This gritty propaganda piece of reportage intended for the Reich press glorified the aura of invincibility raised by the German infantry, which was sincerely believed by the population at home. Heysing reported the situation on 25 October:
‘The tanks are out of fuel, the guns are nearly out of shells, and again and again we have had to take leave for ever from many dear comrades. It is practically impossible to get our boots dry again, and the uniforms are turning yellow and getting threadbare. But none of us lying here stuck in the mud in the midst of the enemy have lost our courage. The frost has to come some time and the terrain will become passable again.’(15)
Although Heysing wrote with convincing authenticity, his optimistic view was not shared by all at the front. Unteroffizier Wilhelm Prüller was wrestling with the greatcoat dilemma. ‘Which is better?’ he reflected at the beginning of October, ‘to be moving and to sweat more with a greatcoat and then to shiver less when you’re quiet, or to go on as we’ve been doing, without one?’ His commanding officer, like Leutnant Koch’s from the 18th Panzer Division, said, ‘we can’t move as well in a coat.’ There was little debate. ‘His is the bigger pay packet,’ Prüller ruefully admitted, ‘so it’s no coats for us!’ His diary chronicled the cumulative and depressing impact the appalling wet weather in Army Group South’s sector had on the troops. It lasted almost three weeks.
On 6 October he observed after it had ‘rained in torrents all night’ that ‘at night it gets really cold now, and we all think that it can’t go on much longer’. With the baggage train marooned somewhere behind on the rutted roads, no food or spare dry clothing got through. The next day saw a snowstorm which did not settle ‘but the wind whistled through every nook and cranny of our hut’. Still it rained. By 13 October rain alternated with snow. ‘It only freezes at night,’ commented Prüller, ‘when it’s cold, but at 07.00 in the morning it thaws out again.’ No mail could reach the troops or was collected because the supply trains ‘can’t catch up with us through the mud’. Four days later, ‘there’s still no trace of our baggage train’. Changed weather conditions resulted in different march routines. ‘There’s no point in trying to move during the day; the mud would not allow it,’ said Prüller. ‘We can make it only during the night, when the earth is frozen hard.’ At the end of the week depression became evident, reflected in much shorter diary entries. ‘The rain stops only for a few hours at a time,’ he wrote, and ‘everything is grey, dark and impenetrable. The whole of Russia is sunk in mud.’
On 28 October Prüller was marching ‘in driving snow-cum-rain. On the eve of the attack on Kursk, the last day of the month, ‘the night was simply freezing,’ he complained. ‘We froze, particularly since we had neither blankets nor overcoats.’ Kursk, as a consequence, was an objective well worth attacking, because it could provide accommodation. ‘The rain has stopped, and the streets are frozen solid,’ commented Prüller as the advance got underway.(16) There seemed no end to their misery.
Leutnant Georg Richter with Artillery Regiment 74, driving through light snow conditions in mid-October, fervently wished the light frost, that periodically hardened the roads, would last longer. But when it did, treacherous slides resulted. One sudden halt resulted in a pile-up involving every single vehicle in the column. Two were totally written off. ‘We spent the night in our vehicles either side of the road and almost froze half to death,’ he commented. Depressing circumstances invariably bred hopeful rumours. ‘A common opinion was that our division would still be relieved before the winter and we would most likely be sent to Africa,’ he mused. Shelter was at such a premium that soldiers were prepared to fight for it. Every time they drove into a village at the end of the day it was ‘always the same old picture’, he complained. ‘Every house completely filled up with soldiers, and all over were staffs and baggage trains.’(17)
On the road to Kalinin, Unteroffizier Helmut Pabst marched 55km during a frozen period on 12 October between 08.00 hours and 02.00 the following day. ‘We didn’t find any billets,’ he ruefully commented when they finally reached their distant objective. Freezing temperatures forced them inside, and ‘the boys warmed themselves in the overcrowded rooms, determined to get warm even if it meant standing’, as was often the case. The infantry endured wretched conditions. ‘My boots were still so wet this morning,’ Pabst complained, ‘I could only get into them in my bare feet.’(18) Their feet, constantly soaked, in temperatures just above freezing, were susceptible to ‘immersion’ or ‘trench foot’. Such chilling interrupted the blood flow to these extremities and could cause tissue damage akin to superficial frostbite. Close-fitting wet clothing and saturated shrunken boots exacerbated the symptom, as also did protracted standing in wet and cold conditions. Damage was often not recognised, and dismissed as aching feet, occurring as it did in conditions above freezing. Not seen since World War 1, ‘trench foot’ and hypothermia (body chill) took a steady toll of the sick, further increasing the vulnerability of under-nourished soldiers to face even harsher conditions to come.
Prevailing dull wet weather with driving sleet and rain, together with the social pressures of a crammed existence in crowded foul-smelling accommodation, produced bad tempers. This, combined with the persistent anxiety of impending combat, frayed nerves and tested leadership. ‘War began to sap the soldiers’ nerves,’ recorded the official history of the 9th Potsdam Infantry Regiment:
‘Many were too tired to take cover or even throw themselves to the ground when the whistle of enemy shells was heard. Sleeping in foxholes remained by necessity perfunctory, as they were always on the look out for some danger.’(19)
Overcrowding in cold, wet and unsanitary conditions produced colds, influenza, disease and lice. Unteroffizier Pabst, packed into a small baker’s house on the Kalinin road, complained, ‘the nine of us can hardly move.’ The billet was crawling with lice.
‘Our little Viennese was unwise enough to sleep on the stove last night; he’s got them now – and how! Socks which we put there to dry were white with lice eggs. We’ve caught fleas – absolute prize specimens.’(20)
Lice were the scourge of the Eastern Front, an irritant contributing to ill-health and cumulative psychological depression. Painstakingly picked off the body, they could only be killed with certainty by cracking them between fingernail and thumb after they were gorged with blood. Machine gunner Joachim Kredel with Infantry Regiment 67 embalmed one in hot candle wax on his mess tin, and sent it home in a match box as a souvenir, ‘so that they might at least see one louse!’ he explained.(21)
At home, the cinemas were showing a noteworthy scoop – the fighting around the old Napoleonic battlefield at Borodino. The implicit parallel was that this event preceded Napoleon’s entry into Moscow in 1812. In 1941 it formed part of the Mozhaisk defence line, the outer ring of concentric barriers protecting the capital city, stretching almost 300km from Kalinin to Kaluga. This line was attacked by the spearhead of Panzergruppe 4: the 2nd SS ‘Das Reich’ and 10th Panzer Divisions. The newsreel portrayed unprecedented realism, narrated by war reporter Hugo Landgraf as he participated in the actual attack. His report ‘on the battlefield at Borodino’ was conducted with an immediacy typical of present-day TV media coverage. It caused quite a stir among cinema audiences.(22)