The Germans reach the Moscow–Volga Canal

During the night of 27–28 November 1941 the spearhead of the German 7th Panzer Division drove into the small town of Yakhroma, some 55 kilometres north of Moscow, and captured an intact bridge over the Moscow Canal. The battlegroup of Colonel Hasso von Manteuffel, commander of one of the division’s rifle regiments, crossed to the eastern bank and established a bridgehead there. The canal was the last great water obstacle north of the Soviet capital. Had the Germans managed to hold and widen the bridgehead, they could have outflanked Moscow from the north-east and cut its links with the rest of the country. Accounts of 28 November often say that German tanks were “on the outskirts of Moscow, near the Moscow–Volga Canal”. In fact, at Yakhroma they were still several dozen kilometres from the Kremlin, and the bridgehead held out only briefly.

The road to the canal

The offensive that Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre resumed on 15 November was meant to outflank Moscow in the north with two panzer groups. General der Panzertruppe Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s 3rd Panzer Group split the Soviet 30th Army from the 16th Army and pressed eastwards, while Colonel General Erich Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group pushed Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army off the Volokolamsk highway towards the capital. After a week of heavy fighting, on 23 November the Germans entered Klin – German sources state that the town was fully taken on 25 November – and on 23–24 November, after crossing the Istra Reservoir, Solnechnogorsk on the Leningrad highway. On 24 November Soviet sappers blew up the Istra dam, and on 26–27 November Istra fell, 35–40 kilometres from Moscow. On 26 November the 6th Panzer Division took Rogachevo and set off towards the canal.

The Moscow Canal, opened in 1937, linked the Moskva river with the Volga over a length of 128 kilometres. It had been built in 1932–1937 by prisoners of the Dmitlag labour camp, among whom the death rate was very high. In the autumn of 1941 the canal became a defensive line behind which the Stavka was concentrating its reserves. Yakhroma, with a bridge and a lock, lay beside it just south of Dmitrov. The German tanks appeared in the town unexpectedly, before the defenders had time to destroy the crossing.

The Yakhroma bridgehead

After crossing the canal, Manteuffel’s group took Yakhroma, a neighbouring settlement and the southern part of the village of Peremilovo on the heights of the eastern bank. In its path, however, stood an army the Germans did not yet know of. Marching here from the Stavka reserve, from the Zagorsk area, was the 1st Shock Army of Lieutenant General Vasily Kuznetsov, formed in the last days of November from the reserve 19th Army. According to Russian data, on 29 November it had seven independent rifle brigades, eleven ski battalions, an artillery regiment and two regiments of light bombers. Its units, marching on foot, went straight into battle from the line of march.

On 28 November the first brigades of the 1st Shock Army, supported by artillery and aircraft, counter-attacked the bridgehead, above all on the heights at Peremilovo. Manteuffel’s group had too few tanks and infantry to hold a wide bridgehead, and the German command had nothing with which to support it. On 28–29 November the Germans withdrew to the western bank of the canal; some Russian studies state that they were finally driven out on 30 November. The fighting at Peremilovo became one of the symbols of the defence of Moscow in Soviet memory, while Manteuffel himself received the Knight’s Cross for taking the bridge, awarded on 31 December, by which time the front lay dozens of kilometres further west.

In those days the Soviet command also defended itself in ways that affected the civilian population. On 17 November the Stavka issued Order No. 0428, which required settlements behind the German lines to be destroyed and burned in order to deny the enemy winter quarters. According to some studies, it was in execution of the same order that on 28 November water was released from reservoirs north of Moscow into the Yakhroma and Sestra rivers to melt the ice and hinder the German crossing; several dozen villages were partly flooded.

The southern wing: Kashira

That same week the fate of the other arm of the pincers was being decided south of Moscow. Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army, bypassing Tula to the east, took Venyov on 24 November, and on 25 November an advanced detachment of the 17th Panzer Division reached the southern outskirts of Kashira on the Oka, through which ran the road to Moscow. It was halted by an anti-aircraft artillery battalion and the 173rd Rifle Division, formed from the Moscow people’s militia. General of the Army Georgy Zhukov rushed Major General Pavel Belov’s 2nd Cavalry Corps and the 112th Tank Division over from the Serpukhov area by forced march, reinforced with rocket launchers. On 26 November Belov’s corps was renamed the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps, and on 27 November it struck the 17th Panzer Division and threw it back from Kashira. Further east, other divisions of Guderian’s took Skopin on 25 November but lacked the strength to go on towards Ryazan. Tula, outflanked on two sides, was still holding out.

Exhaustion

By the end of November Army Group Centre was at the end of its strength. According to German returns cited in the literature, the 3rd Panzer Group had only about 80 tanks left in its three panzer divisions, and the 4th Panzer Group about 170 in its four. Infantry companies were down to a few dozen men, and fuel, ammunition and horses were all in short supply. The frost, which in the second half of November reached minus ten to twenty degrees, and at the beginning of December minus thirty and lower, killed the wounded and immobilised engines; winter clothing had still not reached the troops. German hospitals were filling up with frostbite cases. Air support was weakening, as some units of Luftflotte 2 were being transferred to the Mediterranean. On 23 November Bock reported the exhaustion of his divisions to the Army High Command, but was told to keep attacking. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, had suffered a heart attack in November and counted for less and less at Adolf Hitler’s headquarters.

The Red Army, too, had been bled white, but – unlike the Germans – it had reserves. Besides the 1st Shock Army, the Stavka was bringing up the 10th and 20th Armies to Moscow, as well as further divisions from the interior and the Far East. Moscow, which had gone through a panic in mid-October, was by November a fortress ringed with anti-tank ditches and obstacles.

Place in the war

Yakhroma was the easternmost point reached by the northern arm of the German pincers. In the days that followed the Germans still tried to advance on Moscow directly from the north-west: on 30 November they took Krasnaya Polyana and Puchki, some 30 kilometres from the Kremlin, and on 2 December a patrol of sappers reportedly reached the Khimki area on the outskirts of the capital. On 1 December Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army attacked in the centre, but its offensive at Naro-Fominsk collapsed after a few days. Meanwhile, on 30 November, Joseph Stalin approved the plan for a counter-offensive prepared by Zhukov. On 5 December the Kalinin Front struck, and on 6 December the Western Front; on 7 December the 1st Shock Army retook Yakhroma, and in mid-December Solnechnogorsk and Klin.

On 28 November, the day on which the German bridgehead at Yakhroma began to crumble, the Red Army retook Rostov-on-Don on the southern wing of the Eastern Front. These were the first two signs that the campaign meant to defeat the Soviet Union within a few months was ending in failure. The bridge at Yakhroma – taken by surprise and given up after less than two days – became for historians an image of the whole November offensive: the German troops could still break through to their objective, but no longer had the strength to hold it.