Why Did Hitler’s Panzers Fail in Russia?

by Michael Peck

There was war in China and war in North Africa, and soon there would be war between America and Japan [4]. But in the autumn of 1941, the only war that really seemed to matter was fought in a portion of central Russia.

Operation Barbarossa [5], the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had begun brilliantly on June 22, 1941. Encirclement after encirclement had inflicted almost 4 million casualties on the huge but disorganized Soviet armies. By early October, they had advanced to within 200 miles of Moscow. Now came Operation Typhoon, the offensive to seize the Soviet capital and—or so the Germans hoped—end the campaign.

Desperation breeds optimism, so indeed Germany needed to end the War in the East soon. The newsreels of vast columns of bewildered Soviet prisoners may have conveyed an image of German invincibility, but for the Wehrmacht, Russia was Death by a Thousand Cuts. Germany and its allies had committed more than 3 million men to Barbarossa: by October, they had suffered more than 500,000 casualties, or 15 percent of the invasion force. The panzers sweeping 500 miles deep into Russia left a trail of  broken-down tanks. The Russian roads, few in number and poor in quality, had devoured perhaps 40 percent of the German truck fleet. That left railroads as the supply arteries on the Eastern Front, yet Russian railroad tracks were wider than German ones, stranding supply trains that couldn’t move forward until repair crews modified the Russian rails. German logistics collapsed, leaving the troops short of food, ammunition and especially fuel for the panzers.

—- This Originally Appeared inThe National Interest—-

Not that the Soviets were in any better shape. Its officer corps decimated before the war, and its generals often incompetent but politically acceptable toadies, the Red Army had been caught by surprise and then relentlessly pounded by an opponent that conquered France in just six weeks [6]. But at least the Soviets were falling back on their supply bases. The Red Army was also infused with an endless stream of fresh division after fresh division. The troops were poorly trained and led to be sure, but German intelligence, convinced that the Soviets should have collapsed by now, couldn’t understand how the Red Army could take such a pounding and yet keep growing.

Operation Typhoon was like a boxing match between two battered and bloodied fighters barely on their feet. The Soviets could field more than a million soldiers and a thousand tanks at Moscow, dug into multiple defensive lines dug by women and children. The Germans managed to muster almost two million men, and more than a thousand tanks and five hundred aircraft. The plan was do more of what had already worked so well: conduct a series of pincer operations to surround and destroy the Soviet armies in front of Moscow, and then roll into the capital. The fast-moving panzers would be the arms of the pincers, encircling the enemy to keep them from escaping until the footslogging German infantry caught up with the armor and mopped up the pocket. When the Wehrmacht reached Moscow, the city would also be encircled and captured.

With proper supply and good weather, such a big German strike force could probably have conquered any country in the planet. Alas, neither condition would prove true. The initial phase of Typhoon went according to plan, with four Soviet armies and more than 500,000 Soviet soldiers killed or captured at Vyazma alone.