Panzer commander Karl Rupp remembered, ‘our last push was through wooded terrain’. He was advancing with the 5th Panzer Division some 20–25km from Moscow.
‘The spearhead consisted of two PzKpfwIIs and two PzKpfwIIIs. At the end of the column was another PzKpfwII with riflemen in between. The lead tank was knocked out with no survivors. I was in the second tank. There was no way to get through, we had to pull back.’
They passed a Moscow tram stop on the city route. At night they could see Flak engaging German aircraft over the city.(4)
Panzer thrusts were in reality probing raids. Progress was characterised by a series of short, confused, hotly contested meeting engagements with the enemy. Both protagonists had scant knowledge of the overall situation. Gerd Habedanck, waiting with infantrymen securing a wintry forest road, ‘suddenly heard tracked vehicles driving towards them at frantic speed from the rear’. Three Soviet T-34s abruptly rushed by, spraying up snow from the back. ‘Behind each turret,’ said Habedanck, ‘lay a barely identifiable group of spectre-like Soviet infantrymen, who had jumped onto the back of the tanks hoping to break through to Moscow.’ They pressed tightly up against each other, heads burrowed down into brown greatcoats, to secure protection against the wind. A flurry of wild shooting broke out and two of the Russians toppled from the tanks into the road. ‘Then the last tank drove into a shell crater where it was struck by an anti-tank shell,’ reported the correspondent. ‘It managed to get out and then disappeared down a small wooded track, streaming smoke as it went.’ Shortly after, a thick black pall of smoke began to rise above the tree-tops. A PzKpfwIII then clattered into an ambush position at the edge of the wood. Its first victim was a Russian armoured car travelling toward Moscow, which received a direct hit and was bulldozed from the road. On examination it was discovered there was only 476km on its speedometer. This brand-new vehicle had barely been delivered to the city.(5)
These skirmishes fought in the wooded areas on the outskirts of Moscow were conducted with pitiless ferocity. Much was at stake. Peter Pechel, a forward artillery observer riding with a column of nine tanks moving toward Volokolamsk, 60km from Moscow, had a ‘queasy stomach and difficulty breathing’. The rest of his crew felt the same. ‘Are we going to get it today?’ he considered.
Some T-34 and not so new BT tank types belonging to M. E. Katukov’s 1st Guards Tank Brigade were operating in the same area. They had been ordered to set ambushes along the same highway, with an infantry and anti-aircraft battalion in support. The infantry were already partially surrounded. ‘Four of the [German] tanks crawled along the highway’ and ‘were set on fire’ by two hidden T-34s, said Katukov.
‘All hell breaks loose,’ observed Pechel as the Panzer column came under fire from several directions. Intent on manoeuvring behind the enemy, the Panzer Keil had unluckily placed themselves directly in front of the Russian anti-tank positions. ‘The lead tank is on fire,’ said Pechel, and then ‘the tank in front of me takes a direct hit on the turret hatch’. With no chance of returning fire, Pechel’s tank was hit next.
‘There is a brief roaring sound. I can’t see. Blue stars dance in front of my eyes. Then I feel two quick blows to my right arm and left thigh. My radio operator cries out, “I’m hit!” Suddenly everything turns quiet inside our tank – horribly quiet. I squeeze my way out, shouting, “Quick, get out!”’.
Only two others scrambled from the smouldering wreck. Looking around, Pechel saw five tanks already hit and burning with wounded and dead crews scattered alongside. The entire right side of their Panzer had been shot away by the T-34’s 76mm shell. ‘My arm and thigh begin to hurt,’ he said. ‘There is blood on my face which sticks to my eyes.’ His broken right hand flapped uselessly from his wrist and soon developed a blue tinge from the −14° temperature outside the tank. Pechel slipped into shock as the carnage carried on around him. ‘Those who have already been wounded once are being hit a second and third time,’ he said. Crackling incoming fire became interspersed with the whimpering from the wounded.
‘The commander of the tank in front of me has taken a bullet in the head, and his brains are running down his face. He’s running around in grotesque circles crying “Mother, mother”. Finally, and almost mercifully, he is hit again by shrapnel and falls to the ground.’
Russian counter-attackers swarmed through the woods alongside Pechel, who began to consider his possible fate.
‘Oh God, only four days ago I saw the dead of another one of our companies. I saw the poked-out eyes, the severed genitals, the horrible, tortured, distorted faces. Anything but that.’
Russian soldiers did not differentiate between black SS uniforms and Panzer crews. Any uniform bearing the ‘death’s-head’ insignia at the collar (which Panzer troops might also wear) was inviting retribution ‘When you’re so young, and have been at war since the age of 19, you really haven’t had much of a life. I don’t want to die,’ reflected Pechel, contemplating suicide.(6) At this moment German reinforcements coming up behind his initial probing attack crashed into the Russian positions. He was recovered and transported to the rear for treatment.
Katukov’s two T-34s covered the fighting retreat of the Russian infantry. German soldiers clambered atop one of the tanks shouting to the Russians inside to surrender. The sister T-34 observing this threatening development ‘used his machine gun,’ said Katukov, ‘to clean the enemy off his friend’s tank’. Fire was returned from the other tank, which scythed through more enemy infantry who had meanwhile attempted the same.(7)
Despite the technical superiority of the T-34, they and inferior Russian models continued to endure fearful losses. Mortally wounded tank driver Ivan Kolosow wrote a final letter to his wife Warja at the end of October, revealing, ‘I am the last of three tank drivers [from his platoon] still alive’. Seriously wounded, he regretfully wrote, ‘we will never see each other again.’ Nurse Nina Vishnevskaya, a medical orderly with a Soviet tank battalion, recalled fearsome burns and the hard physical effort required to pull injured crews from their confined fighting compartments. ‘It’s very difficult to drag a man, especially a turret gunner, out from the hatch.’ She described the emotional trauma of caring for the hideously mutilated crewmen.
‘Soon, of course, when I had seen burnt overalls, burnt hands and burnt faces, I understood what war was. When tank men jumped out of their burning machines, they were all ablaze. Besides, they often broke their arms or legs. They were serious cases. They would lie and beg us, “If I die, please write to my mother or wife”’.(8)
Russian resistance in German eyes alternated between the fanatical and the bizarre. An infantry officer with 7th Panzer Division, breaking into fortified villages near the Lama river, described ‘resistance of such bitter intensity, it can only be seriously comprehended by those who had been through it themselves’. During these Panzergruppe 3 battles in the third week of November, ‘Red Army soldiers continued to shoot from blazing houses even when their clothes were on fire.’(9) Such intense fighting was costing the Germans their best NCOs, the very men who led from the front in order to keep the lesser-motivated going. Feldwebel Karl Fuch’s vulnerable Czech 38,T light Panzer was finally knocked out near Klin in an unequal skirmish with Russian tanks on 21 November. He was killed. A photograph taken by his comrades examining the destroyed tank reveal its 37mm gun bent in several places like a toy. Frau Fuchs received the death notice from Leutnant Reinhardt, his company commander. It read: ‘I hope it will be a small consolation for you when I tell you that your husband gave his life so that our Fatherland might live.’ This was probably scant compensation. ‘We commiserate and are saddened that fate did not allow Karl to see his little daughter,’ wrote the Leutnant. He was not to know that the child that had been born after his father left for the front was in fact a son. Reinhardt had doubtless written countless similar death notices. Feldwebel Fuchs’s only child had been five months old nine days before.(10)