Important Eastern Front land battle. After German forces encircled Leningrad in the north, Adolf Hitler turned his attention to the center part of the Soviet front. His Führer Directive 36 on 6 September focused German preparations on a drive against Moscow in Operation TAIFUN (TYPHOON), entrusted to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center. Bock commanded 5 field armies consisting of 14 panzer divisions, 9 panzergrenadier divisions, and 44 infantry divisions. He planned to use his armor to seize two key towns, Vyazma (some 150 miles west of Moscow) and Bryansk (220 miles southwest of Moscow) in order to open the road to the Soviet capital for his infantry. The leading German units involved were Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group, Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s 3rd Panzer Group, Colonel General Erich Hoepner’s 4th Panzer Group, and Colonel General Maximillian von Weich’s Second Army.

To defend Moscow, the Soviets had assembled 6 armies under Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Western Front. They were backed by 4 second-echelon armies. To Konev’s immediate south were 2 additional armies of Marshal Semen Budenny’s Reserve Front. Three more reserve armies were eventually brought forward. All the armies were badly understrength: totaling 80 divisions, they were, in fact, the equivalent of only 25 full-strength divisions. The Germans had more than twice the number of tanks (an estimated 1,000 to 479), and the Soviets had only about 360 aircraft to at least twice as many German planes. The Soviets also suffered from a shortage of trained officers, as many had been pulled out of their units in August and September to organize new formations in the rear. In addition, the Soviets had shortages in modern antitank and antiaircraft weapons.

Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko commanded Soviet forces in the Bryansk area where the Germans planned to attack. On 2 September, Stavka (the Soviet High Command) ordered Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front to move in two different directions, toward Roslav and southwest on Starodub in an effort to halt the German advance. The Soviet effort ended in failure, necessitating a return to defensive operations by 13 September. German forces also moved into a gap of some 36 miles between the Bryansk and Southwestern Fronts.

On 30 September, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group began an advance that carried it 50 miles the first day and 100 miles over the next three days. Guderian took the key rail junction of Orel, 150 miles in the Soviet rear, on 8 October. Two days earlier, 2nd Panzer Group had surrounded Bryansk. At the same time, von Weich’s forces moved from the west, trapping the Soviet Third, Thirteenth, and Fiftieth Armies, although some of Yeremenko’s forces escaped to the east on 25 October.

To the north, meanwhile, Hoth’s 3rd Panzer Group drove into the gap between the Soviet Nineteenth and Thirtieth Armies northwest of Vyazma, while 4th Panzer Group penetrated a vulnerable area between the Reserve and Bryansk Fronts. Konev countered by sending his deputy, Lieutenant General I. V. Boldin, and his operational group of three divisions and two tank brigades to strike the flank of 3rd Panzer Group on 3–4 October, but these efforts came too late. Boldin’s force was caught in the German encirclement, along with the greater part of Konev’s Nineteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-Fourth, and Third-Second Armies west of Vyazma. General Konstantin Rokossovsky had been sent to Vyazma with his staff to gather five reinforced divisions there for a counterattack on 6 October, only to find no Soviet divisions and German tanks already on the scene. He fled the town and soon discovered that he was between the inner and outer rings of the encirclement; he decided to break out to the northeast, picking up units along the way, including the 18th Infantry (the Home Guard Division) and an NKVD unit. These units broke out and joined Konev in Mozhaisk, 40 miles west of Moscow, where surviving elements of the Western and Reserve Fronts were forming a new 135-mile-long line to Kaluga.

Lieutenant General M. F. Lukin, Nineteenth Army’s commander, also broke out of the encirclement to the east with two-plus divisions on the night of 12–13 October. The Germans were hampered by the onset of the rainy season, which turned the roads into quagmires. But Stalin’s penchant for linear defense with fronts deployed in single operational echelon had been pierced by German armor supported by artillery and Stukas, resulting in the encirclement and capture of as many as 660,000 Soviet troops, 1,242 tanks, and 5,412 artillery pieces. Vyazma surrendered on 14 October and Bryansk on 20 October. This engagement was, however, the last of the great German encirclements.

When word reached Moscow of the defeat, a great many citizens took flight, necessitating the proclamation of martial law in the capital on 19 October. Konev received the blame for the defeat; he was replaced by General of the Army Georgii Zhukov, who was charged with the final defense of Moscow.

Soviet army marshal who was in command of the 4th Ukrainian Front at the end of World War II. Born in Markovka, Russia, on 14 October 1892, Andrei Yeremenko was drafted into the Russian army in 1913. He fought in World War I as a junior officer. He joined the Red Guards in October 1917 and the Red Army and Communist Party in 1918. Yeremenko fought as a cavalry officer in the Russian Civil War, ending that conflict as deputy commander of a regiment. He then commanded a regiment and attended the Military Political Academy and the Frunze Military Academy in 1935. Yeremenko commanded a cavalry division between 1935 and 1938, then the VI Cossack Cavalry Corps, which he led in the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939.

In June 1940, Yeremenko took command of a mechanized corps and was promoted to lieutenant general. When the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was commanding the First Red Banner Far Eastern Army. Recalled to the west, he replaced General Dimitri Pavlov as Western Front commander, helping to restore a degree of stability. An outstanding tactician, he understood the importance of airpower and the need to mass armor.

In August 1941, Yeremenko assumed command of the new Bryansk Front, where he was seriously wounded in October. After his recovery, he was promoted to colonel general and put in command of Fourth Shock Army in the defense of Moscow. Again seriously wounded in February 1942, Yeremenko took command of the Southeast Front, defending Stalingrad, in August.

In January 1943, he assumed command of the Southern Front, pushing the Germans out of the Caucasus. Transferred to command the Kalinin Front in April 1943, he was made General of the Army in August. Yeremenko commanded the 1st Baltic Front in October and November 1943 for the advance on Smolensk. He then led the Independent (Black Sea) Maritime Front in the eastern Crimea, before heading the 4th Ukrainian Front from March to July 1945.

Following the end of the war, Yeremenko commanded, in turn, the Carpathian, West Siberian, and North Caucasus Military Districts until 1958. He next served as inspector general of the Ministry of Defense, until his death in Moscow on 19 November 1970.

With the opening of Operation Barbarossa nearly 75% of the German army moved either by foot or horse drawn vehicles. This is why on numerous occasions the unstoppable panzers were forced to a halt deep behind enemy lines, waiting for the infantry support to catch up. The German failure to capture Moscow was caused as much by German industries inability to mechanize the army as any decision made by Hitler or his generals on the battlefield.

When the Soviet counteroffensive struck in early December, the German forces were already weakened by lack of supplies and many German soldiers lost their lives in the retreat because there was not enough transport available. The German losses of motor vehicles and horses were horrendous and would affect the ability of the German forces to conduct offensive operations in 1942.

The answers for the Germans was not as simple as building more trucks. As most of the German war effort was concentrated on the Eastern Front, they were faced with circumstances they had not encountered in the west. The first dilemma was in the original planning for Barbarossa where Hitler and his generals had grossly underestimated the size of the Soviet Union. Additionally many generals were still rooted in WWI concepts of conducting war and when confronted with the vastness of the steppe were incapable of adapting to the situation. In the west the major bottlenecks encountered by German forces were road/rail junctions and major towns. In the Soviet Union the bottlenecks were the river crossings and most importantly the Soviet road system was virtually nonexistent.

So if German industry had been capable of providing the number of vehicles necessary to supply German forces, the basic problems created by the appalling roads especially in the wet weather of late summer and the spring thaw would negate any benefits.

Similarly if the necessary vehicles had been built, then the strain on German fuel oil reserves would have been catastrophic. As it was by 1941 operations were being curtailed by the lack of oil and of course many campaigns Hitler had planned had never come to fruition because of the fuel situation.

While the Soviets were faced with a similar transport crisis, their situation eased as their own production of domestic trucks (which were simpler and more rugged than most German or European vehicles) swung into gear in late 1942, along with the steadily increasing supplies of trucks under the Lend Lease agreement.

Germany's transport problems escalated throughout 1942, culminating at the Battle of Stalingrad. Even before the Soviet counter offensive encircled the 6th Army, von Paulus' troops were inadequately supplied as the transport arm struggled over the few appalling roads leading to the railheads deep in the German rear.

The dark spot on the horizon was a rain cloud. By the time the Kiev battle ended, the weather had changed enough to slow the final stages of the encirclement. The primitive quality of Russian roads, many of them no more than tracks that became deep mud when the rain started, saved Moscow that year. Or as one military theorist said, it was the German dependence upon wheels, rather than having tracked mobility for all arms, that cost them victory. However, tracked mobility for all arms would have meant thousands more thirsty vehicles for an army that could not find fuel for those it already had.

The men who endured that mud said that it was a soft sticky morass that prevented all movement. Many such descriptions, like those of choking Russian dust, are no doubt exaggerated, but the virtual absence of paved roads meant that mud was an obstacle on a scale never encountered in Western Europe. Wheels immediately succumbed to deep mud but, while power-driven wheels sank deeper and deeper, a horse-drawn cart could sometimes clamber away. A German front-line surgeon said:

There was keen rivalry between the two medical companies in the division. As far as mobility and speed were concerned, the motorized company naturally had the advantage over us at first. But as soon as there was any mud about, our horses would still be going strong long after their vehicles had got bogged down.

The German army depended mostly upon heavy draft horses, but these breeds proved unsuited to cold conditions. Without shelter they collapsed and died at temperatures below minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

When fit they consumed excessive amounts of forage. Yet only these powerful horses could pull the heavy wagons the army used, and in a major example of German army incompetence there was a grave shortage of winter horseshoes, without which the horses not only had lessened draft power but sometimes could not even negotiate the distance from railway depot to stables. Major Vogt, the commander of 18 Panzer Division support units, asked himself how the Russians endured the winter conditions year after year. Paul Carell describes the solution he hit upon:

He got hold of the small tough horses he had seen the local peasants use, as well as their light farm-carts, and used them for sending his divisions' supplies forward, a few hundredweight on each cart. It worked. The motorized convoys were stuck in the mud, but the small peasant carts got through.

And so the proudest and most successful war machine the world had ever seen, in the most ambitious campaign in history, was reduced to the use of small farm-carts. It had to be admitted that the horse was more effective in this sort of war and the Red Army showed discernment in its use. In 1941 its force of 30 divisions of cavalry was increased to 41 divisions. Some were Cossacks and Kalmuks, fierce tribesmen who had lived with horses all their lives. The cavalrymen fought as infantry, using the horses to drag mortars and light artillery across impossible country. With shaggy-coated Siberian Kirghil ponies, that could endure temperatures as low as minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, such units could cover 100 kilometres in one night, caring nothing for lines of supply and communication.

Smolensk was seen to be 'the key to Moscow'. Army Group Centre planned another encirclement like that at Minsk, though by now the Red Army was learning how to punch a way out of encirclements. The Soviets were becoming more formidable opponents in every way. Their counter-attacks were becoming better organized and more frequent. Sometimes such attacks prised into the gap that the Germans left between their fast armoured columns and the slower infantry.

Guderian dismissed suggestions of waiting for the infantry to catch up with him. He pressed on to demonstrate his theories until, on 19 July, Hitler intervened in the battle with an audacious plan that would split the central thrust. While the infantry of Army Group Centre continued their advance on Moscow, its twin armoured forces (Panzergruppe Hoth and Panzergruppe Guderian) were to diverge. Hoth would wheel northwards, to become an outer pincer for Army Group North's drive on Leningrad. Guderian would wheel southwards to form an outer pincer for Army Group South's drive into the Ukraine.

Hitler's idea was inconceivable. So inconceivable that Brauchitsch the C-in-C filed it away and tried to forget it. Hitler persisted, and it is at this moment that the campaign, and perhaps Hitler's war, was lost, for instead of saying no, Brauchitsch temporized. He told Hitler that the armoured forces must stop for overhauls, repairs and replacements. Hitler agreed. It would appear at this stage that Brauchitsch had no intention of obeying Hitler's order. Halder had already approved (on 30 June) an OKH operational draft ordering the advance on Moscow to be resumed about 10 August. But this was easier said than done. Bottlenecks and confusion had caused the snarling-up of roads and railways, creating a supply crisis that made it impossible for Army Group Centre to mount an attack in August, except one using less than a quarter of its combat strength.

An extra dimension was given to the strategic disagreement between Hitler and his generals when, for the first time since the last -war, Hitler became sick. The stress of the campaign, his visits to distant Army Group headquarters and the unhealthy conditions at the Wolfsschanze had given him a fever together with dysentery, stomach cramps, nausea and accompanying aches and pains. Those around him were alarmed by an evident deterioration in his health. An electro-cardiogram, sent to a heart institute with a false name on its label, was diagnosed as rapidly progressive coronary sclerosis, hardening of the arteries. Hitler's personal physician neglected to tell his patient the true facts, embarking on a programme of doubtful treatment that kept his patient going on heart stimulants, vitamins and glucose.

In his weakened physical condition, Hitler did not waver in his orders to split the attack. When Guderian heard of the plan to switch his Panzergruppe southwards, he was so strongly opposed to it that he flew to the Wolfsschanze to make his plea to Hitler in person. Artfully, neither Brauchitsch nor Halder accompanied him to this meeting.

Guderian recalled.

I reported at once to the C-in-C of the Army, Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, who greeted me with the following words: "I forbid you to mention the question of Moscow to the Fuhrer. The operation to the south has been ordered .. . Discussion is pointless." I therefore asked permission to fly back to my Panzer Group.

Brauchitsch was not the sort of man who would confront Hitler, but Guderian was just such a man. He stayed to plead his case. He told Hitler that Moscow was the crucial target: a road, rail and communications centre, industrial centre and political centre, whose capture would have a psychological effect upon the whole world. With Moscow in German hands, the Russians would be unable to move their forces between the north and the south. Guderian said that much time would be wasted in diverting his Panzer Group south to attack Kiev.

The round trip of 500 miles, cross-country on terrible Russian roads, would cause great wear on his tanks.

Hitler let Guderian speak without interruption but was unmoved by his arguments. He wanted the raw materials and agriculture of the Ukraine.

He said they must deprive the Russian air force of bases in the Crimea, lest they bombed the Romanian oilfields upon which Germany depended for most of its fuel.

"I here saw for the first time a spectacle with which I was later to become very familiar," Guderian said.

"All those present nodded in agreement with every sentence that Hitler uttered, while I was left alone with my point of view." According to Guderian's account the nodding men included Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl. These two men, closely supervised by Hitler, ran the office of the OKW, Armed Forces High Command, and without their support Guderian's cause was lost.

"Hurrying Heinz' went back to his headquarters but his Group didn't move in any direction.

Bock supported Guderian. Losing Hoth's Panzer force to Field Marshal Leeb in the north was endurable, but to reinforce his rival Rundstedt with precious Panzer divisions for a dash into the Ukraine sounded too much like what had happened in France in 1940. So Bock, fully engaged with the enemy all along his front, did nothing to hurry things along, hoping that Hitler would have a change of mind. The delay continued long after the Panzer forces were refitted and made ready to go again.

Guderian deliberately engaged his armoured force in battles that would make disengagement and the big movement south difficult. General Blumentritt had no illusions about what happened: "Army Group Centre remained inactive on the Desna during the best months of July to September," he said. Goring took Hitler's side in the argument. He was convinced that had Bock, and the other commanders, promptly obeyed Hitler's orders, the war would have been won by early 1942. He told his interrogators so during his imprisonment after the war.

But Bock's Army Group Centre like the other Army Groups was wrestling with ever worse supply problems. The railway operating troops (Eisenbahntruppe) were under manned and inefficient. German civilian railway workers were brought to assist them but the difficulties were deep-seated and could not be corrected overnight. Having suffered losses of men and machines in the battles around Smolensk, the whole Army Group was trying to refit and regroup, but it also had to cope with square mile upon square mile of captives. Even when the encircled Red Army units stopped fighting they had to be tightly guarded and defended to prevent Russian counter-attacks from trying to break in and release them.

Perhaps Hitler had recognized this weakening condition of Bock's Army Group Centre before anyone else did. Perhaps that was what influenced him into diverting the armour and switching the centre of gravity to the southern fighting. In any case, the discussions about switching the Panzer forces to other Army Groups was evidence enough that the German army was numerically incapable of fighting the campaign that its generals had planned. It showed that they did not have enough Panzer divisions to attack simultaneously with all three Army Groups.

Barbarossa had opened with 150 German divisions, only fifteen more than were used for the attack westwards in May 1940 and with only about 30 per cent more tanks than they had used at that time. Yet the area in which the armies were to be deployed in the Barbarossa plan about a million square miles was twenty times the size of the ground involved between 10 May and 25 June 1940. To add to this worrying overall picture was the way in which the front got broader and broader as the Germans fought their way further eastwards!

Although the Red Army were losing men by the hundreds of thousands they always seemed to find more. In mid-August Halder's optimism changed to a mood of concern:

We have underestimated the Russian Colossus ... This conclusion applies as much to its organization as to its economic resources and its system of communication, but above all to its purely military efficiency. At the beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already identified 360. These divisions are admittedly not armed or equipped according to our standards and in many respects the tactical leadership is inadequate. But there they are, and when a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw in another dozen. Time is with them. Their resources lie close by. Our forces are stretched along an immensely broad front, without any depth, and are subjected again and again to enemy attacks. These are successful partly because we have too many gaps in our line owing to the stupendous space.

The war in the East never did form a continuous line from north to south. Everywhere attackers tried to find space between units, with gaps closing and reappearing between them. Sometimes siege conditions evolved around the great cities, and around pockets of defenders. Always big gaps opened again. Everywhere the Germans had to adapt themselves to the scale of Eastern Europe and to its climate too.

The Berliners who made up most of 3 Panzer "Bear' Division were unprepared for Russia's August weather.

It was a hot day and the men were sweating. The fine dust of the rough roads enveloped the columns in thick clouds, settled on the men's faces, and got under their uniforms on to their skins. It covered the tanks, the armoured infantry carriers, the motor cycles, and the jeeps [Kubelwagers] with an inch-thick layer of dirt. The dust was frightful as fine as flour, impossible to keep out.

In the unhealthy August climate of the Wolfsschanze Hitler remained convinced that trapping Russian soldiers and capturing economic resources was the only way the war could be won. For this reason he was determined that Guderian should execute the movement south. Exasperated by the delays, on 21 August he gave the army direct orders to do as he said:

Of primary importance before the outbreak of winter is not the capture of Moscow, but rather the occupation of the Crimea, of the industrial and coal-mining area of the Donets Basin, the cutting of the Russian supply routes from the Caucasian oilfields.

The generals bristled. Halder urged Brauchitsch to send in their joint resignation but was told that Hitler would simply refuse to accept it.

Halder had already confided in his diary that Brauchitsch was 'at the end of his tether and hides behind an iron mask of manliness so as not to betray his complete helplessness." Jodl, the general closest to Hitler, said the Fuhrer 'has an instinctive aversion from treading the same path as Napoleon; Moscow gives him a sinister feeling." In any case, Hitler had promised that, once the encirclement at Kiev was completed, Guderian's armour could rejoin Army Group Centre and resume the drive on Moscow.

Reluctantly the army did as Hitler ordered: Guderian turned south and Southern Army Group's panzer group came north to meet them. The Fuhrer's Kiev encirclement worked perfectly. After terrible fighting, on a front measured in hundreds of miles, the Panzer forces closed 150 miles east of Kiev. The resulting encirclement trapped 665,000 men.

On 26 September 1941, as the Kiev battle ended, von Manstein's army in the south broke through the narrow isthmus that led into the Crimea. It was a dramatic victory on the map, but the Crimea was another great land area that would soak up men by the tens and scores of thousands.

Meanwhile the drive by Field Marshal von Leeb's Army Group North was building to a climax. Successive attempts to take Leningrad had failed but German forward elements were fighting in the suburbs, and the defenders had been worn down to a point of near collapse. In one action women of the Red Army medical corps defended their position with pistols and hand-grenades until they were all killed. So desperate was the position that Zhukov was sent there to command a last-ditch stand.

His appointment was a political sign that Leningrad was to be defended to the very end. Then, under continuous bombardment, with hospitals reporting 4,000 casualties per day and their soldiers yielding to the pressures of heavy fighting, the Red Army's intelligence began receiving reports of German tanks outside Leningrad being loaded on to railway flatcars. These were elements of Hoth's Panzer Group which had been on loan and were now being returned to Bock for the coming assault on Moscow. Leningrad had been reprieved, and the pressure from both the Finnish and German armies noticeably slackened. The Finns had decided that after regaining the land they had lost in the Winter War they would advance no farther. Everywhere on Leeb's Northern Sector the tactics of assault had been abandoned in favour of siege. The go-ahead was now given to Bock's drive to Moscow.

Hitler's permission for Army Group Centre to strike at Moscow had come too late. A wiser man would have wanted to fight the Moscow battle first. As Table 6 shows, Moscow temperatures take a sudden dive in December. The southern front had two months more campaigning weather than Moscow; Leningrad had one month more than Moscow.

From now on it would be a race against time as the dusty Russian climate turned cooler. The German high command was drastically changing all its estimates of a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. The discovery that the Red Army had first-class tanks startled the whole German army. In October 1941 Guderian's reaction was made plain in a report he sent to his Army Group:

I described in plain terms the marked superiority of the T-34 to our Panzer IV and drew the relevant conclusions as they must affect our future tank production ... The officers at the front were of the opinion that the T-34 should simply be copied, since this would be the quickest way of putting to rights the most unhappy situation of the German Panzer troops.

Guderian was not alone in his view. Field Marshal von Kleist called it the finest tank in the world; Major-General von Mellenthin said that in 1941 the Germans had nothing comparable; General Blumentritt thought it adversely affected the morale of the German infantry.

Only the incompetence of Russian generals saved the Germans. Despite the studies they had made of the German victories in France, the Red Army commanders were still spreading their tanks into a thin ineffective screen, instead of using them like battering rams. The Germans claimed that 17,000 Russian tanks were destroyed in the first five months of fighting, while only 2,700 of their own tanks were lost.

But as Soviet production went into top gear these terrible losses were being replaced at a greater rate than those of the Germans. In 1942, when the Germans manufactured 5,056 tanks (a figure that includes self-propelled artillery), the Soviet Union produced 24,500 tanks, of which some 5,000 were the T-34.

The Germans had put every tank they could find into the Barbarossa invasion force in the belief that the campaign would be a short one.

Now, many of the smaller German tanks, some of the Czech designs and most of the French ones were succumbing to the rig ours of climate and terrain.

It was not only tanks that found the going difficult. Any sort of mechanical vehicle suffered. Dust got through air filters to kill engines. Mud swallowed vehicles whole. Temperatures dropped until crankcases and radiators cracked. The Russian roads proved far worse than the planners had allowed for, and the Germans were using far too many civilian trucks, not designed for the wear and tear of even normal military duties.

Sometimes called the Rokitno Marshes, this area is a huge blot upon the map of European Russia. It is 300 miles broad and roughly as large as Bavaria. General Blumentritt told how in the German army: "It was regarded as an almost inaccessible area, covered with woods and swamps, which eliminated it from plans of operation. Army Group South used this inaccessible region to rest its flank, as had Army Group Centre. But 'for Russian troops it is no particular obstacle, for they cross it everywhere with whole army corps ... it even offered our eastern adversaries a very good defence area from which they could, on any side, fall on the flank of troops advancing east."

The Pripet Marshes had probably acquired the plural form of name because the region was not all marshland and large areas of it had been drained and improved over the years. There was firm open ground amongst the marshes and forests and its rivers had ancient wooden bridges suited to local traffic in this primitive region. In short it was totally unsuited for the rapid deployment of German armour but excellent ground for Russian cavalry and units guided by locals. So the German Barbarossa plan was flawed. There was no excuse for this planning oversight, for German staff officers had heard lectures about the marshes in connection with studies of the Russo-Polish War of 1920.

Yet the mistake remained, and now there was a 300-mile-wide hole in the German front. Men would be needed to close this gap.

Everywhere behind the German advance, Communist party workers were organizing partisan units to continue the fight. On 18 July 1941 the central committee of the Communist party adopted a resolution defining the aims and tasks of the underground struggle. Quite unlike the resistance organized in the West, these partisans lived in extremely primitive conditions in the countryside and swore 'to take revenge on the enemy cruelly, tirelessly and without mercy." Their oath required them to die rather than surrender.

The Germans found it impossible to prevent escapes when tens of thousands of prisoners were herded in the open countryside. The terrain mostly forest and swamp with poor roads exactly suited fugitives, and it suited guerrilla warfare too. Escaping Red Army soldiers joined the partisans and added a dimension of military skills to the partisan struggle. A special section of the Red Army's Chief Political Administration was devoted to directing partisan warfare.

As one example of this guerrilla warfare, partisans in the Pskov region in the autumn of 1941 killed more than a thousand German soldiers, destroyed 30 bridges and derailed five military trains. By February 1942 Army Group Centre had assigned four field divisions to fight partisans in the Smolensk and Bryansk area. It was not enough, and soon another three German divisions were withdrawn from the fighting front to combat the partisans.

By mid-July 1941 great changes were made to the Red Army. To speed orders through the military bureaucracy corps headquarters would be eliminated. Mechanized corps were disbanded, to release desperately needed trucks, and men of the motorized divisions became infantry.

"Small armies' of about six divisions were formed. There was no shortage of infantry, but experienced leadership was so scarce that the Soviet Union's many slave-labour camps were scoured to find senior officers who could be released and sent back to the army.

The bulk of the Russian army stationed in Western Russia will be destroyed by daring operations led by deeply penetrating armoured spearheads. Russian forces still capable of giving battle will be prevented from withdrawing into the depths of the steps.

The Panzer divisions raced ahead as they had in France. One of the first clashes came as the Germans encountered the well equipped 4th Armoured Division. This Russian division had 355 tanks, while Guderian's whole Panzer Group of five divisions and three and a half motorized divisions had only 850. But Red Army leadership was poor and the Soviet elements were separated, out manoeuvred and completely smashed. Its commander, 43-year-old Major-General Potaturchev, with hair and moustache groomed like Stalin's, was rounded up while trudging back to Minsk dressed as a civilian. He became the first Soviet general to go into captivity.

Bock's Army Group Centre moved forward as fast as it could, but inevitably the armour and motorized divisions became separated from the infantry, who plodded along far behind, fighting all the way and cursing at the lack of armour support. Great encircling movements, on a scale never seen before, demanded both initiative and organization.

Army Group Centre's first attempt ended in failure. The German formations were not sufficiently concentrated and the greater part of the trapped Russians fought their way clear. A second attempt closed near Minsk. Although many escaped some 300,000 were captured. Such numbers of men are difficult to imagine. One witness said:

We suddenly saw a broad, earth-brown crocodile slowly shuffling down the road towards us. From it came a subdued hum, like that from a beehive. Prisoners of war. Russians, six deep. We couldn't see the end of the column. As they drew near the terrible stench which met us made us quite sick; it was like the biting stench of the lion house and the filthy odour of the monkey house at the same time. But these were not animals, they were men. We made haste out of the way of the foul cloud which surrounded them… All the misery in the world seemed theirs.

Of course the figures coming from the fighting front were not accurate.

They were the establishment figures (or at best ration strength figures) from files captured in various unit headquarters the Germans had overrun. All the same, such numbers made heady reading in Berlin.

So did the news that some of "Hurrying Heinz' Guderian's foremost troops had reached the Dnieper, about halfway to Moscow. On 3 July General Halder wrote in his diary: "It is probably not an exaggeration when I contend that the campaign in Russia has been won in fourteen days."

However, the Germans were suffering casualties too. The Panzer force encountered 52-ton KV tanks that were like nothing they had ever seen before. To stop them was difficult: "The general himself stood thoughtfully in front of a KV, counting the tank shells lodged in its plating11 hits and not a single penetration."

In these early actions the tank was the decisive weapon. It was Lt-General Andrey Ivanovich Yeremenko who is given credit for creating the most frightening of anti-tank weapons although simpler petrol bombs had been used in Spain, and in Finland too. Yeremenko had been brought from the First Far Eastern Army as part of Stalin's 'central front'. Facing General Heinz Guderian's Panzer Group, he ordered that a depot in Gomel should fill 10,000 glass bottles with KS (a petrol and phosphorus mixture used for flamethrowers) so that his men could use them against enemy tanks. The weight and the shape made them easy to grip and to throw. The contents were sufficient in quantity, and fierce in effect. They were cheap and quick to make. The Germans who saw them explode to spill the blazing mixture through the slots and ventilators of their tanks called them "Molotov Cocktails'. The name stuck.

The Germans had never properly grasped what numbers of men they would need to surround half a million Russians and then fight them to a standstill. There were not enough combat soldiers to enclose these vast areas, and not enough support troops to keep them supplied.

Adding to these demands on German manpower were what now proved to be mistaken notions about the Pripet Marshes.

Field Marshal Fedor von Bock had been given command of Army Group Centre, where the maximum effort was made. Sixty years old, Bock was a tall thin man described by General Blumentritt as a Prussian of the old school.

"He was vivacious, often sarcastic, and expressed his thoughts dearly and well. He did not look his age and might have passed for a man of forty. However his health was not perfect, for he suffered from frequent stomach pains." His physical courage in the First World War had earned him the Pour le Merite, the highest German award for valour.

Bock resented the way in which von Brauchitsch, an officer junior to him, had been promoted to become army C-in-C and so his boss. This resentment was fanned in 1940 when Brauchitsch changed the plans for the attack on France and the Low Countries. The weight of the attack was switched away from Bock's Army Group so that his rival Rundstedt's Army Group made the breakthrough and got all the glory. That change still festered in Bock's mind, as did a bitter argument with Guderian about mechanical breakdowns during the occupation of Austria. Bock was a patrician, a capable but difficult man with a long memory for slights, real or imagined.

Bock's cynical attitude to Hitler was rather like his pragmatic relationship with Hermann Hoth and Heinz Guderian, his Panzer Group commanders. As long as these plebeians assisted his career he would use them. Hitler was in control so Bock obeyed him, but when he noticed signs of anti-Hitler conspiracies in his own headquarters he turned a blind eye to them.

In Russia Bock commanded 50 divisions, including Panzer Group Hoth and Panzer Group Guderian, placed on the outer flanks of his central front.

The initial idea had been a drive for Smolensk, but three days after the assault was started Hitler interfered, giving a direct order that Bock's force was to encircle and converge on Minsk. At the same time, the infantry forces were to make an inner pincer that closed behind Bialystok. Such encirclements had not been the key to victory in France. There the armour had simply struck forward, overrun headquarters, and watched the enemy command collapse at ever higher levels. But Napoleon's invasion of Russia had failed because the Russian army withdrew and avoided battle. Hitler demanded a Kesselschlacht, a 'kettle' or cauldron battle, that would encircle and then annihilate the enemy armies and not just push them back. Many of his generals, notably Guderian, believed it better to strike at the enemy's brain for example Moscow and then victory was bound to come. These two opposing points of view had never been resolved and agreed, although Hitler's initial Directive had given emphasis to the destruction of the enemy army:

As part of the preparations for Barbarossa, Hitler had a military headquarters built from which he would supervise the battle. The site chosen by Dr. Todt and Hitler's army adjutant was eight kilometres east of Rastenburg in East Prussia. It was constructed in conditions of great secrecy, under the guise of a bomb-proof war production plant, and was ready for Hitler to start using only a few days before the attack was launched. He moved in on 24 June and named it "Wolfsschanze', wolf's lair: the wolf was an animal with which he constantly identified.

The site was poorly chosen. Up to the time of the attack, the daily Aeroflot airliner passed over it on its schedule between Berlin and Moscow. The region was an airless, fetid swamp with stagnant lakes.

Even shallow diggings were subject to flooding, and, despite strenuous efforts, mosquitoes plagued everyone for much of the time. Hitler said:

"No doubt some government department found the land was cheapest here."

Hitler was in Wolfsschanze for most of the time, so everyone who wanted to keep in touch with the Fuhrer had to go there too. It was a complex of makeshift and uncomfortable offices for people and organizations that functioned more efficiently in the premises from which they had been brought. The OKH was established here, as was Hitler's high command of the armed forces, the OKW. Hitler said: 'this whole headquarters will one day become a historic monument, because here is where we founded a New World order." Jodl thought the place better suited to a military detention camp.

Despite elaborate security measures, more than one person wandered into the Wolfsschanze by accident. A colonel got off the train at the wrong station when looking for Mauerwald close by. He walked right into the compound to take breakfast at the officers’ mess. When challenged by the Fuhrer's naval aide, Admiral von Puttkamer, the intruder refused to believe he was in the Wolfsschanze until Puttkamer pointed to Hitler exercising his dog "Blondi'.

Nor did Hitler's prediction come true. Rastenburg is now Ketrzyn in Poland. All that remains of the Wolf's Lair are massive chunks of concrete overgrown by the forest.

Within days of the German attack, a Council for Evacuation was formed.

Its task was to arrange for the movement of industry and national treasures to safer regions, and Stalin's centralized authority ensured that any decision it made became law. With news of German advances pouring in, the Council sometimes over-reacted. For instance, on 2 July the armoured plate mill at Mariupol, in the southern Ukraine hundreds of miles from the front line and not in danger, was ordered to move to Magnitogorsk. Yet it was moves of this sort that saved the Soviet Union. In the five months from July to November 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large armaments plants, were moved east to the Urals (667), to Siberia (322), to Kazakhstan and Central Asia (308).

The Russian movements of heavy industry also seemed to reinvigorate it.

Workers who had proved so inefficient under the centralized industrial planning of the Communists thrived when permitted to improvise. A foundry that originally took two years to build had its replacement ready in 28 days. The planners found that a factory could be moved and production resumed within six weeks. The Chkalov aircraft plant, moved from Moscow to Tashkent, had aircraft ready in forty days. Sometimes factories, assembled in the open in bad weather, had production lines moving even before walls and roof were finished. One worker arriving at such an improvised factory said she was astounded to discover that almost everyone at work was either a young child or an old woman. The Russians were preparing for a long hard war.

Two plants from Leningrad and Kharkov were moved to Chelyabinsk, east of the Urals, to be combined with the Chelyabinsk tractor factory.

This vast enterprise, renamed Tankograd, was the largest tank factory in the Soviet Union perhaps in the world and the greater part of the T-34 production took place here. The hardiness of the T-34 had been demonstrated by one of the first prototypes. It came out of the Kharkov factory at the end of 1939 and was sent on a trip to Moscow and back, via Smolensk, Minsk and Kiev, a distance of 1,800 miles. February and March were chosen for the trip, so that it would encounter the sort of bad weather that later was to defeat German tanks.

It had a good cross-country performance and top speed of 32 mph, but the most evident aspect of this radical new tank was its sloping armour, which gave it a distinctive profile as well as deflecting hits that might otherwise have penetrated it. It was armed with a high-velocity gun that could tear through German armour at long ranges while its own armour remained impervious to the current German 3.7 em anti-tank guns.

The technology of tank design was challenging to any country's industrial capability. Because the precision machining of large surfaces is so demanding, a reliable measure of a tank's sophistication is the diameter of its turret ring. The T-34's turret was small, providing scarcely enough room for two men. Since loading was a full-time task this meant the tank's commander was also its gunner.

Having such calls upon the tank commander during battle was the tank's most serious disadvantage.

Most Second World War tanks ran on petrol, but the T-34 had a diesel engine. This was a breakthrough in tank technology that even the Germans, with their great experience of diesels, failed to make. The engine was probably based upon a Fiat design (some say it copied a Hispano-Suiza) but the transformation was extraordinary. Lightened by the use of many alloy components, this 38 litre engine produced about 500 bhp and could go about 280 miles at 25 mph before refuelling. Economy for purposes of range rather than expense had been a prime consideration in pursuing the diesel format, but such engines were desirable for their lessened fire risk too. Their worst feature was as anyone who has driven behind a truck will verify that diesel engines emit black smoke, and exhaust could be fatal when it revealed a tank's position.

Had the Russians used these tanks in forces large enough to punch through the enemy lines, the Germans might have been repulsed in the early weeks of the war. But the Red Army's T-34s were committed in twos and threes, and mixed with inferior models. With radios only fitted to the tanks of company commanders, orders had to be passed by flags or hand signals. Everything was made especially difficult when the tank was closed down because Russian optical glass was of very poor quality.

The T-34 Christie-style suspension, invented by an American engineer whose ideas were copied by every other nation, was efficient over rough ground but a gunner stood little or no chance of hitting a target while on the move. All the same the Russian high command ordered their men to keep firing during any encounter, reasoning, rightly perhaps, that the sight of oncoming tanks, firing as they went, was demoralizing. When all the rounds were spent, the tank drivers were ordered to crush the enemy by rolling right over them. Opposing tanks had to be rammed.

Like most other economies the Soviet Union suffered a shortage of the high-quality steel needed for guns, tanks, ships and shells. In the early days of the war some tanks were improvised from boiler plate which gave little protection against anything but small-arms fire. When fighting the Japanese and the Finns the Red Army had used armour-piercing shells based upon designs produced for the imperial navy in the previous century. It was only after German armour-piercing shot was captured that it was copied. But making steel is not an art that can be mastered overnight. The failure to control perfectly the tempering of the steel had a great effect upon the quality of ammunition for the tank guns. So the Red Army tank crews had to get used to the way that the tungsten carbide cores of their armour-piercing shells often broke up on impact, and hope that they would not fall victim to one of the premature explosions in the breach that were not unusual in Soviet gunnery.

At 3.40 am Zhukov, now Soviet chief of staff, phoned Stalin at his large villa at Kuntsevo. Here in one room, the dining-room, Stalin worked, ate and slept on a sofa. When Zhukov told him of the German invasion there was no reply for a long time, just the sound of heavy breathing. At last Stalin called a meeting of the Politburo for 4.30 am.

Far from providing leadership, Stalin seemed to give way to despair.

For eleven days he locked himself away, taking time to come to the realization that he had been totally wrong about Hitler's intentions, that the warnings he had angrily spurned were true. It was 3 July when he emerged from hiding to address the nation on radio. His coarse accent came as a surprise to most listeners; so did the pleading note in his voice, calling the people he had mercilessly enslaved "Brothers and sisters ... my friends!" In a totally unexpected change of disposition Stalin made little reference to Socialism or its heroes; instead he invoked Russian heroes hitherto condemned as class enemies by Soviet history books. Winston Churchill received greater praise than Lenin.

This reinstatement of Russia's Imperial and Orthodox past continued as Guards regiments were revived and the orders of Lenin and the Red Banner were replaced by those of (Prince) Suvorov, (Prince) Kutuzov and (Grand Duke) Alexander Nevski. The churches were reopened and its dignitaries, such as the Metropolitan Sergei, rallied the faithful to resist the Germans. In a more immediate decree Stalin called up no less than 15 million men by his mobilization order of 22 June. He named this struggle "The Great Patriotic War', the designation still given it in the countries of the former Soviet empire.

Stalin, the supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces, took over the war in much the same autocratic way that Hitler did. Like Hitler, he was a psychopath, and his skill as a military commander was about the equal of Hitler's. There were other resemblances between the two dictators; Stalin had a good memory and sometimes came up with the sort of sensible ideas with which laymen often outwit the experts. But his foremost contribution to this war came from his obsessional secrecy.

Stalin's unending fear of rebellion had always caused him to keep a tight hold upon the army, and from it he now separated a High Command Reserve consisting of divisions, corps and whole armies, together with tanks, artillery and air forces. The state of these reserves was marked by means of tally boards at his desk. The front commanders were kept totally ignorant of what reserves were available in order to frustrate their pleas for reinforcements. One specialist historian of this period says that: "Neither tactical threat nor tactical defeat could force him to disgorge his precious reserves and he held on to them tightly until he could be reasonably sure that the enemy had committed all his forces."

While Hitler took control of his armed forces by taking over the high command of the army (OKH), and that of the armed forces (OKW) too, Stalin exercised his iron grip through the Communist party. The party apparatus was everywhere: from factory bench to front-line positions.

The slightest divergence from its wishes, or indeed failure or bad luck, meant being worked to death in a slave-labour camp or summary execution. When Stalin added 'or you'll answer with your head' to his commands it was not a joke. By the time war ended 238 generals and admirals had been executed, or had died in penal battalions, simply because they had failed to win. This horrifying dimension of terror played an important part in saving Moscow in 1941, and indeed in winning the war.

At Stalin's elbow during that first year there was Marshal Shaposhnikov, the chief of general staff, who was quite unlike the one-time NCOs, rough-voiced commissars and other sycophants who made up most of Stalin's staff. Shaposhnikov was a genial, avuncular gentleman who had been a colonel in the Tsar's army. In the postwar period, German and American historians were inclined to guess that Shaposhnikov was the brains behind the Red Army's successes. Modern appraisals are more inclined to see him as a technical adviser, serving the same function that Jodl did for Hitler.

It was Zhukov who emerged from the war with the soundest military reputation. His success against the Japanese had impressed Stalin as well as Zhukov's fellow soldiers. In 1941 the defence of Moscow was put into his hands. Stalin frequently consulted Zhukov, but during these first months of the war Zhukov's influence extended only to his own battle front. Even then his decisions were constantly supervised and questioned by Moscow.

The Luftwaffe used many of the techniques pioneered by Rowehl Geschwader to bring high-altitude bombers over their targets at dawn so that the bombing exactly coincided with the opening of the artillery barrage. The initial targets were aircraft and air force installations.

The Red Air Force was the world's largest, and some of its aircraft designs were excellent, but the bombers found them lined up wingtip to wingtip, for Stalin had forbidden precautions against surprise attack lest it provoke a war. Within 48 hours the Red Air Force had suffered devastating losses and its commander, General Kopels, had committed suicide.

All the same this was not the complete victory that it may sound. The Red Air Force started off four times the size of the Luftwaffe: to eliminate it was a big task. Although devastation had come to the airfields in the western part of the Soviet Union, many more aircraft were available in the rear, and some of these were notably good.

They were being produced at three or four times the rate of German production. The cut in aircraft production that Hitler ordered in September 1940 resulted by February 1941 in a fall of 40 per cent.

Despite their good training, experience and equipment, the Germans had a formidable task to maintain air superiority.

The Luftwaffe's true failure became apparent in those early days of the assault on the Soviet Union. Such a vast country might have been fatally crippled by strategic bombing, but Goring, Milch and Udet had made sure that Germany had no long-range bombers, and no men trained in its demanding techniques.

There is no doubt that millions of people will be starved to death if we take from the country the things we need. - German General Staff economic directive on supply

The German generals liked to explain the way in which Barbarossa was delayed. General Gunther Blumentritt (chief of staff of Fourth Army) said that 'several important Panzer units required thorough overhaul and partial re-equipment after their long march across the Greek mountains ... The Balkan incident postponed the opening of the campaign by five and a half weeks." The army's chief of mobile forces, General von Thoma, later estimated that about 800 of the 2,434 tanks available for Barbarossa had been used in the Balkans. General Guderian said that the weather was the principal culprit: "There was a definite delay in the opening of our Russian campaign. Furthermore we had a very wet spring; the Bug and its tributaries were at flood level until well into May, and the nearby ground was swampy and almost impassable. I was in a position to observe this during my tours of inspection in Poland."

General Siegfried Westphal blamed the campaign in the Balkans: "The troops needed for the conquest of the Balkans had of necessity been drawn from our eastern armies. This led to a most unwelcome postponement of the date fixed for the invasion of Russia, which cost us a good six weeks of the limited campaigning season provided by the brief East European summer." Field Marshal Keitel agreed, bitterly blaming "Italy for her senseless Balkan war'.

Hitler said that his bid for Moscow failed by exactly five weeks.

Liddell Hart, a military writer who interviewed the defeated commanders after the war, did a lot to support their claims that the Balkan campaign was responsible for their failure to take Moscow. But other historians disagree and believe that mid-June had always been the date chosen by the Germans. It was the longest day of the year, and offered the best field conditions. John Keegan, for instance, points out that the date for Barbarossa depended upon the weather and other factors. In his view, the difficulties the army encountered in positioning its units, and the lateness of the spring thaw that year, meant that Hitler could not have invaded earlier than he did. That doyen of historians, A.J.P. Taylor, is scornful of the 'legend invented by German generals to excuse their defeat by the Russians'. He says that the 15 divisions sent to the Balkans were only one-tenth of the total force and their absence would not have been a real impediment to launching the attack.

The 'delay theory' is not easy to sustain in the light of other German activity. For a timetable that scheduled a quick and easy victory, mid-June was a sensible starting date. Besides, once the attack was launched, the leisurely way in which decisions were taken does nothing to suggest men fretting at the loss of a month of fighting.

Gome said Hitler chose 22 June because it was the first anniversary of the armistice the French had signed in the Compiegne forest. Nor did it go unremarked that Napoleon had chosen 23 June for his invasion of Russia in 1812. German schoolchildren were taught that half of Napoleon's Grande Armee were Germans."

Delayed or not, on 22 June 1941 the bombardment began and about 3,200,000 men moved forward. The mechanized forces led the attack and news bulletins echoed the names of Russian towns and rivers that were strangely familiar to those who had studied Napoleon's campaign. When the staff of 4 Panzer Group arrived in Borisov, on the bank of the Beresina River, General Blumentritt walked down to the river and noticed, through the clear water, ancient wooden structures. They were supports for a bridge built by Napoleon's engineers when the Grand Army was in retreat in 1812.