Manstein Hitler's Greatest General

909 Pages·2010·8.12 MB·English

by  Melvin

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page

Chapter 1 - Son of Prussia
Chapter 2 - A Rising Star: The Reichswehr Years
Chapter 3 - Serving Under Hitler
Chapter 4 - At the Very Centre of Power
Chapter 5 - To War Again
Chapter 6 - Architect of Victory
Chapter 7 - A Glorious Summer
Chapter 8 - From France to Russia
Chapter 9 - Panzer Corps Commander
Chapter 10 - The Campaign in the Crimea
Chapter 11 - The Vain Struggle for Stalingrad
Chapter 12 - A Brief Glimpse of Victory
Chapter 13 - Defeat at Kursk
Chapter 14 - Fighting on Two Fronts
Chapter 15 - The Last Battles
Chapter 16 - Crime and Punishment

Epilogue
Table of Ranks
Chronology of Erich von Manstein
Decorations and Awards
Selected Writings and Publications
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Manstein

MUNGO MELVIN

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First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion Books
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Author’s Note on Spellings and Military Terminology
In writing this book, I have attempted to follow the many
conventions of formulation and style common in both
general and military writing, but have risked diverging
from them when it seemed sensible to do so. In Central
and East European place names, for example, I have used
historical German and Russian titles rather than the
modern Ukrainian, and apologize to my Ukrainian friends
for doing so. Hence I refer to Lemberg (German) or Lvov
(Russian) but not Lviv (Ukrainian). Within Russian, I
have dropped the soft sign Russian b normally rendered
in English as an apostrophe. So I use Sevastopol, not
Sevastopol’, and Kharkov, rather than either Khar’kov
(Russian) or Kharkiv (Ukrainian). For consistency, not
least to provide commonality with David Glantz’s
scholarship, I use the Russian Dnepr rather than the
Ukrainian Dnipro or German Dnieper for that great river;
similarly, Dnestr rather than either Dnister (Ukrainian) or
Dneister (German).
In the nomenclature of large formations, from the German I translate
Heeresgruppe as ‘army group’, but retain ‘Front’ for a Soviet group of armies. I
use ‘Eleventh’ when referring to a German army and ‘64th’, for example, when
describing a Soviet one. I retain the Roman number of a German corps (such as
Manstein’s LVI), but use an Arabic one for an equivalent Soviet formation. I use
the specific term ‘Panzer’ for a German armoured unit and ‘Tank’ for a Soviet
one. These distinctions may appear a trifle pedantic, but they make a complex
battle narrative between German and Soviet forces easier to follow. For a
general description of the symbols used in the maps, see the general key below
Map 1. Where more explanation is required, see the specific keys on the
following maps.
Prologue
‘I pay tribute before the whole German people to the heroic achievements of the troops fighting under
your command.’
Adolf Hitler1

After four weeks of hard pounding, the guns fell silent on 1 July 1942 over the
once mighty citadel and naval base of Sevastopol. As the clouds of dust and
acrid smoke lifted, an eerie stillness descended over the battered town and port.
Although some isolated pockets of the Red Army continued to resist fanatically
for a few days more, the last major Soviet bastion on the Crimea had fallen to
the invading German and Rumanian forces. For over eight months the veteran
troops of Colonel General Erich von Manstein’s Eleventh Army had invested the
seemingly impregnable fortress, purportedly the strongest in the world, whose
capture had become for Hitler as much a matter of political prestige as a military
object.2 The great siege had ended with a spectacular feat of German arms, one
last great - gasping - triumph for Germany during the Second World War before
the crushing debacle at Stalingrad, six months later.
The ferocious struggle for Sevastopol remains - in the West at least - a dimly
recalled event, a dark and distant chapter in the German-Soviet conflict so large
in scale and desperate in nature that it continues to defy modern imagination.
Manstein, the victor, is almost as forgotten as the campaign of nearly seventy
years ago. The final attack of June 1942, with all the heavy artillery and close air
support that the Wehrmacht could put at his disposal, only just succeeded.3
Losses on both sides had been horrendous. And for the Germans, the bloody
battles for the city would prove a dramatic episode in an ultimately unsuccessful
war. Of the victory hard won in July 1942, by May 1944 all had been lost and
the Crimea abandoned. On 1 May 1945, Stalin announced that brave Sevastopol,
along with Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, was to become a ‘herocity’ of the
Soviet Union.
The summer of 1942 marked the high-water mark in Germany’s fortunes in
the Second World War. In the Western Desert, Colonel General Erwin Rommel
had captured the stronghold of Tobruk on 21 June, and the British Eighth Army
was in headlong retreat towards Egypt and the Nile. For the Allies, the prospects
looked equally grim in the Soviet Union. In recent months on the Eastern Front,
Soviet armies near Leningrad, Kharkov in the Ukraine and on the Kerch
peninsula on the Crimea had all been defeated decisively. As Manstein savoured
his crowning success at Sevastopol, the main weight of the German Army in the
East - under the aegis of Operation BLUE - was beginning its overly ambitious
summer offensive towards the Caucasus and its economically crucial oilfields
that would lead to the fatal distraction and climactic battle of Stalingrad. Despite
incurring over a million casualties since the start of Operation BARBAROSSA
on 22 June 1941, Hitler’s hopes of smashing Bolshevism in the summer of 1942
were still high, if not unduly optimistic.4
In the meantime, Germany could celebrate another splendid victory. It earned
Erich von Manstein, at the age of 54, his field marshal’s baton: the zenith of his
career. Preceded by a triumphant fanfare, Berlin radio broadcast a special
communiqué announcing the fall of Sevastopol. Shortly after, Hitler’s warm
congratulatory message clattered over the teleprinter link to the Eleventh Army’s
forward command post at the Tatar settlement of Yukhary Karales, now called
Zalesnoe, 20 kilometres due east of Sevastopol:
To the Commander-in-Chief of the Crimean Army, Colonel-General v.
Manstein,

In grateful appreciation of your exceptionally meritorious services in the
victorious battles of the Crimea, culminating in the annihilation of the enemy at
Kerch and the conquest of the mighty fortress of Sevastopol, I hereby promote
you Field-Marshal. By your promotion and the creation of a commemorative
shield to be worn by all ranks who took part in the Crimean campaign, I pay
tribute before the whole German people to the heroic achievements of the troops
fighting under your command.

ADOLF HITLER5
The largely self-contained campaign on the Crimea in 1941-42 had proved a
bitter and costly fight, in many senses a microcosm of the much wider, total war
waging between Germany and the Soviet Union that stretched from the Barents
Sea in the Arctic north to the Black Sea in the south. Whilst German personnel
and matériel losses continued to mount, the capability of the Red Army was on
the increase - quantitatively if not yet qualitatively - despite the grievous damage
it had suffered thus far in fighting a ‘sacred war’ (sviashchennaya voyna) in
defence of Mother Russia.6
In stark contrast with the First World War, when most of Germany’s military
effort was directed and expended on the Western Front, from June 1941 onwards
the decisive campaign was fought in the East. It was here that Manstein wrestled
to contain the Red Army’s growing offensive power and argued with Hitler
about the conduct of operations from Stalingrad onwards. As multiple Soviet
fronts (groups of armies) threatened to engulf the German southern wing, he
demanded repeatedly freedom of manoeuvre to conduct counterstrokes on a vast,
operational scale in order to unbalance, then bring the Russian juggernaut to a
halt and defeat it. As Manstein remarked, however, this approach was
inconsistent with the supreme commander’s ‘way of thinking [that] conformed
more to a mental picture of masses of the enemy bleeding to death before our
lines than to the conception of a subtle fencer who knows how to make an
occasional step backwards in order to lunge for the decisive thrust’.7
The Field Marshal argued with the Führer so persistently that he was
dismissed as an army group commander at the end of March 1944. Throughout
his career, Manstein was an assertive subordinate and self-assured commander.
Although relations remained cordial for the most part, there was certainly no
love lost between him and Hitler, which was painfully obvious to all involved.
As the crises mounted on the Eastern Front, which shifted inexorably westwards,
and Germany’s defeat appeared increasingly inevitable, on 10 January 1944
Time magazine enquired provocatively whether Manstein would ‘play the
Teutonic Pétain’ - and betray his head of state.8 He did not. Although his retort
to a member of the resistance that ‘Prussian field marshals do not mutiny’ is
probably a fiction, it neatly represents his position.9 Even though Manstein
opposed Hitler’s catastrophic decision-making, unlike Claus, Graf von
Stauffenberg, he would not go for the kill. Ultimately, he failed in a doomed
personal contest that saw Hitler’s implacable will trump reasoned military
judgement. On his farewell from Headquarters Army Group South, Manstein’s
intensely loyal staff presented him with an oil painting by a Dutch master of two
fighting cocks (the Hahnenkampf ), symbolizing poignantly his combative
relationship with the Führer.10 No other general served Hitler so well whilst
disputing his military decisions so consistently.
Today, despite his impressive military record, Manstein remains a highly
controversial figure. No German barracks bears his name: any such link would
unleash a storm of political protest. Since the Second World War, and more
particularly over the last thirty years, there has been a distinct historiographic
trend to cast senior figures such as Manstein in a bad light, and to brand the
Wehrmacht as a criminal organization.11 Of course, the less than favourable
aspects of his career demand close scrutiny, bearing in mind that he was brought
in front of a British military court in 1949. Amongst seventeen charges of war
crimes, he was accused of ‘deliberately and recklessly disregarding his duty’ by
failing to ensure the humane treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, large numbers
of whom died or were handed over to units of the German Sicherheitsdienst
(SD) to be killed. Equally damning was the alleged involvement of his army in
the widespread shootings of partisans, in support of the mass extermination of
Jews by Einsatzgruppe D and in the conduct of brutal ‘scorched earth’ policies.
Although Manstein was acquitted on eight charges, he was found guilty on nine,
resulting in a sentence of eighteen years’ imprisonment, subsequently reduced to
twelve on confirmation.
After the fighting ends, apart from the quest for justice or retribution, it is
perhaps inevitable that the ensuing analysis of causes and outcomes continues in
an undeclared war of reputations. The first battle to be fought in the resulting
peace, if one prevails, is that of the memoirs: the reappraisal of past events and
personalities seen through the eyes of the principal surviving participants.
Military history written through the perspective of the commanders involved can
rarely be objective. To expect otherwise would be naive. War, to recast
Clausewitz, remains the province of egos, as well as the familiar realms of
danger, physical exertion, suffering and chance. Whilst it is the job of the
military historian rather than the participant to bring distance and objectivity to
bear, without the views of those directly involved in the making of events, any
history would lack colour and authenticity. 12
After the Second World War, both the victorious and the vanquished offered
their memoirs to a curious and impatient public trying to understand what had
happened, and to learn how decisions that had affected the lives of millions of