BARBAROSSA ( June 22–December 5, 1941) frostbite cases in the Ostheer approached 25 percent of its effective strength Taking Minsk, encirclements at Uman and Kiev, warm waters off the Crimea, all were distant memories of a happier time However, the effect of winter must not be exaggerated: the onset of bitter cold was not the main cause of the Wehrmacht’s military failure, as was later argued by German generals and other apologists Problems ran far deeper This was revealed in relative aircraft losses: the VVS lost over 5,000 fighters and 5,200 bombers to enemy action by early December It lost another 10,900 aircraft to accidents, scorched earth demolition, or outright abandonment in panicky retreats Luftwaffe losses over the same period totaled 2,200 aircraft, or just 10 percent of VVS losses Yet, aircraft losses by the Luftwaffe were less sustainable: the Germans had only 500 serviceable planes left on the entire Eastern Front by December, whereas the VVS still had 1,000 on the Moscow front alone Matters would only worsen after that The German aircraft industry was still running at little more than peacetime production levels into late 1941 and, thus, was far less able to replace lost planes than was the huge and highly advanced Soviet aircraft industry The VVS was more capable of recovery, despite extraordinary losses and disruptions caused by forced relocation of its manufacturing plants during 1941 Soviet aircraft industry would start to turn out large numbers of improved aircraft types in 1942, while the Luftwaffe would struggle for the rest of the war just to replace ongoing attritional losses with ramped-up production of existing or slightly upgraded models Despite such clear warning signs of an inability to compete in a protracted industrial war, solace was taken by Hitler and the OKW from a spectacularly erroneous Abwehr report of December 4, 1941, asserting that Red Army reserves were totally exhausted and therefore that the Soviets were incapable of launching any significant military operation The first blow of an exquisitely timed Soviet counteroffensive that ended the BARBAROSSA campaign fell northwest of Moscow the very next day, with a thunderclap of shock on the German side General Ivan S Konev struck hard into Army Group Center with Kalinin Front On the 6th, Zhukov attacked with the main Soviet body, Western Front, striking deep into raw, frozen, exposed German positions The “Battle of Moscow” entered a whole new phase of desperate German military crisis that lasted through January 1942, as the Red Army launched its first successful counteroffensive of the war Russian historians call the turnaround the Moscow offensive operation (December 5, 1941–January 7, 1942) It was immediately followed by the less successful Rzhev-Viazma strategic operation ( January 8–April 20, 1942) New divisions had appeared in the Soviet order of battle in front of Moscow, supplied along an intact railway system in the deep interior VVS aircraft operated from tarmaced rather than the ersatz airfields used by the Luftwaffe, as the Soviet Union revealed reserves of strength the Wehrmacht could not hope to match Five fresh and elite divisions even arrived by rail from distant Siberia, after Stalin finally accepted sound intelligence from his master spy in Tokyo Richard Sorge had earlier reported that the Japanese military had decided to follow the nanshin or “southern advance” and attack Britain and the United States, rather than take the hokushin road of a “northern advance” into Siberia Without warning the Western powers about the multiple blows set for delivery by Japan, the Stavka unleashed the 141