Seventy years ago, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, in comparison to which the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i (to which Roosevelt’s quote refers) seems like a fart in a hurricane.
The world had for twenty years been sliding towards another World War. In Mein Kampf, published in the 1920s, Hitler formulated a programme for the future destruction of Soviet Russia. Capitalist (and pre-capitalist) ruling classes the world over supported the Nazis, recognizing in them a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’ — in the case of the US bourgeoisie this support was not only ideological (Joseph Kennedy, Prescott Bush) and financial (Henry Ford) but also practical (GM, Curtiss-Wright, Standard Oil, Chase National, IT&T).
In 1939, military talks between Britain, France and Russia to form an alliance against the Third Reich failed and, in order to buy some time for the USSR, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Even after he seized Poland in 1939, setting off the Second World War, Hitler did not risk an immediate attack on the Soviet Union. Rather, he decided to wait until the Anglo-French bloc was defeated. But on 23 November 1939 Hitler told a military conference, “We have a treaty with Russia. However, treaties are observed only while they offer advantages.”
In September 1940 the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan was forged and in December Hitler signed a Directive containing instructions for the invasion of Russia. A series of ruses was put into effect to cover preparations for the invasion — only partially successful, since the Finnish aggression of November 1939 had alerted at least some in the Soviet military to possible future events (Finland was a German ally and its hostility to the USSR, silently underwritten by both the US and UK, went back to the days of the Revolution).
Finally, on Sunday, 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany threw men and equipment against the USSR in unprecedented numbers — 190 divisions, over 4,000 tanks, almost 5,000 aircraft and more than 200 warships. Joining the attack were forces from Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Finland. A total of five million men took part in the blitz attack along the entire Soviet frontier that stretched some 5,986 kilometres. Such an invasion force had never been seen before in human history.
Defining his war aims, Adolf Hitler told a conference of German generals, “Russia is to be abolished.” The war, he said, was to be one of “annihilation.” On the fate of Moscow he did not mince words — the city and every single person in it were to be destroyed, and the site turned into a lake! The Nazis spoke with contempt about “lower orders” of people, an estimation that included the entire Soviet population of Slavs, Jews, gypsies and others — this is a view which many in ‘the West’ still hold, openly or covertly (I will return to this topic in discussing ‘the epidemic of Soviet rape’ on the march to Berlin).
The Nazi generals, conscious of their advantages and their quick victories in Poland and Western Europe, based their plans on the concept of Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, which had already been so successful. Above all they counted on the shattering effect that a surprise strike by massed armoured, air and infantry forces would have, and banked on an easy thrust into the USSR’s vital centres. The generals hoped that the entire campaign would last no more than thirty or forty days. American and British experts sided with the German estimates — the US Army’s General Marshal gave the Red Army no chance of escaping “total defeat within six weeks” while the Imperial General Staff of the UK gave the Soviets three months.
At first it seemed that nothing could withstand the ferocity of the German onslaught. But it soon became clear that even if the German armies would ultimately win, they would not do so with impunity. The Russians began preparing for a massive defensive campaign. In Moscow more than 500,000 citizens began to build fortifications in and around the city. Up to a dozen volunteer divisions and almost ninety combat battalions were formed. As Hitler’s armies pushed towards Moscow, more than forty partisan groups taking their orders from Moscow operated behind enemy lines, disrupting enemy logistics and communications and sometimes tying up large bodies of German troops.
Many in the Soviet military and civilian bureaucracy had realized that sooner or later Hitler would attack but the more perceptive knew that preparations for it were pitifully incomplete — that the Soviet armies, strong though they were, were not equal to the most prepared and powerful army ever assembled. Stalin apparently believed he had at least six more months of peace to strengthen his nation’s defences. In the spring of 1941 the USSR was feverishly striving to fulfil its Third Five-Year Plan (1938—42), building up industrial and military capacity. By the end of that year, military production had increased by over 400%.
Hitler had statistical superiority in the beginning. In early 1941 Germany had the manpower resources of 290 million people and the raw materials and industrial capacity of nearly the whole of Europe at its disposal. The Third Reich was capable of producing twice the quantity of metal, electricity and coal as the Soviet Union — when the invading armies occupied the USSR’s western areas, which accounted for over 40 per cent of its population, and more than half of its industrial output and a third of its food production, Germany’s advantages were even more glaring.
If, as its enemies claim, the Soviet Union’s military forces were being “controlled by fear of punishment,” or Soviet citizens living under a “brutal totalitarian regime,” this would have been the time when they could have defected in droves. Yet none did — in fact, the heroism and self-sacrifice of Soviet military and civilian personnel from all walks of life and from every ethnic group remained at a high level until the final victory.
When I speak of heroism in this context, I am thinking of the ‘Night Witches’ — young women mostly in their late teens or early twenties who flew wood-and-paper biplanes on bombing missions (often in the depths of the winter) to disrupt the Axis armies, and the pilots who rammed German aircraft to bring them down, a tactic you didn’t see in Memphis Belle. I am thinking of the snipers like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Vasiliy Zaitsev and Nina Lobkovskaya, and of Tatyana Baramzina, who was captured, ‘interrogated’ (tortured and raped), then had her eyes gouged out with a bayonet before being shot in the stomach at close range with an anti-tank gun and left to die. I am thinking of the partisans (like Zoya Kosmodemyanska, who, moments before her execution at the age of nineteen, said, “There are 200 million of us — you can’t hang us all!”), the medics, the tankists, machine gunners, soldiers, sailors and air-force personnel, and the inhabitants of Leningr. I am thinking of the Karelians Mariya Smirnova, Mariya Melyentova and Anna Lisitsyna, the Kazakhs Manshuk Mametova and Aliya Moldagulova, the Tatar Maguba Syrtlanova, the Pole Anelia Kzhivon, the Estonian Yelena Kullman and the Lithuanian Marija Melnikaite, the Cossack Trofim Negoduko, of Nur Sadykov, Botabai Suleimenov, Akaky Shevardnadze and the dozens of unknown soldiers from over thirty ethnic groups who died at Brest in the first moths of the war, of Jews and Roma and of the millions of Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians who gave their lives to bring an end to Fascism. And I am thinking of eleven-year old Tatyana Savicheva, the representative of half a million civilians who perished in the 900-day siege of Leningrad, keeping her diary until she no longer had the strength to do anything but die.
And yes, I am even thinking of Yakov Dzhugashvili — Stalin’s son — who threw himself onto the electrified fence of a POW camp rather than be a propaganda tool for the Nazis.
There were groups of disgruntled nationalists who fought for the Third Reich, but they soon learned that shifting their loyalties didn’t mean going up in the estimation of their new friends.
Taking advantage of their surprise attack and superior numbers — up to five to one in the sector of the main effort — Axis troops advanced up to 155 miles by the night of 25 June and 372 miles by 10 July. The leadership was triumphant. A little over a week later, Hitler endorsed a plan to reorganize the Wehrmacht for carrying out new tasks — future operations against Britain and (a vaunted target for the future) the USA.
There were however, some early bumps in the smooth German road. The stiff defence by the garrison of the frontierfortress of Brest — the ‘Hero Fortress’ — showed at the start that the USSR would not be an easy victim. German generals commented on the stubbornness and valour of the defenders, a circumstance that unsettled some who accepted the propaganda that Slavs were a “lower order” of species.
In a fierce battle at Smolensk (lasting from 10 July to 10 September) the Third Reich’s Army Group Centre — the force battering its way towards Moscow — suffered heavy losses. Greater losses were suffered by the Soviets — but at Smolensk for the first time since the war began the Wehrmacht was compelled, temporarily, to assume the defensive in its main line of advance. It was the first crack in the German armour.
By the beginning of the fourth month of the invasion the total losses in the invaders’ ranks exceeded 500,000 officers and men, whereas in the first two years of the Second World War the German armed forces had lost fewer than 300,000 troops in seizing nearly the whole of Europe. Although the Wehrmacht continued its successful drive in the summer of 1941, the Nazi High Command failed to reach its main objectives, failing to capture Leningrad and Moscow, or the oil resources of the Caucasus.
The fight-back gathered momentum until Victory Day on 9 May 1945.
In respect of the number of troops and weapons involved and the frontage of the attack, the Eastern Front was the main theatre of operations in World War II, the site of at least fifty major battles — Moscow (1941-42), Stalingrad (1942-43), Kursk (1943), Operation Bagration (1944), the Yassy-Kishinev Campaign (1944), the Vistula-Oder Operation (1945) and Berlin (1945). At different stages of the war the two sides had from eight to thirteen million troops, from 5,700 to 20,000 tanks and assault guns, from 6,500 to 18,000 aircraft and from 84,000 to 163,000 artillery pieces and mortars — at no time from the day of the invasion until the fall of Berlin did the armed forces of the USSR face less than 66% of the forces of the western members of the Axis.
So I mourn the US service personnel who died at Pearl Harbour (as I mourn all those who died in that horrendous conflict). But for the US to paint itself as the Ultimate Victim, for Hollywood to bombard the “Free World” with at least one movie/series per year telling us how much the US had suffered and dinning into us that the US had won WWII on its own, with the implication that the rest of us should be damned grateful? Bullshit!
