Russia at war 1941-1945

withdrawals. "What initial fears there might have been that the troops would not fight were soon dispelled by the stubborn and bitter defence which the Red Army put up

against the Germans, fighting, as Haider observed, 'to the last man', and employing

'treacherous methods' in which the Russian did not cease firing until he was dead".

[Erickson, op.-cit., p. 598.]

These "rear security units" were a revival of a practice inherited from the Civil War, and proved wholly unnecessary in 1941, the Army itself dealing rigorously with any cases of cowardice and panic.

The role of the NKVD in actual military operations remains rather obscure, though it is known that, apart from the Frontier Guards, who were under NKVD jurisdiction, and

who were the first to meet the German onslaught, there were to be some very important occasions in which NKVD troops fought as battle units—for example at Voronezh in

June-July 1942, where they helped to prevent a particularly dangerous German

breakthrough. But there was a much grimmer side to the NKVD's connection with the

Red Army; thus, not only Russian prisoners who had managed to escape from the

Germans, but even whole Army units who—as so often happened in 1941—had broken

out of German encirclement, were subjected as suspects to the most harsh and petty

interrogation by the O.O. (Osoby Otdel— Special Department) run by the NKVD. In Simonov's novel, The Living and the Dead, there is a particularly sickening episode based on actual fact, in which a large number of officers and soldiers break out of a German encirclement after many weeks' fighting. They are promptly disarmed by the NKVD; but it so happens that at that very moment the Germans have started their offensive against Moscow, and as the disarmed men are being taken to a NKVD sorting station, they are

trapped by the Germans, and simply massacred, unable to offer any resistance.

Apart from that, however, the NKVD interfered less than before with the Red Army [This is not to say that the Army was left strictly to itself. Officers were still subjected to NKVD surveillance.]; the border-line between the military and the "political" elements in the Army was vanishing, and Stalin himself presided over this development. Whatever he had done in the past to weaken the army by his purges and his constant political

interference, he had learned his lesson from the summer and autumn of 1941. Voroshilov and Budienny were pushed into the background and the role of the NKVD bosses greatly reduced. The patriotic, nationalist and "1812" line was wholeheartedly taken up by all ranks of the army. All the military talent—discovered and tested in the first battles of the war and, in some cases, before that in the Far East—was assembled, all available reserves were thrown into battle, including some crack divisions from Central Asia and the Far East, a measure made possible by the Non-Aggression Pact concluded with the Japanese in 1939.

Whatever bad memories and reservations the generals may have had, Stalin had become

the indispensable unifying factor in the patrie-en-danger atmosphere of October-November 1941. There was no alternative. The Germans were on the outskirts of

Leningrad, were pushing through the Donbas on their way to Rostov, and on September

30 the "final" offensive against Moscow had started.

The Battle of Moscow falls, broadly, into three phases: the first German offensive from September 30 to nearly the end of October; the second German offensive from November 17 right up to December 5; and the Russian counter-offensive of December 6, which

lasted till spring 1942.

On September 30 Guderian's panzer units on the southern flank of Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Centre) thrust against Glukhov and Orel, which fell on October 2 [The

surprise was complete. The trams were still running at Orel when the German tanks broke in.], but were then held up by a tank group under Colonel Katyukov beyond Mtsensk, on the road to Tula. Other German forces launched full scale attacks from the south-west in the Bryansk area and from the west on the Smolensk-Moscow road. Large Soviet troop

concentrations were encircled south of Bryansk and in the Viazma area due west of

Moscow. The Germans had planned to contain Soviet troops surrounded in the Viazma

area mainly by infantry, thus freeing their panzer and motorised divisions for a lightning advance on Moscow. But for more than a week, fighting a circular battle of extreme

ferocity, the remnants of the 19th, 20th, 24th and 32nd Armies and the troops under

General Boldin tied up most of the German 4th Army and of the 4th Tank Corps. This

resistance enabled the Soviet Supreme Command to extricate and withdraw more of their front line troops from the encirclement to the Mozhaisk line and to bring up reserves from the rear.