Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe

By 28 June when Minsk fell, such fantasies were dispelled. Stalin suffered a collapse of nerve which caused him to retreat to his dacha in the forest outside Moscow. When a Kremlin delegation headed by Anastas Mikoyan visited him on the 30th, he greeted them with obvious unease, asking sullenly, ‘Why have you come?’ He appears to have anticipated his own overthrow by the minions whom his vast misjudgement had betrayed. Instead, those irredeemably cowed and subservient men besought their ruler to lead them. This, at last, Stalin roused himself to do; on 3 July, he broadcast to the Russian people. In a notable break with the uncompromising authoritarianism that defined his rule, he began with an emotional appeal: ‘Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Fighters of our army and fleet! I address you, my friends!’ He called for a ‘Patriotic War’, the pre-emptive destruction of everything useful in the enemy’s path, and partisan warfare behind the front. Implicitly recognising the British as allies, without irony he declared the war to be part of ‘a united front of peoples standing for freedom’. Then he threw himself into personal direction of every detail of the Soviet Union’s defence as chairman of the Stavka (Staff HQ), the State Committee for Defence, the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Transport Commission. On 8 August, he also appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Red Army.

Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler, Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat. His insistence that ground should be held to the last, even when armies faced encirclement, precipitated their destruction. Following the early battles, thousands of officers and men deemed guilty of incompetence or cowardice were shot, including Western Front commander Dmitry Pavlov. Stalin responded to reports of mass surrenders and desertions with draconian sanctions. His Order 270 of 16 August 1941 called for the execution of ‘malicious deserters’, and the arrest of their families: ‘Those falling into encirclements are to fight to the last…Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by all available means.’ Order 270 was read aloud by commissars at thousands of soldiers’ assemblies.

In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion; many more were shot out of hand, without a pretence of due process. A total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders – more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war. Even Russians who escaped from captivity and returned to the Soviet lines were seized by the NKVD and dispatched to Siberia or to staff battalions – suicide units – which became institutionalised a few months later, in the proportion of one to each Soviet army – the equivalent of a Western Allied corps. As Hitler’s spearheads approached Moscow, more than 47,000 alleged deserters were detained in the city; hundreds of people were executed for alleged espionage, desertion or ‘fascist agitation’. Political officers at every level were granted powers matching those of operational commanders, a grievous impediment to decision-making on the battlefield. Stalin sought to manage personally the movements not merely of armies, but of single divisions.

The German invasion prompted a modest surge of popular enthusiasm for Mother Russia: some 3,500 Muscovites volunteered for military service within thirty-six hours, as did 7,200 men in Kursk province in the first month. But many Russians were merely appalled by their nation’s predicament. The NKVD reported a Moscow legal adviser named Izraelit saying that the government had ‘missed the German offensive on the first day of the war, and this led to the subsequent destruction and colossal losses of aircraft and personnel. The partisan movement which Stalin called for – that’s a completely ineffective form of warfare. It is a gust of despair. As for hoping for help from Britain and the United States, that’s mad. The USSR is in a ring, and we can’t see a way out.’

Correspondent Vasily Grossman described an encounter with a cluster of peasants behind the front: ‘They are crying. Whether they are riding somewhere, or standing by their fences, they begin to cry as soon as they begin to speak, and one feels an involuntary desire to cry too. There’s so much grief!…An old woman thought she might see her son in the column that was trudging through the dust. She stood there until evening and then came to us. “Soldiers, take some cucumbers, eat, you are welcome.” “Soldiers, drink this milk.” “Soldiers, apples.” “Soldiers, curds.” “Soldiers, please take this.” And they cry (these women), they cry, looking at the men marching past them.’ Yevgeni Anufriev was one of a host of messengers delivering call-up orders to the homes of reservists: ‘We were surprised how many of the recipients tried to hide so that they wouldn’t have to accept the papers. There was no enthusiasm for the war at that stage.’

The overwhelming majority of the Red Army’s soldiers were conscripts, no more eager for martyrdom than their British or American counterparts. Some arrived drunk at mobilisation centres, after long trudges from their villages. Soviet educational standards had risen since the Revolution, but many recruits were illiterate. The best human material was drafted to units of the NKVD, directed by Lavrenti Beria, which eventually grew into an elite enforcement arm 600,000 strong. Men from Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic republics were deemed too politically unreliable to serve in tank crews. As a consequence of Stalin’s purges the Red Army suffered a critical lack of competent officers and NCOs.

Infantrymen in the first months of war were taught only how to march, wearing portyanki – footcloths – to compensate for the shortage of boots; to take cover on command; to dig; and to perform simple drills with wooden rifles. There were insufficient weapons, no barracks or transport. Each man learned to cherish a spoon as his most useful possession – veterans said they might throw away their rifles, but never the spoons tucked into their boots. Only officers had watches. In the desperate days of 1941, many recruits were herded into action within a week or two of being drafted. A regimental commissar named Nikolai Moskvin wrote despairingly in his diary on 23 July: ‘What am I to say to the boys? We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us?’

Moskvin did his best in a harangue to his unit, but next day acknowledged its failure: thirteen men had deserted during the night. A Jewish refugee, Gabriel Temkin, watched Russian troops advancing to the front near Białystok, ‘some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks.’ Self-inflicted wounds were commonplace. When a war correspondent sought to flatter a Soviet commander by asserting that casualties looked astonishingly cheerful as they arrived at hospitals from the battlefield, the general responded cynically, ‘Especially those wounded in the left hand.’ Self-mutilation declined sharply after suspects began to be shot. Beyond sanctions for failure, on 1 September the Stavka introduced the only comfort ever provided to its soldiers: the legendary ‘hundred grams’ or ‘product 61’, a daily allowance of vodka. This proved important in sustaining men’s will to resist, but reinforced the Red Army’s pervasive, self-immolatory culture of drunkenness.

A critical strand in the Soviet Union’s response to Barbarossa was a commitment to the doctrine of total mobilisation, first articulated by Mikhail Frunze, the brilliant war minister under Lenin. Michael Howard has observed that, while the Russians suffered a stunning tactical surprise in June 1941, strategically and psychologically they had been preparing themselves since 1917 to fight a big war against Western capitalism. It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the eastward evacuation of key factories and workers, the fortitude of those who carried it out, and the importance of its success. Russia’s industrial migration eventually embraced 1,523 undertakings, including 1,360 major plants. Fifteen per cent were transferred to the Volga, 44 per cent to the Urals, 21 per cent to Siberia and 20 per cent to Soviet Central Asia, in 1.5 million railway wagon-loads. Some 16.5 million workers embarked on new lives in conditions of appalling privation, labouring eleven hours a day, six days a week, initially often under open skies. It is hard to imagine that British or American workers could have established and operated production lines under such handicaps.

Stalin could justly claim that his enforced industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, at the cost of imposing misery and death on millions of dispossessed peasants, alone made it possible for the country now to build the tanks and planes to resist Hitler. His prioritisation of heavy industries capable of undertaking weapons manufacture reflected his acceptance of Frunze’s total war concept. An American diplomat evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga was one day astonished to find himself in the midst of a vast, unidentified industrial area a few miles from the city, which the Russians had ironically christened Bezymyanny – ‘Nameless’. On a nearby airfield stood hundreds of newly completed aircraft, produced in its plants. The 1941 industrial evacuation proved one of the crucial achievements of Russia’s war. Every Soviet citizen over fourteen was declared eligible for mobilisation for industrial labour. With civilian rations cut to starvation levels, only the produce of private vegetable gardens enabled millions to survive. The nation was officially informed that squirrel meat contained more calories than pork, and those who could catch such prey ate it.

Though astonishing industrial output was achieved amid chronic hunger, it would be mistaken to idealise this: production of a Soviet aero engine required five times as many man hours as its US counterpart. Yet the evacuation represented part of what a British intelligence officer once called ‘the Russian genius for piecemeal improvisation’. Another feature of total war was the wholesale deportation of minorities whose loyalty was deemed suspect. Stalin accepted the drain on vital transport resources needed to remove – for instance – 74,225 ‘Volga Germans’ from their own little republic to remote Kazakhstan. Later, they would be followed by many more such outcasts, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars.

In western Russia, the invaders’ juggernaut still rolled forward, sustaining complacency in Berlin. Hitler busied himself with detailed planning for his new empire. He decreed the permanence of occupation, guided by three principles: ‘first to rule, second to administer, third to exploit’; all dissent was to be rewarded by death. As early as 31 July, Goering ordered preparations for a ‘total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews were slaughtered where they were found by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads which followed the Wehrmacht’s spearheads. Nazi officials began drafting plans for a transfer east of thirty million Germanic colonists. Hundreds of thousands of young women were shipped to the Reich from Ukraine and the Baltic states to become domestic servants and farm labourers. Some went not unwillingly: amid the ruin of their shattered homes and communities, they faced destitution. On 19 August, in his diary Goebbels expressed surprise that Hitler thought the war might end soon and suddenly: ‘The Führer believes a moment may come when Stalin will sue for peace…I asked him what he would do if that happened. The Führer replied that he would agree to peace. What then happened to Bolshevism would not matter to us. Bolshevism without the Red Army does not represent a threat.’

Since the 1917 Revolution, the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven million of Stalin’s people, of whom sixteen million were civilians. A soldier named Vasily Slesarev received a letter, carried to the Soviet lines by partisans, from his twelve-year-old daughter Manya in their home village near Smolensk: ‘Papa, our Valik died and is in the graveyard…Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home was burnt, and Slesarev’s son Valerii died of pneumonia while hiding from the invaders. Manya continued: ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here. And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them humans, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’ If such missives were cynically exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine, they reflected real circumstances and passionate sentiments in thousands of communities across vast expanses of Russia.

Sergeant Victor Kononov wrote to his family on 30 November, describing his experiences after being taken prisoner by the Germans: ‘The fascists drove us on foot to the rear for six days during which they gave us neither water nor bread…After these six days we escaped. We saw so much…The Germans were robbing our collective farmers, taking their bread, potatoes, geese, pigs, cattle and even their rags. We saw farmers hanging on gallows, corpses of partisans who had been tortured and shot…The Germans fear every bush, every little noise. In every collective farmer, old or young, they see a partisan.’

The partisan movement, sustaining armed resistance behind the German lines, began in June 1941 and became one of the most notable features of Russia’s war. By the end of September the NKVD claimed that 30,000 guerrilla fighters were operating in Ukraine alone. It was impossible for the invaders to secure the huge wildernesses behind the front. But bands of desperate men, conducting a campaign dependent on starving civilians for food, were by no means acclaimed by them as heroes. One of their commissars, Nikolai Moskvin, wrote: ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans. A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’ Later in the campaign he added an emotional postscript: ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman sufferings.’ So did civilians. The struggle for survival, in a universe in which the occupiers controlled most of the food, caused many women to sell their bodies to Germans, and many men to enlist as auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht – ‘Hiwis’, as they became known: 215,000 Soviet citizens died wearing German uniforms. But partisan operations achieved a strategic importance in Russia, harassing the German rear and disrupting lines of communication, unmatched anywhere else in the Nazi empire save Yugoslavia.

Moreover, for all the Wehrmacht’s dramatic successes and advances, the Red Army remained unbroken. If many of Stalin’s soldiers readily surrendered, others fought on, even in hopeless circumstances. They astonished the Germans by their week-long defence of the frontier fortress of Brest in June; a divisional report asserted that its attackers were obliged to overcome ‘a courageous garrison that cost us a lot of blood…The Russians fought with exceptional stubbornness…They displayed superb infantry training and a splendid will to resist.’ The Soviets had some good heavy tanks. As Hitler’s commanders smashed one Soviet army, they were bemused to find another taking its place. On 8 July German intelligence reported that, out of 164 Soviet formations identified at the front, eighty-nine had been destroyed. Yet by 11 August the mood of Halder in Berlin was much sobered: ‘It is increasingly clear that we underestimated the Russian colossus…We believed that the enemy had about 200 divisions. Now we are counting 360. These forces are not always well-armed and equipped and they are often poorly led. But they are there.’

Helmuth von Moltke, an anti-Nazi working in the German Abwehr, wrote to his wife, expressing regret that he had been foolish enough ‘in my heart of hearts’ to approve the invasion. Like many of his fellow aristocrats in France and Britain, his loathing for communism had exceeded his antipathy to Hitler: ‘I believed that Russia would collapse from within and that we could then create an order in that region which would present no danger to us. But nothing of this is to be noticed: far behind the front Russian soldiers are fighting on, and so are peasants and workers; it is exactly as in China. We have touched something terrible and it will cost many victims.’ He added a week later: ‘One thing seems certain to me in any case: between now and 1st April next year more people will perish miserably between the Urals and Portugal than ever before in the history of the world. And this seed will sprout. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind, but after such a wind as this what will the whirlwind be like?’

Initial bewilderment among the Russian people following the invasion was rapidly supplanted by hatred for the invaders. A Soviet fighter landed back at its field with human flesh adhering to its radiator grille, after a German ammunition truck exploded beneath it. The squadron commander curiously picked off fragments, and summoned the unit doctor to examine them. He pronounced: ‘Aryan meat!’ A war correspondent wrote in his diary: ‘Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time – a time of iron – has come!’

Hitler repeatedly switched objectives: at his personal insistence, in July Army Group Centre, driving for Moscow, halted in the face of strong Russian resistance. This enabled German forces further north to push forward to Leningrad, while those in the south thrust onwards across Ukraine. At Kiev, they achieved another spectacular encirclement, and the spirits of the victorious panzer crews rose again. ‘I felt an incredible sense of triumph,’ wrote Hans-Erdmann Schönbeck. Once more, vast columns of dejected prisoners, 665,000 of them, tramped westwards towards cages in which they starved. In a hostel at Oryl, three hundred miles south of Moscow, on 2 October Vasily Grossman and some correspondent colleagues came upon a school map of Europe: ‘We go to look at it. We are terrified at how far we have retreated.’ Two days later, he described a scene on the battlefield:

I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I’m seeing now…Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight columns, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-drawn carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with coloured sackcloth, veneer, tin…there are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases. This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean…hundreds of metres wide.

The German Winter Offensives 1941 (#ulink_19bb0c43-e05f-5599-b6e9-b39735f5d33d)

The rout described by Grossman was a consequence of the success of the German southern thrust. Meanwhile in the north, Leningrad was encircled and besieged. Russian morale was at its lowest ebb, organisation and leadership pitifully weak. Operations were chronically handicapped by the paucity of radios and telephone links. The Red Army had lost nearly three million men – 44,000 a day – many of them in the great encirclements at Kiev and Vyaz’ma. Stalin started the war with almost five million soldiers under arms; now, this number was temporarily reduced to 2.3 million. By October ninety million people, 45 per cent of Russia’s pre-war population, inhabited territory controlled by the Germans; two-thirds of the country’s pre-war manufacturing plant had been overrun.

Foreign observers in Moscow, especially British, assumed the inevitability of Russian defeat, and merely sought to predict the duration of residual resistance. But on the battlefield, Stalin’s soldiers fought doggedly on. They were half-starved, short of ammunition, sometimes deployed without arms and dependent on seizing those of the dead. Even Molotov cocktails, most primitive of anti-tank weapons, were in short supply until factory women began filling 120,000 a day. The Russians lost twenty casualties for every German, six tanks for every panzer; in October their losses were even worse than those of the summer, with sixty-four divisions written off. But other formations survived, and clung to their positions. On the southern front a Captain Kozlov, Jewish commander of a Soviet motorised rifle battalion, said to Vasily Grossman: ‘I have told myself that I will be killed whatever happens, today or tomorrow. And once I realised this, it became so easy for me to live, so simple, and even somehow so clear and pure. I go into battle without any fear, because I have no expectations.’ Kozlov may even have been telling the truth.

Russia was saved from absolute defeat chiefly by the size of the country and of its armies. The Germans seized great tracts of territory, but larger ones remained; the 900-mile initial front broadened to 1,400 miles when the invaders reached the Leningrad–Odessa line. They destroyed hundreds of Soviet divisions, yet there were always more. Moscow was shocked by the readiness of its units to surrender, and of subject populations – notably in Ukraine and the Baltic republics – to embrace the Germans. But the dogged animal stubbornness of some Red soldiers, which had initially bewildered the Germans, now began to alarm them; every Russian who died cost the Wehrmacht effort, ammunition and precious time to kill. Hitler’s young crusaders found it intoxicating to ride their bucketing tanks across hundreds of miles of enemy territory, but the strain on machinery was relentless; as men grew tired, so too did their vehicles: tracks wore out, cables frayed, springs broke. The strength of many formations was badly reduced: by autumn, 20 per cent of the original invasion force was gone, and two-thirds of its armour and vehicles; only thirty-eight tanks remained in one panzer formation, and barely sixty in another. A division commander wrote of the importance of reducing losses ‘if we do not intend to win ourselves to death’.

By September, Moscow was tantalisingly close. But if Russian counterattacks were clumsy, as at Smolensk between 30 August and 8 September, they remained amazingly persistent. Between June 1941 and May 1944, each month Germany suffered an average of 60,000 men killed in the east; though the enemy’s losses were far greater, this was a shocking statistic. One of its symbolic components was Lt. Walter Rubarth, killed on 26 October fighting for the Minsk–Moscow road; this was the man who, as a sergeant seventeen months earlier, led the triumphant German crossing of the Meuse. A worm of apprehension gnawed at his comrades: ‘Perhaps it is only “talk” that the enemy is broken and will never rise again,’ wrote Hans-Jürgen Hartmann. ‘I cannot help myself – I am totally bewildered. Will the whole war still be over before winter?’

Yet Hitler’s confidence was unimpaired. With Leningrad encircled and his armies triumphant in Ukraine, he had secured his flanks and was ready to resume the assault on Moscow. In an address on 2 October, he described the Wehrmacht’s drive on the capital as ‘the last large-scale decisive battle of this year’, which would ‘shatter the USSR’. Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr wrote: ‘If we don’t succeed this month we’ll never succeed.’ But it was perilously late in the season. The price of Germany’s advances elsewhere was that the Russians were granted time to strengthen their line before Moscow. Zhukov, Stalin’s ablest commander, had been sacked as Chief of the General Staff on 29 July for insisting upon the evacuation of Kiev; he then became commander of the Reserve Front, in which role he quickly made himself indispensable, and secured credit for organising the defence of Leningrad. Now, he was recalled to direct the salvation of the capital.

Six German armies – 1.9 million men, 14,000 guns, a thousand tanks and 1,390 aircraft – participated in Hitler’s Operation Typhoon, the ‘decisive’ assault on Moscow. Once more they swept forward, and once more the Russians suffered vast losses: eight Soviet armies reeled in the path of the offensive, many units broke, many more were cut off. Major Ivan Shabalin, a political officer struggling to lead a mass of stragglers out of an encircled pocket, wrote in his diary on 13 October, a few days before his death: ‘It is wet and cold and we are moving terribly slowly – all our vehicles are bogged down on the muddy roads…More than fifty had to be abandoned in ground that resembled a quagmire; about the same number are stuck fast in a nearby field. At 0600 the Germans opened fire on us – a continuous bombardment of artillery, mortars and heavy machine-guns – and it went on all day…I cannot remember when I last slept properly.’ On 15 October German tank gunner Karl Fuchs exulted: ‘From now on, Russian resistance will be minor – all we have to do is keep rolling forward…Our duty has been to fight and free the world from this communist disease. One day, many years hence, the world will thank the Germans and our beloved Führer for our victories here in Russia.’

Yet the mud Ivan Shabalin complained of was already proving more dangerous to the Germans, as they struggled to advance, than to the defenders holding their ground. Autumn rains were part of Russia’s natural cycle, but those that began on 8 October 1941 astonished the commanders of the all-conquering Wehrmacht, which was strange, since several of them had fought there between 1914 and 1917. In a vast country with few and poor roads – only 40,000 miles of tarmac, less than 50,000 of rail track – they failed to anticipate the impact of weather upon mobility. Suddenly, the racing panzer spearheads found themselves checked, tank tracks thrashing ineffectually in a morass. The German supply system floundered under the strain of shifting food and ammunition across hundreds of miles in weather that deteriorated daily.

Soviet reinforcements were arriving from the east, for Stalin’s Tokyo agent Richard Sorge had convinced him that the Japanese would not attack in Siberia. The rains became heavier, and soon it grew cold. ‘We have had continuous sleet and snow,’ lamented German chaplain Ernst Tewes. ‘Our men are suffering – the vehicles are not properly covered and winter clothing has not yet arrived. We are struggling to move along terrible roads.’ Soldier Heinrich Haape bemoaned the difficulties of keeping supply wagons moving: ‘The men hauled and pushed, the horses sweated and strained – at times we had to take a brief ten-minute rest from sheer exhaustion. Then, back to the transport, our legs in black mud up to the knees – anything to keep the wheels moving.’

Almost every man engaged on both sides in the battles of those days endured extraordinary experiences. Nikolai Redkin, a thirty-five-year-old infantryman, wrote to his wife on 23 October: ‘Hello, Zoya! I barely escaped death in the last battle. My chances of survival were one in a hundred, but I made it…Imagine a party of soldiers surrounded on all sides by enemy tanks and forced against a 70-metre-wide stretch of riverbank. There was only one way out – jump in the river, or die. I jumped and swam. But the bank remained under heavy enemy fire. I had to sit in ice-cold autumn water for three hours, completely numb. When darkness fell the German tanks pulled back and I was picked up by collective farmers. They thawed me and cared for me. It took all of ten days for me to get back from the enemy’s rear areas to our lines. Now I am back with my unit and ready to fight. We shall have a brief rest now, then return to the battle. Damn us if we don’t make the Germans take the same bath as we had. We shall make them bath in snow until they die.’ Redkin’s wish was eventually fulfilled, but he himself did not live to see it: he was still fighting thirty months later when killed in action near Smolensk.

The Germans were weather-bound. Army surgeon Peter Bamm wrote: ‘The back wheel of some horse-drawn vehicle in the mile-long column slips into a deep shell crater concealed by a puddle of water. The wheel breaks. The shaft rises in the air. The horses, wrenched upwards, shy and kick. One of the traces parts. The vehicle behind tries to overtake on the left, but is unable to drive quite clear of the deep ruts. The right-hand back wheel of the second vehicle catches in the left-hand back wheel of the first. The horses rear and start kicking in all directions. There is no going forwards or backwards. An ammunition lorry returning empty from the front tries to pass the hopeless tangle. It slowly subsides into the ditch and sticks fast. Everyone becomes infected with uncontrollable fury. Everyone shouts at everyone else. Sweating, swearing, mud-spattered men start laying into sweating, shivering, mud-caked horses that are already frothing…This scene is repeated a hundred times a day.’

On 30 October, panzer commander Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner wrote despairingly: ‘The roads have become quagmires – everything has come to a halt. Our tanks cannot move. No fuel can get through to us, the heavy rain and fog make air drops almost impossible.’ He added: ‘Dear God, give us fourteen days of frost. Then we will surround Moscow!’ Hoepner got his weather wish soon enough – far more than fourteen days of frost. But the descent of sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow did nothing for the Wehrmacht, and much for its enemies. German vehicle and weapon lubricant froze, and soon likewise soldiers. The Russians, by contrast, were equipped to fight on.

The second week of October 1941 was afterwards identified as the decisive period of the crisis. Zhukov was summoned to the Kremlin; he found Stalin ailing with ’flu, standing before a map of the front, complaining bitterly about a lack of reliable information. The general drove forward to the so-called Mozhaisk defence line, where he was appalled to find yawning gaps, wide open to German assault. ‘In essence,’ he said later, ‘all the approaches to Moscow were open. Our troops could not have stopped the enemy.’ Zhukov telephoned Stalin to report. He recognised that if the Germans attacked in strength, the capital was doomed. Much of the bureaucracy of Stalin’s government, together with diplomatic missions, was evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev, five hundred miles east on the Volga. Beria conducted a frenzy of shootings of ‘dissident elements’ in his prisons. One batch of 157 executed on 3 October included several women: Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, widow of prominent purge victim Lev Kamenev; a thirty-one-year-old air force major named Mariya Nesterenko; forty-year-old Aleksandra Fibich-Savchenko, wife of a senior ordnance officer. Moscow’s key installations and industrial plants were prepared for demolition. A quarter of a million people, mostly women, were set to work digging anti-tank ditches in the suburbs. Panic was reflected in widespread looting of shops. Beria found it convenient to depart for a visit to the safety of the Caucasus. The dictator himself was about to quit the capital.

Suddenly, however, on the evening of 18 October Stalin changed his mind. He stayed, temporarily moved his office to Air Defence headquarters in Kirov Street, and declared Moscow a fortress. Order on the streets was restored by a curfew and imposition of the usual brutal sanctions. On 7 November, by a brilliant propaganda stroke, units en route to the front were diverted to stage the traditional parade through the capital celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. That night came the first heavy snowfall of the year. The Germans, their operations crippled by the weather, lacked sufficient mass to make the final breakthrough; they languished outside the city, suffering rapidly increasing privations. Halder and Bock insisted that a further thrust should be made. More ground was gained: the advancing spearheads occupied some of Moscow’s outlying tram stations while aircraft and artillery bombarded the city.

Some Russians were sincerely moved by Stalin’s appeals for desperate measures in desperate circumstances. A Moscow plastics worker said: ‘The leader did not remain silent about the fact that our troops have had to retreat. He does not hide the difficulties that lie ahead for his people. After this speech I want to work even harder. It has mobilised me for great deeds.’ But sceptics were not lacking – it would be mistaken to exaggerate Russian unity and confidence in the winter of 1941. A Moscow engineer said: ‘All this talk about mobilising the people and organising civil defence just goes to show that the situation at the front is absolutely hopeless. It’s clear that the Germans will take Moscow soon and Soviet power will not hold out.’ Here was an echo of the despair that overtook some informed British people in 1940. Further south in Kursk province a woman said: ‘Shoot me if you like, but I’m not digging any trenches. The only people who need trenches are the communists and Jews. Let them dig for themselves. Your power is coming to an end and we’re not going to work for you.’

But amid such reluctant comrades, a bare sufficiency of patriots and fighters held the line and repulsed the invaders. By the end of November, the German advance had exhausted itself. ‘The Führer himself has taken charge,’ wrote Kurt Grumann, ‘but our troops walk around as if they were doomed. Our soldiers hack at the frozen ground, but the heaviest blows yield only enough earth to fill one’s fingernails. Our strength is decreasing every day.’ Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner said: ‘We are at the end of our personnel and materiel strength.’ Germany’s fuel situation was so critical that its navy was virtually immobilised. The army’s supply system struggled to support spearheads three hundred miles beyond the forward dumps at Smolensk. A gallows joke circulated in German official circles: ‘Eastern campaign extended by a month owing to great success.’

In Berlin on 28 November, a conference of industrialists chaired by armaments supremo Fritz Todt reached a devastating conclusion: the war against Russia was no longer winnable. Having failed to achieve a quick victory, Germany lacked resources to prevail in a sustained struggle. Next day, Todt and tank-production chief Walter Rohland met Hitler. Rohland argued that, once the United States became a belligerent, it would be impossible to match Allied industrial strength. Todt, though an ardent Nazi, said, ‘This war can no longer be won by military means.’ Hitler demanded, ‘How then shall I end this war?’ Todt replied that only a political outcome was feasible. Hitler dismissed such logic. He chose to convince himself that the imminent accession of Japan to the Axis would transform the balance of strength in Germany’s favour. But the November diary of army chief of staff Franz Halder records other remarks by Hitler that acknowledged the implausibility of absolute triumph. For the rest of the war, those responsible for Germany’s economic and industrial planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable. They drafted a planning paper in December 1941 entitled ‘The Requirements for Victory’. This concluded that the Reich needed to commit the equivalent of $150 billion to arms manufacture in the succeeding two years; yet such a sum exceeded German weapons expenditure for the entire conflict. Whatever the prowess of the Wehrmacht, the nation lacked means to win; it could aspire only to force its enemies to parley, together or severally.

Many more months elapsed before the Allies saw that the tide of war had turned. In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes. But it is a critical historical reality that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become impossible, because Russia remained undefeated. Some thereafter nurtured hopes that Germany might negotiate an acceptable peace. But they, and perhaps Hitler also in the innermost recesses of his brain, knew the decisive strategic moment had passed. Gen. Alfred Jodl, the Führer’s closest and most loyal military adviser, asserted in 1945 that his master understood in December 1941 that ‘victory could no longer be achieved’. This did not mean, of course, that Hitler reconciled himself to Germany’s defeat: instead, he now anticipated a long war, which would expose the fundamental divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. He aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to force his enemies to make terms, and he clung to this hope until April 1945. Since the Western Powers and the Russians shared morbid and persistent fears of each other seeking a separate peace, Hitler’s speculation was at least a little less fanciful than it might now appear. Only time would show that the struggle was destined to be fought out to the end; that the rupture he anticipated between the West and the Soviet Union would indeed take place, but too late to save the Third Reich.

7

Moscow Saved, Leningrad Starved

Those who fought the war saw its turning point in late 1942, when Japanese advances in the Pacific were checked, and the Germans eclipsed at Stalingrad and in North Africa. For months before those events, the Allied nations endured a diet of almost unbroken ill tidings, which the United States’ entry into the conflict could not deflect. Konstantin Rokossovsky, the most glamorous as well as one of the most formidable of Stalin’s generals, was commanding Sixteenth Army north of Moscow. In mid-November he told a reporter, ‘Soon the Germans will start to get washed out and the time will come – we’ll be in Berlin.’ His words later seemed prescient, but at the time few people around the world grasped the gravity of the Wehrmacht’s predicament in Russia, the fact that some of Hitler’s closest advisers already believed his bid for global domination doomed.

German forces were still thrusting forward north and south of Moscow, but losing momentum. On 17 November, a Wehrmacht division broke and fled in the face of an attack by new Soviet T-34 tanks. Fresh Russian armies were taking the field; the invaders were running out of armour, fuel, men and faith. A young SS officer wrote: ‘Thus we are approaching our final goal, Moscow, step by step. It is icy cold…To start the [vehicle] engines, they must be warmed by lighting fires under the oil pan. The fuel is partially frozen, the motor oil is thick and we lack anti-freeze…The remaining limited combat strength of the troops diminishes further due to the continuous exposure to the cold…The automatic weapons…often fail to operate because the breechblocks can no longer move.’ If a man spat, the moisture froze before reaching the ground. A single regiment reported 315 frostbite cases. On 3 December Hoepner, commanding Fourth Panzer Group, reported: ‘The offensive combat power of the Corps has run out. Reasons: physical and moral over-exertion, loss of a large number of commanders, inadequate winter equipment…The High Command should decide whether a withdrawal should be undertaken.’

Again and again the Germans threw themselves at the Russian positions – and again and again they were repulsed. Georgy Osadchinsky saw a group of German tanks and supporting infantry mill in confusion before a railway embankment they could not pass, as Soviet guns wreaked havoc. Tank after tank caught fire, and the survivors began to retreat. He watched a German soldier flounder helpless in the snow on all fours, while others scrambled clumsily back towards their own line. ‘Relief and happiness swept through our ranks,’ wrote Osadchinsky. ‘The Germans did not seem so terrible now – they could be beaten.’ Russian tactics were still murderously clumsy, based upon frontal assaults launched at Stalin’s personal behest: one such, against the flank of the German Ninth Army, caused the slaughter of 2,000 men and horses of a cavalry division. Tactical leadership was poor, troops ill-trained; Rokossovsky railed against Zhukov’s insistence on the doctrine of ‘no retreat’, imposed by the Kremlin. Russian blood leached into the snow in unimaginable volume.

But German commanders still underrated their foes. An army intelligence report on 4 December concluded that ‘At present the enemy in front of Army Group Centre are not capable of conducting a counter-offensive without significant reserves.’ They had no notion that Zhukov had been reinforced by nine new armies, twenty-seven divisions; more horsed cavalry units had been raised, which could move through snow where vehicles could not go. The invaders stood just twenty-five miles from the Kremlin, with spearheads nine miles from the capital’s outskirts. But, after suffering 200,000 dead since the start of Typhoon, they had shot their bolt.

On 5 December, the Russians launched a massive assault which caught the Germans almost literally frozen in their positions. The Stavka had awaited the assistance of General Winter. The thermometer fell to 30 degrees below zero Celsius, so that German lubricants hardened while Russian weapons and tanks still worked – the T-34 had a compressed-air starter, immune to frost. A stunned infantryman named Albrecht Linsen described the response of his unit to the Soviet assault: ‘Out of the snowstorm soldiers were running back, scattering in all directions like a panic-stricken herd of animals. A lone officer stood against this desperate mass; he gesticulated, tried to pull out his pistol and then simply let it pass. Our platoon commander made no attempt at all to stop people. I paused, wondering what to do, and there was an explosion right next to me and I felt a searing pain in my right thigh…I thought: “I am going to die here, 21 years old, in the snow before Moscow.”’

The Russians smashed into the exposed German salients north and south of Moscow, then exploited westward. The unthinkable became reality: the invincible Wehrmacht began to retreat. ‘Each time we leave a village, we set it alight,’ wrote Lt. Gustav Schrodek. ‘It is a primitive form of self-defence, and the Russians hate us for it. Yet its grim military logic is clear – to deny our pursuing opponents shelter in the terrible cold.’ Lt. Kurt Grumann wrote from a field dressing-station: ‘Eighty men were brought in here today, half of whom have second-or third-degree frostbite. Their swollen legs are covered in blisters, and they no longer resemble limbs but rather some formless mass. In some cases gangrene has already set in. What is it all for?’ Many tanks and vehicles were abandoned, immured in snow and ice. ‘The ghost of the Napoleonic Grande Armée hovers ever more strongly above us like a malignant spirit,’ wrote gunner Josef Deck.

For ten days the Wehrmacht staggered back through a white wilderness landmarked with huddled corpses, the blackened carcasses of abandoned vehicles. Most German commanders favoured a major withdrawal. Hitler, displaying an obstinacy which mirrored that of Stalin, called instead for ‘fanatical resistance’. The ardent Nazi General Walther Model played a hero’s part in stabilising the line. Stalin, against Zhukov’s strong advice, insisted upon extending operations. On 5 January he ordered a counter-offensive the length of the front. Once more following Hitler’s example, by spurning an opportunity to concentrate forces against the weak point in the German line Stalin threw away the possibility of a great victory; Rokossovsky later offered a scornful catalogue of the blunders made, chances missed. The Germans still resisted fiercely, mowing down attackers in tens of thousands. Soviet reserves were soon exhausted, and their advance ran out of steam. Model recovered some lost ground, and Zhukov’s hopes of encircling Army Group Centre were frustrated. But a decisive reality persisted: the invaders had been pushed back between sixty and 150 miles. The Russians held Moscow.

Even as the fate of Russia’s capital was decided, further west a parallel drama unfolded, of almost equal magnitude and embracing even greater human suffering. From north-west and south, in the autumn of 1941 Axis forces closed upon Russia’s old capital Leningrad. Barbarossa persuaded the Finns to avenge their 1940 defeat: in June 1941 Finland’s army, re-equipped by Hitler, joined the assault on the Soviet Union. German troops thrust from north Norway to reach positions within thirty miles of Murmansk. The Finns showed no enthusiasm for advancing much beyond their 1939 frontier, but on 15 September, with their aid the Germans completed the encirclement of Leningrad. The ensuing siege of the city – the tsars’ St Petersburg, with its elegant avenues, baroque palaces and seaside quays – became an epic that continued for more than two years. It assumed a character unique in its horror, and cost its defenders and citizens more lives than Britain and America together lost in the entire war.

Before the battle began, Soviet commanders had anticipated a direct assault. Tens of thousands of civilians dug defensive works under incoming artillery fire; shells fell on them ‘methodically, precisely’, in the words of a veteran. ‘Our soldiers dashed from their dugouts, grabbing youngsters and women, pulling them off the road and out of the line of fire…An incendiary shell landed. A herd of cattle, frightened by the flaming asphalt, began a stampede, kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Then the terrified animals charged straight into a minefield.’ Some children were belatedly evacuated from the city – into the path of the advancing Germans: more than 2,000 perished in a Luftwaffe attack on a trainload of fugitives at Lychkovo.

The credentials of the hoary old Bolshevik general Kliment Voroshilov, charged with the defence of Leningrad, rested solely upon his loyalty to Stalin; he despised professional soldiers and understood nothing of military science. Moscow dispatched a large food convoy to the city, but Voroshilov decided that to acknowledge a need for it would represent defeatism. He diverted the supplies elsewhere, and launched impromptu assaults on the Germans which yielded only slaughter. A despairing Lieutenant Yushkevich wrote in his last diary entry before being killed: ‘Our soldiers are only issued with old rifles and we have pathetically few machine-guns. We haven’t any grenades either. There are no medics! This is not a military unit – we are simply cannon fodder.’ He described his men ‘being hunted through the woods like animals…Constant shooting – panzers everywhere.’