Russia at war 1941-1945

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 245. As usual in such matters, there are considerable discrepancies between German and Russian, and even between Russian accounts of the Viazma

encirclement. The German claim, repeated by Tippelskirch, that "the Russians lost in the Viazma area sixty-seven infantry, six cavalry and seven tank divisions, totalling 663,000

prisoners, as well as 1,242 tanks and 5,412 guns", is dismissed by some Russians as "a piece of German day-dreaming, or a deliberate deception calculated to extract decorations and promotions from the Führer. In reality ten Soviet divisions (eight infantry, one motorised and one cavalry) were fighting against thirty or thirty-two German divisions.

Moreover, these (encircled) Russian divisions, seriously weakened by earlier fighting, tied up thirty or thirty-two German divisions west of Viazma for a week (from October 6

to 13)." Narodnoye opolcheniye Moskvy (Moscow Home Guard), (Moscow, 1961), pp.

141-2.

The official History, while not accepting inflated German claims, suggests that a far greater number of troops were encircled at Viazma.

It is also certain from numerous Russian break-out accounts that the number of Russian dead must have been enormous (cf. Narodnoye opolcheniye Moskvy, I. V. Boldin, op.

cit., and others). It is perhaps significant that, while claiming 50,000 prisoners in the Briansk encirclement in October 1941, Guderian should, when referring to the Viazma

encirclement, mention no figure at all for prisoners taken there. Maybe his figures

disagreed with the official ones.]

By October 6 German tank units had broken through the Rzhev-Viazma defence line and

were advancing towards the Mozhaisk line of fortified positions some fifty miles west of Moscow, which had been improvised and prepared during the summer of 1941, and ran

from Kalinin (north-west of Moscow on the Moscow-Leningrad Railway line), to Kaluga

(south-west of Moscow and half-way between Tula and Viazma), Maloyaroslavets and

Tula. The few troops manning these defences could halt the advance units of the

Heeresgruppe Mitte, but not the bulk of the German forces.

While reinforcements from the Far East and Central Asia were on their way to the

Moscow Front, the GKO Headquarters threw in what reserves they could muster. The

infantry of Generals Artemiev and Lelushenko and the tanks of General Kurkin which

fought here were, by October 9, placed under the direct orders of the Soviet Supreme Command. On the following day Zhukov was appointed C. in C. of the whole front.

But the Germans bypassed the Mozhaisk line from the south and captured Kaluga on

October 12. Two days later, outflanking the Mozhaisk line in the north, they broke into Kalinin. After heavy fighting Mozhaisk itself was abandoned on October 18. Already on the 14th fierce battles were raging in the Volokolamsk sector, midway between Mozhaisk and Kalinin, some fifty miles north-west of Moscow.

The situation was extremely serious. There was no continuous front any more. The

German air force was master of the sky. German tank units, penetrating deep into the rear, were forcing the Red Army units to retreat to new positions to avoid encirclement.

Together with the army, thousands of Soviet civilians were moving east. People on foot, or in horse carts, cattle, cars, were moving east in a continuous stream along all the roads, making troop movements even more difficult.

[ IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 244.]

Despite stiff resistance everywhere, the Germans were closing in on Moscow from all

directions. It was two days after the fall of Kalinin, and when the threat of a breakthrough from Volokolamsk to Istra and Moscow looked a near-certainty, that the "Moscow panic"

reached its height. This was on October 16. To this day the story is current that, on that morning, two German tanks broke into Khimki, a northern suburb of Moscow, where

they were promptly destroyed; that two such tanks ever existed, except in some

frightened Muscovite's imagination, is not confirmed by any serious source.

What happened in Moscow on October 16? Many have spoken of the big skedaddle

(bolshoi drap) that took place that day. Although, as we shall see, this is an over-generalisation, October 16 in Moscow was certainly not a tale of the "unanimous heroism of the people of Moscow" as recorded in the official History.

It took the Moscow population several days to realise how serious the new German

offensive was. During the last days of September and, indeed, for the first few days of October, all attention was centred on the big German offensive in the Ukraine, the news of the breakthrough into the Crimea, and the Beaverbrook visit, which had begun on

September 29. At his press conference on September 28 Lozovsky had tried to sound

very reassuring, saying that the Germans were losing "many tens of thousands dead"