The Second World War (31 page)

Arriving in time to make the onward journey to the Rastenburg evening conference (Hitler had recently instituted a timetable for meeting his staff officers at noon and midnight), Guderian was greeted by Brauchitsch with the news: ‘I forbid you to mention the question of Moscow to the Führer. The operation to the south [the Kiev attack] has been ordered. The problem now is simply how it is to be carried out. Discussion is pointless.’ Guderian grudgingly obeyed, but in the course of the confrontation dropped so many hints about the ‘major objective’ on Army Group Centre’s front that Hitler eventually raised it himself. Given his chance, Guderian launched into an impassioned plea for sustaining the drive on Moscow. He was heard out; Hitler had a special regard for the Panzer pioneer, which had recently been reinforced by his acceptance of Guderian’s warnings of Russia’s unanticipated tank strength. However, when the general had spoken, the Führer went on to the offensive. His commanders, he said, ‘know nothing about the economic aspects of war’; he explained the necessity of seizing Russia’s southern economic zone from Kiev to Kharkov, and emphasised the importance of capturing the Crimea, from which the Soviet air force menaced Romania’s Ploesti region, still the main source of Germany’s natural oil supply. Since the other officers present made it clear that they supported the leader, and Brauchitsch and Halder had pointedly not accompanied him, Guderian felt obliged to desist from opposition. The only concession he extracted was that his Panzer group should be committed to support Rundstedt in its entirety and allowed to return to the Moscow axis as soon as the battle for Kiev was won. Halder and Brauchitsch were loud in recriminations to his face when he returned to OKH from OKW, and Halder vilified him to Bock on the telephone during his homeward flight to Novi Borisov. But the die was now cast. After nearly three weeks of inertia, the
Ostheer
was to resume the attack with a full-blooded offensive into the black-earth region of the south. Whether it could then complete its thrust towards Moscow would depend on the seasons. The descent of the cold weather was only two and a half months distant and then Generals January and February would be fighting on Stalin’s side.

Stalin, however, was already planning a counter-offensive. On 16 August he had created the Bryansk Front, under A. I. Yeremenko, to close the gap which had appeared between the Central and South-Western Commands (temporary headquarters superior to fronts). To this new front he consigned as much of the new Soviet equipment as could be spared, several T-34 tank battalions and some batteries of Katyusha rockets (‘Stalin organs’ the Germans called them) which fired eight fin-stabilised projectiles with very large warheads. With these weapons and two new armies, the Thirteenth and Twenty-First, Yeremenko attempted to counter-attack into the gap which yawned between Rundstedt’s armoured spearhead, supplied by Kleist’s Panzer Group 1, and Guderian’s Panzer Army, approaching from the north. He was simply putting his head into a trap. Kleist had already pulled off a successful encirclement of 100,000 Russians at Uman on 8 August. The converging Panzer groups now stretched out their pincers to enclose the much larger Russian concentration around Kiev. Guderian, who offered an exposed flank eventually 150 miles long as he beat his way southward from the Moscow axis, was vulnerable to a Russian slicing stroke; but his 3rd and 17th Panzer Divisions, led by thrusting young generals, Walter Model, a future army group commander, and Ritter von Thoma, who was to make his name in the desert against the British, brooked no opposition. They drove forward and on 16 September joined hands with Kleist’s tank force at Lokhvitsa, a hundred miles east of Kiev. It would take another ten days, during which the Second and Fourth Air Fleets saturated the pocket with bombs, to close all the gaps in its walls through which escaping handfuls of Russians managed to filter. However, on 26 September it had been securely enclosed and 665,000 Russian soldiers were prisoners within it – the largest single mass ever taken in an operation of war before or since. Five Russian armies and fifty divisions had been destroyed, uncounted thousands killed; they included Kirponos, mortally wounded in an ambush close to his final command post at Lokhvitsa on 20 September.

The aftermath of the Kiev encirclement yielded the worst of the spectacles which horrified even the hardest-hearted among the German conquerors, as the captives were marched back across the steppe to the wholly inadequate prisoner cages in the rear. ‘We suddenly saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us,’ recorded an eyewitness. ‘From it came a subdued hum, like that from a beehive. Prisoners of war, Russians, six deep. . . . We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them, then what we saw transfixed us where we stood and we forgot our nausea. Were these really human beings, these grey-brown figures, these shadows lurching towards us, stumbling and staggering, moving shapes at their last gasp, creatures which only some last flicker of will to live enabled to obey the order to march? All the misery of the world seemed to be concentrated there.’ Nearly 3 million Russians had now been taken prisoner and of these half a million would die, of lack of shelter or food, in the first three months of the approaching winter.

The sense of the approaching winter had already started to touch the whole of the
Ostheer
in late September, with its threat first of liquefied roads and swollen rivers, then of blizzards and snowdrifts which its men and equipment were equally unprepared to meet. Guderian was hastening his Panzer army back to the central front, burning with anxiety to open the final drive on Moscow before the weather broke. To the south, the Romanians were laying siege to Odessa, which was defended by a hastily constituted Special Maritime Army of 100,000 men and would not fall until 16 October, and the Eleventh Army, commanded by Erich von Manstein, was pushing on across the estuary of the Dnieper to reach the neck of the Crimea on 29 September. That thrust largely settled Hitler’s fear that the Crimea might be turned into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the bombardment of the Romanian oilfields. Manstein’s advance also brought the coastal industrial region of the Donetz and the Don under threat. Nevertheless, the unloosening of the Red Army’s grip on Russia’s southern provinces and the reassembly of Bock’s striking force on the central front for a renewed drive on Moscow did not constitute a comprehensive solution to the development of the Barbarossa strategy. The unlocking of the northern front and the investment and eventual capture of Leningrad were also a necessary stage in the conquest.

Army Group North’s concerted effort to take Leningrad had begun on 8 August with a determined assault on the line of the river Luga, the outermost line of the city’s defences, which was to be co-ordinated with a Finnish-German offensive across the isthmus of Karelia – annexed by Stalin after the defeat of Finland in 1940 – and extending far northward towards the Arctic Circle. Leeb’s offensive was complicated by three factors. The first was that Leningrad was protected from the rear by Lake Ladoga, an enormous body of water interposing between the city and any encirclement from the north. The second was that the Leningrad command had mobilised the city’s population to construct concentric defence lines around the city, including 620 miles of earthworks, 400 miles of anti-tank ditch, 370 miles of barbed-wire entanglement and 5000 pillboxes – an extraordinary labouring effort to which 300,000 members of the Young Communist League and 200,000 civilian inhabitants, including women in equal numbers to men, were committed. The third factor was that Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, was determined, even at this low point in Soviet fortunes, to give no hostages by capturing more territory than that to which he had title. While Leeb laboured forward along the Baltic coast, therefore, Mannerheim’s Finnish units hung fire above Lake Ladoga after 5 September, when the tanks of Hoth’s Panzer group, detached from Army Group Centre following the Hitler-Guderian conclave of 23 August, were returned to Army Group Centre. Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 was left by itself to breach Leningrad’s fortifications and take the city.

A fourth impediment to Leeb’s Leningrad
Blitzkrieg
emerged in mid-September. Zhukov, who had advised Stalin to abandon Kiev before it was encircled and for his pains had been dismissed as chief of staff, arrived at the North-Western Front on 13 September to energise the defences. He found the Germans on the outskirts of the old tsarist capital; Tsarskoe Selo (now called Pushkin), the Russian Versailles, had fallen on 10 September (its enchanting follies and pavilions, like those of the Peking Summer Palace designed by imported Western architects, were to perish in a conflagration caused by the invaders). Shortly afterwards Leeb’s vanguards reached the Gulf of Finland at Strelna. Leningrad, isolated from the rest of Russia by the Finnish advance to the 1939 frontier and by Leeb’s occupation of the Baltic littoral, now connected with the interior only by the water route across Lake Ladoga. The lifeline was tenuous and erratic; Leningraders quickly felt the constriction and would shortly begin to experience the pangs of starvation which would kill a million of them before the lifting of the siege in the spring of 1944. In the immediate term, however, Zhukov’s arrival had achieved a decisive effect. His first order was ‘to smother the enemy with artillery and mortar fire and air support, permitting no penetration of the defences’. Under his resolute command, the energy of Hoepner’s Panzer assaults was broken in the lines of trenches and concrete that the citizens of Leningrad had constructed. The situation has ‘worsened considerably’, Leeb reported to the Führer’s headquarters on 24 September; Finnish pressure in Karelia had ‘quite stopped’; the city, with its 3 million inhabitants, was intact. German bombardment was inflicting a toll of 4000 civilian casualties a day and starting 200 fires; but the great
enceinte
of canals and classical palaces remained impervious to the Panzer thrust. Only twenty tanks took part in the final assault. Hitler had already decided that the bulk of Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 must be diverted to the climacteric Operation
Taifun
(Typhoon), to take Moscow.

Führer Directive No. 35, which resolved the ambiguity of the Barbarossa strategy inherent in its direction since OKH and OKW had each presented their conception of the campaign’s conduct a year earlier, was issued on 6 September. It laid down that, following the encirclement and destruction of the Red Army on the front of Army Group Centre, Bock was ‘to begin the advance on Moscow with [his] right flank on the Oka and [his] left on the Upper Volga’. Panzer Groups 2 and 3 were to be reinforced by Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 brought from the Leningrad front to assure the largest possible breakthrough effort on the Moscow axis. The principal aim of the operation was the defeat and annihilation of the Russian forces blocking the road to Moscow ‘in the limited time which remains available before the onset of the winter weather’.

The army which set off on the last stage of the road to Moscow in late September was greatly different from that which had crossed the frontier ten weeks earlier. Battle deaths, wounds and sickness had reduced its strength by half a million, casualties not to be compared to the ghastly loss suffered by the Red Army but clearly enough to depress morale at the front and cast a pall of misery and apprehension over family life in the Reich. The war diarist of the 98th Infantry Division, diverted northward from Kiev to the Moscow front, recorded the ordeal of its 400-mile march.

The modern general-service carts with their rubber tyres and ball-bearing mounted wheels had long since broken up under the stress of the appalling tracks, and been replaced by Russian farm carts. Good-quality German horses [600,000 had begun the campaign] foundered daily through exhaustion and poor food but the scrubby Russian ponies, although in reality too light for the heavy draught work they were doing, lived on eating birch twigs and the thatched roofs of cottages. Equipment, including many tons of the divisional reserve of ammunition, had to be abandoned at the roadside for lack of transport to carry it. Gradually the most simple necessities of life disappeared, razor blades, soap, toothpaste, shoe-repairing materials, needles and thread. Even in September and before the advent of winter, there was incessant rain and a cold north-east wind, so that every night there was the scramble for shelter, squalid and bug-ridden though it usually was. When this could not be found the troops plumbed the very depths of wretchedness. The rain, cold and lack of rest increased sickness that, in normal circumstances, would have warranted admission to hospital; but the sick had to march with the column over distances of up to twenty-five miles a day, since there was no transport to carry them and they could not be left behind in the bandit-infested forest. The regulation boots, the
Kommisstiefel
, were falling to pieces [in the coming winter their iron-nailed soles would accelerate the onset of frostbite]. All ranks were filthy and bearded, with dirty, rotting and verminous underclothing; typhus was shortly to follow.

The realities of conquest can rarely have been much different. Alexander’s hoplites entered Persepolis almost barefoot, Wellington’s redcoats came to Paris in rags. Neither of those great victors’ armies, however, stood at risk from the Arctic winter. Both, moreover, had already defeated the enemy’s main force before they entered his capital. The
Ostheer
had a great battle ahead of it before it could be certain of finding shelter in Moscow. The opening stages promised well. In an encirclement rivalling that of Army Group South’s at Kiev, Centre’s Panzer groups, Hoth’s and Hoepner’s (detached from the Leningrad front), surrounded 650,000 Russians between Smolensk and Vyazma. Many gave up without a fight; they were the hastily embodied militiamen of the
Osoviakhim
, the pre-war citizen defence force on which Stalin drew for his reserves. Others fought more doggedly. Guderian, visiting the 4th Panzer Division, found ‘descriptions . . . of the tactical handlings of the Russian tanks very worrying’. (It had recently encountered T-34s for the first time.)