Hitler completed his plan for Operation Barbarossa in December 1940. The objective of the offensive was to be the 'A-A line' running from Arkhangel on the Arctic Ocean to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. West of this line lay most of the Soviet Union's industrial, agricultural and raw material resources. Hitler and his generals had also agreed that three Army Groups, North, Centre and South, would advance toward the three great Soviet cities of Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev. Beyond this broad outline, however, the unanimity ended.
Battles of encirclement
Hitler was principally concerned to capture territory, so he wanted the three groups to make equal progress. His generals, on the other hand, were professional soldiers, who believed that a decisive battle would be needed to ensure the Red Army's destruction. Accordingly, they wanted the major effort to be made on the Moscow axis, where their instinct told them the Russians would stand and die. F├╝hrer Directive 21 which laid down the form of Barbarossa, appeared to accommodate both views. In fact, it simply papers over the differences, which would re-emerge at a critical moment during the invasion.
Barbarossa began in the early morning of 22 June 1941. Stalin had perversely ignored the mounting evidence of Hitler's intentions, insisting instead on strict observance of the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the hope that the danger of war might be averted.
Most of the Russian reinforcements that reached the front in the early stages of the invasion simply disappeared, encircled by the German army groups. In the first two weeks of the war Army Group Centre, which had been given two of the four existing panzer armies, completed two encirclements, one near Bialystok, in territory that had been Polish until 1939, and the second at Minsk. Stalin's indulgence of his greed for Polish territory had committed the Red Army to operating 200 miles forward of its frontier fortifications. Short of transport, in a region of poor or non-existent roads, the Russian divisions in the path of Army Group Centre were unable to manoeuvre when cut off by its cross-country vehicles and 300,000 men were swept into the
prison cages.
Early in August Army Group Centre captured another 100,000 prisoners at Smolensk, on the high road to Moscow. Hitler, believing the Red Army was about to fall apart, ordered the group to detach its panzer armies in order to assist the advance of Army Groups North and South toward Leningrad and Kiev. The result was the first great crisis on the Eastern Front.
Guderian, commanding Second Panzer Army, refused to be deflected from his headlong advance toward Moscow, which he believed would win the war, and insisted on taking his case to Hitler. This was a brave act, but Hitler respected him as the man who had led the decisive panzer thrust in France the year before. Nevertheless, he refused to accept Guderian's objection, categorically ordering him to take his tanks south into the Ukraine to join First Panzer Army in the encirclement of the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Guderian did go south, eventually participating in the capture of the largest haul of prisoners - nearly a million of them - ever taken in war. But he took his time, in the hope that circumstances would enable him to continue the advance on Moscow. Consequently, by the time the advance was resumed early in October, with Guderian in the vanguard, the Moscow front had been greatly strengthened and reinforcements had begun to arrive. The Battle of Moscow, to be fought in December, would be far harder than it might have been had Guderian been granted permission to sustain his advance during August.
Still, the eastern campaign appeared to be proceeding to plan as the autumn drew in. By early September Army Group North and the Finnish Army, which had re-entered the war to recover the territory it had surrendered in 1940, were on the approaches to Leningrad. In the Ukraine, Army Group South was pressing forward toward the rich industrial region of the Donets basin and reaching out into the Crimea, from which Hitler planned to establish control over the Black Sea. In the early stages of the advance on Moscow, Army Group Centre encircled another 600,000 soldiers at Bryansk and Vyazma. More than three million prisoners had fallen into German hands, and Hitler's intelligence officers were reporting that Stalin's manpower reserves were on the point of exhaustion. The F├╝hrer was confident that a final advance on Moscow would crush what remained of the Red Army's powers of resistance and bring victory before the Russian winter, in all its terrible harshness, swept across the battlefield.
The advance on Moscow began on 15 November, at the end of the annual 'mud time', when the first frosts had made the ground hard enough for tanks to move across country and trucks to negotiate the roads.
Since June the German army in the East - the Ostheer - had suffered half a million casualties. It had also lost much equipment and many of the horses used to move their artillery and stores. Nevertheless, it remained a formidable fighting organisation. Army Group Centre had been reinforced to a strength of 80 divisions, 14 of them panzer and eight motorised. And most of its commanders and soldiers shared Hitler's belief that it would overcome the Red Army in the battle outside Moscow.
By this time the Red Army in European Russia was at the end of its tether. Reduced by the great encirclements to a strength of only 90 divisions, 800,000 men in all, it could muster only 770 tanks and 350 aircraft, and its morale was understandably shaky. So indeed was that of the government: although Stalin had recovered from his initial nervous collapse and had created a high command with himself at its head, a serious crisis swept the capital on 15 October. During this 'Moscow panic' ministries were abandoned by their officials while the roads and railway stations became jammed with people, high party functionaries among them, trying to escape to
the east.
In this crisis of confidence Stalin turned to Zhukov, the chief of staff who had seen him through the first shattering weeks of Barbarossa. Zhukov had recently helped organise the defence of Leningrad, and now Stalin recalled him to save Moscow from Army Group Centre. As at Leningrad, he conscripted citizens, including 200,000 women, to dig anti-tank ditches, rounded up men under and over military age to fill the depleted ranks of the defending divisions, and drove the Moscow armament factories to new levels of output. But these were only expedients, though. What Russia needed in this supreme crisis was a new army and, as its crux approached, one
was found.
The Siberian army, the Soviet Union's last remaining uncommitted army, had been held in the Far East lest Japan, Hitler's ally in the Tripartite Pact, decided to attack Russia across the Mongolian border for the third time since 1936. But by November Stalin had the assurance of Richard Sorge, perhaps the most remarkable of all 'agents in place', that Japan intended to open hostilities not in Mongolia but in the Pacific, against the United States.
Sorge, a German communist who worked in Tokyo as a journalist, had made himself the confidant of the German ambassador. In the process of helping the ambassador draft his despatches, Sorge gained intelligence of Japan's most secret plans. His direct transmissions to Moscow assured Stalin that it was safe to move the Siberian army west.
By November ten divisions with 100,000 aircraft and a similar number of tanks - many of them the new T-34 model, which was to prove the outstanding armoured fighting vehicle of the war - had arrived on the Moscow front. By 5 December the Red Army outside Moscow was ready to move to the counter-offensive.
At this point Army Group Centre was only 18 miles from the capital and its patrols had glimpsed the golden domes of the Kremlin. But the troops were exhausted. More than 100,000 were frostbite casualties, while horses were dropping dead and vehicle engines freezing solid in the sub-zero overnight temperatures. On 1 December von Bock, commanding Army Group Centre, had told Halder, the army chief of staff, that 'the time is coming very near when the strength of the troops will be completely exhausted'.
Counterblow before Moscow
It was in these circumstances that Zhukov's counteroffensive was launched. Unlike the Germans, his troops were clothed for the Russian winter and knew how to coax vehicles and animals into motion even in the worst of temperatures. By 9 December they were threatening the road and rail communications of the Second and Third Panzer Armies, and driving back the infantry armies that supported them. By Christmas Day they had retaken all the ground won by the Germans since 15 November and were threatening to turn Soviet retreat into German rout.
Hitler ranted at all the responsible generals and dismissed many of them in a purge of almost Stalinist proportions. By 19 December he had sacked 35 divisional and corps commanders, all three army group commanders and the commander-in-chief, von Brauchitsch, whose post he assumed himself. 'Is it any less cold 30 miles to the rear?' he demanded of generals who asked permission to retreat.
Retreat the Ostheer did, all the same, throughout December and into the new year. Not until half way through January, when Army Group Centre had fallen back to a line 85 miles west of Moscow, was the front finally stabilised.
On that line Hitler succeeded in organising a secure defence. Stalin, through Zhukov, insisted on sustaining the Red Army's offensive until mid-March. But by then it was costing more in casualties and loss of equipment than the regained ground was worth. The arrival of the spring 'mud time', when the melting snow reduced roads to the same liquid state as did the rains of autumn, came as a genuine relief to the Soviet high command, by then running out both of men and equipment to maintain the offensive.
The Ostheer, by contrast, had used its weeks on the defensive to accumulate reserves of men and equipment for a great summer attack. Hitler's plan for 1942 was to shift the axis away from Leningrad and Moscow and drive south toward the Caucasus, the centre of Russian oil production, and the line of the Volga river. The latter would become a line of defence against any Red Army offensive mounted within the great expanse of the steppe.
The Ostheer's advance in the summer of 1942 proved almost as dramatic as that of 1941. The vast expanses of treeless plain it crossed, only occasionally interrupted by waterways, were perfect tank country, and at times the panzer units were able to make 30 miles a day. There were more great encirclements, though none yielding prisoners in the numbers captured the previous year, and more fierce tank battles in which vast quantities of Russian armour were destroyed.
By August the First Panzer Army was deep in the Caucasus and German mountain troops had planted the swastika on the summit of Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in Europe. Astrakhan was within reach and Baku, centre of the Russian oil industry, lay just beyond the mountains. But First Panzer Army could not call upon the reinforcements it needed to make the final thrust because of Russian resistance in its rear.
At the beginning of August the biggest of these formations, Sixth Army, had begun a battle to secure possession of the line of the Volga. The battle had increasingly focussed on the city of Stalingrad, at the head of the Volga estuary, and had grown in intensity with each week. By mid-September Sixth Army had pushed the Russian defenders off into a pocket nine miles long and three deep.
It was to shrink even more, until some German positions were within a few hundred yards of the river bank. By early November, when Hitler had shut down all other offensive operations on the steppe front, the Stalingrad battle was consuming thousands of soldiers each week. He was determined to win the battle, which for him had become a symbol of his struggle against Bolshevism. What he did not suspect was that the Russians had also decided that the battle for Stalingrad must be fought to victory or death and were preparing a great offensive against the Sixth Army - which would repay the Germans in spades for all the encirclement disasters they had inflicted on the Red Army in the previous two summers.
Taken from John Keegan's History of the Second World War, Part Two: The Conflict Widens, published with The Daily Telegraph, August 30, 1989.
