Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part III
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Air Warfare on Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Meanwhile, far to the south, Army Group South advanced from
Poland. Its left wing was formed by Sixth Army, acting as a flank guard against
possible counterattacks coming from the Pripet Marshes; next, from north to
south, came 1st Panzer Group, Seventeenth Army, and, emerging from Rumania on 2
July, Eleventh Army operating in conjunction with some Rumanian forces. As
usual, the planners at OKH had staked their main hopes for operativ warfare on
1st Panzer Group, though not to the extent of freeing it from subordination to
Sixth Army. (Throughout the summer of 1941, German panzer groups continued to
be under the orders of infantry armies in order to prevent them from wandering
off on their own.) The 1st Panzer Group was expected to break through the
frontier defenses and advance very fast, its mission being to outflank the
Soviet forces on its right until, by turning southward to the Black Sea, it
could crush them in a Kesselschlacht against Eleventh Army coming from its
Rumanian "balcony." This strategy in turn rendered the south flank of
the panzer army open to attack. As always, there were wide gaps between the
advancing German columns, and Fliegerkorps V had already been instrumental in
beating back a corps-sized Soviet counterattack on 26 June in the area between
Lutsk and Rovno.
It soon became clear that the Soviet forces in this area,
which formed the Southwestern Front under Gen M. P. Kirponos, were better
commanded than elsewhere . In the sector of Seventeenth Army, they slowed down
the German advance, did not allow themselves to be disrupted, and, fighting for
as long as the situation permitted, made what were on the whole well-ordered
retreats. Some of Gen M. I. Potapov's Fifth Army withdrew into the marshes to
the north, where the Luftwaffe was unable to find them and from which they were
to emerge later in the campaign. Others fell back on the Stalin line and, after
that line was breached, tried to cross the Dnieper to safety. It was the task
of Fliegerkorps V, attached to the left wing of the army group, to prevent the
retreat. At first it did so with some success by attacking roads, railroads,
and transportation centers in Lvov, Brody, Zlotuv, Zhitomir, Berdicev, Starokonstantinov,
Belaya Tserkov, and Kazatin. Other than an occasional thunderstorm, the weather
was good and the country completely open. Hence, these attacks, which went on
day and night, were as successful as any that the Luftwaffe mounted in Russia
throughout the campaign. A high point was reached on 30 June when two or three
Soviet motorized columns, moving four abreast, were caught near Lvov and
subjected to what amounted almost to a slaughter. However, Fliegerkorps V did
not have dive-bombing units under its command. It was instrumental in keeping
the air clear of Soviet aircraft, but its ability to offer direct support to
First Panzer Army was limited. This was one factor that caused the advance of
that unit to be considerably slower at first than had been planned.
Penetrating farther to the east, the Germans faced different
problems. Whereas the nature of the terrain in the north had caused the advance
to proceed along the forest tracks, the countryside in the Ukraine presented no
limitations. Under such circumstances, it did not take long before Luftflotte
4, like Army Group South as a whole, found its forces threatened by lack of
cohesion. The problem was made worse by the almost complete absence of roads.
This caused the army and air force to compete for the few available roadways in
order to bring supplies forward. At times it became necessary to supply the
forward units of the Luftwaffe by air, always a very costly operation. As a
result, the bombers were increasingly left behind, the fighters could not reach
the front at all, and only the attack aircraft got proper logistic support.
Although bridges on the Dnieper were repeatedly hit by sorties flown by
Fliegerkorps V, traffic over them was never completely halted because they
proved difficult to destroy. Attacks were also made on the railway network east
of the river in the Konotop-Glukhov- Gorodishche-Priluki-Bakhmach region.
Tactical results were very good, with some 1,000 railroad cars destroyed, but
again the withdrawal of at least some Soviet forces in front of 1st Panzer
Group could not be prevented.
Meanwhile, having reached the Dnieper on 10 July, 1st Panzer
Group was forbidden by Hitler from crossing it. Thereupon the Germans turned
their armored spearheads towards the southeast, keeping west of the river. This
brought them into the rear of the Soviet armies that were slowly falling back
in front of the German Seventeenth Army and led to the creation of the pocket
at Uman. Here Fliegerkorps V was more successful than before in helping the
ground forces seal off the pocket and prevent the escape of the Soviet forces,
particularly since it was assisted by units of Fliegerkorps IV coming from
Rumania in support of the German Eleventh Army. However, this meant that Sixth
Army in the north had to be left completely unsupported. That army accordingly
had to beat off the Soviet Fifth Army coming out of the Pripet Marshes and
directing its attack against the exposed rear of 1st Panzer Group. It did so,
but at the cost of slowing its own advance to a snail's pace and thereby
laying-even though unintentionally-the foundations for the subsequent vast
Kesselschlacht of Kiev.
When Army Group South had finished clearing the Uman pocket
and was preparing to cross the Dnieper on 7 August, it found itself exposed to
a sudden counterattack by the Soviet Twenty-sixth Army on the right flank of
the German Sixth Army. This, had it succeeded, might have cut the army group in
two or at least driven a deep wedge between the widely separated German forces.
As usual, the only force immediately available to hold off the threat was the
Luftwaffe; and, as was often the case during this period, it did so quickly and
effectively, though at the cost of switching to battlefield operations for
which many of its aircraft were not really suitable. A week was to pass before
the German forces coming from the north and the south simultaneously (one of
1st Panzer Group's armored divisions had to turn around and retrace its
previous movement) were able to halt the Soviets and throw them back across the
river. During the first decisive days, Fliegerkorps V, throwing in every
available unit and forced by unfavorable weather to fly at altitudes as low as
50-100 meters, fought on its own and later claimed to have destroyed 94 tanks
and 184 motor vehicles.
By the middle of August, although isolated pockets of enemy
resistance remained, the situation west of the Dnieper could be regarded as
stabilized. From 17 August on, Luftflotte 4 accordingly moved its efforts
farther to the east, hitting the communications center of Dnepropetrovsk day
and night in the hope of preventing the Soviets from making further withdrawals
and preparing for the Germans' own forthcoming offensive. Owing partly to
distance and partly to sheer wear and tear, the number of fighters available to
Fliegerkorps V was down to 44. Although these fighters performed marvels (on 30
August, there was an announcement that 1,000 Soviet aircraft had been shot down
in air-to-air combat), they could not be everywhere at once. Hence, a Soviet
attack on the bridge across the Dnieper at Gornostaypol, which the Germans had
taken in a coup de main, was successful in delaying the advance of Sixth Army
once again. Fliegerkorps V was, however, able to protect the first bridgehead
built by 1st Panzer Group across the Dnieper on 8 September against determined
Soviet attempts to attack it from the air.
Throughout this period, Fliegerkorps IV, with its weaker
forces, continued to fly missions in support of Eleventh Army, which was
approaching the Crimea. It attacked the bridges across the Dniester to prevent
Soviet reinforcements and to prevent the escape of Soviet forces from the Uman
pocket. The center of gravity gradually shifted eastward until Odessa, used by
the Soviets in an attempt to evacuate their forces by sea, became the most
important target. When the Rumanians
crossed the Dniester in the middle of July, Fliegerkorps IV typically switched
back to close support. The same pattern was thus revealed in this somewhat
separate theater as everywhere else. If only because not even Richthofen's
close support experts could respond to the army's demands in less than two
hours, the Luftwaffe's normal preference was for what the Germans called
operativ warfare and what we would call behind-the-front interdiction. At least
during the early phases of the campaign, close support came into its own only
when a clear geographical line divided the forces on both sides or else when a
Soviet counterattack created an emergency.
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