PRELIMINARIES IN THE EAST

In the months after the October 1943 set-backs west of Kiev, the Red Army quickly recovered and launched a new set of offensives. In the south, the winter of 1943-44 was more varied and mild than usual, but the mud caused by the periodic thaws did not hamper the movements of Soviet forces as much as it hindered the Germans. Soviet tanks were equipped with substantially wider treads and were therefore able to move more easily, and, in addition, the Red Army was by this time equipped with thousands of American trucks far more likely to keep going than the German ones. The greatly increased gasoline consumption characteristic of vehicles churning their way through the deep mud imposed a more serious burden on the oil-short Germans than on the Soviets. Furthermore, the Red Army had commandeered far more “panje carts,” high wheeled wooden wagons drawn by a single horse, which could often move—and carry equipment and supplies—when all other modes of transport failed. The major factors enabling the Red Army to maintain its offensive pressure, however, were the continued growth in Soviet military production, the greater experience and self-confidence of its military commanders, and the increasing disparity in the size of its forces as compared to the German units facing them.

The Russians were also aided by two aspects of Hitler's control of the German military effort. With an invasion in the West anticipated by the Germans, the basic strategy of the Third Reich, as already described in Chapter 11, looked to a successful defeat of that invasion before troops and equipment could be turned to the East. As codified in Hitler's general directive Number 51 for the conduct of the war of November 3, 1943, this strategy required that for the time being the Eastern Front would have to take care of itself while Germany concentrated her newly mobilized men and manufactured weapons on defending Western Europe against Allied assault. Minor deviations from this policy were required by crises on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1944, but on the whole this policy was adhered to because, as the directive put it: “In the East the size of the [German-controlled] space is such as to allow if worst came to worst even large losses of space without deadly danger to German survival,” while this was not the case in the West.