To the north, Landsers struggled forward, not so much out of belief that Soviet forces were near collapse as out of the hope that the capture of Moscow would bring some respite. For the troops, the campaign had become a search for shelter, a fight for self-preservation. Panzer thrusts were little more than probing raids, and the offensive as a whole had degenerated into a series of confused, hotly contested engagements conducted with pitiless ferocity. As they inched nearer to Moscow, German troops were stunned to find, if anything, that Russian resistance grew more fanatic. By 27 November, the Third Panzergruppe had taken Klin, while spearheads of the Fourth Panzergruppe had pushed to within twenty miles of the Kremlin, but, in the absence of an attack in the center by the Fourth Army to prevent the Soviets transferring troops to the wings, they stood little chance of reaching the city. In the early morning hours of the twenty-eighth, a battle group of the Seventh Panzer Division of the Third Panzergruppe seized an intact bridge spanning the Moscow-Volga Canal at Yakhroma, a mere eighteen miles to the north of the capital, an action that raised German hopes and Soviet fears that the entire Soviet northwestern front might collapse. The Germans, however, lacked fuel to rush troops to the bridgehead, while the Soviets immediately dispatched units of the First Shock Army, which had assembled in secret behind the front, to the threatened area. Under pressure from fierce Soviet counterattacks, “Kampfgruppe Manteuffel” had to abandon the bridgehead after midnight on the twenty-ninth, an action that shattered the belief, which had sustained the German forces, that the capture of Moscow was imminent.94
Twenty miles to the south, at Krassnaya Polyana, the Second Panzer Division also came to a standstill on the twenty-eighth, as did units from the Fourth Panzergruppe—the Fifth, Tenth, and Eleventh Panzer Divisions and the Second SS Division Das Reich—as they battered futilely against the minefields and fiercely defended earthworks of the Soviet defense line, with the spires of the Kremlin visible some twelve miles in the distance. Two incidents were telling. On the twenty-eighth, German troops knocked out both British- and American-made tanks, a clear indication of the material aid arriving from the West, while, on 1 December, a detachment of motorcyclists from the Second Panzer Division conducting a reconnaissance got within five miles of Moscow. Having no way to exploit this gap in Soviet defenses, however, all the frustrated motorcyclists could do was turn and drive back to German lines. By now, Bock doubted that his forces could go any further, especially in view of the enemy’s ability to draw on seemingly inexhaustible reserves of men. “If we do not succeed in bringing about a collapse of Moscow’s northwestern front in a few days,” he noted on 29 November, “the attack will have to be called off; it would only lead to a soulless head-on clash with an opponent who apparently commands very large reserves of men and material; but I don’t want to provoke a second Verdun.” Significantly, in a matter of weeks, the Great War analogy invoked had changed from the Marne, where the Germans threw away a chance at victory through a failure of will, to Verdun, where the spectacle of relentless material attrition highlighted fatal German weakness.95
Although Kluge now belatedly launched an attack with his depleted forces, an action urged by the OKH despite Bock’s reservations, the state of his troops ensured that it would sputter to a halt almost immediately. The lack of realism at the OKH once again convinced Bock that no one at headquarters had actually read his reports on the true condition of the troops, prompting him on 1 December to issue another stark warning. “I lack the strength for large-scale encirclement movements,” he stressed, then outlined with precision the dire consequences:
The attack will, after further bloody combat, result in modest gains… but it will scarcely have a strategic effect. The fighting of the past fourteen days has shown that the notion that the enemy in front of the army group had “collapsed” was a fantasy…. The attack thus appears to be without sense or purpose, especially since the time is approaching when the strength of the units will be exhausted…. In this state, with the heavy losses in officers and the reduced combat strengths, it could not withstand even a relatively well-organized attack. In view of the failure of the railroads there is also no possibility of preparing this extended front for a defensive battle or supplying it during such a battle.
The Ostheer had now clearly passed the culmination point. On 3 December, both the Fourth Army and the Fourth Panzergruppe reached the end of their strength and broke off the attack. Physically and psychologically, the troops had reached the limit of their endurance, with half the units unable to resist an assault. Most of the divisions of Army Group Center had fallen below 50 percent of their strength, while the army group itself had now suffered a total of 350,000 casualties.96
Signs of apathy abounded: on two days in early December, the Sixth Panzer Division reported a total of “eighty cases of fainting owing to exhaustion.” Just as worrisome, the steady erosion of German strength had serious psychological repercussions and effects on morale. One report noted signs of panic among the troops, who could no longer be completely relied on. Another stressed the demoralizing effect of facing day after day new enemy forces that not only were superior in number and equipment but had also learned German tactics. As his qualitative superiority slipped away, “the German frontline soldier also realizes… that he is alone in the Far East with thinned ranks; he is suffering in the cold Russian winter… constantly aware of the heavy casualties… [and] that no replacements arrive…. The frontline soldier today quite openly states that this campaign still has a long way to go.” Noted another, in stark terms, “The troops are exhausted and kaputt; they are completely indifferent.” Letters home complained of the dismal situation at the front and the lack of winter clothing and equipment, with unflattering comparisons with the enemy, who was “much better… equipped for the winter.” With three-quarters of German supply trains put out of action by the cold and partisan raids, any regular provision of supplies was impossible. The extreme cold, now dropping to as low as –30°F, inadequate clothing and shelter, lack of food, losses of weapons and equipment—in addition to the impact of combat—all sapped German morale.97 Even before the Soviet counterattack, then, the German offensive had ground to a halt. In the absence of an enemy attack, the Germans would have been hard-pressed to maintain their positions since the lines reached by 5 December had long, unprotected flanks. Now, they would face an even bigger challenge: preventing the disintegration of the Ostheer itself.