Narrowly missing Braun, the tank churned around like an enraged dinosaur, smashing into the corner of a barn, which collapsed upon it. ‘It then disappeared into a cloud of snow,’ he said. The remaining tank meanwhile slowly traversed its gun onto the now clearly identifiable solitary PAK, whose fate appeared sealed. A single 50mm projectile slammed into the side of the T-34 at 823m per second. It did not move as a further four rounds tore into the smouldering carcass until it burst into flames. The twin supporting 50mm gun of the pair manned by Unteroffizier Becker had been moved from the other side of the graveyard as soon as the Russian artillery fire had switched to the rear.
Inside the village the surviving T-34 was playing ‘cat and mouse’ with a 37mm anti-tank gun. The latter was eventually cornered and the crew fled as the tank crushed the gun and bulldozed into a cottage directly behind it, the building collapsing to the ground. Stuck fast in a civilian shelter, its see-sawing motion and bellowing diesel engines indicated it could not get out. An anti-tank mine was flung onto its engine deck and the single crack of its detonation reverberated around the village, signifying the end of the action. Clouds of smoke spilling across the snow to the rear of the village also indicated the demise of the tank attack on Putschki. The solitary tank that had evaded the two anti-tank guns had been despatched by a direct-fire hit from the artillery battery.(22)
To the north-west the 23rd Infantry Division sought, with steadily declining strength, to continue its advance to the Moscow–Volga canal. They laboured forward in more than knee-deep snow, 35km from Moscow. Feldwebel Gottfried Becker with Infantry Regiment 9 was ordered to extract a beleaguered company that had been ambushed 5km further east, outside the village of Choroschilowo. The mission was only partially successful. The remnants were rescued but the wounded had to be left behind. Becker delivered his report, much troubled by his conscience. It was received without demur by the battalion commander; these things happened. They remained holding their positions at Staroje, enduring the bitter cold in a totally cheerless landscape. Soon they lost all sense of time. Every two hours a reconnaissance patrol was despatched to check the woodland bordering the village. The veterans were uneasy. There was a collective perception that a Russian attack was pending. A patrol returning that night reported ‘something going on, you can hear loud noises’. Snow began to fall heavily, which reduced visibility to 200–300m. Nobody wanted to do more. Becker was exhausted and his men were tired. They would investigate further in the morning.(23)
Russian probing attacks continued against the 2nd Panzer Division vanguard in the Krassnaya Polyana area. Leutnant Georg Richter gloomily observed that being only 30km from Moscow meant ‘the enemy could move his troops up to the front in trams’. The supporting artillery battery outside Putschki was experiencing problems because ‘its guns could only be traversed with considerable difficulty’. Lothar Fromm, another artillery observer, described the impact of these Arctic conditions:
‘The weapons did not work any more. Let me tell you about the recoil mechanism of the guns. Minus thirty degrees was seen as the lowest temperature at which efficiency could be maintained. They were frozen up. Crews stood there and tried to make them work time, and time again. It didn’t happen. The barrel would not come back and the recoil mechanism was unable to move. That was really depressing.’
By contrast, as Richter complained at Putschki, ‘It was unbelievable what ammunition the enemy had stacked up next to his positions to blast out every calibre’. As a consequence, ‘the factory buildings,’ he wrote, ‘were burning for the umpteenth time.’ Nerves were feeling the strain. ‘The extent of fear and cowardice,’ the dispirited Richter admitted by 3 December, ‘is catastrophic – the cooks won’t come out and cook because they are ducking inside their shelters the whole time.’ Prospects did not appear good. In Richter’s opinion it was ‘senseless’ to try and hold onto the villages of Gorki and Katjuschki.(24)
Generalfeldmarschall von Bock was of like opinion. He instinctively felt the army group had approached the end of its strength. Corps commanders were telexed during the night of 2 December ‘that the undoubtedly serious moment of crisis that the Russian defenders are facing must be exploited wherever the opportunity presents itself.’ But he did not believe it, because he confided, ‘I have my doubts whether the exhausted units are still capable of doing so.’ That night von Bock was presented with a document from the city of Smolensk thanking him for liberating it from Bolshevism. Three months before, Army Group Centre had stood at the pinnacle of success. As he considered the document, von Bock probably reflected all this was virtually an age ago.(20)
Two days later Leutnant Richter was overseeing a gun-position change at Putschki. They were pulling back. Every single vehicle needed to be tow-started in temperatures of −25°C. Many vehicles, in particular the 6.5-ton ‘Tatra’ heavy lorries, had to be abandoned. Their wheels would not turn and the steering was frozen solid. An NCO shouted a warning:
‘“The Russians are attacking. Don’t you see the white ghosts? We have got to open fire, now, now!” For a while I could not see anything, although a burning haystack lit up the surrounding area to some extent, sufficient to shoot. But then, yes, I could see running spectre-like figures; ghosts, one might say. Our men have not got so many white camouflage smocks – they must be Russians.’
They were indeed. Another soldier, writing home that day, encapsulated what was going on in a simple terse statement:
‘The Russians are fielding everything they’ve got, because around here at Moscow – the devil is loose.’(26)
Chapter 16
The devil loose before Moscow
‘The German soldier does not go “kaputt!”’
Halder, Chief of General Staff, German Army
The Soviet counter-offensive
Soviet ‘Shock Armies’ were originally conceived as being particularly heavy in armour, motorised vehicles and automatic weapons. First Shock Army to the east of Yakhroma and the others created during the winter of 1941–42 were not so well equipped. When Kuznetsov, the First Shock Army commander, took over on 23 November, he expanded it from a single rifle brigade to one division, nine rifle brigades, ten independent battalions, a regiment of artillery and a contingent of Katyusha rocket launches. About 70% of the soldiers were over 30 years old. Likewise Twentieth Army was brought up to a similar strength. Tenth Army was approximately 100,000-strong, consisting of seven reserve rifle divisions recruited from the Moscow region. It had been on the march by rail and foot from Syzran on the Volga, some 480km away. Four other newly formed reserve armies were brought forward from the line of the River Volga at the end of November. Twenty-fourth, Twenty-sixth and Sixtieth were placed east of Moscow and Sixty-first was newly located behind the right flank of the south-west front.
Stalin passed over control of the newly formed strike element First Shock, Twentieth and Tenth Armies – from STAVKA Supreme Command to Zhukov on 29 November. Even without the addition of the reserve armies, the Soviet forces opposite Army Group Centre on 5 December were greater than when Operation ‘Taifun’ began, two months before. The German army group had been unable to replace its considerable losses in troops, equipment and especially leaders. Soviet armies in the Moscow sector, by contrast, acquired one third more rifle divisions, five times more cavalry divisions, twice as many artillery regiments and two and a half times as many tank brigades by 5 December than they had on 2 October.(1)
Zhukov’s Chief of Staff, Lt-Gen V. D. Sokolovskiy, calculated the West Front armies numbered over a million men, slightly under the German figure (ie 1,100,000 against 1,708,000), but the latter also included its rear area elements. Massive losses of German ‘teeth arm’ personnel, tanks and weapons had seriously depleted the combat strength of its divisions. Artillery and mortar numbers were similar at 13,500 as also were 1,170 Panzers to tanks, but fewer were running on the German side. The Soviets had an overwhelming preponderance of 1,370 aircraft to about 600 German, with the further advantage of har
dened Moscow airfields.(2)
The Soviet plan was to attack either side of Moscow and bite off the encircling fingers of the German advances from the north-east and south-east. Having eliminated the threat to the Moscow-Volga canal, First Shock Army was to strike west toward Klin and, in conjunction with the Thirtieth and Twentieth Armies, attack Panzergruppe 3 and the German Ninth Army in the north. Twentieth Army, supporting First Shock and combined with Sixteenth Army, was to assault from Krassnaya Polyana and Bely-Rast towards Solnechnogorsk (see map on page 225), capture it from the south and drive towards Volokolamsk. Guderian’s Second Panzer Army salient would be attacked by Fiftieth Army in combination with the Tenth, which were to drive due west, south of the River Upa. The initial intent was to eliminate the immediate German threat to the Soviet capital: as expressed by Lt-Gen Sokolovskiy, ‘to break up the enemy’s attack conclusively and give him no opportunity to regroup and dig in close to our capital’.(3) Just under half the Soviet tank strength, 290 of 720 tanks, was placed at the main point of effort against Klin, Solnechnogorsk and Istra – the nearest German penetrations to Moscow. The Russians were not totally confident of success; a major Russian counter-offensive had yet to succeed in this war. There was, however, an instinctive appreciation that the enemy was probably sufficiently exhausted to be caught off balance.
This lack of balance was hinted at by Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, who declared on 3 December, ‘if the attack is called off then going over to the defensive will be very difficult’. The last card had been staked on Moscow’s fall. In fact, von Bock admitted, This thought and the possible consequences of going over to the defensive with our weak forces have, save for my mission, contributed to my sticking with this attack so far.’ Within two days Panzergruppe 3 reported ‘its offensive strength is gone’. It could only hold its positions if the already decimated 23rd Infantry Division remained under command. Von Bock was also informed by General von Kluge, the commander of Fourth Army, that Hoepner’s planned attack with Panzergruppe 4 should not go ahead.(4) Late that same day Generaloberst Guderian advised that his Second Panzer Army should ‘call off the operation’. He said the ‘unbearable cold of more than −30°C was making moving and fighting by the tired, thinned-out units extremely difficult’. German tanks were breaking down while the Russians, did not.
Oberstleutnant Grampe, commanding a tactical headquarters with the 1st Panzer Division, reported the same day that his Panzers had been put out of action by low temperatures, which had dropped to −35°C. ‘The turrets would not revolve,’ he stated, ‘the optics had misted up, machine guns could only fire single rounds and it took two to three crew members to depress tank gun barrels, only achievable if they stamped down on the main barrel where it joined the turret block.’ His unit was not equipped to cope with such conditions. Cases of first- and second-degree frostbite were beginning to emerge. ‘The division,’ he assessed, was practically immobile.’(5) The German front went over to the defensive, frozen inert at the very moment the Russian offensive was about to strike. Temperatures plummeted from −25°C on 4 December to −35°C on the 5th and to −38°C the following day. Co-ordinated operations appeared impractical. German troops sought only shelter.
The new Soviet armies had been assembled together for only two to three weeks. They were a mixture of fresh Siberian units, burned-out veteran formations and briefly trained militia or reservists. Many lacked equipment and there were shortages of ammunition. Officers and NCOs were inexperienced. Tanks were dispersed among about 15 tank brigades with about 46 machines in each. A high proportion of the units were fresh and unbloodied in battle, and, unlike the enemy, they were warmly clad. Their motivation was superior to that of the German, whose moral component of fighting power had bled profusely, perhaps mortally, since September. As in the case of the original ‘Barbarossa’ invasion, Soviet counter-stroke formations had deployed in such numbers that, even if they were discovered, the difficulty of moving troops and equipments to oppose them was impractical. A‘checkmate’ configuration had been created in these Arctic conditions. They possessed massive local superiority and, above all, total surprise.
In mind-numbing, freezing conditions during the early morning hours of 5 December, the Soviet Twenty-ninth Army attacked across the ice-covered Volga west of Kalinin. They penetrated the German Ninth Army line for up to 10km before they were checked. On the following morning, which dawned clear with temperatures of −38°C, the soldiers of the West and South-west Fronts went over to the offensive. Drifting snow and near-Arctic conditions seriously impeded the final build-up, resulting in piecemeal attacks which gradually achieved a cumulative and unstoppable momentum.
The IInd Battalion of Schützen Regiment 114, part of 6th Panzer Division, in the village of Stepanowo immediately east of the Moscow-Volga canal line, reported on 6 December:
‘During the course of the morning there were signs of unrest among the civil population. The explanation – that Stepan-owo would be taken by the Russians, and that the Germans would leave – was laughed at by the German soldiers. Radio enquiries, however, confirmed the opposite. Soon part of the 7th Panzer Division was coming back along the Stepanowo-Shukowo road.’
A visit by General Model, the corps commander, to 6th Panzer Division headquarters at 10.00 hours, ‘produced a surprising direction,’ admitted the operations officer (1a). Model assessed Panzergruppe 3 had insufficient strength to hold the present line ‘against an enemy who had introduced an astonishing infusion of strength’ and was directing his main efforts against the northeastern flank. ‘As a consequence,’ Model directed, ‘the front must be shortened.’ Engineer rear area route and obstacle reconnaissance was ordered ‘at once’. The logistics (1b) officer was told to ferry back wounded and to begin the necessary reorganisation of the logistic rear support services.(6) Model’s corps was about to embark on its first retreat of the war. It was the third disappointment the 6th Panzer Division had experienced short of victory. They were halted at Dunkirk in 1940 and again before Leningrad in September 1941. Moscow was also to be denied them.
Artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow took part in the barrages that preceded the Russian attack on 6 December. As the infantry moved forward, their inexperience became increasingly apparent. ‘Particularly the youngsters,’ he said, were exposed to a lot of blood and witnessed the horror of war for the first time as wounded men died in deep snow at temperatures of −30°C.’ Pjotr Weselinokov also recoiled at the sights of‘our first battle’. He likened it to an abattoir. ‘The worse thing of all,’ he reflected,‘were the freshly killed bodies of soldiers left steaming’ where they lay in the frozen temperatures. ‘The air was filled with the peculiar stench of flesh and blood.’(7)
On the second day of the offensive, attacks gathered momentum. Thirty-first Army joined the stalled Twenty-ninth Army grappling with the German Ninth Army to the north, on the Kalinin front. They failed to force a passage across the Volga south of Kalinin. Thirtieth Army, however, made a deep 12km penetration into the Panzergruppe 3 flank north-east of Klin. First Shock and Twentieth armies crashed into both Panzergruppen 3 and 4 on a front from Yakhroma to west of Krassnaya Polyana. Some gains were made south of the latter in desperate fighting. Tenth Army, meanwhile, struck Second Panzer Army at the east point of the Tula bulge with one rifle division and two motorised infantry regiments. The rest of the army was still marching up from Syzran. South-west Front’s Second and Thirteenth armies began to apply pressure at Yelets at the southern base of the Tula bulge.
Michael Milstein, attached to Zhukov’s staff, remembered that‘gradually confidence came, the first counter-attacks were showing results’. But this was at considerable cost. Artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow said:
‘There were many wounded, particularly among the [hand-towed] machine gun crews. While all the others had to keep moving forward, nobody could help them. We detached one of our men, who had to administer first aid, to report them to the rear area services, so that the motorised unit following
behind could pick them up.’
‘One could actually see signs,’ said Michael Milstein, ‘that it may be conceivable the Hitler Army might be defeated.’ This was not expressed in the typical inflated ‘Great Patriotic War’ rhetoric. Milstein, a staff officer, objectively assessed the achievement as being ‘no miracle’, rather ‘it was the result of planned operational preparation… Certainly there were losses and disadvantages,’ he concluded, ‘but it was a properly executed operation.’ Lieutenant – and later historian – Dimitrij Wolkogonow, observed that the German Army ‘appeared out of breath,’ and that ‘the Soviet Army counter-offensive was fully unexpected’. This was also the case for the civilian population. Pawel Ossipow grimly pointed out, ‘we also saw a lot of dead civilians, old women and children.’ They were completely caught out by the sudden resurgence of operations in such terrible weather. ‘Many of them ran naked into the open during the attack,’ said Ossipow. ‘It was awful.’(8)
On 5 December German medic Anton Gründer was on duty until 06.00 hours in the Ninth Army sector.
‘As I was making something to eat, all hell broke loose outside. Everything was pulling back, Panzers, artillery guns, vehicles and soldiers – singly or in groups. They were all in shock. There were no more orders; everybody took up the retreat and looked no further forward than what he felt he might reach. Most vehicles didn’t start because of the terrible cold; despite that we were able to take most of the medical supplies with us. We tried to keep together with the remnants of the company so far as possible, but whoever fell out, was lost.’
War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 Page 55