The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  The Soviet leaders kept getting more bad news. A Soviet pilot reported that a column of German tanks was only about a hundred miles southwest of the Kremlin, moving steadily along the highway, and there appeared to be no Soviet defenses that could stop them before they would reach Moscow. Alarmed, the Soviet brass sent out a second plane, which confirmed the sighting. Secret police chief Beria was furious, dispatching one of his subordinates to warn Moscow air commander Nikolai Sbytov that he and his pilots could face arrest for “cowardice and panic-mongering.” But a third plane confirmed all the bad news, and Stalin realized just how desperate the situation now looked for the Soviet capital. As Zhukov noted, “The grave possibility of an enemy breakthrough hung over Moscow.”

  On the evening of October 6th, Stalin called Zhukov in Leningrad, ordering him to fly back to Moscow at once. The next day, the Soviet leader, who was suffering from a bad bout of the flu, received him in his Kremlin apartment. “Look, we’re in really serious trouble on the Western front, yet I can’t seem to get a detailed report about what’s going on,” Stalin complained. Zhukov’s assignment, he told him, was to head immediately to the headquarters of the rapidly disintegrating Western front and to report what was happening. Of course, his real assignment was nothing less than to stop the Germans from marching into Moscow and declaring victory.

  Exhausted physically and emotionally, Zhukov got into a car and set out for the headquarters right away, a difficult drive that lasted late into the night. He ordered the driver to stop on at least one occasion and got out to jog a couple of hundred yards to stay awake. He hardly needed to be told that his fate, along with the fate of the country, depended on his ability to stay alert and figure out what could be done to avert the disaster in the making.

  The flip side to the deepening pessimism of Stalin was the buoyant mood of Hitler about Operation Typhoon. In September, SS officer Otto Günsche, who would later become the personal adjutant to the German leader, visited Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters. When he asked some of the officers stationed there whether this was where the Führer was planning to spend the winter, they laughed as if he had floated an absurd idea. “Spend the winter? What are you thinking of?” one of them replied. “We are fighting a Blitzkrieg against Russia.” Then referring to Hitler’s beloved retreat in the Austrian Alps, he added: “Christmas we will certainly be celebrating on the Obersalzberg as usual.”

  Hitler called Günsche to his conference room so that he could hear his impressions from the Eastern front. Judging by the cheerful way the Führer greeted him—he was whistling softly to himself—he was expecting good news. While conceding that the Russians were fighting hard, Günsche didn’t disappoint him. He said that morale among the SS troops was high and they were happy to be fighting.

  Hitler offered a prediction. “We will break them soon, it is only a question of time.” Then, describing how his panzer forces, with more than two thousand tanks, were preparing for the assault, he added, “Moscow will be attacked and will fall, then we will have won the war.” Once the Soviet forces were defeated and German troops reached the Urals, he added, they would stop there and the Luftwaffe would be charged with bombing any troops that might try to regroup further east. As for the Russians in the areas that he wouldn’t bother to occupy, they could starve. Right before dismissing Günsche with a fascist salute, he vowed, “As the reformer of Europe, I shall make sure that a new order is imposed on this land according to my laws!”

  Even when the weather began to change in early October, bringing the first snow and rain that would soon do their part to slow the German advance, Hitler continued his ruminations about what awaited Russia once it would be firmly under German rule. At a dinner on October 17, he talked about huge construction projects and the need to lay roads everywhere. According to one of those present who wrote down the highlights of the conversation, Hitler spelled out his vision of the future.

  “Where the big rivers are crossed, German cities must arise, as centers of the Wehrmacht, police, administration and Party authorities. Along these roads will lie the German farmsteads, and soon the monotonous steppe, with its Asiatic appearance, will look very different indeed. In ten years four million Germans will have settled there, and in twenty years at least ten million.”

  The settlers would come from as far away as America, he continued, not just from Germany. His implicit assumption: it would be a German-controlled world once the Soviet Union was defeated. As for the Ukrainians, Russians, and other peoples of that defeated land, “no education or welfare is to be laid on for the native population.” In other words, their fate would be total enslavement, and their country’s production would only benefit its conquerors.

  Hitler’s commanders were preoccupied with the more immediate goal: ensuring that their troops would maintain their progress as they prepared to strike Moscow from the south, west and north. A day after Guderian’s tanks entered Orel unopposed on October 3, Army Chief of Staff Halder wrote in his diary that all was going according to plan. “Guderian has reached Orel and is now pushing into completely empty space,” he noted. “[General] Hoepner has broken through the enemy positions and reached Mozhaisk”—a town about sixty miles due west of Moscow that was at the center of the main Soviet defense line. Northwest of Moscow, German troops were pushing toward Rzhev, a town that was seen as a key staging point for the units that were supposed to carry out the northern portion of the pincer movement aimed at Moscow.

  But Guderian wasn’t convinced he had completely open space to the north from Orel toward Moscow. And aside from the discovery that the Soviet T-34 tank was proving to be better designed for combat than his panzers, Guderian was troubled by the signs that the Soviet defenders were doing a better job of organizing their counterattacks, even when they were outgunned, than they had before. While Red Army infantry would attack frontally, their tanks would strike at the German flanks. “They were learning,” Guderian conceded. And he was worried about the impact on his troops’ morale. “The bitterness of the fighting was gradually telling on both our officers and men…. It was indeed startling to see how deeply our best officers had been affected by the latest battles.”

  Even more alarming was that those early days of October produced the first signs of a change in the weather. The first snow fell during the night of October 6 to 7, and, while it was only an early warning of the looming Russian winter, Guderian’s officers pleaded for warm boots, shirts, and socks, all of which were in perilously short supply. Despite the admonitions against pestering the high command with repeated requests, Guderian kept doing so—and kept getting nowhere.

  The early snows didn’t stick, but along with the rains that soon followed, they helped turn the Russian roads into “appalling mud swamps,” as Guderian put it. On October 12, he complained, “Our troops were stuck in the mud and immobilized.” They still managed to help complete the encirclement of another cauldron, this one in Bryansk, south of the larger action in Vyazma. But just as the German command issued an order for the encirclement of Moscow, Guderian’s troops, who were supposed to take care of the southern portion of that task, found themselves increasingly bogged down by both the continued resistance and the weather. In fact, that particular order to encircle Moscow didn’t even reach them.

  While many of the German generals in the field were convinced they could still produce the victory that Hitler was demanding, they weren’t nearly as optimistic as the Führer about the inevitability of it and certainly not sanguine about the price their men would have to pay to achieve it. They had enough of a taste of Soviet resistance and Russian weather to recognize that they were in for a real fight.

  As far as Zhukov knew, the Germans had every reason to believe that they had the upper hand and that they could make it all the way to Moscow. “The enemy thought that the Soviet forces were weakened, demoralized and incapable of defending their capital,” he wrote later. On October 6, the night he drove out to the Western front headquarters following his meeting
with Stalin, Zhukov debriefed the generals there and realized that the situation was grim indeed. The commanders had lost contact with the armies surrounded near Vyazma, and, as Zhukov put it, “there was no longer a continuous front in the west, and the gaps could not be closed because the command had run out of reserves.” With the benefit of hindsight, he claimed he knew that, with good planning and leadership, Soviet forces could still manage to hold off the Germans, but his description of the actual situation suggests he was far from certain.

  Zhukov phoned Stalin at 2:30 A.M. from the Western front headquarters to give him the report he had been waiting for. As usual, the Soviet leader was up at that late hour. “The principal danger now is that the road to Moscow is almost entirely unprotected,” the weary commander explained. “The fortifications along the Mozhaisk line are too weak to halt a breakthrough of German armor. We must concentrate forces on the Mozhaisk defense line as soon as possible from where we can.” The line Zhukov was referring to ran from north to south for about 135 miles, at a distance of about sixty miles from the capital that his remaining troops were supposed to defend at all costs.

  To win time to set up those defenses, about four thousand cadets from two Podolsk military academies, one for infantry, and the other for artillery, were ordered to fill one of the most glaring gaps in the line where German troops were advancing near Maloyaroslavets. According to postwar Soviet lore, the heroic efforts of the cadets stunned the Germans at first and delayed their onslaught for several crucial days. One survivor, cadet S. Leonov, is quoted as rejoicing at their early successes. “We see Germans. They are running away. We can’t believe our eyes. But it’s not a dream: the enemies are running away from us—cadets.”

  Even if true, that was only a fleeting episode. Boris Vidensky, the survivor who went on to become a military historian, recalled the immediate terror of German bombardment, which killed many of his fellow cadets, and German leaflets fluttering down from planes with the appeal, “Red young men, surrender to us!” While the cadets already were wearing the kind of warm underwear, coats and hats that the Germans lacked, they were completely outgunned. Vidensky pointed out that, as an artillery cadet specializing in cannons, he didn’t even know how to fire a machine gun at first. And while the Germans represented the death threat the cadets were facing in front of them, there was another threat from the opposite direction. “This was the first time I saw NKVD blocking units,” Vidensky noted, referring to the troops assigned to shoot any soldiers who tried to retreat. “They were behind us.” But whatever his thoughts were then, he expressed approval of such terror tactics when looking back more than sixty years later. “The idea was to resist the Germans at any price,” he says. “Such toughness brought us victory.”

  The official accounts indicate that about 80 percent of the cadets perished in those few days of fighting. Scattered units elsewhere, including other groups of cadets, also participated in the improvised defense of a line full of holes. As in the case of the hundreds of thousands of troops who died or were taken prisoner in the Vyazma cauldron, Zhukov would claim that such sacrifices were “not in vain.” They bought time for those who were desperately shoring up the defenses all around Moscow, digging trenches, constructing pillboxes and anti-tank barriers, and preparing for the worst. They also bought time for the generals to reorganize their units, shore up the defense lines, and call upon any troops still available.

  But Stalin’s first instinct, as always, was to punish those whom he blamed for not fending off the German onslaught and for allowing so many troops to get caught at Vyazma. After hearing Zhukov’s initial reports, he gave him the command of all the forces defending Moscow and fired several of the top officers who had been in charge during earlier defeats. Although Zhukov had little sympathy for the other senior officers who were dismissed, he defended General Ivan Konev, arguing that he needed him as his deputy commander. Stalin reluctantly agreed but made sure that the new team knew where it stood. “If Moscow falls, both your heads’ll roll,” he told Zhukov. As always, there was no possibility of assigning any of the blame to Stalin, no matter what happened.

  Zhukov calculated he had only about ninety thousand men left to stop the approaching Germans from taking the capital. “These forces were far from adequate to man a continuous defense line,” he noted. As a result, the troops were sent to defend key towns and positions. Their officers, from Zhukov on down, watching for where the Germans would strike next, knew they had to do everything possible to deploy them effectively. “Everyone worked day and night,” Zhukov wrote later. “People literally collapsed from fatigue and lack of sleep. But everyone did all he could at his post—sometimes even the impossible.” The key motivation, he concluded, was “a feeling of personal responsibility for the fate of Moscow.” But the Germans kept punching holes in the Soviet defense lines, and Zhukov realized that the most he could hope for was to delay the German advance long enough for the defenses closer to the city to be strengthened.

  While anti-tank barriers were hastily erected at the approaches to the capital and German air raids sent Muscovites scurrying for cover in the city’s subway stations, even the official Soviet pronouncements, which always tried to avoid admitting bad news, sounded increasingly gloomy. The Soviet media didn’t report Hitler’s speech on October 3 announcing that the “final” drive on Moscow had begun, but Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Solomon Lozovsky indirectly conceded that this might be true when he told foreign journalists that the capture of any particular city wouldn’t alter the outcome of the war. “If the Germans want to see a few hundred thousand more of their people killed, they’ll succeed in that—if in nothing else,” he said on October 7. That same evening, a report on the news mentioned for the first time “heavy fighting in the direction of Vyazma.”

  The next day the army daily Krasnaya Zvezda declared that “the very existence of the Soviet state is in danger” and demanded that all soldiers “stand firm and fight to the last drop of blood.” This was part of a process that Zhukov would call explaining “the gravity of the situation, the immediacy of the threat to Moscow, to the Soviet people.” New instructions called on all Muscovites to help build one defense line outside the city, one right on the boundary of the city, and then defense lines along the inner and outer boulevard rings within the city itself, thus preparing for street fighting. On October 13, Moscow Party chief Aleksandr Shcherbakov told a meeting of activists, “Let us not shut our eyes. Moscow is in danger.”

  And still the Germans kept coming closer and closer. On October 14, they captured Rzhev. While the town lies 130 miles northwest of Moscow, it was the gateway for the German troops seeking to sweep in from the north, and its fall meant that they now appeared well positioned to do so. Rzhev would also soon become a scene of mass killing on a scale comparable to Vyazma, another infernal cauldron that would consume huge numbers of troops. But for the moment, the twin setbacks in Vyazma and Rzhev signaled that the endgame for Moscow had really started, and many Muscovites were coming to the realization that it might not last long or end well.

  Ordinary Soviet citizens only had to read or hear the official announcements to come to that conclusion. They no longer had to read between the lines, as they normally did, to figure out what was happening. An official communiqué on the morning of October 16 declared: “During the night of October 14–15 the position on the Western front became worse. The German-Fascist troops hurled against our troops large quantities of tanks and motorized infantry, and in one sector broke through our defenses.”

  The Germans were closing in, their pincers extended, and by the Soviet government’s own admission, they were breaking through. The Moscow Communist Party organization was calling for “iron discipline, a merciless struggle against even the slightest manifestations of panic, against cowards, deserters and rumormongers.” But that wasn’t about to stop the rumors from flying that German troops were already on the capital’s outskirts or word leaking out that the government and foreign embassie
s were already evacuating key personnel. On October 13, Stalin had issued orders for the evacuation of top Party, government, and military officials to Kuibyshev, the Volga River city that had been picked to serve as the temporary capital if Moscow fell.

  Nor could it stop the mounting sense of alarm among ordinary Muscovites, who were nervously contemplating the possibility that they’d be left alone to face the German conquerors and occupiers. Suddenly, many of them grabbed their belongings and decided to flee as well, but they had to find their way out of the endangered city on their own.

  Moscow was on the verge of panic, not in a metaphorical sense, but in the literal meaning of that term.

  6

  “The brotherhood of man”

  It wasn’t only Muscovites or Hitler and Stalin who were anxiously monitoring the German drive on the Soviet capital. It’s no exaggeration to say that the world was watching. Certainly Winston Churchill was watching with the hope that the Soviet side would tie down Hitler’s forces long enough to ease the pressure on his country, which had held out alone for so long against a military machine that had triumphed everywhere else it had attacked in Europe. Certainly Franklin D. Roosevelt was watching, since he knew, even if he hadn’t confided as much to his countrymen, that sooner or later the United States inevitably would be drawn into this global conflict. Certainly Japan’s military rulers were watching, carefully monitoring the progress of the German forces and pondering whether they should remain on the sidelines or attack the Soviet Union from the east if that country was about to collapse anyway.