Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ ran out. Many of those with energy to read turned to War and Peace, the only book that seemed capable of explaining their agony. Those who survived had not merely exceptional will, but also commitment to a routine: washing themselves, eating off plates, even continuing academic studies. The authorities considered transporting civilians to safety on trucks returning empty across Lake Ladoga. Some mothers and babies indeed travelled, and often died en route; but Stalin rejected a wholesale evacuation, for prestige reasons. Leningrad’s ordeal became a display of fortitude such as only a tyranny could have enforced, and probably only Russians could have endured.

      The British and Americans continued to fear Soviet defeat until the end of 1942: they were slow to comprehend the losses and miseries of the invaders. As 1941 drew to a close, two million German soldiers, their tunics lined with newspaper and straw to compensate for the clothing they lacked, were in straits almost as dire as those of Russia’s people. Hans-Jürgen Hartmann wrote from Kharkov: ‘I have often wondered what this Christmas might be like. I always cast out the war from my imaginary picture, or at least push it to the very edges. I conjured up special words for the occasion. Christmas, homeland, longing, joy and hope. Yet these words, always sincere and heartfelt, became increasingly strange and precious to me. They evoked something timeless, precious – and yet, in the conditions of the Eastern Front, seemed scarcely believable any more…How brutal this war is becoming. It is now a total war, a war against women, children and old people – and that is the greatest horror.’

      Franz Peters and some comrades wandered into a church in a little town; the communists had ripped out its altar, but the Germans clustered around the hole where it had stood, and began carolling. ‘I have never heard “Silent Night” sung with such fervour…Many of us were moved to tears.’ Karl-Gottfried Vierkom read aloud to his comrades a card sent by his mother from Germany: ‘When I finished, there was complete silence. Far away from this terrible disaster – which no one imagined possible when we first entered Russia – something else still existed. Was there still a Christmas somewhere, where people peacefully exchanged gifts, gathered around the tree and went to Midnight Mass?’

      In Berlin there was no place for such sentimentality, which was anyway grotesque at a time when systematic barbarism was being perpetrated by the same German soldiers in Russia who sang carols and nursed self-pity. Hitler, enraged by the repulse before Moscow, appointed himself to replace Walther von Brauchitsch as army C-in-C. He repeated to Model his draconian injunctions against yielding ground. Gen. Hoepner, one of many advocates of a strategic disengagement, wrote: ‘There is a serious cost to one’s nerves fighting against the enemy and one’s own supreme commander at the same time.’ A few days later Hoepner joined a long list of commanders in the east, including von Rundstedt and Guderian, sacked for alleged lack of steel.

      Model, a blunt soldier’s general and dedicated Nazi, addressed the threat of disaster with energy and success. By mid-January, the Soviets had ceased to win ground; on the 21st, to the amazement of his demoralised officers Model launched a counterblow at the Russian flank west of Moscow. His staff asked what reinforcements he could deploy. ‘Myself!’ he declared irrepressibly – and this sufficed. Everywhere he improvised, dashing from unit to unit, often under fire, urging local commanders first to stand, then to strike back. Desperate expedients were employed to enable men to keep fighting in temperatures of –40 degrees Celsius: heated shelters were established, for recuperation between the few hours of exposed activity that were all a soldier could endure; ‘snow shacks’ were built around aircraft engines, to warm them through the night so the Luftwaffe could fly once more. In the last days of January and the first of February, Model’s troops inflicted repeated repulses and heavy casualties on the Russians, still seeking to push forward in the Rzhev salient.

      Horrors afflicted both sides. War correspondent Vasily Grossman met a peasant carrying a sack of frozen human legs, which he proposed to thaw on a stove in order to remove their boots. Fritz Langkanke of the SS Das Reich Division described how a dead Russian, frozen stiff, became wedged under the wheels of his armoured car: ‘I grabbed a saw, wriggled underneath and began cutting away his arms. As I did this, our two faces came close together and with the sawing motion he suddenly began to move. I froze in horror. It was only in response to the saw’s action, but it seemed for a moment he was shaking his head at me.’

      Wolf Dose, a German soldier supervising a POW work detail outside Leningrad, described with bleak detachment the fate of a Russian who collapsed while gathering wood outside a dugout: ‘He lay for a while in the frozen snow, at –20 degrees Celsius. He recovered somewhat…lifted himself up. But the cold had a strange effect on him. He threw himself forward [into the dugout] with such sudden vigour that he landed right on top of the stove. He just lay there, stunned, his skin burning away. Someone managed to pull him off and laid him on the ground. His head was resting on some of the wood he had gathered; his charred hand was soldered onto one of the pieces. He groaned quietly.’ Then someone hauled the man to his feet. ‘Because of the shock of the sudden movement, he emptied the contents of his intestines into his trousers, which swelled up and burst. I saw his thin, distended abdomen covered in blood, excrement and remains of clothing…His eyes stared into empty space. His face had a strange blue-green hue…One only hopes that a quick shot will bring his misery to an end.’

      Men on both sides became inured to such sights, for each was overwhelmingly preoccupied with his own salvation. Dose shrugged: ‘Russia, a country full of cruelty, must be cruelly treated.’ The Red Army struggled to regain the initiative, but again and again was thrown back. The Wehrmacht’s iron professionalism was unbroken. Gen. Gotthard Heinrici asserted that the Russians had repeated the earlier German mistake of seeking to advance on too wide a front, and Zhukov was of the same opinion. It is unlikely that the Russians had the strength or skill to inflict absolute defeat on the Germans that winter, whatever course they had adopted. But Stalin’s clumsy interventions, matching those of Hitler, removed even such a possibility. The Soviet Twenty-Ninth Army, cut off west of Rzhev, fought almost to the last man. There was no repeat of the mass surrenders of the previous summer, not least because Zhukov’s soldiers now knew the fate awaiting them if they accepted captivity. The Germans claimed that 26,000 Russians died in the Rzhev battle, about as many men as Britain’s army lost in three years of North African campaigning. Evidence of the human cost lay everywhere. ‘As we picked our way through the carnage, the hard frozen bodies clinked like porcelain,’ wrote a wondering German officer, Max Kuhnert. But the Russians never grudged losses; what mattered to them was that the front had been pushed back 175 miles from Moscow. Between 22 June 1941 and 31 January 1942, Germany suffered almost a million casualties, more than a quarter of all the soldiers originally committed to Barbarossa. For the rest of the winter, the invaders dug in to hold their ground and rebuild their armoured formations.

      The doctrine of blitzkreig evolved progressively, in the course of Germany’s 1939–40 campaigns in Poland and France. But in 1941, Hitler explicitly committed himself to destroy Russia by waging a ‘lightning war’. His armed forces, and Germany’s economy, lacked the fundamental strength to accomplish anything else. The Wehrmacht’s plan for Barbarossa was overwhelmingly dependent for success on accomplishing the defeat of Stalin’s armies west of the Dnieper–Dvina river line. The deeper within the country heavy fighting took place, the graver became the logistical difficulties of supplying Hitler’s troops, with few railways and inadequate numbers of trucks, which consumed precious fuel merely to deliver loads. The key battles of the 1940 French campaign took place within a few hours’ drive of the German border; now, instead, the Wehrmacht was committed to a struggle thousands of miles from its bases.

      Few soldiers of the German army who survived the winter of 1941 ever regained the faith in their leadership that was forfeited by that experience. They saw Russian soldiers advancing to attack on skis, clad in quilted snowsuits such as they themselves lacked. German weapons and vehicles froze, while those of their enemies worked. Stalin’s soldiers never matched the tactical proficiency of the Germans: their attacks relied on the exploitation of mass and a willingness to sacrifice lives. But Soviet artillery was formidable, and their aircraft increasingly effective. The new katyusha multiple rocket-launcher and the T-34, СКАЧАТЬ