World War II Behind Closed Doors (17 page)

This moment in Soviet history – when Moscow seemed about to fall, with many of its citizens in a state of panic – ran completely contrary to the subsequent myth of the resolute, victorious Red Army. All mention of the reality of the situation that October was suppressed under Communism. Only since the fall of the Berlin Wall have documents emerged from the Russian archives that confirm the extent of the fear that permeated the city that autumn. For example, secret document no. 34 of the State Defence Committee, dated 15 October 1941, reveals that a decision had been taken to ‘evacuate the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and
the top levels of government’ and that ‘in the event of enemy forces arriving at the gates of Moscow, the NKVD – Comrade Beria and Comrade Scherbakov – are ordered to blow up the business premises, warehouses and installations which cannot be evacuated, and all of the Underground electrical equipment’.

It has also emerged that, at this most crucial time, Stalin himself considered fleeing from Moscow. Nikolay Ponomariev,
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Stalin's personal telegraphist, confirmed that on the night of 16 October all the Soviet leader's communications equipment was dismantled in the Kremlin and loaded on to a train, waiting to take Stalin and his immediate entourage further east. But in the event the Soviet leader decided not to cut and run. He stayed in Moscow, imposed a state of siege on the city – which was enforced with the most brutal measures imaginable – and resolved to hold the Germans outside the capital with the help of fresh troops from far away.

That October Vasily Borisov
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was a soldier in a Siberian division in the remote east of the Soviet Union where, he says, ‘we were expecting Japan to attack’. But on the 18th his unit received orders to board trains immediately and head west to face a different foe: ‘In the summer we knew the Germans were advancing very fast and were capturing Soviet territory and we knew they were technically more advanced than us…we knew that the situation was bad’. As they travelled towards the West, he and his comrades knew ‘that a lot of us would be killed. We knew that the war would be hard, and that's what it turned out to be. It was very hard…we felt fear’.

They arrived to protect a defensive line that was being pushed ever nearer Moscow. ‘We were retreating…we had to retreat because we were weaker…we had few weapons as good as the Germans did…. There was so much smoke and fire that we didn't even see which way to crawl – we only heard the commander saying: “Forwards! Forwards!” It's indescribable…. We saw a lot of dead bodies – both on our side and the German side…. It was frightening. Everything was on fire – the snow was black from the explosions… for me it was the most frightening point in the whole
of the war…. Red Army soldiers, to tell the truth, were badly trained. They were not good marksmen because their training consisted of only a couple of days in the shooting range…. If a machine gunner was killed, I was unable to take over from him and load the machine gun because during military service I wasn't taught to do that’.

Nikolai Brandt,
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an eighteen-year-old student called up into the Red Army to take part in the defence of Moscow, recalls how almost his whole chain of command was ignorant of the most basic military skills: ‘I couldn't open the breech block on my rifle, so I was told to turn to my immediate commander and he said: “Oh, your rifle is cold – frozen. You have to warm it up”. How could I warm it up in minus 30? So I turned to the platoon commander and he said the same: “You have to warm it up – the breech block has frozen”. Then they said go to the battalion commander. He was a lieutenant, the only professional officer there, and he just opened the safety catch – and I felt enormous joy when the breech block opened’.

Nikolai Brandt knew that both he and his unit were able to offer little opposition to the Germans. Whilst he possessed an ancient rifle that he scarcely knew how to operate, many of the other men in his unit possessed no weapons of any kind. They planned to charge into battle behind the first wave of attack, and arm themselves from the weapons of their fallen comrades. ‘To send into attack completely untrained people’, he says, ‘is totally ineffective and inhuman’. He himself was badly injured within seconds of taking part in the battle for Moscow: ‘I was wounded by fragments of a mortar and thrown into deep snow – and what saved me was the snow’. Cushioned by the snow beneath him he lay on the battlefield for a whole day, his trousers soaked with blood, until he was able to crawl back to the Soviet line, where he found that virtually his entire unit had been annihilated that day. ‘An unseasoned soldier who comes under bombardment doesn't understand a thing’, he says. ‘He goes out of his mind. But a battle-hardened soldier can get his bearings well. If a mortar explodes, he knows where to run to and from, and from where to
expect the next mortar. He knows when and where to hide. So you get battle experience, which I didn't have’.

By now Stalin had few illusions about the quality of the Red Army. Many of its soldiers, like Nikolai Brandt, were ill trained and ill equipped. And in such circumstances Stalin relied ever more on a form of motivation that had served him well in the past – threat. A dramatic example of just how he sought to motivate his troops in this primitive manner is provided by a revealing phone call he made to Army Commissar Stepanov in October 1941. Stepanov had been sent to the headquarters of the Soviet Western Front at Perhyshkovo to report on the military situation. He then asked Stalin to allow Soviet forces to retreat east of Moscow. After he had made this suggestion there was a long silence, broken eventually by Stalin saying: ‘Find out from the comrades if they have spades’.

‘What, comrade Stalin?’ said Stepanov.

‘Do the comrades have spades?’ repeated Stalin.

Stepanov then discussed Stalin's request with the military commanders around him before replying: ‘Comrade Stalin, which spades? Sappers' spades or some other type?’

‘Doesn't matter which’, answered Stalin.

‘Comrade Stalin’, said Stepanov excitedly. ‘We have spades! What should we do with them?’

‘Comrade Stepanov’, replied Stalin, ‘tell your comrades that they should take their spades and dig their own graves. We will not leave Moscow’.
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It was this kind of ruthlessness that was eventually to help save Moscow – a psychological toughness that was even more important than the fresh troops from the East. And as part of this approach to warfare, Stalin ordered special rearguard blocking detachments to be placed behind the Soviet front lines with orders to shoot any Red Army soldier who tried to retreat. Soviet soldiers in front of Moscow knew that they must conquer their fear or risk certain death at the hands of their own countrymen.

‘These “rearguard detachments” played, I would say, a psychological, morale-supporting role’, says Vladimir Ogryzko,
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an
NKVD officer who served in one of the units that attempted to prevent the Red Army troops retreating. ‘If he [the soldier attempting to flee] resists or something or runs away, we eliminate [him]. We shot them, that's all. They weren't fighters’.

Ogryzko, like many Soviet soldiers, was inspired by the example of resistance shown by Stalin. The Soviet leader had decided to stay in Moscow and tough it out, and so, therefore, should they. The autumn of 1941 was for Stalin – as the spring of 1940 was for Churchill – the moment when true character showed through in adversity. ‘Stalin did well’, says Ogryzko. ‘For all his deep-seated shortcomings…Stalin will be very positively remembered in history. A strong man was required. They used fear to crush fear’.

The Germans had initially been hampered in their advance towards Moscow by the wet, slushy conditions, but by 15 November the roads were frozen and they pushed forward once again. Nearly a million Wehrmacht soldiers advanced on the Soviet capital, confronted by little more than half that number of Red Army troops. By the end of the month the 7th Panzer Division had crossed one of the last strategic barriers between themselves and the Soviet capital – the Moscow-Volga Canal. They were now just over 20 miles from Stalin's office in the heart of Moscow. But the Red Army managed to hold the Germans at the line of the canal. The invaders were reaching the end of their powers of endurance – their supply lines stretched back hundreds of miles and much of their motorized equipment no longer functioned.

A great deal has been made since of the impact of the inadequacy of the Germans' winter equipment – Hitler and his generals had planned on a short, tough war that would be finished by the autumn. And there is no doubt that the lack of warm clothing for the men and adequate cold weather protection for their guns and vehicles played a large part in stopping the Germans in their tracks. ‘When the temperature dropped to below minus 30 degrees Celsius our machine guns were not firing any more’, says Walter Schaefer-Kehnert,
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an officer with a German Panzer unit, who was encamped in front of Moscow that December. ‘Our machine guns were precision instruments, but when the oil got thick they didn't
shoot properly any more – this really makes you afraid’. And this failure of equipment, combined with inadequate winter clothing, made the morale amongst the invading forces plummet.

But, important as the practical problems caused by the inadequacy of the Germans' logistical preparations were, what is sometimes overlooked is that the confrontation between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht outside Moscow in December 1941 marks the first moment when the psychological difference between the two forces was starkly revealed – a difference that was to become obvious in the ruins of Stalingrad one year later. The Germans, of course, believed themselves superior to the Slavic soldiers of the Red Army. Nazi propaganda had proclaimed that this was a war of annihilation fought against a sub-human enemy. And to begin with, those racist statements seemed true enough to the German troops as they carved their way through the Soviet Union. It was the Red Army's inability to resist the Germans' motorized advance in particular that symbolized the gulf between the two sides. For many German soldiers this was obviously a war between a modern, industrialized nation and a primitive, backward one. It was an attitude summed up by Adolf Hitler, who told his colleagues that the inhabitants of the Soviet Union should be treated like ‘the Redskins’ of America.
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But in the freezing Soviet winter, all the Germans' technological advances counted for nothing. This was a more straight forward struggle – one in which the Red Army could compete on equal terms. Vasily Borisov believes that he and his comrades held firm during the battle for Moscow because of ‘Siberian stubbornness…. The commanders used to say that the Siberian divisions saved Moscow…’. And whilst, when they had been retreating under the constant German barrage, Borisov and his comrades had felt an element of fear, once the Red Army began to counter-attack on 5 December, they started to regain their innate confidence. ‘We are very strong and very fit…. This is Siberian spirit. This is how people are raised from childhood. Everyone knows that Siberians are very tough…. I am a true Siberian, everyone knows that we are tough’.

This toughness now manifested itself in the nature of the fighting: ‘During the counter-attacks there was man-to-man fighting. We had to fight the Germans in the trenches. And the fitter ones survived and the weaker ones died…. We had bayonets on our rifles and I was very strong – I could pierce him [the German soldier] with a bayonet and throw him out of the trench…they were wearing coats like us, so the bayonet went through. It's the same as piercing a loaf of bread – no resistance…. It's a question of either/or. Either he kills you or you kill him. It's a real bloody mess…. I never felt proud or happy about killing a person. I just knew I achieved a small victory and I can carry on. I never felt satisfaction or joy from it’.

In the face of this physical onslaught, Vasily Borisov and his comrades noticed a change in the attitude of the Germans: ‘When they saw Siberians fighting man-to-man they felt frightened – Siberians were very fit guys…. They [the Germans] had been raised in a gentle way. They were not as strong as the Siberians. So they panicked more in this kind of fighting. Siberians don't feel any panic. The Germans were weaker people. They didn't like the cold much and they were physically weaker too’. Fyodor Sverdlov, who took part in the battle of Moscow as a company commander of the Soviet 19th Rifle Brigade, confirms that: ‘The German army near Moscow was a very miserable sight. I remember very well the Germans in July 1941. They were confident, strong, tall guys. They marched ahead with their sleeves rolled up and carrying their machine guns. But later on they became miserable, snotty guys wrapped in woollen kerchiefs stolen from old women in villages’.

And while the Germans shivered in their trenches and dugouts in front of Moscow, on the other side of the world an event occurred that would, within days, give Stalin a new ally and Hitler a new foe.

THE CRUCIAL MONTH OF DECEMBER

On 7 December 1941, just two days after the start of the Soviet offensive in front of Moscow, the Japanese bombed the American
fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. And although the suddenness of the attack came as a surprise to the Americans, the realization that the Japanese had finally lost patience with diplomacy did not.

The relationship between the United States and Japan had been declining rapidly since the Japanese occupation of southern Indochina (today's Vietnam) that summer. The Americans had, as a consequence, frozen Japanese assets in the USA and threatened to cut off the supply of oil and other key raw materials to Japan. There followed several months of desultory and badly handled (on both sides) attempts at a compromise. The Japanese case in Washington was not helped by the decrepit state of their ambassador to the United States: the elderly Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura was partly deaf, partly blind and often confused.