Schnapps and the Wehrmacht It is very likely that many Germans who fought on the Eastern Front did not initially have the so-called natural craving for alcohol. However, it was replaced in abundance by fear, constant nervous tension, and therefore they drank, perhaps, no less than ours.

In the spring of 1942, as soon as the snow began to melt, the terrible traces of winter battles were exposed. Soviet prisoners of war were involved in the burial of the corpses of their comrades who died during the January offensive of the Red Army. “Now that the day is getting quite warm,” a German soldier wrote home on paper taken from the pocket of a dead commissar, “the corpses are beginning to stink, and it is time to bury them.” A soldier of the 88th Infantry Division wrote that after the capture of one of the villages during a rapid thaw, about “eighty corpses of German soldiers from the reconnaissance battalion with severed limbs and fractured skulls appeared from under the snow. Most had to be burned.

But as soon as the leaves appeared on the birch trees, and the sun began to dry the marshy soil, the German officers experienced an extraordinary rise in morale. The terrible winter already seemed like something of a nightmare, but now the series of their brilliant victories will resume. The tank divisions were re-equipped, reinforcements arrived, field ammunition depots were prepared for the summer offensive. The infantry regiment Grossdeutschland ("Grossdeutschland"), almost completely destroyed during the winter catastrophe, now grew into a motorized division with two tank battalions and self-propelled artillery pieces. SS divisions were reorganized into tank formations, but many units of the Wehrmacht only received a small replenishment. Friction increased between the SS and the army. The battalion commander of the 294th Infantry Division wrote in his diary about "the great anxiety that we all feel about the strength and importance of the SS ... In Germany, they already say that as soon as the army returns home with a victory, the SS will disarm it right on the border."

Many of the soldiers awarded for valor in the winter campaign were rather indifferent to this, calling the award the “Order of Frozen Meat”. At the end of January, military personnel going home on leave received expressive instructions. “You are subject to military laws,” they were reminded, “and you are responsible for violating them. Do not tell anyone about weapons, tactics or losses, about poor feeding and all sorts of injustices. Such information is only for the benefit of the intelligence services of the enemy.”

The cynicism of the German soldiers was strengthened by the belated entry into the troops of civilian winter clothing - ski suits and women's fur coats, donated as assistance to the soldiers of the Eastern Front in response to the call of Goebbels. The smell of mothballs and the images of the home from where the warm clothes came from deepened the feeling of these soldiers that they had landed on another planet, where dirt and lice reign. The very immensity of the Soviet Union was oppressive and alarming. The same captain of the 294th division wrote that there are “endless unsown fields, no forests, only a few trees here and there. Sad collective farms with destroyed houses. Several people - dirty, dressed in rags - stand with indifferent faces near the railway tracks.

While Stalin was waiting for the Wehrmacht to launch an offensive against Moscow again, Hitler had a completely different idea. Knowing that Germany's survival in the war depended on the availability of food and especially on fuel, he decided to strengthen his position in the Ukraine and seize the oil fields in the Caucasus. In this military "dance of death", Stalin was the first to stumble, and Hitler outwitted himself and eventually came to the finish line last, with disastrous consequences for himself. But for the moment everything seemed to be shaping up according to the Fuehrer's will.

On May 7, Manstein's Eleventh Army in the Crimea counterattacked the Soviet troops, who were trying to advance from the Kerch Peninsula deep into the Crimea. Inflicting tank attacks on the flanks, Manstein was able to surround the Soviet units. Many Red Army soldiers fought bravely and were buried alive in their trenches by German tanks ironing their positions. The catastrophe that followed was almost entirely on the conscience of Stalin's favorite army commissar of the 1st rank Lev Mekhlis, then the representative of the Stavka in the Crimea. Within ten days, he lost 176 thousand personnel, 400 aircraft, 347 tanks and 4 thousand guns. Mekhlis tried to blame the troops, especially the Azerbaijanis, but the horrendous losses caused the greatest hatred in the Caucasus. Mekhlis was demoted, but Stalin soon found him another post.

According to the testimonies of the Germans, soldiers from the republics of Central Asia deserted more often than others. “They were hastily and poorly trained and sent to the front. They say that the Russians are hiding behind them, and they are being sent ahead. At night, they secretly crossed the river knee-deep in mud and water, and when they saw us, they looked with shining eyes. Only in our prison could they feel free. The Russians are taking more and more measures to prevent desertion and flight from the battlefield. Now there are so-called barrage detachments, which have only one task: to prevent the retreat of their units. If things really are that bad, then the conclusions about the demoralization of the Red Army are true.

Soon, the Soviet troops suffered an even greater catastrophe than the failure of the Kerch offensive operation. In order to prevent any offensive actions against Moscow, Marshal Timoshenko, with the support of Nikita Khrushchev, in March proposed that the troops of the Southwestern and Southern Fronts take Kharkov into attack pincers. This offensive was to coincide with the breakthrough of Soviet units deep into the Crimea from the Kerch Peninsula to help the garrison of Sevastopol, which was on the verge of falling.

The Stavka did not fully imagine what the German forces were in reality, believing that the Red Army was still opposed by the German units defeated in the winter. Soviet military intelligence was unable to detect a significant increase in the forces of Army Group South, even if the replacement largely consisted of poorly armed and poorly equipped Romanian, Hungarian and Italian units. Hitler's updated plan Barbarossa was renamed Fall Blau, Operation Blau ("Blue"). The Germans were aware of Tymoshenko's preparations for the offensive, although it happened sooner than they expected. They themselves planned an offensive south of Kharkov in order to cut off the Barvenkovsky ledge, formed as a result of the January offensive of the Red Army. This plan, codenamed Operation Fridericus, was the preparatory stage for Operation Blue.

On May 12, five days after the failed Soviet offensive from the Kerch Peninsula, Timoshenko's offensive began. On the southern flank, his troops broke the resistance of the weak SS security division and advanced fifteen kilometers on the first day. Soviet soldiers were amazed at the evidence of German prosperity and luxury in the captured positions: chocolate, canned sardines, stew, white bread, cognac and cigarettes. Their own losses were heavy. “It was terrible to drive past the seriously wounded, bleeding, loudly or quietly moaning in pain and asking for help,” wrote Yuri Vladimirov from the anti-aircraft battery.

On the northern flank, the offensive was poorly prepared, in addition, the advancing troops were constantly attacked by the Luftwaffe. “We went on the offensive from near Volchansk and, approaching Kharkov, we already saw in the distance the pipes of the famous tractor factory,” writes a soldier of the 28th Army. “German aviation just didn’t give us life ... Just imagine: from 3 o’clock in the morning until literally dusk, with a two-hour break for lunch, we were constantly bombed ... everything that we had, they bombed cleanly.” The commanders were confused, there was not enough ammunition. Even members of the military tribunal “had to take up arms and go into battle,” the same soldier writes further.

Timoshenko realized that he had struck the Germans at the moment when they were preparing their own offensive, but did not suspect that he was moving right into a trap. Panzer General Paulus, a talented staff officer who had never before commanded a large formation, was stunned by the ferocity of Tymoshenko's attacks on his Sixth Army. Paulus' sixteen battalions were routed in the battle in the pouring spring rain. Then General von Bock saw the opportunity to achieve a major victory. He convinced Hitler that Kleist's First Panzer Army could advance to cut off Timoshenko's forces from the south on the Barvenkovsky salient. Hitler seized on this idea, appropriating it for himself. On May 17, just before dawn, Kleist struck.

Timoshenko called Moscow and asked for reinforcements, although he had not yet realized the full danger of his position. Finally, on the night of May 20, he persuaded Khrushchev to telephone Stalin and ask for the offensive to be cancelled. Khrushchev got through to the dacha in Kuntsevo. Stalin ordered Georgy Malenkov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, to answer the phone. Khrushchev wanted to speak with Stalin personally. Stalin refused and ordered Malenkov to find out what was the matter. Hearing the reason for the call, Stalin shouted: "Orders must be obeyed!" - and told Malenkov to end the conversation. It is said that from that moment Khrushchev harbored a hatred for Stalin, which led him to a passionate condemnation of the dictator at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

Two more days passed before Stalin gave permission to stop the offensive. But by that time, most of the 6th and 57th armies were already surrounded. The encircled troops made desperate attempts to break out, went on the attack on the enemy, holding hands. The carnage was terrible. Mountains of corpses piled up in waves in front of the German positions. The skies cleared, allowing the Luftwaffe to operate in perfect visibility. “Our pilots work day and night, by the hundreds,” writes a soldier from the 389th Infantry Division. “The entire horizon is shrouded in smoke.” Despite the fight, Yuri Vladimirov was able to hear the song of a lark on a hot, cloudless day. But then there was a cry: “Tanks! Tanks are coming! - and he ran to hide in the trench.

The end was near. To avoid immediate execution, the political officers took off and threw away their uniforms with insignia and put on the ones taken from the dead Red Army soldiers. In addition, they shaved their heads to look like ordinary soldiers. Surrendering, the soldiers stuck their rifles with bayonets into the ground, vertically, butts up. “By their appearance, they resembled some kind of fairy-tale forest after a strong fire, due to which all the trees lost their crowns,” Vladimirov writes. Distressed, filthy, covered in lice, he contemplated suicide, knowing that he might lie ahead of him. But in the end he allowed himself to be captured. Among the abandoned weapons, helmets and gas masks, they gathered the wounded and carried them on a makeshift stretcher made of raincoats. Then the Germans marched the hungry and exhausted prisoners in columns of five people abreast.

About 240 thousand Red Army soldiers were captured along with 2 thousand artillery pieces and the bulk of the armored vehicles involved. One army commander and many officers committed suicide. Kleist noted that after the battle, the entire territory was so littered with the corpses of people and horses that the commander's car could hardly pass.

This second battle for Kharkov dealt a terrible blow to the morale of the Soviet people. Khrushchev and Timoshenko were sure that they would be shot. Despite their personal friendship, they began to blame each other. Khrushchev seems to have had a nervous breakdown. Stalin, in his usual manner, simply humiliated Khrushchev. He shook the ashes from his pipe onto his bald head and explained that, according to ancient Roman tradition, a commander who was defeated in battle sprinkled ashes on his head as a sign of repentance.

The Germans rejoiced, but their victory had one dangerous consequence. Paulus, who wanted to retreat early in the battle, was delighted with what he considered Hitler's insight: the Führer ordered to stand firm while Kleist prepared a decisive blow. Paulus had a fondness for order and respect for subordination. These qualities, combined with his renewed adoration for Hitler, would play a huge role at a critical moment six months later, in Stalingrad.

Despite the danger that threatened the very existence of the USSR that year, Stalin remained concerned about the issue of post-war borders. The Americans and the British rejected his demands for the recognition of the Soviet border as of June 1941, which included the Baltic states and Eastern Poland. But in the spring of 1942 Churchill changed his mind. He reasoned that the recognition of these demands would be an incentive to keep the USSR in the war, despite the blatant contradiction of such a move to the Atlantic Charter, which guaranteed all nations the right to self-determination. Both Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Sumner Welles indignantly refused to support Churchill. Later, however, in the course of the war, it would be Churchill who would oppose Stalin's imperial ambitions, and it would be Roosevelt who would accept them.

Relations between the Western allies and Stalin were inevitably fraught with mutual suspicion. To the greatest extent, relations within the Big Three were poisoned by Churchill's promises of military supplies to the Soviet Union in a much larger volume than England could actually provide, and the disastrous guarantees given by the American president to Molotov in May 1942 - regarding the opening of the Second Front before the end of the year. Stalin's penchant for suspicion led him to believe that the capitalist countries were simply waiting for the weakening of the USSR.

The cunning Roosevelt informed Molotov through Harry Hopkins that he himself was in favor of opening a Second Front in 1942, but his generals opposed this idea. Roosevelt seemed ready to say anything to keep the Soviet Union in the war, no matter the consequences. And when it became clear that the Allies did not intend to invade northern France this year, Stalin felt deceived.

Churchill felt the resentment of Stalin for not keeping his promises to a greater extent. Although both he and Roosevelt were extremely indiscreet, Stalin refused to acknowledge any objective difficulties. The losses suffered by the Arctic caravans on the way to Murmansk were not included in his calculations. The PQ convoys that began leaving Iceland for Murmansk in September 1941 were in terrible danger. In winter, ships were covered with ice, and the sea was treacherous; but in the summer, with its short nights, the ships became especially vulnerable to German air attacks from air bases in northern Norway. They were also constantly threatened by submarines. In March, a quarter of the ships of the PQ-13 caravan were sunk. Churchill forced the Admiralty to send PQ-16s in May, even if that meant only half the ships would reach the destination port. He had no illusions about the political consequences if the caravans were cancelled. In reality, only six of the thirty-six ships of the PQ-16 convoy were sunk.

The next caravan, PQ-17 - the largest of all sent to the USSR by that time - became one of the greatest maritime disasters of the entire war. According to erroneous British intelligence, the German battleship Tirpitz, escorted by the cruisers Admiral Hipper and Admiral Scheer, left Trondheim to attack the caravan. This prompted the First Sea Lord (Commander-in-Chief of the Navy), Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, on July 4 to order the caravan to disperse. This decision was fatal. In all, German aircraft and submarines sank twenty-four of the thirty-nine ships in the convoy. With them, about 100 thousand tons of cargo were lost - tanks, aircraft and cars. Following the loss of Tobruk in North Africa, and combined with the German advance into the Caucasus, this led the British to believe that they might eventually lose the war. All subsequent convoys during that summer were suspended, much to Stalin's annoyance.

As soon as the Soviet troops on the Kerch Peninsula were defeated, Manstein turned his Eleventh Army against the port and fortress of Sevastopol. With massive shelling and aerial bombardment using the Yu-87, they did not succeed in dislodging the defenders of the city from the caves and catacombs where they held the defense. At some stage, the Germans were rumored to have used chemical weapons against them, although this has not been documented. The Luftwaffe was determined to put an end to the exhausting Red Army bomber raids. “We intend to show the Russians,” writes one chief corporal, “that Germany is not to be trifled with.”

Soviet partisans constantly attacked the German rear, and one group blew up the only railway through Perekop. To fight the partisans, the Germans recruited anti-Soviet Crimean Tatars. Manstein ordered a gigantic 800mm monster siege gun mounted on a railway platform to be delivered near Sevastopol to smash the ruins of the great fortress to smithereens. “I can only say that this is no longer a war,” wrote a motor intelligence soldier, “but only the mutual extermination of two ideologies.”

The most effective was Manstein's surprise attack on assault boats, bypassing the first line of defense, through Severnaya Bay. The Red Army men and sailors of the Black Sea Fleet fought heroically. Political instructors held meetings at which they called for fighting to the death. Anti-aircraft batteries were converted into anti-tank ones, but the guns failed one after another. “The explosions merged into a continuous deafening roar,” recalled one Marine, “it was impossible to distinguish individual explosions. The bombardment began early in the morning and ended late at night. Explosions of bombs and shells covered people with earth, and we had to dig them out so that they would continue to fight. All of our signalmen were killed. Soon our last anti-aircraft gun was knocked out. We became infantrymen, taking up defensive positions in the bomb craters.

The Germans pushed us back to the sea, and we had to go down to the foot of the rocks on ropes. Knowing that we were there, the Germans began to dump the corpses of our comrades who died in battle, as well as barrels of burning tar and grenades. The situation was hopeless. I decided to make my way along the coast to Balaklava and, having crossed the bay at night, to flee to the mountains. I put together a group of marines, but we managed to go no more than a kilometer. They were taken prisoner.

The battle for Sevastopol lasted from June 2 to July 9, the German losses were significant. “I lost many comrades with whom I fought side by side,” wrote one non-commissioned officer after these events. “At some point, in the middle of the fight, over one of them I began to cry like a child.” Finally, when it was all over, Hitler, in complete delight, promoted Manstein to field marshal. The Führer wanted Sevastopol to become a major German naval base on the Black Sea and the capital of a fully Germanized Crimea. But the enormous effort spent on the assault on Sevastopol, according to Manstein himself, at a critical moment reduced the German forces that could be used in Operation Blau.

Luckily, Stalin received a detailed warning of the impending German offensive in southern Russia. However, he dismissed it as disinformation, just as he dismissed intelligence about Operation Barbarossa a year earlier. On June 19, a Fieseler Storch carrying a German staff officer, Major Joachim Reichel, carrying documents under the Blau plan, was shot down over Soviet positions. Nevertheless, Stalin, confident that the Germans would direct the main blow to Moscow, decided that these documents were fake. Hitler, on the other hand, was furious when he was informed of such a leak of information, and removed the commanders of both the corps and the division from their posts. But the first attacks on the starting line east of the Donets River, as the first phase of the operation, had already been carried out.

On June 28, the Second Army and the Fourth Tank Army of Colonel-General Goth launched an offensive to the east in the direction of Voronezh. The headquarters sent two tank corps there, but due to poor radio communications they ended up in open areas and were badly damaged by Junkers raids. Stalin, finally convinced that the Germans were not heading for Moscow, ordered that Voronezh be held at all costs.

After that, Hitler intervened in the plan of Operation Blue. Initially, it was supposed to be carried out in three stages. The first was to be the capture of Voronezh. At the next stage, the Sixth Army of Paulus was to surround the Soviet troops in the big bend of the Don, and then move towards Stalingrad, covering the left flank of the German troops. At this stage, it was not necessary to capture the city. It was important to approach it, or get close "at least to the effective range of our heavy artillery", so that it could not be used as a transport hub or a center for the production of ammunition and weapons. Only then could the Fourth Panzer Army turn south to link up with Army Group A, commanded by Field Marshal List, to advance into the Caucasus. But out of impatience, Hitler decided that one tank corps would be enough to successfully complete the battle for Voronezh. The rest of Hoth's panzer army could follow south. The corps remaining near Voronezh did not have enough strength to crush the stubborn defense of the city. The Red Army has shown how ferocious it can be in street fighting when German armor loses the advantage of maneuverability and lacks air support.

Hitler dismissed all the concerns expressed by his generals, and at first Operation Blue seemed to be going very well. To the great joy of the command of the tank troops, the German armies were rapidly moving forward. In the summer heat, the ground was dry, and they easily made their way to the southeast. “Wherever you look,” wrote a war correspondent, “armored vehicles and all-terrain vehicles are moving forward across the steppe. Their pennants flutter in the haze of a hot day. On one of those days, a temperature of 53 degrees Celsius was recorded in the sun. The only concern of the Germans was the lack of vehicles and frequent stops due to lack of fuel.

Trying to slow down the German offensive, Soviet aircraft dropped incendiary bombs at night, setting fires in the steppe. The Germans only increased the pace of the offensive. Soviet tanks dug into the ground were used as pillboxes, but the Germans quickly bypassed them and then destroyed them. Soviet infantrymen fired back, hiding in the fields of corn, but enemy tanks simply crushed them with their tracks. German tankers stopped in the villages, among the whitewashed huts under thatched roofs, where the Germans cleanly took eggs, milk, honey and poultry from the owners. The anti-Bolshevik Cossacks at first greeted the Germans, but they shamelessly mocked them. “We came to the local residents as liberators,” one chief corporal bitterly ironizes in his letter, “we free them from the last stocks of grain, vegetables, vegetable oil and everything else.”

On July 14, the troops of Army Groups A and B joined at Millerovo, but the large-scale encirclement that Hitler expected did not happen. Barvenkovo ​​cauldron to some extent sobered Headquarters. The Soviet command withdrew its troops before they were surrounded. As a result, Hitler's plan to encircle and destroy the Soviet armies west of the Don failed.

Rostov-on-Don, the gates of the Caucasus, fell on 23 July. Hitler immediately ordered the Seventeenth Army to capture Batumi, while the First and Fourth Panzer Armies were to move towards the oilfields of Maikop and Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. “If we do not take Maykop and Grozny,” Hitler told his generals, “I will have to end the war.” Stalin, appalled at how wrong his assumptions about a new German offensive against Moscow had turned out to be, and realizing that the Red Army was short of troops in the Caucasus, sent Lavrenty Beria to instill fear in the generals.

Now Paulus was ordered to capture Stalingrad with the Sixth Army, and his left flank along the Don was to be covered by the Romanian Fourth Army. The infantry divisions of Paulus by that time had already been on the march for sixteen days without rest. And Hoth's XXIV Panzer Corps, which was rapidly advancing south towards the Caucasus, now turned around to help with the assault on Stalingrad. Manstein was startled to learn that his Eleventh Army, which had captured the Crimea, was now to head north to take part in a new offensive on the Leningrad Front. Once again, Hitler was unable to concentrate forces at a time when he tried to seize vast new territories.

On July 28, Stalin issued order No. 227, prepared by Colonel General Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, entitled “Not a Step Back”: “Alarmists and cowards must be exterminated on the spot. From now on, the iron law of discipline for every commander, Red Army soldier, political worker should be the requirement - not a step back without an order from the high command. The commanders of a company, battalion, regiment, division, the corresponding commissars and political workers, retreating from a combat position without an order from above, are traitors to the Motherland. It is necessary to deal with such commanders and political workers as with traitors to the Motherland. With each army, special detachments were created to shoot those who dare to retreat. The penal battalions were reinforced in the same month by thirty thousand Gulag prisoners under the age of forty, weakened and hungry. In the same year, 352,560 Gulag prisoners died - a quarter of the total number of prisoners.

The severity of Order No. 227 led to horrendous injustices when irritated generals demanded "scapegoats". One division commander ordered the colonel, whose regiment was too late in the offensive, to shoot someone. “We are not at a trade union meeting. We are at war." The colonel chose Lieutenant Alexander Obodov, beloved by all the soldiers, commander of the mortar company. The regimental commissar and the captain-special officer arrested Obodov. "Comrade Commissar! - in despair, still not believing in what was happening, Sasha repeated. - Comrade Commissar! I've always been a good person!" “Following him, stepping on him and inflaming himself with anger, the regimental commissar senior battalion commissar Fedorenko and the special officer captain, whose name was not preserved in my memory, appeared with pistols in their hands,” his friend wrote, “there were pops of shots. Shielding himself with his hands, Sasha brushed away the bullets as if they were flies. "Comrade Commissar! Tova ... "After the third bullet that hit him, Sasha fell silent in mid-sentence and collapsed to the ground."

Even before the Sixth Army of Paulus reached the great bend of the Don River, Stalin created the Stalingrad Front and placed the city under martial law. If the Germans had crossed the Volga, the country would have been cut into two parts. A threat loomed over the Anglo-American supply route through Persia - and this immediately after the British stopped sending sea caravans to the north of Russia. Women and even very young children set out to dig anti-tank ditches and embankments to protect oil storage facilities along the banks of the Volga. The 10th Rifle Division of the NKVD took control of the crossing points on the Volga and began to impose discipline in the city, which was increasingly panicked. Stalingrad was threatened by the Sixth Army of Paulus in the bend of the Don and the Fourth Panzer Army of Hoth, which Hitler suddenly turned around and sent back north to hasten the capture of the city.

At dawn on August 21, infantry units of the German LI Corps crossed the Don in assault boats. The bridgehead was captured, pontoon bridges across the river were built, and the next day the 16th Panzer Division of Lieutenant General Hans Hube moved along them. On August 23, just before dawn, his advance tank battalion, under the command of Colonel Count Hyacinth von Stachwitz, set out against the rising sun in an attack on Stalingrad, which lay only sixty-five kilometers to the east. The Don steppe, covered with scorched grass, was as hard as stone. Only beams and ravines slowed down the movement of armored vehicles. But Hube's headquarters suddenly stopped after receiving a radiogram. They waited with their engines turned off. Then a "Fieseler Storm" appeared in the sky, circled over them and landed next to the battalion commander's car. Khuba was approached by General Wolfram von Richthofen, the rude, shaven-headed commander of the Fourth Air Fleet. He declared that, on the orders of the Fuhrer's headquarters, his entire air fleet would strike at Stalingrad. “Use it today! he said to Huba. - You will be supported by 1,200 aircraft. I can't promise you anything tomorrow." A few hours later, the German tankers enthusiastically waved their hands, greeting the Xe-111, Yu-88 and Yu-87 squadrons flying over their heads towards Stalingrad.

This Sunday, August 23, 1942, the people of Stalingrad will never forget. Unaware of the approach of German troops and taking advantage of the sunny weather, the townspeople went to rest on Mamayev Kurgan, an ancient Tatar burial hill that rose in the center of the city, stretching for more than thirty kilometers along the bend of the right bank of the Volga. Loudspeakers in the streets sounded an "Air Raid" signal, but people only ran for cover when anti-aircraft guns opened fire.

Von Richthofen's planes carried out carpet bombing of the city in shifts. “Toward evening, my massive two-day raid on Stalingrad began, and from the very beginning - with a good incendiary effect,” Richthofen wrote in his diary. The bombs hit the oil storage facilities, causing huge clouds of flames, and then giant plumes of black smoke that could be seen from more than 150 km away. Thousands of tons of land mines and lighters turned the city into a real hell. Multi-storey residential buildings, the pride of the city, were destroyed. It was the heaviest bombing of the entire war in the East. Of the population of the city, which had increased to about 600,000 by the influx of refugees, about 40,000 died in the first two days of the raids.

The tankers of the 16th division of Hube waved their hands, welcoming the returning planes, and the "Junkers" answered them with sirens. By the end of the day, Strachwitz's tank battalion was approaching the Volga north of Stalingrad, but then it came under fire from anti-aircraft batteries, whose 37-millimeter guns could fire both at air targets and at ground targets. The gun crews of these batteries consisted entirely of girls, many of whom were students. They fought to the last man and all died in this battle. The commanders of the German tank units were shocked and embarrassed when they discovered that the anti-aircraft gunners they fought were women.

In one day, the Germans went all the way from the Don to the Volga, which seemed to them a huge success. They reached what they considered the border with Asia, as well as Hitler's ultimate goal - the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line. Many believed that the war was essentially over. They photographed each other, depicting jubilation, standing on tanks, and also filmed columns of smoke rising over Stalingrad. One of the aces of the Luftwaffe, together with his wingman, noticing the tanks below, arranged for them a whole aerial performance, performing aerobatics in the air.

One of the German commanders, standing on the tower of his tank on the high right bank of the Volga, examined the opposite bank through binoculars. “We looked at the vast steppe stretching towards Asia, and I was amazed at its size,” he later recalled. “But then I couldn’t think about it for a particularly long time, because another battery of anti-aircraft guns fired at us, and we had to fight them again.” The bravery of young female anti-aircraft gunners has become a legend. “This was the first page of the defense of Stalingrad,” wrote Vasily Grossman, who heard the story about the heroism of anti-aircraft gunners firsthand.

During that summer of the crisis experienced by the Anti-Hitler Coalition, Churchill decided that he should meet with Stalin and personally explain to him the reasons why the caravans had been suspended, and why the opening of the Second Front was not possible at that time. At home in England, he was heavily criticized for the surrender of Tobruk and heavy losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. Thus, Churchill was not in the best mood for a series of exhausting explanations with Stalin.

He flew to Moscow from Cairo via Tehran and arrived in the capital of the USSR on August 12. Stalin's interpreter watched as Churchill walked around the guard of honor that met him, sticking out his chin, and "stared closely at each soldier, as if weighing the stamina of Soviet soldiers." For the first time this ardent opponent of Bolshevism set foot on the territory of the Bolshevik state. He was accompanied by Averell Harriman, who represented Roosevelt at the negotiations, but the English prime minister had to get into the first car, where he found himself face to face with the stern Molotov.

That evening, Churchill and Harriman were taken to a gloomy and austere Stalinist apartment in the Kremlin. The British Prime Minister asked about the situation at the front, which played into the hands of Stalin. He detailed the extremely dangerous developments in the south before Churchill had the opportunity to explain why the opening of the Second Front had been delayed.

Churchill began by describing the huge military build-up under way in England. He then spoke of the strategic bombing of Germany, mentioning massive raids on Lübeck and Cologne, appealing to Stalin's thirst for revenge. Churchill tried to convince him that the German troops in France were too strong to launch an invasion operation by forcing the English Channel before 1943. Stalin protested vigorously and "disputed the figures given by Churchill regarding the size of German forces in Western Europe". Stalin contemptuously remarked that "he who is unwilling to take risks can never win the war."

Hoping to soften Stalin's anger, Churchill began to talk about plans for a landing in North Africa, which he persuaded Roosevelt to do behind General Marshall's back. The prime minister grabbed a piece of paper and drew a crocodile to illustrate his idea of ​​attacking the beast's "soft underbelly". But Stalin could not be satisfied with such a replacement for a full-fledged Second Front. And when Churchill mentioned the possibility of an invasion of the Balkans, Stalin immediately felt that Churchill's real goal was to get ahead of the Red Army and occupy this part of Europe. Nevertheless, the meeting ended in a slightly more pleasant atmosphere than Churchill had expected.

But the next day, the Soviet dictator's angry denunciation of Allied perfidy, and the stubborn Molotov's repetition of all the accusations made by Stalin, outraged and upset Churchill so much that Harriman had to spend several hours restoring his morale. On August 14, Churchill was about to break off the negotiations and avoid the banquet prepared in his honor, but the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, an eccentric genius of diplomacy, managed to convince him. Now Churchill insisted that he would appear at the banquet in his favorite "siren" overalls (the same was worn by the British civil defense fighters), which Clark Kerr compared to children's overalls, and this is when all Soviet generals and officials were supposed to appear at the banquet in formal military uniforms.

Dinner in the luxurious Catherine's Hall of the Kremlin dragged on past midnight, with nineteen courses and endless toasts, mostly proclaimed by Stalin, who then went around the table to clink glasses with the guests. “He has an unpleasant, cold, cunning, dead face,” General Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, “and every time I look at him, I can imagine how he sends people to their death without blinking. On the other hand, there is no doubt that he has a sharp wit and an excellent understanding of the basic realities of the war.

The next day, Clark Kerr again had to use all his charm and persuasion. Churchill was furious at Soviet accusations of cowardice in Britain. But at the end of the meeting, Stalin invited him to dinner in his office. The atmosphere soon changed, thanks to alcohol and the presence of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana. Stalin showed a friendly disposition, poured jokes, and Churchill suddenly saw the Soviet tyrant in a completely different light. The prime minister convinced himself that he had won Stalin over to friendship, and the next day he left Moscow, rejoicing at his success. Churchill, to whom feelings often seemed more real than facts, failed to discern in Stalin an even more skillful master of manipulating people than Roosevelt.

Once again, bad news awaited him at home. On August 19, the Joint Directorate of Operations, led by Lord Louis Mountbatten, conducted a massive raid to capture Dieppe on the northern coast of France. More than 6,000 soldiers and officers were involved in Operation Triumph, mostly from the Canadian armed forces. The forces of the "Fighting France" and a battalion of American rangers also participated. Early in the morning, at the very beginning of the raid, the attackers came across a caravan of German ships. Thus, the Wehrmacht almost immediately learned about the attack of the Allied forces. The destroyer and thirty-three small landing craft were sunk, all the tanks so laboriously brought ashore were destroyed, and the Canadian infantrymen were trapped on the shore, running into heavy German defenses and barbed wire fences.

The raid, which resulted in the death of more than 4,000 soldiers and officers of the allied forces, was a cruel, but very clear lesson. He convinced the allies that well-defended ports could not be taken from the sea, that any landing on the coast without previous massive air bombardments and shelling by naval artillery was impossible. But perhaps the most important conclusion was that the invasion of Northern France should not begin before 1944. And again, Stalin would be furious because of the postponement of the only correct, in his opinion, variant of the Second Front. Yet the disaster at Dieppe led to one important delusion of the enemy. Hitler believed in the impregnability of what he would soon call his "Atlantic Wall" and that his forces in France could easily repulse any Allied invasion.

In the USSR, the news of the raid on Dieppe gave rise to the hope that this was the beginning of the Second Front. But optimistic expectations were soon replaced by bitter disappointment. The operation was seen as a pitiful handout. The idea of ​​a Second Front became the double-edged sword of Soviet propaganda: a symbol of hope for the entire Soviet people, on the one hand, and a way to shame the British and Americans, on the other. The most witty in this matter were, perhaps, the Red Army. Opening cans of American stew received under Lend-Lease, the soldiers said: “Let's open the Second Front!”

Unlike their comrades in southern Russia, the morale of the German soldiers in the Leningrad region was by no means as high. They were embittered by their own inability to strangle the "cradle of Bolshevism." The harsh winter gave way to the disasters of spring: swamps and clouds of mosquitoes.

The Soviet defenders, for their part, thanked fate that they managed to withstand the famine of that terrible winter, which claimed about a million lives. The main efforts were now directed at cleaning up the city and removing the accumulated sewage that threatened the epidemic. The population was mobilized to plant cabbages on every free piece of land, including the entire Champ de Mars. According to the Lensoviet, in the spring of 1942, 12,500 hectares were planted with vegetables in the city and its environs. To prevent starvation next winter, the evacuation of the civilian population through Lake Ladoga was resumed. More than half a million inhabitants left the city, and military reinforcements arrived to replace them. Preparations also included the creation of food supplies and the laying of a fuel pipeline along the bottom of Lake Ladoga.

On August 9, an important step was taken to raise morale and fighting spirit: Shostakovich's Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony was performed in the city and broadcast to the whole world. German artillery tried to disrupt the concert, but the Soviet gunners suppressed these attempts with return fire, to the delight of the Leningraders. The inhabitants of the city were also pleased to learn that the relentless raids of the Luftwaffe on ships passing through Lake Ladoga were also greatly weakened due to heavy losses of German aircraft: the Luftwaffe lost 160 vehicles.

Soviet intelligence knew that German troops under the command of Field Marshal von Manstein - his Eleventh Army - were preparing a general assault on Leningrad. In Operation Northern Lights, Hitler ordered Manstein to destroy the city and link up with the Finns. To disrupt the German offensive, Stalin ordered the Leningrad and Volkhov fronts to make another attempt to cut off the German ledge that reached the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, and thus break the blockade. This offensive, known as the Sinyavino operation, began on 19 August.

A young Red Army soldier described his first attack at dawn in a letter home: “... A shell screeched overhead and exploded nearby. Fragments buzzed menacingly, rain pounded on the ground. Our preparations have begun. We crawled forward. The silence was filled with a roar of explosions, shells rushed swiftly, with a screech. Our artillery pounded enemy fortifications. The fire shaft moved forward, suddenly, very close by, a deafening slam, clods of earth fell down - the Germans opened fire in return. The air was filled with a rumble, a roar, a screech, a howl of fragments, the earth was shaking, smoke enveloped the battlefield. We crawled without stopping. Forward, only forward, otherwise - death. A fragment scratched my lip, my face was covered with blood, my hands were burned by numerous fragments, like hail, falling from above. Our machine gun has already started working, the cannonade intensified, it is impossible to raise your head. A shallow ditch protected us from shrapnel. We tried to get ahead faster in order to get out of the fire. Airplanes crashed. The bombing started. How long this hell lasted, I do not remember. From somewhere they transmitted: “German armored personnel carriers have appeared.” We were alarmed, but it turned out that our tanks were ironing the enemy's barbed wire. Soon we got to them and came under such fire that even now I don’t understand how I survived. It was here that I saw the first man killed, he was lying headless along the ditch, blocking our path. It just occurred to me that they might kill me too. We jumped over the dead man. The crucible of the battle was left behind, ahead was an anti-tank ditch, from somewhere on the side (it is not clear from where) machine guns were scribbling. Here we are, bending over, running. There were two or three explosions. “They are throwing grenades, come on!” shouted Puchkov. We ran even faster. Two dead machine gunners fell on a log, as if wanting to climb over it, they blocked our path. We climbed out of the trench, crossed the level ground and jumped into the ditch. At the bottom lay a dead German officer, with his face buried in the mud. It was quiet and deserted here. I will never forget this long earthen corridor, with one wall lit by the sun. Bullets screeched everywhere. Where the Germans were, we did not know: they were both in front and behind. One machine gunner jumped up on the edge, but immediately, hit by a sniper's bullet, sat down and, as if in thought, lowered his head to his chest.

Soviet losses were very heavy - 114 thousand people, of which 40 thousand were killed. But, to Hitler's fury, this pre-emptive strike by the Red Army completely destroyed Manstein's plan of attack.

Still obsessed with the idea of ​​taking over the oil fields of the Caucasus and the city that bears the name of Stalin, Hitler was sure "that the Russians had come to an end," although prisoners of war were now captured much less than expected. Having settled down in the new headquarters of Werwolf near Vinnitsa, the Fuhrer suffered from flies and mosquitoes and completely lost his peace in the growing heat. Hitler began to grasp at the symbols of victory, often disregarding the realities of war. On August 12, he told the Italian ambassador that the Battle of Stalingrad would decide the outcome of the war. On August 21, German soldiers from one of the mountain rifle units climbed Mount Elbrus, 5,600 meters high - the highest peak in the Caucasus - and set up the "combat flag of the Reich" there. And three days later, the news that the tank unit, marching at the forefront of the Paulus army, reached the banks of the Volga, inspired the Fuhrer even more. However, he soon became enraged on 31 August when Field Marshal List, commander of Army Group A in the Caucasus, reported to him that the troops were at the limit of their strength and faced much stronger resistance than expected. Not believing List, he ordered an offensive against Astrakhan and the capture of the western coast of the Caspian Sea. Hitler simply refused to admit that his troops were not strong enough to carry out such a task, and that there really was not enough fuel, ammunition and food for the armies.

On the other hand, the German soldiers at the threshold of Stalingrad remained exceptionally optimistic. They thought that the city would soon be in their hands and they could return home. “In any case, we will not settle in Russia for winter quarters,” wrote a soldier of the 389th Infantry Division, “because our division has abandoned winter uniforms. With God's help, we, our dear ones, will see each other this year." “I hope the operation will not drag on for long,” a corporal of the 16th Panzer Division, a reconnaissance motorcyclist, casually noted, noting casually that the captured Soviet female soldiers were so ugly that it was even unpleasant to look at them.

At the headquarters of the Sixth Army, anxiety was growing about communications - overstretched for hundreds of kilometers beyond the Don. The nights, as Richthofen noted in his diary, suddenly became "very chilly." Winter was not far off. Staff officers were also worried about the weakness of the Romanian, Italian and Hungarian troops, who held the defense on the right bank of the Don and covered the German rear. The Red Army counterattacked them and easily pushed them back in a number of places, seizing bridgeheads on the river, which later would play an exceptionally important role.

Soviet intelligence officers were already collecting material on these Wehrmacht allies. Many Italian soldiers were forcibly mobilized, and some were even delivered "in shackles". Romanian soldiers, as Russian intelligence found out, were promised by their officers "after the war, lands in Transylvania and Ukraine." At the same time, the soldiers received a meager salary, only sixty lei per month, and their daily ration was half a pot of hot food and 300–400 g of bread. They hated the members of the "Iron Guard" who fought in their ranks - they spied and denounced the soldiers. The demoralization of the Third and Fourth Romanian armies was taken into account in Moscow.

The fate of the fronts near Stalingrad, in the Caucasus and in Egypt were closely connected. Stretched across such a vast territory, the Wehrmacht troops, overly reliant on weak allies, were now doomed to lose their greatest advantage, Bewegungskrieg - mobile warfare. The era of Germany's dizzying successes was coming to an end as the Germans finally lost the initiative. The Führer at his headquarters, like Rommel in North Africa, could no longer expect the impossible from exhausted troops and extremely unreliable communications. Hitler began to suspect that the apogee of the expansion of the Third Reich had already passed. And now he was even more determined not to let any of his generals back down.

In May, we celebrated the great Victory Day for the 67th time. However, there are still blank spots in the history of the last war. Many events of that time continue to be hotly disputed. 1942 ... After major defeats, the Soviet troops finally achieved serious success in the battles near Moscow, defended the capital. The enemy was forced to retreat. However, by the end of winter, the offensive of the Red Army ran out of steam. An important problem for both sides was unraveling the enemy's intentions and planning operations for the summer period. His Majesty chance helped the Soviet command. In his hands was Major Reichel's briefcase, which contained documents about the offensive operation planned by the Germans in the south, code-named "Blau". However, Stalin, the Headquarters and the General Staff failed to take advantage of this “gift”. Meanwhile, it contained the answer to many questions that worried the rate. Stalin and the command of the Red Army, including Zhukov, were sure that the Germans would again launch a general offensive against Moscow. Here they will try to strike the main blow. However, Hitler decided to inflict this blow on the Soviet troops in the south, as was envisaged by the “Blau” - “Blue” plan developed by his generals. * * * Early in the morning of June 1, 1942, Hitler flew in his Condor plane to Poltava, where the headquarters of Army Group South was located. The Fuhrer was in high spirits. He was sure that a new offensive on the Eastern Front would bring new victories to the German weapons and the German warrior. He warmly greeted Field Marshal Bock, who met him, the commanders of the 1st Panzer Army Kleist, the 4th Panzer Army - Goth, the 6th Army - Paulus, the 4th Air Fleet - Richthofen. The Fuhrer held a meeting of the Wehrmacht command at the headquarters of the southern army group, at which the tasks of the summer offensive of the German troops were discussed. At this meeting, Hitler declared: “If we do not get the oil of the Caucasus, then we will be forced to end this war. Our main task now is the implementation of the Blue plan. The New York Times military columnist, participant in three wars, Pulitzer Prize winner Hanson Baldwin, in his book Battles Won and Lost, paid great attention to Operation Blue. He wrote that in 1942 Moscow still attracted Hitler, but the Führer was now more attracted to the oil fields of the Caucasus due to the lack of gasoline in the Third Reich and the huge fuel consumption on the Eastern Front. The Caucasus, with its oil fields, became the main target for the Germans. Beyond its snow-covered mountain peaks lay distant horizons - the Fuhrer dreamed of breaking through to Iran and Iraq, and even to India. Hitler once said at a meeting in which industrialists participated: “The German economy cannot exist without oil. German-made motor fuel must become a reality, even if it requires sacrifice.” It should be noted that Germany did not have its own oil at all. In 1940, before the attack on the USSR, the Third Reich produced 8 million tons of gasoline and diesel fuel, mainly from local coal, by the so-called hydrogenation of it under high pressure. The Fuhrer dealt with this problem even before coming to power. So, in 1932, he met with the leaders of the IG Farben chemical concern, tried to delve even into the details of the project to create synthetic motor fuel and stated that this project was in line with the plans of the National Socialist Party. The fuel that Germany had at its disposal was enough in peaceful conditions. She did not experience difficulties in this regard at the first stage of the Second World War, when there were battles with the armies of Poland, France and other European countries. However, when the fighting began on the Eastern Front, where the scale was completely different, the demand for petroleum products increased dramatically. Already in the winter of 1941, during the battle for Moscow, the tank units of the Wehrmacht and aviation met with serious difficulties due to a lack of fuel. At that time, the needs of Germany were to some extent met by the oil fields of Romania. However, they could not solve the problem of supplying the Third Reich with fuel. In addition, Soviet aviation dealt significant blows to these oil fields. As a result, the production of oil products here has been constantly declining. Already in the second half of 1942, Germany could practically be left without fuel. All these factors were taken into account by Hitler and his headquarters of the High Command of the German Army when developing the plan for Operation Blue. According to the plan of the fascist command, after the unsuccessful operation to capture Moscow, the German armed forces in the summer offensive of 1942 transferred the main blow to the southern wing of the Eastern Front. The Wehrmacht was no longer capable of delivering simultaneous strikes in other directions, as it was in 1941. The goal of Operation Blau is a breakthrough to the Caucasus. The capture of the oil fields of Baku and Grozny. At the meeting in Poltava, Hitler did not mention Stalingrad. Then for him and the generals - it was just another city on the map, nothing more. The operation was to begin with the capture of Voronezh. Then it was planned to encircle the Soviet troops west of the Don, after which the 6th Army of Paulus develops an offensive against Stalingrad, ensuring the security of the northeastern flank. It was assumed that the Caucasus was occupied by the 1st Panzer Army of Kleist and the 17th Army. * * * June 19, 1942... A dacha on the outskirts of occupied Kharkov. Previously, the first secretary of the regional committee lived here, under Soviet rule the owner of the region, now the commander of the 40th tank corps, General Stumme, and his headquarters have settled. On the evening of that day, the general arranged dinner at his place. Among the invitees were the commanders of all three divisions that were part of the corps, the chief of staff of the corps Frank, the commander of artillery and other officers. There was plenty of alcohol, plentiful snacks. The toasts followed one after another. Everyone cheered up. Some of those present, completely intoxicated, forgot that at a dinner with the general, the corps commander, he said: “We should invite the ladies.” Stumme looked sternly, and he fell silent in fright. And then a clerk appeared and leaned over to the head of the operational department of the corps headquarters, Colonel Hess, and whispered something. Hess turned to Stumme: "I am urgently called to the telephone." When they left the room, the clerk said to the colonel: - Something happened to them in the 23rd Panzer Division. Hesse grabbed the phone. - What happened to you? he asked the chief of staff of the Teichgeber division. After talking on the phone, Hesse ran upstairs. The atmosphere of fun is gone. From the expression on the face of the head of the operations department, everyone understood that something serious had happened. Addressing General Stumme and the commander of the 23rd Panzer Division von Boydenburg, Hesse said that at 9 o'clock in the morning the head of the operations department of the 23rd division, Major Reichel, and the pilot, Lieutenant Dehant, flew from the Kharkiv-Severny airfield to the headquarters of the 17- 1st Army Corps to clarify joint action plans and look at the division's deployment area. - It's already 22:00. They are gone, gone, gone. Called everyone, no one saw them. - What did they have with them? asked General Stumme quietly. - Tablets with maps and documents for the upcoming operation. - Mobilize everyone in search. Reconnaissance should be given a special task, - Shtumme, who had turned pale, gave the order. -If they got to the Russians, we will all be judged. The feast ended, the dejected officers dispersed. Everyone sobered up in an instant. Soon, from the headquarters of the 336th Infantry Division, they reported that they had seen an aircraft in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe Russian forward positions. A reconnaissance unit from this division was urgently allocated to search for the missing aircraft or what was left of it. * * * We have already mentioned above that the plan of Operation Blau became known to the command of the Red Army. Fate itself gave the Red Army a chance to accurately determine the true direction of the enemy's main attack. On June 19, 1942, due to a mistake made by the pilot, a German plane ended up over the neutral zone and was shot down by Soviet artillery. On board was the head of the operations department of the headquarters of the 23rd Panzer Division, Major Reichel. In his briefcase were documents that revealed the goals and plan of Operation Blue, an offensive in the south. The major was killed, and his briefcase with the most important documents ended up in the hands of the Soviet command. Soviet historians did not pay due attention to the Blau plan and the story of Major Reichel. Historians on the German side attach great importance to the analysis of this plan and the episode with Major Reichel. In particular, Paul Karel paid much attention to this in his book “Eastern Front”. The book makes a certain contribution to clarifying the situation on the Soviet-German front in 1942. The author details the case with Reichel and its consequences. The commander of the Southwestern Front reported to Headquarters about the downed plane and the documents found. That same evening Timoshenko received a direct telephone call from Stalin. He was interested in the captured documents and the planned operations in connection with this. Archival materials with a recording of their conversation have been preserved. Tymoshenko: “The intercepted documents with enemy action plans are beyond doubt. In addition to the documents already handed over to you, many others have been captured and are being deciphered. Among them, one document has already been deciphered, which indicates that the offensive has been postponed until June 23. (The German offensive began on June 28, and on June 23 it was planned to complete the regrouping of troops according to the “Blau” - I.T. plan), it is possible that the enemy will know that the plane was shot down in the location of our troops and will be able to make some changes or postpone operation. We think that fundamental changes will not follow, since the factions are basically already concentrated. After listing the planned measures to strengthen the defense, Timoshenko added that it would be good to have one more rifle division in the Korocha area. To which Stalin replied: “If divisions were sold on the market, I would buy 5-6 divisions for you, but, unfortunately, they are not sold. Everything. Good luck. I wish you success.” (See: Boris Sokolov “Intelligence”, M., “Ast-Press”, 2001). Comrade Stalin sometimes liked to joke, but Marshal Timoshenko was in no mood for jokes. Despite the fact that the documents found in Major Reichel's briefcase did not raise doubts about their authenticity, the headquarters still did not dare to withdraw part of the troops from the western direction and transfer them to the south. General Halder, Chief of the German General Staff, wrote in his diary on June 20: "The plane with Major Reichel and the extremely important documents of Operation Blaeu, apparently, fell into the hands of the enemy." And on June 22, after listening to the report of the head of the military service department, Colonel Radke, Halder noted: “The conclusion from the Reichel case: the education of personnel in the spirit of a more reliable preservation of military secrets leaves much to be desired.” The intelligence officer of the 8th Army Corps of the 6th German Army, Joachim Wieder, spoke about the fate of Reichel and the documents that were in his portfolio: “I believe that one fatal event that occurred shortly before our summer offensive made it much easier for the enemy to develop and implement a plan strategic, retreat. Only a narrow circle knew at that time about this unfortunate incident, which forced the army headquarters and our corps headquarters to develop feverish activity for several days and confronted the high command of the ground forces with responsible decisions. And what happened. When our units occupied the starting lines for a large offensive, the young major flew on a Fieseler-Storch reconnaissance aircraft to the headquarters of a neighboring formation to discuss the issue of upcoming operations there. The major's briefcase was chock-full of secret orders and staff documents. The plane did not arrive at its destination. Having lost his course in the fog, he flew over the front line. Soon we, to our horror, discovered the wreckage of the downed "Fieseler-Storch" in the "no man's land". Between trenches. The Russians had already managed to pull the car apart, and our major disappeared without leaving any traces. The question immediately arose - did his briefcase, which contained the most important secret documents - orders from higher headquarters, fall into the hands of the enemy? For several days in a row, all lines of communication between the main command of the ground forces, the headquarters of the army and the headquarters of our corps were constantly busy: urgent calls to the apparatus followed one after another. Since trouble struck in the location of our corps, we received the task to fully clarify all the circumstances of the case and save the command from painful uncertainty. We carried out several reconnaissance searches with strong fire support in the sector of the front where the plane was shot down, and captured several prisoners. At first, the information received from them was extremely contradictory, but gradually the picture began to clear up. It turned out that the plane was fired upon and made an emergency landing on “no man's land”, the officer who was in it was killed either in the air or while trying to escape, and “one of the commissars” took his briefcase. Finally, a prisoner, captured as a result of our last search, accurately indicated the place where the dead German officer was buried. We began to dig in this place and soon discovered the corpse of the ill-fated major. So, our worst assumptions were confirmed: the Russians now knew about the major offensive that our 6th and 2nd armies were to launch, and its direction and the number of our strike units and formations. But it was too late - the main command of the ground forces could no longer revise the decisions made and cancel such a carefully prepared operation. Thus, our attack on Stalingrad from the very beginning took place under an unfortunate star. (See: Boris Sokolov, op. cit.). The former adjutant of the commander of the 6th German Army, Paulus, Colonel Wilhelm Adam, wrote that the incident with Reichel threatened with fatal consequences also because the documents seized from him contained detailed information about the upcoming operations of the neighbors on the left of the 2nd Army and 4th Panzer Army. In his memoirs, written in a prison in Nuremberg, Field Marshal Keitel noted that Reichel's forced landing in no man's land with combat orders was a real disaster for the Germans, because it happened a few days before the offensive. Hitler himself took up the Reichel case. The Fuhrer was outraged by the irresponsible behavior of some generals and officers. The corps commander, General Stumme, the corps chief of staff, Colonel Frank, and the commander of the 23rd Panzer Division, General Boineburg, were removed from their posts and put on trial. Their case was considered by the imperial military court, presided over by Goering. Keitel and the commander of the 6th Army, Paulus, tried to intercede for them. The court sentenced Stumme to five years in prison, Frank to three years. However, they were soon pardoned. They took into account their military merits in the past and returned to service. In September 1942, Stumme replaced the ill Rommel as commander of Panzer Army Africa. Frank arrived with him as chief of staff. However, four days after taking office, and on the first day of the British offensive in the El Alamein area, Stumme died of a heart attack. In connection with the Reichel case, Hitler issued an order that henceforth not a single commander knew about the combat missions assigned to neighboring units. Naturally, the observance of this order led to the fact that it was difficult, and often simply impossible, to coordinate the combat operations of the Wehrmacht units. The Fuhrer had to cancel this order. * * * At the end of June 1942, on the front from Kursk to Taganrog, five German armies stood ready for the offensive, fully manned and well equipped. They were tasked with defeating the Soviet troops in the south. To ensure surprise, the German command carried out a series of actions aimed at hiding from the Red Army the direction of the main attack in the upcoming summer campaign. It was necessary to create the appearance that the Wehrmacht would again launch an offensive on the central sector of the front in order to capture Moscow. For this, the Wehrmacht command developed and carried out a disinformation operation code-named “Kremlin”. Demonstrative aerial photography of Moscow defensive positions was carried out, as well as false redeployment of units and headquarters. Ferry facilities were brought to water barriers and even road signs were made. On June 27, a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft brought amazing news: a huge concentration of German troops was discovered at the junction of the 13th and 40th armies and in other sectors of the Bryansk Front. While the situation was being analyzed at the headquarters of the front and in Moscow, the next day, June 28, 1942, at 10 am, the Soviet-German front exploded - the Wehrmacht launched Operation Blau. German aviation and, above all, attack aircraft fell on the positions of the Soviet troops, German artillery hit without interruption. The tanks and their accompanying infantry moved forward. A battle unfolded, the final of which was considered to decide the fate of the war. The 4th tank army of Hoth, consisting of eleven divisions, rushed to Voronezh and was supposed to go further to the Don. In Hitler's directive number 41. dated April 5, 1942, the goals of Operation Blau were defined as follows: the destruction of enemy forces on the bend of the Don, followed by the capture of the oil resources of the Caucasus and overcoming the mountain barrier. As an important stage in achieving this goal, the task was to capture Stalingrad. About 100 divisions of the Wehrmacht and satellite countries and almost half of the German aircraft of the Eastern Front were concentrated in the south to implement the Blue plan. They were opposed by the Southwestern, Southern and Caucasian fronts under the overall command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko. Soviet strategic reserves were concentrated in the Central direction, where the command of the Red Army expected the main blow. The famous English historian Alan Bullock in the second volume of his book “Hitler and Stalin. Life and Power” notes that the strike force with which Hitler began his second summer offensive against Russia was half that with which the Germans attacked in 1941 - 68 instead of 158 divisions. Hitler hoped to compensate for this by concentrating armies on only one front - the South. Germany's allies - Italians, Hungarians and Romanians supplied 52 divisions - a quarter of all the forces that fought against the USSR. Although the plan for Operation Blau fell into the hands of the Russians, Stalin considered it to be a “planting” and was taken by surprise when the Germans did not turn around in the Moscow direction, but moved to the Don River, began the capture of Stalingrad and set their sights on the oil fields of the Caucasus. While Stalin frantically tried to reorganize his fronts, Hitler moved to his forward headquarters in Vinnitsa, confident that the Russians were finished. * * * It should be noted that Soviet intelligence received reports of Operation Blau planned by the German command from their agents Ressler and Schulze-Boysen from the Red Capella group. However, Stalin dismissed this information. The command of the Red Army did not derive much benefit from the captured documents that were in Major Reichel's briefcase. The case was limited to the bombardment of the areas of concentration of enemy shock groups indicated in these documents. At the end of June 1942, the German Army Group South was divided into two - Army Group A under the command of Field Marshal von List and Group B under the command of Field Marshal von Bock. Army Group A was to advance into the Caucasus, while von Bock's armies were to move towards the Volga and Stalingrad. During the offensive of the German troops, the 1st Panzer Army under the command of Colonel General von Kleist broke through to the Caucasus and captured Maykop, the first oil region, which, however, was completely destroyed before the retreat of the Red Army. Entering the city, the Germans found only burning oil wells. They never managed to establish oil production here. A joint-stock company "German oil in the Caucasus" was even created. The Nazis gathered a large staff of 15,000 specialists and workers for the maintenance of the Caucasian oil fields. It remained only to capture them and establish oil production. N. Baibakov during the war served as People's Commissar of the oil industry, and subsequently led the State Planning Committee of the USSR for many years. At the height of the fighting in the foothills of the Caucasus, Stalin called him. He said: “Hitler is rushing to the Caucasus, everything must be done so that the enemy does not get even a drop of our oil. Keep in mind, if the Germans seize our oil, we will shoot you. But if you destroy the fisheries prematurely, and the Germans never capture them, we will also shoot you.” “You leave me no choice, Comrade Stalin,” Baibakov said. Stalin raised his hand, tapped his temple: "Here is a choice, Comrade Baibakov." For half a year of the occupation of the Kuban, the German engineers who arrived there failed to restore a single blown well. General Pavel Sudoplatov in the book “Special Operations. Lubyanka and the Kremlin 1930-1950” wrote: “Our special unit mined oil wells and drilling rigs in the area of ​​Mozdok and blew them up at the moment when German motorcyclists were approaching them.” In the midst of fighting in the passes of the Caucasus Range, the advance of German military equipment stalled due to a lack of gasoline. For this reason, aviation was often inactive. The chief of the German General Staff, General Halder, wrote in his diary: “It is a bitter irony that, as we approached oil, we experienced an ever greater shortage of it.” The fate of the Caucasus was decided in the Battle of Stalingrad. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this battle, its impact on the course of World War II. Hitler sent a specially formed army group "Don" to help the 6th army of Paulus encircled in the Stalingrad region. The commander of this group, Field Marshal Manstein, reported to the Fuhrer many times that if he did not receive reinforcements, this would lead to disaster. When the situation became critical, Manstein tried to convince Hitler that the only way to save the day was to withdraw Army Group A from the Caucasus. But the Fuhrer refused to do so. He still hoped to implement the "Blau" plan, to seize the oil fields of Baku and Grozny. By November 1942, attempts by German troops to break through the mountain passes to Grozny and Baku were finally repulsed. They failed to gain a foothold at the turn of the Kuban River. Under the pressure of the Soviet troops, the Germans were forced to retreat. The defeat of the German troops at Stalingrad forced Hitler to face reality, to be convinced of the failure of the Blau plan. In March 1943, almost the entire territory of the Caucasus was liberated. Only the Novorossiysk-Anapa-Taman region remained in the hands of the Germans. The last units of the Wehrmacht were evacuated from the Taman Peninsula on October 9, 1943. This day is considered the end date of the battle for the Caucasus. Blue's plan was a complete failure. The oil of the Caucasus, which seemed so close to the Fuhrer, turned out to be very far away. Well, he no longer tried to dream about the oil of Iran and Iraq. Let us imagine how events on the Soviet-German front would unfold in 1942 if the plans of Hitler and his generals were unraveled. Some historians and military experts believe that the duration of the war would have been reduced by at least a year, the political and military goals of the German Nazis would have been frustrated. But history does not have a subjunctive mood, and in the end we had what we had. Joseph TELMAN, Candidate of Historical Sciences.

(German "Blau") - a plan for the summer-autumn campaign of German troops on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front in 1942. The main idea of ​​the operation was the offensive of the 6th and 4th tank armies to Stalingrad, and then the offensive to Rostov-on-Don with a general offensive to the Caucasus. It was replaced on June 30, 1942 by the Braunschweig plan.

History

In contrast to the situation near Moscow in early 1942, the campaign of the Wehrmacht army in 1942 on the southern wing of the Eastern Front against the USSR was more successful. Here it was decided to launch the largest offensive of 1942. On April 5, signed by Hitler, Directive No. 41 was issued with the title “Operation Blau” (German: Blau) on the goals of the German army during the second campaign in the East. According to the directive, the general plan of the campaign was to concentrate the main forces for the main operation on the southern sector of the front in order to destroy the grouping of Soviet troops west of the Don, and then capture the oil-bearing regions in the Caucasus and cross the Caucasian ridge. The infantry divisions of the 6th Army were given the task of blocking Stalingrad and covering the left flank of the 1st Tank Army going to the Caucasus.

The implementation of the Blue plan was entrusted to Army Groups A and B. They included five fully equipped German armies numbering over 900,000 people and having 17,000 guns, 1,200 tanks, and also supporting 1,640 aircraft of the 4th Luftwaffe Air Fleet. The southern Army Group A under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm List included the 17th field and 1st tank armies. In the northern army group B under the command of Field Marshal Fyodor von Bock - the 4th tank, 2nd and 6th field armies.

Part of the tasks set by the plan turned out to be possible for successful implementation due to the unsuccessful offensive of the Soviet troops near Kharkov in May 1942, as a result of which a significant part of the Soviet Southern Front was surrounded and practically destroyed, and it became possible for the Germans to advance in the southern sector of the front to Voronezh and Rostov -on-Don with subsequent access to the Volga and advance to the Caucasus.

On June 30, 1942, the German command adopted the Braunschweig plan, in accordance with which the task was to deliver a new strike, not provided for by the Blau plan, through the Western Caucasus and further along the Black Sea coast to the Batumi region. After Rostov-on-Don was taken by the German army, Hitler considered the result of the Blau plan achieved and on July 23, 1942 issued a new directive No. 45 on the continuation of Operation Braunschweig.