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By Root 1182 0

1,390 aircraft—participated in Hitler’s Operation Typhoon, the “decisive” assault on Moscow. Once more they swept forward, and once more the Russians suffered vast losses: eight Soviet armies reeled in the path of the offensive, many units broke, many more were cut off. Maj. Ivan Shabalin, a political officer struggling to lead a mass of stragglers out of an encircled pocket, wrote in his diary on 13 October, a few days before his death: “It is wet and cold and we are moving terribly slowly—all our vehicles are bogged down on the muddy roads … More than fifty had to be abandoned in ground that resembled a quagmire; about the same number are stuck fast in a nearby field. At 0600 the Germans opened fire on us—a continuous bombardment of artillery, mortars and heavy machine-guns—and it went on all day … I cannot remember when I last slept properly.” On 15 October the German tank gunner Karl Fuchs exulted: “From now on, Russian resistance will be minor—all we have to do is keep rolling forward … Our duty has been to fight and free the world from this communist disease. One day, many years hence, the world will thank the Germans and our beloved Führer for our victories here in Russia.”

Yet the mud Ivan Shabalin complained of was already proving more dangerous to the Germans, as they struggled to advance, than to the defenders holding their ground. Autumn rains were part of Russia’s natural cycle, but those that began on 8 October 1941 astonished the commanders of the all-conquering Wehrmacht, which was strange, since several of them had fought there between 1914 and 1917. In a vast country with few and poor roads—only 40,000 miles of tarmac, less than 50,000 of rail track—they failed to anticipate the impact of weather upon mobility. Suddenly, the racing panzer spearheads found themselves checked, tank tracks thrashing ineffectually in a morass. The German supply system floundered under the strain of shifting food and ammunition across hundreds of miles in weather that deteriorated daily.

Soviet reinforcements were arriving from the east, for Stalin’s Tokyo agent Richard Sorge had convinced him that the Japanese would not attack in Siberia. The rains became heavier, and soon it grew cold. “We have had continuous sleet and snow,” lamented the German chaplain Ernst Tewes. “Our men are suffering—the vehicles are not properly covered and winter clothing has not yet arrived. We are struggling to move along terrible roads.” Soldier Heinrich Haape bemoaned the difficulties of keeping supply wagons moving: “The men hauled and pushed, the horses sweated and strained—at times we had to take a brief ten-minute rest from sheer exhaustion. Then, back to the transport, our legs in black mud up to the knees—anything to keep the wheels moving.”

Almost every man engaged on both sides in the battles of those days endured extraordinary experiences. Nikolai Redkin, a thirty-five-year-old infantryman, wrote to his wife on 23 October: “Hello, Zoya! I barely escaped death in the last battle. My chances of survival were one in a hundred, but I made it … Imagine a party of soldiers surrounded on all sides by enemy tanks and forced against a 70-metre-wide stretch of riverbank. There was only one way out—jump in the river, or die. I jumped and swam. But the bank remained under heavy enemy fire. I had to sit in ice-cold autumn water for three hours, completely numb. When darkness fell the German tanks pulled back and I was picked up by collective farmers. They thawed me and cared for me. It took all of ten days for me to get back from the enemy’s rear areas to our lines. Now I am back with my unit and ready to fight. We shall have a brief rest now, then return to the battle. Damn us if we don’t make the Germans take the same bath as we had. We shall make them bath in snow until they die.” Redkin’s wish was eventually fulfilled, but he himself did not live to see it: he was still fighting thirty months later when killed in action near Smolensk.

The Germans were weather-bound. Army surgeon Peter Bamm wrote: “The back wheel of some horse-drawn vehicle