Initially, infantryman Albrecht Linsen could not believe his eyes with the rapid onrush of Soviet tanks and men. Winter played a hand, with the -30 degrees C temperature freezing the German lubricants while the Russian equipment performed fine, especially the T-34 tanks with their specially designed compressed air starters. The ax fell the very next day as the Soviets launched a massive surprise assault that “caught the Germans almost literally frozen in their positions,” as historian Max Hastings aptly describes it. (Read more about the armored vehicles and engineering marvels that turned the tide of the Second World War inside WWII Historymagazine.) They had never tasted defeat at that point, and a December 4 intelligence report stated flatly that the Soviets were simply not capable of “conducting a counter-offensive without significant reserves.” Unfortunately for the Germans, they had the Soviet T-34 tank to contend with, and they underestimated their opponent. Poland had been taken, and then Denmark and Norway, and then Belgium and France had fallen to the Germans, who now had advance units reportedly within eyeshot of the Kremlin. December 1941 was a dark month and the end of a dark year for the Soviets as the Germans pressed ever onward toward Moscow, the lair where Joseph Stalin and his minions plotted what to do next against the Nazi juggernaut that had, in a few short months, rolled over everything before them.
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