War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-1942 - Plot & Excerpts
Panzergruppe 4 drove a wedge between Maj-Gen Petrov’s Fiftieth Army and the Forty-third Reserve Front Army, and Second Panzer Army entered Bryansk on 6 October, at which point Moscow lost contact with its forward Army Groups. Major Ivan Schabalin, an NKVD staff officer with Fiftieth Army, jotted ‘we are surrounded’ in his diary on 4 October. ‘The entire front, three armies, have been embraced – and what do our generals do? “They think about it.” … As ever, we lose our heads and are incapable of taking any active measures.’ Schabalin assessed the front staff had lost all initiative from the very moment the German attack began. Two days later he despairingly admitted, ‘history has never witnessed anything like the defeat of the Bryansk Front’. The front command irretrievably lost control, ‘it’s rumoured the idiots are already on their way back to Moscow,’ the disillusioned officer complained.(1) At noon on 5 October a reconnaissance pilot from the 120th Fighter Squadron reported that he could see a 24km-long Nazi armoured column moving along the Warsaw highway from Spas-Demensk toward Yukhnov.
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