The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  While Guderian may have come to that realization a bit later than he indicated in his memoirs, he was increasingly alarmed by the contrast between his “insufficiently clothed, half-starved men” and “the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting.” Writing about those battles in November as he tried and failed to reach Tula, he added, “Only a man who knew all that can truly judge the events which now occurred.”

  Guderian and other generals in the field were also beginning to recognize that it wasn’t just the new Siberian troops who were fighting with greater determination than they had encountered before. There was a growing conviction among many of the Soviet fighters that this was a national struggle, something that wasn’t always apparent in the early days of the invasion.

  In Orel about that time, Guderian met an old tsarist general, who told him, “If only you had come twenty years ago we should have welcomed you with open arms. But now it’s too late.” Referring to the devastation of the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution, the tsarist general added, “We were just beginning to get back on our feet and now you arrive and throw us back twenty years so that we will have to start from the beginning all over again. Now we are fighting for Russia and in that cause we are all united.”

  Those sentiments were no accident. They were partly the result of the brutal policies of the Germans in the territories they had already occupied, which shattered any illusions of the local populace and surrendering Soviet troops that their new masters would show them any mercy. But they were also the direct result of the change in tone emanating from the Kremlin. As Waffen SS General Max Simon would report later, “A national concept had not at this time (summer and autumn 1941) penetrated the minds of the Russian front-line troops; it was not proclaimed by Stalin till late autumn.” By then, even someone like the former tsarist general Guderian had encountered was receptive to national appeals coming from the communists he had once fought.

  Stalin’s decision to use the defiant Revolution Day ceremonies in Moscow to proclaim those new national—as opposed to ideological—goals would quickly begin to produce results.

  Vasily Grossman, the Krasnaya Zvezda war correspondent and novelist, reflected on the differences between the soldiers of the opposing armies as they fought each other and struggled with the elements, first the rain and mud, then the freezing temperatures. “Germans are not so well-prepared for the physical hardship, when a ‘naked’ man is facing nature,” he wrote in his notebook. “A Russian man is brought up to hardship, and his victories are hard earned. Germans, on the other hand, are prepared for easy victories that would be based on technological superiority, and they give in to the hardship caused by nature. General Mud and General Cold are helping the Russian side. (But it is true that only those who are strong can make nature work for them, while the weak are at the mercy of nature.)”

  Whatever degree of truth in Grossman’s generalizations, the Red Army soldier was no superman, either physically or psychologically. Many of the troops fighting to defend Moscow felt as worn down as their opponents. They, too, struggled with the elements and keeping themselves fed and warm. Their superiors nervously monitored their mood, watching for signs of trouble.

  The Moscow region military censorship office boasted in an internal memo that it had checked 2,505,867 letters written between November 15 and December 1, which accounted for all the correspondence for that period. While it claimed that most of the letters showed that morale was good, it reported the confiscation of 3,698 letters and deletion of passages from 26,276 others. Since most soldiers certainly knew that their letters could and would be checked, the fact that a portion of the correspondence demonstrated “low morale, which was connected with questions of provisions and warm clothes” and others contained “anti-Soviet propaganda” indicated that the authorities had serious reason for concern.

  “The food is really poor. Soon I won’t be able to move because of hunger,” a soldier named Ptashnikov wrote. Semyon Leskov was more descriptive. “You know how cold it is and we are sitting in the trenches wearing cold boots,” he wrote. “We’re sitting here shivering, and the Germans keep pounding us day and night. They want to get to Moscow by any means, but we’re standing here by the river and we won’t let them break through. Sometimes we have enough food, but usually we don’t because we keep changing our position to fight.”

  The complaints about the cold and the food were widely echoed. “You want me to describe my service…. You know that it’s very cold in winter and that we don’t have enough bread. We haven’t had a bath for two months already and everybody has a lot of lice,” wrote N. I. Folimonov to his wife or mother. Another soldier complained, “They give us enough food just to keep us alive. And our life is really very difficult—only prisoners live like this, and soldiers should not have to endure such conditions…. We have only cabbage and potatoes to eat.” V. Sorokin reported that his unit received only “five spoons of soup” in the morning, which was supposed to keep them going until the evening.

  But the most alarming letters were the ones that linked the dismal conditions with predictions of defeat. “Wherever we go, the Germans encircle us and pursue us like hunting dogs chase rabbits. Believe neither the newspapers nor the radio—they tell lies! We saw everything and I saw how the Germans chase our soldiers and we don’t know where to run. We don’t have enough weapons to fight and vehicles to drive. We lack fuel so our troops leave tanks and vehicles and run,” wrote E. S. Suslin. Another letter, signed by the name Dronov, went from complaining about the meager rations to predicting flatly, “The Germans will take Moscow within a few days—don’t believe the newspapers.” All those letters were confiscated.

  Even as some of the troops in the field grew discouraged, others responded to the call for volunteers to defend the capital. The Moscow authorities had managed to expand the Communist brigades, or home guard units, which were composed of a combination of volunteers and draftees. By late November, their ranks had swelled to about 48,000, almost a fivefold increase from October, when the first groups were organized. Civilian units were quickly transformed into regular military formations. Some were set up as anti-tank units, while others were prepared for street fighting if the Germans managed to enter the city. Others were quickly deployed in positions guarding the approaches to the capital.

  They were thinly deployed—and they knew it. Even with fresh recruits joining their ranks, the forward units hardly constituted an impressive force to stop the Germans. Albert Tsessarsky, the medical orderly who had gone to Moscow for supplies on October 16, was back with his thirty-three-man home guard unit near Mozhaisk, about sixty miles west of Moscow. With about four to five hundred enemy troops facing them on the other side of the Moscow River, they knew they had no chance of stopping the Germans with only a single machine gun once they decided to attack.

  But the home guard troops came up with a clever plan to make the Germans nervous about doing so. Starting in early November, they patrolled the riverbank with ten men at a time—that is, with about one-third of their total strength. Normally, that size patrol would be deployed only by a much larger unit—which was precisely the point. The idea was to lead the Germans to believe that they had far more men than they really did. Although they were dressed in winter coats and valenki, Russian felt boots, each ten-man unit went out for only two hours at a time. “That was the longest we could stand the cold,” Tsessarsky said.

  Across the river, the Germans, who lacked winter gear, huddled in their encampments and didn’t seem eager to move. Even when the river froze in early November, the Germans didn’t try to cross, something that both relieved and perplexed Tsessarsky and the other Russians, who knew that they couldn’t stop them if they did.

  But some of the local inhabitants who had been trapped on the German side tried to make a break for it across the ice one night. The Germans suddenly came to life, turning on a searchlight and shooting at the fleeing civilians. “There were terribl
e scenes,” Tsessarsky recalled. “I remember a mother was crossing the river with a child on a sled. When she reached us, she wanted us to take the baby, but he had been killed. The next morning, we saw many dead bodies on the ice. The ice was red from blood.”

  Tsessarsky treated the wounded as best he could. “My first real medical practice was there,” he noted. Some of the villagers brought their dead with them. Since it was impossible to bury them in the frozen ground, Tsessarsky and the other soldiers wrote down the names of the dead and attached them to the clothing, offering the vague hope that the bodies might be given a proper burial in the spring. “Even now I don’t know what happened to the bodies,” Tsessarsky added, still troubled by that memory as he recounted that period of his life sixty-five years later.

  That night on the river was a grim reminder of what the Germans were capable of and what would await anyone who was caught in their sights.

  Stalin and Zhukov knew that they couldn’t count on such home guard units to hold off or fool the Germans for long and that it was the Siberian divisions that offered the best hope of preventing Hitler from achieving his goal of seizing Moscow. While the troops that were hastily redeployed from the Soviet Far East were known as Siberians, not all of them hailed from that region. Some of the men had fought in earlier battles and were among the survivors of units that had been virtually wiped out. Reassigned to the Far East, they were blended into newly organized units undergoing training there. They soon found themselves returning to the battlefronts on the approaches to Moscow once Stalin felt confident he wouldn’t be attacked from the east by Japan.

  Boris Godov had been in an airborne brigade near Kiev at the start of the war and had sustained a stomach wound while escaping from the German encirclement of the Ukrainian capital. After recovering in a hospital in the Moscow region, he was assigned to the 413th Siberian Division, which was dispatched in late October to defend Tula, the arms-producing city south of Moscow, from the Germans troops led, among others, by General Guderian. “Tula was on the way to Moscow, and who knows if Moscow would have survived if we hadn’t beaten the Germans there,” he said proudly.

  But Godov and his fellow troops in the Siberian division quickly discovered that they weren’t prepared for the intensity of the fighting they’d face and, in some cases, weren’t properly equipped for it. True, they had good winter clothing: valenki (boots), cotton-wool jackets, overcoats, and white camouflage coverings. The field kitchen was also better than in most other units, providing warm soup and kasha morning and evening and even a hundred grams of vodka when the weather turned cold. The bad news, however, was that German planes started bombing the Siberians as soon as they arrived, and they didn’t always have the weapons they needed to fight off ground assaults.

  In one case, an artillery unit discovered that it had been provided with shells that were too small for their guns, which left it at the mercy of German tanks. “The entire artillery regiment perished since they couldn’t do anything,” Godov recalled. Many soldiers died trying to blow up German tanks with hand grenades, since that was the only usable weapon they had. Of the 15,400 men in Godov’s division, only about five hundred survived. But Guderian was frustrated in his efforts to reach Tula and thus in what he hoped would be his final push from the south to Moscow.

  On other parts of the front, the invaders had already penetrated the greater Moscow region, which consisted of eighty-seven districts. In November and December, German troops completely controlled seventeen of them, and occupied parts of another ten. Those living on the outskirts of the capital were never sure whether the next soldiers to show up would be friend or foe.

  Natalya Kravchenko, the daughter of a Moscow artist who had died a year earlier, was staying at the family dacha, or country house, in the village of Nikolina Gora, about thirty miles west of Moscow, during that uncertain period. There were seventeen checkpoints manned by Red Army troops on the heavily shelled road leading from the village to the capital, but they were suddenly abandoned, and the sounds of battle—the gunfire and shelling that the villagers had been hearing—disappeared just as abruptly. “It was a very difficult moment,” Kravchenko recalled. “The silences were one of the most frightening things during the war.”

  Kravchenko, her sister, and her grandmother were in their house when the silence was broken by a strange noise. “We didn’t understand where the sound was coming from and we went to find out,” she said. Right outside their house, all along the village road, there were Siberian troops, fast asleep and snoring. “It’s difficult to imagine the speed at which the Siberian troops were moving forward,” she added. “They used to sleep only two to three hours a day.” This was one of those sleep breaks, and the exhausted soldiers were making full use of it.

  When the soldiers woke up, they asked for water, which the Kravchenko women poured into their helmets. They marched off, and the fighting quickly resumed nearby. Kravchenko’s dacha was transformed into a first aid station for the wounded. The family’s curtains, blankets, and sheets were all used for makeshift operating stations; the wounded were treated on the large drawing tables in her father’s study. The intensity of the fighting soon convinced the Kravchenkos that they should return to Moscow, since it was beginning to look safer than the outskirts, where there was no escape from the bloodshed.

  The Siberians didn’t have that option. Vladimir Edelman was one of the men who had just arrived from the east. Like Godov, he wasn’t really a Siberian. A Ukrainian Jew, he had also fought in the losing battle for Kiev in September. Unlike many of his relatives, who were among the victims of the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, he escaped from his native city and ended up in an infantry unit in the Omsk region composed mostly of Siberian military cadets and recent graduates of military colleges.

  As a lieutenant with combat experience, Edelman was put in charge of a twenty-five-man unit. When his superior officers came to check his soldiers’ shooting skills, they were angered by what they initially saw. Instead of positioning themselves on the ground and aiming according to standard regulations, the Siberians sprawled and took aim from any position they felt comfortable in. The officers berated Edelman for failing to teach them the proper stances and procedures. But when they saw the targets the Siberians had been shooting at, they quickly overlooked all that. “They were excellent shots because they were hunters,” Edelman said. On a scale of one to ten, most of the men had scored nines or tens.

  While still in Siberia, Edelman and the other men had been issued long underwear, sweaters, fur vests, cotton-wool pants, gloves or mittens, winter coats, and fur hats. They kept their handguns under their coats and also wrapped up radios so that they wouldn’t freeze. Edelman admitted that the Germans had better radios, machine guns, and mortars at that point in the war and the Russians would try to seize their equipment whenever they could. But once he and his twenty-five men were deployed northwest of Moscow, Edelman quickly came to realize that the big advantage his men had was their winter gear. The temperature would drop to as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit at times during November and December, and the Germans suffered the most from those temperatures.

  It wasn’t only the German soldiers who froze. Some of the lubricants in their tanks and other vehicles would also freeze. The German troops on the approaches to Moscow hadn’t been supplied with antifreeze or even chains to tow stranded vehicles. In some cases, German planes dropped ropes to the troops so that they could be used for towing. As temperatures plummeted, the same overoptimistic expectations of an early victory that accounted for the failure of German planners to provide winter uniforms was responsible for the increasingly serious transport problems.

  There was no question that the real Siberians could handle the cold better than most Russians and certainly better than the Germans. “We were remarkably enthusiastic and we showed them that we could fight well,” Edelman said. “But the severe Russian winter helped us a lot.” During November and most of December, he pointed out, he and his men wer
en’t able to wash themselves. Finally they reached a village where there was a crude banya, or bathhouse; cold water was available only at a well outside. “The Siberians would have their steam bath and then jump into the snow,” Edelman recalled with amazement. Unable to do that, he rubbed soap all over his body in the steam bath and then ran to the well, splashed cold water on himself, and ran back to the steam bath. The Siberians helped to rinse and dry him so that he’d warm up again.

  One sight remains vividly etched in Edelman’s memory: a group of captured Germans standing at a crossroads where he was directing traffic in the biting cold. They were wearing summer uniforms with light coats and no hats. The only sounds that emanated from them were sighs and moans and the words “O Mein Gott! O Mein Gott!” Every so often, one of them would drop to the ground, dead.

  Another time, as he led his men across a snow-covered field near Volokolamsk, Edelman realized that they were literally walking on bodies that were just beneath the white surface, packed together so tightly after a recent battle that it was impossible to avoid them. “The fields around Moscow were filled with hundreds of thousands of corpses,” he noted. “It’s hard to describe what was happening there.” Many perished as a result of the mines planted first by the Russians to slow the German invaders and later by the Germans to slow the Red Army’s push to drive them back.

  When Edelman and his men forced the enemy to retreat, they sometimes found frozen German bodies stacked like logs. The surviving Germans had evidently hoped that they would be able to bury those who had fallen when the ground thawed in the spring.