“War Is A Matter Of Expedients” Said Von Moltke
at 8:20 am
(Correctitude, High Germany, Places, The King of Terrors, War)
Manstein ordered a signal to be sent back: “Withdrawal must be stopped at once.”
But the signal no longer got through. Corps headquarters did not reply any more. Count Sponeck had already had his wireless station dismantled. It was the first instance of a commanding general’s disobedience since the beginning of the campaign in the East. It was a symptomatic case, involving fundamental principles. Lieutenant-General Hans Count von Sponeck, the scion of a Düsseldorf family of regular officers, born in 1888, formerly an officer in the Imperial Guards, was a man of great personal courage and an excellent commander in the field. While commanding the famous 22nd Airborne Division, which in 1940 captured the “fortress of Holland” with a bold stroke, he had earned for himself the Knights Cross in the Western campaign. Subsequently, as the commander of 22nd Infantry Division, into which the Airborne Division had been converted, he also distinguished himself by outstanding gallantry during the crossing of the Dnieper.
The significance of the affair lay in the fact that Count Sponeck was the first commanding general on the Eastern Front who, when the attack of two Soviet Armies against a single German division faced him with the alternatives of hanging on and being wiped out or withdrawing, refused to choose the former alternative. He reacted to the Soviet threat not in accordance with Hitlerite principles of leadership, but according to the principles of his Prussian General Staff upbringing. This demanded of a commanding officer that he should judge each situation accurately and dispassionately, react to it flexibly, and not allow his troops to be slaughtered unless there was some compelling and inescapable reason for it. Sponeck saw no such reason.
What were the considerations which induced the Count to disregard superior orders ?
Although we have no notes left by him personally, his chief of operations and his deputy chief of staff, Major Einbeck, have laid down in a memorandum the arguments of the Corps command. An instructive report is also extant from Lieutenant-Colonel von Ahlfen, the chief of staff of 617th Engineers Regiment.
This is the picture that emerges from these reports: On 28th December 1941 Lieutenant-General Himer’s 46th Infantry Division, by rallying all its reserves, succeeded in smashing the Soviet bridgehead north of Kerch. The Soviets, and above all the Caucasians, had accomplished incredible feats. In spite of its being 20 degrees below zero Centigrade they had waded to the steep coast up to their necks in water, and had gained a foothold there. Without any supplies they had held out for two days. Their wounded had frozen rigid into ice-covered lumps of flesh. Frozen to death. The landings south of Kerch were likewise sealed off. But at that moment Soviet naval units attacked at Feodosiya, 60 miles behind Kerch. A heavy cruiser, two destroyers, and landing-craft entered the harbour under cover of darkness.
Of Army Coastal Artillery Battalion 147, detailed to defend Feodosiya, only four 10-5-cm. guns and the headquarters personnel had so far got to their destination. In addition, only one German and one Czech-manufactured field howitzer were in the port. The Soviet warships trained their searchlights on to the defender’s gun emplacements and shelled them to smithereens with their heavy naval guns. Then the Russians disembarked.
For infantry engagements the German forces available consisted of the sapper platoon of an assault boat detachment and a Panzerjager platoon with two 3-7-cm. anti-tank guns. Luckily the Engineers Battalion 46, en route to the west, had taken up quarters in Feodosiya for the night Count Sponeck put Lieutenant-Colonel von Ahlfen in charge of repulsing the Soviet landing. The lieutenant-colonel mobilized every single man he could find — paymasters, workshop mechanics, the personnel of food stores and field post-offices, a road construction company, and the men of a signals unit. From this motley crew the first covering line was organized outside the town.
At 0730 hours a signal arrived at Count Sponeck’s headquarters at Keneges: “Soviets are also landing north-east of Feodosiya on the open coast.” An entire division was disembarking.
A few minutes later telephone connections with Army and with Feodosiya were cut—just after Count Sponeck had received the mation that Manstein was sending 170th Infantry Division Sevastopol and two Rumanian brigades from the Yayla Mountains Feodosiya.
What were the Soviet intentions ? Their tactical aim, clearly, was cut the narrow neck of land between the Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula, and to annihilate the trapped 46th Infantry Division. But their strategic objective, undoubtedly, was to strike swiftly into the Crimea from their foothold at Feodosiya, to occupy the traffic junctions behind the Sevastopol front, and to cut off Eleventh Army from its supplies.
That the Russians were in fact pursuing this strategic objective, and not just making local raids on the coast, was proved by the fact that their invading forces comprised two Armies — the Fifty-first under General Lvov at Kerch and the Forty-fourth under General Pervushin at Feodosiya. The Forty-fourth Army had already disembarked some; 23,000 men of 63rd and 157th Rifle Divisions.
General Count Sponeck asked himself: Was 46th Infantry Division strong enough to throw the enemy forces back into the sea at Kerch and at the same time hold the Parpach Isthmus against the new landings at Feodosiya? His answer was No.
Major Einbeck records: “Corps command could only regain their initiative by immediately switching the focus of operations to the Feodosiya area. That was the place where the danger of a drive against Dzhankoy or Simferopol, now threatening Eleventh Army, might be averted. This decision involved surrendering the Kerch Peninsula as far as the Parpach line.”
Count Sponeck believed that, in view of the responsibility he had for his 10,000 men, there was no time to be lost. Because of his clearer, local grasp of the situation he felt justified in acting against the order of his Army commander. He realized that he was risking his neck. He knew the iron law of military discipline. But he was also aware of a military commander’s moral duty to put a meaningful order above a formal one. He did not evade the tragic dilemma which must arise whenever a man’s duty to obey clashes with his personal assessment of operational necessity.
At 0800 hours on 29th December Count Sponeck ordered 46th Infantry Division to disengage itself from the enemy at Kerch, to proceed to the Parpach Isthmus by forced marches, and “to attack the enemy at Feodosiya and throw him into the sea”. He sent a signal to Army informing it of his move, and then ordered his wireless station to be dismantled.
So much for Count Sponeck’s strategic and tactical considerations. They made sense, they were sober and courageous. There was not a trace of cowardice, indecision, or guilty conscience.
In a temperature of 40 degrees below zero Centigrade, in an icy blizzard, the battalions of 46th Infantry Division, the anti-aircraft units, the sappers, and the gunners moved off. The distance they had to cover was 75 miles. Only occasionally was a fifteen-minute halt called to issue hot coffee to the troops. They marched for forty-six hours. Many were frost-bitten in their fingertips, toes, and noses. Most of the horses were not shod for the winter and were emaciated. They collapsed exhausted. Guns were abandoned on the icy roads.
***
Judging by results, therefore, Count Sponeck had been justified. Or was there room for doubt ? Manstein himself, in his memoirs, does not answer the question unequivocally one way or the other. He criticizes Count Sponeck for facing the Army with a fait accompli and making any other solution impossible.
Manstein says: “Such a precipitate withdrawal of 46th Infantry Division was not the way to maintain its combat strength. If the enemy had acted correctly at Feodosiya the division, in the condition in which it arrived at Parpach, would scarcely have been able to fight its way through to the west.” If ! But the enemy did not act correctly, and the outcome alone is what counts. Whichever way one judges the Sponeck affair, the general’s decision sprang neither from dishonourable motives nor from cowardice. His dismissal from his command, decreed by Manstein, can be justified on grounds of principle, as an issue of obedience to superior orders. But this was not all. At the Fuehrer’s Headquarters a court martial was held under the presidency of Reich Marshal Göring which sentenced Lieutenant-General Count von Sponeck, who had been summoned before it, to reduction to the ranks, forfeiture of all orders and decorations, and to death by execution.
Hitler himself must have had some misgivings about this barbarous verdict, for on appeal by the C-in-C Eleventh Army he commuted the death sentence to seven years’ fortress detention. Judged by his later verdicts, this was a remarkable decision, virtually tantamount to acquittal.
But some two and a half years later, after 20th July 1944, one of Himmler’s execution squads amended Hitler’s clemency by brutal murder. Count von Sponeck was shot without cause and without sentence.
Paul Carell : Hitler’s War on Russia
