The Moscow Option (3 page)

Do you remember the dryness in your throat
When rattling their naked power of evil
They were banging ahead and bellowing
And autumn was advancing in steps of calamity?
Boris Pasternak

I

According to Führer Directive 21, issued on 18 December 1940, the German Army was to ‘crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’. With that aim in mind eight infantry armies and four panzer groups had crossed the border on 22 June 1941, destroyed the bulk of the armies facing them and advanced deep into Soviet territory. For three weeks, as the miles rolled away beneath the panzers’ tracks, any doubts as to the enormity of the task had been subdued beneath the enthusiasm of conquest. In the north Hoppner’s two panzer corps were a mere eighty miles from Leningrad by mid-July; in the south Kleist’s Panzer Group was striking towards the lower Dnieper. In the centre, astride the main Moscow highway, the panzer groups under Hoth and Guderian twice closed on huge concentrations of Soviet troops. By 16 July the tanks were rumbling through the ruins of Smolensk, already two-thirds of the way to the Soviet capital. A slice of the Soviet Union over twice the size of France had been amputated, and close to two million prisoners taken. This, surely, was victory on an epic scale.

Epic, perhaps. But not yet victory. The Soviet Union had not collapsed as Hitler had predicted it would. ‘We have only to kick in the door,’ the Führer had said, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Well, the door had been comprehensively kicked in, but the structure still stood bloodily intact.
Fall Barbarossa
, the plan for the defeat of Russia, was beginning to fray at the centre.

It had been an optimistic plan from the beginning. There were too many miles, too few roads, too little firm and open ground. This enemy was an altogether different proposition to those already crushed under the Wehrmacht’s motorised heel. The citizens of the Soviet Union had a greater will to resist than had been shown by the French; they had more room to make resistance count than had been available to the hapless Poles. And there were many more of them. The Germans, outnumbered from the start, were advancing on three divergent axes towards objectives separated by over a thousand miles of often difficult terrain. And as the force of their spearheads was diluted by the growing distances between and behind them the German intelligence estimates of Soviet strength were continually being revised upwards. For every prisoner the Germans took, or so it seemed, there were two new Soviet citizens donning Red Army uniform. The German boat was taking water faster than its crew could bail. Sooner or later, unless something radical was done, it would sink.

There was only one solution to this problem. If the limbs of the Soviet Goliath could not be held down, then the blow had to be struck at the nervous system. This, after all, was the basis of panzer warfare. Death by paralysis, not by body blows. The assault had to be focused on objectives whose importance transcended their immediate value, before the Army as a whole was sucked into a war of attrition it could only lose.

But which objectives? This essentially was the question at issue during the last two weeks of July and the first few days of August. Hitler was not yet overly concerned about Russian resistance, informing the Japanese Ambassador on 15 July that he expected to be withdrawing forces from the Eastern Front some time in August. At this point
Barbarossa
still seemed to be on schedule, and this implied, according to Hitler’s reading of the plan, that Army Group Centre’s armour would soon be sent north and south to aid the flanking Army Groups in securing the Baltic Coast and the Donets industrial region. Hence Führer Directive 33, issued on 19 July, which ordered such a redeployment.

Brauchitsch, Halder and the Army Group Centre generals neither shared Hitler’s confidence nor agreed with the proposed rerouting of the central panzer groups. It was becoming apparent to them that the grandiose aims of
Barbarossa
were not attainable in a ‘rapid campaign’. They urged a continuation of the advance on the central axis. Only before Moscow, they argued, would the Russians be forced to stand and fight. And only the capture of the capital would provide that paralysing blow which alone could avert a long and costly war of attrition. They quoted the findings of the Zossen war-game of December 1940. ‘In view of the paramount importance of preserving (Army Group Centre’s) resources for the final, ultimate onslaught on Moscow’, it had been decided, Army Groups South and North would have to make do with their own resources. For should Moscow not be attained the war-gamers foresaw ‘a long drawn-out war beyond the capacity of the German Armed Forces to wage’.

Hitler, pressured even by the normally docile Jodl, wavered. Directive 34, issued on 30 July, postponed ‘for the moment the further tasks and objectives laid down (for Panzer Groups 2 and 3) in Directive 33’.

This procrastination on the Führer’s part formed the background to the Novy Borrisov meeting of 4 August. The generals all clamoured for permission to continue the advance on Moscow. Hitler spoke forcibly of the need to take Leningrad, the Ukraine and the Crimea, but did not commit himself either way. He then flew off for his rendezvous with destiny on the Rastenburg airfield. Two days later Halder began to supervise the drafting of an operational plan for the capture of Moscow.

This was not a straightforward task, for the Germans’ room for manoeuvre was already severely limited. Halder could not merely sanction a headlong charge towards the capital. That would have been as suicidal as continuing to advance slowly on a broad front.

The first, most obvious, limiting factor was the current disposition of the German and Soviet armies. In the central sector conditions were superficially favourable. During the first week of August both Hoth and Guderian’s groups had taken strides to by-pass the heavy Red Army concentrations in the Yelna area. Hoth’s reconnaissance units were approaching Rzhev, Guderian’s forces had taken Roslavl and were firmly astride the road that ran through it towards Moscow. Luftwaffe reconnaissance reported that behind the Soviet line in this sector there were virtually no reserves. A breakthrough in depth would present few problems to the armoured spearheads of a renewed German advance.

But there would be problems, further back, in the rear flanks of such an advance. Here, in the Velikiye Luki and Gomel areas, there had been a build-up of Soviet strength. To charge forward towards Moscow would further stretch the German forces covering these threatened sectors. Army Group Centre did not have the strength both to advance
and
protect its own flanks. Units from the other two army groups would have to perform the latter task.

In the north the flow of battle provided Halder with a ready-made solution. On 6 August the Red Army held a line from Lake Ilmen to the town of Luga and then down the Luga river to the Baltic coast. Here the terrain - mostly marshland and forest - was most unsuitable for the panzers, and for several weeks Hoppner’s Panzer Group 4 had been bogged down in positional warfare. Then on 12 August the Soviet Thirty-fourth Army launched an attack in the region south of Lake Ilmen, and one of Hoppner’s two corps, the 56th under General Manstein, was detached from the Luga front to deal with it. Within a few days it had done so. More to the point, 56th Panzer Corps was now ideally deployed to form the northern wing of the drive on Moscow.

In the south no such solutions presented themselves. The armoured fist of Army Group South, Kleist’s Panzer Group 1, was moving away from Army Group Centre. A decisive encirclement of Soviet forces had just been completed in the Uman region, and Kleist’s spearhead was now flowing south-eastwards down the land-corridor between the Bug and lower Dnieper rivers. Behind them the huge garrison of Kiev still held out against Sixth Army; further north the Soviet Fifth Army around Chernigov threatened the northern and southern flanks of Army Groups South and Centre respectively. This was a potentially dangerous situation for the Germans, and the dangers were not greatly lessened by Soviet Fifth Army’s voluntary withdrawal across the Desna River in mid-August. Clearly the gap between Army Groups Centre and South had to be filled.

All this was basic strategy, second nature to the mandarins of the German General Staff. One did not advance without securing one’s flanks. But Halder, unlike Hitler, did not exaggerate the problem. He intended to solve it, not let it dictate his overall strategy. One of Kleist’s three panzer corps would be brought back and placed under the temporary command of Sixth Army. The newly-strengthened Army would extend its control northwards to establish a firm connection with Second Army, the southernmost formation of Army Group Centre. This shifting of Army Group South’s centre of gravity away from the Ukrainian steppe would probably limit the prospects of conquest in that area, but it was unavoidable if the march on the capital was to succeed. Rather Moscow and no Ukraine than Ukraine and no Moscow. For the moment the Germans could not have both.

While Halder was thus absorbed choosing ‘ends’ the rest of the German Army was endeavouring to gather the ‘means’. It had now been campaigning for seven weeks, longer than in France, in conditions much more wearing to both men and machines. The tanks had been worn down by the bad ‘roads’, their engines clogged with the ubiquitous dust; the wheeled vehicles had in many cases simply jolted themselves to pieces. An enormous flow of replacement parts and fuel was required to keep this motorised army moving, more enormous than the German transport facilities could cope with. By mid-August supply was running well below demand.

The main stumbling-block was the wider gauge of the Soviet railways. The Germans could only keep the Warsaw-Polotsk line running with the small number of engines and amount of rolling stock captured in the opening week of the attack. The rest of the railways had to be converted to the German gauge, and this would take time. Although the engineers worked around the clock to re-lay the tracks as far as Gomel, Orsha and Dno, the supplies reaching Army Group Centre in the first week of August were quite inadequate for the provisioning of a major offensive. A report from the Quartermaster General’s office on 6 August reached the conclusion that a simultaneous attack by three armies on the central section was out of the question, and that even simultaneous operations by the two panzer groups would be difficult to supply. Clearly there had to be a pause of two or three weeks’ duration for resting, refitting and the accumulation of essential supplies.

The more amenable supply/transport situation in Army Group North’s sector further encouraged Halder in his decision to place the centre of gravity of the Moscow offensive north of the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Certainly the Valdai Hills were not ideal terrain for panzer warfare, but since an attack in that area would both dissipate the northern flank threat and be easy to supply, the disadvantages would have to be accepted. Manstein 56th Panzer Corps, now reinforced with 8th Panzer Division from Reinhardt’s Corps and placed under Panzer Group 3 command, would advance eastward along the southern shores of Lake Ilmen and on to the main Leningrad-Moscow road before turning south-eastwards towards the capital. The attack would begin on 23 August.

Two days later the rest of Army Group Centre would follow suit. The other two corps of Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 would strike north-eastwards towards Rzhev. From there one would continue northwards to meet Manstein’s, and thus enclose several Soviet armies in a pocket around Ostashkov. The other would turn towards Moscow on the Volokamsk road as soon as conditions permitted. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 would not advance on the Bryansk-Kaluga axis envisaged in the original plan, but would pinch out the strong Soviet forces in the Yelna region with Fourth Army help and then advance astride the Vyazma and Yukhnov roads towards Moscow. Behind these panzer forces Fourth, Ninth and Sixteenth Armies (the latter on loan from Army Group North) would move forward to pick up the prisoners and tie down the ground. Halder sent out the operational orders on 14 August.

They would come as no surprise to the troops of Army Group Centre, who unlike their Führer had never considered any other objectives. Already the signs
‘Moskau 240 kilometren’
were pointing the way. Morale among the troops was high, for the end was in sight. ‘Moscow before the snow falls - home before Christmas’ ran the popular slogan. It occurred to few that the one did not necessarily imply the other.

II

On 3 July, with the opening blitzkrieg twelve days old, Stalin had spoken to the Soviet people. ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends!’ he began. The unprecedented intimacy of this introduction underlined, as nothing else could have done, the desperation of the Soviet Union’s situation. These words ushered in a new reality. Of occupied territories, of forming home guards and partisan units, of scorching the earth in the invader’s path. Of total war.

As July unfolded the enemy pressed forward. All along an eight-hundred-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea the Red Army either died, retreated or marched west in long broken lines towards the German maltreatment camps. The towns mentioned in the official Soviet communiques drifted steadily eastward across the maps, the first reports of German atrocities hot on their heels.

But towards the end of that horrifying month the unstoppable advance seemed, for the moment at least, to have been stopped. In the area of Smolensk the line was holding, and the inhabitants of Moscow, two hundred miles further to the east, breathed a nervous sigh of relief.

In the capital conditions were hard but not yet harsh. Strict rationing had been introduced in mid-July, and basic items like food and cigarettes were harder to come by for those in the less privileged categories. But restaurants and theatres remained open, the latter as a showcase for the burgeoning trade in patriotic plays, poems and songs. Moscow’s formidable anti-aircraft defences took a fair toll of the nightly air raids and little damage had yet been done to the city. At night many slept in the recently completed Metro while the sky above the capital was awash with searchlight beams and barrage balloons.