Deleted member 1487
Um....the SS division Reich fought several Soviet units at the Mozhiask defensive line that comprised the 5th Army and they were constrained by mud. Neither was it at full strength at the start of operation Typhoon, as it has received few reinforcements since the start of Barbarossa, while the 32nd Rifle division was at full strength in prepared defensive positions along with tank support, which the SS division lacked until days into the battle.The Siberian Rifle Divisions did not make a win/lose difference in the fall of 1941. They did perform better than the average Soviet Rifle Division from the West, yes, but that was not solely due to experience and the presence of competente cadres; they also came with much less reduced assets, and sometimes with assets attached in excess of their Shtat.
They did give the Germans a bloody nose when the time came, more in the Soviet winter counteroffensive than in stopping the Germans before that; even though I always like how the 32nd Rifle Division, a Siberian one, stopped the 40. Panzer Korps for several days at Borodino. Yeah, eventually the 10. Panzerdivision and SS Das Reich took the field - with the SS Das Reich, which had started the battle nearly at full strength and with a full head of steam, having to disband one of its three-battalion regiments to keep the other two in the field. At reduced strength. The Germans also lost some 100 tanks. Get it: a Soviet Rifle Division - at this time, seldom more than a speed bump for a team of two panzer+motorized infantry German ones - reduces the 40. Panzer Korps to combat-unworthyness. Naturally, as mentioned above, this one division had valuable attachments on top of its official Shtat, instead of being a skeleton of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_SS_Panzer_Division_Das_Reich#Operational_history
By the time Das Reich took part in the Battle of Moscow, it had lost 60 percent of its combat strength.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_Red_Banner_Army#Moscow
The 5th Army was re-raised for the second time in October 1941, under the command of Dmitri Lelyushenko, as part of the Soviet Western Front. Recent sources give the actual re-raising date as 11 October 1941.[9] It included two rifle divisions and three tank brigades.[10]
From Robert Forcyzk's "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-42" pp.136-37
On the morning of 9 October, the SS-Regiment Deutschland fought its way into
Gzhatsk, only 175km west of Moscow, and secured the town by 1230 hours. Jubilant at
this victory, Hausser sent his Kradschützen-Abteilung, followed by the SS-Regiment Der
Führer to probe further down the highway toward Mozhaisk. Druzhinina had established a
blocking position 10km east of Gzhatsk, with his tank concealed in ambush near the
village of Budayevo.
120 At 1630 hours, Druzhinina’s tankers spotted the approaching
Waffen-SS vanguard, led by motorcycles and armoured cars. The Waffen-SS troops were
stunned when more than fifty Soviet tanks opened fire on them, some at point-blank
range. Lacking the ability to defeat T-34s, the Waffen-SS troops withdrew, after suffering
400 casualties. Hausser immediately requested that Stumme’s XXXX Armeekorps (mot.)
send him armoured support to counter the enemy tanks. Further south, Troitsky’s 17th
Tank Brigade counterattacked the lead elements of Kuntzen’s corps northeast of Yukhnov.
Major Nikolai Y. Klypin, who had won the HSU as a tanker in the Russo-Finnish War, led
a vicious counterattack with two companies of T-34 that ripped apart Oberst Horst von
Wolff’s Infanterie-Regiment 478. Wolf had been moving up to reinforce Jahn’s
3.Infanterie-Division (mot.), but his handful of 3.7cm Pak guns were completely useless
against Klypin’s T-34s. Oberst Wolff, one of the few German officers who had won both
the Pour le Mérite in the First World War and the Ritterkreuz in the Second World War,
was killed in action and his regiment routed. After days of disaster, Soviet tankers had
finally gained some measure of success.
The German pursuit had been halted and the Stavka tried to make good use of this time.
Polkovnik Sergey A. Kalihovich’s 19th Tank Brigade arrived by rail in Mozhaisk and was
sent to reinforce Druzhinina’s brigade. More important, the first elements of the 32nd
Rifle Division began unloading at Mozhaisk on 10 October; this was a well-trained, full-
strength unit from Siberia, with 15,000 troops and a full complement of artillery. Also on
this day Zhukov was finally put in overall command of the Western Front (with remnants
of the Reserve Front included), with Konev as his deputy. The Germans had nearly
crushed the Vyazma kessel by this point and the 10.Panzer-Division sent Kampfgruppe
von Hauenschild (Pz.Regt 7 and SR 86) to reinforce Hausser’s advance toward Mozhaisk.
Kuntzen directed the 19 and 20.Panzer-Divisionen to Yukhnov, but the vehicles of both
divisions were in such poor condition that they could only advance at a crawl along the
muddy roads. Command lethargy was also a factor developing among the German mid-
level leaders as illness and exhaustion robbed commanders of their normal aggressiveness.
German inactivity on this day was equivalent to another Soviet tactical victory.
The reality was that Soviet defenders outnumbered and outgunned the German forces attacking along the main highway to Moscow in the period you mention and the 32nd Rifle Division showed up at full strength to back up defenders already in place in defensive positions, while mud constricted the German attack to the roads in pre-sighted kill grounds, preventing any flanking efforts. Though the T-34 is mythologized, in many cases by the Germans to explain their failures in 1941, it did play a major role in defeating the advance on Moscow in October, as the Germans lacked sufficient weapons powerful enough to destroy or disable it, especially when used en masse and from defensive positions.
The role of the 32nd division was to give the defensive line critical reinforcement from a pre-war, full strength, fully trained division (an extreme rarity by October 1941...on both sides), just as the Germans were starting to bring sufficient forces to bear to actually be able to match the Soviet 5th army's defensive power.