John Schettler - Thor's Anvil

“Then what is the problem?”

“There are two pincers involved, and they are very near meeting one another. Model should withdraw immediately.”

“Withdraw! Withdraw! That is all my Generals tell me whenever it snows. I will have the head of the next man who speaks that word to me!”

Now Manstein narrowed his eyes. “My Führer,” he said, stepping closer. “You may have my head any time you like, but while it remains on my shoulders, kindly allow me to use it!”

He put just a touch of anger there himself. They were words Manstein had spoken to Hitler in Fedorov’s history, during the great crisis and tragedy that had been Stalingrad. Now he spoke them here, instinctively knowing that the loss of Model’s troops would be a devastating blow to the army, and one that it would have great difficulty recovering from. Now he questioned the wisdom of even coming here to seek Hitler’s permission at all, thinking it might have been better to simply confront him with a fait accompli, ordering Model out himself. But that Army was under Rundstedt’s Armeegruppe Center, and he had no real authority there. All he could do now was make the best argument possible.

“Model is reporting the enemy has crossed the upper Oskol in force,” he said, mastering his temper. “They have cut the rail line to Prokhorovka and Kharkov. If we want to save that army, we must do so immediately. So yes, I advise he give up that useless position at Voronezh, and form a shock group here, right at Stary Oskol. He still has fuel and supplies to push southwest, and Steiner can attack up that same corridor. The two forces can link up in a few days. That army can still be saved, which would then put it in a perfect position to block the enemy advance on Kharkov, which is, after all, the final objective of their offensive.”

“And what about all these enemy divisions?” Hitler waved at the red lines drawn around Model’s Army. “They will all be free to operate against us.”

“They are mostly slow moving infantry divisions—too slow to pose a threat for weeks. All of their fast mobile divisions are already well to the southwest of the pocket, striving mightily to meet one another and finish that phase of their operations. Then they will lock arms, and go for Kharkov, shoulder to shoulder—unless we interpose Model’s Army between them, and do that now.”

“No!” Hitler flared again. “There will be no withdrawal from Voronezh! I forbid that! Look around you. Do you see von Rundstedt here? No, because he is at his position on the front obeying my orders. That is where you should be, not here, trying to stir more honey into my tea as before. Go! Leave at once. I order Steiner to counterattack, but Model stays right where he is.”

Hitler turned his back on Manstein now, hunched over the map table, his eyes narrowed with a mix of anger and pain. His miracle worker had come with the same proposal that Keitel and Jodl had pedaled. More withdrawals. They wanted to simply hand the enemy back everything that was won in those long hard months of the summer offensive. He would not allow it, and seeing that Hitler was adamant, Manstein pursed his lips, then saluted and turned to leave.

Halder watched him go, knowing that the war had, in that moment, crossed some unseen line. It was not something that could be seen on the map like the penciled in lines of the various fronts. It was something darker, more shadowed, more ominous; a turning point where he could feel that his long managed control of these events was now slipping from his grasp, and that of all the other Generals at OKW. Manstein had always been able to influence Hitler to see reason. Now even he seemed powerless to intervene.

As he watched Manstein stride off, without so much as another word, a thought came to him like the cold December wind, and he felt it for the first time, in spite of the warm fire on the hearth across the room. We could lose this war. We could lose it all. Hitler will make an end of all our best efforts, and hand us one impossible situation after another. At least Manstein has Steiner, a strong hand at the point of greatest crisis. Let us hope that is enough, because if we do lose Model’s Army….

He did not want to think about that. The cold in that line of thinking was enough to freeze the blood in his veins, as it would be now for all those troops if Manstein’s prediction were to materialize.

If Fedorov had been there, he might have seen how the lines of fate were now twisting around those of Model’s front. Manstein had avoided the debacle at Volgograd. He had correctly and wisely extricated Steiner’s Korps from the cauldron in which he sat himself down. Neither Steiner, nor Paulus, were now fighting anywhere near Volgograd. But the shape of that pocket where Model’s 2nd Panzerarmee now sat looked strangely like the one that had formed around Paulus between the Volga and the Don. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Hitler’sunderstanding of how war was fought was in no way like that of Manstein. The Führer wanted any hard won ground held tenaciously. He clung to major cities on a point of honor, endowing them with a significance they might not truly hold in a military sense. That was certainly the case for Volgograd at that moment, and also Voronezh. Hitler Believed it was his stand fast order the previous winter that had saved the day, and kept the burned out warrens of Moscow under his control. Now he would apply the same stubborn method to this crisis.

For Manstein, the vast space of Russia was the perfect proving ground for his concept of the mobile war. That space was to be yielded whenever it might be necessary to permit his forces to move and concentrate where they were most needed. He would even invite the enemy to advance, knowing that every mile they went took them farther from their own source of supplies, created flanks that they would have to man and guard, and presented him with numerous opportunities for a counter thrust. To master the situation, he now wanted to see Model’s army used in a mobile role, not to simply sit there like a dull iron anvil and be hammered upon by the Russians. He knew that even the hardest metal could be broken in such a situation. That was what anvils were made for, to burn, break, bend, or shape metal, or in this case to destroy it.

Model’s ability to hold as he had thus far was entirely dependent on that slender corridor for supplies, and now the Soviets were doing everything possible to choke it closed. It was as if the red army had both hands on their enemy’s neck, trying to choke the life out of him, while Steiner desperately tried to break that grip. Yet as he tried to attack up that corridor, he was met with heavy pressure on both the left and right. Two of his divisions were trying to hold back the southern pincer on the line of the Oskol River, leaving him Leibstandarte and Das Reich, along with the rebuilt 24th panzer Division from Odessa that Manstein had quietly ordered forward seven days ago, again without permission.

The arrival of both Grossdeutschland Division and the Brandenburgers created a noticeable shift in the balance of that struggle. These elite formations were fiercely competent in the attack, implacable on defense, and they had unshakable morale. Looking around the front for anything else he could find, Manstein saw that he had but one card left to play—Hermann Balck.

11th Panzer Division had been in reserve on the Chir front where it had been so instrumental in the defense there. Now he would commit this last mobile reserve, its place taken by two light armored units provided by Volkov. On the 29th of December, the last train from the south came whistling into the station at Prokhorovka, and the troops, tanks and vehicles of Balck’s divisions began to disembark and assemble.