v1.0.1 / chapter 4 of 15 / 01 mar 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* Although the Nazi invasion of the USSR had made shockingly rapid progress at first, by the fall the attack was beginning to lose momentum. By December 1941, the German offensive had run out of steam, and the Red Army struck back hard, throwing the Germans back from the gates of Moscow.
* British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had long been an enemy of Bolshevism, having helped support White forces working against the Reds during the Russian Civil War two decades earlier. Churchill had never restrained his criticisms of Stalin and his ugly regime. However, on the evening before the invasion Churchill had announced to dinner guests that the USSR was going to attacked, and declared that Britain and the United States should do everything to help the Soviets. Later his private secretary, John Colville, asked him how he could make such an abrupt turnabout. Churchill replied: "I have one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
The next day, the German invasion went forward on schedule, smashing through Soviet defenses. Churchill addressed the British nation, employing his gift for oratory to the fullest: "No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle now unfolding."
Churchill knew there were those who thought that the struggle between two predatory nations was to Britain's benefit. He disagreed, pointing out that once Hitler swallowed up the USSR, there would be nothing to prevent the loathesome Nazi regime from becoming the absolutely dominant power on Earth, conquering states at will and intimidating all others that remained independent. Churchill concluded, with his dramatic command of the English language: "We will never parley with Hitler and any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid."
The next day, 23 June, the US government added its own declaration of support for the USSR's struggle against Hitler. However, all that Britain and America could provide for the moment was moral encouragement. Britain was slowly rebuilding strength after the disasters in the West during the spring of 1940, and America's mobilization for war was still ramping up. There was also the problem of getting war material to the USSR, since shipping was in short supply and suffering from German U-boat attacks. Churchill judged that it would be impossible to deliver any serious quantity of supplies before mid-1942.
Many American conservatives and isolationists doubted that supporting a thug regime like Stalin's was a good idea, but the American Communist Party, having done an about-face to support Hitler when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939, did another about-face and joined the cry against Hitler. The British Communist Party was a bit slower to react but turned around on 25 June to support the war against Hitler. In the occupied countries of the Continent, Communist cadres began to ramp up resistance campaigns that would create substantial armies of partisan fighters.
* A British military mission, under the direction of General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, was sent to Moscow, arriving on 27 June 1941. The meetings between the British and the Soviets were not very warm and not very constructive, since the Soviets simply demanded everything without the least consideration of realities. They called for the British to open a second front, a call that they would repeat again and again in the future. The British could do no such thing for the moment, but they did commit to provide help in the future, signing an Anglo-Soviet military assistance pact on 12 July 1941.
On 8 July, Konstantin Oumansky, the Soviet ambassador to Washington DC, had presented the US government with a huge "shopping list" that asked for thousands of aircraft, tens of thousands of antiaircraft guns, and massive quantities of everything else. There was no way the request could be met over the short term, but Roosevelt wanted to at least reassure Stalin that the United States understood the gravity of Soviet Union's situation and was putting aid to the USSR high on the priority list. On 27 July, Roosevelt sent his aide Harry Hopkins to Moscow, where he spoke with Stalin in two sessions lasting a total of eight hours. Stalin spoke Russian to Hopkins in a flow, hardly bothering to allow the interpreter to keep up, detailing in fairly accurate terms the military situation and outlining what the United States needed to provide the USSR to help beat Hitler.
On receiving feedback from the sessions, on 1 August 1941 Roosevelt discussed the matter with his cabinet. The president was highly emphatic, even angry at times, insisting that everything needed to be done to help the Soviets and that bureaucratic obstacles needed to be kicked down. The next day, Oumansky was given further assurances that the commitment of the US government to support the Soviet cause was dead serious. That was the truth, but given the staggering disasters suffered by the Red Army over the previous month, few in London or Washington were confident that the Soviet Union would survive no matter what was done. That made no difference: even if the Hitler won, his victory would have to be made as expensive as possible. Altruistic or cynical, either way the logic behind military aid to the USSR was hard to argue with.
In the meantime, Hopkins was returning from Moscow to brief the president. He made his way to Newfoundland, where Roosevelt and Churchill were engaged in their first face-to-face meeting of the war, devising the "Atlantic Charter", which was signed on 14 August. The Atlantic Charter stated that the US and Britain had no territorial ambitions in the conflict with Hitler, and outlined the principles on which the postwar world would hopefully be run. The Soviets publicly endorsed the charter, though Stalin was privately angry. The whole exercise seemed abstract, even flippant, while the USSR was fighting for its life, and the US and Britain had announced war aims and policies without consulting him. However, steps were taken at the Atlantic Charter meeting towards three-way talks, to take place in a few weeks.
* The British might not have been able to provide much in the way of supplies for the moment, but they quickly demonstrated that they were in dead earnest. The British were aware that there were German agents in Iran and suspected that the country's ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi Kabir, was sympathetic to the Nazi cause. The British had a refinery at Abadan, at the north end of the Persian Gulf, which provided a port from which supplies could be offloaded and then shipped by rail north to the USSR. If the Shah went over to the Germans that connection would be cut, and the Germans would have control over Iran's oilfields.
The Shah was given pointed suggestions that he get rid of the German agents but on 21 August he replied with a refusal, citing his nation's neutrality. The British and the Soviets then secretly agreed to invade Iran. Britain had a division of Indian troops near Abadan and armored units elsewhere in the area, while the Soviets had forces in Azerbaijan, in the USSR north of Iran. On 25 August, citing threats to Iranian security from German agents, the British and the Soviets informed the Iranian government that Iran was to be occupied.
So it was done. British and Soviet forces joined hands after three days of movement from south and north against ineffective resistance, and Iranian forces surrendered. The Iranian connection to the USSR was now secure. Churchill was not a remorseless monster like Stalin, but he was capable of ruthlessness and had demonstrated it. Stalin no doubt admired this. That did not mean that Stalin was softening his demands for more help from the British and the Americans. The Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maisky, pressed the British government for more action. Maisky met with Churchill personally on 4 September to present the Soviet Union's demands.
Churchill found the demands annoying. Stalin was acting as though the USSR was doing Britain a great favor by simply fighting for survival. It could be argued that it was, and certainly British citizens understood that the Luftwaffe bombers that had been pounding Britain's cities at night since the fall of 1940 had turned their unwelcome attention elsewhere. On the other hand, the Soviets had a fight on their hands whether they wanted it or not, and the British were doing what they could to help, in spite of the fact that the Soviet Union had reacted with "stony composure", as Churchill had put it, when nations in the West were overrun by the Nazis.
Churchill, not noted for a mild temper, grew hot at Maisky and shot back at him: "Remember that only four months ago we in this Island did not know whether you were coming in against us on the German side. Indeed we thought it quite likely that you would. Even then we felt sure we would win in the end. We never thought that our survival was dependent on your action either way. Whatever happens, and whatever you do, you of all people have no right to make reproaches of us."
Maisky, confronted with a snarling bulldog, backed up: "More calm, please, my dear Mr. Churchill!" Maisky would not change the message, but he was more tactful about it in the future. Churchill did send a message to Stalin that material assistance was on the way, but pointed out that half-baked British military actions that were certain to end in defeat would help Hitler more than they would Stalin. The most Churchill's senior military advisors could recommend were deception operations, sham invasion plans to make the Germans keep forces in the West.
* At the end of September, representatives of Britain and the US went to Moscow to talk with Stalin, as per the arrangement set up at the Atlantic Charter meeting. Churchill sent Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of supply, and Roosevelt sent Averell Harriman, his special envoy to Britain. Harry Hopkins, who suffered from chronic health problems, was not up to the trip.
The two men spoke with Stalin for three days. The first day's session was agreeable enough, with Stalin briefing his visitors on the military situation. However, the next day, Stalin was fidgety, strained, and nervous. Things were not going well at the front, it seemed, and Stalin interrupted the talks several times to make phone calls. That evening, he was brusque with his guests, "much dissatisfied with what we were offering", as Harriman put it. The final session, conducted the next evening, went much better. Beaverbrook and Harriman agreed to massive shipments of planes, tanks, guns, trucks, jeeps, destroyers, food, raw materials, and hundreds of thousand of boots. Beaverbrook reported that at the end Stalin beamed like "sunshine after rain."
The shipments were to begin as soon as possible, but of course such an enormous effort couldn't get off the ground quickly. Plans were seriously upset when the US was attacked by Japan in December, throwing America into the war abruptly. Shipments of materials from the West wouldn't ramp up until well into 1942. In the meantime, the Soviet Union was more or less on its own.
* By the end of July 1941, despite remarkable victories, German commanders and even Hitler himself were beginning to realize that their intelligence had grossly underestimated Soviet strength. Although the Germans had taken hundreds of thousands of prisoners, the Red Army seemed to have an endless supply of replacements. Even when surrounded, Soviet troops often fought on when they knew their situation was completely hopeless, and some Soviet fighter pilots, knowing they were outclassed, took to ramming German bombers -- and remarkably sometimes even survived. Stories made the rounds among German troops that the Soviets actually trained dogs carrying explosive charges to run under German tanks and blow them up. It is still argued whether this was actually done, but given the determination if not the skill of Soviet resistance, German troops found it easy to believe.
The Germans had lost hundreds of thousands of men, with a good fraction of them killed. These were severe casualties by any standards, and the only compensation was the Red Army had suffered far worse. Even ignoring combat losses and damage, maintaining such a huge operation, particularly in the primitive field conditions in the Soviet Union, meant a lot of wear and tear, as well as an increasing degree of simple exhaustion. Furthermore, although the original German plan had suggested that supply problems could be reduced by "living off the land", the Soviets were becoming increasingly efficient at ensuring that all that was left on the land were cinders and ashes, increasing German logistical requirements and effort.
On 4 August, Hitler flew to Army Group Center's headquarters in Borisov, east of Minsk. The offensive seemed to be dragging on, and so Hitler decided that the focus needed to be shifted on the USSR's economic assets. This meant increasing the pressure to the south, to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus, and to the north, to take Leningrad. This would undermine the Soviet ability to make war and provide resources for the German war machine. In addition, Hitler had a perfectly sensible concern that his offensive spearheads were too far out on a limb logistically and vulnerable to attack on the flanks.
On arrival, Hitler informed Field Marshal von Bock that he was to halt his drive towards Moscow, and that the panzers of Army Group Center were to be used to support a drive by Army Group South to capture the Ukraine, with smaller forces diverted to support Army Groups North's push on Leningrad. Panzer Generals Guderian and Hoth protested loudly. Moscow was only 320 kilometers (200 miles) away, and most of the Red Army was defending the city. Once the Red Army was destroyed, the rest of the USSR might well fall with the city. Guderian flew to Berlin on 23 August to argue for a continued drive on Moscow. The Fuehrer heard him out, then went on at length about the economic need to seize the Ukraine and the Caucasus region. Senior staff officers present said nothing to contradict Hitler, and Guderian left the meeting empty-handed.
* By mid-July, Army Group South had advanced deep into the Ukraine, performing an encirclement of three Soviet armies around Uman, south of Kiev, in the process. The Germans wiped out the pocket in early August, taking more than 100,000 prisoners. Guderian's panzer group was then shifted south to assist in the capture of Kiev itself. By the end of August, the Red Army had moved to a line west of the Dnieper, though the Soviets held on to Kiev on the east shore of the river and to Odessa, on the northwest corner of the Black Sea, which could in principle be supported by sea. By this time, the Luftwaffe was range of Moscow and was hammering the city. Citizens hid in the subway.
Although Stalin was no real military strategist, he was arrogant and ignored the advice of his generals, many of whom were very competent. Following Stalin's misguided orders, the Red Army continued to suffer reverses. With German Army Group South moving to trap Red Army forces in Kiev, Zhukov suggested to Stalin that Red Army forces there were threatened with encirclement and suggested they withdraw to a more defensible line. Stalin called the suggestion "rubbish". He did not want to give up Kiev and still thought he had a choice in the matter. Zhukov submitted his resignation as chief of staff; Stalin accepted it.
Similarly, on 11 September Marshal Budyenny, commander of the Soviet Southwestern Front, requested permission to withdraw from Kiev and escape the trap. Stalin refused, but he did order Budyenny to return to Moscow. Budyenny was a an old crony of Stalin, one of Voroshilov's lieutenants from Civil War days, a fun-loving, virile man with a huge mustache who looked like a romantic bandit and had something of the personality of one. Stalin was particularly fond of him; Stalin may have also begun to wonder, with good reason, if his old buddies were particularly effective generals. In any case, Stalin ordered Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos to take Budyenny's place.
At the end of August and the first two weeks of September, the Germans encircled Kiev, linking up well behind the city on 16 September. Stalin granted permission to withdraw on 17 September, but the trap had snapped shut, and though the Red Army troops inside the trap fought desperately to break out, few succeeded. Kirponos was killed in action, which was just as well considering the alternatives.
Four Soviet armies were completely destroyed. Kiev itself fell on 26 September 1941, with the Germans claiming the capture of over 600,000 soldiers. After such losses, the Germans now had the advantage in numbers of men in the battle. By 24 October, German Army Group South was in Karhkov, a major industrial center in the Ukraine; by the end of October the Germans were in the Crimea, and by the end of November they had seized most of the peninsula except for the fortress city Sevastopol; and on November 20 the Germans entered Rostov-on-Don.
* In the meantime, on 8 August, Field Marshall Von Leeb's Army Group North, supported by armor from Army Group Center, renewed its offensive towards Leningrad. By the end of August, Army Group North was within 48 kilometers (30 miles) of the city. Simultaneously, the Finns pushed the Red Army back in offensives to the north and south of Lake Ladoga, reclaiming the territory lost in the Winter War. However, the Germans would find the Finns reluctant to do much more than that.
The only delay in the German offensive was due to the stubborn resistance of isolated Red Army units in Tallinn, in Estonia. The Soviets held out in Tallinn for a month and then tried to evacuate by sea. They were hit hard by the Luftwaffe and German artillery, which sank 16 warships and 34 transports.
On 8 September, Army Group North had sealed off the land approaches to Leningrad. The Germans had been bombarding the city with artillery since 4 September, and on 6 September the Luftwaffe bombed Leningrad as well, causing great damage and in particular burning down a major food depot. Stalin concluded that the Soviet commander in Leningrad, his old friend Voroshilov, was not up to the task of defending the city. Zhukov was called to the Kremlin, where Stalin congratulated him on the competence he had showed fighting the Germans, and then asked: "Where will you be off to now?"
"Back to the front."
"Which front?" Stalin asked, indulging his inclination to toy with people. Zhukov was only startled for a moment and shot back: "The one you consider necessary."
"Then go to Leningrad. It is in an almost hopeless situation." Zhukov flew into the city the next day, 9 September, his plane evading German fighters. Zhukov's irritation at being attacked was aggravated when the guards at the headquarters for the Leningrad Front refused to let him in since he lacked a pass. Zhukov had to swallow his annoyance -- Red Army soldiers were trained to do what they were told without question, and the regulations applied to Zhukov as they did to everyone else. He had to wait 15 minutes to be granted admission.
Zhukov went to Voroshilov and presented him with a note from Stalin, which read: "Hand over the command of the Front to Zhukov and fly to Moscow immediately." Zhukov sent Voroshilov away curtly and proceeded to terrorize the generals who had been fumbling the defense of the city, sacking one on the spot. Voroshilov went back to Moscow, expecting to get a bullet in his head, but Stalin was fond of Voroshilov and spared him.
Zhukov mobilized the citizens of Leningrad to fight. Voroshilov had ordered the Baltic fleet to be scuttled; Zhukov rescinded the order and had the warships turn their big guns on the Germans to pound them at long range. Voroshilov had ordered factories rigged for destruction; Zhukov had them returned to production of war materials. On 17 September, he sent out an order to his officers saying that any retreat would be punishable by death. With the city isolated, however, it was no longer practical to evacuate those who could not contribute to its defense, such as children and the old. There would be a terrible price to pay for this failure.
* The Germans failed to press the attack on Leningrad, since Hitler had changed his mind about its capture. The city had been isolated and he felt there was no reason to waste his troops. Leningrad could be pounded into rubble with shelling and bombing, and left to starve; it would fall into his hands in time. Hitler would then wipe it from the face of the earth and turn the land over to the Finns.
Having successfully secured his flanks, and in particular emboldened by the tremendous victory at Kiev, Hitler now ordered Army Group North's panzers to be redirected to renew the drive on Moscow. In late September, Zhukov received reports that German tanks were being loaded up on railway flatcars and shunted in the direction of Moscow. He thought this was a deception exercise at first, but within days Red Army troops in front of Moscow were reporting the arrival of German armor from the north.
As with Leningrad, Hitler wanted Moscow completely destroyed, erased from history. On its site, he planned to create an artificial lake. The final drive on Moscow, codenamed Operation TYPHOON, began on 2 October 1941, after the efforts in the north and south wound down. Guderian's panzers shifted north from their excursion into the Ukraine, and made rapid progress at first. Hitler wanted to encircle Moscow and bag all the Red forces defending the city. The German offensive ran along a huge front 640 kilometers (400 miles) wide. The attack was conducted by 14 panzer divisions and 74 infantry divisions, totalling 1.8 million German soldiers. The Red Army could field 800,000 men in 83 divisions to defend Moscow, but only 25 of these divisions were fully effective, and the Soviets were desperately short of aircraft and armor.
General Ivan Konev was commander of the Red Army's West Front and had to face the onslaught. By 7 October, the Germans were beginning encirclements of Soviet Western Front and Reserve Front concentrations in the region. The Germans took 660,000 prisoners at Vyazma, for a total loss of three million men since the beginning of the campaign. A German general wrote with satisfaction: "Each night the villages went on burning, coloring the low clouds with blood-red light."
Stalin had once again created a disaster by refusing to let Red Army units withdraw and escape capture. Now that things had become desperate, he was finally more willing to listen to his generals. He called Georgiy Zhukov, still in charge of the defense of Leningrad, to come to the Kremlin on 5 October. Zhukov left his aide Ivan Fedyuminsky in charge in Leningrad and flew to Moscow on 7 October. Stalin briefed him on the situation and ordered Zhukov to go to West Front Headquarters to sort things out. The next day, Zhukov reported to Stalin that there was nothing standing in the way of the Germans and Moscow. The situation was very serious. The only positive news, if it could be called that, was that the Germans were still preoccupied with the destruction of Soviet troops they had encircled at Vyazma.
On 10 October, Stalin ordered Zhukov to take command of the combined fronts and relieve Konev. Stalin said that Konev would be handed over to a revolutionary tribunal, which meant that almost certainly he would be shot as a scapegoat. Zhukov claimed later that he replied bluntly: "Pavlov was shot, but that changed nothing. The situation at the front didn't improve. Therefore, I don't recommend you to do the same to Konev. He is an immensely experienced and clever man, strong willed and capable of establishing order. I request that you appoint him as my deputy."
The request was granted. Zhukov now focused on the immediate problem of saving Moscow. He had only about 90,000 men, all that was left of 800,000 that had been available before the beginning of TYPHOON. Zhukov mobilized the citizens of Moscow to build defenses. He formed citizens' militias from students, older men, and disabled men. They would be sent into combat with little training, to be thrown under the tracks of the German drive. Few of them would survive.
On 13 October, the Germans broke through the final major Soviet defense line in front of Moscow. On 14 October, the Germans were at Podolsk, 48 kilometers (30 miles) from the city. A unit of officer cadets, many only teenagers, managed to slow them down for a few vital hours. All the cadets were killed. On 16 October, the Soviet diplomatic corps in Moscow abandoned the capital to head for Kubyshev on the Volga, 640 kilometers (400 miles) to the east. Although Stalin had a bunker built in Kubyshev, after receiving assurances from Zhukov that the city could be held, Koba decided to not leave Moscow. He undoubtedly did not want to face the humiliation of being chased out of town.
However, the flight of the bureaucrats led to panic among the citizenry. The police force had all but disintegrated, there was looting, and the railway stations were clogged with civilians. The panic died down when the radio announced on 18 October that Stalin was still in the capital, and on 20 October Stalin imposed martial law. Troublemakers, or for that matter anyone who didn't do as ordered promptly or dared to talk back, would of course be shot on the spot.
On the front to the west, the soldiers continued to fight stubbornly. On the road to Moscow, General Pavilov performed a valiant last stand, and 28 of his men stopped 50 German tanks. Pavilov had been informed by Zhukov that he would be shot if he let the Germans through.
Near the end of October, Stalin paid a tentative visit to the front. His armored car bogged down in the mud about halfway there, and as it was getting dark, he decided he'd seen enough and took another car back to Moscow. Despite this faint-hearted effort, after his pathetic collapse at the beginning of the invasion, he was now demonstrating an admirable resolve, as well as his customary ruthlessness. In late October, he asked a city military commander what the plans were for the annual military parades to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution. The officer was astounded that Stalin would consider a parade when it seemed that Moscow would soon fall to the Germans, and raised objections: "But what if the Germans break through and bomb the parade, Comrade Stalin?"
Stalin replied: "Clear away the dead and wounded and continue with the parade."
The night before the parade, Stalin addressed the Soviet people to rally them once more to the cause. He poured contempt on Hitler's belief that the Slavs were "untermenschen", born slaves, replying: "And it is these people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the Great Russian Nation -- the nation of Plekhanov and Lenin, of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Gorky and Chekhov, of Glinka and Tchaikovsky." The German invasion was not merely an injury -- it was an insult, an expression of contempt for the peoples of the Soviet Union. The defiant tone of the speech went over well in Britain and the United States.
The parade went ahead the next day, 7 November. Fighter squadrons were on alert to deal with any Luftwaffe intruders that might attack the parade, and medical emergency teams were standing by to deal with any casualties. Fortunately, it snowed that day and the parade went forward without the slightest hindrance from the Germans. Stalin spoke to the troops, expressing his conviction that the Germans were strained to the utmost and would quickly collapse. Although the event was to commemorate the Revolution, he called out to the troops by invoking the great heroes of Russia's imperial past. Socialism wasn't enough to motivate people to fight. Stalin had to appeal to their patriotism. Some of the soldiers in the audience were not so convinced, but that didn't matter. They were immediately marched off to the front lines to fight.
* In the meantime, the German advance had been slowing as the weather continued to get nastier. The German high command found the lack of progress frustrating and baffling: the fight should have been over by now, the Soviets seemed to be unable to understand the obvious fact that they had been completely defeated. The Germans were now trying to drive their tanks forward through snow, sleet, and mud, on primitive roads. German forces were at the end of a very long and tenuous supply line in steadily worsening weather, and had little equipment or training in winter fighting. Guderian had requisitioned winter clothing in October, only to be reprimanded. Soon winter clothing would be sent forward through the supply network, but it remained stockpiled in depots in the rear. The primitive supply network was overloaded and ammunition took priority.
On 31 October, the German high command had to order a pause to the advance, which was moving at a snail's pace anyway. The Soviets used the pause to rebuild their forces with astonishing speed, but the pause was short-lived. The weather turned to ice and snow, making the ground solid enough to permit movement of tanks, and on 15 November the Germans moved forward again, with pincers driving north and south to encircle Moscow and deal the Red Army the final killing blow. Guderian's panzer group, moving up from the southwest, found itself blocked by stubborn Soviet resistance. On 27 November, the Red Army made a limited counterstroke against Guderian's forces in a well-organized and well-equipped attack, halting Guderian's drive on the city.
The German effort to circle the north of Moscow was having better luck. On 2 December, German advance units reached Krasnaya Polyana, 21 kilometers (17 miles) from the center of Moscow, finally being blocked by antitank obstacles built by the citizens of Moscow. The Germans were now in a position to shell the city with long-range artillery. On the evening of 2 December, General Rokossovsky received a call on the "special line" from Stalin. The situation was "very difficult", as Rokossovsky recollected after the war, and it was unlikely that Comrade Stalin was calling to have a pleasant chat. Rokossovsky picked up the phone "with some trepidation."
Stalin asked him directly: "Are you aware, Comrade Commander, that the enemy has occupied Krasnaya Polyana, and are you aware that if Krasnaya Polyana is occupied, it means that the Germans can bombard any point in the city of Moscow?" At dawn, the Russians counterattacked the Germans at Krasnaya Polyana and drove them out. The Germans left behind a pair of 300 millimeter heavy guns that they had been setting up to begin shelling the city.
Stalin was in fact doing a great deal of micro-managing, at one point ordering Zhukov and other senior officers to personally go and evict the Germans from a small village named Dedovo. The brass showed up, thoroughly startling the officers on the line, and sent in a tank and a company of infantry to drive out a platoon of Germans. The whole thing was entirely silly, but Zhukov admitted later: "Stalin must be given his due. By his harsh and unscrupulous attitude he was able to achieve the well-nigh impossible."
Stalin was helped a great deal by the weather. December brought blizzards and depths of cold few Germans were familiar with. Weapons froze up and men suffered from frostbite and disease, adding to the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers on the casualty lists. The Luftwaffe found itself grounded in the severe weather, but the Red Air Force seemed to only increase its activities. Although the Fuehrer demanded that the drive on Moscow be continued, as winter tightened its grip commanders in the front line were acknowledging reality and setting up for the defensive.
Runstedt's forces had seized Rostov in the south on 19 November in a driving snowstorm, but his troops were overextended, and counterattacks by Timoshenko's troops forced the Germans to withdraw. Hitler was angry at Runstedt for withdrawing, the Fuehrer never having seen any of his troops in a major retreat before. Runstedt submitted his resignation on 30 November and Hitler accepted it the next day, 1 December, though the Fuehrer tried to soften the action by announcing his removal from command as a "sick leave" and giving him a birthday gift of 250,000 marks a few weeks later.
Runstedt's replacement was Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, previously commander of the 6th Army, a macho bulldog of a man with a perpetually furious expression who the aristocratic Runstedt found crude and overbearing. Command of the 6th Army went to Reichenau's chief of staff, Friedrich Paulus. Hitler thought that Reichenau would turn things around, but Reichenau almost immediately reported that the situation was impossible and that the withdrawal had to continue. The Fuehrer, agitated, flew to Poltava in the Ukraine on 3 December to find out what was going on. He was quickly told by Sepp Dietrich, commander of the SS Leibstandarte Division and a hardcore Nazi, that the decision to withdraw had been correct. This took Hitler back. His composure was going to be further shaken over the next few weeks.
* To the north, Hitler ordered the German Army and the Luftwaffe to pound Leningrad to rubble, instead of sending German troops to be ground up in Soviet defenses. The Nazis bombarded the city relentlessly. As the northern weather went cold and icy, Leningrad began to slowly die. Less than half the food needed to keep the citizenry alive was coming in. In mid-October, the authorities conducted a check of citizen's ration cards and tightened up control of the rationing. A woman who worked at a printing shop that produced ration cards was found with a hundred ration cards in her possession. She was immediately shot.
The citizens had no fuel. They burned all their possessions to stay warm. By late November, food rations had shrunk to what would prove to be an all-time low. A citizen received a handful of bread that tasted of sawdust. People ate paste, shoes, birds, mice, soups made from stinging nettles, anything they could find. Household pets disappeared quickly, their masters weeping as they killed the animals and then ate them.
The city had been flooded with refugees when the Germans closed in on it, and many had no papers. No papers meant no ration card. The refugees started starving in their camps outside the city as early as September, and nearly all in the camps would eventually die. By the onset of winter, people were dropping in the streets, their frozen bodies left unattended until the authorities periodically picked them up and dumped them into mass graves dotted over the city. Eventually, the lack of resources to dig graves forced the authorities to begin cremating the bodies.
Although Soviet authorities kept it a secret for decades, some of the citizens turned to cannibalism, and a few of them murdered to obtain bodies when corpses were not conveniently available. Soldiers coming back from the front heard stories of some of their fellows being killed and eaten and began to move around in armed groups. The authorities recorded about 1,500 cannibals. Most were women who were trying to save their children.
The Soviets had been able to sneak some supplies across Lake Ladoga to the east, with the material delivered by train to a railhead at Tikhvin and then shuttled over the lake by barge in the dark. The Germans seized Tikhvin on 9 November, shutting down the last direct connection between the city and the outside world.
In late November, the ice on Lake Ladoga became thick enough to support sleds and then trucks, but without a railhead to the lake, there was no way to provide the trucks with adequate loads of food. The Red Army recaptured Tikhvin on 9 December, as part of a general offensive of which more is said later, but of course the Germans thoroughly wrecked everything when they left. It most of the rest of the month to get the railroad back in working order. Supplies wouldn't start to flow until January and it would take several months to bring them up to the needed level.
In the meantime, the citizens continued to starve and die. Defiantly, the people went on with their lives as best they could. Historians performed their studies, architects designed new structures, and world-famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the LENINGRAD SYMPHONY. The symphony was performed in the city, with musicians recalled from the front to play. The conductor was faced with a difficult rehearsals, as musicians died of starvation every day. A quarter of a century later, the first night performance was reenacted by the survivors of the orchestra and the audience. Musical instruments were placed in the empty chairs of the dead of the symphony.
Even children made their own contribution to this great and appalling story. A young girl, Tania Savicheva, kept a diary to record life and death under the siege, listing calamities in a simple fashion: "Grandmother died, 25 January 1942, at 3:00 PM." Following pages list death after death, and conclude: "The Savichevas have died. All died. Only Tania is left." The girl was evacuated, but was too malnourished to survive. Her diary was read by Soviet prosecutors at the trials of Nazi leaders after the war.
Leningrad would suffer siege for 900 days in all, but the first winter was the worst. It wasn't until March that the supply line was fully operational. The boats brought in food and took out noncombatants, dealing with Luftwaffe attacks as best they could. A pipeline and power line were laid across Lake Ladoga to keep the city operational. Survivors planted crops anyplace there was to plant them, and by the summer rations wouldn't be a particular problem. Nobody knows exactly how many people died in that hideous winter in Leningrad, but estimates are on the order of two million.
* As the Germans pushed through the snow towards Moscow in early December, the Soviets were preparing a counterstroke. Red agent Richard Sorge at the German embassy in Tokyo provided intelligence that the Japanese were not preparing to attack the Soviet Union from Manchukuo. Sorge had reported German preparations for BARBAROSSA back in June and had been ignored, but now Stalin believed him. Stalin withdrew more than half of the USSR's combat strength from Siberia, shuttling 40 divisions west to deal with the Nazis. These divisions were well trained, experienced, well equipped, and their officer corps had not been badly damaged by the purges. They had a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft. They had already given Guderian a taste of what they were capable of on 27 November. Now they were ready to be used in earnest.
There were half a million men available for the assault. On 5 December the Red Army launched limited counteroffensives against German positions, and found that the Germans surprisingly gave up their positions easily. Encouraged, the Soviets decided to push harder. Rokossovsky's forces to the southwest of the city and Konev's in the north led the push. The front was almost a thousand kilometers (600 miles) wide. The Soviets were now committing massive reserves that German intelligence had never really accounted for; Red artillery had plenty of ammunition and was close to supply bases; and the Red Air Force was out in strength.
Indeed, although the Red Air Force had lost immense numbers of planes in the early days of the war, most of the planes destroyed were obsolescent anyway, Since the aircraft had been mostly shot and bombed while sitting on an airfield, losses of trained pilots had been relatively light. The Red Air Force was now beginning to obtain quantities of modern aircraft, such as the formidable, heavily-armored Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik close-support aircraft, or "Flying Tank", and the fast Petlyakov Pe-2 light bomber. The Soviets were well able to operate these aircraft in otherwise intolerable winter weather. For example, ground crews would drain all the oil from an aircraft when it landed, and keep the oil heated with a field stove until it was poured back in to ready the aircraft for combat again.
The Soviet T-34 tank, better than anything the Germans had and designed with winter operations in mind, was now becoming available in quantity. The new "Katyusha (Sweet Little Katy)" barrage rocket launcher was capable of pouring a wall of explosive on German positions with munitions whose shrill screams shattered the nerve of those who survived the attacks. Well-trained Soviet ski troops moved quickly through German positions. Within 48 hours, the Soviet juggernaut was in full motion.
The Red Army drove forward from Moscow in the center and attacked to open a lifeline to Leningrad in the north, while Soviet forces pushed towards Kursk in the Ukraine. Hitler ordered Army Group Center to stand its ground, but it was impossible. On 20 December, Heinz Guderian told Hitler that his troops could no longer fight. The Soviet Union had seemed on the edge of defeat, and instead had inflicted an undeniable defeat on the Germans.
Soviet propaganda paraded pictures of German soldiers captured wearing women's winter coats or other ridiculous gear, calling them "Winter Fritzes". Films showed the numb and frightened faces of German prisoners, herded off to prison camps. Most would not return. There were not great numbers of German prisoners; although the German Army had taken a beating, there were few more professional armies in the world, and the Germans had managed to fall back in order and avoid encirclement. However, Hitler was not happy with commanders that gave ground and sacked dozens of generals. Runstedt had been one of the first to leave, with those following prominently including Guderian. He would never hold a major field command again. Von Brauchitsch suffered a heart attack and was forced to retire on 19 December, with the Fuehrer having little kindly to say about him and then assigning himself, Hitler, the role of Commander in Chief of the German Army.
Some historians claim that Hitler's insistence on standing fast kept the German Army from collapsing in the face of the Red Army's offensive, while others suggest that it only increased suffering and losses, since the Soviet drive would have run out of steam as it outstretched its supply lines anyway. Hitler might well have considered the lesson that Stalin had shown such trouble grasping -- that it was better to abandon terrain to preserve forces that could be used later to give the enemy a real blow under much more favorable conditions. Whatever the reality of the situation, it is clear that Hitler thought that his stubbornness had saved the day, and came to an unambiguous conclusion that would have major consequences later: Hold ground at all costs.
* The Germans had been forced to abandon piles of equipment. The Soviets proudly displayed these discards to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when he arrived on a diplomatic visit in mid-December. The British and the United States had doubted the Soviet Union would survive, and the Soviets displayed the results of their victory with great pride.
Eden was properly impressed, in fact becoming somewhat overly taken with Stalin, though when Stalin proposed to Eden that the British recognize the Soviet seizure of the Baltics and eastern Poland -- even suggesting that after the war the British could balance these appropriations by taking over bits of France and the Low Countries with Soviet acceptance -- Koba found the British distinctly cool to the idea.
In any case, the newly-liberated territories, Russian soldiers were greeted ecstatically by liberated villagers, and Muscovites celebrated Christmas and New Years' with exhuberance that had bubbled up through the gloom. Still, as Red troops moved into territories held by the Nazis, they were appalled by the destruction and desolation. The Germans wrecked everything with their characteristic efficiency as they withdrew, and their rule over the occupied lands had not been gentle in the first place. The Nazis took particular pleasure in defacing the treasures of Slavic culture. In the town of Klim, they burned the house of the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and destroyed the score of his Sixth Symphony. Count Leo Tolstoy's house in Yasnaya Polyana was razed to the chimneys, and his gravesite was dug up to allow German soldiers to be buried there instead. Russian Orthodox churches were often burned and their icons destroyed.
The churches were also often sites of executions. The Germans killed Soviet civilians with little provocation or hesitation. Soviet propaganda films caught the savagery with heart-wrenching vividness, showing the corpses of the hanged swinging in rows in the falling snow; the burned bodies of victims in shattered houses; a mother weeping, arranging the hair of her dead daughter, a pretty young woman killed by the Nazis.
