The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  As he did in his speech at the Mayakovsky metro station, the Soviet leader admitted that a lot of territory had been “temporarily lost” and that “the enemy is before the gates of Leningrad and Moscow.” But he once again boasted that the Soviet troops were inflicting heavy losses on the invaders and insisted that the Germans “are straining their last forces.” “The enemy is not as strong as some terror-stricken would-be intellectuals picture him,” he added—a statement that underscored his loathing of intellectuals and set up his prediction that the war would end in disaster not just for Germany’s armed forces but also for its masters. “Another few months, another half year, one year perhaps—and Hitlerite Germany must collapse under the weight of its own crimes,” he declared.

  Whether or not Stalin believed his own words, he knew he had to rally his countrymen. One way was to signal his determination to call up as many troops as needed for the effort to repulse the invaders. “Our reserves in manpower are inexhaustible,” he pointed out. The other was to repeat and expand his litany of Russian heroes, this time starting with the thirteenth-and fourteenth-century warriors Alexander Nevsky and Dmitri Donskoi and finishing again with Marshal Kutuzov, the architect of the victory against Napoleon. “Let the manly images of our great ancestors…inspire you in this war!” he declared. It was an unabashed appeal to the kind of patriotism that made no distinction between the old and new regimes. It was also a de facto admission that the country was in such danger that he couldn’t depend on loyalty to the Communist Party to carry the day.

  For all his prophecies of victory and boasting about wildly inflated German losses, Stalin was desperately eager for reassurance that he wouldn’t be proved wrong. On or around November 19, he phoned General Zhukov and asked, “Are you sure we are going to be able to hold Moscow? I am asking with an aching heart. Tell me honestly, as a member of the Party.”

  “There is no question that we will be able to hold Moscow,” Zhukov told him. But he took advantage of the occasion to ask for the assignment of two new armies to the defense of the capital and two hundred tanks.

  “I am glad you are so sure,” Stalin replied. He promised Zhukov two reserve armies by the end of November but claimed he couldn’t do anything about his request for tanks. “We have no tanks for the time being,” he said.

  While Zhukov had to respond with the reassurance that Stalin was seeking, he wasn’t nearly as confident as he sounded. Elena Rzhevskaya, who has written extensively about her own wartime experiences, met Zhukov when he was working on his memoirs in 1964. The famed military leader was largely ostracized at the time, a victim of political infighting in the Kremlin, and he talked openly about the crucial turning points of the war with her. “Marshal Zhukov considered November 1941 the most critical and most ominous month for Moscow, when its fate was decided in battle,” she recalled.

  For all the bravado they had displayed on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin and his generals knew that the fight for control of the Soviet capital—and the country—could still go either way.

  Hitler continued to exude confidence that his forces would emerge victorious soon, and those charged with keeping up the morale of the troops did their best to spur them on. A proclamation addressed to German soldiers in October declared:

  Soldiers! Moscow is before you. In the course of two years of war all of the continent’s capitals have bowed before you, you have marched along the streets of the best cities. Moscow remains. Force her to bow, show her the strength of your weapons, walk through her squares. Moscow means the end of the war!

  —Wehrmacht High Command

  But many of the officers and men who were doing the actual fighting were beginning to be plagued by doubts. Although their string of early victories seemed to confirm that the Red Army wouldn’t be able to resist their onslaught, there were also early indications that the enemy they had been taught to scorn would be difficult to crush, no matter how terrifying his losses.

  General Ewald von Kleist, who commanded the First Panzer Army, was astounded by the refusal of some Red Army units to surrender under any circumstances. “The Russians are so primitive that they won’t give up even when they are surrounded by a dozen machine guns,” he recalled after the war when he was held in Nuremberg. “I would say it is a difference between German bravery and Russian bravery in the sense that the former is logical and the latter brutal.”

  A German soldier who was sent to the Eastern front in August 1941 described his shock in discovering that the Red Army was employing the same kind of human wave tactics that were used in World War I. The Soviet assaults “were carried out by masses of men who made no real attempt at concealment but trusted in sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm us,” he wrote. In one such attack, “The lines of men stretched to the right and left of our regimental front overlapping it completely and the whole mass of Russian troops came tramping solidly and relentlessly forward.”

  Describing the vision before him as “an unbelievable sight, a machine gunner’s dream target,” he added, “It was rumored that the commissars worked out the number of machine guns which we had, multiplied that number by the number of rounds per minute that we could fire, calculated how many minutes it would take a body of soldiers to cross the area and added to the final total a couple of thousand men. Thus some men would get through our line…”

  The German was convinced that the attack he was seeing had been calculated precisely that way. “At 600 meters we opened fire and whole sections of the first wave just vanished, leaving here and there an odd survivor still walking stolidly forward,” he recalled. “It was uncanny, unbelievable, inhuman. No soldier of ours would have continued to advance alone.” As German machine guns overheated from the continual firing, the Soviet side kept sending in more waves of troops. “The Ivans,” as he called them, kept up their attacks for three days, and he never saw a stretcher-bearer during the entire time.

  “The number, duration and fury of those attacks had exhausted and numbed us completely. Not to hide the truth, they had frightened us,” the German admitted. He noted that this depressed many of the men in his unit, who now realized that they were in for a much more difficult struggle than they had anticipated. “That we would win, we had no doubt, but what we were now engaged in would be a long, bitter and hard fought war,” he concluded.

  Many German units were involved in less dramatic engagements and didn’t experience these human wave tactics. But they, too, were finding the fighting in Russia unlike any other they had faced so far. Lieutenant Kurt Gruman of the 185th Infantry Regiment, the Eighty-seventh Infantry Division, pondered the contrasts as he wrote in his diary on November 17, 1941, when he was participating in the drive toward Moscow. Looking back at the time he spent in France, he fondly recalled “the beauties of the Versailles countryside,” “cozy evenings in the club room, sitting in deep chairs with a glass of absinthe or a bottle labeled ‘Martel,’ ‘Hennessey’ or ‘Montmousseau,’” and the “intoxicating shimmer” of Paris.

  When Gruman took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, his life changed immediately. The first battles went relatively smoothly, but soon he was thrust into the fighting at Smolensk, where each victory came at a higher price. “I will always remember the ferocious battles and the heavy losses which both sides suffered,” he wrote. His spirits were subsequently lifted by the successes of “the great October offensive.” “The great encirclement in which we participated will enter history under the name ‘The Battle of Bryansk and Vyazma,’” he wrote. “Nothing could stop us; we quickly surmounted the mined fields and blown-up bridges.”

  While recalling the difficulties of “a season of a veritable quagmire” of mud that forced him to learn how to ride a horse, Gruman boasted how “we crossed Borodino field, where Napoleon had fought,” and then forded the Moscow River. Despite a first clash with Siberian divisions, his faith in victory appeared unshaken. “The charge to Moscow had begun,” he noted with evident satisfaction.


  Gruman was clearly a loyal officer, but his diary entries dwelled more and more on the hardships that the Germans faced. On November 16, he recorded that his unit “finally received a few pairs of winter boots” from the regimental command, leaving little doubt that he was angry that most of the men still didn’t have them. While he observed that it was a beautiful sunny day and that the snowy landscape “casts a spell,” he indicated that the cold of “this wonderful winter weather” could be endured during the day “but at night it tortures us.” The following morning, he wrote that the thermometer showed minus 9 [16 degrees Fahrenheit], and “the morning is beautiful, almost like a fairy tale.”

  But Gruman knew that those early signs of winter and the certainty that temperatures would plummet much lower didn’t augur well. He was worried not only about the men but also about the horses in his unit. “The poor horses were exhausted. The lack of forage and the cold took their toll—all horses stood in the open,” he wrote.

  The health of these transport animals was no minor matter. Despite its reputation as a highly modern, mechanized army, the German invasion force relied to a huge extent on horses. There were still some traditional cavalry units, but the horses were primarily used to haul artillery and supplies. When vehicles became stuck in Russia’s treacherous mud, as they constantly did, horses would pull them out. As General Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff of Army Group Center’s Fourth Army, reported, “The infantry now slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in the slime. Even tractors can only move with great difficulty. A large proportion of our artillery was soon stuck fast.”

  It’s estimated that the Germans used about 750,000 horses during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa and a total of two and half million of those animals during the entire war against the Soviet Union. On average, about one thousand horses perished during every day of the fighting.

  While shelling and bullets killed most of the horses, many collapsed from heart failure brought on by overexertion, particularly during the mud season. Others succumbed to disease and the cold. The Russians had horses that could withstand low temperatures far better than the horses rounded up by the Germans in their occupied territories. Those horses, it turned out, died faster in the cold than humans did.

  As his unit was ordered to advance, Gruman recorded more complaints. “The maps were so inaccurate that it was virtually impossible to use them…. Obstructions and congestion along the way. I would not have minded bludgeoning a few drivers and train commanders.” The sky was “a fiery red” from the shelling, and the soldiers hit the ground as “missiles are exploding among the trees.” One of the greatest fears of the men was the famed Soviet Katyushas, or “Stalin’s organs,” as the new rocket-propelled artillery fired from trucks was called. While his men hadn’t experienced this weapon yet, he pointed out that others had told him “the effect of exploding rockets on morale is far greater than their destructive force.”

  Morale in Gruman’s unit was increasingly shaky even without the Katyushas. The lieutenant noted on November 24, “Each day the combat strength of the troops weakened.” Two weeks earlier, the company had seventy men, but now it was down to forty. He reported that some of the best officers had died trying to set an example of bravery for their men and “the new replacement commanders did not know their business well” and “had no conscience,” using every opportunity to stay in the rear as others died.

  Above all, though, Gruman warned of the dangers of exhaustion. “Our men, who had been fighting since the beginning of August, were tired,” he wrote. “The burden of morale was extreme. The cry of ‘Medic!’ ran through the fighting like stray fire, and the cry of ‘Machine guns forward!’ was not heard. Such sad episodes formerly were not known in our regiment.” Recalling the brave soldiers he saw in earlier engagements, he added, “Such a warrior is not created from a tired, louse-infected, and numerically small company.”

  In an entry dated November 25 to 29, he wrote that “we were unable to break the enemy resistance” and that they had buried more of their men. While he pointed out that other units were still advancing on the Soviet capital, he no longer believed he and his men would be among those who would achieve “the glory of reaching Moscow first.” Instead, he looked to Schneller Heinz, the famed panzer commander Heinz Guderian, who was advancing from the south. “Our hopes for penetrating Moscow from the southwest lie with Guderian’s tank units,” he concluded.

  Guderian, who had once been firmly convinced that he’d fulfill those hopes, was now plagued by doubts about the ability of his tanks to succeed in that task. Shortly after he seized Orel on October 3, his tanks came up against more Soviet T-34s and suffered heavy losses. “Up to this time we had enjoyed tank superiority, but from now on the situation was reversed,” he recalled. “The prospect of rapid, decisive victories was fading in consequence.” To the Soviet side, such a judgment appeared premature, since they still didn’t have anywhere near the number of tanks they needed. Nonetheless, there was no question that the T-34s, even in limited numbers, were making their presence felt in a big way.

  The other major factor was the weather. The mud of October was proving to be a daunting opponent in its own right. “The Russians are impeding us far less than the wet and the mud!” Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group Center, complained in his war diary on October 21. Monitoring Guderian’s progress as he pointed his forces toward Tula, the arms-producing city guarding the southern approach to Moscow, Bock wrote on October 30, “Guderian’s weak spearhead reached the southern outskirts of Tula, which is being defended by the enemy. Everything else is still lagging far behind on the muddy roads.”

  A day later, Bock added that “our losses have become quite considerable,” and reported that Hitler had been demanding an explanation for the lack of progress. “He probably refused to believe the written reports, which is not surprising, for anyone who hasn’t seen this filth doesn’t think it possible,” he noted dolefully.

  Guderian was as exasperated by the commands that were coming from Hitler as by the conditions he faced. When his tank troops began their drive from Orel to Tula on the one road linking the two towns, they discovered that the Russians had blown up bridges and set extensive minefields along both sides of the road. Along with the weather and Soviet counterattacks, this hampered the resupply efforts further. As a result, fuel shortages began to limit the speed of the advance. When he received Hitler’s order on October 28 for “fast moving units” to seize key bridges, he was furious. Noting that the maximum speed his tanks were reaching on the Orel-Tula road was twelve miles per hour, he wrote, “There were no ‘fast-moving units’ any more. Hitler was living in a world of fantasy.”

  On the night of November 3 to 4, a frost hardened the mud roads, making it easier for Guderian’s troops to advance. But whatever relief he felt was offset by his forebodings about what the dropping temperatures would mean for his troops, which rekindled his anger with Hitler’s earlier decisions that had delayed the push on Moscow until this late date. “It is miserable for the troops and a great pity for our cause that the enemy should thus gain time while our plans are postponed until the winter is more and more advanced,” he wrote in a letter on November 6. “It all makes me very sad. With the best will in the world there is nothing more you can do about the elements. The unique chance to strike a single great blow is fading more and more, and I do not know if it will ever recur. How things will turn out, God alone knows.”

  As temperatures dropped to 5 degrees Fahrenheit on November 12 and then minus 8 degrees the next day, Guderian was summoned to a meeting of the commanders of the armies of Army Group Center that only incensed him more. In the “Orders for the Autumn Offensive, 1941,” which the top brass unveiled at that session, the plan of action for the Second Panzer Army bordered on the surreal. Its assignment was to seize Gorky, which Guderian noted was about four hundred miles from Orel and 2
50 miles east of Moscow. The idea was to cut off communication lines to the Soviet capital from the rear. “This was not the month of May and we were not fighting in France!” Guderian noted. With his immediate superior backing him up, he then wrote out a report why “the Panzer Army was no longer capable of carrying out the orders that had been issued it.”

  Returning to his units in the field, Guderian was even more discouraged. On November 14, he visited the 167th Infantry Division. “The supply situation was bad,” he recalled. “Snow shirts, boot grease, underclothes and above all woolen trousers were not available. A high proportion of the men were still wearing denim trousers, and the temperature was 8 below zero!” A few hours later he reached the 112th Infantry Division, where the situation was similar. If some of the troops were managing to deal with the cold, it was only thanks to what they had seized from the enemy. “Our troops had got hold of Russian overcoats and fur caps and only the national emblem showed that they were Germans,” he wrote. The supplies of winter clothes provided by their own army were so meager that they constituted “a mere drop in the ocean,” he added.

  A few days later, the same weary troops of the 112th Infantry Division were in for a terrifying surprise. Siberian troops, fresh off trains from the Far East and fully equipped with winter gear, launched an all-out attack that sent the Germans reeling. Guderian tried his best to explain what happened to his men but didn’t attempt to disguise the dimensions of the disaster. “Before judging their performance it should be borne in mind that each regiment had already lost some 500 men from frostbite, that as a result of the cold the machine-guns were no longer able to fire and that our 37 mm. anti-tank gun had proved ineffective against the T-34,” he wrote. “The result of all this was a panic…. This was the first time that such a thing had occurred during the Russian campaign, and it was a warning that the combat ability of our infantry was at an end and that they should no longer be expected to perform difficult tasks.”