Applying ICE to Your Wireless Product Development Life-cycle

In an attempt to establish a foundation upon which an approach to new wireless product development can be solidified, some basic guidelines are provided here.  As part of your conceptualization process, issues surrounding Interoperability, Coexistence and Experience (ICE) all need to be addressed and clarified.  These facets are not new, but are often overlooked and their purpose here is to enable you to better understand and to encourage you to solidify your product conceptualization.

Interoperability: A term regularly used to characterize how a product from one manufacturer interoperates with a product from another manufacturer.  If a consumer purchases a product that is Wi-Fi- or Bluetooth-enabled, for example, then the consumer will expect that product to interoperate with other like-enabled equipment irrespective of manufacturer.  It’s probably an over emphasis, as it’s a notion that was established in the very early days of wireless development and can easily be forgotten in a market where manufacturers wish to dominate.  Similarly, do you require your product to interoperate with other manufacturers or are you simply looking to create a standalone or unique ecosystem?

Coexistence: Interoperability and coexistence were indisputably the ‘troublesome two’ in the early onset of wireless development and are still a significant factor today.  Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were typically pitted against each other as competing technologies.  In fact, the press and many features illustrated issues where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth endured problems when sharing the same radio spectrum let alone the same room!  Both technologies have suitably advanced and moved amicably forward where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth now provide effective interference techniques to overcome any coexistence and interference issues.  More importantly, these are now seen as two separate, independent technologies offering unique applications.  Your choice of short-range RF technology will therefore become a significant consideration when embarking upon new product development.

Nowadays, issues of coexistence and interoperability are well understood, as there are several schemes available that overcome any shortcomings.  Nevertheless, whilst this facet of the ICE model does reflect the ability to cooperate with multiple manufacturers and their radio spectrums effectively it’s also about ensuring you have selected the right wireless technology for your product.  It may be cliché to mention, but it’s a chicken and egg scenario.  Undoubtedly, in your technical feasibility you have defined what your intended product will do, along with its future-proofing.  Likewise, you have also selected the appropriate technology that will effectively meet your product and marketing requirements; it’s durability in a potentially harsh environment and other factors such as battery life and so on, are all key contributors.  The number of wireless personal area networking technologies available to you all deliver expectations that may suit your intended application and audience, but due diligence should be afforded to the frequency, range, durability in an environment where other technologies are likely to be present.

Experience: This part of the model is overwhelmingly pinnacle in your product design.  It can’t be made any clearer, “How will the consumer interact with my product?” and “How should the consumer experience my product?” If these or similar questions are not addressed at the product definition or prior to the development onset, then the premise of user interaction and/or its interface merely becomes an afterthought, where potentially you may introduce a degree of complexity that can potentially render the product unusable or too complex to operate.  Typically, standards bodies or groups who have defined the technology offer terminology that should remain consistent across manufacturers, as well as expectations at the user interface.  That said, a manufacturer should be abundantly aware that a product will be operated more often by a complete novice whom has no expertise.  The ‘out-of-the-box’ is an ideal experience where the product is unpacked, switched on, and simply operates as intended.

from The Handbook of Personal Area Networking Technologies and Protocols by Dean Anthony Gratton. 

Dr Dean Anthony Gratton is a bestselling author and columnist. Dean has worked extensively within the wireless communications R&D industry and has an accomplished career in software engineering. He was an Editor of the Specification of the Bluetooth System: Profiles, v1.1 and participated in defining the initial Bluetooth Personal Area Networking profiles. He was also active in the NFC technology and marketing committees. Dean is a contributor to several industry periodicals, where he has written many contentious articles sharing his thoughts and challenges on wireless industry news, opinions and gossip.

NGO mediation can be a low risk high reward strategy for both sides.  In using an NGO mediator, the US is not “submitting” to black mail, and yet is exploring what it might take to wean North Korea from using nuclear threats to get resources it desperately needs for development.  Carrots can be offered in exchange for real movement on the part of the North Koreans to develop their economy for its population in general.  The US and South Korea can be brought gradually into a partnership with North Korea to help build infra-structures, educational institutions, and gradually open up its markets for the good of society in general.  These are win win solutions that can be explored under the cover of an NGO mediation.

It is time to stop the vicious cycle of militarism from again robbing North Koreans of a chance at a better life.  And President Kim Jong un has said as much.  His words, “It is time for North Korea to turn itself from being preoccupied with its own security, towards taking steps toward economic development.”  So it is time.  Send in the clowns.  It’s worth a try.

Paul J. Zwier is professor of law at Emory University School of Law and author of Principled Negotiation and Mediation in the International Arena: Talking with Evil (forthcoming).

Giorgio Riello is author of Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World.

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Indian textiles were imported by the European East India companies and were sought after by consumers not just in England, but in most European countries. These were not rare exotic goods: Between 1670 and 1760 the English East India Company imported on average around 15 million yards of Indian cotton cloth a year. These textiles were auctioned in the East Indian companies’ headquarters in London, Lorient or Amsterdam and bought by merchants and wholesalers. They were then sold via a variety of tailors, dressmakers, haberdashers, “cheap clothes” warehouses, either as cloth or ready-made garments.

Indian cottons were sought after by European consumers because of their desirable properties. They were the first textiles whose colour could resist washing and did not fade with light. This explains why in 1696 a London merchant advertised his chintzes “cheickered [sic] with a variety of colours, as Red, Yellow, Blew and Green … wears very well in anything you shall think fittouse it for…”. Silks and woollens could not be so easily washed, whilst linens (used mostly for undergarments) were washed more regularly but were mainly appreciated for their whiteness. Indian cottons were also much cheaper than silks and woollens. Though not as long-lasting as woollens, cottons’ short durability was compensated by the fact that they were seen as extremely fashionable.  Their motifs and design were perceived as exotic in the same way in which Chinese porcelain, Japanese lacquer, chinoiserie, and other Asian goods were.

The inroads of Indian cotton textiles into the consuming habits of Europeans also generated resistance. Moralists agreed that Eastern luxuries – and cotton textiles in particular – corrupted the moral fibre of society and made a mockery of the “strange Trollops in Callicoe Gowns” as a 1703 comedy at the London Royal Theatre called such plebeian women wearing colourful Indian cottons. Governments too were anxious. As today Western states wish to limit the import of cheap commodities from China and other Asian countries, so in the late seventeenth century a series of legal acts came first to limit and then to ban the trade and consumption of Indian cotton cloth in an attempt to protect the interest of European woollen, linen and silk manufacturers. Cottons were prohibited first in France (1686), in England (part prohibited in 1702 and totally in 1721), and later elsewhere in the Continent. It is difficult for us to understand the animosity that accompanied the passing of these laws. In London, for instance, after the ban of 1721, several women were stripped naked in the street because they were found wearing forbidden cloth.  A certain Dorothy Orwell was assaulted by weavers in Hoxton in London “who tore, cut, and pull’d off jer Gown and Petticoat by Violence, threatened her with vile Language, and left her naked” in the square. In other cases, women found wearing calicoes, had acid thrown at their clothing, a bitter act reminiscent of assaults on women wearing fur at the end of the twentieth century.

Notwithstanding the opposition of moralists and governments, cotton textiles have become part of our everyday wear. Later in the eighteenth century, they came to be produced in Europe – thus dismissing any xenophobic association – and became both the most important industry of the industrial revolution and the most common material for our clothing and domestic textiles.

Image on left: Furnishing textile displayed in Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (via Wikimedia)

Image on right: cotton day dress displayed in Patricia Harris Gallery of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (via Wikimedia)

For more about Cotton, check out our exclusive Cambridge Book Club features.

Operation Typhoon involved over three million men on both sides of the eastern front. Such a figure is hard to comprehend and the truth is, even as an historian, it’s easy to lose sight of the human dimension in this war. That was brought home to me last year during a trip to Russia and the battlefield of Viaz’ma. Viaz’ma was the great German encirclement that broke open the Soviet front at the start of October and started the Germans down the road to Moscow. I visited the battlefield with a group of government-approved “searches” who dig up these battlefields looking for artefacts as well as Soviet war dead.

At first glance the forest appears like any other in northern Europe, but once the metal detectors are turned on the forest floor reveals that the battlefield is just below the surface. Literally every few steps yields new discoveries. Most of these are harmless objects – parts of weapons, helmets or shell fragments, but not infrequently unexploded grenades and other ordinance are dug up making it easy to see why one searcher on average dies every year in Russia. The fact that Hitler’s war in the east is still claiming Russian victims may also suggest why the Nazi-Soviet war is still so very much a part of the Russian national identity.

For my part the piles of artefacts coming up out of the ground were a stark reminder of the scale of this battle, but it was still all oddly detached from reality. Where were the men who fought here? The only clues were fragments of bone or the odd personal effect from an unknown man. The searches told me that very few bodies are recovered, on average one is found at Viaz’ma each summer and even then it is extremely unlikely that he will ever be identified. Soviet soldiers in 1941 did not have “dog tags,” but rather small capsules in which their personal details were recorded on a small piece of paper. Even if a capsule was found, the seepage of moisture usually ensured that the identity of the owner would never be known.

After many hours in the forest we were preparing to leave with a van load of artefacts destined for the local museum. We’d already started the long walk back to our 4WDs when one of the Russians came running and asked us to return. A body had been found and was carefully being dug out of the ground, one bone at a time. We arrived to find the man’s leg arranged on a dirty blanket next to his grave. Over the next hour the rest of the skeleton, along with gas mask and personal effects were removed from the ground. His lower jaw still had its full set of teeth. As the work proceeded I think even the experienced searchers felt the heavy silence, a mixture of solemn disbelief and unspoken reverence. Eventually even his capsule was recovered and that night in a controlled room (to protect whatever remained of its contents) it was opened for the first time since 1941. The paper was still intact and the name legible. Without the family’s permission I shall not record his details here, other than to say his first name was Sergei. The man’s younger sister was still alive and in September 2012 was informed that her brother had been found 72 years after he went missing at Viaz’ma. A month later Sergei was reburied with his family present and full military honours.

Sergei’s story reminds us that behind the faceless enormity of the Nazi-Soviet war there are millions of family tragedies. Yet beyond simply representing all those who died, I would like to think he also represents something more enduring. Sergei is why we continue to read and write the history of the Nazi-Soviet conflict.

Image: German soldiers going to surrender on a snow-covered field near Moscow, December 27, 1941. Source: RIA Novosti archive, via Wikimedia.

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Baz Luhrmann’s new Great Gatsby film and an unexpected source that helped inspire it—Trimalchio, an early version of the novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald submitted to his publisher a year before the Great Gatsby manuscript. Long dismissed as an early draft, Trimalchio remained unpublished until 2000, when Cambridge University Press published an edition that remains the only one on the market today.

Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of Fitzgerald—I read The Great Gatsby once in high school and never felt the need for another go-around—but as a girl who grew up in the 1990s, I am a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio. So when they rolled out the trailer for Luhrmann’s glittering 3D adaptation, I started gearing up for the “summer of Gatsby” it promised.

I am a dedicated believer in the adage that the book is always better than the movie (I make exceptions only for The Godfather and Jaws), so I decided to give The Great Gatsby another chance. While I was rereading, I figured I’d also flip through the story it started out as, and I ordered a copy of Trimalchio.

They make a great pair: Trimalchio is more similar to the final novel than I had expected, but the differences are startling. Leonardo DiCaprio told the Los Angeles Times that Trimalchio made Fitzgerald’s “intent shine more clearly through,” which made it “like a bible…on the set” of the film. His performance is rumored to draw on the more mysterious Jay Gatsby of the early version, whose shady backstory and rise to fortune is not revealed until the very end of the novel, so that the rumors of espionage and murder swirl around him go unchallenged and Gatsby starts to look very suspicious. Trimalchio’s Gatsby is also angrier and darker, which becomes clear in the climax of the novel when he argues with Tom Buchanan.

Daisy looks different in her earlier incarnation, too. Luhrmann told the Wall Street Journal that Trimalchio contained a much more complete picture of Daisy and Gatsby’s relationship, and he’s right. There’s a short but pivotal scene in The Great Gatsby in which Daisy and Tom attend one of Gatsby’s lavish weekend parties—in Trimalchio, that scene is extended: it becomes a rather hard-to-imagine peasant costume party, Daisy and Gatsby sneak off into the garden together, and it completely changed the way I read both novels.

It boils down to one moment at the party when Daisy tells Nick, “I’m going to leave Tom.” It’s the closest thing in either book to a real sense of dedication from Daisy. For once, Gatsby is not telling her what she would do—she is volunteering to leave, she wants to be with Gatsby, to give up her life with a man she no longer loves. But she admits that she hasn’t actually told Tom and that “I’m not going to do anything for a month or two. Then I’ll decide,” to which Nick replies, “I thought you’d decided.” Chilled by his response, I became distinctly aware in this early version of what Nick does not realize until the final chapter of The Great Gatsby: that “she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all.” I was left wondering throughout the rest of the novel if she even loved Gatsby at all.

The sense of tragedy that accompanies the end of The Great Gatsby feels hollow in Trimalchio. In fact, it feels like this unwinnable game from Slate (paddle against the current toward the green light until you are borne back into the past): clever, but so hopeless it lacks even the cathartic satisfaction of tragedy or the sense of hope and belief—however foolish—for which Gatsby is always remembered.

No longer grudgingly following a tenth grade reading list, I enjoyed both novels, and it was a thrilling experience to read them side by side. Trimalchio offers the fantastic and rare opportunity to witness an author’s progress: with the early version alongside the final one, I saw an evolution in Gatsby’s character from raw to refined, and an evolution in the story from nihilistic to tragic. I look forward to seeing a film that blends the two, making the American dream and the man who believed in it more complicated by drawing on the story Fitzgerald initially imagined.

Introduction

Rebecca Cassidy

Pathos and Poetry

The first episode of Luck, a television series created by David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), directed by Michael Mann (Manhunter, Heat) and filmed at Santa Anita Park in California, aired on Home Box Office in December 2011. It was immediately taken into a second season and broadcast in Britain in early 2012. In the conservative world of television writing, David Milch is regarded as a maverick genius, known for his uncompromising take on American life. Luck is no Seabiscuit. The first episode weaves together a number of stories: the release from prison of Chester ‘Ace’ Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), a racehorse owner with links to organised crime; a pick-six attempt by four inveterate gamblers or ‘railbirds’; and a hard boot trainer (Nick Nolte) with a dark horse. It also includes the humane destruction of a horse on the track, its head cradled in the arms of a tearful bug boy. Luck is a complex, unflinching portrayal of violence and corruption at the track. Dialogue- and character-driven, it invites reflection and understanding rather than judgement. Milch, a lifelong race fan and winner of two Breeders Cups, describes his series as ‘a love letter’, albeit an unsentimental one: ‘To me, the track is what the river was to Mark Twain. Where you see the most life and interesting people, go there. That’s what I’ve done.’¹ In March 2012, halfway through filming the second episode of the second season, production of Luck was permanently suspended by HBO, when a third horse had to be euthanized as a result of an accident on the set.²

As the brief lifespan of Luck indicates, representing racing is a fraught and complex endeavour. Death stalks the racecourse, along with joy and rapture – something that Luck confronted head on. When, in the first episode, the bug asks a ruined old jockey how to cope with the death of a horse, the jock, played with convincing bitterness by Hall of Famer Gary Stevens, replies, ‘You’ll get over it. That’s why they make Jim Beam.’ This was not a series that ignored or glorified the deaths of animals on the track, but one which encouraged us to confront the costs of our entanglements with animals in a thoughtful and progressive way. To cancel it because of the death of a horse, which died when she reared up, fell and banged her head while being led back to a barn, is to foreclose a potentially productive discussion about welfare. It allows people to return, chomping on cheap burgers, to a comfortable world in which the exploitation of animals can continue as long as it happens off screen.

The reactions of racing enthusiasts to the series, collected in the pages of the Daily Racing Form, were mixed.³ Some complained that Luck was not an accurate representation of the track. Others lamented that this representation would not attract the new fans the sport craves. Although the jury is still out on Luck, part of the purpose of this book is to explore how the morally opaque, troubling image of racing that it presents coexists with alternative historical and contemporary representations which stress its elitist and conservative credentials.

Until recently, a division of labour existed between historians of racing and fiction writers exploring the same subject. As Jane Smiley shows in Chapter 3 of this volume, racing fiction includes murder, conspiracy, cross-class indiscretion and failure. Great authors including Anthony Trollope, George Moore and Ernest Hemingway have used racing as a backdrop to muse on inequality of opportunity, the small tragedies of ordinary lives blighted by bad decisions and the blindness of fate. Many horses and jockeys have died in tragic circumstances on the fictional tracks created by racing’s greatest writers. Historians, until recently, stuck to lists of winners, descriptions of famous races, horses, owners and breeders. Artists fell into both categories. As Douglas Fordham describes in Chapter 2 of the present volume, many painted order and hierarchy, in the image of the establishment they served. Some, like William Powell Frith in Derby Day, turned their backs on the horses and depicted crowds that included thimble riggers, mistresses and infamous murderers. Derby Day is the Victorian equivalent of an episode ofLuck, and when the National Gallery first exhibited it in 1858, it had to erect a barrier to protect it from the large crowds it drew. The Queen loved it too.

New writing about racing is beginning to look beyond descriptions of regal influence and equine heroism to more nuanced, inclusive representations. In North America, Edward Hotaling has described the contribution made by black jockeys to the sport and Steven Riess has exposed the relationship between racing administration and organised crime in New York between 1865 and 1913. In the United Kingdom, Mike Huggins has meticulously documented the often overlooked participation of the middle classes and women in the sport and Donna Landry has unravelled the connections between the Middle East and Europe that framed the creation of the thoroughbred. In Australia, John Maynard has written about Aboriginal jockeys and Wayne Peake has told the story of Sydney’s pony racecourses, the one-time competitor to thoroughbred racing. These and other works urge us to rethink conventional descriptions of racing as an invention of the English aristocracy, which has been exported, unchanged, to the New World. Part of the purpose of this volume is to understand why ideas such as these have endured in place of cosmopolitan alternatives.⁴

“Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin

“La Conga Blicoti” by Joséphine Baker

“An American in Paris” by George Gershwin

“Ain’t She Sweet” by Enoch Light & The Charleston City All Stars

“The Charleston” by Paul Whiteman & His Orchestra

“Si Tu Vois Ma Mère” by Sidney Bechet

“J’Ai Deux Amours” by Joséphine Baker

“Blue Horizon” by Sydney Bechet

“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” – Coon-Sanders Nighthawk Orchestra

“Happy Days are Here Again” by Johnny Marvin

“Sweet Georgia Brown” by Ben Bernie

“It Had to Be You” by Broadway Broadcasters

You’re the Cream in My Coffee by Colonial Club Orchestra           

Can-Can from ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ performed by the Czech National Orchestra

Introduction

The launch of Operation Typhoon heralded the opening of one of the biggest German offensives of World War II. Indeed, it is surpassed in scale only by the German operations to invade France and the Low Countries in May 1940 (Case Yellow) and the Soviet Union itself in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). Although the fighting on the eastern front is arguably best known for Hitler’s 1942 offensive to reach and conquer the oil fields of southern Russia (Case Blue), culminating in the battle for Stalingrad, Army Group South’s 1942 summer offensive involved only half the number of German troops employed for Operation Typhoon. Likewise, the German summer offensive at Kursk in July 1943 saw some three-quarters of a million German troops engaged, which also falls well short of Typhoon’s proportions. While the German operations to invade France and the Soviet Union were sizeably larger in scale (each involving the commitment of more than three million German troops), command in the field was split between three theatre commanders. Operation Typhoon, on the other hand, was directed by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock alone, making it the largest German field command of the war, with almost two million men taking orders from a single commander.

At the start of October 1941 Germany’s war against the Soviet Union had been in progress for more than three months. They were by far the bloodiest three months of Hitler’s war to date with 185,000 Germans dead¹ and many times that number of Soviet soldiers killed.² Hitler was desperately seeking an end to his war in the east, and to achieve this he and his generals settled on a plan for a massive new offensive in the centre of the front to seize Moscow. In order to achieve this, Army Group Centre, the largest of the three German army groups on the eastern front, was reinforced to some 1.9 million German soldiers and would engage the 1.25 million Soviet troops of the Reserve, Western and Briansk Fronts. The resulting battles at Viaz’ma and Briansk were to become some of the largest in Germany’s four-year war against the Soviet Union. The new German offensive, codenamed Operation Typhoon, aimed to tear a massive hole in the centre of the Soviet front, eliminate the bulk of the Red Army before Moscow, seize control of the Soviet capital and force an end to major operations on the eastern front before the onset of winter. For this purpose the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH), which directed operations on the eastern front, ordered a major reorganisation of the Ostheer (Eastern Army) to provide forces for the new offensive. Army Group Centre was to receive the highest concentration of panzer, motorised and infantry divisions ever assembled by Nazi Germany. In total Bock’s army group took command of seventy-five divisions, which included some forty-seven infantry and fourteen panzer divisions. On 2 October, Operation Typhoon’s designated start date,³ more than 1,500 panzers and 1,000 aircraft would combine for a new blitz-style offensive that was intended to overwhelm the Soviet front and allow a rapid exploitation into the Soviet rear. Not surprisingly, engaging more than a million Soviet troops would necessitate battles of immense scale, and there could be no guarantees of the outcome. Even victory on the battlefield would by no means lead to an end of hostilities. As the Germans had seen time and again since June 1941 there was a wide gulf between operational success and strategic triumph. Operation Typhoon could not be just another extension of the German front netting another bag of Soviet prisoners; the operation had to create the conditions for a definitive victory in the east and, accordingly, the OKH concentrated everything it could spare for one vast final offensive.

If there is one aspect to Germany’s war which I have sought to illuminate in my previous books,⁴ it is the difficulties that were involved in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Far from waging a seamless blitzkrieg wreaking havoc on the Red Army, the German panzer groups in the conduct of their advance suffered debilitating losses, which, in the first three months of the campaign, had already undercut Germany’s whole war effort. Yet the wide disparity in opposing losses between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army blinded the German command to anything but the most optimistic assessments of the war. As Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, noted on 3 October: ‘On the opposing side there is an optimism regarding the military developments on the eastern front, which is utterly inexplicable.’⁵ However, General Wilhelm Groener, who helped direct the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, had warned against precisely such complacency when campaigning in the east. According to Groener: ‘Anyone who wants to grasp the strategic nature of the eastern theatre of war must not overlook historical recollections. Beside the gate of the vast lowland between the Vistula and the Urals, which is the home of one state and one people, stands the warning figure of Napoleon, whose fate should implant in anyone who attacks Russia a sense of horror and foreboding.’⁶ Historical parallels were one thing, but in the darkest days of October 1941, when Stalin confronted the prospect of losing the Soviet capital, Marshal Georgi Zhukov remained adamant that the Red Army could outdo even Alexander I in 1812 and defend Moscow against foreign seizure. Nor was Zhukov just telling Stalin what he wanted to hear. The Soviet dictator was clearly agitated and emphasised his desire for the truth in whatever form that might take. As Zhukov recounted Stalin’s questioning: ‘Are you sure that we will hold Moscow? I ask you about this with a pain in my soul. Tell me truthfully, as a communist.’ Zhukov’s answer was blunt and unequivocal, which was altogether in line with his uncompromising nature. ‘We will, without fail, hold Moscow.’⁷ Of course, Zhukov’s assurance was by no means infallible, and Moscow continued to be confronted by a very clear and present danger, but Zhukov had one considerable advantage. As he had already learned in his defence of Leningrad, to beat the Germans he did not have to destroy an enemy force or advance his front to a distant objective; in the autumn of 1941 he needed only to prevent the Germans from obtaining their prize and thereby secure a victory by default. This was of course no straightforward task, but with the entire Moscow region rapidly transforming into a fortified military district Bock was always going to face a bloody battle, and time was not on his side in the worsening autumn conditions.

The one thing that did count overwhelmingly in Bock’s favour was the professionalism of his forces. In 1941 the Wehrmacht was second to none and there was little immediate pressure which Britain could exert on Germany to help counter the blow Bock was about to deliver.⁸ Yet, as Army Group Centre experienced at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, even successful offensives could prove remarkably costly, and none of these battles had induced the much sought-after peace dividend or capitulation from the Soviet government. Meanwhile, the longer the war lasted the more eroded the elite German panzer forces became and the more the front settled down into static positional warfare. Operation Typhoon was therefore a final effort aimed at breaking the looming danger of a stalemate and avoiding the uncertainty of a winter campaign. Capturing Moscow and ending the war in the east was always going to be a tall order, and yet, more than at any other time in 1941, the strategic situation in mid October convinced the German high command that they were set for victory against the Soviet Union. Even the Soviet government was planning for the loss of Moscow and nominated a new capital some 800 kilometres further east. Thus, for all the difficulties of the panzer groups, Hitler’s new October offensive appeared to reinvigorate Germany’s war in the east and, in the view of the German command, brought the Ostheer closer than ever to outright victory.

There can be no question that Bock’s reinforced army group constituted a potent force at the beginning of October but, for all the power concentrated in the centre of the eastern front, Germany’s Typhoon was on course to hit Russia’s own weather storm, the so-called rasputitsa.⁹Throughout the summer, even periodic downpours had played havoc with German supply and transportation, forcing brief pauses in German operations. Now, however, the Germans were to encounter something entirely new. The strangling mud of the rasputitsa not only confronted Bock’s motorised columns with an unprecedented topographical challenge, but also denied his panzer forces their much prized ‘shock’ and rapid manoeuvre. Yet, while the seasonal difficulties in the autumn period are the best-known impediment to Bock’s autumn offensive, they were by no means the only one. Indeed, German military files make clear that the rasputitsa accounts for only part of the difficulties Operation Typhoon would confront and that alone it would most likely not have stopped the German offensive from maintaining its advance, albeit at a slower pace. The fact was that even after the initial battles at Viaz’ma and Briansk, Army Group Centre was still bitterly opposed by Soviet forces on the Mozhaisk line, around Kalinin and on the approaches to Tula. The road to Moscow was never open and the Red Army was never absent. Clearly, therefore, the rasputitsa was not the only factor which stood in the way of the German high command’s plans in October 1941.

For all that Bock was able to array against the Soviet capital and for all the professionalism of his forces, on the opposing side the Soviets met the Germans with fanatical levels of determination and their trademark resilience in the face of daunting odds. The few western observers who experienced the war from within Moscow gained a sense of the totality with which the Soviet regime approached the battle. As the BBC correspondent Alexander Werth noted:

All the military talent – discovered and tested in the first battles of the war and, in some cases, before that in the Far East – was assembled, all available reserves were thrown into battle, including some crack divisions from Central Asia and the Far East, a measure made possible by the non-aggression pact concluded with the Japanese in 1939.¹⁰

Whatever bad memories and reservations the generals may have had, Stalin had become the indispensable unifying factor in the patrie-en-danger atmosphere of October–November 1941.¹¹