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In early November, amid their second big push toward Moscow, the Germans were already suffering their first severe cases of frostbite. Soviet General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov reportedly noted that the enemy was perhaps too efficient: its soldiers had been supplied with the correct size boots. Russians, he said, knew enough to wear oversize footwear -- the better to stuff with wool and straw to protect toes against the cold. A popular Russian caricature of the time had the Fritzes -- as German soldiers were less than affectionately called -- wrapped in anything they could grab out of occupied civilian homes -- including women's shawls and feather boas. Hitler, expecting the war to be over by October, made Napoleon's mistake, neglecting to plan for the exigencies of a Russian winter.
Fighting the killing cold and the stiffening Russian resistance, the invaders' losses mounted. At the end of November, German sources were citing a casualty figure of 767,000, with 162,000 dead. The entire Western campaign of 1940 had cost the Wehrmacht only 156,000 casualties (with 30,000 dead).
On Dec. 2 Hitler proclaimed, "The Soviet Union is finished." But by then the Germans poised at the gates of Moscow were exhausted, cold and dispirited. On Dec. 5, as the Japanese sailed toward Pearl Harbor, the Soviet army launched a massive counterattack along a 560-mile front. The Fritzes were thrown back by its ferocity. A German reporter assigned to the front recalls coming upon a soldier staggering out of a wood screaming "Aah! Come and help me! I can't see. They've gouged out my eyes." Soldiers had attacked him with a knife, slashing his eyes but taking care to let him live. "There!" said one of the Russians. "Go to the other German dogs and tell them we'll destroy them all. We'll cut out their eyes and send what's left to Siberia . . . Now get going."
In a January 1942 report -- part propaganda, part journalism -- the Soviet novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of the winter battle: "The road is still long. From here to the extreme capes of Europe, to Finisterre, 'the end of the earth,' stretches the Kingdom of Death. It is a difficult road. But the Red Army continues its relentless march across the snow." By the time the spring thaw slowed the Russian counterattack, the Germans had been hurled entirely out of Moscow province. In the spring of 1942 they would still be close enough to threaten, but by then they had lost the battle to seize Stalin's capital.
To the north, Leningrad had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the country by a fierce German siege that would not be totally lifted for 880 days, until January 1944. On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, / Leningrad's situation was even more desperate than the capital's. While the Germans outside Moscow were nearly exhausted by three unsuccessful attempts to take the city, Leningrad was not only being lashed by cannon fire and air raids but was also slowly being starved. Hitler had given orders that the city be completely eradicated after its surrender so that German occupying forces would not have to worry about supplying its civilian population.