The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Supply lines weren’t simply overextended; they had broken down completely in many cases. Pointing out that the severe weather was preventing planes from taking off, Gruman reflected the widespread feeling of hopelessness. “Now we cannot rely on any more deliveries,” he wrote on December 21. “What will this do to us? There is a feeling among the men as if they had been put on duty but then someone forgot to send replacements. Have we not been abandoned?” He added plaintively, “One could howl with frustration.”

  As always, the merciless cold added to that sense of desperation. Gruman tried to keep warm by wearing two overcoats and a blanket but still found the cold “all-penetrating.” An improvised field hospital was full of men with second-and third-degree frostbite. “Swollen legs are covered with blisters, so that they are no longer even legs, but rather some kind of formless mass,” Gruman recorded in his diary. “In some cases gangrene had already set in. Those who managed to make it through the deluge of shrapnel have become invalids here.” In some units, far more soldiers were crippled by frostbite than by battlefield wounds during this period.

  While Gruman still tried to talk himself into believing that Germany would ultimately win—“There is no doubt that in the summer the Bolsheviks will once again feel our might,” he wrote—his diary radiated growing despair. It included more and more references to Russians penetrating their positions as they retreated further. In January, his entries grew shorter, and the final entry was on February 17. On that day or shortly thereafter, he, too, probably perished. There’s no way of knowing whether he died in battle or simply from the cold.

  As some of the badly wounded and frostbitten soldiers were sent back to Germany for treatment, it became harder and harder for Hitler’s regime to maintain the fiction that the war was proceeding according to plan. “The anxiety of the German people about the Eastern front is increasing,” Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, confided in his diary on January 22, 1942. “Deaths owing to freezing are an especially important factor in this connection.” Goebbels complained especially bitterly about the “devastating effect” of the mail that soldiers were sending to their loved ones. “Words cannot describe what soldiers are writing back home from the front,” he wrote. Apparently, the German authorities were far less effective in weeding out complaining letters than their Soviet counterparts were.

  Even in his diary, Goebbels couldn’t admit the truth of those letters. He blamed the negative tone of many of the letters from the front on soldiers who wanted to feel important by dramatizing their situations. “The passion for showing off here plays a considerable role,” he wrote. “When the soldier writes and exaggerates he doesn’t stop to think that he may be causing his family and his relatives a lot of worry.” While Goebbels stated he was recommending stronger indoctrination of the soldiers, he didn’t hold out much hope that this would produce the desired effect. “It is a question of human weakness against which one is powerless,” he concluded.

  Like his boss, Goebbels was already blaming the officers and men for falling short, never accepting responsibility for the decisions that had left them in those extreme winter conditions without even the proper clothing. If morale was plummeting, it was the soldiers who were to blame. If they couldn’t put up with the hardships without complaining, they hadn’t been properly indoctrinated.

  This conveniently overlooked two key facts. The first was Hitler’s belief that his troops could achieve victory before the harsh winter weather set in. This proved to be a fatal miscalculation, in large part because of his tactical mistakes. And the second was the German leader’s decision on transport priorities.

  Throughout the early months of the invasion, Hitler faced the choice of sending winter clothing, food or ammunition to the front. He had to decide which of those three needs to fill first, since German rail capability was severely limited. The Soviet rail system operated on wide-gauge tracks, which weren’t used elsewhere in Europe, and only a portion of German-controlled trains were equipped for them. On top of that, German locomotives broke down frequently as temperatures dropped. While sending some food supplies and ordering his troops to seize whatever provisions they could from the territory they controlled, Hitler decided to make ammunition the top priority for transport. As for warm clothing, even when it was prepared for shipment, there was usually no space made available for it on the trains rolling east. That had been the case with the winter clothes Guderian had located at the train station in Warsaw, for instance.

  In a radio broadcast on December 21, 1941, Goebbels appealed to the German people to donate winter clothing for the soldiers at the front, asking that they provide anything they could that would help keep the soldiers warm. Guderian was convinced that this was a direct result of his complaints about the lack of winter clothing in his meeting with Hitler the day before. But given the transport problems, this clothing drive was too little, too late for many of the soldiers trying to survive the first winter of the war. Most of the warm clothing didn’t make it in time for that deadly cold period.

  In a diary entry on March 6, 1942, Goebbels tallied the German losses on the entire Eastern front, not just in the fighting near Moscow, since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. He put the number of dead around two hundred thousand and the total for those killed, wounded, or missing at nearly one million. He also made special note of the impact of winter conditions. “Until February 20, 112,627 cases of freezing or frostbite were reported, including 14,357 third-degree and 62,000 second-degree cases…. The number of those who suffered from freezing is considerably higher than we had at first imagined.” Once again, he worried about the impact on morale. “Even as it is, the final figure is only a small fraction of what is being spread around among the people in the form of rumors,” he wrote.

  As always, the implication was that those sacrifices weren’t being borne with the kind of dignity and stoic acceptance that the Nazi leadership demanded and expected.

  Zhukov was pleased to see his army pushing the enemy back from the outskirts of Moscow, but he knew that the Germans still had considerable firepower left. He also knew the limitations of his own troops, who were continuing to die in far greater numbers than the Germans, while those who survived were often battered and exhausted. So when he was summoned to the Stavka, or Supreme High Command, for a meeting on January 5 with Stalin, other political leaders and the top military brass to discuss the next phase of the counteroffensive, he was understandably wary. He was acutely aware of the limitations of the forces at his disposal that would have to carry out any new orders.

  At the start of the meeting, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, the crusty former tsarist officer who had survived the purges and risen to the position of chief of the General Staff, provided an overview of the military situation. Much to Zhukov’s dismay, he also outlined plans for a massive new offensive that would be aimed not just at pushing the Germans farther back from Moscow but also at breaking the blockade of Leningrad and defeating German forces in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. In other words, the Red Army was supposed to attack on all fronts.

  Shaposhnikov certainly didn’t dream up those plans on his own—he knew who would endorse them. “The Germans seem bewildered by their setback at Moscow and are poorly prepared for the winter,” Stalin declared. “Now is the time to go over to a general offensive.”

  Zhukov warned that this would be a dangerous strategy. While urging a continuation of the offensive on the Western front to keep driving the Germans further from Moscow, he pleaded for more reinforcements and equipment, especially tanks, for the divisions under his command. “As for offensives near Leningrad and in the southwest, forces there face formidable enemy defenses,” he pointed out. “Without powerful artillery support, our forces would be unable to break through, they would be worn down and suffer heavy and completely unjustified losses.” Coming from a commander who never flinched at sacrificing his men when it served to achieve his goals, the message was clear: a general offensive would inevitably
fail and would prove counterproductive.

  Nikolai Voznesensky, who was in charge of wartime economic planning, sided with Zhukov, pointing out that he couldn’t provide the necessary military equipment to support such an ambitious military undertaking. But Malenkov and Beria quickly dismissed his objections, claiming that he was always exaggerating the difficulties. (In 1950, during another round of purges, Voznesensky was tried and shot.)

  As Zhukov had figured out by then, Stalin’s mind was completely made up, and nothing he or Vosnesensky said would make any difference. “I’ve talked with [Marshal] Timoshenko, and he favors the attack,” the dictator added. “We must quickly smash the Germans so that they cannot attack when the spring comes.” Then there was the final flourish. “So this, it seems, ends the discussion,” Stalin said.

  As they walked out of the meeting, Shaposhnikov turned to Zhukov. “It was foolish to argue,” he told him. “The Chief had already decided.”

  Zhukov asked why Stalin had bothered to ask for his opinion. Shaposhnikov sighed. “I just don’t know, old fellow, I just don’t know.”

  Like Hitler, Stalin wasn’t about to listen to his generals when they tried to tell him anything he didn’t want to hear, even when this obstinacy resulted in precisely the “completely unjustified losses” that Zhukov had warned against. As always, the human price of his decisions was the least of Stalin’s concerns. On February 7, for instance, the Germans intercepted the orders radioed to Soviet commanders in the field. The gist of the message: the commanders had to do everything to spare their ammunition but not their men.

  Looking back at those battles with their huge body counts, Mikhail Geykhman, a lieutenant in one of the Siberian artillery divisions that participated in the offensive west of Moscow that winter, waxed philosophical. “We hadn’t been prepared to fight a war with fewer losses,” he said. While claiming that morale was high because they were finally moving forward and the soldiers were increasingly convinced that they could drive back the enemy, he pointed out that even Siberian units like his weren’t nearly as well equipped as the Germans believed—and as popular lore later had it. “We didn’t have enough supplies of anything,” he said.

  During that first winter of the war, many of the men in his unit still wore short boots with leg wrappings and a cloth cap shaped like a helmet called a budyonovka, which also required inserting extra lining and wrappings to keep head and ears warm. It was only toward the end of the winter that most of the troops received the full-length valenki, or felt boots, and ushanki, fur caps with thick ear flaps, that were soon standard issue. As Goebbels had done on the German side, the Soviet authorities appealed to civilians to donate anything warm, including underwear, for the troops at the front.

  When it came to weaponry, the problems were even more serious. Some of the cannons in Geykhman’s division dated back to the civil war and were mounted on wooden wheels and pulled by horses. Most officers considered their handguns inferior to the ones their German counterparts carried. When they could, they seized any handguns they found on dead Germans. They were also short of machine guns and anti-tank weapons. The most frightening moments for Geykhman and his unit were in early February, when they had to face German tanks near Mozhaisk, the town sixty miles due west of Moscow, with whatever firepower they had. “They were coming straight at us,” he recalled. “We understood that we were facing a very strong enemy who knew how to fight.”

  The other shortage was of experienced officers. Geykhman, who had volunteered after graduating from high school at seventeen, a year earlier than most students, had been made a lieutenant after a three-week training course, still short of his eighteenth birthday. As proud as he is of his role in saving Moscow, he noted that many of the best officers had perished in the purges before the war, and everyone was still paying the price. “Our officers weren’t ready for this war,” he said. “We only really learned how to fight in 1943.”

  Finally, it wasn’t just the Germans who had to grab any opportunity to scrounge for food. Strict food rationing had been imposed in major cities such as Moscow and Leningrad right after the Germans invaded, and it spread throughout the country as the fighting intensified. With bizarre precision, the planners determined that ordinary workers should get 1,387 calories per day, while those who did heavier work received 1,913 calories. Their dependents were allocated a meager 750 calories, and there were no provisions for anyone who didn’t work.

  The troops were usually supplied with at least minimal rations, but the soldiers had to look to supplement them in any way they could. Yevgeny Teleguyev, the young volunteer in the NKVD’s special forces known as OMSBON, recalled his platoon’s search for food when they traveled on skis, often behind enemy lines. On one occasion when their rations had run out, they found a horse in the forest and killed it. Then they had to figure out how to skin and cook it. “We were city guys and didn’t know how to do that kind of stuff,” he said. Since they didn’t have an axe to chop off the hooves, they boiled the horse’s legs with its hooves and horseshoes intact.

  Other soldiers stripped horses that had been dead for quite a while, which could be a dangerous way to quell their hunger. One officer of a unit fighting near Rzhev reported that his men were falling ill after eating the rotting remains of a horse. But with some soldiers dying of starvation, it was hard to restrain anyone. If the soldiers were lucky, they found potato pits, holes in the ground or in the basement of huts where peasants stored their potatoes for the winter. Like the Germans, they grabbed whatever they saw.

  The fighting soon was reduced to a struggle for survival on every level. Vera Katayeva, a nurse assigned to troops fighting along the Mozhaisk Highway, recalled that after the Red Army retook the town of Mozhaisk in January, the fighting beyond it settled into a blood-soaked standoff in a narrow corridor that became known as Death Valley. “Soviet and German soldiers spent three months there—January, February and March—killing each other,” she said. “The ground was covered with dead bodies and dead horses.”

  By late January, the Germans were not just following Hitler’s orders and holding their ground in several places. They were also beginning to launch some modest counterattacks of their own. On January 26, Goebbels noted in his diary an “extraordinarily favorable” report from an unnamed commanding general on the northern front, who claimed that Soviet forces there were “being bled white.” As Goebbels wrote, “He believes the Soviet Union will collapse in the spring, provided we are in a position to deliver a few decisive blows. Even though I am not able as yet to share this optimism I nevertheless believe he has something…possibly it is actually true that the Bolsheviks are now using up their last resources and will break down under a severe blow. But let us not cling too much to such hopes,” Goebbels added. “Our preparations for the coming spring and summer must be made just as though the Bolsheviks still had very great reserves. That will make us immune to surprises and we won’t have moral setbacks like those of last summer and autumn.”

  Those setbacks, particularly the failure to seize Moscow as planned before the end of 1941, had clearly shaken his confidence. Optimistic predictions, while still welcomed, were no longer automatically believed.

  Stalin’s general offensive in early 1942 didn’t achieve any of its grandiose goals. New attempts to break the siege of Leningrad and to regain control of key areas of the Ukraine were costly failures, and the costliest failure of them all was the attempt to encircle and destroy the troops of Army Group Center that were still threatening Moscow from the west. As with every previous stage of the battle for Moscow, everything seemed to conspire to produce maximum suffering and maximum losses, in most cases instigated by the decisions flowing from the top.

  One of those decisions was nothing less than a scorched earth policy. On November 17, 1941, Stalin dictated Order 0428, which declared, “All inhabited locations up to a distance of 40–60 kilometers [25 to 37 miles] in the rear of German troops and up to 20–30 kilometers [12 to 19 miles] on either side
of the roads are to be destroyed and burnt to ashes.” The destruction was to be carried out in a variety of ways—by aerial bombing, artillery fire, and ski patrols and partisan guerrillas armed with petrol bombs. On top of that, the order stipulated: “Each regiment is to have a team of volunteers of 20–30 men to blow up and burn down inhabited locations.” Those who excelled in this destruction, it added, would receive special awards.

  All of which was a recipe for countless tragedies for civilians hoping to survive the fighting raging around them, since the implementation of that order meant the destruction of their meager homes in the middle of the winter. “Whether the decision was made in light of military necessity or insane cruelty remains an open question,” Stalin’s biographer Dmitri Volkogonov wrote, “but in either case it was a typically Stalinist, callous act.”

  Those policies provided yet another reason for many local inhabitants to distrust all the warring parties, including the partisans who were beginning to operate behind enemy lines. They soon learned that the partisans might be targeting their homes for destruction, and even when that wasn’t the case, their presence would expose them to brutal retaliation from the German occupiers. In a top secret report submitted on November 8, 1941, N. P. Krasavchenko, a Komsomol secretary who had found himself behind enemy lines after the German victory at Vyazma, 130 miles west of Moscow, reported on local “anti-Soviet” attitudes after he managed to escape. He encountered one partisan who said he was forced to operate alone because he couldn’t trust anyone. “Most people don’t like me because they are afraid of German vengeance and they threaten to turn me in,” he told Krasavchenko.