The Second World War (32 page)

Our defensive weapons available at that period were only successful against the T-34 when the conditions were unusually favourable. The short-barrelled 75-mm gun of the Panzer IV was only effective if the T-34 was attacked from the rear; even then a hit had to be scored on the grating above the engine to knock it out. It required very great skill to manoeuvre into a position from which such a shot was possible. The Russians attacked us frontally with infantry, while they sent in their tanks in mass formations against our flanks. They were learning.

Even more ominously, he reported in his war diary on 6 October the first snowfall of the approaching winter. It melted quickly, leaving the roads, as before, liquid mud. It was difficult to know, at that stage, which was preferable – a prolonged autumn, with all the difficulties of movement that that rainy season brought, or an early winter, which made for firm, frozen going on the roads but threatened blizzards before the final objective was reached.

Stalin could repose no solid hopes in the turn of the seasons. Winter might save Moscow; it might not. There was the gravest doubt whether the remains of the Red Army in European Russia could do so. It had now been reduced to a strength of 800,000 men, divided into ninety divisions, with 770 tanks and 364 aircraft; nine of the divisions were of cavalry, only one – and thirteen independent brigades – of tanks. A large army was stationed in the Russian Far East, but it could not be moved while there was still the danger of war with the Japanese, whom the Russians had fought in Mongolia only two years previously. Hitler, by contrast, had now increased the strength of Army Group Centre itself to eighty divisions, including fourteen Panzer and eight motorised, supported by 1400 aircraft; the other two army groups, though depleted by tank transfers to the Moscow front, retained the bulk of their infantry and were sustaining their pressure against Leningrad and into the southern steppe.

In this supreme crisis Stalin turned again to Zhukov. Though their disagreement in the summer had led to Zhukov’s removal as chief of staff, Stalin recognised his superlative talents which had recently if only temporarily saved Leningrad. Now, on 10 October, he was called south to energise the defence of Moscow. Rumours of panic were already touching the city; Red Air Force pilots who on 5 October reported German columns fifteen miles away driving towards it were threatened with arrest by the NKVD as ‘panic-mongers’; on 15 October, however, fear took hold in earnest. The ‘Moscow panic’ began with a warning by Molotov to the British and American embassies to prepare for an evacuation to Kuibyshev, a city 500 miles eastward on the Volga. According to Professor John Erickson, ‘The real crisis, however, spilled on to the streets and into plants and offices; a spontaneous popular flight added itself to the hurried and limited evacuation, accompanied by a breakdown in public and Party disciplines. There was a rush to the railway stations; officials used their cars to get east; offices and factories were disabled by desertions.’ The panic was not merely unofficial. ‘Railway troops were told to mine their tracks and junctions . . . sixteen bridges deep within the city were mined and crews at other mined objectives issued orders to blow their charges “at the first sight of the enemy”.’

Zhukov, however, kept his nerve. As at Leningrad, he mobilised citizens, 250,000 Muscovites (75 per cent women), to dig anti-tank ditches outside the city. He brought proven commanders, including Rokossovsky and Vatutin, to the threatened front and he concentrated every reserve that Stalin could send him on the Moscow approaches. Stalin, too, found a public resolution he had not always shown in the closed meetings of the Politburo and the Stavka earlier in the campaign. At the traditional Red Square parade held to commemorate the October Revolution on 7 November, even though Bock’s Panzers were only forty miles from the Kremlin, he denounced those who thought ‘the Germans could not be beaten’, declared that the Soviet state had been in greater danger in 1918 and invoked the name of every Russian hero – pre-, post- and even anti-Revolutionary – to stiffen the sinew of his audience. Inspired by those ‘great figures’, and fighting under ‘great Lenin’s victorious banner’, with or without the opening of the ‘Second Front’ promised by the British, he forecast the Red Army’s eventual triumph.

The first frosts of winter were now hardening the ground for the enemy, and the Panzer groups were making faster progress towards Moscow than they had done in October. Their tank strength, however, was reduced to 65 per cent, and Guderian, Hoth and Hoepner were all concerned about their ability to push their spearheads to the final objective. Accordingly, on 13 November Halder arrived from OKW at Army Group Centre’s headquarters at Orsha to canvass opinion from the army group chiefs of staff – Sodenstern of South, Griffenberg of North, Brennecke of Centre – as to the further conduct of the campaign. Should the
Ostheer
, he asked, make a final dash or instead dig in for the winter to await fairer weather for a culminating victory next year? Sodenstern and Griffenberg, respectively overstretched and blocked on their fronts, answered that they wished to halt. Brennecke replied that ‘the danger we might not succeed must be taken into account, but it would be even worse to be left lying in the snow and the cold on open ground only thirty miles from the tempting objective’ – Moscow. Since Hitler had already told Halder (who was himself already looking beyond Moscow) that this was the answer he wanted, the issue was decided on the spot.

The final stage of Operation Typhoon began on 16 November. It was organised as a double envelopment of the Moscow defences, Panzer Groups 3 and 4 moving towards Kalinin north of the city, Panzer Group 2 towards Tula in the south. It was to become known in the
Ostheer
as the
Flucht nach vorn
, ‘the flight to the front’, a desperate attempt, like Napoleon’s in 1812, to get to Moscow for shelter from the snows. But between the
Ostheer
and the city stood Zhukov’s last line of defence, the Mozhaisk position, which included the man-made Sea of Moscow to the north of the city and the river Oka to the south.

Despite the arrival of some reinforcements, the Mozhaisk position at first did not hold. Guderian, blocked at Tula, merely swung his Panzer group around the town and chose a new axis for his advance on Moscow. To the north, the German Ninth Army broke through to the Sea of Moscow and the Volga Canal on 27 November, linking up with Panzer Group 3; the 7th Panzer Division, Rommel’s old command, actually got across the canal on 28 November.

The German effort was now at crisis-point. At Krasnaya Polyana, Panzer Group 3 stood only eighteen miles from Moscow. The Fourth Army, with its outposts at Burtsevo, was only twenty-five miles from the city. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 was sixty miles away to the south. There is a legend that in the following days an advance German unit saw the golden domes of the Kremlin illuminated by a burst of evening sunshine and that a patrol even penetrated an outlying suburb. If it did, that was the last flicker of energy from an army expiring on its feet. The Russian winter in all its cruelty, unknown and unimaginable to a Westerner, was now beginning to bite; the season was approaching when temperatures would fall below minus 20 degrees Centigrade, inflicting on the
Ostheer
100,000 frostbite casualties, of whom 2000 would suffer amputations. After 25 November, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 made no further advance, having failed to take Kashira on the main southern rail line; on 27 November he ordered a halt. After 29 November there was no movement by the northern pincer either, both Ninth Army and Panzer Group 3 having lost the ability to drive forward. Bock, writing to Halder at OKH on 1 December, explained Army Group Centre’s predicament:

After further bloody struggles the offensive will bring a restricted gain of ground and it will destroy part of the enemy’s forces but it is most unlikely to bring about strategical success. The idea that the enemy facing the army group was on the point of collapse was, as the fighting of the last fortnight shows, a pipe-dream. To remain outside the gates of Moscow, where the road and rail systems connect with almost the whole of eastern Russia, means heavy defensive fighting. . . . Further offensive action therefore seems to be senseless and aimless, especially as the time is coming very near when the physical strength of the troops will be completely exhausted.

By the first week of December the ordinary German soldiers of the fighting divisions were almost incapable of movement. Jodl had refused to allow the collection or supply of winter clothing, lest its appearance cast doubt on his assurances that Russia would collapse before the coming of the snows. The men in the firing line stuffed torn newspaper inside their uniforms to repel the cold. Such expedients worked scarcely at all. The Russians, by contrast, were accustomed to and equipped against the temperature; every Russian, military or civilian, possessed a pair of felt boots which experience proved best protected feet against frostbite (America was to supply 13 million pairs during the course of the war) and the Red Army accordingly continued to manoeuvre while the
Ostheer
froze fast.

In the meantime Army Group South had occupied the Crimea (except for Sevastopol) during November. Late in that month, Timoshenko’s front met Rundstedt’s Panzers head on at Rostov-on-Don (the ‘gateway to the Caucasus’ and so to Russia’s oil), recaptured the city on 28 November after it had been in German hands for only a week, and then forced them back to the line of the river Mius, fifty miles behind Rostov, where they dug in for the winter. Army Group North was meanwhile halted outside Leningrad and after 6 December driven back from Tikhvin, its furthest point of advance along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. There it established a winter line which subjected the city to slow starvation – a million were to die in the three-year siege, the majority in the first winter – but did not quite cut it off from supply across the lake, by ice-road in winter, later by boat.

The Red Army’s great manoeuvre, however, began outside Moscow on 5 December. Reinforcements had been found from new waves of conscripts and from the output of her mobilised factories; a few tanks had even arrived by Arctic convoy from Britain, heralds of a source of supply which would become a flood – of trucks, food and fuel – as Western aid developed. Yet the most important source of reinforcement to Zhukov was already in existence: the Siberian force, from which Stalin – who had made only small withdrawals from it previously – had brought ten divisions, 1000 tanks and 1000 aircraft in October and November. That he felt free to do so was chiefly the result of reassurances transmitted by one of the most remarkable espionage agents in history, Richard Sorge, a German but also a Comintern operative who, as a confidant of the German ambassador in Tokyo, was privy to top-secret German-Japanese confidences and so able to assure Moscow (perhaps as early as 3 October) that Japan was committed to war against the United States and therefore would not use its Manchurian army to attack the Soviet Union in Siberia.

Had Japan decided otherwise – and its historic quarrel rather than its focus of strategic ambition lay against Russia, not America – the Battle of Moscow of December 1941 must have been fought as a Russian defensive, instead of as an offensive, and would almost certainly have resulted in German victory. As it was, Stalin’s reinforcements had raised Zhukov’s Western Front to a strength equal in numbers, if not equipment, to Army Group Centre’s, and in consequence the outcome was the first Russian victory of the war. On the morning of 5 December, the Stavka plan mirrored those by which Hitler’s marshals had inflicted such bloody wounds on the Red Army in the summer. Zhukov was to drive headlong at the Germans opposite Moscow, while Konev’s Kalinin Front and Timoshenko’s South-Western Front drove up from the south. Kluge and Hoepner, commanding the Fourth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army (as Panzer Group 4 had been renamed), decided that they could force their troops no further forward and had gone over to the defensive. Accordingly they were inert when the Russians struck. In the north, the deepest advance was made by Lelyushenko’s Thirtieth Army, which advanced as far as the Moscow-Leningrad highway, threatening Panzer Group 3’s link with the Fourth Army. By 9 December it had reached Klin and with the neighbouring First Shock Army seemed poised to bring off an encirclement. The Sixteenth and Twentieth Armies, commanded by Rokossovsky and Vlasov, operating closer to Moscow, matched their progress and on 13 December retook Istra, close to the Moscow-Smolensk highway up which Army Group Centre’s axis of advance from the frontier had lain.

To the city’s south, the Thirtieth and Fortieth Armies attacked Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 and by 9 December menaced its main line of supply, the Orel-Tula railway. Guderian’s Tula position formed a salient; on its opposite face the Soviet Fiftieth and Tenth Armies succeeded in separating Guderian from Kluge’s Fourth Army and driving both away from the Moscow approaches – a displacement widened after 16 December when the Soviet Thirty-Third and Forty-Third Armies joined in.

By Christmas Day 1941 the Russian armies had retaken almost all the territory won by the Germans in the culminating stages of their drive on Moscow. Not only had the
Ostheer
lost ground; its leaders had also lost their Führer’s confidence. He had dismissed generals in droves. On 30 November Rundstedt insisted on resigning in protest at his treatment by OKH; Hitler, on a visit to his headquarters, recognised the justice of his protest but accepted his resignation nevertheless. (Reichenau, who replaced him, died almost immediately of a heart attack.) On 17 December he replaced Bock with Kluge at Army Group Centre and on 20 December dismissed Guderian for preparing to withdraw his Panzer group from its exposed position. He also dismissed Hoepner from the Fourth Panzer Army (between October and December 1941 Panzer groups were redesignated Panzer armies) for unauthorised retreat, and the commanders of the Ninth and Seventeenth Armies. Thirty-five corps and divisional commanders were dismissed at the same time. Most dramatically of all, on 19 December, Hitler relieved Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief of the army. Like Bock, Brauchitsch was ailing; but that was not the reason for his removal. Hitler had come to believe that only his own unalterable will could save the
Ostheer
from destruction. He therefore announced that Brauchitsch would not have a successor but that the Führer would himself directly act as the army’s leader.