There was one point when Nazi Germany had its best chance of winning the Second World War on the Eastern Front
in mid-October 1941. Most of the Red Army’s forces before Moscow had been smashed or encircled, no reserves were available to defend the capital. This was Hitler’s best opportunity to knock out the Soviet Union. All that stood in his way were a handful of Soviet rifle divisions, tank brigades and hastily assembled militia. According to German accounts, theirspearheads were stopped by the mud, but a close examination of German records undercuts this version of events. Instead it is clear that it was the resistance of this handful of Red Army men and women that halted their drive, along with German planning based on wishful thinking. This is the dramatic story that Jack Radey and Charles Sharp tell in this compelling study of a pivotal battle in the struggle for supremacy in the East. Using archival records from bothsides, in graphic day-by-day detail, they reconstruct a previously unstudied aspect of the Battle of Moscow. They show how the German plan to encircle seven Soviet armies on the northern flank of their advance would have trapped over a quarter of a million Red Army troops, and cleared their way to the capital. But the Soviet response, poorly coordinated and depending on makeshift forces scraped together from their shattered armies, drove back the German attack. The gripping narrative describes both sides of the wild battle, with open flanks, attacks and counterattacks and extraordinary planning and logistical blunders, and it gives a vivid close-up of the combatants and commanders in action. Jack Radey and Charles Sharp’s book is a remarkable new contribution to our understanding of the initial stages of the war on the Eastern Front and the breakdown of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. AUTHOR: Jack Radey has researched deeply into the history of the Second World War in general and has made a particular study of the conflict on the Eastern Front. He has written many games, articles and film scripts on subjects as wide ranging as the Korsun Pocket, Borodino ‘41, American Civil War battlefields, D-Day, Iwo Jima, and Barbarossa.
Charles Sharp has a long-standing interest in military history. He spent twenty years in the US Army from the Vietnam War. He served in the army through the end of the Cold War and the first Iraq War, retiring in 1992. Since then he has written fifteen books on the Soviet and German armies in the Second World War, published in the Soviet Order of Battle series, and lectured on military history. SELLING POINTS: . In-depth day by day reconstruction of a critical battle of the Eastern Front . New contribution to our understanding of the defeat of Operation Barbarossa . Based on exhaustive research into German and Soviet operational records ILLUSTRATIONS: 30