War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (63 page)

Even von Bock, the army group commander travelling the same road on 20 October to check supply difficulties, stated:

‘The impression of the tens of thousands of prisoners of war, who were scarcely guarded, marching toward Smolensk, is dreadful. Dead-tired and half-starved, these unfortunate people stagger along. Many have fallen dead or collapsed from exhaustion on the road.’
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Small wonder the Soviet soldier, despite being aware of the shortcomings of his own totalitarian regime, opted to fight to the death.

The rapid German advance, which resulted in the occupation of further towns and cities, was an unmitigated disaster for all that lay in its path. Panzergruppe 3 achieved the maximum progress: 400km compared to a minimum of 220km marched by Ninth Army.
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Fifteen-year-old Alexander Igorowitsch Kristakow, in a village near Vyazma, had lived a simple and happy life up to this point. The family had geese, chickens, two pigs and a cow. After receiving instructions to herd their livestock to a collective farm near Gorki, ‘the Germans,’ Kristakow said, ‘time and time again attacked us with low-flying aircraft’. He survived the experience and returned in time to witness the arrival of the Germans at the beginning of October. ‘All the chickens and geese were taken away and eaten,’ he said. Their sole cow was taken the following year. The day after he was liberated by returning Russian troops, Alexander Kristakow stepped on a mine and was blinded.

On 15 October the Germans reached Rzhev. ‘That was it so far as employment was concerned,’ said 33-year-old postmistress Jelena Gregoriewna. This was a tragedy. She had already lost her second husband at Leningrad. ‘I had to sit there with four children with nothing to eat.’ They made their way into the cellar where they hid throughout the German occupation. Four days previously the town had been bombed, prior to German entry. ‘It’s awful,’ confided Nina Sernjonowa to her diary, ‘what is going to happen?’ It became impossible to sleep at night. ‘Gestapo people came persistently asking the same question – “where have all the Communists disappeared to?” If they were not given up, the family would be shot. A German officer billeted nearby boasted that Leningrad and Moscow had been occupied by the Germans. ‘I said nothing – I did not believe him.’ Nina Sernjonowa grew to detest the Germans once the executions started and soldiers took all their food. She was not to survive the occupation.

Kalinin had fallen on 14 October and, Nikolaj Antonowitsch Schuschakow said, ‘the Germans were given full freedom over five days to plunder everything.’ Moreover, ‘they freed the convicted criminals and got them to join in.’ In all 155 shops in the town were looted and then torched. Two weeks later Alexandra Scholowa and her friend Lobow Karalisowna entered the city. ‘My God, it was a sight!’ she exclaimed. She had lived in the city before ‘but I could hardly recognise it again’. All around, the houses were in ruins, trams stood forlornly, hollow shells, with their cables dangling grotesquely into the street. There was no light or electricity. They saw there were Panzers parked around the railway station. Soldiers had pulled the statue of Lenin from its plinth in Lenin Square and were smashing it into sections to the accompaniment of laughter. A huge swastika flag hung in its place, which a young Russian tried to remove the following day. Caught in the act, he was hanged, head down, from the very plinth he had sought to clear. ‘He took two days to die,’ remarked Scholowa, ‘which served only to harden our resolve to resist.’
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From the beginning of October and continuing into November, Luftwaffe air formations attacked transport, military installations and other targets in and around Moscow. Natalya Pavlicheva, a factory worker, remembered air raid warnings sounded mostly at night. They never went home.

‘So a group of us from the home defence brigade would run up on to the rooftops. We then ran around and simply threw off the fire bombs… Nobody wants to die and of course it was frightening – especially when you were only 17 – but you can get used to anything, can’t you?’

Anastasia Egorova animatedly gesticulated during the same interview as she said:

‘Of course we were frightened. These phosphorus fire bombs were blazing and throwing off sparks and you had to go right up to them, pick them up and run off and find somewhere to put them out. Sparks could quite easily hit, you know, because they were flying off in all directions. It was terrifying, of course, but after a while we got very fierce. We’d pounce on the bombs, grab them by the tail, and stick them straight in [
a bucket of
] water.’
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The fall of Kaluga on 13 October and Kalinin the following day unhinged the defence belt south and north of Moscow. The weak defence line from Volokolamsk to Mozhaisk and Maloyaroslavets that lay in between was breached in several places. In Moscow there was little knowledge about what was going on. Actress Maria Mironowa remembered how ‘we listened to the radio the whole time, poring over the news’. It was all they lived for. ‘But it was a time full of worries. Nobody could get away from it, even a famous artist.’ In the factories workers slept in rows inside following a 12-hour day. Sixteen-year-old Natalie Shirowa, making parts for Katyusha rocket launchers, recalled: ‘We often thought of Moscow as already surrounded and did not even bother to go home after work.’
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The Communist Party Central Committee and State Defence Committee decided to evacuate a number of government agencies and the entire foreign diplomatic corps to Kuibyshev, a city 850km further east on the River Volga. The evacuation – nicknamed the ‘Big Skedaddle’ – began during the night of 15/16 October and witnessed scenes of stampeding at railway stations. These signs of collective panic, accompanied by some looting, represented the nadir of fortune for the Communist regime. Lorries loaded with families and their possessions began to move through the streets. Officials sought to leave without permits, and traffic jams developed on the eastern outskirts of Moscow. Rumours proliferated that surrender was imminent. Offices and factories stopped working. Trains entering stations were swamped by masses of passengers.

‘16 October was an awful day for Moscow,’ recalled journalist A. Maluchin, observing the panic at Kasaner station. ‘Trains were not just made up from passenger wagons,’ he said, ‘but also goods wagons and underground carriages.’ He noticed the trains were going only one direction – eastwards. ‘Trains set off without automatic safety governors [ensuring they were set distances apart], they departed in dense rows separated only by visual distance.’
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Even Lenin’s coffin was removed from its Red Square Mausoleum to be transported to safety. Stalin remained.

Stalin’s presence in the capital was a stabilising factor. Outside the city, reports of flight were causing unease. Gabriel Temkin, digging anti-tank ditches on the defence belt, said: ‘the gloomy news had a devastating effect on the morale of our labour battalion, creating a mood of complete apathy.’ Digging came to a virtual halt. There appeared little point. ‘People were grumbling, “our fortifications are just another exercise in futility”,’ he said. The morale-boosting talk from their
Politruk
(political party official) was seen as ‘hollow’ and he quickly left. ‘He knew everybody detested his speeches.’ Life for Temkin, like many others, deteriorated into a series of personal crises that quickly dwarfed the strategic events being conducted around them. As the weather got worse the left sole of his boot fell off. It could not be replaced and, worse still, with winter approaching, his underwear was stolen on one of the rare occasions the battalion received a shower. Temkin almost tangibly felt, as the weather got colder, his survival chances ebbing away.
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On 19 October General Zhukov declared Moscow to be under a state of siege and placed the capital and its population under martial law. Breakthroughs of the Mozhaisk line between Kalinin and Kaluga and another threatened breach in the Naro-Fominsk area, the third in-depth line in front of Moscow, were creating a bulge directly threatening the Soviet capital. Zhukov repeated the emergency measures he had previously enacted in front of Leningrad. Extensive defences were ordered to be constructed in depth, covering the main approaches to Moscow. Engineering work was already underway behind the first echelon of the West Front to erect anti-tank barriers in all sectors potentially vulnerable to an enemy armoured advance. Every morning and until it was dark, nearly 70,000 women and children and 30,000 factory workers marched out from the suburbs, wretchedly clothed and equipped only with hand tools, to work on the outskirts of the city. Vera Evsyukhova dug anti-tank ditches.

‘They were huge, about 8m wide and 10m deep – as big as that. It was mostly us women that did the work, and it was hard labour. We had to light fires to thaw the earth before we could dig into it. On top it was frozen solid, but deep down it was not so hard.’
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Within three weeks they had dug 361km of tank ditches and erected 366km of tank obstacles with 106km of ‘dragons’ teeth’ (tooth-shaped concrete buttresses) protected by 611km of barbed wire. They needed little encouragement. Gabriel Temkin remembered the atmosphere of unease that had permeated his labour battalion. ‘Everyone felt a nervous chill, listening to radio news about the Red Army again and again abandoning cities and territories,’ he said. ‘The Germans were coming closer and closer.’
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Bridges were prepared for demolition on all approaches, rivers and streams mined, and huge earth embankments raised, interspersed with one-metre deep ‘fish-bone’ pattern ditches, impassable to heavy vehicles. Anti-tank barriers, consisting of ditches covered with rows of barbed wire, and star-shaped iron ‘hedgehogs’, made from six jagged iron rails welded into clusters, were concreted into vital street intersections, to prevent the passage of tanks. Concrete bunkers covered these obstacles with machine guns, anti-tank and artillery pieces.
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The work was not allowed to continue totally unmolested. A 25-year-old cotton weaver, Olga Sapozhnikova, ordered to dig trenches alongside a crowd of other factory girls, remembered, ‘we were all very calm, but dazed and couldn’t take it in.’ On the first day they were strafed by a low-flying German fighter: ‘Eleven of the girls were killed and four wounded,’ she said.
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They could sense the proximity of the approaching Germans. ‘They were strange, those nights in Moscow,’ said Elizaveta Shakhova. ‘You heard the guns firing so clearly.’

‘It was freezing cold, a terrible frost, but you had to keep digging. They made us dig. We had to do it, and we did, we kept digging.’

Through it all ‘they were bombing us all the time,’ said Evsyukhova. Rumour and uncertainty reigned. ‘The Germans dropped leaflets on us stating “Surrender – Moscow is kaputt!” But we did not believe it.’
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There was no sign – at any stage – that Moscow would ever have surrendered. The decision to transfer the most important Soviet ministries and agencies to Kuibyshev had already been taken, and the evacuation of vital industrial assets to the Urals continued. Over a number of weeks from mid-October, 498 industrial operations were transported eastwards, carried in 71,000 freight cars.
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Stalin had clearly resolved to fight on, a view echoed by Soviet diplomat Valentin Bereschkow who learned later that all Moscow bridges and many public buildings, including the Kremlin, were prepared for demolition with delayed-action mines. ‘If the Germans had marched into the city,’ he said, ‘they would have experienced a lot of surprises.’ The tactic had already been employed in other overrun cities such as Kharkov and Kiev. Explosive charges fired after the occupation demolished entire buildings, killing many Germans in the process. ‘The mines were supposed to explode as the installations were occupied,’ Bereschkow explained, ‘hopefully causing heavy casualties among the military headquarters staff, expected to be the first to occupy them.’
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Communist Party activists formed workers’ battalions in every city borough. Within a few days of the crisis Moscow scraped together 25 ad hoc companies and battalions numbering 12,000 men, most of them Party or Young Communist League members. Another 100,000 workers began military training in their spare time, while 17,000 women and girls were trained as nurses and medical assistants. Journalist A. Maluchin recalled lorried convoys full of these volunteers rolling westwards, passed by refugees streaming out of the eastern exits of the city. These reinforcements were hastily incorporated into the Western Moscow defence zone. In all, 40,000 volunteer troops formed rudimentary militia divisions. By the end of October, 13 rifle divisions and five tank brigades were despatched to create a measure of stability to the threatened Volokolamsk sectors on the River Nara and Aleksin on the River Oka. By the middle of November the STAVKA was to provide the West Front with 100,000 men, 300 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces and numerous anti-tank guns. They were redirected to the threatened sectors.
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Mud and Soviet resistance had checked the German offensive at the end of October along a line running from Kalinin on the Volga, through Turginovo, Volokolamsk, Dorokhovo, Naro-Fominsk and Aleksin on the River Oka and south to the outskirts of Tula. Army Group Centre had bitten off a linear strip of 230–260km penetrating into the Russian interior. Some units were within 120–140km of Moscow. Army Group North meanwhile had retained its stranglehold on Leningrad in the north, while in the south Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt’s Army Group South was successfully maintaining its drive along the Azov coast toward Rostov. Sebastopol might hold out but the Crimean peninsula seemed about to fall. Harsh early winter sleet and rain alternating with freezing night conditions, which thawed again by day, brought the front to a standstill for three weeks. During this interlude Soviet reserves achieved a degree of stability in the threatened areas, enabling the Moscow labour force to erect an extensive series of fortifications and obstacles across the likely future route of the German advance.