The November offensive on Moscow

On Saturday 15 November 1941, after a two-week pause, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s German Army Group Centre moved on Moscow once again. That day, on the northern wing between Kalinin and the Ivankovo Reservoir on the upper Volga, the corps of the 9th Army and of the 3rd Panzer Group under General of Panzer Troops Georg-Hans Reinhardt attacked; on 16 November, at Volokolamsk, the 4th Panzer Group of Colonel General Erich Hoepner; and on 18 November, in the south near Tula, the 2nd Panzer Army of Colonel General Heinz Guderian. The roads, which in October had turned to mud, were now frozen and once again passable for tanks. The last phase of Operation Typhoon had begun: an attempt to encircle the Soviet capital before winter immobilised both armies for good.

War chronologies typically describe these days in three entries. Under 12 November they record that the temperature near Moscow fell to minus 12 degrees and that the Soviet Union “for the first time” sent ski troops against the freezing Germans. Under 13 November they state that the Germans began a new offensive because the sodden ground had frozen again, and under 15 November that the Germans attacked Moscow. This needs some additions. What happened on 13 November was not the start of the offensive but the decision, taken at Orsha, to resume it; the first corps set off on 15 November. The frost had set in as early as the beginning of November and by mid-month was harsher than these lists suggest: Guderian wrote in his memoirs that in his sector the thermometers showed minus 15 degrees on 12 November and minus 22 on 13 November, whereas Zhukov wrote that the November frosts near Moscow were usually 7–10 degrees. The figure of minus 12 thus falls within that range, but readings varied widely from place to place and from source to source. Finally, ski troops were nothing new in the Red Army: independent ski battalions had already fought in the Winter War against Finland in 1939–1940, and after its hard lessons the State Defence Committee decided on 2 September 1941 to form 67 reserve ski regiments and, on 15 September, ski battalions for the rifle divisions. In November the first of them were reaching the Moscow front; by the end of the month, according to Russian figures, the new 1st Shock Army had eleven of them. Their great moment, however, would come only in the December counter-offensive.

The pause

At the end of October the advance on Moscow had stalled. After the fighting on the Mozhaisk Line the German spearheads stood 70–100 kilometres from the Kremlin; in the south Guderian had been repulsed at Tula; and further out on the right wing the 2nd Army took Kursk only during the night of 2–3 November. On 1 November Bock ordered a halt to large-scale operations until the frost hardened the roads and supplies could be brought up. The first frost came on 3–4 November, but bringing up ammunition and fuel took almost two weeks. The army group depended on a single, wrecked Smolensk–Moscow highway and on railway lines that had to be converted to the narrower gauge; far fewer trains arrived than the troops needed. Winter clothing, prepared in small quantities, was stuck at congested stations in Poland and Belarus. The soldiers who went into the attack in mid-November wore summer uniforms and greatcoats, and the panzer divisions had only a few dozen serviceable tanks each.

The Soviet side made better use of the pause. Moscow, which in mid-October had experienced panic and the evacuation of the authorities, was turned into a fortified camp surrounded by anti-tank ditches. On 7 November Joseph Stalin, who had spoken the day before at a ceremonial session in the hall of Mayakovskaya metro station, took the traditional parade on Red Square for the anniversary of the revolution, and regiments marched from it straight to the front. General of the Army Georgy Zhukov wrote in his memoirs that in the first half of November the Western Front received some 100,000 men, 300 tanks and 2,000 guns. The most threatened axes – towards Klin and Volokolamsk in the north and towards Tula in the south – were now held in several echelons. At the same time Stalin demanded spoiling attacks; Zhukov protested that he had no reserves for them, but had to carry them out. The attacks by the 16th Army near Volokolamsk and the 49th Army near Serpukhov in mid-November achieved little beyond losses, although the blow near Serpukhov tied down part of the German 4th Army.

The conference at Orsha

On 12 November the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, travelled in his special train from headquarters in East Prussia to Orsha in Belarus. On the morning of 13 November he met there the chiefs of staff of the three army groups and of seven armies of the Eastern Front. He brought guidelines from the Army High Command which named among the distant objectives of the autumn campaign Gorky, Yaroslavl, Stalingrad and Maikop, and as the minimum objective the encirclement of Moscow. Halder admitted that a decision in the war in 1941 was no longer certain, but argued that the Red Army had lost at least half its strength, so the attack had to go on as long as possible in order to inflict the heaviest possible losses on it before the spring.

The chiefs of staff of Army Groups North and South were inclined rather to go over to the defensive and prepare winter quarters. The staff of Army Group Centre was cautious, but Bock, like the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, wanted to attack. He believed the enemy was as exhausted as his own troops, and that falling back to winter positions in front of Moscow would be worse than one last effort. According to Guderian’s memoirs, his chief of staff reminded the conference that “this is not May and we are not in France”; other authors attribute similar words to the chief of staff of Army Group South, General Georg von Sodenstern. Officers who knew the state of the troops did not believe in plans reaching far beyond Moscow. In the end limited objectives were agreed: the encirclement of the capital, and even that depending on the weather and the forces available.

Bock’s plan provided for two pincers. In the north the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups were to break through via Klin and Solnechnogorsk, reach the Moscow–Volga Canal and bypass the city from the north. In the south the 2nd Panzer Army was to skirt Tula to the east and advance on Kashira and Kolomna. The pincers were to meet east of the capital, in the Noginsk area. The 4th Army of Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, in the centre, was to pin down the Soviet forces and join the attack once the wings had succeeded.

The attack

On 15 November the blow fell on the 30th Army, which was defending the sector between the Ivankovo Reservoir and Volokolamsk and in those days passed from the Kalinin Front to Zhukov’s command; on 18 November Major General Dmitry Lelyushenko took over its command. The Germans split it from the neighbouring 16th Army of Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky and pushed on towards Klin. On 16 November the 4th Panzer Group attacked the 16th Army near Volokolamsk – on the very day on which Rokossovsky, on orders from above, was himself to go over to the attack. According to Russian studies, by 20 November the two German panzer groups had advanced about 25 kilometres. Progress was slower than in the summer: Soviet divisions fell back from one line to the next, counter-attacked and withdrew by night before the Germans could encircle them. Zhukov recorded that the enemy, “regardless of losses”, was attacking frontally in order to reach Moscow at any price.

On the Volokolamsk highway the 316th Rifle Division of Major General Ivan Panfilov was fighting; in those days it was renamed the 8th Guards. Its fighting on 16 November gave rise to the legend of the “28 Panfilov men”, who at Dubosekovo were said to have destroyed more than a dozen German tanks and died to the last man. An investigation by the Soviet military prosecutor’s office in 1948 established that the episode in this form had been invented by journalists of Krasnaya Zvezda; the division’s heavy fighting, however, was real. Panfilov himself was killed on 18 November by a mortar-bomb fragment.

On 18 November, after ten days of regrouping, Guderian set off. His divisions, still without winter equipment, broke through the front of the 50th Army south-east of Tula, took Dedilovo and Yepifan and advanced 5–10 kilometres a day, exposing their flanks to blows from Tula. According to Russian figures, German superiority in this sector reached threefold in men, artillery and tanks, and a gap some 50 kilometres wide opened between the 50th Army and the 3rd Army of the South-Western Front. Between 22 and 25 November – sources give different dates – the Germans took Stalinogorsk, today’s Novomoskovsk. On 22 November Zhukov removed the commander of the 50th Army, Major General Arkady Yermakov, and replaced him with Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin.

Place in the war

The November offensive was the Wehrmacht’s last attempt in 1941 to take Moscow or at least to encircle it. In the days that followed it brought the Germans successes that looked menacing from afar: Klin fell on 23 November and Solnechnogorsk on 23–24 November, at the end of the month German tanks reached the Moscow–Volga Canal, and in the south Guderian drew near to Kashira. According to German studies, however, on 23 November Bock reported to the Army High Command that his troops were exhausted, and was told to attack “with the last ounce of strength”, because headquarters believed that on the other side, too, the last battalion was now in the fight.

That calculation proved wrong. The Stavka was holding three new armies in reserve – the 1st Shock, the 10th and the 20th – and at the end of November it handed them over to Zhukov. In the first days of December the German spearheads came to a halt a few dozen kilometres from the Kremlin, in frosts reaching 30 degrees below zero and more, and on 5 and 6 December the Red Army went over to a counter-offensive that threw Army Group Centre back from the capital. The decision taken at Orsha, against the warnings of some staff officers, cost the Germans tens of thousands of killed, wounded and frostbitten soldiers and hundreds of tanks they had no means of replacing. Many historians regard it as one of the gravest mistakes of the German command in 1941: troops that in mid-November could still have dug in for the winter in prepared positions met the December blow exhausted, overstretched and without fortifications.