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Radio War Nerd EP #569 — Operation Barbarossa, pt. 7: Battle of Moscow (I), feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2025-12-24 21:19:07
Imported:
2025-12
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Guest: AnnibaleRecorded: December 22, 2025

The War Nerd returns to battlecast in time for the final leg of Annibale's Operation Barbarossa series: Operation Typhoon, the Battle of Moscow. This episode, Dr. Dolan describes the war inside his bloodied cranium, Ames groans under microbic occupation forces, and Annibale sets the stage for Operation Typhoon, describing the German military command culture in 1941, closer to YouTube influencers than cold steel Bismarcks.

Maps*Barbarossa, June 22 - December 5, 1941

*Operation Typhoon

Annibale's bibliography:

Stahel, David. Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March on Moscow, October 1941.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Covers the first part of Typhoon from the Vyazma - Briansk pockets up to the "rasputitza" stop

Stahel, David. Hitler’s Panzer Generals: Guderian, Hoepner, Reinhardt and Schmidt Unguarded. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023   Recent Stahel's work on the private correspondence of the four main "panzer generals" involved in Barbarossa and Typhoon, gives an excellent window on their psychology.

Radey, Jack, and Charles Sharp. The Defence of Moscow 1941 - The Northern Flank.Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military / Stackpole Books, 2012.  While  not an academic study in the traditional sense of the term, this is a very detailed study of the battle for Kalinin during October and November 1941, giving a good sense of how pointless and self destructive was Panzer Group 3 attempt for a large "swing" around Moscow crossing the  Volga

Megargee, Geoffrey P. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. A well-written synthesis of what we know about the Wehrmacht's conduct in 1941 both in military and criminal terms

Isaev, Aleksey V. Kotyol 1941 goda (Cauldron of 1941). Moscow: Yauza–Eksmo, 2005. Excellent work in Russian on the major Soviet encirclement of 1941. Cover the Vyazma and Briansk "cauldrons" really well from the Soviet side

Annibale's Operation Barbarossa:-Operation Barbarossa, pt 1: German Military Mindset (EP #552)-Operation Barbarossa, pt 2: Germany's Allies & Poland (EP #554)-Operation Barbarossa, pt. 3: Soviet Military Preparations (EP #555)-Operation Barbarossa, pt. 4: The Invasion (EP #559)-Operation Barbarossa, pt. 5: Battle of Smolensk (EP #565)

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW WAR NERD BOOK:THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN HANGED: WAR NERD ESSAYS ON THE U.S. CIVIL WAR

Total time: 1:46:31Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Buy & review John Dolan's new book, They Should Have Been Hanged: War Nerd Essays on the U.S. Civil War

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Files

Comments

JDF

Merry holidays to all WNs out there! What a 🎁: an Annibale episode!!

JDF

(Love to hear Dolan on the mic , folks— you really do!)

cstenzy

A Christmas miracle! Welcome back John 🫡

John Waaben

Zofran is great. I have Crohn’s and I use it whenever things get bad. Also- it’s beautiful to see Dolan back, Merry Christmas!

Damnboooi

When you read one of those throwaway lines in history books like “in addition to the other problems a third of the army died of cholera.” They are talking about previous generations of War Nerds.

GoyBulletStopper

Mark be careful with the zofran use it in moderation it will slow digestion and will leave you constipated

John Waaben

I only ever use it when the nausea has me feeling out of my mind.

Mark Ames

Thanks. Trading one hell for another, but still I’d prefer taking pretty much anything over 24/7 nausea

Logan Ausherman

Mark doesn't seem to realize there's a reason they just don't give out med willy nilly lol

NYCM&AHole

As slayer said: the sport is war - total war - when victory’s really massacre The final swing is not a drill - it’s how many people I can kill!!!! Just want to correct annibale’s quote about war being a sport

JDF

meander re: publicity hounds among US general officers: agree wrt MacArthur and Patton, although both men were amply blessed with what the zoomers call rizz and to a certain extent, both were larger than life figures in their own right—each being a center of gravity (in very different ways!) around which other “lesser” men (and women) were accumulated (or ejected into the void, as the case may be ) like so many asteroid belts, minor moons and other space debris / jetsam / and occasionally other planetary bodies ( generals and admirals, big shot journalists, various high level government officials — representing several governments…) But I’d argue that both were equally well endowed with HODS of auric charisma (scientific historical terminology!) and just plain swagger (affected or otherwise; at the Patton and MacArthur level it didn’t really matter). A different case might be Mark Clark; a figure perhaps more akin to the likes of a Hz Guderian or Mannstein, who were famous, and whose personalities were outsized to an extent but not in and of themselves centers of large solar systems (Rommel until spring 1943 excepted?)) Clark was very self consciously image-savvy and was a notorious publicity hound who seemed almost compelled to make himself shine brighter at every opportunity. His scolding letters to his well-meaning but perhaps less adroit wife when her home front boosterism fell afoul of Marshall and the CCs are remarkable and sad in equal measure. Idk, just a little stoned riffing (we don’t condone stoned anything) but this is what happens if I don’t ignore the “leave a comment “ button on patreon. C’est la guerre, no?

Tristan

Doubling the zofran praise

GoyBulletStopper

I dont know the dr throws zofran at my partner like candy.

Alejandro Pepsi

I have had bad nausea, usually from motion sickness, my whole life. By far the best thing I’ve ever taken for nausea is a peppermint aroma therapy pen called “quease ease” by soothing scents. Peppermint in general is better than zofran in my opinion. Tea works for longer but inhaling either the aroma pen or even just a peppermint tea bag works great for sudden bouts.

Eric Snow

When I have nausea I nibble tiny slivers of raw ginger root. It's very spicy but it helps.

Scott

Where can I read about japan telling Germany that they could not successfully invade the USSR? Google is failing me

Annibale

There's a very detailed discussion of this in John WM Chapman's ''The Imperial Japanese Navy and the North–South Dilemma', part of John Erickson anthology "Barbarossa. The Axis and the Allies ", a fundamental volume on the topic of Barbarossa's preparations

Annibale

Of course there was never a fully official Japanese communication to Germany regarding this (and of course Germany would have ignored it) but Japanese leaked their naval intelligence findings to their German counterparts

Scott

Excellent, thank you for the reading material, love the podcast

JDF

OKW: “let’s see what happens”

JDF

Halder: “we’re so fucked”* * —private diary entry

Kawaii Leonard

We need our war nerds healthy for the current and coming wars. Prayers up and fuck to the American health system for not helping Mark sooner. Excited for Barbarossa 7

Mark Ames

That makes a weird sort of sense, I’ll have to try it

William

“It’s a medical life” starring Dr. The War Nerd

William

I have a Guderian rookie card from when he was a cadet in the 10th Hanoverian

William

*previously on RWN* Annibale: “Eetler” Mark: “wow.. yeah..” John: (wilhelm scream from off camera)

a clash of purple

Dolan and previous guest Matt Christman should get together and commiserate over their brain issues.

Josh

The magical thinking and “just one more big hit and the enemy will collapse” is one of the many comparisons that keep coming to mind between n*zi Germany and post oct 7 Israel throughout this series

John Hieronymus

Zofran is pretty benign we use it all the time for nausea at work and I’ve never seen anyone have an adverse reaction, only a few compazine doses have cause the reaction John describes, scopolamine patches are notorious for causing confusion if left on too long.

JDF

Long live Christman vive Matt ! (He’s making a slow but steady recovery and increasing his appearances on the pod we love to see it folks

Michael Conlin-Elsen

I like to imagine John as if pictured in a 12th century Islamic Golden Age Baghdadi manuscript where they have a diagram of some poor patient getting his dome trepanned by some wisened turban-clad court physician (turns out to be a totally successful turning point in the history of medicine)

Benjamin Glover

If Mark's illness does turn out to be a parasite does that mean the show has a third host

Dill Gherkin

Reading the historian Timothy Mason’s work on Nazi Germany first clued me into the myth making around the Nazi war machine. I wonder if Annibale has read his work. For instance during the invasion of Poland the Nazis had to take troops away from the front to work the fall harvest.

John Hieronymus

We consider queeze ease or other essential oil equivalents to be as good a zofran for many people. Some people hate it though

Ellen Harold

I also had a terrifying reaction to compazine — when I was in my early twenties— it was a false Parkinson’s disease. I had no idea what was happening to me. Before that I had trusted doctors. Since then, I am very leery of taking any medication whatsoever. (it did stop my constant vomiting though, now that I think of it. ) Anyway I’m glad to learn that both Mark and John are on the road to recovery.

Doug Cartel

"the blitzkrieg myth" makes the assertion that a big reason for the hype around the Wehrmacht comes from British apologists trying to explain why they did so bad in the early phase of the war. No no we werent cowards, they were too strong! Worth reading in my opinion.

Doug Cartel

I want to say it was Greg Grandin's "The End of the Myth' where I learned about the American obsession with Germans as our 'teutonic brethren' who lived freely until they were oppressed by some group of landlords or something So the concept of war as a sport with metrics for victory makes sense as a thing both cultures share

theWalrus

Surely at this point Annibale is also a special guest co-host

theWalrus

To me it seems that our elevation of the Operator to his present revered status and the fetishization of small unit tactical superiority is fundamentally similar to the elevation by the Germans of Will and Fanaticism to articles of strategy. This was a great episode; I have spent my Christmas hospitalized for depression and this has really lifted my spirits. It’s a particular relief to hear John back on form

Jeff Normal

Nice episode…I never put together how much the Nazis have in common with new age hippies hahaha….just wish you destiny to manifest…what could go wrong? those well dressed bastards probably just needed some crystals

Ellen Harold

I can’t believe compazine is still on the market.

David Haigh

Great to hear John again - Radio Nerds "In The Wars", it seems. I always thought Wave-Breakers looked like giant Caltrops, which semes oddly fitting corn theyre the o.g. battlefield 'wave-breaker'.

xnfec

Seems common everwhere what with Generals hats getting bigger and their chests more colourful.

xnfec

From the film Alatriste at Rocroi - "Verterans to the front"

Martin

Welcome back, John... Er... Gary... Ermmm... Nerd.

Commissar Mindset

Thanks for another great episode featuring the Generalissimo of RWN guests. Welcome back to the front, John! I suppose as a classics scholar it may be that you know if you now bear the sort of mark a roman veteran could use to convince a local magistrate of his bravery in battle so as to up the odds of winning a legal dispute. Should you ever come to find out if the trick still works in modern Italy, please do inform us. Sorry to hear Mark is still in a rough spot. Hope everyone gets well soon. I have written some self-important nonsense below on the off chance it's of use to someone. Feel free to ignore it or tell me to knock it off, which I gladly will. It is in no way advice from an authoritative source. I freely admit I am about as qualified for such things as the least competent character from M*A*S*H during an episode featuring an olympic hangover. In regard to ailments, medicine, etc. Zofran (easiest way I've learned to say the name of the compound is on-DAN-zeh-tron, which a friend told me sounded like an obscure band name for a group of annoying performing artists that all play theremins). I'll share that I'm prone to nausea and take drugs in this category (anti-emetics) on a daily basis, having gone through a few options with poor results before my present solution was found and implemented. Curiously, in a certain sense they're relevant to military matters because anyone that came down with a case of the ol' PTSD can benefit from their efficacy in managing about half* the physical symptoms (feeling one's gorge rise or a persistent lump in the throat, fight or flight overriding appetite and other parts of digestion due to visceral sensations like a sort of stomach-clutching fear response, perspiring when you shouldn't whether that means it happens a touch more than makes sense or that you're sweating bullets under an industrial AC unit set to fifty farenheit on full blast even when you're well into dehydration) without creating a chemical dependency the way that the benzos thrown at trauma patients like xanax or klonopin tend to do. Considering the risk of abuse and street value of the latter, mentally ill veterans and other conflict survivors like refugees are well served by such alternatives, and yet are unlikely to have them suggested. Of the options available, zofran/ondansetron has a significantly higher risk of causing a cardiac event despite its popularity for rapid relief. My case is sufficiently understood to require intervention for nausea and vertigo that I sometimes take it, but I'm given a script sufficient for advance prescribing to manage severe breakthrough symptoms rather of daily use. My regimen's structure involves taking zofran when the other, less dangerous antiemetic I'm on as a first-line solution fails to get the job done, and even then generally to only do so when on the way to a hospital or in one because an ambulance or an ER has the benefit of monitoring me in case it screws with my heart. A second-line dug (dramamine) is the go-to for breakthrough symptoms, though I tend not to take more than a quarter of the daily max per eight hour dose so I can manage on bad days with a reserve for persistent severity. If my system was more robust I'd probably skip that and go for the zofran but I've found that the less risky stuff does the job fine for anything short of nausea occurring in sufficient frequency to make hydration impossible; while this is distinct for me than 'I feel awful but the ER is not yet required,' it is the closest I have come to the likes of cholera as described in the RWN civil war series and despite the allure of being dosed with opium by a field medic from the 1860s I'm not looking to go any further down that road. The persistent nausea I tend to have on a daily basis is managed by meclizine, which has far less risky side effects even when one considers drug interactions, and which can be prescribed in fast-acting chewable tablets without losing its ability to be effective for eight hours at a quarter of its suggested daily max. Because just about anything able to be taken in this form has the benefit of high bioavailability due to sublingual absorption, it works at least as fast as zofran/ondansetron for me. It's also on the short list of medications that I've yet to be provided a horrible-tasting formulation of, which is definitively not the case with dramamine and its variants. You'd think that the stuff they give you to prevent nausea wouldn't leave an aftertaste so bad as to make you want to throw up, but such is the state of the art I suppose. Possibly this is intended to keep people from shoplifting the stuff and consuming enough to experience hallucinogenic effects that I've universally heard fairly awful descriptions of. Can't say I've ever been tempted. Since I'm already in for a penny's worth of opinionated oversharing and on the subject of symptoms just as likely caused by direct experience of a conflict as by any number of other difficulties in life - the human animal is a marvel in this though not in any sense I enjoy - what clinicians label as agitation is a daily issue for me and I wholly agree that 'agitation of sufficient severity to be of clinical concern' is entirely insufficient language to describe it. Right, that's probably more than enough. If this is objectionable, please inform me and I'll remove it and desist from further rambling on your page. *The other half of the symptoms - for me and those I know, a tremor in the hands, elevated vitals, heart palpitations, and straight-up panic attacks with sufficient chest pain to kick one over a mental cliff in which the sufferer expects to be having a heart attack - are managed quite effectively by an appropriately chosen beta blocker. Whittling down the 20-30 meds in this category is surprisingly simple - remove those that cross the blood-brain barrier (as beta blockers that do so have been found to cause a mild but permanent cognitive impairment recorded as something like a 10-point IQ score drop in some patients in the medical literature, though the efficacy of the allegedly new & improved, eugenic-free IQ tests do not inspire absolute confidence). Get rid of those that a drug interaction checker or a pharmacogenomic test tells you are bad fits. Your remaining candidates will probably include propranolol, which is generally seen as benign.

jonnie

You dont want seratonin syndrome!

Mathew Muntz

Congrats John on the successful trepanation!

GueritoDeLaBahia

As a history buff also experiencing (holiday-related) stomach challenges, hats off as always

Aaron Meland

I'm just here for the health talk

nick

So glad to have you back, John. I missed you a bunch. Glad your doing better my man

T

*snorts adderal while shoving mushrooms in my mouth* You’re not my mom!!!

Jack

Didnt read the whole thing but wanted to reinforce- I know many people who take Zofran and swear by it

Townes

Perfect opportunity to archive your affliction with a great site a friend recommended to me years ago when I had serious food poisoning. https://iwaspoisoned.com/

GC

Quease Ease has worked for me to calm post-anesthesia nausea when ondansetron and compazine both failed. I may be unusually responsive to it but any time anyone I know is getting anesthesia I try to get it sent back with them so they'll have it when they wake up.

Toshio42

"If you will it, Hans..." should've held for applause!

Commissar Mindset

Opposite of a reinforcement. Zofran can be dangerous due to risk of cardiac events which is why they're more comfortable using it in hospitals since they can monitor patient vitals in realtime (and charge you on the off chance your heart has a rough time), I downgraded to meclizine for this reason when it was in regular use.

Mark Ames

a very belated thank you for this comment, and deep solidarity with you dealing with chronic nausea, it's real torture when it's bad and everything else seems trivial