THE GERMAN SUMMER OFFENSIVE

As it became increasingly obvious to the Germans in the fall of 1941 that the campaign in the East was not likely to be completed that year, they began to think about 1942 operations. For a while in September, October and November, there were still hopes of seizing both the industrial area around Moscow and the oil fields of the Caucasus by the end of the year. Even before the Red Army defeated the Germans at the southern end of the front and drove them out of Rostov, all German hopes of taking the Caucasus in 1941 had vanished. Similarly, once the euphoria of early October had been offset by the reality of heavy fighting in November, the Germans realized that even if a final push enabled them to seize the immediate Moscow area, there was no prospect of going any further. The dramatic turn in December, when the German spearheads had been first halted and then overwhelmed and pushed back, made it obvious that any 1942 campaign would start a substantial distance away from where the Germans had envisioned as late as early November 1941.

There were additional complications affecting any German offensive plans for 1942. Casualties among the men and horses in the armies fighting the Soviet Union had not been replaced by the trickle of replacements; and while a major effort was made to build up new divisions, provide more men and conscript additional horses, there were simply not enough of either to restore the army to its June 1941 strength. The shortage of horses was doubly serious because the enormous losses of vehicles in the winter made the infantry divisions even more dependent upon horse-drawn transport than before; this alone made a war of movement on more than one segment of the front at a time quite impossible.

The July 1941 shift of industrial production from priority for the army to priority for air force and navy had been replaced in January 1942 by a renewed emphasis on the needs of the army, but this step could not make itself felt in substantial additional production adequate even to make up for the losses of the 1941 campaign until the summer of 1942 at the earliest.