Well, what about the Japanese?
Ah.
Yeah okay.
How about the Italians then?
Huh…
Well, there’s the Finns and Romanians.
Yeah.
Oh, and the Hungarians and the Slovaks.
Sure coulda used the Japanese, though.
Yeah
September 5, 1941
It started as an invasion of Poland, but the
European part of the Second World War has
now expanded to actively involve all of Europe,
the Mediterranean, most of the north half
of Africa, the Middle East, and action all
over the Atlantic Ocean, even as the war in
East Asia has reached ever more parts of China,
advanced into Indochina, and now threatens
the entire Pacific.
And that invasion of Poland happened just
two years ago this week.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is World War Two.
Last week Britain and the Soviet Union invaded
Iran, to “protect” oil supplies.
In Germany’s invasion of the USSR, Tallinn
fell and Leningrad grew ever more isolated,
there was a deadly evacuation by sea, and
an even deadlier blowing of a dam, and German’s
domestic euthanasia of mental and physical
“undesirables” officially comes to an end.
Of course, there are still plenty of people
out there that Nazi Germany considers undesirable.
This summer, over 20,000 Jews have been killed
in Vilnius, and this week on the 31st comes
what is often called the Great Provocation
incident.
Local authorities have two civilian clad Lithuanians
break into an apartment that belongs to Jews
and take a few potshots from the window at
German soldiers in front of a cinema.
Then, in retaliation for this “Jewish crime”,
all the Jews of the city are rounded up, brought
them first to a local prison and then to Ponary,
a suburb.
Between September 1st and 3rd, 5,000 and as
many as 10,000 of them are murdered there.
Tomorrow, the Vilnius Ghetto- well, two ghettos,
the small and the large with a non ghetto
corridor running between- will be established
with some 20,000 inhabitants.
3,700 Jews will die that day as well.
The German Army has advanced quite a bit to
the north from Vilnius by now.
In fact, by the 1st, the Germans are within
artillery range of Leningrad and are also
nearing the city from south side of Lake Ladoga.
On the 5th, Germany occupies the Estonian mainland.
Now, that day, Hermann Hoth’s panzer group
3, which has been savaging the Soviets on
the right flank of AG North lately, is sent
back to AG Center, so AG North only has Erich
Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 for the attack
on Leningrad.
The Red Army is making a few attacks of its
own this week.
The Western Front is continuing its attacks
for starters.
On the 1st, the 16th, 19th, and 20th armies
make a combined attack northeast of Smolensk
on the Dukhovshchina- Yartsevo Line.
The keep up the pressure for the rest of the
week, but it ends without any major gains.
But the big Soviet offensive against the German
held Yelnya salient finally strikes this week,
with 8 rifle divisions, two tank divisions,
and one of motorized infantry, backed with
artillery and rocket launchers.
George Zhukov’s Reserve Front forces attack
both north and south of the salient, but importantly,
for the first time, this offensive is coordinated
with the one at Dukhovshchina and a Bryansk
Front one at Roslavl.
On just August 30th, the Soviets push 10km
into Gunther von Kluge’s southern flank.
After more heavy fighting, on the 2nd, German
AG Center Commander Fedor von Bock decides
to abandon the salient after 6 weeks of fighting.
The Germans are in danger of being surrounded
early in the week, and by the 5th at the end
of the week, the Soviet 19th Rifle Division
has penetrated into Yelnya itself.
I will talk more about this next week.
I mentioned the Bryansk Front, and Stavka
order it to stop Heinz Guderian’s panzers
driving south to join the fight for Kiev.
“This precipitous action, coupled with Guderian’s
headlong southern advance, led inevitably
to the piecemeal commitment and abject defeat
of Yeremenko’s force.
Nevertheless, the Stavka insisted that the
futile attacks continue.”
In fact, Yeremenko is ordered to attack with
his entire force, surround Guderian’s panzers
and then advance in order to protect the Moscow
Axis and his own connection with the SW Front.
Apparently, he is referred to by his peers
as “the Soviet Guderian”, but this is
still an enormous and daunting task.
He orders the attack for the 2nd.
It is to be in two thrusts.
The 50th and 3rd armies are to attack toward
Roslavl with support from the Reserve Front.
His mobile units, 108th tank and 4th cavalry
divisions and the 141st tank brigade, are
meant to attack through the 3rd army and lead
the attack through Pochep toward Novgorod- Severskii.
While this happens, the 13th and 21st armies
will concentrate on Semenovka and then surround
and destroy the bulk of Guderian’s forces
in the whole Starodub, Pochep, Novgorod- Severskii area.
The distance between the two thrusts is just
under 150 km.
These plans require heavy regrouping and have
big supply issues.
Still, on the 2nd, the two columns advance
into Guderian’s forces.
The Germans, though, fairly easily push Yeremenko’s
forces aside, and by the end of the day the
4th cavalry has been ruined and the 108th
tank division partly surrounded.
Guderian has, by the next day, taken bridgeheads
over the Desna River and is beginning to threaten
Mikhail Kirponos’ rear.
The German 17th army has also captured a bridgehead-
south of Kremenchug on the 31st- and they,
the 6th army, and panzer group Kleist spend
the week trying and trying again to cross
the Dnieper.
Germany is, of course, not fighting this war
alone.
They do have allies, so let’s take a look
at them for a sec.
Japan is not going to attack the Soviets,
as Germany hoped they would, and many in Japanese
High Command think a German quick victory
over the USSR is unrealistic.
Josef Stalin has a good spy network in Japan,
and thanks to guys like Richard Sorge and
Ozaki Hotsumi, gets plenty of intel on Japanese
intentions, so he’s even starting to bring
a lot of men and material from the Far East
to the European Theater.
Japan had at least waited to see how the beginnings
of Operation Barbarossa went before making
any decisions; Benito Mussolini, on the other
hand, jumped right, even with all his commitments
in North Africa, Greece, and the Balkans.
The CSIR, that’s the Italian Expeditionary
Corps in Russia, will, however, not number
more than 62,000 men.
They arrive at the end of August, and Field
Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of Wehrmacht
Command, for all that they’re supposed to
be the best soldiers Italy has to offer, calls
them “a boundless disappointment” and
“half soldiers incapable of standing up
to the Red Army.”
But since Japan and Italy have been two most
prominent Axis Allies, now they’re kinda
replaced in importance by Finland and Romania,
at the far left and far right flanks of the
invasion force.
Finland has a solid army of 475,000 men, and
they recovered the lost territory pretty quickly,
but at a heavy cost, and Finland does not
have a lot of reserves, so Commander Carl
Gustav Mannerheim is suspending forward operations
and will play defense to protect the gains
they’ve made.
German High Command is asking for them to
make more attacks, but “Mannerheim informed
Keitel that this went beyond the terms of
their prewar agreement and, in any case, exceeded
his military capabilities…
Thus, before the end of the summer, Germany
had effectively lost its most worthy ally
on the eastern front.”
Romania brought 325,000 men in the 3rd and
4th armies, AG Antonescu, to the invasion,
but the Romanian army has big issues.
A lot of equipment is obsolete and the officer
training is quite poor.
There is also not a whole lot of industrial
support from back home and the standard of
motorization is pretty bad.
The attacks that took Northern Bukovina and
Bessarabia back early in the operation all
had German support, but German over extension
led for calls of independent Romanian action
against Odessa, so the Romanian 4th army has
been attacking that city, bypassed by AG South,
for nearly a month.
Despite repeated attacks, and even taking
Kubanka, which threatened the actual port
of Odessa, the Romanians have taken huge casualties
and are still bogged down in front of the
main Soviet defenses.
This may be because, as German High Command
notes, the Romanians are using WW1 tactics;
having the infantry make unsupported frontal
attacks against Soviet trenches.
They now stop the attacks, exhausted, and
will wait for reinforcements to arrive.
As to Hitler’s other allies: the Slovaks
fielded 41,000 men, but back on July 22nd
at Lipovec got a taste of organized Red Army
formations and were decimated.
They are not well trained and equipped and
are going to be mostly used for rear area
security jobs.
There are also 45,000 of Miklos Horthy’s
Hungarian troops, though nearly half of that
is used for security tasks, and the mobile
corps is 24,000 men.
These guys have fought well, even compared
to Panzer Group Kleist who they fought alongside,
but by now, heavy casualties have caused their
leadership to want to withdraw, seeing that
it won’t be a quick war, and they don’t
have a lot of depth for a long one.
Horthy approaches Hitler about this, but Hitler
will not allow their withdrawal.
Hitler has other things to worry about too,
like basic logistics.
“The assumption had been made during Barbarossa’s
planning stage that large quantities of Soviet
rolling stock and locomotives would be captured
in the initial phase of the campaign,, providing
support for the drive into the Soviet Union…
Yet, once the initial shock and confusion
of the invasion had passed, the Soviets were
quick to institute an extensive evacuation
of their trains with the subsequent demolition
of those remaining behind.
This was so effective that by the end of August
1941, the Germans had captured only around
1,000 locomotives of which just half were
still operational.
This critical setback had two major repercussions
for the German campaign.
First, the army became almost immediately
reliant on extending the narrow gauge lines
as quickly as possible in order to assume
the enormous burden of sustaining operations
to the east.
Planning for this conversion did not assume
the effects the Soviet “scorched earth”
policy would have on the railroads and installations,
nor the extent of destruction caused by the
Luftwaffe and front line units…
The conversion was therefore slower than expected
and achieved only the mot rudimentary standards
of quality control.
The second complication of the German failure
to capture large numbers of Soviet trains
was that the deficit had to be made up by
the already over extended German railways.”
Logistically, the Germans seem to be doing
better at sea.
In August, in the Battle of the Atlantic,
German U-Boats sank 23 ships for 80,300 tons
and lost just three of their own number.
However, on the 1st, the US Atlantic Fleet
forms a Denmark Straits patrol.
This is two heavy cruisers and four destroyers
at the moment, but will be increased.
The US Navy is now permitted by its government
to escort ships from any nation as long as
an American merchant ship is present.
On the 4th, the American destroyer Greer becomes
the first American warship attack by a German U-Boat.
It is undamaged.
“In fact, the Greer has been brought into
action by the reports of a British aircraft
and has been mistaken, not unreasonably, for
a British ship by the German commander.
Roosevelt, however, presents the incident
to the American public as an example of German aggression.”
Also this week at sea, on August 30th, the
first boat of the “Shetland Bus” begins operations.
This is a clandestine organization formed
by the SOE, British Naval Intelligence, and
Norwegian Military Intelligence that will
maintain contact with the Norwegian resistance,
and ferry people and equipment between Shetland
and Norway.
And that brings us to the end of the week.
With the occupation of Estonian mainland in the north,
Soviet attacks in the center, German attacks
in the south, and Romanian attacks at Odessa.
Two years.
That’s how long I’ve been hosting this
channel, and the war continues to grow ever larger.
Martin Gilbert has a few words about the end
of the second year of the war: “Two years
had passed since the German invasion of Poland…
In the East, 70 days had passed since the
German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The victorious German war machine destroyed
whatever it wished to destroy: Polish intellectuals,
Soviet prisoners of war, Yugoslav partisans,
French resistance fighters, each felt the
full force…
The Jews, scattered among many nations,, were
singled out for torture, murder, and abuse.
In Germany, September 1st marked the day on
which all the remaining Jews of Germany, including
the 76,000 in Berlin, were ordered to wear
a yellow Star of David on their clothing.”
Happy anniversary.
Two days ago on the Sabaton History channel,
Pär- Sabaton’s bass player- and I talked
about their song “Final Solution”.
You can check that out right here.
Our TG Army member of the week is Logan Holmberg.
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