Barbarosa
On the night of June 22, 1941, more than 3
million German soldiers, 600 000
vehicles and 3350 tanks were amassed along a
2000km front stretching from the
Baltic to the Black Sea. Their sites
were all trained on Russia. This force was
part of 'Operation Barbarossa',
the eastern front of the greatest military
machine ever assembled. This
machine was Adolf Hitler's German army. For Hitler,
the inevitable assault on
Russia was to be the culmination of a long standing
obsession. He had always
wanted Russia's industries and agricultural lands as
part of his Lebensraum
or 'living space' for Germany and their Thousand Year
Reich. Russia had
been on Hitler's agenda since he wrote Mein Kampf some 17
years earlier where
he stated: 'We terminate the endless German drive to the
south and the west
of Europe, and direct our gaze towards the lands in the
east...If we talk
about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think
primarily only of
Russia and its vassal border states'. Hitler wanted to
exterminate and
enslave the 'degenerate' Slavs and he wanted to obliterate their
'Jewish
Bolshevist' government before it could turn on him. His 1939 pact
with
Stalin was only meant to give Germany time to prepare for war. As
soon as Hitler
controlled France, he looked east. Insisting that Britain was
as good as
defeated, he wanted to finish off the Soviet Union as soon as
possible, before
it could significantly fortify and arm itself. 'We only have
to kick in the
front door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling
down'ii he told his
officers. His generals warned him of the danger of
fighting a war on two fronts
and of the difficulty of invading an area as
vast as Russia but, Hitler simply
overruled them. He then placed troops in
Finland and Romania and created his
eastern front. In December 1940, Hitler
made his final battle plan. He gave this
huge operation a suitable name. He
termed it 'Operation Barbarossa' or 'Redbeard'
which was the nickname of the
crusading 12th century Holy Roman emperor,
Frederick I. The campaign
consisted of three groups: Army Group North which
would secure the Baltic;
Army Group South which would take the coal and oil rich
lands of the Ukraine
and Caucasus; and Army Group Centre which would drive
towards Moscow. Prior
to deploying this massive force, military events in the
Balkans delayed
'Barbarossa' by five weeks. It is now widely agreed that this
delay proved
fatal to Hitler's conquest plans of Russia but, at the time it did
not seem
important. In mid-June the build-up was complete and the German Army
stood
poised for battle. Hitler's drive for Russia failed however, and the
defeat
of his army would prove to be a major downward turning point for Germany
and
the Axis counterparts. There are many factors and events which contributed
to
the failure of Operation Barbarossa right from the preparatory stages of
the
attack to the final cold wintry days when the Germans had no choice but
to
concede. Several scholars and historians are in basic agreement with the
factors
which led to Germany's failure however, many of them stress different
aspects of
the operation as the crucial turning point. One such scholar is
the historian,
Kenneth Macksey. His view on Operation Barbarossa is
plainly evident just by the
title of his book termed, 'Military errors Of
World War Two. Macksey details the
fact that the invasion of Russia was
doomed to fail from the beginning due to
the fact that the Germans were
unprepared and extremely overconfident for a
reasonable advancement towards
Moscow. Macksey's first reason for the failure
was the simply that Germany
should not have broken its agreement with Russia and
invaded its lands due to
the fact that the British were not defeated on the
western front, and this in
turn plunged Hitler into a war on two fronts. The
Germans, and Hitler in
particular were stretching their forces too thin and were
overconfident that
the Russians would be defeated in a very short time. Adolf
Hitler's
overconfidence justifiably stemmed from the crushing defeats which his
army
had administered in Poland, France, Norway, Holland, Belgium and
almost
certainly Great Britain had the English Channel not stood in his
way.iv Another
important point that Macksey describes is the lack of hard
intelligence that the
Germans possessed about the Russian army and their
equipment, deployment
tactics, economic situation and communication networks.
They had not invested
much time and intelligence agents in collecting
information from a country which
was inherently secretive by nature and kept
extremely tight security. He also
states that it was far from clever that the
General Staff officer in charge of
collecting information about the Soviet
Union had many other duties, was not an
expert on Russia or the Red Army and
he couldn't even speak Russian.v Therefore
it was hardly surprising that the
only detailed intelligence reports concerned
the frontier regions of Russia
that were frequently patrolled by German patrols
and spied upon by airborne
reconnaissance. These were the products of
over-confidence. The German army
plunged into Russia under the impression that
there were 200 Russian
divisions in total; only to discover in the following
months that there were
360 and this figure was later revised to over 400
divisions. The Germans also
knew that the Russian roads were inferior for their
vehicles and that the
Russian railway tracks were of a different size than what
they were using
yet, no department or planning logistics ever took these factors
into account
before the invasion took place. Before the German army was poised
to strike
towards Moscow, one of the vital units of Operation Barbarossa was
diverted.
Army Group South, which was to secure the Ukraine and Romania was
partly
diverted to join in the theatres of battle in the Balkans and
the
Mediterranean. Initially, the Army Group South had been safeguarded
by Hitler as
he used power diplomacy instead of force to take Hungary,
Romania and Bulgaria
into the German fold yet, now he was unwittingly using
these countries as a
spring board for the diplomatic takeover of Yugoslavia
and an invasion of
Greece. At the same time, two mechanized divisions
know as the Africa Corps (Lt.General
Erwin Rommel) were sent to Tripoli
to help the defeated and panicking Italian
Army in North Africa, and
later, a costly invasion of the island of Crete would
further detract from
the German effort because of the heavy losses suffered by
thousands of elite
troops. These deployments were significant because each
expansion to the
south was a subtraction from the troops of Barbarossa as well
as a cause of
delay in its execution. This troop subtraction was brought to
alarming levels
when the British, through diplomatic intrigue, managed to ins
tigate a coup
d'etat in Yugoslavia which overthrew the government and canceled
out the
agreement the country had with the Germans for unresisted
submission.
With every indication that British bombers and troops would
be within range of
Romania and the Barbarossa supply lines, a major
invasion of Yugoslavia as well
as Greece had to take place at short notice.vi
This invasion however
distracting, added fuel to Hitler's confidence when his
forces conquered both
Yugoslavia and Greece in a matter of weeks, but,
these delays would eventually
prove costly as the unprepared and poorly
supplied German troops marched on
towards Moscow. While Macksey gives several
valid reasons for the failure of
Barbarossa before the action is
conducted, other historians stress the fact that
the operation failed due to
the Russian peoples tenacity and the harsh weather
and terrain conditions
during the invasion. They do not agree that the attack
was doomed from the
start as Macksey contests. For example here are reasons why
other’s feel the
operations wasn’t doomed from the start. The first was the
ferocious fighting
zeal of the Russian troops. This fighting spirit had little
to do with the
communist regime's inspiration but with the fact that the Russian
people had
been so used to intimidation and suffering under Stalin's iron fist
that they
had absolutely nothing to lose by fighting to the death, particularly
if your
only alternative was to be executed by your own government for
treason.
When Stalin addressed his people, he spoke to them as fellow
citizens and
brothers and sisters and not with the demands of obedience and
submission which
was commonplace in earlier times. He spoke of a 'national
patriotic war...for
the freedom of the motherland' and he initiated his
scorched earth policy which
would not leave 'a single railway engine, a
single wagon, a single pound of
grain, for the enemy if they had to retreat.
His staunch and often suicidal
determination was unnerving and it had a
negative effect on their fighting
morale. Stories of this Russian tenacity
spread widely among the Germans. Tales
of Russian fighter pilots who wouldn't
bail out if shot down but would crash
into German fuel trucks; of tanks that
were on fire but the burning troops
driving would press on into battle. It
was said that Russian women had even
taken up arms and that troops would find
pretty teenage girls dead on the
battlefield still clutching weapons. The
Germans started to complain about
Russians who were fighting unfairly.
They said soldiers would lie on the ground
and pretend they were dead and
then leap up and shoot unsuspecting Germans who
were passing. Or they would
wave white flags of surrender and then shoot the
soldiers who came to capture
them. Having heard these actions, many Germans
would kill anyone who tried to
surrender. These tales became battlefield horror
stories and raised the wars
already high level of hatred and barbarity. Hitler
wrote to Mussolini shortly
after the invasion and said: " They fought with
truly stupid
fanaticism...with the primitive brutality of an animal that sees
itself
trapped" As a result, in the opening weeks of Barbarossa the Germans
lost
some 100 000 men which was equal to the amount lost in all their
previous
campaigns so far. Another significant factor was the fact the
Russian troops
were well aware of the advantages they had in their climate
and rugged terrain.
Excellent examples of this are in the dense Forests
of Poland and the soggy
lands of the Pripet Marshes. No German tanks could
operate in these hazardous
areas and there was ample cover for small groups.
Russian infantry would
superbly camouflaged themselves and infiltrate the
German positions through the
forests and they even displayed their
resourcefulness by communicating to each
other by imitating animal cries.
They would dig foxholes and dugouts which
provided a field of fire only to
the rear and when the unsuspecting German
infantry walked pass them , the
Russians would pick them off from behind. In
open battle, the Russian people
would devise ingenious weapons with what little
resources they had available.
They made 'Molotov cocktails' which were flammable
liquid in bottles which
were lit and thrown at German tanks. The glass would
break and the flaming
liquid would flow into the tank and ignite the interior.
Combined with
the willingness to fight at any odds and the intimate knowledge of
their own
terrain it is plain to see that the Russian were definitely not going
to fall
as easily as Hitler had first thought. Besides the brutal tenacity of
the
resistance, Germany had another problem, the climate. In the summer of
1941,
the Ukraine was suffered a scorching summer which saw a large amount
of
rainfall. In the intense heat, the German tank tracks ground the baked
earth to
powdery fine dust which clogged machinery, eyes and mouths and made
it hard for
troops to function. When it rained, it brought short relief to
the heat but, the
roads turned into axle-deep mud paths that halted all
movement while horses got
stuck in mud and troops had their boots sucked
right off them only to stay in
the ground. Thousands of vehicles had to be
left as they were because they ran
out of fuel to get out of the mud and the
supply paths were choked as well.
These road conditions combined with
partisan forces behind German lines stifled
supply lines by destroying
railway tracks and making all kinds of re-armament
and food delivery
impossible. While the Germans were being delayed and they
struggled to get a
solid foothold, figuratively and literally, in Russia, the
months passed by
and eventually gave way to the harsh "general winter" which
froze everything
to the core. As Germany pressed on towards Moscow, the cold
weather really
took its toll. All too often the Germans didn't have enough
supplies to
survive let alone fight. Some units only had about 1/4 of their
ammunition
while shipments of coats used to combat the cold, only provided 1
coat per
crew. The food supplied was often frozen solid in the -40(C cold and
one
night spent by German soldiers in their nail studded boots and metal
helmets
could cripple a man for life. Machine guns froze, oil turned thick,
batteries
died and vehicle engines had to be kept running which wasted
precious fuel
supplies. One German officer wrote home to his wife: "We have
seriously
underestimated the Russians, the extent of the country and the
treachery of the
climat! e...th is is the revenge of reality." At this stage,
the Russians
had the obvious advantage. On December 5 1941, with troops that
were used to the
cold weather all their lives and had the proper clothing to
stay outdoors for
days on end, the Russians counter-attacked along a 960 km
front and had great
success. The "do-or-die" Russian troops would send out
groups of darkly clad
men to sacrifice themselves and draw German fire while
white-clad, camouflaged
Russian troops would come in along the snow and
attack. While the German
suffered great losses, they were able to hold on to
key towns that they had
previously occupied and the war in Russia swung back
and forth. As the front
settled into a stalemate, the Red Army could be
satisfied with what it had
accomplished. Despite the numerous defeats it had
suffered in the early part of
the invasion, Russia had managed to somehow
survive, pulling back and regrouping
long enough for the German Army to
overextend itself and allow the winter to
take its toll. It is said that
hindsight is 20/20, and it is simple to point out
the many factors which led
to the failure of Barbarossa and we can see that
Macksey and other’s all
had valid points but they just emphasized different
aspects and time frames
which all fit together to construct a much larger
picture. It is fair to say
that not one particular circumstance contributed to
the failure but, a
culmination of all the events mentioned. Hitler truly was
confident that the
delay in launching the invasion was of no consequence and he
had no way of
knowing just how fiercely the Russians would oppose him. The
combination of!
these factors led to the failure. Near the end, Moscow and
Leningrad had
been saved, and enough reinforcements had been scraped together to
enable the
Red Army to go on the offensive. Operation Barbarossa had been
halted, and
the myth of German military invincibility had been
shattered
forever.
Bibliography
Macksey, Kenneth, "Military
Errors Of World War II", Stoddard
Publishing Co., Ontario, Canada, 1987
Bethell, Nicholas, "Russia
Besieged", Time-Life Books, Canada, 1977 pg.
72