On this 75th anniversary of the German invasion of the
Soviet Union the Russians will once again remind the world that the Red Army
saved European civilisation as well as Russia from the Nazis
Seventy-five years ago Adolf Hitler launched the biggest and most destructive military campaign in history when three million German and allied troops invaded the Soviet Union along a 1,000-mile front.
Operation Barbarossa – the codename for the German invasion of Russia - was no ordinary military campaign: it was an ideological and racist war, a war of destruction and extermination that aimed to kill Jews, enslave the Slavic peoples and destroy communism. The result was a war in which 25 million Soviet citizens died, including a million Jews, executed by the SS in 1941-1942 – an action which became the template for the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. European Russia was devastated by the German invasion as 70,000 towns and villages were destroyed along with 98,000 collective farms, tens of thousands of factories and thousands of miles of roads and railways. During the war the USSR lost 15% of its population and 30% of its national wealth.
The attack on Russia was the climax of Hitler’s bid to
establish Germany as the dominant world power. That bid had begun with the
invasion of Poland in September 1939, followed by the German conquest of France
in June 1940. By 1941 the German war machine had conquered most of Europe as
country after country was invaded or forced to join Hitler’s Axis alliance.
In the west, only Britain, protected by the English
Channel and the strength of the Royal Navy and Air Force, remained defiant and
undefeated. In the east, the Soviet Union was the last remaining obstacle to
German domination of Europe.
The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had concluded a
non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939, together with a secret spheres
of influence agreement dividing Poland and the Baltic States between Germany
and the Soviet Union. This deal began to unravel in summer 1940 following the
defeat of France and Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. In November 1940
Stalin sent his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Berlin to re-negotiate
the Nazi-Soviet pact. But Hitler’s offer of a junior partnership in a global
coalition against Britain and the United States was rejected by Stalin. Shortly
after the Berlin conference Hitler issued the directive for Operation
Barbarossa.
The aim of Barbarossa was to conquer Russia in the
course of a single Blitzkrieg campaign. Hitler and his generals thought that it
would take only a few months to destroy the Red Army, capture Leningrad and
Moscow and occupy the western half of the Soviet Union along a line from
Archangel to Astrakhan. “The world will hold its breath,” said Hitler as he
reassured his generals that all they had to do was kick the door in and the
whole rotten structure of the Soviet communist system would collapse.
These ideological prejudices against the Soviet system
were reinforced by German perceptions that the Red Army had performed badly in
the Winter War with Finland in 1939-1940.
The spur for that war was Finland’s refusal to concede
territory the Soviets considered vital to safeguard the security of Leningrad.
Moscow expected an easy victory, but the initial Soviet attack on Finland in
December 1939 went badly wrong and the Red Army lost tens of thousands of
troops. After the Red Army regrouped, a second offensive forced the Finns to
accept an unfavourable peace treaty in March 1940.
The German military concluded, wrongly, that the Red
Army would be a pushover for the Wehrmacht. What the Germans did not appreciate
was that after the Finnish war the Red Army undertook a far-reaching
examination of its performance. The result was a series of military reforms,
including reinstatement into the armed forces of thousands of “suspect”
officers who had been purged by Stalin in the 1930s. So when Hitler attacked
the Soviet Union he faced a more experienced and formidable military force than
he had imagined.
On the day the invasion began – June 22nd
1941 - Hitler claimed that it was a response to Russian actions and
provocations. Nazi propagandists depicted Operation Barbarossa as a pre-emptive
strike against an imminent Soviet attack on Germany. By invading Russia Germany
was said to be protecting Christian Europe from the Asiatic barbaric hordes in
the east.
The myth that Germany fought a defensive war against the
Soviet Union persists in ultra-right political circles but there is no evidence
that Stalin contemplated starting a war with Germany in summer 1941. On the
contrary, Stalin was desperate to avoid war in order to secure as much time as
possible to complete Soviet defence preparations. While some Soviet generals
were inclined take action to pre-empt the coming German attack that was far too
adventurous for Stalin, who feared war, not least because he suspected the
British were plotting to realign with Germany and take part in an
anti-Bolshevik campaign against the USSR. These suspicions were reinforced by
the mysterious flight to Britain of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess in May 1941,
which Stalin interpreted as part of negotiations for an Anglo-German alliance.
By doctrine and tradition the Red Army was
offensive-oriented and it was planning to fight an offensive war against
Germany but only after Hitler attacked the USSR. Soviet preparations for war
revolved around plans for a counter-offensive in which the Red Army would
absorb the initial German attack and then launch counter-invasions of enemy
territory. There is no evidence that these plans had evolved into a more aggressive
strategy by summer 1941. Soviet preparations for war before 22 June 1941 were
consistent with a defensive posture.
At first all went well for Hitler as the German armies
advanced deep into Soviet territory, destroying everything that was thrown at
them and surrounding and capturing millions of enemy troops. As early as July
3, General Franz Halder, chief of the German army general staff, noted in his
diary: “On my part it would not be too bold to assert that the campaign against
Russia has been won in the space of two weeks.” By September, the Germans had
captured Kiev, surrounded Leningrad and were ready to advance on Moscow.
Halder’s triumphalism was a little premature and by
early August he was beginning to have doubts: “At the beginning of the war we
calculated there would be about 200 enemy divisions against us. But already we
have counted 360. If we destroy a dozen, the Russians present us with another
dozen.”
But it was not just inexhaustible reserves of manpower
that thwarted German plans for a quick and easy victory. Soviet defences did
not crumble completely. The Red Army fought back and conducted a tenacious
defence once it got over the shock and awe of the initial German attack.
In the Brest fortress on the border with German-occupied
Poland, 3,000 Soviet soldiers fought almost to the last man. Odessa, the Soviet
Navy’s main port on the Black Sea, held out for weeks against an attack by the
Romanian 4th army, while its sister port of Sebastopol fought on for another
year. Millions of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner, but tens of thousands
fought their way out of encirclement.
The Red Army did not defend passively; in line with its
offensivist ethos it launched numerous counter-attacks, often forcing German
forces to retreat and regroup. The Soviet defence of Kiev held up the German
advance on eastern Ukraine for nearly a month. So determined was the Soviet
defence of Leningrad that Hitler decided to lay siege to the city rather than
capture it by frontal assault. In the Smolensk area German and Soviet armies
fought for weeks to control the approaches to Moscow.
Hitler’s last chance to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941,
and thereby avoid a costly war of attrition, came in the autumn when he
attacked Moscow with more than a million men. By the end of November, advance
units of the German army could see the spires of Moscow’s Kremlin. But in early
December, the Red Army launched a counteroffensive that forced the Germans back
100 miles. For a while Stalin hoped to reverse Operation Barbarossa completely
and chase the Germans out of Russia altogether, but that proved beyond the
capabilities of the Red Army. Not until the end of 1942, with victory at
Stalingrad, did the war turn decisively in the Soviets favour.
Hitler’s inability to capture Moscow signalled the
strategic failure of Operation Barbarossa. Instead of a quick victory Germany
faced a long war of attrition on the eastern front – a struggle that it was
destined to lose now that Soviet Union was allied to Great Britain and the
United States.
When Germany invaded Russia, Winston Churchill, the
British Prime Minister, immediately declared his solidarity with Soviet Union
while US President Roosevelt authorised American aid to the USSR.
The Americans did not enter the conflict officially
until the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on
the United States in December 1941. This seemingly irrational decision by
Hitler was not as crazy as it appears in retrospect. By this time the United
States was de facto Britain’s ally and was protecting British convoys across
the Atlantic, ships laden with American supplies. Crucially, Hitler was still
confident of victory on the Eastern Front; the Germany army had stalled in
front of Moscow but the full power of the Soviet counter-offensive had yet to
be revealed.
Hitler’s decision to declare war on the Americans was
also intimately connected to the radicalisation of Nazi policy on the Jewish
question. Massacres of Soviet Jews had begun and before the war Hitler had
threatened that if there was another global conflict the Jews would all perish.
The outbreak of the Pacific War presented Hitler with an opportunity to fulfil
his prophecy. The European War was transformed by Hitler into a World War in
which the Nazis could pursue their genocidal goals. Shortly after, at
Heydrich’s Wansee conference in January 1942, it was decided to round-up
Europe’s Jews. Those who were able-bodied would be worked death in the German
was economy while the rest would murdered like their religious compatriots in
the Soviet Union.
Churchill and Roosevelt both feared the German invasion
would succeed. It is important to remember that the initial German successes in
Russia were not surprising given a battle-hardened army that had so easily
conquered Poland and France. Also working in the German favour was the factor
of surprise.
In his so-called secret speech to the 20th
congress of the Soviet communist party in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s
successor as party leader, attacked Stalin for allowing the Red Army to be
surprised by the German attack – a miscalculation that cost millions of lives
and brought the Soviet Union to the brink of defeat, or so it has been argued.
Actually, Stalin was not surprised by the German
invasion. It was self-evident that a German attack was coming. What surprised
Stalin – and his generals - was the weight and effectiveness of the initial
German attack.
Hitler’s attack had been signalled for months by the
build-up of German forces along Soviet borders. It is a myth that Stalin’s intelligence
officials told the Soviet dictator what he wanted to hear i.e. that Hitler was
intent on invading Britain and would not attack the Soviet Union until 1942.
For the most part they provided objective reports based on frontier
reconnaissance. These reports told the same story as political, diplomatic and
espionage sources – that the Germans were preparing to attack the USSR and
would do it very soon.
Stalin was well aware the Red Army would suffer some
damage if it was not fully mobilised when the Germans chose to attack. The
important point to grasp was that Stalin believed that it did not matter if the
Red Army was surprised because he expected Soviet defences to hold and to buy
enough time for the preparation of counterattacks.
Stalin’s view was perfectly understandable. Three
million troops guarded strongly fortified Soviet frontiers. Soviet preparations
for war were as extensive as those of the Germans and these defences gave
Stalin the confidence to gamble on delaying war with Hitler, even if that meant
flying in the face of mounting intelligence of an imminent German attack.
Hence, Stalin held back the Red Army’s full mobilisation until the very last
moment.
“Mobilisation means war,” Stalin told his chief of
staff, General Georgy Zhukov, reminding him that Tsar Nicholas’s mobilisation
of the Russian Army during the July Crisis had precipitated war with Germany in
1914.
Stalin’s illusions about the strength of Soviet defences
were shared by his generals, who were as shocked as he was by the success of
the initial German attack. Zhukov’s efforts to implement plans for
counteroffensive action in the days after 22 June made the situation worse by
making the Red Army’s forward units even more vulnerable to German
encirclement. Most Soviet losses in the early weeks and months of the war were
the result of massive encirclement operations by the Germans, such as those at
Minsk in June 1941 and Kiev in September 1941.
Importantly, the Red Army had no doctrine or training to
deal with encirclement. Soviet soldiers did not know whether to stand and fight
or to attempt a break out. It is the failure of military doctrine and
preparation which explains the catastrophe that befell the Red Army on 22 June
1941 not the factor of surprise. To be sure, this was Stalin’s failure but it
was not his alone. The Soviet generals shared the responsibility – a fact they
tried to cover up by blaming Stalin for the disaster.
Eventually, the Red Army learned how to defend
effectively, but not before it had suffered astronomical casualties. By the end
of 1941 the Red Army had lost nearly 200 divisions in battle and suffered a
stunning 4.3 million casualties. The armed force constructed by the Soviets in
a decade of mobilisation had all but been destroyed.
The Germans suffered, too, losing nearly a million
soldiers by the end of 1941 – casualties far higher than those they had
suffered in Poland and France. Because of these losses Barbarossa was the
Wehrmacht’s first and last multi-pronged strategic offensive in Russia. When
the Wehrmacht resumed the offensive in summer 1942 it was along a single
strategic axis – a southern campaign to capture the oil fields at Baku – which
supplied 90% of Soviet oil..
It was Hitler’s war for oil that led to the most
important battle of the Second World War – the fight for Stalingrad in the
autumn of 1942. Defeat at Stalingrad was the point of no return for the
Wehrmacht. With the encirclement and destruction of the 6th army in
Stalingrad the Red Army seized the strategic initiative and thereafter inflicted
defeat after defeat on the Germans all the way to the capture of Berlin by
Zhukov in May 1945.
On this 75th anniversary of the German invasion of the
Soviet Union the Russians will once again remind the world that the Red Army
saved European civilisation as well as Russia from the Nazis. True, the Soviets
did not win the war on their own, but in alliance with Britain, the US and
other allies. As the old saying goes, the British gave time, the Americans gave
money and the Soviets gave their blood to defeat Hitler. But, as Churchill
said, it was the Red Army which tore the guts out of Hitler’s war machine.
During the war the Red Army destroyed 600 enemy
divisions – Finnish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Spanish and Italian as well as
German. Among the Axis losses were 48,000 tanks, 167,000 artillery pieces and
77,000 aircraft. Germany incurred 10 million military casualties including
three million dead on the Eastern Front. This represented 75% of Germany’s
total losses during the Second World War.
After the war surviving German generals claimed they had
lost to the Red Army because it had more troops and resources and was better
adapted to the weather and terrain of Russia. Hitler was also a convenient
scapegoat for Nazi Germany’s defeat by a supposedly barbarian and backward
nation. His generals declared Hitler to be a poor supreme commander whose
strategic errors had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Conveniently,
these same generals forgot the bad advice they gave to Hitler. In relation to
the Wehrmacht’s role in the Holocaust they were even more forgetful.
In truth, the German-led forces lost to an army that was
better as well a bigger: an army with superior arms, strategy and leadership.
Stalin was a far better Supreme Commander than Hitler. The Soviet dictator did
not seek to dominate his generals. He did not always take their advice but he
learned from their military professionalism and strove to create a coherent and
effective high command.
Stalin made as many mistakes as Hitler but he learned
from them as did the Red Army as a whole. During the war the Red Army developed
into a highly effective learning organisation. The experience and lessons of
combat and command were assiduously collected, analysed and disseminated. The
Soviets kept command structures, force organisation and military doctrine under
constant review. Meanwhile, military technology improved steadily and the
Soviets made good use of the thousands of tanks, planes and trucks supplied by
their western allies.
It is sometimes said that the Soviet victory over Nazi
Germany was pyrrhic — a victory won at too great a cost. But much worse would
have been the alternative of a triumphant Nazi empire in Europe that would have
destroyed western democracy as well as Soviet socialism and completed Hitler’s
genocide of the Jews.
Geoffrey Roberts is Professor of History at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the
author of Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War (2008) and Stalin’s
General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (2012)
Source: Russia Insider 20-06-2016
