The Second World War Read online

  Grossman was dismayed by the chaos and fear behind the lines. In Belev on the road to Tula, he noted: ‘Lots of mad rumours are circulating, ridiculous and utterly panic-stricken. Suddenly, there is a mad storm of firing. It turns out that someone has switched on the street lights, and soldiers and officers opened rifle and pistol fire at the lamps to put them out. If only they had fired like this at the Germans.’

  Not all Soviet formations were fighting badly, however. On 6 October the 1st Guards Rifle Corps, commanded by Major General D. D. Lelyushenko, supported by two airborne brigades and Colonel M. I. Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade, counter-attacked Guderian’s 4th Panzer Division near Mtsensk in a clever ambush. Katukov concealed his T-34s in the forest, allowing the leading panzer regiment to pass by. Then, when they were halted by Lelyushenko’s infantry, his tanks emerged from the trees and attacked. Handled well, the T-34 was superior to the Mark IV panzer, and the 4th Panzer Division suffered heavy losses. Guderian was clearly shaken to discover that the Red Army was starting to learn from its mistakes and from German tactics.

  That night it snowed, then thawed rapidly. The rasputitsa, the season of rain and mud, had arrived just in time to slow the German advance. ‘I don’t think anyone has seen such terrible mud,’ Grossman noted. ‘There’s rain, snow, hailstones, a liquid, bottomless swamp, black pastry mixed by thousands and thousands of boots, wheels and caterpillar tracks. And everyone is happy once again. The Germans must get stuck in our hellish autumn.’ But the advance, although slowed, carried on towards Moscow.

  On the Orel–Tula road, Grossman could not resist visiting the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana. There he found Tolstoy’s granddaughter packing up the house and museum to evacuate it before the Germans arrived. He immediately thought of the passage in War and Peace when old Prince Bolkonsky had to leave his house of Lysye Gory as Napoleon’s army approached. ‘Tolstoy’s grave,’ he jotted in his notebook. ‘Roar of fighters over it, humming of explosions and the majestic autumn calm. It is so hard. I have seldom felt such pain.’ The next visitor after their departure was General Guderian, who was to make the place his headquarters for the advance on Moscow.

  Only a few Soviet divisions escaped from the Viazma encirclement to the north. The smaller Briansk pocket was proving to be the greatest disaster so far, with more than 700,000 men dead or captured. The Germans scented victory and euphoria spead. The route to Moscow was barely defended. Soon the German press was claiming total victory, but this made even the ambitious Generalfeldmarschall von Bock feel uneasy.

  On 10 October, Stalin ordered Zhukov to take over command of the Western Front from Konev and the remnants of the Reserve Front. Zhukov managed to persuade Stalin that Konev (who would later become his great rival) should be retained rather than made a scapegoat. Stalin told Zhukov to hold the line at Mozhaisk, just a hundred kilometres from Moscow on the Smolensk highway. Sensing the scale of the disaster, the Kremlin ordered a new line of defence to be constructed by a quarter of a million civilians, mostly women, conscripted to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches. Numbers of them were killed by strafing German fighters as they worked.

  Discipline became even more ferocious, with NKVD blocking groups ready to shoot anyone who retreated without orders. ‘They used fear to conquer fear,’ an NKVD officer explained. The NKVD Special Detachments (which in 1943 became SMERSh) were already interrogating officers and soldiers who had escaped from encirclements. Any classed as cowards or suspected of having had contact with the enemy were shot or sent to shtrafroty – punishment companies. There, the most deadly tasks awaited them, such as leading attacks through minefields. Criminals from the Gulag were also conscripted as shtrafniks, and criminals they remained. Even the execution of a gang boss by an NKVD man shooting him in the temple had only a temporary effect on his followers.

  Other NKVD squads went to field hospitals to investigate possible cases of self-inflicted injuries. They immediately executed so-called ‘self-shooters’ or ‘left-handers’–those who shot themselves through the left hand in a naive attempt to escape fighting. A Polish surgeon with the Red Army later admitted to amputating the hands of boys who tried this, just to save them from a firing squad. Prisoners of the NKVD of course fared even worse. Beria had 157 prominent captives executed, including Trotsky’s sister. Others were dealt with by guards throwing hand-grenades into their cells. Only at the end of the month, when Stalin told Beria that his conspiracy theories were ‘rubbish’, did the ‘mincing machine’ slacken.

  The deportation of 375,000 Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan, which had begun in September, was accelerated to include all those of German origin in Moscow. Preparations to blow up the metro and key buildings in the capital began. Even Stalin’s dacha was mined. NKVD assassination and sabotage squads moved to safe houses in the city, ready to carry out guerrilla warfare against a German occupation. The diplomatic corps received instructions to depart for Kuibyshev on the Volga, a city which had already been earmarked as a reserve capital for the government. The main theatre companies in Moscow, symbols of Soviet culture, were also told to evacuate the capital. Stalin himself could not make up his mind whether to stay or leave the Kremlin.

  On 14 October, while part of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army in the south circumvented the fiercely defended city of Tula, the 1st Panzer Division captured Kalinin north of Moscow, seizing the bridge over the upper Volga and severing the Moscow–Leningrad railway line. In the centre, the SS Das Reich Division and the 10th Panzer Division arrived at the Napoleonic battlefield of Borodino, just 110 kilometres from the capital. Here they faced a hard fight against a force strengthened by the new Katyusha rocket launchers and two Siberian rifle regiments, forerunners of many divisions whose deployment round Moscow would take the Germans by surprise.

  Richard Sorge, the key Soviet agent in Tokyo, had discovered that the Japanese were planning to strike south into the Pacific against the Americans. Stalin did not trust Sorge entirely, even though he had been right about Barbarossa, but the information was confirmed by signals intercepts. The reduced threat to the far east of the Soviet Union allowed Stalin to start bringing even more divisions westwards along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Zhukov’s victory at Khalkhin Gol had played an important part in this major strategic shift by the Japanese.

  The Germans had underestimated the effect on their advance of the rain and snow, turning routes into quagmires of thick, black mud. Supplies of fuel, ammunition and rations could not get through, and the advance slowed. It was also delayed by the resistance of soldiers still trapped in the encirclement, preventing the invaders from releasing troops to continue the advance on Moscow. General der Flieger Wolfram von Richthofen flew at low altitude over the remains of the Viazma pocket, and noted the piles of corpses and the destroyed vehicles and guns.

  The Red Army was also helped by interference from Hitler. The 1st Panzer Division at Kalinin, poised to attack south towards Moscow, was suddenly told to move in the opposite direction with the Ninth Army to attempt another encirclement with Army Group North. Hitler and the OKW had no idea of the conditions in which their troops were fighting, but Siegeseuphorie, or victory euphoria in Führer headquarters, was dissipating the concentration of forces against Moscow.

  Stalin and the State Defence Committee decided on 15 October to evacuate the government to Kuibyshev. Officials were told to leave their desks and climb into lines of trucks outside which would take them to the Kazan Railway Station. Others had the same idea. ‘Bosses from many factories put their families on trucks and got out of the capital and that is when it started. Civilians started looting the shops. Walking along the street, one saw everywhere the red, contented drunken faces of people carrying rings of sausage and rolls of fabric under their arm. Things were happening which would be unthinkable even two days ago. One heard in the street that Stalin and the government had fled Moscow.’

  The panic and looting were spurred on by wild rumours that the Germans were already at the gates. Frightene
d functionaries destroyed their Communist Party cards, an act many of them were to regret later once the NKVD restored order, because they would be accused of criminal defeatism. On the morning of 16 October, Aleksei Kosygin entered the building of Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars, of which he was deputy chairman. He found the place unlocked and abandoned, with secret papers on the floor. Telephones rang in empty offices. Guessing that they were calls from people trying to discover whether the government had left, he answered one. An official asked whether Moscow would be surrendered.

  Out in the streets, the police had vanished. As in western Europe the year before, Moscow suffered from enemy-paratrooper psychosis. Natalya Gesse, hobbling on crutches after an operation, found herself ‘surrounded by mobs suspicious that I had broken my legs parachuting in from a plane’. Many of the looters were drunk, justifying their actions on the grounds that they had best take what they could before the Germans seized it. Panic-stricken crowds at stations trying to storm departing trains were described as ‘human whirlpools’ in which children were torn from their mothers’ arms. ‘What went on at Kazan station defies description,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg. Things were little better at the western train stations of Moscow, where hundreds of wounded soldiers had been dumped, uncared for, on stretchers along the platforms. Women searching desperately for a son, a husband or a boyfriend moved among them.

  Stalin, emerging from the Kremlin fortress, was shocked by the sights he saw. A state of siege was declared and NKVD rifle regiments marched in to clear the streets, shooting looters and deserters on sight. Order was brutally restored. Stalin then decided that he would stay, and this was announced on the radio. It was a critical moment, and the effect was considerable. The mood turned from mass panic to a mass determination to defend the city at all costs. It was a phenomenon similar to the change of heart during the defence of Madrid five years before.

  Stressing the need for secrecy, Stalin told the State Defence Committee that the celebrations for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution would still go ahead. Several members were aghast, but they recognized that it was probably worth the risk as a demonstration to the country and the world at large that Moscow would never yield. On the ‘eve of Revolution’, Stalin gave a speech, which was broadcast from the vast ornate hall of the Mayakovsky metro station. He evoked the great, but scarcely proletarian, heroes of Russian history, Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov. ‘The German invaders want a war of extermination. Very well then. They shall have one!’

  This was Stalin’s conspicuous re-emergence into Soviet consciousness, after several months of avoiding association with the disasters of retreat. ‘I have looked through the files of old newspapers from July to November 1941,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg many years later. ‘Stalin’s name was hardly ever mentioned.’

  The leader was now inextricably linked with the courageous defence of the capital. And the following day, 7 November, Stalin took the salute from Lenin’s empty mausoleum on Red Square, as rank upon rank of reinforcements marched through the falling snow, ready to turn north-westwards and on to the front. The canny Stalin had foreseen what an effect this coup de théâtre would have, and ensured that it was filmed for foreign and domestic newsreels.

  During the following week hard frosts set in, and on 15 November the Germans’ advance resumed. It soon became clear to Zhukov that their main line of attack would be on the Volokolamsk sector, where Rokossovsky’s 16th Army was forced to conduct a fighting retreat. Zhukov was under great pressure, and lost his temper with Rokossovsky. The contrast between the two could hardly have been greater, even though they were both former cavalrymen. Zhukov was a rather squat fireball of energy and ruthlessness, while the tall and elegant Rokossovsky was calm and pragmatic. Rokossovsky, from a family of minor Polish nobility, had been arrested towards the end of the purge of the Red Army. He had nine steel teeth to replace those knocked out of him during the ‘conveyor belt’ of interrogation sessions. Stalin had ordered his release, but reminded him from time to time that this was a temporary concession. Any mistakes and he would be returned to Beria’s thugs.

  On 17 November, Stalin signed an order that all forces and partisans should ‘destroy and burn to ashes’ all buildings in the combat zone and behind, to deny the Germans shelter in the approaching frosts. The fate of civilians was not considered for a moment. The suffering of soldiers, especially the wounded dumped on railway platforms, was also appalling. ‘Stations were covered by human excrement and wounded soldiers with bloodstained bandages,’ wrote a Red Army officer.

  By the end of November, the German Third Panzer Army was within forty kilometres of Moscow on the north-west side. One of its lead units had even seized a bridgehead across the Moscow–Volga Canal. Fourth Panzer Army had meanwhile reached a point sixteen kilometres from the western edge of Moscow, having pushed back Rokossovsky’s 16th Army. It is said that in a heavy fog a motorcyclist from the SS Deutschland Regiment drove right into Moscow and was shot down by an NKVD patrol next to the Belorussian Station. Other German units could make out the onion cupolas of the Kremlin through powerful binoculars. The Germans had been fighting desperately in the knowledge that the full force of the Russian winter would soon be upon them. But their troops were exhausted, and already many were suffering from frostbite.

  Defence works on the approaches to Moscow had continued at a frenzied rhythm. Steel ‘hedgehogs’ made of girder lengths welded together like giant caltraps acted as anti-tank barriers. The NKVD had organized ‘destroyer battalions’ to combat paratroop or sabotage attacks on key factories and as a last line of defence. Each man was issued with a rifle, ten rounds and a few grenades. Stalin, afraid that Moscow might be encircled from the northern side, ordered Zhukov to prepare a series of counter-attacks. But first he needed to reinforce the armies north-west of Moscow, battered by the Third and Fourth Panzer Armies.

  The situation also appeared critical in the south of the country. Rundstedt’s army group had secured the Donbas mining and industrial region in mid-October, just when the Romanians finally took Odessa. Manstein’s Eleventh Army in the Crimea was laying siege to the great naval base of Sebastopol. The First Panzer Army advanced rapidly ahead towards the Caucasus, leaving behind the infantry. And on 21 November, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, commanded by Brigadeführer Sepp Dietrich whom Richthofen called ‘the good old war-horse’, had entered Rostov at the entrance to the Caucasus and seized a bridgehead across the River Don. Hitler was exultant. The oilfields further south seemed within his grasp. But Kleist’s panzer spearhead was over-extended, its left flank guarded only by weakly armed Hungarian troops. Marshal Timoshenko seized the opportunity and counter-attacked across the frozen Don.

  Rundstedt, realizing that a full advance into the Caucasus was impossible before the next spring, pulled his forces back to the line of the River Mius which flowed into the Sea of Azov west of Taganrog. Hitler reacted to this first withdrawal by the German army in the war with angry disbelief. He ordered that the retreat be cancelled at once. Rundstedt offered his resignation, which was immediately accepted. On 3 December, Hitler flew down to Army Group South’s headquarters at Poltava, where that earlier invader, Charles XII of Sweden, had been decisively defeated. The next day, Hitler appointed Generalfeldmarschall von Reichenau, a convinced Nazi, whom Rundstedt disparagingly described as a roughneck who ran ‘around half-naked when taking physical exercise’.

  But Hitler was taken aback to find that Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the SS Leibstandarte, agreed with Rundstedt’s decision. And Reichenau, having assured Hitler that he would not pull back, promptly carried on with the withdrawal, presenting Führer headquarters with a fait accompli. With his hand forced, Hitler then compensated the sacked Rundstedt with a birthday present of 275,000 Reichsmark. He was often cynical about how easy it was to bribe his generals with money, the grant of estates and decorations.

  Leningrad had been saved from annihilation, partly due
to Zhukov’s ruthless leadership and the determination of the troops, but mainly because of the German decision to concentrate on Moscow. Army Group North from then on was to be the poor relation on the eastern front, hardly ever receiving reinforcements and constantly afraid of being stripped of units to strengthen formations in the centre and south of the country. This neglect on the German side was exceeded on the Soviet side, with Stalin on several occasions wanting to strip Leningrad of troops to defend Moscow. Stalin had no warm feelings for what he saw as a city of intellectuals, who despised Muscovites and were suspiciously fond of western Europe. How seriously he considered giving up the city is hard to tell, but it is quite clear that during that autumn and winter he was far more concerned about preserving the forces of the Leningrad Front than the city, let alone its citizens.

  Soviet attempts to break the encirclement from outside with the 54th Army failed to dislodge the Germans from the southernmost shore of Lake Ladoga. But at least the defenders still held the isthmus between the city and the lake, although this was partly due to the caution of the Finns who hesitated to advance on to pre-1939 Soviet territory.

  The siege settled down into a pattern, with regular German bombardments of the city at fixed times. Civilian casualties mounted, but mainly from starvation. Leningrad was effectively an island. The only connection still possible with the ‘mainland’ was across Lake Ladoga or by air. Some 2.8 million civilians were trapped, and, with half a million troops, the authorities had to cater for 3.3 million people. Food distribution was shockingly uneven in a supposedly egalitarian society. Party officials made sure that their families and close relations did not suffer, and those who controlled the supply of food, right down to individual breadshops and canteens, profited shamelessly. Bribery was often needed to obtain even the basic ration.