That was the plan, and it was executed with traditional German ferocity in the attack. The 17th Siberians had barely had time to catch their breath after arriving on the trains, when suddenly they were faced with the mobile wrath of five massed German Panzer Divisions. Concentrated against the 17th Siberians, they punched through in a grueling two-day fight, whereupon Hoth ran through the hole in the line like a madman, his 57th Panzer Korps leading the Schwerpunkt through with 12th Panzer Division. On July 8th, the tip of Hoth’s spear was already 40 kilometers east of the breakthrough point where the battle was still raging. The Siberians had tried to plug the gap by sending in their one reserve unit, the 57th Motor Rifle Division, but it bought them only a brief stay.
Hoth would drive that penetration 100 kilometers before the Soviets could react and bring in two reserve armies to try and staunch the deep wound in the front. His lead elements were nearing Yelets, covering half the distance to Lipetsk in three days before growing pressure on both the north and southern flanks of the penetration prompted him to stop. It was here that the wisdom of Sergei Kirov was most keenly seen. What Hoth needed now, more than anything, was good infantry to hold the flanks of his drive so he could keep the Panzer Divisions moving instead of having to fend off enemy counterattacks. But all that infantry was far to the west, fighting to reduce the Kirov Pocket and claim the city named for the Soviet head of state.
Events would continue to develop rapidly over the next week. The Grossdeutschland Division Recon Battalion fought like demons to hold the narrow grip they had over the Don north of Kalach. They held off the entire Soviet 8th Armored Corps, a formation that perhaps had less striking power than its name suggested. Further south, 1st SS Division reached the lower Don, then turned the area over to German security regiments and moved northeast to rejoin the main attack on Volgograd.
Then, on July 15, 1942, the SS 5th Panzergrenadier Regiment of the Totenkopf Division met a strange looking band of cavalry. The SS had been sent to see if a crossing point could be forced south of Tormosin that would allow an approach to Volgograd from the southwest. There, Ivan Volkov had mustered units at Kotelnikovo and sent them up to that very place. It was defended by a pair of Soviet Rifle Divisions that had been dug in there for nearly a month. Volkov’s troops merely watched them from their positions on the southern bank of the river… Until the Totenkopf Division arrived. Volkov’s men fished, swatted mosquitoes, lolled about on the banks of the river occasionally firing a mortar or artillery piece at the Soviets, and basically watching the German troops methodically reduce the defense to nothing over a three-day battle.
Then the Argir Cavalry Regiment of Volkov’s Kuban Command swam their horses across the river to meet their new found ‘Allies’ for the first time in the war. The rag tag horsemen stared in awe when they saw the tough Germen Panzergrenadiers in their dark camo uniforms, MG-42s slung over their broad shoulders, and belts of ammunition dangling below their waist. The Germans did not quite know what to make of them. They looked much like all the other cavalrymen they had chewed up in their long year of war in Russia.
It was an awkward and near silent meeting, until one of the Lieutenants in the Argir Cav simply clicked his heels together and stiffened his arm in the traditional Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler!” he shouted, “Heil Volkov!”
This brought smiles and laughter from the Germans, and a burly SS Sergeant stepped forward, extending his hand. With that single handshake, the Germans had finally linked up with their ally deep within the heartland of Asia, the Orenburg Federation, and the war would never be the same after that.
Chapter 6
The strategic situation facing the Soviets at Volgograd was radically different from that in Fedorov’s history. The entire eastern bank of the Volga was a hostile shore, where despondent troops under the black flag of Orenburg huddled in heavy concrete bunkers studded with the cold steel of artillery and machineguns. The daily ritual was for both sides to exchange desultory artillery fire, but Volkov’s men had never been able to press a direct cross river assault against the city itself. In fact, Kirov’s troops had crossed years ago, occupying areas where the river swept in a wide bend near Beketova, and now they also sat in heavy fortified bunkers, waiting.
Yet nothing could get down that river from the north in the way of barges for supply. The guns on the east bank were plentiful enough to close that waterway completely. Instead, the city relied on the rail lines coming in from the north, west, and south. Two of the three had already been cut, leaving only the north rail line open to feed in the vital stores of food, fuel, ammunition and replacement troops, if they could be found. If that rail line were to be cut, then the city would have to rely on its own internal production.
The politically important city of Kirov had done this for over six months, the stony heart beating at the center of the Kirov Pocket. On July 19, that city finally fell, as the thick encircling bands of German infantry slowly closed on it like a steel vise. Sergei Kirov wept that night, not for the dint to his personal pride, but for the thousands of men who had fought there, enduring the whole winter, the rains and mud of spring, undaunted, until they were simply overcome by superior numbers and lack of supplies.
The city itself was a gaunt, broken ruin, its buildings decapitated by artillery and bombing, the cold stone walls of the ruins scored black with the char of fire. Virtually anything that could be burned for heat and cooking had already been consumed. There wasn’t a dog left alive in the entire city, as all had been killed for food long ago, and not even the ubiquitous rats survived the hunger that sought them out in the last extreme. In many ways it was harder to take the news of the city’s demise than the burning of Moscow, and it was compounded when on that same day, the German 51st Infantry Korps stormed into Kursk.
Further north, the Russians had taken hold of Hoth’s 3rd Panzer Army like a man wrestling with a mighty serpent. The 1st Shock Army under Konev had moved into reserve long ago, and it struck from the north, while Yeremenko’s 1st Red Banner Army came up from the south. He had not yet fully supplied his army, and felt he had been forced into combat before he was ready, but war was war. Now his army was strung out along the deep southern shoulder of Hoth’s advance, and the two armies had brought enough to the fight to slow and then stop the German drive.
“We’ve stopped them,” said Zhukov, “but we haven’t the strength to do anything more. Pushing them back is out of the question. And now, with this news of the end of resistance in the Kirov Pocket, I fear the Germans will soon be bringing all the infantry they had there onto the line. I give us another month, but after that, something will break.”
“What about all the troops we have on the Don?” asked Kirov. “Might we launch that offensive early?”
“We might, but it would likely stall half way to our planned objective. Give me time and let me build those divisions up a bit more. I’m sending them everything I can get my hands on. Under the circumstances, I will have no troops left for the planned attack towards Kharkov this summer… They are all in the Kuban.”
“Enough of that!” Kirov turned on him. “If they weren’t there, all the Germans facing them would be elsewhere.”
“You mean the two divisions at Kerch in the Crimea? Those are the only German forces presently in contact with our armies in the Caucasus. Even Volkov has been content to simply sit on his line south of the Kuban and wait. They are completely ignoring that front, as I knew they would. There is plenty of time for that later. The Germans just linked up with Volkov south of Tormosin. That route isn’t practical for any real communications between the two sides, but it was a nice little symbolic victory for the folks back home.”