Inferno - Max Hastings [115]
Men on both sides became inured to such sights, for each was overwhelmingly preoccupied with his own salvation. Dose shrugged: “Russia, a country full of cruelty, must be cruelly treated.” The Red Army struggled to regain the initiative, but again and again was thrown back. The Wehrmacht’s iron professionalism was unbroken. Gen. Gotthard Heinrici asserted that the Russians had repeated the earlier German mistake of seeking to advance on too wide a front, and Zhukov was of the same opinion. It is unlikely that the Russians had the strength or skill required to inflict absolute defeat on the Germans that winter, whatever course they had adopted. But Stalin’s clumsy interventions, matching those of Hitler, removed even such a possibility. The Soviet Twenty-ninth Army, cut off west of Rzhev, fought almost to the last man. There was no repeat of the mass surrenders of the previous summer, not least because Zhukov’s soldiers now knew the fate awaiting them if they accepted captivity. The Germans claimed that 26,000 Russians died in the Rzhev battle, about as many men as Britain’s army lost in three years of North African campaigning. Evidence of the human cost lay everywhere. “As we picked our way through the carnage, the hard frozen bodies clinked like porcelain,” wrote a German officer, Max Kuhnert. But the Russians never grudged losses; what mattered to them was that the front had been pushed back 175 miles from Moscow. Between 22 June 1941 and 31 January 1942, Germany suffered almost a million casualties, more than a quarter of all the soldiers originally committed to Barbarossa. For the rest of the winter, the invaders dug in to hold their ground and rebuild their armoured formations.
The doctrine of blitzkreig evolved progressively, in the course of Germany’s 1939–40 campaigns in Poland and France. But in 1941, Hitler explicitly committed himself to destroy Russia by waging a “lightning war.” His armed forces, and Germany’s economy, lacked the fundamental strength to accomplish anything else. The Wehrmacht’s plan for Barbarossa was overwhelmingly dependent for success on accomplishing the defeat of Stalin’s armies west of the Dnieper-Dvina river line. The deeper within the country heavy fighting took place, the graver became the logistical difficulties of supplying Hitler’s troops, with few railways and inadequate numbers of trucks, which consumed precious fuel merely to deliver loads. The key battles of the 1940 French campaign took place within a few hours’ drive of the German border; now, instead, the Wehrmacht was committed to a struggle thousands of miles from its bases.
Few soldiers of the German army who survived the winter of 1941 ever regained the faith in their leadership that was forfeited by that experience. They saw Russian soldiers advancing to attack on skis, clad in quilted snowsuits such as they themselves lacked. German weapons and vehicles froze, while those of their enemies worked. Stalin’s soldiers never matched the tactical proficiency of the Germans: their attacks relied on the exploitation of mass and a willingness to sacrifice lives. But Soviet artillery was formidable, and their aircraft increasingly effective. The new Katyusha multiple rocket launcher and the T-34, probably the best tank of the war, shocked the Germans and heartened the Russians, though the first time Katyushas were used men of both sides fled in terror. A Wehrmacht officer, Helmut von Harnack, wrote: “The fact that we did not bring this campaign to a finish, and go on to take Moscow, is a massive blow for us. The lack of foresight about the weather … is of course an important reason. But the truth is we totally underestimated our opponent. He showed a strength and resilience we did not believe him capable of—indeed, resilience greater than most of us imagined humanly possible.”
Stalin