Yeah, they’re close to Leningrad.
It might be tough to surround, I mean, there’s
the big lake, and the Gulf of Finland and
all, so it wouldn’t be air tight.
All I'm saying is It might take a while.
Okay
August 8, 1941
Germany invaded the USSR in June, and the
Soviets have struggled to organize and reorganize
their high command since then, even as they
lost enormous amounts of men and land to the invaders.
This week, their chain of command gets more
concrete.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is World War Two.
Last week, the Japanese occupied French bases
in Indochina, and the US and the Dutch responded
by freezing Japanese assets.
The US will also build up its forces on the
Philippines as a deterrent to further aggressive
Japanese behavior.
The Germans were advancing in the USSR in
the north and the south, and in the center
new orders came calling for the spearhead
units to rest and refit, and Georgy Zhukov
was replaced as Red Army CoS by Boris Shaposhnikov.
There have been a bunch of changes in Soviet
High Command, actually.
This week on the 8th, after what David Glantz
describes as “a bewildering series of changes
in name and membership” since it was first
activated June 23rd as the Stavka of the Main
Command, the Stavka of the Supreme High Command
emerges- a war council with Josef Stalin as
Supreme High Commander.
The Stavka, though, and the General Staff,
and in fact all government departments and
things related to the war effort, are subordinate
to the GKO, the State Defense Committee, whose
resolutions have the full strength of law.
This was established back on June 30th.
The GKO and the Politburo direct the Stavka,
whose job is to evaluate strategic conditions,
create units and groups of units, and coordinate
operations, whether at the field army, front,
or group of fronts level.
It also directs the reserves and tech support.
The Red Army General Staff is under the Stavka,
and it is tasked with strategic direction
of the the conduct of the war.
So, the General Staff and the various front
commanders propose campaigns and strategies,
the Stavka discusses them with party and state
leaders and reaches its decisions re campaigns
and operations.
The Stavka directly supervises the various
fronts and the naval fleets.
It ALSO directs the Partisan Movement through
the central HQ of the Partisan Movement.
In actual practice, however, the word Stavka
is now loosely used to describe the General
Staff, Supreme High Command, or Josef Stalin.
There is a separate Red Army Air Force Command
to deal with what’s left of the air force.
Now, I mentioned last week that General Pavlov,
among others, was executed, right?
For military incompetence.
Political commissars by now again have co
equal status with military commanders, thanks
to all the initial Red Army defeats, so there’s
a general air of suspicion.
Many soldiers are going to prison, while many
former soldiers are being released from prison
to fight.
“Many soldiers who escaped from German encirclement
returned to Soviet lines only to find themselves
disarmed, arrested, and interrogated by NKVD
“rear security” units looking for cowardice
and sabotage.”
And the Germans have taken an awful lot of
prisoners, and they get a load more this week.
On the 5th, Fedor von Bock, commander of German
AG Center declares the encirclement at Smolensk
over, and they have taken 309,110 prisoners.
It was closed last week, but the Soviets manage
to break a hole in the east on the 1st.
It is sealed again, though large numbers of
Red Army soldiers escaped.
The Soviets, for their part, continue strong
attacks at the Yelnya salient, though the
Germans take Roslavl the 3rd.
AG Center, however, in spite of all of its
victories, has severe supply and manpower issues.
But they are getting ready to settle in to
defense- according to Hitler’s Directive
from last week, to give their two panzer groups
time to refit and reorganize.
That decision to stop heading east and pretty
much stay in place was prompted by success.
(Glantz, Operation Barbarossa).
“By the end of July, the German invaders
were becoming aware of the true scope of their enterprise.
The enormous success of their initial advance
had caused them to outrun their fragile logistical structure….
Second Panzer Group’s embattled bridgehead
over the Desna River at Yelnya was 720 kilometers
from the nearest German railhead.
Poor roads made it difficult for wheeled vehicles,
let alone foot infantry, to keep pace with
the tanks in the spearheads.
The infantry was running short on boots, and
staff officers began to plan for large quantities
of winter clothing.”
We’ve seen how new Soviet armies and reserves
are pouring in, but on the German side- by
the end of July they’d taken some 213,000
casualties, but had gotten just 47,000 replacements.
But Hitler doesn’t want to send in more
stuff.
He is reserving newly produced tanks and things
for after the campaign season, for new and
reconstituted panzer groups then.
Back on July 14th, he even reduced the production
priority of the army in the field.
So this week on the 4th at AG Center HQ when
Hitler visits- as I mentioned he would last
week- his senior commanders plead with him
just to get 350 engines for Mark III tanks.
Not the tanks, just engines is tough for them
to get.
Well, AG Center starts implementing the last
week’s directive the 6th, after the Soviet
28th army is destroyed in the encirclement.
So this day, the infantry divisions of the
German 2nd Army and two divisions from Heinz
Guderian’s second panzer group attack southward
across the Sozh River toward Gomel.
Thing is, Stavka is kinda ready for this since
back on the 23rd it had formed a new Central
Front, under Vasily Kuznetzov, made up of
the 13th and 21st armies.
The German attack does force the 21st army
to the south, and even threatens to open a
gap between the Soviet forces defending Kiev
and those defending east of Smolensk.
There is a lot going on around Kiev and in
Ukraine, actually.
Walther von Reichenau’s forward units reach
the outskirts of Kiev the 6th, but they are
driven back by Andrey Vlasov’s 37th Army
at the end of the week.
Ewald von Kleist has broken through the Soviet
defenses and outflanked the Soviet 6th and
12 armies from the north, as we saw, while
the German 17th army has also broken through
in a two-pronged advance, one to the north
to meet up with Kleist and one toward the
Black Sea, and the German trap closes on the
2nd when Kleist’s units link up with units
of the 17th SE of Uman.
There is another, smaller, encirclement as
well when the 16th Panzer Division meets Hungarian
forces at Pervomaisk.
Ivan Tyulenev, in command of the southern
front, does not realize that his armies are
in two “cauldrons”, he thinks that it
is only mobile German forces that stand between
them and safety.
The reality is that from the east they’re
being attacked by 6 divisions from two motorized
corps of the 1st Panzer Group and 2 infantry
divisions, and from the west by elements of
the 6th Army, the 17th Army, and mobile Hungarian
units, so they are on their own.
On both the 6th and 7th, they try to break
free, but to no avail.
I mentioned last week that Stavka ordered
the SW and Southern fronts to launch a combined
attack, but with the South Front in a cauldron,
that ain’t gonna happen.
What does happen is that Potapov’s 5th Army
launches an attack on its own beginning the 4th.
By the end of the week it has ended with heavy
Soviet casualties and not much to show for it.
After that, the 5th begins to withdraw to
the safety of the Kiev defenses.
There’s a lot of action in the north this
week as well.
On the 2nd, the Germans begin to attack Staraya
Russa south of Lake Ilmen on their drive to
Leningrad.
Ernst Busch’s 16th Army captures Kholm and
Staraya Russa by the 6th and the Germans now
have a continuous front from Lake Ilmen to
Velikie Luki, but their advance was delayed
three weeks by Nikolai Vatutin’s counterattack
that I spoke of last week.
So AG North, under Wilhelm von Leeb’s command,
advanced 450 km in the first two weeks of
the invasion, but then spent nearly a month
to move another 120.
They’re still over 100km from Leningrad.
On the 8th comes a determined assault on the
River Luga line, outermost of Leningrad’s defenses.
The attack on Leningrad is to be coordinated
with a Finnish- German attack across Karelia,
formerly Finnish territory, and attacks extending
northward past the Arctic Circle.
Thing is, it’s kind of hard to encircle
Leningrad with Lake Ladoga behind it and the
Gulf of Finland in front of it.
And the city has had time to mobilize its
inhabitants to build a serious system of concentric
defense lines around it.
1,000 km of earthworks, 650 km of anti-tank
ditches, 600 km of barbed wire defense, and
5,000 pillboxes.
This was all built by 200,000 civilians- equal
numbers of men and women- and 300,000 members
of the Young Communist League.
Klim Voroshilov, in overall command of the
Soviet NW Direction- a group of fronts- has
used the time gained to beef up the Luga defenses.
He was actually criticized last week by Stalin
for his “lack of toughness.”
To help Voroshilov out, now on the 6th and 7th the
Stavka assigns the new 34th and 48th armies
to the NW Front, the first toward Staraya
Russa and the second north of Lake Ilmen.
At the end of the week on the 8th, Hitler
orders Leeb to surround Leningrad and link
up with the Finns.
Leeb’s main attack is to be between the
River Narva and Lake Ilmen, with a secondary
attack south of Lake Ilmen.
This is actually the whole attack plan, courtesy
of David Glantz.
The Northern Group, which is the 31st Motorized
and 38th Army Corps will attack towards Kingisepp
and Leningrad from the Luga bridgeheads.
The Southern Group, which is the 1st and 28th
Army Corps, will hit the Soviet 48th Army
along the Shimsk- Novgorod- Chudovo Line,
surround the city from the east and cut off
its communications with Moscow.
On the far left, the 18th Army is to move
on Narva and then take Tallinn and the Estonian coast.
On the far right, the 17th Army will beat
the Soviets south of Lake Ilmen, take Staraya
Russa and Velikie Luki and cut the Moscow-Leningrad
railway east of the Valdai Hills.
That’s the plan, anyhow.
And plans may be subject to change, for on
the 7th, at a meeting of OKH and OKW, High
Command of the Army and High Command of the
Armed Forces, Franz Halder and Alfred Jodl,
the respective Chiefs of Staff, try to convince
Hitler that they do need to resume the advance
on Moscow.
The Japanese this week resume something too-
the bombing of Chongqing in China.
They have been conducting a terror bombing
campaign there since February off and on,
the last major attack being June 5th, which
you’ll have seen if you follow our Instagram
day by day coverage of the war.
The resumption of the campaign will last for
the next few weeks.
But Japanese aggression not just in China,
but in that whole part of the globe has aroused
the Allies.
On the 6th, the Americans and the British
warn Japan not to invade Thailand.
That same day, the Japanese government makes
proposals to the US.
These involve concessions in China and Indochina
in return for unfreezing Japanese assets in
the states.
The US does not accept.
The Japanese then propose that PM Fumimaro
Konoye and US President Roosevelt meet up.
The next day, Japan’s Lord Privy Seal, Kido
Koichi, warns Konoye that if they go to war
with the western powers they will likely lose
because they don’t have the long term resources
for it.
He also says this “…stressing a point
so obvious that others had overlooked it to
Japan’s vast disadvantage: if Japan seize
the Netherlands’ East Indies and got into
a war with the United States, the oil from
the wells in the Indies, after these had been
repaired, would still have to be shipped to
Japan, which would then be vulnerable to blocked
by ships and submarines.
The self-evident point that the conquest would
not move the oil wells from Borneo or Sumatra
to the Japanese Home Islands (any more than
it would move the rubber plantations or tin
mines there) had apparently not occurred to
anyone else in Tokyo; it was not about to
hold them back now.”
And with that sobering analysis I will end
the week.
A week of German gains on all of their Eastern
Fronts, even as the Central Front then quiets
down to play defense.
There are changes in command structure and
strategic direction, and more tension between
Japan and the US.
There is one thing that’s not changing direction,
and that is what is going on in German occupied
territory.
We know this because SS Headquarters in Berlin
receives reports daily of the executions.
Martin Gilbert writes that on the 7th, “…the
German police commander in the central sector,
von dem Bach Zelewski, reported… that his
units had carried out 30,000 executions since
their arrival in Russia.
The SS Cavalry Brigade also sent in a report
to Berlin that day, to say that it had carried
out 7,819 executions to date in the Minsk
area.”
Now, these are obviously secret reports, so
you may be wondering how we know it’s not
just an exaggeration or fabrication by someone.
Well, since they are top secret reports, they
are sent by the most secure cypher system
Germany has available, Enigma.
Which has been cracked.
So these reports are read by British Intelligence.
It is not a secret what is happening to civilians
in the occupied territory.
It is an unfolding horror story that is already
increasingly coming to the attention of the
outside world.
To understand the details of that error we
follow those events in our War Against Humanity
series that are now coming out every second
week.
You can watch the most recent one here.
Our TimeGhost Army member of the week is Ilya
Dolgov.
It is thanks to the financial contributions
of the TimeGhost Army that we are able to
put all of these events into a new context
of chronology, to remember our past and learn
from it.
Join the Army on Patreon.com or on timeghost.tv
See you next time.
