War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 (76 page)

Opinion concerning the retreat varied with individual experience. Horst Orlov, a Panzer company commander who had been close enough to Moscow to see its towers ‘lit by the sun’, was emphatic about the disciplined nature of the retreat. He declared during a postwar interview:

‘I can only say that in my area of responsibility, where I was committed, the retreat was conducted in an orderly manner. There were naturally losses in matériel and also personnel, but to speak of a flight would be overstating it.’

Leutnant Adolf Stamm with the Flak artillery recalled ‘awful days in front of Moscow, suffering in temperatures below −35°C and sometimes even −40°C.’ But he remembered the retreat was generally under control.

‘On 6 December, it was already St Nicholas’s Day, we received the order to clear our positions and conduct the retreat using available resources. The withdrawal was not a flight or a panic-stricken rush. Rather, positions were vacated platoon by platoon from village to village. What was particularly difficult to master was to get the vehicles started and then move back through the deep snow’
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There was total unfamiliarity with the tactical handling of a withdrawal. The German Army had never practised it in the prewar period and until now had never experienced the need to execute it. Scenes observed by Leutnant Richter, retreating with Panzergruppe 4, were repeated along Panzergruppe 3’s route. ‘Discipline is beginning to let up,’ the latter observed in a later operations report.

‘There are more and more soldiers separated from their commands walking westward, without weapons, leading cattle by ropes or pulling walking sledges filled with potatoes. Men killed by air bombardment are no longer buried … A psychosis, bordering on panic, has gripped the baggage trains, unaccustomed to this retreat, being only used to a rapid advance. Service troops, too, are without rations and are cold. They are retreating in utter confusion. Among them are those wounded who could no longer be sent to the rear… Traffic control elements working day and night can hardly cope any more. The Panzer Group’s most difficult hour has begun.’

Leutnant Richter’s unit, moving steadily westwards, had begun to speed up by 17 December. ‘But one misses the orderly hand of the High Command,’ he stated. Everything was mixed up. ‘Every vehicle is from another unit, another division.’ Morale was falling. ‘One heard the private soldiers often asking: “Where are the commanders? Will nobody create some order here?”‘ Richter felt they had a point because‘you seldom saw a high-ranking officer’. His sentiment was echoed by the Panzergruppe 3 headquarters staff:

‘The High Command can hardly know what things look like out here at the front. The seriousness of troop reports is not fully appreciated; perhaps they do not want to understand.’
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High Command was barely able to interpret and cope with a constant stream of reports across the front, all identifying previously unreported new Russian units. An advisory OKH letter was despatched to staffs to counter alarmist reports. It read: ‘The large number of enemy units identified sometimes had a paralysing effect on our leadership,’ and instructed, ‘the leadership must not be allowed to fall into a numbers psychosis’. More assessments were required. Staffs were directed to measure the combat power of often poorly trained and equipped Soviet reserve units instead of counting off the quantities, while ignoring the underlying qualities of opposing divisions. ‘Intelligence officers must be trained to be discriminating,’ the report insisted. Troops at the front meanwhile felt neglected. Leutnant Richter complained, ‘the trouble is that nobody feels responsible if the Russians come.’ When they did, we’re off! was the solution’.
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Still the ragged German columns fell back. One 7th Panzer Division officer said we had set off from Suwalki on 22 June 1941 with three complete battalions
(Abteilungen)
numbering 270 tanks, now we have only 10 fighting vehicles led by the regimental commander himself.’ There were no heavy PzKpfwIVs: ‘the last one had broken down and was blown up’. The signals battalion had lost 70 vehicles since the campaign began. Its second company had only 10 of 23 signal detachments left, the rest lost through breakdown or enemy action.
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Another veteran claimed the division ‘hardly looked like a military formation’ marching back on 10 December. Some men rode, others were on
Panje
sledges, the mass were on foot. The Panzer regiment had converted some tank crews to infantry. Only the bare necessities were carried: emergency rations and a rifle. Many fell out of the line with frostbite. One infantry officer from the 6th Schützen Regiment described the exhausting routine resisting constant Russian attempts to cut the Klin-Jaropoletz road near the River Lama.

‘Dead-tired, we went from village to village. Time after time it was “Halt! Occupy positions! Prepare to move – march!” One did not even consider rest.’
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Another Panzer officer ruefully admitted, ‘this breaking contact with the enemy and then retreating through a region long regarded as the administrative rear zone was not to the taste of the German soldier.’ Morale plummeted because, as the 20th Panzer Division officer explained, ‘being required to fall back long distances created fertile ground for encouraging panicky and disturbing rumours.’

The lot of motorised formations paled into insignificance compared to that endured by the infantry. ‘One look at the infantry,’ declared a 20th Panzer Division soldier, ‘was enough to change our minds if we ever felt compelled to complain.’ He added:

‘It was astonishing what was expected of and done by them. Worst was the cold. Temperatures could change from four days at −15°C to −20°C by day and −35°C at night and then go up and be followed by a snowstorm. Those who endured it would remember it for the rest of their days. They lay in the open and were unprotected on the roads.’
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Infantry Unteroffizier Rolf Müllender said‘nobody had reckoned on’ the sudden counter-offensive on 6 December. His unit north of Moscow was quickly bypassed. ‘A ski battalion whooshed by and we did not have a clue what had happened,’ he said.

‘Then came the order to pull back along the road toward Solnechnogorsk and Klin. We began marching with 26 men who remained from about 833 that had started the campaign as rearguard for the infantry marching ahead. One could say we were the last men in front of the enemy. Although skimpily dressed with summer coats and head warmers, we would pick up anything that could make one warm left lying behind by the dead, or our comrades. We put it all on to withstand the temperature. Weapons operated badly for the most part, especially the machine guns.’
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Infantry rearguards, such as the remnants of Leutnant Haape’s Infantry Regiment 18, faced formidable problems. Strongpoints were established around villages and some attempt made to interlock weapon systems. Soldiers adapting to extreme conditions realised that weapons, once thawed out and dry-cleaned of lubrication, could fire more reliably. Small arms were kept warm in village ovens until needed. ‘In any case,’ a wiser Haape assessed, ‘it’s damned difficult for troops to attack over open snowfields in the face of an alert enemy.’

These more effective German tactics contributed to rising casualties among attacking Soviet units. Russian officers and NCOs were tactically amateurish compared to their German counterparts. Commanders tended to assign wide frontages, as much as 9–14km for a rifle division, dispersing forces, equipment and tanks evenly across the front. Tanks were placed in support of infantry, in preference to concentrating on narrow breakthrough areas or massing on main advance routes. Such shortcomings diluted combat power and weakened the Russian capacity to strike swiftly into German rear areas with sizeable mobile forces. Snow, ice and near-Arctic conditions impeded cross-country mobility. The consequence was frontal headlong assaults against flimsy German positions, which could have been infiltrated or simply bypassed.

The Russians were well aware that ‘the German soldier was poorly clad for winter operations’. A later staff report observed, ‘he sat most of the time in warmed shelters or in buildings prepared for defence; he preferred to die in the warmth than to die in the cold.
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Russian artillery was generally employed to demolish this essential shelter. But the inevitable bunching of infantry on the objective, a feature of inexperience, was severely punished by the interlocking fire systems the Germans faultlessly created. General Zhukov felt obliged to issue a curt directive to West Front commanders within three days of the offensive to desist from profligate frontal attacks. ‘Especially created shock groups had been drawn into heavy and bloody frontal attacks,’ he later complained. The advance of the Thirtieth and First Shock Armies was held up in the Klin area due to such tactics. He called on commanders ‘to persuade their troops to bypass strongpoints of the enemy and pursue him relentlessly.’
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Primitive attempts to encircle German units often missed, or breakthroughs were not followed up by commanders fearful of German counter-measures on their flanks. The strongpoint system maximised German resources and experience, effectively networking their automatic weapons and artillery with a few Panzers in a way the Russians could not. Many German units owed their subsequent survival, despite a considerable mauling, to Soviet tactical failings and inexperience at the higher operational level to combine resources effectively enough to create successful encirclements.

German soldiers were driven by a stark philosophy simply to survive. Leutnant Haape’s regimental commander explained:

‘A soldier must learn that death is always by his side. And if we don’t want death to have complete power over us we must take it for granted that he may strike at any moment – either at us or our comrades. And we must take it as a matter of course. It’s up to every soldier to develop that attitude, or he’s not worth calling a soldier.’
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A ‘scorched-earth’ policy was conducted as rearguards retreated from village to village behind Kalinin. The falling darkness was lit from the bright flames of burning villages,’ observed Werner Pott, writing a letter home, ‘in a house which would be up in flames in half an hour.’ His unit was holding ‘a long thin wedge’ sticking out into the enemy line.

‘For weeks we have been in action without a rest or break. Day after day, marching to another quarter through snowstorms at −25°C, with frozen noses and feet so bad it makes you cry out when you take your boots off.’

‘Filth, vermin and other unpleasantries’ pervaded their lives. But beyond this it was the sight of the civilian population condemned to death by hunger or freezing that affected Pott the most, as they burned all villages through which they retreated. He described the scene:

‘Red tongues of flame shot greedily upward as if they wished to devour the heavens – the world is on fire!

‘Stooping old men and mothers with tiny children hasten by, a small bundle on their backs, carrying their last belongings. Behind us engineers are blowing bridges and houses.

‘Back home somewhere is a Christmas tree, twinkling with familiar decorations. Much loved people are singing beautiful carols. It is better not to think about it.’

Werner Pott, a 19-year-old former Hamburg student, concluded his philosophical letter with a terse statement. ‘Now we’re off again to fight on; the village is already burning from end to end.’
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Wilhelm Göbel with the 78th Infantry Division witnessed the same gloomy spectacle. ‘The nights presented an awful sight,’ he said, with the entire horizon glowing red from the fires of burning villages.’ He recalled an Unteroffizier Müller from Infantry Regiment 215, who had been given a stinging rebuke for not entirely burning the village of Dolginino, north of Mozhaisk, ‘because the weeping and crying had become too much for him’. Göbel was emphatic: every rearguard had the order to burn the village to the ground as it left.’ The consequence for the inhabitants left behind with no shelter in near-Arctic conditions was clear. They were thereby totally delivered to the mercies of the cold,’ Göbel admitted.
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Leutnant Haape described what these −45°C temperatures were like. ‘Every time we inhaled the frozen air our bodies lost heat,’ he said, ‘and the cold seemed to penetrate the marrow of our bones until walking became a stiff and awkward business.’ Nevertheless, Infantry Regiment 18 continued to burn villages as it fell back from Kalinin.

‘Nothing had to be left to the Red Army – and nothing was left. We marched with flames licking our footsteps, marched day and night, with only short halts, for we well knew that we were the rearguard… there were no troops between us and the pursuing Russians… Like Mummies we padded along, only our eyes visible, but the cold remorselessly crept into our bodies, our blood, our brains. Even the sun seemed to radiate a steely cold and at night the blood-red skies above the burning villages merely hinted a mockery of warmth.’
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Christmas was a sentimental time for the German soldier. Twenty-two-year-old infantryman Harald Henry with Ninth Army sought anxiously to deliver a letter to his parents in time for Christmas. He was concerned that the ‘dry reports’ they were getting in Germany were not the true picture, and admitted that his ‘Christmas letter’ written on 3 December ‘says too little also’. On 7 December he told them he was in poor health, with dysentery and septic lice bites, but ‘I am alive,’ he continued, ‘and uninjured, which gives me some hope to keep going’. Despite the pressures of everyday front life, Harald Henry felt an imperative to write home and stay in touch. ‘Greetings from 11.12,’ he wrote, ‘impossible to write – Harald.’ Another short note followed on 13 December and he managed a further letter on the 21st which included these last few lines: