The Walder Chronicles: Book 15 of the Blitzkrieg Alternate Series by Max Lamirande

Author:Max Lamirande [Lamirande, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Obsidian Press
Published: 2024-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Extracts of Heinz Guderian's 1952 book Panzer Leader

One last great push, End of October 1942

The battle for the center of Moscow and possession of the famed Kremlin grounds was fierce and bloody. The crossing of the Moskva had also been a tough affair. As I looked at the casualty figures earlier in the day, I remember thinking that this level of losses could simply not be sustained. The ground was covered in fresh snow, and it somewhat covered the scars and debris of war lying all around the Russian city. The Wehrmacht was bleeding white in the fight, even if extracting five times the damage to Moscow’s fanatical Russian defenders.

The weather, by now, was truly awful. I was, however, grateful to be in a city because, in the countryside, the torrential rains would have been a difficult proposition for my units. After all, one of our best strengths was to stay mobile.

But that was the case only in the summer months. As it was, the battle of Moscow was probably one of the few times in my career where I felt comfortable being engaged in a street-to-street fight with no mobile operations. Simply said, in Russian October weather, it would have been impossible to plan any grand maneuvers. Supply, however, still had to crawl its way up the mud quagmires and so our situation remained critical. We did use less fuel in the battle, and tanks had to move less; thus, gasoline allocations were curtailed in favor of more ammunition. It helped somewhat. We had also taken several large airfields, and once they were cleared of rubble and repaired, the Luftwaffe started to fly in several tons a day. Still insufficient but a hell of a lot better than in the open steppes where no large runways were readily available.

By the end of October, The Wehrmacht was poised to finish its conquest of Moscow within days. Army Group Center had penetrated deep within, and while our losses were enormous, we had pretty much destroyed the Russian armies that had been defending the area. Hoth had even been able to infringe on the Northern reaches of the city during the few blessed lulls in the rains that lasted two days. The ground got dry enough for him to attempt a panzer move, and that worked.

What was left in front of us, still clinging to every inch of ground to their last breath, were scattered and broken units. They mostly gathered in the northern part of the city, where only light fortifications remained. And that was that we would take Moscow and sever the head of the Soviet state.

What had me worried were the reconnaissance flights that came back from the direction of the city of Roslavl, about 80 miles north-east of Moscow. They reported large Russian troop concentrations. At first, I could hardly believe that the damned Soviets had again found more troops to face us. But more flights had confirmed that at least twenty to thirty divisions were coming toward Moscow.

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