Throughout this critical period only one fresh, trained division
reached the "western front," the 310th Motorised, which
came (without its vehicles) from Siberia. One watcher has described
how the leading battalions, fit and strong in their quilted uniforms,
rolled into Zvietkovo railway station and "greeted in passing,
with hand and caps, their comrades, who had scarcely the strength to
answer with a wave of their hands." Indeed, when Zhukov assumed
personal command of the battle on 14th October, it must have seemed
to him that the twin barrels from which Mother Russia had for so long
been accustomed to draw for her security—space and men—were
truly being scraped to the bottom.
For a few more days Zhukov could cherish the belief that his
situation, though highly dangerous, was controllable. While the
flanks held, at Kalinin and Mtsensk, a weak centre was the lesser
evil, for the dreaded pincers of Hoth and Guderian would be kept
apart, and only Hoepner's tanks remained to back the direct approach
of the German 4th and 9th armies. Even if Bock succeeded in covering
the whole distance to the capital, there was still the possibility
that, like Napoleon's, his tenure of the city could be precarious and
short-lived. If the Russian divisions on the flanks could hold their
position, for Bock's army to strain forward into Moscow by the direct
route would be "to poke his snout into a trap—which we
will spring when the blizzards start."
It was apparently this thought which was uppermost in Zhukov's
mind, as it must have been in that of every man in the Red Army.
There was but six weeks to go before the onset of winter—their
last ally, which might yet succour them in their extremity. Each day
that passed brought closer the time when the ice wind, now gathering
strength over the Aral Sea, would sweep down over Siberia, across the
steppe, through Moscow, and onto the battlefield.
The Germans, too, had an inkling of this. Bayerlein has described
how in the mornings, as the Panzers started up their engines,
The already flat rays of the sun, low in the horizon over the
plains, misled us. But each evening ... . ominous black clouds would
build up far in the distance, towering high above the steppe. These
dark masses carried in the stratosphere the rain, the ice and snow of
the coming winter. But each morning they were gone or seemed to only
to reappear more mountainous than ever in the evening twilight.
But on 14th October the station was transformed when the northern
hinge of the Russian front cracked. Hoth's tanks broke into Kalinin,
and the 3rd
Panzergruppe
, with the 9th Army on its heels,
rolled down the headwaters of the Volga toward the "Moscow Sea,"
the huge artificial lake from whose eastern end a canal led seventy
miles due south to the capital. Within weeks the lake would have been
frozen over its entire fifty-mile length, and useless as a defensive
barrier. But those days were themselves vital, and now, with the five
infantry divisions and the few shot-up packets of armour and cavalry
which were stranded on the north shore of the lake, they were gone.
Zhukov realised that above all, he had to keep his command in
being. There could be no more standing fast regardless of the
consequences, no more trading of lives for time when the reserves
accumulated. Because there were no reserves, lives and time were
pari
passu
in the scales.
In Moscow itself a sullen fear spread downward from the ranks of
high Party officials, who knew the reality behind the communiqués
and the exhortatory proclamations which glared down from the drab
walls. The cream of manpower was skimmed off into the "workers'
battalions," while over half a million of the city's less
martial inhabitants were drafted into the outskirts to work day and
freezing night on defence positions and antitank trenches. From the
people, from wounded Red Army men passing back through the railway
stations, and along that broad mysterious "grapevine" that
flourishes in a repressive society, ugly and disturbing rumours
sprouted. The recurrent nightmare of the Tsarist armies, crippling
shortage of ammunition, was throwing its long shadow. Horrific
stories of the enemies' behaviour to prisoners and civilians alike
matched tales of mass execution of "deserters" and
"malcontents" by the NKVD. For three days after the fall of
Kalinin something akin to panic gripped Moscow. The news that
government offices were being transferred to Kuibyshev prompted a
mass flight by all those who were capable of movement. At first
affecting lesser Party officials and bureaucrats, under the pretext
that they had already received orders, the movement spread rapidly to
their families, to officials of key organisations such as the ration
and postal bureaus, and even to the police and part of the militia on
internal duties.
With distribution broken down and the streets empty, looting and
plundering began. The sound of small-arms fire by day and the glare
of German incendiaries by night completed the picture of a capital on
the verge of disaster.
Stalin himself remained. It would be understandable if he
ruminated on the peace of Brest-Litovsk, which Lenin had signed in
1918 to save the Bolshevik regime from destruction by the German
Army. There is no doubt that Stalin's nerve gave way on occasion,
just as his clumsy interference in military operations had upset
Shaposhnikov's conduct of the retreat. He is on record with some
uncharacteristically wild statements at moments of stress. "American
troops under American command will be welcome on any part of the
Russian front"—to Harry Hopkins on 30th July; "A
British Expeditionary Force might operate from Persia and join in the
defence of the Ukraine"—to Stafford Cripps after Uman.
And, even more melodramatic, following the fall of Kiev:
"All that Lenin created—we have lost for ever."
But no record can be found of any diplomatic approach, of peace
overtures, however tentative or indirect, by the Soviet Union at this
time. The dictator of all the Russians had too many enemies to risk
altering the
status quo
.
On 19th October, Moscow was declared to be under a state of siege,
and special reinforcements of NKVD security troops were brought in to
restore order. From that time the momentary flickers of panic died
away. The atmosphere in the city, blacked out. with snow lying in the
streets, the shops closed, air-raid sirens wailing, was of a kind of
militant despair.
This despair was grounded in the hopelessness of personal
salvation from any quarter. It was the antithesis of the apathy and
resignation that lay behind the French collapse in 1940.
Then a people sacrificed their country and institutions for their
own personal safety. The pleasures of wine, adultery, and civilised
conversation could, it seemed, be preserved simply by refusing to
fight. But the Russians of 1941 knew these things only dimly.
Privation and sacrifice were, and for centuries had been, their
habitual condition; and now in the German invader they had a focus
for all their misery and resentment. There was also a deeper
inspiration to their resistance.
Even those of us who knew that our government was wicked, that
there was little to choose between the SS and the NKVD except their
language, and who despised the hypocrisy of Communist politics—we
felt that we must fight. Because every Russian who had lived through
the Revolution and the thirties had felt a breeze of hope, for the
first time in the history of our people. We were like the bud at the
tip of a root which has wound its way for centuries under rocky soil.
We felt ourselves to be within inches of the open sky.
We knew that we would die, of course. But our children would
inherit two things: A land free of the invader; and Time, in which
the progressive ideals of Communism might emerge.
If, as Hitler claimed to believe, the Will was all-important, the
Germans had already lost the war. For what could they put against
this? Greed for territory and "
Sklaven
," a contrived
doctrine of racial "superiority"; some muddled prejudices
about "Bolshevism." These things were valueless against the
deep patriotism, the submissive faith in the dialectic, of the
Russians. The Wehrmacht was living by the sword. If, and when, the
sword should blunt . . .
The problem before Zhukov and the
Stavka
was one of
finesse. They had to keep some sort of a front in being until winter
arrived, and their resistance had to be flexible enough to evade
encirclement yet sufficiently vigorous to delay the enemy whenever
his condition, or a break in the weather, offered the opportunity. Of
the two classic pillars of Red Army doctrine (and of the Imperial
Army before it) one, mass, had already been broken beyond repair; the
second, the fighting retreat which lured an invader ever deeper into
the east, was limited by the urgent necessity of keeping him at arm's
length from Moscow. To this end the Russians were fighting with small
ad hoc
groups of mixed arms, strong in cavalry but rarely
greater than a brigade in strength, which were conducting mobile
operations between a net of defended localities manned by local
militia and "workers' battalions" themselves having orders
to fight to the end.
In the north and centre the country was so heavily wooded that the
Panzers rarely got the opportunity to fan out. Accustomed to the puny
Bauern
of Western Europe, the Germans were bewildered by the
vast forests in which they struggled day after day. Now it was dark
for fourteen hours out of twenty-four. While the German columns were
halted, Soviet cavalry threaded its way along trails behind the
"front," laying mines and mortaring supply convoys. Even
Hoth's
Gruppe
, which had broken through, it seemed, at
Kalinin, was reduced to a walking pace by the end of October.
Thus, although the Germans were closest to Moscow in the north and
centre—at Mozhaisk they could see the anti-aircraft fire over
Moscow on a clear night—the real danger for the Red Army was
farther south, where the country was more open and where, almost
without tanks, Zhukov was faced by the whole of Guderian's 2nd Panzer
Army. At this stage in the battle Zhukov had only one independent,
tank force left, the 4th Armoured Brigade of Colonel Katukov. This
had been newly equipped with T 34's in September, and was staffed by
pupils and instructors from this tank training school at Kharkov. It
had already enjoyed two narrow escapes from encirclement, having
first been ordered to Budënny at Kiev, but arriving on the scene
two days late, after Model had closed the trap; then entrained at
Lgov for the "western front," it had passed through Orel on
the very day that Guderian broke through. With the exception of a
sharp brush with
Gross Deutschland
at Bielopolie on 20th
September, the brigade had barely fired its guns, and after the
Bryansk encirclement had opened the Russian southern flank it was the
only force with any striking power left between the Oka and Mtsensk—a
void nearly seventy miles wide.
Ordered to turn around at Mtsensk and hold up Guderian's advance
on Tula, Katukov had delivered a sharp attack against the 4th Panzer
on 6th October, causing that division "to go through some bad
hours, and suffer grievous casualties." Instead of pressing his
initial advantage Katukov then withdrew, prudently taking the view
that to keep his force in being was more important than a glorious
death ride against the whole enemy
Gruppe
. Guderian recorded,
"This was the first occasion on which the vast superiority of
the T 34 to our own tanks became plainly apparent . . . The rapid
advance on Tula which we had planned had to be abandoned . . ."
After licking its wounds for a couple of days the 4th Panzer had
resumed its advance on Mtsensk, and entered the outskirts of the town
on llth October. Geyr (the corps commander) had wished to relieve the
4th Panzer with the 3rd, and a part of 10th Motorised, but the bad
condition of the roads made this impossible without a halt of at
least two days and pulling the division back to Orel, so the 4th
Panzer had struggled on, through periodic snow showers, which melted
as they touched the ground. The mud was now so thick that movement
off the road was impossible, and along it vehicles were averaging six
miles in an hour. On the evening of llth October, as the vanguard of
the 4th Panzer probed cautiously into the burning suburbs of Mtsensk,
the division was strung out over fifteen miles of single-track road,
and with its supporting artillery and infantry almost outside the
range of radio contact. This was the moment for Katukov to strike
again. The T 34's moving rapidly across the earth, which was already
freezing again in the lowering temperature of dusk, their wide tread
carrying them in places where the PzKw IV's floundered on their
armoured bellies, attacked the German column with dash and violence,
slicing it up into sections which they systematically reduced. The
gunners of the 4th Panzer, whose morale had already suffered in their
first encounter with Katukov five days earlier, once again saw their
shot bouncing off the sloping armour plate of the Russian tanks.
There is nothing more frightening than a tank battle against
superior force. Numbers—they don't mean so much, we were used
to it. But better machines, that's terrible . . . You race the motor,
but she responds too slowly. The Russian tanks are so agile, at close
ranges they will climb a slope or cross a piece of swamp faster than
you can traverse the turret. And through the noise and the vibration
you keep hearing the clangour of shot against armour. When they hit
one of our panzers there is so often a deep long explosion, a roar as
the fuel burns, a roar too loud, thank God, to let us hear the cries
of the crew.
The 4th Panzer was virtually destroyed, and the defence of Tula
granted another precious respite. But aside from its tactical
significance Guderian drew an ominous conclusion.