Inferno - Max Hastings [105]
On 30 October, panzer commander Col. Gen. Erich Hoepner wrote despairingly: “The roads have become quagmires—everything has come to a halt. Our tanks cannot move. No fuel can get through to us, the heavy rain and fog make air drops almost impossible.” He added: “Dear God, give us fourteen days of frost. Then we will surround Moscow!” Hoepner got his weather wish soon enough—far more than fourteen days of frost. But the descent of subzero temperatures and heavy snow did nothing for the Wehrmacht, and much for its enemies. German vehicle and weapon lubricant froze, and soon likewise soldiers. The Russians, by contrast, were equipped to fight on.
The second week of October 1941 was afterwards identified as the decisive period of the crisis. Zhukov was summoned to the Kremlin; he found Stalin ailing with “flu, standing before a map of the front, complaining bitterly about a lack of reliable information.” The general drove forward to the so-called Mozhaisk defence line, where he was appalled to find yawning gaps, wide open to German assault. “In essence,” he said later, “all the approaches to Moscow were open. Our troops could not have stopped the enemy.” Zhukov telephoned Stalin to report. He recognised that if the Germans attacked in strength, the capital was doomed. Much of the bureaucracy of Stalin’s government, together with diplomatic missions, was evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev, 500 miles east on the Volga. Beria conducted a frenzy of shootings of “dissident elements” in his prisons. One batch of 157 executed on 3 October included several women: Trotsky’s sister, Olga Kameneva, the widow of prominent purge victim Lev Kamenev; a thirty-one-year-old air force major named Mariya Nesterenko; forty-year-old Aleksandra Fibikh-Savencho, wife of a senior ordnance officer. Moscow’s key installations and industrial plants were prepared for demolition. A quarter of a million people, mostly women, were set to work digging antitank ditches in the suburbs. Panic was reflected in widespread looting of shops. Beria found it convenient to depart for a visit to the safety of the Caucasus. The dictator himself was about to quit the capital.
Suddenly, however, on the evening of 18 October Stalin changed his mind. He stayed, temporarily moved his office to air defence headquarters in Kirov Street, and declared Moscow a fortress. Order on the streets was restored by a curfew and imposition of the usual brutal sanctions. On 7 November, by a brilliant propaganda stroke, units en route to the front were diverted to stage the traditional parade through the capital celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. That night came the first heavy snowfall of the year. The Germans, their operations crippled by the weather, lacked sufficient mass to make the final breakthrough; they languished outside the city, suffering rapidly increasing privations. Halder and Bock insisted that a further thrust should be made. More ground was gained: the advancing spearheads occupied some of Moscow’s outlying tram stations while aircraft and artillery bombarded the city.
Some Russians were sincerely moved by Stalin’s appeals for desperate measures in desperate circumstances.