The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [92]
In Moscow the bread ration started out at 800 grams per day for manual workers, 600 for non-manual workers and 400 for everyone else (although blood donors got extra). Meat rations were 2.2 kilograms, 1.2 kilograms and 600 grams per month. Anyone whose ration card was lost or stolen faced starvation. The Nomenklatura, the notable and powerful people of the workers’ paradise, and their families, got lavishly preferential treatment, as they had ever since 1917. At a time of siege this often meant the difference between life and death, and the entire Soviet rationing system – despite the inefficiencies and corruption – effectively became a means by which the authorities decided who lived and who died.
Fighting around Smolensk did not end with its fall to Guderian on 15 July, however. As late as the first week in September, the Soviets launched massive counter-attacks under Timoshenko and Zhukov, which the latter with some justification claimed as ‘a great victory’ because it held the Germans back from further advances, at least for the time being. In slowing the German advance towards Moscow as the weather was about to turn, some historians cite Smolensk as the first indication that the war might be approaching a turning point. The Smolensk battle had been fought for sixty-three days over 390 miles of front, and the Soviets had retreated 150 miles, with 309,959 ‘irrecoverable losses’ out of 579,400 taking part. Once the 159,625 sick and wounded are added, this amounted to a staggering 80 per cent casualty rate.62 At the Moscow Defence Museum it is possible to see the records of schools in which only 3 per cent of the male students who graduated in 1941 survived the war. In a sense the scale of Russian losses simply did not matter, since there were always more to fill the gaps, whereas Germans could not be replaced fast enough. As an historian of the Eastern Front writes, ‘the three German Army Groups… had suffered 213,301 casualties, prisoners and missing in the first six weeks, until 31 July, and only received 47,000 new troops. The Soviets had suffered almost ten times as many irrecoverable losses – 2,129,677 – by 30 September, but, unlike the Germans’, the losses seemed not to count.’63
Although Rundstedt’s 1st Panzer Group broke through the Soviet Fifth Army and got to within 10 miles of Kiev by 11 July, it could not take the city. The very successes of the Germans, in hugely extending their lines of communication, caused grave logistical problems for the Wehrmacht, especially once partisans began disrupting supplies in the rear. Originally disorganized and often leaderless, the Soviet partisans became much better equipped and more centrally directed as the war progressed. Their most famous martyr was Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an eighteen-year-old girl whom the Germans executed for setting fire to stables in the village of Petrishchevo. She revealed nothing under torture, and cried: ‘You can’t hang all 190 million of us!’ before she died.64
Hitler likened the war against the partisans to fighting lice in the trenches. ‘A lice-covered soldier’, he opined, ‘has to start the fight against the lice.’ He believed that gendarmeries stationed in every town should ‘take it by the root… The bands can’t keep forming – even in the towns the bandits have to be fished out individually… But if the British could cope with the nomads in the north-western