TAIFUN (September 30–December 4, 1941) at the critical center, commanding two armies designated Reserve Front General Andrei I Yeremenko commanded the three armies of Briansk Front holding the southern end of the Line In all, 1.25 million Red Army krasnoarmeets, with supporting artillery and tank forces, defended the most vital and central few hundred miles of the Eastern Front However, Stalin and the Stavka did not anticipate that the main German blow would fall on this central section of the Eastern Front They were preoccupied with the ongoing German drive to take Leningrad and with the aftermath of the disasters at Uman and Kiev, which had ripped open the south, and a new calamity pending in the Crimea Lack of command attention at the top reinforced the Soviet weakness of divided command along the frontlines, notably at the Schwerpunkt where the Germans were about to strike at Budyonny’s Reserve Front Command confusion among Soviet leaders, civil and military, was one of the underlying reasons for early German success in TAIFUN Bock’s first move came on September 30 with a diversionary attack in the south by Guderian against Yeremenko’s position Bock intended to pull Soviet forces away from the main blow to be landed some 400 miles farther north That assault came three days later, as 4th Panzergruppe sliced right through Budyonny’s dispositions, racing ahead 100 miles in a sweeping northeastern arc to take the critical rail junction at Viazma on October Meanwhile, 3rd Panzergruppe broke through in the north Hoth’s Panzers and motorized infantry curled southeast and linked with Hoepner at Viazma: the Wehrmacht had achieved another vast encirclement, with four Soviet armies trapped inside the “Kessel.” The Red Army suffered another catastrophic defeat as over 650,000 of its troops surrendered, including a large number of senior officers Worse was to come: a second successful German encirclement was carried out at Briansk, where an additional 120,000 or more surrendered The casualties were truly staggering: perhaps as many as one million officers and men were lost to death, wounds, or captivity, as well as thousands of tanks and guns and masses of other war matériel Only General Georgi Zhukov’s personal intervention with Stalin prevented the arrest and execution of Konev as yet another scapegoat for the dictator’s own failings as supreme commander As early as October 5th, before the fall of Viazma, Stalin and the Stavka agreed to pull back to a fourth defensive position: the Mozhaisk Line It was poorly manned with NKVD police battalions, opolchentsy (“People’s Militia”), and other scratch forces The first Panzers touched the Mozhaisk Line on October 10 They were through it just eight days later The road to Moscow lay wide open, with almost no effective Red Army formation standing in the way Stalin panicked: the government was ordered to evacuate Moscow for the Urals; Zhukov later reported that week as the most harrowing of the war Yet, Moscow never fell What happened? The Germans were slowed by the mud sea of the October rasputitsa, but there was more in play than that Hitler paused the offensive, falsely confident that the Viazma–Briansk encirclement—added to the earlier and highly successful Kesselschlacht and mass Soviet surrenders at Uman and Kiev—had already broken the back of the Red Army He was certain that the Soviet had no more reserves to block the path to Moscow The delay lasted six weeks, during which lingering resistance behind German lines was ruthlessly crushed Even then, Hitler and the 1063