After a month of victorious progress, the German High Command were disconcerted by the rapidity of their own advance. Their armies were now fighting on a front 1,000 miles wide. The Stukas could no longer deliver the concerted hammer blows which had punched the holes in the Russian lines which the Panzers had so mercilessly exploited. Even though the Soviet airforce had by now lost approximately five thousand aircraft, the supply of replacements seemed endless. The factories in the east, which were churning out more effective fighter models, were out of Luftwaffe bombing range. The German air assault began to run low on fighters.
The Luftwaffe also had serious supply problems. The distance from home base and the destruction of the transport infrastructure meant that aircraft replacement pans had to be flown to forward airfield. The lengthening supply lines were also affecting the German ground forces. Tank commanders, hundreds of miles from their Polish depots, nevertheless pressed for the final thrust toward Moscow. They argued that only the continuation of the offensive would prevent the Russians from organising a fresh line of resistance. While many of Hitler’s generals disagreed that such an attack should be launched immediately, they were almost unanimous in recommending that Moscow should become the primary objective of the next phase of the war.
Hitler, on the other hand, was worried about the possibility of the gaps between the Panzer divisions and the main armies being exploited by Russian reinforcements. He also feared that the hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops left behind the German lines in the wake of the advance might co-ordinate their actions into an effective guerrilla movement.
Hitler had never been fully convinced of the importance of Moscow and continued to regard it as a secondary objective. The debate stretched out until mid-August. A vital month of summer weather was wasted. The Russians had the breathing space to throw reserve divisions into the gaps in their defences. Though barely trained, poorly equipped, some in the battered remnants of their civilian clothing, their stubborn ferocity meant that they were still a force to be reckoned with.
Eventually, the generals were silenced and two major objectives were prioritised: the capture of Moscow and the fall of the Ukraine.
A giant pincer movement, involving Guderian’s Panzer Group II in a movement from the North and Panzer Group I under von Kleist who were to sweep up from the south, began to close its jaws on a huge pocket of Russian forces to the rear of Kiev. Field Marshall Zhukov, the Soviet Chief of Staff, pleaded with Stalin for a strategic withdrawal of the troops defending the city. He was dismissed from his post. Marshall Timoshenko, the newly appointed South-West commander, arrived just in time to see the Soviet divisions trapped. The 600,000 prisoners taken by the Germans remain the highest number ever captured in a single engagement.
A Panzer IV being guided into a concealed position in a Russian forest.
The battle for the Ukraine now centred on the Crimean Peninsula where the right flank of Army Group South pressed the Soviet 51st army back towards Sebastapol. While half of the German Group Centre were engaged in subduing the Ukraine, Marshall Zhukov was transferred to the reserve forces behind West Front, and seized the opportunity to attack the German 4th army. Occupying a salient near Smolensk, the Germans were now themselves vulnerable to encirclement. The 4th army were thrown back 12km but, without sufficient tanks and aircraft, Zhukov failed to tighten the noose he had made. However, in terms of morale, Zhukov’s counter thrust was highly significant. His action was the first substantial Soviet counter-attack of the war.
Hitler’s response was to regroup Army Group Centre and prepare the most critical operation of the campaign. Operation Typhoon, the drive toward Moscow, was finally under way. Seventy divisions, spearheaded by the 1,500 tanks of Panzer Groups 2 and 3, would race toward the Russian capital before the rains of autumn or the snows of winter could halt their progress.
On 30th September General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group almost inevitably broke through the Soviet line and had encircled the defending Bryansk Front by 6th October. Simultaneously, the Western Front, commanded by Marshall Timoshenko, fell into a similar trap. The pockets of Vyazma and Bryansk containing nine armies of 71 divisions were almost completely destroyed. Another 660,000 troops faced the grim brutality that the German army meted out to prisoners of war and the road to Moscow lay open.
In the Baltic States von Lieb’s Army Group North had captured the city of Novgorod by 16th August, a vital target in the approach to Leningrad. The beleaguered defenders had fought to the death following the German discovery of the city’s defensive plans on the corpse of a Soviet officer. General Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group resumed its drive toward Leningrad, but without supporting infantry its progress was limited.
Leningrad was a vital centre of the wartime production industry, and reserves and equipment were poured into the defence of the city. The citizens themselves formed into militia, divisions of which were flung against the Germans more in despair than hope. Following a basic training period averaging 16 hours, the first militia divisions were sent to the front, six days after being formed; the second two days, and the third, the same day it was established.
An early version of the Stug III moving up in support of the infantry through a blazing Soviet landscape.
Despite such gargantuan efforts, the first shells began to pour down on Leningrad early in September. With the arrival of the 18th Army to reinforce the Panzers on the 8th, the German stranglehold on the city tightened further. The capture of Schlusselburg to the east signalled the end of rail transport.
When Marshall Zhukov arrived to take over the defence of the city on 10th September, he found the defenders in an advanced state of disorganisation and the inhabitants close to panic. Undaunted, he briskly set about bolstering its defences. A shortage of anti-tank guns was dealt with by converting anti-aircraft artillery to the task of attempting to halt the Panzers. Six brigades of naval infantry and students were formed and reinforcements drafted in from the Karelian Isthmus. Zhukov began to take the fight to the Germans, through raids and counter-attacks, but by now the German troops had pierced the inner circle of defences and were rampaging through the suburbs.
After a furious exchange of advances and retreats, at the end of the month the defenders were still hanging on to their city by their fingernails. It seemed inevitable that Leningrad would capitulate.
But as Zhukov awaited a renewed assault, the 4th Panzer Group suddenly departed. They had been ordered south to join the battle for Moscow and the remaining German forces began to build siege lines. Leningrad would not now be taken by force, it would be starved into submission.
The German invaders now controlled all of western Russia on a line from Leningrad in the north to Rostov on the Black Sea, and the Red Army was still retreating before them. The countryside they left behind was a wasteland. The first few months of the war had robbed the nation of nearly fifty per cent of her grain-producing lands.
But the fighting spirit of the Russians was far from crushed. It had been inflamed by accounts of the slaughter of prisoners of war, and the murder and torture committed by the German invaders. Even the constant series of military reverses failed to dampen the ardour of defenders whose motherland had been ravaged.