Anthony Tucker-Jones - The Battle for the Caucasus

IMAGES OF WAR

THE BATTLE FOR THE CAUCASUS 19421943

Hitlers mountain troops scaled the Caucasus Mountains in 1942 and hoisted the Nazi swastika on Mount Elbrus.

IMAGES OF WAR

THE BATTLE FOR THE CAUCASUS 19421943

RARE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM WARTIME ARCHIVES

Anthony Tucker-Jones

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

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Copyright Pen and Sword Books Limited, 2018

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright of all the photographs. If there are unintentional omissions, please contact the publisher in writing, who will correct all subsequent editions.

ISBN 978 1 47389 492 1

eISBN 978 1 4738 9494 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 4738 9493 8

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This book is intended to provide a visual introduction to Hitlers ambitious Operation Edelweiss, his dramatic if very foolhardy attempt to seize the oilfields of Maikop, Baku and Grozny in the Caucasus in the southern Soviet Union. Seen by many as a wholly unnecessary diversion of resources from Hitlers conquest of the city of Stalingrad, this campaign held the key to Stalins vital oil supplies. It also featured the deployment of Hitlers elite mountain troops.

The battle for the Caucasus is the least known of the campaigns fought on the Eastern Front and yet it is full of high drama. Looking at the map the inevitable question is what possessed Hitler to send an army deep into the Caucasus mountains, sandwiched between the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east. It seemed a fools errand in a distant land.

Hitlers ambitious plans for the Caucasus may look like mission creep after the remarkable destruction of the Red Army in the summer of 1941 and spring of 1942. However, it was actually a material strategic consideration as early as July 1941. He had instructed then:

The enemy forces which are still west of the Dnieper must be decisively defeated and dispersed. As soon as the state of operations and of supplies allows, 1st and 2nd Panzer Groups will be concentrated under command of 4th Panzer Army and, with the support of the infantry and mounted divisions, will occupy the Kharkov industrial area and thrust forward across the Don to Caucasia.

By mid-August 1941 Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the German Army, was at loggerheads with Hitler over what their strategic priorities were on the Eastern Front. Brauchitsch felt Moscow was the goal, but the Fhrer thought otherwise. The most important aim to be achieved before the onset of winter, wrote Hitler, is not to capture Moscow, but to seize the Crimea and the industrial and coal region on the Donets, and to cut off the Russian oil supply from the Caucasus area. In the north, the aim is to cut off Leningrad and join with the Finns.

Hitlers generals were not pleased by these strategic diversions on the flanks, which inevitably weakened the drive on Moscow. If anything was going to unseat Stalin and force the Soviets to sue for peace it would be the humiliating capture of their capital. Hitler as always felt he knew best. His generals were aghast that he wanted to capture Leningrad and wipe it from the map. The Kriegsmarine could not understand why he was not even prepared to preserve the harbour installations and shipyards. Hitler intended the same fate for Moscow, but he failed to capture either city.

In the meantime Hitler sacked Brauchitsch and assumed the role as CinC Army for himself. Hitler also got rid of his turbulent priest of bad news General Halder, who was serving as the Armys Chief of the General Staff. Halder, who saw himself as the voice of reason in warning Hitler about the Red Armys build-up north of the Volga, was replaced by General Zeitzler.

When the spring campaigning season of 1942 opened, Hitler once more was content to stand still before Moscow and concentrate his efforts against the distant Caucasus, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Zeitzler was a first-class staff officer. He had served Kleist on the Eastern Front, then been posted as Chief of Staff in the West where he had helped thwart the Canadian-led raid on Dieppe. Zeitzler was flattered by his latest promotion and was not in a position to oppose Hitlers continued assault on Stalingrad and the move into the Caucasus. When he finally grasped what was happening German reserves could not be extricated because they had been committed too far.

Besides this, German intelligence made a compelling case for going into the Caucasus. Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, who was in charge of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front, said:

We knew that the output of manganese ores in the Urals and western Siberia was inadequate for the local steel industry, and that manganese was having to be transported north from Chiatura in the Caucasus; since the Caucasus was the objective of our summer offensive, its capture would have a severe effect on Soviet steel production. Furthermore, the second richest veins of tungsten and molybdenum in Europe (after those in Portugal) were also in the Caucasus... We calculated that the loss of ferrous alloy production at Sestafoni [in Georgia] would reduce high-grade steel production for the arms industry by at least thirty per cent.

In contrast the impact of seizing the regions oil was likely to be much slower. As far as petroleum production was concerned, however, adds Gehlen we did not expect the loss of the Caucasian oilfields to have much effect on Soviet fighting capacity until mid-1943, as there had been extensive stockpiling in Central Russia.

Like all military campaigns the geography of the region played a great part in the battle for the Caucasus. The gateway to the region is either via the mountainous Crimea and across the Kerch Straits, Rostov-on-Don or Stalingrad on the Volga. Taking any of these would have permitted Hitlers forces to wheel south-east into the Caucasus. To the north-east lies the Caspian Depression formed by the mighty Volga delta and the city of Astrakhan. This blocks the route east into Kazakhstan.

The first major physical barriers in the northern Caucasus are the Kuban and Terek rivers. Then from the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea the Caucasus mountains stretch south-east to Baku on the Caspian Sea. These formed a protective barrier for the southern Soviet republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Conquest of the latter would have brought Hitler to the very borders of Turkey and Iran.