Michael Milstein, attached to Zhukov’s staff, remembered that‘gradually confidence came, the first counter-attacks were showing results’. But this was at considerable cost. Artillery soldier Pawel Ossipow said:
‘There were many wounded, particularly among the [hand-towed] machine gun crews. While all the others had to keep moving forward, nobody could help them. We detached one of our men, who had to administer first aid, to report them to the rear area services, so that the motorised unit following behind could pick them up.’
‘One could actually see signs,’ said Michael Milstein, ‘that it may be conceivable the Hitler Army might be defeated.’ This was not expressed in the typical inflated ‘Great Patriotic War’ rhetoric. Milstein, a staff officer, objectively assessed the achievement as being ‘no miracle’, rather ‘it was the result of planned operational preparation… Certainly there were losses and disadvantages,’ he concluded, ‘but it was a properly executed operation.’ Lieutenant – and later historian – Dimitrij Wolkogonow, observed that the German Army ‘appeared out of breath,’ and that ‘the Soviet Army counter-offensive was fully unexpected’. This was also the case for the civilian population. Pawel Ossipow grimly pointed out, ‘we also saw a lot of dead civilians, old women and children.’ They were completely caught out by the sudden resurgence of operations in such terrible weather. ‘Many of them ran naked into the open during the attack,’ said Ossipow. ‘It was awful.’(8)
On 5 December German medic Anton Gründer was on duty until 06.00 hours in the Ninth Army sector.
‘As I was making something to eat, all hell broke loose outside. Everything was pulling back, Panzers, artillery guns, vehicles and soldiers – singly or in groups. They were all in shock. There were no more orders; everybody took up the retreat and looked no further forward than what he felt he might reach. Most vehicles didn’t start because of the terrible cold; despite that we were able to take most of the medical supplies with us. We tried to keep together with the remnants of the company so far as possible, but whoever fell out, was lost.’
Caring for the wounded in the confusion of the retreat was an almost unsupportable burden. ‘Dreadful scenes were played out before our eyes,’ admitted Gründer. Many wounded presented themselves for treatment with emergency bandages that had been applied more than a week before.
‘One soldier had an exit wound through the upper part of his arm. The whole limb had turned black and the pus was running from his back down to his boots. It had to be amputated at the joint. Three soldiers smoked cigars throughout the operation because the stench was so unbearable.’(9)
The German retreat took many forms, varying between disciplined order and panic-driven flight. Whatever the recriminations and debates between army group and higher headquarters over its extent, it continued to run. Motorised formations, which had achieved the glory of the advance, were fortunate in being able to withdraw to a plan of sorts. They had a chance. The infantry, who through sheer brute strength and willpower had underpinned the offensive and arrived last, were the most exhausted. Being foot-borne, their survival chances were correspondingly less. Caught in the open, with no prepared bunkers to their rear, many perished anonymously in hard-fought rearguard actions.
The Soviet counter-stroke before Moscow in December 1941 achieved complete strategic and operational surprise. By Christmas the Germans had lost all the ground they had won during the final drive following the Orscha conference. The first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive cleared the Germans before Moscow, but the second phase did not succeed in destroying the Ostheer. Soviet operational inexperience resulted in some reverses before a tortuous yet continuous German front was shored up by April 1942. Army Group Centre had lost its offensive capability.
Leutnant Heinrich Haape’s leave train was halted, just as he was departing for Germany. ‘Every man is to return at once to his unit and report for duty,’ they were told. Muttered protests stopped when it was announced the Russians had broken through at Kalinin. ‘There was silence among the men now,’ Haape recalled, ‘nobody swore – the matter was too serious for swearing even.’
‘And where are the Russians?’ asked Haape, when he rejoined his division. ‘Everywhere,’ was the response, ‘nobody seems to know precisely where.’(10)
In the north the deepest Russian advance was made by General Lelyushenko’s Thirtieth Army. It soon reached the Moscow-Leningrad highway, jeopardising the link between Panzergruppe 3 and von Kluge’s Fourth Army. On 13 December Klin was reached, threatening a partial encirclement with First Shock Army advancing due west. It took two days of fierce fighting to clear the town. Sixteenth and Twentieth Armies, meanwhile, captured Istra on the original Army Group Centre axis of advance toward Moscow. Solnechnogorsk was abandoned by the Germans on 12 December. South of Moscow, Guderian’s main supply artery, the Orel-Tula line, was menaced by advancing Soviet forces as the Fiftieth and Tenth Armies succeeded in separating Second Panzer Army from von Kluge’s Fourth Army to its north. During the first phase of the Soviet counter-offensive, which lasted until Christmas, the Russian armies took back all the ground the Germans had won during their final drive on Moscow after the Orscha conference.
Pawel Ossipow pondered the cumulative impact of successive German setbacks:
‘On the second or third day of the counter-offensive, on 7 or 8 December it dawned on us that our attack was going successfully, morale amongst all the soldiers, sergeants and officers soared. From then on we pushed forwards in order to overtake the Germans before they could set villages on fire. As a rule they torched everything before a withdrawal.’(11)
Devastating villages was universal practice across the front for both sides. It had already occurred during withdrawals around Leningrad. Gefreiter Alfred Scholz, with the 11th Infantry Division, had participated in the systematic wasting of territory whereby civilians were pitilessly set outside in cruel freezing temperatures down to −30° and −40°C.
‘I personally saw,’ he admitted, ‘Russian women and children lying frozen in the snow’. As the withdrawal started in the central sector, the excesses visited on the population during the advance were repeated during the retreat. Obergefreiter Wilhelm Göbel, with Infantry Regiment 215 (part of 78th Division) south-west of Moscow, recalled the pain of constant withdrawals. ‘While accommodated in these villages,’ he admitted, ‘the Germans were taken in hospitably by the civilian population. They washed our underclothes, cleaned our boots and cooked potatoes for us.’ When his IInd Battalion commander, Major Käther, received the order ‘to burn down various villages and pollute wells,’ he remonstrated, stating that he ‘disagreed with such senseless destruction.’ But duty and an in-bred sense of order and discipline overcame his doubts. ‘An order is an order,’ he resolved. ‘We had to do our duty as soldiers and had strictly to obey’(12) Each rearguard was instructed to torch villages as it withdrew. When Pawel Ossipow reached his own village near Volokolamsk he found his own house had been burned to the ground and his family had fled. There was some compensation in the fact that ‘liberated villagers always welcomed us and offered hospitality, which pleased us’.(13)