The 'Moscow Strategic Defensive Operation' was the Soviet overall designation for the Battle of Moscow, embracing the German 'Taifun' (i) and 'Wotan', and a series of Soviet strategic and smaller-scale operations in defence of Moscow (2 October/5 December 1941).

The seven component operations 1 of the Soviet defensive phase were combined into the 'Moscow Strategic Defensive Operation' (30 September/5 December 1941).

'Barbarossa' had called for the capture of Moscow within four months, that is by the middle of October 1941, by the formations of Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' of three Panzergruppen and three armies. Despite lengthy and rapid initial advances, the German forces were slowed by the combination of the distances involved and the Soviet resistance, the latter in particular during the Battle of Smolensk (6 July/5 August), which with its after-effects delayed the German offensive toward Moscow by almost two months. Having secured Smolensk, the German forces then concentrated their efforts in the north against Leningrad and in the south against Kiev, further delaying the central drive toward Moscow.

Thus the German advance on Moscow was renewed only on 2 October in 'Taifun' (i), and was intended to complete the capture of Moscow before the onset of winter. After an advance leading to the encirclement and destruction of several Soviet armies, the Soviets stopped the Germans at the defences of the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line', just 75 miles (120 km) to the west of Moscow. Having penetrated the Soviet defences, the German progress was then slowed by weather conditions, with the onset of autumn rain turning roads and fields into a thick and cloying mud that significantly impeded the progress of German vehicles, horses and soldiers. Although the onset of colder weather and the freezing of the ground then allowed the German advance to be driven forward once again, the Germans struggled in the face of stiffening Soviet resistance as well as the steadily increasing cold for which they lacked adequate clothing and equipment.

By a time early in December, the leading elements of Generaloberst Hermann Hoth’s 3^rd Panzergruppe and General Erich Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe (from 1 January 1942 the 3^rd Panzerarmee and 4^th Panzerarmee respectively) of von Bock’s Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' were less than 19 miles (30 km) from the centre of Moscow. But the German forces had shot their bolt and were now able to advance no farther.

On 5 December 1941 fresh Soviet troops, previously based in Siberia and excellently prepared for winter warfare, attacked the German forces in front of Moscow, and by 22 January 1942 the Soviets had driven the German forces back to the west over a distance of between 60 and 150 miles (100 and 250 km), so ending the immediate threat to Moscow and marking the closest that Axis forces ever got to capturing the Soviet capital.

The Battle of Moscow was one of the most important events of World War II, primarily because the Soviets were able to prevent this most determined attempt to capture their capital. The battle was also one of the largest during the war, with more than 1 million casualties. It marked a turning point as it was the first time since the German forces began their campaigns of aggression in 1939 that they had been forced into a major retreat. For Hitler, Moscow was the most important military and political target in the USSR as he believed that the capture of the city would in short order lead to the general collapse of the USSR.

The city was thus the main objective for the large and well-equipped Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' which, for 'Taifun' (i), committed Generaloberst Maximilian Reichsfreiherr von Weichs’s 2^nd Army, Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge’s 4^th Army and Generaloberst Adolf Strauss’s 9^th Army supported by Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s 2^nd Panzerarmee, Hoth’s (from 5 October General Hans-Georg Reinhardt’s) 3^rd Panzergruppe and Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe as well as the air strength of Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte II. The Germans had more than 1 million men for the operation, together with 1,700 tanks and 14,000 pieces of artillery. But the German strength in the air had been reduced significantly, for since 22 June the Luftwaffe had lost 1,603 aircraft and had damage to another 1,028. As a result Luftflotte II had only 549 serviceable machines, including 158 medium and dive-bombers together with 172 fighters.

The attack relied on standard Blitzkrieg tactics, using Panzergruppen driving deep into Soviet formations and executing double-pincer movements to compress the Soviet formations into pockets which could be destroyed largely by the following German infantry.

The German plan was based on a pair of initial movements, the first a double pincer performed around the Soviet forces of General Polkovnik Ivan S. Konev’s (from October General Georgi K. Zhukov’s) West Front and Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Semyon M. Budyonny’s Reserve Front located around Vyaz’ma, and the second a single pincer around General Leytenant Andrei I. Eremenko’s (from 14 October General Major Georgi F. Zakharov’s) Bryansk Front to capture the city of Bryansk. From that point, the plan called for another quick pincer movement north and south of Moscow to encircle the city.

However, the German armies were already battered and experiencing some logistical issues, and facing the German army group the three Soviet fronts were formed from exhausted armies that had already been involved in heavy fighting for several months. The forces committed to the defence of Moscow totalled 1.25 million men, 3,232 tanks and 7,600 pieces of artillery. By this time the Soviet air forces had suffered huge losses, in the order of 21,200 aircraft, but an extraordinary industrial effort had partially offset the loss of these largely obsolete warplanes, and the air forces had 936 generally more modern aircraft, of which 578 were bombers, for the defence of Moscow; 545 of the aircraft were serviceable on 1 October.

While a threat to the German forces in numerical terms, however, these troops were poorly disposed, with most of the troops deployed in a single line, and there was little in the way of reserves which could be summoned from the rear. Moreover, many Soviet soldiers were seriously lacking in combat experience and some critical equipment such as anti-tank weapons, while the majority of the numerically large Soviet tank strength was based on obsolete models.

The Soviet command ordered the construction of three sets of defensive belts to the west of Moscow. The outer part was the 'Rzhev-Vyaz’ma Defence Line' on the line between Rzhev and Bryansk via Vyaz’ma. Nearer Moscow was the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line', which was a double line of defences stretching between Kalinin and Kaluga. And just outside Moscow was the 'Moscow Defence Zone', which comprised a triple ring of positions from the south-east on the Moskva river to the north-west on the Volga Canal. These defences were still largely uncompleted by the beginning of the operation as a result of the speed of the German progress. Furthermore, the Soviets had discovered the nature of the German attack quite late, and Soviet troops were ordered to assume a total defensive stance only on 27 September.

However, new Soviet divisions were being formed on the Volga river, in the Ural mountains and in Soviet Asia, and it would be a matter of only a few months before these new troops could be committed, making the battle a race against time as well.

Describing the German advance in the north toward Leningrad, and in the south into the area lying to the east of Kiev, as the precursors of the the 'basis' on which von Bock’s Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' would strike the strategically decisive blow against Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Semyon K. Timoshenko’s Western Direction, on 6 September Adolf Hitler issued his Führerweisung Nr 35 for what became the 'Taifun' (i) assault on Moscow. This directive gave notice that the German primary effort would be switched back to Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' at the end of September, by which time the army group would have had its detached Panzer and air units returned to it, together with reinforcements in armour from the other two army groups and the reserve held by the Oberkommando des Heeres. Thereafter, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Heeresgruppe 'Nord' and Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Heeresgruppe 'Süd' and were to continue their current operations with reduced strength. von Leeb’s army group was to establish contact with the Finnish forces on the Karelian isthmus to the north-west of Leningrad and also drive past the Volkhov river to meet the Finns to the east of Lake Ladoga, while von Rundstedt’s army group was to continue its progress to the east to take Kharkov and Melitopol, and also to detach Generaloberst Erich von Manstein’s 11^th Army to the south to enter and overrun Crimea.

During the final week of September, Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' was authorised to recall Guderian’s 2^nd Panzergruppe (from 5 October the 2^nd Panzerarmee) and Hoth’s 3^rd Panzergruppe from Heeresgruppe 'Süd', and also acquired the headquarters of Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe from Heeresgruppe 'Nord', together with supplementary Panzer corps from Heeresgruppe 'Nord' and Heeresgruppe 'Süd'. By that time, Heeresgruppe 'Nord' had taken Petrokrepost (Schlüsselburg in German) on the outflow of the Neva river into Lake Ladoga, thereby severing Leningrad’s last overland contact with the rest of the USSR, and the Finnish forces had established themselves across the Karelian isthmus to the north of the same city and on the Svir river to the east of Lake Ladoga. The spearheads of Heeresgruppe 'Süd' were nearing Kharkov, on the confluence of the Kharkiv, Lopan and Udy rivers, and closing on Melitopol near the mouth of the Molochna river on the Sea of Azov. Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' held the line it had occupied to the east of Smolensk in August.

On the Soviet side, the commands for Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Kliment M. Voroshilov’s North-Western Direction and Timoshenko’s Western Direction, whose functions had been assumed by the general staff and the Stavka, had gone out of existence on 27 August and 10 September respectively, leaving only Marshal Semyon M. Budyonny’s (from September Timoshenko’s) South-Western Direction. In the far north, between Lake Onega and the Barents Sea, General Leytenant Valerian A. Frolov’s Karelian Front was managing, with the aid of the approaching winter, to hold the Germans and Finns away from Murmansk and the railway along the western side of the White Sea which linked Murmansk with the rest of the USSR. Against Heeresgruppe 'Nord', the Leningrad Front, with General Georgi K. Zhukov in command after 10 September, when he succeeded Voroshilov, defended Leningrad, and General Leytenant Pavel A. Kurochkin’s North-West Front held the line from Lake Ladoga to the south as far as Ostashkov. On the southern flank, Timoshenko took personal command of the South-West Front from General Polkovnik Mikhail P. Kirponos on 26 September and, with it, General Leytenant Dmitri I. Ryabyshev’s South Front and General Polkovnik Fyedor I. Kuznetsov’s 51^st Independent Army in Crimea, assumed responsibility for the defence of the part of the Eastern Front to the south of Kursk. Against Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' were aligned Konev’s West Front, Eremenko’s Bryansk Front, and the Reserve Front over which Budyonny had succeeded Zhukov as commander.

The long pause in the central part of the Eastern Front had given the Stavka time to rebuild the Soviet defences to the point that the three fronts had a total of at least 1.25 million men. Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' had a greater numerical strength, but its total of 1.93 million men included a large auxiliary contingent, and its combat effective strength of 78 divisions in fact offered it little more than numerical parity.

The quiet in the area to the west of Moscow ended on 30 September when, in autumnal sunshine, the armour of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' surged to the east once again as 'Taifun' (i) began. Konev and Eremenko had their West Front and Bryansk Front concentrated to the west of Vyaz’ma blocking the direct route to Moscow, and to the west of Bryansk respectively. von Bock’s armour, in the form of the 3^rd Panzergruppe in the north, 4^th Panzergruppe in the centre and 2^nd Panzergruppe in the south, passed round the Soviet forces' outer flanks and between the two Soviet fronts, and in less than one week had encircled six Soviet armies in the area to the west of Vyaz’ma and were forcing almost the the whole of the Bryansk Front, totalling three armies, into pockets to the south-west and north-east of Bryansk.

Near Vyaz’ma, the West Front and Reserve Front were quickly defeated by the highly mobile forces of the 3^rd Panzergruppe and 4^th Panzergruppe, which swiftly located and exploited weak areas in the defences and then plunged at great speed into the Soviet rear areas. Still under construction, the defence was overrun as both German armoured spearheads met at Vyaz’ma on 10 October. General Leytenant Mikhail F. Lukin’s 19^th Army, General Leytenant Filipp A. Ershakov’s 20^th Army, General Leytenant Stepan A. Kalinin’s 24^th Army and General Leytenant Nikolai K. Klykov’s 32^nd Army were thus caught in a huge pocket just to the west of the city.

The encircled Soviet forces did not surrender easily, much to the surprise of the Germans, so the fighting was fierce and desperate, and the Germans had to use 28 divisions to destroy the surrounded Soviet armies. Much of this strength had to be diverted from what should have been its more important task of supporting the offensive toward Moscow. The delay imposed on the Germans by the Soviet defence of the Vyaz’ma pocket allowed the remnants of the West and Reserve Fronts to retreat and consolidate their lines around Mozhaysk. Moreover, the surrounded Soviet forces were not completely destroyed, and some of the encircled troops escaped in groups up to the size of infantry divisions.

The Soviet resistance near Vyaz’ma also provided time for the high command to bring up reinforcements for the 5^th, 16^th, 43^rd and 49^th Armies defending the Moscow axis, and to transport three infantry and two tank divisions from the Far East.

Farther to the south, near Bryansk, the Soviet performance was little more effective than that near Vyaz’ma. The 2^nd Panzerarmee executed an enveloping movement around the whole front, linking with the advancing 2^nd Army and capturing Orel by 3 October and Bryansk by 6 October.

Luftflotte II flew 984 combat missions and destroyed some 679 vehicles on 3 October alone, and on 4 October a force of 100 medium bombers and dive-bombers destroyed railway lines and hampered Soviet troop movements in the area of Sumy, Lgov and Kursk, thereby severing communications between the Bryansk Front and Timoshenko’s South-West Front. General Major Yakov G. Kreiser’s 3^rd Army and General Leytenant Piotr M. Filotov’s 13^th Army were encircled but, again, did not surrender and many of the troops were able to escape in small groups, retreating to intermediate defence lines around Ponyri and Mtsensk. By 23 October the last remnants had escaped from the pocket.

The Germans' final count of prisoners from the Vyaz’ma pocket was some 663,000 men and from those near Bryansk about 100,000 men. But the results of the operations in the extensive forests around Bryansk were somewhat problematical inasmuch as the fighting tied down parts of Generaloberst Maximilian Reichsfreiherr von Weichs’s 2^nd Army and the 2^nd Panzergruppe until a time late in the third week of the month, and many of Eremenko’s troops eventually either filtered their way out to Soviet territory or hid in the deep woods to become the core of the partisan movement which became so great a thorn in the German lines of communications.

By 7 October the German offensive in this area had become bogged down. The first snow quickly melted, turning roads into deep rasputitsa (glutinous mud). The German armoured formations were slowed to a crawl and found it impossible to manoeuvre with any facility, and both men and machines were steadily degraded in performance.

Generalmajor Willibald Freiherr von Langermann und Erlenkamp’s (from 23 December Generalmajor Dietrich von Saucken’s) 4^th Panzerdivision was ambushed by General Major Dmitri D. Lelyushenko’s hastily formed I Guards Special Corps, including General Major Mikhail Ye. Katukov’s 4^th Tank Brigade, near Mtsensk. Here early examples of the new T-34 medium tank were concealed in the woods as the German armour passed and then, as an extemporised Soviet infantry force contained their advance, the Soviet armour attacked from both flanks and savaged the division’s PzKpfw IV battle tank units. This tactical reverse was a major shock to the Germans, who quickly established that the armour of the new T-34 was almost impervious to the fire of German tank guns.

Luftflotte II flew 1,400 attacks against Soviet positions to support the 4^th Panzerdivision, destroying 20 tanks, 34 pieces of artillery and 650 vehicles of various kinds.

Elsewhere, major Soviet counterattacks had further slowed the German offensive. The 2^nd Army operating to the north of Guderian’s formation with the aim of trapping the Bryansk Front now faced with a strong Soviet counterattack with the ground forces supported by heavy air support. Despite its numerical inferiority, the Luftwaffe inflicted heavy losses on the Soviet air forces: 152 dive-bomber and 259 medium bomber sorties blunted the Soviet attack while another 202 dive-bomber and 188 medium bomber sorties were flown against supply columns in Bryansk area. With the Soviet forces caught in the open, the Luftwaffe destroyed 22 tanks and more than 450 vehicles, and the Soviet counterattack was routed.

The severity of the initial Soviet defeat was huge: the Germans at the time estimated that they had captured 673,000 Soviet soldiers in the Vyaz’ma and Bryansk pockets, but recent research suggests a somewhat lower but still vast figure of 514,000 prisoners, reducing Soviet strength by 41%.

Recalled in haste from Leningrad, where he had succeeded in stabilising the front, Zhukov assumed command of the combined West Front and Reserve Front on 10 October with the primary task of manning the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line' with survivors from the Vyaz’ma pocket, recent conscripts, and a leavening of seasoned troops rushed into the area from other sectors and from Siberia.

The desperate Soviet resistance had nonetheless greatly slowed the German advance. When, on 10 October, the Germans arrived within sight of the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line', they encountered a well-prepared defensive system manned by fresh Soviet forces, and on the same day Zhukov was recalled from Leningrad to take charge of the defence of Moscow. Zhukov at once ordered the concentration of all available defences on a strengthened 'Mozhaysk Defence Line', a move supported by General Aleksandr M. Vasilevsky, head of the operations directorate in the Stavka.

While still outnumbered, the Luftwaffe still controlled the sky whenever it appeared in strength. The dive-bombers of the Stukageschwadern and the level bombers of the Kampfgeschwadern flew 537 sorties, in the course of which they destroyed some 440 vehicles (mainly motor vehicles and trucks) and 150 pieces of artillery.

On 13 October Iosif Stalin ordered the evacuation of the communist party, the general staff and a number of civil administration establishments from Moscow to Kuybyshev (now Samara), leaving only a limited number of officials behind. The evacuation caused panic among Muscovites. On 16/17 October much of the city’s civilian population tried to flee, mobbing the available trains and jamming the roads from the city. Despite all this, Stalin publicly remained in the Soviet capital, somewhat calming the fear and pandemonium.

By 13 October the Germans had reached the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line' fortifications protecting Moscow against attack from the west and this extending from Kalinin in the north toward Volokolamsk and Kaluga in the south. Despite recent reinforcements, the combined strength of the 5^th, 16^th, 43^rd ands 49^th Armies manning the line reached barely 90,000 men, a figure which hardly sufficient to stem the German advance. Zhukov therefore decided to concentrate his forces at four critical points: Volokolamsk, Mozhaysk, Maloyaroslavets and Kaluga.

At this time the entire West Front, which had been almost wholly destroyed in its encirclement near Vyaz’ma, was being rebuilt. Moscow itself was transformed into a fortress. According to Zhukov, 250,000 women and teenagers were used for the creation of the defensive system in tasks such as the digging of trenches and anti-tank moats around Moscow, a labour that involved the movement of a vast quantity of earth without mechanical help. Moscow’s factories were hastily transformed into military complexes: the car factory was switched to the manufacture sub-machine guns, a clock factory produced mine detonators, the chocolate factory delivered food for the troops, and vehicle repair facilities were adapted for the repair of damaged tanks and trucks.

The situation was still critical, however, as the Soviet capital was still within reach of the German armour and, moreover, was now the target for major air attacks, although these caused only limited damage because of extensive anti-aircraft defences and effective civilian fire brigades.

On 13 or, according to some sources, 15 October the Germans resumed their offensive. At first this did not involve any direct assault on the Soviet defences, but took the form rather of an attempt to bypass them by pushing toward the north-east in the direction of the weakly protected city of Kalinin, and toward the south in the direction of Kaluga and Tula, capturing all except Tula by 14 October.

The 'Mozhaysk Defence Line' began to fail on 14 October, however, when Hoepner’s 3^rd Panzergruppe took Kalinin. On 17 October, the Stavka established a Kalinin Front under Konev to assume control of Zhukov’s right flank and thereby make it possible for Zhukov to concentrate his efforts on supervising the Soviet effort on only the direct western and south-western approaches to Moscow.

Encouraged by this initial success, the Germans now undertook a frontal assault on the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line', taking Mozhaysk and Maloyaroslavets on 18 October, Naro-Fominsk on 21 October and Volokolamsk on 27 October 27 after bitter fighting. Because of the increasing danger of attacks on his flanks, Zhukov felt compelled to withdraw his remaining forces to points east of the Nara river.

In the south, the 2^nd Panzerarmee was advancing on Tula with relative ease as the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line' did not extend that far to the south, and because there were no significant concentrations of Soviet troops to impede the advance. Even so, the adversity of the weather, the growing shortage of fuel, and the damage to both roads and bridges all combined to slow the Germans, who reached the outskirts of Tula only on 26 October. The German plan initially called for an instant capture of Tula and for the launch of a southern pincer movement around Moscow. However, the first attempt to capture the city failed as the German armour was stopped by the 50^th Army and civilian volunteers in a desperate fight. Guderian’s army had to halt, within sight of the city, on 29 October.

The German forces were now physically and materially exhausted, with only one-third of their motor vehicles still serviceable, infantry divisions down to 33% or at best 50% strength, and major logistical problems preventing the delivery of warm clothing and other winter equipment to the front.

Even Hitler now appeared to have reconciled himself to the inevitability of a longer-term struggle, since the prospect of sending tanks into so large a city without heavy infantry support seemed, after the cost of capturing Warsaw in 1939, very risky.

While the main weight of the Soviet effort was centred on the defence of Moscow, the main German thrusts were in fact aimed past the Soviet capital. During the second week of October, in the north the 3^rd Panzergruppe had headed toward Yaroslavl, and in the south the 2^nd Panzerarmee (ex-2^nd Panzergruppe) was advancing from the south-west on an axis taking it via Orel and Mtsensk, which it reached on 12 October, toward Tula, Ryazan and Gorky. On 12 October, Hitler gave the same order for Moscow which he had earlier given for Leningrad: the German forces were to surround the city and starve it out of existence, and no German soldier was to enter in Moscow until hunger and disease had effectively destroyed the Soviet capital.

The crisis came in the second and third weeks of October. The loss of Kalinin, on 14 October, triggered panic and looting in Moscow and raised the spectre of disintegration among the troops. On 19 October, the State Defence Committee put Moscow under a state of siege. At the front, Zhukov said that 'rigid order was established…Stern measures were introduced to prevent breaches of discipline.' The diplomatic corps and most of the government apparatus were evacuated to Kuybyshev. Hitler’s address on 3 October opening the German winter relief programme had already sounded like a victory speech, and six days later Dr Otto Dietrich, secretary of state in the propaganda ministry and chief press spokesman, had told the foreign press corps in Berlin that the campaign on the Eastern Front had been decided. One day later, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht had terminated the 'Platinfuchs' operations of Generaloberst Nikolaus von Falkenhorst’s Armee 'Norwegen' out of northern Finland toward Murmansk as it now believed that the end of the war on the Eastern Front was imminent. Much of the world in general, and the British and US governments in particular, wished to believe otherwise, but this seemed to be unrealistic. The US military attaché in Moscow had reported on 10 October that it seemed 'the end of Russian resistance is not far away'. The British government had suspected that the end might be close during September, before the start of 'Taifun' (i), when Stalin had called urgently on the British to open a second front on the European continent or, failing that, to deliver 25 to 30 divisions to fight in the USSR. Bad as the Soviet situation looked, it was, for the moment, actually worse than either the Germans or the British and Americans imagined. Four months of war, huge manpower sacrifices, and massive territorial losses had combined to reduce Soviet productive capacity by 63% in coal, 68% in iron, 58% in steel, and 60% in aluminium. In October, after rising during the summer, Soviet war production also dropped enormously, probably in the order of 60% or more. During October the Moscow and Donets industrial complexes had been shut down to facilitate their evacuation to the east: the decline continued into November and December, during which months the Moscow area and the Donets basins delivered no coal, the output of rolled ferrous metals fell to 33% of that of June 1941, and ball bearing output fell by 95%. W. Averell Harriman, the US Lend-Lease organiser, had been in Moscow at the end of September and accepted a shopping list from Stalin for US$1 billion on Lend-Lease supplies, but the delivery of the required matériel would take months.

On 15 October the German forces moving on Moscow were, from north to south, General Adolf Strauss’s 9^th Army, Hoth’s 3^rd Panzergruppe, von Kluge’s 4^th Army, Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe, von Weichs’s 2^nd Army and Guderian’s 2^nd Panzerarmee. Aligned against these German forces were, again from north to south, the Soviet 22^nd, 29^th, 31^st, 30^th, 1^st Shock, 20^th, 16^th, 5^th, 33^rd, 43^rd, 49^th, 50^th, 10^th and 61^st Armies of the Kalinin Front and the West Front.

On 18 October, the 4^th Panzergruppe, after driving past Mozhaysk and Kaluga, began turning to skirt Moscow on the south and thereby open the way for the infantry formations of von Kluge’s 4^th Army to execute the right-hand inner pincer component of the planned encirclement of Moscow. The 4^th Army, anticipating similar assistance on its right from the 2^nd Panzerarmee, had issued the orders for the encirclement on 16 October and had set the line of the Moscow peripheral railway as the army’s closest approach to the city. At the rate of advance they had attained in the early days of the month, the tanks of Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe would have been less than two days from Moscow when they passed Mozhaysk, but in fact they were now not moving as rapidly as they had before.

The reason for this was simple and characteristically Russian: the Germans were having their first encounter with the rasputitsa, the thick and cloying mud which besets western Russia as the late autumn rains and then the snow begin to fall. The first snow fell during the night of 6 October, and from this time alternating rain and snow and the pounding of tanks and trucks turned the roads into ever deeper quagmires of mud. By the end of the third week in the month, the spearhead divisions of the 4^th Panzergruppe and 2^nd Panzerarmee had become stretched out over 25 to 32 miles (40 to 50 km) and, in a radical change since the summer months, the infantry was sometimes outdistancing the tanks. The 3^rd Panzergruppe even considered the dismounting of its tank crews and going ahead on foot and with panje wagons (Russian peasant one-horse carts). Meanwhile, strong counterattacks on the 3^rd Panzergruppe at Kalinin and on the 2^nd Panzerarmee along the Zusha river at Mtsensk had demonstrated most disturbingly to the Germans that even though aerial reconnaissance revealed the partial evacuation of Moscow, the Soviets were not entertaining any notion of yielding the city without a fight. Because of the weather, for almost the first time in the war the Soviets were now able to meet the Germans on almost equal terms. Advancing only slowly and confined to the roads, the Germans could be met head-on and forced to fight for every mile. The new Soviet T-34/76 medium tanks, which hitherto had been too few in numerical terms to exert any real influence on the fast-moving encirclement battles, now began to come into their own, for their wider tracks reduced their ground pressure and made them better able to cope with mud than the narrower-tracked German tanks. Heavy armament and thicker armour allowed one or two T-34 tanks to form the core of a roadblock to stop an advance until the Germans could bring up either 88-mm (3.465-in) dual-role anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns or 100-mm (3.94-in) field guns, which were the the only mobile pieces of German artillery able to penetrate the T-34’s armour. What the Germans could not ignore, however, was that fact that both of these weapons, but especially the 88-mm (3.465-in) weapon, were both heavy and bulky, and therefore vulnerable, and difficult and thus to be moved over rutted, potholed roads.

At the end of October, Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' was in practical terms stalled along the line between Kalinin in the north and the Oka river, to the west of Tula, in the south: the centre of this front was 35 miles (55 km) from Moscow. Heeresgruppe 'Nord' had meanwhile been forced to forget the possibility of completing the siege line around Leningrad in the area to the west of Lake Ladoga in September after Mannerheim refused to commit more Finnish troops to operations against Leningrad because he had pledged in 1918 not to use the border on the Karelian isthmus as a jumping-off point for any attack on the city, and therefore declined to push the Finnish front any farther to the south. Now holding an uncomfortable Flashenhals (bottleneck), 6 miles (10 km) wide, to the east of Schlüsselburg, von Leeb on Hitler’s orders had begun a thrust to the east on 14 October with the object of advancing from Chudovo to the north-east past Tikhvin to the Finnish line on the lower reaches of the Svir river. This drive also had slowed, and at the end of the month, the rasputitsa brought it to a halt before it had reached Tikhvin.

In the last week of October Heeresgruppe 'Süd' managed to take Kharkov and Stalino, and also to break through the Perekop isthmus into Crimea before the rasputitsa brought in to a stop.

On the Soviet side of the front, the blunting of Germany’s assaults to the east was very welcome, of course, but did not lessen the grave danger in which the country still remained. If Heeresgruppe 'Nord' did manage to reach Tikhvin, it would cut the single railway line to the southern shore of Lake Ladoga and tighten the isolation of Leningrad. At Stalino, Heeresgruppe 'Süd' was on the verge of seizing total control of the heavy industry and coal mines of the Donets river basin. The Panzer formations to the north-east and south of Moscow loomed over the industrial heart of central Russia and were on the verge of leaving the Soviet forces from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Azov reliant for their very lives at the ends of a railway system never conceived to provide adequate lateral communications.

In a speech to the Moscow communist party organisation on the night of 6 November, Stalin harped strongly on the nationalist theme, told the party leaders about the recent US$1 billion Lend-Lend agreement, and blamed the defeats so far on the absence of a second front in the west. Both to stiffen the resolve of the Soviet forces and to boost civilian morale, Stalin ordered that the traditional military parade of 7 November, the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, be staged in Red Square. Soviet troops marched past the Kremlin and most of them then continued straight to the front. The parade was of great importance, for it was a major symbolic demonstration of the Soviet resolve, and was invoked as such frequently in the years to come. In his speech to the troops, Stalin invoked the names of Russia’s heroes of previous ages and demanded that the men emulate the deeds of these great men. In both speeches Stalin predicted Hitler’s ultimate defeat but did not comment on the probable outcome of the current campaign. Before the party audience, he repeatedly spoke of the coalition with the UK and USA as the guarantee of ultimate victory.

Despite the braveness of the show, however, the Soviet forces were in a very precarious position. Although 100,000 additional Soviet troops had reinforced Klin and Tula, where new German offensives were expected, the Soviet defences were still thin. Nevertheless, Stalin demanded that his forces launch several pre-emptive counter-offensives against the German lines, though Zhukov protested, and emphasised the dangers inherent in the complete lack of Soviet reserves.

The Germans were able to repel most of these counter-offensives, further depleting the Soviet forces of men and vehicles that could have been used for the defence of Moscow. The offensive was successful only west of Moscow near Aleksino, where Soviet tanks inflicted heavy losses on the 4^th Army because the Germans still lacked any anti-tank weapon capable of defeating the T-34 tank.

Despite this reverse, the Germans still possessed an overall superiority to the Soviets in manpower and equipment. The German divisions committed to the final assault on Moscow included 943,000 men and 1,500 tanks, while Soviet forces were reduced to a shadow of their former selves, with barely 500,000 men and 890 tanks. By comparison with their situation in October, though, the Soviet infantry divisions now occupied much superior defensive positions, a triple defensive ring surrounding the city, and some remains of the 'Mozhaysk Defence Line' still in Soviet hands near Klin. Each of the Soviet field armies was generally deployed in a multi-layered defence with at least two infantry divisions in second-echelon positions. Artillery support and combat engineer teams were also concentrated along major roads that German troops were expected to use in their attacks. Finally, the Soviet troops in general and the officer corps in particular were now more experienced and better prepared for the offensive.

Yet, as light snow and freezing cold signalled the end of the rasputitsa and the freezing of the land which would restore mobility to the German forces, the future faced by the USSR seemed grim. Within a matter of days, the soldiers parading through Red Square could be trapped in a pocket centred on Moscow, with Stalin himself and the Soviet government driven out into the borderlands between European and eastern Russia. The Stavka had started to create nine reserve armies (10^th, 26^th, 57^th, 28^th, 39^th, 58^th, 59^th, 60^th and 61^st Armies), supplementing the 1^st Shock and 20^th Armies established on a few days earlier, on the line from Vytegra on the south-eastern edge of Lake Onega to the Rybinsk Reservoir on the confluence of the Volga and Sheksna rivers, and thence to the east and south along the Volga river, yet even this seemed to offer no real prospect of any by the shortest-term security as the need to defend this line would indicate that the industrial regions round Leningrad and Moscow had been occupied, and that the USSR could be destroyed as a military power. Stalin had admitted as much when, during the previous summer, he told Harry Hopkins, the US Lend-Lease negotiator, that a German advance of 150 miles (240 km) to the east of Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev would destroy 75% of the USSR’s existing industrial capacity.

Near the end of the first week in November, the front was beginning to became active once more, although on its flanks rather than its centre. Although it had almost been ready to fall back to the Volkhov river in the preceding week, Heeresgruppe 'Nord' managed now to push through the rasputitsa and steadily strengthening Soviet resistance to take Tikhvin on 8 November, allowing von Leeb to state that Leningrad was now also cut off from contact across Lake Ladoga. In the south, the 11^th Army, commanded since 13 September by von Manstein after its initial commander, Generaloberst Eugen Ritter von Schobert, had been killed in an air accident, by 8 November had cleared all of Crimea but for the Kerch peninsula in the east and the Sevastopol fortress in the west.

von Bock had issued orders on 30 October for his Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' to resume 'Taifun' (i), and was waiting only for the weather and ground conditions to make this possible. In the second week of November, as the weather began to clear and the ground to freeze, the German armour once again could get under way. The Oberkommando des Heeres and the field commanders on the Eastern Front now contemplated a troublesome question which had been raised by the time lost during the rasputitsa: where were the German armies to halt for the winter after their post-rasputitsa surge? The plans and preparations for 'Barbarossa' and its successor operations had not contemplated the continuance of active operations into the winter as all command levels had assumed that the campaign would have been completed successfully by the end of 1941. On 7 November, Hitler conceded to Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander-in-chief, that the German forces could not reach a number of vital objectives, including Murmansk, the Volga river, and the oilfields of the Caucasus region, during 1941, and on the following day, in a speech to commemorate the 'Beer Hall Putsch' of 1923, called Blitzkrieg a nonsense word and said that he was prepared to prosecute the war into 1942 and beyond. Thus the idea, in fact never more than an illusion, of a single-season victory over the USSR had vanished as the vastnesses of the USSR started to fall subject to bitter winds, deep snow and temperatures well below zero. On 5 November Generaloberst Franz Halder, the chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres’s general staff, told Oberst Adolf Heusinger, his chief of operations, that Germany needed some way to bring the current campaign to an end.

The form which this way should take appeared different to each of those involved. von Leeb had exhausted the reserves of Heeresgruppe 'Nord' in taking Tikhvin and could move forward no farther, was not inclined to withdraw, and described his army group as existing on a hand-to-mouth basis. von Bock had severe doubts about how much farther his Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' could advance but, recalling the disastrous consequences of Germany’s World War I decision to halt and fight on the Marne river in September 1914, was not prepared to forego whatever chance there might still be to take Moscow, and could not currently envisage anything worse than having to sit out the winter just outside Moscow with the Soviets in control of the city and the railway lines extending into it from the north, south and east. von Rundstedt demanded that the Oberkommando des Heeres allow him to halt his Heeresgruppe 'Süd' along the line it currently held so that he could preserve the strength remaining to it after the summer’s long marches and give him the time he needed to rebuild its strength for the next spring’s operations. Halder saw two possibilities: one was the conservation of strength as the determining factor (Erhaltungsgedanken), and the other was the exploitation of existing strength to maximum effect in the time remaining as the determining factor (Wirkungsgedanken). Halder was sure that the two factors would have to be weighed and balanced against each other, and the result converted into guidance for the field commands.

On 7 November, Halder sent to each army group and army chief-of-staff an 11-page document and a map with notice that both options would be discussed at a general staff conference about one week later in Orsha. The map was of European Russia, and had two north/south lines drawn on it: one was designated as the 'farthest boundary still to be attempted', and the other the 'minimum boundary'. The former boundary extended from Vologda in the north via Gorky and Stalingrad to Maykop in the south, and its attainment would cut off the central part of the USSR from railway contact with the northern ports (Murmansk and Arkhangyel’sk) and the Caucasus, and would bring into German possession the whole of the industrial complex centred on Moscow, the upper and middle reaches of the Volga river, and the Maykop oilfields. Halder was uncertain whether or not the attainment of this boundary would end the war, but he believed that it would bring German forces into an alignment they could maintain indefinitely in the event that Hitler decided against a resumption of the offensive to the east. The latter boundary terminated in the north on the middle reach of the Svir river, some 32 miles (50 km) to the east of Lake Ladoga, and in the south at Rostov-na-Donu, at the mouth of the Don river on the Sea of Azov; in its centre it passed about 160 miles (2609 km) to the east of Moscow. This boundary would provide a secure link with the Finns on the Svir river, bring into the German ambit Moscow and the group of industrial cities to the north-east between Rybinsk and Yaroslavl, sever all the railway lines running toward Moscow from the east, and place Heeresgruppe 'Süd' in a position suitable for subsequent advances toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Nevertheless, this would be only an interim boundary, and another offensive campaign would be required to bring Vologda, Gorky, Stalingrad and the Maykop and Baku oilfields under German control.

Halder and the operations, organisational, intelligence and supply branch chiefs of the Oberkommando des Heeres arrived in Orsha, in the area controlled by Heeresgruppe 'Mitte', during the night of 12 November, and the conference began in the morning of the following day to extend through the day and into the night. Halder’s own thinking, for which he claimed Hitler’s approval, favoured the Wirkungsgedanken, for which he had given the chiefs his position in the paper he sent with the map. The objective to be attained before the current offensive was called to a halt, he stated, should be to secure favourable starting points for 1942 operations while minimising the danger of troops being caught unprepared by the winter: in fact, Halder added, it would be acceptable to take some risks before the onset of winter to reach the farther boundary or at least the minimum boundary.

At Orsha, Halder made the case that carrying the offensive at least to the minimum boundary was necessary as well as advantageous. The fundamental concept on which the campaign of 1941 had been based was the defeat of the USSR be the end of the year. This was no longer fully possible for a number of reasons including natural forces, but primarily the Soviets' surprisingly great military and matériel strengths. Even though the USSR had been weakened radically, its remaining potential was so great that it could not yet be dismissed as a military threat and just kept under observation as had first been planned. Thus the Eastern Front would remain an active theatre into the following year, even though this raised problems. One of these, according to Halder, was the fact that the Oberkommando des Heeres had known from the first that the forces assembled for 'Barbarossa' could not be maintained beyond the end of 1941, which meant that the manpower losses thus far could not be replaced in the coming year, and cutbacks in motor vehicle allotments would reduce the German forces' mobility. If it could survive, however, the USSR still possessed sufficient manpower and industrial capability to rebuild its forces by the summer of 1942. Thus the German forces would still have to seek to inflict on the Soviets forces before the end of 1941 a level of attrition sufficiently great that the German forces would not have to pay in blood during 1942 for what was now neglected.

The chiefs-of-staff of the various armies reminded Halder of matters of which he was already cognisant: as of 1 November, the German casualties were 686,000 men, equivalent to 20% of the 3.4 million men (including replacements) who had been committed to the Eastern Front since the start of 'Barbarossa', and in simpler terms one regiment in every division; of the 500,000 motor vehicles on the Eastern Front, 33% were worn out or damaged beyond repair, and only 33% were fully serviceable; the Panzer divisions now had only 35% of their original tank strengths; and the Oberkommando des Heeres itself rated the 136 divisions currently allocated to the Eastern Front as the equivalent of no more than 83 full-strength divisions.

All of these factors could only get worse if operations continued, and another, logistics, would deteriorate still more, especially as every advance to the east placed a still greater burden on the already overtaxed railways connecting Germany and the Eastern Front, and evidence of this fact was that the troops' winter clothing was already being left in storage because it could not be delivered except at the expense of other supplies. German rolling stock could not be used in the captured parts of the USSR until the tracks had been relaid to the standard gauge; and in the parts of the USSR already seized the Germans had found only 500 Soviet locomotives and 21,000 wagons, this total representing little more than 10% of what was required.

The estimates of the armies' chiefs-of-staff about what might still be accomplished were also very sombre. Generalleutnant Kurt Brennecke, von Leeb’s chief-of-staff, informed Halder that Heeresgruppe 'Nord' had no divisions available for any offensive to the east, and could acquire these only by first destroying General Leytenant Trifon I. Shevaldin’s (from 28 November General Major Andrei L. Bondarev’s) Soviet 8^th Army, which it had confined in a pocket to the west of Leningrad. von Bock’s chief-of-staff, Generalmajor Hans von Greiffenberg, showed no enthusiasm for Halder’s suggestion that Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' should not resume its drive on Moscow for about two weeks so that it could build the strength for a deeper thrust. von Rundstedt’s chief-of-staff, General George von Sodenstern, pointed out that von Rundstedt believed that any advance on Maykop, were it to be undertaken after the long march already made, would remove Generaloberst Ewald von Kleist’s 1^st Panzerarmee, the only major armoured formation available to Heeresgruppe 'Süd', from action for most of the next year.

After dinner on the evening of 13 November, Halder summarised his assessment of the conference. He had decided, that the extensive operations he had proposed on 7 November and during the morning’s session could no longer be considered as viable options. Even so, Halder added, he believed that the army groups would still have to get as much as possible from their formations until a time in about the middle of December. Heeresgruppe 'Süd' would have to push forward, though not as far as Stalingrad; Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' would not seek to make any considerable advance to the east of Moscow, but would have to exert greater pressure on the city itself; and Heeresgruppe 'Nord' would have to resume its drive in the area of Tikhvin, close on Leningrad, and assist the Finns in the area to the east of Lake Ladoga. Vologda, Gorky, Stalingrad and Maykop would have to be left as objectives for the next summer’s operations, when the Soviets would have, Halder believed, a numerical superiority. On the other hand, Guderian’s chief-of-staff, Oberstleutnant Kurt Freiherr von Liebenstein, made reference to the 1940 'Sichelschnitt' campaign against France in reminding Halder that the war was not being fought in France and the month was November and not May.

Soviet sources describe the strategic situation at the time of the lull during November in terms which are somewhat contradictory. The official accounts maintain that it was Soviet resistance which halted the Germans to the west of Moscow and dismiss the adverse weather as nothing but a German excuse for failure, but also suggest that the effect of the Soviet success was temporary, and that the strategic and operational initiatives remained with the Germans. In overall terms, therefore, the Soviets sought to portray the period as one in which the Soviets fought the Germans to a halt and thereby gained themselves a brief respite: the Germans required two weeks to prepare their next effort, and the pause allowed the Soviets to reinforce their front and consolidate the defences of Moscow.

By 15 November the ground had finally frozen, solving the rasputitsa problem. The Germans' armoured spearheads were unleashed once more, with the goal of encircling Moscow and linking near the city of Noginsk to the east of the capital. In order to achieve this objective, the 3^rd Panzergruppe and 4^th Panzergruppe had to concentrate their forces between the Moscow Reservoir and Mozhaysk, then advance to Klin and Solnechnogorsk, thereby encircling the capital from the north. In the south, it was intended that the 2^nd Panzerarmee should bypass Tula, which was still in Soviet hands, and advance to Kashira and Kolomna, linking with the northern pincer at Noginsk.

On 15 November the German armoured formations began their offensive toward Klin. Here there were no Soviet reserves as Stalin’s wish for a counter-offensive at Volokolamsk had forced the relocation of all available reserves forces farther to the south. The first German stage of the German offensive split the front in two, dividing the 16^th Army from the 30^th Army. Several days of intense combat followed and, despite the German efforts, the multi-layered defence reduced Soviet casualties as the 16^th Army retreated slowly and constantly harassed the German divisions trying to make their way through the fortifications.

The 3^rd Panzergruppe finally captured Klin after heavy fighting on 21 November, and took Solnechnogorsk four days later. Soviet resistance was still strong, and the outcome of the battle was by no means certain. Stalin asked Zhukov for his honest opinion whether or not Moscow could be held, and Zhukov replied that it was possible, but that reserves were desperately needed.

By 28 November Generalleutnant Hans Freiherr von Funck’s 7^th Panzerdivision had seized a bridgehead across the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was the last major physical obstacle before Moscow, and was thus less than 22 miles (35 km) from the Kremlin. Then a counterattack by the 1^st Shock Army drove the division back across the canal. Just to the north-west of Moscow, the Germans reached Krasnaya Polyana, little more than 12.5 miles (20 km) from the Kremlin.

By this time, however, both the German and Soviet forces had become severely depleted, with regiments sometimes reduced to the strength of a single company.

As a result of the resistance to the arms of their pincer on both the northern and southern sides of Moscow, the Germans attempted on 1 December a direct offensive from the west, along the highway linking Minsk and Moscow near Naro-Fominsk. However, this offensive had only limited armoured support and was tactically inept inasmuch as it was a direct assault on the extensive Soviet defences. After meeting determined resistance from the 1^st Guards Motorised Division and flank counterattacks by the 33^rd Army, the German offensive was driven back four days later after the Germans had lost 10,000 men and several dozen tanks.

By a time early in December, the temperature, so far relatively mild by Russian standards, dropped to figures as low as -20° to -50° C (-4° to -58° F ), freezing German troops who still had no winter clothing, and German vehicles not designed for weather as severe as this. More than 130,000 cases of frostbite were reported among German soldiers, frozen grease had to be removed from every shell before it could be loaded, and vehicles had to be heated for hours before they could be started.

Thus the 'Taifun' (i) offensive against Moscow had been halted, but the Germans took limited consolation from the fact, according to their intelligence estimate, that Soviet forces had no reserves left, and would therefore be incapable of undertaking a counter-offensive.

This proved wrong disastrously wrong, for Stalin had ordered the transfer of fresh divisions from Siberia and the Far East, relying on intelligence from his best agent in Japan, Richard Sorge, who indicated that Japan had decided not to attempt any attack on the USSR. The Soviet forces had accumulated a 58-division reserve by a time early in December, when the offensive proposed by Zhukov and Vasilevsky was finally approved by Stalin. However, even with these reserves the Soviet forces committed to the operation numbered only 1.1 million men, a total which was only slightly greater than that of the Germans. Nevertheless, with careful troop deployment, the Soviets managed to create a 2/1 manpower superiority at a number of decisive points.

For the Soviet high command, as much as for that of the Germans, the critical strategic consideration early in November, aside from the approach of winter which was as welcome to the Soviets as it was unwelcome to the Germans, was the comparative strength and state of the combatant sides. The manpower and matériel which had kept the USSR alive to date, despite truly enormous losses, were sufficient to sustain the USSR for another round of operations. As of 1 December, the Soviet armies in the field would have a strength of some 4.2 million men, which would provide them with a slight superiority in armour over the Germans, about parity in warplanes, and a small inferiority in artillery and mortars.

The Germans gravely underestimated Soviet strength. Estimates given to the chiefs-of-staff at the Orsha conference put the totals of the Soviet formations and larger units at 160 divisions and 40 brigades, and rated their combat effectiveness at less than 50% as more than half of those formations' and units' officers and troops were believed to be untrained. According to the Soviets, their actual numbers on 1 December were 279 divisions and 93 brigades. Many of these formations and units, especially those from the reserves, lacked both training and experience, but fighting alongside these less capable elements was a growing nucleus of seasoned divisions. The man principally, though indirectly, responsible for this increase in readiness was a Soviet agent, Richard Sorge, who operated in Tokyo in the guise of a German journalist until his arrest on 18 October 1941. It seems that by this time Sorge had supplied enough information on Japanese plans, or rather the Japanese intent not to exploit 'Barbarossa' in undertaking a strategic offensive against the USSR in the Far East, to make it possible for the Soviet high command begin shifting some forces to the west even before 22 June. Through Sorge, therefore, Stalin knew about a Japanese decision of 30 June to uphold its neutrality treaty of April 1941 with the USSR and undertake instead the gamble of war with the USA. By the autumn of 1941, Stalin had either become sufficiently convinced of the reliability of Sorge’s information to redeploy more troops from the east to the west. The first of these Siberian troops had reached the front in October, and more became available in November, but the Stavka held most of these capable Siberian divisions back from the front to stiffen the reserve armies which were then being formed. By 1 December the Soviets had transferred 70 divisions from eastern Siberia, and another 27 divisions out of central Asia and the Transcaucasus region. These formations together constituted 30% or more of the total strategic reserves committed during the 1941 campaign.

In a departure from previous practice, Stalin did not commit his main reserves when the German advance was now resumed. The reserve armies were still being formed, and it is possible that Stalin had not yet decided to make a decisive stand at Moscow. Even so, to Stalin the defence of the Moscow area would remain the paramount strategic requirement. (So far, between June and November Stalin had committed 150 divisions, 51% of the Stavka’s total divisional reserves, in the West Front’s sector.) Late in October, Zhukov’s West Front had received 11 infantry divisions, 16 tank brigades and 40 regiments of artillery from the reserve and from other fronts. Then, in the first half of November, it was allocated 100,000 men, 300 tanks and 2,000 pieces of artillery. During this period, industrial and other workers from Moscow and nearby cities had been drafted to form 12 militia divisions and four first-line infantry divisions. On 10 November Zhukov gained General Major Arkadi N. Ermakov’s (from 22 November General Leytenant Ivan V. Boldin’s) 50^th Army from the Bryansk Front, which was being deactivated, and a week later General Major Dmitri D. Lelyushenko’s 30^th Army from the Kalinin Front. These extensions of his southern and northern flanks respectively gave Zhukov control of the line between a point just to the south of Kalinin to Tula.

In the middle of November, before the weather changed and the lull ended, the Stavka had incorporated almost all of its forces into the defence of Moscow. Zhukov’s West Front held the direct approaches from the west and was to counter the strong armoured thrusts to the west of Klin and at Tula. Konev’s Kalinin Front and Timoshenko’s South-West Front were to pin the outer flanks of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' and thereby prevent von Bock from shifting more strength to his centre and therefore against Moscow. General Polkovnik Yakov T. Cherevichenko’s South Front and General Leytenant Mikhail S. Khozin’s Leningrad Front were under instruction to prepare offensive action near Rostov-na-Donu and at Tikhvin respectively with the object of drawing German reserves away from the central sector of the Eastern Front.

In the second week of November, Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' had basically the same deployment as that with which it had entered the lull period. In the north, Strauss’s 9^th Army held the left of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte', just to the south of the dividing line with Heeresgruppe 'Nord' to the west of Ostashkov, as far as Kalinin. The 3^rd Panzergruppe, commanded by Generaloberst Hans Reinhardt, who had replaced Hoth on 5 October, stood on the Lama river, 32 miles (50 km) to the west of Klin, with Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe on its right in the area to the north of the Moscow Highway linking Moscow and Smolensk. The left flank of von Kluge’s 4^th Army straddled the Moscow Highway and its right flank linked with Guderian’s 2^nd Panzerarmee on the Oka river. The main weight of the 2^nd Panzerarmee's armour was concentrated in a salient to the south of Tula and projecting to the east. von Weichs’s 2^nd Army covered the southern flank of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' in the area to the east of Orel and Kursk.

Against these German formations, the Kalinin Front, the West Front and the right flank of the South-West Front mustered an initial 14 armies.

Despite his doubts about how much farther Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' could advance, von Bock had tried to retain his option for a deep thrust past Moscow. He had pulled his armour slightly inward toward Moscow, but maintained some armoured strength arching well round and to the east of the city. He directed the 3^rd Panzergruppe to the south of the Volga Reservoir in the direction of the Moscow-Volga Canal; the 4^th Panzergruppe via Klin toward the Moscow-Volga Canal; and the 2^nd Panzerarmee past Tula toward Kashira and Ryazan. These axes would bring the 3^rd Panzergruppe and 4^th Panzergruppe to the Moscow-Volga Canal for advances on Rybinsk and Yaroslavl, give the 2^nd Panzerarmee the option of heading to the north from Kashira toward Moscow, or to the east across the Oka river toward Gorky, and leave the close encirclement of Moscow to the 4^th Army. As time passed, however, von