Barbarossa (32 page)

Bock, who was ill, replied that he had "informed OKH verbally
of the contents of [Guderian's] earlier reports, and that the OKH
were thoroughly aware of the true nature of conditions at the front."
Guderian persisted in his "demand" that the orders be
changed, and eventually Bock consented to ring up Brauchitsch (who
was also ill; he had suffered a serious heart attack on 10th
November), and handed the reluctant Panzer commander an earpiece so
that he could listen in to the conversation.

Fatigue and ill health had sapped Bock's ambition, but they do not
seem to have affected ObdH's caution in his personal relations. In
the face of Bock's flat request to cancel the attack and go over to
the defensive in suitable winter positions, Brauchitsch was "plainly
not allowed to make a decision." Or rather, as an unprejudiced
observer might record, he made a decision—but not the one for
which Guderian, and to a lesser extent, Bock, had been asking—namely,
that the attack was to continue. All that Brauchitsch would agree to
was that the 2nd Panzer Army's larger objectives should be placed
temporarily in abeyance and that Guderian could confine his efforts
to reaching the line Zaraisk-Mikhailov and cutting the Ryazan
railway.

This change was a tacit admission that the southern arm of the
pincer attack on Moscow was no longer operational in the full sense.
The only hope of reaching the Russian capital lay, therefore, with
the Panzers of the 3rd and 4th
Gruppen
in their approach from
the northwest, and with Kluge's 4th Army, edging its way forward
astride the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Under the terms of the original
plan Kluge was not supposed to start his attack in earnest until the
two Panzer columns had met east of the capital, but this was plainly
impossible if Guderian had orders to go no farther than the line of
the Ryazan railroad. Meanwhile Reinhardt, by his audacious thrust
across the Moscow-Volga canal, had drawn down on the 3rd
Panzergruppe
the full weight of the Siberian reserve in a succession of savage
counterattacks against his flank. In five days the German order of
battle in the north had so altered that there were only two Panzer
and one motorised division moving forward, and the rest of the armour
was involved in desperate protective battles along their northeast
flank. Under these conditions it was essential that Kluge attack with
all his strength against the Russian centre, or the whole offensive
was in danger of withering away. Blumentritt has given a highly
subjective account of those critical days at 4th Army headquarters:

These unpromising conditions [the difficulties of the Panzer
divisions in the north] raised the question whether 4th Army should
join in the offensive or not. Night after night Hoepner came through
on the telephone, to urge this course; night after night von Kluge
and I sat up late discussing whether it would be wise or not to go to
his assistance. Von Kluge decided that he would gain the opinion of
the front-line troops themselves—he was a very energetic and
active commander who liked to be up among the fighting troops—so
he visited the forward posts and consulted the junior officers and
N.C.O.'s. The troop leaders believed that they could reach Moscow and
were eager to have a try. So after five or six days of discussion and
investigation von Kluge decided to make a final effort with the 4th
Army.

This version of events, with its picture of the commanders
managing their separate armies independent of any supreme authority,
like crusading barons, has no relation to the facts. It may be that
Blumentritt feels that the best way to protect Kluge and the ailing
Bock from blame for these critical days of "discussion and
investigation" (i.e., inactivity) is with the story that Kluge
was engaged in field research. What actually happened is that as soon
as news of the delays filtered through to Hitler,
via
army
group headquarters, OKH and OKW—accompanied as it was by a good
deal of verbal shuffling and dissimulation—he gave orders that
the offensive was to be renewed along the entire front. It was the
Fuhrer's order, addressed personally to every man in the German Army,
that made Kluge go over to the offensive on 2nd December, not the
latter's consultation with junior officers and N.C.O.'s.

At the end of November other developments, at the extremities of
the front, had been remarked at the
Wolfssschanze
, and there
is no doubt that they made a deep impression on Hitler, confirming,
if they did not initiate, his attitude in two vital respects—the
offensive capacity of the Russians and the need for constant
supervision of his senior commanders.

At the beginning of November the Russians had started an offensive
against Leeb's position in the Tikhvin-Volkhov bulge. This operation
was intended to draw German reserves away from the central front and,
on a longer view, to open the way for a complete relief of the
beleaguered Leningrad garrison during the winter, but it was
conducted in a manner reminiscent of the clumsiest battles of the
summer and the Khalkin Ghol. Attacks were always frontal; the enemy
was sought not at his weakest point, but where his resistance proved
most stubborn; the operation was controlled directly from Moscow, and
the commanders on the spot reacted with wooden orthodoxy under the
brooding gaze of their "members of the military council"
(commissars) and the NKVD. As the days passed, Russian losses piled
up under the "categorical requirements" of the impatient
Stavka
while the Germans, from their well-sited defence
positions, barely gave ground at all. All the predictions regarding
Russian power in the offensive, to which the Finnish war had given
urgency, were revived. It seemed as if the training and firepower of
a German division would always be a match for a corps of the Red
Army.

At the same time Timoshenko went over to the offensive in the
extreme south, with results that were very different, for in this
theatre Rundstedt's armies (in contrast to those of Leeb, which had
been static for nearly three months) were dangerously overextended.
Rundstedt himself had strong personal reservations about continuing
the advance after the autumn rains started, and had gone on record
with this opinion on at least three occasions. Whether Rundstedt's
attitude affected the vigour with which the infantry divisions in his
army group marched eastward is something for which there can never be
direct evidence. Certainly it made no impression on Kleist, who had
listened with substantially greater enthusiasm than his superior to
Hitler's mid-August instructions to "clear the Black Sea coasts
and master the Caucasus." The result was that while the 6th Army
was blocked in front of Voronezh, the 17th was spread out between the
Dnieper and the middle Don, and Manstein's 11th was removed from the
main battlefield in its attempt to clear the Crimea. Kleist had
continued to drive his weary Panzers east, across the Mius and into
Rostov—"Gateway to the Caucasus" and the mostly
easterly penetration achieved by the German Army in 1941. Kleist's
own account of his operations is not always above suspicion,
particularly when relating to battles in which he was defeated—but
his version of the Rostov setback (the first positive defeat suffered
by the German Army in any theatre of the war up to that time) can be
accepted. After the usual complaints about the weather and the fuel
shortage Kleist said:

My idea . . . was merely to enter Rostov and destroy the Don
bridges there, not to hold that advanced line. But Goebbels'
propaganda made so much of our arrival at Rostov—it was hailed
as having "opened the gateway to the Caucasus"—that
we were prevented from carrying out this plan. My troops were forced
to hang on at Rostov longer than I had intended and as a result
suffered a bad knock.

Whatever Kleist's intentions in Rostov, he had been singularly
careless of his northern flank, screening this with a few battalions
of satellite troops, mainly Italians and Hungarians. Timoshenko, in
contrast, had built up three fresh armies out of local drafts and
from the trans-Caucasian reserve and brushed the satellites aside on
the first day (an experience from which, as will be seen, the Germans
were singularly slow to take lessons). Kleist had to leave Rostov in
such a hurry that forty tanks and a large quanity of heavy breakdown
equipment was abandoned. When Kleist started to get into
difficulties, Rundstedt had announced to OKH his intention of
withdrawing to the line of the Mius River, but Hitler had forbidden
this and, on Rundstedt's threatening resignation, had replaced him as
commander of the army group with Reichenau. Just as Rostov was the
first retreat by the German Army since 1939, so Rundstedt was the
first senior commander to be summarily dismissed. They were omens of
a new kind, but Hitler interpreted them in a significant way. The
Russians, he believed, were not formidable in attack; this was amply
demonstrated by the fighting on the Volkhov. A resolute, unyielding
defence was the answer—and if the professional soldiers,
"trained" in the formal arts of tactics thought otherwise,
then the remedy lay in the Führer's own hands. It is against
this inauspicious background, and on the highly dangerous assumption
that even if the German Army should exhaust itself the Russians were
incapable of a serious counteroffensive, that the last attacks of 2nd
and 3rd December were ordered.

The tables of strength shown in Greifenberg's staff appreciation
still looked fairly impressive, and as every unit in the army group
had orders to go over to the attack—even the hard-pressed
Panzers protecting Hoepner's flank on the Moscow-Volga canal—there
seemed a chance that the Russians' front would crack at one point, at
least. But although the will was there, sheer physical difficulty
made its fulfilment impossible. The advance started well enough at
the various corps headquarters, but as it progressed downward and
outward to the leading formations a strange numbness and imprecision
are apparent, as at the extremities of a frostbitten limb. At some
parts of the front that day the thermometer fell to 40 below and the
breechblocks of rifles froze solid; oil in the sumps of tanks and
trucks had the consistency of tar, and the drag on the dynamos made
it impossible to start their engines; battery plates were warped,
cylinder blocks were split open, axles refused to turn.

Bock himself could rise from his bed for only three or four hours
a day. Less than a month before he had reminded his staff of the
battle of the Marne, which was given up for lost when it might yet
have been won. "Both opponents are calling on their last
reserves of strength, and the one with the more determined will
should prevail." Now he had lost heart. On 1st December he
reported to OKH, ". . . it is only possible to gain local
successes." Had Brauchitsch been completely fit, he might have
intervened—though knowing what we do of his pliant character,
it seems unlikely.

As it was, he simply lay about gasping, his face an alarming
bluish grey colour. "Great concern for the health of ObdH,"
noted Halder primly in his diary. On 4th December, OKW discussed the
possibility "that the Commander-in-Chief might have to ask for
his relief on account of his health." But by then the
ingredients of disaster were piling up; the German offensive had
burned itself out, and with it the whole striking power of the
Wehrmacht; Zhukov's counterstroke was but twenty-four hours away.

On the last day of Kluge's attack the wind had begun to blow. Many
of the infantry divisions had improvised "permanent"
positions during their period of immobility and were reluctant to
emerge from them to attack through a blizzard which cut visibility to
fifty feet or less. Yet one, the 258th, did manage to penetrate the
Russian positions during the short hours of the afternoon of 2nd
December. Myth and legend have multiplied around this episode.
Whether or not it is true that the Germans could "see the towers
of the Kremlin reflecting the setting sun" or that they were
brought to a halt by "Russian workers who poured out of their
factories and fought with their tools and hammers," the fact
remains that this was never a proper breakthrough, any more than the
operation of which it was a part was a proper "offensive."

[An account of this, which rather dispells the legend of the
"workers with hammers," has been given by Major General A.
Surchenko. According to him, the break took place on the 5th Army
sector, and as that had no reserves Zhukov allocated from front
reserve the 18th Independent Rifle Brigade (commanded by Surchenko),
22nd and 23rd Ski Battalions, 140th and 136th Tank Battalions
(totalling 21 tanks) plus 9 tanks from 5th Tank Brigade. The
breakthrough was stopped by a tank battalion of the 20th Tank
Brigade, and driven back by the mixed force allocated by Zhukov.
Surchenko claims the operations lasted from 1st to 5th December. Two
divisions of the Moscow Opolchenye (110th and 113th) defended the
Narva River line, but it is not clear whether they were engaged.]

Rather it was the last spasm in a desperate military convulsion
which was nearly to prove fatal.

During the night of the 4th-5th December the whole of the
"northwestern front" went over to the offensive, and by the
6th, Army Group Centre was under violent pressure along its entire
length. The Russians were employing no fewer than seventeen armies
and in the new generation of commanders—Koniev, Vlasov,
Govorov, Rokossovski, Katukov, Kuznetsov, Dovator—there were
names that were to become and remain objects of dread to the German
soldier for the duration of the war.

[Owing to the smaller size of the Russians' division, their
"armies" were seldom more than equivalent to a corps in the
Wehrmacht.]

Within days the three principal groups of Bock's command—Hoepner's
armour, Kluge's, and Guderian's, had lost contact with one another,
and it seemed as if the entire army group were about to disintegrate.
The very suddenness of the transition from an offensive pattern where
the flanks are protected by the momentum of the whole to a desperate
defensive resulted in a fragmentation of the German position into a
thousand combats fought in isolation by units with unusable vehicles,
small arms frozen solid (the grenade was the only weapon which
maintained its efficiency), half drunk on schnapps, frostbitten, and
riddled with dysentery.