Barbarosa Essay, Research Paper
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