Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942

by David Stahel

Overview

A gripping and authoritative revisionist account of the German Winter Campaign of 1941–1942

Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as its first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy’s strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.

Hitler’s strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army’s offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories.

Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf’s Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler’s capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers’ diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374714253
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	562
Sales rank:	407,177
File size:	35 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

David Stahel is the author of over a half dozen books about World War II, several focusing on Nazi Germany’s war against the Soviet Union (including Operation Typhoon and The Battle for Moscow). He completed an MA in war studies at King’s College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. In his research he has concentrated primarily on the German military in World War II. Dr. Stahel is a senior lecturer in European history at the University of New South Wales, and he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 Hungry as a Bear: The Soviet Counter-offensive Begins 17

2 Dodging the Soviet Bullet: Army Group Center Holds 37

3 Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Army Group Center Between Hitler and Stalin 55

4 Keeping the Wolf from the Door: The Panzer Groups Retreat from Moscow 75

5 Digging In His Heels: Hitter Orders a Halt 93

6 Put to the Sword: The End of Brauchitsch 115

7 The Bear Without Any Claws: The inadequate Red Army 133

8 The Battle of Nerves: Army Group Center on the Brink 153

9 The More the Merrier: Christmas 1941 and the Supply Crisis 175

10 Playing with Fire: Guderian Gets Burned 195

11 Turning the Screws: Ninth Army's Near Collapse 215

12 Rank and File: Soldiering in Army Group Center 233

13 Reinforcing Failure: Stalin's January Offensive 251

14 Hanging in the Balance: Fourth Army's Impending Encirclement 271

15 The Flood Gates Are Breaking: Ninth and Fourth Panzer Armies Rupture 291

16 Making a Virtue of Necessity: Surviving the Russian Winter 309

17 Defending the Indefensible: Hitler's Last Stand 329

18 Lonely Front: Embattled Homeland 349

19 Retreat and Counterattack: Army Group Center Rebounds 369

20 Departing the Eastern Front: Treacherous Routes of Escape 391

21 The Last Hurrah: The Failure of the Soviet Winter Offensive 409

Conclusion 429

Notes 441

Bibliography 503

Acknowledgments 525

Index 527

Editorial Reviews

09/20/2019

Legend has it that the dreaded Russian winter defeated Germany's army during the Soviet campaign of World War II. Stahel (The Battle for Moscow; Operation Typhoon) seeks then to examine why Army Group Centre, the massed organization of German divisions that targeted Moscow, generally fared better than their Soviet counterparts and emerged in relatively good condition following the winter of 1941–42. While firmly in the camp of operational military history, this present work still includes related elements that impacted the German war effort, including the influence of the American entry into the war on German soldiers' psyches, combined with the scarcity of food, usage of drugs and alcohol, the soldiers' sexuality, and the treatment of prisoners of war, both German and Soviet. Hitler's oversight remains an overarching theme. His meddling not only resulted in the sacking of field marshals and countermanding of overall strategic direction, but went so far as to dictate the number of machine guns deployed to a specific location. VERDICT A solid analysis of the 1941–42 winter campaign, this work should appeal to readers interested in operations on the World War II's eastern front.—Matthew Wayman, Pennsylvania State Univ. Lib., Schuylkill Haven

Library Journal

12/16/2019

Military scholar Stahel (The Battle for Moscow) draws on German military records, diaries, letters, and memoirs to recreate the Battle of Moscow in this vivid revisionist history. Describing the Soviet counteroffensive that forced Germany to retreat in January 1942 as a “Pyrrhic victory,” Stahel contends that the Germans were able to thwart the Red Army’s strategic goals and better prepare for spring and summer fighting. He combines a soldier’s-eye view of the campaign with analysis of high-level strategic planning, and reveals the tensions and contradictions between the German Army’s philosophy of empowering subordinates to take initiative and the Nazi Party’s ideology of obedience. Stahel credits German field marshal Günther von Kluge with preserving the Army Group Center despite Hitler’s amateurish interference in military planning, and takes Soviet commanders to task for overextending their forces and losing six times as many soldiers as the Germans. Stahel wrangles a staggering amount of primary source material into a cohesive narrative and writes clearly and efficiently. The depth of analysis and sheer volume of information may be overwhelming for generalists, but readers with a deep interest in the subject matter will deem this an invaluable resource. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"An engaging, fine-grained account of an epic struggle, one that restores contingency and perspective to a battle that has been mythologized for too long . . . Mr. Stahel describes these days brilliantly, switching among various levels of command while reminding us of the experiences of the soldiers on the ground and the civilians caught up in the Nazi 'war of annihilation' . . . [Readers] will surely be thankful to him for taking a fresh look at a crucial series of battles about which we wrongly thought we already knew everything there was to know." —Brendan Simms, The Wall Street Journal

“Stahel has done a vast amount of research . . . His arguments are convincing, his prose always lucid . . . This is a serious work of scholarship: a well-argued piece of revisionist history, and a reminder that, for all the misery and slaughter in the West, it was even worse in the East.” —Tim Bouverie, Air Mail

"Stahel has created a well-researched, compelling account of an oft -misunderstood period of the Second World War . . . Stahel renders the conflict in exquisite detail, breaking down the fighting to days and even hours to provide a blow-by-blow analysis. . . a formidable piece of scholarship, unafraid to tackle assumptions about the war and build a more complex, nuanced picture of the German Army in 1941-1942. It is a text driven by perspective: those of the German high command, of ordinary soldiers, and of military historians concerned to conceptualise victory in war." —Alexander Izza, Military History Matters

From the Publisher

2019-08-07
The hair-raising follow-up to the author's The Battle for Moscow (2015).

Stahel (European History/Univ. of New South Wales) has written an intensely researched account of three months of brutal fighting under awful conditions on the Eastern Front whose deaths and cruelty dwarfed whatever Britain and American endured in the west throughout the war. Never short of strong opinions, the author maintains that Germany had lost within months of its June 22, 1941, invasion when it became obvious that the Soviet Union would not collapse. Once the fighting "passed from being a blitzkrieg to a slogging war of matériel, which was already the case by the end of the summer, large-scale economic deficiencies spelled eventual doom for the Nazi state." Germany's advance stalled in early December, the result of increasing resistance, exhausted, freezing troops, and the impossibility of supply over immense distances and primitive roads. At the same time, a long-planned Soviet offensive began, regaining about 15% of its lost territory before running out of gas in February. Most of the new Red Army divisions were hastily assembled, poorly trained, and lacked heavy fire support. They suffered casualties that shocked even the Soviet high command. Both Hitler and Stalin made matters worse. No Russian general dared refuse Stalin's orders to attack, and many were shot until Georgy Zhukov convinced the Soviet leader to back off. Ignorant of conditions at the front and convinced that Aryan fighting spirit trumped any deficiency, Hitler repeatedly forbade retreating. Historians still debate how much damage this caused because senior commanders did not always obey. Stahel's blow-by-blow, unit-level analysis will appeal to military scholars, and his vivid anecdotes will draw in some general readers. He concludes that the Soviet offensive failed in its strategic goals and endured catastrophic losses, but it contributed to the steady erosion of the Wermacht.

A page-turner for World War II buffs but likely more than most readers want to know about an awful campaign.

Kirkus Reviews