Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (55 page)

On 14th December at 1300 hours a Russian second lieutenant with a white flag appeared in front of Captain Hingst, commanding 8th Company, 3rd Panzer Regiment, who was employed with units of 2nd Rifle Regiment along the southeastern edge of the town as part of the combat group Hauser. The Soviet officer carried a letter signed "Colonel Yukhvin" and demanding the surrender of Klin. "The position of the defenders is hopeless," the Soviet colonel wrote. It was the first Soviet invitation to surrender presented under a white flag on the Eastern Front.

Captain Hingst treated the Russian very courteously and, having reported to Colonel Hauser and asked for instructions, sent him back at 1400 with the answer that the colonel was mistaken, the situation was by no means hopeless for the defenders.

Hingst was right. The disengagement of LVI Panzer Corps had meanwhile progressed according to plan. At 16.30 hours, when the road had been cleared, the 1st Panzer Division with its motor-cycle battalion moved off to the west. By 15th December all units had reached the interception line of 2nd Panzer Division at Nekrasino. On the southern edge of the town Colonel Hauser withdrew his forces over the small Sestra river into the western part of the town itself. As soon as the last tank was across, the bridge was blown up. Headquarters and combat groups of 53rd Motorized Infantry Regiment, as well as the Tank Company Veiel of 2nd Panzer Division, held Klin, by then in flames, until 2100 hours. Then this rearguard likewise moved off to the west. The Russians infiltrated into the town.

Klin was lost. The front of 3rd Panzer Group had been pushed in. The German armoured wedge aiming at Moscow from the north had been smashed. The two Soviet Armies, the Thirtieth and the First, had succeeded in eliminating the dangerous threat to Moscow. On the other hand, the Soviets had not succeeded in annihilating 3rd Panzer Group.

Thanks to the bravery of the fighting forces and the skilful handling of 1st Panzer Division, the divisions of two Panzer Corps and units of V Army Corps had been successfully saved from encirclement, and the men as well as a large proportion of the weapons and material withdrawn to the Lama position 56 miles farther back.

But what was the situation like at the other focal points of the Moscow front—with 4th Panzer Group west of the city and with Guderian's Second Panzer Army down in the south?

Moscow is situated on the 37th meridian. On 5th December the two wings of Guderian's Panzer Army, which were to have enveloped the Soviet capital from the south, stood with 17th .Panzer Division before Kashira, about 37 miles north of Tula, with 10th Motorized Infantry Division at Mikhaylov, and with 29th Motorized Infantry Division north- west of Mikhaylov. Mikhaylov, however, is on the 39th meridian. In other words, Guderian was well behind the Soviet metropolis. The Kremlin, in a sense, had already been overtaken. As a result, Guderian's thrust, though still 75 miles south of Moscow, was every bit as dangerous as the armoured wedge in the north which had got within some 20 miles of the Kremlin. For that reason Guderian's front, the area from the southern bank of the Oka via Tula to Stalinogorsk, became the second focus of the Soviet counter-offensive.

The Soviet High Command employed three Armies and a Guards Cavalry Corps in a two-pronged operation designed to encircle Guderian's much feared striking divisions and annihilate them. The Soviet Fiftieth Army formed the right jaw of the pincers, and their Tenth Army the left jaw. General Zhukov—the leading brain of the Soviet High Command, who was personally in charge of the Soviet counter-blow at Moscow —tried to apply the German recipe here in the south, just as he had done with General Kuznetsov's formations in the north, at Klin. He tried to pinch off the protruding front line of Second Panzer Army, and to do it so quickly that the German divisions were left no time to withdraw.

It was a good plan. But Guderian's strategic perception was even better. On 5th December Guderian's attempt to achieve a link-up north of Tula between 4th Panzer Division and 31st Infantry Division, with a view to encircling the town finally, had failed. As a result, the Second Panzer Army was tied down in heavy defensive fighting. During the night of 5th/6th December, the night preceding the Soviet offensive, Guderian therefore ordered the withdrawal of his exhausted forward formations to the Don-Shat-Upa line. This movement was in progress when, on 6th and 7th December, the Russians charged against LIII Army Corps and XLVII Panzer Corps at Mikhay-lov. They encountered only the rearguards, which offered delaying resistance and covered the withdrawal already in full swing.

Even so, things were bad enough. The retreat in icy wind through waist-high snow, over mirror-smooth roads, was hell. Not infrequently the formations, as they painfully struggled along the roads, were involved in skirmishes with fast Siberian ski battalions. Like ghosts the Siberians appeared in their white camouflage smocks. Soundlessly they approached the road on skis through the deep snow. They fired their rifles. They flung their hand-grenades. And instantly they vanished again. They blew up bridges. They blocked important crossroads. They raided supply columns and killed the men and the horses.

But Guderian's battle-hardened divisions were no inexperienced rabbits. The 3rd Panzer Division, for instance, was withdrawing with its vehicles from the area north of Tula, from one sector to the next, through an icy blizzard. Fast mixed rifle companies with their armoured infantry carriers, anti-tank guns, and self-propelled anti-aircraft guns formed their rearguard or even acted as assault reserves for 3rd and 394th Rifle Regiments. When the bulk of their units had detached themselves from the enemy these mixed companies launched swift counter-attacks or, by continuously changing their position and rapidly firing all their automatic weapons, produced the impression and the sound effects of strong formations. On suitable occasions they would even launch lightning-like counter-blows over distances of three to six miles.

One such occasion arose near Panino on 14th December. The regiments had to cross the bridge over the Shat. The Russians were putting on the pressure with tanks and ski battalions. The villages in front of the bridge had to be burnt down to gain a clear field of fire and to deny cover to the Soviets.

Second Lieutenant Eckart with his 2nd Company, 3rd Rifle Regiment, was covering the vital road fork. The Russians came in battalion strength—Uzbeks of a Rifle Regiment of Fiftieth Army. With them, in their foremost line, were anti- tank guns and heavy mortars. Eckart sent a signal to Second Lieutenant Lohse, commanding 1st Company, in which all the armoured troop carriers of the rifle regiments were grouped: "I require support." Lohse quickly collected four tanks to add to his half-dozen armoured troop carriers and drove off. Behind the smouldering ruins of a village he cautiously crept up against the flank of the attacking Russians.

Now! They broke cover. Three Soviet anti-tank guns were over-run. The Russians were driven into the fire of 2nd Company. Those who were not killed pretended to be dead—a favourite Soviet trick.

Lohse's command carrier was the last to cross the bridge. The squat silhouette of a T-34 appeared on the horizon. It fired. But its aim was poor. The Germans succeeded in blowing up the bridge.

Lohse's armoured troop carrier company had lost one vehicle carrying an anti-tank gun. Sergeant Hofmann was wounded, and one man was missing. But an entire Soviet battalion had been destroyed.

Men like Lohse and Eckart—second lieutenants and sergeants, captains as much as machine-gunners or the drivers of tanks, of armoured infantry carriers, gun tractors, lorries or horse-drawn vehicles of every kind—these were the men who tackled the situations which were frequently critical for entire combat groups or divisions. The dramatic retreat through blizzard and fire made the German front-line soldier hard; it produced that tough, patiently suffering, self- reliant, and enterprising individual fighter without whom the German armies in the East could not have survived the winter before Moscow.

The cruelty of the winter, its savagery towards German and Russian alike, was gruesomely illustrated for a rearguard of 3rd Rifle Regiment on the fourth Sunday in Advent of 1941. It happened at Ozarovo. Through his binoculars the second lieutenant spotted a group of horses and troops standing on a gentle slope in the deep snow. Cautiously the German troops approached. There was a strange silence. The Soviet group seemed terrifyingly motionless in the flickering light of the snowy waste. And suddenly the lieutenant grasped the incredible—horses and men, pressed closely together and standing waist-deep in the snow, were dead. They were standing there, just as they had been ordered to halt for a rest, frozen to death and stiff, a shocking monument to the war.

Over on one side was a soldier, leaning against the flank of his horse. Next to him a wounded man in the saddle, one leg in a splint, his eyes wide open under iced-up eyebrows, his right hand still gripping the dishevelled mane of his mount. The second lieutenant and the sergeant slumped forward in their saddles, their clenched fists still gripping their reins. Wedged in between two horses were three soldiers: evidently they had tried to keep warm against the animals' bodies. The horses themselves were like the horses on the plinths of equestrian statues—heads held high, eyes closed, their skin covered with ice, their tails whipped by the wind, but frozen into immobility. The frozen breath of eternity.

When Lance-corporal Tietz tried to photograph the shocking monument the view-finder froze over with his tears, and the shutter refused to work. The shutter release was frozen up. The god of war was holding his hand over the infernal picture: it was not to become a memento for others.

Like 3rd Panzer Division, the other divisions of Guderian's two Panzer Corps likewise withdrew from the frontal arc north-east of Tula, fighting all the time against the attacking Soviet Fiftieth, Forty-ninth and Tenth Striking Armies, and thus evaded the pincer operation, the bear-hug in which Zhukov wanted to clasp the Second Panzer Army.

At Mikhaylov, where on 8th December Zhukov's Striking Army made a surprise attack, the 10th Motorized Infantry Division, engaged in delaying defence, suffered considerable losses. At XXIV Panzer Corps the 17th Panzer Division halted the first Soviet thrust from the direction of Kashira. Southeast of Tula the "Grossdeutschland" Regiment stood up stubbornly against fierce Soviet attacks from inside the city, and thus defended the Corps' left switch-line covering the withdrawal towards the Don-Shat-Upa line. Under cover of these engagements the bulk of the Army retreated.

Stalinogorsk was evacuated. Yepifan was abandoned after heavy defensive fighting, in accordance with orders, by the 10th Motorized Infantry Division, which had fought its way into the town on its retreat. The defensive line along the Don-Shat-Upa line was reached on llth December.

However, Guderian's hope of holding out here proved unrealizable. Units of the Soviet Thirteenth Army broke into the front of General Schmidt's Second Army on both sides of Yelets, south of Guderian's Panzer Army. On 13th December Yefremov was abandoned by Second Army. The 134th and 45th Infantry Divisions—some of whose units were encircled at Livny for a few days—offered desperate resistance, but were forced to give ground and march for their lives. Lance-corporal Walter Kern of 446th Infantry Regiment, 134th Infantry Division, reports: "Whenever we moved into a village in the evening we first had to eject the Russians. And when we got ready to move off again in the morning their machine-guns were already stuttering behind our backs. Our killed comrades, whom we could not take along, lined the roads together with the dead bodies of horses, or remained lying in the ravines where we stopped to offer resistance, but which often turned out to be dangerous death-traps."

The situation was similar in the sector of 45th Infantry Division—the former Austrian 4th Division—in action south of 134th Infantry Division. Cut off at one moment, bursting through the enemy at the next, their supply columns destroyed, their operational and withdrawal directives dropped to them from the air, the combat groups of this gallant division fought their way out of the Livny pocket to the south-west.

With the front line of his right-hand neighbour withdrawn from the Yelets-Livny area to the south-west, Guderian's right wing in the Don-Shat-Upa position was left hanging in mid-air. Guderian, therefore, had to withdraw once more, taking his line a further 50 miles to the west, to the Plava.

Presently, when the Russians broke through with twenty-two rifle divisions between Yelets and Livny, Guderian was compelled to move his line back even farther. In the course of this move the connection was lost between Second Panzer Army and Fourth Army, so that a gap of 20 to 25 miles appeared in the front line between Kaluga and Belev.

The Soviet High Command seized its opportunity and launched the I Guards Cavalry Corps through the vast gap which was forming in the German lines. General Belov's Cavalry Regiment, supported by combat troops on skis and motor sledges, chased westward towards Sukhinichi and northwest towards Yukhnov. Matters were moving to a climax.

The gap in the front became the nightmare of the German High Command. From now onward there was a danger that the southern wing of Fourth Army might be enveloped. Indeed, if the Russians succeeded in breaking through via Kaluga to Vyazma on the Moscow motor highway they might even strike at the rear of Fourth Army and cut it off. A single thrust from the north could thus close the huge pocket.

It was obvious that this was also the aim of the Soviet Command. This bold strategic operation was positively asking to be executed. The spectre of defeat, distant as yet, began to haunt the badly mauled German forces of Army Group Centre.