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When the Germans launched their second supposedly final attack on Moscow a fortnight ago Berlin military spokesmen called it a "do-or-die" drive. It was planned and commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who because he loves to lecture his men on the glory of dying for the Fatherland, is called der Sterber (the Dier). By this week many a German had died before Moscow, and the Dier was still doing. But the city still stood.
To Marshal von Bock, losses do not greatly matter; certainly they do not matter as much as final success.
Fedor von Bock may eventually succeed in taking Moscow. But this week it appeared that he would have to make at least one more try before he even surrounded the city. Subduing it would be still another matter.
Russians, growing confident on their first major successes, began to say that if Moscow held out a few weeks longer, the turning point of the whole war against Germany would have been reached.
The approaches to Moscow make a first-class military cemetery. The land is mostly flat, some of it gently rolling. To the northwest there are numerous swamps, now partly frozen. To the north there are great, patchy forests, which even in winter are good cover because they consist mostly of pine and spruce. All around is a net work of rivers—Volga, Moskva, Oka, Sherna, Protva, Ugra, Ruza, Yauza—which are now mostly frozen.
This terrain is decorated with superb internal communications, which favor the defender. Moscow is the focus of ten radiating railroads, and even though the Germans have cut six of those roads, the stumps are still available for throwing troops into this or that sector of the front. There are, besides, eleven trunk highways and numberless small roads running north, west and south from the city. Moscow teems with busses, trucks and cars available for urgent transport.
Polka-dotting this area is a formidable system of prepared defenses. There are no Russian lines, as such, before Moscow. The fortifications are in depth, and they run from the present line of action right to the city. They consist of everything from tiny land mines to monstrous forts three stories deep.
The city is itself a super-deathtrap. Big cities, and especially capital cities, are the index of a defender's ferocity. Madrid showed for 30 months that the Loyalists meant business. Warsaw was Poland's small core of guts. Oslo was the keyhole of Norway, and in it the key turned pretty easily. Paris fell without a whimper, and so, soon afterward, did France. The Germans threatened last week, 32 weeks after Yugoslavia was supposedly licked, to flatten Belgrade. Of all the capitals, Moscow looms as the most formidable.
It is huge: it covers 117 square miles. It is a maze of irregularly traced, winding streets. It is remarkably self-sufficient. Its industry, 14% of all Russia's, is doing all it can for defense. Its water supply is so far safe: the great Uchinsk Reservoir, 16 miles north of the city, the older Mytischi mineral springs system, ten miles northeast, and the Rublievo river-water system, ten miles west, are all still out of the enemy's reach. Its sources of electrical power lie farther afield, but they are well scattered and, so far, only slightly hampered.
But Moscow's greatest death-dealing weapon is its life.