The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  In his own encounters with villagers, the Komsomol secretary came across similar attitudes. “Thank God there are no partisans here,” he reported them as telling him. “But if there were some, we’d give them up to the Germans.” The villagers explained that if they failed to do so, the Germans would burn down their houses and execute them. Those German atrocities, of course, would begin to generate their own backlash, shattering any remaining illusions that the local populace could count on quietly surviving the occupation, no matter how obedient they were. As Soviet troops began to take back towns and villages near Moscow, an all too common sight was partisans or ordinary citizens still hanging from makeshift gallows. For anyone caught in the vicinity of this titanic struggle, there was no easy escape.

  That was doubly true for the warriors, especially those who were ordered to carry out their leaders’ most dangerous orders. On the Soviet side, this meant Stalin and Zhukov’s plan to encircle and destroy Army Group Center, the main body of German troops west of Moscow. The idea was to encircle the German forces near Vyazma, in the same general area where Soviet troops had been encircled and virtually wiped out in October. As Stalin envisaged it, this would deal a huge blow to the German war machine. But by pushing the exhausted Soviet forces deeper and deeper into enemy territory, it also increased the risk that they would be stretched too far without the means to protect their own flanks. In that case, the Germans would have the chance of once again closing in on them instead of the other way around.

  To avoid such an outcome, Stalin and his generals needed to work closely together, making sure that troop strength was buttressed at key points. But already, in the first part of the offensive, the Soviet leader demonstrated that he felt free to ignore the urgent pleas of his military commanders, even in the case of Zhukov, who normally held more sway with him than anyone else.

  After his troops scored victories near Volokolamsk, northwest of Moscow, Zhukov received an order on January 19 to pull out a major part of those forces, the First Shock Army, so that they could rejoin the reserves. He phoned Stalin to argue that he needed that unit to keep the drive going in that crucial area. “Don’t argue,” Stalin snapped. “Send it along.” When Zhukov continued to protest the weakening of his forces, the dictator replied: “You have plenty of troops—just count them.” When that, too, failed to silence Zhukov, Stalin hung up on him.

  When it came to the push against Vyazma, Zhukov would later admit that both he and Stalin made crucial mistakes. “We overestimated the capabilities of our forces and underestimated the enemy’s, and the nut proved to be harder to crack than we had expected,” he wrote later. But, as with the fundamental decision of launching a general offensive in the first place, he shifted most of the blame to Stalin. He pointed out that the Germans had withdrawn to the prepared defensive positions that Hitler’s generals had wanted to retreat to earlier and that they had begun to reinforce those positions with reserve troops brought in from France. This allowed them both to dig in to resist attacks and to mount counterattacks of their own.

  Zhukov also warned Stalin that his artillery units were woefully short of ammunition, forcing the infantry to mount attacks without anything approaching adequate artillery support. Stalin remained unmoved, and he continued to order more and more attacks, many of which ended with disproportionately high body counts on the Soviet side. “If you don’t achieve results today, you will tomorrow,” Stalin blithely told Zhukov. “If you attack, you may at least tie down the enemy, and the results will be felt on other parts of the front.”

  That was little consolation for the commanders and the men dispatched to fight those battles without the planning and support that would give them a chance to achieve victory. Under the command of General Mikhail Yefremov, the Thirty-third Army had pushed its way to within striking distance of Vyazma. It was supposed to be joined by troops moving from the Kalinin region in the north. Together they were supposed to deal a decisive blow to the enemy’s Army Group Center not just in Vyazma but also up to Rzhev, the city further to the north that remained a likely jump-off point for a new push against Moscow.

  The mission of the Soviet forces was to encircle and destroy the Germans, but more often than not, they found themselves encircled instead. General Yefremov and his Thirty-third Army, along with General Pavel Belov’s First Cavalry Corps, were cut off behind enemy lines near Vyazma. During February and March, other Soviet forces trying to dislodge the Germans holding Rzhev shared their fate. The fighting was at such close quarters that it was hard for the Soviet command to organize parachute drops of food and ammunition, since the enemy often seized the supplies. “Hey Russians! Ivan!” the Germans taunted them over megaphones when they did so. “Danke schön. We’re eating your pork and peas. It’s delicious.” For troops who were often near starvation, nothing could be more demoralizing.

  Forced to recognize that many of the troops under the command of Yefremov and Belov were hopelessly stranded behind enemy lines, Stalin and Zhukov agreed to allow the two generals to try to fight their way back east to avoid complete encirclement. Belov eventually succeeded in making his way back with some of his forces, but the remaining troops of Yefremov’s Thirty-third Army were virtually wiped out during their last desperate attempt to break through in April. The popular commander was among those who perished. According to most accounts, Yefremov was wounded and then shot himself to avoid capture.

  The Soviet counteroffensive pushed the Germans back about forty-five to sixty-five miles along the central front, but it fell far short of its objectives. “Events demonstrated the error of Stalin’s decision calling for a general offensive in January,” Zhukov concluded. Although he had argued against that decision and he claimed that he opposed some of the tactical calls Stalin made at the time, Zhukov was also tarred by the huge losses during that offensive. Since the Germans were every bit as battered and exhausted, neither side felt triumphant.

  In fact, Moscow felt safer and was safer, since subsequent events would demonstrate that the Germans wouldn’t be able to mount another serious drive to seize the Soviet capital. But the Germans were still occupying such towns as Vyazma and Rzhev, which had been launch points for the first drive on Moscow. For Stalin, who had been particularly intent on liberating Rzhev, this was a major source of frustration. This also meant that even after the battle for Moscow was effectively over in late April, at the start of the spring thaw, which ruled out any further major actions by either exhausted army for several weeks, the Moscow-related fighting would continue. Rzhev, already the scene of some of the most intense fighting, would still be a major killing field for almost another entire year. Even if the threat to Moscow had largely receded, no one was celebrating.

  11

  “The worst of all worlds”

  In December 1941, as Soviet troops began their counterattacks aimed at pushing the Germans back from the approaches to Moscow, Anthony Eden embarked on the long roundabout journey to the Soviet capital that wartime conditions necessitated. Weakened by the flu, the British foreign secretary spent four days on a destroyer bound for Murmansk largely confined to his bed. Since the Arctic port city was fogged in when they arrived on December 12, the British delegation couldn’t be flown the next leg of the trip. Instead, they faced the prospect of a two-or three-day train ride to Moscow. But when they were still waiting on the ship, the Soviet side arranged a surprise for Eden.

  The foreign secretary had undertaken the journey because relations between Stalin and his Western allies remained tense, despite the professions of friendship on both sides. Since Lord Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman’s visit to Moscow in September, the Soviet leader had continued to press his demands for speedier delivery of the promised Lend-Lease supplies and any sort of military action that would take some of the pressure off his weary troops, no matter how often Churchill and others reminded him that Britain was hardly prepared to start fighting on the Continent, much less entertain his far-fetched suggestions that it should dispatch troops
to Russia.

  There was also another issue that Stalin was pushing: an agreement about postwar boundaries. Much to the dismay of both Churchill and Roosevelt, Stalin was intent on defining the new geopolitical contours of the Continent after Hitler’s eventual defeat. His armies had barely held their own on the outskirts of Moscow, but their leader was already looking ahead to a new European order that would satisfy his territorial ambitions.

  Eden had volunteered for his mission in order to try to dampen those expectations and to keep relations between these uneasy allies on an even keel. Neither he nor Churchill knew what kind of reception to expect, since Stalin had demonstrated his testiness on more than one occasion already, though he often adopted a softer tone immediately following a nastier exchange. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London, who regularly conveyed his leader’s complaints, accompanied Eden on his journey and provided the first signal of Stalin’s frame of mind.

  After they docked in Murmansk, Eden stayed on board while Maisky went into town to make the arrangements for a heavily guarded train. Returning to the destroyer, the Soviet ambassador asked for a private word with Eden, and they went into the foreign secretary’s cabin. Maisky placed a black bag on the table and delivered a message from Stalin. The Soviet leader, he said, didn’t want Eden and his delegation to feel “embarrassed” during the visit by the dispute between Britain and Russia over the ruble exchange rate. Like the Americans, the British had repeatedly protested an exchange rate that inflated all their expenses in Russia. Without conceding any ground on that issue, Maisky explained that Stalin was putting enough rubles at Eden’s disposal for him and his delegation to have no problems during their visit. Then, as an astonished Eden looked on, the ambassador pulled out “package after package” of bills that he put in rows on the table.

  “I was agape at so much wealth,” the foreign secretary recalled. But he had the presence of mind to ask Maisky to thank Stalin for his generosity and to assure him that his delegation could cover its expenses and that they wouldn’t need the money on the table.

  Maisky was visibly upset by Eden’s polite refusal, but when the foreign secretary refused to change his mind, he gathered up the packages of rubles, placed them back in the black bag, and locked it.

  This was typical Stalin. He wanted to appear conciliatory and soften up his British visitor before their talks but with an ostensibly generous gesture that put Eden in an awkward position, since he had no choice but to reject it. The Soviet leader probably had no idea why his guest couldn’t accept the money, since, in his world, he rewarded or punished anyone as he saw fit—and no other rules applied.

  The next morning, December 13, Maisky went back on board to tell Eden the news that Pravda was trumpeting: the Soviet victory in the battle for Moscow. Although the foreign secretary knew the fighting was far from over, he was elated. “That’s marvelous!” he told Maisky. “For the first time the Germans have suffered a reverse!”

  On their train journey, which began the late afternoon of the same day, Eden was impressed by the ability of the Russians to deal with the unrelenting cold that reached minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit at night. The special train was equipped with anti-aircraft guns mounted on open wagons between the passenger carriages, which were manned by crews in two-hour shifts. “The cold which these men had to endure when moving at a fair pace through these Arctic temperatures must have been cruel,” Eden observed.

  During one of the occasional stops along the way when they got off to pace alongside the tracks, he asked Maisky, “How can your people stand such cold?” When the ambassador assured him that the crews were appropriately dressed and used to the icy temperatures, Eden added, “Well, the Germans are not used to such frosts.”

  When the train pulled into Moscow on the evening of December 15, icicles hung from the carriages and the station was plunged into darkness. Suddenly, it was bathed in light for fourteen minutes as Molotov greeted his British counterpart. The Soviet foreign minister eagerly reported that Soviet troops had just driven German troops out of Klin, fifty miles north of Moscow. Then the lights went out, and people moved like shadows through the steam and smoke of the train and the continuing blackout of the capital, which had been established to avoid providing visible targets for German bombers. The capital didn’t feel as triumphant as the official proclamation had made it sound a couple of days earlier.

  If Eden had any doubts about the impact of the improved military picture on Stalin’s frame of mind, they promptly evaporated when the two men sat down for their first meeting the next evening. Right from the start, the Soviet leader focused on his territorial ambitions, along with his other ideas for the postwar period, no matter how premature such a discussion inevitably felt. He wasn’t going to let Eden off the hook by merely discussing the current situation. The first real success of his army, stopping the Germans just short of Moscow and then beginning to push them back, only strengthened his resolve to press his British guest for the commitments he wanted. Stalin could try to appear magnanimous by offering wads of rubles, but his generosity didn’t extend to his country’s neighbors, whose prewar status and borders were not to his liking.

  Even during the earliest days of the German invasion, when the Red Army was in retreat everywhere and a catastrophic defeat seemed in the making, the Soviet leadership had signaled its determination to stake out its future claims. In July 1941, at the urging of Churchill’s government, Maisky had conducted negotiations in London with the leader of the Polish government in exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, aimed at getting these hostile neighbors to reestablish diplomatic relations and cooperate in the struggle against Germany. The talks provided the first clues to how the Soviet side intended to achieve its territorial goals.

  The Poles, of course, were the aggrieved party, since Stalin had joined forces with Hitler in dismembering their country as envisaged by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. After invading Poland from the east in September 1939, the Soviet Union annexed a large swathe of territory that had been eastern Poland, and deported about two million Poles from those areas to Soviet labor camps, prisons or exile in remote regions. Among them was the equivalent of several divisions of Polish soldiers that Soviet forces had captured during the invasion. Several thousand of their officers had disappeared without a trace, including more than four thousand whose bodies were later discovered in a mass grave in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in 1943. The victims had their hands tied behind their backs, and had been shot in the head.

  Sikorski’s government wanted two clear commitments from Moscow: a declaration that the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland was null and void, which would mean that the country would be restored to its pre-1939 borders at the end of the war, and the freeing of all Polish military personnel and civilians who were deported and imprisoned. This would allow the formation of Polish army units in the Soviet Union who would join the fight against the Germans.

  But at their talks in July 1941, Maisky immediately indicated that the Kremlin’s idea of a reestablished Poland was at odds with Polish goals. “I explained that as we saw it the future Polish state should only consist of Poles, and should cover those territories which were inhabited by Poles,” he recalled. As the Polish negotiators understood, this formulation meant that the Soviet side intended to hold on to a large part of the territories it had annexed in 1939, since it viewed them as Ukrainian and Belorussian and already had conducted its version of ethnic cleansing there. If these were to be the criteria for the postwar boundaries, the ostensible Soviet willingness to renounce the territorial agreement with the Nazi regime would have little practical significance.

  Sikorski felt compelled to conclude an agreement, no matter how troubled he was by the Soviet stance. As Jan Ciechanowski, the Polish ambassador in Washington, pointed out, “The British government was strongly pressing General Sikorski to speed up the conversations with the Soviets, instead of pressing the Soviets to accept the just conditions of Poland.” Churchill conceded as much in his memoi
rs. Although Britain had gone to war over Poland, he was now particularly intent on keeping his new Soviet ally in the fight against the Germans and, at least according to some reports, he still suspected Stalin might cut another deal with Hitler if circumstances changed once again. “The issue of the territorial future of Poland must be postponed until easier times,” the prime minister wrote. “We had the invidious responsibility of recommending General Sikorski to rely on Soviet good faith in the future settlements of Russian-Polish relations, and not to insist at this moment on any written guarantees for the future.”

  The agreement concluded on July 30 did include provisions for the formation of Polish army units on Soviet soil and amnesty for Poles imprisoned there, and it restored diplomatic relations between the two countries. But while the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 were declared invalid, the territorial question remained unresolved. In Washington, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles stated that he understood that the agreement “was in line with the United States policy of non-recognition of territory taken by conquest.” In the House of Commons, Eden reiterated his government’s position that it didn’t recognize the territorial changes of 1939, but he added that this “does not involve any guarantee of frontiers by His Majesty’s Government.” For Poles, as Ciechanowski put it, this was “the first swallow on the rising dawn of a new British policy of appeasement.”

  Less than two weeks before Eden’s visit to Moscow, Sikorski had also undertaken the circuitous journey to the Soviet capital, flying from London, via Cairo, Tehran and Kuibyshev. Meeting with Stalin on December 3 and 4, he pushed for information about his missing officers and for the implementation of the proclaimed amnesty for all Polish military prisoners so that they could form the basis of a new fighting force. Sikorski only encountered denials and feigned ignorance when it came to the fate of the missing Polish officers. “They must have escaped somewhere,” Stalin declared. But Sikorski managed to win the Soviet leader’s agreement to permit the newly freed Poles to cross to Iran, where the British had promised to provide the supplies they needed to outfit themselves as a proper army again. Under the command of General Wladyslaw Anders, those troops would later fight valiantly in North Africa and, most famously, capture the monastery at Monte Cassino during the Italian campaign in 1944.