The 3rd Battalion swiftly breaks enemy resistance at the edge of a forest. We are making for Petrovo. There, according to the testimony of prisoners, there will be field fortifications. Our neighbour lost his way on a snow-covered forest road. The maps are so inaccurate as to be almost unusable.
20 November. Increasing use of a Russian volley-firing weapon, which the soldiers have nicknamed the Stalin Organ. We have not yet come under fire from it. They say that the demoralizing effect of the exploding missiles is even greater than their destructive power.
21 November. Shells exploding in the middle of the village. Everyone lies flat. Outside, screams and groaning of the severely wounded… Our anti-tank guns are powerless against their heavy tanks. We demand reinforcement with an anti-aircraft unit.
November 22. The enemy attacks 173rd Regiment. A forceful blow and the enemy is defeated. Sixty dead Russians are left on the battlefield, one hundred are taken prisoner.
Our advance is an inspiring sight. The entire regiment mounts a frontal attack out of the forest at the village. Suddenly a T-34 tank is sent from behind the houses and turns round spewing fire. Anti-tank guns of every calibre and anti-aircraft guns are turned on it. The monster’s turret evidently jams: at all events, it is firing only its machine gun. A shell goes into the exhaust pipe. Flames burst out. The engine is smoking, but the tank rushes on at high speed. Eventually, a chain comes off the drive mechanism. The tank spins round on one spot. The next shell tears off the second caterpillar. The T-34 is finally halted.
At the front I was instructed as an interpreter to ask officers taken prisoner what the Germans saw as the strengths of our army. They would mention the T-34, the stoicism of our soldiers, and Zhukov. I told Marshal Zhukov that when we met.
25–29 November 1941. We have failed to break the enemy’s resistance. SS units and tanks have occupied Istra and are advancing to the east. For now they are depriving us of the glory of being the first to reach Moscow. We bury our regiment’s dead at Surmino. Our hopes are resting on Guderian’s tanks, which are punching through towards Moscow from the south-west.
5 December 1941. No indication of when we will be relieved. We are beginning to calculate when the last of us will be put out of action and there will be nobody left to hold the weapons. There are so few people left who are capable of manning the heavy machine guns and heavy mortars that, if we lose any more, we will be unable to continue using these armaments. Some of them, along with their means of transport, were left behind when we entered Ruza owing to shortage of personnel.
7 December 1941. We realize it is impossible to hold the line of defence. Together with the commanding officer, examine the locality for a new position. Organize a dressing station in an orphanage. Eighty people brought in, forty of them with second- and third-degree frostbite.
What comes next? What is the point of all this?
11 December 1941. Rear units pull out in accordance with orders and set fire to the villages. The flames from the fire light up the night sky.
At 15:00 we listen closely to the Führer’s speech in the Reichstag and are pleased to hear of the declaration of war on the United States. Our naval forces will give a fitting response to Roosevelt’s insolent challenge.
16 December 1941. I travel through Ruza, abandoned, almost completely deserted. Wooden huts burning here and there. These torches light up the town. It is as light as day. During the night comes the order: prepare for defensive action. At last, the Führer’s masterful command. We may retreat no further, we must hold the Ruza line of defence to the last. Ruza itself is to become a bridgehead.
Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the Army, seeing the failure of the Blitzkrieg, considered the retreat from Moscow a catastrophe and a signal that the war had been lost. He and his generals demanded that their troops be withdrawn right back to the borders of the Reich. Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch and, himself already supreme commander-in-chief, appointed himself simultaneously commander-inchief of the Army.
The war continued. The German front commands requested warm clothing for the soldiers from the quartermaster-general. The latter had supposed that, as the lightning war would be over during the summer months, none would be needed.
Under the Barbarossa Plan, an attack on the USSR had been timed for 15 May 1941. If it had begun then, the Germans would have had a significant advantage with an additional month before the coming of winter, but the plan was disrupted by the campaign in Greece. Working on Josef Goebbels’ diaries in the Council of Ministers Archive, I came across an entry recording a very important discussion he had with Hitler on the eve of war against the USSR. Drawing up his plans for a Blitzkrieg to defeat Russia almost instantly, the Führer admitted, ‘The campaign in Greece has severely weakened us in terms of materiel, so this matter is dragging on somewhat. Fortunately, the weather has been fairly bad and the harvest has not yet ripened in Ukraine’ (16 June 1941).
In spring 1941 Hitler had declared war on Greece after it rejected an ultimatum from his Italian ally. An unequal struggle began between little Greece and the bloated military might of Nazi Germany, which by then had subjugated almost the whole of continental Europe. This heroic, steadfast, but tragically doomed struggle nevertheless tied up the German Army in a protracted war in the Balkans.
In the 1980s I found myself in Greece on Okhi Day, a national holiday celebrated on 28 October, when the Greeks said ‘Okhi’, ‘No’, to that enemy ultimatum. Greece’s very youngest citizens marched in holiday procession, very touching in their little white blouses, and each bearing a small Greek flag.
I felt very emotional as I reflected how profoundly Greece’s Okhi Day is relevant to us Russians: it was a day that influenced the entire course of the war.
21 December 1941. At first we could help ourselves to a lot in the areas we occupied, where we were left to forage for ourselves. Now we are back in the same locality and it seems to me we have almost nothing and nowhere to take anything from.
28 December 1941. Everyone is suffering terribly from insects. Unfortunately, the bread ration is being reduced.
People have had no opportunity to change their clothes for several months now; dirty underwear has been in their satchels since the summer. To wash it you need more than soap and water, you need the confidence that there will be time for your washing to dry. In our present circumstances, every sick soldier remains on active service.
29 December 1941. The lack of winter clothing! It would have been so much simpler in the autumn to prepare for winter. It was already known that there would be a shortage of the uniforms essential for further advances owing to deliveries not having arrived in good time.
The Red High Command need harbour no false hopes and imagine they are going to win a brilliant victory. Their success for the moment is due to our mistakes. There can be no doubt that the Bolsheviks will again feel our force come the summer.
In North Africa it seems that the British have managed to rally their forces and are on the offensive. In Libya we have insufficient troops because, destined for that sector of the front, they have been brought into the fighting in the east. We place all our hopes on Rommel.
30 December 1941. The local people who had fled the villages and hamlets are returning in great numbers, looking for food, but we must be merciless. We cannot squander our modest stocks. Let famine finish the job where lead has not succeeded!