119 - Winter is Here! The failure of Barbarossa - WW2 - December 5, 1941

by Panzer
-37?
That’s pretty cold.
Would you go outside in that?
Me neither.
You know the daily high on Mars gets warmer than that sometimes?
yeah, Mars.
But they’re still gonna fight?
That ain’t gonna go well.
December 5, 1941
Germany invaded the Soviet Union June 22nd, and now, nearly six months later, they have
been relentlessly driving toward Moscow, week after week after week.
And this week, on the doorstep of Moscow with the whole world watching, the German drive
is stopped.
It has failed: it is over.
I’m Indy Neidell; this is an extremely long episode of World War Two.
Last week Operation Crusader continued in North Africa.
Axis commander Erwin Rommel made a daring armored dash for the Egyptian border, but
Allied Commander Claude Auchinlek made an equally daring decision to keep up his own
attacks, and units from the besieged Tobruk garrison managed to make contact with relief
forces.
The Kido Butai, Japan’s carrier fleet, the world’s largest, is sailing east across
the Pacific toward Hawaii, and the Germans are still driving toward Moscow, though it’s
getting more and more difficult with every day that passes, and further south the Soviets
retook Rostov, the biggest German loss of the whole offensive so far.
On the 29th, an 18 year old Russian girl is hanged by the Germans.
A card around her neck reads “She set fire to houses”.
According to an article in Pravda, so you may have to take the exact wording with a
grain of salt, her last words at the scaffold are to the German soldiers, “You can’t
hang all 190 million of us.”
Also that day, Dr. Fritz Todt, in charge of infrastructure restoration in the occupied
USSR and Inspector General for Water and Energy, returns to Berlin and tells Adolf Hitler,
“Given the arms and industrial supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon powers, we can no longer
militarily win this war.”
But the Wehrmacht is very much trying.
Erich Hoepner’s 4th panzers take Krasnaia Poliana November 30th and are now in artillery
range of Moscow.
In the morning of December 1st, Gunther von Kluge’s 4th Army launches a furious attempt
to take the shortest route to Moscow, the Minsk-Moscow highway.
By noon the Soviets have been pushed back several kilometers and the Germans are 7km