Russia at war 1941-1945

attempt to capture the city by a coup de main failed owing to the enemy's strong anti-tank and anti-aircraft defences; we lost many tanks and officers... The

condition of the Orel-Tula road had meantime grown so bad that arrangements had

to be made for the 3rd Panzer Division ... to be supplied by air... In view of the impossibility of launching a frontal attack on Tula, General Freiherr von Geyr

suggested that in order to continue our advance we by-pass the town to the east...

(He) was also of the opinion that there was no possibility of using motorised troops

until the frost set in.

[Guderian, op. cit., p. 152. (Emphasis added.)]

Guderian's argument that rain and mud interfered with the success of the first German offensive against Moscow seems futile, since it affected the Russians as much as the Germans; besides, Guderian himself admits that it was the defence put up by the

Russians, and not the mud that stopped him from capturing Tula, this key position on the way to Moscow. Moreover, the Russians also sprang on him the unpleasant surprise of

throwing in some of their T-34 tanks under Katyukov much to Guderian's disgust.

[ Guderian, op. cit., p. 248.]

On the night of November 6—that is, a week after the first German offensive against

Moscow had virtually petered out, and ten days before the second offensive began—

Moscow celebrated the 24th Anniversary of the Revolution. The Germans were still some forty miles from Moscow—in some places even nearer; and although the atmosphere in

Moscow was that of a besieged city, with tens of thousands of wounded crowding the

hospitals, and many thousands more arriving every day—the conviction that Moscow

would not be lost had steadily grown in the past fortnight.

The usual Eve-of-Revolution Day meeting was held on that night of November 6 in the

large ornate hall of the Mayakovsky tube station. The hall was crowded with hundreds of delegates of the Moscow City Soviet, and various Party and trade union organisations, and representatives of the Armed Forces. As many who attended that meeting later told me, the underground setting of the meeting was uncanny, depressing and humiliating.

Stalin's speech at the meeting was a strange mixture of black gloom and complete self-confidence. After recalling that the war had greatly curtailed, and in many cases wholly stopped, the peaceful building of socialism that had gone on for so many years, Stalin said:

In four months of war, we have had 350,000 killed, 378,000 missing and 1,020,000

wounded. During the same period the enemy had lost over four and a half million in dead, wounded and prisoners. There can be no doubt that Germany, whose human

reserves are running out, has been weakened much more than the Soviet Union,

whose reserves are only now being fully deployed.

Battle of Moscow II—Stalin's Holy Russia Speech 245

It is extremely doubtful that anybody in Russia could have believed these figures; but it was perhaps essential to overstate the German losses in order to bring home his

contention that the blitzkrieg had already failed. It had failed, Stalin said, for three reasons: the Germans, as could be seen from Hess's mission to England, had hoped that Britain and America would join them in their war against Russia or, at any rate, give Germany a free hand in the East; this had not come off: Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union were in the same camp. Secondly, the Germans had hoped that the Soviet régime

would collapse and the USSR fall to pieces.

Instead, the Soviet rear is today more solid than ever. It is probable that any other country, having lost as much territory as we have, would have collapsed.