Stahel, David, Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941

Abstract

For the reviewer, it is an astonishing yet welcome fact that the German-Soviet War of 1941–1945 is still being covered by such recently published books such as Niklas Zetterling and Anders Franksonʼs The Drive on Moscow, or Jack Radey and Charles Sharpʼs The Defense of Moscow 1941, while Lev Lopukhovsky has written a major study about the Viazʼma encirclement battle. There is also the meticulous and profound, but somewhat less accessible, day-to-day four-volume study about the Battle for Smolensk, in which David Glantz has cast new light on this complex operation, which, according to a detailed official study by General G. F. Krivosheev, resulted in the Soviet loss of 759,974 soldiers. Now David Stahel, whose previous books aboutOperation Barbarossa and the battle for Kiev asserted that Hitlerʼs decision to attack the Soviet Union on 22 June and divert its forces to conduct the encirclement battle of Kiev in September sealed the fate of the Third Reich in the long run, has produced a new volume about Operation Typhoon and the German defeat at Moscow in December 1941. This new work, which exploits predominantly German sources, should be evaluated and compared with the major studies written by General Klaus Reinhardt and Ernst Klink, which were published in 1971 and 1983 respectively, to determine whether Stahel provides new and deeper insights. Apart from his German-centered approach, Stahel points out that the main focus of this book is on the role of German panzer and motorized divisions, whose operations produced understandable limitations on the German Army’s operational capabilities. However, despite acknowledging the fact that the invading German Army of June 1941 was principally an infantry army, he does not adequately cover the many problems generated by the army’s organizational structure. For example, Army Group Centerʼs forces on 2 October 1941 numbered 46 infantry, 13 panzer, and seven motorized infantry divisions, although unlike the US infantry divisions in June 1944, the German motorized divisions were only partially motorized. Even though the Wehrmacht began the war on 22 June 1941 with around 600,000 motor vehicles, Stahel estimates it lost between ʻ180,000 and 240,000ʼ vehicles by the end of September, which is a bit inaccurate. Here, he should have mentioned that the Army Command (Allgemeines Heeresamt) had declared on 1 May 1941 that the monthly attrition rate up to this time, while fighting in countries with good infrastructures like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, was as much as 12 percent. This meant that, under the far worse conditions of the Russian road network, the monthly attrition rate went sky-high. The author might also have mentioned that the attrition rate was not the only problem with motor verhicles, since the number of differing spare parts for vehicles within Army Group Center reached