Winter Battle '41/42
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1. The Siberians are coming
The outposts in the sector of 87th Infantry Regiment had just been relieved. The time was 0500, and it was icy cold. The thermometer stood at 25 degrees below zero Centigrade. The men were trudging through the snow towards the little Yakhroma river. From the chimneys of the peasant cottages in the valley the smoke rose straight into the grey morning. Everything was quiet. The 87th Infantry Regiment belonged to 36th Motorized Infantry Division. The regiments from Rhineland – Hesse were holding the front line between the Volga reservoir south of Kalinin, also known as the Moscow Sea, and Rogachevo. The long sector could be held only in the form of separate strongpoints. For anything else the regiments were too weak. They had been bled white – and, even more so, frozen white.
In a temperature of 30 to 40 degrees below zero Centigrade no man could lie in a forward snowhole for more than an hour. Unless, of course, he was wearing a sheepskin and felt boots, a fur cap and padded gloves. But the men of 36th Motorized Infantry Division had none of these things.
They were within 30 yards of the village. Iced-up, their horse-drawn wagons stood by the stream. The shaft of the village pump rose high above the low roofs. By the pump stood some Russian women, getting water. Suddenly they all started – the pickets who had just been relieved and the Russian women. Instinctively they ducked. They scampered to the nearest cottages. And there it was – the “howling beast.” There was a crash, fountains of snow rising into the air, red-hot fragments bouncing off the ground, which was frozen as hard as stone. The shell-splinters crashed into the bath-house and into the cottages. Action stations!
The date was 5th December 1941 – a Friday. A page was being turned in the history of the war. The great Russian counter-offensive before Moscow was beginning. Here, is the sector of 36th Motorized Infantry Division, in the operations zone of LVI Panzer Corps, the curtain was rising on a savage historical drama. Twenty-four hours later the great battle began also on the remaining sectors of Army Group Centre – between Ostashkov and Yelets, along a 600-mile front.
What was the situation before Moscow on that 5th December? North and west of the Soviet capital the German spearheads had got to within a few miles of the outskirts of the city. On the northern wing of Army Group Centre, Ninth Army held a 105-mile arc through Kalinin to the Moscow Sea.
The divisions of 3rd Panzer Group, which were to have outflanked Moscow in the north, had advanced as far as Dmitrov on the Moskva-Volga Canal. Farther south were the most forward units of XLI Panzer Corps, poised to cross the canal north of Lobnya. The combat group Westhoven of 1st Panzer Division, having captured Nikolskoye and Belyy Rast, had reached the western edge of Kusayevo. Adjoining on the right, 4th Panzer Group held a quadrant around Moscow, from Krasnaya Polyana to Zvenigorod; the distance to the Kremlin was nowhere more than 25 miles. The combat outposts of 2nd Panzer Division were at the first stop of the Moscow tramway. An assault detachment of Engineers Battalion 62 from Wittenberg had got closest to Stalin’s lair by penetrating into the suburb of Khimki, only 5 miles from the outskirts of the city and 10 from the Kremlin.
On the southern wing of Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group, reading from left to right, were 106th and 35th Infantry Divisions, 11th and 5th Panzer Divisions, as well as the SS Motorized Infantry Division “Das Reich,” and 252nd, 87th, 78th, 267th, 197th, and 7th Infantry Divisions. Next followed the divisions of Kluge’s Forth Army. They were 30 miles from Moscow, along a line running from north to south, between the Moscow motor highway and the Oka.
Next along the front came Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. It had bypassed the stubbornly defended town of Tula and was holding a big eastward bulge around Stalinogorsk; its armoured spearhead, the 17th Panzer Division, pointing northward against the Oka, stood before Kashira.
On the extreme right wing the Second Army was covering the southern flank and maintaining the link with Army Group South.
This then was the 600-mile front line along which the German offensive had come to a standstill at the beginning of December – in the most literal sense frozen into inactivity. Men, beasts, engines, and weapons were in the icy grip of 45 and even 50 degrees below zero Centigrade. In the diary of a man of 69th Rifle Regiment, 10th Panzer Division, we find the sentence: “We are waging the winter war as if this was one of our Black Forest winters back home.”
That was the exact truth. Officers and troops lacked suitable special winter clothing to enable them to camp and fight on open ground at temperatures of minus 50 degrees. As a result, they clad themselves in whatever they could lay their hands on, or what they found in Russian textile mills, workshops, and stores – one garment on top of another. But this hampered the men’s movements instead of making them warm. And these filthy clothes, which were never taken off, were breeding places for lice, which got right into the skin. The men were not only cold, but also hungry. Butter arrived hard as stone and could only be sucked in small pieces as “butter ice.” Bread had to be divided with the axe, and then thawed out in the fire. The result was diarrhea. The companies were dwindling away. Their daily losses due to frostbitten limbs and feverish intestinal troubles were higher than those from enemy action.
Like the men, the horses suffered from cold and hunger. Supplies of oats did not arrive. The frozen straw off the cottage roofs no longer satisfied their hunger, but merely made the animals sick. There was a heavy incidence of mange and colic. The animals collapsed and died by the dozen.
The engines likewise were out of action. There was not enough anti-freeze: the water in the radiators froze and engine-blocks burst. Tanks, lorries and radio vans became immobile and useless. Weapons packed up because the oil froze in the moving parts. No one had thought of making sure of winter oil. There was likewise no special winter paste for the lenses of field-glasses, trench telescopes, and gun-sights. The optics froze over and became blind and useless.
Hardly anything was available that would have been necessary for fighting and for survival in this accursed Russian winter. The Fuehrer’s Headquarters had thought that the troops would be in Moscow before the onset of the frost. The bill for this bad miscalculation in the operational time-table and the resulting lack of supplies had now to be footed by the men in the field.
Why were the needs of the hard-pressed front not met by supplies from Europe? Because what few locomotives were available likewise froze up. Instead of the twenty-six supply trains needed daily by Army Group Centre, only eight, or at most ten, arrived. And most of the JU-52 supply aircraft were unable to take off from their airstrips in Poland and Belorussia because of the biting cold and the lack of hangars.
Here is a passage from a letter by Lance-corporal Werner Burmeister of the 2nd Battery, 208th Artillery Regiment, a regiment newly arrived from France:
It’s a hopeless job – you’ve got six horses harnessed to the gun. The front four can be led by hand, but for the two alongside the shaft someone must be mounted, because unless a man is in the saddle and jams his foot against the shaft it will hit the flanks of the animals at every step. At thirty degrees below, in those tight, nailed jackboots of ours, you get your toes frozen off before you even realize it. There isn’t a man in my battery who hasn’t got frostbite in his toes and heels.
That was the Russian winter – cruel in an undramatic and trivial way. The Russian troops invariably received leather boots one or two sizes too large, to enable them to be stuffed with straw or newspaper – a highly effective procedure. It was a trick well known also to the old lags in the German Army in the East. But unfortunately for them their boots were the right size.
In these conditions, was it surprising that the troops were finished? The combat strength of the regiments was down to less than half. The worst of it was that the Officers’ and NCO Corps, as well as the bulk of the old experienced corporals, had been decimated by death in action, by freezing, and by disease. There were lieutenants in command of battalions, and frequently sergeants in command of companies. There were no reserves anywhere. In such conditions Army Group Centre was expected to hold a line over 600 miles long. All this must be realized in order to understand what happened next.
And what was the situation on the Soviet side? Even while the German offensive was still gaining ground the Soviet High Command had assembled a striking force south of Moscow and another north of the city. Whatever military reserves were available in the huge country were brought to Moscow. The eastern and southern frontiers were ruthlessly denuded. Siberian divisions, accustomed to winter and equipped for winter warfare, formed the nucleus of these new forces. The Soviet High Command dispatched thirty-four Siberian divisions to its Western Front; of these twenty-one were facing Army Group Centre, which had comprised seventy-eight divisions in October, but which by early December was left with the combat strength of a mere thirty-five. This greatly reduced effective fighting power was thus outweighed by the freshly arrived Siberian units alone. Their employment proved decisive.
The concentration of Soviet forces before Moscow was the result of what was probably the greatest act of treason in the Second World War. Stalin knew Japan’s intention to attack not Russia but America. He knew it from his agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, who, as the trusted colleague of the German Ambassador and the friend of the most highly placed Japanese politicians, was acquainted with the intensions of the German and the Japanese leaders. He reported to Stalin that Japan had refused the German Government’s suggestion that she should attack Russia. He reported that the Japanese military were preparing for war against America in the Pacific. Since Sorge’s reports about the German offensive intensions in spring 1941 had been so fully confirmed by events, Stalin this believed the reports from Tokyo and withdrew his entire forces from the Far East to Moscow, even though the Japanese Kwantung Army was poised ready to strike in Manchuria.
But for these dispositions Moscow could not have been saved. The ultimate proof of the tie-up between Sorge’s information and military events is provided by the fact that Stalin opened his offensive on the very day when the Japanese warships set course for Pearl Harbour to start the war against the USA. Even this top-secret date, the date of Japan’s attack on America, had been passed on to Stalin by Sorge.
And as soon as Soviet reconnaissance aircraft confirmed the Japanese naval deployment Stalin, mistrustful though he was, felt sure that Dr Sorge’s information was reliable. He could now safely employ his Siberians outside Moscow.
At the beginning of December 1941 the Soviet High Command had concentrated altogether 17½ Armies for an attack against the German Army Group Centre. There of these – the First, Tenth, and Twentieth Armies – consisted of Siberian and Asian divisions which had been newly raised. The other Armies, according to the reliable military historian Samsonov, had been “trebled or quadrupled by the inclusion of reserves.”
Russian military writers, who are fond of playing down their own numbers while invariably overestimating the German forces, quote the ratio between German and Soviet strength at the beginning of the counter-offensive as 1.5 to 1 in favour of the Soviets. And this Soviet superiority became more marked with each week that passed.
Throughout December the German Army Group Centre received not a single fresh division. The Russian “Western Front,” on the other hand, which was facing it, was reinforced during that same period by thirty-three divisions and thirty-nine brigades. These figures speak for themselves. Germany’s resources were inadequate. She was waging a war beyond her capabilities.
What were the Soviet High Command’s plans for its counter offensive? Even without official Soviet sources the answer would be easy. It sprang from the situation itself. The first task was to smash the two powerful German armoured wedges threatening Moscow from the north and south.
Whether – as is nowadays claimed by Soviet military writers – the Red High Command had been planning from the very start to follow up this first objective by that of encircling the entire German Army Group Centre must remain a matter for speculation. It does not seem very plausible. But if this was indeed the plan from the outset, then it was badly conceived.
We shall presently see why.
The outposts in the sector of 87th Infantry Regiment had just been relieved. The time was 0500, and it was icy cold. The thermometer stood at 25 degrees below zero Centigrade. The men were trudging through the snow towards the little Yakhroma river. From the chimneys of the peasant cottages in the valley the smoke rose straight into the grey morning. Everything was quiet. The 87th Infantry Regiment belonged to 36th Motorized Infantry Division. The regiments from Rhineland – Hesse were holding the front line between the Volga reservoir south of Kalinin, also known as the Moscow Sea, and Rogachevo. The long sector could be held only in the form of separate strongpoints. For anything else the regiments were too weak. They had been bled white – and, even more so, frozen white.
In a temperature of 30 to 40 degrees below zero Centigrade no man could lie in a forward snowhole for more than an hour. Unless, of course, he was wearing a sheepskin and felt boots, a fur cap and padded gloves. But the men of 36th Motorized Infantry Division had none of these things.
They were within 30 yards of the village. Iced-up, their horse-drawn wagons stood by the stream. The shaft of the village pump rose high above the low roofs. By the pump stood some Russian women, getting water. Suddenly they all started – the pickets who had just been relieved and the Russian women. Instinctively they ducked. They scampered to the nearest cottages. And there it was – the “howling beast.” There was a crash, fountains of snow rising into the air, red-hot fragments bouncing off the ground, which was frozen as hard as stone. The shell-splinters crashed into the bath-house and into the cottages. Action stations!
The date was 5th December 1941 – a Friday. A page was being turned in the history of the war. The great Russian counter-offensive before Moscow was beginning. Here, is the sector of 36th Motorized Infantry Division, in the operations zone of LVI Panzer Corps, the curtain was rising on a savage historical drama. Twenty-four hours later the great battle began also on the remaining sectors of Army Group Centre – between Ostashkov and Yelets, along a 600-mile front.
What was the situation before Moscow on that 5th December? North and west of the Soviet capital the German spearheads had got to within a few miles of the outskirts of the city. On the northern wing of Army Group Centre, Ninth Army held a 105-mile arc through Kalinin to the Moscow Sea.
The divisions of 3rd Panzer Group, which were to have outflanked Moscow in the north, had advanced as far as Dmitrov on the Moskva-Volga Canal. Farther south were the most forward units of XLI Panzer Corps, poised to cross the canal north of Lobnya. The combat group Westhoven of 1st Panzer Division, having captured Nikolskoye and Belyy Rast, had reached the western edge of Kusayevo. Adjoining on the right, 4th Panzer Group held a quadrant around Moscow, from Krasnaya Polyana to Zvenigorod; the distance to the Kremlin was nowhere more than 25 miles. The combat outposts of 2nd Panzer Division were at the first stop of the Moscow tramway. An assault detachment of Engineers Battalion 62 from Wittenberg had got closest to Stalin’s lair by penetrating into the suburb of Khimki, only 5 miles from the outskirts of the city and 10 from the Kremlin.
On the southern wing of Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group, reading from left to right, were 106th and 35th Infantry Divisions, 11th and 5th Panzer Divisions, as well as the SS Motorized Infantry Division “Das Reich,” and 252nd, 87th, 78th, 267th, 197th, and 7th Infantry Divisions. Next followed the divisions of Kluge’s Forth Army. They were 30 miles from Moscow, along a line running from north to south, between the Moscow motor highway and the Oka.
Next along the front came Guderian’s Second Panzer Army. It had bypassed the stubbornly defended town of Tula and was holding a big eastward bulge around Stalinogorsk; its armoured spearhead, the 17th Panzer Division, pointing northward against the Oka, stood before Kashira.
On the extreme right wing the Second Army was covering the southern flank and maintaining the link with Army Group South.
This then was the 600-mile front line along which the German offensive had come to a standstill at the beginning of December – in the most literal sense frozen into inactivity. Men, beasts, engines, and weapons were in the icy grip of 45 and even 50 degrees below zero Centigrade. In the diary of a man of 69th Rifle Regiment, 10th Panzer Division, we find the sentence: “We are waging the winter war as if this was one of our Black Forest winters back home.”
That was the exact truth. Officers and troops lacked suitable special winter clothing to enable them to camp and fight on open ground at temperatures of minus 50 degrees. As a result, they clad themselves in whatever they could lay their hands on, or what they found in Russian textile mills, workshops, and stores – one garment on top of another. But this hampered the men’s movements instead of making them warm. And these filthy clothes, which were never taken off, were breeding places for lice, which got right into the skin. The men were not only cold, but also hungry. Butter arrived hard as stone and could only be sucked in small pieces as “butter ice.” Bread had to be divided with the axe, and then thawed out in the fire. The result was diarrhea. The companies were dwindling away. Their daily losses due to frostbitten limbs and feverish intestinal troubles were higher than those from enemy action.
Like the men, the horses suffered from cold and hunger. Supplies of oats did not arrive. The frozen straw off the cottage roofs no longer satisfied their hunger, but merely made the animals sick. There was a heavy incidence of mange and colic. The animals collapsed and died by the dozen.
The engines likewise were out of action. There was not enough anti-freeze: the water in the radiators froze and engine-blocks burst. Tanks, lorries and radio vans became immobile and useless. Weapons packed up because the oil froze in the moving parts. No one had thought of making sure of winter oil. There was likewise no special winter paste for the lenses of field-glasses, trench telescopes, and gun-sights. The optics froze over and became blind and useless.
Hardly anything was available that would have been necessary for fighting and for survival in this accursed Russian winter. The Fuehrer’s Headquarters had thought that the troops would be in Moscow before the onset of the frost. The bill for this bad miscalculation in the operational time-table and the resulting lack of supplies had now to be footed by the men in the field.
Why were the needs of the hard-pressed front not met by supplies from Europe? Because what few locomotives were available likewise froze up. Instead of the twenty-six supply trains needed daily by Army Group Centre, only eight, or at most ten, arrived. And most of the JU-52 supply aircraft were unable to take off from their airstrips in Poland and Belorussia because of the biting cold and the lack of hangars.
Here is a passage from a letter by Lance-corporal Werner Burmeister of the 2nd Battery, 208th Artillery Regiment, a regiment newly arrived from France:
It’s a hopeless job – you’ve got six horses harnessed to the gun. The front four can be led by hand, but for the two alongside the shaft someone must be mounted, because unless a man is in the saddle and jams his foot against the shaft it will hit the flanks of the animals at every step. At thirty degrees below, in those tight, nailed jackboots of ours, you get your toes frozen off before you even realize it. There isn’t a man in my battery who hasn’t got frostbite in his toes and heels.
That was the Russian winter – cruel in an undramatic and trivial way. The Russian troops invariably received leather boots one or two sizes too large, to enable them to be stuffed with straw or newspaper – a highly effective procedure. It was a trick well known also to the old lags in the German Army in the East. But unfortunately for them their boots were the right size.
In these conditions, was it surprising that the troops were finished? The combat strength of the regiments was down to less than half. The worst of it was that the Officers’ and NCO Corps, as well as the bulk of the old experienced corporals, had been decimated by death in action, by freezing, and by disease. There were lieutenants in command of battalions, and frequently sergeants in command of companies. There were no reserves anywhere. In such conditions Army Group Centre was expected to hold a line over 600 miles long. All this must be realized in order to understand what happened next.
And what was the situation on the Soviet side? Even while the German offensive was still gaining ground the Soviet High Command had assembled a striking force south of Moscow and another north of the city. Whatever military reserves were available in the huge country were brought to Moscow. The eastern and southern frontiers were ruthlessly denuded. Siberian divisions, accustomed to winter and equipped for winter warfare, formed the nucleus of these new forces. The Soviet High Command dispatched thirty-four Siberian divisions to its Western Front; of these twenty-one were facing Army Group Centre, which had comprised seventy-eight divisions in October, but which by early December was left with the combat strength of a mere thirty-five. This greatly reduced effective fighting power was thus outweighed by the freshly arrived Siberian units alone. Their employment proved decisive.
The concentration of Soviet forces before Moscow was the result of what was probably the greatest act of treason in the Second World War. Stalin knew Japan’s intention to attack not Russia but America. He knew it from his agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, who, as the trusted colleague of the German Ambassador and the friend of the most highly placed Japanese politicians, was acquainted with the intensions of the German and the Japanese leaders. He reported to Stalin that Japan had refused the German Government’s suggestion that she should attack Russia. He reported that the Japanese military were preparing for war against America in the Pacific. Since Sorge’s reports about the German offensive intensions in spring 1941 had been so fully confirmed by events, Stalin this believed the reports from Tokyo and withdrew his entire forces from the Far East to Moscow, even though the Japanese Kwantung Army was poised ready to strike in Manchuria.
But for these dispositions Moscow could not have been saved. The ultimate proof of the tie-up between Sorge’s information and military events is provided by the fact that Stalin opened his offensive on the very day when the Japanese warships set course for Pearl Harbour to start the war against the USA. Even this top-secret date, the date of Japan’s attack on America, had been passed on to Stalin by Sorge.
And as soon as Soviet reconnaissance aircraft confirmed the Japanese naval deployment Stalin, mistrustful though he was, felt sure that Dr Sorge’s information was reliable. He could now safely employ his Siberians outside Moscow.
At the beginning of December 1941 the Soviet High Command had concentrated altogether 17½ Armies for an attack against the German Army Group Centre. There of these – the First, Tenth, and Twentieth Armies – consisted of Siberian and Asian divisions which had been newly raised. The other Armies, according to the reliable military historian Samsonov, had been “trebled or quadrupled by the inclusion of reserves.”
Russian military writers, who are fond of playing down their own numbers while invariably overestimating the German forces, quote the ratio between German and Soviet strength at the beginning of the counter-offensive as 1.5 to 1 in favour of the Soviets. And this Soviet superiority became more marked with each week that passed.
Throughout December the German Army Group Centre received not a single fresh division. The Russian “Western Front,” on the other hand, which was facing it, was reinforced during that same period by thirty-three divisions and thirty-nine brigades. These figures speak for themselves. Germany’s resources were inadequate. She was waging a war beyond her capabilities.
What were the Soviet High Command’s plans for its counter offensive? Even without official Soviet sources the answer would be easy. It sprang from the situation itself. The first task was to smash the two powerful German armoured wedges threatening Moscow from the north and south.
Whether – as is nowadays claimed by Soviet military writers – the Red High Command had been planning from the very start to follow up this first objective by that of encircling the entire German Army Group Centre must remain a matter for speculation. It does not seem very plausible. But if this was indeed the plan from the outset, then it was badly conceived.
We shall presently see why.
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