Directive No. 41

On 5 April 1942, at his headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn), Adolf Hitler signed Directive No. 41, entitled “Summer Campaign 1942”. The document opened with an assessment of the winter just past: “The winter battle in Russia is nearing its end. Thanks to the unequalled courage and self-sacrificing devotion of our soldiers on the Eastern Front, German arms have achieved a great defensive success.” Then came the aim for the months ahead: as soon as the weather and the state of the roads allowed, the Wehrmacht was to regain the initiative, “to destroy finally the manpower still remaining to the Soviets and to deprive them as far as possible of the most important sources of their war economy”. This time, however, not along the whole front at once, as in 1941, but above all in the south. The aim of the main operation was to destroy the Soviet forces west of the Don and to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus and the passes through the mountain range itself. The offensive that grew out of this directive went down in history under the code name Case Blue (Fall Blau), and its final act was the Battle of Stalingrad.

It is often said that the main objective of the offensive was the oilfields of the Caucasus, while a “subsidiary thrust” was to take Stalingrad and cover the flank of the main advance. The first part is correct; the second needs qualifying. The directive did not order the capture of Stalingrad. The city was the point at which the third and final phase of the operation on the Don was to close, and the task was formulated conditionally: “every effort” was to be made “to reach Stalingrad itself, or at least to bring the city under the fire of our heavy weapons so that it is eliminated as a centre of war industry and communications”. Nor did the directive envisage two parallel thrusts, one on Stalingrad and one on the Caucasus. Under Directive No. 41 they were to follow one another: first the destruction of the Red Army in the great bend of the Don, and only then the march on the Caucasus. Hitler ordered two simultaneous advances in diverging directions only in July, in Directive No. 45.

After the winter before Moscow

The Barbarossa plan, laid down in Directive No. 21 of December 1940, had assumed the defeat of the Soviet Union in a single rapid campaign. Operation Barbarossa brought Germany vast territorial gains and millions of prisoners, but not victory. At the beginning of December 1941 the Wehrmacht came to a halt before Moscow, and on 5 and 6 December the Red Army went over to a counter-offensive which threw Army Group Centre back from the capital and ended the Battle of Moscow. On 19 December Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and took command of the Army himself. From then on he directed not only the war as a whole but also, directly, the operations on the Eastern Front, and the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, worked directly under his orders.

In the winter the Wehrmacht went through its deepest crisis since the start of the war. In January Joseph Stalin ordered an offensive on all fronts, even though the Red Army lacked the strength to succeed everywhere. In the end the Germans held the front, clinging to strongpoints on Hitler’s orders, but at the price of heavy losses. At Demyansk and Kholm encircled garrisons were supplied by air for months, and the Rzhev–Vyazma offensive was still under way. By the spring of 1942, according to the German high command’s own figures, German losses in the east – killed, wounded and missing – exceeded a million men, nearly a third of the force that had crossed the border in June 1941. Replacements could not keep pace. According to General Staff calculations cited by historians, on 1 May 1942 the Eastern Front was some 625,000 men short. The infantry divisions of Army Group South were said to be at roughly half their original strength, and those of Army Groups Centre and North at about 35 per cent. Tens of thousands of vehicles and most of the horses had also been lost during the winter.

It followed from this reckoning that in 1942 the Wehrmacht could no longer attack along the whole front. Hitler and his generals agreed that a single direction had to be chosen. Some of the military would admittedly have preferred to go over to the defensive in 1942, or to seek a decision before Moscow once more, but since the summer of 1941 Hitler had considered the raw materials of the south more important. As early as August 1941, against the wishes of his commanders, he had sent Guderian’s tanks into Ukraine instead of against the capital.

Oil

The choice of the south was dictated above all by oil. Germany had no deposits of its own worth mentioning. Before the war it had imported most of its oil from overseas, and since September 1939, cut off by the British blockade, it had depended on synthetic petrol made from coal and on the oilfields of Romania. At the end of 1941 the government of Marshal Ion Antonescu warned Berlin that Romanian stocks were exhausted and that it could not meet growing demands. The campaign in Russia consumed enormous quantities of fuel. As early as the spring of 1942 the Kriegsmarine had to curtail the sailings of its large ships because the oil intended for it was being taken by the Eastern Front. The chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, told General Georg Thomas, head of the War Economy Office, in May that the operations of 1942 must “get us to the oil”, since otherwise Germany would be unable to conduct any operations the following year.

The Caucasus held the deposits that supplied the Soviet Union with almost all of its oil. The fields around Maikop and Grozny in the northern foothills provided about a tenth, and Baku on the Caspian Sea about four-fifths of Soviet oil. Hitler reckoned that taking the Caucasus would give Germany fuel and at the same time deprive the Red Army of it, paralysing the Soviet war economy. The coal and industry of the Donets Basin, the grain of the Kuban and the manganese of Georgia also mattered. Finally, the Caucasus opened – at least on the maps at headquarters – the way to Iran and the Middle East.

From Siegfried to Blue

The Army General Staff (OKH) had been planning the summer campaign since February 1942. At the beginning of March it was given the code name Siegfried. On 28 March Halder presented the outline of the operation to Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. The draft directive was then prepared by the operations staff of the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) under General Alfred Jodl. His deputy, General Walter Warlimont, recalled after the war that Hitler did not accept the text submitted to him, but personally reworked it and wrote in the most important passages himself, especially the section on the conduct of operations. Hence the lengthy disquisitions on how to close the pincers of an encirclement, unusual in a document of this kind. In the first days of April the code name Siegfried was changed to Blau (Blue) – German sources give 5 or 7 April. The directive itself was simply called “Summer Campaign 1942”.

What the directive ordered

In keeping with the “original plan for the Eastern campaign”, the directive set tasks for all three army groups. The forces in the centre were to hold the front. In the north Leningrad was to be taken, the siege brought to an end and a land link established with the Finns, but only when conditions allowed or when forces became available. In the south the armies were to “break through the front and enter the Caucasus”. Hitler acknowledged that, given the state of the troops after the winter, the reserves available and the difficulties of transport, these aims could only be achieved one after another. All available forces were therefore first to be concentrated on the main operation in the south.

Before that the front and the rear had to be “cleaned up”. The directive ordered the destruction of the Soviet forces on the Kerch Peninsula, where fighting for the eastern tip of the Crimea had been going on since the winter, and the capture of Sevastopol. The Luftwaffe, and later the navy, were to prepare these operations and to hamper Soviet traffic across the Black Sea and through the Kerch Strait as vigorously as possible. In Ukraine the Soviet forces which during the winter had broken through the front on both sides of Izium and formed a deep salient south of Kharkiv were to be cut off along the Donets and destroyed. Limited-objective attacks in other sectors were to be carried out with overwhelming superiority, so as to restore the soldiers’ belief in victory even before the great offensive and to instil in the enemy a sense of “hopeless inferiority”.

The main operation itself was to consist of a series of successive, mutually coordinated thrusts, conducted from north to south. Hitler wrote that experience had shown that the Russians were not particularly vulnerable to large-scale operational encirclements. The breakthroughs were therefore to take the form, “as in the double battle of Vyazma and Bryansk”, of tight pincers, and the armoured units were not to become separated from the infantry. The sequence was as follows:

• first, a thrust from the area south of Oryol towards Voronezh and the capture of the city itself; the infantry was at once to build a defensive front between Oryol and Voronezh;
• then the armoured and motorised units were to advance south from Voronezh, their left wing along the Don, to meet a second thrust launched eastwards from the Kharkiv area, and together with it destroy the Soviet armies;
• in the third thrust the forces advancing down the Don were to link up in the Stalingrad area with forces attacking eastwards from the area of Taganrog and Artemovsk, across the Donets between the lower Don and Voroshilovgrad, today’s Luhansk.

In the process every opportunity was to be taken to seize bridgeheads on the eastern and southern banks of the Don, and intact bridges at Rostov, which the Germans had lost in November 1941, were particularly desirable. Only once this great encirclement west of the Don had been closed would the way to the Caucasus be open. The directive stressed that, because of the season, a rapid crossing of the Don to the south was essential.

The long north-eastern flank of the offensive was to be covered by a front along the Don with good anti-tank defences, prepared from the outset to be held through the winter. This ever-lengthening front was to be held “in the first instance” by the allies. The Germans were to provide a strong force between Oryol and the Don and in the Stalingrad sector, as well as individual divisions in reserve behind the Don. The directive even specified the order: the Hungarians furthest north, then the Italians, and the Romanians furthest to the south-east. German headquarters knew very well that the Hungarians and Romanians, at odds over Transylvania, should not stand side by side. Besides directly supporting the troops, the Luftwaffe was to cover the concentration in the rear, especially the railway bridges over the Dnieper, destroy the bridges over the Don and, at the start of the operation, smash the Soviet air force. The navy was to help with supply in the Black Sea and, in the Baltic, to bottle up the Soviet fleet in the Gulf of Finland. The secrecy of the operation was to be maintained even towards the allies, for whom separate instructions were to be issued.

The allies on the Don

The directive assumed that the offensive would be launched with “all available forces, German and allied”. As early as the winter Berlin had begun pressing its allies for more troops. In January 1942 the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and after him Keitel travelled to Budapest for this purpose. Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary agreed to send the entire Second Army, some 200,000 men, to the east. Romania, which had been fighting in the east since the first day, agreed to field substantial forces, from which the Third and Fourth Armies were formed in the summer. Benito Mussolini decided to expand the Italian expeditionary corps to the size of an army. In numbers it was a huge contribution, several hundred thousand soldiers in all. But the allied armies had very few tanks and anti-tank weapons, poor supplies and little experience of fighting the Red Army. The directive placed them in the most exposed sector: on the long flank, which they were to defend should the Russians strike from the north.

The other side of the front

The Soviet Supreme Command was also preparing for the summer. Stalin was convinced that the Germans would strike at Moscow again, and he kept most of his reserves there. This view was later reinforced by German deception, Operation Kremlin, designed to persuade the Russians that the capital was the objective. Against the advice of the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, who recommended a temporary strategic defensive, Stalin agreed to a series of limited-objective offensives. The most important of them was Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s attack from the Izium salient towards Kharkiv – the very area that Directive No. 41 had marked out to be cut off. The Crimean Front, for its part, was still trying to break through the Ak-Monai isthmus to relieve Sevastopol. Both operations were to become a prelude to the German offensive in a way the Soviet command had not foreseen.

Place in the war

Directive No. 41 was the last attempt to win the war against the Soviet Union in a single campaign. It assumed that after its winter losses the Red Army would not rebuild its strength, and that a single great encirclement west of the Don would be enough to open the way to the Caucasus. The preliminary operations went as Hitler wished. In Operation Trappenjagd, launched on 8 May, Colonel General Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army routed the Crimean Front on the Kerch Peninsula. The Soviet offensive towards Kharkiv, launched on 12 May, ended with Timoshenko’s forces encircled by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group South and Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s First Panzer Army, and according to their own figures the Germans took some 240,000 prisoners. On 4 July, after a third assault, Sevastopol fell.

The main offensive began on 28 June. Two days later its code name was changed to Braunschweig, because on 19 June part of the plans had fallen into Russian hands with the shot-down aircraft of a German staff officer. Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army reached Voronezh, and General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army advanced into the bend of the Don. This time, however, the Russians withdrew instead of letting themselves be encircled, and the great pockets announced in the directive did not close. At the beginning of July Hitler divided Army Group South into Army Group A under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, which was to advance into the Caucasus, and Army Group B, taken over after Bock’s dismissal in mid-July by Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs. On 23 July, in Directive No. 45, he ordered both army groups to attack simultaneously, towards the Caucasus and towards Stalingrad, thereby abandoning the sequence he himself had laid down in April. From the conditional “reach, or at least bombard”, Stalingrad became an end in itself.

The Germans never reached the oil. In August they took Maikop, but Soviet crews had destroyed the wells and refineries so thoroughly that production never restarted. The Wehrmacht never reached Grozny or Baku. The Sixth Army became bogged down in street fighting in Stalingrad, and the front on the Don, manned – as the directive had foreseen – by Hungarians, Italians and Romanians, became the weakest point of the whole deployment. On 19 November 1942 the Red Army struck precisely at the Romanian armies north and south of the city and encircled the Sixth Army. In the following weeks it destroyed the Italian army on the Don, and in January 1943 the Hungarian one. The Battle of Stalingrad, in which the entire Sixth Army perished, became the turning point of the war in the east. The offensive that Hitler had laid out on 5 April 1942 in order to break the power of the Soviet Union once and for all ended in the greatest defeat in the history of the German army.