The Moscow Option (4 page)
In the Kremlin there was too much knowledge for optimism. Stavka, the supreme Soviet military-political command, met in the ancient rooms and received news of the latest disasters. There were many of them. The Red Army had been surprised, outmanoeuvred, outclassed and outfought. Warned by the British, by its own commanders at the front, by its agents round the world, the Soviet leadership had applied Nelson’s blind-eye technique with spectacularly disastrous results. The Air Force had been cut to ribbons on the ground, whole armies like lumbering mammoths had been surrounded and reduced by the German masters of the panzer art. When given the opportunity to attack, Red Army formations had charged like incoherent Light Brigades down the muzzles of the German guns. Defensively inept, offensively gallant to the point of suicide, the front line of the Red Army had practically ceased to exist.
Who was responsible for this disaster? Not the ordinary Red Army soldier. Though lacking the experience and tactical skills of his German counterpart, though frequently armed with inferior equipment, he had fought, and continued to fight, with a reckless bravery that the Germans found thoroughly depressing. Not the front-line officer either. No more than his French, British or Polish counterparts, could he have been expected to grasp the essence of panzer warfare overnight.
If anyone was responsible it was the Supreme Command. Or more simply, Stalin. Firstly for allowing the German Army to take his own by surprise, secondly for removing those leaders who did understand armoured warfare - most notably Tukhachevskiy - in the purges of 1937-8. But, these undoubted mistakes notwithstanding, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the fundamental reason for the Soviet defeat in the summer of 1941 was the different sense of priorities held by the political leaderships of Germany and the Soviet Union. If one state was devoting its energies to conquest and another to national construction there was an excellent chance that the former would prove a more efficient conqueror.
Stavka had to learn the hard way. Though some measures could be implemented immediately - generals like Rokossovsky, whose excellent military careers had been cut short for political reasons, could be pulled out of the Siberian concentration camps and given their uniforms back - the thorough reorganisation, re-equipping and retraining of the Red Army would take a great deal of time. And time was extremely precious.
In August it must have seemed that those lessons that needed to be learned in a hurry were hardly being learned at all. A further series of frontal attacks were launched and, like bears tumbling into traps, Thirty-fourth Army near Lake Ilmen, Twenty-eighth Army around Roslavl, and Thirteenth and Fiftieth Armies between Gomel and Krichev disappeared into historical limbo. All these attacks took place in those rear-flank areas of the projected German advance; their failure eased Halder’s anxieties considerably. Only around Yelna in the central sector did the Red Army battle the Germans to an honourable draw through August, and this apparent success was to prove as fatal as the failures. The leaders in the Kremlin interpreted it, wrongly, as evidence of the continuing viability of linear defence lines, and proceeded to construct two more between Yelna and the capital. The first of these, under General Zhukov, contained five fresh armies on a line from Ostashkov to Kirov; the second consisted merely of earthworks dug by workers brought out from Moscow. On the front itself the eight armies of Timoshenko’s West Front held a line from Lake Seliger to Yelna. Further south the two armies of Yeremenko’s new Bryansk Front were to cover the Bryansk-Orel sector, which outdated Soviet intelligence had earmarked as Guderian’s probable approach route.
All these lines were desperately thin. The potential Soviet manpower was proverbially inexhaustible, but armies need more than manpower. Only so many men could be trained and armed in the time available, and the weaponry situation was adversely affected in the short term by the removal of the armament industry to the east. The one trained and equipped Soviet army as yet uncommitted against the Germans - the thirty-division-strong Far Eastern Army - could not be withdrawn from its positions in the Maritime Provinces and along the Manchurian border until Stavka’s agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had confirmation of the rumoured Japanese intention to strike south rather than north in the coming months.
So, proverbially inexhaustible or not, the Red Army was outnumbered in front of Moscow. Through August Stavka waited. For the strength at its disposal to grow, for a message from Sorge, for the first welcome signs of autumn. And for the Germans to renew their attack along the road to Moscow.
III
As the sun rose slowly above the pines on 23 August, the strengthened 56th Panzer Corps moved forward from its starting line south of Lake Ilmen. There were no roads to speak of, and 8th Panzer struck east along the railway line towards Lychkovo. Some ten miles to the north 6th Panzer and 3rd Motorised Division were directed along marshy forest tracks towards Kresttsy on the main Leningrad-Moscow road. A similar distance to the south the motorised SS division ‘Totenkopf’ covered the Corps’ southern flank against the strong enemy formations in the Demyansk-Lake Seliger area. Progress was slow but steady, the terrain offering considerably more opposition than the enemy, who was still struggling to fill the gap left by Thirty-fourth Army’s recent destruction.
By nightfall on 24 August 6th Panzer was astride the main road and 8th Panzer, after a short bitter engagement with a company of Soviet T-34 tanks, had taken Lychkovo and was rolling on towards Valdai. An improvised Soviet counter-attack along the eastern shore of Lake Ilmen was beaten off without difficulty by 3rd Motorised.
The following day 8th Panzer crashed into Valdai. The town, despite some recent attention from the Stukas, looked relatively normal. There was the obligatory statue of Lenin, the small cluster of administration buildings, the lines of wooden houses stretching from the centre out to the forest. Barely an hour later the leading units of 6th Panzer appeared along the road from the north. This division was directed east to take and hold the important railway junction of Bologoye; 8th Panzer was to continue south-eastwards along the main road towards Vyshniy Volochek.
In the Kremlin the threat posed by Manstein’s Corps was underestimated. For days an argument had been raging as to the most probable point of the enemy’s forthcoming breakthrough attempt. Opinions were divided fairly evenly between the Moscow highway and Bryansk-Orel sectors; all eyes were watching to see which it would be. Reports of a major armoured attack south of Lake Ilmen were discounted. It was only the enemy making the most of his victory over the unfortunate Thirty-fourth Army; the local Red Army commander was clearly exaggerating the scale of the attack.
By 25 August the danger was too visible to brush off so lightly, but by this time Stavka was otherwise occupied. At dawn on that day the rest of Army Group Centre, close on a million men and two thousand tanks, moved into the attack. In the Belyy area and on the main Moscow road Hoth’s tanks burst through the Soviet line with all the concentrated power of long practice. 57th Panzer Corps attacked northeast towards its intended junction with Manstein, 39th Panzer Corps motored east towards Vyazma for a rendezvous with Guderian. The latter’s tanks had broken through the Soviet positions on the Roslavl-Yukhnov road, with one corps punching deep into the rear of the Soviet concentrations around Yelna. The largely immobile Red Army units continued to fight hard against the slow push of Fourth Army against their front, but could do little to affect the pincers closing behind them. By 28 August Model’s 3rd Panzer Division had made contact with the leading elements of 7th Panzer at Losimo and the ring was closed. Inside the pocket were the major parts of three Soviet armies.
A similar ring was tightening on another five in the Ostashkov region. By the afternoon of 27 August Rzhev had fallen, and only sixty-five miles separated the closing pincers. The terrain and the poor quality of the roads continued to give the Germans trouble but the enemy, for the most part fully engaged by the infantry armies, was conspicuously absent in the rear areas. The tanks roamed through empty countryside. ‘It was like France, only with less roads and more trees,’ as one panzer captain put it. On 31 August the pincers met five miles south of Torzhok. Two-thirds of the Soviet forces before Moscow were now trapped in the Yelna-Vyazma and Ostashkov pockets.
Through the first week of September the German forces concentrated on reducing the encircled areas, opposing break-out attempts, and herding the surrendering Red Army soldiers towards the west. Of course the pockets covered immense areas and many Red Army units were able to keep out of the German clutches. But those which did escape, either by breaking through the thin lines to the east or by melting into the convenient forests, were in no state to interfere with the continuation of the German advance. The roads to Moscow were open.
On 2 September Zhukov was appointed Supreme Commander of the forces covering the capital. He did what he could, sending what reserves he could find into the last lines covering the city. But they were few and, most significantly, their contingency orders stressed that they were to fall back to the north and south of the capital, not into it. The fall of Moscow was beginning to look inevitable. On 4 September Stalin received the British Ambassador Stafford Cripps in the Kremlin. He seemed, according to Cripps,
“unbalanced by the tremendous strain of events. One moment he was accusing both us and the Americans of deserting him, the next moment he was stressing the importance of the aluminium shipments we were sending for the continuation of the war. After telling me that once Moscow had fallen there was no line short of the Volga that could be defended, he went on to talk with great excitement of a planned counter-attack in the south. There was none of that cold solidity which I had always assumed to be his habitual self.”
The mood of the populace was also growing more apprehensive by the day. News that there was ‘heavy fighting in the direction of Kalinin’ meant only one thing to those trained through the years to read between the official lines. Kalinin had fallen; the enemy was less than a hundred miles distant. When Pravda talked about the ‘terrible danger’ facing the country the citizens of Moscow knew what was meant. And there were other clues than those provided by the newspapers. All over the city industrial machinery was being dismantled for evacuation or wired for destruction; from the Kremlin courtyard the black smoke of burning documents was drifting up and out across the sky.
Through the second week of September the enemy drew nearer. Manstein’s corps captured the Volga bridge at Kalinin intact and fought its way down the road to Klin. Schmidt’s 39th Panzer Corps crashed into Mozhaysk. Guderian’s tanks took Sukhinichi and bore down on Kaluga. In the north, the centre and the south, like a tunnel looming to engulf a train, the German panzer armies closed in on the Soviet capital.
On 10 September it was announced that the Government, the Diplomatic Corps and as much as possible of Moscow’s cultural and scientific assets were being evacuated to Kuybyshev on the Volga. No mention was made of Stalin’s whereabouts, but it soon became known that his predecessor’s embalmed body had been removed from its mausoleum for transportation to an unknown destination.
These measures were interpreted by some as the first stage of Moscow’s abandonment, and those not privileged to share in the exodus sought self-preservation in less dignified ways. Shops were looted by citizens in the first throes of starvation; lorryloads of food were overturned and ransacked. The approach of the Germans induced many to burn their Party cards, and handbills suddenly appeared denouncing communism and the Jews. Stalin’s portrait disappeared from many apartment walls.
The government acted decisively to quell this premature mutiny. Moscow was pronounced a part of the military zone of operations, a State of Emergency declared. NKVD squads roamed through the city shooting ‘suspects’ with little or no compunction.
Amidst this spreading disorder the last desperate attempts were made to provide for the capital’s defence. Women, old men and children were herded to the outskirts and told to dig; young men were pressed, some willingly and some not, into workers’ battalions for the defence of the main roads leading into the city proper. In Alexandrov Park, beneath the Kremlin wall, office-workers in suits practised bayonet charges. Commandeered cabs and buses carried regular units westward through the city towards the approaching storm.
By 14 September the Mozhaysk ‘line’ had been pierced on all the major axes and comprehensively outflanked from the north. Even the beginning of the autumn rains, which for hours, sometimes days, immobilised the German columns, could not stem the tide. Had the Germans been further from the city of decision these setbacks might have weakened their morale, but with Moscow so close it would take more than the odd shower to dampen their determination.
On the southern flank Guderian’s forces had reached the banks of the Oka river on a front stretching from Kaluga to Serpukhov, and were striking east between Podolsk and Proletarskiy. Only on 15-17 September did problems arise, in the form of an attack by Timoshenko’s still viable Bryansk Front armies in the region of Kirov. But this was a makeshift affair, born of desperation and conducted as such. The charging Red Army units, including cavalry, were cut down in swathes by the motorised troops deployed on Guderian’s trailing flank. For the architect of the panzer arm, up with his spearhead a hundred miles further east, the matter was no more than a passing concern. He was headed for Noginsk, forty miles east of Moscow, and a meeting with Manstein.
