1941 continued

Even the United States knew about it, and they told their Soviet ambassador the plans for the invasion that they had acquired from German double agents. German planes were spotted over the USSR on reconnaissance, German diplomats in Russia burned documents while their families fled, and German ships abandoned Soviet ports. Even if Stalin did not take these blatant maneuvers as acts of war, he should have paid attention to Hitler’s own book, Mein Kampf, in which he targeted Russia as the ultimate goal of German expansion. He cited the Slavic people as natural born slaves, Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy, and believed that no diplomatic relations could ever be held with the easterners. Some revisionist historians think Stalin shrugged this evidence off to be drawn into war with Germany and therefore have an excuse to push westward. There is no clear proof of this, so one can only assume that Stalin might have known about the invasion, but held onto the hope that conflict could be delayed if he kept quiet. Either way, the Kremlin's stance was passive and Molotov declared, "only a fool would attack us."

Hitler’s Generals were inclined to agree, many of whom had the two fronts of WWI still fresh in their minds. But Hitler believed in his "Directive Number 21" that he could conquer the USSR within weeks, then turn full steam towards Britain. He was so confident that he even asked Molotov if he wanted to share in Britain’s "soon to be lost" colonies. Ironically, during that conference the officials had to sleep in air-raid shelters from British bombing, making it clear that Britain was anything but defeated. Some officials were confident of Hitler, like the Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, who only ordered winter clothing for the German troops who would be occupying "conquered" Russia. Few German Generals shared this optimism, like the legendary Guderian, whose Panzers with their trademark "G" would later tread across the Russian lands, and was actually appalled. Still, nearly all German commanders agreed that Moscow should be the primary target--everyone, that is, except for Hitler. The Generals wanted to sack the Soviet government and communications center, but Hitler wanted to strangle the Soviet economy and let the Russian people overthrow the Communists themselves. After that, he believed, Moscow would be an easy target.

Hitler planned to turn Russia into a nation of slaves for Germany, and appointed Alfred Rosenberg to be the head of the "Ministry of the East." Russia would be broken up into small territories and Rosenberg would reign there. This was not to be for many reasons, but eventually Heinrich Himmler would be the top leader in the east. The Germans would starve the Russians by sending all their food to Germany, and the surviving Ukrainians, Balts, Belorussians would be "Aryanized" as soon as the war in the west was over. Russia itself would become a colony for Aryan peoples, with members of the Red Army and Communist Party subject to liquidation along with other enemies of the state. Tragically, Hitler again forbade any punishment for Germans who abused civilians. Just like in the destruction of Poland, German Generals thought this was absurd and would destroy the tight discipline of the Wehrmacht.

Even in June of 1941, the Soviets still wanted very much to remain allies with the Germans. They sent Germany 1.5 million tons of grain, 2 million tons of oil and large amounts of war materials like copper and chrome. Truth be told, Stalin believed that war with Germany was inevitable, but refused to believe it would come before 1942. He wanted another year to ready his army, and thought for sure that Hitler would make territorial demands before invading, as he had done in 1939. He also did not want to accuse Hitler and aggravate him into an invasion or give him any justification for war, which would later come back to haunt Stalin. On 14 June he sent out a private message that he did not want war, to which he received no reply. The reasons for that were obvious, as the German war machine was poised along the Soviet borders, waiting for the code word "Dortmund." The go ahead finally came on the evening of 22 June, the shortest night of the year.

BARBAROSSA
Like Napoleon 129 years before him, Hitler had conquered nearly all of Europe. And like Napoleon, Hitler didn't know when to stop. Both couldn’t invade England, and then turned eastward, swallowing up land up until the Russian border. Hitler and Napoleon made several tactical blunders in their careers, but the worst decision they made was to invade Russia. Had Hitler learned from history and decided not to attack his Russian "ally," the war may have ended very differently. Even so, in June of 1941, Hitler unveiled his master plan for what would have been his greatest triumph: to crush the Soviet Union and eradicate Communism, then exterminate all the Slavs. He called it "Operation Barbarossa," after the famous German emperor hundreds of years before. In the pre-dawn hours of 22 June, the same day that Napoleon launched his Russian attack, the Wehrmacht thrust at the Soviet Union on a 1000 mile front. They attacked from the north, south and central areas using 2000 aircraft, 6000 guns, 102 infantry divisions, 19 Panzer divisions, 14 motorized divisions, 5 special divisions and 1 cavalry division, featuring soldiers from Finland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Romania and Italy.

Oddly, the Luftwaffe had fewer than 500 fighters available for the east--less than half of what was used to invade the west. One explanation is that Hitler believed the Soviets didn't stand a chance against his air force. Strategically it did not make sense to tie up his Bf-109s in Russia when they were needed to fight the British. Besides, Hitler was confident enough in his ground forces that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. The Germans' plan was for Army Group North to move in from East Prussia through Lithuania and Estonia into Leningrad, with help from the Finns and Romanians in Finland. Army Group Center would attack from Poland through Belorussia towards Moscow in a double thrust. Finally, Army Group South started from Poland and invaded through the Ukraine to the Caucasus. The only thing that stood between the Germans and victory was the Soviets' 154 infantry divisions, 37 armored brigades and 25 cavalry divisions. The stage was set for the fiercest battles of WWII.

The first hours of the attack were a textbook example of the blitzkrieg as German planes destroyed the immobile Soviet tanks and planes and land forces captured vital bridges. Stalin actually told some border posts to be on combat alert, but he told them to be so discrete about it that it was extremely ineffective. In fact, they had strict orders not to fire, even if attacked first. When German border guards shot at Soviets without warning, Red Army commanders felt helpless because they had little to fight with as the Germans attacked fiercely. Often, Soviet soldiers could not "dig in" because they had no shovels. However, as the Germans pushed east, the front expanded until their forces became too spread out, allowing partisans and Red Army factions to penetrate German columns. The troops’ morale was further lowered by Hitler, whose constant interference put a strain on the commanders, even when victory seemed imminent. The Red Army was in chaos, as they tried to tell Moscow what was happening. Communication lines were often cut, and if they could get through, many Soviet officials refused to believe the attack. In fact, Stalin forbade a counterattack until 7:15 am, 3 hours after the invasion.

Soviet air defense was practically non-existent. During the first air strike, the Germans used 637 bombers and 231 fighters against the 31 known Soviet airfields. The damage on that first day was unimaginable--1200 Soviet aircraft, while the Germans only lost 35. In the 1930s, when Stalin stripped the VVS (Soviet Air Force) of its commanders to his liking, he ensured it would be the weakest link of homeland defense. The majority of servicable aircraft were terribly obsolete, and the newer aircraft had deficiencies that still needed to be worked out. Unfortunately for the Russians, Stalin's emphasis was on production instead of research, development and training. Inadequately trained Soviet pilots flying outdated aircraft could not hope to compete with superior German fighters, piloted by some with years of combat experience. Some brave Soviet pilots that were unable to shoot down German aircraft resorted to crashing into them, often at the cost of their own lives. Upon learning of the invasion, Stalin was shocked and essentially "crawled into a bottle" for the remainder of June while Molotov ran the show. When he regained his composure, he ordered an immediate retaliation, but did not want to cross into German territory in the hopes that the situation could be resolved without an all-out war.

In the following week, Soviet positions were knocked out one by one, and Stalin realized that this was going to be the end of the Russian people if he did not act out. When Mussolini found out about the invasion, he was also shocked and hurt that he was not included in it--he later convinced Hitler to take 60,000 of his troops. Guderian and Hoth were 60 miles south of Minsk and wanted to push further on 26 June, but Hitler feared Soviet breakout so he told them to link up at Minsk. Pavlov tried to attack the Germans, but when he did he left Minsk vulnerable and the Germans encircled division after division. Pavlov escaped the Germans, but when Moscow heard of the Red Army’s losses, he was executed by his own government. After the fall of Minsk, the Red Army remnants that were trapped in Guderian’s pincers were relentlessly hammered away. In a week the Soviets lost 22 infantry divisions, 7 tank divisions, 6 mechanized brigades, 1500 guns and 300,000 troops became POWs.

By July the Axis was 400 miles from Moscow. On 2 July, Stalin spoke to the people of the USSR on the radio for the first time, and many were shocked to hear from his accent that he was in fact, Georgian. Within the first 30 days, the Germans were within 125 miles of Leningrad, while von Bock's forces had plunged 480 miles into the USSR. Cities began to fall like dominoes: Pskov, Minsk, Vitebsk, Novgorod, Brest-Litovsk, Mogliev, and Smolensk on 17 July. The world gave the Soviet Union 6 weeks to live before the complete collapse of the state, while the German High Command issued the statement: "the issue in the East has already been settled; Smolensk is the last halt on the road to Moscow." Even with the obvious success of Barbarossa, Hitler did not target Moscow as the main objective. Rather, he made another mistake from his greater mistake by avoiding Moscow and attacking Leningrad to the north and the Crimean lands to the south, believing that the rest of the USSR would crumble after their capture. Here he was thinking too defensively by attempting to secure economic strength in the southeastern USSR and cut off the Soviets from the Baltic Sea by taking Leningrad. When his commanders told him this was an unwise plan he chided them by telling them they knew nothing of the "economics of war". But many German officials thought little of Hitler's blunder because they had wrongly assumed that the war was nearly over.

Hitler also made the tactical blunder of thinking it was more important to destroy the Soviets than make a quick and effective drive east. The Kiev offensive was a good example: the Red Army surrounding Kiev was destroyed and the Ukraine ultimately captured, but this German "overkill" took pressure off the Soviet units retreating from Army Group Center. This allowed them to fortify Moscow enough to repel the winter attack. Another problem with Germany’s attack was that there was simply too much space in between the 3 main fronts and no definitive plan of action. Additionally, the Soviets had far superior intelligence to the Germans, and usually knew when and where the Germans were, but had so few weapons and resources they could not match the attacks. There were also the unforseen problems faced by the Germans, like the Soviet roads that were too narrow, unpaved, or otherwise untraversable for German vehicles. General Rundstedt was dismayed to find that the roads marked "good" on German maps were really of poor quality. The few roads that were good, Rollbahns, were only used by top priority vehicles. The roads were dry and dusty, making any travel a pain, which was foreign to the Germans, who were used to the quality roads of western Europe.

This immobility continued with the Soviet railroads, which were unusable because they were of a different rail guage from western Europe and subsequently made it impossible to use German railcars. This put extra wear and tear on the German tanks, which hardly saw any rest during the opening months of Barbarossa. Even when the Germans had operating trains, they were always at the mercy of Russian partisans, or freedom fighters, who would attempt to derail the trains any chance they got. All this time, Hitler was constantly arguing with his Generals as to what steps the Wehrmacht should take to secure a victory in the east. However, the Germans' biggest problem was the Soviet reluctance to surrender. Much of this was due to the strict policies of Stalin, who pledged that any Soviet who gave up risked not only execution, but reprisals against his own family. The Germans were frustrated by the Soviets, who would pretend to be dead or wave a surrender flag, then shoot at the Germans when they approached them. This only increased the Germans' brutality many times over upon the Russian peoples.

THE SOVIETS' DARKEST HOUR
While the Russians could only look upon the invasion with sheer terror, the Ukranians saw it as a chance for freedom. Many Ukrainians loved the Germans because they both were rooted in Christianity, and the Communist ideology was atheistic. Western Ukrainians were especially welcoming, because the Soviets had stolen it in 1939 along with Poland, all but destroying Ukrainian culture and targeted the churches and wealthy. Thus it was a joyous day when German radio propaganda boasted the German advance would grant Ukrainian independence. Stalin had persecuted and starved them so much that when the Germans gave them back their churches, farms and government, naturally they fully supported the new German presence. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, Belorussians and other Soviet republics, they would soon find out that the Germans had only one plan for them: total exploitation. As soon as the Ukrainians re-established their government, the SS destroyed it and incarcerated their officials. The Ukraine was divided into quarters, with part going to the former Poland (now part of Germany), part going to Romania, and the rest was made Reichskommissariat Ukraine, under strict military rule. Yet this was only an inconvenience compared to the horror they would soon face.

The SS Einsatzgruppen targeted the Jews, then any Ukrainian suspected of siding against Germany, until no reason was needed to kill. On 29 and 30 September in Kiev 33,771 Jews were murdered by the SS, and over a half million Ukrainian Jews would later perish. Much like Poland, the Ukraine was purged of its native population through slavery and murder. The Communists were not much better, as they executed thousands of Ukrainians who sided with the Germans, or even those who were indifferent. As the Red Army retreated from the constant German attacks, they destroyed anything the Germans could use, regardless of whom it belonged to, leaving thousands of innocents with burnt fields and charred homes. As for the partisans, they were drawn into the Soviet cause because of German brutality. Many realized that they could not be neutral and that the Germans were not on their side, which created 30,000 partisans in the opening months of Barbarossa. Within a year that figure had swelled to 150,000. They received help from the Soviet High Command, who gave them supplies and even awarded medals for service, albeit on a limited basis. However, a partisan’s life was harsh: they survived off the land, endured sweltering heat in the summer and bitter cold in the winter, yet rarely found adequate medical care. Most were men but it was not unusual to see women and children, especially as the war progressed.

The Soviets’ problem was that they tried to attack everything, and in war if you attack everything, you attack nothing. There is also an old Russian saying that goes "try to catch many rabbits, and you catch none;" certainly fitting of the Soviets' counterattack. The Soviet method of defense was mono-dimensional: hold ground at all cost, which was an ineffective response to the German blitzkrieg style of war. This made it easy for the Germans to flank then surround the Red Army, resulting in enormous losses of men and machine for the Soviets. The capture of Vyazma brought 663,000 Soviet POWs, Gomel 84,000, Minsk 324,000 plus 3342 tanks and 1809 guns, and Smolensk 310,000 POWs plus 3205 tanks and 3120 guns. The Soviet military hierarchy was equally counterproductive because every command level required a Communist political officer called a Commisar, whose approval had to be met for every decision the unit made. Naturally this had disasterous results when the lightning quick blitzkrieg attacks warranted quick decisions on plans of action by Soviet commanders. The Soviets were often slaughtered, captured, or on the run before the Commisar's word had been handed down.

They had originally planned to make their defensive line around the Dnieper, but everything was horribly unorganized. Stalin refused to trade land for time and paid the price, yet he lived up to his namesake as a man of steel. His own son was captured by the Germans and when the Germans offered him in exchange for another prisoner, he declined the offer. He was such an influence on his Red Army he went so far as to play recordings of his speeches over loudspeakers as his soldiers fought to their deaths. The Germans were relentless, especially the SS, Hitler’s special military brigade that protected him and the Nazi party. Consequently, the SS was always well-armed, and they were ruthless against Soviet soldiers as well as civilians. They treated their POWs with the harshest brutality and contempt. Each day the Germans captured city after city, laying waste to everything in their path. In early July they massacred the Baltic peoples, especially the Jews, who suffered the most--the Einsatzgruppen's killing went on without delay. One such task force leader later confessed at the Nuremberg trials that his team of 500 men killed 90,000 Russians in the first year alone. In one case, the SS took 280 POWs, then shot them in a ditch. When they saw that the ditch still had room, they shot 30 more men, 23 of whom were skilled Polish laborers, working for the Germans.

Under Field Marshal Semën Timoshenko, the Soviets put up all their reserves against the Germans on 2 July. The southern front gave way to the Germans, forcing Kirponos to retreat and on 10 July Stalin gave Budënny control of the newly combined southern and southwestern group. However, on 15 July von Kleist took Berdichev and Kazatin, cutting off these two regions. The Soviets were now forced to withdraw in the Ukraine and Budënny had Kishinev evacuated and set up a defensive position around the Dniester river. The Soviets ill-conceived plan was to dig in, fight till the bitter end and evacuate, then repeat the process. Interestingly, by mid-July the Germans were ahead of their supply plans and had difficulty keeping up with their advances. They also feared the Soviet masses near the supply lines were a threat, when in reality they were either out of munitions, supplies or otherwise weak. In response to the German invasion, the US dispatched a team of Marines to Iceland as a means of security in Europe. Also, Britain vowed to give as much aid as possible to the Soviets, bombing Germany on 14 July to buy the USSR time. That year the Germans also began experimenting with their gas chamber agent, Zyklon-B on the hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs and Moscow was under attack from the Luftwaffe. By the end of July the Germans were 200 miles from Moscow and the Soviets began setting up defense lines in front to prepare for an invasion of their capital.

BRIEF STRUGGLE IN THE MID-EAST
In late April, 1941, after the 10th Indian division went into Iraq, the Prime Minister Rashid Ali protested and sent in his army to surround the British airbase. On 2 May the RAF bombed Iraq and over the next couple of weeks reinforcements were sent in, taking Baghdad and forcing Ali to escape to Iran. General Charles de Gaulle, representing the Free French, asked the British to invade Syria and Lebanon, who were under the Nazi-controlled Vichy government. The British sent an Australian division on 8 June towards Beruit, but a few days later the Vichy forces counterattacked, which slowed Allied advances. After heavy fighting and bombing, the Vichy forces pulled back and by the end of June a cease-fire agreement was reached. The Allies lost 4700 men but secured the valuable middle east. A month later they marched into Iran to help the failing Red Army, and a joint intervention was established. When Iran was invaded on 24 August, the Iranian Shah fought back, but quickly surrendered 4 days later. The capital city of Tehran was later occupied on 17 September.

THE CONTINUATION WAR
When Barbarossa started, Finland claimed neutrality, but would retaliate if their positions were attacked. When the Germans invaded Soviet land, naturally they did retaliate, so the Finns fought them alongside the Germans. This was called the "Continuation War" by the Finns, because it picked up where the Winter War left off. German General Dietl had the impossible task of advancing 60 miles up to the Soviet port of Murmansk in Scandinavia. By 4 July the Germans isolated Soviet forces on the Rybachi peninsula near Finland. Hitler then misinterpreted an Allied convoy in the Arctic as an invasion of Norway, so he redirected valuable troops there. As a result, Dietl was short-staffed and the Soviets began repelling the German attacks. On 17 July Dietl had to switch tactics to defensive maneuvers until reinforcements could arrive. Frustratingly, he was only 30 miles from Murmansk.

The next failed Axis attack on the USSR was from General Hans Feige on 26 July. He called it off 4 days later after only gaining 13 miles and losing 5,500 troops. Further south, the Finns were 40 miles into Soviet territory, but were stopped by the Soviets’ determined reinforcements. The Finns too were worn out so on 25 August they stopped to regroup. Still, the Germans were amazed at the Finns’ fighting skills and determination, and welcomed them in their ranks whenever possible. On 8 September Dietl got his reinforcements and resumed his attack. He fought for 2 weeks, but it was ineffective. On 18 September he called off his attack after taking 10,000 casualties and ordered his troops to dig in for the remainder of the winter.