War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (62 page)

Wood-clearing was tedious, frustrating, exhausting and dangerous. By nightfall the sweep was over. ‘Then came an order that said the operation had been unsuccessful and we had to do the whole thing again from the beginning.’ Just as they started, another radio message was received ordering a withdrawal. This meant a 10–15km march, which was to last nine hours. Much of it was spent waiting in column, as the company made tortuous progress through the trees. It was a physical ordeal which left them:

‘Standing hour after hour in the open, wet and frozen with hands wrapped [
in bandages],
lashed all the time by the unbelievable weather. Our boot soles froze sticking to the ground. We were wet through and had simply to stand, stand, stand, wait – march a bit – and stand again.’

At 02.00 hours they reached a village where they were told they could rest. ‘All of us are ill and absolutely worn out to some degree or other.’ Their joints were stiff. ‘Every fibre in my body is broken,’ complained Henry. Early the next morning it would probably start all over again. The awful weather, however, precluded any further movement. Men lay on the floor, some 30 to a small room. ‘Liquid excrement ran through the middle of the hut between our ponchos and packs,’ said Henry. ‘We all had diarrhoea and stomach cramps.’
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There seemed no end to the suffering.

Soldiers grew increasingly sensitive to the ‘hurrah-patriotism’ they heard on the radio and read in the press. ‘One can only shake one’s head at what you hear on some radio programmes, or in some propaganda company reports,’ complained an artillery Leutnant with the 131st Infantry Division. ‘We’re not too influenced by such shitty stories,’ he said, ‘but it is no good singing about it.’ Morale was being eroded. ‘After four months,’ concluded the officer, ‘one has had enough.’
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‘Morale has dropped,’ reported IIIrd Corps with Army Group South, particularly after the optimistic propaganda ‘which contradicts their experience on the battlefield’. Troops enduring the hardship that produced the victories were unsparing with their comments. One said, ‘the capture of Odessa, Kharkov, or anywhere else makes no impression at all if you yourself are lying in the shit.’
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Warfare on the Eastern Front had changed from attaining strategic objectives to fighting for the next shelter. Oberstleutnant von Bose, commanding an infantry battalion with the 98th Division, took a delivery of rations on a particularly cold night on 16 October and found they were frozen solid. He radioed his regimental headquarters and said, ‘we’re freezing and want to attack’. Back came the mystified response: ‘Attack where?’ Von Bose retorted, ‘It doesn’t matter where – we need accommodation!’ An order followed to capture the village of Awdotnja, which the battalion took in a surprise attack. All night the battle raged against repeated Soviet counter-attacks, desperate to regain their lost shelter.
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The German soldier at the front felt keenly the disappointment of having the chalice of victory dashed from his lips, more so than the population in the Reich. Unteroffizier Helmut Pabst summed up the feeling in mid-October when he wrote, ‘what a country, what a war, where there’s no pleasure in success, no pride, no satisfaction, only a feeling of suppressed fury now and then.’
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Harald Henry exclaimed:

‘How much longer should this go on! There should surely eventually be a stop to it, or at least a relief. We have acquitted ourselves magnificently, and with heavy losses, in all the great Army Group Centre pocket battles: Bialystok, Minsk, Mogilev, Roslavl, the Desna river, Vyazma and Bryansk. In the final resort we ought to be allowed at least some rest. We can’t take much more.’
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The
Ostheer had
delivered all that had been demanded of it, and more. The last remaining identified Soviet field armies were destroyed in the twin encirclement battles at Vyazma and Bryansk. Operating beyond logistic range and bled white in the process, the German armies had inflicted a further devastating blow on the Russians. But still the enemy fought on. Moreover, whatever the result of the victory, a two- to three-week delay was being imposed by the mud of the autumn rains. General Blumentritt remarked, ‘the troops not unnaturally now resented the bombastic utterances of our propaganda in October.’
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Moscow… A defence crust forms

The Soviet leadership was taken aback at the ‘Autumn Storm’, triumphantly announced by the German press, that burst upon them. Panzergruppe 4 drove a wedge between Maj-Gen Petrov’s Fiftieth Army and the Forty-third Reserve Front Army, and Second Panzer Army entered Bryansk on 6 October, at which point Moscow lost contact with its forward Army Groups. Major Ivan Schabalin, an NKVD staff officer with Fiftieth Army, jotted ‘we are surrounded’ in his diary on 4 October.

‘The entire front, three armies, have been embraced – and what do our generals do? “They think about it.” … As ever, we lose our heads and are incapable of taking any active measures.’

Schabalin assessed the front staff had lost all initiative from the very moment the German attack began. Two days later he despairingly admitted, ‘history has never witnessed anything like the defeat of the Bryansk Front’. The front command irretrievably lost control, ‘it’s rumoured the idiots are already on their way back to Moscow,’ the disillusioned officer complained.
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At noon on 5 October a reconnaissance pilot from the 120th Fighter Squadron reported that he could see a 24km-long Nazi armoured column moving along the Warsaw highway from Spas-Demensk toward Yukhnov. This was about 160km south-west of Moscow. Nobody would believe him. He was ordered to fly back and confirm. Now the undisturbed German column could be seen approaching Yukhnov itself. A degree of authentication was provided by the damage the aircraft received from anti-aircraft fire. Colonel Sbytov, Air Commander of Moscow Military District, decided this was proof enough and passed the urgent report on. He was immediately accused by the NKVD of ‘encouraging panic’, and his staff was threatened with court martial and execution. A third reconnaissance report confirmed the column had actually entered the town. Stalin was informed. There were no Russian forces on the Warsaw highway between Yukhnov and Moscow. Units in the capital were placed on alert and an ad hoc force hastily assembled to hold up the German advance until major reserves could be committed.
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The next day, with the front before Moscow apparently falling apart, General Georgi Zhukov was recalled from Leningrad and ordered to report to the capital. On 10 October, he was appointed Commander of the West Front, responsible for all the defences west of the Soviet capital. He was to have a decisive influence on the approaching battle.

Zhukov’s immediate priority was to stabilise the front. He requested Stalin to begin transferring large reserves toward Moscow. The State Defence Committee, the Party’s Central Committee and the Supreme Command took measures to halt the enemy advance. Troop movements began on 7 October, reinforcing the concentric defence belts facing west. A total of 14 rifle divisions, 16 tank brigades and more than 40 artillery regiments were taken from the supreme Headquarters Reserve and adjoining fronts.
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They totalled some 90,000 men. Remnants of units that had cut their way out of the German double encirclements were filtered into the same defence lines.

In addition, existing West Front air forces were reinforced by Maj-Gen Klimov’s 6th Fighter Corps, all the fighter squadrons from the Moscow Military District, several long-range fighter divisions and four newly formed squadrons. On 13 October the State Defence Committee issued order number 0345, calling for maximum effort from the highest commander to the lowliest Red Army private. ‘Cowards and panic-mongers’ – any soldier who gave up a position without authorisation – would be ‘shot on the spot’ for crimes against the state.
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The power of the Communist Party lay in the cities. Its instruments of state reached out to control the geographical expanse of Russia from these political vantage-points. This explains the superhuman effort made to defend centres such as Leningrad, the cradle of the Bolshevik ideology, and Moscow, the capital of the Soviet apparatus – and later Stalingrad, the city that bore Stalin’s name. Hitler’s own totalitarian ideological convictions granted intuition that enabled him to discern the intrinsic value of such objectives. To despatch a rival ideology with lethal certainty necessitated the destruction of the primary cities of the Soviet Union: to blockade them, level them to the ground and disperse the populations. In choosing to conduct a
Vernichtungskrieg
(war of annihilation) the German regime ignored the possibility of exploiting home-grown dissatisfactions with the Soviet system, evident in rural areas. The Teutonic hordes portrayed in Eisenstein’s film
Alexander Nevsky
playing in Russian cinemas, with images of German Knights burning babies alive, was perceived in the Russian nationalist psyche as being not far from the truth.

The opportunity to exploit internal political contradictions, which the German staff achieved in 1917 by aiding Lenin, was forgone in 1941. Major Ivan Nikitowitsch Kononov, the commander of the Russian 436th Rifle Regiment, cut off in the Vyazma pocket, claimed ‘an atmosphere of panic reigned within [Nineteenth] Army… the soldiers only attacked under considerable pressure from the political apparatus.’ This negative view of resistance inside the pocket was shared by his army commander, Lt-Gen Lukin. In his view, shared with his German captors after being wounded and taken prisoner, the infantry ‘did not demonstrate the necessary will to break out. They would rather go into captivity’. They were ‘driven’ into offering themselves in their thousands as victims ‘time and again’ in failed break-out attempts. A number of high-ranking Soviet generals captured at this time were eventually to switch loyalties against the communist cause. Lukin explained:

‘The farmer wants land, the worker a part of the industry he was promised… If misery and terror reign and above all a cheerless existence, then you could understand that these people would positively welcome being freed from Bolshevism.’

An alternative regime to Stalin was therefore conceivable. One could justifiably fight against ‘the hated Bolshevik system,’ claimed General Lukin, ‘without thereby compromising one’s claim to be a Russian patriot’.
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No such options were offered to the Soviet front soldier.

‘We have not seen a single one of our own aircraft in the last few days,’ wrote Major Schabalin with the Soviet Fiftieth Army on 7 October. ‘We are giving up cities with practically no resistance.’ Within three days he was on the run from pursuing German forces inside the pocket. His health was deteriorating and now it was snowing heavily. ‘Masses of cars and people’ were on the roads, mute testimony to the defeat and disintegration of the Russian armies. A colleague from the 217th Rifle Division told him that they had suffered 75% casualties. Resistance was collapsing all around. ‘Where are the rear areas and where is the front?’ he wrote on 11 October. ‘It is difficult to say,’ he reflected, ‘the noose around the Army is being drawn ever tighter.’ Two days later the situation had become even more tenuous.

‘The enemy has pressed us together in a circle. All around was the uninterrupted sound of gunfire, an unbroken barrage of artillery duels, mortars and machine guns – danger and fear for practically the whole day.’

Life was reduced to short snatches of rest during lulls, in woods, marshes and night bivouacs. He was soaked and cold. ‘I have not slept since 12 October,’ Schabalin complained, ‘or read a newspaper since the 2nd.’
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Pocket fighting was an unremitting nightmare for the Soviet soldier. Anatolij Tschernjajew, an infantry platoon commander, said, ‘the worst was when the Germans sent over their reconnaissance groups at nights into villages where we were accommodated, and threw grenades inside.’ This was generally the precursor to liquidation.

‘Then they went into the attack, practically surrounding the village, rolling tanks right up to us. That was truly a catastrophe, because we had absolutely nothing to use against them, no anti-tank guns or anything!’
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On 15 October Major Schabalin was ‘staggering about, bodies all around, constantly under fire’. His army ‘had been completely annihilated’, and he spent his final days filling in diary entries around a wood fire with soldiers he did not know. Schabalin’s body was recovered in light rain in a small village south-west of Paseka. There were no entries after 20 October. The importance of the little book was recognised by the searching German soldiers, who passed it on to the Second Army staff. Schabalin was one of thousands who failed to escape the pocket.
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Capture was worse than defeat. Vladimir Piotrowitsch Schirokow witnessed a column of 15,000 Soviet prisoners being driven from Vyazma to Smolensk.

‘Most of them could hardly keep going and despite that they were constantly cudgelled. They simply broke down and remained lying on the ground. If someone from the local population threw them a loaf of bread they would be beaten or even directly shot on the spot. The edges of the road were covered with bodies, which were left lying for days. Only 2,000 of these 15,000 prisoners survived their arrival at Smolensk.’
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