When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they did so along a front of approximately 1,200 miles using some 150 German and Axis-satellite divisions. The broad strategy behind the massive undertaking - the single largest offensive land campaign ever waged - was nothing less than the leveling of the USSR 'to its roots in one blow' (as described in the authorization order penned by Hitler).
When the invaders failed to fulfill that goal, they were left to fight a contest that became increasingly attritional. For instance, on 30 March 1942, the 16 panzer divisions then in the east could field a total of only 140 operational tanks among them, a number smaller than the officially authorized strength for just one such unit. In addition to tank losses, another 100,000 motor vehicles (trucks, automobiles, motorcycles, etc.) were also lost, with little prospect of their replacement any time soon. In terms of manpower, the German replacement system had managed over the winter to send just one man east for every four being lost there.
Naturally, then, the German strategy for their 1942 campaign in Russia had to be carefully chosen. The resources needed to repeat anything like the previous year's performance were simply lacking. Hitler's choice of strategy in the east that year, then, seemingly had to be selected from among the following four options.
First, there was the idea put forward by Gen. Friedrich Fromm, then head of the German army's replacement apparatus, to remain entirely on the strategic defensive in the east for the whole year. Such a change would have at once freed some resources to be used in the Mediterranean, while also bringing the east front armies back to full strength and mobility by 1 January 1943.
Second, a series of limited, sequential offensives could be launched to 1) capture Sevastopol and the rest of the Crimean peninsula; 2) advance Army Group South's right flank to Rostov; 3) pinch off and annihilate the Soviets' Toropets salient that jutted westward some 50 miles between the main fronts of Army Group North and Army Group Center; and 4) capture Leningrad, thereby achieving a direct overland link with the Finns.
Third, a new effort to capture Moscow could be launched from Army Group Center alone. The hope here would be the loss by the Soviets of their central communications hub for all of the European portion of the Soviet Union, coupled with the psychological blow inherent in being forced to move their seat of government, would together be enough to send fatal shock waves through the remaining portions of their state, economy and armed forces.
Though most observers at the time, including many on the intelligence and command staffs of both sides, expected the Moscow option to be the one selected, Hitler rejected it almost out of hand. And he rejected it for the same reasons he also set aside the other three options. That is, none of them could be depended on to be fully decisive that year. (Numbers one and two of the sequential offensives plan were carried out, but only as preparation for the main show.)
The German dictator believed he had to reach a final decision in the east in 1942 for two reasons. First, the Anglo-Allies were slowly but surely beginning to gather themselves for strategic offensive operations, and they couldn't be depended on to take more than another year before launching themselves back onto the continent. Second, Hitler was being inundated with reports from the various economic departments of the Reich government, all universally pessimistic about the possibility of continuing the war if some large new source of oil wasn't gained in the year ahead. In fact, the consensus view on the oil question held that all German mobile operations on land, in the seas and in the skies, would completely grind to a halt sometime during the second half of 1943 if a new oil source wasn't secured.
The German armed forces had actually finished the campaigns of 1940 with a slight surplus of POL (petroleum, oil and lubricant) supplies. That feat had been possible because of the new stocks added when Norway, France and the Benelux were overrun. As it turned out, though, no matter how fast the panzer spearheads thrust into the USSR's western areas in 1941, the feat could not be repeated. That was because the Soviet fuels captured tended to be of such low octane ratings they were useless for German engines until put through and expensive and time-consuming redistillation process.
The POL situation deteriorated still further once Italy came fully into the war. During peacetime that nation's main oil sources had been from wells within Allied territory. With Mussolini's declaration of war those sources were cut off. Thus the Germans had to begin diverting significant portions of their own precious stocks simply to maintain the already rickety Italian Empire.
Hitler had studied strategy, including Clausewitz, who emphasized the primary aim in war was always and everywhere to be the destruction of the enemy's armed forces, only after which would follow the seizure of economic and political objectives. Once he even scolded Heinz Guderian, the blitzkrieg's panzer general inventor: 'There's no need for you to try to teach me [strategy]! I've studied Clausewitz and Moltke, and read all the Schlieffen papers! I'm more in the picture than you are!'
He therefore knew he was putting the operational cart before the strategic horse when he picked the Caucasus oil regions as the target for 1942. His mistaken faith that the Soviets were already near complete exhaustion, however, along with his dread certainty he had no other viable options given the Reich's POL situation, compelled the decision. He told the assembled officers at the Army High Command: 'If I don't get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, then I must end the war'.
Recognizing a need, however, did not automatically provide the means to satisfy it. The distance between Taganrog - the small port town near the northeast corner of the Sea of Azov, and one of the jump off points for the new German offensive - and Baku, the heart of the Soviet trans-Caucasus oil region, is a little greater than the 700 miles separating downtown Warsaw from Kremlin Square in Moscow. Despite that daunting geographic fact, in 1942 the Germans would launch their effort along a front of only 450 miles, while at its peak the push would involve only 68 German and 25 satellite divisions. And even that force could only be gathered by denying almost all personnel and equipment replacements to the other two army groups, thereby further diminishing overall German combat capabilities along the rest of the front.
Maikop and Grozny, the two oil centers on the European side of the Caucasus, together yielded only 10 percent of total Soviet oil production. Baku, then, more distant across the mountains, had to be the final goal; for it alone produced some 80 percent of all Soviet oil, about 24 million tons per year.
An even more daunting problem, and one Hitler apparently was never made aware of, centered on how to actually get the Caucasus oil from the region to the German industrial heartland once the new conquest had been achieved. That is, in March 1941, the German War Economy and Armaments Board sent a report to the Army High Command pointing out it would at most be possible to send overland - via pipeline, truck and rail - some 10,000 tons of oil per month from the Soviet fields to Germany. The Danube barge fleet, as well as the overall traffic potential of that river, were already entirely taken up moving supplies from Romania's Ploesti oil complex.
The only really viable route for significantly large quantities of oil to get to Germany would be via the Black and Aegean Seas to Mediterranean ports. The document concluded: 'The opening of those sea routes and the security of the tankers in the Black Sea is the prerequisite for the use of Russian supply sources in sufficient quantity to support the further continuation of the war'.
Thus, after seizing the oil fields themselves, the German armed forces would still also have to annihilate all Soviet naval and air presence in, under and above the Black Sea, and likewise remove Anglo-Allied air and naval intervention capabilities in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Seas. The bad news apparently never got to Hitler, however, since the evidence indicates that particular report didn't get beyond the in-basket of Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, the Führer's chief administrative lackey at the Army High Command.
Of course, the Germans never got far enough to be able to tap any important quantity of oil from the main Soviet fields. Hitler also ordered the critical Baku complex not be bombed during the two months German bombers could reach it, since he still hoped he'd soon be drawing resources from it and therefore didn't want to acquire a wrecked facility. Thus the campaign that ultimately cost the Axis five entire armies didn't even seriously disrupt Soviet oil acquisition, let alone bring in new POL supplies for Berlin's war effort.
Given everything, then, the only strategic question remaining was why the German war machine did indeed not grind to a halt in 1943, as had been universally predicted by their economic planners the year before. Three factors intervened to give the Germans more time on that score. First, Italy capitulated and changed sides, thereby ending the German requirement to supply Mussolini's armed forces and allowing those quantities of oil to be funneled back to the Wehrmacht. Second, the German synthetic fuels program continued to expand through 1943, thereby providing more of the needed POL. And third, it seems many of the reports given to Hitler were based on falsified data.
That is, careful postwar examination of surviving records, comparing them with POL quantities actually used in production and on the battlefield, indicates supply officers and factory managers, from the bottom of the command and management chain to near its very top, almost universally under-reported the amount of essential POL they had on hand. They did so, in fact, by an average of about 50 percent.
Such a conspiracy of lies may at first seem unlikely in a police state as suffocating of individual initiative and as punishing of infraction as Nazi Germany. In a planned economy in which oil is the critical resource, however, it's understandable how everyone able to do so in any way would find it hard to resist building up, and then maintaining and concealing, a local, hidden, unreported supply that was kept as large as possible. Hitler seems never to have suspected, believing it was Armament Minister Albert Speer's organizational and technocratic genius that kept the gears greased and the panzers' fuel tanks topped off. Thus the Stalingrad campaign was ultimately little more than a laughable, useless dream played out within the context of a larger nightmare.
Map Clarification: In both scenarios, for all purposes, the western hex of Voronezh (N1334), as well as Rostov (N3635), are indeed TOWN hexes, just as shown on the map. Ignore the word "city" in the reference to Rostov in rule 7.4; that place is a town.