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By Root 1378 0

December 1941 that “victory could no longer be achieved.” This did not mean, of course, that Hitler reconciled himself to Germany’s defeat: instead, he now anticipated a long war, which would eventually expose the fundamental divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. He aspired to achieve sufficient battlefield success to force his enemies to make terms, and he clung to this hope until April 1945. Since the Western Allies and the Russians shared morbid and persistent fears of each other seeking a separate peace, Hitler’s speculation was at least a little less fanciful than it might now appear. Only time would show that the struggle was destined to be fought out to the end; that the rupture he anticipated between the West and the Soviet Union would indeed take place, but too late to save the Third Reich.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOSCOW SAVED, LENINGRAD STARVED

THOSE WHO FOUGHT the war saw its turning point in late 1942, when Japanese advances in the Pacific were checked and the Germans eclipsed at Stalingrad and in North Africa. For months before those events, the Allied nations endured a diet of almost unbroken ill tidings, which the United States’ entry into the conflict could not deflect. Konstantin Rokossovsky, the most glamorous as well as one of the most formidable of Stalin’s generals, was commanding the Sixteenth Army north of Moscow. In mid-November he told a reporter, “Soon the Germans will start to get washed out and the time will come—we’ll be in Berlin.” His words later seemed prescient, but at the time few people around the world grasped the gravity of the Wehrmacht’s predicament in Russia, the fact that some of Hitler’s closest advisers already believed his bid for global domination doomed.

German forces were still thrusting forward north and south of Moscow, but losing momentum. On 17 November, a Wehrmacht division broke and fled in the face of an attack by new Soviet T-34 tanks. Fresh Russian armies were taking the field; the invaders were running out of armour, fuel, men and faith. A young SS officer wrote: “Thus we are approaching our final goal, Moscow, step by step. It is icy cold … To start the [vehicle] engines, they must be warmed by lighting fires under the oil pan. The fuel is partially frozen, the motor oil is thick and we lack antifreeze … The remaining limited combat strength of the troops diminishes further due to the continuous exposure to the cold … The automatic weapons … often fail to operate because the breechblocks can no longer move.” If a man spat, the moisture froze before reaching the ground. A single regiment reported 315 frostbite cases. On 3 December Hoepner, commanding Fourth Panzer Group, reported: “The offensive combat power of the Corps has run out. Reasons: physical and moral over-exertion, loss of a large number of commanders, inadequate winter equipment … The High Command should decide whether a withdrawal should be undertaken.”

Again and again the Germans threw themselves at the Russian positions—and again and again they were repulsed. Georgi 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 often 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 leeched into the snow in unimaginable volume.

But German commanders still underrated their foes. An army intelligence report