rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

A TURN OF THE TIDE 777When Bock spoke for the first time of going over to the defensive Haidertried to remind him that ”the best defense was to stick to the attack.”It was easier said than done, in view of the Russians and the weather. Thenext day, December 4, Guderian, whose Second Panzer Army had been halted inits attempt to take Moscow from the south, reported that the thermometer hadfallen to 31 degrees below zero. The next day it dropped another five degrees.His tanks, he said, were ”almost immobilized” and he was threatened on hisflanks and in the rear north of Tula.December 5 was the critical day. Everywhere along the 200-mile semicircularfront around Moscow the Germans had been stopped. By evening Guderianwas notifying Bock that he was not only stopped but must pull back, and Bockwas telephoning Haider that ”his strength was at an end,” and Brauchitschwas telling his Chief of the General Staff in despair that he was quitting asCommander in Chief of the Army. It was a dark and bitter day for the Germangenerals.This was the first time [Guderian later wrote] that I had to take adecision of this sort, and none was more difficult . . . Our attack onMoscow had broken down. All the sacrifices and endurance of ourbrave troops had been in vain. We had suffered a grievous defeat. 1065At Kluge’s Fourth Army headquarters, Blumentritt, the chief of staff, realizedthat the turning point had been reached. Recalling it later, he wrote: ”Ourhopes of knocking Russia out of the war in 1941 had been dashed at the verylast minute.”The next day, December 6, General Georgi Zhukov, who had replaced MarshalTimoshenko as commander of the central front but six weeks before, struck.On the 200-mile front before Moscow he unleashed seven armies and two cavalrycorps – 100 divisions in all – consisting of troops that were either fresh orbattle-tried and were equipped and trained to fight in the bitter cold and thedeep snow. The blow which this relatively unknown general now delivered withsuch a formidable force of infantry, artillery, tanks, cavalry and planes, whichHitler had not faintly suspected existed, was so sudden and so shattering thatthe German Army and the Third Reich never fully recovered from it. For a fewweeks during the rest of that cold and bitter December and on into January itseemed that the beaten and retreating German armies, their front continuallypierced by Soviet breakthroughs, might disintegrate and perish in the Russiansnows, as had Napoleon’s Grand Army just 130 years before. At several crucialmoments it came very close to that. Perhaps it was Hitler’s granite will and determinationand certainly it was the fortitude of the German soldier that savedthe armies of the Third Reich from a complete debacle.But the failure was great. The Red armies had been crippled but not destroyed.Moscow had not been taken, nor Leningrad nor Stalingrad nor the oilfields of the Caucasus; and the lifelines to Britain and America, to the northand to the south, remained open. For the first time in more than two years ofunbroken military victories the armies of Hitler were retreating before a superiorforce.That was not all. The failure was greater than that. Haider realized this,at least later. ”The myth of the invincibility of the German Army,” he wrote,”was broken.” There would be more German victories in Russia when another