the failures of military intelligence before the war.
Instead of the expected 5,000 tanks, the Soviets
disposed of 20,000. Goebbels reflected that had
the true strength of the Soviet Union been
known: ‘Perhaps we would have drawn back from
tackling the questions of the East and Bolshevism
which had fallen due.’ What a momentous ‘per-
haps’, on which the whole course of the war was
to depend! During the first six weeks the Germans
lost 60,000 dead; newspaper columns in Germany
were filled with small black iron crosses announc-
ing a son or husband fallen for Führer and
Fatherland. As the Germans penetrated the Soviet
Union the already vast front from the Black Sea to
the Baltic of more than 1,000 miles lengthened
even further. The same tactics that had worked
in the ‘confined’ space of France failed in the
vastness of the Soviet Union. Though Stalin was
completely stunned by the German attack, not
expecting it, despite all warnings, to be launched
before 1942, huge Russian reserves of manpower
and the setting up of industrial complexes beyond
the Urals meant that the Soviet military capacity
to resist was not destroyed.
But Stalin’s fear of provoking Germany by tak-
ing adequate preparatory measures had left the
Soviet armies unprepared and exposed to German
encirclements at the outset. The Germans cap-
tured more than 3 million prisoners between June
and December 1941. But if the Soviet Union
could avoid actual defeat in 1941 and 1942 it
would then become impossible for the German
armies to defeat the more numerous Soviet
armies, whose weapons matched, and in the case
of the T-34 tank even outclassed, those of the
Germans. First the autumn rains and the mud and
then the winter weather caught the German
armies unprepared. Not only did the troops freeze
during the particularly severe winter of 1941–2,
but much of the mechanised equipment became
unusable in the Arctic frosts. Russia’s two greatest
cities, Leningrad and Moscow, were the goals of
the central and northern German armies.
Leningrad was almost surrounded by the Germans
and the Finns.
The siege of Leningrad is an epic of the
Second World War. It lasted from September
1941 to January 1944. During the siege 641,803
people died from hunger and disease alone. The
Soviet spirit of resistance was not broken. Almost
three-quarters of a million German troops were
bogged down around the city for 900 days. The
Germans were also denied the capture of
Moscow, although they reached the southern
suburbs. Germany’s defeats were not due to
‘General Winter’ alone, but to the skill and
heroism of the Soviet forces facing the invaders.
The German high command was forced to admit
that for the first time a Blitzkrieghad failed. The
war was not over in the east; the war of attrition
that had defeated Germany in 1914–18 and
which Hitler had done everything to escape, was
just beginning.
There are occasions when secret intelligence
plays a crucial role in war. The Soviets had a spy
in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, a German press corres-
pondent who had predicted the date of the
German attack almost to the day. The warning
appears to have fallen on deaf ears. But when he
passed on the information that the Japanese
would strike south and not attack the Soviet
Union just before his arrest as a spy, and Japanese
military inactivity confirmed his tip off, Stalin,
though still suspicious, gradually withdrew those
troops facing the Japanese after the Siberian
campaigning season was over (Sorge was impris-
oned and executed in 1944). With the help of
these troops and other reinforcements, Marshal
Zhukov, the most outstanding general on the
Soviet side during the war, organised the defence
of Russia’s capital. In December 1941 fresh Soviet
divisions counter-attacked and the Germans were
forced to give up territory, but their own retreat
was orderly. They were not routed or captured in
huge numbers as the Russians had been. Although
the Russians did not yet enjoy superiority in men
or materials on the Moscow front, the Germans
were severely disadvantaged by the length of and
lack of adequate rail and road supply lines to their
own troops.
Stalin’s mistakes in carrying on the Russian
offensives in the spring of 1942, believing the
German armies virtually beaten, led to major mil-
itary disasters on the Kharkov front in the south
in May and June 1942 and in the Crimea.
Hundreds of thousands more Soviet troops were