Jim Lacey: Operation Barbarossa
Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He is the author of the recently released The First Clash and Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The opinions in this article are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.
Seventy years ago today the two most vile systems the world has yet produced locked themselves in a deadly embrace. Along an 1,800-mile front, 4.5 million soldiers of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its allies commenced Operation Barbarossa, launching themselves against Stalin’s Communist regime. At the time, not many gave the Soviet Union much chance of survival, and the results of the first few months of fighting seemed to bear out those estimations.
By early December, German forces had surrounded Leningrad and pushed deep into the Ukraine; men in one of the German infantry divisions could see the spires of Moscow’s churches. The Soviets had lost at least 802,000 killed, 3 million wounded, and another 3.3 million captured. These 7 million losses, in just the first months of a war that would last four years, were double the number of troops German intelligence had reported the Soviets possessed at the start of the war. They also represented over seven times America’s killed and wounded during all of World War II. But the Germans paid a steep price for their initial successes, with over three-quarters of a million of their own men dead or wounded.
By late fall, the Soviet Union seemed to be on its last legs, and those were wobbly. At one point early in the invasion, Stalin, “the man of steel,” had a nervous breakdown. When a group of party officials came seeking his guidance, he cowered, believing that they had come to execute him for his mishandling of the war. But the Germans and the rest of the world had underestimated Soviet recuperative powers. As the old adage goes, “Russia is never as strong as she looks; nor as weak as she looks.” Through a superhuman effort the Soviets picked up most of their major industries, put them on trains, and moved them to the other side of the Ural mountains, where they spit out tens of thousands of tanks, cannons, and aircraft. Moreover, a first-class spy network informed Stalin that the Japanese were not going to attack Siberia, allowing him to reinforce his beleaguered forces on the western front with 14 crack Siberian divisions. Finally, by early December, the greatest of all Russian generals had arrived at the front — General Winter...