Autumn rains were slashing across the ‘Ostfront’. The natural phenomenon upon which Stalin had relied to deter the final German offensive had arrived. One disgruntled Landser wrote home:
‘We can’t go on. There is no more petrol and nothing is coming up behind us. The route is long and the roads even worse over the last few days. The snow has melted and worsened the muck. Rations still do not arrive and we sit in filth the entire day.’
An infantryman in Second Army recorded, early on 10 October it began to rain and the rain turned to sleet. The difficulties soon set in,’ he said, ‘the roads turned into knee-deep mud and were unbelievable.’ It proved particularly heavy going for the artillery. ‘The so-called “Rollbahn” upon which we are marching is a sea of knee-deep mud,’ complained an artillery unit with the 260th Infantry Division. ‘Vehicles sink up to the axle and in many places the morass is up to the bellies of the horses.’(5)
The headlines back home in the Reich followed a similarly tortuous path as disillusionment set in. ‘The momentous hour has struck: the Eastern campaign is at an end,’ crowed the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper on 10 October. The following day it proclaimed ‘The Breakthrough in the East is widened’. Then on 12 October it claimed, ‘The Annihilation of the Soviet Army is almost finished’, and on the 13th ‘The Battlefields of Vyazma and Bryansk are far behind the Front’. A degree of temporisation was introduced by a clearly exhausted press, seeking to maintain the morale tempo, when on 14 October the headline read ‘The Movements in the East are proceeding according to plan’. The next day there was a simple acknowledgement that ‘The Fighting in the East is running to plan’. This was followed by a resounding silence on 16 October when the headlines limply changed the subject to ‘Torpedo boats sink six freighters from a Convoy’.(6) The point was not lost on the politically astute population of Berlin, always quick wittily to expose press inconsistencies. A joke was circulated whereby it was assessed the ‘BZ’ (an abbreviation for the Berliner Zeitung newspaper) was the only newspaper remaining worth reading. The explanation being, ‘it only lied between “B and Z” while all other newspapers lied from “A to Z”!’(7)
Leutnant Heinrich Haape recalled watching how ‘the first snow fell in heavy flakes on the silently marching columns’ of Infantry Regiment 18 two days after leaving Butovo. ‘Every man’s thoughts turned in the same direction as he watched the flakes drop on the slushy roads.’ Winter had arrived. It was late afternoon and the temperature dropped, causing the snow to fall more thickly until the countryside assumed ‘a white mantle’. Haape remembered, ‘we watched it uneasily’.(8)
Greatcoats were a problem. Not all soldiers even had the temperate issue. During the attack it hampered movement. On dismounting, infantrymen left them behind in their vehicles. Jackets had to suffice. Leutnant Koch serving with the 18th Panzer Division recalled that, just prior to the second (November) phase of Operation ‘Taifun’, his battalion commander ordered all greatcoats to be left behind with the logistic train at Orel. Unlike many other formations, their issue had arrived, but they were not allowed to take them.(9) Leutnant Haape’s men in Infantry Regiment 18 resorted to other methods. ‘In order to keep warm they put on all their spare clothes and slept dog-tired, in full battledress.’ Whereas previously there had been time to wash and change clothing during the static ‘interregnum’ period before ‘Taifun’, ‘now the poor fellows were constantly on the move’ and sleeping in louse-infected houses. There was no time to wash their clothing and scant opportunity to change it. Ingenuity was employed to stay warm. As Leutnant Haape explained:
‘Newspapers in the boots took up little space and could often be changed. Two sheets of newspaper on a man’s back, between vest and shirt, preserved the warmth of the body and were windproof. Newspaper round the belly; newspaper in the trousers; newspaper round the legs; newspaper everywhere that the body required extra warmth.’(10)
Soldiers for the first time in this war positively enthused over propaganda publications. Sheets of it could be put to good use.
Roads resembled muddy moonscapes with metre-deep craters which filled with water. Thousands of trucks were stranded. Supply and construction troops laboured to produce log-wood roads and other repairs, but to little effect. Rain or sleet fell incessantly after the night of 7–8 October. Tracked vehicles moved with difficulty. wheeled transport not at all. It was taking 24 to 48 hours to negotiate a short 10km stretch of road. Second Panzer Division reported ‘it was virtually impossible to supply the troops with the necessary combat and life support’. Junkers Ju52 transport aircraft dropped supplies from the air and landed fuel containers from towed gliders. ‘Each day our bill of fare,’ the report continued, ‘was two crackers, some sausage and a couple of cigarettes.’(11)
Little could be requisitioned from the local population, who were already short themselves. Only light artillery could be moved, at speeds of a kilometre an hour despite superhuman efforts. Von Bock observed, ‘in some cases 24 horses are required to move a single artillery piece.’(12) Heavy guns remained where they were. Carriage wheels for light guns had often to be removed and carried by hand through the mud. The 1st Artillery Abteilung supporting the 260th Infantry Division made dispiriting progress.
‘The gun crews, with coats smeared in wet mud up to their hips, had been in this mud bath for days without taking their boots off. They were clustered around wheel spokes and hanging off ropes. On the signal “Heave!” ten pairs of hands pulled with a loud “huh!” and “get going!” across the barrier. A battery needed one, two or often three hours to overcome such an obstacle. Often it appeared a vehicle had hopelessly sunk in the mud or that a half-destroyed bridge was irretrievably repairable… A sharp easterly wind brought with it the sound of grumbling artillery fire, indicating our comrades in the forward battalion were already in action against withdrawing Russians.’(13)
The simplest task required Herculean effort. Emaciated horses collapsed in the mire, unable to continue. Fähnjunker Karl Unverzagt serving with a Panzergrenadier unit said, ‘there was hardly ever an opportunity to get the mud off’. Not that it really mattered because ‘it provided the most ideal camouflage you might imagine!’ Von Bock, passing a 5th Division artillery regiment on the road, commented ‘it is hard to recognize the men, horses and military vehicles as a military column under their crust of dirt.’(14)
Leutnant G. Heysing with Panzergruppe 4 observed the ‘fast’ motorised divisions started to be overtaken by the foot infantry. ‘Even if the soldiers of the Panzer divisions are more or less powerless against the mud,’ he wrote, ‘this deluge has its master too; the soldiers of the German infantry divisions appear on the scene, drawing closer on anything that can in any way be referred to as a path.’ The infantry, having successfully concluded the double encirclement battles, was moving up.
‘They came marching in endless columns from the west from morning to night, taking advantage of every minute of the few hours of late autumn daylight. Tens and hundreds of thousands, endless and unlimited, with arms and munitions hanging on them, just as soon as they became available from the battle of Vyazma… These infantrymen, all with the same expression under their faded field caps, stamp silently through the mud, step by step to the east. The loamy liquid runs into the top of their boots… The coats also are wet, smeared with clay. The only things dry and warm are the glimmering cigarette butts hanging from the corner of their mouths… If the path is not wide enough to walk in columns, they march in long rows.’