Finally, almost three months after Barbarossa commenced on 16 September 1941, Field Marshal von Bock issued orders for the capture of Moscow under the code name Operation Typhoon. Three panzer groups would spearhead this, with one of them being withdrawn from the troubled attack on Leningrad. Although Hitler instructed the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups to conduct two attacks opposite Moscow, following the Kiev victory von Bock had added a third, with Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group advancing from the south-west.
Firstly though, Red Army forces east of Smolensk had to be destroyed by pincer attacks on Vyazma during October 1941, then Bock’s Army Group Centre was free to drive on the Soviet capital. While Hitler’s armies were unnecessarily distracted on his far flanks, in the centre the culmination of Barbarossa would not be launched until 2 November 1941 with Typhoon. For Hitler’s push on the Soviet capital, Army Group Centre gathered 1,929,000 men supported by 1,000 panzers, 14,000 guns and mortars and nearly 1,400 aircraft.
To resist almost 2 million German troops, consisting of three armies, three panzer groups and seventy-eight divisions, were 1,250,000 Soviet troops of Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front, Konev’s (having replaced Timoshenko in mid-September) Western Front and Budenny’s new Reserve Front.
That November, the Red Army launched pre-emptive attacks on Army Group Centre, which got as far as Kashira to the south, the following month. The Soviets liberated Kashira and blunted Hitler’s advance on Moscow.
In the meantime, Hitler had opened his initial attack against the Bryansk and South-Western Fronts on 30 September. Guderian’s panzers quickly broke through the former and charged toward Orel, to the south of Moscow. His 2nd Panzer Group pushed through the Yermakov Group toward Sevsk and Orel on the Bryansk Front’s left flank. In response, Major General D.D. Lelyushenko was sent from Moscow to command the defences at Mtsensk.
Orel fell on 3 October while General Joachim Lemelsen’s 47th Panzer Crops swung to the north to cut off the Bryansk Front. Bryansk itself, south-west of Moscow, fell on 6 October just as the first winter snows began to fall. However, Guderian’s tanks suffered a reverse near Mtsensk on 6 October, at the hands of the new Soviet T-34, with the 4th Panzer Division suffering heavy losses.
To the north, von Bock’s main pincer movement, intended to trap the Soviet West Front before it could fall back on the Vyazma Defence Line, opened on 2 October. The 9th Army and the 4th Panzer Group pierced the junction of the Soviet 30th and 19th Armies north of Dukhovshchina. This enabled the 56th Panzer Corps to attack toward Kholm and Vyazma and the 46th Panzer Corps toward Rzhev on the upper Volga. On 10 October, the northern arm of the pincer cut through the Vyazma Defence Line between Vyazma and Sychevka and worryingly got to Gzhatsk on the railway from Smolensk to Moscow.
The southern arm, made up of the German 4th Army and the 4th Panzer Group, captured Spas Demensk and Kirov on 4 October and reached the approaches of the Mozhaisk (Moscow) Defence Line six days later. In order to escape Army Group Centre, Stalin uncharacteristically permitted both the West and Reserve Fronts to move east of the Vyazma Defence Line. The Soviet 31st and 32nd Armies from Budenny’s Reserve Front were given the task of covering the withdrawal. Things did not go well. North of the city the Germans trapped the Soviet 50th Army, while to the south they encircled the Soviet 3rd and 13th Armies. Yeremenko, cut off from Moscow, ordered his troops to break out two days later. Those men still trapped in the pockets (numbering some 50,000) surrendered on 17 and 25 October. It was yet another disaster.
By 7 October, Hitler’s 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups also trapped the Soviet 19th, 20th, 24th and 32nd Armies, along with the Boldin Group, in a vast pocket west of Vyazma. Just a week later, on the 13th, resistance collapsed and a staggering 650,000 Soviet troops laid down their arms, including over 1,000 tanks and 4,000 pieces of artillery. This constituted forty-five divisions; almost half of the forces resisting Typhoon.
In the first two weeks of Typhoon, Army Group Centre had inflicted at least 700,000 casualties on the defenders at relatively little cost to itself. It seemed that the Red Army could not recover from such a massive blow and Muscovites began to flee the capital. The weather, combined with Hitler’s demands that Tula to the north-east and Kursk to the south be captured, now slowed progress.
Stalin chose this critical moment to reorganise his High Command and the situation slipped further from his grasp. The tried and tested Zhukov was summoned from the defence of Leningrad to organise the Mozhaisk Line. This ran in an arc for over 120 miles from the Moscow Reservoir to the north near Volokolamsk, cutting through the 1812 battlefield of Borodino to west of Mozhaisk and down to the Ugra and Oka Rivers. Zhukov found it far from complete, but bolstered it with reinforcements comprising six divisions, six armoured brigades, ten artillery regiments and machine-gun battalions.
Every available man was rushed to the front line, including Major General K.K. Rokossovsky’s 16th Army, Major General K.D. Golubev’s 43rd Army, Lieutenant General I.G. Zakharkin’s 49th Army and Major General D.D. Lelyushenko’s 5th Army – in total, less than 100,000 men. The question on everyone’s mind was, would this be enough? In desperation, Soviet forces from the Far East, North-West and South-West Fronts were also committed to the coming battle for Moscow.
On 10 October, Zhukov assumed command with the West and Reserve Fronts becoming his West Front, while his deputy Konev was sent to create the new Kalinin Front. Units of General Lelyushenko’s 5th Army, including the 32nd Division, took up positions at Borodino at the very heart of the Mozhaisk Line on 11 October. Three days later, the Germans broke through at the Shevardino Redoubt and Lelyushenko was wounded in fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Much to Zhukov’s annoyance, the 5th Army was forced to abandon Mozhaisk.
While Zhukov strove to consolidate Moscow’s defences on the ground, in the air the shaken Red Air Force began to gather its muscle. Each of the four sectors of the Moscow PVO zone were protected by the equivalent of a fighter corps while the 6th PVO Fighter Corps was more the size of an air army. Stalin ensured the fighters deployed to the capital were state of the art. Over half of Klimov’s force consisted of modern types. By early July, his command contained 585 fighters – 170 MiG-3, 75 LaGG-3s and 95 Yak-1 fighters, backed by 200 I-16s and 45 I-153s. These were to be later bolstered by British-supplied Hurricanes and American P-40s. Up to 2,000 Soviet fighters took part in the defence of Moscow between July 1941 and January 1942. The result of this was that the Luftwaffe largely avoided the skies over the Soviet capital.
The Moscow Defence Zone was established on 12 October under General Pavel Artemiev (commander of the Moscow Military District) and stretched in a 60-mile radius out from the city. Additional defensive belts were ordered, consisting of an outer belt and three inner ones within the city itself, to be ready within eight days. Some 600,000 Muscovites found themselves digging trenches and tank traps. It was an impossible task for Artemiev to complete by 20 October. Also, more volunteer divisions were called for but only 10,000 men were raised, the best of the volunteers having already gone to war. Nonetheless, five new Moscow Rifle Divisions were created.
Everything now hung in the balance, with both sides having made their preparations. The 3rd Panzer Group was threatening to envelop Moscow from the north after it captured Kalinin on 14 October. It just needed to get around the Volga Reservoir and push along the eastern bank of the Volga Canal to Moscow. Zhukov had no time to do anything with the Mozhaisk Line and it was predictably pierced by General G. Stumme’s 40th Panzer Corps at Mozhaisk, General Adolf Kuntzen’s 57th Panzer Corps between Borovsk and Maloyaroslavets, and by General Hans Felber’s 13th Corps at Kaluga by 18 October. Stalin ordered Moscow into a state of siege the following day. By 30 October the Germans were through the defence along its entire length and just 40 miles from Moscow.
Now that Moscow’s outer defences had been pierced the situation looked extremely dangerous. It was vital that Stalin and Zhukov held their nerve. Zhukov was anxious not to squander their reserves with rapid knee-jerk counter-attacks. This was to bring him into conflict with Stalin. The Soviet leader was desperate to drive Hitler away from the Kremlin at any price. In the meantime, the Muscovites bore the brunt of the slaughter.
In reality Army Group Centre was now far too stretched to constitute a real threat to Moscow. With the 2nd Panzer Army tasked to take the armaments city of Tula and envelop Moscow from the south, the 2nd Army striking from Kursk to Voronezh, the 4th Army west of Moscow, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups enveloping from the north-west and the 9th Army instructed to help Army Group North, Bock’s front had expanded by a third. There were simply not enough troops to go round. He wanted to attack Moscow by the shortest possible route, but found his original front expanded from 400 to 600 miles.
In addition, just three days after Hitler’s invasion the Richard Sorge spy network in Tokyo (he had contacts in the German embassy) was able to report that the Japanese preferred the pickings of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies to any renewed aggression in Mongolia. Once the Sorge spy network had let Japanese intentions toward American interests in the Pacific be known, a trickle of Red Army reinforcements began to head west.
During mid-October, the only new and trained formation to reach the front was the Siberian 310th Motorised Division, although frustratingly it arrived at Zvietkovo Railway Station without its vehicles. At the same time, the reconstituted Soviet 5th, 16th, 43rd and 49th Armies mustered only 90,000 men. These could not provide a continuous defence, so Soviet forces, along with most of the artillery and anti-tank weapons, had to be concentrated on the main axes: Volokolamsk, Istra, Mozhaisk, Maloyaroslavets and Podolsk-Kaluga.
Troops from the Far East only began to arrive in early November in greater numbers; indeed, Zhukov had doubled his strength by the time Hitler’s offensive commenced. On 14 October 1941, General Afansy Beloborodov’s Siberian 78th Rifle Division, which was 6,000 miles from the front, was ordered to deploy to Moscow. He recalled:
I was very anxious about our debut in combat. We were about to fight a strong and experienced enemy, yet we were being committed to action for the first time. We realised that the first setbacks – and they were inevitable – might put the men off their stroke. I meditated upon the impending engagement while still on the way to the front.1
During the long, jolting train journey Beloborodov had plenty of time to ponder. He need not have worried – for its tough performance defending the approaches to the capital, his unit was paid the highest honour and re-titled the 9th Guards Rifle Division. Beloborodov says the enemy was ‘mortally afraid of hand-to-hand fighting’, such was the savage ferocity of the Siberians.
Before long Stalin’s reinforcements were pouring in. The Far Eastern Front provided a very welcome seventeen divisions plus eight tank and one cavalry brigade, equipped with a total of 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft. In addition, Outer Mongolia, Zhukov’s old stomping ground, sent one rifle division and two tank brigades; Transbaikalia sent seven rifle, two cavalry divisions and two tank brigades; Ussuri provided five rifle divisions plus one cavalry and three tank brigades; and, finally, Amur provided two rifle divisions and one tank brigade. From these, Zhukov was able to form three new armies, the Soviet 1st Shock, the 10th and the 20th.
Konev’s new Kalinin Front, formed by the 22nd, 29th and 31st Armies, had the key task of shielding Moscow to the north around the Sea of Moscow (Ivankovo Reservoir) and the Volga Canal. This gave Zhukov reason for quiet optimism. Nevertheless, despite these powerful reinforcements, Red Army strength was weaker than the Wehrmacht, not only in numbers but also equipment and training.
General Golikov, who had helped contribute to Stalin’s delusion that Hitler was not going to invade, was summoned to see the Soviet leader on 21 October. Now that the enemy were approaching the capital, Golikov must have feared that he was in serious trouble; instead, he was given command of the 10th Reserve Army gathering south-east of Moscow. This was drawing divisions from as far afield as the Turkestan and Siberian Military Districts and would be assembled by the first week of November.
The 10th Army was a somewhat ill-fated command. Having first been formed in 1939, it was destroyed at Grodno in mid-1941. Attempts had been made to rebuild it during October, but this had been put on hold. It was the third establishment of which Golikov took charge, and of its nine divisions, seven were new units.
Golikov’s experiences were typical of those of other army commanders. He was to discover that most of the officers were reservists and that less than a third were regulars. His command was poorly trained and largely comprised of men with no previous military experience. To make matters worse, they were mustered in summer uniforms and there were shortages of food, ammunition and weapons. Inevitably, training was hampered by cases of frostbite. Golikov and his staff had to constantly badger the chain of command for much-needed supplies. Despite all this, the 10th Army was given just fifteen days’ preparation before being sent to the front.
Earlier in the year, Soviet troops had turned up at the front wearing a ragtag mixture of uniforms and headgear. In particular, the Model 1936 helmet had the unfortunate tendency of making the wearer look like a German soldier. Production of the newer Model 1940 helmet had to be increased, but initially could not keep up with demand. Some captured soldiers did not even have helmets, just the pilotka side cap or the old Budenovka cloth helmet. Local military depots struggled to equip new recruits and issued them with whatever ancient stock they had to hand. In the run-up to war, Khrulev, the quartermaster general, struggled to arm and equip the Red Army in a timely manner. By the end of the year the logistics system was still creaking at the seams. The creation of the Reserve Front and all the new reserve armies greatly exacerbated the situation. Things would eventually improve, but it was to be a long haul, as Golikov and his comrades discovered.
The Germans knew of these gathering reinforcements but seemed unaware of the full implications. At a meeting of all the army group chiefs of staff held at Orsha in early November, Chief of the General Staff General Halder stated:
There was good reason to believe that Russian resistance was on the verge of collapse. … the Führer’s plan was to by-pass Moscow and capture the railway junctions beyond it – as OKH [Army High Command] had reports that large reserves, amounting in strength to a fresh army, were on their way from Siberia.2
The Führer’s plan was wishful thinking. It is noticeable that Halder spoke of an ‘army’ and not ‘armies’, indicating they were unaware of the true scale of Zhukov’s reinforcements.
The people of Moscow were also rallied to the city’s defence, as Zhukov noted with some pride:
During October and November the working people of Moscow provided five divisions of volunteers to the front. Their total contribution from the start of the war had been seventeen divisions. In addition to these divisions the people’s militia, Muscovites formed and armed hundreds of fighting teams and tank-destroyer detachments.3
Twelve volunteer divisions had been formed in Moscow by early July; each was given a number and named after the district from where it had been recruited. These totalled 68,000 men and almost 10,500 officers and NCOs. In fact, a target of 200,000 had been set.
Five of these volunteer divisions were trapped at Bryansk and Vyazma, and the 2nd (Stalin), 7th (Bauman), 8th (Krasnaya Presnya), 9th (Kirov) and 13th (Rostokino) had to be disbanded after being completely destroyed in the fighting.
Abram Evseevich Gordon, from Moscow University, volunteered that summer for the capital’s citizens’ defence units known as opolchenie. Initially he found himself simply digging trenches. Then he and his fellow opolchentsy were issued with old Polish Army uniforms and Polish rifles and trained as cavalry. In August, his group were transferred to the Red Army to reform the 113th Rifle Division, which had been destroyed earlier in the year. Kitted out in Red Army uniforms and armed with rifles and Molotov cocktails, they were sent to block the Warsaw Highway leading into the capital in October. It was a massacre. The young recruits knew nothing of tactics and fired off all their ammunition before the panzers ever reached them. Just 300 men, including Gordan, survived the encounter but they were surrounded and hunted down. He was captured but managed to slip away and re-join the regular army.
Despite their bravery, the volunteer units were sacrificial lambs. While Zhukov pulled the Red Army’s reserves toward Moscow ready for his counter-offensive, he had no intention of committing them to battle before early December. Throughout November, the people of Moscow were to pay the price of this tough decision with their blood. In mid-October, the call had gone out for yet more Muscovite fighters. After just six days, four volunteer divisions were thrown into the fight. ‘The Germans took village after village,’ reported Walter Kerr, who was in Moscow with the New York Herald. ‘The Moscow volunteers tried to hold them, failed, but died in the ruins.’4
Kerr saw the non-defence factory workers responding to the call to arms, turning up at the recruitment depots carrying ‘packs on their backs containing extra clothing, food and tin cups’. He says, ‘They were the best Moscow had. They should have been properly trained. They should have been properly equipped. But the Germans were coming on, and the High Command needed time.’5
Near Borovsk, south of the highway to Smolensk and Minsk, the 4th Volunteer Division, lacking uniforms and armed with just rifles and light machine guns, was cut to pieces by the advancing Germans. Rather than saving them, Stalin used the Muscovites as pawns in a strategy that was not just about saving Moscow but defeating Hitler. Kerr noted:
The men of Moscow died by the thousand, yet still the Germans advanced. The volunteers fought and died, not knowing, for they could not have known, the plans of the High Command. In the meantime the regular reserve divisions moved up from the east, not to the firing line, but to the woods near the city, to be used when Zhukov was ready to use them.
[…] Hitler … did not know, any more than the volunteers knew, that the Kremlin was tightening its spring and that one day soon the reserve divisions would be thrown into the battle.6
An additional 100,000 workers were given some military training in their spare time. The local Communist Party formed workers’ battalions 12,000 strong, and 17,000 women undertook medical training. For these Muscovite workers’ battalions, the garrison released just 5,000 rifles and 210 machine guns, but after that the regular forces were instructed not to give up any more arms. The battalions, while numbering 675 men each, were sent to the front with just 295 rifles, 145 revolvers, 120 captured hand grenades, nine machine guns and 2,000 Molotov cocktails. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet war reporter, saw at first hand Moscow’s siege mentality, ‘Barricades at the outer approaches, and also closer in, particularly around the suburbs, as well as the city itself’.7
The German chiefs of staff of Army Groups North and South were against any further advance toward Moscow, while the chief of staff from Army Group Centre opted for a more neutral stance. They knew with the onset of winter they should consolidate their positions and husband their remaining resources. Their advice mattered little, because reaching the railway junctions so far behind the Soviet capital at that time of year was quite impossible.
By November the dreadful slaughter was rising to incredible proportions. The Wehrmacht had lost almost a quarter of its manpower. General Heinz Guderian noted, ‘Total casualties on the Eastern Front since 22 June 1941 had now reached the total of 743,000 men; this was twenty-three per cent of our average strength of three and a half million men.’8
During a speech made in early November 1941 on the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin grandly claimed:
In four months of war we have lost 350,000 killed, and 378,000 missing, and our wounded number 1,020,000. In the same period the enemy has in killed, wounded and prisoners lost more than four and a half million men.
There can be no doubt that as a result of four months of war Germany, whose reserves of manpower are already being exhausted, has been considerably more weakened than the Soviet Union, whose reserves are only now being mobilised to the full.9
In the name of morale-boosting propaganda, he clearly played down the Red Army’s staggering losses and deliberately inflated German casualties. It was true, however, that Hitler had exhausted his manpower whereas the Russian bear was only just waking up. Stalin added:
Hunger and impoverishment reign in Germany today; in four months of war Germany has lost four and a half million men; Germany is bleeding, her reserves of manpower are giving out, the spirit of indignation is spreading not only among the peoples of Europe who have fallen under the yoke of the German invaders, but also the German people themselves, who see no end to the war. The German invaders are straining their last efforts. There is no doubt that Germany cannot sustain such a strain for long.10
Exhausted and lacking adequate winter clothing, the German armed forces were in a dire situation. The German High Command assessed that the 101 infantry divisions on the Eastern Front (excluding Finland) had the combat power of just sixty-five and that the seventeen panzer divisions equated to just six. The total German force committed had just over 60 per cent of its established capability; in other words, the real strength of Hitler’s forces on the Eastern Front was just seventy-one divisions.
Regardless of his weakening combat power, on 7 November 1941 Hitler optimistically issued orders for Typhoon to be resumed. This was based on the premise that the Red Army before Moscow was getting weaker, not stronger. The West Front, by this stage, had received some 100,000 reinforcements with 300 tanks and 2,000 guns. Typhoon recommenced on 15 November and although the panzers got to within a few miles of Moscow they were unable to make decisive breakthroughs, either to the north or south.
Stalin was weighing his options and asked Zhukov if he could hold Moscow. The latter’s response was yes, if he was given two additional armies and 200 tanks. He would get the 1st Shock Army and Golikov’s 10th Army but no more tanks. Stalin, impatient to forestall Hitler’s final assault on Moscow, instructed Zhukov on 14 November to conduct spoiling attacks south of Moscow and around Volokolamsk.
At this time, considerable Stavka reserves began to arrive in the Moscow area and were used to reinforce the most threatened axes. Notably, the 17th, 18th, 20th, 24th and 44th Cavalry Divisions were used to bolster the 16th Army on the Volokolamsk–Klin axis. Also, General P.A. Belov’s Cavalry Corps, the 415th Rifle and 112th Tank Divisions and the 33rd Tank Brigade arrived on the left flank.
Zhukov did not want to waste his precious reserves on an enterprise that was unlikely to produce positive results. Nonetheless, Rokossovsky’s 16th Army, which had been employed preparing in-depth defences, was instructed to leave its sanctuary. Pushing forward 1 mile, his men suffered heavy casualties. The 44th Cavalry Division was all but massacred as it arrived fresh from the city of Tashkent. Rokossovsky held Zhukov responsible for his needless losses. In truth, Stalin’s micromanagement of the battle was to blame.
Despite all these new forces and the fact that the Western Front had six armies by the middle of November, being stretched along a 375-mile front meant that they had very little depth. However, Stalin and Shaposhnikov called for a pre-emptive attack to disrupt the Germans’ preparations. Stalin proposed striking from the Volokolamsk–Novo–Petrovskoye area using the right flank units of Rokossovsky’s army, the 58th Tank Division, the Independent Cavalry Divisions and Davtor’s Cavalry Corps. While in the Serpukhov area he wanted to use Belov’s Cavalry Corps, Getman’s Tank Division and part of the 49th Army. Again, Zhukov did not want to exhaust his reserves at the very moment the Germans were about to attack
The Siberians made their presence felt on 18 November, when a newly arrived division supported by an armoured brigade attacked the German 112th Infantry Division, which was guarding 4th Panzer’s push on Venev. The unfortunate 112th, having already suffered 50 per cent frostbite casualties, was overrun by Soviet T-34 tanks. A week later, German Intelligence identified more fresh reserves thrown into the fighting which had come from the Far East – the 108th Tank Brigade, and the 31st Cavalry and 299th Rifle Divisions.
Reporter Walter Kerr, with the Red Army, experienced the bitter cold at first hand:
I saw a column of sledges moving in single file along a forest road. The flanks of the horses were covered with a white frost, and the drivers, muffled against the cold, were walking alongside in an effort to restore the circulation of blood to their feet. […]
They were taking bandages, splints, containers of blood for transfusions, frozen beef, bread, shells for 122mm gun-howitzers, fodder for the cavalry and rifle ammunition for the infantry. The horses plodded and slipped along and the drivers walked in silence. When it is as cold as this, you do not feel like talking. You just keep going.11
Hitler’s insistence that the Wehrmacht would not have to fight a winter campaign was now reaping terrible results. Guderian, touring his troops, observed that they were ‘insufficiently clothed, half-starved men: and who also saw by contrast the well-fed, warmly clad and fresh Siberians, fully equipped for winter fighting’.12
Cold became the Wehrmacht’s enemy, as much as the Red Army. During the winter the temperature could drop as low as -40°F. German soldiers who were still in their summer uniforms were left to endure the miseries brought on by the extreme weather. ‘The cold soon exceed all bounds. […] Frost gripped my pus infected fingers,’ said German infantryman Harald Henry, who was in his early twenties. ‘My gloves were so wet I couldn’t bear them any longer. I wrapped a towel round my ravaged hands. It was enough to make you want to bawl.’13
The men were reduced to relying on clothing parcels from loved ones back home and captured Red Army greatcoats. Using their entrenching spades, German soldiers resorted to breaking up wooden ammunition crates and cutting down trees to create firewood. They also billeted themselves with local farmers by moving into their stout wooden dachas.
The Siberians could endure the conditions better than most Russians, and certainly vastly better than the Germans. Amongst the troops from the Far East was Lieutenant Vladimir Edelman, who was a native Ukrainian. Before redeployment, he and his Siberian troops had been issued with ample winter clothing, which gave them a great advantage over their enemies who were literally freezing on the approaches to Moscow. Edelman saw German prisoners clothed in summer uniforms and light coats without hats. Every now and then one would cry out in agony, ‘O Mein Gott! O Mein Gott!’, as they slowly froze to death along the roadside.14
However, the Siberian units did not have it all their own way, and were on occasion thwarted by incompetence and their vulnerability to the marauding Luftwaffe. Dispersing from the train depots often did not go unimpeded. Ukrainian Boris Godov arrived in late October with the Siberian 413th Division to defend the city of Tula, an important weapons manufacturing centre south of Moscow. His artillery unit arrived with the wrong ammunition for their guns and paid the price at the hands of the panzers. Although the 413th Division helped save Tula from capture, just 500 of its 15,400 men survived unscathed.
When General Guderian visited the 112th and 167th Infantry Divisions holding the line south of Bielev to the west of Tula, on 14 November 1941, he was dismayed to find that the men were suffering because of a complete lack of winter clothing. Many of them had frostbite and their vehicles were immobilised due to a lack of anti-freeze. In particular, the 112th was at breaking point. ‘Snow shirts, boot grease, under clothes and above all woollen trousers were not available,’ noted Guderian. ‘A high proportion of the men were still wearing denim trousers, and the temperature was eight below zero!’15 He found the men had been forced to wear Soviet overcoats and fur hats. The 112th Infantry Division had 500 cases of frostbite and their machine guns had packed up because of the cold. In addition, their 37mm anti-tank guns could not overcome the armour of the Soviets’ T-34 tank. This left them incapable of fending off Zhukov’s Siberians, and for the first time during the campaign a German unit panicked and fled. There was little choice but to relieve the division, as it was no longer capable of effective combat operations.
Guderian was furious, as he had requested warm clothing in September and October, and immediately took steps to find out what was going on. ‘All stocks of clothing that the Panzer Army held were immediately sent to the Front, but the shortages were so great that these provided a drop in the ocean.’16 The army’s quartermaster general insisted that winter clothing had been issued. After making a series of telephone calls, Guderian discovered that it had been stranded for several weeks at Warsaw Railway Station due to a lack of trains and disruption to the lines by Polish partisans.
Guderian personally briefed Army Group Centre’s commander, Field Marshal von Bock, on 23 November. In light of the desperate situation regarding winter clothing and the threat posed by the arrival of the Siberian units to their inadequately guarded right flank, Guderian requested that his attack be cancelled and that his troops be permitted to go on the defensive during the winter. In response, Bock claimed that OKH was well aware of conditions on the Eastern Front. Nonetheless, he called the army’s commander-in-chief with his subordinate listening in. Guderian went away unhappy:
In view of the manner in which the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Chief of the Army General Staff refused my requests it must be assumed that not only Hitler but also they were in favour of a continuation of the offensive.17
Rashly, Guderian hoped he could personally make Hitler see sense. When he saw the Führer in late December a heated argument took place over the issue. Guderian pointed out that the cold was causing twice as many casualties as the Red Army and that it was his duty to lessen the ‘suffering’ of his men. Hitler accused him of not seeing the bigger picture and insisted that winter clothing had been issued. When the quartermaster general was summoned, he had to admit the kit remained in Warsaw. But it was all too late – the damage had been done, Hitler’s troops froze, and a week later Guderian was relieved of his command.
By the end of November, Army Group Centre’s armour was deployed as follows: 3rd Panzer Division was at Klin on the Kalinin–Moscow road; 7th Panzer had a bridgehead east of the Volga–Moscow Canal at Yakhroma; to the south, 2nd Panzer was battling for Tula and 4th Panzer was east of the city, but could get no closer. The situation was at stalemate.
By this stage, Zhukov was more than satisfied with the Red Army’s efforts before Moscow:
In twenty days of the second phase of their offensive, the Germans lost 155,000 dead and wounded, 800 tanks, at least 300 guns and 1,500 planes. The heavy losses, the complete collapse of the plan for a blitzkrieg ending to the war, and the failure to achieve their strategic objectives depressed the spirit of the German forces and gave rise to the first doubts about a successful outcome of the war. The Nazi military-political leadership also lost its reputation of ‘invincibility’ before world public opinion.18
The Red Army was now acting aggressively everywhere except before Moscow on the West and Kalinin Fronts. Here, as Zhukov observed:
The exhausted German enemy, although he had lost his momentum, continued to gnaw his way forward. Army Group Centre was only nineteen miles from the capital and in spite of its severely weakened condition could not be brought to a halt.19
According to General Günther Blumentritt, Field Marshal von Kluge’s chief of staff, the Russian weather and determined Soviet counter-attacks thwarted Hitler’s winter push on Moscow:
The offensive was opened by Hoeppner’s panzer group on the left. Its progress was slow, in the face of mud and strong Russian counter-attacks. Our losses were heavy. The weather then turned adverse, with snow falling on the swampy ground. The Russians made repeated counter-attacks from the flank across the frozen Moskwa, and Hoeppner had to divert more and more of his strength to check these thrusts. The 2nd Panzer Division succeeded in penetrating far enough to get sight of the Kremlin, but that was the nearest it came.20
There was no hiding Hitler’s intelligence failure – Colonel Kinzel and his men, who had built up an ‘accurate picture’ of Soviet defences, were not to blame. ‘We had been badly misled,’ said Blumentritt, ‘about the quantity of reinforcements that the Russians could produce. They had hidden their resources all too well.’21
The bitter weather continued to take a heavy toll on the German soldiers who were ill-equipped to fight in the winter conditions. In contrast, a German doctor with the 276th Infantry Division marvelled at the toughness of their adversaries:
The Russian [was] … completely at home in the wilds. Give him an axe and a knife and in a few hours he will do anything, run up a sledge, a stretcher, a little igloo … make a stove out of a couple of old oil cans. Our men just stand about miserably burning the precious petrol to keep warm. At night they gather in the few wooden houses which are still standing.22
On 2 December von Kluge’s 4th Army was launched into the attack and forward elements of the 258th Infantry Division penetrated Moscow’s suburbs. Strong Soviet counter-attacks persuaded von Kluge and Blumentritt that they were not going to break through and that these advanced units should be withdrawn. This proved to be very prudent action as Zhukov threw 100 divisions at them in his general counter-offensive three days later.
Despite receiving the divisions from the Far East and the new reserve divisions (which constituted the 1st Shock, 10th and 20th, plus nine rifle and two cavalry divisions, eight rifle and six tank brigades) from Stavka, Zhukov still possessed no general superiority. On 1 December, the Western Front mustered 577,726 men, while the Kalinin Front had 118,394 and the right flank of the South-Western Front supplied 63,398: 1,060,380 men in total. The Germans held more than three times this number of men just as POWs.
Zhukov was acutely aware that for his counter-offensive he was deficient in tanks and aircraft:
Late in the evening of 4 December the Chief [Stalin] telephoned me and asked, ‘Is there anything else you need beyond what we gave you?’
I said I still needed air support from Supreme Headquarters reserve and the air defence forces and at least 200 tanks and crews. The front had too few tanks and needed more for the rapid development of the counter-offensive.
‘We can’t give you any tanks; we don’t have any,’ Stalin said, ‘But you’ll get your air support. Arrange it with the General Staff. I am going to call them now. Just remember that the Kalinin Front Offensive begins on 5 December and the operational group on the right wing of the South-West Front around Yelets on the 6th.’23
By the time of Zhukov’s Moscow counter-offensive, the German Army had suffered over 100,000 cases of frostbite, of whom 14,357 were so serious that they required amputations; 62,000 were incapacitated but did not require amputation; and 36,270 were considered able to return to duty within ten days. On 5 December, Operation Typhoon was formally called off (although two days earlier some local withdrawals had already been sanctioned).
Stalin’s Red Air Force did its utmost to ignore the weather and from 15 November to 5 December 1941 clocked up 15,840 sorties. This equated to nearly five times the flying rates of the Luftwaffe. The 6th PVO Fighter Corps gave the Luftwaffe a tough time in the skies around Moscow. During the last two months of 1941 it claimed to have shot down 250 German planes.
It was then the German Army’s turn to be on the receiving end of things when the corps switched from its air defence role to ground-attack and set about the German armies west of Moscow. During June–December 1941 the Soviets lost 21,200 aircraft, of which only about half were destroyed in combat.
Stavka’s plan called for an offensive by all three fronts in the Moscow area: Konev’s Kalinin, to the north of the Sea of Moscow; Zhukov’s Western, either side of the capital; and Timoshenko’s South-Western, on Zhukov’s left flank. Zhukov would provide the main effort: on his right, the fresh 1st Shock and 20th Armies were to open the attack supported by the 30th and 16th Armies on the flanks. They were to link up with Konev’s 29th and 31st Armies. Opposite Moscow, Zhukov’s front was to tie down German forces while the 10th and 50th Armies on the southern wing, along with Timoshenko’s forces, attacked Guderian’s Panzer Group.
Lelyushenko’s 30th Army at Dmitrov, to the north of Moscow, made the deepest penetration into German lines on the first day. It advanced to the Moscow–Leningrad Highway, threatening the junction between the German 4th Army and the 4th Panzer Group. After three days, it had got to Klin, and with the 1st Shock Army on the left flank seemed poised to achieve a successful encirclement. Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and Vlasov’s 20th Army made equally pleasing progress liberating Istra, west of Moscow, by 13 December.
The Soviet 13th and 40th Armies belonging to Timoshenko’s South-Western Front pierced the southern face of 3rd Panzer Group’s salient, which it had created in November. Timoshenko was threatening the Germans’ main supply route, the Orel–Tula Railway by 9 December. In the meantime, the 50th and 10th Armies struck the northern edge of the salient, driving a wedge between Guderian and von Kluge. Once the Soviet 33rd and 43rd Armies had joined the offensive on 18 December, the German 4th Army was increasingly pushed back westward. To the north, Konev’s Kalinin Front drove the German 9th Army from Kalinin and thrust south-westward along the upper Volga toward Rzhev. In the far south, von Rundstedt’s Army Group South was ejected from Rostov-on-Don on 28 November, having only occupied it five days previously.
‘There are lots of broken vehicles,’ said Vasily Grossman after witnessing the results of Zhukov’s offensive, ‘on the roads and in the steppe, lots of abandoned guns, hundreds of German corpses, helmets and weapons lying everywhere.’24 General Rudolf Hofmann, chief of staff of the German 9th Army, assessed:
The result of the battle for Moscow was to bring both sides temporarily to the end of their strength. Neither side succeeded in attaining its objectives. The Germans did not capture Moscow, though for a while it looked almost within their grasp, and the Russians did not succeed in disintegrating and destroying Army Group Centre.25
This belittles the Soviet victory. While the Wehrmacht did not achieve its immediate objective with the capture of Moscow, or indeed its long-term objective with the defeat of the Soviet Union, the Red Army achieved its immediate goal of halting Hitler and pushing the front line away from the Soviet capital. The destruction of Army Group Centre was not achieved because of Stalin’s insistence on a general counter-offensive that dissipated their effort.
Zhukov enjoyed his first, if flawed, victory and recalled triumphantly, ‘The Hitlerites lost on the battlefields of Moscow a grand total of over half a million men, 1,300 tanks, 2,500 guns, over 15,000 vehicles, and much other materiel.’26 German sources refute these figures. General Halder, chief of the German General Staff, estimated total German losses on the Eastern Front as of 28 February 1942 to be 1,005,000 casualties (i.e. killed, wounded and missing). Losses for the period, as of 26 November 1941, were 742,000; therefore, German losses for the period of Zhukov’s counter-offensive near Moscow in all sectors of the front are estimated at 262,000, which is half of Zhukov’s estimate for the Western Strategic Sector alone.
Whatever the true figure, even by Halder’s reckoning, as of November 1941 the Germans had lost almost a quarter of their forces on the Eastern Front, and by February 1942 this had risen to almost a third. ‘The Battle for Moscow laid the firm foundations for the ensuing defeat of Nazi Germany,’ concluded Zhukov.27
Despite the mounting losses, Stalin was clearly heartened that the Red Army had managed to hold Hitler at the very gates of Moscow. Every time he addressed the public Stalin now exuded new-found confidence. Gustav Herling, held at the Yercevo labour camp, noted this change:
In December 1941 we heard Stalin give another and very different speech. I shall never forget that strong voice, cold and penetrating, those words hammered out as if with a fist of stone. He said that the German offensive had been arrested at the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, that the day of victory over German barbarism was approaching.28
Stalin was now determined to launch another counter-offensive. On 5 January 1942, he told his gathered generals:
The Germans are in disarray as a result of their defeat before Moscow. They’ve prepared badly for the winter. This is the most favourable moment to go over to a general offensive. The Germans hope to hold our offensive until the spring, so that they can resume active operations when they have built up their strength.
Our task is therefore to give the Germans no time to draw breath, drive them to the West, and force them to use up all their reserves before spring comes because by then we will have new reserves and the German reserves will have run out.29
Stalin envisaged that the main effort would be against Army Group Centre, with the aim of trapping it west of Vyazma. The Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts were to crush Army Group North and save Leningrad. It would be Timoshenko’s job to deal with Army Group South, liberating Kharkov, the Donbass and Sevastopol.
Zhukov did not like the idea of a vast general offensive along the entire Eastern Front stretching from Leningrad to the Black Sea; they simply did not have the strength for such an effort. Manpower and supplies needed to be replenished. He argued that their strength should be directed against Army Group Centre for a single knock-out blow – Stalin did not agree.
Konev opened the attack on 10 January 1942, supported by Rokossovsky’s 16th Army and Vlasov’s 20th Army. He pierced enemy lines on the Volokolamsk Highway, while Zhukov attacked along the Mozhaisk Highway. However, German reinforcements from Western Europe ensured that things did not go to plan. This culminated in a crisis on the junction of Zhukov’s Western Front and the Bryansk Front. The offensive lasted until 20 April and Zhukov pushed up to 155 miles, but in the process the Red Army suffered twice the losses of the Wehrmacht. In the north, the offensive produced no results and in the south managed just 60 miles.
In total, the bitter battle for Moscow lasted six months and cost 926,000 Soviet dead, not to mention the wounded and missing. These colossal losses were greater than Britain and America lost in the whole of the Second World War. The net result was that Zhukov held Moscow and Field Marshal von Bock lost his job to von Kluge.
Hitler was incensed that his generals had not taken Moscow. He promptly sacked Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, von Bock, von Leeb and Guderian, while von Rundstedt was transferred west. Thirty-five corps or divisional commanders were also removed from their posts. It was a poor thank you for all the effort and blood that had been expended pushing toward Moscow. It was clear there would be no quick victory on the Eastern Front.