Inferno - Max Hastings [102]
Helmuth von Moltke, an anti-Nazi working in the German Abwehr, wrote to his wife, expressing regret that he had been foolish enough “in my heart of hearts” to approve the invasion. Like many of his fellow aristocrats in France and Britain, his loathing for communism had exceeded his antipathy to Hitler: “I believed that Russia would collapse from within and that we could then create an order in that region which would present no danger to us. But nothing of this is to be noticed: far behind the front Russian soldiers are fighting on, and so are peasants and workers; it is exactly as in China. We have touched something terrible and it will cost many victims.” He added a week later: “One thing seems certain to me in any case: between now and 1st April next year more people will perish miserably between the Urals and Portugal than ever before in the history of the world. And this seed will sprout. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind, but after such a wind as this what will the whirlwind be like?”
Initial bewilderment among the Russian people following the invasion was rapidly supplanted by hatred for the invaders. A Soviet fighter landed back at its field with human flesh adhering to its radiator grille, after a German ammunition truck exploded beneath it. The squadron commander curiously picked off fragments, and summoned the unit doctor to examine them. He pronounced: “Aryan meat!” A war correspondent wrote in his diary: “Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time—a time of iron—has come!”
Hitler repeatedly switched objectives: at his personal insistence, in July Army Group Centre, driving for Moscow, halted in the face of strong Russian resistance. This enabled German forces farther north to push forward to Leningrad, while those in the south thrust onwards across Ukraine. At Kiev, they achieved another spectacular encirclement, and the spirits of the victorious panzer crews rose again. “I felt an incredible sense of triumph,” wrote Hans-Erdmann Schonbeck. Once more, vast columns of dejected prisoners, 665,000 of them, tramped westwards towards cages in which they starved. In a hostel at Orel, 300 miles south of Moscow, on 2 October Vasily Grossman and some correspondent colleagues came upon a school map of Europe: “We go to look at it. We are terrified at how far we have retreated.” Two days later, he described a scene on the battlefield:
I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I’m seeing now … Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight columns, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-drawn carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with coloured sackcloth, veneer, tin … there are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases. This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean … hundreds of metres wide.
The rout described by Grossman was a consequence of the success of the German southern thrust. Meanwhile in the north, Leningrad was encircled and besieged. Russian morale was at its lowest ebb, organisation and leadership pitifully weak. Operations were chronically handicapped by the paucity of radios and telephone links. The Red Army had lost nearly 3 million men—44,000 a day—many of them in the great encirclements at Kiev and Vyaz’ma. Stalin started the war with almost 5 million soldiers under arms; now, this number was temporarily reduced to 2.3 million. By October 90 million people, 45 percent of Russia’s prewar population, inhabited territory controlled by the Germans; two-thirds of the country’s prewar manufacturing plant had been overrun.
Foreign observers in Moscow, especially the British, assumed the inevitability of Russian defeat, and merely sought to predict the duration of residual resistance. But on the battlefield, Stalin’s soldiers fought doggedly on. They were half starved,