The Battle for Moscow

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The Battle for Moscow

By: David Stahel

Narrated by: John Lee

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About this listen

In November 1941, Hitler ordered German forces to complete the final drive on the Soviet capital, now less than 100 kilometers away. Army Group Center was pressed into the attack for one last attempt to break Soviet resistance before the onset of winter. From the German perspective, the final drive on Moscow had all the ingredients of a dramatic final battle in the east, which, according to previous accounts, only failed at the gates of Moscow.

David Stahel challenges this well-established narrative by demonstrating that the last German offensive of 1941 was a forlorn effort, undermined by operational weakness and poor logistics and driven forward by what he identifies as National Socialist military thinking.

With unparalleled research from previously undocumented army files and soldiers' letters, Stahel takes a fresh look at the battle for Moscow, which even before the Soviet winter offensive, threatened disaster for Germany's war in the east.

Europe

Germany

Military

Russia

Soviet Union

War

Imperialism

Red Army

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Some of the detail in this book, lifted from letters home, diaries, journals, studies, reports, really flesh out the starkness of the bottom line statistics of death and horror. There's some surprisingly sentimental detail; soldiers gathering round a radio at a particular time of evening to listen to a specific song; the oasis in a desert moments of a postal delivery containing letters and words not of war but love; juxtasposed with the daily occurrence of casual slaughter and the normalisation of indescribable brutality.

it's easy to think that the soldiers engaged in the Eastern Front battles were just propaganda nourished drone like automatons but this book reveals great self awareness from individuals across all ranks; letters home show just how much they understand that they've been brutalised and, whilst never really explaining the apparent apathy and acceptance of critically thoughtful men (and how could it?) it conveys poignantly the human nature of these people commanded to carry out the most unnatural tasks.