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The Battle for Moscow - Part II

© Ralph Zuljan

Having lost their battle for Moscow with Hitler, the German generals applied themselves to the rapid conclusion of the diversion of Army Group Center's panzers southward with the expectation of advancing on Moscow once this move was complete. Among the benefits of a panzer drive south was that the vulnerable and extended southern flank of Army Group Center would then be secured. Once it was completed, there would be no threat of a northward thrust against the rear of the army group by Soviet forces nominally to the south or southwest of it.

Whether such a threat to the flank of Army Group Center ever existed, however, is open to debate. Despite the fact that the Soviet Southwestern Front was stronger than the fronts opposing the advances of the German army groups further north on the Eastern front, its armies were being pushed back. They had thus far managed to avoid being caught in the destructive battles of encirclement that other Soviet armies had been trapped in, but the Soviet forces fighting Army Group South were not in a position to disengage without risking destruction.

In order for even a small part of these forces to represent a serious threat to the German advance in the center, against Moscow, they would have had to have been fully disengaged in the south first. To do this implied weakening Soviet resistance in the Ukraine. Withdrawing substantial forces would have meant significantly weakening the Soviet defense in the south. Since the Soviet forces in the Ukraine were already being pushed back by the German offensive, doing so would have risked turning what was a battle for the Ukraine into a Soviet rout comparable to that occurring further north. Under these circumstances it was extremely doubtful that an effective Soviet attack could have been mounted against Army Group Center's exposed southern flank.

In the postwar period, under the influence of the writings of German generals involved in Barbarossa campaign -- Guderian in particular, there has been a great deal of attention given to the implications of a successful German attack on Moscow. Some historians, Stolfi for example, have gone so far as to suggest that a German victory in the war against the Soviet Union depended on capturing Moscow before the winter of 1941-42 and that there were no good military reasons for the Germans not achieving this result. Such writings focus on the redirection of panzer forces south -- on Hitler's orders -- as the primary reason the German campaign failed to reach Moscow before the winter. In response, other historians like Glantz have suggested that part of the reason the Germans turned south was the increasing Soviet resistance on the Moscow axis at the time of the Battle of Smolensk and the need to secure Army Group Center's southern flank. These are the same reasons expressed by Hitler in his arguments with the army generals and written into Directives 33 and 34.

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