No, he won’t listen to me.
No, he won’t listen to you either.
Then who should we send?
I dunno… how about Heinz? Yeah?
Okay, cool. Heinz, yeah.
August 29, 1941
This war grows bigger and bigger as the months
roll on, and this week is no exception.
This week Britain and the Soviet Union invade
Iran.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is World War Two.
Last week, Josef Stalin issued orders that
will brand any of his commanders who surrender
under any circumstances traitors.
Hitler again ordered his main attacks in the
Soviet Union to turn from the center to the
north and south, and the evacuation of the
Australians from Tobruk and their replacements,
by Polish and Czechoslovak units, began and
continues this week.
Some major news this week comes from those
newest of Allies, Britain and the Soviet Union.
On the 25th, apparently worried by reports
of German “tourists” entering Iran, the
two demand that Iran accept their “protection”
of its oil supplies and send their forces
into the country.
The British forces are led on land by Edward
Quinan with naval support by Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
The advance is in two regions, one to take
the oil installations near Abadan, and one
coming from Iraq toward Kermanshah- that last
commanded by William Slim, whom we’ve seen
in Syria and East Africa so far this year.
British landings are made at Bandar Shapur,
Abadan, and Khoramshahr.
They sink a couple of small Iranian warships
and seize some German merchant shipping.
The Soviets are in three columns under Vasily
Novikov’s command- one heading for Tabriz,
while the other two advance on either side
of the Caspian Sea.
All three columns make good progress, and
the Soviets bomb Tabriz.
On the 26th, the British take control of the
Abadan region.
The Soviets enter Tabriz and bomb Tehran.
The 27th, the British take Shahabad toward
Kermanshah and in the south take Ahwaz.
The Iranian government resigns.
The 28th, a new government takes office in
Iran under Ali Furughi and orders a cease fire.
Negotiations with the British and Soviets
begin.
And on the 29th, the fighting comes to an
end in Iran.
The British and Soviets will link up the 31st
at Kazvin.
Looking into the future: On September 9th,
the Iranian government will agree on the final
terms.
The invaders will occupy certain points in
the country, but agree to stay out of Tehran.
This invasion is Operation Countenance.
Another operation launched the 25th is Operation
Gauntlet, in which British, Canadian, and
Norwegian commandos raid Spitzbergen, up near
the north pole, and destroy stores of coal,
oil reserves, and mining machinery.
The Soviets and Norwegians want to deny theri
installations to the Germans.
They also evacuate 2,000 Russian civilians
to Archangel.
They also evacuate 50 French officers.
Yep.
See, those guys had been captured by the Germans
in May last year and send to a POW camp in
East Prussia.
They escaped from there to the Soviet Union,
and from there hoped to join the Free French,
but the Soviets interned them on Spitzbergen.
They are now free .
There is a lot of action in other northern
parts this week, in the Soviet Union.
On the 23rd, Klim Voroshilov sends the 48th
Red Army to defend attacks on Leningrad from
the SE.
The Stavka then divide Markian Popov’s Northern
Front, though, into the Leningrad Front, still
under Popov, and the Karelian Front under
V.A. Frolov.
Then on the 27th, the GKO- the State Defense
Committee- takes direct control of these fronts
and the NW Front by dissolving NW High Command
and merging its staff with the Leningrad Front.
This ends Voroshilov’s control over the
military situation at Leningrad.
But German AG North Commander Wilhelm von
Leeb’s forces are on the move.
Rudolf Schmidt’s 39th Motorized Corps capture
Liuban the 25th and his units reach the Neva
River the 29th.
The 18th Motorized Division from the 29th
Corps take Kirishi and threatens to split
the Soviets defending SE of Leningrad.
On the 29th, the Germans take Mga, cutting
the last railway link between Leningrad and
the rest of the Soviet Union.
Leeb orders his forces that day to surround
Leningrad.
Also in the area, on the 28th, Tallinn falls
to German forces and Estonian volunteers.
Now, the 27th, 23,000 Soviet military personnel
and sympathetic civilians are evacuated from
Tallinn in the “Baltic Dunkirk”.
Vladimir Tributs of the Red Navy has the Baltic
Fleet of 190 ships there that have to cross
nearly 250 km of water between two coasts
occupied by the Germans.
The waters are mined, and the Soviets have
no aerial support, so between mines, the Luftwaffe,
and German coastal guns, 25 of the 29 large
transport ships are sunk.
Martin Gilbert says 10,000 people total perish,
though some sources place the number as over
12,000.
And even further north this week, on the 28th
the Finns take Viipuri.
They are not far from reaching their former
border positions that fell to the USSR last year.
The Soviets are also losing some ground in
the center this week.
Semyon Timoshenko’s Western Front has been
fighting for nearly two weeks solid, but its
mission has been expanded to take Velizh,
Demidov, and Smolensk, but so far his 22nd
and 29th armies have been pushed back by Hermann
Hoth’s panzers and the 22nd is surrounded
near Velikie Luki and savaged.
By the 26th, Velikie Luki falls, yielding
34,000 prisoners and 300 guns to the Germans.
But AG Center Commander Fedor von Bock is
aware that this sort of limited offensive
is not going to destroy the Red Army.
And he writes the 25th that his armies- which
have been mainly on defense lately, “…can’t
hold much longer the way things look now.
I am being forced to spread the reserve which
I so laboriously scraped together for the
hoped for attack behind my front just to have
some degree of security that it will not be
breached.
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.”
He has reason for dismay, since a couple of
days earlier, he and Army Command CoS Franz
Halder give Panzer Group Commander Heinz Guderian
the task of persuading Adolf Hitler to drive
on toward Moscow instead of diverting forces
to the north and south..
On the 23rd, Bock requests that Guderian be
granted an audience.
So Guderian heads to Rastenburg, but before
he sees Hitler, he is greeted by Army Commander
Walther von Brauchitsch who tells him, “I
forbid you to mention the question of Moscow
to the Fuhrer.
The operation to the south has been ordered.
The problem now is simply how it is to be
carried out.
Discussion is pointless.”
Guderian has to obey this, but during the
discussion drops hint after hint about AG
Center’s “major objective” until Hitler
brings it up himself.
So now that Guderian has his chance, he launches
into his spiel for plowing on toward Moscow.
Hitler does hear him out, but then tells Guderian
that he and the other commanders know nothing
about the economic aspects of the war and
that the main job IS to seize the Soviet Union’s
southern economic zone and the Crimea.
Everyone in the room, including Keitel, Jodl,
and Schmundt agrees with Hitler, so Guderian
is obliged to back down, though he gets the
concession that once the Battle of Kiev is
won his panzers can return to the Moscow Road.
Guderian is in the doghouse with Halder, Brauchitsch,
and Bock after this, but that’s it- the
offensive will go full force to the south.
It’s opposition, as I mentioned last week,
is Andrey Yeremenko’s new Bryansk Front,
which will attack Guderian’s Panzers on
a long front from Zhukovka to Yampil.
Actually, the Stavka has dissolved the Red
Army’s Central Front and reinforced Yeremenko
and given him much of the Central Front’s
sector.
CF Commander Mikhail Efremov is now Yeremenko’s
Deputy.
So the Bryansk Front is the 50th, 13th, and
21st armies, which cumulatively can hopefully
halt Guderian.
But already by mid week, elements of his Panzer
Group and Maximilian von Weichs’ 2nd Army
start attacks to link up east of Kiev with
AG South.
However, the terrain down there east of the
Dnieper and north of Kiev is difficult, and
Mikhail Potapov’s 5th Red Army is holding
up, so at least the German infantry is being slowed.
AG South Commander Gerd von Rundstedt is worried
that the Soviets will withdraw and escape,
so at the end of the week he orders Panzer
Group Kleist and the 6th and 17th armies to
cross the Dnieper at as many points as possible
and not to worry about their flanks.
This week, on the Dnieper, though, the Soviets
destroy the Zaporozhe Dam.
The dynamiting of the damn seriously raises
the water level of the river, floods and destroys
villages along the river without warning,
and kills many thousands, and perhaps tens
of thousands, of civilians.
It also kills a fair amount of Red Army soldiers
crossing the river.
The dynamiting is done by NKVD agents and
reportedly is hurriedly done.
America journalist H.R. Knickerbocker writes,
“The Russians have proved now that they
mean truly to scorch the earth before Hitler
even if it means the destruction of their
most precious possessions… (it) was an object
almost of worship to the Soviet people.
Its destruction demonstrates a will to resist
which surpasses anything we had imagined.
I know what that dam meant to the Bolsheviks…
The Dnieper Dam when it was built was the
biggest on earth…
Stalin’s order to destroy it meant more
to the Russians emotionally than it would
mean to us for Roosevelt to order the destruction
of the Panama Canal.”
That’s some pretty big news.
There is other news leaking from warring nations
this week as well, though more of the secret kind.
From August 23 and continuing into next week,
Bletchley Park gives the British Enigma intercepts
of 17 German police messages from their eastern
zones to Berlin which lay out the details
of the murders of Jews.
At Kamenets Podolsk, many Jews are being murdered
this week.
They had been deported by the Hungarian government,
however the German authorities tried to send
them back since they “could not cope”
with them.
The Hungarian government refused, so SS General
Jaeckeln took charge of the situation.
He has the Jews marched to some bomb craters
outside the city, undressed, and then mown
down by machine guns.
Many die from the weight of others falling
on top of them.
The job is done by the 29th, and Operational
Situation Report number 80 gives the exact
number of those shot as 23,600 “in three
days”.
Winston Churchill broadcasts the 24th about
what is going on in German occupied eastern
Europe, “whole districts are being exterminated.
Scores of thousands- literally scores of thousands-
of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated
by the German police troops… we are in the
presence of a crime without name.”
Churchill does NOT refer specifically to Jews,
though.
Had he done so, it might have alerted the
Germans that the British are intercepting
their top secret messages.
But there is civilian unease about some of
the Nazi programs even at home in Germany.
In fact, public unease in Germany over the
T4 euthanasia program has been growing and growing.
This week on the 24th comes Hitler’s order
to end the program.
Though it does officially end, many people
will continue to meet their deaths because
of what certain doctors deem mental or physical
defects.
Under the code name T4, 80,000 mental patients,
a great many of them children, have been put
to death between September 1939 and now- that’s
more than 100 per day.
And with that I will end the week.
A week that sees the invasion and submission
of Iran, the fall of Tallinn and a disaster
at sea, a disaster on a Soviet river in Ukraine,
and Guderian failing to change Hitler’s mind.
Something to consider here- so far this summer
the war has been an epic disaster for the
Soviets with a colossal wastage of men and
material, sure, but unlike the German army,
the Red Army does not have to win the war
in 1941, it just has to survive long enough
for the Germans to exhaust themselves.
On August 23rd, in Berlin, German FM Joachim
von Ribbentrop tells the Japanese ambassador,
General Hiroshi Oshima, that the war against
the Soviet Union may well last into 1942.
On the 27th, an OKW memorandum says that the
campaign will have first priority in 1942.
And Franz Halder writes to his wife this week
on the 23rd, “The goal which I had set myself
to achieve, namely to finish off the Russians
in this year, will not be attained and we
will have a strength- draining eastern front
over the winter.”
If you’d like to see our coverage of another-
far far larger- disaster in Ukraine than that
dam being busted, you can watch our B2W episode
about the Holodomor right here.
Our TG Army member of the week is Benjamin
Newman.
The TG Army funds all of our documentary work,
so for more in depth and ground breaking series,
join the Army at TG.tv or patreon.com.
See you next time.
