War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (68 page)

By 28 November there were 21 Soviet divisions aligned against IIIrd Panzer Corps at Rostov. The corps commander, General der Kavallerie Eberhard von Mackensen, had reported even 10 weeks earlier that his two divisions, the ‘Leibstandarte’ and 13th Panzer, were worn out and short of everything from socks to anti-freeze. They were down to two-thirds of their normal strength. Fighting power had been reduced in much the same way as the German divisions struggling toward Moscow. The IIIrd Corps reported, ‘any actions which are undertaken are borne by non-commissioned officers and a few die-hards’. Their strength was at an end. ‘The bulk of the men go along only because of their training and the basic decency in their bones.’
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On 28 November the corps evacuated Rostov and pulled back behind the River Mius. It was the first German retreat of the war.

On the Central Front, Panzergruppen 3 and 4 attacks beyond Klin and Solnechnogorsk opened a 45km gap between Dimitrov on the Moscow–Volga canal and the village of Krassnaya Polyana, just 18km north of Moscow. To the south, Second Panzer Army’s 17th Panzer Division pushing toward Kashira had begun to form a deep pocket around Tula, placing their enveloping spearhead 100km short of the southern outskirts of Moscow. These pincer arms, however, did not possess the power they had enjoyed at Smolensk, Kiev and Vyazma. They were weak. Von Bock on 23 November enjoined both von Brauchitsch and his Chief of Staff, Halder, ‘for heaven’s sake’ not to overestimate the strength of his forces. Staffs ‘must be clear,’ he said, ‘that as far as this attack is concerned it is “the eleventh hour”’.
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Army Group Centre was making only slow progress. ‘Are we to be pitied or admired?’ asked a soldier in the 260th Infantry Division. ‘Without winter clothing and with no gloves, and footwear in need of repair, we live in the open, lying if necessary in foxholes.’
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During clear evenings the advancing infantry could see flashes from Flak and ghostly searchlight beams above the city of Moscow. It was within their grasp. The German effort had reached crisis point. Panzergruppe 3 at Krassnaya Polyana was within 20km of the suburbs.

Locomotives puffing sparks and huge clouds of steam into the frozen night air slowed and clattered their way into the sidings and railheads at Yakhroma and Ryazan, north and south of Moscow. Goods wagons and passenger carriage doors were freed of ice and knocked open. Soldiers leaped down onto tracks, raising clouds of condensation; stretching, urinating and slapping themselves for warmth. Quickly rounded up in the normal pandemonium of military activity with shouting, whistle blasts, vehicles drawing up and flashing lights, they were formed up and marched off into the darkness. Unloading vehicles took longer. There was ceaseless activity as trains shunted in, unloaded and puffed out of the railhead again. It was bitterly cold. Deep snow impeded the movement of the troops as they set off to their new assembly areas. Many of the soldiers had endured cramped conditions inside these trains for the nine, to ten-day journeys that had brought them from as far afield as Ulan, Siberia and the border with Mongolia and China.

New armies were being formed and assembled in areas just behind the front. At Yakhroma, north of Moscow, First Shock Army began to coalesce in freezing conditions toward the end of November. In the centre was Twentieth Army, and Tenth Army was around Ryazan to the south. Stalin had closely questioned Zhukov two weeks before on Moscow’s survival prospects. ‘Are you sure we are going to be able to hold Moscow?’ he asked. ‘Tell me honestly, as a member of the Party.’ Zhukov believed ‘there is no question that we will be able to hold Moscow’ but it was dependent upon the arrival of reserves he had requested on being appointed commander of the Moscow Front. ‘Two more armies and two hundred tanks,’ he said. Stalin had answered, ‘They will be ready by the end of November, but we have no tanks for the time being.’
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Meanwhile the front was to be held with what there was.

The number of tanks on the Russian West Front increased from 450 to 700 between 1 October and 15 November. In addition the STAVKA had reinforced and covered projected German attack avenues, providing eight rifle and seven cavalry divisions, four rifle brigades, an airborne corps and independent tank and specialist units at the end of November. Further armies were also forming up: the Twenty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, Fifty-eighth, Fifty-ninth, Sixtieth and Sixty-first armies. In total, 194 divisions and 94 brigades had been newly created since the beginning of the war, which had started with 291 divisions.

Russian intelligence was informed by Richard Sorge that Japan might be verging on an offensive so vast in scale and remote from Russian territory that substantial Russian units could be risked transferring from Siberia to the west. The Sorge spy network was eventually compromised with his capture and execution. Even so, 27 of the new divisions (comparable in size to Army Group North at the outset of ‘Barbarossa’) came from the Far East, Central Asia and the Transcaucasus.
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This amounted to the creation of a second strategic echelon not yet identified by Luftwaffe reconnaissance. Although the new armies were inexperienced and short of artillery and tanks, they were fresh. They would not hesitate in the attack, unlike the assaulting veteran but weak German divisions, until they, too, knew what it was like to be bloodied. The potential to administer a strategic counter-blow was crystallising in the very Arctic conditions that would make their sudden deployment in the teeth of their exhausted foe quite devastating.

‘Flucht nach Vorn’

Flucht nach Vorn
(the desperate German rush against Moscow’s defences) was predicated on the belief that Soviet forces were verging on collapse. Von Bock was reminded by General Halder, ‘we must understand that things are going much worse for the enemy than for us and that these battles are less a question of strategic command than a question of energy.’
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It was not energy driving soldiers, more a desire to conclude the campaign. Unaware of the true situation, they instinctively felt a ‘decision’ achieved in front of Moscow or the capture of the city itself would bring a form of respite, a lull in the fighting, at minimum some shelter, at best the end of the war. ‘Moscow’ became the dominant theme of
Feldpost,
diaries and unit accounts. Time and distance was measured in terms of proximity to the city.

Von Bock lamented on 21 November, ‘the whole attack is too thin and has no depth’. Unit symbols on his ‘green table’ belied the true situation; the ratio of forces was no more unfavourable than before, except ‘some companies have only 20 and 30 men left’. He accepted ‘heavy officer losses and the over-exertion of the units in conjunction with the cold give a quite different picture’. Alois Kellner, a despatch rider journeying between divisions near Naro-Fominsk, about 70km from Moscow, saw the picture only too clearly. ‘The frozen bodies of
Landser
were stacked next to the roads like timber,’ he said. These grisly constructions, ‘shaped like huts, might include between 60 and 70 bodies, frozen stiff’.
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Officer losses were especially high. ‘Many second lieutenants are leading battalions,’ von Bock recorded, ‘one first lieutenant was leading a regiment’ (a weak brigade of three battalions).
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Panzer commander Karl Rupp remembered, ‘our last push was through wooded terrain’. He was advancing with the 5th Panzer Division some 20–25km from Moscow.

‘The spearhead consisted of two PzKpfwIIs and two PzKpfwIIIs. At the end of the column was another PzKpfwII with riflemen in between. The lead tank was knocked out with no survivors. I was in the second tank. There was no way to get through, we had to pull back.’

They passed a Moscow tram stop on the city route. At night they could see Flak engaging German aircraft over the city.
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Panzer thrusts were in reality probing raids. Progress was characterised by a series of short, confused, hotly contested meeting engagements with the enemy. Both protagonists had scant knowledge of the overall situation. Gerd Habedanck, waiting with infantrymen securing a wintry forest road, ‘suddenly heard tracked vehicles driving towards them at frantic speed from the rear’. Three Soviet T-34s abruptly rushed by, spraying up snow from the back. ‘Behind each turret,’ said Habedanck, ‘lay a barely identifiable group of spectre-like Soviet infantrymen, who had jumped onto the back of the tanks hoping to break through to Moscow.’ They pressed tightly up against each other, heads burrowed down into brown greatcoats, to secure protection against the wind. A flurry of wild shooting broke out and two of the Russians toppled from the tanks into the road. ‘Then the last tank drove into a shell crater where it was struck by an anti-tank shell,’ reported the correspondent. ‘It managed to get out and then disappeared down a small wooded track, streaming smoke as it went.’ Shortly after, a thick black pall of smoke began to rise above the tree-tops. A PzKpfwIII then clattered into an ambush position at the edge of the wood. Its first victim was a Russian armoured car travelling toward Moscow, which received a direct hit and was bulldozed from the road. On examination it was discovered there was only 476km on its speedometer. This brand-new vehicle had barely been delivered to the city.
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These skirmishes fought in the wooded areas on the outskirts of Moscow were conducted with pitiless ferocity. Much was at stake. Peter Pechel, a forward artillery observer riding with a column of nine tanks moving toward Volokolamsk, 60km from Moscow, had a ‘queasy stomach and difficulty breathing’. The rest of his crew felt the same. ‘Are we going to get it today?’ he considered.

Some T-34 and not so new BT tank types belonging to M. E. Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Brigade were operating in the same area. They had been ordered to set ambushes along the same highway, with an infantry and anti-aircraft battalion in support. The infantry were already partially surrounded. ‘Four of the [German] tanks crawled along the highway’ and ‘were set on fire’ by two hidden T-34s, said Katukov.

‘All hell breaks loose,’ observed Pechel as the Panzer column came under fire from several directions. Intent on manoeuvring behind the enemy, the Panzer
Keil
had unluckily placed themselves directly in front of the Russian anti-tank positions. ‘The lead tank is on fire,’ said Pechel, and then ‘the tank in front of me takes a direct hit on the turret hatch’. With no chance of returning fire, Pechel’s tank was hit next.

‘There is a brief roaring sound. I can’t see. Blue stars dance in front of my eyes. Then I feel two quick blows to my right arm and left thigh. My radio operator cries out, “I’m hit!” Suddenly everything turns quiet inside our tank – horribly quiet. I squeeze my way out, shouting, “Quick, get out!”’.

Only two others scrambled from the smouldering wreck. Looking around, Pechel saw five tanks already hit and burning with wounded and dead crews scattered alongside. The entire right side of their Panzer had been shot away by the T-34’s 76mm shell. ‘My arm and thigh begin to hurt,’ he said. ‘There is blood on my face which sticks to my eyes.’ His broken right hand flapped uselessly from his wrist and soon developed a blue tinge from the −14° temperature outside the tank. Pechel slipped into shock as the carnage carried on around him. ‘Those who have already been wounded once are being hit a second and third time,’ he said. Crackling incoming fire became interspersed with the whimpering from the wounded.

‘The commander of the tank in front of me has taken a bullet in the head, and his brains are running down his face. He’s running around in grotesque circles crying “Mother, mother”. Finally, and almost mercifully, he is hit again by shrapnel and falls to the ground.’

Russian counter-attackers swarmed through the woods alongside Pechel, who began to consider his possible fate.

‘Oh God, only four days ago I saw the dead of another one of our companies. I saw the poked-out eyes, the severed genitals, the horrible, tortured, distorted faces. Anything but that.’

Russian soldiers did not differentiate between black SS uniforms and Panzer crews. Any uniform bearing the ‘death’s-head’ insignia at the collar (which Panzer troops might also wear) was inviting retribution ‘When you’re so young, and have been at war since the age of 19, you really haven’t had much of a life. I
don’t
want to die,’ reflected Pechel, contemplating suicide.
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At this moment German reinforcements coming up behind his initial probing attack crashed into the Russian positions. He was recovered and transported to the rear for treatment.

Katukov’s two T-34s covered the fighting retreat of the Russian infantry. German soldiers clambered atop one of the tanks shouting to the Russians inside to surrender. The sister T-34 observing this threatening development ‘used his machine gun,’ said Katukov, ‘to clean the enemy off his friend’s tank’. Fire was returned from the other tank, which scythed through more enemy infantry who had meanwhile attempted the same.
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Despite the technical superiority of the T-34, they and inferior Russian models continued to endure fearful losses. Mortally wounded tank driver Ivan Kolosow wrote a final letter to his wife Warja at the end of October, revealing, ‘I am the last of three tank drivers [from his platoon] still alive’. Seriously wounded, he regretfully wrote, ‘we will never see each other again.’ Nurse Nina Vishnevskaya, a medical orderly with a Soviet tank battalion, recalled fearsome burns and the hard physical effort required to pull injured crews from their confined fighting compartments. ‘It’s very difficult to drag a man, especially a turret gunner, out from the hatch.’ She described the emotional trauma of caring for the hideously mutilated crewmen.