Moscow 1941
A City and Its People at War
Chapter One
The Shaping of the City
By one measure—the number of people involved—the Battle of Moscow was the greatest battle in the Second World War, and therefore the greatest battle in history. More than seven million officers and men from both sides took part, compared with the four million who fought at Stalingrad in 1942, the two at Kursk in 1943, the three and a half in the battle for Berlin in 1945. This was a scale never matched in the fighting in Western Europe and Africa. The Battle of Moscow swirled over a territory the size of France, and lasted for six months, from September 1941 to April 1942. The Soviet Union lost more people in this one battle—926,000 soldiers killed, to say nothing of the wounded—than the British lost in the whole of the First World War. Their casualties in this one battle were greater than the combined casualties of the British and the Americans in the whole of the Second World War. This was the horrendous price they paid for inflicting on the Wehrmacht the first real defeat it had ever suffered. They fought ...
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