The Moscow Option Read Online Free PDF

outclassed and outfought. Warned by the British, by its own commanders at the front, by its agents round the world, the Soviet leadership had applied Nelson’s blind-eye technique with spectacularly disastrous results. The Air Force had been cut to ribbons on the ground, whole armies like lumbering mammoths had been surrounded and reduced by the German masters of the panzer art. When given the opportunity to attack, Red Army formations had charged like incoherent Light Brigades down the muzzles of the German guns. Defensively inept, offensively gallant to the point of suicide, the front line of the Red Army had practically ceased to exist.
    Who was responsible for this disaster? Not the ordinary Red Army soldier. Though lacking the experience and tactical skills of his German counterpart, though frequently armed with inferior equipment, he had fought, and continued to fight, with a reckless bravery that the Germans found thoroughly depressing. Not the front-line officer either. No more than his French, British or Polish counterparts, could he have been expected to grasp the essence of panzer warfare overnight.
    If anyone was responsible it was the Supreme Command. Or more simply, Stalin. Firstly for allowing the German Army to take his own by surprise, secondly for removing those leaders who did understand armoured warfare - most notably Tukhachevskiy - in the purges of 1937-8. But, these undoubted mistakes notwithstanding, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the fundamental reason for the Soviet defeat in the summer of 1941 was the different sense of priorities held by the political leaderships of Germany and the Soviet Union. If one state was devoting its energies to conquest and another to national construction there was an excellent chance that the former would prove a more efficient conqueror.
    Stavka had to learn the hard way. Though some measures could be implemented immediately - generals like Rokossovsky, whose excellent military careers had been cut short for political reasons, could be pulled out of the Siberian concentration camps and given their uniforms back - the thorough reorganisation, re-equipping and retraining of the Red Army would take a great deal of time. And time was extremely precious.
    In August it must have seemed that those lessons that needed to be learned in a hurry were hardly being learned at all. A further series of frontal attacks were launched and, like bears tumbling into traps, Thirty-fourth Army near Lake Ilmen, Twenty-eighth Army around Roslavl, and Thirteenth and Fiftieth Armies between Gomel and Krichev disappeared into historical limbo. All these attacks took place in those rear-flank areas of the projected German advance; their failure eased Halder’s anxieties considerably. Only around Yelna in the central sector did the Red Army battle the Germans to an honourable draw through August, and this apparent success was to prove as fatal as the failures. The leaders in the Kremlin interpreted it, wrongly, as evidence of the continuing viability of linear defence lines, and proceeded to construct two more between Yelna and the capital. The first of these, under General Zhukov, contained five fresh armies on a line from Ostashkov to Kirov; the second consisted merely of earthworks dug by workers brought out from Moscow. On the front itself the eight armies of Timoshenko’s West Front held a line from Lake Seliger to Yelna. Further south the two armies of Yeremenko’s new Bryansk Front were to cover the Bryansk-Orel sector, which outdated Soviet intelligence had earmarked as Guderian’s probable approach route.
    All these lines were desperately thin. The potential Soviet manpower was proverbially inexhaustible, but armies need more than manpower. Only so many men could be trained and armed in the time available, and the weaponry situation was adversely affected in the short term by the removal of the armament industry to the east. The one trained and equipped Soviet army as