Moscow in the crosshairs

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yayın yılı:

2011

Yayıncı:

Cambridge University Press

As the days counted down to Bock's final offensive, spirits among the German soldiers were generally high. The men of the Ostheer had been left in no doubt about the scale of the German victory in the Ukraine, nor the tenuous state of the Red Army. Not surprisingly hopes were renewed that the war might indeed be ended in 1941 and many expressed the belief that, however bad the situation might appear in their own units, on the whole the German army was still strong and it was the Soviets who were having to stave off defeat. Yet if there was one aspect of Russian history that every German soldier knew, it was the fate that had befallen Napoleon's invading army in 1812. Indeed the French Emperor had already conquered Moscow in September and by the middle of October was withdrawing from Russia, heading back to his supply centres, when his army was so utterly ruined. Bock, by contrast, would be heading further east and further away from his supply centres. The fabled spectre of campaigning through a Russian winter thus assumed a certain foreboding prominence, which loomed in the minds of many Landsers as the weather began to change. Solomon Perel, who was travelling with a group of soldiers from the 12th Panzer Division, noted that the men ‘had not forgotten Napoleon's defeat in 1812 and…[t]hey were scared out of their wits’. Another soldier wrote home on 21 September, ‘God save us from a winter campaign in the east. It is very cold here already and rains practically every day.…

Künye/erişim: kaynak bağlantısı