The Second World War (46 page)

Stalin, emerging from the Kremlin fortress, was shocked by the sights he saw. A state of siege was declared and NKVD rifle regiments marched in to clear the streets, shooting looters and deserters on sight. Order was brutally restored. Stalin then decided that he would stay, and this was announced on the radio. It was a critical moment, and the effect was considerable. The mood turned from mass panic to a mass determination to defend the city at all costs. It was a phenomenon similar to the change of heart during the defence of Madrid five years before.

Stressing the need for secrecy, Stalin told the State Defence Committee that the celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution would still go ahead. Several members were aghast, but they recognized that it was probably worth the risk as a demonstration to the country and the world at large that Moscow would never yield. On the ‘eve of Revolution’, Stalin gave a speech, which was broadcast from the vast ornate hall of the Mayakovsky metro station. He evoked the great, but scarcely proletarian, heroes of Russian history, Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov. ‘
The German invaders
want a war of extermination. Very well then. They shall have one!’

This was Stalin’s conspicuous re-emergence into Soviet consciousness, after several months of avoiding association with the disasters of retreat. ‘
I have looked through the files
of old newspapers from July to November
1941,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg many years later. ‘Stalin’s name was hardly ever mentioned.’

The leader was now inextricably linked with the courageous defence of the capital. And the following day, 7 November, Stalin took the salute from Lenin’s empty mausoleum on Red Square, as rank upon rank of reinforcements marched through the falling snow, ready to turn north-westwards and on to the front. The canny Stalin had foreseen what an effect this coup de théâtre would have, and ensured that it was filmed for foreign and domestic newsreels.

During the following week hard frosts set in, and on 15 November the Germans’ advance resumed. It soon became clear to Zhukov that their main line of attack would be on the Volokolamsk sector, where Rokossovsky’s 16th Army was forced to conduct a fighting retreat. Zhukov was under great pressure, and lost his temper with Rokossovsky. The contrast between the two could hardly have been greater, even though they were both former cavalrymen. Zhukov was a rather squat fireball of energy and ruthlessness, while the tall and elegant Rokossovsky was calm and pragmatic. Rokossovsky, from a family of minor Polish nobility, had been arrested towards the end of the purge of the Red Army. He had nine steel teeth to replace those knocked out of him during the ‘conveyor belt’ of interrogation sessions. Stalin had ordered his release, but reminded him from time to time that this was a temporary concession. Any mistakes and he would be returned to Beria’s thugs.

On 17 November, Stalin signed an order that all forces and partisans should ‘
destroy and burn to ashes
’ all buildings in the combat zone and behind, to deny the Germans shelter in the approaching frosts. The fate of civilians was not considered for a moment. The suffering of soldiers, especially the wounded dumped on railway platforms, was also appalling. ‘
Stations were covered
by human excrement and wounded soldiers with bloodstained bandages,’ wrote a Red Army officer.

By the end of November, the German Third Panzer Army was within forty kilometres of Moscow on the north-west side. One of its lead units had even seized a bridgehead across the Moscow–Volga Canal. Fourth Panzer Army had meanwhile reached a point sixteen kilometres from the western edge of Moscow, having pushed back Rokossovsky’s 16th Army. It is said that in a heavy fog a
motorcyclist from the SS
Deutschland
Regiment drove right into Moscow and was shot down by an NKVD patrol next to the Belorussian Station. Other German units could make out the onion cupolas of the Kremlin through powerful binoculars. The Germans had been fighting desperately in the knowledge that the full force of the Russian winter would soon be upon them. But their troops were exhausted, and already many were suffering from frostbite.

Defence works on the approaches to Moscow had continued at a frenzied rhythm. Steel ‘hedgehogs’ made of girder lengths welded together like giant caltraps acted as anti-tank barriers. The NKVD had organized ‘
destroyer battalions
’ to combat paratroop or sabotage attacks on key factories and as a last line of defence. Each man was issued with a rifle, ten rounds and a few grenades. Stalin, afraid that Moscow might be encircled from the northern side, ordered Zhukov to prepare a series of counter-attacks. But first he needed to reinforce the armies north-west of Moscow, battered by the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies.

The situation also appeared critical in the south of the country. Rundstedt’s army group had secured the Donbas mining and industrial region in mid-October, just when the Romanians finally took Odessa. Manstein’s Eleventh Army in the Crimea was laying siege to the great naval base of Sebastopol. The First Panzer Army advanced rapidly ahead towards the Caucasus, leaving behind the infantry. And on 21 November, the 1st SS Panzer Division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, commanded by Brigadeführer Sepp Dietrich whom Richthofen called ‘
the good old war-horse
’, had entered Rostov at the entrance to the Caucasus and seized a bridgehead across the River Don. Hitler was exultant. The oilfields further south seemed within his grasp. But Kleist’s panzer spearhead was over-extended, its left flank guarded only by weakly armed Hungarian troops. Marshal Timoshenko seized the opportunity and counter-attacked across the frozen Don.

Rundstedt, realizing that a full advance into the Caucasus was impossible before the next spring, pulled his forces back to the line of the River Mius which flowed into the Sea of Azov west of Taganrog. Hitler reacted to this first withdrawal by the German army in the war with angry disbelief. He ordered that the retreat be cancelled at once. Rundstedt offered his resignation, which was immediately accepted. On 3 December, Hitler flew down to Army Group South’s headquarters at Poltava, where that earlier invader, Charles XII of Sweden, had been decisively defeated. The next day, Hitler appointed Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, a convinced Nazi, whom Rundstedt disparagingly described as a roughneck who ran ‘
around half-naked when
taking physical exercise’.

But Hitler was taken aback to find that Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS
Leibstandarte
, agreed with Rundstedt’s decision. And Reichenau, having assured Hitler that he would not pull back, promptly carried on with the withdrawal, presenting Führer headquarters with a fait accompli. With his hand forced, Hitler then compensated the sacked Rundstedt with a birthday present of 275,000 Reichsmark. He was often cynical about
how easy it was to bribe his generals with money, the grant of estates and decorations.

Leningrad had been saved from annihilation, partly due to Zhukov’s ruthless leadership and the determination of the troops, but mainly because of the German decision to concentrate on Moscow. Army Group North from then on was to be the poor relation on the eastern front, hardly ever receiving reinforcements and constantly afraid of being stripped of units to strengthen formations in the centre and south of the country. This neglect on the German side was exceeded on the Soviet side, with Stalin on several occasions wanting to strip Leningrad of troops to defend Moscow. Stalin had no warm feelings for what he saw as a city of intellectuals, who despised Muscovites and were suspiciously fond of western Europe. How seriously he considered giving up the city is hard to tell, but it is quite clear that during that autumn and winter he was far more concerned about preserving the forces of the Leningrad Front than the city, let alone its citizens.

Soviet attempts to break the encirclement from outside with the 54th Army failed to dislodge the Germans from the southernmost shore of Lake Ladoga. But at least the defenders still held the isthmus between the city and the lake, although this was partly due to the caution of the Finns who hesitated to advance on to pre-1939 Soviet territory.

The siege settled down into a pattern, with regular German bombardments of the city at fixed times. Civilian casualties mounted, but mainly from starvation. Leningrad was effectively an island. The only connection still possible with the ‘mainland’ was across Lake Ladoga or by air. Some 2.8 million civilians were trapped, and, with half a million troops, the authorities had to cater for 3.3 million people. Food distribution was shockingly uneven in a supposedly egalitarian society. Party officials made sure that their families and close relations did not suffer, and those who controlled the supply of food, right down to individual breadshops and canteens, profited shamelessly. Bribery was often needed to obtain even the basic ration.

Food was indeed power, both for the corrupt individual and for the Soviet state, which had long used it to coerce submission, or to take revenge upon unfavoured categories of people. Industrial workers, children and soldiers received a full ration, but others, such as wives who did not work and teenage children, received only a ‘
dependant’s’ ration
. Their ration card became known as the ‘
smertnik
’–the death card. With a truly Soviet attitude to hierarchy, they were considered ‘useless mouths’, while Party bosses received supplementary rations to help their decision-making on behalf of the common good.

‘
Our situation with food
is very bad,’ Vasily Churkin noted in late
October when defending the line near Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga. ‘We get 300 grams of bread that is as black as earth, and watery soup. We feed our horses with birch twigs with no leaves on them, and they die one after another. Locals from Beryozovka and our soldiers leave just the bones on a horse that’s fallen down. They chop off pieces of meat and boil them.’

Soldiers were far better off than civilians, and those who had families in the city waited for winter with mounting anxiety. Frightful stories of cannibalism began to circulate. Churkin recorded how ‘
Our corporal Andronov
, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow, full of energy, made a mistake for which he paid with his life. The chief of supplies sent him in a vehicle to Leningrad under some pretext. At that time in Leningrad they were more starved than we were, and most of us had families there. The vehicle with Andronov was stopped on the way. In the vehicle they found canned food, meat, and cereal, which we had taken from our own meagre rations [to send to our families]. The tribunal sentenced Andronov and his chief to death. His wife with a small child were in Leningrad. People say that their neighbour ate the child, and the wife lost her sanity.’

The starving city needed hard frosts so that the ice on Lake Ladoga was strong enough to support trucks bringing in food supplies across the ‘ice road’. Great risks were taken in the first week of December. ‘
I saw a Polutorka
truck,’ Churkin wrote. ‘Its hind wheels had fallen through the ice. In it were sacks with flour, they were dry… Its cabin pointed up, its front wheels stood on the ice. I passed about a dozen Polutorka trucks loaded with flour that froze into the ice. They were the pioneers of the “Road of Life”. There was no one by the trucks.’ The inhabitants of Leningrad would have to wait a little longer for the stockpiles already assembled. At the lakeside settlement of Kabona, Churkin saw that ‘
all along the bank
, stretching for so many kilometres that one couldn’t even see the end, lay an enormous amount of sacks with flour and boxes with foodstuffs prepared to be sent across the ice to starving Leningrad’.

By the beginning of December, many German commanders in Army Group Centre realized that their exhausted and frozen troops could not now take Moscow. They wanted to withdraw their depleted forces to a defensible line until the spring, but such arguments had already been overruled by General Halder on the instructions of Führer headquarters. Some began to think of 1812 and the terrible retreat of Napoleon’s army. Even with the mud now frozen hard, the supply situation had failed to improve. With temperatures dropping to below minus 20 degrees Centigrade, and often with zero visibility, the Luftwaffe was grounded most of the time. Like airfield ground crews, motorized troops had to light fires under the engines of their vehicles before they could hope to start them. Machine guns and rifles
froze solid because the Wehrmacht did not have the right oil for winter warfare, and radios failed to work in the extreme temperatures.

Artillery and transport draught horses brought from western Europe were unused to the cold and lacked forage. Bread arrived frozen solid. Soldiers had to cut it up with hacksaws and thaw it out in their trouser pockets before they could eat it. The weakened
Landser
could not dig trenches in the iron-hard ground, without having melted it first with large bonfires. Few replacements had arrived for their jackboots, which had fallen to pieces after so much marching. There was also a shortage of proper gloves. Frostbite casualties now exceeded the number of those wounded in battle. Officers complained that their soldiers had started to look like Russian peasants because they had stolen the winter clothing of civilians, sometimes even forcing them at gunpoint to hand over their boots.

Women, children and old men were forced out into the snow from their log cabins, or
izbas
, where the soldiers ripped up the floors to search for their reserves of potatoes. It might have been less cruel to kill their victims than to force them to starve or freeze to death, half stripped of their clothes in what was turning out to be the most savage winter for years. Conditions for Soviet prisoners were worst of all. They died in their thousands from exhaustion on forced marches westwards through the snow, from starvation and from disease, mainly typhus. Some were reduced to cannibalism in their dehumanized state of abject suffering. Each morning, their guards made them run for a few hundred metres, beating them. Any who collapsed were shot immediately. Cruelty had become addictive in those who had total control over beings they had been taught to despise and hate.