‘Their blood froze in their veins at what the light showed. Hundreds, no, thousands of Russians were approaching their thin positions. Cossack cavalry were attacking too between vehicles and columns of lorries. A staccato noise of shots and strikes rang out… the monotonous automatic bapp-bapp-bapp-bapp of 20mm cannon in the ground role was constantly superseded by lighter sharp reports from the 37mm PAKs and the heavy bell-like sound of 50mm antitank guns. In between heavy and light machine guns were rattling away, intermixed now and then with several mortars and heavy-calibre infantry guns.’
From this point onward the fighting troops, Braun explained, lost all sense of time. ‘Several times the attacking Russians were shot to pieces directly before the positions.’ The rest were thrown back. Piles of bodies appeared in wave-like mounds before the German positions as the Russians stacked their dead to chest height to seek cover from fire. Complete Russian company groups tortuously crawled through heaps of their own dead to attempt sudden rushes against the German trenches. Little could be seen from these positions although the shrieks of the mortally wounded and appeals for help could clearly be heard. Russian lorries and armoured vehicles were hit until more light was provided from a petrol-laden carrier that burst into flames. The furious battle raged all night. Braun remembered how startled soldiers were when checking watches during a pause. They saw they had been fighting uninterruptedly for five hours. As dawn approached the fires on the burning lorries finally went out.
The coming light brought a sense of relief, for with it would come the reinforcing Panzers. Soldiers allowed themselves a chance to relax. ‘Suddenly the dead in the foreground started to move again,’ realised Braun with some alarm. Even though they were raked by a combined weapons barrage, ‘a sea of Red Army soldiers’ bore down on their positions. The impact of the merciless defensive fire dreadfully shaped the approaching mass, chopping parts away so that Braun described it resembling ‘the head of a huge Hydra, with ever new earth-brown forms’. With a nerve-shattering ‘Urrahscream’ the Red Army soldiers swept in waves across the German positions. Braun and his comrades, fearing for their survival, glanced anxiously ‘at the dark red colouring on the muzzle brakes of their anti-tank guns’, now glowing from the heat of constant firing.
‘Like a storm flood the [Russian] flow began to trickle over the embankments into ditches. Then small breaches were torn aside until finally the unstoppable wave flooded into the hinterland. Brave [German] infantrymen and in places even the anti-tank teams with guns were trampled into the ground by the mass of humanity driven by the certainty of death to seek an escape to the east.’
Isolated ‘islands’ of resistance held out, shooting in all directions. ‘Now the time came for the logistics men and the staff,’ Braun said. ‘Cooks fought weapons in hand from their kitchens and the rear-area drivers fought for their naked lives.’
Panzer reinforcements in the next village drove into the counterattack, plunging and firing into the mêlée with machine gun and main armament fire. ‘They fired without aiming straight into the mass,’ said Braun, ‘hitting Red Army men who had broken through and their own men.’ Dozens of Panje carthorses galloped around out of control, ‘whinnying pitifully’. Russian platoon vehicles, completely festooned with men hanging on for dear life, rolled over the living and the dead. ‘Russian lorries raced by at full speed, completely full of soldiers,’ Braun observed, ‘lit only by the flash of weapon reports’.
On the position, the infantry fought with pistols, spades and grenades to gain space. Even the company commander fought with a smoking-hot machine pistol from his trench, fed full magazines by his orderly. Braun, fighting nearby, opened fire on Russians running toward him with their hands up. He had noticed the grenades. A huge detonation followed after the Russians pitched to the ground.
Finally it was over. ‘With tracks whirring and loud engine noises our Panzers from Regiment 3 approached their island of resistance from the rear.’ Steadily the steel-grey Panzers moved through their position on the final mopping-up. Russian survivors raised their hands and were formed into small columns to be marched off. Braun noticed their dumb, beaten-looking expressions as they were waved on.(10) It appeared had momentous victory had been achieved.
The Panzers did what they could to hold the porous perimeters in support of their own motorised infantry, who were quite literally bled white. Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, well aware of these losses, cajoled and pushed his infantry divisions forward.
‘The performance of the infantry,’ he reflected in his diary on 3 October, ‘has been almost unbelievable.’ More, however, was required. Three days later he was to remind General Strauss of the Ninth Infantry Army ‘that its most important task was quickly to send strong infantry forces after the tanks’. Road conditions were atrocious. Driving along the Roslavl–Moscow highway he saw ‘things are a mess’. He described how ‘four to five columns side by side, with unauthorised Luftwaffe elements wedged in between them, clog the road on which the entire supply effort, including deliveries of fuel for the tanks, depends’.
Four days later the Vyazma pocket, still fighting furiously, was dwindling in size. Guderian’s Second Panzer Army was having difficulty containing the Bryansk pocket. Von Bock’s diary charted the steady compression until by 13 October the Vyazma Kessel was beginning to collapse amid fanatical resistance. Bryansk, meanwhile, was disintegrating into lesser pockets, which remained troublesome and indeed unpredictable. On 15 October a German regiment from the 134th Division was surrounded on all sides in the southernmost pocket.(20) Two more sub-pockets were pinched out between 17 and 18 October.
An officer from Schützen Regiment 7 with 7th Panzer Division described the plight of its first battalion, before being rescued by the Panzers of Regiment 25:
‘It was actually worse than Jarzewo [Yartsevo – a bloody sector on the Smolensk perimeter]. Then, the enemy attacked mainly in battalion strength. This time we had to hold back several divisions, but with motorised infantry companies spread over a 12km sector. What use are numerous heavy weapons and favourable terrain in a few positions on the whole of the left sector, when everything is only held together by a series of strong-points?’
Hauptmann Schroeder’s Panzer Abteilung reached the right flank of the threatened battalion in the nick of time. They were totally sobered by what they found. All around them lay large numbers of the 3rd Company, strewn about their positions on the heights north of Bogowodjiskije.
‘In several foxholes there were four or five dead interspersed with one or two survivors standing among the bodies of their own, rifles at the ready. Several of the machine guns were completely shot-out and nobody in the company had any ammunition left. A badly wounded Feldwebel was still crouched at the ready in his trench. My impression was that the soldiers of the 3rd Company had actually fought to the limit of sustainable endurance.’(21)
Schroeder, visibly affected by the scene, was to remind his battle group constantly during the bleak days ahead of the example they had witnessed that day. The price had been paid by men convinced that one final effort would conclusively break Russian resistance. The end justified the means. Panzer commander Karl Fuchs also lost a close friend.
‘We hard-hearted soldiers have no time to bemoan his fate. We tie down our helmets and think of revenge, revenge for our dead comrades. The battle of Vyazma is over and the last elite troops of the Bolsheviks have been destroyed.’(22)