The Moscow Option

by David Downing

  On the northern flank the bridge at Dubna was captured by a coup de main, the defenders mistaking a panzer column led by captured Soviet tanks for retreating Red Army units. Then, with 8th Panzer leading, the Germans moved down the east bank of the Moscow-Volga canal to Yakhroma, before veering east towards Zagorsk to cut the Moscow-Yaroslavl railway. Now only two lines remained open between the capital and the East.

  On the evening of 18 September Zhukov reported to Stalin. The Soviet leader, despite the rumours to the contrary flying round Moscow, was still in the Kremlin. Now Zhukov told him, and Stavka, that the city could not be held, and that he wished to order his remaining forces east to a line Yaroslavl-Ryazan. He was allowed to do so.

  At this meeting Zhukov noticed that Stalin seemed to have recovered his former ‘calm resolution’. Though reluctantly accepting that the Red Army’s preservation was more important than Moscow, the Soviet leader was determined that the struggle should go on within the city limits. The NKVD battalions and the worker units would harass the Germans street by street.

  The situation in the Ukraine was then discussed at length, and it was agreed that no further withdrawals should be made unnecessarily. Only the certainty of encirclement was justification for retreat. It was also decided that Stavka should leave the capital for Gorkiy while it was still possible. The option of surrender was not discussed. The members of Stavka left the meeting at 03.15 on 19 September and went home to pack their bags.

  Three days and six hours later the leading units of 18th Panzer joined hands with the spearhead of 8th Panzer in the industrial village of Elektrostal, four miles south of Noginsk on the Moscow-Gorkiy railway. The previous day a special train bearing Stalin, the Stavka staff and the body of Vladimir llych Lenin had passed through the same spot. Moscow, though not yet fallen, was encircled and falling. In far-off Germany radio listeners were advised to wait for a special announcement.

  IV

  Before the outbreak of war Moscow’s population had been in excess of four million, but by 22 September the calls to arms, the evacuation of industry and the exodus of the previous weeks had reduced the number of those residing in the city to roughly half that number. Now those two million people locked inside the beleaguered city had to decide whether or not to resist the imminent German occupation. Stalin had certainly decreed that they should, but Stalin was probably gone. Large detachments of the NKVD were certainly in evidence, but from the pragmatist’s point of view they would prove somewhat easier to disarm than the Germans.

  Nevertheless there were many prepared to continue the fight, to make of Moscow another ‘Madrid’. The heritage of the revolution had deeper roots than the Germans suspected, and they had been given new life by the approach of what Pravda called ‘the riffraff of ruined Europe’. In the factory suburbs of Moscow the German Army would learn that there was more to socialism than Stalin.

  Not all who fought did so from such convictions. Some fought out of fear of the long-term consequences should they not, many had no other motivation than the momentum of the struggle. Most of them had volunteered to join the battalions raised from the Moscow working-class in the preceding fortnight; it was these battalions who would form the organisational core of the resistance, manning the improvised defence lines which stretched along the boulevards ringing the inner city.

  There were others who opposed the decision to make a battleground of Moscow. Some did so from nobler motives than others. Surely it made more sense, they argued, to continue the struggle further east than to sacrifice the city and its inhabitants for no obvious military advantage. Those who wished to go on fighting should slip out of the city during the night, cross the fields and break through the thin German line to the east, and rejoin the Red Army.

  Such arguments made sense to those who believed in ultimate Soviet victory; it appealed little to those who doubted such an outcome. They were much more impressed by the departure of Stalin, the media and government apparati and the Red Army than by the possibilities of death and glory. There were cries that the war had lasted long enough already. Who would benefit from Moscow’s sacrifice? Certainly not the Muscovites. No, only Stalin and the hated party, now safe and warm in Gorkiy, would benefit. And they were doomed anyway, doomed by the tide of history they had so often invoked to excuse their cruelties. It would be wise to forget Stalin and his cronies, wise to rehearse heartfelt declarations of gratitude for the German liberators, and to work with these new masters for Russia’s reintroduction into the family of civilised nations.

  And of course there were many, perhaps the majority, of Moscow’s inhabitants who intended neither to fight nor to welcome the Wehrmacht. They listened to the gunfire growing louder, they hid food in the cellars. They hoped for the best, expected the worst.

  Soon they would know. To the east of the capital the Panzer Groups held the ring, to the west the infantry units of Fourth Army fought their way closer to the city. By 29 September there was fighting in the western and north-western suburbs, the next day the Germans broke through the outermost defensive ring on the edge of the built-up area. The defending forces were soon broken up into isolated units, but these continued to contest bitterly what ground they held. In the industrial suburbs of Kuntsevo and Koroshevo the workers fought for each square yard of their factories, and German casualties were high. In the boulevards of central Moscow there was less fighting, mostly lone snipers blasted out with grenades and mortar fire.

  The remnants of the worker battalions retreated to the subways, to bomb sites, railway yards and the factory complexes of the south-eastern sector. In the huge State Motor Works four hundred workers were to hold out for four weeks before being wiped out to the last man and woman. Other small areas of resistance endured almost as long.

  But these were isolated pockets, and overall the city was militarily secured as early as 8 October. Not long after this date the ‘lions’ of the Army began relinquishing responsibility to the jackals who followed in their wake. The einsatzgruppen began combing the city for Jews and communist officials, and received not a little assistance from Muscovites eager both to pay off old scores and to ingratiate themselves with the conquering Germans. Moscow passed out of the grim light of the war, and into the grimmer darkness of Nazi occupation.

  V

  In the weeks prior to Moscow’s fall, Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been making unexpected progress in the Ukraine. Halder had feared that this Army Group, which was outnumbered by more than two to one, would have to remain primarily on the defensive. However, some desperate Soviet attacks had presented Rundstedt with opportunities which were impossible to ignore.

  After the Uman encirclement battle in mid-August one of Kleist’s panzer corps had secured a bridgehead across the Dnieper around Kremenchug. This force offered no great threat to the Soviet position but Stavka, in the throes of the battle before Moscow, decided that every attempt should be made to distract the Germans from their central preoccupation. 38th Army was ordered to throw Kleist’s panzers back across the river.

  It was cut to ribbons. The panzers moved north through this new and inviting gap and into the rear of the Soviet forces in and around Kiev. Rundstedt, seeing his opportunity, pushed Mackensen’s Panzer Corps through a weak link in the Soviet line south of Gomel, and south to join Kleist. For a few days a giant encirclement seemed possible but for once Stavka acted swiftly, ordering a withdrawal of their forces to a line from Bryansk through Konotop to Dnepropetrovsk. Only two armies were trapped when the converging pincers met at Priluki on 15 September. Army Group South disposed of these and moved slowly forward to the new line.

  So by the beginning of October the Germans’ situation was looking much healthier than Halder might have expected. It now seemed as if the major objectives laid down for Barbarossa - Moscow, Leningrad, the Ukraine - would be attained before the winter set in.

  In the central sector the prime objective had already been achieved, and Halder saw no point in extending the central drive to the ea
st, for all Manstein and Guderian’s noisy canvassing. Gorkiy could probably be captured, but to what purpose? It would be better to leave Army Group Centre’s weary infantry on the defensive. Then the trains hitherto engaged in transporting the pressing needs of day-to-day combat could be used to bring forward the winter equipment that was sitting in the Warsaw marshalling yards.

  The panzer groups would naturally have no such respite. They would be needed for operations in the north and south, for the capture of objectives more worthy of their attention than Gorkiy. Panzer Group 3, once again comprising only 39th and 57th Panzer Corps, would be sent north for the attack on Leningrad. Panzer Group 2, which now included Manstein’s 56th Panzer Corps, was to hold the line east of Moscow until relieved by the infantry, and to extend it south-eastwards in the direction of Ryazan. One strengthened corps, to be known as Gruppe Vietinghoff, was to strike south along the Tula-Orel road into the rear of the Soviet armies facing Army Group South. Mackensen’s Panzer Corps was to drive north-eastwards to meet Gruppe Vietinghoff. The rest of Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 was to punch through the Red Army line in the Sumy-Konotop area and drive south-east behind Kharkov, before moving on into the Donbass industrial region.

  Halder did not expect these operations to proceed smoothly. There were still a lot of Russians in uniform, and conditions were deteriorating rapidly with the approach of winter. But for once he overestimated the enemy. All the extant Soviet accounts agree that in these crucial weeks which followed Moscow’s fall the Red Army came close to breaking. In order to avoid doing so it bent. According to the Soviet writer Moskalenko, then fighting in the Kursk sector:

  “We thought: ‘Either the war is over and we are fighting on for no reason, or it will be fought to a finish to the east of Moscow.’ None of us considered surrendering - the way the Germans treated prisoners was no secret - but only a few diehards, in those dreadful weeks, wanted to fight and die where they stood. Most of us just wanted to walk away from it all. And we did, in good order, to the east.”

  Only the defenders of Leningrad were denied such an option. In the first week of November, over frost-hardened ground, Panzer Group 3 fought its way north through Chudovo to the southern shores of Lake Ladoga. Panzer Group 4, reinforced by the arrival of 2nd Panzer from OKH reserve, pushed forward along the Gulf of Finland coast towards Leningrad itself. The Finns, spurred on by the fall of Moscow, abandoned their reluctance to cross the old frontier. They advanced down the western shore of Lake Ladoga, joined hands with Hoth’s Panzers, and ended any hopes the Leningraders had of using the freezing lake as a lifeline to the outside world. By 13 November the city was completely cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union.

  Eighteenth Army moved in hopefully for the kill. It was not to be a quick or an easy one. Leningrad was doomed, but its defenders were not about to throw in an unused towel. This was not Moscow. This was the ‘cradle of the revolution’. There would be no surrender.

  So for three months Eighteenth Army fought its way street by street, house by house, through the spiritual centre of Soviet communism. Special units charged across the ice to do battle with the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base. The toll was appalling. According to Professor Hoddle in his Leningrad: Death of a City, over half of Eighteenth Army’s troops were injured or killed in the eleven-week battle. Casualties among the defenders were higher still, and there can be few who do not know the fate of the ‘survivors’ of the battle for Leningrad. The city and its inhabitants died, but the heirs of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev exacted a high price from their conquerors.

  South of Moscow the Wehrmacht was having an easier time. Two Soviet armies in the Briansk sector failed to withdraw fast enough and were caught by the closing pincers of Mackenson’s Corps and Gruppe Vietinghoff. In the far south Eleventh Army overran the Soviet defences on the Perekop Isthmus and occupied all the Crimea save the important fortress of Sevastopol. In the central Ukraine Kleist’s main force broke through to Oboyan and swung southwards behind Kharkov. By the beginning of November the panzers were streaming down the right bank of the Donetz and into the Donbass industrial region. It was only on the Mius river that the panzer spearhead, weakened by the weather, breakdowns and its over-extended supply-lines, was halted by freshly-arrived Siberian troops.

  The German military leadership was satisfied. There would be much to show the Führer when he recovered. Moscow and the Ukraine had fallen, Leningrad would soon follow. According to their calculations sixty per cent of Soviet industry had been overrun. Half of the Soviet population now lived in the lengthening shadow of the hooked cross. The Red Army was all but broken.

  Perhaps there would be no Russian Compiegne, no cosy railway carriage in which the conquests and the deaths could be translated into those cold words so beloved by the politicians. But it hardly mattered. The German troops settled down to endure a winter of occupation, many of them in the relative warmth of the larger Soviet cities. The coming spring would see an end to it, once and for all. The shouts of defiance emanating from Gorkiy could be safely dismissed as empty rhetoric.

  VI

  Churchill was more hopeful. On 9 October he had spoken to the House of Commons in characteristic vein:

  “The twisted crosses now flaunt themselves along the streets of the Russian capital. Yet, for all this, it would be a rash and foolish man who would assume the defeat of Russia. Perhaps the Nazi leaders, during those long cold Berlin nights, the sound of British bombs loud in their ears, will remember with a chill that Napoleon too entered Moscow on the threshold of winter . . .”

  Stalin was also making the most of Napoleonic parallels. On 17 October he had spoken to the Soviet people for the first time since the fall of the capital. Again they listened to the slow, toneless voice, its Georgian accent more pronounced than ever, describe the tragic situation of the Soviet Union in unnervingly matter-of-fact terms. Stalin talked of huge losses, but claimed that the enemy’s losses were larger still. He admitted the vast extent of the territories conquered, but reminded his audience of the still vaster expanses still available. He appealed to national pride, invoking those great Russians of the past whom Trotsky had once consigned to ‘the dustbin of history’. With Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in the same camp, Stalin promised, the war could not in the long run be lost. It was a matter of time. He quoted Kutuzov’s dispatch to the Tsar in 1812:

  “The loss of Moscow does not mean that Russia is lost. I regard it as my duty to save my army from destruction, to safeguard its means of life and to ensure the inevitable destruction of the enemy even if this entails the evacuation of Moscow. It is therefore my intention to retire through Moscow along the Ryazan road.”

  ‘We have taken the same road,’ said Stalin, somewhat inaccurately. Doubtless it would be a long and a hard one. But with this enemy - here he quoted a number of typical German untermensch references - there could be no dealings. Peace would only come with victory.

  Chapter 2: Premature Crusade

  A dram of discretion is worth a pound of wisdom.

  German proverb

  I

  On the evening of 16 September 1941 three fast Italian ocean liners slipped out of Taranto harbour. They were carrying fresh troops and equipment for the Axis armies in North Africa. It was a five-hundred-mile voyage to the safety of Tripoli harbour.

  The liners’ departure was noted by a British submarine standing watch outside Taranto, and the information relayed to Naval HQ Malta. In the early hours of 17 September the submarine Upholder ducked under the Italian destroyer screen and sent two of the liners to the bottom. Yet again the fallibility of Rommel’s Mediterranean supply route had been crushingly underlined.

  This was only one of many such disasters during the autumn of 1941 but for Admiral Weichold, German liaison officer with the Italian Naval Staff in Rome, it was the proverbial last straw. The losses at sea were becoming untenable, yet his superiors in Berlin seemed either unwilling or unable to take any measures to rectify the situation.
In a desperate bid to elicit some sort of positive response Weichold lavishly doctored the loss statistics, appended his opinions, and dispatched the whole package to the Naval Command (Oberkommando der Kreigsmarine or OKM) in Berlin. It arrived on Grand-Admiral Raeder’s desk on the morning of Wednesday 24 September, a propitious moment. The next day Raeder was to attend a conference of the Reich’s war leaders, called by acting-Führer Goering to decide the future course of German strategy.

  The conference was held at Goering’s Karinhall residence in eastern Germany. The Reich Marshal was enjoying his stint as Supreme Commander and had no intention of meeting his fellow service chiefs on ground of their choosing. Amidst the looted art treasures of occupied Europe and the baronial opulence of Karinhall he expected to enjoy a definite psychological advantage.

  On the morning of the 25th the other leaders arrived at the airstrip ten miles away, and were driven through the forests to Goering’s ideal home by the side of the small Wuckersee. Those arriving included Jodl and Paulus for the OKW, Brauchitsch and Halder for the OKH, Raeder for the Navy, Jeschonnek as Goering’s Luftwaffe second-in- command, and Minister of Armament Production Dr Todt. They were given coffee in a reception room whose walls seemed literally plastered with paintings, and then led into the dining-hall that had been prepared for the conference.