War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (58 page)

As the smoke cleared, the superstructure of the 250m bridge-span beckoned. A solitary Russian sentry stood with his back towards him on the road. It was one of those bizarre incidents of war that can occur even during the most intense fighting. He was attired in a simple khaki cape and alone, his comrades having long since fled. Unable to bring himself to shoot this unsuspecting and vulnerable individual, the German officer called out: ‘Hey you! Hop it!’ He later recalled the Russian ‘obviously did not understand German, but he turned around and for a few seconds was rooted to the spot, mouth agape’. Suddenly he sped away. The German advance guard, lying around catching their breath on the south side of the bridge, let him go. ‘A race with death’ followed as they hesitatingly broke into a run to reach the other side. Facing them on the northern bank was an artillery piece, a machine gun bunker and infantry positions. ‘We received heavy fire,’ said the company commander, ‘but it was not possible to pause.’ At every running step they winced in anticipation that the bridge might be blown up. It was not. By the evening of 14 October, Kalinin was in German hands.
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The
Kesselschlachten
(pocket battles) at Vyazma and Bryansk were to last 10 days. Fighting raged in woods, villages and over strategic road junctions and around lakeland to finish off the last effective remaining Soviet armies before Moscow. As in earlier encirclement battles at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, the initial burden of the fight fell upon the motorised infantry and motorcycle battalions of the Panzer divisions. Schützen Regiment 6 belonging to the 7th Panzer Division was ordered to hold 6km-wide battalion sectors, which was two or three times greater than the norm. This could only be practically achieved by establishing interlinked strongpoints. These covered wide stretches of front with limited or often no depth. Support weapons and artillery would then attempt to dominate the inevitable gaps by fire. Mobile Panzer units were employed in a ‘fire brigade’ capacity as reserves. As 7th Panzer Division commented:

‘Inevitably it happened as it had to! With no centralised control, the Russians massed against our positions and stormed them day and night. The enemy successfully broke through several times at night. Initially with small bitterly fighting sub-units and later with dynamically led complete formations, they got through our positions. In such cases they even penetrated battalion headquarters and artillery positions, where hand-to-hand fighting broke out.’
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Feldwebel Karl Fuchs, commanding a Czech 38,T light tank on the edge of the Vyazma pocket, declared, ‘for days now the enemy has tried to break out of our iron encirclement, but their efforts have been in vain’. Ground mist was beginning to complicate the subjugation of a foe using every ruse to break out. Fuch’s Panzer platoon of four tanks was ordered to scout and foil such attempts occurring between infantry strongpoints. After they had destroyed two Russian tanks and beatien off a third, the fog rose from the valley feature they were covering. ‘We really let them have it with every barrel,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘tanks, anti-aircraft guns, trucks and the infantry fired on everything in sight.’ Inevitably a price was paid. The motivation driving the exhausted German soldiers was their perception this was likely to be the final battle of the campaign. Fuchs wrote sadly three days later that ‘my brave, young friend Roland just died of severe wounds’. He reflected with frustration ‘why did he have to give his life now, with the end practically in sight?’
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Further sacrifices were required of the 7th Panzer Division. One of the private soldiers in its 7th Infantry Regiment claimed companies could now field only two platoons. These weak units were required to hold sectors 3.5km wide, a battalion task. ‘One attack after the other was broken up by the infantrymen and supporting weapons,’ he said. Forty of his comrades from the ‘Schleevoigt’ Platoon were overrun and killed with their platoon commander at the head, having ‘fought to the last round’. Vyazma became a battle of annihilation, pursued with the pitiless ferocity of men intent on finishing the war here. Leutnant Jäger from the same regiment described the bizarre lengths Russian tank, infantry and even cavalry took to puncture the thin German lines. His men held fire until the last possible moment:

‘The first bursts caused huge losses of people and matériel. Their attack was absolutely unbelievable. Whole columns were on the move with artillery, horse columns and lorries in between coming out of the woods behind Shekulina. Without deviating they came directly at us. What targets they presented our forward artillery observers! The sent salvoes of artillery, without pause, one after the other into the enemy hordes. It caused a practically unbelievable destruction.’

Following the assaults, which continued throughout the night, the German infantrymen lay in their foxholes, virtually out of ammunition. ‘They waited, nerves at breaking point, for whatever was to come next.’
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Soviet corpses were strewn all around.

The 2nd Panzer Division had converged on Vyazma from the south with Panzergruppe 4. On 10 October the anti-tank guns of the Kampfgruppe ‘Lubbe-Back’ were spread about 150m apart with infantry from Regiment 304 dug in between. They awaited the inevitable attacks from the interior of the pocket. At daybreak Panzers would relieve them. As the sun descended, the landscape was transformed to a dark grey, always a tense time. Panzerjäger H. E. Braun recalled, ‘the woods and shrubs in the foreground appeared to change shape from minute to minute’. Light eventually deteriorated into a misty darkness. ‘Everyone paid sharp attention’ to the scene ahead; ‘they were reliant now on hearing alone.’ Braun said:

‘They could hear the sounds of battle within the pocket. The sky to the west slowly changed to a red hue. Villages must be on fire. Now and then a sharp detonation could be picked out. Tension increased and pulses beat faster.’

Braun shared this acute anticipation. At first indiscernible, and then gradually more clearly, strange noises wafted toward the antitank and infantry positions. At about 22.00 hours the fires in the west had died down. Total darkness reigned and in the blackness the noise in front of the perimeter perceptibly increased. A horse would whinny, wagon wheels creaked and engine noises could be heard. ‘The tension was unbearable,’ said Braun as the first Very lights burst in the night sky.

‘Their blood froze in their veins at what the light showed. Hundreds, no, thousands of Russians were approaching their thin positions. Cossack cavalry were attacking too between vehicles and columns of lorries. A staccato noise of shots and strikes rang out… the monotonous automatic bapp-bapp-bapp-bapp of 20mm cannon in the ground role was constantly superseded by lighter sharp reports from the 37mm PAKs and the heavy bell-like sound of 50mm antitank guns. In between heavy and light machine guns were rattling away, intermixed now and then with several mortars and heavy-calibre infantry guns.’

From this point onward the fighting troops, Braun explained, lost all sense of time. ‘Several times the attacking Russians were shot to pieces directly before the positions.’ The rest were thrown back. Piles of bodies appeared in wave-like mounds before the German positions as the Russians stacked their dead to chest height to seek cover from fire. Complete Russian company groups tortuously crawled through heaps of their own dead to attempt sudden rushes against the German trenches. Little could be seen from these positions although the shrieks of the mortally wounded and appeals for help could clearly be heard. Russian lorries and armoured vehicles were hit until more light was provided from a petrol-laden carrier that burst into flames. The furious battle raged all night. Braun remembered how startled soldiers were when checking watches during a pause. They saw they had been fighting uninterruptedly for five hours. As dawn approached the fires on the burning lorries finally went out.

The coming light brought a sense of relief, for with it would come the reinforcing Panzers. Soldiers allowed themselves a chance to relax. ‘Suddenly the dead in the foreground started to move again,’ realised Braun with some alarm. Even though they were raked by a combined weapons barrage, ‘a sea of Red Army soldiers’ bore down on their positions. The impact of the merciless defensive fire dreadfully shaped the approaching mass, chopping parts away so that Braun described it resembling ‘the head of a huge Hydra, with ever new earth-brown forms’. With a nerve-shattering ‘Urrahscream’ the Red Army soldiers swept in waves across the German positions. Braun and his comrades, fearing for their survival, glanced anxiously ‘at the dark red colouring on the muzzle brakes of their anti-tank guns’, now glowing from the heat of constant firing.

‘Like a storm flood the [
Russian
] flow began to trickle over the embankments into ditches. Then small breaches were torn aside until finally the unstoppable wave flooded into the hinterland. Brave [
German
] infantrymen and in places even the anti-tank teams with guns were trampled into the ground by the mass of humanity driven by the certainty of death to seek an escape to the east.’

Isolated ‘islands’ of resistance held out, shooting in all directions. ‘Now the time came for the logistics men and the staff,’ Braun said. ‘Cooks fought weapons in hand from their kitchens and the rear-area drivers fought for their naked lives.’

Panzer reinforcements in the next village drove into the counterattack, plunging and firing into the mêlée with machine gun and main armament fire. ‘They fired without aiming straight into the mass,’ said Braun, ‘hitting Red Army men who had broken through and their own men.’ Dozens
of Panje
carthorses galloped around out of control, ‘whinnying pitifully’. Russian platoon vehicles, completely festooned with men hanging on for dear life, rolled over the living and the dead. ‘Russian lorries raced by at full speed, completely full of soldiers,’ Braun observed, ‘lit only by the flash of weapon reports’.

On the position, the infantry fought with pistols, spades and grenades to gain space. Even the company commander fought with a smoking-hot machine pistol from his trench, fed full magazines by his orderly. Braun, fighting nearby, opened fire on Russians running toward him with their hands up. He had noticed the grenades. A huge detonation followed after the Russians pitched to the ground.

Finally it was over. ‘With tracks whirring and loud engine noises our Panzers from Regiment 3 approached their island of resistance from the rear.’ Steadily the steel-grey Panzers moved through their position on the final mopping-up. Russian survivors raised their hands and were formed into small columns to be marched off. Braun noticed their dumb, beaten-looking expressions as they were waved on.
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It appeared had momentous victory had been achieved.

The Panzers did what they could to hold the porous perimeters in support of their own motorised infantry, who were quite literally bled white. Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, well aware of these losses, cajoled and pushed his infantry divisions forward.

‘The performance of the infantry,’ he reflected in his diary on 3 October, ‘has been almost unbelievable.’ More, however, was required. Three days later he was to remind General Strauss of the Ninth Infantry Army ‘that its most important task was quickly to send strong infantry forces after the tanks’. Road conditions were atrocious. Driving along the Roslavl–Moscow highway he saw ‘things are a mess’. He described how ‘four to five columns side by side, with unauthorised Luftwaffe elements wedged in between them, clog the road on which the entire supply effort, including deliveries of fuel for the tanks, depends’.

Four days later the Vyazma pocket, still fighting furiously, was dwindling in size. Guderian’s Second Panzer Army was having difficulty containing the Bryansk pocket. Von Bock’s diary charted the steady compression until by 13 October the Vyazma
Kessel
was beginning to collapse amid fanatical resistance. Bryansk, meanwhile, was disintegrating into lesser pockets, which remained troublesome and indeed unpredictable. On 15 October a German regiment from the 134th Division was surrounded on all sides in the southernmost pocket.
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Two more sub-pockets were pinched out between 17 and 18 October.

An officer from Schützen Regiment 7 with 7th Panzer Division described the plight of its first battalion, before being rescued by the Panzers of Regiment 25:

‘It was actually worse than Jarzewo [
Yartsevo – a bloody sector on the Smolensk perimeter].
Then, the enemy attacked mainly in battalion strength. This time we had to hold back several divisions, but with motorised infantry companies spread over a 12km sector. What use are numerous heavy weapons and favourable terrain in a few positions on the whole of the left sector, when everything is only held together by a series of strong-points?’

Hauptmann Schroeder’s Panzer Abteilung reached the right flank of the threatened battalion in the nick of time. They were totally sobered by what they found. All around them lay large numbers of the 3rd Company, strewn about their positions on the heights north of Bogowodjiskije.

‘In several foxholes there were four or five dead interspersed with one or two survivors standing among the bodies of their own, rifles at the ready. Several of the machine guns were completely shot-out and nobody in the company had any ammunition left. A badly wounded Feldwebel was still crouched at the ready in his trench. My impression was that the soldiers of the 3rd Company had actually fought to the limit of sustainable endurance.’
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Schroeder, visibly affected by the scene, was to remind his battle group constantly during the bleak days ahead of the example they had witnessed that day. The price had been paid by men convinced that one final effort would conclusively break Russian resistance. The end justified the means. Panzer commander Karl Fuchs also lost a close friend.