Inferno - Max Hastings [103]
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RUSSIA WAS SAVED from absolute defeat chiefly by the size of the country and of its armies. The Germans seized great tracts of territory, but larger ones remained; the 900-mile initial front broadened to 1,400 miles when the invaders reached the Leningrad–Odessa line. They destroyed hundreds of Soviet divisions, yet there were always more. Moscow was shocked by the readiness of its units to surrender, and of subject populations—notably in Ukraine and the Baltic republics—to embrace the Germans. But the dogged animal stubbornness of some Red Army soldiers, which had initially bewildered the Germans, now began to alarm them; every Russian who died cost the Wehrmacht effort, ammunition and precious time to kill. Hitler’s young crusaders found it intoxicating to ride their bucketing tanks across hundreds of miles of enemy territory, but the strain on machinery was relentless; as men grew tired, so too did their vehicles: tracks wore out, cables frayed, springs broke. The strength of many formations was badly reduced: by autumn, 20 percent of the original invasion force was gone, and two-thirds of its armour and vehicles; only thirty-eight tanks remained in one panzer formation, and barely sixty in another. A division commander wrote of the importance of reducing losses “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”
By September, Moscow was tantalisingly close. But if Russian counterattacks were clumsy, as at Smolensk between 30 August and 8 September, they remained amazingly persistent. Between June 1941 and May 1944, each month Germany suffered an average of 60,000 men killed in the east; though the enemy’s losses were far greater, this was a shocking statistic. One of its symbolic components was Lt. Walter Rubarth, killed on 26 October fighting for the Minsk–Moscow road; this was the man who, as a sergeant seventeen months earlier, led the triumphant German crossing of the Meuse. A worm of apprehension gnawed at his comrades: “Perhaps it is only ‘talk’ that the enemy is broken and will never rise again,” wrote Hans-Jürgen Hartmann. “I cannot help myself—I am totally bewildered. Will the whole war still be over before winter?”
Yet Hitler’s confidence was unimpaired. With Leningrad encircled and his armies triumphant in Ukraine, he had secured his flanks and was ready to resume the assault on Moscow. In an address on 2 October, he described the Wehrmacht’s drive on the capital as “the last large-scale decisive battle of this year,” which would “shatter the USSR.” Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr wrote: “If we don’t succeed this month we’ll never succeed.” But it was perilously late in the season. The price of Germany’s advances elsewhere was that the Russians were granted time to strengthen their line before Moscow. Zhukov, Stalin’s ablest commander, had been sacked as chief of the General Staff on 29 July for insisting upon the evacuation of Kiev; he then became commander of the Reserve Front, in which role he quickly made himself indispensable, and secured credit for organising the defence of Leningrad. Now, he was recalled to direct the salvation of the capital.
Six German armies—1.9 million men, 14,000 guns, 1,000 tanks and