Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [82]
Both sides were at their last gasp. Both knew that they had only a few more weeks to go. Winter would come soon; overnight the ground would freeze, and everything else along with it, and the snow would whistle across the steppes. If the Germans could not wrap up the campaign before that, they could not do it this year, maybe not at all. If the Russians could only last until General Winter came to the rescue, they might well live to fight again. Everything hinged on the next few weeks, perhaps even the next few days, for no one knew when winter would arrive.
By any reasonable numerical measure the Germans had won already. They were in possession of two-thirds of Russia’s coal reserves, and three-quarters of her iron ore. Thirty-five million Russians were in occupied territory. Thousands of Russian tanks, guns, and aircraft had been destroyed or captured, and the Red Army had been all but wiped out. In fact, if there were really two and a half million Russian soldiers in European Russia in June, it had been wiped out almost twice already. It had even now been the greatest campaign in history; Napoleon’s efforts were amateurish compared with this.
The Germans had paid a price for it. Their tanks were down to one-third strength, and their divisions at little more than half-strength. There were few supplies and no reserves. As the rains dwindled and the ground hardened in early November, the Wehrmacht gathered itself for the last spring; the way home led through Moscow.
Army Group Center jumped off on November 15. It made gains north and south of Moscow. But in front of Moscow the Russians replied with a desperate counteroffensive that held the central German forces on the defensive for two weeks. Day after day the Reds came down the road from Moscow to Mozhaisk, taking monstrous casualties, but pinning the Germans where they were. The Russians were now throwing better planes into the battle, and the Luftwaffe no longer quite had the sky to itself. Then there was another ill omen: a Russian armored brigade showed up riding British tanks; when Hitler invaded Russia, the great anti-Communist, Churchill, rose in the House of Commons to announce in his gravelly voice, “If Hitler were to invade Hell, I should find occasion to make a favorable reference to the Devil.” Here now was the first fruit of that favorable reference. The new Russian T-34 tank was in action, better by far than anything the Germans possessed. Even more surprising, the Russians seemed to be finding new troops, this time battle-hardened divisions fresh from facing the Japanese in Siberia. The dead piled up along the Moscow road. Still the Wehrmacht ground forward, but at increasingly heavy cost.
The first real Russian success was in the south, where von Rundstedt’s advanced units got cut off by a counterattack at Rostov. When von Rundstedt asked permission to pull out, Hitler sacked him; there was to be no retreat.
That was incidental; around Moscow the great decision was being taken. The Germans were still making progress on the first of December. They still hoped to close a great pincer around the city, the heart of both communism and the entire Russian military and communications network. To the north, they were even with the city; to the south, they were well past it, and turning northward. The trap was beginning to close. It looked as if victory were within their grasp.
The hand froze before it could clutch. Winter arrived early, the earliest and the hardest winter in half a century. The