The retreat from the Caucasus begins

War chronologies record under 22 December 1942 that the Germans began to withdraw from the Caucasus. This needs qualifying. On that day the troops of Army Group A were still in their positions – on the Terek, in the mountains above the Black Sea and outside Novorossiysk. Yet the last days before Christmas were the moment at which retreat became unavoidable: the German attempt to relieve the encircled 6th Army had stalled, and a new Soviet offensive on the middle Don had opened the road to Rostov, through which ran every line of communication of the forces fighting in the Caucasus. Adolf Hitler agreed to the withdrawal of Army Group A only on the night of 27–28 December, and the first divisions left the Terek line at the turn of the year. The date of 22 December thus marks not the start of the march itself but the moment at which the decision was being made.

A front at the end of the world

In the summer of 1942 Army Group A was to capture the oil of the Caucasus. After taking Rostov at the end of July its divisions covered hundreds of kilometres of steppe in a few weeks, in August occupied the wrecked town of Maikop, and mountain troops planted a flag on Mount Elbrus. Then the advance stalled. Hitler dismissed the army group’s commander, Wilhelm List, and for more than two months commanded it himself from Vinnytsia. On 22 November he handed it over to Ewald von Kleist, whose 1st Panzer Army passed to General Eberhard von Mackensen.

In December Army Group A consisted of two armies. In the west General Richard Ruoff’s 17th Army, together with Romanian units, held the lower Kuban, Novorossiysk without its harbour, and the mountain passes above the coast. Its drive on Tuapse had ended in failure: in November and December Soviet counter-attacks eliminated the German wedge in the mountains, and Soviet historiography regards the defence of Tuapse as having ended on 20 December. In the east the 1st Panzer Army stood on the Terek from Mozdok to Nalchik, having reached Ordzhonikidze at the beginning of November and been halted there. The gap between the Caucasus and Stalingrad, several hundred kilometres of Kalmyk steppe, was covered in the area of Elista by what amounted to a single German motorised division.

Facing them was General Ivan Tyulenev’s Transcaucasian Front, divided into the Northern Group of Forces under General Ivan Maslennikov on the Terek and the Black Sea Group of Forces under General Ivan Petrov on the coast. The most advanced German units were more than 600 kilometres from Rostov. Every shell and every ton of fuel passed over the Don crossings at Rostov and along the few railway lines running from there across the steppe. As long as the Wehrmacht held the front on the Don and the Volga, this position was risky but tolerable. After 19 November it ceased to be tolerable.

December on the Don

Operation Uranus and the encirclement of the 6th Army at Stalingrad in November 1942 transformed Kleist’s position overnight. Rostov, until then deep in the rear, suddenly lay a few hundred kilometres from a front formed by hastily assembled battle groups of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s new Army Group Don. Everything depended on whether a way could be forced through to Stalingrad. Operation Winter Storm, launched on 12 December, brought German tanks to the Myshkova river, a few dozen kilometres from the pocket, but stopped there. The airlift delivered to the encircled troops a fraction of what they needed.

On 16 December the second great Soviet offensive, Operation Little Saturn, began. Troops of the South-Western Front and part of the Voronezh Front shattered the Italian 8th Army on the middle Don and drove south, towards the airfields supplying Stalingrad and towards the lower Don. By about 22 December it was clear that Manstein could not both rescue the 6th Army and stop this offensive. The next day he took the 6th Panzer Division away from the relief force and moved it to the threatened northern flank, which in practice ended the relief attempt. On 24 December General Vasily Badanov’s Soviet tank corps burst onto the airfield at Tatsinskaya, the main base of the airlift, while Soviet forces from around Stalingrad advanced on Kotelnikovo.

In this light the situation of Army Group A looked grave. Had the Red Army reached Rostov, it would have cut off not one army, as at Stalingrad, but two – in all, by various estimates, several hundred thousand German and Romanian soldiers, a week or two’s march from the Don. From mid-December Manstein demanded that Army Group A fall back and give him at least part of the 1st Panzer Army. The same argument was put to Hitler by the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler, who had replaced Franz Halder in September. Hitler refused. For him the Caucasus still mattered for more than military reasons: giving it up meant admitting publicly that the goal of the entire 1942 campaign, the oil of Grozny and Baku, had been lost.

The decision on the night of 27–28 December

The breakthrough came a few days after the date usually recorded. According to Zeitzler’s post-war account, on the evening of 27 December he told Hitler that unless he ordered an immediate withdrawal from the Caucasus he would soon have “a second Stalingrad”. Hitler is said to have agreed, and Zeitzler – fearing that the dictator would change his mind – passed the order on by telephone at once. When Hitler rang late that night to countermand it, he was reportedly told that it was too late. The story comes from a single witness and is probably embellished, but its substance is confirmed by the documents: on 28 December the high command issued Operations Order No. 2, which instructed Army Group A to pull back its left wing in stages.

The order was a half-measure, and this weighed on the fate of Kleist’s troops for a long time. The 1st Panzer Army was to withdraw from the Terek in stages to the north-west, towards Salsk and Rostov, but the 17th Army was to remain on the Black Sea and hold Novorossiysk and the lower Kuban. Hitler still hoped that from a bridgehead on the Kuban he could advance into the Caucasus again in 1943. The retreat was also slowed at first by a ban on abandoning heavy equipment and stores; at the beginning of January Manstein complained to Zeitzler that at this pace Rostov might fall before the troops from the Caucasus had passed through it.

The first divisions of the 1st Panzer Army began to leave their positions on the Terek on New Year’s night, 1 January 1943. On 3 January Maslennikov’s troops entered Mozdok. Earlier, on 31 December, the Red Army had taken Elista, abandoned by the German motorised division, which had withdrawn westwards. The Soviet command hoped that the Black Sea Group of Forces would break through from the south towards Krasnodar and Tikhoretsk and cut the Germans off, while the Stalingrad Front of General Andrei Yeremenko, renamed the Southern Front on 1 January, would reach Rostov from the east. Both thrusts proved too weak and too slow.

Its place in the history of the war

The retreat from the Caucasus was one of the most competently conducted German operations of the winter of 1942–1943 and, at the same time, Hitler’s first great territorial concession in the east. Falling back through Stavropol (then called Voroshilovsk, liberated on 21 January) and Armavir (23 January), the 1st Panzer Army escaped the trap: its main forces passed through Rostov to Army Group Don, and the Germans held the city itself until 14 February 1943, covering the last crossings. On 1 February Kleist received his field marshal’s baton. In January and February the Red Army recovered Nalchik, Pyatigorsk, Maikop (29 January) and Krasnodar (12 February), but it failed to encircle either of the German armies.

The 17th Army, which according to German studies numbered some 400,000 men together with the Romanian troops, shut itself up in the Kuban bridgehead, on the Taman Peninsula and around Novorossiysk. Heavy fighting raged over it through the spring and summer of 1943, in the air as well, but the offensive into the Caucasus on which Hitler had counted never came. In September and October 1943 the bridgehead was evacuated across the Kerch Strait to the Crimean Peninsula; the last units left it on 9 October. Many historians believe that these divisions, idle on the Kuban, would have been more useful on the Don and the Dnieper.

From the perspective of the war as a whole, the end of December 1942 closed Case Blue. The Germans had taken neither the oil of Grozny, nor Baku, nor Stalingrad; instead they had lost the 6th Army and all the gains of the summer. For the people of the North Caucasus the occupation, which lasted from several months to more than a year, meant executions, deportations for forced labour and the murder of the Jews; and after the return of Soviet power came a further tragedy: in 1943–1944 Stalin deported whole peoples to Central Asia, collectively accused of collaboration, among them the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars.