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....
The Cold War and an understandable pride in our own achievements during World War II has tended to mask the contributions the Soviet Union made to the Allied victory. But what Russia brought to the alliance was clearly understood at the time. Churchill, who despised Stalin and was keenly aware of the threat Communism posed to the free world, was once called to account for his support of the Soviet Union in World War II. He replied, “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Roosevelt, meanwhile, never forwent an opportunity to materially and morally prop up the Soviets and “Uncle Joe,” as he naïvely referred to Stalin. Simply put, Britain and the United States were only too happy to see Europe’s two great totalitarian powers bleed themselves white on the plains of Central Europe....