Daily losses during the early border battles had been stupendous, confirming Wehrmacht claims. From 22 June until 9 July 23,207 soldiers were lost each day on the Belorussian front, which amounted to 341,000 irrecoverable losses from 625,000 soldiers committed to battle. At Smolensk 12,063 men were killed or irretrievably injured each day from 10 July until 10 September, ie 486,171 irrecoverable losses from a committed strength of 581,600. The reeling Russia colossus was dealt a further crushing blow at Kiev when 8,543 men fell on average each day, which was 616,304 from a combined defeated armies total of 627,000.(7)
Losses in material were equally appalling. On the Belorussian front, 4,799 tanks were destroyed at a rate of 267 per day from the start of the invasion until 9 July, alongside 9,427 artillery and mortar pieces captured or knocked out at 524 per day, and 1,779 aircraft shot down or hit on the ground at 99 per day. At Smolensk 1,348 tanks were lost in two months between July and September at 21 per day, 9,290 artillery and mortar pieces at 147 per day and 903 aircraft at a daily destruction rate of 14. Fewer tanks were operable by the time of the Kiev encirclement battle, but 411 were knocked out at five per day between 7 July and 26 September. Artillery and mortars provided the main Russian fire power in the pockets and 28,419 guns were lost, picked off at 347 per day with 343 aircraft.(8)
The double encirclement battles at Bryansk and Vyazma cost the Soviet field armies caught either in the pockets or on the retreat some 9,825 soldiers per day. By the end of November their losses were to total 658,279 men. Soviet tank losses from the beginning of Operation ‘Taifun’ were running at 42 per day and were eventually to total 2,785. Artillery and mortar losses reached 3,832 pieces at 57 per day, and, despite the poor weather, four aircraft were being lost on average each day.(9)
Stupendous though these losses were, the Red Army was not persuaded or indeed reduced sufficiently to advise Stalin and the Communist regime to sue for peace. Officer and senior NCO losses were serious but absorbed by a centralised structure, which – unlike the Ostheer – was not reliant upon initiative. Contrary to the German Auftragstaktik style of leadership, Soviet formations were committed to battle as large closely supervised blocs. German contemporary accounts constantly dwell on the ‘unpredictability’ such methods conferred. General von Mellenthin, a panzer commander, emphasising this characteristic, remarked ‘today he is a hero attacking in great depth – tomorrow he is completely afraid and not willing to do anything’.(10) Panzer General Hermann Balck was to comment after the war:
‘The Russians are astonishingly unpredictable and astonishingly hard for a Westerner to understand. They are a kind of herd animal, and if you can once create panic in some portion of the herd it spreads very rapidly and leads to a major collapse. But the things that cause the panic are unknowable.’(11)
It was this ‘unknowable’ element that clouded German intelligence thinking. Having survived the shock of the initial onslaught, the Soviet Army was relying upon space and its considerable manpower resources to buy the time necessary to develop the experience that would eventually reduce casualties. In short, the Ostheer had to deliver a knock-out blow to win. The Russian Army, by contrast, had merely to remain standing to achieve eventual victory. It was this apparently inhuman capability to endure punishment and losses that German planners were never able to quantify. They applied their own psychological and rational parameters, irrelevant to the Russian context of waging war.
General Balck, observing the steady dissipation of German strength with some concern, admitted, ‘when we advanced on Moscow, the general opinion, including my own, was that if we take Moscow the war will be ended’. This was the logic applied by the German General Staff in pursuing its final reckless push against the city. Soldiers at the front, facing the reality of continued and sustained bitter resistance, thought otherwise. ‘Looking back in the light of my subsequent experience,’ Balck concurred, ‘it now seems clear that it simply would have been the beginning of a new [phase in the] war.’(12)
The perception of the Ostheer, the field army, differed from that of planners at OKW in Berlin academically assessing relative strengths. There were disagreements over objectives as a consequence. Second Panzer Army was, for example, allocated Gorki, 500km east of Moscow, as an attack objective. Its Chief of Staff, Oberstleutnant von Liebenstein, frustratedly retorted, ‘This is not May again and we are not fighting in France.’ He changed the objective to Wenjew, 50km north-east of Tula, considered to be the maximum achievable objective for the Second Panzer Army.(13) Von Bock acknowledged ‘the attack cannot become a great strategic masterpiece’; rather the aim was ‘to conduct the thrust in concentration at the tactically most favourable points’. This was a clarification of earlier statements which suggested the best that might be achieved was the creation of conditions for a future encirclement of Moscow. ‘Our planned interim objective is Moskva and the Moskva-Volga canal and the capture of its crossings,’ he said, warning ‘it is not impossible that the state of the attack forces units may force us to halt on this line.’
There were too many conflicting pressures to overcome. Plans were deteriorating to the status of a gamble. Von Bock was only too aware of the situation:
‘Conditions have thus forced the Army Group to work with very short-range objectives. I cannot suggest waiting longer than is necessary to attack… because I fear that the weather conditions will then thwart our plans… if we get deep snow, all movement is finished.’
Hitler and Halder had achieved their intention, the acceptance of a last gamble: a Flucht nach Vorn (headlong dash) against Moscow in the hope it might succumb. Halder privately admitted, ‘the time for spectacular operational feats is past… the only course lies in purposeful exploitation of tactical opportunities’. Generalmajor von Greiffenburg returned from Orscha and reported to von Bock, ‘all that remains of the recently propagated distant objectives opposed by the army group is that the army groups are to do what they can.’(14)
Fundamental shortcomings that had applied at the end of September prior to Operation ‘Taifun’ were even more apparent. The Ostheer had attacked, despite serious logistic sustainability shortfalls, to annihilate what it perceived to be the last Soviet field armies before Moscow. These logistic and manpower shortages reduced the latest attempt to rush Moscow to the status of combined raiding forays. Mortally wounded, the Ostheer was at the end of its strength. Second Panzer Army reported on 17 November:
‘The army has favourable attack conditions for the moment from the situation perspective, the strength of the enemy and ‘going’ over terrain and roads. It cannot, however, exploit this advantageous situation because of constant train and supply delivery problems. Responsible army staffs are unable to replenish divisions with fuel. The fuel situation today is such that the attacking Panzer divisions have about 60–90km worth of fuel… Likewise the motorised [infantry] divisions have not received their allocation and as a result have been static within their locations for several days.’(15)