The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  For all the talk about the enthusiasm of his men, Edelman reluctantly admitted that they were subject to brutal discipline. “I saw the shooting of deserters,” he said. “I saw this in my battalion.” He didn’t shy away from discussing the memories that many veterans prefer to suppress, putting them in the context of the normal terrors of combat. “The first time you have to get out of a trench and run straight into enemy guns, your heart is pounding so hard and you’re drenched in cold sweat. You run and the men on your left and right fall, and you know that at any moment the same can happen to you.” As an officer, he added, “You have to charge and believe your soldiers will follow you.”

  And what if someone didn’t want to get out of the trench to follow him? Edelman looked away, then replied, “When you see someone is staying behind, you punch him in the face. There are different rules in war. Why should I attack and you don’t? There’s no time for sentiment.”

  The Siberians helped recapture several towns and villages northwest of Moscow, but they paid a heavy price for their victories. Of the twenty-five men under Edelman’s command when they joined the battle for Moscow in late October, only three were still with him by January 1942. “The rest were either killed, wounded or frozen,” he said. “My hands and feet also froze but I still kept fighting.” Edelman was wounded five times during the war and decorated after the battle for Moscow for his bravery. His mother, who had escaped from Kiev, was notified twice that he was dead.

  Despite his evident patriotism and courage, Edelman was eager to set the record straight on one point. “It’s a myth that people yelled ‘For the motherland! For Stalin!’” he said. “I never heard anyone yelling that. There are a lot of myths and you can only find out the truth bit by bit.”

  The truth about the Siberians, as is so often the case about others who participated in the defense of Moscow, has literally remained just below the surface of the fields and villages where so many fought and died. Semyon Timokhin grew up in Toropovo, a tiny village in the Kemerovo region of Siberia. He was only seven when the battle for the capital was reaching its climax and his father was one of the conscripts dispatched to the Moscow region. As his train was approaching its destination, German bombers struck, and he was badly wounded. “His arm was torn to shreds and that was the end of the war for him,” Semyon recalled.

  Semyon heard plenty of vivid accounts of the Siberians’ ordeals. His uncle, Vladimir Timokhin, was also sent to fight near Moscow that autumn and recounted one particularly gruesome night. Around 3 A.M., a huge explosion shook his barracks and one part of the building simply disappeared. Jumping up from his cot, Vladimir looked out and saw that the ground was white, though it hadn’t been covered with snow the day before. In fact, there was still no snow. The soldiers had been issued white pajamas the day before, and it was their torn pajamas and bodies that were strewn across the dark ground.

  Growing up after the war, Semyon pursued a military career, eventually rising to the rank of general in the army, specializing in aviation. After he retired from his last assignment as head of the Moscow area aviation headquarters in 1989, he was allotted a plot of land not far from Snegeri, a village just northwest of Moscow, where the Siberians had participated in brutal tank and infantry battles. “I began to cultivate and fence it, and found bones all over the place,” he said. It turned out that the local inhabitants had tried to bury those who had died in late 1941 and early 1942, once their bodies began to thaw in the spring. “All this territory with more than two hundred plots of land turned out to be a huge common grave,” Semyon explained.

  A plot of land this close to Moscow was a prize possession, but given all that he already knew about the price the Siberians had paid there, he couldn’t continue to treat it as just another place to grow cabbage, tomatoes, parsley, apples and pears as he had planned to do. “I could not stay there,” he said. The ghosts of his fellow Siberians drove him away.

  10

  “Don’t be sentimental”

  By late November, Stalin and his generals were beginning to realize that they had survived the worst part of the drive on Moscow. They knew that the Germans were overextended, running low on supplies and constantly freezing. They knew, too, that Hitler didn’t have large numbers of fresh reserves to call up at that point, no saviors like the Siberians to throw into the battle. And they knew that their men who had rushed to the defense of the capital had, for the most part, fought as hard as they could. “Our soldiers were fully conscious of their personal responsibility for the fate of Moscow, for the fate of their homeland, and were determined to die rather than let the enemy through to Moscow,” Marshal Zhukov wrote later. Despite the propagandistic tone of that assessment, it was generally accurate.

  But none of that meant that Stalin was ready to ease up on his generals or his men. Zhukov got a personal taste of that when the Soviet leader called him about a report that Dedovsk—a town northwest of Moscow, only twenty miles from the Kremlin—had been abandoned by his troops and taken over by the Germans.

  “Do you know that they’ve occupied Dedovsk?” Stalin asked.

  “No, Comrade Stalin, I didn’t know that,” Zhukov replied.

  “A commander should know what’s going on at the front!” the dictator snapped. He then ordered Zhukov to go immediately to the area and “personally organize a counterattack and retake Dedovsk.”

  When Zhukov demurred, saying that he shouldn’t leave the headquarters at such a tense time, Stalin wasn’t about to listen. “Never mind, we’ll get along somehow,” he brusquely informed him, adding that Zhukov’s chief of staff could take over while he went off on his mission.

  Zhukov quickly found out the real story. General Konstantin Rokossovsky, whose Sixteenth Army was responsible for that region, explained that Dedovsk hadn’t fallen to the Germans. In fact, his troops were fighting along the Volokolamsk highway further north to prevent a breakthrough toward Dedovsk and Nakhabino. In the course of that fighting, the Germans had taken a small village called Dedovo. The names were close enough for someone to have mixed them up. “It was plain that the report Stalin had received was all a mistake,” Zhukov recalled.

  But when he called headquarters to explain the misunderstanding, Stalin flew into a rage and demanded that Zhukov retake the village. It didn’t matter that the village had no tactical or strategic significance and that Stalin had been thinking of another place when he had issued the original order. He wasn’t about to let Zhukov off the hook.

  Somewhat sheepishly, Zhukov proceeded into the field and told Rokossovsky and another general that they had to mount an operation to take back the village from the Germans. In reality, this meant diverting troops to seize a few houses. With far more important battles raging all around them, they at first objected, pointing out that this would be a needless diversion, which would entail sending a rifle company across a deep gully away from the main fighting. Rather than argue a hopeless case, Zhukov informed them that this was an order from Stalin. That ended all discussion.

  When Zhukov reported the successful completion of this senseless mission on December 1, he was told that Stalin had called three times. “Where is Zhukov?” he had demanded, apparently having completely forgotten that he’d sent him away. “Why has he gone away?”

  On the same day, German troops had launched a new attack on another part of the front that had been fairly quiet until then. Finally back at his headquarters, Zhukov called Stalin to discuss the latest attack. It was only when they were just about done that the Soviet leader mentioned his previous assignment. “Well, and what about Dedovsk?” he asked.

  Zhukov knew better than to repeat that the town had never been in danger and that the Soviet leader had confused it with a tiny village. He simply reported that his troops had driven the Germans out of Dedovo. It wouldn’t have hurt anyone but himself to underscore the fact that Stalin had been provided with erroneous information and then compounded the error by refusing to acknowledge it. In his dealings with Stalin, Zhukov
was more outspoken than almost anyone else ever dared to be, but he, too, was under no illusions about the risks of provoking his ire.

  In that respect, Stalin and Hitler ran their military campaigns in similar fashion. Both dictators regularly cowed their generals, overruling them whenever they saw fit. But by late November and early December, the two leaders were in a novel position vis-à-vis each other. The German army’s rapid march across Russia had all but stalled just short of Moscow, and the Red Army was finally poised to strike back in some areas. It would not simply keep retreating. This would test Stalin’s and Hitler’s military leadership skills in new ways.

  While Stalin ordered Zhukov to launch the first counteroffensive starting December 6, Hitler belatedly responded to appeals of his generals to acknowledge how overextended and exhausted their troops were by ordering an end, for the duration of the winter, of their drive to seize Moscow and other key objectives. Hitler’s Directive 39 issued on December 8 declared, “The severe winter weather which has come surprisingly early in the East, and the consequent difficulties in bringing up supplies, compel us to abandon immediately all major offensive operations and to go over to the defensive.”

  Like Stalin’s refusal to admit the truth about the confusion between Dedovsk and Dedovo, Hitler’s directive was deliberately misleading in blaming all his army’s misfortunes on the harsh winter weather. His own mistakes—particularly his failure to make any plans for a winter campaign—were at least as big a culprit. And while the German leader was ostensibly allowing his troops to assume defensive positions, the reality was far more complicated and distressing on the ground. He still wasn’t listening to his generals. Stalin’s refusal to listen at key moments would also prove very costly, but Hitler’s unshaken faith in his own military genius would have far more serious consequences in this new phase of the battle for Moscow.

  There was another way that the two dictators were alike. Both men demanded that their armies fight this war with no regard to even the most rudimentary concepts of humanity. Brutal treatment wasn’t just tolerated; it was encouraged, even demanded. On the German side, Nazi propaganda drummed home the message to the troops on a daily basis that their enemies were Untermenschen, or subhumans. On the Soviet side, racist doctrine wasn’t officially part of communist ideology but quickly developed its own momentum.

  Ilya Ehrenburg, who like Konstantin Simonov was a famous war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, penned his most quoted lines about the Germans in August 1942. “Now we know. The Germans are not human,” he wrote. “Now the word ‘German’ has become the most terrible swear word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German he will kill you…. If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.”

  While that article appeared after the battle for Moscow was over, similar sentiments pervaded the war coverage of Ehrenburg and others during the fighting around the capital. And no wonder. It was Stalin who had set the tone for all the propagandists during his speech in the Mayakovsky metro station on November 6, when he had vowed, “Well, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they shall have it.”

  From the beginning of the war, the Soviet leader had also left no doubt that he wasn’t concerned about how many of his own people died in the process. Back in September, Stalin heard reports that German forces attacking Leningrad had pushed old people and children in front of them as human shields. The Soviet leader responded by denouncing “the German swine” for such tactics, while issuing unambiguous instructions to his generals not to worry about civilian casualties. “My advice is, don’t be sentimental, smash the enemy and his willing or unwilling accomplices in the teeth,” he declared. “Hit the Germans and their delegates, whoever they might be, with everything you’ve got, cut the enemy down, never mind if they are willing or unwilling enemies.”

  Abram Gordon, who had volunteered for service right after graduating from the State Pedagogical Institute in Moscow, quickly learned what this determinedly unsentimental approach to war meant in practical terms. He was part of a unit assigned to blocking the German advance toward the capital along the Warsaw Highway in early October. The two thousand men were outgunned and outnumbered. During one day’s pitched battle, they desperately tried to stop German tanks with grenades and Molotov cocktails until they ran out of even those meager weapons. Not more than 300 to 350 of the Soviet fighters were still alive and able to move by the end of the day. Their only hope was to retreat into the forest under the cover of darkness, leaving behind both the dead and the severely wounded. “One can only imagine what happened to them the next day when the Germans occupied that territory,” Gordon said.

  In the final stages of the battle, Gordon and his fellow soldiers had come across ten Germans who had lost their way and quickly surrendered. “We had to decide what to do with them,” Gordon recalled, still visibly uncomfortable with the memory. “The fact is that we had to retreat into the forest as soon as possible. We could not take them with us and we could not release them.”

  Most Soviet veterans prefer not even to mention such incidents, and Gordon clearly wanted to stop there. But pressed to spell out what he was implying, he added, “We had to shoot them.” And he admitted that he was one of the men assigned to the firing squad. “I was ordered to kill them. For quite a long time this memory tormented me, but now I clearly understand that these measures were necessary. We were soldiers in a war where you had to kill or be killed.”

  The tables were soon turned when the Germans captured him. Taken to a large farmyard, he found himself behind a barbed wire fence with thousands of other Soviet POWs. Their German captors lined them up and started marching them west, presumably to one of the full-blown POW camps that they had set up farther back from the front lines.

  At that moment, Gordon had the first in a series of close calls. Looking straight at him, a German guard shouted out the question, “Are you Jewish?” As Gordon is the first to point out, his dark features leave little doubt about the answer. Too numb with fear to respond, he suddenly heard someone next to him shout back, “No, he’s from the Caucasus.” Gordon is convinced those words saved his life.

  The prisoners were forced to march more than thirty miles before they were allowed to rest near the road. There he met Lieutenant Nikolai Smirnov, who was already thinking about how to escape. When the officer suggested to Gordon that they try to hide in one of several large haystacks nearby, the soldier didn’t need much convincing. He figured that his chance of survival in captivity was close to zero.

  For about two hours, the two men crawled painfully slowly to the haystacks, since they wanted to make sure that the guards wouldn’t spot them. They made it and burrowed deep into one of the haystacks, spending another three or four hours there. During that time, some of the other POWs noticed their absence and, figuring out what they had done, decided to follow their lead. But as they reached the haystacks, the guards saw them. Soon the air was filled with screams as the Germans thrust their bayonets into the places where they had just begun to hide, and shot others. Since Smirnov and Gordon were at the bottom of the haystack, they survived unscathed.

  When it was completely dark and the Germans resumed the march of the POWs, Smirnov and Gordon finally emerged from the haystack and began their trek back to Soviet-controlled territory. With the help of villagers who provided them with food and directions, they eventually found their own troops. But their ordeal wasn’t over.

  Along with several other men who had escaped captivity or simply become detached from their units, they were sent back to Moscow to be grilled by military interrogators. Smirnov and Gordon decided they would tell their story straight, including everything, even their brief period in German hands. They figured that they could hardly be considered POWs—traitors in the eyes of Stalin’s regime—since they had escaped so quickly.

  But the military counterintelligence service viewed a quick return as equally sus
pect. This could mean they were spying for the Germans. Summoned to the dormitory where he had lived as a student, Gordon discovered that it had been transformed into an interrogation center. When it was his turn to face questioning, he was ordered into room 13, the very room that he had lived in earlier. It felt like an eerie coincidence.

  There was no time for nostalgia, however. The officer who questioned him was openly skeptical of his story and left little doubt that he viewed him as a possible spy. “I’m a Jew,” Gordon declared in frustration, making the point that he couldn’t have talked the Germans into sparing him even if he had wanted to spy for them. That finally convinced his interrogator to release him and reassign him to military duty. “This was the only time in my life where my origins helped me,” Gordon wryly noted.

  Smirnov wasn’t so lucky. His interrogator dispatched him to a prison camp in Mordovia, a region southeast of Moscow where many Gulag victims perished. As an officer, he was doubly suspect and, officially, he was sent there so that he could be vetted further. As Gordon would learn later when he tried to find out what happened to the brave lieutenant who had engineered his escape, Smirnov died in the prison camp about four months later. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis.

  Elena Rzhevskaya, the future writer, who had learned German and often served as a Red Army interpreter during interrogations of German POWs, recalled her astonishment when she discovered that the enemy operated under different rules. Questioning a German lieutenant who was part of a group of sixteen men who had given themselves up when they were surrounded by Soviet forces, she asked him whether their action was considered treason. “No, it’s not,” the lieutenant replied, adding that his men fought better knowing that they could surrender if they had to. Looking back at that encounter decades later, Rzhevskaya still sounded surprised. “Unlike Soviet soldiers, German soldiers weren’t punished [by their own side] for being captured,” she said. “Those who survived were even promoted.”