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"The Battle of Moscow, 1941-1942: The Red Army's Defensive Operations and Counteroffensive Along the Moscow Strategic Direction" is a detailed examination of one of the major turning points of World War II, as seen from the Soviet side. The Battle of Moscow marked the climax of Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa," which sought to destroy the Soviet Union in a single campaign and ensure German hegemony in Europe. The failure to do so condemned Germany to a prolonged war it could not win. This work originally appeared in 1943, under the title "Razgrom Nemetskikh Voisk pod Moskvoi" (The Rout of the German Forces Around Moscow). The work was produced by the Red Army General Staff's military-historical section, which was charged with collecting and analyzing the war's experience and disseminating it to the army's higher echelons. This was a collective effort, featuring many different contributors, with Marshal Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov, former chief of the Red Army General Staff and then head of the General Staff Academy, serving as general editor. The book is divided into three parts, each dealing with a specific phase of the battle. The first traces the Western Front's defensive operations along the Moscow direction during Army Group Center's final push toward the capital in November-December, 1941. The study pays particular attention to the Red Army's resistance to the Germans' attempts to outflank Moscow from the north. Equally important were the defensive operations to the south of Moscow, where the Germans sought to push forward their other encircling flank. The second part deals with the first phase of the Red Army's counteroffensive, which was aimed at pushing back the German pincers and removing the immediate threat to Moscow. Here the Soviets were able to throw the Germans back and flatten both salients, particularly in the south, where they were able to make deep inroads into the enemy front to the west and northwest. The final section examines the further development of the counteroffensive until the end of January 1942. This section highlights the Soviet advance all along the front and their determined but unsuccessful attempts to cut off the Germans' Rzhev-Vyaz'ma salient. It is from this point that the front essentially stabilized, after which events shifted to the south. This new translation into English makes available to a wider readership this valuable study.… (more)
User reviews
There are some frank admissions made throughout in regards to Red Army weaknesses, both for the rank-and-file and in terms of commanding officers, which would undoubtedly be absent from any literature that was released on the war during Stalin's lifetime for the general public. But, for the most part, what you have here are pages of descriptions of defensive operations in the lead up to the Red Army's Moscow Counteroffensive, usually described under the umbrella term "active defense," and the ensuing counterattacks along the Moscow direction by a few fronts and the armies under their command. Attention is also paid to logistics, party work among soldiers, and some of the heroic acts performed by Red Army soldiers. Stalin's name is featured here more than any other, as would be expected in some respects, with the likes of Zhukov, Rokossovsky, Dovator, Belov, and a few others making a rare appearance.
There are numerous tables offered for the sake of reference and some of them are quite eye opening, especially when it comes to the number of troops in divisions. There are a few mentions of the losses sustained by Red Army forces but numerous instances of German losses, which are undoubtedly inflated. Whether they were inflated by the authors of the study or the primary reports they were based off of is a separate question. Finally, I have often believed that Red Army forces operating on the Moscow direction were capable of inflicting a greater defeat on the Wehrmacht that what actually occurred in the winter of 1941/1942. In part I am still of that mindset but, in reading this volume and following the numerous maps and information included, I am also more aware of the difficulties Red Army forces encountered and the limits they were up against. In some ways this is a very important work but one that speaks more to its limits as a document created under Stalin than an analysis of the Battle of Moscow.