The Greatest Battle Read online

  ALSO BY ANDREW NAGORSKI

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  The Birth of Freedom:

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  Reluctant Farewell:

  An American Reporter’s Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Nagorski

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  AP/Wide World Photos: 1, 2, 3

  Franklin D. Roosevelt Library: 4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nagorski, Andrew.

  The greatest battle : Stalin, Hitler, and the desperate struggle for Moscow that changed the course of World War II / Andrew Nagorski.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Moscow, Battle of, Moscow, Russia, 1941–1942. 2. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Military leadership. 3. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Military leadership. I. Title.

  D764.3.M6N33 2007

  940.54'214731—dc22 2007017053

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4573-6

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-4573-5

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  the first of the next generation

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  We will break them soon, it’s only a question of time…Moscow will be attacked and will fall, then we will have won the war.

  —Hitler speaking to an aide in mid-September 1941

  Are you sure we are going to be able to hold Moscow? I am asking with an aching heart.

  —Stalin in a phone call to General Georgy Zhukov in mid-November 1941

  Contents

  A Note on Transliteration

  Introduction

  1

  “Hitler will not attack us in 1941”

  2

  “Look how smart we are now”

  3

  The Price of Terror

  4

  Hitler and his generals

  5

  “Moscow is in danger”

  6

  “The brotherhood of man”

  7

  Panic in Moscow

  8

  Saboteurs, Jugglers, and Spies

  9

  “O Mein Gott! O Mein Gott!”

  10

  “Don’t be sentimental”

  11

  “The worst of all worlds”

  12

  The Deadliest Victory

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographic Insert

  A Note on Transliteration

  The transliteration system found in the body of this book is the one that is usually used by the American media. Although it is not always totally consistent, it is considered the simplest and most readable. The system used in the endnotes and bibliography, however, is the Library of Congress system, which is commonly employed by U.S. libraries. In the case of Russian works that have been translated previously into English, the spelling of the authors’ names has been adopted as published.

  Introduction

  In the fall of 1941, two gargantuan armies fiercely fought each other on the northern, southern, and western approaches to Moscow. On both sides it wasn’t so much the generals who were calling the shots as the tyrants Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Those two leaders issued everyone their orders, never hesitating to send millions to their death whether in combat or in prisons and the camps. Both demonstrated ruthless resolve and, at times, brilliant tactics, but they were also prone to strategic shortsightedness on a colossal scale.

  Hitler dispatched his armies deep into Russia without winter clothing, since he was convinced they would triumph long before the first frosts arrived. Stalin sent many of his troops into battle without guns, since he hadn’t prepared the nation for the German onslaught. This doomed countless thousands of Germans to death by freezing in the first winter of the Russian campaign and countless thousands of Red Army soldiers to instant death because they did not survive long enough to pick up whatever weapon they could find among the dead and the dying.

  The battle for Moscow, which officially lasted from September 30, 1941, to April 20, 1942, but in reality spanned more than those 203 days of unremitting mass murder, marked the first time that Hitler’s armies failed to triumph with their Blitzkrieg tactics. When those armies had crushed Poland, France and much of the rest of Europe with breathtaking speed, they had looked unstoppable. “This defeat, however, was more than just another lost battle,” Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the German officers who later joined the conspiracy against Hitler, recalled in his memoirs. “With it went the myth of the invincibility of the German soldier. It was the beginning of the end. The German army never completely recovered from that defeat.” True enough, but the German forces would continue to fight with astonishing tenacity, and their ultimate defeat was still a long way off, which is why such judgments have been rendered only with the benefit of hindsight.

  The battle for Moscow was arguably the most important battle of World War II and inarguably the largest battle between two armies of all time. Combining the totals for both sides, approximately seven million troops were involved in some portion of this battle. Of those seven million, 2.5 million were killed, taken prisoner, missing or wounded badly enough to require hospitalization—with the losses far heavier on the Soviet than on the German side. According to Russian military records, 958,000 Soviet soldiers “perished,” which included those killed, missing or taken prisoner. Given the treatment they received at the hands of their captors, most Soviet POWs were, in effect, condemned to death. Another 938,500 soldiers were hospitalized for their wounds, which brought overall Soviet losses to 1,896,500. The corresponding number for the German forces was 615,000.

  By comparison, the losses for other epic battles, while horrific, never reached those kinds of figures. In the popular imagination, the battle for Stalingrad, from July 1942 to early February 1943, is generally considered the bloodiest of those struggles. It was huge but never approached the size of the battle for Moscow. About half the number of troops—3.6 million—were involved, and the combined losses of the two sides were 912,000 troops, as compared to the 2.5 million in the Moscow battle.

  None of the other major battles of the two world wars come much closer to Moscow’s tallies. In the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, for example, the combined losses of the Turkish and Allied troops were roughly 500,000; for the battle of the Somme, from July to October 1916, German, British and French losses totaled about 1.1 million. And just in terms of the numbers of troops involved in the fighting, many other legendary battles of World War II weren’t even in the same league as the battle for Moscow. At the pivotal battle of El Alamein during the North African campaign, for example, the opposing armies totaled 310,000.

  This was also a battle that was played out in front of a global audience, with the United States, Britain, Japan and others making key decisions based on their assessments of its likely outcome. There’s no doubt that if the Germans hadn’t been stopped at the outskirts of Moscow, the repercussions would have been felt around the world.

  And yet the battle for Moscow is now largely forgotten. Historians have paid far more attenti
on both to the battles of Stalingrad and the Kursk salient, which represented clear-cut victories over Hitler’s forces, and to the searing human drama of the siege of Leningrad. By contrast, the battle for Moscow was marred by too many errors and miscalculations by Stalin and raised too many unsettling questions to be subject to the same level of attention. As a result, it was often hastily dealt with in the history books and has never attained the mythological status of the later victories. But it’s precisely because of its crucial role in the early period of World War II and what it reveals about the nature of the totalitarian giants who faced off against each other that the real story of the battle for Moscow has to be told, elevating this battle to its proper place in the history of the war.

  History always looks inevitable in retrospect, but the plain fact is that there’s usually nothing inevitable about the cataclysmic events that shape our world. To the Soviet leadership in 1941, there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of the German assault on their country, despite the official rhetoric. In the confrontation between the two monstrous leaders of all time, Hitler and Stalin, it was the German who initially caught his Soviet counterpart off guard. Stalin had ignored a rising flood of intelligence warning him that the Germans were about to attack and expressly forbidden his generals to take the measures that would have given their armies a better chance of withstanding the invaders.

  The result was that the Soviet forces were thrown into total disarray during the early months of the war, and the Germans pushed deeper and deeper into the Soviet heartland, with Moscow clearly in their sights. On August 12, 1941, Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, outlined the main target of the German offensive. “The object of operations must then be to deprive the enemy, before the coming of winter, of his government, armament, and traffic center around Moscow, and thus prevent the rebuilding of his defeated forces and the orderly working of government control,” he wrote in Directive 34a. In other words, Hitler’s goal of a swift victory in the east, so he could then turn his attention back to the war against Britain, depended on his ability to surround and then seize the Soviet capital.

  Soon enough, that looked like a very real possibility. While some Soviet troops fought heroically against overwhelming odds, others—and they numbered in the hundreds of thousands—surrendered as quickly as they could. Stalin, for his part, suffered a near psychological collapse as his country looked as though it might implode. Buoyed by their early swift progress, German soldiers put up signposts proclaiming “To Moscow.” As Hitler prepared for Operation Typhoon in September 1941, which was supposed to culminate in the collapse of the Soviet capital, he told his subordinates, “In a few weeks we shall be in Moscow.” Then, he added, “I will raze that damned city and in its place construct an artificial lake with central lighting. The name of Moscow will disappear for ever.” Whether or not he meant the last part literally or was carried away by the emotion of the moment, his boasts accurately reflected the growing sense that the Soviet capital wouldn’t be able to mount an effective defense against the forces preparing to launch a massive assault.

  And what would the seizure of Moscow signify for the entire war effort? When foreign invaders had seized the city twice before—the Poles in the early seventeenth century and Napoleon in 1812—those victories had proven to be short-lived. In Napoleon’s case, the breakthrough to Moscow only set the stage for the catastrophic defeat and retreat of his Grande Armée. But Moscow in those earlier times wasn’t nearly the prize it was in 1941. By then, it was not only the political but also the strategic and industrial center of the country and its transportation hub. Its seizure would have been a devastating blow for the Soviet Union—and for all those seeking to thwart Hitler’s war aims.

  Boris Nevzorov, a Russian military historian who has spent his life studying the battle for Moscow, argues that the Germans’ failure there was the key event that determined the outcome of the war. “If they had taken Moscow, the war would have ended with a German victory,” he maintains. Other historians and some of the surviving participants dispute that claim, insisting that the Soviet Union would have eventually rebounded even from the loss of its capital. Neither side can prove its case, of course; history doesn’t provide definitive answers to “what if” questions. But Nevzorov is on indisputably firm ground when he characterizes the battle for Moscow as “our first great victory and the first great loss for Nazi Germany.”

  Soviet accounts of the battle solemnly mention the danger the country faced as German troops closed in on the capital in the fall of 1941. “It was the lowest point reached throughout the war,” notes the five-volume official History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, which was published in the early 1960s. But those accounts don’t dwell on the significance of the German failure to complete the push to take the city. This is no accident, nye sluchaino, as the Russians say. The early Soviet histories of the period had plenty of reasons to dispose of the battle for Moscow quickly.

  First of all, the disastrous series of events associated with the battle raised all sorts of questions about Stalin and his incessant use of terror as a weapon against his own people—a practice he continued throughout the war. It was his mistakes that allowed the Germans to get as close as they did, and the subsequent scenes of panic in the city as people rushed to escape belied the myth that everyone had an unshakable faith in victory from the beginning.

  Then there was the sheer scale of the Soviet losses. Boris Vidensky was a cadet at the Podolsk Artillery Academy when the war started and was among the lucky few of his class who survived when they were thrown—thoroughly unprepared—against the advancing Germans. He went on to become a senior researcher at the Military History Institute in Moscow. In retirement, he recounted that after the war, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the legendary Red Army architect of the Soviet victory, decided to try to estimate the losses of his troops near Moscow. In the postwar period, Zhukov served as defense minister, and he ordered his deputy to make some rough calculations. When the deputy showed him the figure he had come up with, Zhukov quickly barked out an order. “Hide it and don’t show it to anybody!”

  Even when the German drive to take the capital was repulsed, the battle for Moscow proved to be an incomplete victory. Just as it was preceded by Stalin’s huge miscalculations, it was followed by more of them. Stalin’s insistence, over the opposition of his generals, that they now hurl their exhausted forces into an all-out offensive against the Germans produced a series of costly defeats and sent casualty counts skyrocketing. The Germans stubbornly hung on to pockets of territory, notably around the town of Rzhev, northwest of Moscow, for nearly a year after the battle for the capital was officially declared over. The initial relief that Moscow was saved was quickly replaced by bitter disappointment.

  In other words, despite the genuine courage and heroism of Moscow’s defenders, this huge battle was marked by humiliations and defeats from its earliest days all the way through to its lengthy aftermath. Both sides came to realize that they were in for a long war, the bloodiest fighting in human history. And it was even bloodier than necessary because of Stalin’s and Hitler’s miscalculations and unremitting ruthlessness. For Stalin, the human toll was the least of his concerns. As he would tell Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during the Korean War, the North Koreans could keep fighting because they “lose nothing, except for their men.” He maintained the same attitude toward his own country’s losses as they mounted at a dizzying pace.

  To be fair, Stalin also inspired many of his countrymen, and it was his decision to stay in Moscow when he had already ordered the evacuation of other top officials and both military and civilian installations that proved, in retrospect, to be a key turning point in the battle for Moscow. If Stalin was living proof of Machiavelli’s dictum that for a ruler it is much safer to be feared than loved, he also at times came close to the Florentine’s ideal “that one ought to be both feared and loved.” The war was one of those times. Many of his countryme
n were genuinely willing to sacrifice their lives for their country and for Stalin, convinced that they were one and the same.

  This book draws upon a broad range of sources, some tapped for the first time. Among them: large numbers of newly declassified documents from the archives of the NKVD, as the KGB was then called; first-hand accounts from survivors, some of whom only now feel free to talk about the full range of their experiences, often contradicting the sanitized version of events presented by Soviet and even some Western writers; interviews with the children of such key figures as Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, and top NKVD leaders responsible for planning for resistance and sabotage in a German-controlled Moscow; published and unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs from a variety of Russians and foreigners.

  All of this evidence makes clear that the battle for Moscow wasn’t just the largest single battle of the war but also its earliest turning point. To be sure, the battle of Britain had already demonstrated that the German military machine wasn’t unstoppable, but that was an air battle. Wherever Hitler’s armies could march, they had continued to win victories—that is, until the battle for Moscow.

  At a rally in Berlin’s Sportpalast on October 3, 1941, Hitler told his cheering supporters that the drive to Moscow, which appeared to be in its final stages, was “the greatest battle in the history of the world.” Once the Soviet dragon was slain, it “would never rise again,” he predicted. While keenly aware of the precedent set by Napoleon, Hitler was convinced—and managed to convince his armies—that they didn’t have to fear defeat in the snows of Russia. But he was soon to be proven wrong in all his predictions. He was right only in his claim that the battle for Moscow was the greatest battle ever—but from his perspective, for all the wrong reasons.