Hitler and Mussolini
Photo Source:National Archives

During World War II, one of the most significant events that took place as far as the outcome of the war was operation Barbarossa. Basically, Operation Barbarossa or Unternehmen Barbarossa as it was known in Germany, was a double cross by the Nazis of their Soviet Union ally. It was named after the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a crusader leader in the 12th century. This plan caused Germany to have to divert precious manpower from the western front to the eastern front. This forced the Nazis to have to fight on two fronts at the same time. Not only was this a terrible tactical decision, but one that went against history. Napoleon had marched into Russia against, what he thought, was an impotent Emperor and lost almost his entire army. The French Grand Army or Grande Armee was composed of about 771,500 men when reserves are counted and only about 22,000 men survived. There are some historians that claim 40,000 survived and others that state that only 5,000 did, but I used, what I think is the most accepted number. That was less than 3% of the army. The Soviet Union's winter and lack of sufficient clothing and supplies was the army's biggest enemy. The Russians had used a policy of scorched earth to burn any food supplies that the French Army could have used. As the French died off it became relatively easy to defeat their weak and small numbered force. The French army had captured Moscow, but to their surprise the Russians had stripped the city of anything edible. Most of the population of the city had fled. This should have shown future generations that the Soviet Union does not give up easily.

One would think that Hitler would have known what happened to the French and taken this into account, also his generals must have advised him of the folly of fighting on two fronts. Maybe they weren't forceful enough because of their fear of being shot? In any event, no one could accuse Hitler of being a tactician. As a matter of fact, there are numerous cases where German military officers would not make a move on their own for fear of his wrath, even if a situation needed an immediate decision. So why did the Germans want to attack the Soviet Union? The entire move was based on distrust. Even though the Soviet Union and Germans were allies, neither one really trusted the other. The Germans felt that the Soviet Union was just buying time to prepare their forces to attack them. The Soviet Union felt that it was only a matter of time before the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. This was not a very solid platform to base an alliance on. The alliance was known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet Union and Germany had become strong trading partners under this pact and the Soviets were supplying Germany with oil and raw materials and the Germans supplied the Soviets with technology. So attacking the Soviet Union cut off Germany's Soviet oil and ores. This was another reason not to do it. The Germans thought that the Soviet army would be weak since it had been purged of many of its best officers by Stalin a few years before.

One has to realize the scope of this operation. Over 4 million men were moved to the Soviet border. That was men who could have been used in Europe. So what did Hitler tell Stalin when he made this move? I find this almost unbelievable, but he told Stalin that he did this to make the British think that he was going to invade the Soviet Union and Stalin seems to have bought it, of course once the German army actually crossed into Soviet territory then Stalin realized what was really going on. To back the lie up, the Germans launched some false operations to make it appear that this was true.

When Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union, guess what the German high command began to study? Why it was the historical records of Napoleon's Russian invasion. It may not have occurred to Hitler to check them over before making an invasion decision, but now he insisted that the high command not repeat those mistakes. What kind of a country was the Soviet Union before the German invasion? In one word, strong. It had an industrial output that was second only to the U.S. and about the same as Germany. There were about 5 million men in the Soviet armed forces before the war. There were more Soviet troops in the area than invading German troops. The Soviets had far more tanks, as a matter of fact they had over 24,000. Their T-34 tank was said to be the most advanced tank in the world at the time of the invasion and their tank force outnumbered the invading Germans by 4 to 1. The Soviet aircraft were mostly far more modern than the German aircraft. The Soviets had many, many more artillery pieces, some say as many as 10 the number the Germans had. About the only thing in the German army's favor, was their better trained soldiers and officers and superior small arms. Another problem for the Soviets was that the army was in a peace time status with their assets very vulnerable by air attack. The other down side to the Soviet army at the time was that it need equipment and had many incompetent officers.

The Soviets moved huge amounts of forces up to their border just in case the Germans did invade, but they were too static. Near the end of June, 1941 the Soviets had almost 3,300,000 men on their border. The Germans had about one million more. Now, one has to remember this was not the entire Soviet military, there were millions more. The Soviet force had over 15,500 tanks, almost 60,000 cannons and mortars and almost 11,000 aircraft. The Germans had a little over 4,000 tanks, over 42,000 cannons and mortars and almost 5,000 aircraft. On June 22, 1941 the Germans were ordered to begin their invasion. It is calculated that of all the German forces available at the border about 3,000,000 actually invaded the Soviet Union. On paper the Germans looked to be the weaker power. One factor in favor of the Germans was that they also had about 1/2 million foreign troops supporting them from Hungary, Slovakia, Italy and Romania. The invasion was said to be a complete surprise. The Germans had taken out the Soviet ammo dumps and almost everything of strategic value and the Soviets were almost out of ammo. The Germans overran them, but not without a fierce battle in the south that saw a 1,000 tank attack by the Soviets that caused heavy loses upon the German Army there even though, eventually, it got through the Soviet defenses.

The Germans Army Corps was now told by Hitler to reach Moscow. There was only one problem, it had 6 Soviet armies between it and its objective. The Soviets threw 700 tanks at the Germans, but they wiped them out with planes because they had achieved air superiority in that area. Even when the Germans would capture large number of Soviet soldiers, large numbers would escape capture. Hitler was getting mad. It had been 4 weeks since the attack was ordered and too many Soviets were escaping encirclements by the German forces. He halted the drive to Moscow against the opposition of his officers. They felt that since most of the Soviet Union's military was around Moscow, they could win the war by defeating them. The Germans had gotten to within 7 miles of Leningrad when new orders came from Hitler. He wanted Leningrad starved out, not attacked. He ordered some of the forces to divert and join the rest of the German forces and head for Moscow again, leaving the smaller force on starvation duty. In one battle near Kiev the Germans captured over 600,000 Soviet soldiers. The drive on Moscow was known as Operation Typhoon.

The Soviet army was now smaller than the German force. The Germans next encircled and captured over 660,000 Soviet soldiers at Moscow in the first battle. At this point the incredible total of 3,000,000 Soviet soldiers had been caput red. As the Germans were advancing on Moscow the weather began to change and this slowed their progress down to only a couple of miles per day. It was now well into the middle of November and the attack on Moscow resumed. The worm was beginning to turn however. The Soviet Siberian troops had just defeated the German 2nd Panzer army in the South. By December 2nd the Germans were within 15 miles of the Kremlin. There was a problem looming for the Germans, the weather was killing them in far greater numbers than the Soviets. It seems that the lessons they tried to learn so well from Napoleon's mistakes had not been learned at all. They just didn't have the right cold weather gear to sustain them. The German division strength had fallen to about half. General Zhukov had launched an attack on December 5th and now pushed the Germans back over 200 miles from Moscow. The Germans were never to get this close to Moscow for the rest of the war.

Germany had tried to have its troops wait out the Soviet winter, but how could they? They were short of food, didn't have the proper clothing, no shelter in some areas and a total lack of supplies. Napoleon must have been looking at this and saying "you saw what happened to me, didn't you learn anything?"