Battle of Moscow

Background and causes

Operation Barbarossa aimed to take Moscow within four months. By July 1941 Army Group Centre had crossed the Dnieper and taken Smolensk, but Hitler turned the panzers north and south to clear Leningrad and Kiev, a diversion that cost the Soviets nearly 700,000 men around Kiev and delayed the capital's assault. When Operation Typhoon opened on 30 September, the Germans were weaker and the Red Army had raised new armies. Moscow was the Soviet Union's largest city, its rail hub and its political centre; Stalin refused to leave, and the 7 November parade in Red Square sent troops straight to the front. Soviet intelligence, including Richard Sorge's reports that Japan would not attack, allowed divisions to be transferred from Siberia and the Far East.

Forces and commanders

Army Group Centre committed the 2nd, 4th and 9th Armies, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups and the 2nd Panzer Army, with up to two million men, roughly a thousand to two and a half thousand tanks and fourteen thousand guns; Luftflotte 2 could field only about 549 serviceable aircraft after the summer's losses. Facing them were three Soviet fronts — Western, Reserve and Bryansk — with about 1.25 million men, a thousand tanks and 7,600 guns, plus newly raised reserve armies and divisions from Siberia and the Far East. Moscow's defenders built three defensive belts and the Mozhaisk line; 250,000 women and teenagers dug trenches and anti-tank ditches, and factories were converted to weapons production. The new T-34 and KV-1 tanks gave Soviet armour a qualitative edge that German anti-tank guns could not match.

Course of the battle

Typhoon began on 30 September. The 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups met at Vyazma on 10 October, encircling four Soviet armies; the Bryansk pocket fell at the same time, and the Germans took hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Mud then slowed the advance, and Zhukov, recalled from Leningrad, rebuilt the Mozhaisk line. On 15 October Stalin ordered government offices evacuated to Kuibyshev, causing panic in Moscow, but he stayed. The Germans paused, then attacked again after the ground froze in mid-November, taking Klin, Solnechnogorsk and Istra and reaching Khimki, about thirty kilometres from the Kremlin. Tula held in the south. On 5 December the Red Army counterattacked with fresh Siberian divisions, retook Kalinin and Klin, and pushed the exhausted Germans back 100–250 kilometres by early January 1942.

Outcome and cost

The German offensive failed. Moscow was never taken, and the belief in a swift victory over the Soviet Union ended. German losses were severe — estimates run to half a million men, with 1,300 tanks, 2,500 guns and 15,000 vehicles lost, much of it during the retreat; Soviet losses were even larger, but the Red Army could replace them. On 19 December Hitler dismissed Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and took personal command of the army, a decision that centralized military authority in his hands. The front stabilized east of Moscow, and the Rzhev salient became a grinding battleground for another year. The battle also showed that blitzkrieg could be stopped by depth, reserves, weather and logistics.

Legacy and memory

Moscow became the symbol of Soviet resistance. The city was awarded the title Hero City in 1965, a Museum of the Defence of Moscow opened in 1995, and the 7 November parade is still staged as a day of military honour. The battle's memory is bound up with the image of civilians digging trenches, the parade in Red Square and the Siberian divisions arriving in the snow. Historians continue to debate casualties and the weight of the German diversion to Kiev, but the strategic result is not in doubt: the first great German defeat of the war, and the end of the myth of invincibility that had followed the Wehrmacht since 1939.