Borodino Field 1812 and 1941

How Napoleon and Hitler Met Their Matches Outside Moscow

Robert Kershaw

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780750995955
• eBook ISBN: 9780750997591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

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.

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 li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part One: The Approach to Borodino
• Part Two: Borodino Field
• Part Three: Beyond Borodino Field
• Postscript Roads to Moscow and Back
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Picture Section