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p In the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the tide went against the Soviet Armed Forces. In the first three weeks of the war the Red Army abandoned Latvia, Lithuania, 80 Byelorussia, a large slice of the Ukraine and Moldavia. The nazis thought the war was all but won. On July n, 1941, General Haider wrote in his diary that the Soviet front, "behind which reserves existed no longer, cannot be held".  [80•1 

p The German Command was confident that their road to Moscow would lie open once they captured Smolensk. On July 10, 1941, began the German offensive against Smolensk; the city was captured on July 16 despite stout Soviet resistance. But when the nazis moved on east from Smolensk, they ran into fresh resistance. More, in a fierce counter-attack the Red Army temporarily captured the northern part of the city, stalling the German advance for several weeks.

p Early in September Soviet troops east of Smolensk, near the towns of Yelnya and Yartsevo, mounted an offensive of their own. They liberated Yelnya and in so doing smashed a large nazi force.

p The Red Army displayed heroism and tenacity, and a burning wish to turn the tables in the Smolensk Battle. The German blitzkrieg was beginning to fold. The nazis saw that their intention of entering Moscow on the march was a pipe-dream—doubly so since the flanks of Army Group Centre, driving towards the capital, were exposed both north and south. To play safe, Hitler decided to wheel part of his troops northeast and another lot southeast.

p In the northeast, the nazis laid siege to Leningrad. However, their effort to take the city proved in vain. Blockaded Leningrad, its population suffering terrible hardships, drew off the bulk of Army Group North, of which only six divisions could be spared to help in the Moscow offensive.

p The courage of Leningrad’s defenders and civilian population was unexampled. When the fascist ring closed round the city at the end of August, a population of 2,500,000 was almost totally cut off from the rest of the world.  [80•2  The food stores in the Badayev warehouses were destroyed in a fire caused by nazi shells and bombs. The power supply failed. Electricity was available only for the Smolny,  [80•3  the bakeries and Army Headquarters. The water supply was cut off. The daily bread ration dropped to 125 grams for children and 81 disabled people and to 250 grams for those who worked. People died in the streets from hunger and exposure. To stay alive, people ate carpenter’s glue and leather belts. And the torments of hunger were aggravated by the winter’s .cold.

p But nothing could break the spirit and the discipline of the Leningraders. In a research institute the staff preserved a valuable collection of grain samples. When enemy, shells crashed into vans carrying bread passers-by helped reload the bread on some other vehicle, never taking a loaf themselves.

p Poets, writers, musicians, artists, scientists and designers worked on. The Leningrad factories produced war supplies in the immediate proximity of the battle-line. This courage .and dedication surpassed anything known heretofore.

p In the southeast, the German Command headed for Kiev. In the fighting for the Ukrainian capital, the Soviet troops were competed to withdraw. But their heroic stand had a bearing on subsequent developments at the approaches to Moscow, helping frustrate the nazi aim of a blitz victory.

p After a few successful flanking operations to the South and North of its Army Group Centre, the Germans were poised for a general offensive against Moscow. Hitler and his generals knew that Moscow’s industries figured prominently in. the Soviet economy. Besides, Moscow was a crucial communication centre, and a seat. of culture. More, it was of the utmost significance as the capital, from which the Communist Party and the Government guided all peacetime activity and were then. organising the nation’s war effort. Moscow, in short, was the standard-bearer in the’ fight for liberation, the pride and hope of the peoples,, a wartime centre coordinating the efforts of all the freedom-loving forces risen or rising to combat German fascism.

p The German imperialists were sure that once Moscow was conquered the Soviet people would surrender. .

Following the pattern set in their assaults on the Western countries, the German Command kept up the air offensive against the Soviet capital begun on July 22. But it collapsed: an ingenious system of anti-aircraft defences and the courage of the defenders saved Moscow from large-scale destruction. Only 120 out of the 4,212 nazi planes which took part in -the 36 raids from July 22 to October i, managed to reach the limits of the city.  [81•1 

82 MISSING 83 MISSING 84 did they draw up an operational plan, but also a plan for the destruction of Moscow and its inhabitants. Speaking to the Staff of Army Group Centre, Hitler said: "The city must be blockaded so as to allow no Russian soldier, no inhabitant, whether man, woman or child, to escape; Every attempt to break out is to be countered with force. The necessary preparations have been made to flood Moscow and its environs.... Where Moscow stands today there will be a large sea which will forever conceal from the civilised world the capital of the Russian nation."  [84•1 

p The second phase of the "general offensive" began on November 15-16. But the nazis soon discovered that Soviet resistance had become still more tenacious. Th$ Soviet stand at Moscow was a compound of many feats/ One of these was by 28 men of General I. V. Panfilov’s 316th Infantry Division, who repulsed 50 panzers, destroying 18. "Russia is huge,” said their political office, V. G. Klochkov, "but there is nowhere we can retreat, for behind us is Moscow.” This became the motto of all the defenders of the Soviet capital.

p During the fighting for Kryukovo, a Moscow suburb on the Moscow-Leningrad railway, three panzers broke through the Soviet lines and headed at top speed for Moscow. A battery of anti-aircraft guns on the highway finished them off. Three giant replicas of anti-tank “hedgehogs” now stand on the spot in tribute to the city’s defenders.

p Early in December the attack capability of the nazi army petered out. The "general offensive" was over. The blitzkrieg strategy, so successful in the rest of Europe, proved a total flop when used against the Soviet Union. With all the odds weighing heavily against it, the Red Army frustrated the nazi war plan and stemmed the tide. The resistance, the acme of human courage, beyond compare in history, provided the time and opportunity for a gradual shift of the strategic initiative to the Soviet side, coupled, of course, with the political and economic requisites provided by the nation as a whole.

p To give the enemy no time to recover, the Red Army mounted a large-scale offensive from Moscow on December 5-6, committing the forces of three fronts—Kalinin (General I. S. Konev), Western (General G. K. Zhukov) and South- 85 Western (Marshal S. K. Timoshenko). The thrust developed with good results into a general Soviet offensive in the central theatre. The troops displayed extraordinary enthusiasm. Sergeant V. V. Vasilkovsky covered an enemy embrasure with his body to silence a nazi machine-gun in the clash for Ryabinka village, and a few days later the feat was performed by Private Y. N. Paderin.

p The 612th Infantry Regiment was ordered to hook around the enemy lines, wedge itself into the nazi rear, straddle the Minsk Highway and block the apprbach of German reserves. It withstood the onslaught of a large force of infantry, panzers and the Luftwaffe, cutting the highway at the 14151 kilometre sign. How the men fought is described in a death note by one of the soldiers:

p "We were twelve, ordered to block the enemy, especially tanks. And we held them. Now there are just three — Kolya, Volodya and I, Alexander. But the enemy keeps coming. We’ve lost Volodya, of Moscow. The enemy still keeps coming. Nineteen enemy tanks are aflame. But there are just the two of us. We shall stand firm to our dying breath, unless reinforcements come to relieve us.... Now I am alone, wounded in head and arm. The burning tanks are twentythree. Maybe I’ll die. Maybe someone will find this note and remember us. I am Russian, from the town of Frunze. An orphan. Good-bye, friends. Yours, Alexander Vinogradov. 22.2. 1942."  [85•1 

p Twelve men armed with hand-grenades, incendiary bottles, anti-tank guns, rifles and submachine-guns destroyed 23 panzers in an unequal engagement, winning unfading glory.

p In the counter-offensive at Moscow in December 1941 and in early 1942, the Soviet forces defeated 38 nazi divisions and panzer units. The Red Army drove the enemy out of over 11,000 towns and villages to a distance of 100 to 250 kilometres from Moscow. This was how the tide began turning. Meanwhile, south-east of Leningrad another Soviet offensive in the Tikhvin area added to the success of Soviet arms.

p West-German war historian Paul Carell wrote: "... Whatever victories were yet to come, the divisions of Army Group Centre never recovered from the blows they suffered before Moscow. They were never again brought up to full strength, 86 they never recovered their full effectiveness as a fighting force. At Moscow the strength of the German Army was broken."  [86•1  Only in one thing Garell erred: no victories were "yet to come" for Army Group Centre.

p Hitler could do nothing to block the inevitable consequences of his defeat. When Berlin received the news of the outcome of the Battle for Moscow "unrest grew among the Eople. The pessimists remembered Napoleon’s war with issia, and all the literature about La Grande Armde suddenly had a marked revival. The fortune-tellers busied themselves with Napoleon’s fate, and there was a boom in astrology."  [86•2 

p The German Government blamed the defeat on the generals, many of whom were dismissed, including Fieldmarshal Walther von Brauchitsch, Army Commander-in-Chief, all commanders of the army groups and many commanders of panzer and field armies.

p The German defeat at Moscow sharpened the antagonisms in the Hitler bloc, above all between Japan and Germany, and Italy and Germany: When the Red Army was still engaged in heavy defensive actions, Japan officially informed Berlin that she had put off the attack on the USSR until 1942. The Red Army victory added to the Soviet Union’s international standing and influence. For the peoples it meant that a realistic prospect of at last defeating Hitler Germany had appeared.

p Patriots in countries overrun by the nazis took heart. A new stage began in the Resistance movement throughout Europe. Well-organised partisan forces appeared, operating under a considered plan.

p Nazi Germany had suffered her first .major military defeat in the Second World War. Nineteen forty-one went down in history not only as an arduous, but also a heroic year, a year of the bitterest trials, but also a year of revived hope. The all but superhuman effort of the Soviet people made it a year marked by the beginning of the end for Hitler and his Wehrmacht. No longer was the latter thought invincible and its blitzkrieg strategies went bankrupt.

p But the Soviet Union failed to consolidate the turning of the tide, and for a number of reasons, among which the most 87 salient was the absence of a second front that would sluice off at least part of the German strength from the East.

To sum up, the nazi advance eastward was stemmed, resulting in a temporary strategic equibalance. More, the scene was set for tilting the scales gradually in favour of the Soviet Union.