Ostkrieg (30 page)

Moscow had always been the prime target for Halder, so, despite the lateness of the season and the diminished fighting power of his units, he pushed the offensive forward. Although it was not the moment he had originally envisioned for the showdown, he proceeded in the hope that the presumed superiority of the German soldier would allow one last triumph. Although Hitler, clearly aware of the time factor, had hoped that the offensive could begin as soon as mid-September, the heavy fighting at Leningrad and in Ukraine meant that some units were delayed in reassembling while others did not return at all. From the outset, then, the Germans had difficulty concentrating their forces as well as ensuring adequate supply. Tellingly, at the last planning conference on 24 September, the decision was taken that Guderian's forces would launch their attack on 30 September, two days before the general offensive, in order to reach the surfaced road between Orel and Bryansk, vital for logistic purposes, as soon as possible. This meant that many of his formations would enter the attack after three months of nearly constant fighting with no rest or replenishment.
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The relative lull in the central sector of the front had also given the Soviets time to build deeply echeloned defenses on the main routes to the capital. The forwardmost line extended from Vyazma to Bryansk, with successive belts to the east, the most important of which was centered on Mozhaisk, just to the west of Moscow. Special efforts had also been made to beef up the Red Air Force in the Moscow area. Although the Red Army had manned this defense system with 1.25 million troops, German pressure in the north and south meant that the great majority of them were new, poorly trained and equipped formations sprinkled with veteran units worn down in earlier battles. With a lack of vehicles and poor communications, Soviet units were, thus, not fully adequate to conduct a skillful defense. Nor did the Stavka, despite intelligence reports warning of a German attack, fully appreciate the significance of this information. Soviet officials had expected an attack earlier but now, with the impending onset of the autumn muddy season, seem not to have anticipated that the Germans would launch another large offensive so late in the year. Not until 27 September did the Stavka issue a warning
to expect a possible German attack, and even then the warning failed to reach Russian troops in the forwardmost positions.
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When, on 30 September, a clear, sunny autumn day, Guderian's Second Panzergruppe struck between the Sejm and the Desna Rivers in the direction of Orel and Bryansk, it initially profited from Soviet communication and intelligence shortcomings. By the end of the day, spearheads from the Forty-seventh and Twenty-fourth Motorized Corps had driven a twelve-mile wedge into the defending Soviets, whose commander, Eremenko, assumed that this was only a local offensive. The next day, the Soviets launched piecemeal counterattacks without adequate air or armored support to close the gap, but Guderian's forces brushed them aside and continued the advance. By day's end, Geyr's Twenty-fourth Motorized Corps had penetrated nearly fifty miles in the direction of Orel. Since the rest of the front was quiet, Eremenko still did not see the situation as critical and, thus, allowed counterattacks to continue. Early on the morning of 2 October, however, following a short artillery bombardment, Bock's main force sprang into action to the north. Hoth's Third Panzergruppe shattered the Soviet defenses facing it, while, by day's end, units of Hoepner's Fourth Panzergruppe had advanced nearly twenty-five miles to the rear. The Stavka, however, preoccupied by the threat in the south, failed to realize that a disaster greater than Kiev was looming in the north. On the fifth, in fact, nobody would believe reports from a Soviet reconnaissance pilot who spotted a German armored column some fourteen miles long advancing unopposed toward Yukhnov, to the west of Moscow. Even as second and third flights confirmed the initial report, the Stavka had difficulty accepting that German spearheads were only one hundred miles from the capital. Only belatedly were ad hoc forces assembled and sent to block the German advance.
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The Germans, however, faced problems of their own that prevented them from taking full advantage of their initial successes. Over the first few days, spearheads from the Third and Fourth Panzergruppen drove deep into Soviet positions, captured the city of Kholm, and pushed across the Dnieper in hopes of encircling strong enemy forces near Vyazma. On the fourth, however, with its supply columns stuck on unpaved roads, the Third Panzergruppe ran out of fuel, and its rapid advance came to a sudden halt. Twenty-four hours were lost while the Luftwaffe transported supplies to the front, time that the Soviets used to good advantage to withdraw troops from the threatening encirclement. Not until the seventh did the Germans manage to close the pocket east of Vyazma, but, by that time, aerial reconnaissance indicated that large numbers of the enemy had already escaped eastward. To the south, Guderian's panzers
pushed through heavy resistance and seized Orel, a key road and rail junction 120 miles to the east, on 3 October. “Our seizure of the town took the enemy so completely by surprise,” Guderian noted, “that the electric trams were still running as our tanks drove in.” The Soviets, however, reacted swiftly and launched furious counterattacks with a tank brigade equipped with new T-34s, trapping the Fourth Panzer Division as it approached Mtsensk. Unable to break out of the ambush with its under-gunned and underarmored Pz IVs, the Fourth Panzer saw many of its tanks reduced to smoking hulks. These rapid countermeasures forced the Germans to abandon their advance on Tula for a week. The “vast superiority” of the Soviet tanks caused such shock and “grievous casualties” that Guderian admitted, “The exhaustion that was now noticeable was less physical than spiritual. It was indeed startling to see how deeply our best officers had been affected by the latest battles.”
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Nonetheless, German success was such that Army Group Center concluded on the seventh, after the capture of Bryansk, that the destruction of the bulk of the enemy forces was imminent. Halder thought that with “moderately good weather” the encirclement of Moscow was certain to succeed. Bock, usually more cautious, also brimmed with optimism. As opposed to earlier encirclements, where the enemy had succeeded in tying down large German forces and delaying their advance, this time, he believed, he had sufficient force simultaneously to clear the pockets and to push on to Moscow. The Stavka, too, was thunderstruck by the rapid encirclement and imminent destruction of its forward forces. Zhukov, hastily recalled from Leningrad, recognized the danger immediately: virtually all routes to Moscow lay open, while available reserves had been sent south to deal with the consequences of the Kiev disaster.
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In Berlin, Goebbels, who had grown increasingly concerned about sinking morale in Germany and had been pressing Hitler for some time to address the German public, now took the opportunity to orchestrate a speech by the Führer at the Sportpalast. On 3 October, before a wildly cheering crowd, Hitler launched a thundering denunciation of the Jews, stressed the enormity of the alleged danger to Germany that had been averted, and declared that the Soviets had been “broken and will not rise up again.” Nor was this mere public bravado. In private talks with Goebbels, Hitler stressed that the advance was going better than expected and conveyed his confidence that “if the weather stays moderately favorable the Soviet army will essentially be smashed within fourteen days.” Significantly, however, he deemed it unlikely that Stalin would capitulate, nor did he expect the Soviet state to collapse. Although the worst of the
war in the east was over, Hitler opined, he still expected the British to put up tough resistance. Control of Russian agricultural and industrial areas, however, positioned Germany well for the final showdown with the “London plutocracy.”
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At headquarters, the generals were just as ecstatic. Halder and Jodl believed the victory at Vyazma to be the most decisive of the eastern campaign, while Quartermaster-General Wagner thought that the collapse of the Soviet system was imminent. On the eighth, to Goebbels's chagrin, the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich, announced to the startled foreign press that the defeat of the Soviet Union was at hand. Even as the German leadership celebrated, however, events began to slip out of control. Impressed by the scale and magnitude of the victory, the German High Command now altered its plans by expanding the offensive; instead of concentrating forces for the final drive on Moscow, the OKH dispersed its strength in an attempt to attain a variety of objectives simultaneously. On the seventh, on the basis of a Führer directive, it ordered the Third Panzergruppe to advance north to Kalinin to assist Army Group North in seizing the Moscow-Leningrad railroad, thus further isolating Leningrad. At the same time, the Second Panzergruppe (now renamed the Second Panzer Army) was to send one wing northeast through Tula, then around Moscow to the south, while another arm was to take Kursk, nearly one hundred miles to the southeast. Moreover, all these moves were to begin even as German troops were struggling to reduce Soviet forces at Vyazma and Bryansk. Thus, only part of the Second Panzer Army, the Fourth Army, and the Fourth Panzergruppe were now to envelop the capital. Fearing a dispersal of forces that would weaken his attack, Bock vigorously protested these nonconcentric moves, but to no avail. While Halder believed that Bock had adequate forces to accomplish his task, Hitler thought that the more important goal was to weaken the enemy decisively, achieve favorable winter positions, and prepare to resume the campaign in 1942, an implicit admission that a defeat of the Soviet Union in 1941 was unlikely. As a result, however, Bock lacked sufficient forces at perhaps the decisive moment in the campaign, when the new Russian defense lines had not been fortified and reserve troops had not yet been brought up.
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As German units crept closer to Moscow, on the thirteenth seizing Kaluga and breaching the Mozhaisk defense line while the next day occupying Kalinin, a key city on the Volga about one hundred miles north of the capital, nascent panic began to spread in the city. Fearing the imminent loss of the capital, the Communist Party Central Committee and State Defense Committee made plans to destroy key installations
and evacuate government agencies from the city, even as frantic efforts began to prepare defenses and recall reserve units. Evacuations began during the night of 15–16 October amid scenes of hysteria at rail stations. Signs of collective panic abounded as people looted shops and rushed to escape the city. Offices and factories stopped working amid proliferating rumors of an imminent surrender. Stalin seems even to have tried, via the Bulgarian ambassador in Moscow, to initiate discussions for a negotiated peace with Germany, offering the cession of extensive territories in the western Soviet Union, but nothing came of the effort. Churchill and Roosevelt, fearing the danger of a Soviet collapse, both sent urgent messages to Stalin pledging support.
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On the eighteenth, the Soviet dictator prepared to leave the capital but at the last moment was persuaded to stay by his military advisers. The next day, the State Defense Committee declared a state of siege in the Moscow region and decreed that any disturbances of public order would be punished by military tribunals. NKVD (Soviet Security Police) troops were also told to “shoot provocateurs, spies, and other agents of the enemy . . . on the spot.” At the same time, Zhukov ordered that extensive defenses be constructed in depth to slow the attacking Germans by forcing them continuously to break through new positions. Within weeks, 100,000 laborers—women, children, and factory workers—had constructed over two hundred miles of tank ditches and erected numerous tank obstacles. Zhukov also pioneered new methods of defensive fighting, emphasizing smaller units and the concentration of antitank guns and artillery at key points. By the twentieth, the crisis was surmounted; in retrospect, those few days in mid-October, which coincided with the faltering of the German offensive, were likely the most dangerous period for the Soviet regime. Stalin, however, quickly recovered his resolve, while German weakness limited any attempt to exploit the crisis. Still, the giant encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk had been catastrophic. In two weeks of fighting, the Germans had ripped through the Soviet defense lines, encircled or killed roughly a million men, and left the enemy, at least temporarily, with no strategic reserves to plug a gap three hundred miles wide.
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Despite the Germans' intention to move relentlessly in the direction of the Soviet capital, two factors—the beginning of the muddy season and fierce enemy resistance—hobbled their advance. A key qualifier in the optimistic German assessments of the situation had been that the sunny, dry late autumn weather continue. Beginning on 6 October in the southern sector, however, and on the seventh and eighth in other areas, the fall rains began, steady downpours that turned the roads into bottomless
quagmires, stymied all movement, and prevented supply columns from reaching the front. Having expected the campaign to be over by mid-October, the OKH seems not to have taken the effects of the
rasputitsa
(lit., the time without roads), the wet period during the spring and fall when much of western Russia dissolves in water, into consideration. Ironically, despite efforts at the time, and ever since, to portray the weather as unusually bad, rainfall totals from mid-October through November were actually less than average. The Russian saying “in the autumn a spoonful of water makes a bucketful of mud” nonetheless proved devastatingly accurate. “The roads, so far as there were any in the western sense of the word, disappeared in mud,” remarked one officer, “knee-deep mud . . . in which vehicles stuck fast.” Ill versed in how to negotiate the unpaved tracks, German columns continued to drive through the same ruts, which only made the already poor roads worse. At the same time, the strain of grinding through the endless mud sent fuel consumption soaring and led to an alarming rate of vehicle breakdowns. Motorized divisions, mired in the mud and stretched over many miles, were unable to concentrate and vulnerable to attack.
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The Germans discovered, to their distress, that pursuit was impossible over muddy tracks without supplies, equipment, and fuel.