Borodino Field 1812 and 1941 E-Book

Robert Kershaw

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 534

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The Battle of Borodino resonates with the patriotic soul of Mother Russia. The epic confrontation in September 1812 was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars, leaving France's Grande Armée limping to the gates of Moscow and on to catastrophe in snow and ice. Generations later, in October 1941, an equally bitter battle was fought at Borodino. This time Hitler's SS and Panzers came up against elite Siberian troops defending Stalin's Moscow. Remarkably, both conflicts took place in the same woods and gullies that follow the sinuous line of the Koloch River. Borodino Field relates the gruelling experience of the French army in Russia, juxtaposed with the personal accounts, diaries and letters of SS and Panzer soldiers during the Second World War. Acclaimed historian Robert Kershaw draws on previously untapped archives to narrate the odyssey of soldiers who marched along identical tracks and roads on the 1,000-kilometre route to Moscow, and reveals the astonishing parallels and contrasts between two battles fought on Russian terrain over 100 years apart.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to my grandsons Elijah, Finley and Freddieand my granddaughter India

First published 2021

The History Press

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© Robert Kershaw, 2021

Maps by Tim Mitchell © Piernine Ltd

The right of Robert Kershaw to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 7509 9759 1

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Part One: The Approach to Borodino

1 The Road by Vyazma

147 Miles to Moscow

The Vyazma Pocket, 6–8 October 1941

‘A Feast of Church Towers’, Vyazma, 29–31 August 1812

2 The Road by Gzhatsk (Gagarin)

114 Miles to Moscow

The Moscow Highway, 8–11 October 1941

‘The Pretty Little Town of Gzhatsk’, 31 August–5 September 1812

3 The Road from Gzhatsk to Borodino

From 114 to 83 miles to Moscow

Moscow Behind Us! 11–14 October 1941

Ground of ‘No Particular Advantage’, 5 September 1812

Part Two: Borodino Field

4 The Road by Rogachyovo, Yelnya, and Shevardino

From 86 to 84 Miles to Moscow

Break-in, 13–14 October 1941

‘What a Sham!’ Shevardino, 5–6 September 1812

5 The Road by Artyomki, Utitsy and Borodino Railway Station

From 83 to 82 Miles to Moscow

The Stop–Start Advance, 14–15 October 1941

The Battle of the Giants, 7 September 1812 6 a.m. to 11.30 a.m.

6 The Road Through Borodino Field

83 Miles to Moscow

The Fight Among the Monuments, 15–16 October 1941

Indecision in the Centre, 7 September 1812 11.30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Part Three: Beyond Borodino Field

7 The Road by Raevsky, Gorki and Tatarinovo

From 80 to 76 Miles to Moscow

Supreme Effort, 17 October 1941

‘A Volcano Crowned with Vapours’, The Raevksy Redoubt7 September 18122 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.

8 The Road to Mozhaisk

70 Miles to Moscow

The Capture of Mozhaisk, 18–19 October 1941

Mozhaisk to Moscow, 8–14 September 1812

Postscript Roads to Moscow and Back

Roads to Moscow, 1941

Roads Back from Moscow, 1812 and 1941

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to John Badgery for his assistance in translating many of the Russian 1941 personal accounts and in particular helping, through his former military expertise, in interpreting Russian maps and place names. Vladimir Kroupnik identified and translated a number of especially interesting Russian personal accounts also relating to Borodino in 1941 and advised on their context. George Falco de Mats, a fellow battlefield tourer, helped to guide me through the intricacies of Napoleonic rearguard actions on the Russian side in 1812. My wife, as ever, beavered constantly in the background, enabling me to write, and my thanks also to my agent Charlie Viney for his encouragement and enthusiasm in sponsoring a slightly unusual project.

Prologue

On 10 October 1941 a black locomotive, emblazoned with a distinctive Soviet red star, puffed into the busy station siding encased in swirling steam. As it came to a squealing, grinding halt, the flatcars behind clanked and buffeted each other to a standstill. It was becoming dark. A chorus of urgent directives and shouted commands rang out amid the bustle of ramps pushed up against flatcar sides. Wedges were hammered out and knocked clear amid the rattle of collapsing chains. Russian soldiers jumped down as vehicle engines aboard began to whine and turn over before firing into life, raising clouds of grey exhaust smoke. Soldiers were not allowed to speak to inquisitive civilians looking on. The priority was to get the reconnaissance vehicles off, followed by tanks and armoured vehicles.

Colonel Victor Polosukhin’s car was escorted from these sidings at Dorokhovo railway station, 60 miles west of Moscow. German Luftwaffe air raids had wrecked the main Mozhaisk station, 11 miles further down the track. Gangs of labourers were industriously filling bomb craters and re-laying twisted and contorted rail track further west to enable a more efficient unloading operation. The colonel wanted to reach Borodino some 25 miles to the west, about a thirty-six-minute drive by car. In so doing he was driving against the main flow of refugees choking the roads heading east to Moscow. Polosukhin needed to see the rapidly developing situation up front for himself, and left the busy rail yard behind. The leading echelons of his command, the 32nd Rifle Division, were already unloading vehicles from stationary flatcars.

Local civilians realised such urgent activity did not bode well. Historian Dr Peter Miller, who commented on everyday life in Moscow, wrote in his diary three days before that ‘there is a feeling of approaching catastrophe in the air and endless rumours’. Shops were empty, ‘Orel has been surrendered, Vyazma has been surrendered, and the Germans have got to Maloyaroslavets’.1 These place names had an eerie atmospheric Napoleonic ring to them. Polosukhin had only a sketchy idea of what was going on. His division had entrained from the Leningrad reserve further north, after arriving earlier that summer. As his small staff group drove westward, the front grumbled intermittently 70 miles away in the distance. Unbeknown to him, three German tank groups or Panzergruppen had torn a 300-mile gap in the Moscow outer defence line. Five to six Russian armies were surrounded at Vyazma on the Smolensk to Moscow road ahead and another three further south at Bryansk. Although the news was disturbing, Polosukhin had yet to fully comprehend how catastrophic it was. Rumours abounded that German advance forces were nearing Gzhatsk (present-day Gagarin), just 114 miles from Moscow.

The colonel appreciated history. Place names like Vyazma, Gzhatsk, Maloyaroslavets and Borodino were the 1812 milestones that signposted Napoleon’s Grande Armée approach route to Moscow, now seemingly replicated by Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Polosukhin’s 32nd Rifle Division was one of the oldest in the Red Army and was descended from one of the first regiments of the Petrograd (now Leningrad) Workers in 1917. The division was not tainted by the opprobrium of the earlier Soviet defeats along the frontier that accompanied the opening of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union. It was an undeclared war, breaking the former Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact, signed barely two years before. Polosukhin’s division had, by contrast, recently distinguished itself during intense fighting against the Japanese at Lake Khasan in 1938, for which it was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. The 32nd Division was at high pre-war strength standards, common among the Far Eastern forces, where they had been stationed the past ten years. When alerted for action in late September 1941, the division was already fully mobilised with its 14,500 men, 872 vehicles, 444 machine guns and 286 artillery and heavy mortar pieces. Labelled a ‘Siberian’ division, it was formed from the Volga Military District in 1922, primarily recruiting soldiers from the north-east, which included the Western Siberian Oblasts (or Districts).

Polosukhin sought to get as far forward at Borodino as possible, to view his sector of the so-called ‘Mozhaisk defensive line’. This fortified zone followed an arc from the small city of Volkalamsk in the north, crossed the 1812 Borodino battlefield west of Mozhaisk and extended south to the confluence of the Ugra and Oka rivers. It was about 143 miles wide and between 38 to 50 miles deep, but only 40 per cent of its foreseen bunkers and firing positions had been completed. Due to be manned by 150 battalions, only about forty-five were in situ. The Mozhaisk defensive line was the innermost of three shielding Moscow. The first at Vyazma and Bryansk had already been breached. Behind Mozhaisk was the Moscow Control Zone, comprising urban sectors prepared for the defence of the city itself. Some 200,000 of its residents were compulsorily called out and brought forward to build the Mozhaisk line, and had laboured for the past two months. The plan was that each defending battalion would be provided with four pillboxes housing 45mm guns, two with 76mm guns and twelve for machine guns, all able to fire on fixed lines. Sir John Russell, a member of the British Embassy staff, recalled the sheer extent of the effort, observing:

This great tank trap they were digging outside Moscow, and one saw what looked like ants moving around, in fact the entire civil population of Moscow, every man, woman and child was out there digging.2

Trainloads of Moscow militia, factory workers and residents came out to Borodino, not as they did before the war to enjoy a traditional Sunday picnic, but to dig. Most of them were women. Seamstress Antonia Savina was conscripted several times to dig anti-tank ditches, sustained by a sausage and one small bread roll each day. She and the others slept in local clubs at nights and had to provide their own blankets and cushions. It was not long before she and they were infested with lice. Vasili Pronin, the Chairman of the Moscow City Council, remembered looking inside an anti-tank ditch on one occasion, where ‘in glutinous mud, we saw about 50 wet figures’. Sliding down to talk with them, he discovered they were professional artists and workers from the Bolshoi and other Moscow theatres, with ‘faces tired and wet’. They gathered around and ‘all asked one thing only: What’s happening at the front?’ Sympathising with their plight, he offered to replace them with other more menial workers, but their indignant response was: ‘Do you take us for deserters? It’s worse at the front!’ They assured him they were prepared to ‘put up with everything, so long as our people can hold Moscow’.3

When Colonel Polosukhin reached the western end of the Borodino battlefield he observed the progress that these pressed labour gangs had made on the watercourses that ran broadly north to south. The Kolocha river, the Kamenka and Semenovska streams and the Voina and Stonets had their slopes steepened to create precipitous anti-tank traps. Hillocks and woods that had witnessed Napoleon’s battle in 1812 had again been transformed into defence lines, this time with concrete bunkers as well as earth emplacements. Traversing the ground with binoculars from left to right, he picked out likely German approach routes. Some fifty-three concrete pillboxes, barbed-wire entanglements, seven minefields and 9 miles of anti-tank ditches had been erected to interdict and canalise these potential lines of advance.

It seemed likely that the Germans would approach his position in much the same way the French had done in 1812. Vulnerable points and gaps were identified from his map reconnaissance, in particular battalion areas labelled 8 to 14, from the village of Kovalyovo to the north of the Mozhaisk road, to Elnya straddling the Minsk highway to Moscow further south. There were no significant natural obstacles between battalion areas 28 and 29, around the villages of Artyomki and Tatarinovo, that might impede a panzer advance. Polosukhin had 23,000 men at his disposal, 14,500 from his own division and others from attached units, to hold a line that conventionally needed five more divisions to man. He accepted he could not cover all the defence zones, and concentrated on the main roads traversing the old Napoleonic battlefield. These were the Mozhaisk and Minsk highways and other likely tank approach routes.

John Russell, from the British Embassy, observing the defence preparations, remarked:

I think they did tap every emotional resource that was available to them. I remember for instance a lot of churches being opened again, which had been shut for a long time.

The Tsarist Russian commander Kututzov had similarly sought to inspire his men when he paraded the Icon of the Black Virgin from Smolensk before his assembled troops, to fire up religious fervour prior to battle in 1812. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the typical Red Army soldier was more prepared to fight for ‘Mother Russia’ than Comrade Premier Joseph Stalin. Polosukhin visited a concrete pillbox at the foot of the Raevsky redoubt where Tolstoy’s fictional Pierre Bezukhov had witnessed bloody French assaults in September 1812. Grigouri Tokati, an Ossetian aeronautical engineer, summed up what likely went through the division commander’s mind in October 1941, after so many military defeats:

In that very situation something else appeared among us, the tradition of Borodino. Borodino is the place where Napoleon was defeated, this suddenly released feelings appearing from nowhere that helped to unite people.4

In 1812 about 130,000 Frenchmen and their allies with 587 artillery pieces faced perhaps 150,000 Russians with 624 guns along a 2½- to 5-mile front in a climactic ‘Battle of the Giants’. It is estimated that 100 artillery rounds boomed and 2,330 musket shots spat out each minute for up to ten hours. Men fell at the rate of 6,500 per hour, or about 108 men struck each minute. Three to four cannon and seventy-seven muskets fired each second to create an unbelievable level of noise. Figures are inconclusive, but available data suggests that 239 local village houses were destroyed during the battle and, in the summer of 1813, records show 52,048 corpses and 41,700 horse carcasses were recovered for burial.5

Napoleon attacked the Russian centre, despite identifying a weakness on the left. Colonel Polosukhin also had an exposed left; his right, as in 1812, was protected by the steep banks of the Kolocha river, freshly fortified with concrete bunkers. All he could do in 1941 was cover the two main roads approaching from the west, the same that Napoleon used. Although they favoured an armoured approach, the woods that screened the front of his fortified zone would canalise the panzers. A further change was the railway line, constructed in the 1860s, which traversed the middle of Borodino field, just off centre from Napoleon’s original line of attack in 1812. The railway track ran over embankments, through shallow cuttings and across swampy areas, mostly screened by trees, which tended to impede any north–south passage of armour.

After his initial reconnaissance, the commander of the 32nd Rifle Division likely appreciated that, like Kututzov in 1812, he was also fighting to bar the gates of Moscow to a western invader. The Germans were coming from broadly the same direction and the Russian defence would need to be conducted from similar locations. The forty memorial monuments and plinths erected, dedicated to units and individuals that fought in 1812, indicated as much. The historical Borodino Field Park established by the Tsar in 1912, which he was surveying, covered nearly 70 square miles.

Colonel Polosukhin also took the opportunity to stop by the old Borodino museum building, which had been opened by the Tsar during the first centenary celebration. He was probably the final formal visitor before its subsequent destruction. Museum staff were bustling about, urgently packing exhibits into cases, which were earmarked for transportation well to the rear at Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. Staff regarded the grim-faced senior Red Army officer with some trepidation. He wrote something in the visitor’s book before leaving. Curious, they checked the ledger and found, under the column ‘Purpose of Visit’, he had written:

I have come to defend the battlefield.6

PART ONE

THE APPROACH TO BORODINO

1

The Road by Vyazma

147 Miles to Moscow

The Vyazma Pocket, 6–8 October 1941

On 6 October 1941 the vanguard of the Das Reich SS Division was driving northwards along the road from Juchnow, towards Dubna and Gzhatsk. This minor road skirted the outline of a vast pocket coalescing around the trapped elements of the Soviet 16th, 19th, 20th and 30th armies to the west. Motorcyclists and four-wheeled light armoured cars were the first vehicles to appear, from the Aufklärungs Abteilung or Reconnaissance battalion. They paused repeatedly, observed the road ahead with binoculars, and drove off rapidly. These vehicles were the ‘eyes’ of the following advance, which as SS Sturmmann (Corporal) Helmut Günther remembered, ‘simply had to be everywhere’. Günther, a veteran since the invasion of Yugoslavia, belonged to the division’s Kradschützen or motorcycle battalion.

Behind them came a mix of Kubelwagen jeeps, light Krupp 1-ton Schnauzer trucks, so called because of their duckbill-shaped bonnets, medium Mercedez-Benz and Opel Blitz trucks towing anti-tank and infantry guns as well as medium trucks festooned with assault pioneers transporting engineer equipment. The SS soldiers, dressed in distinctive camouflage smock tunics, kept a wary eye to their left, where in the middle distance the front line sparkled, cracked and grumbled as Russian anti-tank guns duelled with panzers. ‘That was what was so unnerving about this land and its people,’ Günther recalled, ‘suddenly danger would threaten from some place where one would least expect it.’ Blazing villages produced distinctive smoke columns, curling languidly into the grey sky across a vast panorama of treetops, adding to the general obscuration over the Kessel ‘cauldron’ pocket, being steadily compressed on their left flank. Stuka dive-bombers circled overhead like vultures, monitoring the flashing, spluttering conflagration below.

Two Sturmgeschütz III self-propelled guns clattered by, followed closely by the first company vehicle packets from the Reich Infantry Regiment Deutschland. Groups of 1½-ton Mercedes and Krupp medium trucks roared by, some towing guns and trailers, all carrying SS infantry. Each company packet numbered two dozen or more vehicles. On board, the men complained of sore backsides, ‘as if someone had rubbed pepper under my skin,’ Günther complained. ‘The stench of exhaust gases wiped out attentiveness and deadened nerves’ as they bumped and jolted along. ‘Just the 500 vehicles of our battalion alone made a fearsome racket,’ remembered Günther.

Ten minutes later another column hove into sight. Mile-long traffic jams began to build up, following the ‘pick-pock’ sounds of skirmishing rifle fire ahead, interspersed with machine-gun bursts that sounded like ripping canvas. Nuisance strafing runs by suddenly appearing Red Air Force aircraft caused swarms of trucks and jeeps to race madly off the road. This caused delays before the line could be reassembled.

Vehicles were grossly overloaded. Not only did they expect to fight, the vanguard had to be logistically self-sufficient. ‘You would not believe everything that we hauled along with us!’ recalled Günther: behind the spare tyre on the sidecars ‘were pots and skillets, which beat a wild tune during the movement!’

Here and there an accordion or guitar bore witness to the musical talents of the crew. The sidecars themselves were stuffed to overflowing with ammunition boxes, machine gun belts, hollow charges, hand grenades and similar novelty items. Then there was the personal gear of the crew. The rider in the sidecar had to perch with one ass cheek on the edge, because there was simply no other place left.

Günther remembered one motorcyclist wore a top hat: ‘Where that guy had got it, heaven only knows.’ Others sported red bandana neckerchiefs. ‘No wonder that we were maligned as “gypsies” by starchy Wehrmacht officers who disapproved of such individual frippery.’1

The Das Reich Division had been tasked to skirt the east side of the Vyazma pocket and move north to cut the highway that led north-east to Moscow. Just north of the intersection was the town of Gzhatsk, which needed to be secured before an advance along the Moscow highway. Panzergruppe 3, which included the 6th and 7th Panzer Divisions alongside two motorised divisions, was engaged in a broad sweeping advance around the north, or other side, of the emerging Vyazma pocket. Panzergruppe 4, including the 10th Panzer Division, was leading the advance up from the south side to complete the encirclement. Das Reich would provide the motorised infantry cement needed to secure the panzer ring sealing the pocket. If not required, it was to continue the advance down the Moscow highway towards Borodino and Mozhaisk, 80 and 70 miles respectively from the Russian capital. A bridge sign erected by the 48th Pioneer Battalion across the Dvina river signposted the way ‘to the last race’ for the advancing 10th Panzer. They were nearly there. Operation Typhoon, the final and unexpected autumn German offensive on Moscow, was the final opportunity that year to take the capital and follow in Napoleon’s footsteps.

The muddy road to Gzhatsk was beginning to fall apart under the constant procession of heavy vehicles. Trucks, despite the weather, were often open topped. The infantry inside observed the wood line to their left for signs of movement as well as scanning low cloud for signs of approaching Soviet aircraft. SS Sturmmann Ludwig Hümmer, with the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion Deutschland Regiment, was a veteran of France and the Low Countries. This was his second day of driving with the vanguard. ‘Often our column came to a halt,’ he recalled, when the indicators of crumbling Soviet resistance to their left became ever more apparent. ‘Some vehicle-borne enemy soldiers were surprised in our immediate vicinity by our rapid advance,’ he recalled.

‘They came directly at our column, mistaking us in our camouflaged jackets in the distance to be retreating Russians.’ Once they realised their mistake, they turned about and drove back. ‘But too late, there was no escape.’ They were swept up by jeeps and motorcyclists, who pursued immediately ‘and most gave up without any exchanges of fire once they appreciated the hopelessness of their situation’. Many Russian prisoners were taken and the captured vehicles added to the column.

‘Once again we were in the middle of the action,’ Hümmer reflected, ‘when at that moment it had appeared so harmless.’ The rest days after Kiev had been only too brief. They sensed they would not sit on their vehicles for long ‘because in the distance we could already hear the sounds of fighting’. Rain had transitioned to sleet and then wet snow the day before. Operation Typhoon had begun optimistically enough five days before, with warm autumn sunshine on their backs. Now, as each vehicle passed, snow squalls cloaked churned-up muddy wheel ruts beneath a sanitising mantle of white.2

The road eventually became impassable for wheeled vehicles so Hümmer’s company had to dismount and continued the advance on foot. They marched a further 6 miles through woods and small villages before halting at nightfall. ‘Apparently leaderless Russians were roaming about in the area,’ he remembered, ‘and were picked up and made prisoner.’ Eggs and potatoes, ‘farmer’s breakfast’, were fried that night, during a welcome pause. All the evidence suggested the last Soviet line barring their approach to Moscow was crumbling. Next morning they were ordered to ‘mount up’ again on trucks, with some urgency, because ‘we had to get to the Smolensk, Vyazma to Moscow highway,’ Hümmer recalled, ‘and in driving snow we climbed up and drove forward’. This time ‘our battalion took over point’ for the advance; they were the lead troops.3

‘Providing security’ for the advance was not, as Helmut Günther with the motorcycle battalion explained, ‘something that smacks of guard duty’. The battalion was ‘outfitted with substantial firepower’:

‘Security’ usually meant combat against a numerically superior attacker who knew full well that he had found a soft spot and believed that he now held the trump cards in his hand. It was our outfit’s mission to dispel that belief and enable the division to roll on in its mission unimpeded.

Like Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, SS formations regarded themselves as a special elite. Volunteers came from all over Germany and at this stage of the war needed to prove untainted Aryan descent to their great grandparents. Günther’s recruit-training platoon, for example, came from every corner of the Reich, including young men from Pomerania, Swabia, the North Sea coast, the Ruhr Basin, the Rhine region, and as far removed as Transylvania, the Black Forest and Bavaria. Most joined not to shirk national duty, others did not want to be left out, and some were idealistic. Racial purity meant they were bound by blood and they considered themselves superior. The blood group tattooed on their upper arm signified a tangible form of pseudo blood-brotherhood.

Uwe Timm researched his older brother Karl Heinz, who had joined the SS, after the war. He remembered him as an unremarkable, quiet, ‘brave’, steady lad, a sapper in the Totenkopf ‘death’s head’ Division. His sparse one-line diary entries read mainly about waiting for action, loot and an acceptance that death and killing had become an everyday occurrence. One brief entry recalled, ‘Ivan 75 meters away is smoking cigarettes,’ adding simply ‘fodder for my machinegun’. This was less about being callous, more an absence of empathy towards the deaths that were occurring regularly around them. Killing civilians who got in the way was rarely recorded because it was hardly noteworthy.

Modern conflict fought by democracies more recently show evidence of similar callous attitudes, often misinterpreted, because few today have experienced the rigours of military service beyond the era of mass conscription. Warfare for German soldiers during the Second World War, as often for the Allies, involved the adventure of pseudo military tourism. Bizarrely, this included killing the enemy, often in strangely exotic locations.

SS soldiers were not necessarily more politically motivated or indoctrinated than their Wehrmacht counterparts: both were educated and raised within a National Socialist society. ‘What did we know about the big political picture?’ Helmut Günther asked rhetorically. His unit was as surprised as many others by the decision to invade the Soviet Union – making this a two-front war that had resulted in catastrophe during the First World War. ‘Political indoctrination? Don’t make me laugh!’ Günther exclaimed:

We mostly read the newspapers to learn what film was playing in the city we were in or which watering hole had something going on.

When their more politically aware company commanders gathered them together on a Sunday morning to explain war news, ‘the time was used to catch up on sleep behind the back of the man in front’. The typical SS trooper viewpoint of Russia was that it was huge, had immense grain and mineral resources, the people were obliging, the roads impassable, the weather terrible and it was plagued by lice and fleas. The East meant Lebensraum, ‘living space’, for retired veterans, who might settle after the war, like the ancient Roman Legionaries.4

There was often friction between SS and Wehrmacht army units. The classic Wehrmacht view was that the SS had an inflated view of their prowess, with ‘fat head’ officers leading unprofessional Nazi soldiers. The SS felt the Wehrmacht were the direct descendants of the Kaiser’s Imperial Army, with all the negatives that implied: decrepit old generals and officers that had purchased commissions. SS military performance in Poland in 1939 was regarded as questionable. SS General Sepp Dietrich’s Leibstandarte Regiment had to be rescued by a regular infantry regiment when surrounded by Polish forces at Pabianice. Their performance in France and the Low Countries was commendable, but offset by brutal atrocities, and the SS was still cold-shouldered by OKW (Supreme Command) after the campaign. By early 1941 the SS had expanded to six divisions. Ill will dogged army–SS relations in Yugoslavia and the Balkans, but a single SS officer had secured the Serbian capitulation of Belgrade with only a handful of men. By late 1941 the rigours of the Barbarossa campaign in Russia, the longest to date, was earning the SS grudging respect and more recently, following the southwards advance to Kiev, some praise.

The truth lay in between. At first the army mocked the SS camouflage tunics, labelling them ‘tree frogs’ and claiming they were inadequately trained. Conversely, the SS criticised the Wehrmacht’s lukewarm morale, which was becoming a factor in this bloody campaign of attrition. Bravery might be measured in casualties, and in this the SS were considered ‘bullish’ extremists, carrying on missions regardless of cost. Analysis of casualty figures, however, suggests SS casualties were broadly similar to Wehrmacht panzer divisions and Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger (Paratrooper) units. The 10th Panzer Division lost 12 per cent of its strength in the first five weeks of the Russian campaign: a total of 1,778 men. The Deutschland Regiment of Das Reich lost a similar proportion: 1,519 men from the start of the invasion to the eve of Operation Typhoon. The army suspected the SS were beginning to receive better equipment, vehicles and rations as well as a preponderance of the best ‘human material’ for its recruits. Yet certain elite Wehrmacht units like the Grossdeutschland, the Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division also received like privileges.5

The intense bloodletting of the Russian campaign brought the two sides closer together. SS soldiers defined the Waffen-SS as being an integral part of the ruling national party, whereas army units saw the Wehrmacht as part of the division of power in German society. Such differences, however, became irrelevant during the day-to-day business of simply staying alive on the Russian front. The official history of the 10th Panzer Division records that troops of the SS Reich Division became ‘old acquaintances’ due to the frequency with which they had fought and bled together after the invasion’s launch on the Bug river to Jelnya, a particularly hard fought attritional engagement on the edge of the Smolensk pocket. ‘As a result,’ according to a 10th Panzer account, ‘an unspoken comradeship had developed between the men of the two units.’ This was about to be reforged. Whenever the two units came together on operations ‘they knew that they could depend on their neighbours’.6

Napoleon took just over seventy days to reach Vyazma, whereas Hitler’s Wehrmacht needed almost 100 days. The Germans were involved in intense costly fighting the moment they crossed the line of the Bug river on 22 June 1941. Napoleon, by contrast, marched and manoeuvred after crossing the Nieman river, reached by the Wehrmacht on their first day. He successfully blocked a union of the two primary Western Russian armies led by Generals Barclay de Tolly and Bagration, but was unable to bring either successfully to battle. Successive rearguard actions kept Napoleon at arm’s length. By contrast, the Germans fought a series of encircling actions which inflicted 3 to 4 million casualties on the Russians at a cost of half a million to the invasion force of 3.6 million men. The average experience of the Grand Armée soldier up to Vyazma was to march through a landscape devastated by ‘scorched-earth’ measures inflicted by the retreating Tsarist armies. German soldiers in 1941 ironically spent more time defending rather than attacking during their advance. This was because short sharp manoeuvres to encircle Soviet armies became hard-fought defensive engagements to keep them inside thereafter. The Germans had, moreover, to face in two directions, first to contain Soviet forces inside the pockets and then to fight off rescue attempts from outside, often at the same time.

Although the encirclement battles leading to the two rings at Vyazma and Bryansk in early October 1941 were conducted by fully motorised panzer and infantry troops, these represented just under 30 per cent of the total Army Group Centre strength. Overall the invading German army in 1941 was only 22 per cent mechanised, the remainder being marching foot infantry supported by horse-drawn artillery and logistics. As for Napoleon, the momentum of Blitzkrieg or so-called ‘Lightning War’ depended upon the speed of marching man and the horse. Only these foot-borne infantry divisions, supported by the real ‘killers’ of the campaign – the division and corps horse-drawn artillery – possessed the combat power needed to overwhelm the Soviet pockets. Unlike the previous experience in Poland, the West and the Balkans, the Russians once surrounded chose not to surrender, but to fight to the death.

Ironically, Napoleon’s Grande Armée made better time in 1812. Hitler’s Blitzkrieg reached Smolensk, covering a remarkable 412 miles in twenty-seven days, compared with Napoleon’s fifty-four. But by the time both armies were approaching Vyazma, at about the 500-mile point, the Germans had diverted south to the Ukraine, to reduce the massive Kiev pocket, and were some thirty days behind. What Napoleon’s forces were not able to replicate was the speed of the vehicle-borne panzer and motorised infantry vanguards, which were able, with Luftwaffe air ascendency, to speedily bypass and surround Soviet formations.

As the Das Reich Division was moving north towards the key arterial highway linking Minsk and Smolensk to Moscow during the first week of October, it skirted the developing pocket on the east side. Nine panzer and motorised divisions were completing a double encirclement at Vyazma, netting six Soviet armies, and at Bryansk, where they contained another three. Eventually twenty-five German infantry divisions had to march up to coil python-like around and squeeze the life out of these trapped Russian divisions. This tied up most of the combat power of German Army Group Centre, leaving just half a dozen mobile divisions to press on to Moscow 147 miles away. Each of these mobile divisions had start states of about 16,800 men and 2,400 vehicles, representing ten to fifteen times more combat power, man for man, than the 1812 Napoleonic equivalents.

At daybreak on 2 October, the 10th Panzer Division with Panzergruppe 4 began its encirclement operation with an assault crossing of the Desna river, a tributary of the Dnieper. Thrusting rapidly deep into the Soviet lines, its battle groups soon found themselves spread over 60 miles of roads that were deteriorating rapidly in rain and sleet. Lack of fuel and blown bridges and other crossing points unable to support armour further slowed momentum. It formed the south side of the pocket, aiming to swing north to link with the 7th Panzer Division from Panzergruppe 3, attacking south and east beyond Vyazma. Both sought to cut the Moscow highway link and trap Soviet Marshal Timoshenko’s Western Front armies inside the pocket.

As darkness fell during the evening of 6 October, a reinforced tank platoon from the 10th Panzer unexpectedly burst into the southern suburbs of Vyazma and seized the bridges leading into the city. Another panzer company rushed up to secure this coup to develop and reinforce the vulnerable bridgeheads gained. At 7.30 a.m. the division’s II Panzer Abteilung (battalion) drove through the city itself and captured the bridge spanning the Vyazma river on the north-west side. Within ninety minutes they had reached the bridge ramp and began cautiously observing grey vehicles and tanks they saw on the opposite bank. On closer examination through binoculars it became apparent they were likely German. White recognition flares shot up from both sides, followed by relieved handshaking on the bridge with the men from the 7th Panzer battle group. The huge pocket was finally sealed.

‘I was 15 years when the Fascists came,’ remembered Alexander Igorowitsch Kristakow, living with his parents in a small village near Vyazma. ‘We had geese, hens, two pigs and a cow, not much, but enough for us to live, and we were satisfied,’ he recalled. When the first air attacks started he helped with the evacuation of the village cattle to a nearby collective at Gorki. ‘Time and time again the Germans shot us up in low-level strafing attacks,’ but ‘I was lucky and managed to return to the village’.

Life changed irreversibly at the beginning of October ‘when the Germans came and first of all took all the geese and hens away and scoffed the lot’. Both pigs and the cow – all they had left – were taken in 1942. Vyazma had a population of about 35,000 when the Germans marched in, living in 5,500 houses. After it was liberated on 13 March 1943 only 5,000 inhabitants remained sheltering in fifty-one houses. Alexander Kristakow detonated a German mine the day after the liberation and was blinded. This interview was conducted wearing dark glasses.7

Eighteen-year-old Soviet artilleryman Viktor Strazdovski’s unit, trapped inside the pocket, was equipped with 60mm guns, ‘trophies left from World War I,’ he recalled, and ‘they didn’t have modern sighting devices’. His gun crew had only one rifle between five soldiers. The dramatic loss of Kiev in the southern Ukraine just weeks before had left them bewildered and fearful:

We simply kept wondering why our army was surrendering one town after another. It was a real tragedy. It’s difficult to express in words how we lived through that.

Strazdovski had only just joined his artillery unit, which was badly equipped and poorly trained. Their rapid and unexpected envelopment within the new pocket meant ‘we were face to face with the Germans, and we had to use these primitive weapons in actual combat’. They were hardly confident at the likely outcome.

Unteroffizier Ludwig Horn, a 22-year-old NCO in charge of a six-man gun crew, was with Artillery Regiment 90 from the 10th Panzer Division. They were confident and closed up fast against the trapped Soviet troops. ‘I enjoyed the strength of our army,’ he recalled at the outset of the invasion at the Bug river, ‘sending thousands of shells into the Russian border defences.’ He shared the view of many of his countrymen that they were racially, technically and tactically superior to the Soviets. ‘It was partly,’ he explained, ‘a great feeling about power being unleashed against a dubious and despicable enemy.’

The campaign thus far had been an exhilarating succession of victories. The disintegration of complete Soviet units around the Vyazma pocket appeared to confirm and magnify their feeling of innate technological ascendency. ‘When I was sent to the place where the Germans broke our defence line, you can imagine how we felt,’ recalled Viktor Strazdovski, ‘we felt we were doomed.’

‘The Russians didn’t believe we would attack at this time of the year,’ Feldwebel (Sergeant) Karl Fuchs with the 7th Panzer Division wrote to his new wife, ‘when the cold weather is settling in.’ Rising ground fog, a consequence of rain and sleet, obscured visibility inside the pocket.

‘Once the fog lifted from the valley, we really let them have it with every barrel,’ Fuchs recalled. ‘Tanks, anti-aircraft guns, trucks and the infantry fired on everything in sight.’

‘There were four of us,’ Soviet artilleryman Strazdovski remembered:

with two rifles between us, and we didn’t know in which direction we would run into the Germans. The woods around us were ablaze. On the one hand we couldn’t disobey our order, but on the other hand we felt doomed.

Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, an officer with the 11th Panzer Division, regarded the low-level mist hanging eerily over the valley below from high ground to the east of the pocket. ‘When the fog came up it was like a herd of men and vehicles coming up by the thousand,’ he recalled, ‘and it made your blood freeze.’

Russian vehicles were bogged down in the swampy conditions below. ‘Then the people came on to us like a herd of sheep.’ He shouted to his men, ‘Let them come, let them get nearer, let them come on!’ They held fire until the last moment before ripping the approaching masses of men apart with concentrated 20mm cannon and machine-gun fire.

‘What happened there is like a mincing machine,’ remembered Strazdovski, ‘when people are sent to a sure death, unarmed to fight a well trained army.’8

Ludwig Horn was ecstatic at the fearful destruction their artillery was wreaking on the pocket. ‘We could all communicate all the time easily,’ he explained, so each descending salvo was calculated mathematically. ‘It was one big advantage,’ he explained, ‘that the attack was so co-ordinated.’

This was to be the last Blitzkrieg success, fast-moving panzer groups supported by motorised infantry and artillery, under the umbrella of overwhelming Luftwaffe air superiority. Columns of blazing vehicles and seemingly panic-stricken assaults by infantry to break through, led to desperate bizarrely fought actions, as the loose German perimeters attempted to contain break-out attempts. Horn witnessed ‘waves and waves of advancing soldiers’ coming at them:

The first row was mown down, then the second bent down and took up the guns of the dead and continued to move forward until they were mown down also.

The irrational attacks were ‘incredible for us, but it seemed normal for them,’ he claimed. It promoted an arrogant feeling of dispassionate disdain among the German defenders, who regarded these senseless suicide attacks as inhuman. Horn was wounded by splinters from a Soviet hand grenade when they ambushed a Russian truck. The dismounting Russians rushed at them with bayonets and he ‘threw my hand grenades’ and ‘shot them from the hip’. Tensed up, they saw that some of the Russians had crouched petrified behind their truck, playing dead. ‘Hands up!’ they shouted, but got no response. ‘We started shooting them, naturally,’ and, ‘under the impact of the bullets they wavered and shook a bit,’ but refused to surrender. ‘We shot them all,’ he recalled.

Such behaviour from the Soviets was incomprehensible. ‘They are cowards,’ Horn rationalised, ‘they didn’t deserve any better anyhow.’ He believed he killed perhaps twenty to thirty Red Army men during this skirmish, ‘the most exciting night of his life’.

‘No German soldier would have attacked without any weapon,’ he insisted. ‘We would never have done that, crouching and doing nothing.’ Ironically, if the Russians had surrendered, they would likely not have survived. Horn’s lieutenant ordered the prisoners to be shot – equally incomprehensible he thought. Not only was this action ‘un-chivalrous’, it was ‘stupid’ because ‘Russians hiding in the forest might have seen the prisoners being shot and so they might fight better the next time.’9

Fuchs remembered the grim fight with some alacrity, because his battalion had to cling precariously to the ridges west of Vyazma ‘with great tenacity’. They were committed against heavy superior KV or T-34 Soviet tank types.

‘Wherever there is a hot spot,’ he wrote to his father, also serving on the Russian front, ‘we appear like ghosts’ wreathed in the prevailing fog ‘and engage the enemy in battle’, It was a costly struggle: ‘My brave young friend Roland just died of severe wounds,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘Why did he have to give his life now, with the end practically in sight?’

Having witnessed the total collapse of between seven and nine armies, German soldiers advancing on Moscow began to feel the Russians would never recover from this. ‘The battle of Vyazma is over,’ Fuchs assured his wife, ‘and the last elite troops of the Bolsheviks have been destroyed.’ Ivan, in his opinion, was finished.

Leutnant Schaefer-Kehnert, overlooking the devastated, noticed:

Some Russian girls – I will never forget them – in trousers dressed like soldiers. They got in a cart, with a horse, and had a barrel of water and then went around giving water to the dying Russian soldiers lying on that field … They were lying there by the thousand, like the battlefield of old history.

‘A life wasn’t worth much for the Russians,’ he surmised, echoing Horn’s view, who concluded, ‘Their deaths were not taken as seriously as with us.’ Like the majority of German soldiers, ‘We were of the belief that there shouldn’t be much left of the Red Army now.’

Ludwig Horn was a keen photographer and went on to explore the town of Vyazma. He took enough pictures to later fill nine photograph albums with Kriegs errinerungen, or wartime memories, of Russia and other campaigns. He took a snap of two German infantrymen passing Lenin’s statue delivering a symbolic oration in the main square, while keeping a watchful eye out for snipers. ‘Most civilians seem to have evacuated,’ he observed beneath the photo caption. ‘I can find a clean shirt I can use, but nothing useful, and nothing to eat.’ Pickings were sparse.

The way to Moscow, now only 147 miles away, seemed open. Fuchs, regarding the carnage, believed, ‘From now on, their opposition will not be comparable to previous encounters.’ They had defeated the last armies of the Red Army standing before Moscow: 673,000 prisoners and 1,300 tanks were taken, more than at Kiev a few weeks before. ‘All we have to do now,’ Fuchs assured his young wife, ‘is to roll on, for the opposition will be minor.’ He looked forward to getting back home; he had not yet seen his newborn son, and never would. When he dispatched these letters home he had barely a month to live.10

‘A feast of Church Towers’, Vyazma, 29–31 August 1812

Napoleon’s Grand Armée in 1812 was about a calendar month ahead of the Wehrmacht’s 1941 progress when it approached Vyazma in stifling heat. Private Jakob Walter, marching with the German Württemberg contingent in Marshal Ney’s III Corps, recalled their tortuous progress, ‘because the closed ranks forced all to go in columns; and the heat and dust flared up into our eyes as if from smoking coal heaps’. The weather had been hot and sultry since they had left Smolensk ten days before. Napoleon’s aide, Phillipe-Paul Comte de Ségur, described how ‘our army was crossing the broad plains of the province of Vyazma marching at top speed across the fields, several regiments abreast’. This claustrophobic formation required the infantry to march in short compact columns, as many as eighty men abreast. The road alongside was for the exclusive use of hundreds of horse-drawn wagons and artillery caissons, which churned it into a fine powdery dust. Masses of cavalry likewise raised huge suffocating clouds of dust as they trailed past the compacted infantry, screening them on both sides. Jakob Walter’s original company of about 100 Württembergers was reduced to just twenty-five men on leaving Smolensk. Spare shirts and underwear had long since been jettisoned by the men in the intense heat, which did not augur well for the approaching autumn and winter. ‘The march up to there,’ on nearing Vyazma, he recalled, ‘as far as it was a march is indescribable, and inconceivable for people who have not seen anything of it.’11

Captain Heinrich von Brandt, a Polish officer with the 2nd Vistula Regiment, recalled, ‘The heat was extreme,’ and, ‘furious gusts of wind swirled up such dense clouds of dust that often we could no longer see the great trees which lined the road’.

‘The main Moscow road we were on is sandy,’ remembered Captain Girod de l’Ain with the 4th Division:

and the army marching in several serried columns abreast, raised such clouds of dust that we could not see one another two yards away and our eyes, ears and nostrils were full of it, and our faces encrusted.

The thirst was so bad, ‘will you believe me,’ he insisted, ‘when I say that I saw men lying on their bellies to drink horse’s urine in the gutter’. Poor visibility dogged the column progress constantly. Lieutenant Karl von Suckow, with the Württemberg Guard, remembered they stationed a drummer ‘to beat the drum all the time’ to prevent exhausted soldiers from taking the wrong turning. ‘This fact alone will indicate just how dense the clouds of dust were.’

The Grand Armée advanced its corps in diamond formation, space permitting, with one division marching at point, two following on the flanks and the fourth division coming up in reserve. This meant a two-division front could face any unexpected appearance of the enemy. The infantry suffered considerably in the midst of these huge marching columns. As von Brandt explained:

The constant burning dust was a real torment. So as to protect at least their eyes, many soldiers improvised dark spectacles out of bits of window glass. Others carried their shakos under their arms and wrapped a handkerchief round their heads, tearing only a hole large enough for seeing the way and breathing. Others made garlands of foliage.

Jakob Walter complained ‘the dust was like a thick fog’ exacerbated by ‘the closed line of march in columns, and the putrid water from holes filled with dead people’ and ‘eye pains, fatigue, thirst and hunger tormented everybody’.12

Marching through Russia had been more costly than a series of battles. Napoleon pushed his armies hard, seeking by a succession of manoeuvres to bring the separated retreating Russian armies to decisive battle. The only strategic success to date was in preventing a union of the two main Russian Western armies before Smolensk. There were no pitched battles; the French columns were always kept at arm’s length by repeated short, sharp and bitterly contested Russian rearguard actions. The huge invading force that crossed the Nieman river on 24 June had shrivelled from over half a million men to around 190,000 by the time they left Smolensk. The Grande Armée had withered, dissipated by the need to hive off forces to garrison depots, protect its flanks as it penetrated deeper into Russia, and screen the main advance. Most men had simply succumbed to terrain and weather. Lance Corporal Wilhelm Heinemann, with the Brunswick Chasseurs, had begun to notice: ‘Up to now we’d been marching in the van with the strongest, who’d no inkling of what a dissolving army looks like.’ Accidentally shot in the foot, he was now hobbling at the rear and appreciated:

These were no longer the same columns. Already they were beaten men, looking only for a spot on this foreign soil to lie down and die.

Now, as the weary columns trudged by, he realised the physical change that had come over the army:

First came the strongest, and then the weaker, then others whose strength was almost at an end. And last of all the dying, dragging themselves along at the tail. If any sank down, the thick dust soon covered him like a pall over a bier.

The army was visibly disintegrating. Bread was scarce and the intermittent supplies of food provided through foraging came from captured livestock and what could be found in peasant houses or dug up from the fields. Jakob Walter described how ‘most of the men could no longer digest pure meat, diarrhoea seized many, and they had to be abandoned’. Water was often drawn from swamp pools. Holes were sunk 3ft deep and brackish water extracted amid swarms of midges, mosquitoes and flies. ‘The water was very warm,’ Walter recalled, heated by bacterial decomposition, and was ‘reddish brown with millions of little red worms’. The only way it could be consumed was ‘bound in linen and sucked through the mouth’, with predictable consequences. Major Heinrich von Roos, the senior doctor with the Württemberger Chasseurs, cast a professional eye over the ownership of campsites belonging to the retreating Russian army and compared them to their own. ‘The excreta left by men and animals behind the Russian front indicted a good state of health,’ he observed. ‘Whereas ours [showed] the clearest signs that the entire army, men and horses alike, must have been suffering from diarrhoea.’13

On 29 August, thumping cannon reports up ahead heralded the arrival of Marshal Joachim Murat’s cavalry vanguard, ahead of Marshal Davout’s I Corps, at Vyazma. The rest of the army following up heard the familiar sounds of yet another rearguard action, the intensity of firing suggesting intermittent skirmishing rather than a pitched battle. The town’s population of between 10,000 and 15,000 lay alongside the serpentine Vyazma river, seated on a plateau that dominated the surrounding valleys and gullies and the defile through which the Moscow road passed. Since Smolensk, Jakob Walter had become accustomed to a bleak road where ‘the war displayed its horrible work of destruction’:

All the roads, fields, and woods lay as though sown with dead people, horses, wagons, burned villages and cities.

The Russians appeared to be pursuing a ‘scorched-earth’ policy as they withdrew. ‘Everything looked like the complete ruin of all that lived,’ Walter recalled, but the town coming into view appeared different. Chasseur Lieutenant Maurice de Tascher thought the settlement ‘a superb town, which at a distance appears to be a feast of church towers’. The countryside nearing Moscow appeared more prosperous. Césare de Laugier, with Prince Eugène’s IV Corps, enthusiastically counted thirty-two spires; none of them had ‘seen anything so beautiful or inviting since Vitebsk’, now a month past. There was some dismay, therefore, when smoke began to rise and shroud the golden domes of the oriental churches and convents. Albrecht Adam, with Eugène’s staff, watched the fires take hold. ‘Although we were by now used to seeing such sights,’ he admitted, ‘we could not help but be overwhelmed by a sense of pity on this unfortunate city of 10,000 souls.’ Two battalions of the 25th Line were dispatched into the city to fight the flames, much enthused at the prospect of being the first in to loot.14

General Armand de Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Grand Equerry, entered the city the following day with the Emperor. ‘Several people believed,’ he recalled, ‘that this burning of the towns and villages we entered was due as much to the disorderly conduct of our advance guard as to the rearguard of the Cossacks, who did not spare Russia.’ The sharp engagement with the Russian rearguard had given the Cossacks the opportunity to ignite many fires. The civilian population fled towards Moscow, swelling the vast numbers of refugees already surging towards the capital. This unheralded Russian behaviour was incomprehensible. Until now it was thought the incendiary measures were not ordered or prepared in advance. Napoleon dismissively joked about ‘these people who burn their houses in order to prevent us from sleeping a night there’. Yet the ominous behaviour was beginning to depress the soldiers. ‘Everybody was struck by the fact,’ de Caulaincourt observed. They inspired ‘solemn reflections which these terrible measures provoked, about the results and length of a war in which the enemy was making such sacrifices from the very start’.15

The first mass civilian deaths had occurred at Smolensk, during the assault and burning of the city. The crossing of the Dnieper river signified entry into the Russian heartland, raising patriotic and nationalist fervour. Nobody had successfully invaded Russia this far since the Mongols and Tatars, 300 years ago. Atrocities and excesses committed by the Grande Armée’s foraging robber bands, left, right and ahead of the orderly marching columns, turned native serfs against the French. Revolutionary fervour, previously exported by France, fell on the deaf ears of a peasantry who could neither read nor write. Some 30,000 starving deserters scattered as far back as Minsk were violently pillaging a peasantry who increasingly fought back. Members of Jakob Walter’s company had fired on a group of fifty peasants who had rushed them during a foraging expedition near Plotsk. ‘What could we do but shoot at them?’ he asked ruefully. The local peasants used ingenious ploys to hide their supplies. He remarked disingenuously:

If they had voluntarily removed the simple covers, much of the household furniture would have remained unspoiled, for it was necessary to raise the floors and the beams in order to find anything and to turn upside down everything that was covered.

The invading French Army was likened to a swarm of locusts. Ensign Rafail Mikhaylovich Zotov, with the St Petersburg Militia, recalled ‘outrage at the audacious invasion of the foreigners’, and that ‘on the streets, in every community, in the family circle, there was no other topic of conversation but the “people’s war”’.16

Both Napoleon and later Hitler were much influenced by their previous victories over the Russians, both feeling they knew the psyche of the ordinary Russian soldier. Napoleon’s experience of the Russian debacle at Austerlitz in 1805 influenced his perceptions like Hitler’s view of the lacklustre Soviet performance against the Finns during the 1939–40 Winter War. The Führer was convinced that the poor performance of the Red Army during the summer frontier Blitzkrieg meant one more ‘kick in the door’ would bring down the whole Jewish-tainted Bolshevik edifice ‘like a pack of cards’. Both the Tsarist and the Soviet Russian soldiers were enigmatic figures.

Major General Sir Robert Wilson, serving as the British military commissioner with the 1812 Russian Headquarters, felt he knew the Russian soldier well. ‘The infantry,’ he recalled, ‘is generally composed of athletic men between the ages of 18 and 40, endowed with great bodily strength’ and ‘inured to the extremes of weather and hardship’. He could march days and nights on the ‘scantiest food’ with six hours on the road against four of rest. He was ‘ferocious, but disciplined’ and ‘obstinately brave’, being totally ‘devoted to their sovereign, their chief, and their country’.

Wilson thought them admirable soldiers ‘possessing all the energetic characteristics of a barbarian people with the advantages engrafted by civilization’. It was not enough to simply kill Russians, British soldiers later discovered in the Crimea: ‘you had to knock them down as well’. Lieutenant Ilya Radozhitsky, with a light artillery company retreating through ‘unbearable summer heat’, believed:

Our men and horses endured these hardships better than the enemy since they were born in this particular climate and were accustomed to a rough life.

Like many of his Russian contemporaries, Radozhitsky was dispirited by the constant withdrawals: ‘No matter how strong Russian spirits were, their physical strength was sapped from continuous exertion.’ Trudging along the sandy tracks and roads and wading swamps, like the pursuing Grande Armée, ‘could wear soldiers out and leave considerable numbers of the fatigued stragglers to the enemy’. Despite his misgivings, Russian rearguards seemed to efficiently sweep them up. Russian General Peter Bagration, commanding the Second Western Army, was dismayed at the seeming national betrayal the long retreat suggested. ‘Honest to God,’ he confessed to the Chief of Staff of the First Army to his north, ‘I feel sick and cannot breathe out of anguish, misery and embarrassment.’ Lieutenant Radozhitsky lamented, ‘The retreat of our two armies from the borders of the empire to Smolensk allowed the enemy to seize a vast territory, some 530 miles wide, almost without a fight.’

‘I am ashamed to be wearing this uniform,’ Bagration admitted, ‘honest to God, and I am sick because of it.’ He vowed to leave the army after this.17

One of Marshal Berthier’s aides, Colonel François Lejeune, had come to admire the effectiveness of the Russian rearguards, which ‘withdrawing in admirable good order’, tended ‘to defend all positions that offer any advantage’. This meant advancing French cavalry had to constantly form and reform and shake out into attack columns supported by artillery, ‘which only conquered a little ground after exchanging many discharges of grape and attacks with the sabre’.

Whatever preconceived notions Napoleon may have had about the Russian fighting man, the lower ranks in the Grande Armée were starting to realise he was a formidable adversary. Delaying tactics ‘meant a lot of time was being consumed in making but little progress,’ Lejeune commented. The Russians were steadily wearing them down. Albrecht Adam, with Eugène’s staff, recalled a Russian prisoner brought into IV Corps Headquarters, who ‘by his singular conduct, attracted universal attention’. He was totally unabashed, displaying ‘pluck as almost bordered on temerity’. Not unsurprisingly, he absconded the first night.18

For many Russian soldiers, the French invasion was not just a galvanising national call to arms; it also represented a personal catastrophe. The service term was twenty-five years and conscript families knew that, short of a miracle, they would never see their menfolk again. Recruits had their foreheads and beards shaved to mark ownership by the military, which also proved illegitimacy should they desert. Soldier Pamfil Nazarov admitted he ‘cried bitter tears’ at ‘the terrible news’ of his conscription. Ivan Menshoy, drafted into the Leib-Guard Dragoon Regiment, echoed ‘how terrible was that minute!’ ‘I remember how my family wept, and my sister Pelagoya cried the most.’

Family celebrations on departure were conducted as a form of wake. It was the worst thing that could happen. Family bonds cemented society together, psychologically as well as for physical wellbeing. ‘Tears flowed for three days before my departure for Tula,’ the recruit assembly point, Menshoy remembered. He reflected on the common saying among serfs, ‘that the gates to the soldiery were wide, but the gates to the return were narrow’. Allegiance to family shifted to the regiment, the new provider that underpinned sustenance and life. It was this emotive bond, as strong as family, that lay at the core of the fighting qualities of the Russian soldier.19

Despite the long retreat that gave up vast tracts of Russian territory, the average Russian soldier was in better physical and psychological shape than his Grande Armée