Case Blue begins

At dawn on 28 June 1942, east of Kursk, the great German summer offensive on the Eastern Front began. It had been planned in April’s Directive No. 41 under the codename Blau (Blue). The first blow was struck by Army Group Weichs under Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs: Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army, the German 2nd Army and the Hungarian Second Army of General Gusztáv Jány. The objective was Voronezh on the Don. Two days later, on 30 June, General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army moved east from the area of Vovchansk. The whole operation was directed from Poltava by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group South.

Case Blue is sometimes described as “the German plan to capture Stalingrad and the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus”, and under 26 June it is recorded that the Germans “set off towards Rostov-on-Don”. Both statements need correcting. At the end of June the Germans were still far from Rostov: on 26 June two preliminary operations on the Donets and the Oskol were coming to an end several hundred kilometres north of the city, which the Wehrmacht did not take until 23–24 July. Caucasus oil was indeed the main objective of the whole campaign, but in June Stalingrad was not an objective in itself. Directive No. 41 provided only that the troops would “attempt to reach” the city or at least bring it under the fire of heavy weapons, so that it would cease to be a centre of industry and communications. The capture of Stalingrad became a task only in Directive No. 45 in July.

A plan in three phases

The offensive was to unfold in stages, from north to south. In the first phase (Blau I), Army Group Weichs was to break through from Kursk to Voronezh and reach the Don, while the infantry of the 2nd Army and the Hungarians were to build a defensive front from Oryol to Voronezh, covering the whole operation from the north. In the second phase (Blau II), the 6th Army was to strike east from Kharkiv, and Hoth’s panzer divisions were to turn from Voronezh down the Don, so that the two forces would close a pincer on the Soviet troops between the Donets and the Don. In the third phase Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army and the 17th Army were to advance east from the Kharkiv and Donetsk area towards the lower Don and Stalingrad. Only after the Red Army had been destroyed west of the Don would the road to the Caucasus open – to Maykop, Grozny and Baku.

For the start of the offensive Army Group South concentrated, according to the figures most often cited in Russian and German literature, some 900,000 soldiers, more than 1,200 tanks and assault guns, and about 1,600 aircraft of Luftflotte 4. Further Allied armies were to follow behind them: an Italian army, two Romanian armies and the rest of the Hungarian army. On the Soviet side the threatened axis was defended by the Bryansk Front of Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov, the South-Western Front of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and the Southern Front of Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky. The figures given for these three fronts vary from source to source. Russian studies speak of roughly 650,000 soldiers in the first echelon, with several reserve armies beyond the Don.

The Wehrmacht that went into this offensive was, however, weaker than a year earlier. Since June 1941 it had lost more than a million men in the east, counting killed, wounded and missing, and replacements could not keep pace. Army Group South was given priority in men, tanks and fuel, but at the expense of Army Groups Centre and North, which had to go over to the defensive. The supply of the whole offensive depended on a few railway lines and a small number of bridges over the Dnieper. That is why so much depended on the allies. Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary sent its entire Second Army east, some 200,000 soldiers including labour units, poorly equipped with anti-tank weapons and without modern tanks. Under the directive it was this army, and later the Italian and Romanian armies, that was to hold an ever longer front along the Don while the German panzer divisions moved on east and south. The Germans also underestimated Soviet industry: their intelligence assumed that the USSR would produce several thousand to just over ten thousand tanks in 1942, whereas in reality, according to later calculations, it produced more than 24,000.

The preliminary operations: Wilhelm and Fridericus II

Before the main offensive began, Bock wanted to straighten the front on the Donets, which had been bent by the Soviet winter and spring attacks. After Timoshenko’s defeat at Barvenkovo in May, when the Germans had smashed the Soviet offensive on Kharkov, conditions were favourable. On 1 June Adolf Hitler flew to Bock’s headquarters at Poltava to discuss the final preparations with the army commanders.

Operation Wilhelm was carried out by the 6th Army. On 10 June the III Panzer Corps of General of Cavalry Eberhard von Mackensen and VIII Army Corps attacked the Soviet 28th Army in the salient at Vovchansk. The pincers closed after only a few days, but torrential rain turned the roads to mud and most of the Soviet troops managed to escape behind the Oskol. The Germans reported taking some 24,800 prisoners. The operation ended on 15 June.

The second operation, Fridericus II, was to move the front further south, to Kupiansk. Rain delayed it by several days, so it did not begin until 22 June. It was conducted by Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army: Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps struck east towards Kupiansk, while XLIV Army Corps forced the Donets. The targets were the Soviet 38th and 9th Armies. According to German reports, some 22,800 prisoners had been taken by the end of the fighting on 24–25 June (some studies give 26 June). This time too, German commanders noticed that the Russians were withdrawing faster and more skilfully than in 1941. The two operations gave the 6th Army and the 1st Panzer Army favourable starting positions on the Oskol. It was this fighting on the Donets, and not a march on Rostov, that was going on on the day under which chronologies place the “advance on Rostov”. Further south, after the destruction of the Crimean Front in May, the third assault on Sevastopol was still under way, tying down Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army and a large part of the Luftwaffe.

The Reichel affair

On 19 June Major Joachim Reichel, chief of operations of the 23rd Panzer Division, flew to units at the front in a light Fieseler Fi 156 Storch liaison aircraft. Contrary to standing orders, he took with him XL Panzer Corps’ orders for the first phase of the offensive, with a sketch of the whole concept of the operation. The aircraft strayed off course and landed – according to some accounts it was shot down – a few kilometres behind the Soviet line. A German patrol that reached the spot found the wreck, but not the documents. Bock had to explain himself to Hitler in person. The furious Führer ordered the dismissal of the commander of XL Panzer Corps, General Georg Stumme, his chief of staff and the commander of the 23rd Panzer Division, and Stumme was court-martialled. Sentenced to fortress detention, he was pardoned after Bock interceded on his behalf and was sent to Africa in the autumn.

The documents reached Moscow. Timoshenko reported them to Stalin, who replied that above all it must be kept secret that the orders had fallen into Soviet hands. On 26 June Golikov was summoned to the Kremlin. Joseph Stalin told him that he did not believe the plan was genuine and called it “a great fabrication”. Since the spring the Soviet Stavka had been convinced that the Germans would strike at Moscow again. It was confirmed in this belief by a German deception operation, Operation Kremlin, the orders for which had been issued at the end of May in Army Group Centre. The strongest reserves were therefore positioned on the Moscow axis, and the Bryansk Front had even been ordered to prepare its own attack on Oryol. Even if Stalin accepted that the Germans would strike at Voronezh, he regarded it rather as a prelude to a turn north towards the capital. Hitler, for his part, did not change the plan. On 30 June only the codename was changed: Blau was replaced by Braunschweig.

The blow towards Voronezh

During the last days of June it rained over the front, and the start of the offensive had to be put back. On the morning of 28 June aircraft bombed the Soviet positions and rear areas as far as the Don, and after an artillery preparation the tanks and infantry moved off. Weichs watched the attack from a hill east of Shchigry. The main thrust of the 4th Panzer Army struck the junction of the Soviet 13th and 40th Armies. By midday General Werner Kempf’s XLVIII Panzer Corps had reached the River Tim, captured an intact railway bridge, and by the afternoon was already on the River Kshen, several dozen kilometres from its starting positions. The neighbouring XXIV Panzer Corps broke through the defences of two rifle divisions, and its spearheads overran the command post of the 40th Army, whose staff lost contact with its subordinate units. On the right flank the Hungarians attacked; they had been given a more difficult sector and suffered heavy losses in the very first days.

From the first day the Luftwaffe had air superiority. It attacked airfields, columns and defensive lines, at times ranging ahead of the tanks. Golikov tried to plug the breach with his tank corps, but committed them to battle separately and without co-ordination. Stalin reminded him in a telegram that he had more than a thousand tanks and the enemy no more than five hundred, and demanded that he use them “sensibly”. The head of the Soviet armoured forces, General Yakov Fedorenko, was sent to Kastornoye to direct a counter-stroke. In Moscow, on 26 June, Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky formally became Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, and he soon flew to Voronezh.

On 30 June, after two days’ delay caused by the rain, the 6th Army went over to the attack, striking the right wing of the South-Western Front, the Soviet 21st and 28th Armies. That same day it broke through the front to a depth of some 30 kilometres, as far as the River Korocha. XL Panzer Corps, now under new command, drove east towards Stary Oskol and Novy Oskol to link up with Hoth’s tanks and trap the Soviet forces in a pocket west of the Don.

Place in the war

The first days of Blau restored the German commanders’ faith in victory, shaken in the winter before Moscow. On 3 July Bock noted that the enemy facing the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army was beaten. The pocket into which Golikov’s and Timoshenko’s troops were to fall, however, proved much smaller than expected. The Red Army, taught by experience at Kharkov, was increasingly withdrawing rather than holding its positions to the end. On 6 July the Germans entered Voronezh, but only as far as the western bank of the River Voronezh. Bitter fighting for the city and a counter-stroke by the Soviet 5th Tank Army under General Alexander Lizyukov tied down Hoth’s divisions for a week longer than the plan had envisaged.

On 9 July Army Group South was divided into Army Group A under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, assigned to the Caucasus, and Army Group B, which Weichs took over after Bock’s dismissal on 13 July. On 23 July Hitler issued Directive No. 45, ordering both army groups to advance simultaneously, on the Caucasus and on Stalingrad. On that day and the next the Germans took Rostov. On 28 July Stalin responded with Order No. 227: “Not a step back!” In August the Wehrmacht reached Maykop, whose oilfields the Russians had destroyed before withdrawing, and the peaks of the Caucasus, while the 6th Army stood at the gates of Stalingrad. The Germans never took Grozny or Baku. The front on the Don, held by the Hungarian, Italian and Romanian armies, became the weakest point of the whole deployment, and on 19 November 1942 the Red Army struck there in Operation Uranus and encircled the 6th Army at Stalingrad. The offensive that set out from Kursk on 28 June was the last attempt to decide the war against the Soviet Union in a single campaign, and it ended in the disaster at Stalingrad, the turning point of the war in the east.