One artillery NCO serving with Army Group Centre expressed his foreboding more succinctly. ‘God save us from a winter campaign in the east,’ he wrote. ‘It is very cold here already and it rains practically every day.’(38) Infantryman Harald Henry noted in his diary on the eve of Operation ‘Taifun’ that even ‘at the beginning of this new offensive we had no rest for 44 hours having been incessantly on the march’. Pressure was beginning to telclass="underline"
‘You couldn’t imagine how it is with endless nights with no cover or coats in a half-open barn or even digging in under the open sky! One cannot even unfasten one’s equipment if the enemy is nearby. You have to sleep through the awful cold, battered again by icy storms tonight like the one before, already soaked by freezing rain, with your marching pack still attached to your back.’(39)
The German infantryman was at the end of his tether, as was also the fighting power of the Ostheer.
A dying army
The fighting power of an army can be broken down into three components: the conceptual, physical and moral.(1)The conceptual is ‘how’ the campaign is to be fought and includes the strategy and operational and tactical plans to support it. Successful Blitzkrieg was dependent upon the flexibility conferred by the Auftragstaktik concept of mission command tactics. Up to one-third of the veteran leadership of the Ostheer, its officers and senior NCOs, had perished by the eve of Operation ‘Taifun’. These were veteran combat leaders, men who had been killed leading from the front. Although they represented one-third of the whole, in logistic ‘tail’ compared to forward ‘teeth’ terms they represented a greater loss, more like 50%, because only a small proportion of a typical division actually closes with the enemy. (See Appendix 3.) Such men were irreplaceable. Eighteen months was required to train individual replacements, but the seed-corn of experience had been irretrievably lost. Therefore the conceptual component, the command and leadership of the fighting element of the Ostheer, had been grievously injured.
The physical component represents the sum of resources: manpower, logistics, equipment and the training and readiness that makes up the whole. In manpower terms the Ostheer had suffered over half a million casualties, more than three times what it had lost in France. Thirty division equivalents were for practical purposes removed from the order of battle, a loss greater than the size of Army Group North, which had fought itself to Leningrad. A logistic ‘trip-wire’ had been crossed past which little could effectively be squeezed beyond physical choke-points. War-winning priority equipment – Panzers, artillery prime movers and motorised vehicles – were worn out. There was barely 500km of effective life in them before major overhauls and replacements would be needed to avoid breakdowns. This was hardly sufficient to reach Moscow.
The third and decisive component was the moral, the ‘hearts’ that sustain the conceptual ‘mind’. Losing the cream of its combat leadership affected not only the flexibility, experience and professionalism of the remainder, it also impacted on the will to fight. Most Landser were committed and motivated by duty to fight. There was, however, some questioning of the practical ability to reach Moscow, even if it was the last major objective. The debilitating and cumulative impact of stress and physical deprivation was wearing men down. Doubts and scepticism are evident in Feldpost letters and diaries that survive from this period at the front. ‘Duty’ was being eroded to some extent by a moral questioning in some instance of the ‘justness’ of a cause that was inflicting state-sponsored terror upon the local populace. Interestingly, the official history of the Potsdam-Berlin Infantry Regiment 9 fighting on the Central Front is entitled ‘Between Duty and Conscience’.(2) Preaching ideological conflict was not the same as physically inflicting its implications upon a helpless civilian populace. Soldiers feel more at ease with the certainty of a just and clearly identified cause to rationalise the violence they are called upon to execute in battle. A degree of moral degradation was also afflicting the Ostheer. Thinking men had to come to terms with the immense cost and ghastly implications of prosecuting an ideological ‘Total War’.
The Ostheer was bleeding profusely. All three of the primary components constituting its fighting strength were seriously damaged. The assumption that kept the force going was that the Russians were even more grievously hurt. Victory was achievable, it was felt, if the final Soviet field army standing before Moscow could be decisively defeated. Such a catastrophic reversal might indeed provide the catalyst required to convince the Soviet regime to conclude an armistice and allow the occupation of Moscow. Failure was never seriously countenanced, despite the parlous state of the Eastern Army itself. The Wehrmacht had never been defeated in this war, but neither had it sustained such punishment in any previous campaign. It was practically ‘victoring itself to death’.
Chapter 13
The last victory
‘It ought to finish here before the onset of winter. That means the end of this month should see the conclusion [of the campaign].’
Double encirclement…
Vyazma and Bryansk
Artillery Hauptmann Georg Richter felt the sun on his back as he observed the Russian positions from the heights overlooking the River Desna. It was 1 October, a beautiful autumn day. His unit, Artillery Regiment 74, was in support of the 2nd (Viennese) Panzer Division belonging to Generaloberst Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 4. The river lay in the dead ground before him. Scanning the other side, he was able to locate eight Russian bunkers. Both sides were harassing each other with sporadic artillery fire.
Richter wrote in his diary that night, ‘I believe the attack will start the next day; in my opinion it will be the last big operation this year.’ The woodland on the heights ‘was just like an exercise area where another track opens up as soon as a vehicle goes by’. It was a fragile peace. Mines were going off intermittently. Only 150m away a gun exploded as it was being guided into its firing position. Shortly after, a platoon prime mover (artillery towing vehicle) also blew up on a mine. There had been time while all this was going on to review the future. Doubts were less about whether the objective would be reached, but rather how the eventual victory would be played out.
‘The question is: will Moscow be included in the huge pocket about to be created, or would the ring close immediately in front of the towers of the capital?’(1)
Unteroffizier Helmut Pabst, serving with Ninth Army, declared, ‘We don’t yet know when it will start,’ but it would obviously be soon. ‘Somebody has seen the tanks,’ he said, ‘the yellow ones which were meant for Africa.’ All sorts of weapons – SP assault guns, Nebelwerfer multi-barrelled rocket launchers and heavy guns – were appearing in his sector. ‘It’s piling up inexorably like a thunderstorm,’ he observed. News was pieced together by the soldiers ‘like bits of a mosaic’. The front was showing all the signs of impending developments. Pabst and his men perceived ‘the veil over the calm getting thinner, the atmosphere gathering tension’.(2) The storm was about to break.