The Wehrmacht was by now severely handicapped by the weather. Bad visibility hampered the ‘flying artillery’ of the Luftwaffe. Field Marshal von Bock’s armies, forced to halt at the end of October for resupply and reinforcement, were spurred on by desperation to finish off the enemy before the real winter came.
The fighting in the second half of November was relentless. Regiments on both sides were reduced to fractions of their former numbers. Guderian, having found himself blocked by strong resistance at Tula, south of Moscow, swung further round to the right. On the left flank, Hoth’s panzers pushed forward to cross the Moskva–Volga canal. From one point north of Moscow, German troops could see through their binoculars the muzzle flashes of the anti-aircraft batteries round the Kremlin. Zhukov ordered Rokossovsky to hold the line at Kryukovo with the remains of his 16th Army. ‘There can be no further falling back,’ he ordered on 25 November. Rokossovsky knew that he meant what he said.
Russian resistance was so determined that the weakened German forces slowed to a halt. At the end of November, in a last-ditch attempt, Field Marshal von Kluge sent a large force straight up the main road to Moscow, the Minsk Chaussée, along which Napoleon’s troops had marched. They broke through, but numbing cold and the suicidal resistance of Soviet regiments blunted their attack.
Guderian and Kluge, on their own initiative, began to withdraw their most exposed regiments. Guderian took the decision sitting in the Tolstoy house of Yasnaya Polyana, with the grave of the great writer covered by snow outside. They wondered what would happen next along the whole central front. The deep German salients either side of Moscow were vulnerable, but the desperation and shortages of the troops they had been fighting convinced them that the enemy had also been fought to a standstill. They never imagined that the Soviet leadership was secretly massing fresh armies behind Moscow.
Winter had arrived in full force, with snow, bitter winds, and temperatures dropping below minus twenty degrees centigrade. German tank engines were frozen solid. In the front line, the exhausted infantrymen dug bunkers to shelter from the cold as much as from enemy bombardment. The ground had started to freeze so hard that they needed to light big fires on it first, before attempting to dig. Headquarters staffs and rear echelons occupied peasant houses, expelling Russian civilians into the snow.
Hitler’s refusal to contemplate a winter campaign meant that his soldiers suffered terribly. ‘Many of the men are going about with their feet wrapped in paper, and there is a great dearth of gloves,’ wrote the commander of a panzer corps to General Paulus. Except for their coal-scuttle helmets, many German soldiers were by now hardly recognizable as members of the Wehrmacht. Their own close-fitting, steel-shod jackboots simply hastened the process of frostbite, so they had resorted to stealing the clothes and boots of prisoners of war and civilians.
Operation Typhoon may have inflicted huge casualties on the Red Army, but it cost the smaller Wehrmacht irreparable losses in trained men and officers. ‘This is no longer the old division,’ wrote the chaplain of 18th Panzer Division in his diary. ‘All around are new faces. When one asks after somebody, the same reply is always given: dead or wounded.’
Field Marshal von Bock was forced to acknowledge at the beginning of December that no further hope of ‘strategic success’ remained. His armies were exhausted and the cases of frostbite – which reached over 100,000 by Christmas – were rapidly outstripping the numbers of wounded. But any hope that the Red Army was also incapable of further attack was suddenly shattered, just as the temperature fell to minus twenty-five degrees centigrade.
The Siberian divisions, including many ski-troop battalions, formed only a part of the counter-attack force prepared secretly on Stavka orders. New aircraft and squadrons from the Far East had been assembled on airfields to the east of Moscow. Some 1,700 tanks, mainly the highly mobile T-34, whose unusually broad tracks coped with the snow and ice far better than German panzers, were also ready for deployment. Most Red Army soldiers, but far from all, were equipped for winter warfare, with padded jackets and white camouflage suits. Their heads were kept warm with ushanki, round fur caps with ear flaps at the side, and their feet with large valenki (felt boots). They also had covers for the working parts of their weapons and special oil to prevent the action from freezing.
On 5 December, General Koniev’s Kalinin Front attacked the outer edge of the German’s northern salient. Salvoes of Katyusha rockets fired from multiple launchers, which German soldiers had already nicknamed Stalin organs, acted as the terrifying heralds of the onslaught. The following morning, Zhukov threw in the 1st Shock Army, Rokossovsky’s 16th Army, and two others against the inner side of the salient. To the south of Moscow, Guderian’s flanks were also attacked from different directions. Within three days, his lines of communication were gravely threatened. In the centre, continual attacks prevented Field Marshal von Kluge from diverting troops from his Fourth Army to help the threatened flanks.
For the first time, the Red Army enjoyed air superiority. The aviation regiments brought up to aerodromes behind Moscow had protected their aircraft from the cold, while the weakened Luftwaffe, operating from improvised landing strips, had to defrost every machine by lighting fires under its engines. The Russians enjoyed a harsh satisfaction at the abrupt change in fortunes. They knew the retreat would be cruel for the ill-clad German soldiers struggling back through blizzards and the frozen snowfields.
The conventional counter-attacks were greatly aided by raids causing panic and chaos in the German rear. Partisan detachments, organized by officers of NKVD frontier troops sent behind enemy lines, attacked from frozen marshes and the forests of birch and pine. Siberian winter-warfare battalions from the 1st Shock Army appeared suddenly out of the haze: the only warning was the hiss of their skis on the snow-crust. Red Army cavalry divisions also ranged far into the rear, mounted on resilient little Cossack ponies. Squadrons and entire regiments would suddenly appear fifteen miles behind the front, charging artillery batteries or supply depots with drawn sabres and terrifying war-cries.
The Soviet plan of encirclement rapidly became clear. In ten days, Bock’s armies were forced to pull back anything up to a hundred miles. Moscow was saved. The German armies, ill-equipped for winter warfare, were now doomed to suffer in the open.
Events elsewhere had also been momentous. On 7 December, the day after the main counter-attack started, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later Hitler announced, to the cheers of the Greater German Reichstag housed in the Berlin Kroll Opera, that he had declared war on the United States of America.
During that second week of December, a savagely exultant Stalin became convinced that the Germans were on the point of disintegration. Reports of their line of retreat, with scenes of abandoned guns, horse carcasses and the bodies of frozen infantrymen half-covered in drifting snow, tended to encourage the idea of another 1812. There had also been outbreaks of panic in the German rear. Support troops, whose vehicles often became unusable in the terrible conditions, were shaken by unexpected attacks far behind the lines. Visceral fears of barbarous Russia surged inside them. They felt very far from home.
Stalin was obsessed with the opportunity, and fell into Hitler’s mistake of believing in the power of the will, while discounting the reality of insufficient supplies, bad transport and exhausted troops. His ambition knew no bounds as he gazed at the Stavka ‘decision-map’. He demanded much more than an extension of the counter-attacks against Army Group Centre. On 5 January 1942, Stalin’s plans for a general offensive were fully set out at a joint meeting of the Stavka and the State Defence Committee. He wanted major offensives in the north to cut off the besiegers of Leningrad, and also in the south – back into the lost territories of the Ukraine and the Crimea, an idea strongly encouraged by Marshal Timoshenko. Zhukov and others who tried to warn of the dangers failed utterly.
*
The Führer, also preoccupied by thoughts of 1812, had issued a stream of orders against any ret
reat. He was convinced that, if they held out through the winter, they would break the historical curse on invaders of Russia.
His intervention has long been the subject of debate. Some argue that his resolution saved the German Army from annihilation. Others believe that his demands to hold ground at any cost led to terrible and unnecessary losses in trained men which Germany could not afford. The retreat never really risked becoming a rout, if only because the Red Army lacked the communications, the reserves and the transport needed to continue the pursuit. Hitler, however, was convinced that his strength of will in the face of defeatist generals had saved the whole Ostfront. This was to have disastrous consequences at Stalingrad the following year, bolstering his obstinacy to a perverse degree.
The fighting became increasingly chaotic, with front lines swirling in different directions on the map as Stalin’s general offensive deteriorated into a series of flailing brawls. Several Soviet formations became cut off as they broke through the German front with insufficient support. Stalin had underestimated the capacity of German troops to recover from a reverse. In most cases, they fought back ferociously, well aware of the consequences of being caught in the open. Commanders on the spot assembled scratch units, often including support personnel, and bolstered their defences with whatever armament was available, especially flak guns.
North-west of Moscow, at Kholm, a force 5,000 strong led by General Scherer held out, resupplied by parachute drops. The much larger Demyansk Kessel, with 100,000 men, was resupplied by Junkers 52 transports painted white for camouflage. Over 100 flights a day, bringing in a total of 60,000 tons of supplies and evacuating 35,000 wounded, allowed the defenders to hold out against several Soviet armies for seventy-two days. The German troops were half-starved when finally relieved at the end of April, yet the conditions for Russian civilians trapped in the pocket were infinitely worse. Nobody knows how many died. They had nothing to eat save the entrails of the horses slaughtered for the soldiers. Yet this operation determined Hitler in his belief that encircled troops should automatically hold on. It was part of the fixation which greatly contributed to the disaster at Stalingrad less than a year later.
Stalin’s callous abandonment of General Andrey Vlasov’s 2nd Shock Army, cut off in marshes and forests a hundred miles north-west of Demyansk, did not, however, serve as a warning to Hitler, even after the embittered Vlasov surrendered and, throwing in his lot with the Germans, agreed to raise an anti-Stalinist Russian army. As if to offer a curious dramatic balance, the commander of the relief force at Demyansk, General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, turned against Hitler after being captured at Stalingrad. Then, in September 1943, as will be seen, he volunteered to raise ‘a small army from prisoners of war’ to be air-landed in the Reich to start an uprising. It was a proposal which the suspicious Beria did not take up.
With troops in the open at temperatures sometimes dropping to minus forty degrees centigrade, Hitler’s almost superstitious refusal to order winter clothing had to be remedied. Goebbels quickly managed to mask the truth. An appeal to the population at home provided newsreel footage of national solidarity, with women handing over fur coats, even winter-sports champions bringing in their skis for the Ostfront. The response encouraged Hitler to declaim over lunch at the Wolfsschanze: ‘The German people have heard my call.’ But when the clothes started to arrive towards the end of December, soldiers tried them on with cynical amusement or wonder. The garments, clean and sometimes smelling of mothballs, created a strange impression on the lice-plagued recipients. ‘You could see the sitting room with the sofa,’ wrote a lieutenant, ‘or the child’s bed, or perhaps the young girl’s room from which they came. It could have been on another planet.’
Sentimental thoughts of home were not just a form of escapism from their world of vermin and filth, but also from an environment of escalating brutality in which conventional morality had become utterly distorted. German troops, most of them, no doubt, loving fathers and sons at home, indulged in a sort of sick war tourism in Russia. An order had to be circulated which forbade the ‘photographing of executions of [German] deserters’, events which had greatly increased with the sudden decline in morale. And executions of partisans and Jews in the Ukraine – to judge from the audience shown in the pictures – attracted an even greater throng of amateur photographers in Wehrmacht uniforms.
A German officer described how shocked he and his soldiers had been when Russian civilians had cheerfully stripped the corpses of their fellow countrymen. Yet German soldiers were taking clothes and boots from living civilians for themselves, then forcing them out into the freezing wastes, in most cases to die of cold and starvation. Senior officers complained that their soldiers looked like Russian peasants, but no sympathy was spared for the victims robbed of their only hope of survival in such conditions. A bullet might well have been less cruel.
During the retreat from Moscow, German soldiers seized any livestock and food supplies on which they could lay their hands. They ripped up floorboards in living rooms to check for potatoes stored underneath. Furniture and parts of houses were used for firewood. Never did a population suffer so much from both sides in a war. Stalin had signed an order on 17 November ordering Red Army units – aviation, artillery, ski-troops and partisan detachments – to ‘destroy and burn to ashes’ all houses and farms for up to forty miles behind the German lines to deny the enemy shelter. The fate of Russian women and children was not considered for a moment.
The combination of battle stress and the horrors of war increased the suicide rate among German soldiers. ‘Suicide in field conditions is tantamount to desertion’, troops were warned in one order. ‘A soldier’s life belongs to the Fatherland.’ Most shot themselves when alone on sentry duty.
Men would pass the long, dark nights thinking of home and dreaming of leave. Samizdat discovered by Russian soldiers on German bodies demonstrates that there were indeed cynics as well as sentimentalists. ‘Christmas’, ran one spoof order, ‘will not take place this year for the following reasons: Joseph has been called up for the army; Mary has joined the Red Cross; Baby Jesus has been sent with other children out into the countryside [to avoid the bombing]; the Three Wise Men could not get visas because they lacked proof of Aryan origin; there will be no star because of the blackout; the shepherds have been made into sentries and the angels have become Blitzmädeln [telephone operators]. Only the donkey is left, and one can’t have Christmas with just a donkey.’*
The military authorities were concerned that soldiers going home on leave would demoralize the home population with horror stories of the Ostfront. ‘You are under military law’, ran the forceful reminder, ‘and you are still subject to punishment. Don’t speak about weapons, tactics or losses. Don’t speak about bad rations or injustice. The intelligence service of the enemy is ready to exploit it.’
One soldier, or more likely a group, produced their own version of instructions, entitled ‘Notes for Those Going on Leave’. Their attempt to be funny reveals a great deal about the brutalizing effects of the Ostfront. ‘You must remember that you are entering a National Socialist country whose living conditions are very different to those to which you have become accustomed. You must be tactful with the inhabitants, adapting to their customs and refrain from the habits which you have come to love so much. Food: Do not rip up the parquet or other kinds of floor, because potatoes are kept in a different place. Curfew. If you forget your key, try to open the door with the round-shaped object. Only in cases of extreme urgency use a grenade. Defence against Partisans: It is not necessary to ask civilians the password and open fire on receiving an unsatisfactory answer. Defence against Animals: Dogs with mines attached to them are a special feature of the Soviet Union. German dogs in the worst cases bite, but they do not explode. Shooting every dog you see, although recommended in the Soviet Union, might create a bad impression. Relations with the Civil Population: In Germany just because somebody is wearing women’s clothes does not necessarily mean that sh
e is a partisan. But in spite of this, they are dangerous for anyone on leave from the front. General: When on leave back in the Fatherland take care not to talk about the paradise existence in the Soviet Union in case everybody wants to come here and spoil our idyllic comfort.’
A certain cynicism even emerged over medals. When a winter-campaign medal was issued the following year, it quickly became known as the ‘Order of the Frozen Flesh’. There were more serious cases of disaffection. Field Marshal von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, exploded in rage just before Christmas on finding the following examples of graffiti on the buildings allotted for his headquarters: ‘We want to return to Germany’; ‘We’ve had enough of this’; ‘We are dirty and have lice and want to go home’; and ‘We didn’t want this war!’ Reichenau, while acknowledging that ‘such thoughts and moods’ were evidently the ‘result of great tension and deprivation’, put full responsibility on all officers for the ‘political and moral condition of their troops’.
And while a small group of well-connected officers led by Henning von Tresckow plotted to assassinate Hitler, at least one Communist cell was at work in the ranks. The following appeal in ‘Front Letter No. 3’ to set up ‘soldier committees in each unit, in each regiment, in each division’ was found by a Russian soldier in the lining of the greatcoat of a German soldier. ‘Comrades, who is not up to his neck in shit here on the Eastern Front?… It is a criminal war unleashed by Hitler and it is leading Germany to hell… Hitler must be got rid of and we soldiers can do this. The fate of Germany is in the hands of people at the front. Our password should be “Away with Hitler!” Against the Nazi lie! The war means the death of Germany.’
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 Page 6