These many differences between the two sides explain the remarkable victories won by German arms between June and September. Soviet forces were sent in piecemeal, to plug gaps in the leaky front line, unable to concentrate for any more ambitious operations. Stalin used his new military powers to push his tired and disorganized troops to the limit, but bit by bit the Soviet line bent and cracked. In the north German armies edged ever closer to Leningrad. When Stalin heard that German forces were shielding themselves behind hostages – delegations of Russians with petitions to the Leningrad command to surrender the city – he ordered his defenders not to be sentimental but to gun down their fellow citizens. ‘War is merciless,’ he wrote, ‘and it will bring defeat in the first instance to him who shows weakness and vacillation…’31 But hardness of heart was not enough; on Sep-ember 26 the Germans reached the shores of Lake Ladoga behind Leningrad, and the 900-day siege of the city began.
On the other fronts disaster followed on disaster. In the south, where the bulk of Soviet armies had been based in June, progress was slower. But in August Hitler changed his mind about the priority to Army Group Centre he had given in June and switched the main German effort to clearing the Ukraine and seizing Kiev. The change was strongly resisted by the army leadership, who wanted to capitalize on the victory at Smolensk by pushing on rapidly to Moscow and destroying what remained of the Red Army in the process. Theirs was the view of Clausewitz: concentrate on the destruction of the enemy's forces. They did not share Hitler's view that what counted in war was economics. The seizure of the Ukraine, with its rich grainlands, its mines and metals plants, was part and parcel of the pursuit of ‘living-space’. Hitler believed that the loss of these resources would spell disaster for the Soviet war effort and make the new German order invincible.
Hitler prevailed and in the process possibly saved the Soviet capital. The capital of the Ukraine was less fortunate. Though under heavy harassing attack, bogged down by autumn rains, and short of tanks and aircraft, the First Panzer Group from the north and the Second Panzer Group moving from the south met up far to the east of Kiev. In Moscow the German shift from the central front to the southern had been anticipated in August. General Yeremenko, who lost his wife and young child in the initial German onslaught, was given charge of the counter-offensive to save the Ukraine. The attempt failed. Stalin urged Yeremenko to report victories and poured in precious reserves from other parts of the front to bolster the Soviet attack. They were all squandered in the effort to prevent another catastrophic encirclement. Stalin refused to let Kiev be abandoned to the enemy, though only a strategic withdrawal would have saved the Soviet forces, as Zhukov had argued in July. Without a specific order from Stalin, the local commander in Kiev refused all demands from his colleagues that he save the army by retreating politically prudent no doubt, but militarily disastrous. When even Stalin had to accept the reality that German forces had encircled Kiev and its hinterlands, it was too late. Evacuation of the front was ordered on September 17, but the order never reached the embattled garrison in Kiev, which fought on in the ruins of the ancient city for two more days before surrendering. The rest of the trapped army, except for small groups of stragglers who fought their way out, became prisoners. In all 527,000 men were killed or captured, and the way was open for German armies, though battle-weary and greatly depleted, to occupy the rest of the Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. Most senior commanders lost their lives in the final battering of the pocket by German aircraft and artillery. The Kiev Front commander, General Mikhail Kirponos, was ambushed with a thousand men as he tried to break out. Wounded in the leg, he fought on until the splinters from an exploding mine abruptly dispatched him.32
Kiev fallen; Leningrad encircled; at last Moscow caught Hitlers attention. So swift had been the capture of the southern area that, with one final flourish, the capture of Stalin's capital was within German sights. On September 6 Hitler published Directive Number 35, which inaugurated Operation Typhoon, the destruction of what was believed to be the last significant Soviet forces guarding the capital, in the region of Vyazma and Briansk. The task of holding the last line fell to General Ivan Konev, who took over from Timoshenko on September 13. Konev, a former lumberjack and an NCO from the First World War, was one of the group of outstanding Soviet commanders whose baptism of fire was experienced in the retreats of 1941. He was a tall, rather ascetic-looking figure, with a distinctive bald head and piercing eyes and a reputation for severity. He abstained from drink and disliked drunkenness in others: in front of his troops he adopted a simple, austere life-style. He read widely from Russian literature, which he quoted as he talked, and carried his own library with him at the front. He was regarded as a devoted Communist. He ended his career as Commander-in-Chief of all Warsaw Pact forces in the 1950s.33
The force Konev commanded in front of Moscow was scratched together, a mixture of battle-weary remnants of the struggles further west and poorly-trained opolchenie, militia units that contained men more than fifty years old, as well as women. There were few modern tanks or aircraft and far too few vehicles. Most of the Soviet divisions were well under strength, with 5,000 to 7,000 men instead of the usual 14,000. They faced forces numbering 800,000 with over 1,000 tanks, organized in three Panzer armies.34 The plan was a repeat of the formula that had proved so successful since the first encirclements in June. Soviet forces were to be caught in two powerful pincer movements around Vyazma to the north and Briansk to the south, and the road to Moscow opened up.
Operation Typhoon was launched in the south on September 30. Led by General Heinz Guderian, the architect of the German tank armies, it soon lived up to its name. The storm tore open the southern wing of the Soviet armies, commanded by Yeremenko; the soldier who had failed to save Kiev now faced the nightmare of losing Moscow, too. So swift was the German assault that Guderian's troops entered Orel while the streetcars were still running. A week later Briansk was captured and Yeremenko's three armies were trapped. Little news could be sent to Moscow; Stalin's only instruction was to hold tight to every defence line rather than retreat. On October 6 Yeremenko himself narrowly escaped the German encirclement. He was severely wounded by a shell but lived to fight another, and vital, day at Stalingrad.
Further north the attack began on October 2 under cover of artillery and air attack and a smoke-screen that turned the landscape to deep fog in front of the Soviet defenders. Konev's armies fared no better than Yeremenko's. German forces converged on Vyazma, threatening an even larger encirclement of five Soviet armies. In two days the whole Soviet front was once again in crisis, far faster than Stalin had ever imagined could happen. October 5 was a critical day. Routine air reconnaissance from Moscow found a column of German armour twelve miles long converging on Yukhnov, only eighty miles from the capital. Twice more aircraft went out to confirm the unbelievable news before it was passed on in full to Zhukov's successor as chief of staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. Finally it was believed, though this did not stop Beria from ordering the NKVD to arrest and interrogate the unfortunate air officer for ‘provocation’. Stalin telephoned the Moscow district command at once: ‘Mobilize everything you have.’ He called an immediate emergency meeting of the State Defence Committee.35 Stalin, who had been ordering last stands all summer, ordered one more, the most important of his life. In front of Moscow, along the thinly manned ‘Mozhaisk Line’, the army of the revolution, cornered but defiant, was to face the enemy.
In the first days of October the two dictators were poised on the edge of victory and of defeat. German expectations had been high all summer. As early as July the Army Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, wrote in his war diary that it would not be an exaggeration ‘to say that the Russian campaign has been won in two weeks’. In mid-July Hitler ordered a new set of gigantic armaments programmes for the air force and the navy to swing the war back to the West and confrontation with Britain and the United States.36 The second wave of victories produced at Hitler's headquarters a state of near euphoria.
As German forces pressed towards Leningrad and Moscow Hitler's early fantasies about a sprawling German empire in the east began to take on substance and form. On September 29 he ordered that after the capture of Leningrad, which seemed imminent, the city be ‘wiped from the face of the earth’. The same month, when he decided on the drive for Moscow, he swore that that city would be razed to the ground, to be replaced by a large artificial lake: ‘The name Moscow will disappear forever.’37 At mealtimes in his headquarters he talked endlessly of his plans for the East, of the Asiatic ‘brutes' he had conquered. Finally, on October 2, he returned to Berlin to address his people for the first time since the invasion began in June.
The German public was thirsty for news. On October 4 Hitler vouchsafed to release remarkable news indeed. He arrived at the Berlin Sportpalast, where an audience was assembled to listen to the routine exhortations to give to the Nazi Winter Relief Charity. The first row of seats in the dimly lit hall was reserved for wounded men, and they sat a few yards from Hitler with their crutches stretched out in front of them pointing towards their leader. There were the usual pleas for the German public to dig deep into their pockets. But so buoyant were Hitler's spirits with the news from Russia that he could not resist sharing it with his audience. He had come, he told them, from ‘the greatest battle in the history of the world’. The plan had worked. The Soviet enemy was beaten ‘and would never rise again’. He detailed the evidence: over 2 million Soviet prisoners, 22,000 artillery pieces seized or smashed, 18,000 tanks destroyed, 14,500 aircraft shot down. Cheers echoed around the hall.38
Six days later Hitler put a seal on the victory. His press chief, Otto Dietrich, was sent to Berlin from Hitler's headquarters to tell not just the German people but the whole world that Germany had won. On October 10, in the richly decorated Theatre Hall of the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, the foreign press corps gathered. There was an air of suspense, exaggerated by the long, probably deliberate, delay in starting the proceedings. German officials stood at the front, all in uniform, even those whose office was entirely civilian. At last Dietrich emerged, grinning with self-importance. The red velvet curtains behind him were drawn back, revealing a vast map of the Soviet front that dwarfed the huddle of Germans in front of it. Dietrich echoed Hitler, whose words he read. The last remnants of the Red Army were now trapped in two steel vices, tightened day by day by German forces; their destruction, Dietrich continued, was assured. Beyond them was simply undefended space, which German legions were poised to fill. Neutral pressmen in the audience looked glum. The rest, newspapermen from Germany's allies, rose and cheered, their arms outstretched in salute. The next day German newspapers confirmed the tidings: CAMPAIGN IN EAST DECIDED! THE GREAT HOUR HAS STRUCK! In Berlin the faces showed the relief. Bookshops began to display Russian grammars in their windows to serve the officials and colonists of the new German empire.39 The smooth, sweet taste of victory was on everyone's tongue. Hitler had spoken; the war in the East was won.
In Moscow the mood turned from sombre to panic-stricken. The public there had few illusions about the course of the war, but propaganda kept up the image of tough, improvised revolutionary warfare that was slowing and holding the fascist horde. Few Muscovites knew anything about what was happening at the front save by rumour. Not even Stalin knew clearly what was going on. He saw the defence of Moscow and Leningrad as a unique challenge. They symbolized the new Soviet state. The Soviet Union might survive the fall of its capital and its second city, but the effect on the Soviet public and on world opinion would be devastating. Nonetheless Stalin had to face reality. On October 1 the orders went out to begin evacuating the Government 500 miles to the east, to the city of Kuibyshev. The population of Moscow began evacuating, along with foreign embassies, office staff, archives, art treasures and commissars. Stalin sent his own library and his family. Finally it was decided to send Lenin.
The custodian of Lenin's body was summoned to a meeting of the Politburo. Here he was told by Stalin to take everything he needed to move the embalmed leader to safety. A railway carriage, fitted with refrigeration and shock absorbers, was then prepared. A special train with its ghoulish freight pulled out of Moscow for distant Tyumen. Lenin was housed in a former Tsarist school, guarded by soldiers and scientists. At the mausoleum in Red Square the guard of honour remained in place as if everything were normal. Stalin might have followed. His papers were sent ahead to Kuibyshev. His personal train and a fleet of aircraft were kept on standby.40 He could not risk capture. He might have made peace, as Lenin had done at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 to save the revolution. It was rumoured in Berlin in early October that Stalin had sought an armistice through Tsar Boris of Bulgaria. It would not have been an irrational choice, any more than was Lenin's.
The evidence on the peace mission is far from clear. The story that emerged in the 1980s suggested that on October 7 Stalin ordered Beria to send out peace feelers to Hitler via the Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow, Ivan Stamenov . The emissary was instructed to say that Stalin would give Hitler the Baltic states, Moldavia and parts of Belorussia and the Ukraine. According to the story the Bulgarian refused, telling either Beria or Molotov that the Soviet Union would, in the end, win. There is no evidence from the German side of any contacts in 1941. More recent revelations suggest a rather different picture. The attempt to make a peace offer may have been part of a political initiative sponsored by Beria to try to confuse the Germans long enough to form a more solid defence line in front of Moscow. This version fits more comfortably with the rest of what is known about Stalin's behaviour in early October – frantic efforts to organize the defence and to recruit American and British assistance and his subsequent decision at the moment of acute crisis to stay in the capital.41
Stalin's decision was a historic one. It was taken against a background of mounting chaos in the capital. The sight of trucks removing files and equipment, of smoke curling up from bonfires of documents that could not be carried, of a stream of evacuees, mostly women and children, leaving the crowded railway stations, proved too much for the remaining population. Moscow was under constant aerial bombardment. Not even the threat of an NKVD bullet could stem the wildest rumours. The journalist Ilya Ehrenburg recalled that in Moscow ‘the general mood was appalling’. The panic suddenly burst in mid-October, just as Ehrenburg, too, got his marching orders for the east. The scenes he found at the Kazan Station defied description. Trains were swamped by desperate Muscovites, who occupied any space they could. Ehrenburg lost his luggage in the mêlée but was lucky enough to find a place on a long suburban train that took almost a week to reach the safety of the designated capital of rump Russia.42 For those left behind Beria ordered food to be distributed free to the population to save it from the Germans. But by then people were helping themselves. Looters moved into the empty shops and offices. In the modern apartment buildings in the city centre the managers collaborated with thieves to steal paintings and furnishings left behind. Stalin had almost lost control of his capital not to the German army, now only two or three days away, but to his own frightened people.
The panic was triggered by an unusually frank and grim communiqué broadcast in Moscow on October 16. ‘During the night of October 14–15,’ ran the report, ‘the position on the Western Front became worse.’ The Germans, with large quantities of tanks, ‘broke through our defences’.43 The following day the radio announced that Moscow would be defended stubbornly to the death, that no thought had been given to abandoning the capital (which was not, of course, true), but that above all Stalin was still in Moscow. Why he chose to remain we cannot know for certain. But on the 17th, instead of following his Government, he went out to his dacha, which had been mined for demolition, to do some work. He found his guards about to blow up the building. He ordered them to clear the mines and started to work in his study. In Moscow the NKVD moved in to shoot looters and restore order, while thousands of not entirely enthusiastic volunteers were formed into labour battalions to dig defences or into ramshackl
e militia to be moved at once to the front. Every tenth apartment building manager was shot as an example. A state of siege was declared on October 19. The city prepared for the showdown. Stalin informed his guards that he was staying put: ‘We will not surrender Moscow.’44
4
Russia's War Page 13