The Moscow Option Read Online Free PDF Page A

the centre of gravity of the Moscow offensive north of the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Certainly the Valdai Hills were not ideal terrain for panzer warfare, but since an attack in that area would both dissipate the northern flank threat and be easy to supply, the disadvantages would have to be accepted. Manstein 56th Panzer Corps, now reinforced with 8th Panzer Division from Reinhardt’s Corps and placed under Panzer Group 3 command, would advance eastward along the southern shores of Lake Ilmen and on to the main Leningrad-Moscow road before turning south-eastwards towards the capital. The attack would begin on 23 August.
    Two days later the rest of Army Group Centre would follow suit. The other two corps of Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 would strike north-eastwards towards Rzhev. From there one would continue northwards to meet Manstein’s, and thus enclose several Soviet armies in a pocket around Ostashkov. The other would turn towards Moscow on the Volokamsk road as soon as conditions permitted. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 would not advance on the Bryansk-Kaluga axis envisaged in the original plan, but would pinch out the strong Soviet forces in the Yelna region with Fourth Army help and then advance astride the Vyazma and Yukhnov roads towards Moscow. Behind these panzer forces Fourth, Ninth and Sixteenth Armies (the latter on loan from Army Group North) would move forward to pick up the prisoners and tie down the ground. Halder sent out the operational orders on 14 August.
    They would come as no surprise to the troops of Army Group Centre, who unlike their Führer had never considered any other objectives. Already the signs ‘Moskau 240 kilometren’ were pointing the way. Morale among the troops was high, for the end was in sight. ‘Moscow before the snow falls - home before Christmas’ ran the popular slogan. It occurred to few that the one did not necessarily imply the other.
     
    II
    On 3 July, with the opening blitzkrieg twelve days old, Stalin had spoken to the Soviet people. ‘Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends!’ he began. The unprecedented intimacy of this introduction underlined, as nothing else could have done, the desperation of the Soviet Union’s situation. These words ushered in a new reality. Of occupied territories, of forming home guards and partisan units, of scorching the earth in the invader’s path. Of total war.
    As July unfolded the enemy pressed forward. All along an eight-hundred-mile front from the Baltic to the Black Sea the Red Army either died, retreated or marched west in long broken lines towards the German maltreatment camps. The towns mentioned in the official Soviet communiques drifted steadily eastward across the maps, the first reports of German atrocities hot on their heels.
    But towards the end of that horrifying month the unstoppable advance seemed, for the moment at least, to have been stopped. In the area of Smolensk the line was holding, and the inhabitants of Moscow, two hundred miles further to the east, breathed a nervous sigh of relief.
    In the capital conditions were hard but not yet harsh. Strict rationing had been introduced in mid-July, and basic items like food and cigarettes were harder to come by for those in the less privileged categories. But restaurants and theatres remained open, the latter as a showcase for the burgeoning trade in patriotic plays, poems and songs. Moscow’s formidable anti-aircraft defences took a fair toll of the nightly air raids and little damage had yet been done to the city. At night many slept in the recently completed Metro while the sky above the capital was awash with searchlight beams and barrage balloons.
    In the Kremlin there was too much knowledge for optimism. Stavka, the supreme Soviet military-political command, met in the ancient rooms and received news of the latest disasters. There were many of them. The Red Army had been surprised, outmanoeuvred,