{"id":16615,"date":"2011-06-22T16:00:28","date_gmt":"2011-06-22T22:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=16615"},"modified":"2011-06-22T15:56:04","modified_gmt":"2011-06-22T21:56:04","slug":"barbarossa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=16615","title":{"rendered":"Barbarossa"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Little\u00a0things 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.<\/p>\n

But there’s nothing small about today’s piece.<\/p>\n

It was seventy years ago today that the greatest single cataclysm in human history started. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The phase of the war that started on this date in 1941 – Unternehmen Barbarossa<\/em> in German, for “Operation Barbarossa”, a reference to Friedrich the First, the Holy Roman Emperor who’d conquered northern Italy hundreds of years before \u00a0– was an attack by almost four million German soldiers and 3,500 tanks, on a front over a thousand miles wide. \u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n

Every history book tells you that much.<\/p>\n

Beyond that? \u00a0The four year war in the East\u00a0reset the counter on “bloody” for all human history – so much, indeed, that it is incomprehensible to Americans today how bloody it was. \u00a0“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. \u00a0 There is no way to comprehend human numbers like that.<\/p>\n

\"\"

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. <\/p><\/div>\n

A smaller chunk? \u00a0OK – 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). \u00a0Even taking the Soviets at their word, that’s more than the total of American dead from all <\/em>of our wars<\/a> in the past 236 years combined. \u00a0In under six months. \u00a0The Soviets suffered twice as many <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Soviet POWs march into captivity. 3 million Soviet soldiers were captured during Barbarossa. Less than 5% survived the war.<\/p><\/div>\n

In six months.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And the machinery of the Holocaust? \u00a0The extermination camps of eastern Poland? \u00a0The 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).<\/p>\n

\"\"

German soldier examines a dead Russian, and a blazing BT-7 tank. <\/p><\/div>\n

But we had a long way to go to get to any of that. \u00a0By this time of the day, 70 years ago, the German Luftwaffe <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Russian planes - Polikarpov trainers in this case - destroyed by a German dive bomber attack. <\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

German tanks and "half-track" personnel carriers roll past blazing Russian tanks and buildings.<\/p><\/div>\n

All that’s well in the future.<\/p>\n

Seventy years ago today, the biggest meatgrinder in all human history was teeing up with a vengeance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Little\u00a0things 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ww2-fact-and-myth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16615"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20688,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16615\/revisions\/20688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}