The Vyazma and Bryansk pockets

On Friday 10 October 1941 German newspapers appeared with headlines of a kind not printed since the fall of France. The Nazi Party organ, the Völkischer Beobachter, announced on its front page that the campaign in the east had been decided and that the last Bolshevik forces were perishing in the great battles at Vyazma and Bryansk. The day before, the Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich had called a press conference in Berlin for German and foreign journalists and, invoking Hitler himself, declared that Soviet Russia was finished militarily and that the British dream of a two-front war was dead. On that same 10 October, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov took command of the remnants of the forces defending Moscow.

Popular chronologies record under 10 October that the Germans encircled some 660,000 Red Army soldiers at Vyazma, and that some predicted an imminent end to the war. That figure needs explaining. It is not the strength of the troops encircled at Vyazma alone, but a later German tally of the prisoners taken in both pockets together, at Vyazma and at Bryansk: the Wehrmacht communiqué issued after the fighting ended spoke of 663,000, and Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s order of the day of 19 October of 673,098 prisoners. On 10 October the fighting in the pockets was only just getting under way, and the encircled armies were trying to break out to the east. The second part of the entry is true, however: the “glowing prophecy” of the war’s end was made by none other than Dietrich.

The first week of “Typhoon”

Operation Typhoon opened on 30 September with an attack by Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 on the southern wing, and on 2 October the main forces of Army Group Centre went over to the offensive. The Germans did not strike where they were expected, along the Smolensk–Moscow highway, but on the flanks, against thinly held sectors. North of the highway Panzer Group 3, subordinated to Colonel General Adolf Strauß’s 9th Army, broke through the front at the junction of the Soviet 30th and 19th Armies. In the south Colonel General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, operating together with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army, smashed the Reserve Front’s 43rd Army on the Desna, took Spas-Demensk on 4 October and Yukhnov on 5 October. From both breaches the panzer divisions wheeled towards Vyazma, into the rear of the Soviet armies facing west.

On the Soviet side three fronts stood on the Moscow axis. Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Western Front held the sector from Lake Seliger to Yelnya; behind it and on its left wing stood Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s Reserve Front, and further south Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front. After the summer defeats at Smolensk and the costly attacks of August and September, such as the Yelnya offensive, many divisions had been filled up with newly called-up reservists or came from the people’s militia raised from Moscow volunteers in the summer. The defence lacked depth, and its strongest sectors – among them Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army by the highway – were not attacked at all.

A counter-attack by Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin’s operational group near Kholm-Zhirkovsky on 3–5 October failed to stop the panzer group from the north, and on 5 October Budyonny reported that he had nothing with which to close the breach on his left wing. Only that afternoon did the Stavka agree to the Western Front’s withdrawal to the Rzhev–Vyazma line. The order came too late. The troops fell back in disorder under the bombs of VIII Air Corps, and communications between front and army headquarters broke down again and again. The staff of the 16th Army managed to get away to the east to organise the defence of Vyazma, but its divisions were handed over to the 20th Army and remained in the encirclement.

The Vyazma pocket

On the morning of 7 October tanks of the 10th Panzer Division from Hoepner’s XL Motorised Corps entered Vyazma from the south, and a few hours later units of the 7th Panzer Division from Panzer Group 3, advancing from the north, appeared on the eastern edge of the town. The ring was closed. Since 5 October that group had been commanded by General of Panzer Troops Georg-Hans Reinhardt, because its previous commander, Colonel General Hermann Hoth, had been transferred to Ukraine to command the 17th Army. Encircled west of Vyazma were Lieutenant General Mikhail Lukin (PL)’s 19th Army, Lieutenant General Fyodor Yershakov’s 20th Army, Major General Konstantin Rakutin’s 24th Army, Major General Sergei Vishnevsky (PL)’s 32nd Army and Boldin’s group. According to Russian studies the pocket and several smaller encirclements next to it held the headquarters of four armies, 37 divisions, nine tank brigades and 31 artillery regiments of the High Command Reserve.

Lukin took overall command of the encircled troops. For several days he tried to break out to the east, first straight ahead against the German motorised corps at Vyazma, then through the forests to the south. Rakutin was killed on 7 October while leading his army out of the pocket. On the night of 10–11 October the strongest attack fell on the German 11th Panzer Division; parts of two divisions then managed to escape the encirclement. On 12 October the ring was briefly broken north of Vyazma, and Boldin’s group among others passed through the gap, but the Germans quickly closed it. After that the large breakout attempts ceased. The pocket broke up into smaller ones, which the Germans destroyed one by one. Lukin, seriously wounded, was taken prisoner, as were Vishnevsky and Yershakov; Lukin survived the German prisoner-of-war camps and returned to the Soviet Union in 1945. The last encircled units laid down their arms around 19–20 October. According to Russian researchers some 85,000 men in all escaped from the Vyazma encirclement, mostly in small groups, and the remnants of 16 divisions reached the new defensive line at Mozhaisk as units several hundred to two thousand strong.

The Bryansk pockets

In the south Guderian, whose divisions had only just returned from Kiev, moved faster than anyone. On 1 October his XXIV Motorised Corps took Sevsk; on 3 October the 4th Panzer Division drove into Oryol, which had not been prepared for defence, and from there Guderian turned north-west into the rear of the Bryansk Front. On 6 October the 17th Panzer Division took Bryansk with its bridges over the Desna, cutting off the front headquarters’ line of retreat, while the divisions of Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs’s 2nd Army were closing in from the west. The Bryansk Front was cut in two: north of the city, in the forests near Bryansk and Dyatkovo, was Major General Mikhail Petrov’s 50th Army; south of it, in the Trubchevsk area, were the 3rd and 13th Armies. On 9 October the 2nd Army’s infantry linked up with Guderian’s tanks and closed the second ring. By that day Guderian’s group already bore the name 2nd Panzer Army.

The Bryansk pockets were less tightly sealed than the one at Vyazma. The German front was thin here, and the forests and marshes made it easier to slip through the ring. On the road to Tula, moreover, Guderian was halted at Mtsensk by Major General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s hastily assembled 1st Guards Rifle Corps. On 6 October Colonel Mikhail Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade, equipped with T-34 tanks, ambushed the spearhead of the 4th Panzer Division. After the war Guderian wrote of “a few terrible hours” and of how the superiority of the T-34 over the German tanks had for the first time become plainly apparent; some historians, however, among them Niklas Zetterling, believe that the legend of Mtsensk exaggerated the German losses. Mtsensk fell only on 11 October, and the march on Tula came to a halt for the time being.

Inside the rings chaos reigned. The Bryansk Front’s headquarters, attacked at its command post, lost contact with its armies. On 12–14 October the encircled armies attempted to break out. The 3rd Army succeeded on the Navlya, the 13th near Khomutovka, and its remnants, some 10,000 men, crossed the Svapa on 18 October. The 50th Army was shattered at the crossings of the Resseta; Petrov was killed during the breakout, and the last groups emerged from the forests in the Belyov area only on 20–23 October. On 13 October Yeremenko was seriously wounded in an air raid and flown out to Moscow. Russian studies estimate that the armies of the Bryansk Front lost up to 85–90 per cent of their strength in this fighting, along with all their heavy equipment and transport. At the same time, for two weeks they tied down most of the divisions of the 2nd Army and the 2nd Panzer Army, which were supposed to advance on Tula and outflank Moscow from the south.

“The campaign in the east is decided”

The closing of both pockets set off euphoria in the German command. On 7 October the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, flew to Bock’s headquarters, and it was agreed that the moment, when there were scarcely any Soviet troops left in front of Moscow, had to be exploited at once. According to an assessment by the staff of Army Group Centre dated 8 October, the enemy no longer had any sizeable forces to throw into the path to the capital. Hitler, however, diverted part of the forces to the flanks: Panzer Group 3 and part of the 9th Army were to turn north towards Kalinin, and the 2nd Panzer Army was to take Kursk. Bock objected to this dispersal, but on 8 October Hitler’s order settled the matter.

The mood carried over into propaganda. On 3 October Hitler declared in the Berlin Sportpalast that the enemy “is already broken and will never rise again”, and on 9 October Dietrich presented journalists with a picture of victory so unequivocal that foreign correspondents came to believe that all Soviet resistance was about to collapse. German military communiqués had until then been regarded as reliable on concrete, verifiable matters, so the words of Hitler’s spokesman were taken literally. The German press seized on the slogan that the campaign had been decided; the Völkischer Beobachter wrote that “seven short autumn days had sufficed” to deal a mortal blow to the greatest war machine of all time and – even though Konev had commanded the Western Front since September – attributed the defeat to Marshal Timoshenko. In the Reich, where the mood had been uncertain since the summer, people began to talk of soldiers coming home for Christmas.

Not everyone in the leadership shared this triumphalism. The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who had for years been vying with Dietrich for control of the press, noted in his diary that the press chief had painted the military situation in “extraordinarily positive and optimistic” colours and that the slogan “the war is over” promised an outcome that was still uncertain. He ordered the press to write more cautiously. A few weeks later, when the advance had bogged down, the words of 9 October began to weigh on the regime, and abroad they became an example of propaganda running ahead of the facts.

Zhukov in Moscow

On the Soviet side the first days of October brought paralysis. In Moscow, reports of German tanks near Yukhnov were long disbelieved. On 5 October Joseph Stalin summoned Zhukov from Leningrad; he flew into Moscow on 7 October and that same night went to the front to find out what was happening. As he later recalled, on the road to Maloyaroslavets and Medyn he met almost no troops, and the Reserve Front’s headquarters did not know where its commander was. On 8 October Stalin gave Zhukov the Reserve Front in place of Budyonny, who was relieved. Meanwhile a commission of the State Defence Committee, with Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov and Georgy Malenkov, arrived at the Western Front’s headquarters. On the evening of 10 October the Stavka merged the remnants of both fronts into a single Western Front under Zhukov’s command, and on 12 October also placed under him the troops assembled on the Mozhaisk Line. Konev, who according to Zhukov’s memoirs faced a court martial, became his deputy, and on 17 October was given the newly formed Kalinin Front.

Zhukov had little at his disposal. According to German and Soviet estimates, in mid-October there were fewer than 100,000 soldiers between Vyazma and Moscow: officer cadets from the military schools, machine-gun battalions, tank brigades, and divisions that had escaped from the pockets or were arriving by rail from other fronts, including the Far East. Colonel Lev Lopukhovsky, a Russian historian of the battle of Vyazma, puts the losses of the Western and Reserve Fronts from 28 September to 18 October at some 780,000 men, around 527,000 of them taken prisoner, and the Bryansk Front’s losses in prisoners alone at some 147,000. The official Russian tables edited by Grigory Krivosheev give, for the entire defensive phase of the battle of Moscow, from 30 September to 5 December, 514,338 killed, missing and captured and 143,941 wounded and sick; historians point out that the armies in the pockets submitted no loss reports at all, so these figures are understated. According to German data, Army Group Centre lost some 49,000 killed, wounded and missing from the start of the operation to 17 October.

Place in the war

The Vyazma and Bryansk pockets were among the greatest defeats suffered by the Red Army in the entire war, comparable to the Kiev encirclement in September. At Vyazma the Germans destroyed the main forces of two fronts; at Bryansk they shattered a third. In the transit camp for prisoners at Vyazma, set up in the buildings of a meat-processing plant, people died of hunger, cold and disease by the hundred every day; according to Russian researchers between 70,000 and 80,000 people were buried in pits on its grounds. Most of the Soviet prisoners taken in the autumn of 1941 did not live to see the spring.

And yet Dietrich was wrong about the most important thing. The encircled armies fought on at Vyazma until about 19 October and at Bryansk until 23 October, tying down dozens of German divisions that were then missing from the pursuit. At Mtsensk, and by the middle of the month also at Kalinin and Mozhaisk, the German columns ran into fresh resistance, and on the night of 6–7 October the first snow fell, followed by rain and thaw. Halder was later said to have remarked that after the battle of Vyazma and Bryansk the OKH concluded that the war against the Soviet Union could no longer be won – words attributed to him in an account by Helmut Arntz. Enough men escaped from the pockets for Zhukov to build a new front on the Mozhaisk Line, which the Germans attacked in mid-October. In those same days panic broke out in Moscow and the government was evacuated to Kuybyshev. At the end of October Army Group Centre came within a few dozen kilometres of Moscow, and there it stuck. The great victory of early October, proclaimed as the end of the campaign, turned out to be the last great encirclement of 1941. The next offensive, in November, and the Soviet counter-offensive of 5 December showed that the war in the east was only just beginning.