Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (30 page)

Thus, on 29th November, Manteuffel had to relinquish his bridgehead. He took up covering positions on the western bank of the canal. To the south-west the 6th Panzer Division covered the right wing of LVI Panzer Corps. The Corps' left wing was covered by 14th Infantry Division and 36th Motorized Infantry Division. The chance of a lightning blow at Moscow from the north had been lost.

Twenty miles south of Yakhroma, on the other hand, the situation took a dramatic turn. South of Rogachevo the XLI Panzer Corps, which had been brought up from Kalinin, was attacking the canal crossings north of Lobnya on the right wing of Third Panzer Army on 1st December. First of all, units of the Potsdam 23rd Infantry Division, surrounded south of Fedorovka, had to be relieved. Farther south, to the northwest of Lobnya, General Veiel's 2nd Panzer Division was threatening Moscow from the north-west. One of its combat groups, under Lieutenant-Colonel Decker, picked its way through blizzard and icy cold as far as Ozeretskoye along the mined road from Rogachevo to Moscow. The village was taken. "All aboard for the Kremlin—on the Red Square route," the outposts wisecracked to each other.

They were standing in the bus-stop shelters on the suburban route to Moscow, beating their arms round their bodies and stamping their feet to keep warm. "Where's that damned bus?" they joked. "Late as usual."

As Second Lieutenant Strauss of the 1st Company Panzer-jager Battalion, 38th Division, passed the bus-stop in his car, driving down the road to Gorki, his driver turned to him with a giggle: "Why don't we take the bus, Herr Leutnant? Only a forty-five-minute journey to Comrade Stalin's home."

The sergeant had a somewhat optimistic idea about Soviet buses. The distance to Red Square was, after all, 24 miles.

However, the combat group of the reinforced 2nd Rifle Brigade under Colonel Rodt got much nearer to their objective. On 30th November the brigade's rifle battalions and sappers had taken Krasnaya Polyana against stubborn resistance by Siberian cavalry fighting dismounted, and Moscow workers' militia; they had taken Pushki, and, on the following day, Katyushki. Now Major Reichmann's 2nd Battalion, 304th Rifle Regiment, got as far as Gorki. That was a mere 19 miles to the Kremlin or 12 miles to the outskirts of Moscow. An assault party of Panzer Engineers Battalion 38 actually penetrated as far as the railway station of Lobnya and blew it up in order to prevent its use by Soviet tactical reserves. That was 10 miles from the outskirts of the city and 17 from the Kremlin.

Moscow's heart seemed to stop for a moment when the news reached the city. It was the day when
Pravda
carried two exciting and typical reports on its front page—one about the shooting of marauders in the city's main streets and the other about sentences of death for foodstuff speculators.

Moscow had become the fighting line. Through the town rumbled the new T-34s from the factories on the city's eastern outskirts; lorry-loads of workers' militia and Komsomol members rattled to the railway stations—tactical reserves to be thrown against Katyushki and Gorki. Siberian battalions drove to the front line in taxis and in the requisitioned private cars of Party and State officials. Ammunition was carried to the danger spots in requisitioned vans and buses. A workers' battalion from a tractor plant on the eastern outskirts of Moscow could be in action in the west or the north-west within an hour. It was the use of what strategists call the inner lines that enabled Stalin to halt the German spearheads at Katyushki and Gorki by employing sufficient tactical reserves at the crucial spots.

On the road leading from Staritsa via Volokolamsk to Moscow lies the little town of Istra. This town had been chosen as the key-point of Moscow's second line of defence. It was held by Siberian infantry regiments.

The XL and XLVI Panzer Corps of Fourth Panzer Group had to fight hard for every village and every patch of wood. Inch by inch the advanced formations and combat groups of 5th and 10th Panzer Divisions and the "Reich" SS Motorized Infantry Division struggled forward—over windswept fields and through forests deep in snow. On 23rd November they succeeded in reaching the Istra river and the Istra reservoir. The reservoir was 11 miles long and, on an average, a mile and a half wide. It fed the Istra river, which was about 100 feet wide and flowed into the Moskva. The ground on the eastern bank of the Istra was high and thickly wooded. The Russians were well established there in favourable positions, with a wide view over the snow-covered fields of the western bank. Anyone wishing to attack them had to cross the river or the reservoir.

Nevertheless llth and 5th Panzer Divisions succeeded on 24th and 25th November in crossing the river and the reservoir and forming bridgeheads. Motorcycle Battalion 61 of llth Panzer Division, led by Major von Usedom, made a daring rush over the ice of the Istra. The Russians opened up at them with artillery. The air was filled with splinters of steel and ice. But the motor-cyclists fought their way across to the far bank and gained a precarious foothold on the frozen ground. The reservoir itself was crossed near Lopatovo, at its narrowest point. There were some anxious minutes as the men headed for the dam of the reservoir. It must have been wired for demolition. What would happen if

the dam suddenly burst and gigantic masses of water were released?

But the assault units of llth Panzer Division were lucky. Their surprise came off. There was no time for the Russians to press the button. Lieutenant Breitschuh's sappers removed 1100 mines and two tons of high explosive from the reservoir dam.

Farther to the south the crossing of the important Istra river was likewise successfully accomplished. Lieutenant- Colonel von der Chevallerie seized the bridge of Busharovo with the reinforced 86th Rifle Regiment, 10th Panzer Division. The operation was carried out under cover of a thick blizzard. Chevallerie's group was the remnants of the once proud 10th Panzer Division. Now its 7th Panzer Regiment had no more than twenty-eight tanks left, and the 69th and 86th Rifle Regiments had shrunk to four weak rifle battalions of 120 men each. Boehringer's artillery battalion was down to one single tractor and ten guns. Nevertheless the remnants of 10th Panzer Division fought with spirit.

The enemy put up furious resistance and brought up whatever he could lay his hands on, according to a diary account of one of the men in the action. The self-sacrificing way in which the Russians fought was admirable, but for the time being unavailing, since the attacking units of Army Group Centre continued to nibble their way towards Moscow in spite of all difficulties.

On 26th November, a cold hazy day 20 degrees below zero Centigrade, the combat group of 10th Panzer Division attacked the town of Istra from the north. It was a costly engagement. In the forest fighting which ensued the attackers suffered heavily from the shrapnel of Soviet multiple mortars, but they succeeded in pushing the Soviets—Manchurian units from Khabarovsk—out of the woods and, with a last supreme effort, reaching the northern edge of Istra.

Meanwhile the battalions of the "Reich" SS Infantry Division had come up. The SS Motorcycle Battalion Klingenberg first of all had to burst through a fortified line in the forest immediately west of Istra on the Volokolamsk-Moscow road, held by units of the famous 78th Siberian Rifle Division. The men of that division had a reputation for the fact that they neither took prisoners nor allowed themselves to be taken. In hand-to-hand fighting, with hand-grenades and spades, pillbox after pillbox had to be taken. Klingenberg's motorcyclists fought with spectacular gallantry, and many of the young men of the Waffen SS paid with their lives. When Captain Kandutsch reported on the engagement to his C-in-C, General Stumme, there were tears in his eyes. Many of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds who lay dead on the battlefield were barefoot inside their boots. Yet the temperature was 15 degrees below freezing.

Just outside Istra, in a loop of the river, was the fortress of the town, dominating its western approaches. The "Reich" SS Division succeeded in taking the citidel by surprise. The "Deutschland" and "Der Fuehrer" SS Infantry Regiments, supported by the "Reich" SS Artillery Regiment, had broken in from the south and infiltrated into the barricaded streets. Hitler's and Stalin's guards gave each other no quarter. The Siberians were forced to withdraw. Istra, the keypoint of Moscow's last line of defense, was taken.

On 27th November Polevo fell. That day the Soviet air force began its ceaseless attacks on Istra. The Russians were determined not to yield undamaged that vital transport centre before Moscow. The German staffs—this was learned from monitored commands by radio—were not to find accommodation. The church towers with their onion domes were reduced to rubble. House after house was shattered by the Red Air Force. Two thousand bombs were dropped on the little town. No roof was left intact for the German staffs.

On the morning of 28th November the Waffen SS took Vysokovo and continued its advance towards Moscow. By then the assault units were within a 20-mile radius of the Kremlin.

The thermometer stood at 32 degrees below zero Centigrade. The men had to spend the nights in the open. They put on everything they had—but it was not enough. They had no sheepskin jackets, no fur caps, no felt boots, no fur gloves.

Their toes froze off. Their fingers in the thin woolen mittens turned white and stiff.

But in spite of all the hardships there were moments of comfort and ease. During the black, eerie, tense nights at the turn of November-December 1941, when the whole land seemed rigid in the grip of the ringing frost, when the Junkers planes overhead droned towards Moscow and the skyline was lit up by Soviet anti-aircraft fire, the troops would switch on the German forces programme from Belgrade and listen to Lale Andersen's dark voice singing
Lili Marlene.
It

seems hardly credible, but whoever was in that campaign against Moscow that winter and got away alive will always remember that sentimental, nostalgic song that brought tears of homesickness to the men's eyes.

On 2nd December the spearheads of the "Reich" SS Infantry Division were outside Lenino. Second Lieutenant Weber, the orderly officer of the OC Army Artillery 128, Colonel Weidling, wrote in a letter to his mother in Hamburg:

These Russians seem to have an inexhaustible supply of men. Here they unload fresh troops from Siberia every day; they bring up fresh guns and lay mines all over the place. On the 30th we made our last attack—a hill known to us as Pear Hill, and a village called Lenino. With artillery and mortar support we managed to take all of the hill and half of the village. But at night we had to give it all up again in order to defend ourselves more effectively against the continuous Russian counter-attacks. We only needed another eight miles to get the capital within gun range—but we just could not make it.

Fourth Panzer Group just could not make it any longer.

Its offensive formations advanced only a few more miles. The situation of 10th Panzer Division was typical. The combat group of the combat-hardened 69th Rifle Regiment had reached the village of Lenino on 1st December, supported by the division's last tanks. But they could only seize the western fringe of the village from the Russians. In its eastern part, separated from the Germans by a small stream, the enemy was firmly established, as if concreted into the ground. For four days they lay opposite each other. Russian artillery ceaselessly shelled the German positions. The handful of men of 69th Regiment became fewer and fewer—and they did not gain an inch of ground. This was only 21 miles from the Kremlin, 14 miles from the north-western outskirts of Moscow, and 11 miles from its northern river port.

But other divisions were still worming their way forward through ice and snow towards the capital. South of Istra, to both sides of the Ruza-Zvenigorod road and along the Moskva river, the IX Corps under General Geyer tried its luck with 252nd, 87th, and 78th Infantry Divisions. Their first objective was the Zvenigorod-Istra road and the town of Zvenigorod itself, an arsenal and ammunition dump for the western sector of Moscow's defences.

The town was situated amid a virgin forest area deep in snow. Inside it, in countless well-camouflaged dugouts and concrete pillboxes, were the regiments of the Soviet Fifth Army. The first obstacle to be taken was Lokotnya. There the 78th Infantry Division from Württemberg got stuck in the mud towards the end of October. Now it intended to thrust past the enemy barrier.

In a bold outflanking movement Colonel Merker led his reinforced 215th Regiment on a "tiptoe advance" secretly along small paths, in single file, through snowbound virgin forest and across exposed clearings into the rear of the Russian positions, over-ran them, and on 20th November cap-turned Lokotnya.

By 24th November the infantry regiments, reinforced by sappers, fought their way right up to Aleksandrovskoye, a veritable fortress, and by noon of 2nd December to the eastern end of Yershovo. By then the division had spent its strength. It did not succeed in taking Zvenigorod.

Between the 78th Infantry Division's left-hand neighbour, the 87th Infantry Division (DC Infantry Corps), and the "Reich" SS Infantry Division (XL Panzer Corps) the 252nd Infantry Division drove forward and penetrated into the Soviet defences. Heavy fighting ensued in the pathless forests, and the regiments found themselves in great difficulties. The 461st Infantry Regiment was cut off and had to rely on its own resources for the next two days. Stukas battered the Russians until their resistance was broken. The 7th Infantry Regiment reached Prokovskoye. On 1st December a combat group of 2nd Battalion pushed the fighting line a few miles beyond Prokovskoye against repeated enemy attacks. Beyond that they were unable to advance. The snow, the cold, exhaustion, and Russian opposition forced a halt.