The central front proved decisive. There the Germans aimed their main blow directly at Moscow. But they were delayed in fierce fighting near Smolensk. The summer Blitzkrieg became a fall campaign. Hitler increased the number of his and his allies' divisions in Russia to 240 and pushed an all-out effort to capture the Soviet capital. In the middle of October German tanks broke through the Russian lines near Mozhaisk, some sixty miles from Moscow. Stalin and the government left the city for Kuibyshev, formerly Samara, on the Volga. Yet, instead of abandoning Moscow as in 1812, its defender, Marshal George Zhukov, had his troops fall slowly back on the capital, reducing the German advance to a crawl. The Germans proceeded to encircle the city on three sides, and
they came to within twenty miles of it, but no further. Late in November the Red Army started a counteroffensive against the extremely extended German lines on the southern front, recapturing Rostov-on-Don at the end of the month. In early December it struck on the central front, attacking both north and south of Moscow as well as in the Moscow area itself. The Germans suffered enormous losses and had to retreat. Winter came to play havoc with unprepared German troops and to assist the Russians. On January 20 the Red Army recaptured Mozhaisk, thus eliminating any immediate threat to Moscow. But German troops had to retreat much further west before they could stabilize the front. In fact, its lines overextended, its troops unequipped for cold weather and exhausted, the German army probably came near complete collapse in the winter of 1941/42. Some specialists believe that only Hitler's frantic determination to hold on prevented a catastrophic withdrawal. As it was, the German army gave up about one hundred thousand square miles of Soviet territory, but retained five hundred thousand when fighting finally quieted down.
In retrospect it seems clear that, in spite of its many splendid victories, the great German campaign of 1941 in Russia failed. The Red Army remained very much in the field, and the Blitzkrieg turned into a long war on an enormous front. Quite possibly Hitler came close to crushing the Soviet Union in 1941, but he did not come close again. Taking into account Soviet resources and the determination to resist, the Nazis had to win quickly or not at all. German losses in their initial eastern campaign, large in quantity, were still more damaging in quality: the cream of German youth lined the approaches to Moscow.
Furthermore, although the Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazi armed might from the summer of 1941 until the end of the Second World War in Europe, it certainly did not fight alone. Churchill welcomed Soviet Russia as an ally the day of the German attack - although shortly before he had been ready to wage war against the U.S.S.R. in defense of Finland. Great Britain and the United States arranged to send sorely needed supplies to the Soviet Union; and after the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States became a full-fledged combatant. In spite of German submarines and aircraft and the heavy losses they inflicted, British convoys began to reach Murmansk and Archangel in the autumn of 1941, while American aid through Persia started to arrive in large quantity in the spring of 1942. More important, the Axis powers had major enemies to fight in Africa, and eventually in southern and western Europe, as well as in the east.
The second great German offensive in Russia, unleashed in the summer of 1942, was an operation of vast scope and power, even though it was more limited in its sweep and resources than the original attack of 1941: in 1942 the Germans and their allies used about 100 divisions and perhaps
a million men in an attack along the southern half of the front, from Voronezh to the Black Sea. Having occupied the Kerch area and captured Sevastopol after a month of bitter fighting, the Germans opened their main offensive early in July. They struck in two directions: east toward the Volga, and south toward the Caucasus. Blocked on the approaches to Voronezh, the German commander, Marshal Fedor von Bock had his main army of over 300,000 men cross the Don farther south and drive to the Volga. At the end of August the Nazis and their allies reached Stalingrad.
That industrial city of half a million people, strung along the right bank of the Volga, had no fortifications or other defensive advantages. Yet General Basil Chuikov's 62nd Army, supported by artillery massed on the other bank, fought for every house and every foot of ground. Reduced to rubble, the city became only more impassable to the invaders in spite of all their weapons and aircraft. Both sides suffered great losses. Hitler, who had assumed personal command of the German army in December 1941 and possibly saved his troops from catastrophe in the winter of 1941/42, began to make disastrous strategic errors. He kept pounding at Stalingrad for fruitless weeks and even months and, disregarding professional opinion, would not let his troops retreat even when a Soviet counteroffensive began to envelop them. Eventually, at the end of January 1943, Marshal Friedrich Paulus and some 120,000 German and Rumanian troops surrendered to the Red Army, their attempt to break through to the Volga thus ending in a complete fiasco. The German offensive southward had captured Rostov-on-Don once more and had swept across the northern Caucasus, the attackers seizing such important points as the port of Novorossiisk and the oil center of Mozdok. But again the extended German lines crumbled under Zhukov's counteroffensive in December. The invaders had to retreat fast into the southern Ukraine and the Crimea and were fortunate to extricate themselves at all.
After some further retreats and counterattacks in the winter of 1942/43, the Germans tried one more major offensive in Russia the following summer. They struck early in July in the strategic watershed area of Kursk, Orel, and Voronezh with some forty divisions, half of them armored or motorized, totaling approximately half a million men. But after initial successes and a week or ten days of tremendous fighting of massed armor and artillery the German drive was spent, and the Red Army in its turn opened an offensive. Before very long the Red drive gathered enough momentum to hurl the invaders out of the Soviet Union and eventually to capture Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, stopping only with the end of the war. The smashing Soviet victory was made possible by the fact that the German forces had exhausted themselves. Their quality began to decline probably about the end of 1941, while the
increasing numbers of satellite troops pressed into service, notably Rumanians, could not at all measure up to the German standard. Hitler continued to make mistakes. Time and again, as in the case of Stalingrad, he would not allow his troops to retreat until too late. The Red Army, on the other hand, in spite of its staggering losses, improved in quality and effectiveness. Its battle-tested commanders showed initiative and ability; its weapons and equipment rolled in plentiful supply both from Soviet factories, many of which had been transported eastward and reassembled there, and through Allied aid, while the German forces suffered from all kinds of shortages. As long as they fought on Soviet soil, the Germans had to contend with a large and daring partisan movement in their rear as well as with the Red Army. And they began to experience increasing pressure and defeat on other fronts, as well as from the air, where the Americans and the British mounted a staggering offensive against German cities and industries. The battle of Stalingrad coincided with Montgomery's victory over Rommel in Egypt and Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria. Allied troops invaded Sicily in the summer of 1943 and the Italian mainland that autumn. Finally, on June 6, 1944, the Americans, the British, and the Canadians landed in Normandy to establish the coveted "second front." As the Russians began to invade the Third Reich from the east, the Allies were pushing into it from the west.