Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (33 page)

Cold weather and Siberian troops—The miracle of Moscow was no miracle-A chapter from the history of German-

Soviet collaboration after the First World War-The unknown army-Tukhachevskiy's alliance with the Reichswehr- Himmler's grand intrigue-Stalin beheaded the Red. Army.

IN April 1945, when the Russian troops were in Oranienburg, Potsdam, Hennigsdorf, and Grossbeeren, the doom of Berlin was sealed. But in 1941 the Germans were just as close to the gates of Moscow and were yet defeated.

Why? What were the reasons for this defeat which was of such crucial importance for the further course of the war? For whatever victories were yet to come, the divisions of Army Group Centre never recovered from the blows they suffered before Moscow. They were never again brought up to full strength; they never recovered their full effectiveness as a fighting force. At Moscow the strength of the German Army was broken: it froze to death, it bled to death, it spent itself
.
At Moscow also Germany's faith in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht was shaken for the first time.

What were the causes of this defeat? Was it "General Winter," with his 30, 40, or 50 degrees below zero, that defeated the German Army in the east?

Was it the Siberian crack divisions with their splendid winter equipment and the cavalry from Turkestan? Undoubtedly the exceptionally cold weather played a disastrous part, with its record thermometer reading of minus 52 degrees Centigrade—a temperature for which no German soldier was prepared and no weapon fitted. And undoubtedly the vigorous Siberian divisions played a decisive part.

But cold weather and Siberian troops were only the more obvious reasons for the German defeat. The "miracle of Moscow," as the Soviets call the turn of the tide outside their capital, was due to a simple fact which was anything but a miracle—a fact that can be summed up in very few words. There were too few soldiers, too few weapons, too little foresight on the part of the German High Command, in particular an almost total lack of anti-freeze substances and the most basic winter clothing. The lack of anti-freeze lubricants for the weapons was particularly serious. Would the rifle fire or wouldn't it? Would the machine-gun work or would it jam when the Russians attacked? Those were questions which racked the troops' nerves to the limit. Improvised expedients were all very well while the troops were on the defensive, but to launch an attack or even an immediate counter-attack with weapons functioning so unreliably was out of the question.

Adolf Hitler and the key figures of his General Staff had underrated their opponent, in particular his resources of manpower and the performance and morale of his troops. They had believed that even their greatly debilitated armies would be strong enough to deal him his
coup de grâce.
That was the fundamental error.

Liddell Hart, the most important military writer in the west, in
The Soviet Army,
attributes the salvation of the Soviet Union above all to the toughness of the Russian soldier, to his capacity to endure hardships and ceaseless fighting under conditions which would have finished off any Western army. Liddell Hart then adds that an even greater advantage for the Russians was the primitive nature of the Russian roads. Most of them were no more than sandy country lanes. Whenever it rained they turned into quagmires. This circumstance contributed more to the repulse of the German invasion than any sacrifice by the Red Army. If the Soviet Union had had a road system such as the Western countries, Russia would have been over-run as quickly as France. All that Hitler had failed to consider; like most Western military men he had been ignorant of these facts. The final resistance at Moscow could have been overcome only by a fresh, well-equipped, adequately supplied force of about the strength of that which mounted the offensive on 22nd June. But what was that force like now? Five months of ceaseless fighting had reduced the regiments of the

front-line divisions to a third of their nominal strength, and often less. The frost did the rest. Before Moscow casualties from frost-bitten limbs were higher on average than casualties through enemy action.

We still have the original schedule of the losses suffered by XL Panzer Corps. Between 9th October and 5th December the "Reich" Division and the 10th Panzer Division, including Corps troops, lost 7582 officers, NCOs, and men. That was about 40 per cent, of their nominal combat strength.

Total casualties on the« Eastern Front as of 5th December 1941 were 750,000, or 23 per cent, of the average total strength of 3,500,000 troops. Nearly one man in every four was killed, wounded, or missing.

The Russians had suffered considerably greater losses, but they also had the greater resources. Army Group Centre did not receive a single fresh division in December 1941. The Soviet High Command, on the other hand, switched to the Moscow front thirty fresh rifle divisions, thirty-three brigades, six armoured divisions, and three cavalry divisions.

The question "Why did not the German forces reach Moscow?" will, of course, be answered differently by the strategist, the commander in the field, and the airman. The economist, no doubt, will have a different answer again.

General Blumentritt, for instance, the Chief of the General Staff of Fourth Army, and subsequently Quartermaster-in- Chief of the Army General Staff, sees the reason for the disaster in Hitler's strategic planning error in failing to tackle Moscow and Leningrad as the priority objectives in good time—
i.e.,
immediately after Smolensk. That is the view of the strategist.

Anyone remembering the wartime enemy air raids on German towns will ask: What about the Luftwaffe? He will note with surprise that the German Luftwaffe did not succeed in interfering with the passage of Soviet troops to the front through the Moscow transport network, nor in preventing the arrival of the Siberian divisions, nor generally in paralysing Moscow itself as an area immediately behind the lines. Nothing of that kind happened. The last German air raid on Moscow was made during the night of 24th/25th October with eight machines. After that only nuisance raids were made in December. Thus during the decisive phase of the operation the nerve centre of Russia's defence, the mainspring of Russian resistance, remained unharassed from the air. Why?

Every German airman who was at Moscow knows the answer. The Russians had established tremendously strong antiaircraft defences around the city. The forests were thick with AA batteries. Moreover, the German Luftwaffe in the east had been decimated in ceaseless operations, just as much as the ground forces, and had to yield the air to the Soviet Air Force, which, before Moscow, was numerically twice as strong. Besides, the Soviet Air Force had numerous well-equipped airfields near the front, with heated hangars, enabling any unit to take off swiftly and repeatedly regardless of the weather. The German machines, by way of contrast, were based on primitive air strips, a long way behind the fighting line, which permitted operations only in favourable weather. Thus Moscow was virtually spared from the air.

Marshal Zhukov, it is true, does not regard the German weakness in the air as decisive. In a lecture to Soviet officers he said: "The Germans were defeated at Moscow because they had not ensured sufficient locomotives of suitable gauge . to move supplies and reserves to the front line in large quantities, regardless of mud and snow, in what is the Soviet Union's best and most comprehensive railway network, that of the Moscow area."

Certainly there is some truth in that. But the decisive fact was that Stalin won the race for fit manpower—for both the fighting forces and the armaments industry.

The struggle for manpower had become the most serious problem of the war. The irreparable losses of the German side, and the resulting shortage of combatant troops, decided the battle of Moscow. The subject has hitherto not received the attention it deserves, but some interesting facts are revealed in the more recently published papers and letters of Field-Marshal Keitel, the former Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.

Keitel wrote:

I had to force upon Speer, the new Minister for Armaments and Ammunition, a programme enabling me to call up again for active service 250,000 servicemen exempted for armament production. The struggle for manpower began at that moment and has never ceased since.

The German Wehrmacht—
i.e.,
Keitel—lost that struggle. The number of men who remained exempted from active service without good reason has been estimated at half a million. Keitel writes:

What would these men have meant to the armies in the East? The calculation is simple. With 150 divisions of 3000 men each, they would have meant a reinforcement of their combat strength by half their nominal establishment. But instead the shrunken units were replenished with grooms and farriers and suchlike, and these in turn replaced by willing Russian prisoners of war.

Keitel quotes two figures which illustrate the problem:

The monthly losses of the land forces alone, in normal conditions and excluding major battles, averaged 150,000 to 160,000 men. Of these only 90,000 to 100,000 could be replaced. Thus the army in the field was reduced in numbers by 60,000 to 70,000 men each month. It was a piece of simple arithmetic to work out when the German front would be exhausted.

And how do the Russians see the miracle of Moscow? Their answer in all military reviews is simple: We won because we were bound to win. We were better, we were stronger, because Bolshevism is better and stronger than all other systems. This is how Samsonov formulates it: "The Soviet people and its army . . . wore down the attacking Army Group Centre in heavy fighting and halted its advance along the approaches to the capital."

How then do they explain the victorious German advance right up to the very gates of Moscow? How do they explain the fact that even Stalin's Government expected to lose the capital? This has remained to this day the weak point of the Soviet theory of the invincibility of the army of workers and peasants—an army in which even Stalin himself placed no excessive hopes at certain times. Nikita Khrushchev has tried to remove this discrepancy by putting forward an explanation for the Russian defeats during the first six months of the war which had long been secretly advanced by the Soviet Officer Corps, but which had previously lacked official authority. Khrushchev announced it at the 22nd Party Congress in Moscow In October 1951. He declared: Only because Josef Stalin had robbed the Red Army's Officer Corps of its best men by his insane purges in 1937-38, only because his executions and incarcerations of allegedly anti-Party commanders almost completely denuded the troops of their leaders and disorganized them, did the Germans succeed in 1941 in getting to the gates of Moscow.

It is a spectacular theory. After the grave charge of having presented to Hitler the advantage of surprise by his gullibility, Stalin is now also blamed for the military defeat. How convincing is the historical evidence for this theory?

It is quite true that in his purges during 1937 and 1938 Stalin, on reliable evidence, liquidated 20,000 to 35,000 active officers of the Red Army. Khrushchev's theory therefore makes sense. For if a man kills off his marshals, generals, and officers he must not be surprised if his army loses its military efficiency. Removing a General Staff officer is like felling a tree: it takes eight to ten years on an average to train a major in the General Staff who could organize a division's supplies or direct its operations. But Stalin had at least half of all his General Staff officers executed or imprisoned.

But why did the Red dictator kill off nearly half his Red Army Officer Corps? Why did he get his NKVD henchmen to liquidate 90 per cent, of all generals and 80 per cent, of all colonels by a bullet in the back of their necks? Why did three of his five marshals, 13 of his 15 Army commanders, 57 of his 85 Corps commanders, 110 of his 195 divisional commanders, 220 of his 406 brigade commanders, as well as all the commandants of his Military Districts have to die by the bullets of his green-uniformed NKVD execution squads?

The sensational answer provided by Khrushchev at the 22nd Party Congress was: The tens of thousands of officers liquidated on charges of high treason and hostility to the Party were all innocent; not one of them was an enemy of the Party, not one of them attempted to overthrow the regime, not one of them was a spy in German pay, as Stalin maintained. No—it was Hitler who had staged it all. Through his secret service he had planted fake evidence on Stalin

—evidence about a conspiracy headed by Marshal Tukhachevskiy and other prominent military leaders. Evidence, moreover, of Tukhachevskiy's and his friends' collaboration with the German Wehrmacht. Khrushchev concluded literally: "With deep sorrow mention has been made here of the many famous Party and State functionaries who lost their lives innocently. But prominent Army leaders also fell victim to persecution, such as Tukhachevskiy, Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Yegorov, Eydemann, and others. They were men who had served our Army well—especially Tukhachevskiy, Yakir, and Uborevich. They were famous Army leaders. Later victims of persecution were Blyukher and other well-known Army leaders. The foreign Press once published a rather interesting report, to the effect that Hitler, while preparing to attack our country, got his secret service to plant on us a faked document showing Comrades Yakir, Tukhachevskiy, and others to be agents of the German General Staff. This allegedly secret 'document' fell into the hands of President Benes of Czechoslovakia, and he, evidently with the best intentions, passed it on to Stalin.