The War in the Desert

While the panzers were rampaging east across the Soviet Union, capturing Minsk and Smolensk, and closing in on Leningrad and the north and Kiev in the south, other strategic opportunities were also opening up for the Germans.  The fight with Great Britain was now mainly focused at sea, though both sides continued to launch bombing raids on one another’s cities.  Sometimes the U-boats seemed to gain the upper hand, at other times the British convoy system did enough to protect enough shipping to keep their island nation in the war.  Churchill had become so desperate that in fall of 1940 he had traded 99-year leases to the United States on British territories as far apart as Newfoundland and British Guiana, as well as in Bermuda and across the Caribbean, in exchange for 50 old destroyers.  Increasingly, as 1941 wore on, the United States Navy was taking a more aggressive posture in protecting the shipping lanes in the Atlantic, as Roosevelt hoped to repeat Woodrow Wilson’s strategy of using sinkings by the German submarines to persuade a reluctant public to support war against Nazi Germany.

While the war at sea was indecisive, General Erwin Rommel was doing wonders in the Saharan Desert with his small force.  The Italians had suffered disaster after disaster at the hands of the British Army, in spite of considerable numerical superiority.  Only the dispatch of a small force of German mechanized and panzer divisions saved the fledgling empire to which Mussolini was clinging.

But they did more than stave off disaster.  Taking advantage of Churchill’s blunder in stripping his African armies to an ill-fated expedition into Greece, Rommel struck hard and fast, and sent the British reeling back across the flat and barren desert.  The Sahara, flat and barren, was quite as good a country for tank warfare as the steppes of Ukraine, and Rommel took full advantage.  By early April, he had laid siege to more than 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops in the important Libyan port of Tobruk.  However, his forces were too small to crack the defenses, which were primarily manned by tough Australian troops.

Over the next several months, Rommel and his British counterparts engaged in battles of maneuver across the desert, which included a brilliant dash over the border into Egypt by the vaunted Afrika Korps.  However, Rommel’s force was never quite large enough to seriously threaten the Suez Canal.  His supply lines extended hundreds of miles back to Tripoli, and the British Navy and Royal Air Force seriously threatened his supply lines across the Mediterranean.

Hitler’s laser-focus on the war in Russia kept him from recognizing the enormous opportunity presented in Africa.  With just another panzer division or two, with just a few more Luftwaffe squadrons to protect the shipping out of Italy, Rommel very likely could have seized Alexandria and shut down the Suez Canal, dealing a deadly wound to the British Empire.  This would also have opened the door to an advance into the Middle East, where many of the Islamic rulers were friendly towards Nazi Germany, and abundant oil supplies could be found.  But support for such an ambitious endeavor would have required stripping down the forces engaged in Russia, or else dangerously exposing the long coastline of the empire the Wehrmacht had conquered along the northern, western, and southern coasts of Europe. 

As it was, Rommel had just enough strength to keep the British at bay, but not enough tanks, fuel, or superior German troops (the Italians were often brave, but no math for the British) to finish the job.  He managed to fend off Claude Auchinleck’s major counterattack, Operation Crusader, in November of 1941, but his forces were so exhausted that he had to relinquish the siege on Tobruk, and retreat back across the desert.  The British breathed a sigh of relief, and once again ambitiously expected to have Africa cleared before very many months passed.  But Rommel was not quite done yet.  The next summer would find the Afrika Korps back at Tobruk again, and threatening the British hold on Egypt and the Suez Canal.  But before that could happen, historic events would occur in the killing fields of the Soviet Union, and in the Pacific, that would change the course of the war and the history of the world for years to come. 

The Capture of Smolensk

The German panzers continued pushing eastward.  The easy advances of the early days were becoming a distant memory.  As the Red Army regrouped following the shock and devastation of the early days, they began to learn just what it would take to successfully engage the Wehrmacht, which had been masters of every battlefield where they had fought.  They began to deploy their heavy tanks into the fight, which came as a nasty shock to the Germans, and inspired them to begin developing their own super tanks to successfully engage their formidable Soviet counterparts.

Leading the charge to the east was one of the masterminds of panzer warfare, Heinz Guderian.  Guderian, like most successful military officers, was egotistical and highly motivated.  He was also courageous, sometimes leading from the front and personally engaging in combat operations.  His soldiers were utterly devoted to him, painting white “G’s” on their vehicles in honor of their commander.  But the same loyalty and admiration was not always found in Guderian’s superior officers, who often found him to be insubordinate, dismissive of orders he did not like.  In France, this had worked out to Germany’s advantage.  When Guderian had been ordered to halt the advance of his panzer divisions, he responded by ordering a “reconnaissance in force,” which effectively was an advance.  This contributed significantly to the entrapment of the Franco-British armies against the sea, and Germany’s smashing victory of the spring of 1940.

The same sort of thing happened as the panzers ground on towards Smolensk, the next great obstacle on the road to Moscow.  Guderian and Hermann Hoth fell under the command of Field Marshal Hans von Kluge, a highly professional Prussian officer whom Guderian disliked.  Once again, when ordered to halt his advance, Guderian ignored the order, and was threatened with court-martial.  But when they came to the Dneiper River, and Kluge again insisted on a halt, Guderian used the influence his name carried with the army high command to persuade Kluge to authorize continuation of the attack.  The advance was slower now, averaging about 15 miles a day, far less than they had enjoyed during the encirclement of Minsk.  But they were still advancing, and the Red Army was still reeling.  The Luftwaffe controlled the skies, driving off any appearances of the enemy air force, and providing vital ground support.  On July 29^th, Guderian’s 29^th Motorized Infantry Division finally seized Smolensk, while Hoth’s panzer spearheads bypassed the city from the north and completed another envelopment of two Soviet armies. 

The panzers of Army Group Center had by now, in less than two months, advanced an incredible 450 miles.  Few military accomplishments in history could match what they had done.  The was similarly positive in the north, where German units were closing in on Leningrad, and in the south, where Kiev was under threat.  But most of the professional soldiers believed seizing Moscow was the key to winning the war, and they were now only 225 miles away.  Guderian’s tank crews posted hand-painted signs along the highway east of Smolensk, reading, “To Moscow.”

But Hitler would have other ideas.  And so also did the Red Army.  Defeated and in disarray, they began to collect themselves, and solidify their defenses along the routes to Moscow.  Soon, they even began to counterattack, and force the Germans to make modest withdrawals.  It was no grand strategic victory, but it showed that, in spite of massive casualties of dead, wounded, and prisoner, the Red Army was by no means out of the game. 

Warning Signs for Barbarossa

On the battlefield, the German Wehrmacht was proving its crushing superiority over the Red Army on every front.  But there were warning signs, including the appearance of heavy tanks that were superior to anything the Germans could put in the field.  It was not due to superior mobility or better equipment that the Germans continued to prevail in every engagement and drive forward, but because of their masterful skill at the operational level.  German infantry would courageously attack and disable Soviet tanks with grenades or explosive charges, when their own tanks and anti-tank guns proved too small to be effective. 

They found the Red Army to be a formidable, if somewhat confusing opponent.  Formidable in that he fought with a dogged tenacity, but confusing in that sometimes he would surrender in vast numbers with scarcely a shot being fired.  From the perspective of Ivan, however, this was not so unreasonable.  On the one hand, many were animated by genuine patriotism, a desire to defend their beloved Motherland, which certainly proved to be a far greater impetus than devotion to the Communist Party (something that Stalin and the Bolshevik leaders shrewdly realized early on in the struggle).  Many would fight to the last round, and if they survived, would vanish into the woodlands or marshes behind German lines and wage a dangerous and brutal partisan warfare against the invaders.  Some fought because they had no other choice; it was either be killed by the enemy, or by their own commissars.  The NKVD would often align themselves behind an attacking formation to shoot down anyone who retreated without permission.  Discipline in the Red Army was always brutal, much more so after the panic and disasters of the early days of the war.  But this same brutality which kept many in the field, for lack of any better options, also incited many to surrender at the first opportunity, hopeful that they would receive better treatment at the hands of the Germans than from their overlords in Moscow. 

Tragically, this would often not turn out to be the case.  While some defectors were incorporated into the German service, and units were formed from the various nationalities, to become a prisoner of war as a member of the Red Army was very often a death sentence.  Much of this was maliciously caused by Nazi racial ideology, which viewed the Slavic soldiers of the Red Army as inferior to Aryan stock.  They were cooped up in prison camps with hardly anything to eat, living in unspeakable conditions, where more than half would die from shooting, exhaustion, and starvation.  Some were used for slave labor, as the Reich faced severe labor shortages as they attempted to administer their vast empire and wage war at the same time.  Some of the starvation was, no doubt, due to capturing vast number of prisoners that were more than the Army was capable of handling.  So, all the prisoner of war deaths were unquestionably not the result of deliberate mistreatment, but a comparison of the treatment of Soviet prisoners with that of American and British shows that racial ideology made a significant difference in how prisoners were treated.  What compounds this tragedy all the more is the treatment of the survivors of Nazi captivity at the end of the war, who were either killed or sent off to the Gulag as traitors upon being “liberated.”  No soldier was in a more desperate and hopeless place in the Second World War than the common Ivan of the Red Army—especially in the early days when defeat and retreat were the order of the day.

In addition to stiff resistance, that impressed many German officers, including the commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, there were many other signs of looming trouble even in the early days.  One was the paucity of good roads.  Famed British historian B.H. Liddell Hart believed that if the Soviet road system had been as modern as that of France, the Soviet Union would have been crushed in a matter of weeks.  But very few roads were paved; some that were marked on maps were little more than dirt tracks, making them very difficult to negotiate for wheeled vehicles.  As noted above, many Soviets escaped from encirclement and survived to wage partisan warfare behind the lines, sabotaging supply columns and isolated outposts.  Additionally, getting supplies to the front proved a considerable difficulty the further the panzers advanced.  Soviet railroads ran on a different track gauge than those of western Europe, and these had to be replaced if ammunition and food was to be gotten to the front swiftly, instead of by truck and horse-drawn wagons. 

Nonetheless, on July 3^rd, Franz Halder (chief of staff of the German Army High Command), asserted his belief that the war had been effectively won in two weeks. The days to come would show just how bad a misjudgment this was. 

Responses to Barbarossa

The crushing defeat at Minsk was a disaster for the Red Army, and it threw the dictator Stalin into a panic.  For many years after the war, the legend was that Stalin, shocked by this betrayal by his erstwhile ally Hitler, had panicked upon the invasion, withdrawn himself, and was only brought back at the insistence of the Politburo.  While there is an element of truth in the narrative, it is also considerably distorted.

The myth was propagated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Kruschev, in his famous 1956 speech, who (among other things) sought to pin much of the blame for the summer of 1941 disaster on his predecessor.  However, when speaking off the record, according to the Glasnost tapes, Kruschev admitted, “No one with an ounce of political sense should buy the idea that we were fooled, that we were caught flat-footed by a treacherous surprise assault.”  No, it was an assault that the Soviet Union had done much to provoke, as Stalin well knew.   That being said, there does seem to be evidence that Stalin had convinced himself that Hitler would not invade without at least some prior warning, some demand for concessions which would leave room for negotiation.  Nonetheless, with the increasing tension and antagonism between the two sides, and the increasing signs of troop movements along the border, nobody in the know among the Soviet command could have been too surprised.  Failing to have his troops on high alert was Stalin’s most critical error of the war.  It cost the Soviet Union dearly, but in the end, Stalin would show himself far superior both as a strategist and as a diplomat in his nation’s interests, to any of the other major war leaders.

Contrary to the myth, Stalin did not disappear into his dacha on the first day of the war.  Although he himself did not speak publicly, he authorized Vyacheslav Molotov to speak to the public, with bland assurances that they would defeat the treacherous invasion.  Records prove that Stalin remained in his office, working diligently, until June 29^th, when news came of the fall of Minsk, with the disastrous losses in troops and weapons.  Stalin erupted in anger, and for one of the rare times during the war succumbed to panic, crying out that they had flushed everything Lenin had handed them down the toilet.  At that point, Stalin did return briefly to his dacha outside of Moscow.  The Red Army which he had built up at such expense over more than a decade as an offensive force was being systematically smashed by an enemy far inferior in number of troops, weapons, and planes, but far superior in operational capability.  Very likely, Stalin was fearful that his soldiers would not be willing to fight for a regime that had crushed and terrorized them over the past two decades.  However, after a brief interlude, the Politburo insisted upon his return, and on July 3 Stalin himself spoke to his nation, calling the nation to resist the treacherous invasion of the enemy.

At the same time, Winston Churchill was displaying to the world just how great a champion of freedom he truly was.  He openly, brazenly declared that all the crimes of Communism, which he had been wont to criticize in the past, “fade away before the spectacle which is now unfolding,” as if Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was somehow more contemptible than Stalin’s own assault on Finland, occupation of the Baltic countries, or theft of large parts of Romania.  The truth is that, at this point in history, Hitler was a piker in the realm of mass murder compared to Stalin.  And yet, Churchill and the British were willing entirely to cast in their lot on the side of the Bolshevik regime of mass murder, even though Soviet victory would only be trading the power of one dictator on the continent for another.  Additionally, it would leave the Poland that Great Britain had allegedly gone to war on behalf of enslaved to Communism instead of Nazism.  Among the many other things demonstrated by Operation Barbarossa, the response of Britain (and also the United States, where Roosevelt immediately moved to provide help to the Soviet Union) proved that the democracies were not in this fight at all for freedom, but only for political advantage.   

The First Great Encirclement

Two days after the invasion of the Soviet Union began, Adolf Hitler moved his headquarters to the “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia, a complex of ugly, low-lying buildings deep in the mosquito-plagued forests.  From this center, the Fuhrer would direct the war until it was seized by the Red Army in the closing months of the war.

But that time was far in the future.  For the moment, it was hardly imaginable that the reeling Soviet forces could recover from the hammer blows with which they had been struck in the opening days.  Although there were pockets of tough Soviet resistance, as at Brest-Litovsk, and Army Group North had encountered some heavy KV-1 tanks that were superior to anything the Wehrmacht possessed, for the most part everything was going according to plan.  The Soviet air force had been all but destroyed, mostly on the ground, allowing completely unhindered reconnaissance and ground support from the Luftwaffe.  One of the greatest difficulties the Germans faced was the vast amounts of territory being covered by their panzer and mechanized divisions, because the foot-slogging infantry divisions, whose supplies were pulled in horse-drawn wagons, were left far behind.  Incessant marching in dust, heat, and occasional downpours of rain, strained the infantry to the exhaustion point.  But the Red Army was too disorganized by the shattering blows they had received to cut off and annihilate the panzer spearheads, although they continued to inflict heavier casualties on the Germans than they had received during any of their encounters with the Western allies.

In the north, von Leeb’s army group made steady progress in its advance towards Leningrad, liberating the recently-occupied Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.  In many of the cities, a population that had suffered greatly under Bolshevik tyranny helped the murderous SS Einsatzgruppen units in tracking down and murdering any Jews suspected of being engaged in sabotage or partisan activity.  Army Group South, under Gerd von Rundstedt, faced the heaviest opposition, because it was there Stalin had deployed his best units, having laid plans for an offensive out of southwestern Ukraine.  While they managed to push the Red Army back, there were no spectacular encirclements in the early days of the campaign.  Meanwhile, the advancing Wehrmacht forces were greeted enthusiastically in many places by the Ukrainians, who had suffered perhaps more than any other Soviet republic, particularly during the mass starvation of the Holodomor.  This hostility of the Ukrainians toward the Moscow-centered government, and their joyful reception of the Wehrmacht, goes a long way towards explaining much of the propaganda and genuine hatred that marks the current war between Russia and Ukraine.

It was Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center which enjoyed the greatest success; and not surprisingly, since they had the most powerful panzer forces, Panzer Groups 2 and 3, led respectively by expert tanks commanders Heinz Guderian and Hermann von Hoth.  In less than a week, these panzer groups had slashed an incredible 250 miles deep into Soviet territory, meeting up at the great Belorussian city of Minsk.  The hard-marching German infantry closed another pocket at Bialystok.

These would be the first great cauldron battles of the war in the east.  Some 300,000 Soviet soldiers would eventually surrender, but many fought with fanatical determination to break out, oftentimes in human wave assaults that were mowed down in windrows by German machine gun and artillery.  Some 2,500 tanks were destroyed also in this battle, the first great success of the Wehrmacht, which promised to be the harbinger of many more if the Red Army did not learn quickly from the catastrophic errors it had made in the early days of the war. 

The Opening Shots of Barbarossa

I have necessarily spent a great deal of time addressing the build-up toward war in the East, and with very good reason.  The Second World War was, in many ways, several different wars that somehow united into one giant maelstrom.  But the eye of the storm, from June 22, 1941 onward, was in the clash between Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Stalin’s Red Army.  The war between Japan and China, then Japan and the United States; the wars between the Anglo-Americans and the German Reich, any of them by themselves, would have comprised one of the greatest and bloodiest conflicts in human history.  But (with the possible exception of the Sino-Japanese war, in terms of casualties and sheer brutality) none could match the Nazi-Soviet conflict in terms of sheer immensity of scale, number of men and weapons involved.  It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the largest and bloodiest war ever fought in human history.  The outcome on the Eastern Front would determine the outcome of the war.

Adolf Hitler was gambling everything on the ability of the Wehrmacht to destroy the Soviet Union.  Knocking Britain’s continental sword out of her hand (to borrow the Fuhrer’s quaint phrase) would force the British to concede that they could not win the war, and also would make the Americans think twice about entering a war in which they almost certainly could not achieve anything better than a bloody stalemate.  Germany would be free from dependence upon foreign imports, and from the repercussions of the Royal Navy’s blockade, because it would enjoy unfettered access to the food and mineral resources of the former Soviet empire.  On the other hand, if for some reason the Wehrmacht failed, Germany would become mired in a protracted, two-front war which she could not possibly win, no matter how superior her forces might be at the tactical and operational level. 

Most of the Red Army was massed near the frontier, which played into Hitler’s hands.  The plan was to effectively destroy the Soviet forces in approximately three weeks of encirclement operations, such as had worked with such brilliance against France.  Of course, the size of the Soviet Union dwarfed that of the Western Front, and the Red Army had access to almost limitless reserves of manpower, as well as possessing colossal industrial strength.  But if the Red Army was smashed, and the Soviet state collapsed—as Hitler predicted—then the Third Reich could form its eastern empire all the way to the Urals, and leave only a token force to guard against any resurgence from a Communist state (or whoever took Stalin’s place), and begin settling German farmers and their families in the conquered areas.

At approximately 3 a.m. on June 22^nd, 1941, the German artillery roared, and the Luftwaffe aircraft took off from their bases to begin the surprise attack.  Although, as Nikita Kruschev would later relate, everyone from Stalin down knew that war was about to break out, Stalin had been fanatically committed to refusing to do anything to provoke Hitler.  It is impossible to know for certain why Stalin allowed his forces to be caught unprepared.  The idea that he “trusted Hitler” seems almost laughable.  More likely, he was focused on his own offensive ambitions, and did not imagine that Hitler would attack without warning.  He probably expected some sort of concessions to be demanded, over which there would be diplomatic wrangling, while he prepared his forces for war. 

It was a deadly mistake.  The Red Army was not in position, the Red Air Force was caught with its pants down, thousands of planes being destroyed on the ground, giving the Luftwaffe complete air superiority.  The river Bug proved no obstacle to the advance of the German army groups, as their panzers sliced dozens of miles deep into the Soviet rear areas before the sun set on the first day of the war.  Confusion reigned in the Red Army; one commander named Pavlov panicked and fire off contradictory orders in all directions, for which he was summarily executed at Stalin’s order.  It was several hours before the Kremlin acknowledged they were at war, and ridiculous orders to counterattack were issued.  There would be no counterattacks, no taking control of the situation at the front.  The Red Army was reeling, and within days tens of thousands of its front-line soldiers would be encircled in giant cauldrons.

But there were also signs that this would be a far harder campaign than any in which the Wehrmacht had engaged so far.  While panzer and mobile divisions raced eastward, the infantry besieged the fortress of Brest-Litovsk.  Surrounded and cut off from all hope of relief, the Russian soldiers refused to surrender, but fought a resistance for days that was so bitter it amazed the German commanders, who had expected a quick surrender.  All along the front, though for the most part the Germans were advancing in breakneck speed, from place to place Russian soldiers were showing the dogged toughness that had made them a respected adversary in days gone by, and which would eventually turn around the disastrous situation brought about by Stalin’s refusal to put his forces on a war footing. 

A War of Unrelenting Harshness

Though in the West, we usually focus on the drama of Pearl Harbor, Midway, Normandy, and Iwo Jima, it is fair to say that, in truth, the war was fought and decided on the Eastern Front.  The Second World War in Europe began on September 1, 1939, although in many ways it is fair to say that it was simply a continuation of the bloodletting that began in early August of 1914.  War in Asia had been going on since 1937 between Japan and China.  The vast majority of blood spilled was in the China theater, and on the Eastern Front between Russia and Germany. 

The war between Germany and the Soviet Union would be the greatest in terms of numbers and casualties in human history.  War is never a pretty thing, but in this conflict in the east it would reach a scale of brutality not seen since ancient times.  The blame for this brutality is usually focused upon Hitler’s obsession with obtaining living space for the German people, and Nazi hatred of the subhuman Slavs and Jews who populated the Soviet empire.  And, without doubt, there is a great deal of truth in the accusation.  One of the cardinal errors made by Adolf Hitler was his determination to depopulate all the conquered region between Poland and the Urals, driving the surviving Soviet population into the eastern hinterland.  Many of the Soviet people, particularly in Ukraine—which had suffered massive starvation under Stalin’s reign of terror—would welcome the Germans as liberators.  However, the Nazis made the deliberate choice not to involve them in the war effort against Stalin, but instead subject them to a brutal occupation policy that, in the end, was not much of an improvement upon the crushing tyranny of Moscow.  While hatred of Bolshevik rule was strong enough that numerous foreign divisions were formed and fought in the German service, in the end, Hitler’s failure to capitalize on popular resentment of the Bolsheviks was one of the primary reasons the war in the east was lost.

The “Commissar Order,” which permitted German troops to shoot the political officers assigned to each Soviet command, is generally presented as a reason for the onslaught of brutality, as well.  Since these commissars were strictly political and were nothing but brutal Communist enforcers, the horror over this order has probably been unnecessarily exaggerated.  Considering the mass murders for which the Communists had been responsible for 1917, they certainly are not deserving of our sympathy.  However, it is true that the more violent elements of the German military structure took advantage of the order and extended it beyond what the letter of the law allowed.  Since the Nazi hierarchy viewed it as a war of extermination, little was done to hinder the murderous proceedings both at and behind the front lines.

There is another side to the story, however, which is rarely told.  On June 22^nd, 1941, the very first day of the war, Germans who strayed too far in advance, who were captured, were later found by their advancing comrades murdered and mutilated in bestial fashion.  Numerous Germans also documented scenes of unspeakable carnage in Soviet prisons, where prisoners (many of them political) were found slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands, and left to rot when the Red Army retreated.  Although popular histories wish to place all the blame for the brutality on the German side, the reality at the front was both sides from the very first gunshot fought with a level of brutality and inhumanity unparalleled in modern times, and it is impossible to say which one started the brutality.  In fact, the murderous cruelty that would be displayed until the very end was a result of the godless totalitarian systems which ruled both sides.

The Soviet Union had also put itself in a difficult position by refusing to sign on to the Geneva Convention, which offered some measure of protection by establishing rules of conduct antagonists were to follow, particularly with respect to civilians and prisoners of war.  The unleashing of partisan warfare behind the lines from the very early days of the war also presented the Germans with more than a pretext for many of the harsh measures employed, since it was very difficult to discern who was a friend, and who was involved in acts of sabotage and murder while out of uniform (historically always a potentially capital offense).  The Soviet method of conducting the war invited an even greater brutality and savagery, and things were bound to be bad enough as it was.

Shortly before the war began, Hitler told his generals, “This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness.”  Unprecedented, merciless, and unrelenting harshness was a phrase which would aptly describe the conduct of both sides in this deadly war of extermination in the east. 

The Challenge of War in the East

Adolf Hitler expressed confidence that, once the door of the Bolshevik citadel was kicked in, the whole rotten structure would come crashing down.  But still, as he likewise expressed at other times when in a more sober frame of mind, one never knew what he was getting into when one went into a war.  This was doubly so in the case of the Soviet Union, which since the Bolshevik Revolution had lived in a much more isolated condition than the other nations of Europe.  While Hitler and the Nazis held the Russian enemy in racial and ideological contempt, it was impossible for them not to know that their enemy had a formidable military history.  Hitler’s gamble was that the terror state installed by Lenin and perfected by Stalin would not be able to hold itself together under the strain of attack by the world’s most powerful and efficient army.  A few initial defeats, the Fuhrer reasoned, and the entire State would cease to function.  The army would collapse, and Hitler would have his empire, his living space for the German people.  Communism would be dead, or reduced to a rump state in the far east where it would never again be a threat to German hegemony in Europe.  With the Soviet Union destroyed, Great Britain would be forced to sue for the best peace they could get, and even the United States could do nothing to injure them since all her necessities could be drawn from her own empire.

But the size of the task was gargantuan.  Not only was Germany severely outnumbered in number of men and weapons, as we have previously shown, but she would be attacking on a much broader front than had ever been attempted in the history of warfare.  In order to defeat the Red Army in the opening weeks of the campaign, blitzkrieg would have to work just as effectively, if not more so, than it had in France the previous spring.  Fast-moving panzer columns must slice through the outer crust of defenses into the rear areas, entrapping the huge Soviet armies. Otherwise, the enemy would grow stronger, and the Wehrmacht weaker, the further the Germans advanced, as the enemy fell back upon his own bases of supplies and the Germans moved further from their own. 

What should be the primary objective of the campaign was something never quite agreed upon by Hitler and his generals, a mistake which would have serious ramifications.  The generals tended to believe that Moscow, the Soviet capital, should be the main objective.  Not only would the moral effect of seizing the enemy center of power be enormous, but Moscow was also a major industrial center and mobilization area for the Red Army.  Hitler, on the other hand, tended to view the war in economic terms.  The rich farmland of Ukraine and its great city of Kiev, the rich oil resources of the Caucasus, weighed more heavily on his mind than Moscow.  This controversy would divide the German high command in the months to come.

Spearheading the attack would be three great army groups.  Army Group North, the smallest of the three, would aim at Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), in conjunction with the Finns, who were happy to join in with the Germans in an attempt to avenge Stalin’s unprovoked attack upon them during the Winter War.  The most powerful contingent would be Army Group Center, under the command of Fedor von Bock, containing the bulk of the Wehrmacht’s panzer forces, including its most brilliant tank leader, Heinz Guderian.  Gerd von Rundstedt commanded Army Group South on the south side of the Pripet Marshes, who would advance into Ukraine with only a small contingent of panzers.

It was the greatest army the world had ever seen, in term of skill and efficiency.  The world’s best generals and junior officers led the Wehrmacht, and her accomplishments on the battlefield outclassed that of any other army.  It stood in particular contrast to the bumbling performance of the Red Army in Finland, although Hitler tended to look more at that than at its much better performance under Georgi Zhukov in the far east against the Japanese.  The Red Army was the largest force in the world, but severely hamstrung by Stalin’s massacre of its generals.  Soon, it would also be bringing into the field tanks technologically superior to the panzers Hitler would be throwing against them.  But would it be enough to keep them from falling victim to the blitzkrieg tactics of the Wehrmacht which had cut the French and British to pieces?

The Wehrmacht and the Red Army: Comparison of Forces

Although one would not guess it from what happened in the opening weeks of the war, the reality was that in many ways the Soviet Union was very well prepared for war.  Stalin had accelerated the buildup of forces to an extraordinary rate.  In fact, the USSR was already effectively on a war footing, whereas Adolf Hitler (remarkably) would not put Germany on a total war footing until 1943, after the Stalingrad debacle!

But by sheer weight of weapons, on paper at least it looked like a mismatch between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army.  When war broke out in June of 1941, Germany deployed about 3,300 panzers on its long invasion front.  The Red Army, meanwhile, could boast a tank park of some 15,000.  Admittedly, many of these were old and outdated, but the reality was that, apart from the Panzer IV, much the same could be said of Hitler’s tank force.  Additionally, the Red Army was beginning to bring into action its KV and T-34 tanks, which were far superior technically to anything the Germans would field for another two years.  The appearance of these powerful tanks on the battlefield would come as a nasty surprise to German commanders during the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa.

In the air, too, the Red Air Force held a vast numerical superiority.  The Luftwaffe had proven its quality in the skies over France, but had been seriously depleted during the Battle of Britain.  The invasion of Crete, too, had done serious damage.  When the invasion began, the Luftwaffe was able to put only about 2,250 aircraft in the sky, while the Soviets could deploy about 15,000 aircraft, with many more in reserve.

Artillery was another area where Stalin’s forces held a considerable advantage.  Just over 7,000 artillery pieces would fire off the opening rounds of history’s bloodiest war on June 22^nd, but the Soviets had positioned some 37,000 guns at the front, with more than 100,000 guns and mortars in reserve. 

In short, that Hitler could feel confident in attacking such a superior enemy demonstrates either an incredible hubris, or else an absolute confidence in the qualitative superiority of his own forces.  In Hitler’s case, there was probably a mixture of both.  The coming battles would certainly prove that the German forces were far superior tactically in both the air and on the ground, and would wreak unbelievable damage on the Soviet forces.  But, that the Red Army was able to recover and survive would demonstrate that Hitler underestimated both the depth of their resources, and also their resolve.

Stalin’s Soviet Union, then, was far from unprepared for war.  In fact, they were conscripting men for labor, removing any potential dissidents from the border areas, and even emptying their prisons to prepare for the coming conflict.  Diplomatically, too, Stalin was getting his country prepared.  We have already described the arrangements made to secure his eastern rear against conflict with Japan.  Help was bound to come from the United States too.  Undercutting his own secretary of state, conservative Democrat Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt had arranged to effectively bring an end to the moral embargo imposed on sending armaments to the Soviet Union after its invasion of Finland.  Over the protests of the minority conservatives who realized Communism to be just as evil and aggressive as Nazism, Roosevelt managed to get language inserted into new Lend-lease legislation giving him the discretionary power to send arms even to the Soviet Union if he saw fit.  This would prove to be a huge difference maker in the war about to break out. 

Making Arrangements With Japan

The stage was all but set for the largest and most brutal clash of arms in the history of mankind.  Hitler, of course, who had already determined to strike, was deploying his forces accordingly, feverishly making final preparations.  He had hoped to attack earlier, perhaps in May, but trouble in the Balkans had forced him to set the date for the third week of June.  Stalin had his own military plans, though these are not as clear as Hitler’s.  His forces were being deployed for offensive action, and Stalin had made it clear that the Red Army would soon be going on the offensive, to push Bolshevism into western Europe. 

Besides military preparations, there were also diplomatic steps to be taken.  One of the key players in the events about to unfold was Japan, formally Germany’s Axis ally, but whose Manchurian territory seized from China bordered the Soviet Union.  It is difficult to pin down precisely what Hitler’s intentions, or even desires, were regarding Japan.  Both before and in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa (the name of his war against the Soviet Union), Hitler seemed unable to make up his mind whether he preferred Japan to attack the USSR at its back door, or to continue its aggression in China and the Pacific, thus neutralizing the United States—which was becoming more and more belligerent against Germany, in spite of its tacit neutrality.  When Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited Berlin in March of 1941, von Ribbentrop danced around the question of Germany’s relations with the Soviet Union, and instead encouraged the Japanese to attack Singapore, a key British stronghold in the far east.  Hitler had instructed German diplomats not to let the Japanese know about the pending attack on the Soviet Union.  At other stages, Hitler seemed favorable toward working in concert with the Japanese in his attack on the USSR, but in the buildup to war, his attitude trended toward encouraging the Japanese to help against the British, and confidently assuming he could destroy the Bolshevik monster himself. 

Stalin too knew that war was pending, and he did not vacillate like Germany’s Fuhrer.  While Hitler showed flashes of brilliance in his diplomatic approaches, and sometimes even as a military strategist, his mercurial, undisciplined personality also made him sometimes erratic in judgment, and prone to mistakes.  Joseph Stalin’s cold and relatively unemotional nature served him well, both in diplomacy and strategy.  While his failure to adequately prepare for Hitler’s attack would bring his nation to the brink of disaster, in the long run he would prove to be not only Hitler’s equal in ruthlessness, but also his master in shrewdness.

Hitler’s neglect to confide in his Japanese ally would prove very consequential.  While Ribbentrop had not been forthcoming, Matsuoka divined that something was afoot in relations between Germany and the Soviet Union.  Also, Japan was preparing for the increasing likelihood of war with Britain and the United States, and with her limited resources feared overstretching herself.  Border clashes in Mongolia, where Japanese forces had been thoroughly whipped by a rising star among Soviet generals by the name of Zhukov, had made them wary of engaging the USSR in all-out war.  Enough of the Japanese Army was already tied up in the war of attrition in China to put herself at risk against Stalin’s armies, even if the bulk of his forces were tied up fighting the Wehrmacht.

Leaving Berlin, Matsuoka traveled to Moscow, where he found Stalin to be in a very accommodating mood.  He managed to travel back to Tokyo with a 4-year neutrality treaty signed with the Soviet Union, which would free the Japanese to concentrate on their war against China, and a potentially looming showdown with the USA and Great Britain.  But Adolf Hitler had lost a golden opportunity to secure an ally who might well have helped him to win a war against the enemy he had spent most of his adult life preparing to fight.