From November 20 [1941] to January 21, 1942, 230 vehicles were lost. Of them, 70 trucks were lost or abandoned, 91 trucks were disabled due to mechanical problems, and the enemy destroyed 69 vehicles…
Of the total number of 363 tanks taken from the enemy no tanks were repaired, and of 1,882 [enemy] vehicles only 59 have been repaired and are used now.26
In fact, the situation with vehicles was catastrophic. Of 272,600 that the Red Army had before the war and 206,000 that were taken for the army from civilian organizations, 271,400 were lost in battles before August 1941.27 This considerably restricted the speed and efficiency of the Soviet offense.
There were other problems. The OO of the 20th Army of the same Western Front reported to Abakumov: ‘Even during the defense… communication between the army detachments is frequently broken. As a rule, after the telephone connection has disrupted, radio transmitters are rarely used. Our men do not like transmitters and do not know how to use them… All detachments have good radio transmitters, but in insufficient numbers. There is a lack of radio operators, and some of them are poorly trained.’28
Soon the Western Allies helped to solve these and other problems. Two weeks before the frenzied confusion in Moscow, on October 1, 1941, the First Moscow Protocol of the lend-lease aid program was signed by American, British and Soviet representatives.29 In fact, the first British convoy arrived in the northern Russian port of Archangel even before that, on August 31. It delivered British Valentine and Mathilda medium-sized tanks, American Bantam jeeps and Studebaker US6 trucks that Britain had received from the United States. In the summer of 1942, Studebaker trucks and radio transmitters reached the Red Army on a massive scale. Overall, the Soviets received about 400,000 Studebaker and other trucks, 422,000 field telephones, and 35,800 radio transmitters.30 The Red Army servicemen called the trucks ‘Studery’, and those vehicles, along with the American military jeeps known as ‘Willis’, became icons of Allied aid.
Despite all the setbacks, the Red Army continued its counteroffensive until April 1942, pushing the German Army Group Center 175 miles west of Moscow.
Combat Losses, End of 1941–Early 1942
In general, Soviet combat losses from the autumn of 1941 through the spring of 1942 were enormous. The situation near Leningrad (currently St. Petersburg) is a good example.
By September 1941, Army Group North had encircled Leningrad and the 900-day siege of Leningrad had begun. On June 25, 1941, Finland started the ‘Continuation War’, trying to get back the part of the country lost to the Soviets in 1940, and the Finns were also shelling Leningrad. Nikolai Nikoulin, whose unit fought at the Sinyavin Heights not far from Leningrad during the winter of 1941–1942, described what the servicemen witnessed in the spring of 1942:
Piles of corpses at the railroad looked like small hills of snow, and only the bodies that were on the top were visible. Later in the spring, when the snow melted, the whole picture became exposed, down to the bottom.
On the ground there were bodies dressed in summer outfits, in soldier’s blouses and boots. These were the victims of the autumn 1941 battles.
On top of them, there were layers of bodies of marines in peacoats and wide black trousers.
On top of the marines lay the bodies of soldiers from Siberia, dressed in sheepskin coats and Russian felt boots [valenki], who were killed in January–February 1942.
On top of them, there was a layer of bodies of political officers dressed in quilted jackets and hats made of fabric; such hats were distributed in Leningrad during the blockade.
In the next layer, the bodies were dressed in greatcoats and white camouflage gear; some had helmets, while others did not. These were the corpses of soldiers of many divisions that attacked the railroad during the first months of 1942.31
Hendrick Viers, who defended this railroad on the German side and whom Nikoulin met in the 1990s, told him about the combat in January 1942: ‘At the early dawn, a crowd of Red Army soldiers used to attack us. They repeated the attacks up to eight times a day. The first wave of soldiers was armed, but the second was frequently unarmed, and very few could reach the road.’32
Contemporary St. Petersburg officials do not seem to care about those who perished. At the beginning of 2009, the remains of more than 180,000 soldiers killed in the autumn of 1941 still lay in the forest at the Sinyavin Heights. Instead of burying the remains, in 2008 the city administration used this territory as a dump.33
Notes
1. Mikhail Khodorenok and Boris Nevzorov, ‘Chernyi oktyabr’ 41-go. Pod Vyaz’moi i Bryanskom Krasnaya Armiya poteryala sotni tysyach boitsov,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie 20 (June 21–27, 2002), 5 (in Russian); details in L. Lopukhovsky, 1941. Vyazemskaya katastrofa (Moscow: Eksmo–Press, 2008) (in Russian).
2. Details in Yu. A. Zhuk, Neizvestnye stranitsy bitvy za Moskvu. Krakh Operatsii ‘Taifun’ (Moscow: Khranitel’, 2007) (in Russian).
3. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York: Charles Scribbner’s Sons, 1946), 374.
4. Robert Robinson with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books Ltd., 1988), 161.
5. From the memoir of N. A. Sbytov. Document No. I-34, in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev, 83–86 (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995) (in Russian).
6. Serov’s letter to Stalin, dated February 8, 1948. Document No. 29, in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 268–73 (in Russian).
7. GKO Order No. 801ss, dated October 15, 1941. Document No. II-34, in Moskva voennaya, 365–6.
8. Report of K. R. Sinilov, dated August 9, 1942. Document No. III-37, in ibid., 550.
9. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, 375–6.
10. Arkadii Perventsev, ‘Iskhod [iz ‘dnevnikov pisatelya opervykh dnyakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny],’ Moskva, no. 1 (2005), 192–222 (in Russian).
11. During the first six months of war, there were 141 German air strikes on Moscow, and 2,196 Muscovites were killed, while 5,512 were wounded. Many buildings were completely or partially destroyed in the center of Moscow, including the Bolshoi and Jewish theaters and Moscow University. Details in Moskva voennaya, 409–67.
12. An excerpt from the memoirs of V. P. Pronin, chair of Moscow Council, in ibid., 725.
13. GKO Order No. 813, dated October 19, 1941. Document No. I-55, in ibid., 124–5. Sinilov remained the commandant of Moscow until June 1953, when he participated in Beria’s unsuccessful putsch.
14. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, 377. From October 20 until December 13, 1941, 121,955 people were arrested in Moscow. Of these, 23,937 were released, 4,741 were sentenced by military tribunals to imprisonment and 357 to death, while 15 were executed on the spot; the rest were tried later. Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (Dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 12 (in Russian).
15. Text of the speech at http://www.sovmusic.ru/text.php?fname=st_71141, retrieved September 6, 2011.