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Fedor was son of a major general, grandson of a general. He was born 61 years ago in ancient Küstrin, where Frederick the Great was imprisoned by his father so that he would learn "the meaning of Prussianism." At cadet schools young Fedor showed by his unbreakable spirit that he already understood something of that meaning. By 1910 he had talked his way into the right to wear red stripes down his trouser legs—the badge of a general staffer. He had begun making speeches with the refrain: "Our profession should always be crowned by a heroic death for the Emperor and the Fatherland."
In Fedor von Bock's cosmos, the Fatherland remained constantly deathworthy; the Emperor was interchangeable with, successively, Weimar Republicanism, Hindenburg, the Führer. He was completely unpolitical: he never plotted, was never purged.
He always satisfied his superiors, often was the butt of his contemporaries. They used to goad him at mess by suggesting that an enemy bullet was not something to be grateful for. This would enrage Bock and he would make his usual harangue, until his fellows all said together: "Ah, the holy fire of Küstrin."
But as Fedor von Bock worked his way up, he won more & more respect—both for his fanaticism and for his thoroughness. Soon his fanaticism spread in the Army, until every unit had a handful of "Bock's own dying heroes."
When war came, he gave plenty of soldiers the fatal chance. He was not one to hoard lives. In Poland he had to do more fighting than General Gerd von Rundstedt, but by losing far more men he went just as fast. In France, too, his central armies of Group B suffered relatively high casualties. In Russia he won Germany's greatest victories (Bialystok-Minsk, Smolensk, Bryansk-Vyazma) and suffered the greatest losses. Last week he was still sending men to glorious, spendthrift death.
Steely determination to win and a willingness to die have won more than one battle. But when these qualities develop into indifference to losses—as they did on the Western Front in World War I and as they did in Napoleon's later campaigns—they can easily lose wars. Before Moscow Bock is expending men and materiel whose strength Germany will never be able to call on again. It is just possible that when the military history of World War II is written and a list is made of the generals who have done most to whittle down Germany's chances of victory, the name of Bock may lead all the rest.
Scrabbling. His greatest efforts were flung at Moscow's flanks (see map, p. 24). Starting from a line (Nov. 17), the strongest previous blows of which had been struck directly opposite Moscow, he skirted south of the hard core of resistance at Tula to drive straight east as far as Skopin; then cut south of another hard core at Kalinin to drive east to Dmitrov. His intention seemed to be to develop a huge encirclement of the capital.
But advance through Moscow's terrain of swamps, forests, rivers, and especially of forts-in-depth could not possibly be a Blitz advance. It was a slow, painful, scrabbling process.