‘One began to hear sarcastic references to the military leaders far away in Germany,’ commented Blumentritt. ‘The troops felt that it was high time our political leaders came and had a look at the front.’(28) Unease permeated the motivation sustaining fighting power at the front, especially among the infantry. Harald Henry’s infantry regiment in Ninth Army marched at night, when the mud temporarily froze over. Between 17.45 hours and 02.00 the following morning ‘we were outside in a snowstorm, apart from a short break,’ he said.
‘My things were gradually saturated as the water soaked through my greatcoat to my body, which was frozen stiff. Everything was dripping and the weather was freezing. My stomach and bowels were in a state and cold temperatures dropped off the scale – and the lice! The frost penetrated the weeping sores on my fingers.’
Henry’s company was ordered to sweep a wood. The snow, over knee-deep, soon filled his boots with a slushy mess. As they painstakingly clambered across frozen marshland they occasionally broke through the ice, immersing their feet in freezing water.
‘My gloves were so wet I could not bear the ache [of his infected hands] any longer. I could have wept with pain as I bound my useless hand with a handkerchief. My contorted face was streaked with tears, but I was in a trance-like state. I plodded forward, babbling incoherently, feeling I was asleep and reliving a nightmare. All the others were in the same state. There was shooting and one threw oneself into the snow, formed a half-circle, made ready and waited for orders. It was a cycle of non-ending misery.’
Wood-clearing was tedious, frustrating, exhausting and dangerous. By nightfall the sweep was over. ‘Then came an order that said the operation had been unsuccessful and we had to do the whole thing again from the beginning.’ Just as they started, another radio message was received ordering a withdrawal. This meant a 10–15km march, which was to last nine hours. Much of it was spent waiting in column, as the company made tortuous progress through the trees. It was a physical ordeal which left them:
‘Standing hour after hour in the open, wet and frozen with hands wrapped [in bandages], lashed all the time by the unbelievable weather. Our boot soles froze sticking to the ground. We were wet through and had simply to stand, stand, stand, wait – march a bit – and stand again.’
At 02.00 hours they reached a village where they were told they could rest. ‘All of us are ill and absolutely worn out to some degree or other.’ Their joints were stiff. ‘Every fibre in my body is broken,’ complained Henry. Early the next morning it would probably start all over again. The awful weather, however, precluded any further movement. Men lay on the floor, some 30 to a small room. ‘Liquid excrement ran through the middle of the hut between our ponchos and packs,’ said Henry. ‘We all had diarrhoea and stomach cramps.’(29) There seemed no end to the suffering.
Soldiers grew increasingly sensitive to the ‘hurrah-patriotism’ they heard on the radio and read in the press. ‘One can only shake one’s head at what you hear on some radio programmes, or in some propaganda company reports,’ complained an artillery Leutnant with the 131st Infantry Division. ‘We’re not too influenced by such shitty stories,’ he said, ‘but it is no good singing about it.’ Morale was being eroded. ‘After four months,’ concluded the officer, ‘one has had enough.’(30)
‘Morale has dropped,’ reported IIIrd Corps with Army Group South, particularly after the optimistic propaganda ‘which contradicts their experience on the battlefield’. Troops enduring the hardship that produced the victories were unsparing with their comments. One said, ‘the capture of Odessa, Kharkov, or anywhere else makes no impression at all if you yourself are lying in the shit.’(31)
Warfare on the Eastern Front had changed from attaining strategic objectives to fighting for the next shelter. Oberstleutnant von Bose, commanding an infantry battalion with the 98th Division, took a delivery of rations on a particularly cold night on 16 October and found they were frozen solid. He radioed his regimental headquarters and said, ‘we’re freezing and want to attack’. Back came the mystified response: ‘Attack where?’ Von Bose retorted, ‘It doesn’t matter where – we need accommodation!’ An order followed to capture the village of Awdotnja, which the battalion took in a surprise attack. All night the battle raged against repeated Soviet counter-attacks, desperate to regain their lost shelter.(32)
The German soldier at the front felt keenly the disappointment of having the chalice of victory dashed from his lips, more so than the population in the Reich. Unteroffizier Helmut Pabst summed up the feeling in mid-October when he wrote, ‘what a country, what a war, where there’s no pleasure in success, no pride, no satisfaction, only a feeling of suppressed fury now and then.’(33) Harald Henry exclaimed:
‘How much longer should this go on! There should surely eventually be a stop to it, or at least a relief. We have acquitted ourselves magnificently, and with heavy losses, in all the great Army Group Centre pocket battles: Bialystok, Minsk, Mogilev, Roslavl, the Desna river, Vyazma and Bryansk. In the final resort we ought to be allowed at least some rest. We can’t take much more.’(34)
The Ostheer had delivered all that had been demanded of it, and more. The last remaining identified Soviet field armies were destroyed in the twin encirclement battles at Vyazma and Bryansk. Operating beyond logistic range and bled white in the process, the German armies had inflicted a further devastating blow on the Russians. But still the enemy fought on. Moreover, whatever the result of the victory, a two- to three-week delay was being imposed by the mud of the autumn rains. General Blumentritt remarked, ‘the troops not unnaturally now resented the bombastic utterances of our propaganda in October.’(35)
Chapter 14
‘The eleventh hour’
‘The state of our forces must not, “for heaven’s sake”, be overestimated in future… they must be clear that as far as this attack is concerned it is “the eleventh hour”.’
Moscow…
A defence crust forms
The Soviet leadership was taken aback at the ‘Autumn Storm’, triumphantly announced by the German press, that burst upon them. Panzergruppe 4 drove a wedge between Maj-Gen Petrov’s Fiftieth Army and the Forty-third Reserve Front Army, and Second Panzer Army entered Bryansk on 6 October, at which point Moscow lost contact with its forward Army Groups. Major Ivan Schabalin, an NKVD staff officer with Fiftieth Army, jotted ‘we are surrounded’ in his diary on 4 October.
‘The entire front, three armies, have been embraced – and what do our generals do? “They think about it.”… As ever, we lose our heads and are incapable of taking any active measures.’
Schabalin assessed the front staff had lost all initiative from the very moment the German attack began. Two days later he despairingly admitted, ‘history has never witnessed anything like the defeat of the Bryansk Front’. The front command irretrievably lost control, ‘it’s rumoured the idiots are already on their way back to Moscow,’ the disillusioned officer complained.(1)