Field Marshal von Bock had under his command one and a half million men, but his panzer divisions were weakened by the lack of replacement tanks and spare parts. When he assembled his commanders on the eve of the offensive, he set 7 November (the anniversary of the Russian Revolution) as the deadline for surrounding the Soviet capital. The ambitious Bock longed to be known as the conqueror of Moscow.
The Stavka, meanwhile, had been expecting a German offensive against Moscow ever since Army Group Centre had halted in mid-August. Stalin had sent General Yeremenko to organize armies into a new Bryansk Front, while two other fronts, Western and Reserve, were prepared to protect the capital. Yet in spite of these precautions, Yeremenko’s forces were taken by surprise when, early on the morning of 30 September, Guderian’s panzer Schwerpunkte struck their southern flank out of an autumnal mist. The sun soon broke through, making a warm, clear day, ideal for the offensive. The Germans had nothing to fear from the air. At that moment, less than five per cent of Red Army aviation in European Russia still survived.
During the first days of October, the offensive went perfectly for the Germans, with the panzer groups and Field Marshal Kesselring’s Second Air Fleet working closely together. Yeremenko asked the Stavka for permission to withdraw, but no permission was given. On 3 October, Guderian’s point units on the right reached the city of Orel, 125 miles behind Yeremenko’s lines. Surprise was complete. As the leading panzers raced up the main street past trams, passers-by waved to them, assuming they were Russian. The Red Army had not even had time to prepare charges to blow up the important arms factories. On 6 October, Yeremenko and his staff narrowly escaped capture by German tanks soon after midday. All communications were lost. In the chaos of the following days, Marshal Budenny, supposedly commanding the Reserve Front, even lost his headquarters, and Yeremenko, who was badly wounded in the leg, had to be evacuated by air.
Soviet leaders in the Kremlin at first refused to acknowledge the scale of the threat. On 5 October, a fighter pilot reported a column of German panzers a dozen miles in length, advancing rapidly up the road to Yukhnov, not much more than a hundred miles from Moscow. Even when another pilot was sent out on reconnaissance and confirmed the report, the Stavka still refused to believe it. A third pilot was sent out, and he too confirmed the sighting. This did not stop Beria from wanting to arrest and interrogate their commander as a ‘panicmonger’, but it finally succeeded in galvanizing the Kremlin.
Stalin called an emergency session of the State Defence Committee. He also ordered General Zhukov, who had brutally invigorated the defence of Leningrad, to fly back immediately. After Zhukov had seen the chaos for himself, Stalin instructed him to reorganize the remnants from the disaster into a new western front. Every available unit was thrown in to hold some sort of line until the Stavka reserves could be deployed. With Moscow itself now at risk, over one hundred thousand men were mobilized as militia and a quarter of a million civilians, mostly women, were marched out to dig anti-tank ditches.
The first snow fell on the night of 6 October, then promptly melted, turning roads to thick mud for twenty-four hours. Bock’s panzer groups still managed to achieve two large double encirclements, one by Bryansk itself and the other round Vyazma on the central route to Moscow. The Germans claimed to have cut off 665,000 Red Army soldiers and to have destroyed or captured 1,242 tanks—more than in the whole of Bock’s three panzer groups.
‘What a great satisfaction it must be for you to see your plans maturing so well!’ wrote Field Marshal von Reichenau to General Paulus, his former chief of staff, and soon to be his successor as the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army. But groups of Russian soldiers, although surrounded and unsupplied within the pockets, fought on almost until the end of the month. ‘Strong-point after strong-point has to be captured individually,’ Paulus heard from a divisional commander. ‘As often as not, we cannot get them out even with flame-throwers, and we have to blow the whole thing to bits.’
Several German panzer divisions also encountered a new form of unconventional weapon during this fighting. They found Russian dogs running towards them with a curious-looking saddle holding a load on top with a short upright stick. At first the panzer troops thought that they must be first-aid dogs, but then they realized that the animals had explosives or an anti-tank mine strapped to them. These ‘mine-dogs’, trained on Pavlovian principles, had been taught to run under large vehicles to obtain their food. The stick, catching against the underside, would detonate the charge. Most of the dogs were shot before they reached their target, but this macabre tactic had an unnerving effect.
It was, however, the weather which rapidly became the Wehrmacht’s worst hindrance. The season of rain and mud, the rasputitsa, set in before the middle of October. German ration lorries frequently could not get through, so single-horse farm carts, known as panje wagons (panje was Wehrmacht slang for a Polish or Russian peasant), were commandeered from agricultural communities for hundreds of miles around. In some places, where no birch trunks came to hand to make a ‘corduroy road’, the corpses of Russian dead were used instead as ‘planks’. A Landser would often lose a jackboot, sucked from his leg in the knee-deep mud. Motorcyclists could only advance in places by getting off to haul their vehicles through. Commanders, who never lacked for manpower to push their staff cars through a boggy patch, wondered how anybody could make war in such conditions. All of them, however, feared the freeze that would soon follow. Nobody forgot that every day counted.
The German advance formations struggled on as best they could. In the centre, on 14 October, 10th Panzer Division and the SS Das Reich Division reached the Napoleonic battlefield of Borodino in rolling countryside with woods and rich farmland. They were only seventy miles from the western edge of Moscow. On the same day, 100 miles north-west of the capital, 1st Panzer Division took the town of Kalinin, with its bridge over the Volga, and severed the Moscow-Leningrad railway line. Meanwhile, on the southern flank, Guderian’s panzers swung up past Tula to threaten the Soviet capital from below.
The progress of the three-pronged attack on Moscow threw the Soviet leadership into panic. On the night of 15 October, foreign embassies were told to prepare to leave for Kuybyshev on the Volga. Beria started evacuating his headquarters too. The NKVD interrogators took their most important prisoners with them. They included senior officers who, although desperately needed at the front, were still being beaten to a pulp in the search for confessions. Three hundred other prisoners were executed in batches in the Lubyanka. At the end of the month, however, Stalin told the chief of the NKVD to halt what Beria himself called his ‘mincing machine’. The Soviet dictator was more than willing to go on shooting ‘defeatists and cowards’, but for the moment he had tired of Beria’s conspiracy fantasies, describing them as ‘rubbish’.