9. Battle Of Moscow
Though events in the summer at Smolensk and in Kyiv in early autumn held bad omens for the chances of successfully capturing the Soviet capital, Hitler was still adamant an attack go ahead. And so Operation Typhoon began in October, with 1,000,000 men racing towards the eternal glory of marching in Red Square. There is conventional wisdom that says that the best officer in the Russian army is General Winter: a cold (sorry) and merciless foe who takes his time and always emerges victorious. But he is attended to by a faithful adjutant who goes by the less portentous title of
Rasputitsa. This refers to the sudden onslaught of rain and subsequent mud that blights the landscape of Russia and the surrounding regions of Europe with meticulous timing every spring and autumn. The Wehrmacht shuddered to a halt in swirls of sucking sludge, losing plenty of vehicles, horses and clothing to the bothersome brown barricade. Until the awful alliteration was alleviated and the ground froze rock solid with the arrival of proper winter. The tanks starting rolling again, full speed ahead, and the citizens of Moscow and their government started to get rather jittery. As the Germans resumed their long march, the city of Kuybyshev (now Samara) some 530 miles to the east was hastily selected as the emergency capital and government offices and assets were evacuated. Stalin himself allegedly had a private train waiting if the worst were to happen. The Germans advanced relentlessly, securing many smaller towns and cities at disastrous cost to themselves but lives were irrelevant as long as they marched into Moscow. By early December in the north, the vanguard had secured a town under a dozen miles from the city, and some could ostensibly view the spires of the Kremlin through their binoculars, whilst in the south they had been stopped by a desperate attack a more reassuring 70 miles away. Khimki and Kashira were the last names the Germans heard. They would never see Moscow again. On 5 December 1941, reserve forces from Siberia leapt into action on skis, and on account of Russia being really, really cold and the Germans for the most part lacking any clothing or equipment suited to this environment, proceeded to both save the capital of the Motherland and permanently change the course of the war. To understate it: in the weeks that followed, German forces took up the hobby of long-distance running
en masse to keep warm. By early 1942, determined units barely held onto to a salient around the city of Rzhev, 130 miles west of Moscow. This bulge in the front would trouble Stalin and his generals for a long while afterwards, being the site of many vicious, futile and extremely bloody Soviet counterattacks in an attempt to fend off the fascist invaders once and for all. The defeat outside Moscow couldve easily been a humiliating rout, but Soviet scarcity of resources and German resilience barely saved their situation. Thus we see that Moscow was an epic encounter on a scale that would give a change of scenery and pace to the genre. Riding into action on the back of a T-34 and skiing after the admittedly freezing, sick and concurrently half-hearted remnant of German forces in a landscape more resembling an icy hell than a winter wonderland could make for interesting gameplay, and the sheer scale of it if portrayed with skill and flourish would leave a lasting impact. It was one of three major pivotal battles it deserves the exposure and reverence.