Without prior notification, economic production was unable to remedy the shortfall. The Quartermaster-General set up numerous production lines in the Reich and occupied territories to produce – in addition to bathtubs, fire-grates and other equipment – 252,000 towels, 445,789 articles of woollen underwear and 30,000 snow camouflage jackets. An appeal (code-named ‘Bögen’) was set in motion for the German civilian population to provide winter clothes and skis for troops at the front. Trains were loaded with clothing, accommodation materials and winter sports equipment and sent forward, only to become snarled up in sidings at Warsaw as greater priorities were given to fuel and ammunition. The railway logistic network meanwhile ground to a frozen halt as a result of the weather and partisan attacks.(29)
Results at the front were catastrophic. ‘One started to look for things to use,’ said artillery forward observer Hans Mauermann, outside Leningrad. White sheets were stolen from Russian houses for use as camouflage ‘to produce covers, not so much for warmth, but so one was not so starkly visible in the snow’. Only chalk was available to whiten helmets. ‘That was the practical sum of our winter preparation,’ he said.(30) During the heat of the summer campaign most infantry soldiers had cut off the legs of their ‘long johns’, the only type of Wehrmacht underwear issued. As a consequence, soldiers froze with only shorts beneath their trousers, supplemented by a thin issue temperate coat and a poncho, a waterproof sheet that could be joined with others to make a bivouac tent. By the middle of November alternating frost and thaw conditions were replaced by permanent ice and snow.
Temperatures hovered between −8° and −22°C on average, offering little respite. A higher than usual number of logistic trains arrived in the Army Group Centre area on 24 November. This shipment of 24 trains permitted the first winter clothing issue to be distributed. On average one man from five received an overcoat. They were not issued to the men of the rear services. Russian tank driver Benjamin Iwantjer on the Central Front wrote on 17 November, ‘the Germans are still wearing summer clothing’. They had captured a ‘thin, dirty and hungry’ 18-year-old German soldier who told his captors all they wanted to know when questioned with a map. When offered his freedom, Iwantjer said, ‘he would not go for anything in the world’. So far as the German was concerned ‘the war was over’ and ‘he was content to be a prisoner and still alive, because he believed we would shoot him.’(31)
‘The wind was forever howling and blowing in our faces,’ recalled German machine gunner Walter Neustifter, causing ‘ice to crystallise all over our faces, in front, behind, and on the nose’; the cold was all-pervasive. Weapon systems began to malfunction and vehicles did not start. ‘It is freezing again,’ declared Leutnant Georg Richter on 5 November, ‘Will the campaign now go on?’ All the wheels of his artillery towing vehicles had frozen fast, with ‘mud frozen like granite between the wheels and brake drums’. Hard work was required to clear it. They tried to dig bunkers around the artillery positions when a failure of fuel resupply obliged a halt. ‘It’s not so easy to stay outdoors without gloves and head protection,’ Richter commented. He noted the average temperature was −15°C, and the ground had frozen hard to a depth of 20cm.(32) By 16.00 hours – late afternoon – it was dark. General Guderian, speaking with soldiers from 167th Division on 14 November, observed:
‘The supply situation was bad; snow-shirts, boot polish, underclothes and above all woollen trousers, were not available. A high proportion of the men were still wearing [summer] denim trousers, and the temperature was eight degrees below zero!’
He continued on to the 112th Infantry Division, ‘where I heard the same story’. Around him stood soldiers wearing captured Russian overcoats and fur caps. ‘Only the national emblem showed that they were Germans.’ Driving on to a Panzer brigade he saw only 50 tanks were left of the 600 which had originally been available to three divisions. ‘Ice was causing a lot of trouble,’ he remarked, because calk grips needed to prevent tracks skidding had yet to arrive. ‘The cold made the telescopic sights useless’ and the optic salve to remedy this had also not been delivered. Fires were burning beneath the Panzers in preparation for starting them up. ‘Fuel was freezing on occasions,’ he was told, ‘and the oil was becoming viscous… This unit, too, lacked winter clothing and anti-freeze mixture’. Guderian left feeling depressed.(33)
Soldiers tackled their problems through self-help. In the 2nd Panzer Division, hides, old furs and felt boots were stolen from Russian cottages. Fur collars were wound around necks and used as gloves and ear protectors, and boots were stuffed with straw and felt. Platoons commandeered up to four coats apiece to enable sentries to use them in turn as they came on duty. General Guderian wrote on 17 November:
‘We are only nearing our final objective step by step in this icy cold and with all the troops suffering from the appalling supply situation… Yet the brave troops are seizing all their advantages and are fighting with wonderful endurance despite all their handicaps. Over and over again I am thankful that our men are such good soldiers.’(34)
Tikhvin, east of Leningrad, fell to von Leeb’s Army Group North on 9 November. A stranglehold had been placed on any Soviet hope of resupplying the city, now condemned to starvation. Repeated Russian attacks were mounted against the Tikhvin salient in order to open the railway north of Lake Ilmen to break the blockade. A German push from the salient toward Lake Ladoga stopped 56km short. Army Group North was now increasingly dependent upon the progress of the Moscow offensive in the centre to stabilise its increasingly vulnerable salient east of Leningrad. Cold weather arrived earlier in the north. ‘Sometimes it was −40° sitting there in a bunker,’ declared Rolf Dahm, a radio operator in an infantry battalion besieging Leningrad. Everything was difficult. ‘There was the problem of washing and going to the toilet in extremis,’ he said, interjecting, ‘You try coming out and dropping your trousers when it’s 40° below zero!’(35)
The immense breadth of front that had to be secured by the shrinking Ostheer is placed in sharp relief by Generalfeldmarschall von Bock’s comment on contrasting weather conditions between fronts. On 1 November he complained:
‘The situation is enough to drive one to despair and filled with envy, I look to the Crimea, where we are advancing vigorously in the sunshine over the dry ground of the steppe and the Russians are scattering to the four winds.’
‘It could be the same here,’ he exasperatedly declared, ‘if we weren’t stuck up to our knees in the mud!’(36) An unseasonably cold period soon set in to the south, which by mid-November was recording lower temperatures than even Army Group Centre.
Army Group South, spearheaded by the 1st SS Division ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ took the city of Rostov on 21 November. Rostov, at the confluence of the River Don and Gulf of Taganrog, was the communications gateway to the Caucasus. Jubilation followed in the German press over this notable but, unbeknown to them, dangerous achievement. The IIIrd Panzer Corps was soon subjected to attacks in and around Rostov from across the frozen River Don in the south and the open steppe to the north. On its left, elements of three Soviet armies battered away at XIVth Panzer Corps. Within 24 hours von Kleist, the commander of First Panzer Army, realising he had insufficient forces to resist this onslaught, ordered the evacuation of the city. The order was countermanded by Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army. Giving it up would have military and ‘far-reaching political consequences’. Hitler had been staging a publicity spectacle for the renewal of the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, the cornerstone of the Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis. With Rostov lost, Leningrad isolated and Moscow in imminent danger, the Soviet strategic position looked worse than ever.