The Moscow Option by David Downing Read Free Book Online Page A

meet Gruppe Vietinghoff . The rest of Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 was to punch through the Red Army line in the Sumy-Konotop area and drive south-east behind Kharkov, before moving on into the Donbass industrial region.
    Halder did not expect these operations to proceed smoothly. There were still a lot of Russians in uniform, and conditions were deteriorating rapidly with the approach of winter. But for once he overestimated the enemy. All the extant Soviet accounts agree that in these crucial weeks which followed Moscow’s fall the Red Army came close to breaking. In order to avoid doing so it bent. According to the Soviet writer Moskalenko, then fighting in the Kursk sector:
    “We thought: ‘Either the war is over and we are fighting on for no reason, or it will be fought to a finish to the east of Moscow.’ None of us considered surrendering - the way the Germans treated prisoners was no secret - but only a few diehards, in those dreadful weeks, wanted to fight and die where they stood. Most of us just wanted to walk away from it all. And we did, in good order, to the east.”
    Only the defenders of Leningrad were denied such an option. In the first week of November, over frost-hardened ground, Panzer Group 3 fought its way north through Chudovo to the southern shores of Lake Ladoga. Panzer Group 4, reinforced by the arrival of 2nd Panzer from OKH reserve, pushed forward along the Gulf of Finland coast towards Leningrad itself. The Finns, spurred on by the fall of Moscow, abandoned their reluctance to cross the old frontier. They advanced down the western shore of Lake Ladoga, joined hands with Hoth’s Panzers, and ended any hopes the Leningraders had of using the freezing lake as a lifeline to the outside world. By 13 November the city was completely cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union.
    Eighteenth Army moved in hopefully for the kill. It was not to be a quick or an easy one. Leningrad was doomed, but its defenders were not about to throw in an unused towel. This was not Moscow. This was the ‘cradle of the revolution’. There would be no surrender.
    So for three months Eighteenth Army fought its way street by street, house by house, through the spiritual centre of Soviet communism. Special units charged across the ice to do battle with the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base. The toll was appalling. According to Professor Hoddle in his Leningrad: Death of a City , over half of Eighteenth Army’s troops were injured or killed in the eleven-week battle. Casualties among the defenders were higher still, and there can be few who do not know the fate of the ‘survivors’ of the battle for Leningrad. The city and its inhabitants died, but the heirs of Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev exacted a high price from their conquerors.
    South of Moscow the Wehrmacht was having an easier time. Two Soviet armies in the Briansk sector failed to withdraw fast enough and were caught by the closing pincers of Mackenson’s Corps and Gruppe Vietinghoff . In the far south Eleventh Army overran the Soviet defences on the Perekop Isthmus and occupied all the Crimea save the important fortress of Sevastopol. In the central Ukraine Kleist’s main force broke through to Oboyan and swung southwards behind Kharkov. By the beginning of November the panzers were streaming down the right bank of the Donetz and into the Donbass industrial region. It was only on the Mius river that the panzer spearhead, weakened by the weather, breakdowns and its over-extended supply-lines, was halted by freshly-arrived Siberian troops.
    The German military leadership was satisfied. There would be much to show the Führer when he recovered. Moscow and the Ukraine had fallen, Leningrad would soon follow. According to their calculations sixty per cent of Soviet industry had been overrun. Half of the Soviet population now lived in the lengthening shadow of the hooked cross. The Red Army was all but broken.
    Perhaps there would be no Russian Compiegne, no cosy