The Defense of Moscow 1941: The Northern Flank

389 Pages·2012·2.87 MB·English

by  Jack Radey

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Jack Radey and Charles Sharp 2012
9781783408979
The right of Jack Radey and Charles Sharp to be identified as Authors of this
Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Authors’ Notes
Prologue
Chapter 1 - Background
Chapter 2 - Preliminaries, October 7th–9th
Chapter 3 - The German Pursuit and Capture of Kalinin, October 10th–14th
Chapter 4 - New Operational Plans
Chapter 5 - The German Advance on Torzhok, October 15th–16th
Chapter 6 - The Soviet Counterstroke Begins, October 17th
Chapter 7 - The Battle Along the Torzhok Road, October 18th–21st
Chapter 8 - The Battle for Kalinin City, October 22nd–24th
Chapter 9 - Revised Plans
Chapter 10 - Aftermath, October 25th–Early November
Chapter 11 - Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Appendix 1 - German Order of Battle
Appendix 2 - Soviet Order of Battle
Appendix 3 - German Directives, Orders and Reports
Appendix 4 - Soviet Directives, Orders and Reports
Index
Foreword
By David M. Glantz
The Soviet–German War (1941–1945), known in the West as Hitler’s War on
Germany’s Eastern Front during World War II, and to Russians as ‘The Great
Patriotic War,’ stands like a colossus astride the history of the twentieth century.
The vast scale of the war, coupled with its unmatched ferocity and the human
and material carnage it produced, has challenged the descriptive power of
historians who have written about it and tested the imagination of readers who
have attempted to comprehend it. Many past histories of the war have added to
this confusion because they were marred by Cold War biases, the self-serving
recollections of participants in the war, or, as was the case with many of the
hundreds of histories written in the Soviet Union, appreciations designed to
bolster the superiority of a political, economic and social system. Whatever the
cause, these histories are replete with myth, legend, and outright inaccuracies,
which have not only obscured or utterly concealed large segments of the war
from the reader’s view but have also perverted accounts of those portions of the
wartime narrative relatively well known to contemporary readers.
Thankfully, however, the fading of the Cold War fears and animosities,
coupled with the death of most participants in the war and the waning of
ideological struggles characterizing the postwar years, has been accompanied by
unprecedented releases of documentary materials from the once-locked archives
of the Soviet Union. Today, by exploiting these new materials and re-examining
documents from archives long-open but poorly exploited, a new generation of
historians is slowly lifting the veil of inaccuracy and misunderstanding that has
cloaked and obscured our understanding of the war. This new book by Jack
Radey and Charles Sharp stands at the forefront of this vitally important process.
The Defense of Moscow: the Northern Flank is revisionist history at its best. It
describes but a single aspect of the famous battle for Moscow, which, together
with Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, is familiar to even the most casual readers of
the histories of the war. This book demolishes myths and legends, replacing
them with fresh and accurate insights as to how this battle, long famous as the
first defeat suffered by Hitler’s vaunted Wehrmacht, was actually fought and
won by the soldiers and commanders of Stalin’s Red Army. Without ‘stealing
the thunder’ of Radey’s and Sharp’s book, by unearthing, exploiting, and
studying newly released archival materials, the two historians clearly
demonstrate why and how the battle for Kalinin was fought. In the process, their
study has shown how this fight, which historians have long treated as a mere
‘side-show’ to the culminating stage of Operation Barbarossa, was, in reality, an
important element in the German High Command’s strategy for defeating the
Red Army, capturing Moscow, and, ultimately, winning the war.
By skillfully exploiting newly released and long-neglected archival materials,
the authors of this clear, concise, and well-written book have provided not only
fresh insights as to how and why the battle for Moscow was fought, but also the
necessary context for understanding why Germany ultimately lost the war. It is a
‘must read’ for historian and layman alike. I hope this is but the first of many
books penned by these historians.
David M. Glantz, Carlisle, PA
Authors’ Notes
Two issues confront a historian in any exploration of the ‘Great Patriotic War,’
as the Soviets referred to it. The first is finding appropriate maps, and the second
is language. We’ll take them in order.

Maps
The Germans went to war not only without a good intelligence picture of their
opponents (they underestimated the Red Army by a factor of three, and totally
misunderstood the Soviet ability to mobilize resources), but also without
adequate maps of the country they were to invade. Using outdated 1:300,000
scale maps, they found themselves operating with great difficulty and being
regularly surprised by the terrain. While maps were captured in small batches
during 1941, it was not until the capture of the headquarters of 2nd Shock Army
in 1942 that the Germans acquired a full, up-to-date map set of the western
USSR. The Soviets, who by doctrine had assumed they would be fighting on
their opponents’ soil, lacked much in the way of good maps for the territory they
had acquired in 1939, and were only ‘on the map’ once they were pushed back
into the pre-war USSR territory.
A modern historian has to deal with trying to find maps that roughly date from
the period to be studied. The best complete set of maps available to most readers
is the US Army set of 1:250,000 maps issued in 1954. Fortunately these can be
accessed online at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/easterneurope/ thanks to
the University of Texas . The maps are not complete; some villages are not
named, and some have different names than were used at the time. Other villages
were destroyed during the war, and there is some new construction shown on the
maps that was not there during the war. Nonetheless, these are the most useful.
Other sources that can supplement them include a collection of aerial
photographs taken by the Luftwaffe during the war. They can be found at
http://www.wwii-photos-maps.com/ under the heading ‘target dossiers.’ Some
libraries have collections of maps at other scales that were captured from the
Soviets by the Germans , and then captured by the American or British Armies
during the war.

Language
Translating German presents relatively few challenges. At least the alphabet is
pretty much the same. Russian, on the other hand, is written in Cyrillic. There
are at least four different ways to transliterate Cyrillic into English. Is it Tsar
Alexander or Czar Aleksander? General Rokossovsky or General Rokossovskii?
Josef Stalin or Iosef Stalin? The system that is most familiar to the principal
author of this work is the old-fashioned one used by Progress Publishers, the
Soviet outlet for English translations of works in Russian. Consequently this one
was used pretty much throughout the book. The principal researcher, on the
other hand, learned a method used by the US Army in the early 1950s, which has
since been superceded by yet another one. The Germans, naturally, transliterated
Cyrillic names into German, producing yet another set of spellings, similar to the
previous three, but different. The authors have made every attempt to be
consistent throughout, but inconsistencies may remain.