Who won the Battle of Moscow?
The Soviet Union won. Between October 1941 and January 1942 the Red Army stopped Army Group Center's drive on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, within sight of the city, then counterattacked on 5 and 6 December and threw the Germans back as much as 250 kilometers. It was the first great defeat of the Wehrmacht and ended Hitler's hope of beating the Soviet Union in a single campaign.2
In the first days of December 1941, German officers on the northern approaches to Moscow were close enough to see the city through their field glasses. Behind them lay hundreds of miles of conquered country and the wreck of whole Soviet armies. In front of them lay the capital, the prize that was supposed to end the war. Then the temperature fell to nearly forty below, the engines would not start, and out of the snow came fresh Soviet divisions nobody in Berlin had believed still existed. The Battle of Moscow, fought from the end of September 1941 to January 1942, was the first great defeat of the Wehrmacht.3
The road to Moscow
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 with three army groups. In the center, north of the Pripet Marshes, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's Army Group Center struck toward Smolensk and Moscow behind the panzer groups of Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth. By mid-July it had advanced more than 400 miles and stood only about 200 miles from Moscow.4
Then it stopped. Through August Hitler and his army high command argued over what came next. The generals wanted Moscow, the hub of the Soviet road and rail network and the seat of its government. Hitler wanted the grain of Ukraine and the industry of the Donets basin, and he sent much of his armor south into Ukraine. Only in September did he turn back to the capital, ordering an offensive code-named Taifun, Typhoon. The weeks lost in that argument would be counted in mud and frost.5
Operation Typhoon
For Typhoon Bock gathered three panzer groups: the Fourth in the center, the Third to the north and Guderian's Second to the south. The US Army's official history counts the army group at 1,929,000 men, including a large body of auxiliaries, and the three Soviet fronts in its path, the Western, Reserve and Bryansk Fronts, at no fewer than 1,250,000. Britannica dates the battle from 30 September; the main blow fell on 2 October.6
It fell with stunning effect. Within a week the panzers had closed great pockets around six Soviet armies west of Vyazma, and almost the whole Bryansk Front was cut up into further pockets near Bryansk. Estimates of the haul range from about 600,000 prisoners at Vyazma, Britannica's figure, to some 663,000 there and 100,000 more at Bryansk in the US Army's count. For a moment the road to Moscow looked open.7
Mud and panic
On the night of 6 October the first snow fell. It melted, rain followed, and the traffic of a mechanized army churned the unpaved roads into the rasputitsa, the season of bottomless mud. Trucks sank to their axles, supply columns stalled for days, and by the third week of October the spearhead divisions were strung out over 25 to 30 miles of track. The pockets themselves held German divisions back, because the trapped Soviet armies went on fighting.8
In Moscow the danger was plain. Stalin recalled General Georgy Zhukov from besieged Leningrad, and on 10 October Zhukov took over the combined Western and Reserve Fronts. On 14 October the Third Panzer Group took Kalinin, northwest of the capital, and the Mozhaisk defense line began to crumble. Government offices and foreign embassies were evacuated east to Kuybyshev on the Volga, more than a million people had already left the city, and Lenin's embalmed body had already been sent to Tyumen in Siberia in July. On 19 October the State Defense Committee placed Moscow under a state of siege. Deserters were to be shot on the spot.9 › Siege of Leningrad, 1941 to 1944
Stalin stayed. On 7 November, the anniversary of the revolution, he reviewed the traditional parade on Red Square, and troops marched past the Kremlin wall and on toward the front. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites dug anti-tank ditches around the city and planted steel obstacles in its streets, while anti-aircraft guns and fighters guarded the sky against the Luftwaffe.10
The last push
By the end of October Army Group Center was practically at a standstill, its center about 35 miles from Moscow. Some German generals wanted to dig in for the winter. Bock wanted to go on, convinced the Soviets were close to collapse, and the army chiefs Walther von Brauchitsch and Franz Halder agreed with him. So did Hitler. In mid-November, once frost had hardened the ground, the offensive resumed, on 15 November south of Kalinin and on the 16th with the two northern panzer groups.11
The plan was a great pincer around the capital. In the north the Third Panzer Group took Klin on 23 November and on 27 November reached the Moscow-Volga Canal, seizing a bridgehead at Yakhroma the next day. The 2nd Panzer Division got to within about 12 miles of the city, west of Krasnaya Polyana. In the south Guderian drove past Tula, which the Soviet Fiftieth Army refused to give up, toward Kashira. On 2 December a final effort put German detachments into Moscow's outer suburbs, but the advance as a whole stuck in the forests that screened the capital.12
Forty below
The winter of 1941 was the coldest in decades. On the night of 4 December the thermometer fell to about 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (about minus 32 Celsius), and by dawn on 6 December to about minus 38 (minus 39 Celsius). Tank engines would not start, and machine guns and artillery jammed as their lubricants froze. The army had planned for a summer campaign, and its winter clothing had not reached the troops. In one of Guderian's corps alone there were some 1,500 cases of frostbite, 350 of them needing amputation.13
The cold was not the only problem. Germany had a single railway line feeding Bock's armies, and the Soviets had nine. Over the course of the battle, by Britannica's count, 75 fresh Soviet divisions reached the front while the German attackers received no reinforcements at all. Many were Siberian troops, transferred from the Far Eastern frontier and at home in the cold. They went into action in white snow camouflage that the Germans soon learned to fear.14
The counteroffensive
On 5 December the Kalinin Front attacked northwest of the capital, and on 6 December Zhukov's Western Front and the Southwestern Front joined in, roughly 100 divisions along a front of some 200 miles. Zhukov struck both arms of the German pincer at once: in the north around Klin and Kalinin, in the south around Tula and Yelets. On 6 December alone the Soviet Thirtieth Army broke about 8 miles into the flank of the Third Panzer Group northeast of Klin, and in the night of 5 to 6 December Bock had already approved the first withdrawals.15 › 5 December in military history, 1941
The Germans fell back through the snow, abandoning tanks, guns and vehicles they could not move. Within days the war widened around them. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December, and on 11 December Hitler declared war on the United States. From his generals down, Britannica writes, the invaders were haunted by thoughts of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812.16 › Battle of Borodino, 1812
Hitler takes command
On 16 December Hitler ordered Army Group Center to stand fast, in the words relayed by his staff, not to go a step back, to close the gaps and hold. Three days later he accepted Brauchitsch's resignation and made himself commander in chief of the army. Bock went on sick leave the same day and handed Army Group Center to Günther von Kluge.17
Historians still argue about the halt order. Britannica judges that a general retreat might have collapsed into a rout, and that holding fast restored the troops' confidence. But it was paid for in frozen men, and the hedgehog towns the Germans clung to, Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk and others, had to be supplied by air at a ruinous cost to the Luftwaffe. By 7 January 1942, when the first phase of the counteroffensive ended, the Germans were back where they had stood in November, and in places the Soviets had driven them back as much as 250 kilometers. Many German divisions were down to a third of their strength and were never fully rebuilt.18
What Moscow decided
The cost was enormous on both sides, and the figures are disputed. Britannica puts German losses at 250,000 to 400,000 killed or wounded and Soviet losses at 600,000 to 1,300,000 killed, wounded or captured, meaning that in this one battle the Red Army may have lost more dead than the United States and Britain lost in the whole war.19
What the battle decided is less disputed. Operation Barbarossa had been built on the belief that the Soviet Union would collapse within a single summer. At Moscow that belief died. Chief of staff Halder called the winter of 1941 the greatest crisis in two world wars. Germany now faced a long war of attrition against an enemy with more men, and soon more tanks, and from 11 December it was also at war with the United States. When the Wehrmacht attacked again in the summer of 1942 it could do so only in the south, and its road led to the Volga.20 › Battle of Stalingrad, 1942
For the Soviet Union the meaning was simpler. In the darkest weeks of 1941, with the government gone to the Volga and the enemy at the canal, the capital had held. The photographs of that winter, the parade marching off to the front, the women planting girders in the streets, the riflemen climbing out of the snow, became part of how the country remembered the war. For the wider story of the war in the east, see our guide to the greatest battles of the Eastern Front and the World War II era page; the anniversary of the start of Typhoon falls on 2 October.21
