Armor and Blood

Written orders did not appear until two days after the attack began—and the Red Army was not precisely geared to verbal transmission. Operation Rumyantsev nevertheless commenced in earnest on August 3, with nine armies, two tank armies, and two air armies. The initial sector was well chosen. Its defenders, still worn from Citadel, had spent two weeks retreating—not to prepared positions, but to whatever the Landser could scratch out of the earth and the tankers could improvise. Their logistics and their maintenance were not much better than those of the Russians. Their replacement situation was worse, especially in the infantry divisions. In a day, Voronezh Front opened an eight-mile gap between the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf. It was a fitting coda to Citadel, a valedictory for the rejuvenated Red Army. It was also only a beginning.

For the next two months, Manstein shored up sector after sector as the Soviet offensive steadily expanded. Citadel’s stalwarts, Totenkopf, Das Reich, and a once more hastily redeployed Grossdeutschland, played central roles in a one-way process. They bought days—but not time. In Robert Citino’s trenchant words, “The situation maps were a blizzard of red arrows heading west.” On August 8, Zeitzler paid an unannounced visit to Manstein’s headquarters, to be confronted with two stark alternatives. Either transfer no fewer than twenty divisions to Army Groups South and Center or conduct a fighting retreat to the Dnieper River. When Hitler authorized a reinforcement of half a dozen divisions, Manstein dismissed this as temporizing. Instead of committing every available division to sustaining the southern Russian front, Hitler was fretting where the next Allied blow in the Mediterranean would fall—a contingency Manstein dismissed as “just as improbable as it was unimportant.”

With the Orel salient’s evacuation successfully in progress, Hitler flew to Vinnitsa on August 27 and met with Manstein. After some preliminary fencing, the field marshal repeated his alternatives: Either immediately reinforce Army Group South with at least twelve divisions or abandon the Donets area. According to Manstein, Hitler agreed to provide whatever could be spared from other sectors in Russia. In the context of other developing Soviet offensives, that turned out to be nothing. Manstein compared experiences with Kluge, who had received essentially the same response. On September 2, he warned Zeitzler again that delaying reinforcements until the Allies committed to a second front risked immediate disaster in the East. And on September 3, Kluge and Manstein met with Hitler at Rastenburg. They made a common point: Either send substantial reinforcements to their army groups or authorize “mobile operations”—anodyne language for organized withdrawals screened by local counterstrikes. This time Hitler was entirely uncooperative, denying his subordinates both reinforcements and initiative. He was even less responsive to their suggestion of addressing the emerging problems of a strategically expanded war in the East and a two-front war emerging in the West by creating a unified high command.

Hitler’s renewed intransigence reflected events on the other side of the continent. On September 3, the British Eighth Army landed in Calabria, at the tip of the Italian boot. The same day, Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. And on September 7, Manstein informed the OKH that unless something was done immediately, Army Group South might not remain “in control of the situation.” The next day, Hitler visited Manstein’s headquarters— behavior at least susceptible of interpretation in context as the mountain coming to Muhammad. Manstein responded with a detailed briefing that focused on the situation facing his army group. Hitler reacted by allowing the Sixth and First Panzer Armies to withdraw and by once more promising reinforcements to the Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf, now retitled the Eighth Army. He repeated that promise as he boarded his plane.

Manstein nevertheless followed the meeting with a message reiterating the need for prompt and major reallocation of forces on the Eastern Front and between the East and the war’s other theaters. That same day, September 9, British airborne troops seized Taranto, and elements of the U.S. Fifth Army landed at Salerno. And on September 14, Manstein informed the OKH that either it authorize a withdrawal or the entire army group would fall back across the Dnieper on his authorization. He received the reply not to act until the matter was discussed with Hitler. Manstein in turn demanded a private meeting with the Fuhrer, with only Zeitzler attending. The next day he flew to Rastenburg, where he made his points with a slight but significant spin. He described retreat to the Dnieper as a consequence of previous promises of reinforcements not being kept and of orders to send them not being obeyed. Manstein declared himself confident, however, that the orders he intended to issue next day would be obeyed. No doubt remained what those orders would entail.

This was a glove not thrown at Hitler’s feet, but flicked across his face. Manstein’s foremost military biographer correctly comments that no dictator can accept such a challenge. Nor can a leader of a democracy accept this kind of defiance with equanimity: the Korean War’s Truman-MacArthur controversy comes to mind. Faced with the alternative of dismissing Manstein on the spot, Hitler authorized retreat to the Dnieper. He also spoke again of reinforcements. But even had the Fuhrer suddenly become willing to denude occupied regions of their garrisons, there was no time left to shift them to Russia. Nor were there many quiet sectors left in “Fortress Europe.” As a particularly ironic counterpoint, the 16th Panzer Division, sent to Italy only in June, came close to throwing the Salerno landing into the sea on August 14.

Since mid-July, at least, Kluge and Manstein had acted from a common matrix. They agreed the Reich’s strategic and grand strategic circumstances were sufficiently desperate to require a major change in the Wehrmacht’s high command structure, with the immediate aim of restoring the military situation in Russia and the long-term one of concluding the war in an acceptable fashion—a Teutonism for some kind of compromise peace. It was an open secret that both headquarters contained men more or less aware of the resistance. Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, of Army Group Center’s intelligence staff, had gone so far as to attempt to assassinate Hitler by immolating himself as a suicide bomber. He described Kluge as sending him to Manstein with a proposition. After a successful putsch, Kluge would offer his colleague the post of chief of the Wehrmacht general staff—in other words, supreme command of the armed forces.

Gersdorff was sufficiently cautious to couch his message initially in terms of the need for a united command and the curbing of Hitler’s propensity to control everything himself. Manstein agreed but said he lacked Hitler’s trust, especially since “foreign propaganda” described him as seeking high command for himself. Only Kluge or Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had the seniority, the gravitas, and the influence to approach the Fuhrer with this kind of proposal. According to Gersdorff’s memoirs, the discussion sharpened when he suggested to Manstein that the field marshals should confront Hitler and “hold a gun to his chest”—presumably metaphorically. Manstein’s alleged answer, that Prussian field marshals do not mutiny, has become a trope for the mentality of the entire senior officer corps. His emendation that Hitler’s removal would lead only to chaos was accompanied by his assurance to Kluge that he, Manstein, would always stand loyally at the service of legitimate state authority.

For Manstein, the stated subtext of this encounter was his expressed belief that the war was not yet lost— not quite. He repeatedly insisted in his memoirs that he was fighting for a draw—a Remis-Frieden. Remis is a word usually associated with chess and sports. The Russo-German War, and, indeed, all of Germany’s World War II, fit neither category. How was such a draw to be achieved politically? What would be its terms? On those points, the “simple soldier” is simply silent.

An alternate subtext may well have been a common one among the Wehrmacht’s senior officers after 1942: self-imposed tunnel vision, focusing on immediate problems that were daunting enough in themselves, legitimated procrastination. In terms of character, this reflected a doubled-down commitment to what Isabel Hull calls “one-sided actionism”: combining intellect, will, and recklessness to make the best of a desperate situation. This lofty echoing of the Nibelungenlied’s heroes was likely to be accompanied by the consideration that should the war be lost, colonels and generals would become shoeshine boys and bellhops—the lucky ones, that is. And the two combined to obscure a moral question. Is an oath one-sided? Can—indeed, must —an oath be defined in context: to whom it is given and how it is used?

It was easier not to think about it—easier to fight a war. As Army Group South and Army Group Center fell back, they scorched the earth. Neither Manstein, Model, nor Kluge considered it necessary to consult higher authority. Apologists declared they were only following precedents set by the Russians themselves in the first months of Barbarossa. A clearer precedent had been established by a Fuhrer order in Stalingrad’s aftermath: Should withdrawals be necessary, destroy anything materially useful; evacuate all men between fifteen and sixty- five. This was no mere torching of villages and looting of houses, but the systematic destruction of anything, in Manstein’s words, that might afford concealment or shelter to enemies; anything that might remotely assist Soviet war production. In total war, that meant everything. The swath of devastation covered hundreds of square miles. What was not burned was blown up. As an occupying power, Germany was required to protect civilians under its control. Instead, thousands were driven west with what they could carry, with the alternative of risking execution