Operation Typhoon: Hitler's March on Moscow, October 1941

When ever we talk about second world war, I always comes down to "D-day, Normandy, Market garden, Bulge. Most people dont realise that all the way in 1941 a much larger offensive against the USSR took place. This book and its "prequels" and "sequels" tells us about those offensives.This books tells us that the whole notion that it was the weather was the decisive factor is utter non-sense. Long before the Winter started the replacement army already informed the German army Chief of Staff that replacements cannot keep up. Also the replacements had less combat experience and was such less combat effective. It also shows that the Panzer generals wanted to fight their own seperate war and contributed to the Red Army's Survival. Most importantly It showed us that the Red Army did not take things lying down.Fantastic book, but in order to understand this, I believe you have to read the Prequels and Sequels and considering the price of the prequels and sequels, it might not always be easy.

This is the third of David Stahel's books that I've reviewed (following "Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East" and "Kiev - 1941"), and I am as impressed with this as with his earlier works. His understanding of the German-Soviet War is not unique, but he kicks it up a notch and makes clear, through detailed understanding of military realities, just how far away from final victory the German forces were even after their victories around Vyasma and Bryansk. One little quote he cited, from the German side, has inspired me to write a novel.I'm very much looking forward to his next book on the November campaign and (hopefully) the German retreat.

Another well written and researched book. I've found David Stahel to be a very good author!

A masterpiece. Stahel is amazing.

The first three months of Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union were by far the bloodiest three months of Hitler’s war to date with 185,000 Germans dead and some 366,000 injured.“Far from waging a seamless blitzkrieg wreaking havoc on the Red Army, the German panzer groups in the conduct of their advance suffered debilitating losses, which, in the first three months of the campaign, had already undercut Germany’s whole war effort.” “Operation Barbarossa … was a strategic failure with disastrous implication for Nazi Germany’s war effort.”“Clearly, Hitler and the Army General Staff had dramatically underestimated the Soviet Union.”To beat the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union did not have to destroy an enemy force or reach a distant objective. It needed only to prevent the invaders from obtaining their prize and thereby secure a victory by default.From early October to early December the Soviet high command transferred enough men to the central part of the front to staff 99 new divisions.Army Group Centre alone recorded killing around 80,000 ‘partisans’ between July 1941 and May 1942. The 707th Infantry Division reported taking 10,940 prisoners in anti-partisan operations in just four weeks starting on 11 October 1941. Of these prisoners, 10,431 were shot, although only 90 rifles had been found.Almost two million Soviet POWs had died by February 1942.After Romanian forces captured Odessa, they shot 19,000 of the city’s Jews. In the course of World War Two, some 300,000 Jews died under Romanian occupation.