' The Caucasus And The Oil '

At last...........my Eastern Front book collection is now approaching a most satisfactory level, and I'm tracking down one or two of the harder-to-find ones : like this, Wilhelm Tieke's 'The Caucasus And The Oil'. It wasn't until I read Robert Citino's 1942 book recently that a realised that TCATO is so far the only detailed treatment of that campaign, which so far has attracted little scholarly study.

In the UK the going price for a copy ( it was published by Federowicz ) seems to be around £40-£60 - mine came from the US via e-bay at very reasonable cost..........

 

Martin of course you realize that Tiekes book is a bit tattered and old but still a good read, there may be something on the area more updated and unit specific ?

 

You're quite right about Tieke's book, Erich ( it was originally written in the 70s/80s ) - Citino describes it as 'big, sprawling and disorganized' which it is ; but it's still to date the only work in English devoted to the campaign. Citino also praises Joel Hayward's brilliant 'Stopped At Stalingrad' which has a good chapter but otherwise, for the Caucasus, he says 'it is necessary to consult a fairly obscure body of German-language literature'.

Citino's page-long note on the historiography of the Caucasus campaign is very interesting and starts by saying : 'For a campaign of such earth-shaking importance, the literature is thin' and suffers in academic and book-sales potential by being overshadowed by Stalingrad.

 

totally agree a major work needs to be in progress of this area of almost unknown's in English, so much is still lost and unheard of with only specifics covered ops such as Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk as the major points of the whole Ost front.

am not sure of Tieke is still with us or not but the man needs a good probe to re-work his book over again with more new detailed information or at least another author/team to take his work that one step further......

 

There's not a great deal in German on the campaign - most focus on individual aspects, so there are plenty of books on Gebirgsjäger actions for example. It's fairly well covered in the unit histories of divisions which fought there - 3 Pz, 125 ID, 198 ID - for example, and there's a smattering of memoirs, diaries and letters of mixed quality. Dimt's Flammender Kaukasus is among the best.

There's quite a lot at BA-MA, although KTB AGp.A is all but illegible thanks to some dodgy microfilming. Quite a lot of first-hand accounts were collected at Corps level - it looks like they were planning a propaganda book after the successful conclusion of the campaign... which, of course, never came...

The Caucasus campaign will feature heavily in my next book on 1942 operations.

 

It sounds like interesting stuff. I'm currently reading "Armageddon" by Max Hastings, which is a little too general to interest most people on this board, but he does have some interesting things to say about the air war and the very late realization that oil production was the key industry that should have been targeted. There is the suggestion that if oil had been targeted early, the war might have ended much sooner. It's hard to argue with that.

On a related subject, I've always wondered why the allies allowed Sweden to feed Germany with iron ore and steel? Sweden was "officially" neutral but in fact were the main source of many war materials that Germany desperately needed. There were hundreds of examples of Sweden violating the neutrality (transporting German troops and war material to the Finnish front by rail and ship might be the best example), so why didn't the allies declare war on Sweden? Russian subs could have had a field day sinking Swedish freighters in the Baltic. The Baltic was in easy reach of allied aircraft and they could have destroyed Swedish ships and ports.

 

I read Armageddon a few years ago, and it was a good book. I've never disliked anything Hastings has written. As for the oil, I forget exactly what he wrote, but the Allies placed oil third on their list of priority industries -- behind the electrical and transportation systems. I'd argue that hitting the electrical system harder would also have ended the war quicker: without electricity, industry ceases to operate. Oil would have immobilized the machines of war, while electricity would have immobilized the industry of war. Its a tough choice to make.

AWPD-1 TARGETING FOR VICTORY

 

The German accounts of the war, at least in 44/45 all have one complaint in common - lack of fuel. Speer continued to produce planes, but there was no fuel to train pilots. Panthers were coming off the assembly lines with no fuel... In many cases, German panzers towed a second panzer behind them to get to the front before a battle, simply to have enough fuel to have any mobility at all. By this point, they were mixing gasoline (synthetically produced) with 50% ethanol which greatly reduced the speed and power of vehicles. And there was damned little of that...

Even by this point in the war, with thousands of German prisoners saying the same thing and allied ground forces finding abandoned vehicles with empty tanks after each engagement, they still didn't really grasp how vital the fuel production was, or couldn't express that to the air commands. They'd hit a synthetic fuel plant then scratch it from the list even though the Germans would have it back in production in a few weeks.

If they'd have concentrated on fuel from early on (say, 1942) the war might have taken a far different course.

 

Yes, good work about the Kaukasus--as well as the Balkans--is hard to come by. Werner Haupt's KRIM/STALINGRAD/KAUKASUS is one of the good in-German
military overviews that came out with many of the somewhat sanitized versions of divisional/army group history from West Germany in the 1970s. Paul Carell's
(real name Paul Karl Schmidt) HITLER MOVES EAST has some good but spotty Balkan material up to Stalingrad timeline. His second book on the Ostfront's last years is almost unobtainable. I wish I could remember its name!

 

Well, you've got at least one guaranteed sale !

Oh - and Carell's second book was 'Scorched Earth'.

I'm currently re-reading Hayward's 'Stopped At Stalingrad' which, although primarily a study of the Luftwaffe actually does give a very good overview of the Crimean and Caucasus operations.

 

I Liked "Stopped at Stalingrad" as you realize the mess the Luftwaffe was facing when it was supposed to cover a huge area covered by the troops going to Stalingrad and Caucasus...

 

Another surprise 'find' in a London secondhand bookshop today - 'Battle For The Caucasus' by Marshal of the Soviet Union Andrei Grechko.

Now, I'm fully aware that this is one of those 1970's 'Progress Publishing' books which today are almost curio pieces of the Cold War.( here's a sample : 'The victory in the Caucasus was indisputable proof of the triumph of the Leninist nationalities policy and the unbreakable friendship of the Soviet peoples...the strength of the Soviet Union and the fraternal socialist countries is is a reliable shield against any aggression on the part of the Imperialists...' etc, etc, etc...........

However, the book contains much information unavailable elsewhere including sniper activity, mountain fighting and so on. As one of the few books dedicated to this overlooked area I'm pleased to add it to my collection.