All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [106]
Again and again the Germans threw themselves at the Russian positions – and again and again they were repulsed. Georgy Osadchinsky saw a group of German tanks and supporting infantry mill in confusion before a railway embankment they could not pass, as Soviet guns wreaked havoc. Tank after tank caught fire, and the survivors began to retreat. He watched a German soldier flounder helpless in the snow on all fours, while others scrambled clumsily back towards their own line. ‘Relief and happiness swept through our ranks,’ wrote Osadchinsky. ‘The Germans did not seem so terrible now – they could be beaten.’ Russian tactics were still murderously clumsy, based upon frontal assaults launched at Stalin’s personal behest: one such, against the flank of the German Ninth Army, caused the slaughter of 2,000 men and horses of a cavalry division. Tactical leadership was poor, troops ill-trained; Rokossovsky railed against Zhukov’s insistence on the doctrine of ‘no retreat’, imposed by the Kremlin. Russian blood leached into the snow in unimaginable volume.
But German commanders still underrated their foes. An army intelligence report on 4 December concluded that ‘At present the enemy in front of Army Group Centre are not capable of conducting a counter-offensive without significant reserves.’ They had no notion that Zhukov had been reinforced by nine new armies, twenty-seven divisions; more horsed cavalry units had been raised, which could move through snow where vehicles could not go. The invaders stood just twenty-five miles from the Kremlin, with spearheads nine miles from the capital’s outskirts. But, after suffering 200,000 dead since the start of Typhoon, they had shot their bolt.
On 5 December, the Russians launched a massive assault which caught the Germans almost literally frozen in their positions. The Stavka had awaited the assistance of General Winter. The thermometer fell to 30 degrees below zero Celsius, so that German lubricants hardened while Russian weapons and tanks still worked – the T-34 had a compressed-air starter, immune to frost. A stunned infantryman named Albrecht Linsen described the response of his unit to the Soviet assault: ‘Out of the snowstorm soldiers were running back, scattering in all directions like a panic-stricken herd of animals. A lone officer stood against this desperate mass; he gesticulated, tried to pull out his pistol and then simply let it pass. Our platoon commander made no attempt at all to stop people. I paused, wondering what to do, and there was an explosion right next to me and I felt a searing pain in my right thigh … I thought: “I am going to die here, 21 years old, in the snow before Moscow.”’
The Russians smashed into the exposed German salients north and south of Moscow, then exploited westward. The unthinkable became reality: the invincible Wehrmacht began to retreat. ‘Each time we leave a village, we set it alight,’ wrote Lt. Gustav Schrodek. ‘It is a primitive form of self-defence, and the Russians hate us for it. Yet its grim military logic is clear – to deny our pursuing opponents shelter in the terrible cold.’ Lt. Kurt Grumann wrote from a field dressing-station: ‘Eighty men were brought in here today, half of whom have second-or third-degree frostbite. Their swollen legs are covered in blisters, and they no longer resemble limbs but rather some formless mass. In some cases gangrene has already set in. What is it all for?’ Many tanks and vehicles were abandoned, immured in snow and ice. ‘The ghost of the Napoleonic Grande Armée hovers ever more strongly above us like a malignant spirit,’ wrote gunner Josef Deck.
For ten days the Wehrmacht staggered back through a white wilderness landmarked with huddled corpses, the blackened carcasses of abandoned vehicles. Most German commanders favoured a major withdrawal. Hitler, displaying an obstinacy which mirrored that of Stalin, called instead for ‘fanatical resistance’. The ardent Nazi General