Fighting on the Mozhaisk Line

On Monday 13 October 1941 the German divisions that in the first week of Operation Typhoon had smashed three Soviet fronts at Vyazma and Bryansk reached the last prepared defensive line on the western approaches to Moscow – the Mozhaisk Line. That day Kaluga, at its southern end, fell, and on the roads leading to the capital through Volokolamsk, Mozhaisk and Maloyaroslavets fighting began that was to last until the end of the month. In Moscow the secretary of the city party committee, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, told a meeting of party activists that day that the capital faced mortal danger.

Popular chronologies describe these days as follows: under 13 October they state that the Germans attempted a new attack on Moscow because the sodden ground had hardened, under 14 October that the temperature kept falling and heavy snowfalls immobilised the German tanks, and under 15 October that the Germans were advancing on Moscow. The weather, however, came in the opposite order. The first snow fell on the night of 6–7 October and quickly melted. It was followed by rain and the rasputitsa, the autumn season of mud, which from about the middle of October turned the dirt roads into a quagmire and cut the spearheads off from fuel and ammunition. The ground froze only at the beginning of November, and by mid-November the frost was hard enough for tanks to drive across country again. In mid-October, then, the offensive was not helped by hardened ground – on the contrary, it was sinking ever deeper into the mud.

The Mozhaisk Line

Work on a defensive line at the level of Mozhaisk began in July 1941, after the defeat at Białystok and Minsk. It had four fortified districts – Volokolamsk, Mozhaisk, Maloyaroslavets and Kaluga – stretching from the Moscow Sea to Kaluga, some 100–120 kilometres from the Kremlin. Tens of thousands of inhabitants of Moscow and its province dug it, but in October it was far from finished: according to Russian studies only part of the planned firing positions had been built, and many bunkers had only their concrete walls ready, without doors or steel shutters. The line was designed for 25 divisions. When the Western and Reserve Fronts were encircled at Vyazma at the beginning of October, there was nothing to man it with.

On 6 October the State Defence Committee designated the Mozhaisk Line as the main line of resistance. In the first days it was manned with whatever was at hand: officer cadets from the military schools of Moscow and Podolsk, reserve battalions, NKVD and militia units. On 9 October these troops were placed under the commander of the Moscow Military District, Lieutenant General Pavel Artemyev (PL), as the Mozhaisk Line Front. According to Russian data, on 10 October the line, which had been planned for 150 battalions, was held by 45. In the following days divisions taken from the Leningrad front, from the south and from the interior arrived by train, as did the first divisions from the Far East. By mid-October the Mozhaisk Line was held, according to various estimates, by some 90,000 soldiers.

On 10 October General of the Army Georgy Zhukov took command of the combined Western and Reserve Fronts, and on 12 October the Mozhaisk Line Front was also placed under him. Zhukov did not have the forces to defend a continuous front, so he concentrated them along the main roads to Moscow, since in the mud the Germans could move only on the highways. Volokolamsk was defended by the 16th Army of Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky, whose staff had escaped from the Vyazma encirclement without its troops; Mozhaisk by the new 5th Army of Major General Dmitry Lelyushenko; Maloyaroslavets by the 43rd Army; and Kaluga by the 49th Army. His order of 13 October announced that cowards and panic-mongers who abandoned their positions or threw away their weapons would be shot on the spot.

Kaluga and Kalinin

The German command was convinced that after the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets there were no longer any serious Soviet forces in front of Moscow. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock did not wait for the infantry to release all the panzer divisions from the rings of encirclement, and pushed whatever he had free into the pursuit. On the southern wing German infantry entered Kaluga on 12 or 13 October – German sources give the first date, Russian ones the second – and broke through the Mozhaisk Line at its southern end before the 49th Army had time to man it.

In the north, in accordance with Hitler’s order of 8 October, General of Panzer Troops Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Panzer Group 3 and part of the 9th Army turned north-east. On 14 October the 1st Panzer Division burst into Kalinin, today’s Tver, and seized the bridge over the Volga. Soviet divisions and the local people’s militia held out in the north-western part of the city until 17 October. The Germans wanted to strike on from here towards Torzhok, into the rear of the North-Western Front, but an operational group under Lieutenant General Nikolai Vatutin beat off this attack in the second half of the month. On 17 October the Stavka formed the armies defending this axis into the Kalinin Front under Colonel General Ivan Konev. The capture of Kalinin drew a considerable part of Army Group Centre’s tanks away from Moscow – German staff officers wrote after the war that it was precisely this turn to the north that ruined the chance of reaching the capital quickly.

Borodino and Mozhaisk

The heaviest fighting took place on the Minsk highway, the shortest road to Moscow. On 9 October the SS division “Das Reich” took Gzhatsk, and in the following days XL Motorised Corps of Panzer Group 4 moved on towards Mozhaisk. In its path stood Colonel Viktor Polosukhin’s 32nd Rifle Division, transferred from the Far East – it had originally been meant to fight near Leningrad, but after the disaster at Vyazma it was turned back and detrained near Mozhaisk on 10 October. The division took up a defensive sector some 40 kilometres wide, which included the battlefield of Borodino, where in 1812 Kutuzov had fought Napoleon. According to Russian studies the first clashes with German reconnaissance came on 12–13 October, and from 14–16 October the division was fighting the whole corps, supported by the 18th and 19th Tank Brigades. The Soviet positions changed hands repeatedly over several days. Lelyushenko was wounded and the 5th Army was taken over by Major General Leonid Govorov, an artilleryman who was later to command the defence of Leningrad. On 18 October the Germans took Mozhaisk. The corps’ war diaries spoke of “the heaviest fighting since the start of the eastern campaign”. At the end of the month the 5th Army halted the advance west of Kubinka.

It was a similar story to the south-west. On the line near Ilyinskoye, on the road to Maloyaroslavets, combined units of cadets from the Podolsk infantry and artillery schools – some 3,500 young men, according to various figures – held out from 10–11 October to 17 October. Their losses are estimated at about 2,500 killed; some studies state that only one in ten survived. Maloyaroslavets fell on 18 October, and near Borovsk the 110th Rifle Division and the 151st Motorised Brigade held up LVII Motorised Corps until 16 October. On 21–22 October the Germans entered Naro-Fominsk, but the 33rd and 43rd Armies stopped them beyond the Nara river, some 70 kilometres from Moscow.

Volokolamsk and Panfilov

On the northern sector the Germans attacked Volokolamsk in mid-October. It was defended chiefly by Major General Ivan Panfilov’s 316th Rifle Division, formed in the summer in Alma-Ata from Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Russians, and by a cadet regiment from the Moscow infantry school. The division, stretched across several dozen kilometres of front, held up the advance of the German infantry and the panzer divisions supporting it for almost two weeks. On 27 October the 16th Army gave up Volokolamsk and fell back east of the town. For the fighting in October and November the division was granted Guards status in November, and after the death of Panfilov, who was killed by a mortar fragment on 18 November, it bore his name.

Panfilov’s division is linked to one of the best-known legends of Soviet wartime propaganda – the story of the 28 Panfilov men who on 16 November at Dubosekovo were said to have destroyed 18 German tanks and died to the last man. The story was written up in November 1941 by journalists of Krasnaya Zvezda. An investigation by the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office in 1948 established that the details of the story, the number of heroes and their last words were a literary invention, and that several of the “fallen” had survived the war. The findings of the investigation were revealed in the 1990s (among other places in Novy Mir in 1997), and the full report was published in 2015 by the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Historians do not dispute, however, that Panfilov’s division fought at Volokolamsk with great self-sacrifice – it is the specific story that is a myth, not the battle itself.

The halt

After 15 October, when most of the infantry and tanks had been released from the rings around the pockets, the advance on Moscow gathered pace – hence the date given in popular chronologies. But the German divisions were exhausted. According to German data, by 17 October Army Group Centre had lost some 49,000 men since the start of the operation; the 6th Panzer Division had only about 60 tanks left, and the 4th Panzer Division, after the fighting at Mtsensk, 38. The rasputitsa made itself felt from about 13 October, when supplies of fuel and ammunition could no longer keep up with the spearheads. Lorries got stuck on roads that had to be corduroyed, and the only passable artery was the Vyazma–Moscow highway, wrecked by demolitions and air raids; on 19 October the entire 5th Infantry Division was assigned to repairing it. German studies also point out that October 1941 was not exceptionally wet, and that the frost came earlier than usual – the mud was an obstacle that the German command had foreseen but disregarded, counting on the operation being over before the thaw.

Hitler, meanwhile, was already thinking about what he would do with Moscow. An OKW instruction of 7 October, passed on to the army group in the following days, forbade the acceptance of the city’s surrender even if it were offered: Moscow was to be encircled and destroyed by artillery fire and air raids, and its inhabitants were to be pushed out to the east. At the front the offensive was weakening. From 19–20 October attacks had to be halted on most of Army Group Centre’s sectors. On the southern wing Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army reached Tula only on 29–30 October, where it was beaten back by the 50th Army with a workers’ regiment from the Tula factories. At the end of October the German command halted the offensive until the frost hardened the roads and supplies could be brought up.

Place in the war

The fighting on the Mozhaisk Line cost the Red Army tens of thousands of men and did not stop the Germans on the line itself: Kaluga, Kalinin, Mozhaisk, Maloyaroslavets and Volokolamsk fell, and the front moved several dozen kilometres closer to the capital. But it gave Zhukov what he needed most – two or three weeks. In that time he manned a new front from Kalinin to Tula and brought up reserves from the interior and the Far East, while Moscow, having lived through panic and the evacuation of the authorities in mid-October, turned into a fortified camp ringed by anti-tank ditches. On 7 November a parade was held in Red Square, from which the troops marched straight to the front.

At the end of October Army Group Centre came to a halt 70–100 kilometres from the Kremlin. On 13 November, at a conference in Orsha, the German command decided to resume the offensive as soon as the ground froze, and on 15–17 November the last phase of “Typhoon” began. In its course the Germans came within a few dozen kilometres of Moscow in the first days of December, but on 5 December the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive. In Soviet memory the October fighting at Borodino, Mozhaisk, Maloyaroslavets and Volokolamsk became the beginning of this turn of fortune – although at the time, in mid-October, it seemed that Moscow was only days away from falling.