Russia at war 1941-1945

wandering barefooted about the village, carrying a few dirty rags, a rusty pail and a tattered sheepskin. One of the boys said that she slept in her shattered hut, and they gave her potatoes, and sometimes soldiers passing through the village would give her

something, though she never asked for anything. She just stared with her blind white eyes and never uttered any articulate words, except the word "Cherti" —the devils.

We drove on to Yelnya, through more miles of uncut fields. Once we drove off the road into a wood, because there were three or four German planes overhead. In the wood there were Russian batteries and other signs of military activity. Yelnya had been wholly

destroyed. On both sides of the road leading to the centre of the town, all the houses—

mostly wooden houses—had been burned, and all that was left was piles of ashes and

chimney-stacks, with fireplaces some way down. It had been a town of about 15,000

inhabitants. The only building still intact was a large stone church. Most of the civilians who had been here during the German occupation had now gone. The town had been

captured by the Germans almost by surprise, and very few civilians had had time to

escape. Nearly all the able-bodied men and women had been formed into forced-labour

battalions, and driven into the German rear. A few hundred elderly people and children had been allowed to stay on in the town. The night the Germans decided to pull out of Yelnya— for the Russians were closing in, threatening to encircle the town— the

remaining people of Yelnya were ordered to assemble inside the church. They spent a

night of terror. Through the high windows of the church black smoke was pouring in, and they could see the flames. For the Germans were now going round the houses, picking up what few valuables they could find, and then systematically setting fire to every house in the town. The Russians drove into the town through the burning wreckage, and were able to release the now homeless prisoners.

In the course of this one and only visit to the Front we had talked to three German

airmen, the crew of a German bomber that had been shot down almost immediately after their raid on Viazma.

[They had just missed the house where we were staying, but had killed several people in the house across the street. The episode is described in Moscow '41.]

All three were arrogant, boasted of having bombed London, and were quite sure that

Moscow would fall before the winter.

They argued that the war against Russia had been rendered inevitable by the war against; England; it was part of the same war; and once Russia had been knocked out, England

would be brought to her knees. "And what about America?" somebody asked. "America, that's a long way away: Amerika, das ist sehr weit." They also said that it had taken five Russian fighters to bring down their Heinkel...

Chapter VII ADVANCE ON LENINGRAD

While the Red Army succeeded in stabilising the Front east of Smolensk, events in the north and, before long, in the south, took a turn for the worse. The unequalled tragedy of Leningrad will be related in some detail later in this book, and the German advance on Leningrad need be mentioned only briefly here. The German plan was to make one rapid thrust through Pskov, Luga and Gatchina to Leningrad, and to capture the city, while the Finns were expected to strike from the north. A second enveloping movement was to be carried out round Lake Ilmen, and then on to Petrozavodsk, east of Lake Ladoga, where the German troops were to join with the Finns. The Russian troops of the "North-West Direction", under Voro-shilov, had been routed in the Baltic Republics, and the Wehrmacht crashed through to Ostrov and the ancient Russian city of Pskov on their way to Leningrad, some 200 miles to the north. They had captured Ostrov on July 10 and

Pskov two days later. Another German force, after capturing Riga and occupying the

whole of Latvia, was rapidly advancing into Estonia, with the Russians retreating in disorder to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and one of the most important Soviet naval bases on the Baltic. Of the original thirty divisions of the North-Western Front only five were now fully manned and fully armed, the rest were left with a ten to thirty per cent complement of either men or equipment.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, pp. 78-79.]

By July 10, the position was as disastrous as during the worst stages of the Russian retreat through Belorussia. The Germans had a 24 to one superiority in men, four to one in guns and nearly six to one in mortars, not to speak about tanks and aircraft.

[In this, as in most other cases, there is a discrepancy between the Russian and the German estimates of the German forces involved. According to Telpukhovsky, op. cit., the Germans had assembled for their thrust against Leningrad 700,000 men, 1,500 tanks and 1,200 planes. The Germans, without giving any figure for the number of men in