The Chief of Staff of Army Group South, von Sodenstern,
expressed a most emphatic opinion against any further advance. So did
the Chief of Staff of Army Group North. At Army Group Centre von
Greifenberg took a more indefinite line, pointing out the risks but
not expressing opposition to an advance. He was in a difficult
position. Field-Marshal von Bock [whose Chief of Staff he was] was a
very capable soldier, but ambitious, and his eyes were focussed on
Moscow . . .
Some of the subordinate staff officers were more outspoken. On
being assigned as objectives the railway junctions at Gorki (250
miles
behind
, i.e., east of Moscow) Liebenstein protested,
"This is not the month of May, and we are not fighting in
France!" Halder listened impassively to the objections, then
closed the discussion by declaring that the offensive was "the
Führer's wish," and that it was necessary to capture the
railway junctions "as OKH has reports that large Russian
reserves, amounting in strength to a fresh army, are on their way
from Siberia."
On this highly disquieting note the conference broke up, and the
staff officers returned to their armies to prepare for the final
battle.
The transfer of troops from the Far East had begun in earnest in
the first days of November, and by the time that the German offensive
got under way again Zhukov had more than doubled his strength as
compared with the initial period at the middle of October, when he
had assumed active command.
[The total brought from the Far East in the winter of 1941
included seventeen hundred tanks and fifteen hundred aircraft, and
was made up as follows:
Transbaikalia:
seven rifle divisions
two cavalry
divisions
two tank brigades
Outer Mongolia:
one rifle
division
two tank brigades
Amur:
two rifle divisions
one
tank brigade
Ussuri:
five rifle divisions
one cavalry
division
three tank brigades]
Yet the total Russian strength remained inferior to that of the
Wehrmacht, in numbers as well as in weight of equipment, and to match
the German strength before Moscow the
Stavka
was coolly
running the risk of thinning out other sectors of the front, taking
divisions from regions where it could still "deploy" space
until winter set in. From the depleted southern fronts Timoshenko was
being ordered to send tanks and artillery to Moscow and was
compelled, also, to retain the majority of his divisions in the
Belgorod-Yelets area, where they could give indirect support to
Zhukov's risht flank. In the far north all the local (i.e., other
than Far Eastern) reserves were concentrated into two armies, the 4th
and the 52nd, which were directly subordinated to the
Stavka
and charged with the double task of reopening the
Leningrad-Tikhvin-Moscow railway and staging an offensive of
sufficient vigour to prevent reinforcement of Army Group Centre out
of Leeb's command.
We now know that it was not until 30th November that Stalin gave
final approval to Zhukov's plans for a winter counteroffensive, but
the project must have been in the planning stage for several weeks
before this. The
Stavka
calculation was simple, with every
factor subject to rational prediction, as befitted Köstring's
"nation of chess players." By the end of October the two
armies had fought each other to a standstill; but the Russians would
soon receive help from their classic ally—the ferocious winter,
whose severity no European could ever calculate, for which their own
soldiers were trained and clothed, and to which they were accustomed
since childhood. Yet by itself the impact of the winter would not be
enough for an exhausted and outnumbered Red Army to turn the tables
on its adversary; the chosen instrument for this task was the
agglomeration of hard, long-service divisions from the Siberian
Command. In order that the impact of the Siberian troops take maximum
effect, it was vital that they be held back until the last moment;
and it was at this stage (if the chess analogy may be pursued) that
different games might develop. Would the Germans attempt another
forward movement? And if they did, would it add to their exhaustion,
and thereby to their vulnerability; or would it be so dangerous as to
force the Siberian piece into play before the board was ready?
Zhukov and Shaposhnikov expected that the Germans would make one
more effort, and they had also correctly anticipated its form—a
reversion to the orthodox Cannae-like plan, with the armour
concentrated on the flanks. They, too. placed their strength on the
flanks; the 1st Shock Army at Zagorsk to the north of Moscow, the
10th Army, the very strong 1st Guards Cavalry Corps, to the south, at
Ryazan and Kashira. The 26th Army was held back at Yegoryevsk, east
of the capital, and the 24th and 60th Armies of the reserve front
were at Onekhovo-Zuyevo. But the bulk of these forces and all the
Siberian units which had been drafted into them were held back from
the front itself. They were not to exert themselves blocking the
German armour, but to allow Hoth and Hoepner in the north, Guderian
in the south, to turn inside them and wheel toward Moscow, breaking
their strength against the Russian infantry which manned the inner
ring of defences. It was an operation as delicate and as critical as
the
manoletina
of a matador who lets the bull brush his side
as he withdraws the cape.
On 15th and 16th November, Bock's Army group started off on its
final heave, or lunge, toward the Russian capital. The ground was
white, lightly sprinkled with snow, and hard as rock. The sun, barely
perceptible even at its meridian, shone from a sky "neither
blue, nor grey but strangely crystalline and luminous utterly without
warmth or poetry." The air was still, for the blizzards were not
due until December, and the sound of firing, the orange flash of a
75-mm. had an astringent clarity. Across the hard going it seemed for
a few days as if the Panzers had recovered their freedom of action.
On the northern flank, in particular, where forest trails had frozen
hard and ice covered the swamps, the density of their Panzer
concentration which had so hampered the Germans in October began to
yield results. On 23rd November, Hoth entered Klin. The 7th, 15th and
11th Panzer followed close on one another's tracks in the breach, an
armoured jemmy of tremendous strength that soon threatened to break
open the whole Russian position in the northwest. Two days later
Rokossovski was compelled to abandon Istra, and on 28th November the
tanks of the 7th Panzer, trailing plumes of light powder snow as they
clattered across frozen reservoirs, reached the Moscow-Volga canal.
The division was one of Reinhardt's, made up of the same men who had
breached the defences of Leningrad in September and seen the sunlight
reflecting from the minarets of the Winter Palace. This time there
must be no hesitation.
After twenty-four hours of constant movement and under continuous
attack from Russian aircraft, the 7th Panzer surprised a sapper
detachment at Dmitrov and forced its way across the bridge there
before the structure was demolished. By evening four hundred men had
been established on the eastern bank, with some thirty tanks and two
batteries of 37-mm. antitank guns. All unknowing, they had
trespassed into the territory of the Siberian divisions.
Meanwhile Guderian, in the south, was forcing his way up to the
Oka crossings; and here, too, the bull's horn was to graze perilously
close to the matador's flesh. The three-week respite which Katukov's
exploits had earned for the Tula garrison had been well spent, and
the Soviet infantry of the 50th Army, reinforced by some four
thousand men in workers' battalions, had transformed the town into a
fortress which would have taken an army corps to reduce it.
Guderian's tanks had neither the time nor the heavy firepower to
attempt such a task. Instead he diverted them east, then north,
looping around Tula in an effort to reach the Serpukhov railroad—a
turning movement through an arc of 120 degrees. To protect his flank
Guderian had directed the 4th Panzer on Venev, and was dropping off
his infantry divisions in a protective screen along the upper Don.
For the ordinary German line divisions conditions were already
verging on the impossible. Many of the men were without any clothing
to supplement their uniforms except denim combat overalls. These they
used to pull on over their uniforms, the larger sizes being
especially favoured as the soldiers would fill the loose folds with
screwed-up paper. "Newsprint was the best, but hard to get hold
of. More plentiful were leaflets addressed to the Russian Army. I
remember trying for a week to keep warm on a proclamation that
'Surrender is the only sane and sensible course as the Issue has been
finally decided.' " Doubtless the Russians enjoyed this irony
when they took these men prisoners—though that they maintained
their geniality toward soldiers "dressed" in pamphlets
threatening the scale of reprisal activity against Partisan bands
seems less probable. The impact of the cold was intensified by the
complete absence of shelter; the ground was impossibly hard to dig,
and most of the buildings had been destroyed in the fighting or
burned by the retreating Russians. A doctor with the 276th Division
contrasted
The Russian [who was] . . . completely at home in the wilds.
Give him an axe and a knife and in a few hours he will do anything,
run up a sledge, a stretcher, a little igloo . . . make a stove out
of a couple of old oil cans.
Our men just stand about miserably burning the precious petrol
to keep warm. At night they gather in the few wooden houses which are
still standing. Several times we found the sentries had fallen asleep
. . . literally frozen to death.
During the night the enemy artillery would bombard the
villages, causing very heavy casualties, but the men dared not
disperse far, for fear of being picked up by marauding horsemen.
The 112th Division, one of the infantry units guarding the right
flank of the 4th Panzer's drive on Venev, had suffered over 50
percent frostbite casualties in each of its regiments by 17th
November. On 18th November it was attacked by a Siberian division
from the Russian 10th Army and an armoured brigade newly arrived from
the Far East with a full complement of T 34's. The Germans found that
their automatic weapons were so badly frozen that they would fire
only single shots; the 37-mm. antitank ammunition—useless
against the T 34 at other than pointblank range—had to be
scraped with a knife before it would fit into the breech as the
packing grease had frozen solid. To these shivering and practically
defenceless men the sight of the Siberians in their white quilted
uniforms, lavishly equipped with tommy guns and grenades riding along
at thirty miles an hour on the dreaded T 34's, was too much, and the
division broke up. "The panic," the army report gloomily
noted, ". . . reached as far back as Bogoroditsk. This was the
first time that such a thing had occurred during the Russian
campaign, and it was a warning that the combat ability of our
infantry was at an end, and that they should no longer be expected to
perform difficult tasks."
It is evident that the
Stavka
was determined to confine
Guderian's offensive, even if to do so entailed the expenditure of
some of its cherished reserves of fresh troops. For in the week
following the route of the 112th Division, Guderian's intelligence
identified three more units which had come from the Far East, the
108th Tank Brigade, the 31st Cavalry, and the 299th Rifle Division.
In each case the Russians stayed in action only a short time before
withdrawing into the frozen wastes south of the Oka, but their
intervention was enough to cramp the development of the 2nd Panzer
Army's thrust, which no longer had the appearance of a spear on the
map, but more of a shallow boil swelling defensively in every
direction around the persistent thorn of the Tula garrison. Something
of Guderian's frustration can be gauged from his letters to his wife,
in Germany.
The icy cold, the lack of shelter, the shortage of clothing,
the heavy losses of men and equipment, the wretched state of our fuel
supplies, all this makes the duties of a commander a misery, and the
longer it goes on the more I am crushed by the enormous
responsibility which I have to bear. .. .
And again:
We are only nearing our final objective step by step in this
icy cold and with all the troops suffering from the appalling supply
situation. The difficulties of supplying us by rail are constantly
increasing—that is the main cause of all our shortages since
without fuel the trucks can't move. If it had not been for this we
should by now be much nearer our objective.
By 28th November, however, Guderian was forced to recognise that
other factors besides fuel shortage were exerting their influence:
Only he who saw the endless expanse of Russian snow during this
winter of our misery, and felt the icy wind that blew across it,
burying in snow every object in its path; who drove for hour after
hour through that no man's land only at last to find too thin
shelter, with insufficiently clothed half-starved men; and who also
saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully
equipped for winter fighting; only a man who knew all that can truly
judge the events which now occurred.
On 24th November, Guderian travelled to Bock's headquarters to
explain the delays in getting his
Gruppe
's offensive under
way. At Orsha the Panzer commander delivered a long and bitter tirade
about the conditions under which his men were having to fight, and
ended by claiming, ". . . the orders which I had received had to
be changed since I could see no way of carrying them out." (A
curious attitude for a member of the
Heeresleitung
or, indeed,
for any professional soldier. A more orthodox reaction on receiving
orders which one can "see no way of carrying out" is,
surely, to resign?)