The Germans at Ordzhonikidze

At the beginning of November 1942 German tanks halted a few kilometres from Ordzhonikidze, today’s Vladikavkaz – the city where the Georgian Military Road begins, at that time the only highway across the main ridge of the Caucasus to Tbilisi. Popular war chronologies record under 5 November that the German III Panzer Corps and the Romanian 2nd Mountain Division took the small town of Alagir that day, the southernmost point reached by the Axis powers on the Eastern Front. The reality was somewhat different, though the gist of that account is right. According to Soviet and German studies, Alagir had been taken by the German 23rd Panzer Division as early as 1 November, and 5 November was rather the day on which the German attack finally came to a halt. The area of Alagir and Gizel outside Ordzhonikidze is regarded by historians as the furthest extent of the German offensive in the Caucasus – more than 600 kilometres from Rostov. A few days later the Red Army very nearly encircled an entire German panzer division there.

The oil that was never taken

The aim of the summer offensive in the Caucasus was the oilfields. Adolf Hitler told his generals – according to a later account by Friedrich Paulus – that if he did not get the oil of Maykop and Grozny, he would have to end the war. From the start of Case Blue at the end of June, Army Group A advanced rapidly: in August it took Maykop, which the Russians had wrecked, and General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army reached the Terek and at the beginning of September forced a crossing at Mozdok. Then the advance stalled. In the mountains the German mountain troops failed to get through the passes towards Sukhumi; on the coast the Germans took most of Novorossiysk but not the port; and on the Terek the 1st Panzer Army spent all of September and October unable to break through the hills at Malgobek that barred the way to Grozny.

The Caucasus was also losing the competition for forces with Stalingrad. From August, when the 6th Army fought its way across the great bend of the Don towards the Volga, most of the aircraft, fuel and reinforcements were sent there. Kleist lost some of his divisions, and his troops, supplied along hundreds of kilometres of steppe, suffered from a constant shortage of petrol and ammunition. After Field Marshal Wilhelm List was dismissed in September, Army Group A was commanded by Hitler himself from his headquarters at Vinnytsia, more than a thousand kilometres away.

The attack on Nalchik

Kleist therefore looked for a weak spot where he could strike with his limited forces. He found one on his western wing, in the foothills of the Caucasus, held by General Pyotr Kozlov’s exhausted Soviet 37th Army, which had no tanks. The 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions of General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps were moved there in secret; alongside them already stood General Ioan Dumitrache’s Romanian 2nd Mountain Division, considered one of the best units of the Romanian army. According to a Soviet study, on a six-kilometre breakthrough sector the Germans achieved a threefold superiority in men, a superiority several times over in artillery, and total superiority in tanks. The command of the Northern Group of Forces of the Transcaucasian Front, under General Ivan Maslennikov, noticed nothing; it was itself preparing an attack somewhere else entirely, at Malgobek.

The blow fell on 25 October. After a heavy air raid, which among other things knocked out the headquarters of the 37th Army, the Romanian mountain troops and German infantry broke out of their bridgehead on the Baksan River, and the next day the panzer divisions entered the breach. The Soviet front collapsed: the divisions of the 37th Army, cut off from one another, fell back into the mountains, and a gap opened between them that left the road to the east wide open. Army Group A’s staff reported to Hitler’s headquarters that the attack had taken the enemy by surprise and that turning the tanks towards Vladikavkaz would “open up broad prospects”.

Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, fell on 28 October according to Soviet sources. It was taken by the Romanians; on 2 November General Dumitrache received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for it – which is why some chronologies give that date for the capture of the city. After a few days of regrouping, the 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions pushed on east, on 31 October overran the headquarters of the newly arrived Soviet 10th Rifle Corps and reached the Ardon River. In the fighting on the Terek the commander of the 13th Panzer Division, General Traugott Herr, was badly wounded; he was replaced by General Hellmut von der Chevallerie.

Alagir and Gizel

On 1 November German tanks took Alagir, at the mouth of the Ardon valley, where the second road across the mountains, the Ossetian Military Road, begins. That same day the Luftwaffe bombed Ordzhonikidze. On the morning of 2 November, supported by nearly a hundred tanks, the 13th Panzer Division broke through the outer ring of the city’s defences between Fiagdon and Dzuarikau and by evening had taken Gizel, a village on the western outskirts a few kilometres from the centre of Ordzhonikidze. From here it was some hundred kilometres to Grozny and about two hundred to Tbilisi – but across passes that tanks could not force.

Here the attack came to a halt. The commander of the Transcaucasian Front, General of the Army Ivan Tyulenev, abandoned a planned offensive and within two days moved the 10th Guards Rifle Corps, two tank brigades and anti-tank and rocket artillery regiments to the city. In front of it General Ivan Rosly’s 11th Guards Rifle Corps and local militia units held the line, and the Soviet 4th Air Army, despite bad weather, flew some 2,200 sorties on this axis in twelve days, according to Soviet figures. On 3 and 4 November the Germans tried to widen the breach, having massed – again according to Soviet figures – up to 150 tanks at Gizel, but they got no further. On 4 November the 1st Panzer Army’s staff reported that the attack on Ordzhonikidze would have to be suspended until its rear and flanks had been cleared. On 5 November the attack ceased altogether, and the army received a warning from Hitler’s headquarters that major Soviet attacks along the whole front were to be expected on the anniversary of the revolution, 7 November, and that “every foot of ground” was to be defended.

The Gizel pocket

The German wedge at Ordzhonikidze was narrow and deep, and its flanks were hanging in the air. The Soviet command decided to cut it off. On the morning of 6 November the 11th Guards Rifle Corps, with two rifle brigades and two tank brigades, struck along the Fiagdon River towards Dzuarikau, into the rear of the German force, and at noon the brigades of the 10th Guards Corps, supported by tanks, attacked Gizel frontally. By evening the 13th Panzer Division and some of the forces that had followed it found themselves in an almost closed pocket. Their only link with the rest of the corps was a corridor a few kilometres wide near Mayramadag, at the entrance to the Suar gorge.

For the next few days a fierce battle raged over this corridor. The Germans threw in the Romanian 2nd Mountain Division and a regiment of the Brandenburg special forces unit, supported by several dozen tanks, but they could not dislodge the Soviet 34th Rifle Brigade, formed from naval cadets. The pocket, however, was never closed. The Soviet attack was conducted cautiously and with small forces – the Northern Group’s command was still worried about the Grozny axis and kept its main strength there – and Kleist brought up elements of the 5th SS Division Wiking to help. Under their cover, on the night of 11/12 November, the 13th Panzer Division broke out of the encirclement to the west, abandoning some of its heavy equipment. On 11 November troops of the Soviet 9th Army took Gizel, and on 12 November they reached the line of the Fiagdon and Mayramadag rivers, where the front settled for the winter.

Soviet studies state that in the defensive operation at Nalchik and Ordzhonikidze, which lasted from 25 October to 12 November, 140 tanks and 70 guns were captured, and that the German and Romanian forces lost more than 5,000 killed. These figures come solely from the Soviet side and are probably inflated – some of the “captured” tanks were wrecks left on the battlefield – but German documents also speak of heavy losses, and the 13th Panzer Division lost its fighting value for many weeks.

The end of the march on the Caucasus

The fighting at Gizel brought the German offensive in the Caucasus to an end. After five months on the march, the 1st Panzer Army stood at the foot of the mountains with few tanks, no reserves and at the end of an overstretched supply line. The oil of Grozny, from which its spearheads were in places less than a hundred kilometres away, remained out of reach, and the oil of Baku – which was what Hitler really wanted – was further still. The Maykop oilfields, the only ones the Germans took, had been so thoroughly destroyed before the Soviet withdrawal that only negligible quantities were extracted from them before the winter. The last chance of achieving the strategic goal of the whole 1942 campaign was lost at exactly the moment when the 6th Army at Stalingrad was also preparing its final assault.

Two weeks later the situation in the Caucasus was completely reversed. On 19 November 1942 the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive at Stalingrad, and on 23 November it closed the ring around the 6th Army. On 22 November Kleist took command of the whole of Army Group A, and the 1st Panzer Army passed to Mackensen. When at the turn of the year Soviet forces on the Don threatened to cut Army Group A off from Rostov, Hitler agreed to a withdrawal: in January 1943 the Germans abandoned Mozdok, Nalchik and Maykop, and their troops pulled back partly through Rostov and partly into a bridgehead on the Kuban. The Caucasus – the goal for which the Wehrmacht’s forces had been split along two diverging axes in the summer of 1942 – did not give the Reich the oil that might have changed the balance of the war.