Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (23 page)

Kaluga, 100 miles south-west of Moscow, fell on 13th October. On 14th October Eckinger's advanced detachment of 1st Panzer Division took Kalinin, 93 miles north-west of Moscow, cut the Leningrad—Moscow railway, and captured the only Volga bridge that was to fall into German hands intact during the Second World War. A small bridgehead on the eastern bank, held by 1st Panzer Division and Motorized Training Brigade 900, covered the bridge. Thus the cornerstones of the 190-mile-long first line of defences covering Moscow had been brought down. The centrepiece of this line, however, the barrier across the motor highway some 60 miles outside Moscow, was between Borodino and Mozhaysk. There, at Borodino, 62 miles from Moscow, the "Reich" Motorized SS Infantry Division was in position on 14th October. It was historic ground. Here, in 1812, Napoleon was brought to the brink of defeat. Here, in 1941, Stalin intended to bring Hitler to a halt. To do this he had hurriedly brought up the best forces he had—a crack unit from Siberia, the 32nd Siberian Rifle Division from Vladivostok, with three infantry regiments and two armoured brigades newly equipped with T-34s and KV-2s. Stalin began to denude his Far Eastern frontier ruthlessly. He could afford to do so. He knew that Japan would not attack. Japan, after all, was planning to strike at America in the Pacific. Stalin had reliable information from his spy Dr Sorge, the adviser to the German Ambassador in Tokyo. Dr Sorge was worth more than a whole army to Stalin.

At Borodino the regiments of the "Reich" SS Infantry Division and the "Hauenschild Brigade" of 10th Panzer Division with the 7th Panzer Regiment, as well as a battalion of 90th Motorized Artillery Regiment and the motor-cycle battalion of 10th Division, had their first encounter with the Siberians —tall, burly fellows in long great-coats, with fur caps on their heads and high fur boots. They were most generously equipped with anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and even more so with the dangerous 7-62-cm. multi-purpose gun nicknamed by the German troopers the "Crash Boom." They fought impassively. There was never any panic. They stood fast and held on. They killed and let themselves be killed. It was an appalling battle.

The Russians employed their multiple mortars, the "Katyushas," known to the German forces as "Stalin's organ-pipes," which invariably caused havoc by their high-fragmentation effect. At Borodino also the heavy T-34 tanks were used for the first time in massed formations. Since 8 • 8-cm. anti-aircraft guns were not always available, the infantry had to tackle the T-34s with high-explosive charges. More than once the outcome of the battle hung in the balance. The casualties suffered by the "Reich" Motorized SS Infantry Division were so alarmingly high that its 3rd Infantry Regiment had to be disbanded and the survivors divided up between the "Deutsch-land" and "Der Fuehrer" Regiments. The entire army artillery available on the sector of the Panzer Group was concentrated under the command of the artillery commander 128th Division, Colonel Weidling, with instructions to blast a hole through the Soviet defences for the Waffen SS grenadiers, who charged with death-defying courage. First, the flamethrower batteries with their

remote-control electric firing devices had to be taken. Then came the minefields. Then the barbed wire. Then the pill- boxes. Experienced assault parties under-ran the defensive fire of massed anti-aircraft, anti-tank, and mortar batteries and repulsed immediate counter-attacks by Russian tanks in close combat. Hell was let loose. Overhead roared the Soviet low-level bombers. German fighters of VIII Air Corps tore in and out of the billowing clouds of smoke.

The dressing stations were kept busy. Lieutenant-Général Hausser, the commander of the "Reich" SS Infantry Division, was seriously wounded. Row upon row of injured lay on the ground—the tank-men in their black uniforms, the grenadiers in torn field tunics, the men of the Waffen SS in their blotchy camouflage smocks. Dead, gravely wounded, burnt, or beaten to death. Anger had made the troops see red—on both sides. No quarter had been given.

At last a breach was torn through the strong positions held by the Siberians. The two infantry regiments of the "Reich" SS Division, the "Deutschland" and "Der Fuehrer" Regiments, charged through. There was no time to fire their guns. Spades and rifle-butts were the weapons used. The Siberian batteries were taken from behind. Their crews, behind the breastworks of anti-aircraft, anti-tank, and machine-guns resisted stubbornly and were cut down in hand-to-hand combat. The infantry regiments of 10th Panzer Division were engaged in the same kind of fighting. They fought on the battlefields where Napoleon had stood 130 years before them; they stormed the stubbornly defended historic scarp of Semenov-skoye. The Siberians resisted in vain.

The 32nd Siberian Rifle Division died on the hills of Borodino. The great bolt of Moscow's first line of defence on the Moscow highway had been blasted open. The 10th Panzer Division and the "Reich" Division advanced across snow- covered fields towards the Moskva. There the last resistance of the Russian combat groups was broken. On 19th October 1941 Mozhaysk fell. Mozhaysk—right outside the gates of Moscow! A mere 60 miles of motor highway. And that highway led straight from Mozhaysk into the Soviet capital.

"Mozhaysk has fallen!" The news spread through the streets of Moscow. "Mozhaysk has fallen. The Germanski are coming."

Clouds of smoke were rising from the Kremlin chimneys, just as though the outside temperature was 30 degrees below zero Centigrade. They were burning the secret papers which they could not evacuate.

The Muscovites were flabbergasted. Only a fortnight previously they had been full of confidence in victory in view of America's promises of help. On 2nd October Churchill's representative, Lord Beaverbrook, and Roosevelt's representative, Mr. Harriman, had gone to the Kremlin to sign the protocol on Anglo-American arms deliveries.

Although the United States of America was still neutral and a noncom-batant, it was announced that the three Great Powers were determined to co-operate towards victory over the German arch-enemy of all nations. For the first ten months of the agreement, starting with 1st October, the following supplies were promised and also delivered:

3000 aircraft—2000 more than the total number of operational machines available to the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front on 30th September—4000 tanks—three times as many as all three German Panzer Groups had at their disposal on 30th September—and 30,000 motor vehicles.

But would these deliveries come in time? Was Hitler not again winning his race against the Western Powers, just as he had won it in the Kremlin before in 1939?

On 10th October a dinner was given for the foreign diplomats and journalists at Moscow's Hotel National. On the menu were bliny, caviare, vegetable soup, roast beef, creamed potatoes, steamed carrots, chocolate pudding, and

mocha. Toasts were drunk to Stalin and to the defence of Moscow. And to victory. That was the day when Timoshenko was relieved of his command and replaced by a man known then to only very few people—Army General

G. K. Zhukov. He was made Commander-in-Chief Western Front; Lieutenant-Général V. D. Sokolovskiy became his Chief of Staff, and N. A. Bulganin, as member of the Military Council, became the political head of the front.

Five days later, at 1250 hours on 15th October, Foreign Minister Molotov received the US Ambassador, Steinhardt, and informed him that the whole Government, with the exception of Stalin, were leaving Moscow, and that the Diplomatic Corps was being evacuated to Kuybyshev, 525 miles east of Moscow. Each person was allowed only as much luggage as he or she could carry.

When the news spread through the city, and in particular when it became known that Lenin's coffin had been removed from the Mausoleum in Red Square, panic broke out. "The Germans are coming!"

Those who lived on the Mozhaysk Road in Moscow pricked up their ears at any noise that sounded like tanks. Had they got here already? Anything was considered possible in Moscow at that time.

Cities have nerves too. And if the strain on them becomes too much they give way. On 19th October 1941 Moscow's nerves were strung to breaking-point. Alarmist rumours were flying about the city. The Government had fled. The Diplomatic Corps had left Moscow. Lenin's coffin, the glass coffin with the father of the Revolution, had been removed to an unknown destination. And the postscript to all these stories and rumours was: "The Germans are already outside the city." And in a whisper they added, "Their tanks might be here any minute now." The possibility of this happening had the most astonishing effect on the population. The people suddenly lost their fear of Stalin's secret police, the militia, and the security detachments. There was a rumble of angry voices in the bread queues outside the bakers' shops: "We've had enough of the war—put an end to it!"

Presently the first shop was stormed in Sadovaya Street. A lorry loaded with tinned food was ransacked, overturned, and set on fire. Rebellion was lurking in the dank, cold streets, cowering in ill-heated flats, sharing the table of starving people. Stalin's power was tottering. His portrait was being removed from the walls; the first Party cards were being burnt. Handbills, crude hurriedly printed sheets, suddenly appeared in people's letter-boxes in the morning: "Death to the Communists!" they said. They also contained anti-Semitic slogans. Horrified, the recipients stared at the seditious text. Moscow, Mother Moscow, was reeling. The .heart of the Soviet Union was missing a beat. Yet the skies had not fallen.

A. M. Samsonov, the official Soviet chronicler, describes the situation in his book
The Great Battle of Moscow.
He says:

A mood of alarm spread in the city. The evacuation of industrial undertakings, Ministries, authorities, and institutions was speeded up. There were also, at that time, sporadic cases of confusion among the public. There were people who spread panic, who left their place of work and hastened to get out of the city. There were also traitors who exploited the situation in order to steal socialist property and who tried to undermine the power of the Soviet State.

The dictator in the Kremlin struck with a mailed fist. On 20th October he declared a state of emergency in Moscow. The capital was declared a zone of military operations. The law of the fighting front now governed its life.

Samsonov writes: "The decree laid it down that all enemies of public order were to be handed over at once to courts martial, and that all provocateurs, spies, and other enemies calling for rebellion were to be shot out of hand." And so they were. The capital had become the front line. Its inhabitants were virtually incorporated in the Army. As early as llth July People's Defence Divisions totalling 100,000 men had been recruited from among the city's population by decree of the Defence Committee and posted along the city's western outskirts. In the subsequent winter operations the German divisions encountered this People's Army at all crucial points of the Central Front. Frequently these men fought fanatically —by Lake Seliger, at Rzhev, outside Dorogobuzh, and at Maloyaroslavets. Starting on 1st October, the lists of inhabitants were combed through once again. Another 100,000 Muscovites were called to the colours. They passed through a 110-hour training course—
i.e.,
twenty days—and were then sent to the front.

Between 13th and 17th October the Moscow City Soviet finally raised a further twenty-five independent Workers' Battalions—men who at the same time worked at their jobs and served in the forces. They numbered 11,700 men, the equivalent of a division. They were employed mainly on the eastern bank of the Moska-Volga canal. At the same time the 1st and 2nd Moscow Rifle Divisions were set up from reservists with experience of active service, and twenty-five Local Defence Battalions, numbering 18,000 men, formed to maintain order in the city. It was a truly total mobilization of a metropolis.

Every man and every woman was integrated into the military machine. Some 40,000 boys and girls under seventeen were mobilized to dig earthworks on Moscow's second line of defence and organized under military command.

Together with 500,000 women and old men, they worked three shifts, day and night, under atrocious conditions, constructing 60 miles of anti-tank ditches, 177 miles of wire obstacles, and 5010 miles of infantry trenches.

By the end of October, however, neither the fanaticism of the Party nor courts martial and executions were able to check the progressive disintegration of the city. The flats of evacuees were looted or taken over by deserters. Wounded men, juveniles who had run away from labour detachments, and young children roamed the streets. Security units had to comb underground tunnels, railway stations, and bomb sites continually. Moscow seemed finished. These harsh but unquestioned facts have been described by Mendel Mann, a Jewish village schoolmaster from Poland who had escaped to Russia. His book
At the Gates of Moscow,
first published in Israel and since translated into nearly all languages of the Western world, is called a novel, but its setting is based on the author's own experiences.

In this book we find the following scene, which is typical of the situation in Moscow at the end of October 1941 :

Two wounded soldiers came tumbling out of a small side-street. One of them, tall and angular, had an arm in plaster, the other, short and plump, was moving very adroitly on his crutches. He had a knee injury. They had reached the middle of the all but empty main street and shouted, "German tanks are in Kaluga Street and in Psochnaya! They are in the city already! They are here! Save yourselves, Russians!" A patrol of six armed men, three of them militia and the other three NKVD, stopped by a gateway and then slowly retreated across Sadovaya Street. They did not exchange a word, but regarded each other silently. . . . Suddenly the shops were being locked up. Iron shutters were pulled down with a clatter. The doors of houses opened and curious spectators collected in the doorways.