VII Army Corps

The VII Army Corps marched in the wake of the panzer groups as part of the 4th Army's infantry mass, mopping up the Vyazma pocket through October 1941 and then following the Warsaw highway toward Mozhaisk. In November it ground forward against the Mozhaisk defence line, where Soviet militia divisions, cadets and dug-in artillery exacted a price for every village. By early December it stood on the Nara river near Naro-Fominsk, the closest infantry corps to Moscow, before the counteroffensive forced it to yield its gains through the winter. Its divisions had marched over 600 kilometres since June, many men still in summer uniforms when the minus 30 degree frosts arrived; the corps held the Nara line through December only by burning villages for shelter, a scorched-earth retreat that foreshadowed the devastation of the Rzhev battles to come. The tracks recorded here are schematic headquarters-area positions, not surveyed front lines.