ABSTRACT
Informed by their secret agent in the German embassy in Tokyo, the communist Richard Sorge, that there would be no Japanese attack on the USSR, the Soviets were able to mass 3 million men for the defense of Moscow in December 1941. On 5 December, two days before Pearl Harbor, they went on the attack. With much of their equipment immobilized by the severe cold, the Germans were forced to retreat from their advance positions in the outskirts of Moscow before they were able to stabilize their lines some 90 miles west of the city in January 1942. It now became apparent that the war in Russia would last considerably longer than the German planners had foreseen.
