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To: Homer_J_Simpson
South, Into The Unknown-Part 2

The Fuehrer's Directive of 31st July demanded that on the Caucasus front the second phase of Operation Edelweiss was now to begin—the capture of the Black Sea coast.

Army Group A was to employ its fast formations, now grouped under the command of First Panzer Army, in the direction of Armavir and Maikop. Other units of the Army Group, the Army-sized combat group Ruoff with General Kirchner's LVII Panzer Corps, were to drive via Novorossiysk and Tuapse along the coast to Batumi. The German and Rumanian mountain divisions of General Konrad's XLIX Mountain Corps were to be employed on the left wing across the high Caucasian passes to outflank Tuapse and Sukhumi.

To begin with, everything went according to plan—with absolutely breathtaking precision.
On the day when the new Fuehrer Directive was issued the III and LVII Panzer Corps also made a big leap forward in the direction of the Caucasus. General von Mackensen with the 13th Panzer Division, newly placed under his command, took Salsk on the same evening. Advancing across several anti-tank ditches, the division on 6th August gained Kurgannaya on the Laba, and the 16th Motorized Infantry Division took Labinsk.

In the evening of 9th August Major-General Herr's 13th Panzer Division stormed the oil town of Maikop, the administrative seat of a vast region of oilfields. Fifty aircraft were captured intact.
The oil storage-tanks, however, had been destroyed and the plant itself paralyzed by the removal of all key equipment.
Progress was also made by XLIX Mountain Corps and by V Army Corps, which had forced a crossing of the Don east of Rostov. By 13th August the divisions took Krasnodar and forced a crossing of the Kuban.

The advance of LVII Panzer Corps proceeded equally successfully. After a rapid southward thrust through the Kuban steppes the Panzer Combat Group Gille of the "Viking" SS Panzer Grenadier Division, and Combat Groups "Nordland" and "Germania" behind it, were deployed along the northern bank of the Kuban. The Panzer Group Gille crossed the river; the group under von Scholtz put across at Kropotkin and swiftly established a bridgehead, thereby clearing the road to the southern bank of the Kuban for the Army-sized Combat Group Ruoff.
The "Viking" Division was then turned south-west, in the direction of Tuapse, at the head of LVII Panzer Corps. Under the command of General of Waffen SS Felix Steiner, the Scandinavian, Baltic, and German volunteers who were grouped together in the "Viking" Division penetrated into the north-westerly and south-westerly part of the Maikop oilfields.

During the first few days of August 1942 the fast formations of Army Group A were thus sweeping along their entire front through the Kuban and Kalmyk steppes in order to engage the elastically resisting and slowly withdrawing Russian divisions before they reached the Caucasus, and in order to prevent them from escaping into the mountains and there establishing a new defensive line.

Signaller Otto Tenning, who was then driving in the command car of the point battalion of 3rd Panzer Division, has given the author the following report:

"The next place we came to was Salsk. For our further advance through the Kalmyk steppe orders were that we must not fire at enemy aircraft. In this way the Russians were to be prevented from making out the position of our most advanced units, since through the raised clouds of dust it was probably impossible from the air to tell friend from foe. I was detailed with my scout car to 1st Company and was doing a reconnaissance with Sergeant Goldberg. We were cautiously approaching a small village when the recce leader suddenly spotted something suspicious and sent a radio signal: 'Enemy tanks lined up along the edge of the village.' To our surprise we discovered a little later that these supposed tanks were in fact camels. There was much laughter. From then onwards dromedaries and camels were: no longer anything unusual. Indeed, our supply formations made a lot of use of these reliable animals."

The advanced formations of 3rd Panzer Division reached the town of Voroshilovsk on 3rd August.
The Russian troops in the town were taken by surprise, and the town itself was captured after a brief skirmish towards 1600 hours. A Russian counter-attack with tanks and cavalry was repulsed.

The advance continued.
Men of the "Brandenburg" Regiment went along with the forward units, always ready for special assignments. Rumanian mountain troops too were included in the formations under 3rd Panzer Division.

The native Caucasian population was friendly and welcomed the Germans as liberators.
There simply is no denying the fact that entire tribes and villages readily, and, indeed, against the wishes of the German High Command, volunteered to fight against the Red Army. These freedom-loving people believed that the hour of national independence had come for them. Stalin's wrath, when it struck them later, would be terrible: all these tribes were expelled from their beautiful homeland and banished to Siberia.

The faster the advance towards the Caucasus was gaining ground the clearer it became that the Russians were still withdrawing without any great losses in lives or material. The German formations were gaining territory—more and more territory—but they did not succeed in savaging the enemy, let alone annihilating him. A few upset peasant carts and a few dead horses were all the booty lining the route of the German advance.

In order to cover the increasingly long eastern flank of the drive to the Caucasus, General Ott's LII Army Corps with 111th and 370th Infantry Divisions were wheeled eastward on a broad front and deployed towards the Caspian Sea. Elista, the only major town on the Kalmyk steppe, fell on 12th August.

Meanwhile the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions continued to move southward. The Kalmyk steppe lay parched under a scorching sun. The thermometer stood at 55 degrees Centigrade. A long way off, in the brilliantly blue summer sky, the troops saw a white cumulus cloud.
But the cloud did not move.
The following day, and the day after, it was still in the same spot.
It was no cloud. It was Mount Elbrus, 18,480 feet high, with its glistening glaciers and its eternal snow— the greatest mountain massif of the central Caucasus.

"How many miles have we done to-day?" Colonel Reinhardt, the commander of 421st Infantry Regiment, asked his adjutant.
First Lieutenant Boll looked at his map, on which the routes of advance of 125th and, next to it, 198th Infantry Divisions—forming V Corps—were marked. He measured off the distance.
"Forty miles, Herr Oberst."
Forty miles. That was the distance the infantry had marched that day. Under a searing sky, through the treeless Kuban steppe. On the march the columns were enveloped in thick clouds of greyish-brown dust. Only the heads of the horsemen showed above it. The farther south they advanced the looser the connection became between individual regiments. Only the distant trails of dust indicated that somewhere far to the right and far to the left there were other marching columns similarly advancing to the south.

In the shade of his command car Reinhardt studied the map.
"Absolutely terrifying, those distances," the adjutant observed.
Reinhardt nodded. His finger moved across the map to the Kalmyk steppe. "Kleist's tanks are no better off either."

Indeed, they were no better off. The XL Panzer Corps— since 2nd August subordinated to First Panzer Army—had taken Pyatigorsk with 3rd Panzer Division on 10th August and Mineralnyye Vody (Mineral Water) with 23rd Panzer Division, and had thus reached the foot of the Caucasus.
The last great obstacle still ahead was the Terek river. Would they be able to cross it and then gain the high mountain-passes by way of the Ossetian and Georgian Military Highways?

The III and LVII Panzer Corps at the centre of the front were meanwhile driving on through heat and dust, from the Don into the Maikop oilfield region, attempting to overtake the retreating enemy. Colonel Reinhardt stabbed the map at Krasnodar.
"That's our objective."
Then he pointed to Maikop.
"And that's where Kleist has to get. Then we'll see what we've collected in the pocket formed by our Seventeenth Army and Kleist's First Panzer Army between these two cornerstones."
The adjutant nodded. "It's a good plan, Herr Oberst, but I have a feeling that the Russians are not going to oblige us by waiting for the bag to close."
Reinhardt passed the map back to Boll.
"We'll see," he grunted.
"Got any water left?"
"Not a drop, Herr Oberst. My tongue's been sticking to the roof of my mouth like a piece of fly-paper for this past hour."
They climbed back into their car.
"Let's go; we've got to drive another six miles to-day."

That was what the advance was like for 421st Infantry Regiment, 125th Infantry Division, and it was much the same for all the infantry, jagers, and mountain units of Ruoff's group in early August 1942.
For a while the war on the southern front assumed the character of desert warfare. The pursuit of the Soviets through the Kuban steppe turned into a race from watering-point to watering-point. There were few stops for food. Admittedly, emergency supplies of drinking-water were carried for the troops in large water-cisterns, but these could not, of course, carry enough for the horses as well. As a result, new watering-places had to be captured every day.

On the right wing of Army Group A the Russians withdrew elastically in the face of pressure by the German Seventeenth Army, in the same way as they had done successfully on the middle Don. The Soviets would systematically hold on with strong rearguards to the few villages and numerous river-beds: at first they would defend them stubbornly, and presently they would abandon them so quickly that they lost scarcely any prisoners. In this way they implemented Marshal Timoshenko's new instruction: the enemy's advance was to be delayed, but at the decisive moment the units were to be withdrawn to avoid encirclement at all costs. That was the new elastic strategy of the Russians. The Soviet General Staff had dropped Stalin's old method of contesting every inch of ground, a method which had time and again led to encirclement and gigantic losses.

The lower Soviet commands very soon learned these tactics of delaying actions and elastic resistance, a technique which had been struck from the German training manuals since 1936. By making skilful use of the numerous river-courses running across the line of the German attack, the Russians time and again delayed the German advance and pulled back their own infantry.

In these circumstances the German divisions of the Army-sized Combat Group Ruoff and of First Panzer Army did not succeed in implementing the key task of Directive No. 45: "The enemy forces escaping over the Don are to be encircled and annihilated in the area south and south-east of Rostov." Once again Hitler's plan had misfired.
They moved on interminably—pursuing, marching, and driving. The advance continued, farther and farther. The troops moved from river to river: the Kagalnik was overcome, the Yeya was crossed. There were eight more rivers to cross before the Württemberg V Corps reached the Kuban. This Corps was employed against Novorossiysk between the Rumanian Third Army on its right and the LVII Panzer Corps and, behind it, the XLIX Mountain Corps on its left. The XLIV Jäger Corps followed behind General Kirchner's fast divisions. At Tikhoretsk the oil pipeline from Baku to Rostov crossed the railway and road. The Russians were stubbornly defending this key point with strong artillery, anti-tank guns, and three armored trains.

The 88 flak combat parties, put under 125th Infantry Division, had a difficult task. But at last the advanced units of 125th and 198th Infantry Divisions linked up.
Tikhoretsk fell.
The Russians gave way. But they did not flee in panic. Striking suddenly from vast fields of man-high sunflowers, the Russians frequently caught the German troops in their fire. But as soon as the Germans tried to come to grips with them they were gone. At night individual vehicles were ambushed. It was no longer possible to send out motor-cycle dispatch-riders. In this manner V Corps with 125th, 198th, 73rd, and 9th Infantry Divisions reached the Krasnodar area by 10th August 1942. In a mere sixteen days the infantry-men had covered the roughly 200 miles from Rostov to the capital of the Kuban Cossacks, fighting and marching through the scorched earth of the sun-seared Kuban steppe, but also through magnificently fertile river-valleys.

Around them stretched unending fields of sunflowers, huge areas of wheat, millet, hemp, and tobacco. Enormous herds of cattle moved across the limitless steppe. The gardens of the Cossack villages were veritable oases. Apricots, mirabels, apples, pears, melons, grapes, and tomatoes grew in luxuriant profusion. Eggs were as plentiful as sand on the seashore, and there were gigantic herds of pigs. It was a splendid time for the cooks and paymasters.
Krasnodar, the centre of the Kuban district, on the northern bank of the Kuban river, then had about 200,000 inhabitants. It was a town of large oil refineries. General Wetzel employed his V Corps for a concentric attack on the town—the 73rd Infantry Division from Franconia from the north-west, the Hessian Regiments of the 9th from the north, and the men from Württemberg of the 125th and 198th Infantry Divisions from the north-east and east. The Russians offered stubborn and furious resistance in the orchards and the suburbs. They wanted to hold open the town centre, with its bridge over the Kuban, in order to take across as many human beings as possible and, even more important, whatever material they could move. Anything that could not be taken across to the southern bank was set on fire, including the vast oil-storage tanks.

By noon on 11th August Major Ortlieb with the 1st Battalion, 421st Infantry Regiment, had worked his way forward to within charging distance of the bridge—a mere 50 yards. Packed closely together, Russian columns were moving over the bridge.
The 2nd Company was given the order to attack. Captain Sätzler sprang to his feet, his pistol in his raised hand. He took only three steps before he collapsed, shot through the head.
The company charged on. Its forward sections were within 20 yards of the ramp. At that moment the watchful Soviet bridge officer detonated the charges. At half a dozen separate points the bridge went up with a roar like thunder, complete with the Russian columns on it. Among the smoke and dust, men and horses, wheels and weapons, could be seen sailing through the air. Horse-drawn vehicles, the horses bolting, raced over the collapsing balustrades, hurtling into the river and disappearing under the water.

This action proved that the Russians had learnt a lot in recent months.
The demolition of the bridge cost the Germans two days. Not until the night of 13th/14th August did the 125th Infantry Division succeed in crossing the river by assault boats and rafts.
During the preceding day Major Ortlieb had reconnoitered the crossing-point right under the watchful eyes of the Soviets entrenched on the far side. Disguised as a peasant woman, a hoe over his shoulder and a basket over his arm, he had calmly walked along the river.

Under the concentrated fire of German artillery and the 3.7cm. flak battery the troops accomplished the crossing of the Kuban and succeeded in building a pontoon bridge.
The V Corps was marching into the land of the Circassians.
The Muslim population had hoisted the crescent, the flag of Islam, over their houses and was welcoming the Germans as their liberators from the atheist Communist yoke.

7 posted on 08/04/2012 5:38:29 AM PDT by Larry381 ("Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.")
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To: Larry381

Timonshenko from the limited knowledge I have was portrayed as an incomptenet lackey of Stalin especially after he got destroyed at 2nd Kharkov. Although from the reading you posted he did a good job of giving ground to preserve the Red Army.


11 posted on 08/04/2012 12:51:16 PM PDT by C19fan
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