The Battle Of Moscow Was MUCH WORSE Than You Think | Operation Typhoon 1941

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:14]On the 30th of September of 1941, at some point on the Soviet Eastern Front, the engines of the tanks of Panzer Group 2 began to roar before dawn. It was not yet the official day for the start of the operation, but Colonel General Hines Gudderion had requested and received authorization to advance his attack by 2 days. The rest of Army Group Center would start on the 2nd of October. What was about to begin was the largest offensive underified command of the entire Second World War.

[00:00:43]Operation Typhoon, the German attempt to take Moscow and end the war in the east before winter arrived. To understand why Typhoon was launched at that precise moment and with that configuration, one must go back a few months and observe the real state of the German army in the autumn of 1941.

[00:01:00]This is not an academic exercise. It is the key to understanding why an operation that began with spectacular victories ended up turned into a logistical nightmare. 3 and 1/2 months earlier on the 22nd of June of 1941, more than 3 million German soldiers had crossed the Soviet border with 3,55 tanks, 2,995 aircraft, and more than 600,000 motor vehicles. It was the largest military operation in history. Army Group Center, the most powerful of the three that composed the invasion, had advanced from the Polish border in two large encirclements. First in Minsk and then in Smolinsk, capturing hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners. By mid August, however, the advance had slowed.

[00:01:46]The Panza divisions had been under constant pressure for weeks, and their condition was worrying. On the 22nd of August, the war diary of Army Group Center concluded with a brutally honest phrase. The armored units are so exhausted and worn out that there can be no talk of any massive operational mission until they have been completely replenished and repaired. 2 days later, Hitler ordered that those same armored units turned south to participate in the Battle of Kiev. Gderion protested it was useless. Kiev was an unprecedented operational triumph. 665,000 Soviet prisoners captured in a single encirclement, but it had an invisible price. The engines of the panzas, which had been in the campaign for more than 2 months, were pushed to the limit in the detour to Ukraine and back. When Halder, the chief of the general staff of the German army, reviewed the state of the Panza groups at the end of September, what he saw was, in his own words, the crisis of the engines. The 12 veteran Panza divisions of Army Group Center totaled about 750 operational tanks, a drop of 70% from their initial strength in June. Only two divisions, the second and the fifth Panza, reached the eastern front, newly equipped with about 450 tanks between them both. But the numbers did not tell the whole story. To compensate for the wear, Hitler had authorized in September the shipment of 60 Czech tanks, 38, 150 Mark III, and 96 MarkV. Barely 306 vehicles out of a total production of 815 units in the previous 3 months. It was a fraction. As Colonel Walter Chales Debbolio, chief of staff of Panza Group 4, pointed out, what was called a division at the end of September was in reality only half of a division. The situation of wheeled vehicles was equally grave. Panzer Group 2 had lost between 30 and 40% of its wheeled transport by the 20th of September. If that figure was representative of the whole of the Eastern Army, between 180,000 and 240,000 vehicles had been written off during the summer campaign. By way of comparison, Hitler authorized in that same period the shipment of 3,500 replacement trucks. The disproportion was brutal. Logistics were no less problematic. The Soviet railway used a track gauge different from the European one, which forced the Germans to reconvert the tracks in conquered territory. Each pair of Soviet stations needed a new service facility because German locomotives required more frequent stops. The result was that trains circulated slower and with smaller loads than planned. Guerilla and partisan attacks added demolitions of bridges and tracks that the scarce railway engineers could never repair quickly enough. General Vagnner, quartermaster general of the army, already warned in September that fuel reserves could be insufficient to conclude the autumn campaign. The men who were to execute Operation Typhoon were mostly aware of what was being asked of them. Hines Rahi wrote to his wife on the 26th of September about the imminent offensive toward Moscow. I hope that in 14 or 20 days Moscow will be reached, but not by us. A non-commissioned officer of the 79th Infantry Division noted on the 24th of September. Whether there will be an end to Russia this year, I doubt very much.

[00:05:03]The military power is effectively shattered, but the country is too large and capitulation is not an option for the Russians. And Aloy Shawyer in a letter to his family on the 28th of September summarized his 3 and 1/2 months of campaign. What I have experienced and lived through in this quarter in Russia, I cannot express in words. There is much that I would want to forget and not be reminded of ever again. In the German rear, public perception was very different. The secret reports of the SD, the security service on popular opinion recorded on the 25th of September that fears of a war of positions in the east or the prospect of a winter campaign had receded. The following report from the 29th of September confirmed that more and more people were convinced of German victory before the start of winter.

[00:05:50]Gerbles worried about the excess of popular optimism that his own propaganda had generated noted in his diary, "The depression has disappeared completely.

[00:05:59]Sometimes the mood of the people goes much beyond the real possibilities. We have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks to reduce the now extreme optimism to a normal level. Faced with this picture, the German military leadership organized on the 24th of September a conference at the headquarters of Army Group Center, presided over by Field Marshall Fedor vonbach. The heads of the OKH, Halder, and the commander-in-chief Bouch, the commanders of Bach's three armies, Strauss, Klug, and Vikes, and the three heads of the Panza groups, Hoth, Hupner, and Gderion attended. The plan presented combined extraordinary strategic audacity with an equally extraordinary blindness to the real limitations of the army that was going to execute it. The operation was named Typhoon, the start date, the 2nd of October. The objective to destroy the three Soviet fronts protecting Moscow, create two large encirclements in Vasma and Brians, and then advanced to surround the Soviet capital. With nearly 2 million men, 1,500 tanks, 1,000 aircraft, and 75 divisions under his command, Bach commanded the largest force ever directed by a single German officer in the Second World War. What no one over the map table wanted to discuss was whether that army in that state could really reach Moscow. Logistical studies prior to the operation made it clear that even if the weather cooperated, the supply system could not sustain an advance beyond the initial encirclements. The seizure of Moscow was ruled out from a logistical point of view even before firing a single shot.

[00:07:30]But in Hitler's headquarters and in the Oage itself, the conviction that the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse was so powerful that no cold analysis had a chance of prevailing.

[00:07:40]Hitler expressed it clearly on the 3rd of October in a public speech in Berlin.

[00:07:44]Today begins the last great decisive battle of this year. It was a mixture of propaganda and selfdeception. Gerbles, more perceptive than his boss in this aspect, noted in his diary that popular optimism had exceeded the real possibilities and that he had much work to do to bring the extreme enthusiasm back to a normal level. The Soviet adversary Bach was facing was the following. the western front of Colonel General Konf, the reserve front of Marshall Budini, and the Briansk front of Lieutenant General Aramnco, totaling 1,250,000 men, 7,600 guns, 9000 tanks, and 667 aircraft. It was not the shattered army without reserves described by German propaganda. It was a serious force deployed in depth which had built several staggered defensive lines during the summer including the viasma defensive line and further east the very important Moshe defensive line anchored in four defensive regions in Vololamsk Moheisk Maloyara Slavets and Kuga but Stalin did not believe that the Germans were going to launch an offensive of this magnitude so late in the year in August and September he had interpreted Gderian's turn toward Ukraine as a diversionary ary maneuver to cover an imminent attack on Moscow and had ordered offensives in Dukov, China and Yelnia that cost his own troops enormous losses precisely in the divisions that now had to defend the capital. The irony was cruel. The Soviet offensives of August and September had been launched by the same forces that now found themselves weakened before the largest German offensive of the year. The board was set. On the 2nd of October, at 5:30 in the morning, the German artillery batteries opened fire along hundreds of kilometers of front. Operation Typhoon had begun, and with it began also the last great gamble of Nazi Germany for a quick victory in the east. The gamble that, if it went well, would end the war in a few months, and that if it failed, would prolong it until the resources of an entire continent fell upon Berlin. In October of 1941, neither side knew for sure which of the two paths history would take, but the German logistical reports kept in drawers and written on official paper already contained the answer. 5 days to close the trap, the collapse of the Soviet front.

[00:10:01]The soldier Hines Otto Fston of the first Panza division described what he saw as dawn broke on the 2nd of October.

[00:10:08]A massive barrier of preparatory fire followed by columns of tanks advancing toward the east. A river of troops and vehicles flooding toward the east. By midday, that stream had crossed the Soviet positions destroyed by the bombardment. In the north of the front, Hoth's Panza Group 3 penetrated 20 km into the Soviet lines during the first day and found a resistance lower than expected. The weather helped clear sky, dry conditions, mild temperatures. The war diary of Panza Group 3 noted that the good weather benefited all movements on the bad roads and tracks. Where mud was present, the dry conditions allowed bypassing cross country without large losses of time. In the center, Hopner's Panza Group 4 advanced up to 15 km into Soviet positions. The first day, the enemy encountered was described as surprised but resisting with ferocity.

[00:10:57]In the south, Gderrion had already been operating for 2 days and by the night of the 2nd of October had the impression of having achieved a total breakthrough. In less than 3 days, his subordinate Panza Core XXXVI recorded 3,800 prisoners, 17 tanks destroyed or captured, 42 guns, 77 trucks, and 300 horses. Marshall Boach in his headquarters was euphoric. In his diary, he wrote that night. The army group went over to the attack according to the plan. We advanced so easily everywhere that doubts arose as to whether the enemy had not in reality retreated. The intelligence captured from Soviet officers refuted that hypothesis. There was no order to retreat. The Soviet armies had received orders to hold their positions at any cost. Intercepted communications confirmed Soviet determination.

[00:11:46]Reinforcement not possible. The crossings must be held. The commander is dead. I have taken command. I can't hold out any longer. Destroying the radio.

[00:11:55]The most spectacular case of those first days was the capture of Oral. The city of 140,000 inhabitants lay in the path of the advance of Gudderians fourth Panza Division. It was taken by the sixth company of Captain Arthur Walshagger with only four tanks which entered the city before anyone had organized the defense. The life of the city was still in full swing, Walsher recalled. When the citizens of Oral saw us, they fled to the buildings and alleys white as ghosts. His tank secured the bridges and the main railway station. Orel had fallen 240 km from Gderian's starting point 4 days earlier, practically without firing a shot. It was the action, not the rule, but it reinforced the perception at the German headquarters that the Soviet army was disintegrating. The Soviet journalist Vaseli Gman was in Oral when an alarmed colleague found him. The Germans are lunging directly at Oral. There are hundreds of tanks. I escaped narrowly under fire. We must leave immediately.

[00:12:53]Otherwise, they will catch us here. Only it was not hundreds of tanks. It was four. The psychological effect of a handful of panzas entering alone a city of 140,000 inhabitants says a lot about the state of the Soviet defense in those first days of October. 3 days after Oral on the 6th of October, Hoth's 7th Panza Division completed its arc toward the north to cut the Soviet retreat routes from the west. The staff soldier Hans Vonluck recalled decades later on both sides of the road to Moscow the armored units formed for the attack on Vasma.

[00:13:25]Against bitter resistance the city was enveloped to the north and south and on its eastern fringe this pocket was also closed. Losses on both sides were heavy.

[00:13:34]What made the initial victories of typhoon possible was a combination of factors that would not coincide again in that campaign. The exceptional weather of the first days of October allowed the maneuver of armored vehicles. The concentration of three Panza groups on a relatively narrow front created a striking mass that the Soviet lines deployed in width without sufficient depth could not absorb. The Soviet command with the three defensive fronts committed to holding positions instead of yielding ground and preserving forces facilitated the encirclement by denying their commanders permission to withdraw.

[00:14:09]General Aramnco of the Brian's front had requested without success permission to withdraw his forces to new positions.

[00:14:16]General Kone of the Western Front had exposed to Stalin the growing danger for his forces and likewise did not receive authorization to fall back. The Soviet defensive rigidity, a child in part of Stalin's command culture that punished any retreat with demotion or death, delivered to Boach the encirclements he sought. The German headquarters received the news of the initial advance with a euphoria bordering on disconnection from reality. Hitler in a speech in Berlin on the 3rd of October declared, "This adversary is already knocked down and will never rise again." Soldiers like Wilhelm Fuller of the 25th Motorized Infantry Division took note in their diaries. What a boost his words give us when we crowd around the radio receiver, not wanting to miss a single word. But others read the news with greater skepticism. Hans Jurgen Hartman noted, "Perhaps it is just talk that our enemy is defeated and will never rise again. I can't help it. I am totally bewildered.

[00:15:10]Will the whole war end before winter?"

[00:15:13]The problem for the German command was that already from the first day, warning signs were appearing that should have been read with more attention. Fuel reserves were even before the start of the operation worryingly small. Plans had been made to bring more fuel by transport aircraft and towed gliders, a sign that the conventional logistical system was not sufficient. Some infantry divisions suffered very grave losses from the first day trying to dislodge strongly entrenched Soviet positions.

[00:15:41]The 131st Infantry Division of General Maya Berdorf suffered very severe losses on the 2nd of October trying to dislodge Soviet positions in its sector. and Panza Group 3 in the north had from the beginning mobility problems related to the state of its vehicles. The first Panza division of Krueger went directly from combat to the operation without rest or repair time. But in that moment of initial euphoria, no one in the German leadership paid attention to the warning signs. General Vagnner, quartermaster general of the army, wrote in a letter on the 3rd of October that he believed that a great success, that is to say the decisive one, will be achieved in 4 weeks. Perhaps the Germans had lost their fear of the Russian winter and the vastness of the Soviet Union. Or perhaps they had simply replaced it with Hitler's maxim. For the German soldier, nothing is impossible.

[00:16:32]The operational scheme of Typhoon contemplated two large encirclements in the first phase. In the north, Panza groups three and four converged toward Viasma to close an enormous pocket that would trap the Soviet armies of the Western Front and the Reserve Front. In the south, Gderian's Panza Group 2 and Vik's second army pressed on the Briansk front. The Vasma encirclement was closed on the 7th of October, only 5 days after the start of the offensive. The speed was possible thanks to the excellent weather, which for a few more days remained dry and mild. Within the pocket were trapped the Soviet 16th, 19th, 20th, 24th, and part of the 32nd armies.

[00:17:11]A total of eight Soviet armies in the combined pockets of Bryansk and Vasma which the Germans called Doppelact the double battle. 64 rifle divisions, 11 tank brigades and 50 artillery regiments were enclosed. The Soviet historian and later Marshall Jukov himself would recognize decades later that the battles of Yasma and Briansk, although a calamity for the Soviet army, played a decisive role in the defense of Moscow.

[00:17:36]The enclosed troops kept the German containment divisions occupied for days.

[00:17:40]Days that Zhukov used to build the Moheisk line and bring reserves from the east. Thanks to the persistence and the firmness of our troops who fought in the encirclement near Vasma, Zhukov wrote, "We had gained invaluable time to strengthen the Mosheisk defensive line."

[00:17:56]"It was not in vain that the surrounded troops gave their lives and shed their blood, but closing the encirclement and eliminating it were two very different things." From German headquarters, a clear order of priorities was issued.

[00:18:08]The motorized units had to exit the pocket as soon as possible and press toward the east. In the first place, the immediate release of all available forces from the battlefield will begin, especially the motorized units, as well as the incessant pursuit of the enemy who escaped the encirclement to prevent at any cost the construction of a new defensive front. The problem was that the encirclement was an operational reality, not a command board that could be ignored. The Soviet armies trapped inside did not surrender. They fought.

[00:18:38]The battle inside the Vasma pocket was one of the most brutal of the entire Eastern campaign. The enclosed Soviet troops knew that their only alternative to dying in the attempt was capture, and capture in German hands in 1941 was equivalent for the vast majority to a slow death from hunger, disease, and mistreatment. They launched wave after wave of massive assaults against the German containment lines. Sometimes at night, sometimes at dawn, sometimes with tanks, sometimes with infantry alone without support of heavy weapons. The account of anti-tank gunner H Brawn of the second Panza division illustrates what that was like. As nightfell, flares lit up the sky and revealed first hundreds and then thousands of Soviet soldiers together with Ksac cavalry and columns of trucks advancing on the thin German front. The blood froze, Brawn recalled. All night the attacks followed in waves. The Soviet soldiers built walls with their own dead to have cover.

[00:19:34]At dawn, the attacks finally ceased. But at daybreak, they began again, like the head of a hydra, with always new earthcoled forms, launching massive assaults driven by the certainty of death. In some sectors, the containment fronts gave way. General Ezbec in command of the 11th Panza division reported on the 12th of October that his front had been broken and that the Soviet attack reached the divisional post itself before the arrival of the tanks repelled the attackers with enormous losses. A Catholic priest from the same division Ernst Tous noted there was a horrific blood bath on the Russian side terrible. Among the attackers there were again women in uniform and further on even children all dead. General Hinrichi, commander of the exact army corps, described in a letter to his family the weight of what was happening.

[00:20:21]One has to read carefully each Soviet radio interception to feel the desperation of men who know they are dying and keep on fighting. On the front of the pocket, the experience of the German soldiers who contained it was a catalog of horror. The soldier Eric Krauss of the 35th Infantry Division received orders to hold positions on the outer perimeter of Yasma with his feet shattered after 7 weeks of combat. We still do not rest, although we have spent 7 weeks fighting and can barely move our aching and bleeding feet. They demand too much of us. It was a night attack that finally broke his lines.

[00:20:56]Soviet tanks advancing on German positions and desperate runs of infantry that yielded ground under the weight of the assault. All the oaths of the officers and non-commissioned officers were of no use. Everyone fled from the Russian tanks. Only the arrival of the reserve Panza regiment restored the situation. Lieutenant Carl Fuches, a tanker of the 7th Panza Division in the same area, saw things with greater confidence from inside his tank. In a letter of the 12th of October, he wrote to his father, "Whenever there is a hot spot, we appear like ghosts and engage the enemy. Yesterday must have been the proudest day for our company in this campaign. tanks, anti-aircraft guns and trucks, and the infantry fired on everything that was seen. But barely 3 days later, the death of his best friend Roland made him change his tone. Why did he have to give his life now with the end practically in sight? The Bransk encirclement was in many ways even more difficult to liquidate than that of Viasma. The territory was more extensive, the forest thicker, and the German forces scarcer in relation to the perimeter they had to cover. Gderion had little infantry to seal a pocket that extended over an enormous area of forested terrain, and the tanks were useless in the dense forests where the Soviets escaped. The war diary of Naing's 18th Panza Division described nights of continuous crisis. The situation during the night is always especially critical when the enemy with numerical superiority assaults a position. Our own security measures are simply overrun and then in small groups they break toward the east. Bach himself recognized in his diary that the Briansk encirclement was more than unstable and that Gderian's weak forces were incapable of preventing some Russians from breaking through. When the OKH issued a special bulletin on the 9th of October announcing the second pocket in Briansk, Boach called Halder to complain. He had deliberately avoided mentioning that pocket in official communicates precisely because his eastern front was too permeable. Gderion is scratching everything he can to prevent a large-scale breakout. The commander of the Bransk front himself, Lieutenant General Aramco, was seriously wounded on the 13th of October in a German air attack while directing breakout operations. He was evacuated by plane and visited in the hospital by Stalin in person who asked him about the state of the front. Aramco responded, "The troops have been assaulting the enemy ring for 8 days and have finally broken it." That was true. In the sector of General Freiry, combat elements of the enemy broke the German front on the 13th of October. The German record of how many Soviets escaped was deliberately vague. Aramco himself in his memoirs disputed Gdderian's version which minimized the escapes, stating that it was large units and complete divisions that escaped the Nazi ring.

[00:23:42]The final balance of the double battles of Yasma and Brians was in terms of prisoners and material destroyed. One of the greatest military successes of the entire Second World War. The German communique of the 18th of October cited 673,980 Soviet prisoners taken. Another quarter of a million Soviet soldiers had died or been wounded. Only about 250,000 men escaped the pockets. among them approximately 85,000 from Vasma. Boach declared on the 19th of October that the battles of Vasma and Brians constituted the greatest achievement of arms of the entire campaign. But those 85,000 who escaped from Vasma and the 23,000 from Brians rushed to reinforce the Mosheisk defensive line. And the days that the trapped units had bought with their lives were exactly the days that Jukov, newly appointed commander of the Western Front, needed to organize the defense of Moscow. The Vasma pocket was not just a German triumph. It was also the first link in the defense of Moscow. The mud that Napoleon knew the Rasputita and the limit of the Blitzkrieg.

[00:24:50]The night of the 6th to the 7th of October, the first snow of the year fell on the central front. Until that moment, the weather had been exceptionally good.

[00:24:58]Clear sky, mild temperatures, reasonably hassable roads. In Berlin, Gobles had written that the god of weather seemed to have sided with the Germans. Hitler had declared on the fourth day of October that if the weather remained averely good for two more weeks, the Soviet Union would be mostly crushed.

[00:25:16]The weather did not stay. With the first snow came the rain. The rural Soviet roads which in dry conditions were already of very poor quality transformed into something the Germans had not seen before. The Rasputa, the period of the lawless roads, that sticky and deep mud characteristic of the Russian autumn that turns the ground into a trap for any heavy vehicle. Gdderian noted in his diary on the morning of the 7th of October that vehicles could only advance at a snail's pace and with a great wear on the engines. Cavalry Captain Max Kunut described thus the psychological effect of the sudden change of conditions. Suddenly our task in Russia seemed insurmountable. Our supplies got stuck just like our heavy artillery even with its heavy horses. The tanks advanced laboriously through the mud that affected their maneuverability and consumed more of their precious fuel than planned. All Russia, it seemed to us, was a great basin of sticky mud, and we were in the middle. The Russian mud was not simply difficult. It was of a qualitatively different nature from any central European mud. General Blumtrit, Chief of Staff of the Fourth Army, explained it after the war. The reality far exceeded our worst expectations. It is difficult to convey a picture of what it was like to someone who did not actually experience it. The infantry soldier slips in the mud while several teams of horses are needed to drag each gun forward. All wheeled vehicles sink up to the axles in the Mer. Even the tractors could only move with great difficulty. A large proportion of our heavy artillery was soon stuck and therefore was not available for the battle of Moscow. The impact on logistics was catastrophic. The supply system was already precarious before the mud began. The reports of the quarter masters of the Panza groups made it clear that the real supply capacity was approximately half of the daily needs of the army group in normal movement conditions. When movement was reduced to 2 km per hour as recorded by both Lemlson's XI Panza core and Kersner's Etxxi Panza core in those first weeks of October, the arithmetic of supply became brutal. A report from Lemlson's XXX Panzacore dated the 9th of October described the state of the roads and the effect on operations with a precision that no subsequent report surpassed.

[00:27:28]Movements are seriously delayed by the impassible roads. The speed of the column at this moment is approximately 2 kmh.

[00:27:36]In those conditions, a division that had to advance toward an objective 60 km away took 30 hours in continuous movement without counting stops, breakdowns, or attacks. In practice, the 60 km advance could take several days.

[00:27:50]War journalist Ernst Karna, newly arrived at the front, shared a guard shift with a veteran and recorded the conversation. Take a look at the map of Russia, the veteran told me. The land is immense. And how far have we advanced?

[00:28:03]Not as far as Napoleon in 1812. Our conquest is only a thin strip on the map, I replied. But we have technical means and completely different equipment than what they had, he laughed dryly.

[00:28:14]Fine, but they are more susceptible to breaking down. It was an exchange that captured, in a few words, the fundamental paradox of the German campaign in the east. Lemlson's 6xxvi Panza core received its supplies from the Rosavl railway junction 170 km away.

[00:28:31]A single round trip took 3 days. Hell's 15th Infantry Division received part of its supplies from Smolinsk 350 km away.

[00:28:40]The 98th Infantry Division transported its ammunition from between 300 and 400 km to the rear. Even when the gasoline arrived, the amount was so scarce that many times it was only enough to supply the towing vehicles that had brought it.

[00:28:54]A German soldier described it with a precision that no official report matched. Engineers, anti-aircraft artillery, and tank regiments send their heavy vehicles to the rear to put them in front of the supply vehicles and tow them forward, but all is in vain. The fuel brought in this way is just enough to supply the towing detachments. The horses died by the thousands. Panza Group 3 lost 1,000 horses a day. The infantry divisions, whose supply system depended on the horse to a much greater extent than the Panza divisions, found that their animals sank up to their necks in the mud and had to be slaughtered. The veterans replaced the European horses with Pang, the robust Russian ponies. But these were too small to drag the 105 and 150 mm guns, which required teams of six and eight animals in good condition. A single piece of artillery was seen advancing, pulled by 24 horses. Major von Luck of the Seventh Panza Division described his motorcyclists and grenaders covered with Russian sheepkins confiscated from local peasants. No report mentioned what those peasants would wear in the approaching winter. The shortage of food was also felt. The advance was too slow to continue the summer practice of living off the territory. The supply from the rear was insufficient. There were many times in that first autumn when we had no bread for several days in a row, a soldier recalled. And there was little that could be requisitioned or even bought from the civilian population.

[00:30:20]Even the wells supplied Vafaness units suffered grave shortages. Heising of the Dasich noted, "Amunition, fuel for our vehicles, and bread soon became as rare as gold. We could not even transport our wounded to a safe place. The XXV Army Corps of General Capmp at the southern end of the front had in mid-occtober an average combat strength of only 50 men per company. Disease was added to the combat wear and tear. 50% of all medical cases recorded between September of 1941 and August of 1942 were related to the cold. According to subsequent studies, the lack of winter clothing was total. The Russian mud also had an unexpect effect on the expensive initial advances. It endangered the conquered positions. Vehicles that remained immobilized were not just a logistical burden. They were stationary targets for the growing activity of Soviet aviation and for the bands of Soviet soldiers who roamed the forests in the rear after the encirclements. On the 19th of October, Army Group Center established that the state of the roads had worsened to the point of constituting a grave crisis in the supply of the troops with provisions, ammunition, and above all fuel. On the same date, the quartermaster general of the second Panza army declared that the fuel supply reaching the front was completely inadequate and Gudderion informed the army group that at present large-scale operations are not possible.

[00:31:44]It was the 19th of October. Bach was still more than 100 km from Moscow and the situation would not improve. General Vagnner, quartermaster general of the army, wrote on the 17th of October to the commanderin-chief Brochic. In the high tension situation, the demands made of me are enormous. The theater of operations in the center is at this moment a mixture of mud, snow, ice, and cold. Practically everything a soldier does not need. But the thesis that the mud was the only cause of the failure of typhoon does not stand up to examination.

[00:32:16]Zhukov fought in the same mud conditions. His supplies also had difficulties. The difference was that the Soviet railways reached the outskirts of Moscow, that the depots were kilometers from the front instead of hundreds, and that the factories in Moscow continued producing weapons and ammunition that could be taken to the front in trucks that did not need to travel 300 km of destroyed road. The Rasputa was the same for both sides on the roads, but in deep logistics, the asymmetry was crushing. The line built with civilian hands that stopped the most powerful army in the world.

[00:32:52]The Soviet command had little time, but it used it with remarkable efficiency.

[00:32:56]When Zhukov took command of the Western Front on the 10th of October, he found barely 90,000 men, 11 rifle divisions, 16 armored brigades, and more than 40 artillery regiments to defend the Moscow axis. The Mohisk defensive line was the backbone of that defense. The line was anchored in four defensive regions.

[00:33:15]Volkalamsk in the north, Mohisk in the center. Maloyara Slavet south of the center, and Kuga in the south. It was a line built hastily during the summer with labor from mobilized citizens, hundreds of kilometers of anti-tank trenches, minefields, concrete obstacles, and buried artillery positions. It was not the Majino line, but in the conditions of the autumn mud, any obstacle that forced an tanks to stay on the main road and channeled them toward prepared positions was an enormous force multiplier for the exhausted Panza groups with scarce fuel that arrived from the viasma encirclement. The Moheisk line represented the first serious obstacle since the start of Typhoon. And unlike the first days of the operation, now there were no clear skies or dry roads or fresh units. Stum's XXX Panza Corps took Moheisk in a week of fighting that cost the SS division Das Reich 1,242 casualties, including 270 dead.

[00:34:10]Fischer's 10th Panza Division lost another 776 men with 167 dead. In total, the Das Reich and the 10th Panza Division had advanced together from Vasma through the mud, crossed the Mosheisk line, and reached about 80 km west of Moscow. Core Commander Stum transmitted Fischer's effective strength report to headquarters and according to the account exclaimed, "My god, this is nothing more than a reinforced reconnaissance patrol." The soldier Gunther Heising of the Das Reich described the advance on foot of his comrades in those days. These infantry soldiers, all with the same facial expression under their faded field caps, advance silently through the mud step by step toward the east. The clay-like liquid enters the upper part of their boots. What does it matter? Their feet have been soaked anyway for days. Also wet are the trousers that roll around their knees like cold compresses every night. The image captures the paradox of a campaign that on paper advanced and on the ground was drowning. Kunen's LVI Panza took Maloaros on the 18th of October and advanced another 30 km to Cameoy, 70 km from Moscow before the advance stopped. Thma's 20th Panza division with only 34 tanks on the 16th of October had been left behind for rest. Its diary summarized the state of the material with a now historical phrase, "The spirit is brave, but the truck is weak." On the southern flank of the fourth army, the Soviet counterattacks launched from the 25th of October put several German divisions on the defensive and put an end to any possibility of renewed advance in that sector. During October, Schroth's the 12th Army Corps was pushed back between 2 and 3 km on the 25th of October with one company that at the end of the day had only 12 men. The next day, the Soviet attack expanded and forced Clue to commit his divisional reserves. A unit of the 98th Infantry Division was crushed when T34 and KV1 tanks overran a battalion command post. Colonel Garis, commander of the 282nd Infantry Regiment, called it a black day and determined that the advance on Moscow would find its definitive end and that the offensive momentum of the division would remain broken for long weeks. In the south, the situation was, if anything, even more grave. Schwepenberg swept a fear of Panza core was advancing toward Tula, the industrial city 200 km south of Moscow. Its spearhead was the fourth Panza division, which on the 6th of October had had a catastrophic encounter with the new Soviet T-34 tanks on the outskirts of Matsensk. Colonel Katukov, in command of the Soviet armored brigade defending the area, had prepared a classic ambush. His T-34s hidden in forests and buildings opened fire when the German Panza the 39V were already very close. The German tanks with their armor and guns inferior to those of the T-34 in that engagement suffered grave losses. The internal German report on Mitsensk was surprisingly honest. The Soviet T34s were superior in armor and armorament to all German tanks then in service. For the first time in the campaign, German tank officers recommended modifying their tactics. Gudderion himself forwarded a report to the Oage about the limitations of the Panzer of Fourth against the T-34. A report that was basically ignored. By the 12th of October, Langaman Lencamp's fourth Panza division had only 40 operational tanks from an original strength of more than 170 plus 35 replacements received at the end of September. Its ammunition stocks were very scarce in all calibers. At the beginning of November, only 6 weeks after the start of the operation, it would have 46 operational tanks. It had managed to repair six in 3 weeks.

[00:37:52]Further south, still, General Kemps XXX3 Panza was trying to advance on Kursk, a city 460 linear km south of Moscow and 800 km from the most advanced point of the German front in the north in Kalinin. That geometry alone explains the strategic insanity of the exploitation phase of Typhoon. Army Group Center was trying to maintain a front of nearly 800 km with forces that hardly covered the original front of 500 km. Hubiski's 9th Panza Division, spearhead of the XXXvite Corps, came to have only seven operational tanks in mid-occtober. Hubiski himself formally protested his orders to continue the offensive and listed three reasons. Any further advance lengthened his flanks without there being forces to cover them. The state of the roads did not allow the advance and his regiments were militarily very weak. That a Panza division with seven operational tanks continued being qualified as a Panza division in the German order of battle reports says a lot about the distance between the reality of the front and the perception of headquarters. In the north, Reinhardt's adventure in Kalinin represented another example of the impossible objectives that the German command continued to demand. Kershner's XX Panza took Kalinin, a city on the vulgar north of the main axis, but was practically surrounded when Konv's newly formed Kalinin front launched counterattacks from all flanks. By the 20th of October, the core had been in uninterrupted combat for 17 days.

[00:39:21]Krueger's first Panza division, which had reached Kalanine with 79 tanks on the 14th of October, had only 24 operational a week later, and eight more had been destroyed by their own crews to prevent their capture after breaking down. Between the 13th and the 20th of October, the division lost 765 men and 45 officers. The pattern was repeated everywhere. Divisions that had started Typhoon with hundreds of tanks now counted their personnel in dozens or in units and the official offensive continued on paper. On the 22nd of October, Boach opened his diary entry with a lapidary phrase, "There is no significant advance anywhere. The Kremlin as a bastion Stalin Zhukov and the impossible defense."

[00:40:07]While German columns were sinking into the mud 100 km to the west, Moscow lived its darkest hours. On the 15th of October, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the government to Quebeesev, 25,500 km to the east. The ministries began to move. Foreign diplomatic missions received orders to depart. Key industrial facilities began to be dismantled for their move to the east.

[00:40:30]On the 16th of October, what is known as the Moscow panic broke out. Without newspapers, without metro, without shops open, with factories sealed or prepared for demolition, and with the party elite fleeing in cars loaded with goods, the Moskavite population interpreted that the city was being abandoned. Resentment was more decisive than fear. Months of sacrifice and of demands on the people, and now those who had preached sacrifice the most were the first to clear out.

[00:40:56]There were lootings, riots, public insults to the Soviet regime, and calls of support for Hitler. But Stalin did not go. That decision more than any other defined the character of the defense of Moscow. When the Soviet dictator stayed in the Kremlin facing the German threat, the slogan Stalin is with us ceased to be propaganda to become a verifiable reality. By the 19th of October, the riots had ceased.

[00:41:20]Normality returned with a combination of welfare measures and coercion. The proclamation of the state of siege of Moscow on the 20th of October gave the authorities powers of summary execution.

[00:41:31]The city began to transform systematically into a fortress. 500,000 Mosavvites excavated 80 km of trenches and anti-tank ditches. 300 km of barbed wire were placed. Each important building was reconverted into a bastion.

[00:41:46]Machine gun nests in attics, artillery positions at street junctions, sandbag barricades, and metal anti-tank hedgehogs on each avenue. barrier head of the NKVD prepared the mining of hundreds of prominent buildings including the Bojoy theater in anticipation of the Germans entering. If the Germans had reached Moscow in 1941, they would have found a desert. Zhukov in command of the defense received reinforcements that arrived from the far corners of the Soviet Union. The Siberian divisions equipped for combat in extreme winter began to reach the front. New tank brigades arrived from the factories of the Eurals. In the first two weeks of November, Zhukov received more than 100,000 fresh soldiers and dozens of new tanks. Zhukov himself, one of the most ruggedly effective generals of the entire war, organized the defense with a combination of extreme toughness and operational talent. To the commanders who yielded ground without authorization, he had them shot. To those who held their positions before crushing pressure, he promoted them. His order of the 13th of October was explicit. summary execution for cowards and alarmists who abandon the battlefield and withdraw from their positions without permission. A week later, he had the commander of the 17th Rifle Division executed without trial for having allowed his forces to withdraw several times without authorization.

[00:43:07]They were brutal methods, but the Moscow of October of 1941 was a city that was being governed by the terror of two armies. The German from the west and the Soviet state itself from the east. The question of which was more terrifying depended on where you were. But Zhukov was not just brutality. He was a systematic organizer who understood how a deep defense works and how to use the terrain to stop a mechanized offensive.

[00:43:31]He distributed his scarce reserves at nodal points covering the main advance axes instead of dispersing them along the entire front. He concentrated his artillery in sectors where the mud forced the German tanks to stay on the road, turning each highway into a lane of fire. and he built reserves that he never committed until the point of crisis was injubitable, preserving a counterattack capacity that Boach did not have. The logistical asymmetry was astonishing and growing. Zhukov fought a few kilome from the depots, the factories, and the railways of Moscow.

[00:44:04]The Germans fought 100 km from the nearest front with functioning supply and 300 or 400 km from their main depots over roads that trucks crossed when they could and without a reconverted railway network that covered the needs. The German army needed at least 32 daily trains to cover its basic needs. 16 arrived. Siberian divisions against soldiers without coats, the asymmetry that decided the battle.

[00:44:31]At the end of October, the Typhoon Front had stopped deacto in its entire extension. There was no formal surrender of the offensive, only the tacit recognition that vehicles did not move.

[00:44:42]Divisions did not advance and the cold that followed the periods of mud froze the positions in their place. The officers called this a pause. In practice, the army was at the limit of its capacity. In the north in Kalinin, Kersner's XX core resisted the counterattacks of the Kin in front without possibility of advancing. In the center, Hopon's Panza Group four held positions east of Moshe Heisk without fuel to attack. In the south, Gudderion concentrated forces for a new attempt against Tula. The cold arrived at the same time the mud solidified for many soldiers. The end of the mud was received with relief because vehicles were able to move again, but the cold brought its own problems. The German army had no winter clothing. Vehicle lubricants solidified at temperatures below 20°. Tank brakes failed. Machine guns jammed. Aircraft engines did not start. Field hospitals recorded thousands of cases of frostbite. The contrast with the Soviet situation was striking. The Siberian divisions that reached the Moscow front in October and November had been trained to fight at 40°. Their soldiers wore complete winter gear, felt boots, quilted clothing, lubricants for weaponry, and extreme cold. Their T-34 tanks could start at temperatures that paralyzed German engines. Every factor of terrain and climate that weakened the German attackers relatively strengthened the Soviet defenders. A Soviet pamphlet dropped on the 30th of September, even before the start of typhoon, had warned, "If you do not leave here voluntarily, you are lost. The harsh Russian winter is preparing. It had turned out prophetic." The soldier Hans Roth noted in his diary on the 7th of October, even before the winter arrived with force.

[00:46:20]The weather is changing. A freezing wind from the north sweeps the vast plains.

[00:46:24]Slowly but surely, the cold seeps through the thin fabric of our threadbear coats. Our hands are numb and stiff. Slowly, it begins to clear, even for the most encouraable optimist that the hardest part is still ahead. The second ruthless enemy approaches, the Russian winter. The OKH and the OKW continued planning the second phase of Typhoon. The renewed operation would begin on the 15th 16th of November when the frozen ground allowed again the movement of vehicles. The objectives remained Moscow which was to be surrounded to the north by Panza groups three and four and to the south by Gderrion's second Panza army. But the real state of the forces made those plans almost fictitious. The fourth Panza division which was to head Gudderion's advance toward Tula had at the end of October ammunition for 18% of its needs and fuel trucks at 40%. The infantry officer of one of the vanguard battalions described his personnel, 20 men in some companies. The 35th Infantry Division of Fifth Corps had in its company's personnel so reduced that the divisional doctor recorded that 70% of the men suffered from illnesses not related to combat wounds. Lieutenant Colonel Trescow, first staff officer of Army Group Center, visited Lieutenant Colonel Lossberg of the OKW in October and told him that in his opinion the troops were in worse condition than the Western German army in September of 1918, weeks before the armistice of the First World War. It was therefore the moment to end the mobile operations in the east for this year and commit the troops to building winter positions. The assessment was ignored. The OKH planned the second phase of typhoon. Even Gerbles, who received detailed daily military reports and knew the difficulties, rejected the possibility that the weather would stop a German victory. We have to try to obtain victory even against the weather, he noted on the 21st of October. It is certainly more difficult than we originally thought, but in the final instance, the war cannot be allowed to fail because of the weather. 27 km from the Kremlin, the furthest point the Vermacht reached.

[00:48:31]The second phase of typhoon began on the 15th of November with the frozen ground.

[00:48:35]The conditions were very different from those of early October. The hard ground allowed movement, but temperatures of 10 to 20° caused havoc among men without adequate clothing and vehicles without special lubricants for the cold. It was an exchange of one problem for another.

[00:48:52]The two points of the attack were the advance of Panza Group 3 and Panzer Group 4 through the north in the direction of the Moscow Vulgar Canal and the advance of Gderian's second Panzer army through the south in the direction of Tula and beyond. The final objective was to surround Moscow in an enormous embrace, cut its communications and surrender the city without the need to assault it. The plan on paper was coherent. In practice, the divisions that had to execute it were in many cases in worse condition than at the moment. The first phase had stopped. The frozen ground had turned the roads into passable surfaces. But the same temperatures that facilitated the movement of vehicles destroyed the brakes, solidified the motor oils, and turned each repair into a survival exercise for the mechanics who had to work with numb fingers at 20°. Hoopnesi Panza launched the renewed attack in the northern sector with Vile's second Panza division and Sheller's 11th Panza division as the spearhead. The second division, despite having rested relatively during the pause of late October, listed 149 operational tanks.

[00:49:58]Feain's fifth Panza division, which also participated in the sector, had a similar state. The initial advance was faster than expected thanks to the frozen ground. And at the end of November, the panzas of the forcore had reached the outskirts of Krasnaya Polyana, barely 27 km from the Kremlin.

[00:50:15]Those were the closest kilometers to Moscow that the Germans would reach in the entire war. The visibility on clear days allowed soldiers with binoculars to distinguish the spires and domes of the highest buildings of the capital.

[00:50:28]Lieutenant Carl Ludwig von Brookke of the 62nd Infantry Division recalled after the war having seen through his binoculars the towers of the Kremlin. It was one of the few moments in which the initial euphoria of October seemed for an instant justified, but it was an untenable position. The logistics of the second phase were, if anything, more fragile than those of October. Trains arrived with less regularity than before. Fuel was scarce. The artillery fired with extremely reduced rations to conserve ammunition. And Kershner's XXI Army Corps, which should have joined the advance from Khenin to seize the Moscow Vulgar Canal to the north, did not arrive with enough force in time to do so. In the north, Funk's seventh panza division and Krueger's first Panza division managed to cross the Moscow Vulgar Canal in Yakroma on the 27th of November. It was the furthest point to the east that German troops would reach in the entire war, but the positions was a bridge head salient without support on the flanks with the river at the back and Soviet forces in superior positions in three directions. The division crossed the bridge, established a small bridge head on the east bank and held it for 48 hours, but the Soviet counterattacks and the absence of reinforcements made its consolidation impossible. The panzas withdrew to the west side of the canal before the position was liquidated. Gdderian's advance in the south was equally frustrating. Despite months of attempts, Tula never fell. The defenders, a mixture of regular NKVD soldiers and brigades of armed workers from the city's own factories, resisted all assaults. Gudderion tried to surround the city, but lacked enough infantry to seal a complete perimeter around an industrial city, while at the same time advancing in the direction of Moscow. In mid- November, the second Panza army had managed to cut the Tula Moscow road south of the city, but could not advance further. Arnim's 17th Panza division and Naing's 18th Panza Division, which were to have continued toward the north after taking Tula, were blocked before the suburbs of the city. In the central sector of the front, Kluji's fourth army held positions along the Moscow highway and resisted the continuous counterattacks of the Soviet 5th Army in the Mo Heisk sector. Each small German advance was answered with Soviet counterattacks that forced them to retreat or to spend ammunition and men to hold the gained ground. The equation did not add up. The German divisions attacked with less than half of their original strength without reserves with scarce supply and were answered by Soviet units that arrived from the easter. At the beginning of December, the German command recognized that the second phase of typhoon had also failed.

[00:53:05]The deepest advance had occurred in the northern sector at about 1520 km from the periphery of Moscow. From the most advanced suburbs, German soldiers could see the flash of the highest buildings of the Soviet capital with binoculars, but they could not enter. On the 5th of December of 1941, Zhukov's western front launched the Great Soviet counter offensive that would push Army Group Center hundreds of kilometers toward the west during the following months. At that moment, the German divisions before Moscow were so exhausted that the simple fact of maintaining their positions under the Soviet blow required superhuman efforts.

[00:53:43]Zhukov's offensive would be another chapter in a history that had begun on the 2nd of October with the German certainty of an imminent victory. For Army Group Center, the 5th of December was not the end of a defeat that had just occurred. It was the moment in which the defeat, which had been brewing for weeks, became finally impossible to deny. 99 new Soviet divisions, the equation that the Vermacht could not win.

[00:54:09]The final balance of Operation Typhoon in its first phase, that which covered October of 1941, combined staggering numbers with a strategic reality that made them irrelevant. Army Group Center had taken 673,980 prisoners in Vasma and Briansk. It had destroyed or captured 876 tanks, 2,891 guns, 465 anti-tank pieces, and 355 anti-aircraft pieces. It had advanced between 200 and 300 km in the 3 weeks of the first phase. It was objectively one of the greatest operational achievements in military history, and it had not been enough. At the end of October, Army Group Center could not continue advancing. Its fuel reserves were critical. Its divisions had an average of between 1/3 and 1/2 of their initial strength. Its supply lines operated at less than half of the required capacity.

[00:55:06]It had 48,000 casualties only in the first half of October on top of the 229,000 already accumulated until the 1st of October for a total of 277,000 casualties since the start of Barbarasa.

[00:55:21]The replacement army had sent 151,000 men. The deficit was 126,000 people and there were no more reserves in Germany.

[00:55:30]At the same time, the Soviet Union had moved 99 new divisions to the central sector of the front between early October and early December. They were not all on the front line, but they were arriving. And while the German army shrank day by day, the Soviet army grew.

[00:55:46]The intelligence officer of army group center confronted with the constant appearance of new Soviet divisions did not have a satisfactory answer for his superiors. Lieutenant Hans von Luck of the seventh Panza division wrote after the battle of Yasma, "We wondered how Stalin kept producing new divisions and where did the thousands of tanks and guns come from? It was a question that German generals had stopped asking themselves seriously because the answer forced them to review the entire premise on which Typhoon had been built. The strategic failure of Typhoon had multiple causes that the German participants themselves debated for decades. The generals in their postwar memoirs blamed the weather, speaking of General Mud and General Winter. In the formulation that became famous, the delay caused by the divergence toward Kiev ordered by Hitler in August and the interference of the Furer in operational decisions. Each of those factors had real importance. But the most honest analysis of the situation points to something deeper. Army Group Center launched Typhoon with forces that although imposing on paper were operating at the limit of their logistical and technical capacity from the first day. The railway system could never sustain the operation beyond the initial encirclements. Motorized vehicles accumulating wear since June broke down faster than they could be repaired. And the adversary, far from crumbling as German propaganda promised, continuously regenerated its forces.

[00:57:11]Marshall Kessler, commander of Airfleet 2 during Typhoon, expressed it with precision decades later. For this task, the Panza groups were too weak. Our strategic mechanized forces had to be proportional to the depth and breadth of the area to be conquered and to the strength of the enemy, and we had nothing even close to enough for this.

[00:57:30]Our fully tracked vehicles, including the tanks, did not have adequate service capacity. Technical limitations to constant movement existed. A mobile operation at 1,000 km of depth through a heavily occupied enemy territory requires vast supplies. Lieutenant General Kurt von Tippleskirch, who fought as a division commander in October of 1941, offered the most balanced synthesis. The magnitude of the local successes spoke in favor of Hitler. But only the result of the war could demonstrate if the scope of the tactical victories on the battlefields was in proportion to the time consequently lost for the continuation of the operation. If the objective of the campaign was not reached, the Russians had lost a battle but had won the war. What would have happened if Moscow had fallen? The question that history does not answer.

[00:58:21]Operation Typhoon leaves open several questions that historians continue to debate and that turn this campaign into something more than a conventional military episode. The first and most evident, would anything have changed if the offensive had begun 6 weeks earlier in August before the detour toward Kiev?

[00:58:39]The German generals who promoted the Moscow campaign in the summer of 1941 and who were overruled by Hitler believed after the war that the answer was affirmative. The best known version of this argument is that of Gdderion, who maintained that if his panzas had continued toward Moscow in August instead of turning toward Ukraine, the Soviet capital would have fallen before the Raspatitza. But the most recent studies are skeptical. The same divisions that would have attacked Moscow in August already carried 3 months of constant wear since the start of Barbarasa. the logistical problem.

[00:59:13]The roads and the railway gauge would have been present anyway and the time available before the Rasputita in the best of scenarios in August would have been a few weeks. Furthermore, the battle of Kiev, which Gderion presented as the detour that ruined Operation Typhoon, captured 665,000 Soviet soldiers and disrupted the southern flank of the German front.

[00:59:35]Without that operation, box flank would have been exposed during all of Typhoon.

[00:59:40]The second question, what would have happened if the Germans had taken Moscow? The Soviet response was planned.

[00:59:46]The alternative capital in Quebeev, 800 km to the east, was ready and already receiving evacuated ministries and diplomatic missions. The most important armament factories were being moved to the Eurals and Siberia, where they would continue producing war material regardless of what happened at the front. Stalin had left clear instructions. If Moscow fell, the government would continue from the east.

[01:00:10]The loss of Moscow would have been a psychological and propagandistic blow of the first magnitude, but it would not have stopped the war. Sir Ian Kershaw, the most rigorous biographer of Hitler, concluded, "If the Vermacht had reached the city in the absence of a Luftvafer capable of raising Moscow to the ground, the result probably would have been a preview of what finally occurred in Stalingrad." The third question, more mysterious. Why did the German command systematically ignore the warning signs that their own analyses produced?

[01:00:40]Logistical reports said that the advance beyond the initial encirclements was impossible. Material reports said that the tanks would not hold out.

[01:00:49]Meteorologists had predicted the Rasputita with sufficient precision.

[01:00:53]Nevertheless, Halder, Boach, Brow, and Hitler continued ordering advances that their own staffs knew were impossible.

[01:01:00]Part of the answer lies in the initial success of the 2nd of October. Those first extraordinarily good days with advances of 15 to 20 km daily and encirclements that closed in record time created a certainty of victory that resisted contrary evidence. Gobble saw it from Berlin clearly. The German people who had lived with the promise of a quick victory in the east since June would raise their level of expectation to such a point that any setback would become a political catastrophe.

[01:01:28]The offensive had to continue even though the conditions made it impossible because the political cost of stopping it was unthinkable. Another part of the answer lies in the operational culture of the German army. As the historian Robert Satino pointed out, the notion of making a pause went against everything this officer corps believed. The importance of will and aggressiveness and especially the importance of finishing the war in a single campaign.

[01:01:53]The blitzkrieg was not just a tactic. It was a way of thinking that attributed failure always to the individual's lack of will, never to the objective limitations of resources. In that mental framework, to stop was to surrender, and to surrender was unthinkable. This same mentality explains why even at the end of October, when it was evident that the advance had failed, there was no discussion at headquarters about adopting winter defensive positions. The only conversation was about when and where to launch the next offensive.

[01:02:23]There is also a dimension that conventional military accounts tend to overlook. The role of selfdeception in German intelligence estimates. Since the start of Barbarasa, the Oakage analyses systematically underestimated the Soviet capacity to regenerate forces when a Soviet army was destroyed. Another appeared. Holder noted on the 11th of August. At the start of the war, we calculated with 200 enemy divisions. Now we already count 360.

[01:02:50]These divisions are not armed and equipped as we understand and tactically they are poorly directed in many aspects but they are there and when we destroy a dozen of them the Russians put another dozen in their place. The diagnosis was lucid but it did not change the planning. This inability to integrate information into decision-making is one of the most striking characteristics of the German campaign in the east. The same generals who produced brilliant analyses of the enemy situation continued ordering operations that these analyses demonstrated to be impossible.

[01:03:21]Marshall Klest, head of Panza Group 1, admitted in Nuremberg, "I never read Clausvitz." It was the admission that the army that had developed the Blitzkrieg had ignored the military theorist who best had articulated the limits of offensive warfare. The fourth question, perhaps the most disturbing for those who study military history.

[01:03:41]What does Operation Typhoon indicate about the relationship between tactical success and strategic failure? During October of 1941, Army Group Center won some of the most spectacular battles in modern military history. It took more than 600,000 prisoners, destroyed thousands of tanks and guns, and advanced hundreds of kilome toward the east. And with all that, it did not achieve the objective for which the operation had been designed. There is not in military history a clearer example that one can win all the battles and lose the war. The explanation of Lieutenant General Vasilfki, Deputy Director of the Soviet General Staff, summarizes with precision the result.

[01:04:21]Evaluating the outcome of the events of October, it must be said that it was very unfavorable for us. The Soviet army suffered grave losses. The enemy advanced nearly 100 m, but the objectives of Operation Typhoon were not achieved. One of Boach's groups remained irmediably stuck near Tula, another beyond Moshisk and another more in the upper reaches of the Vular. The resistance and the courage of the defenders of the Soviet capital stopped the Nazi hordes. Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Munzel, commander of the sixth Panza regiment of Model's Threeard Panza Division, offered at the end of October his conclusion on the campaign. The great attack toward Moscow failed due to the overestimation of our forces and above all due to the climatic and terrain difficulties specific to the time of year. The culminating point of the campaign in the east had already been surpassed. The largest battle of the largest front of the Second World War had reached its physical limit. Not because the German army lacked courage or tactical skill which it had in abundance, but because the distance was too great, the resources too scarce, the adversary too resilient, and the time too short. It was the first strategic defeat of Nazi Germany. Although for many a German at the front, the magnitude of what occurred would only be revealed in the following months. When the Soviet counterattack of December demonstrated that the army of which they had been part, the most powerful in the world in September of 1939 was no longer invincible. Operation Typhoon began on the 2nd of October of 1941 with the German certainty of a decisive victory. It ended in November with the most powerful army in the world looking at Moscow from a distance incapable of advancing one more kilometer. On the 5th of December, Zhukov launched his counter offensive. Germany would never again be so close to Moscow. The typhoon had passed without tearing the target out by the route. In the following months, while Army Group Center resisted the Soviet counterattack and built winter defensive positions in a terrain that had never been prepared for that, the survivors of the divisions that had advanced from the Polish border in June would have plenty of time to calculate what it had cost to get there. Hundreds of thousands of casualties, tens of thousands of vehicles destroyed, the accumulated wear of four months of campaign without pause. The Blitzgri that had crushed France in 6 weeks, that had taken Minsk in 7 days and Smolnk in six more weeks, had found on the Russian plane an adversary that could not be taken with a single thrust. And in that discovery lay already embriionic, the final resolution of the conflict.