Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941, by Stahel, David

On 26 July 1941, a month into Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, Panzer Group 2, one of the most important mobile formations available to the Third Reich, wrote in its war diary: ‘The corps [XXXXVI Panzer Corps, M.L.] has been attacked all day by strongly superior forces with panzers and artillery. . . . The corps has absolutely no reserves available. . . . The corps can perhaps manage to hold on to its position, but only at the price of severe bloodletting’. For long, the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union has been portrayed, especially by Western historians, as something that was caused by the bad weather, arguments between Hitler and his generals on whether or not to attack Moscow, and the immense size of Russian reserves. In the end, the Wehrmacht was only halted at the gates of Moscow after scoring one enormous victory after the other and inflicting millions of casualties on the Red Army. Although there is much truth in this, recent research has shown that the attack on the Soviet Union was not going as well as planned, and that especially the various panzer groups, the main striking power of the German army, were soon in a desperate state, suffering from poor maintenance, fierce Soviet resistance, but most importantly bad logistics. In fact, in an earlier book, the historian David Stahel stated that for Nazi Germany the Second World War had been lost in August 1941. Since the Third Reich only had the resources for one gigantic blow against it archenemy, this attack had to succeed. And although it brought numerous humiliating defeats on the ill-prepared Red Army, the Wehrmacht did not knock Soviet Russia out of the war. As a consequence, Stahel writes, the war was in fact lost for Germany. Seen from that point of view, Operation Typhoon, the German attack on the Soviet capital and the subject of Stahel’s latest book, Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941, was already doomed from the start. On paper at least, the German striking force looked very impressive. Operation Typhoon was the greatest concentration of German mobile forces in World War II (p. 18); Army Group Centre contained almost 2 million

. However, as Stahel correctly states, after three months of fighting, a panzer division on paper did not equal a panzer division in strength. Between June and October 1941, 12-panzer divisions of Army Group Center fielded just 750 tanks, a 70 percent drop in strength (p. 19).
Nevertheless, at first the German offensive made good ground and resulted in new, often stunning, victories. Euphoria ran high with Hitler and those within his close vicinity; the defeat of Soviet Russia seemed imminent to them. To those on the ground in the East, however, things looked quite different, as Stahel analyzes convincingly. Not only were the German forces constrained by bad roads and stiff Soviet resistance, the lack of fuel and of spare parts for the tanks was even more disastrous. The lack of the former had even resulted in orders 'for the forward battle groups to abandon their vehicles and proceed on foot' (p. 241).
According to Stahel, the Achilles heel of Operation Barbarossa in general and Operation Typhoon in particular, was logistics. With hindsight it's clear that the Wehrmacht did not pay enough attention to the logistical demands of fighting a war of maneuvers in the vastness of Soviet Russia. Although the panzer divisions had suffered serious losses, it was not because of lack of fire power that Army Group Centre didn't reach its goal, i.e., the capture of Moscow and the expected-although even that seems to have been very unlikely-surrender of Stalin's Russia. In the convincing words of Stahel, 'It was not the rasputitsa preventing their [tracked vehicles, M.L.] use; rather it was the inability of the army to supply them with fuel and munitions. There were too few trains arriving at the railheads and even the inadequate quantities that were being delivered could not be transported to the front by the army group's immobilised Grosstransportraum' (p. 250).
Underlying this was Nazi Germany's general poor preparation for total war. It was thoroughly prepared for short, swift campaigns like those in France and the Low Countries in May/June 1940 but woefully unprepared for a battle of attrition in which the Third Reich had now submerged itself. Both sides made huge errors, but there was one big difference: From the start, the Soviet Union had acknowledged and planned for a long and costly struggle. Even in the first months of Operation Barbarossa, when Russia lost many of its most important industrial regions and resources, it still outproduced Germany, especially in tanks, and would continue to do so during the entire war. German military production reached its peak in September 1944, but by then it was too little, too late.
As in his previous two publications on Operation Barbarossa, Stahel uses a lot of primary sources, both from the German and Soviet side. By doing so, he paints a convincing and well-analyzed picture of Operation Typhoon and the reason(s) for its failure. He thoroughly corrects the view that has been dominant for so long in Western historiography, i.e., that of the German generals who stated after the Second World War that victory in the 1941 campaign was prevented by circumstances completely beyond their control and better judgment. The basic reason for the failure of Operation Barbarossa was the lack of planning and understanding of logistical demands, also on the part of the majority of those in the German High Command and commanders in the field. With his latest publication, Stahel has now written three books on Operation Barbarossa. He has done so in an erudite manner. Hopefully, he will continue writing on the German-Russian conflict, starting with the events in 1942.

Martijn Lak
The Hague University/Leiden University