Chapter 1136: Bitsa Park

A King Tiger tank was moving slowly through a dense forest. Its wide tracks churned forward, crushing the green grass and snapping the thin branches and new leaves of the bushes. Not far behind it and to its side, another King Tiger tank was also advancing at a crawl. It knocked over a small tree, which snapped with a crisp crack.

The battle for Moscow had already been raging for a month. This slow progress was partly due to the heroic stubbornness of the Soviet defenders, but it was mostly due to the German army’s period of rest and waiting. Everyone was waiting for the moment the encirclement was complete. That moment had finally arrived yesterday, June 30th.

And so, just as the calendar flipped to July, the German army groups that had encircled Moscow launched a new large-scale offensive. The smoke of battle hung in the air from sunrise until the afternoon. Shells whistled over rooftops, their explosions rattling the already-shattered glass in the buildings. The sound of dense gunfire was everywhere. The air-raid sirens, once they started, never stopped.

Kluge’s Army Group F continued its offensive from the southwest of the city. His 5th SS Panzer Division was locked in a fierce struggle with a Soviet armored regiment for Bitsa Park. In this rare piece of “wilderness” terrain within the Moscow urban area, both sides committed as much armor as they could. As a result, this small area became a veritable tank graveyard.

Seven King Tiger tanks, 14 Tiger tanks, and 30 Panther tanks and assault guns were destroyed in this massive park. The Soviet side, for their part, left 90 armored vehicles of various types and over 2,000 soldiers here. The high ground in the park was piled with the wrecks of armored vehicles from both sides, eventually blocking the way for other tanks, forcing the infantry to take over the fight.

Soldiers leaned against the burnt-out, cooled-down husks of armored vehicles, firing at each other. Beside the corpses of these steel monsters, they piled up the bodies of fallen soldiers. Vatutin personally gave the order not to yield a single inch of the park. So when the Germans finally took the high ground, thinking they had captured the park, the Soviets threw in an entire armored regiment in a frenzied counter-attack.

Thirty Stuka-2 bombers, attached directly to the Army Group, dropped their entire bomb loads on the streets surrounding Bitsa Park to stop Soviet reinforcements. In the end, over 1,000 Soviet troops still managed to charge into the park, making the battle even bloodier and more insane.

The fight unfolded in the woods. In some sectors, soldiers from both sides even engaged in bayonet-to-bayonet combat. One German infantry regiment was finally pulled back due to heavy losses, and another was sent in to replace it. By 1:00 PM, the second regiment also couldn’t hold, and a third had to be sent in to continue the fight.

General Karikov of the 82nd Corps was forced to personally move his command post forward to Trade Union Street, to spur on his troops and inspire them to keep fighting in this “palm-sized” place. In just a few hours, the Germans had over 800 men killed in action. The Soviets, counting their reinforcements, had already lost over 2,900 men here.

The park was like a bloody mouth, devouring the lives of soldiers from both sides, and it was still devouring them at this very moment. The two King Tiger tanks drove in from the flank, into the Soviet defensive zone. Soviet machine guns suddenly opened up, the bullets hammering against the King Tigers’ armor with a sound like popping soybeans.

The German infantry following the tanks all hit the dirt. In the chaos, the Germans set up their own machine guns and began spraying the dense woods. A German soldier, clutching his rifle, ran hunched over from behind a fortification made of park benches, dashing through the bushes as leaves and twigs were shredded by bullets behind him.

“Captain! Radio says we’re getting a saturation bombardment in 3 minutes! Coordinates have been sent!” He ran, holding his steel helmet, and finally dove into a large shell crater, his slide kicking up a cloud of dust. When this infantry company had first been brought up as reinforcements, it had 111 men. Now, there were fewer than 80 left.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” the captain shouted to the infantry platoon firing from the other side of his crater. The men over there clearly heard the order and began shouting in German to those further away. Soon, the German attack stopped. The Soviets, clearly sensing something bad was about to happen, also stopped firing.

Just a few seconds after the gunfire ceased, the first artillery shell landed near the Balaklava Avenue side of the park. Mud and grass were blasted into the air by the shockwave, flying into the sky with all sorts of debris, only to fall back down amidst the explosions of other shells.

The 75mm infantry guns, as regimental-level support artillery, proved their worth in this battle. The falling shells accurately blasted a Soviet heavy machine gun bunker, which had been firing just moments before, into the sky. Some exposed Soviet soldiers were also hit by the barrage. They fell, screaming, and were left to bleed out on the ground.

As the Germans advanced, a river blocked their path. The bridge had been blown by the Soviets. The German tanks were forced to detour along the riverbanks. Soldiers from both sides fired at each other across the water, their bullets flying over the river to the enemy positions, taking lives or punching holes in cover.

The turning point of the entire battle occurred outside the park. Another German force attacked fiercely north along Trade Union Street. They finally pushed their frontline to the crossroads where Trade Union Street and Obruchev Street met. There, they entered a standoff with the Soviet troops across the street.

Inside Bitsa Park, two streets away, the Soviet Red Army troops, their flank now threatened, finally abandoned the defensive positions they had held for an entire day. Weeping, they left the place they had defended, leaving it to the two German King Tiger tanks that were protecting the slowly advancing infantry.

“Yes! Our troops have established a new defense line at Bitsa Park and Balaklava Avenue. The Soviets are not counter-attacking! If you wish, Your Excellency, you can bring the Corps’ 150mm howitzers here for more accurate shelling of the Kremlin.” A German divisional commander established his temporary HQ on the newly captured high ground and reported the latest results to General Karikov. His division had replaced another that had been shattered. They were now the closest troops to the Kremlin—though countless Soviet units still lay between them and their target.

But Karikov did not stop his attack. At this time, his other two infantry divisions were advancing past Vostryakovskoye Cemetery, pushing north along Vernadsky Avenue. They fought a desperate battle with the Soviets for a concert hall. An ad-hoc assault team stormed the building, annihilating the Soviet defenders inside, along with 32 band members who had been resisting with them.

By 4:00 PM, the Germans had achieved gratifying results on both Vernadsky and Trade Union Avenues. Sandwiched between these two streets was the famous Lenin Avenue. The Soviet defenders there were finally forced to abandon their positions and retreat to Vorontsov Park to set up a new defensive line.

This was not a good day for the Soviet army defending Moscow. After losing their key outer “Ring Road line,” they had now lost the even more critical Obruchev Street–Balaklava Avenue line to the Germans.

Of course, Vatutin wasn’t just dealing with Kluge’s Army Group F. In the northern part of Moscow, Army Group A’s infantry crossed the Moscow Canal. After a full day of fighting, they captured “Sunday Cultural Park” in the far north. The lead King Tiger of Field Marshal Rundstedt’s 13th SS Panzer Division was now only 700 meters from Levoberezhny railway station.

“I finally understand the difficulties General Rokossovsky faced… The combat skills these Germans display in urban warfare are no worse than their skills in open-field battles. It’s not that they are bad at urban warfare; it’s just that they are even better at open-field warfare.” After reading the stack of heavy reports on the last few hours of battle, Vatutin put them down, dejected.

He had lost more ground today than in the previous ten days. Only now did he understand that the “fierce” German attacks of the past few days were just a warm-up. When the real storm came, he couldn’t even withstand a single one of the Germans’ thunderous blows. He had hoped these carefully prepared defensive lines would hold until August. But on the very first day of July, he had lost them all to the German army.

“Comrade Stalin is on the line. He’s asking about the situation at the front… He’s asking if Bitsa Park held, and when the German attack will stop.” Vatutin’s chief of staff stood with his hands behind his back, his face as ash-gray as if his own mother had died. The questions in the telegram made him feel like a traitor to his country, as if he should pull out his pistol and blow his own brains out.

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