Hitler's Panzers (28 page)

Kiev was a crucial benchmark in another, no less decisive way. On September 24, a series of explosions shook the city. Preset, remote-controlled demolitions started fires that destroyed much of what remained intact after the fighting. Hitler ordered retribution. The army enthusiastically cooperated not for the first time in such exercises, but in a visible, spectacular way that made its position on the Jewish question unmistakable. Its culmination was the shooting of more than 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar—an operation that would have been impossible without army-supplied transport, administration, and area security.

Events in Kiev reinforced the growing awareness among Russians who had worked and sacrificed to build a Soviet future that the Germans were no less committed to destroying that future. The Soviet people did not become overnight the united and determined force of Communist myth. Panic, looting, wildcat strikes—a general breakdown of law and order prevailed in Moscow during the fighting. Well before then, however, it was increasingly obvious that whatever might be wrong with the USSR, it was nothing the Germans could fix—or wanted to.

Stalin’s obscene treatment of his own people had created a significant opportunity the Germans failed to utilize. Stalin himself acknowledged the possibility in a speech of May 1945. Prospects for extending individual and local cooperation with occupation into a call for a joint war against Soviet tyranny nevertheless foundered from the beginning on Nazi-structured racism. Hitler forbade any consideration of Slavs as allies. Independently of Hitler, atrocities became a rear-area norm. Soldiers took snapshots of mass hangings and mass shootings, often sending them home to their families. Such messages as “1,153 Jewish looters shot,” or “2,200 Jews shot,” grew into boasts of 20,000, 30,000 shootings and more.

These body counts had little to do with actually fighting partisans. The vast, consistent discrepancy between the numbers of weapons seized and people executed make that point eloquently. The perpetrators submitted detailed reports to Berlin in codes so simple that British intelligence had been reading them since 1939. The information went unpublicized because the British government believed its release would jeopardize other code-breaking operations deemed vital to the war effort—especially the decryption of German raidio messages by the ULTRA operation.

Nor was the work confined to Nazi organizations. Einsatzgruppen, Waffen SS, and army “ field-grays” came together in a common cause across occupied Russia. While generals like Leeb and Bock offered token protests, Reichenau called for “severe and just retribution against subhuman Jewry” and for a campaign of terror against all Russians. Hoth issued a more extreme version. Guderian declared he “made the order his own.” Manstein, promoted to army command in the Crimea, took up his new post by demanding the eradication of partisans and “Jewish Bolsheviks.”

Arguably more crucial to the war’s metastasizing brutalization were the junior officers. In 1939 about half still came from more or less traditional sources: the educated middle classes broadly defined. With the outbreak of war, combat experience became the dominant criterion. There was less and less time to provide more than basic instruction to officer candidates who saw their survival to date as prima facie proof of skill and luck, and who tended to regard training courses in the Fatherland as an opportunity for unauthorized rest and recreation. After the fall of 1942, any German over sixteen could become an army officer if he served acceptably at the front, demonstrated the proper character, believed in the Nazi cause, and was racially pure. The Waffen SS was more overtly egalitarian, but its basic criteria were essentially the same.

This relative democratization in good part reflected the growing synergy between National Socialist ideology and the demands of the front. Hitler wanted young men “as tough as leather, as fleet as grey-hounds, and as hard as Krupp steel,” correspondingly unburdened by reflection or imagination. The Red Army at its best did not offer sophisticated tactical opposition. What division and regimental commanders wanted in subordinates was tough men physically and morally, those willing to lead from the front and publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate, indeed, that a steady supply of twentysomething lieutenants with wound badges and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired majors and colonels to suppress their own doubts about Hitler and his war. And men with such conditioning were more likely to encourage than restrain aggressive behavior against “others” and “outsiders.”

IN OTHER WARS Kiev was a victory for the ballad-makers. In this one it was no more than the first step to what the General Staff regarded as the campaign’s finale: a drive for Moscow that Halder expected to force Russia out of the war on any terms Germany chose to impose. Hitler, who had been considering the prospect of continuing operations into 1942, found no difficulty accepting an audacity that matched, perhaps even exceeded, his own. A new directive of September 6 acknowledged Moscow as the focal point of the campaign’s next stage.

The blitzkrieg team was frayed. The Luftwaffe’s operational losses had been compounded by the problems of maintenance at improvised forward air strips, and crew fatigue the system refused to recognize. The 2nd Air Fleet, Army Group Center’s opposite number, had approximately 170 single-engine fighters, about the same number of bombers, and 120 ground attack planes. The artillery’s material losses had been limited, but its horses were dying, its vehicles were breaking down, and its ammunition reserves were limited. The infantry was tired. Average divisional strengths had been reduced by a quarter—more in the rifle companies. Morale was still high; and to some degree the shortage of men was compensated by material. Increasing numbers of 50mm antitank guns, effective against T-34s, were coming on line. Army Group Center had 14 battalions of the assault guns that had demonstrated their worth over and over again in all sectors. In the final analysis, however, the attack on Moscow would go as far as the panzers could carry it.

The code name was Typhoon, and reality approached rhetoric. The initial intention had been to redeploy 4th Panzer Group on Hoth’s left and launch a two-pronged attack. The rapid victory at Kiev enabled Guderian’s group to be brought up on the right. When the number was finalized, Bock had fourteen panzer and eight motorized divisions, more than 1,000 tanks on a 500-mile front. The panzers were not what they had been on June 21. Casualties had been heavy and replacements inadequate. But they remained the cream of the army: tempered but not yet brittle, respecting their enemy but still convinced they had the Soviets’ measure.

Guderian’s panzer divisions were still at about half their assigned tank strength. The situation in Groups 3 and 4 was better. Two of Hoepner’s divisions had even enjoyed full, albeit brief, refits in France. The problem was sustainability. Shifting Panzer Groups 2 and 4 quickly and smoothly showcased the quality of German staff planning and traffic management, but it came with a price in wear and tear. Hitler had ordered engine production allocated to new vehicles, and the army group had received only 350 replacements. The shortage of other vehicles exceeded 20 percent. Fuel consumption was outstripping the Reich’s production capacity. Existing supplies remained difficult to move forward due to the still-inadequate rail system.

The main German offensive was scheduled to begin October 2. Panzer Group 4 would follow the secondary road Roslavl-Moscow, then pivot left toward the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Panzer Group 3 would break through in the north and swing right. The two groups would meet at Vyazma in another by-now standard encirclement. The sting in Typhoon’s tail, with apologies for the mixed metaphor, would be provided by Guderian. Panzer Group 2 would jump off two days earlier, break through to the northeast toward Orel-Bryansk, and create a second pocket. The one-two punch would shatter the Soviet central front and open for a second time the road to Moscow. Whether the city would be enveloped or captured by a knife-thrust up the middle was left to contingency. It would be a race against the weather, against Soviet ability to reinforce, and against the Germans’ growing spectrum of losses and shortages. Success depended—again—on speed and shock.
Also
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Panzer voran!

The Germans’ opponents were a mixture of worn-down veterans and grass-green conscripts. Most divisions were at half strength in men, less in equipment. All but a few of the tanks were old models, the same ones the Germans had already destroyed by hundreds. Higher headquarters lacked trained staff officers and mutual confidence. The Red Army did not expect the Germans to mount another all-out drive so close to the coming of the autumn rains. When air reconnaissance reported a massive German armored column advancing from Smolensk, the NKVD sought the crews’ arrest for inciting panic.

The Germans did well enough on that score by themselves. Panzer Group 2 started 17th and 18th Panzer Divisions northwest toward Bryansk. Fourth Panzer Division advanced 80 miles northeast toward Orel in 24 hours, covered 150 miles in four days, and took the city’s defenses so completely by surprise on October 3 that streetcars were still running when the tanks interrupted service. Casualties were fewer than 200 men. Bryansk fell on October 7, and 17th Panzer Division trumped 4th by overrunning an entire Front headquarters.

Hoepner’s group in Typhoon’s center was able to concentrate 560 tanks in two corps on a mere 50-mile front. The Soviets were simply pushed out of the way, and by October 5, Hoepner was ready to commit his reserve of two panzer and two motorized divisions: the third corps he had not had at Leningrad. Hoth’s group had fewer and less powerful tanks than Hoepner. Its supply problems were greater due to inferior roads. Constant counterattacks slowed its pace. Nevertheless Panzer Group 3’s spearheads found the junction between two Soviet armies, drove a wedge between them, and captured intact a number of major bridges over the Dnieper. Hoth’s promotion to army command under Rundstedt on October 5 had no effect on the well- worked-in staff that welcomed Reinhardt from XLI Panzer Corps. Dependable rather than spectacular, he had raised and shaped 4th Panzer Division, led his corps through France and Russia, and was part of the panzer family.

The Red Air Force responded to Typhoon in force, the Sturmoviks doing particular damage to tank formations. Guderian recorded personally dodging a series of attacks by low-flying bombers. The panzer groups’ initial successes nevertheless owed much to Richthofen’s Stukas, and to the bombers who interdicted road junctions and rail lines, harassed troop columns, and disrupted communications to the point where the Soviets failed to grasp what was happening to them as it happened. The tanks were used up in small-scale counterattacks. The artillery was overrun in position; the infantry held its ground until cut off.

Infantry-armor cooperation was closer in the initial stages of Typhoon than at any previous time during Barbarossa. The foot- marchers secured the panzers’ flanks by pinning Soviet frontline divisions in place, then crushing them with set-piece attacks that cost lives but inhibited orderly withdrawal even after Stalin was persuaded to authorize retreat late on October 5. The next evening, Group 3’s 7th Panzer Division cut the Moscow highway at Vyazma from the north. At midmorning on the seventh, Hoepner’s 10th Panzer entered the city from the south, closing a pocket containing 30 Soviet divisions from five armies. Elements of three more armies were enveloped when the infantry divisions of the German 2nd Army linked up with Guderian’s panzers at Bryansk on the seventh and eighth.

The trapped Russians fought with by-now predictable desperation. The Germans were no less determined, and this time the infantry was close behind the tanks. Fighting continued until the end of October. When final accounts were tallied, the booty included 6,000 guns and mortars, 1,300 tanks, and almost 700,000 men. Another 300,000 Soviet soldiers died anonymously or just disappeared. A 300-mile gap had been torn in the Soviet line, and no reserves were available to throw in. They had been sent to oppose Army Group South—an overlooked consequence of the battle for Kiev. Zukhov described the situation bluntly: The panzers’ way was wide open; nothing could guarantee against their sudden appearance before Moscow.

The High Command and Adolf Hitler agreed. And then the same generals who had for weeks been focused on Moscow with laserlike intensity decided that the time had come to end the war on the flanks. Third Panzer Group, now 3rd Panzer Army, was sent northeast to cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway. Guderian’s rechristened 2nd Panzer Army was ordered to send a corps southeast toward Kursk. The rest of it would join Hoepner and take Moscow—when, that is, the mobile divisions were no longer needed to secure the pockets, and once they could refuel.

Fourth Panzer Division lost two days in Orel with dry tanks and had to “borrow” 3rd Panzer’s fuel allotment to push a weak battle group up the Tula highway. The tactical sun was shining on October 6 when 34th Motorcycle Battalion pulled off another of the
Husaresstücke
(hussar stunts) by now routine for the panzer bikers by seizing an unde molished bridge. When the tanks crossed, the situation changed. An ambush of T-34s knocked out ten of 35th Panzer Regiment’s tanks and drove the Germans back across the bridge.

The advance resumed the next day, but the Germans were unable to reinforce and develop their success despite unusually strong air and artillery support. Fuel remained in short supply. The year’s first snowfalls began on October 7. And 4th Panzer faced a different kind of opposition. The Red Army had begun awarding the title “Guards” to formations that distinguished themselves in combat. The 1st Guards Rifle Corps was not what Guards would become. But it put stones in the Germans’ road for four days—time enough to construct a defensive line that held up the panzers for two more weeks.

In Hoepner’s sector the only division initially available to take the Moscow road was Das Reich, the 2nd SS Motorized. This was the first time the panzer arm entrusted a Waffen SS division with a vital mission, but the men in black were stopped by a roadblock backed by a couple dozen T-34s and 30 BT-7s. Not until October 13 did the advance resume. By that time Zukhov had brought up enough troops to form the Mozhaisk Line near the 1812 battlefield of Borodino. Rain and snow, thaws and freezes, were turning the ground to mud and transforming the overall logistic situation from precarious to desperate. Breaking the Mozhaisk Line took two weeks, first to last. When it was done, five panzer divisions were 80 miles from Moscow as the crow flies. For two weeks more they got no farther.