December 5, 1941

Operation Typhoon

The German drive on Moscow stalls as the Soviet counteroffensive begins

There was never a moment when anyone declared Typhoon a failure. The strongest date is 5 December 1941 — a year earlier than the listing files it.

Filed under 1942, decided in December 1941

The listing places the failure of Operation Typhoon in 1942. Modern scholarship treats 5 December 1941 as the end of the renewed German drive: the second and final offensive phase had run into that date without capturing Moscow.

On the same day the Soviet Kalinin Front under Ivan Konev began a counteroffensive north of Moscow; Zhukov's Western Front joined the following day.

There was no surrender and no declaration of failure — different endpoints describe different things, and broader definitions extend the Battle of Moscow into spring 1942.

The initiative changes hands

Some German formations had come within roughly 10 to 12 miles of Moscow, but they had fought themselves down; the initiative around the capital passed to the Red Army, forcing exhausted and overextended formations of Army Group Centre into retreat and emergency defensive fighting.

On 8 December, three days after the counteroffensive opened, Hitler's Directive No. 39 ordered the immediate abandonment of major offensive operations in the east and a transition to the defensive.

Walther von Brauchitsch was dismissed as Army commander-in-chief on 19 December during the resulting command crisis.

Not the weather alone

Weather-only explanations reproduce a postwar defence advanced by German generals. Mud and severe cold compounded the failure without causing it by themselves.

Army Group Centre had exhausted much of its combat strength and supply capacity during the advance, while Soviet resistance preserved the capital and the Stavka assembled reserves.

The opening phase had produced enormous encirclements — David Stahel estimates roughly 750,000 to 1,000,000 Soviet troops enclosed at Vyazma and Bryansk — and those victories still did not leave the army strong enough to take Moscow.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1941-12-05.

What the sources leave uncertain

There was no single surrender or formal declaration that “Operation Typhoon had failed.” Different endpoints describe different things.
5 December 1941 is the strongest date for the end of Typhoon's active German offensive phase and the start of the Soviet counterstroke. Hitler's formal defensive directive followed on 8 December.
Some accounts run the Moscow strategic counteroffensive through 7 January 1942, while broader definitions extend the Battle of Moscow into spring 1942. Those dates should not be presented as an undisputed operational end date for Typhoon itself.
The German attack began on 30 September in the southern sector and on 2 October across the main Army Group Centre front, producing a secondary start-date variation.