098 - Has Germany Lost WW2 Already in Mid-1941 - WW2 - July 11 1941

Yeah, it begins this week, but it doesn't change anything. Why? Because it's not part of the Second World War. Okay, fine, I'll mention it. July 11, 1941 You've launched a gargantuan offensive on your enemy, sending millions of troops forth to crush him, and you achieve rapid success, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war. But how do you corral them, and move them, and guard them? You better figure it out pretty quick. I'm Indy Neidell. This is World War Two. Last week the Allied invasion of Syria continued to gain ground, and Claude Auchinleck took over command of Britain's Middle Eastern Theater of Operations. Of course, the major news was the actions all along the front line from the Baltic to the Black Sea of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. They had advanced on all fronts, but though closing the Minsk pocket took an enormous amount of Soviet prisoners, they were seeing stiffer resistance than anyone had anticipated. Germany clearly held the strategic initiative. It was not enough, however, just to dictate the course of the ongoing battles. The advantages had to be turned into a final victory capable of ending the war. To achieve this, Halder had no recourse to substantial reserves of manpower or equipment, and the intangible factor of time was equally irreplaceable. With the Soviet Union rapidly mobilizing every aspect of its enormous military potential, AG Center had to deliver on the hopes of its leaders and crush the remaining Soviet resistance in the second phase of its operations. They had halted operations in AG Center for reorganization, but the renewed offensive by the panzer spearheads began back on the 3rd. On the 4th, Hermann Hoth made a small bridgehead across the Gdwina and Heinz Guderian another, but these were both subject to intense counterattacks to the point that Hoth is stopped and Guderian reports to Army Commander-in-Chief Walther Brauchisch V, as a result of personnel and material losses, the momentum of the attacks by 3rd and 18th Panzer Divisions has been lost. Hoth reports that only 50% of his tanks are combat ready after just two weeks of operation. On the 6th, in the Panzer Corps Diary, the 18th Panzer Division is described as no longer fully combat ready because of the losses of men and material. Major General Walther Nehring, Divisional Commander, will opine, this situation and its consequences will become unbearable in the future if we do not want to be destroyed by winning. And Hoth tells Brauchisch about the difficulties the infantry is having in the occupied territory to the west. The sheer number of POWs is creating all sorts of problems and the civilian populace is clogging the roads. Fedor von Bock, in command of AG Center, says that one of his staff saw thousands of Soviet POWs on the roads south of Minsk unarmed, but also unsupervised. He has had to withdraw two more divisions from active service for security duty. But the problem on the Russian roads is not just traffic. Bad weather has further wrecked the perilous state of them. Hans von Lucke of the 7th Panzers writes, after brief downpours of rain the roads turned into muddy tracks which were only passable in some places after engineers or offloaded grenadiers had felled trees to make a wooden runway with the trunks. It was not so much our opponents that held up our advance as the catastrophic roads. Well, the opponents are going to make an effort to do some damage as well. It is now on the 6th that Stavka, Red Army Command, has Semyon Timoshenko, in charge of the Western Front since the 1st, launch a Soviet offensive towards Lepel. The attack fails, but it surprises German command, who didn't think Timoshenko had the strength for such an attack at all. But his forces are dangerously thin and Hoth's attack on his flank, the 7th, pushes through and takes Vitebsk the night. This basically wrecks the Soviet defenses anchored on the Dvina, and it looks like Hoth can again make a deep thrust through and past the Soviet lines. This also begins the battle for Smolensk. Guderian takes longer to get his forces ready to cross the Dnieper, but on the 9th he's assembled on the West Bank and ready to go. But then Gunther von Kluge, Guderian's superior since last week, turns up and says any crossing needs to be backed by infantry, so Guderian must wait for Maximilian von Weich's 2nd army to arrive on foot. Guderian basically just says no, and since Kluge's authority is pretty much only token, he doesn't really have much choice but to let him do what he wants. But it isn't just Kluge, Guderian has commanders under him who want to wait for some infantry support. Guderian's renewed attacks are successful, though, north and south of Mogilev, though a direct attack on it is a costly failure. In the north, the Germans reach Tartu, 300 km from Leningrad, but high command is concerned by the Soviet counterattacks in the region. Halder writes in his diary, everyone is vying for the honor of telling the most hair-raising tales about the strength of the Russian forces. I have not talked so much about AG South the past couple of weeks, but it has made slower progress than the other two groups. It is commanded by Gerd von Rundstedt. It was he who commanded Group A in the attacks in Western Europe last year, and it was his group that broke through in the Ardennes. Here he has two different groups of forces, a big northern one of German infantry and five panzer divisions, and a southern one of the Romanian and Hungarian divisions. Those last are supposed to take Odessa and the Black Sea ports, while the Germans head into the Ukrainian steppes to take Kiev. But while they'd had no trouble with the border defenses, the German forces have been stalled by a big concentration of Red Army force. This is the Soviet Southwestern Front, in the able hands of Mikhail Kirponos and with more able hands in the person of Konstantin Rokossovsky as a tank force commander. This force has a lot of the Soviet armor, with six mechanized corps and a bunch of the new T-34 tanks. Their plan to fight the German Blitzkrieg is to hit Panzer Group Kleist's spearheads with pincer attacks from the 5th and 6th armies. These had not managed to meet up, and Kleist had taken Lvov at the end of June. The 5th army is operating out of the Pripet marshes, and that's a firm base. The Germans can't go there. The 6th army, though, has its positions in the open steppe. There's nowhere else for them to be, so those two armies have kept up their pressure and their pinching operations, but between the Panzers and Luftwaffe's support, the Germans have been advancing. A narrower and narrower spearhead that will be known as the Zhitomir Corridor that reaches closer and closer to Kiev. On the 5th, the German 6th army breaks through the Soviets west of Zhitomir. Group Kleist begins to move through the gap, and by the end of the On the 11th, Kirponos has a conference with his command to discuss the situation. Kirponos had already glimpsed the danger to which his failure to pinch off Kleist's penetration of his front exposed Kiev, and indeed his whole command. Panzer Group 1's advance now constituted one arm of a counter-pincer's, should the Germans bring down tanks from the north from Box Army Group's center, a second pincer arm would be created and he, his men, and the whole of Ukraine would be enveloped within it. Adolf Hitler gets word this week that 287,704 Soviet soldiers have been taken prisoner from closing the Minsk pocket, and 2,585 Soviet tanks destroyed there as the mopping up operations there come to an end. He meets with Halder and Brauchitsch the 8th. And everyone's pretty jubilant. Halder writes of the opposition they still encounter in the field, which he thinks of as disorganized and without command. Under these conditions, it is clear that the front, which also has no reserves left, cannot hold out much longer. Others, though, are not so optimistic. The Japanese naval attache in Rome is very skeptical about Germany's prospects. To him, it looks like Japan's invasion of China all over again, which has lasted for four years now with no end in sight. The German diplomatic corps is also pretty pessimistic. And in the Soviet Union, well, it certainly doesn't look like they're about to collapse. In fact, Stalin reorganized his Red Army High Command the 10th. The GKO- the State Defense Committee- had been set up back on June 30th. That was made up of Stalin, Voroshilov, Beria, Molotov, and Malenkov. The Stavka is subordinate to that, and it is now reorganized to include Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov from the Party, and Zhukov, Budenny, and Shaposhnikov from the Army. They also established three new areas of command. Klement Voroshilov will be in charge in the north, the Northwest Front, Timoshenko the Central West Front, and Semyon Budenny will command the Southwest Front. Britain and the USSR sign a mutual defense agreement this week, and on the 7th, British PM Winston Churchill telegrams Stalin that British bombing raids on Germany will continue and intensify, using Britain's air resources to destroy German cities and draw German aircraft back from the Russian front. Germany has beefed up its air defenses, though. Back on the 4th, a raid on Buehmen saw five of the 12 attacking planes shot down. Churchill does have other things on his plate to worry about, like the continuing Allied invasion of Syria. At 0600 July 11th, Claude Auchinleck receives a message from Vichy French General Henri Dantz proposing to end hostilities at midnight. Dantz does make it clear that he will negotiate with the British and not with the Free French. This is under orders from the Vichy government, who contend that the Free French are traitors and enemies of the state. The British reject the proposal and present a counter-proposal. Dantz must send his commanding officers to the British outpost of the Haifa Road by 9 AM. Failure to do so will result in relentless hostilities. Dantz doesn't have much choice, but to agree to this, he does forward this info to Vichy France, and they're somewhat taken aback, and they ask Germany what to do. The German political department responds they think the British are insincere, and warns against making an agreement with them. Well, we will see how that works out next week. Here are a few notes to end this week. On the 5th, the Ecuadorian-Peruvian War begins. I realize this is not part of the World War, but I'm mentioning it to pre-empt all the comments that ask why I didn't mention it. That same day, Partisan Leader Tito issues an appeal to Yugoslavia. Now is the time. The hour has struck to rise like one man in the battle against the invaders and hirelings. On the 7th, in the Serbian village of Bela Cerkva, an armed clash- the first- happens between a partisan detachment and the German police. Two police are killed. Also on the 7th, American troops replace British and Canadian ones in Iceland. The 11th, Franklin Roosevelt appoints Bill Donovan to head a new intelligence agency. This will be the OSS, the Office for Strategic Services. I did not have time to mention it last week, but back on the 1st, a new British organization was established. This is the Special Air Services, SAS, under David Sterling. The name is to be intentionally misleading to the enemy as to what its activities are to actually be, which are gathering intelligence and just wreaking havoc as a commando force operating behind enemy lines. The Axis are also forming a new organization this week. On the 10th, the CSIR- the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia- is formed. This is a unit of the Italian army to fight with the Germans in the east. The men will arrive to the fight over the next few weeks and will initially be under command of Eugen Schobert's 11th army. And the week comes to an end, and with it possibly the end of the war in Syria, but no end in sight in the Soviet Union as the Germans advance in the north, the center, and the south, even as their logistical problems grow and grow, much like the Red Army resistance. And hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war taken. And if they make a pocket of Kiev or of Smolensk and seal those, it will be many hundreds of thousands more. Which sounds great in terms of weakening the enemy, but how do you administer them all? How do you move them? How do you prevent them from fighting? You'll have to take a great many troops from active duty to do that, but if you do that, then how will you continue to press your advantage? And if you can't do that, you'll lose the initiative. And above all, what if taking all those prisoners does not, in fact, weaken the enemy? There are those now who have a sneaking suspicion that that is the case. German High Command better hope that they are wrong. If you would like to see how Josef Stalin and the Red Army fared against a different opponent in the west, you can check out our Between 2 Wars video on the Polish-Soviet War right here. Our TimeGhost Army member of the week is Derek Batts. Derek is making sure our series is running smoothly and getting better and better and more in depth and more detailed for each and every week of the war, so make sure to sign up at timeghost.tv or patreon.com. As always, remember to subscribe, ring that bell, and see you next time!