Hitler thus allowed himself to be persuaded by OKH and his field generals to launch a major attack against forces defending the Soviet capital. Moreover, a tempting cluster of Soviet divisions seemed to be massing west of Moscow around the cities of Vyaz’ma and Bryansk, ripe for encirclement by Hitler’s fast- moving panzer spearheads. Resolute Red Army defenders and harsh weather combined to doom the German effort to capture the Soviet capital city.īut August brought smashing German successes to the north and south of the Eastern Front, lending credence to intelligence reports that the Soviet regime teetered on the brink of collapse. Prestige targets like Moscow did not figure prominently in Hitler’s planning, and as late as August 1941, his orders to OKH stressed that “the most important missions before the onset of winter are to seize the Crimea and the industrial and coal regions of the Don, deprive the Russians of the opportunity to obtain oil from the Caucasus and, in the north, to encircle Leningrad and link up with the Finns, rather than capture Moscow.” During the autumn of 1941, German SS troops slog along a muddy road near Moscow. From the beginning of Barbarossa, Hitler had insisted that the Wehrmacht give top priority to the destruction of Soviet field armies, and only afterward to the capture of strategic assets in the north and south. Operation Typhoon, the campaign Hitler predicted would be “the last, great, decisive battle of the war,” was the result of a debate between Hitler and the army high command, Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), over the war’s military objectives. It was time, Hitler decreed, for a push against the center-toward Moscow. Bock’s soldiers had conquered land as far eastward as the Russian city of Smolensk and were now less than 180 miles from the Soviet capital. By September, Hitler’s legions were within sight of Leningrad, while to the south German and Romanian divisions had swept across the north shores of the Black Sea, threatening vital petrochemical and agricultural production within the vulnerable Ukraine and Crimean regions.īetween the two sectors, Army Group Center, under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, had taken 610,000 prisoners and destroyed 5,700 enemy tanks. One Soviet army after another had been smashed as Germany’s Ostheer, its army in the East, plunged deep into the industrial heart of Josef Stalin’s vast Eurasian state. Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union begun on June 22, 1941, had succeeded spectacularly on nearly every front. Simmura McCrea - The 15cm artillery battalion.įishbreath (traitor!) commands whichever infantry division is defending Volkovysk.The war map gave Adolf Hitler every reason to be confident. Last seen splattered with blood somewhere around the officer's saloon.Įlfeater - The new commander of the 23rd Fallschirmjagers, who were commissioned for the Greek campaign and have a pretty impeccable combat reputation so far.Īnd for the others (if they still want them):ĭarkerDark - The 10th Grenadiers, one of my dearest infantry divisions.
Monkeyhead - Of the 1st Fallschirmjagers, of course. Taricus - He's leading the 36th SS Grenadiers, who saw action in Greece during April and earned their stripes in battle there. These are Panzer IV D's and fresh off the assembly line in Germany. Clearly it looks like a better idea to ford the river below Brest and bypass the fortress until we can shell it to pieces. and knocked out a few too many tanks for my comfort. The 26th and 19th Panzer Divisions engaged a force of Soviet T-26 tanks, who fought back pretty viciously, actually, before being forced back to the Nieman river. We had a proper tank battle in the fields alongside the river opposite Grodno.
Otherwise, one of our Bf109 wings stumbled over an AA position by sheer bad luck and lost a couple fighters.
In the morning, Soviet aircraft swept in with guns blazing, but failed to strike any significant targets among the grenadiers and they hunkered down through it. They took about 25% dead and wounded in the assault, fighting bravely through the bottlenecked defenses, and dug in. It's not a favorable attacking position, but their skill and firepower should have been enough to blast their way through the defense.
The 15cm artillery unearthed the defenders from their battlements, when I dispatched Generaleutnant Taricus and his 36th Grenadiers across the bridge leading into the city. Our attack on Grodno is going pretty well.