Once Rundstedt’s mobile forces had finished at Uman, they continued, veering to the south of Kiev. The First Panzer Group then swung north, joining up with Guderian’s divisions, whose sudden strike down from the central front took the Soviet command by surprise. The danger of a terrible trap became plain, but Stalin refused to abandon Kiev. He only changed his mind when it was far too late. On 21 September, the encirclement battle of Kiev ended. The Germans claimed a further 665,000 prisoners. Hitler called it ‘the greatest battle in world history’. The Chief of the General Staff, Haider, on the other hand, called it the greatest strategic mistake of the campaign in the east. Like Guderian, he felt that all their energies should have been concentrated on Moscow.
The advancing invaders, overrunning one position after another, suffered a confusion of emotions and ideas as they gazed with a mixture of disbelief, contempt and also fear on the Communist enemy, who had fought to the last. The piles of corpses seemed even more dehumanized when charred, and with half their clothes stripped from them by the force of a shell blast. ‘Look closely at these dead, these Tartar dead, these Russian dead,’ wrote a journalist attached to the German Army in the Ukraine. ‘They are new corpses, absolutely brand-new. Just delivered from the great factory of the Pyatyletka[five-year plan]. They are all the same. Mass-produced. They typify a new race, a tough race, these corpses of workers killed in an industrial accident.’ Yet, however compelling the image, it was a mistake to assume that the bodies before them were simply modern Communist robots. They were the remains of men and women who, in most cases, had reacted to a sense of patriotism that was somehow both spiritual and visceral.
4
Hitler’s Hubris: The Delayed Battle for Moscow
‘The vastness of Russia devours us,’ wrote Field Marshal von Rundstedt to his wife just after his armies had successfully completed the Uman encirclement. The moods of German commanders had started to swing between self-congratulation and unease. They were conquering huge territories, yet the horizon seemed just as limitless. The Red Army had lost over two million men, yet still more Soviet armies appeared. ‘At the outset of the war’, General Haider wrote in his diary on 11 August, ‘we reckoned on about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.’ The door had been smashed in, but the structure was not collapsing.
By mid-July, the Wehrmacht had lost its initial momentum. It was simply not strong enough to mount offensives in three different directions at once. Casualties had been higher than expected – over 400,000 by the end of August – and the wear and tear on vehicles far greater than predicted. Engines became clogged with grit from the dust clouds, and broke down constantly, yet replacements were in very short supply. Bad communications also took their toll. The railway tracks, which were a slightly broader gauge, had to be relaid, and instead of the highways marked on their maps, the armies found dirt roads which turned to glutinous mud in a brief summer downpour. In many marshy places German troops had to build their own ‘corduroy roads’ of birch trunks laid side to side. The further they advanced into Russia, the harder it was to bring supplies forward. Panzer columns racing ahead frequently had to stop through lack of fuel.
The infantry divisions, which composed the bulk of the army, were marching ‘up to forty miles a day’ (but more usually around twenty), their jackboots roasting in the summer heat. The Landser, or infantryman, carried about fifty-five pounds of equipment, including steel helmet, rifle, ammunition and entrenching tool. His canvas and leather pack contained mess tin, canteen, an Esbit field stove, a combined spoon and fork in aluminium, rifle-cleaning kit, spare clothes, tent pegs and poles, field dressing, sewing kit, razor, soap and Vulkan Sanex condoms, even though carnal relations with civilians were officially forbidden.
The infantry was so tired trudging forwards in full kit that many fell asleep on the march. Even the panzer troops were exhausted. After servicing their vehicles – track-maintenance was the heaviest work – and cleaning their guns, they had a quick wash in a canvas bucket in a vain attempt to shift the ingrained dirt and oil from their hands. Their eyes swollen from fatigue, they then shaved, blinking into a mirror temporarily attached to a machine-gun mounting. The infantry tended to refer to them as ‘die Schwarze’ because of their black overalls. War correspondents described them as ‘the knights of modern warfare’, but their dust-choked vehicles broke down with monotonous regularity.
The frustrations provoked quarrels between commanders. A majority – General Heinz Guderian was the most outspoken – despaired of Hitler’s diversions. Moscow was not only the capital of the Soviet Union, they argued, it was also a major centre for communications and the armaments industry. An attack on it would also draw in surviving Soviet armies to their final destruction. The Führer, however, kept his generals in order by exploiting their rivalries and disagreements. He told them that they knew nothing of economic matters. Leningrad and the Baltic had to be secured to protect essential trade with Sweden, while the agriculture of the Ukraine was vital to Germany. Yet his instinct to avoid the road to Moscow was partly a superstitious avoidance of Napoleon’s footsteps.
Army Group Centre, having secured Smolensk and encircled the Soviet armies beyond it at the end of July, was ordered to halt. Hitler sent most of Hoth’s panzer group northwards to help the attack on Leningrad, while ‘Panzerarmee Guderian’ (the new designation was a typical Hitlerian sop to a disgruntled but necessary general) was diverted southwards to act as the upper jaw of the great Kiev encirclement.
Hitler changed his mind again early in September when he at last, agreed to Operation Typhoon, the advance on Moscow. Yet more time was lost because Hoth’s panzer divisions were still engaged in the outskirts of Leningrad. The forces for Operation Typhoon were not finally ready until the very end of September. Moscow lay just over 200 miles away from where Army Group Centre had been halted, and little time remained before the period of autumn mud, and then winter. When General Friedrich Paulus, Haider’s chief planner for Barbarossa, had raised the question of winter warfare earlier, Hitler had forbidden any mention of the subject.
Hitler in the Wolfsschanze used to gaze at the operations map showing the huge areas notionally controlled by his forces. For a visionary who had achieved total power in a country possessing the best-trained army in the world, the sight induced a sense of invincibility. This armchair strategist never possessed the qualities for true generalship, because he ignored practical problems. During the brief campaigns in Poland, Scandinavia, France and the Balkans, resupply had at times been difficult, but never an insuperable problem. In Russia, however, logistics would be as decisive a factor as firepower, manpower, mobility and morale. Hitler’s fundamental irresponsibility – a psychologically interesting defiance of fate – had been to launch the most ambitious invasion in history while refusing to gear the German economy and industry for all-out war. In hindsight, it seems more like the act of a compulsive gambler, subconsciously striving to increase the odds. The horrific consequences for millions of people seemed only to strengthen his megalomania.
Field Marshal von Bock had under his command one and a half million men, but his panzer divisions were weakened by the lack of replacement tanks and spare parts. When he assembled his commanders on the eve of the offensive, he set 7 November (the anniversary of the Russian Revolution) as the deadline for surrounding the Soviet capital. The ambitious Bock longed to be known as the conqueror of Moscow.
The Stavka, meanwhile, had been expecting a German offensive against Moscow ever since Army Group Centre had halted in mid-August. Stalin had sent General Yeremenko to organize armies into a new Bryansk Front, while two other fronts, Western and Reserve, were prepared to protect the capital. Yet in spite of these precautions, Yeremenko’s forces were taken by surprise when, early on the morning of 30 September, Guderian’s panzer Schwerpunkte struck their southern flank out of an autumnal mist. The sun soon broke through, making a warm, clear day, ideal for the offensive. The Germans had nothing to fear from the ai
r. At that moment, less than five per cent of Red Army aviation in European Russia still survived.
During the first days of October, the offensive went perfectly for the Germans, with the panzer groups and Field Marshal Kesselring’s Second Air Fleet working closely together. Yeremenko asked the Stavka for permission to withdraw, but no permission was given. On 3 October, Guderian’s point units on the right reached the city of Orel, 125 miles behind Yeremenko’s lines. Surprise was complete. As the leading panzers raced up the main street past trams, passers-by waved to them, assuming they were Russian. The Red Army had not even had time to prepare charges to blow up the important arms factories. On 6 October, Yeremenko and his staff narrowly escaped capture by German tanks soon after midday. All communications were lost. In the chaos of the following days, Marshal Budenny, supposedly commanding the Reserve Front, even lost his headquarters, and Yeremenko, who was badly wounded in the leg, had to be evacuated by air.
Soviet leaders in the Kremlin at first refused to acknowledge the scale of the threat. On 5 October, a fighter pilot reported a column of German panzers a dozen miles in length, advancing rapidly up the road to Yukhnov, not much more than a hundred miles from Moscow. Even when another pilot was sent out on reconnaissance and confirmed the report, the Stavka still refused to believe it. A third pilot was sent out, and he too confirmed the sighting. This did not stop Beria from wanting to arrest and interrogate their commander as a ‘panicmonger’, but it finally succeeded in galvanizing the Kremlin.
Stalin called an emergency session of the State Defence Committee. He also ordered General Zhukov, who had brutally invigorated the defence of Leningrad, to fly back immediately. After Zhukov had seen the chaos for himself, Stalin instructed him to reorganize the remnants from the disaster into a new western front. Every available unit was thrown in to hold some sort of line until the Stavka reserves could be deployed. With Moscow itself now at risk, over one hundred thousand men were mobilized as militia and a quarter of a million civilians, mostly women, were marched out to dig anti-tank ditches.
The first snow fell on the night of 6 October, then promptly melted, turning roads to thick mud for twenty-four hours. Bock’s panzer groups still managed to achieve two large double encirclements, one by Bryansk itself and the other round Vyazma on the central route to Moscow. The Germans claimed to have cut off 665,000 Red Army soldiers and to have destroyed or captured 1,242 tanks – more than in the whole of Bock’s three panzer groups.
‘What a great satisfaction it must be for you to see your plans maturing so well!’ wrote Field Marshal von Reichenau to General Paulus, his former chief of staff, and soon to be his successor as the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army. But groups of Russian soldiers, although surrounded and unsupplied within the pockets, fought on almost until the end of the month. ‘Strong-point after strong-point has to be captured individually,’ Paulus heard from a divisional commander. ‘As often as not, we cannot get them out even with flame-throwers, and we have to blow the whole thing to bits.’
Several German panzer divisions also encountered a new form of unconventional weapon during this fighting. They found Russian dogs running towards them with a curious-looking saddle holding a load on top with a short upright stick. At first the panzer troops thought that they must be first-aid dogs, but then they realized that the animals had explosives or an anti-tank mine strapped to them. These ‘mine-dogs’, trained on Pavlovian principles, had been taught to run under large vehicles to obtain their food. The stick, catching against the underside, would detonate the charge. Most of the dogs were shot before they reached their target, but this macabre tactic had an unnerving effect.
It was, however, the weather which rapidly became the Wehrmacht’s worst hindrance. The season of rain and mud, the rasputitsa, set in before the middle of October. German ration lorries frequently could not get through, so single-horse farm carts, known as panje wagons (panje was Wehrmacht slang for a Polish or Russian peasant), were commandeered from agricultural communities for hundreds of miles around. In some places, where no birch trunks came to hand to make a ‘corduroy road’, the corpses of Russian dead were used instead as ‘planks’. A Landser would often lose a jackboot, sucked from his leg in the knee-deep mud. Motorcyclists could only advance in places by getting off to haul their vehicles through. Commanders, who never lacked for manpower to push their staff cars through a boggy patch, wondered how anybody could make war in such conditions. All of them, however, feared the freeze that would soon follow. Nobody forgot that every day counted.
The German advance formations struggled on as best they could. In the centre, on 14 October, 10th Panzer Division and the SS Das Reich Division reached the Napoleonic battlefield of Borodino in rolling countryside with woods and rich farmland. They were only seventy miles from the western edge of Moscow. On the same day, 100 miles north-west of the capital, 1st Panzer Division took the town of Kalinin, with its bridge over the Volga, and severed the Moscow-Leningrad railway line. Meanwhile, on the southern flank, Guderian’s panzers swung up past Tula to threaten the Soviet capital from below.
The progress of the three-pronged attack on Moscow threw the Soviet leadership into panic. On the night of 15 October, foreign embassies were told to prepare to leave for Kuybyshev on the Volga. Beria started evacuating his headquarters too. The NKVD interrogators took their most important prisoners with them. They included senior officers who, although desperately needed at the front, were still being beaten to a pulp in the search for confessions. Three hundred other prisoners were executed in batches in the Lubyanka. At the end of the month, however, Stalin told the chief of the NKVD to halt what Beria himself called his ‘mincing machine’. The Soviet dictator was more than willing to go on shooting ‘defeatists and cowards’, but for the moment he had tired of Beria’s conspiracy fantasies, describing them as ‘rubbish’.
Stalin demanded accurate reports from the front, but anyone who dared to tell him the truth was accused of panic-mongering. He found it hard to hide his own disquiet. He suspected that Leningrad would fall, so his first consideration was how best to extricate the troops to help save Moscow. His lack of concern for the starving population was as callous as that of Hitler.
There was only one encouraging development at this time. Red Army divisions from the Manchurian frontier were already starting to deploy in the region of Moscow. Two of the first Siberian rifle regiments to arrive had in fact faced the SS Das Reich at Borodino a few days before, but it would take several weeks to transport the bulk of the reinforcements along the Trans-Siberian railway. The key Soviet agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had discovered that the Japanese planned to strike south into the Pacific against the Americans, not against the Soviet Far East. Stalin did not entirely trust Sorge, but this time his information had been confirmed by signals intercepts.
On the morning of 16 October, Aleksey Kosygin, the deputy chairman of Sovnarkom, the Council of Peoples’ Commissars, entered its building to find the place abandoned. Papers had been scattered by draughts, doors were left open, and telephones rang in empty offices. Kosygin, guessing that the callers wanted to check whether the leadership had left the capital, ran from desk to desk trying to answer them. Even when he picked up the receiver in time there was silence at the other end. Only one important official dared to identify himself. He asked bluntly whether Moscow would be surrendered.
At Stalin’s crisis meeting in the Kremlin on 17 October with Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the new chief of the Red Army political department, plans were discussed for mining factories, bridges, railways, roads and even that Stalinist showpiece, the Moscow Metro. No public announcement was made about the evacuation of the remaining ministries to Kuybyshev, but news spread with astonishing rapidity, considering the penalties for defeatist talk. Stories circulated that Stalin had been arrested in a Kremlin coup, that German paratroopers had dropped in Red Square and other enemy troops had infiltrated the city in Soviet uniform. The fear that the capital
was about to be abandoned to the enemy provoked thousands to try to get out, storming trains in stations. Food riots, looting and drunkenness turned many minds to the chaos in 1812 which led to the burning of Moscow.
Stalin had considered leaving, but changed his mind. It was Aleksandr Shcherbakov, ‘with his impassive Buddha face, with thick horn-rimmed glasses resting on the tiny turned-up button of a nose’, wearing ‘a plain khaki tunic with only one decoration on it – the Order of Lenin’, who announced on Moscow Radio Stalin’s decision to remain.
A state of siege was declared on 19 October. Beria brought several regiments of NKVD troops into the city to restore order. ‘Panicmongers’ were shot along with looters, and even drunkards. In the popular mind, there was only one test of whether the city would be defended or abandoned: ‘Was the military parade [for the anniversary of the Revolution] going to take place on Red Square?’ The people of Moscow seemed to provide the answer themselves, rather than wait for their leader to speak. Rather like the defence of Madrid exactly five years before, the mood suddenly turned from one of mass panic to one of mass defiance.
Stalin, with his uncanny instinct, soon realized the symbolic importance of the parade in Red Square, even if Lenin’s mummified corpse had been evacuated to a safer place. Molotov and Beria at first thought the idea crazy, with the German Luftwaffe in easy striking distance, but Stalin told them to concentrate every anti-aircraft battery available round the capital. The cunning old impresario was planning to borrow the best-dramatized touch from the siege of Madrid, when on 9 November 1936 the first international brigade of foreign volunteers had paraded up the Gran Vía, to the populace’s wildly enthusiastic but mistaken cheers of ‘Vivan los rusos!’ They had then marched straight on through the city, to face Franco’s Army of Africa on its western edge. In Moscow, Stalin decided, reinforcements for Zhukov’s armies would march through Red Square, past the saluting base of Lenin’s mausoleum, and straight on to face the invader. He knew the value that newsreel footage of this event would have when distributed round the world. He also knew the right response to Hitler’s speeches. ‘If they want a war of extermination’, he growled on the eve of the anniversary parade, ‘they shall have one!’