Barbarossa

Throughout this series, I’ve been focusing on the smaller stories behind the big stories of World War 2 – one of mankind’s most defining event.  Little things that have been nearly lost to popular history; the myths behind things that popular culture and the government have told us about the war over the years.

But there’s nothing small about today’s piece.

It was seventy years ago today that the greatest single cataclysm in human history started.   It involved the most soldiers of any battle in history; seven million combatants on the first day, a total of 12 million men involved by the time winter fell, the first wave of a four year long battle that would involve tens of millions of soldiers, and leave tens of millions – 4-5 million Germans, over 25 million from the USSR, military and civilian.

The phase of the war that started on this date in 1941 – Unternehmen Barbarossa in German, for “Operation Barbarossa”, a reference to Friedrich the First, the Holy Roman Emperor who’d conquered northern Italy hundreds of years before  – was an attack by almost four million German soldiers and 3,500 tanks, on a front over a thousand miles wide.  It had three major objectives; in the north, seize the Russian approaches to the Baltic Sea at Leningrad, to forever safeguard the German coast from enemy naval attack; in the south, to take the agricultural heartland of Ukraine, and beyond them the oil fields of the Caucusus; in the center, the drive through the Russian heartland to Moscow to try to decapitate the Soviet government.

Every history book tells you that much.

Beyond that?  The four year war in the East reset the counter on “bloody” for all human history – so much, indeed, that it is incomprehensible to Americans today how bloody it was.  “The Eastern Front” had an air of menace on Hogan’s Heroes, an aura of Stalingrad and the frozen hell of the steppes and reek of death wafting over the taiga, which made trivial the fact that in four years, over 30 million people – soldiers, civilians, everyone – died.   There is no way to comprehend human numbers like that.

German soldiers accompany a tank across the steppe. As vaunted as were the mechanized Panzer divisions, most of Germany's military was horse-drawn, and could not keep up - a key part of the failure to take Moscow.

A smaller chunk?  OK – the casualties in Barbarossa – from June 22 to December 5, 1941, when the war entered its next phase, the hellish frozen stalemate at the gates of Moscow – totalled 1.2 million German and Soviet dead (including 800,000 that the Soviets would admit to; it was likely much higher).  Even taking the Soviets at their word, that’s more than the total of American dead from all of our wars in the past 236 years combined.  In under six months.  The Soviets suffered twice as many dead in these six months than the United Stated did in the entire war, and that’s just counting immediate, documented combat casualties; if you add in all the Soviet prisoners of war captured just during these six months that died in captivity, the Soviets lost three times as many people – by their own admission – as all the Americans that have died in every war in our history.

Soviet POWs march into captivity. 3 million Soviet soldiers were captured during Barbarossa. Less than 5% survived the war.

In six months.

And that was just the appetizer for the most intense orgy of bloodletting in human history – a war whose repercussions are still felt today; the historic wary paranoia of the Russians was supercharged; the horrors of the war turned the Germans from a warlike people to an exceedingly pacific one almost overnight, in historic terms.

And the machinery of the Holocaust?  The extermination camps of eastern Poland?  The invasion gave them cover (and charged interest in 1945, when trains that should have hauled supplies to the German Army were diverted to haul Jews around).

German soldier examines a dead Russian, and a blazing BT-7 tank.

But we had a long way to go to get to any of that.  By this time of the day, 70 years ago, the German Luftwaffe had destroyed 2,000 Soviet planes – many on the ground, shot up in long straight rows just like the Americans planes at Wheeler Field in Hawaii would be on December 7, only by the scores of hundreds rather than dozens – for a loss of 35 of their own.

Russian planes - Polikarpov trainers in this case - destroyed by a German dive bomber attack.

By the end of day three, nearly 4,000 Russian planes had been knocked out, and the Germans had complete air supremacy along the entire front.

The big story – that the Germans drove to the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, but were bogged down first by poor logistics, then by autumn rains, then finally a fearsome Russian winter.

German tanks and "half-track" personnel carriers roll past blazing Russian tanks and buildings.

All that’s well in the future.

Seventy years ago today, the biggest meatgrinder in all human history was teeing up with a vengeance.

23 thoughts on “Barbarossa

  1. I wonder what would have happened if Hitler would have treated certain areas like Ukraine as allies, instead of brutely ruling over them. He could have used them and their resources more productively. I’ve heard it said that same with the death camps. Instead of using all those resources to exterminate people, if he would have used everything in the war effort.

    We should be happy that his hatred of other peoples helped defeat the Germans.

  2. My son recently got interested in war movies and we were watching Enemy at the Gates (about a Russian and German sniper at Stalingrad, if you don’t know) when he asked who the good guys were.

    How the heck do you answer a question like that? The Germans who started the war and committed the Holocaust and numerous depravities in their occupied countries, or the USSR who surpassed the Germans in numbers of their own civilians killed and who treated their soldiers as simple canon fodder at best, and with incredibly inhumane cruelty at worst?

    I said they were both bad guys (and the movie makes quite clear that the USSR wasn’t exactly nice towards their soldiers), just one marginally worse than the other and that we should be glad they were fighting each other that fiercely and not combining against us.

  3. “Wars and rumors of wars”

    The 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history. More people died in the carnage of war in the 20th Century than in the 10 centuries that prceeded it combined.

  4. “Wars and rumors of wars”

    The 20th Century was the bloodiest century in human history. More people died in the carnage of war in the 20th Century than in the 10 centuries that precededed it combined.

  5. nerdbert;

    I saw that movie right after it came out. You are correct – Joseph Stalin and his field commanders, Nikita Kruschev and Georgi Zhukov the most notorious, sacrificed more men in frontal assaults than the Japanese did during all of WWII. Many people knew that the Japanese didn’t put much value on human life, but conveniently, the Russians during WWII and the Chinese during the Korean war, had equal views.

    I have spoken with local immigrants from the Soviet Union who heard stories from grandparents and in some cases, parents, that were in the thick of it. They were thrilled to get out of there, because the underlying current of Communism and its’ brutality is still there.

  6. Great post, Mitch. Very impressive. A couple, three of comments.

    I think that half-track in the final picture is actually a recon or observer (beobachter) model and not a personnel carrier.

    If Hitler had treated the Ukrainians better, that would certainly have changed things. For example, there were actually a couple of Ukrainian units formed to fight with the Germans and there would probably have been more. The Nazis would probably not have needed as many anti-partisan troops, or could’ve just used the “loyal” Ukrainians to perform this. OTOH, given all the other things the Nazis had against them, on this front and simply in general, the war was lost at the point they attacked France.

    My understanding is that Zhukov was a brilliant general, in the same class as Manstein, Rommel, or Guderian. I have never heard he was particularly bloodthirsty – as Russian/Soviet generals go. I think the human wave attacks, often used by the Soviets, were more in taking advantage of what one has to work with; they did the same with tanks. Besides, persons like Khrushchev were actually not generals, but commissars, intended to enforce discipline and, indeed, a form of political correctness, to ensure that those wave attacks went in one direction only, so to speak.

  7. Zhukov, from what I’ve read, was a very capable general at the least, but he was also an even better politician. He was much favored by Stalin and much of the battle of Berlin was managed by the Kremlin to allow Zhukov to claim credit for it. If anything, I’d put him in more in the “bearded” (or Russian) version of Montgomery mold than a Guderian.

    But Zhukov was also a bloodthirsty and brutal leader. He had a policy of having returned prisoners and families of captured prisoners in Leningrad shot, for example. And his treatment of his shock troops was infamous.

    And like most Soviet histories you have to be careful of what he claimed or was given credit for and what he actually did. What’s come out since the fall of the USSR has at best clouded Zhukov’s legacy and official history.

  8. Herbert Hoover went to Europe in the late 1930s. Hoover, being a Quaker, was a bit of a pacifist. He came home saying he hopes Hitler and Stalin go to war and destroy each other.

  9. treated certain areas like Ukraine as allies

    In a lot of areas, not just Ukraine, German forces were welcomed as liberators. However, Germans were brainwashed into Aryan race superiority over every other, especially slavic. It was not possible for them to treat anyone as allies from the idealogical point of view, especially not on the battlefield nor occupied territories. From the political point of view, to buy time, a la Ribbentrop/Molotov, no problem, but once hostilities started – animal instinct kicked in.

    treated their soldiers as simple canon fodder at best

    There was a reason why SS always trailed advancing forces. Just like for Soviets, German soldiers only had one direction they could go – forward. Retreat, neither for Russian nor German front line soldiers was a viable (literally) option.

  10. a couple of Ukrainian units formed to fight with the Germans

    Never on a front line, if I remember correctly.

  11. JPA…..would that be especially true with urban fighting? German army did pretty good on the wide open prairies (kind of like quick desert wars). But then they got bogged down in Stalingrad. They should have pulled out of Stalingrad and used these forces where they can win.

    But I suppose we should be happy about Hitlers screwups. I suppose a Nazi win in 1941-42 would have been worse than a Stalin win in 1945. At least in 1945 we had half of Europe under our (western democracies) control.

  12. I have never heard he was particularly bloodthirsty – as Russian/Soviet generals go.

    Absolutely the bloodiest and thirstiest. While he was a great tactician, he treated soldiers as numbers and nothing more. In a lot of battles he made sure to have more soldiers than opposition bullets.

    He was much favored by Stalin and much of the battle of Berlin was managed by the Kremlin to allow Zhukov to claim credit for it.

    Stalin did not favour anyone but himself. Zhukov was actually in a dog house for the first part of the war – it is actually amazing he was not killed by Stalin after the initial success of Barbarossa.

    As for Berlin, Stalin pitted Zhukov against Konev creating a competition on who will get there first. Zhukov won, but not until 100,000’s of Russian soldiers were dead trying to prove whether Zhukov’s or Konev’s dick was bigger.

  13. German army did pretty good on the wide open prairies (kind of like quick desert wars). But then they got bogged down in Stalingrad.

    Either one. SS was always watching German soldier’s back. Hitler and Stalin, actually, had very similar tactics. Imagine that, fascism = communism! Who would have thought.

  14. a Nazi win in 1941-42 would have been worse than a Stalin win in 1945.

    For me, personally, yes. I would not be here. For the rest of the world – one and the same. See above – fascism = communism.

  15. Zhukov, from what I’ve read, was a very capable general at the least, but he was also an even better politician.

    I have no doubt about this, considering Stalin’s bloodthirsty and irrational paranoia.

    I like the Monty comparison. Complete agreement.

  16. But then they got bogged down in Stalingrad.

    All armies get bogged down in big cities. That’s not unusual. My understanding is the Germans kept doubling down with their better/best troops in urban fighting while they had Rumanian/Italian troops on the flanks. It was the collapse of the flanks that trapped the 6th and guaranteed the Germans could only choose the speed with which they would lose in the east.

  17. There was a reason why SS always trailed advancing forces. Just like for Soviets, German soldiers only had one direction they could go – forward. Retreat, neither for Russian nor German front line soldiers was a viable (literally) option.
    Common practice in Continental armies in those days. Read Hemingway’s account of of the retreat from Caporetto in A Farewll to Arms. Anyone in the area of battle who was not clearly under the control of an officer was considered a deserter or spy and shot after a brief hearing.

  18. Stalin did not favour anyone but himself.

    He’s about the only person with less room under his bus than Obama.

    Zhukov was actually in a dog house for the first part of the war – it is actually amazing he was not killed by Stalin after the initial success of Barbarossa.

    Which was part of my implication about his political ability. He screwed up during the initial assaults (which he claimed was due to orders from above to counterattack). He got shuffled off to Leningrad, which was at best a bloody and poorly managed siege, but still managed to make it back into a top lead role as a trusted Stalin confidant.

    As for Berlin, Stalin pitted Zhukov against Konev creating a competition on who will get there first.

    I’ve heard that, too. But it was, in the end, Stalin who drew the lines between the two armies and it was Stalin who gave Zhukov the honor. As it turned out Konev would have won the race without the direct intervention of the Kremlin due to German deployment. Konev just wasn’t the (ahem) trusted Soviet man (cough) that Zhukov was at that time.

    Ironically, both Zhukov and Konev were both nearly executed by Stalin for losing battles early in the war which was one of the reasons they were more concerned about winning battles than losing troops. Not that there was ever much of a cultural concern for the common soldier despite all the propaganda the USSR put out, but both their histories reinforced that lack of concern.

  19. One of my pet peeves is people who treat communists in the US lightly. Almost affectionatly. The Minn Historical Society recently did an article on commie librarians in Duluth in the 1930s. I thought “great, let’s glorify the KKK next”. But the article was straightforward facts, not pro-communism.

    And the author shocked me. He/she actually noted the hyprocisy….that the pacifist/Hitler enabling commies in Duluth suddenly became pro-war after Hitler attacked USSR.

  20. As the saying goes: amateurs study tactics… professionals study logistics. The Germans were doomed before they even started by their inability to resupply.

    “And the author shocked me. He/she actually noted the hyprocisy….that the pacifist/Hitler enabling commies in Duluth suddenly became pro-war after Hitler attacked USSR.” – Where do you think that Orwell got the inspiration for “Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia, Winston” ?

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