“Because of extreme attrition of their material and equipment, the [two] panzer groups are only effective if they are employed as one entity.”

A few weeks later, he would add that “If, after all the successes, the campaign in the east now trickles away… it is not my fault.”

In early September, one German officer succinctly noted:

“No victorious Blitzkrieg, no destruction of the Russian army, no disintegration of the Soviet Union.”

General Gotthard Heinrici wrote a letter to his wife which admitted:

“The Russian is very strong… The war here is without doubt very bad… All past campaigns seem like child’s play in comparison with the present war. Our losses are heavy…”

The kicker, however, came from Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder. After previously boasting that the war had been won in two weeks, his diary entries from early August showed a clear shift in tone:

“It is clearer and clearer that we have underestimated the Russian colossus… At the start of the war, we reckoned on some 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. These divisions are definitely not armed and equipped in our sense, and tactically they are in many ways badly led. But there they are… If we destroy a dozen, the Russians put another dozen in their place.”

Buyer beware.

Kiev: Annihilation and Crisis

The paradoxes of this war - operational victory juxtaposed against total strategic defeat - were only beginning for Germany. After the successful liquidation of the pocket around Smolensk, the Wehrmacht faced a decisive moment. It was the beginning of August, leaving an adequate window to prosecute further operations before the mud season came on - but operations to what end?

By this point in the war, the front had organically created an enormous salient around Kiev. The German advance into central Russia now jutted out over the top of the southern front. In essence, Army Group Center had advanced much deeper than Army Group South had, with the latter’s progress grinding to a halt as it reached the mighty Dnieper River.

This was a tantalizing opportunity. A strike southward by units from Army Group Center had the potential to scoop up almost all of the Soviet southwestern front in what promised to be perhaps the biggest encirclement yet. But such a move would entail denuding Army Group Center of its all-important panzer divisions, precluding further progress in the center and necessarily delaying any move on Moscow.

Hitler makes a plan. (Screenshot CC)

 

For some, therefore, Hitler’s decision to detach critical panzer units from Army Group Center and send them south towards Kiev is the moment Germany lost the war. Distracted by the prospect of another big encirclement, the Fuhrer foolishly delayed the advance on Moscow and cost Germany its best opportunity to win the war in 1941. This theory is obviously tempting, particularly because it allows all the blame to be shifted to Hitler. Mr. Mustache has for obvious reasons become a popular scapegoat for German defeat: in the postwar period, he could not defend himself because he was dead, and nobody else would defend him because he was Hitler. It is therefore common and convenient to blame Hitler for the particular decisions that led to German defeat. This, however, is wrong.

It is fair to accuse Hitler of being wicked, or neurotic, or any number of unpleasant things, but he was not overly responsible for any particular decisions that led to German defeat. One could say, of course, that as the commander in chief he bore ultimate responsibility, and fairly so. But he was at all times advised by staff officers and served by an officer corps that implemented his orders dutifully, and in 1941 there were many German officers cheering on their Fuhrer’s decision to send the panzers south toward Kiev. Instead of portending some sort of world-historical screwup, they hailed a titanic victory. More to the point, the decision to redirect forces to the Kiev axis was perfectly in keeping with the longstanding assumptions of Prusso-German war-making, which prioritized destroying the enemy’s fighting mass above all else. This was, according to conventional wisdom, the absolutely correct way to wage war.

Furthermore, from an operational perspective, this was nothing less than a perfect opportunity to wage the mother of all annihilation battles. No instructor at the German military academies could have cooked up a more dreamy scenario. The map had fallen in a favorable way for the Wehrmacht owing to the natural flow of the Dnieper, which bends like something approximating an enormous “S” around Kiev. German Army Group South had advanced up to Dnieper line, with the Red Army strongly holding the bend of the river with four armies (the 5th, 21st, 26th, and 37th). However, Army Group Center’s advance to Smolensk in July meant that the Germans were already over the river (that is, to the east of the Dnieper) to the north of Kiev. As a result, the Soviet position around Kiev had come to form a giant salient, with German lines protruding towards their rear in both the north and south.

Further adding to the enticement of the position (from the German view) was the fact that the key positions on the wings of the salient were already held by Panzer forces - Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group in the north, and Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group in the south. This made it possible to directly strike across the Soviet salient without rearranging the line. Guderian’s Panzer Group had to do little more than turn to the right.

This was, therefore a conceptually very simple operation. 1st and 2nd Panzer groups would drive towards each other, seal off the enormous salient around the Dnieper bend, and trap four Soviet armies in a pocket.

It is curious, then, that such a sublime and clean opportunity to fight yet another annihilation battle has been transformed into some sort of unhinged decision by Hitler which cost Germany the war. This interpretation largely results from the fact that two of Nazi Germany’s more widely read memoirists - Heinz Guderian and Franz Halder - went out of their way to dramatize it as a turning point where Hitler ignored their advice.

A brief note, perhaps, on the institutional curiosities of the Nazi war machine. The term “high command”, in this case, is an inadequate descriptor, as Nazi Germany had two prominent bodies that fit the descriptor. One was the OKH - Oberkommando des Heeres, or Army High Command. This was the body that conducted strategic planning for Army Groups and Armies. Its supreme commander was General Walther von Brauchitsch, and the chief of staff was the oft aforementioned Franz Halder, who kept a diary that became a foundational primary material for scholars after the war. However, there was also the OKW - Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or Armed Forces High Command, run by Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl. In theory, this was a body above the OKH which coordinated the operations of the Army (Heer), Navy (Kriegsmarine), and Air Force (Luftwaffe), but it in practice operated as a rival decision-making center to the OKH.

This all fit the standard operation procedure of the Hitler regime. The Fuhrer liked setting up rival centers of power which would compete for resources and approval, both because this enhanced his personal power (by letting him arbitrate between competing minions), and because it generated ambitious proposals, with underlings constantly under pressure to bring bigger and bolder ideas to him.

In the postwar period, it became standard fare for members of the Army staff (OKH) to portray themselves as pure professionals and not really Nazis at all, in contrast to the OKW men, who were written off as fanatically Hitler-worshipping yes-men. This was seemingly solidified by the fact that the prominent OKW figures, like Jodl and Keitel, were convicted of War Crimes at Nuremberg and hanged, while the OKH men like Halder were largely let off. The upshot of all this is that it became common for the Wehrmacht to be portrayed as consisting of a “clean” faction (Halder, the OKH, and many of the field commanders) and a “Nazi” faction (the OKW and the Waffen SS). In fact, this theory is little more than a continuation of the power struggle between the OKW and the OKH which long predated either Auschwitz or Nuremberg.

In the early autumn months of 1941, the Wehrmacht found itself held up by just such a power struggle. The OKH (particularly Halder) were in favor of an immediate drive on Moscow, while the OKW was in agreement with Hitler that the priority ought to be the clearing of the flanks. Therefore, when the memoirs of someone like, say, Guderian are read, it ought to be understood that this was not simply a matter of Hitler unilaterally ignoring his advice and opting to go another direction - rather, Guderian and Halder were on the losing side of an intra-service struggle for Hitler’s signature. In the longer run, this bizarre and sclerotizing institutional fissure was patched up when Hitler made himself commander in chief of the OKH directly and ran the war in the east through that body, with the OKW taking responsibility for the other fronts.

Hitler with the staff of the OKH (Bundesarchiv-CC)

The truth, of course, is that both the OKW and the OKH were full of officers who were perfectly willing to implement the Fuhrer’s orders, whether those orders related to the liquidation of racial enemies or to the diversion of 2nd Panzer Group southward towards Kiev. Guderian argued against the southward turn at first, but once he was brought to discuss the matter with Hitler face to face he predictably melted (Guderian tended to be rather overawed in Hitler’s presence and usually came away agreeing with the boss) and enthusiastically implemented the order.

All that being said, the decision had been made. Rather than move directly on Moscow, much of Army Group Center’s strength - particularly the panzer forces - would be diverted north and south to assist other objectives. Units from Panzer Group 3 would go north to help seal the front around Leningrad, while Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 would wheel south and help bag an enormous cauldron around Kiev.

It is a great tragedy, but Hitler was probably right. Contrary to the vain protestations of the OKH, the road to Moscow was not wide open - there was a wall of Soviet armies deploying in the way. Army Group Center was still in the process of shoring up its logistics. Truck transport was in tatters, rail lines needed to be repaired, supply dumps needed to be established, and replacement vehicles needed to be railed in. In this circumstance, clearing the flanks before blasting further into the Russian interior was an entirely sensible course of action. The idea that Army Group Center could have simply walked into Moscow in September 1941 is an absurd post-war fabrication.

All of this, perhaps, ignores the real issue. The Battle of Kiev in 1941 was, from the traditional German view of warfare, one of the most spectacularly successful operations of all time, in that it destroyed the equivalent of an entire Soviet Army Group in a matter of weeks.

The scheme worked essentially to perfection. Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group shot directly south along the inner bend of the Desna River and attacked at the hinge between the Soviet 21st and 40th Armies. Simultaneously, Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group crossed the Dneiper to the southeast of Kiev and broke through the lines of the Soviet 38th Army. The Germans now had two powerful Panzer Groups (wielding a combined nine panzer divisions with trailing motorized infantry divisions) breaking into the rear of the Soviet armies in the Dnieper bend, with three field armies (the 2nd, 6th, and 17th) pinning the rest of the Soviet lines around Kiev.

At this crucial juncture, the Soviets needed to move decisively to save these armies. The four armies now trapped in the rapidly closing pocket ought to have immediately sorted themselves out for a breakout to the east, aided by numerous Soviet armies loitering in the theater. Unfortunately, the Red Army at this point had neither the experience needed to quickly arrange such a complex operation, nor the political will to simply abandon a city as important as Kiev. Therefore, apart from a few divisions of the 21st Army which managed to withdraw through the gap before it closed, the Soviet armies instead shrank their positions into a fragile shell where they were trapped in the broad arc of the Dnieper and Desna Rivers, with two Panzer Groups walling up the only exit.

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The end came remarkably quickly. The Soviet 21st conducted itself a bit better than the rest, with a few divisions escaping eastward and the rest at least maintaining a cohesive front for a time. The other armies in the bend - the 37th, 5th, and 26th - were quickly bottled up in shockingly small pockets, where they were pummeled without mercy by the Luftwaffe and by German artillery. These pockets were abnormally tight, and more than one German officer commented on the shock of looking through their binoculars and seeing so many vehicles and men crowding into such small spaces.

 

 

 

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A larger question presents itself. The Battle of Kiev had cost the Red Army an astonishing 700,000 total casualties. Whole armies were swallowed up into firebags to either die or surrender. Tank losses were somewhat lighter (the destroyed armies being largely conventional infantry), but the Red Army did lose an eye popping 28,000 heavy guns of all types (flak, artillery, anti-tank). The scale of this battle and of the Red Army’s losses had few historic precedents.

Can a battle that inflicts so much damage on the enemy ever truly be called a mistake?

Certainly, from the viewpoint of the annihilation battle (the only view that the German Army had ever found useful), Kiev was a masterstroke. In one neat maneuver, it wiped out an entire Soviet army group, captured much of Soviet Ukraine, and protected the Army Group Center’s southern flank - and the entire operation took less than a month. For Hitler, the victory was another personal success that vindicated his military instincts, and the Reich propaganda ministry was appropriately prepared to milk it for all it was worth.

The Wehrmacht was now four months into its eastern war, and had already fought three enormous annihilation battles, in Belorussia, at Smolensk, and at Kiev.

So why was the enemy not annihilated?

Vyazma: The Culmination Point

Few moments in World War Two are as misunderstood as the Battle for Moscow. There is a popular version of the story, known to all the western boys who have grown up with a fascination in the war, which goes like this: after a series of stunning victories throughout the summer, the Wehrmacht made a final push for Moscow, where they came within a few miles of winning the war – famously, German troops could see the towers of the Kremlin through binoculars – before coming up just short due to the terrible winter weather, supply problems, and inopportune meddling by Hitler. The implication of this story is that early December 1941 in the suburbs of Moscow are the specific time and place at which Germany lost the war.

The mythology of the fight for Moscow reflects an attempt by the German officer corps to reconcile a difficult paradox: how could they be losing a war in which they had won every battle? Moscow marked the first real operational setback for Germany in the three years since they had invaded Poland – as the first defeat, it must therefore also be the place where the war was lost. Even more conveniently, Moscow was a point in the war where Hitler’s interference became more intense, allowing German memoir writers to blame the defeat on their Fuhrer. But Moscow had never been of any obvious importance to Germany’s officers – the point of Barbarossa was to destroy the Red Army. Once it was clear that the Wehrmacht had failed to achieve this objective, the focus shifted to Moscow.

Soviet soldiers killed during the Toropets–Kholm-Offensive-January-1942 (CC)

 

 The Battle of Moscow

Soviet policeman on Gorky Street, Moscow, Russia, 1 Aug 1941 (CC-ww2dbase)

Soldiers of the Soviet Voroshilov Regiment in training, Moscow, Russia, 30 Aug 1941 ww2dbase

Aircraft listening post near Moscow, Russia, Oct 1941 ww2dbase. (CC-Russian Intl Agency)

Russian civilians building defensive fortifications in Moscow, Russia, 1 Oct 1941 (Russia Intl Agency ww2dbase CC)

Preparing barrage balloons on Bolshaya Ordynka Street, Moscow, Russia, 1 Nov 1941 (CC ww2dbase)

Soviet troops fighting in snowy terrain near Moscow, Russia, late 1941 (CC ww2dbase)

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Germany’s lunge for Moscow in the autumn of 1941 reflected the Wehrmacht’s dire situation. Barbarossa, despite its brilliant operational results, had failed to break the Red Army. What then? What does one do when a lightning operational maneuver fails to knock the enemy out of the war?

For the Wehrmacht, with its limited playbook, the answer was clearly to launch yet another offensive. German officers were trained to think of war in a very specific way, and to seek solutions on the operational level, which is to say the aggressive movement of large formations – the sort of chess piece maneuvering that appeals to the wargaming mind. In this case, the solution was Operation Typhoon: a Barbarossa follow-up which called for a pincer maneuver to encircle and destroy the Soviet forces on the approach to Moscow before capturing the city itself.

To deliver this much needed knockout strike, forces were reassigned from the northern and southern army groups to concentrate maximal fighting power in Army Group Center, whose commander – Field Marshal Fedor Von Bock – now wielded three of the Wehrmacht’s four panzer groups. Bock’s army group had now swelled to roughly 2 million men, making Typhoon the largest single German field command of the entire war. This was a formidable force, but the impressive order of battle on paper belied just how much damage the dogged Red Army defenders had dealt out over the previous three months.

Due to the depth of the Wehrmacht’s advance into the Soviet Union (and the difficulty of modifying German trains to be compatible with Soviet track) Typhoon was to be poorly supplied. Before the operation ever began, Wehrmacht logistics personnel warned that the offensive could not be properly supplied all the way to Moscow. The pristine, superbly equipped army which had invaded the Soviet Union in June was now severely degraded – Halder would ruefully admit that “such an army will not be available to us again.”

The scale of the Wehrmacht’s operational successes had largely blinded German leadership to the abysmal state of their own army. This was, as one analyst has phrased it, an army in the process of being “de-modernized.” The Wehrmacht wanted to fight a war of maneuver, moving quickly and artfully to flank and disorient the Red Army, but after heavily bleeding tanks and vehicles during the summer fighting, the army was running perilously short on mobility and punching power. A successful invasion of the Soviet Union would have required an army capable of initiating multiple successive offensive operations, with fresh, fully supplied panzer divisions and motorized infantry that could land a sequence of blows. The Wehrmacht was simply not the army for this job. When Typhoon began on October 2, they endeavored to land a knockout hit using half strength Panzer divisions and an enormous number of tired and poorly supplied infantry units. The lack of motor transport further ensured that any further forward progress would be of the stop-start variety – tanks lunging forward, then pausing to allow infantry and supplies to catch up. As Bock himself wrote in his diary, “How a new operation is to start from this position with the slowly falling combat value of the troops, who are attacked again and again, I don’t quite know yet.”

An overarching issue by this point was the inadequacy of Germany’s rail and truck transit. Contrary to popular belief, Soviet scorched earth efforts had not totally disabled the railways (in fact, they tended to keep the railways running to evacuate factory equipment right up until the last possible moment), and German engineering units managed to restore rail connectivity to Army Group Center in preparation for Typhoon. The problem was simply that there was inadequate rail capacity to supply such an enormous army, and this forced the Wehrmacht to make impossible choices, in terms of allocating limited capacity to various needs like replacement vehicles, spare parts, ammunition, fuel - and winter clothing. Logistical pinches were amplified by the unrestrained optimism of the Army’s quartermaster, General Eduard Wagner, who as a rule tended to drastically overpromise and underdeliver.

Lacking the ability to either adequately supply the army or reinforce it, the Germans had to resort to half measures and patch jobs to scrape together the necessary force for Typhoon.

In no arm was this more apparent than armored vehicles - tanks in particular. Cumulative German tank losses were enormous, even in an unbroken string of victories. On paper, Army Group Center began Operation Typhoon in October with more tanks than it had in June, but this increase in strength was achieved through a variety of stopgap solutions which papered over the overall degradation of the Wehrmacht’s fighting power.

Germans operating in the vast Russian savannas.

Tank losses had been severe, and logistics were held together by a thread, and all of this was amplified by the Wehrmacht’s now endemic reporting issues. Wehrmacht units tended to waver back and forth between over and under reporting their losses, depending on how they wanted to manipulate supply. It was common to over-report tank losses and breakdowns in order to request replacement vehicles and spare parts, but under-report them in order to get more ammunition and fuel. More broadly, the inadequate state of German supply created a strong incentive to lie. As a result, German commanders did not have a precise sense of the actual combat strength of their all-important panzer units - but they did know that the situation was dire.

On average, the tank strength of the Wehrmacht in the east by the beginning of September was approximately 30% permanent losses, 23% under repair, and 47% ready for combat. In Army Group Center, however, only 34% of the original tank strength was action-ready - these units having seen particularly fierce fighting at Smolensk. One of Hitler’s adjuncts reported the Fuhrer’s emerging alarm at the state of the panzer force:

“How was he to conduct a war, if he was counting on 1,000 additional tanks, and then someone told him there were actually only 500? He had assumed that the people in the Ordnance Office could at least count.”

To beef up Army Group Center for Typhoon, the Germans had to play almost all their immediately available cards. This included transferring a Panzer Group from Army Group North (so that Bock had 3 of the eastern army’s 4 panzer groups), dispatching both of the panzer divisions in Army High Command’s strategic reserve, allocating a batch of 316 replacement vehicles from storage, and sending captured French tanks to conduct rear area security tasks so that German panzers could be freed up for frontline action. Even with all of these measures taken, Army Group Center was still significantly under strength.

On a unit-by-unit basis, the army simply was shockingly degraded. Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group, which had begun the war in June with 900 tanks, was down to a mere 256 combat-ready panzers by the end of September, to which they could add 149 promised replacement vehicles.

The Germans did manage to put together a powerful package for Typhoon. Bock now commanded 60% of the German forces on the eastern front. But even after giving Bock an extra Panzer Group, and deploying panzer divisions from the strategic reserve, and sending replacement vehicles, Army Group Center only barely managed to match its tank strength from June. The real crusher, however, was the fact that railing in all of these new units and replacement vehicles meant that there was no longer rail capacity for spare parts, and consequentially broken down vehicles had a tendency to stay that way.

Schematically, Typhoon was merely an expansion of previous German movements in the Soviet Union. In both Belorussia and at Smolensk, Army Group Center had bagged huge encirclements using its two panzer groups as pincers - General Hoth’s 3rd Panzer as the northern pincer and Guderian’s 2nd as the southern. Now, with 4th Panzer Group under General Hoepner added to the inventory, there would be three pincers, with Hoenper’s group slotting into the middle.

The entire operation at first looked like yet another flawless implementation of the standard Wehrmacht package. Hoepner’s panzer group blasted a gap in the Soviet front while Guderian and Hoth curled around the edges. The Soviet response was sluggish and confused, largely due to the fact that the Soviet commander of the front, Ivan Konev (who would later prove to be extremely competent) had been ordered by Stalin and the Stavka to mount a frontloaded defense of a wide front with insufficient forces. This left the front lines thin and easy to penetrate, and Konev was unable to withdraw his units after losing communications with most of his frontline commanders due to Luftwaffe bombing of command posts. More or less hung out to dry, Konev watched helplessly as a whopping seven armies were either partially or completely encircled on the approach to Moscow.

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The defense against Operation Typhoon probably marked the absolute low point of Soviet operational conduct. Within the first three weeks of October, the Red Army lost more than 900,000 men defending the approach to Moscow, and the road to the capital was looking perilously open. And yet, at the end of October, it was the Wehrmacht that felt desperation. They were out of energy and out of time.

Snow fell on the night of October 6. The following morning it quickly melted and created mud.

We had anticipated this of course, for we had read about it in our studies of Russian conditions. But the reality far exceeded our worst expectations… The infantryman slithers in the mud, while many teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to their axles in the slime.

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German soldiers who had been on campaign, trekking across these vast expanses for months, now struggled to move very short distances. And still, despite the complete destruction of the Soviet forces at Viazma, there were still Red Army forces in the field, fighting back. Between the mud, the shortage of vehicles and fuel, general exhaustion, and a continuous Red Army defense, the Wehrmacht was now crawling forward. Furthermore, the slow going affected not only the advance of the combat units at the front, but also the German supply line, which by now was completely overwhelmed and providing only a trickle of the food, fuel, and ammunition needed to sustain the army. This in turn forced more hard choices - every ton of fuel and shells that was painfully hauled up to the front represented a large number of winter uniforms that were left behind.

Can’t park there, Hans. Welcome to rasputitsa.

Bock, trying his best to explain the situation to high command, bluntly said that “the objectives… surely cannot be reached before winter, because we no longer have the required forces and because it is impossible to supply those forces.”

The German forces painfully blasting their way forward toward Moscow were hardly recognizable as the same world-class troops that had shaken the pillars of Europe. Their speed, precision, and vitality were gone. Instead of fighting a war of maneuver and movement (the type of war that Germany excelled at), they were now waging a battle of attrition, which was the sort of game that the Soviet Union was always going to win. One German officer explained, “We gradually lost the ability to manoeuvre. War became one of linear movement… We were no longer instructed to surprise, outflank, and annihilate the enemy. We were told: “you will hold the front from such a point to such and such a point, you will advance to such a line”.” On the other side of the line, despite the sequence of defeats, some Soviet officers could sense the shift in Germany’s ability to fight. Lieutenant General Vassily Sokolovsky boasted that “The Blitzkrieg has developed into a continuous grinding of the German war machine.” Now, it was grinding to a halt.

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Reality Check at Moscow

In hindsight, it is very clear that the German decision to push for Moscow in the closing months of 1941 had no serious chance of success and placed Germany in a strategically perilous position. Even the disastrously bungled Soviet defense at Vyazma cost the Germans more than enough time and casualties to doom the attack, proving that Typhoon was simply not an adequate solution to Germany’s problem – after all, if an operation can annihilate an entire enemy army group and still fail, this suggests that the operation was unworkable from the beginning.

Operation Typhoon was, after all, a choice. There were many other potentially fruitful activities that Hitler’s team might have engaged in: for example, beefing up the logistics pipeline, proclaiming the end of collective farms and recruiting the Ukrainian populace to overthrow Bolshevism, or ramping up conscriptions and war production back home (shockingly, even months after invading the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was not on so-called “total war” economic footing). Perhaps, after annihilating the Red Army forces on the approach to Moscow at the end of October, the Wehrmacht could have dug into winter positions and looked to refit and reorganize for 1942, rather than attempting the final crawl through the mud and the snow towards the city.

Instead, the Germans did the only thing that they knew: draw up another offensive operation and try for another knockout blow, pushing forward until it was impossible to move further. Knowing, as one does now, that Typhoon was never going to work, it is easy to criticize the limited scope of the German expertise. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that whatever their limitations in other aspects of war-making, the Wehrmacht remained the most operationally skilled army in the world, and in 1941 the Red Army proved completely incapable of countering them. Typhoon failed to take Moscow, but it did destroy an entire line of Soviet field armies guarding the approach to the capital, and inflicted horrific casualties on the Soviets. For Stalin and his associates at Stavka, the situation map told of a rapidly unfolding catastrophe.

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World War 2 abounds with pictures of Jewish victims of Nazi savagery, but few people remember other groups also suffered horribly in German captivity. These are not Jews, but Soviet prisoners of war, being intentionally starved by the Germans, as part of an official policy of general extermination.

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To the residents of Moscow, including Stalin, it was not immediately obvious that the city would hold. By late October, as the Germans were battling to liquidate the Red Army pockets on the highway, Moscow had acquired a clear aura of impending doom. Civilian infrastructure broke down, with public transportation interrupted and electricity available only intermittently – coal supplies were now being hogged by armaments plants. Remarkably, there were instances of civil unrest: a rare occurrence in a population that had long ago reached the point of submission courtesy of the NKVD.

Contrary to German hopes, however, incidents of disorder in the street did not reflect a swelling anti-Soviet mood among the populace, but rather a growing fear that the government would abandon them. Some Muscovites observed how unprecedented and ominous it was that the city’s bakeries were now distributing several days’ worth of rations all at once – was the government expecting to be disrupted? In fact, Stalin and his crew had already made plans to abandon the city. On October 15, Stalin issued an order initiating the evacuation of the government and preparations to demolish factories, supply depots, and infrastructure in the event the Germans successfully entered the city. A substantial number of factories had already been evacuated, and plans were now in motion to turn what remained into a wasteland for the Germans.

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A rare candid photo of Stalin shows a man burdened and weary. (Author)

Stalin – usually imperturbable and stony – seemed to be at low ebb. “Are you sure that we can hold Moscow?” he asked Zhukov, “I ask you about this with a pain in my soul. Tell me truthfully, as a communist.” Zhukov – a ‘whatever the cost’ military man par excellence – answered “We will, without fail, hold Moscow.”

After the mid-October panic, the mood in the capital stiffened into defiance. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were conscripted to dig anti-tank ditches and construct field fortifications in the outskirts of the city, while able-bodied men continued to be put into uniform. Zhukov and Stalin even agreed to hold the November 7 parade for the annual commemoration of the revolution, as a demonstration of resolve.

After reviewing the parading troops, Stalin addressed the crowd. His speech, which was printed in all the newspapers the next day, admitted that the USSR was in dire straits, but insisted that Soviet victory was inevitable. “The whole world is looking at you”, he said, “for it is you who can destroy the marauding armies of the German invader.” He also, significantly, recalled the great heroes of Russia’s military history, like Alexander Nevsky, Dmitri Donskoi, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov. As early as July, the Soviet regime had begun rehabilitating a specifically Russian sort of patriotism by drawing a corollary between the German invasion and the villains of Russia’s past, like Napoleon and the Mongols. Stalin once again played up this theme with the Wehrmacht at the gates. His closing line, “Death to the German occupiers!” nicely encapsulated the mood.

After toying with evacuating in October, Stalin was now set on staying in the capital to fight it out. On December 1, the General Secretary received a phone call from Zhukov’s forward headquarters in the village of Perkhushkovo. The alarmed staffer on the other end of the call reported that the Germans were very near, and asked if headquarters could be relocated further to the east. Stalin replied by asking if they had shovels on hand. The officer, bewildered at first, replied that they did have shovels and asked what should be done with them. “Comrade Stepanov, tell your comrades to take your spades”, replied the dictator, “and dig themselves some graves. The Stavka’s not leaving Moscow. I’m not leaving Moscow. And they’re not going anywhere from Perkhushkovo.”

It is, however, a simple matter of fact that Stalin was at the center of Soviet victory, as the undisputed leader of the country, intimately involved in all critical decisions. Stalin was viewed as indispensable by all his subordinates (he continued to derive great legitimacy from his seemingly superhuman workload), and in fact his general popularity rose substantially during the war as he came to serve as the archetype for the state and its stubborn, stoic stand against the storm. In the waning months of 1941, as the German onslaught reached its apex on the approach to Moscow, Stalin’s defiance personified a growing Soviet rage in the face of the apocalypse. As Stalin himself said, to thunderous applause from the crowd in Moscow, “The German invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the Soviet Union. Very well then! If they want a war of extermination they shall have it!”

This sense of a heroic stand at the gates of hell was exhilarating, and not only to Soviet citizens. One American journalist, who had also been in France in 1940, recalled:

Every newspaper man who witnesses a momentous occasion of this kind tries to think of the one phrase which tells the full, thrilling story… While I was watching the Germans occupy Paris… the best I could do was: “Paris fell like a lady.” Now, the best I could find was: “Moscow stood up and fought like a man.”

Soviet soldiers in the Leningrad front. (CC)

With the Wehrmacht thinly strung out and unable to move, the strategic initiative by default passed to the Red Army for the first time in the war. Zhukov wasted no time, and immediately initiated a ferocious counteroffensive to drive the Wehrmacht back from the doorstep. On paper, Army Group Center outnumbered the Red Army forces in the Moscow region (perhaps 1.7 million Germans against 1.1 million Soviet troops), but the Red Army had reserve armies in the process of being formed, its forces, unlike the Germans, were fresh and close to their supply and communication hubs, they had access to functioning railways, and even more importantly, the Soviets were now able to concentrate troops at targeted points on the line. Despite inferior numbers on the front, concentrated attacks gave the Red Army a numerical advantage of more than 2 to 1 at key points. The attack began on December 5, and soon managed to throw the leading edges of the German line back from Moscow.

Zhukov’s decision to waste no time and immediately hit the exhausted Germans proved decisive, and the Red Army put Army Group Center in a very difficult position over the winter. On December 8, Hitler issued War Directive 39, which ordered the army to “abandon immediately all major offensive operations and go over to the defensive.” The order was a belated recognition of a reality that already existed on the ground. For many German soldiers clinging to their positions outside Moscow, “the defensive” was already all too real.

If the summer months witnessed the height of German hubris, December would give rise to similar overconfidence among Soviet leadership. After months of crushing operational defeats and terrible losses, the sudden shift in momentum was intoxicating. The Red Army did achieve significant operational breakthroughs which eliminated the imminent threat to Moscow and caused a genuine crisis for German command. However, the contrast between the panic of October and the successes of December convinced Stalin that the Germans were on their last legs, and led to massive inflation of expectations.

The best that the Red Army could aim for in the winter was to eliminate the direct pressure on Moscow and push the Germans off the doorstep – but Stalin and his minions became convinced instead that it was possible to encircle major German formations and potentially destroy Army Group Center altogether. In one memo, Stalin expressed his confidence that the winter offensive would “ensure the complete defeat of the Nazi forces in 1942.”

Unfortunately, the Red Army simply was not capable of such ambitious operations. The Soviets remained deficient in the technical and logistical elements of waging an offensive war. The Soviet officer corps was inexperienced and unable to properly coordinate the maneuver of their units the way German officers could, Soviet supply and control systems were still cumbersome and unable to back up a deep offensive, ammunition and hot food were tightly rationed, and the Red Army struggled to coordinate a successful combined arms battle. On the other hand, the Wehrmacht – although badly chewed up – was still the world’s most lethal army, and was able to hold together with cool nerves, tactical superiority, and carefully timed counterattacks. The tragedy, therefore, was that neither army was capable of defeating the other in 1941.

While the myth of a German chance at victory is just that – a myth – December 1941 did witnessed the first shift in the trajectory and the nature of the war, as the conflict widened and – for the first time in years – Germany lost control of the strategic initiative. But conditions on the ground in the Soviet Union were not the only thing changing to Germany’s disadvantage. On December 5, Zhukov unleashed his reserve armies and began to batter Army Group Center. Two days later, a Japanese strike force launched a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the Nazi-Soviet War was joined with a growing World War.

Maneuver Becomes Attrition

There is often a tacit assumption when discussing warfare that, at a given moment, one side is “winning” and the other is “losing.” The Nazi-Soviet War, especially in 1941 and 1942, dispels this notion. Disorientation, desperation, anger, and suffering were ubiquitous for both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Both sides could point to certain successes, but these came in the context of a broader catastrophe. The Wehrmacht could celebrate a series of brilliant encirclements and battles won, but these – Smolensk being the ideal example – came against the backdrop of a cataclysmic misread of Soviet mobilization power: the Germans continued to encircle and destroy Soviet units, but these units were not supposed to exist, and the Red Army was supposed to have collapsed. On the Soviet side, the successful evacuation of many critical factories – especially tank factories – was (and still is) held up as a great victory by the communist regime, but of course these factories were evacuated because the Red Army was being smashed up and down the line, and crucial industrial regions were being overrun by the Germans. In the end, both parties found themselves engaged in a desperate struggle for survival which no one was prepared for: the scale and intensity of the warfare was simply without precedent. The river of suffering and death had spilled its banks.

This leads to the larger point. In 1941, neither the Red Army nor the Wehrmacht was capable of destroying the other outright. No decisive victory was possible for either side, which means that this war was precisely that thing which the Germans had dreaded - a war of attrition.

The Wehrmacht took huge numbers of prisoners, but could not break the Red Army (CC)

Individually, the German operations had all the characteristics of a war of maneuver, with their artful pincer movements and the powerful and decisive application of their mechanized package at decisive points. They produced enormous encirclements which ballooned Soviet casualties to outrageous levels. The problem was that these victories did not bring overall strategic decision.

The Germans fought four enormous cauldron battles in 1941 - in Belorussia, at Smolensk, at Kiev, and Vyazma on the approach to Moscow. When an army is forced to fight a sequence of maneuver campaigns, each one failing to bring about a decisive result, the cumulative effect is attritive. And this was Germany’s problem. The Red Army was simply too powerful, the manpower reserve too enormous, and the Soviet state too tenacious to destroy in one, or even two big maneuver campaigns, and the Wehrmacht was trapped in a war of attrition whether it wanted one or not.

Ultimately, this revealed that the Wehrmacht, while extremely gifted in the operational and tactical domains of warmaking, was fatally incompetent in other domains, like military intelligence and logistics. In particular, German assessments of Soviet mobilization power were perhaps the greatest military intelligence misfire of all time.

The Soviet Union’s mobilization powers were truly awesome, and perpetually made a mockery of German military intelligence. In early August, reports were presented to Hitler which predicted that the Red Army no longer had sufficient forces to form a continuous defensive front, and was likely near the end of its resources – “The number of new units being organized may have reached its peak. The creation of more new units is hardly to be expected.” The report predicted that, at the absolute maximum, the Red Army could field 390 divisions. This number was an upward revision from pre-invasion estimates and yet it still represented a laughable understimation.  By this time, the Soviet mobilization had raised the Red Army’s line strength to 401 divisions – a number which would grow to 450 by September, and 592 by December. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Stavka achieved this tremendous organizational feat and then replicated it in the first half of 1942 by fielding 10 additional field armies.

In the ultimate analysis, Germany lost the war because it was engaged in an attritive struggle that it did not expect and could not understand, and it could not adjust to these conditions due to ideological constraints.

By the autumn of 1941, critical grain-growing and industrial regions were behind German lines. Of course, the entire point of Barbarossa was to allow Germany to exploit the economic resources of the western Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine, to create an economically self-sufficient greater German empire – one important assumption by German leadership, therefore, was that Barbarossa would swing the economic dimension of the war in Germany’s favor. This proved to be an utter fantasy.

The Soviet Union spent a considerable amount of energy evacuating factories out of the German path, although contrary to communist boasting these industrial assets were not rebuilt without a hitch in the rear areas. Evacuating a single factory involved hundreds, if not thousands of rail cars worth of equipment, and in the chaos of the war these loads tended to congregate at railway junctions, creating great heaps of disorganized machinery and equipment. By one estimate, roughly 1.5 million railcar loads worth of factory equipment were evacuated to the rear areas (the Urals, the Volga Valley, Siberia, and Central Asia). For obvious reasons, most of these factories were not immediately reassembled in 1941, and the following year would see an enormous drop in Soviet industrial output – some estimates suggest that 1942’s output had dropped by more than one-third from 1940 levels.

 

Ironically, even though the Soviet Union lost economically valuable territories in 1941 (and Germany by extension gained them), it was the Third Reich that soon found itself facing serious economic difficulties.

The Soviet regime managed to evacuate or destroy enough valuable infrastructure that the Germans found it difficult to get any real value from captured regions. Exploiting Ukraine, for example, required redirecting German trains and coal to get things moving, but the sprawling Nazi empire was already short on both of these things. To function in the Soviet Union, the Germans had to repair track and infrastructure – but this required labor, and already Germany was facing a severe labor shortage. Additionally, moving resources out of the Soviet Union would require allocating rail capacity that was needed to move supplies in to keep the army going. The economic situation was growing so desperate that some German planners suggested shutting down the entire armaments industry for the winter to save coal. In the end, the occupied portions of the Soviet Union provided less economic value to Germany than tiny, occupied Belgium.

Insofar as the Nazis found Ukraine to be a wasteland, they merely reaped what they sowed. Remarkably, German leadership specifically chose not to abolish the Soviet collective farms – a simple gesture which could have won the support of many Ukrainians.  One German official suggested that “Long-term secure deliveries of raw materials and foodstuffs to the German Reich could be achieved with fewer forcible means through a sympathetic treatment of the nationalities concerned” – bureaucratic jargon for trying to win over the Ukrainians by treating them with a bare minimum of humanity.

This sensible suggestion was dismissed outright. The Nazis were planning to starve the Slavs to death anyway, the collective farm seemed like a useful system for doing so, and the Germans never doubted that they could run them more efficiently than the communists had, and so the collective farms stayed. But the Germans, caught up in a cataclysmic war, with no knowledge of the local areas and no compelling ideology like communism, could not control the peasants like the Soviets could, and so Ukraine would not feed Germany the way Hitler wanted it to. Any hope held by the local populations that the Wehrmacht came to free them from communist oppression evaporated instantly upon contact with German barbarity.

“Close your hearts to pity.”