, but for their commanders like von Strachwitz and Sieckenius there was none. Sieckenius left to organise new replacement tanks for his almost non-existent regiment. Von Strachwitz remained at the rear base to oversee repairs and organise resupply of necessary items from spare parts to uniforms, especially winter clothing. He was not very successful in acquiring the latter, as very little was available, a great deal of it being stuck in warehouses and rail sidings in Poland and Germany. His men had to freeze in their basic, threadbare standard uniforms. He carried out the usual administrative tasks and what training could be carried out indoors. In many ways it was a grim time for him. It was his first major retreat of the war and he found it a galling experience. His training and whole cavalry ethos was for mobility and attack, so he chafed at the inaction, and the retreat was a harsh, unwanted lesson. He could not know at the time, but this was only the first of many.
NOTES
1. Ibid. p. 127.
2. Paul Carrell, Hitler’s War on Russia Vol. 1 Hitler Moves East (Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 125.
3. David Stahel, Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 221.
4. Ibid., p. 233.
5. Ibid., p. 235.
6. Carrell, Hitler’s War on Russia Vol. 1 Hitler Moves East, p.12 9. These figures are from German sources and the ones most often quoted. The Soviets admit to a lower figure of some 400,000 total casualties and prisoners. The truth probably lies in between, with some 500,000 prisoners over and above the dead and wounded.
7. Not long after Kiev was occupied the Einsatzgruppen moved in to round up the Jews. Some 65,000 innocent men, women and children were marched to the ravine at Babi Yar and murdered by SS, SD and policemen who made up the murder squads.
8. Günter Schmitz, Die 16 Panzer Division 1938–1945 (Dörfler im Nebel Verlag Gmbh, 2004).
9. Von Manstein was given command of Eleventh Army after its commander Ritter von Schobert was blown up when his Fieseler Storch courier plane inadvertently landed on a Russian minefield.
10. Timothy Wray, Standing Fast: German Defensive Doctrine on the Russian Front during World War II (United States Government Printing, 1987), p. 195.
11. A report of 18 August 1941 listed a Finnish battalion and contingents of 621 Dutch, 194 Norwegian, 216 Danes, and even a few Swedes. The Finns lost 255 killed while serving with Viking. Source Peter Strassner, The 5 SS Panzer Division “Viking” (J. J. Fedorowicz Publishing, Canada, 2006).
12. Russian divisions had less manpower than the equivalent German divisions. For instance a Russian infantry division had 10,000–12,000 men while a German infantry division had 11,000–20,000. A Russian mechanised brigade was roughly equivalent to one German Panzer division.
13. Strassner, The 5 SS Panzer Division “Viking,” p. 69.
14. For example, Panzergrenadier Division Viking, which had a contingent of tanks on strength, normally used 136 cubic metres of fuel daily but required 350 cubic metres in heavy mud. And like 16th Panzer, it was a long distance from its depots using 700 cubic metres of fuel to get the fuel it required from its depot at Dnjepropetrowsk. Ibid., p. 69.
15. Ibid. p. 69.
16. Ibid. p. 75.
17. A German panzer regiment at this time should have had 150–200 tanks, and a battalion 75–100 tanks, however the regiments generally had far less than half that number, sometimes being reduced to 30 tanks or fewer, although numbers constantly fluctuated as damaged tanks were repaired.
18. The Soviet penal battalions held very few criminals. Many in them were “political prisoners,” others were there because they had retreated in battle. Minor infractions of military discipline could also be a reason depending on the whim of the unit commander. The majority of the men of these units were killed so membership was tantamount to a death sentence. Only serious wounds offered a chance of escape, being regarded as atonement by blood.