Degrees of separation: the eastern front, 1914 and 1941

While Germany’s eastern front in the Second World War is known for its enormous scale and unprecedented bloodletting, it is also significant that the conflict was prefaced only a generation before by another war, which accounted for millions more German, Austrian and Russian casualties. Indeed, no two countries have killed more of their opposing citizens than Germany and Russia. On the eastern front in the First World War, the combined number of German and Russian dead and missing (excluding all other nationalities) amounted to some 2.75 million men (750,000 Germans and 2 million Russians). In spite of this imposing figure, in December 1940 Hitler set Germany on course to attack the Soviet Union, but not out of fear of the power of his rival in the east; it was precisely because he believed it could be carried through easily in one swift campaign. Hitler’s eye was on the plentiful mineral and oil riches, the vast fields of fertile earth and the abundant access to human labour, which could free him forever from Britain’s continental blockade and provide the building blocks to a new autarkic German economy destined for world power status. Hitler had long prophesied the acquisition of Lebensraum (living space) in the east, and it was the short-lived German victory over Russia in the First World War that provided the precedent. In 1918, the newly created Soviet Union ceded 1.4 million km2 of land, including the Baltic states, parts of Belorussia and Ukraine, to Germany in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Yet, while Hitler and his generals were inclined to focus on the ultimate defeat of the Russians in the First World War, they ignored the fact that Russia had fought tenaciously for over three years against Germany and its allies, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Indeed, the German High Command of 1940–1 was influenced by a so-called ‘Tannenberg myth’, which contrasted a natural German military superiority with barbaric Russian hordes. This not only reflected racial and cultural prejudices that impacted upon German behaviour in the east, but also pervaded their military plans and led to baseless assumptions that the war could be won in the initial border battles.

The battle of Moscow involved 2.5 million men on both sides of the eastern front, making it one of the largest and, without question, one of the most important battles of the Second World War. According to Andrew Roberts, Hitler’s offensive towards the Soviet capital was nothing less than decisive: ‘It is no exaggeration to state that the outcome of the Second World War hung in the balance during this massive attack’. For both sides, the battle for Moscow was an epic of endurance and sacrifice, while its sheer magnitude concentrated the world’s attention as never before.

There can be no debate that Nazi Germany’s drive on Moscow was a human calamity with few precedents in history. The battle began at the start of October 1941 with Operation Typhoon and, with a two-week pause at the start of November, continued to the very gates of Moscow by early December 1941. As one German soldier wrote: ‘Burning villages, the bodies of dead Russian soldiers, the carcasses of dead horses, burned-out tanks, and abandoned equipment were the signposts of our march.’ Magnifying this level of destruction across a front nearly 700 km wide, Army Group Centre, the German force charged with seizing the Soviet capital, left a torrent of devastation through central Russia.

Iron crosses and iron resolve: Bock’s relentless attack

While there were limited indications to suggest a potential Soviet counteroffensive around Moscow, it was not a prospect that was taken seriously within the German command. After all, if the battle for Moscow was to be decided by the last battalion, it was simply inconceivable to anyone in a position of authority that the Stavka could possess the strength both to hold the weight of Army Group Centre at bay, while at the same time marshalling reserves for a substantive offensive of its own. German intelligence compiled by Kinzel’s Foreign Armies East also dismissed the prospect of a major Soviet offensive by concluding on 22 November that the movement of Soviet forces from quiet sectors to endangered ones indicated the Western Front ‘probably had no more reserves available aside from those that had already been brought from the Far East’. By contrast, Zhukov stated after the war that the ‘counteroffensive had been prepared all through the defensive actions’, while German forces had been ‘bled white’ by their constant attacks. In fact in the last week of November the Stavka began transporting five of the new reserve armies, formed behind the Volga River, to the front lines. Three of these, the Twenty-Fourth, Twenty-Sixth and Sixtieth, took up positions east of Moscow, while the remaining two were sent south. The Tenth Army was deployed west of the Oka River, downstream from Kashira, to defend both Kolomna and Ryazan from Guderian’s panzer army, while the last Soviet army, the Sixty-First, was committed behind the right flank of the South-Western Front. The existence of these armies remained unknown to the German high command and, even without them, Halder predicted in a presentation to Hitler on 19 November that the Red Army would number some 150 divisions along with twenty to thirty tank brigades by 1942. At the same time, the Ostheer was predicted to total only about 122 divisions (infantry, motorised, panzer, SS, mountain and security). The resurgence of the Red Army did not begin in late 1942 or even 1943; it was already underway in late 1941 and, what was worse for the German high command, even with the imposing, yet incomplete, figures before them, they continued to dismiss the concept out of hand as well as its implications.

Victory or death: the Nazi cult of the dead

As of 26 November 1941, the Ostheer had sustained 743,112 casualties in the war against the Soviet Union. That equalled 23 per cent of the total German invasion force on 22 June 1941, and even this figure did not include those released from duty due to sickness. Overall, by the end of November more than a quarter of a million men (262,297 German troops) had been killed outright or died of their wounds. With the reserves of the Replacement Army long since exhausted, the Ostheer was now some 340,000 men short, which, according to Buhle at the OKH, meant that the combat strength of the infantry divisions was reduced by 50 per cent. Army Group Centre’s losses from the beginning of November to 3 December came to 45,735 men. Under such circumstances less and less could be expected of the combat units and yet, as Siegfried Knappe noted, ‘Russian resistance became more and more determined now as we neared Moscow, and our casualties were becoming much heavier.’ Similarly, Gustav Schrodek recalled: ‘Our ranks were getting thinner. A couple got hit every day. When would it be our turn?’ Such fatalism was easy to understand among the worst affected companies. One non-commissioned officer, writing a letter home on 21 November, spoke of his company being reduced to just twenty men as early as October: ‘We few remaining soldiers of our division crave so badly the forlorn hope of replacement.’ Ultimately, the division was forced to provide its own replacements by disbanding one battalion in every regiment and using the men generated to reinforce the remaining formations. Such administrative sleight of hand may have raised the number of active service companies, but it left the same number of men having to achieve the division’s objectives. Just how German casualties were impacting upon the long stretches of the eastern front was illustrated by Ernst Kern when he noted on 24 November: ‘This time we had to hold a position that, until now, had been defended by a whole battalion. There were five of us in a sector half a kilometre long, with twenty-eight bunkers that we felt were royally built. Each of us could have five bunkers to live in … We decided to stay together in a centrally located bunker.’

Feeding the Bear: British and American aid for the battle of Moscow

While the German armies in the Soviet Union were over-extended, under-resourced and fighting their own exhaustion as much as the Red Army, Rommel’s small force in North Africa was about to suffer its most serious reversal to date. With an active strength of less than 40,000 men, (in addition to his Italian allies) Rommel’s Afrikakorps was taken by surprise when General Claude Auchinleck launched his ‘Crusader’ offensive on 18 November. Rommel was already at a distinct disadvantage with just 249 tanks (seventy of which were the obsolete Mark iis) in his two panzer divisions (15th and 21st) against some 770 British and American tanks. Moreover, the British enjoyed vastly better logistical and aerial support (some 550 serviceable aircraft to the Luftwaffe’s seventy-six), giving Auchinleck a formidable advantage. As one of Rommel’s staff officers wrote on 23 November: ‘The question is: “to be or not to be” for the Deutsches Afrika Korps.’

No such questions were being asked on the eastern front, but Rommel’s surprise at being caught unawares by an enemy offensive was paralleled by the fact that no one in Army Group Centre’s command or the OKH had any idea that Stalin was withholding large numbers of reserves for an offensive of his own. Certainly, the Soviet counteroffensive, which was to hit Army Group Centre in early December, was a long way from the carefully timed counterstroke of Soviet mythology. Zhukov had already been forced into launching local offensives in early and mid-November, which were largely premature and gained little ground, but they did grind down parts of the Fourth Army and deeply impacted upon the confidence of senior German officers, not least Kluge. If regimental- and divisional-sized Soviet attacks could induce such results, then Zhukov was correct to argue for the concentrated use of whole Soviet armies. Since early October, in the strictest secrecy, the Stavka had been forming a new strategic echelon of reserve armies. Four new armies were formed in October and another eight in November.

‘The golden towers of the Kremlin, gleaming in the sunlight’: the illusion of Moscow

At the beginning of the month of December the OKH’s large-scale maps (1:1 million) of central-western Russia showed two German panzer groups seemingly poised on the very fringes of Moscow, about to deliver the final coup de grâce. It was, however, a deceptive impression. The offensive strength of Panzer Groups 3 and 4 had almost reached absolute exhaustion, which not only undercut Germans plans for the capture of Moscow, but took no account of their operational manoeuvrability to meet any potential Soviet winter counteroffensive. Indeed, the little remaining reserve strength within Army Group Centre, principally the inactive forces on the right wing of the Fourth Army, were now to be employed to prop up Bock’s stalling attack.

Contrary to a lot of what has been written about the Fourth Army’s role in the battle for Moscow, Kluge was by no means responsible for Army Group Centre’s failed offensive. The idea that Kluge was the great reluctant commander, whose stubborn refusal to join the attack undermined Bock’s whole effort and represents one of the great missed opportunities of Germany’s war in 1941, is simply untenable. The Fourth Army’s weak right wing never came close to making the difference between victory and defeat at Moscow, but that has not saved Kluge from becoming a scapegoat for much more important German deficiencies and weaknesses.

Hanging by a thread in the north: Hoepner and Reinhardt march on Moscow

With the exception of the Second Army’s slow advance in the south, Operation Typhoon resumed its active operations on 15 November, but the contrast with 2 October could not have been more apparent. The staggered offensive timetable meant that on 15 November only the xxvii Army Corps (from the Ninth Army) was able to commence the attack. Bock noted its ‘good progress’, and Halder rejoiced at the news that the enemy was pulling back, to which he observed: ‘That is something new in this campaign.’ The Soviet proclivity to defend every metre of ground had helped to facilitate the large-scale encirclements of the past, and if local commanders were adapting their methods to fixing defences on natural boundaries it was hardly a positive development. Reinhardt in fact described the attack as a punch into thin air (Luftstoß) and claimed that the enemy had already re-established its defences behind the Volga, with only screening troops in the forward positions. Moreover, the bridges that the xxvii Army Corps was supposed to capture had been blown. On the following day (16 November) Schaal’s lvi Panzer Corps joined the attack to the south of Wäger’s corps. Unlike the shock effect of previous offensives, Funck’s 7th Panzer Division, supported by concentrated artillery and rocket fire, made only slow progress. Losses for the division on this first day came to eleven officers and some 120 men. The accompanying 14th Motorised Infantry Division was more successful, seizing two bridgeheads across the Lama River at Gribanowo and Kussowa.

On 22 November the weekly German magazine Militär-Wochenblatt proclaimed the success of the Ostheer’s war in the east with a remarkable and, in most instances, roughly accurate tally of achievements:

It was, without question, an extraordinary achievement on paper, but it did not change the basic fact that Germany’s war effort was doomed. As Robert Citino concluded, by the end of 1941 Germany had, in a strategic sense, gained nothing: ‘In the eastern campaign, the Germans had brought Bewegungskrieg [mobile warfare] to a destructive peak that it would never know again . . . But it had achieved precisely nothing.’

A cold reception: Halder’s offensive plans

Undeterred by the state of Army Group Centre, the OKH remained adamant that Bock could continue his attack towards Moscow and even achieve a resounding success. The feeling was that doubts within the command staff of the major formations in the east had to be countered with ‘the thinking of the general staff’, and to do this Halder himself would travel to the east and meet with the chiefs-of-staff of the three army groups as well as most of the armies to fire the new offensive with the requisite vigour and resolve.

On 12 November, Halder left the army high command compound at Angerburg in East Prussia to board a special train to take him, and a number of his top branch chiefs, to Orsha in eastern Belarus. There he would meet with the three chiefs-of-staff of the army groups, Lieutenants-General Kurt Brennecke (north), Greiffenberg (centre) and General of the Infantry Georg von Sodenstern (south), as well as the chiefs-of-staff from seven of the ten armies operating in the east (from north to south, the Eighteenth, Sixteenth, Ninth, Fourth, Second Panzer, Sixth and Seventeenth). The meeting took place in Halder’s special train and began promptly at ten o’clock on the morning of 13 November. Halder commenced proceedings giving a speech that attempted to recast the history of the eastern campaign to fit his agenda for the Ostheer’s impending success. As Halder explained the ‘fundamental idea’ of the campaign had been to ‘wrest a decision’, but that this was no longer ‘100 percent attainable’. Indeed, without the slightest hint of irony, Halder then made the contrasting admission that the Soviet Union had been weakened ‘by at least fifty percent’ and that therefore it could not simply be ‘kept under observation’. The east, he said, would therefore have to remain an active theatre of war and the army now had to ‘strive to maximise damage to the enemy’ before the end of the year. Halder assured his officers that the situation was still favourable. ‘

Killing time before Moscow: Army Group Centre’s stagnant offensive

At the start of November Bock’s Army Group Centre occupied a great arching position in the centre of the eastern front, which measured some 800 km in length (linear distance). Weichs’ Second Army held the southernmost reaches of the army group, and was poised to seize Kursk after a long and exhausting advance hindered more by the roads and conditions than by enemy resistance. To his north was Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, which had just completed a month-long drive from Orel to Tula and was now looking to threaten Moscow from the south. Counting on this support was Kluge’s Fourth Army, which had been fought to a standstill on the approaches to Moscow from Tarusa to Volokolamsk. This was in spite of the fact that Kluge retained command over Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, which in numerical strength was the most powerful German panzer group on the eastern front. Holding the northern flank of the army group was Colonel-General Adolf Strauss’ Ninth Army, which, together with elements of General of Panzer Troops Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Panzer Group 3, maintained control of Kalinin in spite of intense enemy counterattacks.

The size of the operational area and the difficulties under which the army group had to labour to sustain itself in the field given the paucity of supplies taxed its strength tremendously. It was hoped that the operational pause would replenish enough of the army group’s stockpiles to support another offensive, but the Wehrmacht objectives were never made conditional to the requirements of the Quartermaster-General and over-extension resulted from every major offensive in 1941. As Hans Jürgen Hartmann noted at the start of the month, November promised to be no different: