The Surprise German Attack on Russia

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On June 22,1941 Germany launched a surprise attack on Russia. Hitler announced “Soldiers of the eastern front an assembly of strength on a size and scale such as the world has never seen in now complete. The biggest front line in history is launched to save our entire European civilization and culture from the threat of bolshevism.”  With that surprise attack, Hitler tore up the endless codicils that marked the non-aggression pact between these behemoth totalitarian states. For six months the Russians suffered unprecedented catastrophes before halting with the help of the cruel winter weather the German onslaught. 

Between the Baltic and Black Sea, the German forces were arranged in three massive army groups, comprising seven armies, four Panzer groups, and three air fleets. Poised on the frontiers were some 3,200,000 men—148 divisions, including nineteen Panzer divisions and twelve motorized fighting vehicles, 7184 artillery pieces and 1830 aircraft. By comparison, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 landed a first wave of six sea borne divisions and three airborne, a grand total of nine divisions containing some 75,000 British and Canadian troops and 57,000 Americans, along a front of less than fifty miles, as opposed to one of nearly 1,000. 

The cost to the Soviet Union was enormous and unprecedented. At least twenty million Soviet citizens died, and a further twenty-five million were mutilated or crippled. Out of every hundred Soviet soldiers who went to the front, only three survived physically unharmed to the end.

Within forty-eight hours, 2,000 Russian aircraft had been destroyed most of them on the ground.  Many of the Russian planes were pegged down to prevent pilots from either fleeing Stalin’s brutal regime or posing as an armed threat to the regime. For the same reason ammunition was kept under separate control well away from the weapons it was intended for. 

On paper, the Soviet Union was militarily stronger than Nazi Germany. The size of the Red Army in June 1941 was 5,373,000 men, armed with over 67,000 field guns and mortars, 1,861 tanks, and over 2,700 combat aircraft. No fewer than 170 divisions with a total strength of 2,680,000 men armed with 37,000 guns and mortars, 14,75 tanks and 1,540 modern combat aircraft were stationed on the western frontier. The failure of the Soviet Union to halt the attack can be blamed on the door of Joseph Stalin, who was blind to the numerous signs of an impending attack. Stalin not only had spies killed who reported the impending invasion, but admonished his commanders not to take any action to encourage German transgression of the non-aggression pact, including reconnaissance missions. In failing to realize that Hitler worked on intuition rather than hard logic, Stalin made what was probably the most serious mistake of his career.

Moreover, Stalin with his savage purges has all but destroyed the Red Army as an effective fighting force with savage purges during 1937-8. The floodgates were open with the execution of Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant commander in the Red Army plus seven leading generals. Stalin accused these men of being traitors who strove to overthrow the soviet government.  Roy Medvedev, the pre-eminent Soviet historian, believes that some 400,000- 500,000 political and administrative leaders were shot between 1936-39. The total number of victims was some 4.5 million. These are estimates because accurate figures are not available. Most reliable sources indicated that some 35,000 officers were shot or sent to labor camps. At least half of the five marshals, thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, 220 our of the 406 brigade commanders, seventy –five of the eighty members of the supreme military council, including every single commander of a military district, and all eleven vice-commissars of war. The remnants of the Army officer corp. were inexperienced, disorganized and completely demoralized. The modernization and mechanization programs were utterly shattered.

Initially, Stalin seemed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He retreated to his dacha and issued few directives. Ultimately, he formulated an effective but costly campaign to slow down the German advance. He sought external military alliances with the Western powers, his former antagonists, and reorganized his populace into a total war machine. Moreover, Stalin effectively orchestrated the latent Russian patriotism to save the Motherland into frenetic activity capable of rebuilding their shattered armament capacity, even moving factories in Western Russia to safer areas in the hinterlands.