The above scenario is historically correct in many respects. Nonetheless, the Soviet troops withdraw rather than fall prey to yet another disastrous encirclement, and on November 30-precisely two months after Operation Typhoon begins-it culminates in the capture of Moscow. And in obedience to Hitler’s order, Fedor von Bock uses Army Group Center to surround Moscow, instead of fighting for the city street by street. Stalin alone remains in Moscow until mid-November, when the first German troops reach the city in force. It also evacuates a million Moscow inhabitants, prepares to dynamite the Kremlin rather than have it fall into German hands, and makes plans to remove Lenin’s tomb to a safe place.
Thoroughly alarmed, the Stalin regime evacuates the government 420 miles east to Kuybyshev, north of the Caspian Sea. With Herculean efforts from German supply units, Army Group Center continues to lunge directly for Moscow. But this year the weather fails to rescue them, and by early November frost has so hardened the ground that German mobility is assured. The hapless Russians look to the skies for the onset of rain, for this is the season of the rasputitsa-literally the “time without roads”-when heavy rainfall turns the fields and unpaved roads into muddy quagmires.
Within a few days, it achieves the spectacular encirclement of 685,000 Soviet troops near the towns of Bryansk and Vyazma, about 100 miles west of Moscow. Initially, Army Group Center runs roughshod over its opponents. The seeming parity in the number of tanks is misleading, however, since the overwhelming majority of Soviet tanks are obsolescent models. In contrast, the Soviets have only 1.25 million men (many with little or no combat experience), 7,600 artillery pieces, 600 aircraft, and almost 1,000 tanks. It has at its disposal 1.9 million men, 48,000 artillery pieces, 1,400 aircraft, and 1,000 tanks. When the operation begins, Army Group Center enjoys a substantial advantage over the Soviet forces assigned to defend Moscow. Here is how Typhoon might have played out: The best “minimal rewrite” of history must therefore focus on the final German bid to seize Moscow, an offensive known as Operation Typhoon. Glantz points out, such a scenario ignores what the Soviet armies around Kiev might have done had they not been trapped, and introduces too many variables to make for a good counterfactual. This, many historians argue, was a fatal blunder. But it delayed the resumption of major operations against Moscow until early autumn. The elimination of the Kiev pocket on September 26 bagged 665,000 men, more than 3,000 artillery pieces, and almost 900 tanks. Others have pointed to Hitler’s decision in August to divert most of the armored units attached to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center, whose objective was Moscow, and send them south to support an effort to surround and capture the Soviet armies around Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. But the Wehrmacht had force enough to support three offensives, and its quick destruction of so many Soviet armies suggests that this was a reasonable decision. Some historians have pointed to the German decision to advance along three axes: in the north toward Leningrad, in the south toward Ukraine, and in the center against Moscow. But Barbarossa failed to take its capstone objective, Moscow. The Germans took the Soviets completely by surprise, advanced hundreds of miles in just a few weeks, killed or captured several million Soviet troops, and seized an area containing 40 percent of the USSR’s population, as well as most of its coal, iron ore, aluminum, and armaments industry. In many respects, Barbarossa was a stunning success. All one had to do, he insisted, was to “kick in the door” and the “whole rotten structure” of Stalin’s Communist regime would come tumbling down. O ne of the classic “what ifs” of the Second World War centers on how-or if-the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, code-named Operation Barbarossa, could have achieved a quick victory. What If the Germans Had Captured Moscow in 1941? Close
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