As Bock had feared, the Soviets also incorporated the effects of the rasputitsa in their defense plans. Zhukov, aware that the German advance could continue only on the paved main roads, concentrated his sparse forces on the key approaches to Moscow as well as using the rail lines that converged on the city to bring in a steady stream of reinforcements. By mid-October, then, the Russians resumed their customary ferocious counterattacks against a German advance weakened by the transfer of troops and the precarious supply situation. On the southern wing, when the Second Panzer Army resumed its offensive to the northeast on the seventeenth, it discovered in the vicinity of Mtsensk an “enemy as strong as ever… [that] put up unusually tough resistance.” Both the Second and the Fourth Armies, meanwhile, suffered from supply difficulties and steady enemy counterattacks that exhausted the troops and forced them to take sporadic defensive action. The Russian air force, operating from bases near Moscow, also became increasingly active, to the dismay of the advancing Germans. In the north, Reinhardt’s Third Panzergruppe (Hoth had in the meantime been appointed commander of the Seventeenth Army) faced fierce and unremitting enemy assaults that stalled its further progress, forcing Bock on the twenty-third to shelve all plans for an attack beyond Kalinin. On its left, the Ninth Army had taken Rzhev and sought to move north but, on the eighteenth, warned that it would not be able to continue the advance without extensive resupply, while, to its right, the Fourth Army faced similar problems after advancing through Mozhaisk. With the roads worsening in the wet conditions, with vehicles and horses stuck fast in the muck, and with the failure of the railways, the fighting units simply had insufficient supplies to advance. The OKH’s apparent fear that large numbers of Soviets were pulling back and insistence on forming special pursuit detachments to cut them off thus bordered on the fantastic. “The enemy,” Bock admitted, “has moved in new forces from Siberia and the Caucasus and has launched counterattacks.” The Germans were dealing not with a defeated enemy but with a determined opponent bent on defending the capital with all means at his disposal.44
Faced with an advance on Moscow that had slowed to a crawl, Hitler sought a solution on the flanks, further dispersing German strength. On 28 October, he ordered the deployment of units from the Third and Fourth Panzergruppen in an effort to eliminate Soviet forces between the Volga and Lake Ladoga to the north, effectively writing off the bulk of the Fourth Panzergruppe from the attack on Moscow. At the same time, the Second Panzer Army was ordered not to advance eastward beyond Tula but to strike toward Voronezh on the Don, some two hundred miles to the southeast, in order to cut off strong enemy forces. Although Hitler believed that the right wing of the Fourth Army was strong enough to assume the tasks of the Second Panzer Army, on 28 October Kluge had to use his last remaining reserves and go over to the defensive in order to cover the growing gap in the German front. Although strategic fantasy reigned at the OKH, the hard fact was that, by the end of October, the Germans had run out of troops. The supply situation, the sheer exhaustion of the Landsers, and the miserable weather all made it impossible to continue the advance. His units out of fuel, doubtful that Hitler had read his reports on the bleak situation at the front, reduced to the absurd proposal that detachments equipped with machine guns mounted on horse-drawn panje wagons be employed as mobile combat teams, and driven “to despair,” on 1 November Bock ordered that “further advances should be temporarily suspended” until supply problems could be overcome. “Our losses,” he admitted in his diary, “have become quite considerable. In the army group’s area more than twenty battalions are under the command of lieutenants.” The attempt to smash the remainder of the Red Army in a quick battle, he acknowledged, had failed. If the enemy was to be beaten, a new, full-scale offensive would have to be launched, although the army group could not replace the heavy casualties it had already suffered, nor could the decrepit German supply system provide the necessary material help.45
In his 21 August directive to the OKW, Hitler had stressed that the most important aim to be achieved before the onset of winter was not capturing Moscow but seizing the industrially and economically vital regions of southern Russia and the Caucasus. Even as the German troops creeping toward Moscow captured the world’s attention, then, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on developments to the south. Although the Kiev encirclement had ripped a hole in Soviet defenses, Army Group South anticipated problems and heavy fighting as it moved to the southeast to occupy the Crimea and establish positions for advancing into the Caucasus. The Eleventh Army, under Manstein, ran into stubborn Soviet resistance and suffered heavy losses in its late September attempt to seize the strongly fortified Crimean Peninsula. At roughly the same time, the First Panzergruppe, attacking from Dnepropetrovsk, made disappointingly slow progress, although it did take Zaporozhye on 1 October and by the eleventh had reached the Mius River north of Taganrog. To the north, the attack on the key industrial city of Kharkov further dissipated the strength of the offensive as once again the Germans sought to gain all their objectives simultaneously. Heavy rain, the onset of cold weather, exhaustion, vehicle breakdowns, and supply difficulties slowed all movements, causing Hitler to give priority to the attack on the Donets Basin. By 12 October, however, this drive too had stalled as a result of the now familiar combination of mud, inadequate supply, exhaustion, and stiff opposition.46
With the southern sector of the army group almost immobilized, Hitler intervened on 14 October. Fearing that Soviet forces would escape across the Donets, he ordered the Seventeenth Army to send two divisions northward to cooperate with the Sixth Army in a new attempt to seize Kharkov. Since this would imperil the drive southeast into the Donets Basin and beyond into the Caucasus, opposition arose from Rundstedt, the army group commander, and the OKH. Following three days of wrangling, and after aerial reconnaissance revealed Soviet forces withdrawing from Kharkov, Hitler relented: Manstein would now renew his attack on the Crimea, and the First Panzer Army (formerly the First Panzergruppe) would drive on Rostov, while the Sixth and Seventeenth Armies would strike straight east to occupy all the territory up to the Don River, then establish bridgeheads across it in the direction of Stalingrad.47
Manstein launched his attack on the Crimea on the eighteenth, but his forces, which lacked armored support, suffered heavy losses in the attempt to batter through strong Soviet defenses. The fall of Odessa two days earlier also contributed to German difficulties since many of the units evacuated from that city were now used in defense of the peninsula. With his attacking units exhausted, Manstein demanded the transfer of a mobile division, but, in view of the fuel situation and the priority of seizing Rostov, Hitler refused. Manstein did, however, receive Luftwaffe reinforcements on 24 October, which enabled his troops to break through Soviet positions and occupy most of the Crimea, except for the fortress city of Sevastopol. This triumph, however, could not offset the increasing supply problems caused by the incessant rain, muddy roads, lack of vehicles and horses, and absence of converted rail lines. Halder, however, demanded the crossing of the Don in order to secure a base for future operations. Despite grumbling from his commanders about the unreliable supply situation, on 25 October Rundstedt ordered Reichenau, whose Sixth Army had finally captured Kharkov, to advance as far as Belgorad, Stülpnagel (the Seventeenth Army) to force a bridgehead over the Don at Izyum, and Kleist (the First Panzer Army) to move on Rostov. A pause would then follow, during which the troops would lay in supplies and wait for the ground to freeze before resuming the advance. Fearing that the momentum of the offensive would be lost, Halder pressured Rundstedt not to halt but to make every effort to meet his long-range strategic objectives. German commanders, lacking vehicles and fuel, responded to Halder’s urging by forming pursuit detachments consisting of infantry and peasant carts. Although Rundstedt noted the link between supplies and the ability of his troops to attack and could have pointed to a morale report signaling a growing apathy among his troops, the OKH persisted in its impossible order for Army Group South to seize Maikop and Stalingrad. Even Hitler possessed a more realistic view, telling Brauchitsch in early November that the Ostheer could no longer hope to achieve its furthest objectives in 1941. Instead, the goal would be to weaken the Soviets and secure positions from which to complete operations in 1942.48