The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  But three days after they seized Orel, the Germans received a nasty surprise of their own. Attacked by Russian T-34 tanks, they sustained major losses. “This was the first occasion on which the vast superiority of the Russian T-34 to our tanks became plainly apparent,” Guderian admitted. In order to be effective against them, the driver of a German Panzer IV had to maneuver his tank behind the T-34 and fire an extremely accurate shot at the grating above the engine to put it out of commission. From other angles, the Germans could only damage the tanks but not disable them.

  For Guderian, the other unpleasant discovery was that the huge operation and continual combat was exacting a toll not only in terms of higher than expected casualties and exhausted troops but also in terms of strained supply lines. For the first time, the panzer units began encountering occasional fuel shortages. But most troubling, as Guderian saw it, was the looming prospect of a change in the weather and a lack of warm clothing for his troops. He repeatedly requested winter clothing, only to be told that his troops would receive it “in due course” and that he should stop making such “unnecessary” requests. So, too, with their requests for antifreeze for the engines of their vehicles. “We saw as little of this as we did of winter clothing for the troops,” he noted bitterly. “This lack of warm clothes was, in the difficult months ahead, to provide the greatest problem and cause the greatest suffering to our soldiers—and it would have been the easiest to avoid of all our difficulties.”

  Like Stalin, Hitler was ensuring that his officers and men would pay a higher price for both their victories and defeats than whatever the enemy’s actions accounted for. Like Stalin, he was responsible for a growing number of self-inflicted wounds. As a result, the German forces finally advancing on Moscow, while still victorious and formidable, weren’t quite the juggernaut that they had been during the early weeks of Operation Barbarossa. They had been roughed up on more than one occasion, and the strain of moving so far so fast—including the sudden shifts in their course and targets, as in Guderian’s case—was beginning to show. They were about to face their most difficult test to date, with a growing sense of unease about whether they were up to it.

  The arrows of the German advance were now unambiguously pointing toward Moscow.

  5

  “Moscow is in danger”

  It was late August 2005, sixty-four years after those early months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when I accompanied a trio of searchers on a trip to the dense woods near Vyazma, 140 miles due west of Moscow. To this day, Russians from all walks of life band together in small groups of searchers who take camping trips to the sites of World War II battlefields, combing the areas for the remains of soldiers, their gear, weaponry, and whatever rare evidence they can find to rescue the fallen from anonymity. While the Germans usually buried their dead, the Red Army, especially in the early months of the war, suffered such huge losses and gave up so much territory so quickly that they left most of their dead wherever they had fallen. In the aftermath of the war, Stalin and other Soviet leaders were as uninterested in those remains as they had been in the catastrophic level of casualties that produced them. With a sense of mission that borders on the mystical, the searchers gather what they can and see to it that the remains they find are given at least the approximation of a proper burial, with military honors if at all possible.

  On the outskirts of Vyazma, which was the first target of Operation Typhoon when Hitler finally focused on taking Moscow, we stopped at what looked like a small cemetery right near the road. There are a couple of rows of simple rectangular graves, each one with an army helmet placed on it—in many cases a helmet riddled with bullet holes. On modest stone monuments in front of the graves, a few names are listed. Andrei Palatov, my guide and the leader of the Zvezda, or Star, group that numbers ten searchers, explained that groups like his had started the cemetery in 1990. Over the fifteen years since, he added, his group alone had brought the remains of about one thousand soldiers for burial there, and they had counted only those remains that were more or less complete. Altogether, thirty thousand remains have been buried in the small cemetery just since 1990, and the search groups are continuing to rebury more soldiers all the time. Each grave represents the last resting place for hundreds—in some cases, thousands—of the fallen.

  In most cases, it’s impossible to know the names of the soldiers and officers whose remains are found. For all the attention lavished on the military, the Soviet Union hadn’t developed the simple but dependable engraved dog tags that the German and other armies had, which allowed easy identification of the dead. Instead, the Soviet army issued its soldiers capsules made of wood or hard rubber with a screw-on cap. The soldier’s identification information was written on a small piece of paper that was rolled up and inserted into the capsule. But all sorts of things went wrong. The wooden capsules deteriorated over time, and the handwriting on the slips of paper, whatever the container, tended to fade. But most important, the popular name for the capsule was smertny medalyon—death medallion—and soldiers routinely threw them away, fearing that they brought bad luck on the battlefield. That’s why only a few names are listed in a cemetery that is the final resting place for thirty thousand soldiers.

  A separate grave adorned with fresh flowers lists more names than usual. It contains the bodies of children from the area who died after the war, usually when they stumbled upon weaponry or ammunition that then exploded. While neither side had time to lay down mines, there were plenty of grenades, shells, and other dangerous objects, which still occasionally took the lives of those who ventured into the forest.

  As hard as it is to imagine that this small cemetery beside the road contains the remains of so many soldiers, it is even more difficult to comprehend the scale of the fighting near Vyazma. During less than two weeks in early October 1941, entire Red Army units were encircled and wiped out by the Germans. Palatov cited the German claims that they had killed four hundred thousand and captured another six hundred thousand—a staggering one million tally. The Germans almost certainly inflated their figures, but not by an exponential amount. There is no doubt that the Soviet losses totaled hundreds of thousands in the Vyazma fighting.

  Up to that point, only the battle for Kiev, on the eve of Operation Typhoon, had proven more deadly. In that case, Stalin’s refusal to allow his generals to give up the doomed Ukrainian capital allowed the Germans to encircle the Soviet troops and inflict massive losses. General Zhukov and other commanders had argued that a withdrawal would prevent a massacre and would allow those forces to regroup and fight later battles. But Stalin wouldn’t hear of it. “How could you even think of giving up Kiev to the enemy?” he barked at Zhukov. Like Hitler, Stalin didn’t hesitate to ignore the advice of his generals, overruling them at will.

  If the encirclement of the Red Army in Kiev was a clear result of Stalin’s refusal to allow his commanders to retreat, the ensuing tragedy near Vyazma was a product of a complete breakdown of communications and command. At the start of Operation Typhoon, the Soviet rulers failed to realize that German forces were quickly moving to encircle and trap as much of the Red Army as possible near Vyazma, making it the next “cauldron,” an inferno of death and destruction. The German mission was simple: to trap and destroy the Soviet troops, blocking all means of escape. When the Soviet brass became aware of what was happening, they urged their men to escape by any means, and this time Stalin didn’t object. But by then, it was already too late for all but a tiny number of them.

  Boris Oreshkin was one of the lucky ones. “In our literature one can hardly find any information about this battle,” he noted. “It’s quite normal: who wants to talk about defeats?” Manning an observation post atop a hill with three other soldiers, watching wave after wave of German planes flying over on October 2, 3 and 4, with no Soviet planes rising to meet them, Oreshkin felt as though he was in the dead calm of the center of a storm. He could see smoke and explosions on the horizon, indicating the direction of the
German attack—right toward Vyazma. But when he and his buddies tried to report what they saw, they could only reach a soldier standing guard at a nearby airfield, who had no interest in their warnings. “I think that we—four ordinary soldiers—were the only people who could see clearly what was going on,” he claimed, with hardly any irony.

  Soon the Germans began attacking nearby, and their planes dropped bombs on the airfield and anything else they could see. By October 9, Oreshkin was part of the desperate sea of soldiers seeking to find a way out of the German encirclement, under bombardment from the air and pummeled by artillery and machine gun fire on the ground. The Soviet troops were told to break out of the cauldron, but the result was chaos. When a rumor started that some soldiers had succeeded in breaking through the German lines, Oreshkin reported, “People threw away gas masks, helmets and bags. Everybody just had one thought: to have enough time to escape the encirclement.” He even threw away his food bag, normally the last item that a panicked soldier abandons, thinking that he would be safe if he could make it only a short distance to the other side of the German lines.

  The journey would prove to be sheer torture. Oreshkin and the others spent the night running blindly back and forth in the woods, trying to avoid the bursts of German machine gun fire and cascades of artillery shells. German tanks fired at point-blank range at the Soviet soldiers trying to escape. At one point, Oreshkin heard a sound “as if somebody had taken a sheet of iron and started to shake it,” and then there was a blinding light and a hot flame shooting out right next to him. The explosion threw him to the ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw that a friend who had fallen next to him had a gaping wound between his shoulder blades. It was as if a giant stake had been driven through him. “Dress my wound,” the soldier pleaded. Oreshkin tried to help him, but it was hopeless, and another round of shells quickly sent him sprawling again.

  By the next morning, when he had reached a pond where he could quench his thirst, Oreshkin felt done for. “I was never more exhausted in my life than I was there. Even death looked like deliverance.” Then he saw a junior lieutenant tear up his documents and throw his gun into the pond. He also saw a line of German troops approaching and Soviet soldiers getting up, barely able to raise their hands in surrender. He quickly followed the lieutenant’s example and threw his documents and gun into the water as well.

  When he joined the group of about twenty surrendering soldiers, Oreshkin was shocked by the disdainful confidence his captors displayed. “We were conveyed to a village by a single soldier,” he noted. “He was walking ahead of us and didn’t even think that it was necessary to hold the gun in his hands. He was sure that we would do nothing to him and this fact finally broke me down, humiliated me and showed me the whole hopelessness of our situation.” Oreshkin would miraculously survive not only to fight again but also, in 1944, to capture German troops who would feel as humiliated and defeated as he felt then. But the overwhelming majority of those who were trapped in Vyazma didn’t have a chance of making it.

  Now these sixty-four years later on a picture-perfect sunny day, the searchers and I made our way into the shadowed forest about ten miles south of the town of Vyazma, the center of the cauldron where so many had perished. We had hiked only a short distance when Palatov, who was leading our expedition, stopped and climbed down into a ditch where his group had left their most important find on their last outing. He carefully lifted up a plastic bag and pulled out an intact skull, explaining that they would take it to the small cemetery for burial along with any other human remains they’d find during their next trips. The only other skull we’d see during our trip was that of a horse—horses were widely used by both armies—but the evidence of the ferocity of the fighting was everywhere. As Yegor Chegrinets, Palatov’s frequent partner on these expeditions, pointed out, “You can’t escape the war here. It just grows out of the ground.”

  I soon saw what he meant. After pitching our tents, we walked deeper into the forest, which was occasionally broken up by wild fields that had once belonged to villages. We waded through the tall grass, stepping gingerly to avoid spraining our ankles in some hidden depression. During the fighting, the villages, too, were obliterated and in many cases were never rebuilt. Although we were only ten miles from the town, it felt as though we were in a different universe, in a forest with dense undergrowth that sprang up even over what once were country roads. Palatov warned me to stay close. The previous year, he said, a pair of hikers had gotten lost in the forest and had set off in the wrong direction. They had a four-day trek before they reached civilization.

  Palatov, Chegrinets and Maxim Suslov, the third member of the group, turned on their metal detectors, and soon the quiet of the forest was broken by constant beeps as they zeroed in on metal just below the surface. While cautioning me not to touch anything, they began scooping up bullet casings, shell and bomb fragments, grenades, helmets, bayonets, mess kits, and parts of pistols. The bullet-riddled front of a jeep was lying among some trees, as were other vehicle parts, harnesses, gas masks, and one Soviet boot. Palatov picked up the standard food pouch of a soldier, the kind Oreshkin had thrown away in desperation. There was far more than the searchers could carry, and they left much of what they found in the forest. They took only a few objects for display in the small museum they had set up for that purpose in Moscow.

  At a certain point, I was struck by the fact that something was missing in this now deceptively beautiful, wild forest: any form of wildlife, even birds. The searchers explained that while there were deer and wild boar in the forest and certainly some smaller animals, we probably wouldn’t see any. The local inhabitants had picked up plenty of battlefield weapons after the war and they shot at anything that moved. The animals stayed well clear of people venturing into the forest—and, my guides added, we’d be smart to do the same in case we saw anyone who wasn’t part of our group. That was especially true at night, when drinking and shooting often went together. We didn’t run into any outsiders during our outing. Neither did we see any animals during the whole trip.

  As we approached a gully, Palatov recounted the story of one of the few Soviet officers who had been experienced and calm enough to lay a trap for the Germans in the heat of the battle. Many of his fellow officers had panicked, just as the soldiers had, but this particular officer had figured out that the Germans were likely to hide in the gully overnight before attacking. As a result, he ordered his men to camouflage themselves in positions surrounding the gully, and when the Germans went down into the gully, as he had anticipated, they opened fire on them. This was one of the few times during the Vyazma battle when the Russians had the upper hand and inflicted heavy losses on the Germans. I followed Palatov into the gully, and his metal detector started going off immediately. He dug just below the surface and found parts of a German belt, spent cartridges, and even a pfennig. It was as if the ground had spoken up to confirm his story.

  Just outside our campsite that evening, Palatov found three grenades that had failed to explode. While the TNT had deteriorated over sixty-four years and wasn’t particularly dangerous, one grenade still had an intact detonator. Holding them up, he announced: “They’re Polish.”

  Astonished, I asked how that was possible. Palatov explained that it wasn’t uncommon to find Polish ammunition and other weaponry. The problem was that it was impossible to know which army it had come from. After Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, both occupiers seized whatever Polish supplies they could get their hands on and added them to their arsenals. All of which was perfectly logical, but the find had caught me completely by surprise. In one of those bizarre ironies of history, German and Soviet soldiers fighting at Vyazma had killed each other with Polish bullets and grenades. And not only at Vyazma. A report by A. L. Ugryumov, head of the political department of Moscow’s Frunzensky district, on the performance of newly formed home guard units composed of Muscovites mobilized to defend the capital, noted that many of the inexperienced sold
iers marched into battle in early October equipped only with “Polish trophy rifles.”

  There are few people left in the region who remember anything from that period. But in 1996 Palatov recorded an interview with Maria Denisova, a woman who has since died. She was fifteen at the time of the Vyazma battle and lived in one of the villages destroyed in the fighting, precisely in the area where we had been hiking. She recalled hiding in terror in the basement of her house along with her mother and a wounded Russian soldier. A German spotted an opening to the basement and tossed in a grenade that killed the soldier and seriously wounded her mother. When Denisova and her mother came out, every house in the village was on fire. The two of them hid in one of the dugouts abandoned by fleeing Soviet soldiers, and her mother died there from her untreated wounds a few days later. Denisova’s father had hidden in another dugout with four other men, but the Germans had spotted them and ordered them out. One man’s shirt was covered with blood since he had just killed a sheep. The Germans took this as evidence that they were partisans and shot them all.

  After the fighting died down, Denisova witnessed a scene of pure horror. “There were so many dead bodies all over the place,” she recalled. “We walked on them as if it was a floor covered with bodies. They were next to each other and on top of each other. Some didn’t have legs, heads or other parts. We had to walk on them since there was no other place to step. Everything was covered with them: the entire village and the riverbank. It’s awful to remember! The river was red with blood as if there was only blood flowing there.” She and other survivors had no choice but to pick up the military canteens strewn about and drink from the bloody river, since the village had no well. They also ate the rotting meat of the dead horses that littered the area.