They do not cry out, they do not groan, they do not curse.
Undoubtedly there is something mysterious, something inscrutable,
about their stern, stubborn silence.
As if from a spiteful determination to
compel
their enemies
to show weakness, the Germans rendered no medical services to the
prisoners and kept their food rations to a minimum.
Dwinger has described how
Several of them burnt by flamethrowers, had no longer the
semblance of a human face. They were blistered shapeless bundles of
flesh. A bullet had taken away the lower jaw of one man. The scrap of
flesh which sealed the wound did not hide the view of the trachea
through which the breath escaped in bubbles accompanied by a kind of
snoring. Five machine-gun bullets had threshed into pulp the shoulder
and arm of another man, who was also without any dressings. His blood
seemed to be running out through several pipes ... I have five
campaigns to my credit, but I have never seen anything to equal this.
Not a cry, not a moan escaped the lips of these wounded, who were
almost all seated on the grass . . . Hardly had the distribution of
supplies begun than the Russians, even the dying, rose and flung
themselves forward . . . The man without a jaw could scarcely stand
upright. The one-armed man clung with his arm to a tree trunk, the
shapeless burnt bundles advanced as quickly as possible. Some half a
dozen of them who were lying down also rose, holding in their
entrails with one hand and stretching out the other with a gesture of
supplication . . . Each of them left behind a flow of blood which
spread in an ever-increasing stream.
The uneasy feeling that they were fighting something of almost
supernatural strength and resilience was widespread among the German
soldiers, particularly the infantry, and can be traced in their
letters and diaries—alternating with periods of triumph and
exultation. But this mood took a little longer to penetrate OKH. It
was not until the end of August that the possibility of a winter
campaign—as distinct from the police duties of an occupation
force—was accepted there. On 30th August, Halder ordered:
In view of recent developments which are likely to necessitate
operations against limited objectives even during the winter, the
Operations Department will draft a report on the winter clothing that
will be required for this purpose. After approval by the Chief of the
Army General Staff, this report will be passed to the Organisation
Department for the necessary action.
The victory at Kiev had encouraged many of the General Staff to
believe that one more
Kesselschlacht
would finish the Russians
off, and that they could winter in Moscow. Only Rundstedt was
wholeheartedly against this course, recommending that the Army stand
on the Dnieper until the spring of 1942. As this would have entailed
withdrawals on the central front, it was
ex hypothesi
unacceptable to Hitler, and the fact that the most of the senior
generals, Bock, Kluge, Hoth, Guderian, all held responsibilities (and
nurtured ambitions) in the central sector ensured that Rundstedt
remained in a minority among his professional colleagues.
Under interrogation by Liddell Hart after the war, Rundstedt
claimed that Brauchitsch agreed with him, but as his interrogator
dryly observes,
from contemporary records it does not appear that Brauchitsch
really shared this cautious view when in more eager company.
Certainly the Commander in Chief did not give any indication of
his misgivings when he spoke to Freiherr von Liebenstein and other
chiefs of staff at Bock's headquarters on 15th September. The purpose
of the new operations, he told the assembled commanders, was "the
destruction of the final remnants of Army Group Timoshenko."
Three quarters of the German Army on the Eastern front was to be
committed, including all the Panzer divisions (except those in
Kleist's
Gruppe
, which were to continue clearing the Ukraine).
Hoepner had been brought down from the north and would be put in the
centre; on either side of him would be the 9th and the 4th, and the
2nd Army; and on the extreme flanks, once again, would be the Panzer
armies of Hoth and Guderian.
The attack frontage was unusually wide. Between Hoth's starting
line, north of Smolensk, and Guderian, on the left bank of the Desna,
were over 150 miles. The German plan was that Hoepner's thrust would
break the Russian front in two, and that the shattered fragments
would polarise around the communications centre of Vyazma (assigned
to Hoth) and Bryansk (the objective of Guderian). Once these twin
Kesselschlachten
had been subdued, there would be no obstacles
to a direct advance on the Soviet capital.
For the rank and file the Führer had prepared an order of the
day which informed them :
After three and a half months' fighting, you have created the
necessary conditions to strike the last vigorous blows which should
break the enemy on the threshold of winter.
Coming after earlier and more strident exhortations, perhaps, it
was an exhortation from which few can have derived much comfort.
As ill luck would have it, the Russian front opposite Bock's
concentration was passing through a command vacuum during the very
days when the Germans were completing their final dispositions. For
Timoshenko had been ordered south, to build up some sort of a screen
out of the shattered fragments of Budenny's old group. Koniev had
been appointed to the "western front," while Yeremenko
remained in command of the "Bryansk front." Coordination
between these two was far from perfect, and the many gaps which
weakened their joint front were being plugged directly from Moscow by
troops of the "reserve front," responsible to Zhurkov.
While the "reserve front" was mainly concentrated around
the arc of an inner defensive zone, Yeltsi-Dorogobuzh, with two
armies astride the Yukhnov approach, Yeremenko was planning an
independent counterattack at Glukhov—the very point which
Guderian had selected for his own thrust.
The total Russian strength, including the active forces of Koniev
and Yeremenko and the "reserve front," was fifteen infantry
armies.
[In front of Moscow these were (north to south) Koniev's western
front (22nd, 29th, 30th, 19th, 16th, and 20th Armies), 24th and 43rd
from the reserve front, and the Bryansk front (50th, 3rd, 13th and
"Operational Group Yermakov"). Behind them was the "Vyazma
Line," occupied by the 31st, 49th, 32nd and 33rd armies of the
reserve front.]
In numbers this came to over half a million, but their equipment
varied enormously. Almost all were short of artillery, though mortars
and smaller arms were plentiful. Their mobility factor was very
low—even horses were beginning to be scarce, and were being
drafted into mixed horsedrawn and mechanised "corps"
(actually of about divisional strength) which were useful in
reconnaissance or rearguard actions but lacked the weight and
firepower needed for prolonged fighting. Still more serious was the
decline in the quality of the human material; for although the higher
tactical leadership was improving as it emerged from the terrible
crucible of the early battles, the Red Army man was left with little
save his own personal courage and physical toughness to help him
against the most experienced and highly trained soldiers in the
world.
From the point of view of equipment and training, the armies with
which the
Stavka
found itself fighting the opening stages of
the battle of Moscow were the weakest the Soviets ever put into the
field. Nearly all were reservists; what little they could remember of
their basic training would have been along principles very different
from those which had become
de rigueur
against the Panzers. A
"refresher" course—with the majority so illiterate
that they could not read a black-board; a few days in overcrowded
barracks or being driven like cattle across firing ranges with live
ammunition singing over their heads; then the journey westward, the
endless waiting in railway sidings, the shock and violence of air
attack. This amorphous mass was soon to be subjected to an assault
technique—the
Panzerblitz
—whose practitioners had
brought it to a state of perfection, and to which no army in the
world had yet found the answer.
But there was one reserve pool still left to the Russians, and it
contained some of the finest units in the whole Red Army; these were
the twenty-five infantry divisions, and the nine armoured brigades of
General Apanasenko's "Far Eastern front." Apanasenko's
command had been fully mobilised on 22nd June, and as the western
frontiers began to cave in a Japanese attack was expected hourly.
Then as days lengthened into weeks and the Siberian campaigning
season shortened, the tension slowly relaxed and the
Stavka
began to contemplate the heady possibility of using these troops,
highly trained and inured to cold as they were, at some moment of
crisis in the West.
Stalin's experience of Japanese conduct along his Far Eastern
frontiers over a long period in the 1930's, and of the force and
suddenness with which they provoked and exploited "incidents,"
made him extremely reluctant to weaken his defences there. Following
the safe course of attributing to others the same malignant and
cynical process of thought which he himself applied to a given
problem, the Russian dictator had for long resisted Shaposhnikov's
advice that men should be brought west along the Trans-Siberian. That
Stalin finally relented was due to the assurance which the
Stavka
was receiving from the Sorge network in Tokyo, whose
reliability—unlike the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact—he
had solid grounds for accepting.
The Soviet Union, by reason of the appeal and Catholicism of the
Communist faith, has always possessed an advantage in matters of
espionage and subversion over nations which have to rely on the baser
(as Communists claim) motives of patriotism or avarice. In its
confrontation with Germany, Russia received help, literally
immeasurable, from three separate organisations.
The first of these was the
Rote Kapelle
, a spy cell
operating deep within the German Air Ministry and including
Schulze-Boysen, a senior intelligence officer of the Luftwaffe. Two
other Soviet agents, Dolf von Schelia of the Foreign Office and Arvid
Harnack of the Economics Ministry, fed Schulze-Boysen information
from their own departments, which he communicated to Moscow by a
secret radio service.
Rote Kapelle
was particularly valuable
in supplying information concerning the disposition of the Luftwaffe,
strengths and objectives for particular operations, and even details
of individual air raids. It is also credited with passing the first
news of the German decision not to push Kleist on into the Caucasus
after the fall of Kiev, and of Hitler's preference for investing
rather than assaulting Leningrad.
Second and, at this early stage of the war, undoubtedly the most
important, was the Sorge group in Tokyo. Sorge was on the staff of
the German Ambassador. He had access to, and reported on, every
secret document which passed through the Embassy bag. Sorge also had
a direct entrée to the working and decisions of the Japanese
Cabinet through an associate, Hozumi Ozaki, who was an aide to Prince
Konoye. As early as 25th June, Sorge reported on the Japanese
decision to move into French Indochina, and during the summer all
evidence from this source pointed to a Japanese preference for the
soft pickings of the Dutch East Indies over the barren territory of
Mongolia.
The third source from which the
Stavka
derived information concerning its enemy's plans was its Swiss agent "Lucy."
Lucy's identity has never been established, but his—or
her—importance was crucial.
Information of such an accurate and incredibly well-informed
nature streamed to Moscow that suspicions were aroused that this was
merely an agent of the
Abwehr
engaged on an elaborate process
of "disinformation" aimed at luring the Soviet command into
a giant trap. In what remains an astonishing performance, and one
finally accepted by Moscow as genuine, "Lucy" supplied
up-to-date data on the German order of battle, with day-to-day
changes, as well as being able to answer enquiries about high-level
matters dealing with the German Army. Such was "Lucy's"
role that one highly valued Soviet agent considered that ". . .
in the end Moscow very largely fought the war on Lucy's messages."
The Germans, in contrast, had very little idea of what was going
on in Moscow. The gross, and now painfully apparent, errors in their
earlier estimate of Soviet strength had discouraged OKH from making
any assumptions other than those justified by actual field
data—interrogation of prisoners, unit identification, and so
forth. Captured Russians were usually too frightened to talk, and
generally so ignorant of matters outside their own platoon that, even
had they the inclination, their information would have been of
negligible value. The Luftwaffe did its best, but once again the
primitive character of the Red armies, their absence of a heavy
"tail," their propensity toward moving by night, made it
difficult for an intelligence forecast to be built up outside the
sphere of local tactical dispositions. While the Germans retained the
initiative, and a complete ascendancy over the battlefield, this
handicap was of no very great importance. But once their advance
slowed down and their forces were overextended, ignorance of their
opponent's real strength and intentions was to bring them close to
disaster.
The Russians' field intelligence was inferior to the Germans'
during the first months of the war. They took fewer prisoners, and in
the chaos of the seven-hundred-mile withdrawal there was neither the
time nor the apparatus for sifting and analysis of reports. But by
the autumn of 1941 the Russians were beginning to enjoy the benefit
of reports, which were to grow in scope and accuracy, from the
Partisan bands that were operating behind the German lines.