The Second World War

by John Keegan

  ‘General Winter’

  The sense of the approaching winter had already started to touch the whole of the Ostheer in late September, with its threat first of liquefied roads and swollen rivers, then of blizzards and snowdrifts which its men and equipment were equally unprepared to meet. Guderian was hastening his Panzer army back to the central front, burning with anxiety to open the final drive on Moscow before the weather broke. To the south, the Romanians were laying siege to Odessa, which was defended by a hastily constituted Special Maritime Army of 100,000 men and would not fall until 16 October, and the Eleventh Army, commanded by Erich von Manstein, was pushing on across the estuary of the Dnieper to reach the neck of the Crimea on 29 September. That thrust largely settled Hitler’s fear that the Crimea might be turned into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the bombardment of the Romanian oilfields. Manstein’s advance also brought the coastal industrial region of the Donetz and the Don under threat. Nevertheless, the unloosening of the Red Army’s grip on Russia’s southern provinces and the reassembly of Bock’s striking force on the central front for a renewed drive on Moscow did not constitute a comprehensive solution to the development of the Barbarossa strategy. The unlocking of the northern front and the investment and eventual capture of Leningrad were also a necessary stage in the conquest.

  Army Group North’s concerted effort to take Leningrad had begun on 8 August with a determined assault on the line of the river Luga, the outermost line of the city’s defences, which was to be co-ordinated with a Finnish-German offensive across the isthmus of Karelia – annexed by Stalin after the defeat of Finland in 1940 – and extending far northward towards the Arctic Circle. Leeb’s offensive was complicated by three factors. The first was that Leningrad was protected from the rear by Lake Ladoga, an enormous body of water interposing between the city and any encirclement from the north. The second was that the Leningrad command had mobilised the city’s population to construct concentric defence lines around the city, including 620 miles of earthworks, 400 miles of anti-tank ditch, 370 miles of barbed-wire entanglement and 5000 pillboxes – an extraordinary labouring effort to which 300,000 members of the Young Communist League and 200,000 civilian inhabitants, including women in equal numbers to men, were committed. The third factor was that Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, was determined, even at this low point in Soviet fortunes, to give no hostages by capturing more territory than that to which he had title. While Leeb laboured forward along the Baltic coast, therefore, Mannerheim’s Finnish units hung fire above Lake Ladoga after 5 September, when the tanks of Hoth’s Panzer group, detached from Army Group Centre following the Hitler-Guderian conclave of 23 August, were returned to Army Group Centre. Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 was left by itself to breach Leningrad’s fortifications and take the city.

  A fourth impediment to Leeb’s Leningrad Blitzkrieg emerged in mid-September. Zhukov, who had advised Stalin to abandon Kiev before it was encircled and for his pains had been dismissed as chief of staff, arrived at the North-Western Front on 13 September to energise the defences. He found the Germans on the outskirts of the old tsarist capital; Tsarskoe Selo (now called Pushkin), the Russian Versailles, had fallen on 10 September (its enchanting follies and pavilions, like those of the Peking Summer Palace designed by imported Western architects, were to perish in a conflagration caused by the invaders). Shortly afterwards Leeb’s vanguards reached the Gulf of Finland at Strelna. Leningrad, isolated from the rest of Russia by the Finnish advance to the 1939 frontier and by Leeb’s occupation of the Baltic littoral, now connected with the interior only by the water route across Lake Ladoga. The lifeline was tenuous and erratic; Leningraders quickly felt the constriction and would shortly begin to experience the pangs of starvation which would kill a million of them before the lifting of the siege in the spring of 1944. In the immediate term, however, Zhukov’s arrival had achieved a decisive effect. His first order was ‘to smother the enemy with artillery and mortar fire and air support, permitting no penetration of the defences’. Under his resolute command, the energy of Hoepner’s Panzer assaults was broken in the lines of trenches and concrete that the citizens of Leningrad had constructed. The situation has ‘worsened considerably’, Leeb reported to the Führer’s headquarters on 24 September; Finnish pressure in Karelia had ‘quite stopped’; the city, with its 3 million inhabitants, was intact. German bombardment was inflicting a toll of 4000 civilian casualties a day and starting 200 fires; but the great enceinte of canals and classical palaces remained impervious to the Panzer thrust. Only twenty tanks took part in the final assault. Hitler had already decided that the bulk of Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 must be diverted to the climacteric Operation Taifun (Typhoon), to take Moscow.

  Führer Directive No. 35, which resolved the ambiguity of the Barbarossa strategy inherent in its direction since OKH and OKW had each presented their conception of the campaign’s conduct a year earlier, was issued on 6 September. It laid down that, following the encirclement and destruction of the Red Army on the front of Army Group Centre, Bock was ‘to begin the advance on Moscow with [his] right flank on the Oka and [his] left on the Upper Volga’. Panzer Groups 2 and 3 were to be reinforced by Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 brought from the Leningrad front to assure the largest possible breakthrough effort on the Moscow axis. The principal aim of the operation was the defeat and annihilation of the Russian forces blocking the road to Moscow ‘in the limited time which remains available before the onset of the winter weather’.

  The army which set off on the last stage of the road to Moscow in late September was greatly different from that which had crossed the frontier ten weeks earlier. Battle deaths, wounds and sickness had reduced its strength by half a million, casualties not to be compared to the ghastly loss suffered by the Red Army but clearly enough to depress morale at the front and cast a pall of misery and apprehension over family life in the Reich. The war diarist of the 98th Infantry Division, diverted northward from Kiev to the Moscow front, recorded the ordeal of its 400-mile march.

  The modern general-service carts with their rubber tyres and ball-bearing mounted wheels had long since broken up under the stress of the appalling tracks, and been replaced by Russian farm carts. Good-quality German horses [600,000 had begun the campaign] foundered daily through exhaustion and poor food but the scrubby Russian ponies, although in reality too light for the heavy draught work they were doing, lived on eating birch twigs and the thatched roofs of cottages. Equipment, including many tons of the divisional reserve of ammunition, had to be abandoned at the roadside for lack of transport to carry it. Gradually the most simple necessities of life disappeared, razor blades, soap, toothpaste, shoe-repairing materials, needles and thread. Even in September and before the advent of winter, there was incessant rain and a cold north-east wind, so that every night there was the scramble for shelter, squalid and bug-ridden though it usually was. When this could not be found the troops plumbed the very depths of wretchedness. The rain, cold and lack of rest increased sickness that, in normal circumstances, would have warranted admission to hospital; but the sick had to march with the column over distances of up to twenty-five miles a day, since there was no transport to carry them and they could not be left behind in the bandit-infested forest. The regulation boots, the Kommisstiefel, were falling to pieces [in the coming winter their iron-nailed soles would accelerate the onset of frostbite]. All ranks were filthy and bearded, with dirty, rotting and verminous underclothing; typhus was shortly to follow.

  The realities of conquest can rarely have been much different. Alexander’s hoplites entered Persepolis almost barefoot, Wellington’s redcoats came to Paris in rags. Neither of those great victors’ armies, however, stood at risk from the Arctic winter. Both, moreover, had already defeated the enemy’s main force before they entered his capital. The Ostheer had a great battle ahead of it before it could be certain of finding shelter in Moscow. The opening stages promised well. In an encirclement rivalling that of Army Group South
’s at Kiev, Centre’s Panzer groups, Hoth’s and Hoepner’s (detached from the Leningrad front), surrounded 650,000 Russians between Smolensk and Vyazma. Many gave up without a fight; they were the hastily embodied militiamen of the Osoviakhim, the pre-war citizen defence force on which Stalin drew for his reserves. Others fought more doggedly. Guderian, visiting the 4th Panzer Division, found ‘descriptions . . . of the tactical handlings of the Russian tanks very worrying’. (It had recently encountered T-34s for the first time.)

  Our defensive weapons available at that period were only successful against the T-34 when the conditions were unusually favourable. The short-barrelled 75-mm gun of the Panzer IV was only effective if the T-34 was attacked from the rear; even then a hit had to be scored on the grating above the engine to knock it out. It required very great skill to manoeuvre into a position from which such a shot was possible. The Russians attacked us frontally with infantry, while they sent in their tanks in mass formations against our flanks. They were learning.

  Even more ominously, he reported in his war diary on 6 October the first snowfall of the approaching winter. It melted quickly, leaving the roads, as before, liquid mud. It was difficult to know, at that stage, which was preferable – a prolonged autumn, with all the difficulties of movement that that rainy season brought, or an early winter, which made for firm, frozen going on the roads but threatened blizzards before the final objective was reached.

  Stalin could repose no solid hopes in the turn of the seasons. Winter might save Moscow; it might not. There was the gravest doubt whether the remains of the Red Army in European Russia could do so. It had now been reduced to a strength of 800,000 men, divided into ninety divisions, with 770 tanks and 364 aircraft; nine of the divisions were of cavalry, only one – and thirteen independent brigades – of tanks. A large army was stationed in the Russian Far East, but it could not be moved while there was still the danger of war with the Japanese, whom the Russians had fought in Mongolia only two years previously. Hitler, by contrast, had now increased the strength of Army Group Centre itself to eighty divisions, including fourteen Panzer and eight motorised, supported by 1400 aircraft; the other two army groups, though depleted by tank transfers to the Moscow front, retained the bulk of their infantry and were sustaining their pressure against Leningrad and into the southern steppe.

  In this supreme crisis Stalin turned again to Zhukov. Though their disagreement in the summer had led to Zhukov’s removal as chief of staff, Stalin recognised his superlative talents which had recently if only temporarily saved Leningrad. Now, on 10 October, he was called south to energise the defence of Moscow. Rumours of panic were already touching the city; Red Air Force pilots who on 5 October reported German columns fifteen miles away driving towards it were threatened with arrest by the NKVD as ‘panic-mongers’; on 15 October, however, fear took hold in earnest. The ‘Moscow panic’ began with a warning by Molotov to the British and American embassies to prepare for an evacuation to Kuibyshev, a city 500 miles eastward on the Volga. According to Professor John Erickson, ‘The real crisis, however, spilled on to the streets and into plants and offices; a spontaneous popular flight added itself to the hurried and limited evacuation, accompanied by a breakdown in public and Party disciplines. There was a rush to the railway stations; officials used their cars to get east; offices and factories were disabled by desertions.’ The panic was not merely unofficial. ‘Railway troops were told to mine their tracks and junctions . . . sixteen bridges deep within the city were mined and crews at other mined objectives issued orders to blow their charges “at the first sight of the enemy”.’

  Zhukov, however, kept his nerve. As at Leningrad, he mobilised citizens, 250,000 Muscovites (75 per cent women), to dig anti-tank ditches outside the city. He brought proven commanders, including Rokossovsky and Vatutin, to the threatened front and he concentrated every reserve that Stalin could send him on the Moscow approaches. Stalin, too, found a public resolution he had not always shown in the closed meetings of the Politburo and the Stavka earlier in the campaign. At the traditional Red Square parade held to commemorate the October Revolution on 7 November, even though Bock’s Panzers were only forty miles from the Kremlin, he denounced those who thought ‘the Germans could not be beaten’, declared that the Soviet state had been in greater danger in 1918 and invoked the name of every Russian hero – pre-, post- and even anti-Revolutionary – to stiffen the sinew of his audience. Inspired by those ‘great figures’, and fighting under ‘great Lenin’s victorious banner’, with or without the opening of the ‘Second Front’ promised by the British, he forecast the Red Army’s eventual triumph.

  The first frosts of winter were now hardening the ground for the enemy, and the Panzer groups were making faster progress towards Moscow than they had done in October. Their tank strength, however, was reduced to 65 per cent, and Guderian, Hoth and Hoepner were all concerned about their ability to push their spearheads to the final objective. Accordingly, on 13 November Halder arrived from OKW at Army Group Centre’s headquarters at Orsha to canvass opinion from the army group chiefs of staff – Sodenstern of South, Griffenberg of North, Brennecke of Centre – as to the further conduct of the campaign. Should the Ostheer, he asked, make a final dash or instead dig in for the winter to await fairer weather for a culminating victory next year? Sodenstern and Griffenberg, respectively overstretched and blocked on their fronts, answered that they wished to halt. Brennecke replied that ‘the danger we might not succeed must be taken into account, but it would be even worse to be left lying in the snow and the cold on open ground only thirty miles from the tempting objective’ – Moscow. Since Hitler had already told Halder (who was himself already looking beyond Moscow) that this was the answer he wanted, the issue was decided on the spot.

  ‘The flight to the front’

  The final stage of Operation Typhoon began on 16 November. It was organised as a double envelopment of the Moscow defences, Panzer Groups 3 and 4 moving towards Kalinin north of the city, Panzer Group 2 towards Tula in the south. It was to become known in the Ostheer as the Flucht nach vorn, ‘the flight to the front’, a desperate attempt, like Napoleon’s in 1812, to get to Moscow for shelter from the snows. But between the Ostheer and the city stood Zhukov’s last line of defence, the Mozhaisk position, which included the man-made Sea of Moscow to the north of the city and the river Oka to the south.

  Despite the arrival of some reinforcements, the Mozhaisk position at first did not hold. Guderian, blocked at Tula, merely swung his Panzer group around the town and chose a new axis for his advance on Moscow. To the north, the German Ninth Army broke through to the Sea of Moscow and the Volga Canal on 27 November, linking up with Panzer Group 3; the 7th Panzer Division, Rommel’s old command, actually got across the canal on 28 November.

  The German effort was now at crisis-point. At Krasnaya Polyana, Panzer Group 3 stood only eighteen miles from Moscow. The Fourth Army, with its outposts at Burtsevo, was only twenty-five miles from the city. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 was sixty miles away to the south. There is a legend that in the following days an advance German unit saw the golden domes of the Kremlin illuminated by a burst of evening sunshine and that a patrol even penetrated an outlying suburb. If it did, that was the last flicker of energy from an army expiring on its feet. The Russian winter in all its cruelty, unknown and unimaginable to a Westerner, was now beginning to bite; the season was approaching when temperatures would fall below minus 20 degrees Centigrade, inflicting on the Ostheer 100,000 frostbite casualties, of whom 2000 would suffer amputations. After 25 November, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 made no further advance, having failed to take Kashira on the main southern rail line; on 27 November he ordered a halt. After 29 November there was no movement by the northern pincer either, both Ninth Army and Panzer Group 3 having lost the ability to drive forward. Bock, writing to Halder at OKH on 1 December, explained Army Group Centre’s predicament:

  After further bloody struggles the offensive will bring a restricted gain of gr
ound and it will destroy part of the enemy’s forces but it is most unlikely to bring about strategical success. The idea that the enemy facing the army group was on the point of collapse was, as the fighting of the last fortnight shows, a pipe-dream. To remain outside the gates of Moscow, where the road and rail systems connect with almost the whole of eastern Russia, means heavy defensive fighting. . . . Further offensive action therefore seems to be senseless and aimless, especially as the time is coming very near when the physical strength of the troops will be completely exhausted.

  By the first week of December the ordinary German soldiers of the fighting divisions were almost incapable of movement. Jodl had refused to allow the collection or supply of winter clothing, lest its appearance cast doubt on his assurances that Russia would collapse before the coming of the snows. The men in the firing line stuffed torn newspaper inside their uniforms to repel the cold. Such expedients worked scarcely at all. The Russians, by contrast, were accustomed to and equipped against the temperature; every Russian, military or civilian, possessed a pair of felt boots which experience proved best protected feet against frostbite (America was to supply 13 million pairs during the course of the war) and the Red Army accordingly continued to manoeuvre while the Ostheer froze fast.

  In the meantime Army Group South had occupied the Crimea (except for Sevastopol) during November. Late in that month, Timoshenko’s front met Rundstedt’s Panzers head on at Rostov-on-Don (the ‘gateway to the Caucasus’ and so to Russia’s oil), recaptured the city on 28 November after it had been in German hands for only a week, and then forced them back to the line of the river Mius, fifty miles behind Rostov, where they dug in for the winter. Army Group North was meanwhile halted outside Leningrad and after 6 December driven back from Tikhvin, its furthest point of advance along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. There it established a winter line which subjected the city to slow starvation – a million were to die in the three-year siege, the majority in the first winter – but did not quite cut it off from supply across the lake, by ice-road in winter, later by boat.