‘We had marched 1,000km from East Prussia, 1,000km in a little over five weeks. Three-quarters of the journey covered; a quarter still to do. We could do it in a fortnight at the most.’
There was then a pause in the normally incessant stream of marching orders. Until ‘on 30 July we received the incredible order to prepare defensive positions’.(9)
Many postwar personal accounts point to this abrupt dispersal of effort ‘to the four winds’ with hindsight as sealing the eventual outcome of the campaign. The ‘nineteen-day interregnum’ between 4 and 24 August, which one eminent historian claims ‘may well have spared Stalin defeat in 1941’, is not a theme in contemporary diary accounts and letters home.(10) Ordinary soldiers may comment on plans after the event, but during conflict it rarely occurs to them. Soldiers did what they were told. Most of their letters reflect a desire to get the campaign finished. If this warranted a change in the direction of attack, then so be it. Survival and conditions at the front are what they wrote about.
Optimism was tempered with an increasing frustration at the way the campaign was being drawn out. ‘If this tempo is maintained,’ wrote a Düsseldorf housewife to the front, ‘then Russia’s collapse will not be long in coming.’(11) An Obergefreiter declared on 8 August that ‘since this morning the battle is now raging for the cradle of the Bolshevist revolution. We are now on the march to Leningrad.’ Despite bitter resistance from ‘committed communists’, and facing rain and storms, the advance ‘could not be held up by them’.(12) Another infantry Gefreiter with Army Group South wrote on 24 August, ‘the enemy fought bitterly at several positions but, nevertheless, had to fall back with heavy losses’. Many of his comrades ‘were left dead or wounded on the battlefield. This war is dreadful,’ he lamented.(13) There was more frustration at the requirement in the centre to go over to the defensive and engage in static positional warfare than comment about the opening thrust to the south. ‘I’m already fed up to the eye-teeth with the much vaunted Soviet Union,’ declared an Unteroffizier from the 251st Infantry Division.
‘Day and night we have to live in shell holes and protect ourselves against shrapnel. The holes are full of water and lice and other vermin are already crawling out.’(14)
It might have been 1917. Another infantry Gefreiter from 256th Division complained, ‘it was better last year, by the beginning of July the war with France was already over and the first people were beginning to go on leave’.(15) Common to many letters is recognition of the imperative to finish the campaign quickly in order to survive. Bernhard Ritter, a 24-year-old motorised infantry soldier, attempted to come to terms with the psychological toll the war was exacting by expressing his private innermost thoughts to his diary. He wrote on 19 August:
‘Which direction will the war cast us next? How will it go? We hope that another decisive battle will be fought soon and that we will be part of it.’
Ritter, like many front-line soldiers, sought to distance himself from the pain and anguish of losing friends in order to maintain emotional equilibrium. It was not easy. Ritter came across the graves of two former comrades in the rear. They had all ridden in the same vehicle. He subconsciously tried to rationalise his feelings of regret.
‘One understands the implications exactly. He was on my side, a fraction of a distance away – that one could feel totally and unsentimentally. It was the normal course of events, even if one hardly knew the other man.’
The graves would remain behind the advance. ‘One of the simple secrets of life that war teaches us,’ reflected Ritter, was that buried inside those plots ‘was something from our own souls’.(16)
Harald Henry, still enduring tortuous forced marches with Army Group Centre, wrote on 18 August:
‘It would be no overstatement to declare “a dog could not go on living like this,” because no animal could stoop to live any lower or more primitively than us. All day long we hack ourselves under the ground, crawl into narrow holes, taking sun and rain with no respite and try to sleep.’
He wrote another letter four days later, during the static ‘interregnum’ period, as the future strategic direction of the campaign was being discussed. ‘Yesterday was a day so immersed in blood, so full of dead and wounded, so blasted by crackling salvoes and shrapnel from shells and the groans and shrieks of the wounded, that I can no longer write about it.’ Casualties within Henry’s unit were high. ‘Old Unteroffizier Grabke and many other friends are dead,’ he said. ‘It was a miracle I was relieved from this heavy fighting in the afternoon and so far have not been injured.’(17) The strategic implications of a change in the direction of advance were of no consequence to men who sought to survive the next day. Soldiers and families at home simply wanted the fighting to stop. ‘Is the Russian still not finished off?’ wrote a mother to her son at the front:
‘We had hoped you would be able to settle any doubts. My dear son! I have put in a few pieces of paper [ie in the envelope]. Perhaps you haven’t got any writing material to give us at least a sign of life. Yesterday I got some post from Jos. He is OK. He wrote – “I passionately wanted to be part of the attack on Moscow, but now would now be more pleased if I could get out of this hellish situation.”’(18)
The Germans had underestimated their Russian opponents. This inability to finish off an apparently reeling foe formed the background to vacillating strategies. Nobody, it seemed, was able to identify a war-winning solution. The soldiers left it to the generals who in turn tended, with failure, to blame Hitler. There had been a misappreciation between the Russian national and ‘Soviet’ identity. Hitler assumed the innate ‘rottenness’ of the Soviet Bolshevik ideology would result in the rapid collapse of the regime. He and his generals preferred to apply the experience of 1917 to the outcome of the campaign. A more meaningful example was Napoleon’s experience of 1812.
German victory over Tsarist Russia during World War 1 and the treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was followed by further German advances into the Baltic states, Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine and Crimea. The Russian Army buckled under the strain of a two-pronged military and propaganda offensive that exacerbated tensions and disharmony in Imperial Russia. Many Wehr-macht officers and soldiers had served in this war, which presaged the total collapse of the Imperial Russian State. Although the successful methodology of its joint military-propaganda prosecution was not reapplied in 1941, generalisations were nevertheless made on its likely outcome based on World War 1 lessons.
The precedent of 1812 was arguably more significant. The fact that Russia did not surrender to Napoleon even after the capture of Moscow, before winter, had not escaped Adolf Hitler. It is debatable whether Moscow was so crucial to the survival of the regime. Stalin in his 3 July speech harnessed the emotive appeal of nationalist ‘Mother Russia’ to protect the homeland. ‘I see Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land’ against ‘the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of locusts,’ he said.(19) Grigori Tokaty, a refugee White Russian teaching at Moscow Military Academy, recalled at this moment of crisis:
‘In that very situation something else appeared among us. The tradition of Borodino. Borodino is the place where Napoleon was defeated. This suddenly released feelings appearing from nowhere that helped to unite the people.’(20)