In the first few months of the attack, the Germans encircled and captured massive amounts of Soviet soldiers, around 300,000 each at Minsk and Smolensk, and over 600,000 at Kiev. And, then right outside Moscow, they captured another 600,000 at Vyazma.
That’s a mind-boggling amount of men to encircle. Weren’t the Germans worried about all those soldiers in their rear, ready to attack from behind? I presume the Germans were still advancing forward. It seems the Red Army could break a circle with that many men?
Inside the circle, what was it like? Did the Soviets see Germans in front and said “The gig is up; all 300,000 of us give up?”. Or was there constant airstrikes and artillery barrages poured into the circle? My guess is that once surrounded, they couldn’t get re-supplied in ammo or food, so there wasn’t a choice?
Obviously, I want to learn more about the beginning of Barbarossa, where the Germans were humming along before Moscow and Stalingrad. Any book recommendations? I just got finished with Beevor’s Stalingrad book, but want to know more about the earlier parts of the Eastern Front.
Perhaps as a seperate observation, it seems strange that 91,000 encircled at Stalingrad was the turning point, which is less that 1/6 of the amount of solders captured right outside Moscow.
At least from what I read, most of the soldiers captured or encircled were in the process of mobilizing for the defense of the Soviet borders and thus were completely unorganized, ill-equipped and had poor morale. Many soldiers basically shut-down upon seeing the masses of German troops and were incredibly hesitant to mount an actual defense. The book “The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II” does an incredibly good job of showcasing the difference between those captured early in the war without a fight and those later who were much more organized and put up incredible resistance.
I’ve got some recommendations that don’t have anything directly to do with the campaign. You seem to be uncomfortable with the concepts of maneuver warfare and the operational art being used at that point.
An oldy but a goody:
Sun Tzu - Art of War
More directly relevant to the ways the German’s were trying to operate and the development of mechanized tactics during the interwar period:
Heinz Guderian - Achtung Panzer
B H Liddell Hart - Strategy: An Indirect Approach
A more modern look:
Robert Leonhard - The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver Warfare and Airland Battle
Then seek out the specifics of the campaign and the battles within it. At that point you’ll have a better mental framework to think about the information of specific actions. It’s easier to break apart the pieces with the right tools. That might include Hart’s discussion of gaps and surface or Sun Tzu’s ordinary and extraordinary forces.
It wasn’t the 91,000 encircled inside Stalingrad; it was the million-plus that Vasilevsky and Zhukov mustered to encircle the Germans in the counterattack. The Axis allies (mostly Romanians and Italians) who held the flanks of the German spearhead were weak, badly led, outgunned, and stretched very thin; when the Soviet onslaught began, they gave way rapidly, and the Red Army attacks from north and south linked up within three days. German units trapped east of the meeting point retreated into Stalingrad, while others fled west.
Then Hitler’s military “genius” came into play; instead of allowing a breakout west, he instructed Sixth Army to hold onto Stalingrad. However, the Luftwaffe had nowhere near enough planes to resupply them, and with inadequate food, fuel, and ammunition, the end was clear.
As Asuka notes the men taken prisoner were in no state to offer any resistance. John Keegan’s The Second World War records a German view of the prisoners taken in the aftermath of the Kiev encirclement;
p. 161 ‘We suddenly saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us,’ recorded an eyewitness. 'From it came a subdued hum, like that of a beehive. Prisoners of war, Russians, six deep…We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, then what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching towards us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of will to live enable to obey the order to march? All the misery of the world seemed to be concentrated there.’
The Germans also surrounded some big pockets of Soviet troops in the 1942 campaign, such as those outmaneuvered in the Soviet offensive at Kharkov in the spring. They fought furiously and in a relatively organized way to break out of the encirclement. And some units as well as individual did, but still a big ‘bag’ captured by the Germans. The force inside the pocket is going to typically run out of ammo and supplies if it can’t pretty quickly get past the side of the pocket it pushes on, which is going to tend to be the one in the direction of its original rear area, which the force surrounding the pocket basically knows.