Responsibility for defeating Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group South fell to the Southwest and Southern Fronts. Zhukov praised Kirponos and his Chief of Staff Lieutenant General M.A. Purkayev and Operations Officer Major General I. Kh. Bagramyan for their "organizational skill and level-headedness." Kirponos commanded over 907,000 men. Three of his four armies and half of his eight mechanized corps defended the L'vov salient. Stavka created Tyulenev's command two days after Barbarossatag to fight in Bessarabia while giving Southwest Front freedom of maneuver on the critical Kiev axis.

Forces defending the Ukraine suffered from common Red Army weaknesses: 1) Inexperienced officers and NCOs - especially in headquarters. 2) Too few radios and too few qualified radio operators while communications for echelons above corps was telegraph - immobile and susceptible to Luftwaffe interdiction. 3) Logistics units were inadequate and untrained for their support missions. This despite the fact that 19 of 57 ammunition dumps, two of four fuel dumps, one of three repair depots and six of ten railroad regiments in the Red Army were in the southern theater.

Infantry represented the Red Army's backbone. The Wehrmacht acknowledged this before the campaign when it listed tough and brave soldiers plus indirect-fire weapons (both defensive assets) as Soviet strengths. Army Group South's soldiers discovered through harsh experience that the Red infantry was "Panzersicher" (secure against Panzers). Prewar infantry divisions, of which Kirponos had 46, technically consisted of 14,483 men although in reality they had 8,000-12,000. Rifle divisions supposedly had a tank battalion, but earlier these had been absorbed into the mechanized corps. Both Southwest and Southern Fronts had an airborne corps. However, numerous airborne soldiers had made only one or two parachute jumps and many none at all.

By 22 June ten mechanized corps defended the Ukraine and Bessarabia. Prior to Barbarossatag German intelligence had identified only three so massed Soviet attacks surprised von Kleist's men. Unfortunately, the corps' subordinate units were spread over hundreds of square miles making concentration difficult. Poor readiness and conflicting orders further dissipated their strength. Army Group South faced as many as 5,465 tanks, although Soviet sources state that only 27 percent were in operational condition. "Older" BT-7 and T-26 tanks were better than Panzer Is and IIs and equal to some marks of Panzer IIIs and IVs. The T-34 and KV-1 tanks and the KV-2 infantry-support tank were superior to all German Panzers, about which the Germans had known since late 1940. Fully one-half of all Red Army tank losses resulted from poor maintenance, supply, driving and other non-combat causes.

The Red Army considered artillery its decisive branch. Kirponos alone fielded 16,997 indirect-fire weapons. Divisional guns were excellent models. The "Katyusha" (codenamed Guards Mortars) fired 36 82mm or 16 132mm rockets per launcher. They were cheap and easy to produce, terrified the Germans but suffered from inaccuracy and a slow reload rate. Anti-tank artillery represented a critical part of the Red Army's defensive doctrine. The standard 45mm gun could defeat all contemporary Panzer variants.

As the defender, the Red Army relied on earthworks and the Fortified Regions, each of the latter manned by a regiment with five to ten artillery bunkers, 10-15 machine-gun bunkers and 15-30 anti-tank bunkers. After March 1941 Kirponos put maximum effort into their construction, employing 43,000 workers per day. The Germans subsequently counted 1,912 completed, combat-ready positions and 192 under construction.

Red Air Force losses during the first days and weeks of Barbarossa are well known. Prewar Luftwaffe intelligence identified 38 air divisions, (120-240 aircraft each) and suspected the existence of 50 more. The Germans considered the IL-2 Sturmovik "an excellent machine" while the I-16 fighter possessed twice the rate of fire of the Bf 109 and fired a heavier projectile.

The Soviets dominated the naval war in the south. Against the small Rumanian Navy and a few German "E-boats", the Black Sea Fleet counted one old battleship, five cruisers, 17 destroyers, 43 submarines, numerous smaller craft and 624 aircraft. The Dnepr Flotilla had four monitors weighing up to 900 tons and mounting guns as large as 150mm, plus many gunboats.

Logistics troubled the Soviets as well. Trucks were at a premium despite the high production values of the Five-Year Plans. Mechanized corps' tanks attacked without their motorized infantry because their trucks were hauling supplies in the rear and many artillery pieces had no prime movers. Initially Kirponos and Tyunelev benefited from the highly developed Ukrainian rail system.

Some words on Ukrainian geography: Prehistoric ice sheets had scoured European Russia flat and shaped the Dnepr's watershed. Glaciers reached the Rokitno Marshes and created the low, water-saturated marshland. Elsewhere the soil was fine and humus-rich, producing particularly nasty mud that evaporated slowly. The Rasputitsa ("time without roads") ensued numerous times each spring and autumn as temperatures rose and fell and roads alternately turned into quagmires or froze hard as rock. The Ukraine lacked the vast forests found north of the marshes. It did contain numerous large rivers, the Dnepr being over a mile wide in many places. Interestingly, these rivers did not constitute a significant tactical barrier but hamstrung logistics -operations east of the Dnepr caused German rear echelon troops constant headaches.

The Germans achieved almost complete surprise. Army Group North (Field Marshal von Leeb), with XVI and XVIII Armies, totaling 20 divisions, and IV Panzergruppe (Colonel-General Hoepner) with three tank and three motorized infantry divisions, faced Soviet Northwest Front (Colonel-General F. I. Kuznetsov; 'front' is Russian terminology for army group) with one army on the coast, and another inland. These had four tank, two motorized, and 19 infantry divisions, but the willingness of their soldiers, mostly from the former Baltic States' armies, to fight for their new masters was questionable.

Army Group Center (von Bock) confronted Soviet West Front (Army General D. G. Pavlov) in Belorussia. Bock had nine Panzer, six motorized, and 35 infantry divisions, while Pavlov's three armies had 12 tank, six motorized, two cavalry, and 24 infantry divisions. Bock planned for his two Panzergruppen (II and III) to advance 250 miles (400km) into Belorussia and converge east of its capital, Minsk, to crush Pavlov's forces between themselves and the infantry of IV and IX Armies. Pavlov played into his hands by ordering all his reserves forward on 24 June. By 27 June, Pavlov's three armies, and a fourth sent to reinforce him, were encircled in two large pockets, around Bialystok and Novogrodek. Communications were so disrupted that Stalin first heard of the encirclement only three days later, from a German radio broadcast. He at once had Pavlov and several of his subordinates court-martialed and shot.

By 8 July the Germans had eliminated two Soviet armies and most of three others, taken over 290,000 prisoners, and captured or destroyed 2,500 tanks and 1,500 guns. Guderian took Smolensk from the south on 15 July, while Hoth bypassed it on the north, closing the only eastward escape route on 27 July. Some Soviet units broke out, but by 8 August 347,000 prisoners had been taken, and 3,400 tanks and over 3,000 guns destroyed or captured. In the next two weeks another 78,000 prisoners were taken, and in two months Army Group Center had covered two-thirds of the 750 miles (1,200km) from the frontier to Moscow.

The Germans now had to decide what to do next. Smolensk was not the victory Soviet historians subsequently claimed - it is now admitted that 486,171 (83.6 percent) of the 581,600 troops engaged there between 10 July and 10 September were 'irrevocably' lost: that is, killed, captured, or wounded beyond further service. However, the Soviet resistance undoubtedly stiffened and German losses rose. With the additional stresses of distance, heat, and dust, over half of Army Group Center's tanks and trucks were out of action, and the infantry and the horses pulling their carts and guns were nearing exhaustion. The Barbarossa Directive had indicated that after 'routing the enemy forces in Belorussia' the emphasis was to shift to destroying those in the Baltic, and taking Leningrad. Only after that would Moscow be considered. Hitler's adherence to this plan sat ill with Bock and Guderian, but he rejected their pleas to go immediately for Moscow.

Army Group South (Field Marshal von Rundstedt) had I Panzergruppe, VI and XVII Armies in Poland, and three armies (German XI, Romanian III and IV) in Romania. The five Panzer, three motorized, and 26 infantry divisions in Poland invaded Ukraine south of the Pripyat marshes, while the seven German and 14 Romanian divisions in Romania waited in case the Ploesti oilfields needed their protection, and did not move until 29 June.

Stalin's belief that Ukraine would be Germany's main target had put more Soviet forces south than north of the marshes. Southwest Front (Colonel-General M. P. Kirponos) had four armies, and a newly formed South Front (Army General I. V. Tyulenev), along the Romanian border, had two. Between them they had 20 tank, 10 mechanized, six cavalry, and 45 infantry divisions, considerably more than the invaders. However, their tanks, too, were mostly obsolete and worn out, the motorized infantry lacked lorries, and here too the Germans had air superiority, while the population in recently annexed Galicia, West Ukraine, Bukovina, and Bessarabia was mostly as anti-Soviet as in the Baltics and western Belorussia, facilitating free movement by sabotage groups. I Panzergruppe encountered Soviet tanks on the second day, and several battles delayed the required breakout, while the Soviet 5th Army, on being outflanked, retreated in good order into the marshes. Against South Front progress was also slow, and captures were few. The 400 miles (640km) to the Dnepr took two months; Army Group Center had covered 500 miles (800km) and taken many prisoners in that time.

However, Army Group South's fortunes improved after mid-July, when Rundstedt directed two of I Panzergruppe's three corps southeastward from Berdichev to Pervomaysk, to get behind three Soviet armies. XVII and XI Armies helped close this, the Uman 'pocket,' on 2 August, and six days later 103,000 trapped Soviet troops surrendered. The rest of South Front had no choice but hasty withdrawal across the Dnepr, leaving Odessa as an isolated fortress.

Argument about going for Moscow continued. Army Commander-in-Chief Field-Marshal Brauchitsch, Chief of OKH General Staff Colonel-General Halder, and Guderian all tried between 18 and 24 August to get Hitler's permission. Instead Guderian was sent south, to meet Kleist's I Panzergruppe at Lokhvitsa, about 140 miles (225km) east of Kiev, and encircle the entire Southwest Front.

Three weeks earlier, on 29 July, Zhukov had advocated pulling back Southwest Front and abandoning Kiev. Stalin refused, whereupon Zhukov resigned as Chief of General Staff and requested a field command. Stalin gave him the so-called Reserve Front, in the front line west of Moscow. Zhukov then forced the first German retreat of the war at Yelnya, but could not exploit his success because the fronts on either side of his had to withdraw. On 18 August he detected a sudden fall in German activity. Finding the same true of the adjacent Central Front, he told Stalin he believed Guderian was regrouping to drive south, and suggested establishing a strong force in the Bryansk area, to attack him in flank.

Stalin replied that he had foreseen the possibility by creating Bryansk Front a few days earlier. However, its commander, Colonel-General (later Marshal) Yeremenko, wrote in his memoirs that his directive was to defend against an eastward, not a southward push. He failed to stop Guderian's tanks, and they met Kleist's on 16 September. Two days later Stalin reluctantly authorized abandonment of Kiev, but too late; Kirponos was killed, his four armies were destroyed by 26 September, and the Germans claimed 665,000 prisoners. Soviet historians rejected that figure, but post-Soviet official analysis admits 'irrevocable' losses of 616,304 in Ukraine between 7 July and 26 September, tantamount to losing over four divisions a week for 10 weeks.

While Guderian was returning north to prepare to advance on Moscow, Leningrad's defense was crumbling in Voroshilov's inept hands, and by 8 September it was completely isolated, except for a perilous route across Lake Ladoga. On 9 September Stalin sent Zhukov to take charge. By 14 September the Germans were on the Gulf of Finland, less than 4 miles (6.4km) from the city's outskirts, so Zhukov had to act quickly. Three days of dismissals, blood-curdling threats, frantic improvisations, and probably some shootings rallied the demoralized defenders, and one piece of luck contributed - on 12 September IV Panzergruppe began leaving to join the Moscow offensive. On 17 September six German divisions tried to break through from the south, but failed, and on 25 September Army Group North settled for a siege.

Stalin now needed Zhukov elsewhere. The assault on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, began on 30 September, and immediately smashed through the defenders, Western, Bryansk, and Reserve Fronts. They numbered 1.25 million men in 96 divisions and 14 brigades, supported by two 'fortified areas' (static defenses). But earlier losses had reduced their mobile forces to only one division and 13 brigades of tanks, with 770 tanks, and two divisions of motorized infantry. The rest included nine horsed cavalry divisions and 84 of infantry, with 9,150 guns, including mortars.

German losses so far had been comparatively small, 94,000 killed, 346,000 wounded, and very few captured up to 26 August. But the Panzergruppen, now renamed Panzer armies, were seriously short of tanks. At the end of September, II had only 50 percent, I and III about 75 percent, of war establishment; only IV had its full complement. There was also a 30 percent shortage of lorries, and manpower in 54 of German's 142 Eastern Front divisions was over 3,000 (20 percent) below establishment. Nevertheless, Army Group Center, reinforced by Panzer and motorized divisions from Army Groups North and South, and five infantry divisions from South, had 14 Panzer, eight motorized, and 48 infantry divisions, about half of all Germany's East Front force, outnumbering the defenders in tanks and aircraft (1,000 versus 360) by almost three to one, and in guns by two to one.

Guderian attacked on 30 September, broke through Bryansk Front's southern flank, and advanced over 130 miles (210km) in two days, to Orel. Bryansk Front's three armies were encircled by 6 October, and on the 8th were ordered to break out eastward. Some did, but over 50,000 were captured.

Western and Reserve Fronts fared even worse. Ill and IV Panzer, IV and IX Armies attacked on 2 October, and here too broke through at once, III Panzer (Hoth) heading for Vyazma, IV Panzer (Hoepner) for Yukhnov. On 7 October they met west of Vyazma, encircling 45 Soviet divisions, and by 19 October had claimed 673,000 prisoners. Post-Soviet research confirms a lower but still immense figure: 514,338 to the end of November, 41 percent of the two fronts' strength. On 18 October 40th Panzer Corps took Mozhaisk, only 60 miles (100km) from Moscow. Panic broke out in the capital on 16 October; Stalin stayed, but government departments, the diplomatic corps and most of the General Staff were evacuated to Kuybyshev (now Samara). Thousands of Muscovites fled, looting was widespread, and a 'state of siege' (martial law) was proclaimed on 19 October.

However, two factors intervened to slow the Germans. The first was the weather. Snowfalls began on 6 October, and from the 9th sleet and heavy rain was almost continuous. Vehicles and carts bogged down, and the infantry, often up to their knees in mud, frequently outran their ammunition and rations. The weather was no better on the Russian side, but the slowing favored the defenders, particularly by immobilizing the Panzers. The German advance could speed up again only after the mud froze; and low temperatures would then bring new problems.

The second factor was Zhukov, who arrived on 7 October. Stalin at once sent him to the front line to establish the true state of affairs. At 2.30 am on 8 October, he telephoned Stalin to tell him the main need was to strengthen the Mozhaisk defense line, then set off in heavy rain and fog to find Marshal Budenny and Reserve Front HQ. He finally found him in the deserted town of Maloyaroslavets, only to find that he did not even know where his own headquarters was, let alone the state of his forces.

On 10 October Hitler's press chief, Otto Dietrich, summoned the foreign press corps to announce officially that the war had been won. On that day Stalin gave Zhukov command of the remnants of Western and Reserve Fronts, and at his suggestion appointed Western Front's previous commander, Konev, as his deputy in charge of the front's northern sector, around Kalinin (now Tver). Stalin also acted instantly to reinforce the Mozhaisk defense line, transferring 14 infantry divisions, 16 tank brigades, and over 40 artillery regiments from reserve or other sectors, to re-form four armies. So eroded were they by previous fighting that they totaled only 90,000 men, equal to six full-strength divisions.

On 17 October the Kalinin sector, with three armies and one ad hoc combat group, became a separate Kalinin Front, under Konev. By 18 October, the Germans had taken Kalinin and Kaluga, threatening to outflank Moscow from north and south, and forcing Zhukov to re-form his front only 40 miles (64km) from the city. Tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, were conscripted to dig defensive lines, trenches, and tank traps; men were given a rifle and sketchy training, and formed into 'people's militia' battalions.

7 November, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was approaching. Stalin considered it important to hold the normal ceremonies, including a military parade in Red Square. To avoid disruption by air raids, the Party rally on 6 November was held underground, in the Mayakovskaya Metro station. Stalin's speech multiplied German losses by seven and divided Soviet losses by two, but most notably he invoked not Communism but Russian patriotism, then and at the parade on the next day. The troops marched straight to the front, with Stalin's exhortations to emulate 'our great ancestors' -from Alexander Nevsky, victor over the Teutonic Order in 1240, to Kutuzov, who outwitted Napoleon in 1812 - ringing in their ears.

As the ground hardened in mid-November, the Germans recovered mobility, but met new problems. Few had winter clothing or white camouflage suits, and there were 133,000 cases of frostbite. Supplies of fuel, anti-freeze, and winter lubricants for aircraft and vehicles were inadequate. Frozen grease had to be scraped off every shell before it could be loaded, and maintenance of aircraft, tanks, and trucks in the open air was a nightmare. Stalin and Zhukov had ordered 'scorched earth,' as much destruction of buildings as possible, before retreats. The troops often went both frozen and unfed; at the end of November the offensive petered out.

The official German assessment of 1 December, that the Red Army had no reserves left, now proved spectacularly wrong. From various sources, but particularly his spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, Stalin had learned that Japan intended to attack southward, against Europe's and the USA's Asian dependencies, not northward against the Soviet Union. He began transferring divisions from the Soviet Far East; adding them to newly raised formations, he accumulated a 58-division reserve by the end of November.

Zhukov later admitted that he had not planned a major offensive. Local probing attacks simply revealed German weaknesses, justifying an offensive by West and Kalinin Fronts, and it began in 25 degrees of frost at 3.00 am on 5 December. They had fewer tanks and aircraft than Army Group Center, but fresher troops, clad, fed, and equipped for cold weather, guns, tanks, and trucks designed for it, and heated hangars for servicing their aircraft.

In 34 days' heavy fighting the Germans were pushed back a minimum of 60 miles (100km), in some places up to 150 miles (240km). Zhukov, supported by Chief of General Staff Shaposhnikov, set limited objectives, forbade frontal assaults, and wanted all resources concentrated on pushing the central front line back, to make Moscow safe for the next year's campaigning.

The definitive invasion order was Hitler's Directive No. 21, of 18 December 1940. It decreed Operation Barbarossa, 'to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign' (four months), and a 'final objective ... to erect a barrier against Asiatic Russia on the general line Volga-Archangel,' from which the Luftwaffe could if necessary eliminate 'Russia's last surviving industrial area in the Urals.' All preparations were to be completed by 15 May 1941. Events in Greece and Yugoslavia delayed the start by five weeks, but a four-month campaign could still be over just before winter set in.

The Soviet leaders noted the growing German deployments along their western borders, but could not determine the invasion date. Not until Saturday, 21 June, did they receive information definite enough to alert the border military districts. Timoshenko and Zhukov spent most of the evening and night writing orders; the local commanders received them only hours before the invasion, and many units remained unalerted. The air force suffered particularly, losing 1,200 aircraft on the first day. Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Kuznetsov ran through the streets from the General Staff to his headquarters, to put the entire navy on highest alert; in consequence, no ship or shore base was damaged in the first attacks, and no naval aircraft were lost.

Poor communications and transport hampered the army's attempts to react. Radios were few, so communications depended mainly on public telegraph and telephone nets, which were damaged or destroyed by bombing, gunfire, or German saboteurs. Many front-line units received no orders, others only orders already outdated by events. The mobilization plan required units to requisition lorries and carthorses from the civil economy, but the enterprises owning them took no steps to provide them.

Major-General (later Marshal) Rokossovsky, then commanding 9th Mechanized Corps in Kiev Special Military District (Southwest Front from the outbreak of war), learned that invasion was imminent only from a German army deserter. He had to open his secret operational orders on his own initiative, as he could not contact Moscow, District HQ in Kiev, or 5th Army HQ in Lutsk. His corps was mechanized only in name, with only one third its allocation of tanks, those it had were obsolete, their engines worn out, and the 'motorized infantry' had no lorries, nor even horses or carts. As his corps was retreating, it several times had to punch its way through German mobile forces. His only defense against the frequent air attacks was his own anti-aircraft guns, as he never saw a Soviet aircraft; and his corps' performance was so much above average that three weeks later he was promoted to command an army.

EASTERN EUROPE AND THE USSR 1941

Hitler's war against the Soviet Union led to the largest armies ever maintained fighting the greatest land battles yet seen. The frontline would ultimately stretch for over 1,500 miles and at any one time there were close to ten million soldiers under arms. Note how the vast Pripyat marsh sits square in the path of an invader from the west. Partisan activity from 1942-44 would be concentrated in the swamps and forests shown here. Note also the pivotal importance of Moscow as the hub of the Soviet rail network.

For many German families, World War II is synonymous with the Russian front. It was where the overwhelming majority of German servicemen fought, and where most of their 3.9 million dead lie buried. In 1945 the Russian front came to Germany, engulfing East Prussia, Saxony and surging west all the way to the Elbe, while two million Soviet soldiers stormed Berlin, would-be capital of Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich'.

In Russia World War II is known as 'The Great Patriotic War'. If the war only became truly 'patriotic' after the invaders were exposed as genocidal enslavers, and not the liberators many people had hoped them to be, there was no doubting its great scale. Hitler's invasion pitted the largest national armies ever assembled against each other. The front stretched from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Black Sea. Battles took place over unprecedented distances: the gap smashed in the German lines by the Soviet winter offensive in December 1942 was wider than the entire western front in World War I.

It is salutary to compare the scale of operations on the Russian front with those in western Europe. In August 1944 38 Allied divisions fighting on a 120km front in France encircled 20 German divisions and, after 27 days' fighting, took about 90,000 prisoners. At the same time the Soviet forces mounted three offensives. Along the borders of Romania, 92 Soviet divisions and 6 tank/mechanised corps attacked 47 German and Romanian divisions on a frontage of about 700km, encircling 18 German divisions and taking 100,000 prisoners in a week. Meanwhile. 86 Soviet divisions and 10 tank/mechanised corps were attacking into southern Poland, destroying nearly 40 German divisions in the process. The third Soviet offensive, which had been underway since 22 June, involved 172 divisions and 12 tank/mechanised corps in an advance of 600km along a 1,000km front: 67 German divisions were overwhelmed in the battle, 17 never to reappear on the German order of battle.

By late 1944 91 Allied divisions in France. Belgium and the Netherlands, faced 65 German divisions across a 400km front. In the east, 560 Soviet divisions were fighting 235 German divisions across a 3,200km front, and driving them rapidly westwards. Thus there is a strong argument that the Soviet Union had already won the war by 1944, whether the western Allies finally opened a second front or not.

The human cost of the war is difficult for Americans or western Europeans to imagine. To compare the scale of casualties, about 2.5 per cent of the British population was killed or injured during World War II; American casualties were 0.6 per cent. In the USSR, the proportion was no less than 25 per cent. Another statistic gives pause for thought. Twice as many soldiers were killed on the eastern front in 1941-45 than in all the theatres of war of 1914-18 put together.

Neither side limited its killing to military personnel: the Soviet war-dead total of over 20 million includes at least seven million civilians. The War in the East was a medieval war of conquest conducted with twentieth-century technology. It was Hitler's war: there was no prospect of it ending in a conventional peace treaty. The German dictator intended far more than just moving a border here and annexing a province there. He was not going to accept reparation payments or negotiate a treaty, restricting the future size of the Red Army. Hitler planned nothing less than a war of extermination, eliminating the Communist regime, the Jews and indeed most of the peoples of Eastern Europe. The conquered territories would become German colonies, with new German cities linked to the Reich by autobahn and railroad, the Russian steppe dotted with German soldier-colonists establishing (like Roman legionaries of old) brave outposts of civilisation in a barbarous land.

The full extent of Hitler's grotesque war aims was only known to the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. After the war, many German generals would persuade both the Nuremberg prosecutors and western military historians that they had not known. In 1945 British and American officers found it difficult to accept that fellow officers and gentlemen - who had fought a largely 'clean' war in the west - could have been implicated in the horrors being reported in the east. Unfortunately, more recent investigation has exposed the disagreeable truth that the German army was deeply implicated. Heinrich Himmler, chief executor of the 'Final Solution', described the Holocaust as 'a page of Glory in our history which has never been written and never is to be written'. However, the days are long past when the SS could serve as the alibi of a nation: German army and police units participated in the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Communist government officials, their families and other civilians. So did the pro- German forces raised in the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary.

The Wehrmacht high command was invited to the Berghof by Hitler on the eve of the attack on Poland in 1939. The loss of so much German territory to Poland under the terms of the Versailles Treaty had never been accepted, and a war to recover these lands might well have been undertaken even if Hitler had never come to power. But Hitler invested the campaign with far more than territorial objectives. His address to the generals anticipated both the nature of German rule in the east and the nature of his war against the USSR:

' . . . in the East I have put my death's head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language ... Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans ... As for the rest ... the fate of Russia will be exactly the same.'

One officer recorded in his diary how Herman Gรถring literally danced with glee.

It is beyond doubt that the German army treated Soviet prisoners-of-war more cruelly than its Japanese allies dealt with Allied POWs in Burma and the Pacific. Of the approximately five million Soviet servicemen taken prisoner in World War II, over three million were killed. At his trial at Nuremberg, SS General von dem Bach- Zelewski said: 'If for decades, a doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race, and that the Jews are not even human at all, then such an explosion is inevitable'.

If the role of Adolf Hitler is central to the nature and the course of the War in the East, that of his enemy and eventual nemesis, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - or Stalin, as the world knew him - was hardly less important. There was considerable truth in the idea that 'only Stalin got us into this mess, and only Stalin can get us out', although it was not a sentiment to voice in public. Stalin bears unique responsibility for the weakness of the Soviet armed forces in 1941 and the readiness of the Russian/Ukrainian peasantry to welcome almost any foreign invader who promised to drive out the Communists and abolish the collective farms. It was on his orders that countless soldiers were sacrificed in premature, over-ambitious offensives beyond the operational abilities of the army that Stalin had beheaded in 1937.Yet as the war progressed, Stalin learned to listen to his best generals, to rely on them rather than the party apparatchiks whose political reliability was no substitute for military competence. Only Stalin could have forced through the industrialisation of the USSR in the 1930s with such brutal lack of concern over the human cost; but perhaps only Stalin could have orchestrated the removal to safety of so much Soviet heavy industry after the German invasion. Enigmatic and inhuman, the workaholic Stalin never visited the front or a factory, indeed he seldom left the Kremlin. From his Spartan office there, he exerted a steadily more decisive grip on the war.

'Truth' the old proverb says 'is the daughter of Time', and only with the passage of years has a balanced account of Hitler's War in the East become feasible. Post-war Soviet accounts were created to feed the vanity of Stalin. As soon as the tide of battle had turned the ageing tyrant (who had never served in any army) proclaimed himself Commander-in-Chief. Successive 'histories' sought to demonstrate Stalin's military genius. After his death. Khruschev demanded similar treatment, necessitating complete revision of Soviet history; another radical overhaul followed his overthrow. After the 'decades of stagnation', President Mikhail Gorbachev swept away the surviving gerontocracy and instituted reforms that led to the disintegration of the Soviet empire that Stalin established in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union outlasted that empire by less than two years, splintering along ancient national boundaries. In the process, the history of the Great Patriotic War has been liberated from the dead hand of Communist functionaries.

For the 50 years that the Soviet history of World War II was massaged to suit the ruling clique, western readers relied heavily on German accounts of the War in the East. Some are classics of war literature, others extremely valuable for the light they cast on German grand strategy. Yet, as will be seen, even a commander of indisputable brilliance like Von Manstein was capable of twisting the facts. His literary sleight of hand in Lost Victories was as hard to detect as his shift of Panzer divisions to the south of Kharkov in 1943, and no less effective. The common impression given by German accounts is that the Soviets enjoyed enormous numerical and material superiority and that if it had not been for Hitler's lunatic decisions, the Russians could have been defeated. There is a degree of truth here, but it is far from the whole story. Some of the generals who advanced this thesis had also entertained the hope, fostered by Goebbels, that the western Allies might strike a deal with Hitler and join forces with the Wehrmacht against the 'Bolshevik hordes'.

Stalingrad and Kursk were recognised at the time as battles of special significance. The former was a defeat of unparalleled magnitude for the German army. Germany had accelerated its call-up to provide the manpower for its 1942 offensive in Russia: its complete and utter failure left the Ostheer no prospect of realising Hitler's boundless objectives in the east. Kursk was another disaster for the Germans: although the military losses there are often exaggerated, its political impact is beyond dispute. As successive Russian offensives drove back the front line in the late summer of 1943, Germany's allies opened negotiations with Moscow. Only inside the concrete bunkers of the 'Wolf's Lair' could you fail to know which way the wind was blowing.

The Soviet Union was a very different Russia from the country Germany had defeated in 1917. On the eastern front in World War I, Russian armies were much less well equipped than their German opponents. Poor procurement decisions - huge fortresses packed with siege artillery, but not enough field guns - rather than lack of heavy industry handicapped them from the start. In their early battles in 1941 the Germans found the Red Army similarly inferior, but the tables were turning even as the Panzer divisions fought their way to the outskirts of Moscow.

Russian industry had been transformed under the communist regime: coal and steel production vastly exceeded pre-1914 levels and gigantic new factories like the tank plant at Kharkov were not just building more tanks than Germany, they were building better ones. Soviet tank production in the early 1930s exceeded 3,000 tanks a year. German production was only 2,200 per annum as late as 1940. The later BT tanks and the T-26 carried 37mm and later 45mm guns, and the T-34 and KV-1 entering production in 1940 were superior to any German tank either in service or on the drawing board. Stalin's crash industrialisation programme began with the 1928 Five Year Plan. Yet these giant strides in heavy industry had been achieved at terrible human cost. Working conditions were as bad as anything Marx had encountered in nineteenth-century industrial slums, although Stalin's dark mills were on a truly satanic scale. Unrealistic production quotas were set, and then increased. Failure was not an option, so the systematic faking of production statistics began - and became a permanent feature of Soviet-style industry. A more rational, humane strategy might have brought greater results, but the cold-blooded ideologue in the Kremlin knew no other method than terror. The political, military and psychological consequences of Stalinism would profoundly affect the War in the East.

Like a number of his fellow Bolshevik revolutionaries, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili adopted a pseudonym. His choice of 'Stalin' - 'Man of Steel' - says a great deal about his self image. Jailed several times by the Tsarist authorities, Stalin was a professional revolutionary who never actually held down a job in his life. After Lenin's death in 1923, many senior figures in the Communist Party imagined themselves to be part of a collective leadership, but Stalin manoeuvred them all aside. By the time of the German invasion, Stalin had been the undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union for nearly 20 years. Indeed, such was the machiavellian subtlety of his rise to power that it is difficult to identify when his 'rule' actually began.

While Soviet industrial output soared, agricultural productivity slumped. Since the overwhelming bulk of the Soviet population lived in small villages, and most of the Red Army was recruited from the countryside - as well as most senior commanders who survived the purges, the young men that faced the German invader were still living with the consequences of'collectivisation'. Peasant farms were reorganised into Collective Farms with merciless enthusiasm by Party officials. Kulaks (the marginally better-off peasants) were to be 'liquidated' as 'class enemies'. The reign of terror across the Russian countryside touched every village, and although grain was still shipped into the cities, there was widespread starvation, particularly in the Ukraine. Several million people died in the years of famine, millions of others were alive in 1941 only because they had survived by eating grass, shoe leather or even human flesh.

Most of the Bolshevik leadership came from urban backgrounds and had an almost superstitious fear of Russia's peasant population. The peasant soldiers of 1914 had practically worshipped the Tsar and the Communist regime meant little to rural communities struggling to farm in Russia's unforgiving climate. Yet their determination to control the countryside, to abolish private farms and direct agricultural production from Moscow probably caused what they were seeking to prevent. The largely apolitical peasantry conceived a deep loathing for the regime. Resistance was passive: the productivity of collective farms would remain so bad for fifty years that even by the 1980s, the five per cent or so of privately-cultivated land (allowed after Stalin's death) supplied over a quarter of the USSR's food stocks. When the German forces invaded, they were welcomed as liberators across the Ukraine, and attempts by Moscow to create partisan movements across western Russia were sabotaged by the villagers who betrayed the guerrillas to the Germans. Their hopes were soon dashed of course, the invaders regarding them as untermensch, racial-inferiors to be exterminated or used for slave labour. As for abolishing collective farms, more than one Nazi observed that if collective farms had not been introduced, the Germans would have had to invent them. They were tailormade feudal estates for the new German rulers.

The 'Bolshevik Old Guard', the original revolutionaries catapulted to power in 1917, knew a great deal about Stalin.The party cadres were not unanimously behind him either: nearly a quarter of them voted against him in what they foolishly thought was a secret ballot in 1934. Stalin had the old Bolsheviks arrested and shot and commenced a thorough purge of the Communist Party too. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Party Congress, 1,108 had been arrested by the 18th Congress in 1939, by which time three quarters of the central committee elected in 1934 had also been shot.

Although a number of Soviet officers were arrested on trumped-up charges in the early 1930s, two institutions had so far largely escaped Stalin's terror - the armed forces and the instruments of terror themselves, the NKVD (the Russian acronym for 'Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs'; previous titles for the communist secret police included Cheka and OGPU, later titles include MVD and KGB). Half-a-dozen generals were seized when the show trials of former leading communists Zinoviev and Kamenev began in 1936. The army's most senior advocate of mechanisation, Marshal Mikhail Tukachevsky, was demoted after increasingly public clashes with Stalin's civil war cronies Marshals Voroshilov and Budenny. In early 1937 Stalin moved against the NKVD, Commissar- General Yagoda was arrested along with some 3,000 of his officers. Yagoda himself was tried and executed with Party theorist Bukharin the following year. Tukachevsky was arrested in May 1937 and shot on 12 June, the firing squad commanded by his friend Marshal Blyukher (unaware his own death warrant was already signed on Stalin's desk).

In the days of the Tsars, national administration was remote, almost irrelevant compared to local concerns. Under Stalin, the hand of government could not be avoided. Industry had made its 'great leap forward', the entire rural economy re-shaped and the 'class struggle' kept to the fore - Stalin claimed it would intensify as the last surviving elements of capitalism fought to prevent the final victory of socialism. The ideological veneer was accepted by party activists, but society had been brutalised and life cheapened. Recent studies suggest western estimates of eleven million deaths in the 1930s should be revised to 16 or even 19 million. By the time the armed forces were purged in 1937 there were some seven million people held in remote labour camps, the GULAG.10 Another seven or eight million people were herded off to the camps between 1937 and the German invasion. This total of 14-15 million people, representing about a tenth of the Soviet work force, provided slave labour in the mining and forestry industries across the bleak wilderness of Siberia. In the Vorkuta coal mines the temperature is below freezing for more than half the year. Prisoners worked outside at the Kolmya River gold mines in temperatures of -50째C. In such conditions, less than ten per cent of the people arrested in the mid-1930s were still alive in 1941. Some camps were simply execution centres for political opponents: in the Baikal-Amur camps the NKVD resorted to mass shootings rather than wait for starvation or disease to eliminate the 'enemies of the people'.

No lists of these camps was ever published, the GULAG system never mentioned in the media, but everyone was aware of the threat, the possibility of being taken up on the way to work, or of the NKVD knocking on the apartment door in the small hours of the morning.

The system was also exported. Any potential focus for opposition to future Communist rule was eliminated in Soviet-occupied Poland in 1939 and the Baltic States in 1940.To be a teacher, political activist, trade union leader or military officer was enough to guarantee arrest. In a single night in June 1941, one week before the German invasion, the NKVD deported 132,000 people from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to the Russian interior. NKVD records from 1940 detail the removal of 15,031 Polish officers from prisoner-of-war camps where they had been held since September 1939. The same records make it clear these men never arrived in other camps. They disappeared. Not until 1989 did the Soviet government admit their fate, although one of the killing fields, at Katyn outside Smolensk, was unearthed by German troops in 1943. Mass graves there contained 4,000 bodies, all shot in the back of the head.

For decades, perception of the big problem the Germans had with Soviet railroads when they invaded in 1941 was seen to have been converting their non-standard gauge (track width) to that of the central European norm. But that perception has been wrong, at least according to one recently declassified report. The document was written for the U.S. Army shortly after the war by Hans Klein, who served as the German army high command's "Technical Officer for Operational Railway Transportation" during 1941-42.

Since the gauge conversion required going from the wider Soviet track to the narrower German, Klein explains, that change posed what was really the simplest of engineering problems for the invaders to solve. Along stretches where the retreating Soviets hadn't had time to thoroughly destroy the rail beds (which was most of the time during the blitzkrieg Barbarossa campaign), all the Germans had to do was pull up the spikes, move the rails toward each other a bit, and spike them down again. No surveying, blueprints, or new construction was needed.

The real trouble was the Soviets built and ran wider (and longer and heavier) locomotives. Those locomotives, being so much bigger than their German counterparts, were therefore able to carry more fuel and water and thus could go much farther between service stops. For example, the average distance between Soviet service installations on the Brest-Litovsk to Moscow line was 138 kilometers. When the Wehrmacht moved in, their railway troops had to build from scratch one major service installation between each pair the Soviets already had in place. Those stations had to include locomotive sheds, repair shops, slag pits, turntables, sidings, water towers, etc., and needed skilled labor and scarce heavy equipment to complete them. (In comparison, track gauge conversion could usually be accomplished employing only primitively equipped conscript labor.) Almost none of this had been planned for, Klein says, and the resultant confusion and delay was the real drag on German railway utilization in the east in 1941.

In a similar and also just recently declassified report, this one written by another German supply officer named Werner Bodenstein, we learn two more facts about the invaders' railroad supply system in 1941.

First, except for a few railroad engineering troops provided by the army, all the German railway personnel who went east in 1941locomotive engineers, train crews, station managers, skilled workers, etc. were civilian employees of the Reich Railroad Authority, and thus didn't come under military discipline. That meant they tended to work normal civilian hours and incredible as it may seem most took their authorized two week Christmas break in mid-December and went home for the holidays. So just as the German army was plunging into its greatest crisis to date the first Soviet winter counteroffensive most of the cadre of its rail supply system was home in Germany, no doubt hoisting a few in honor of the brave troops at the front.

Bodenstein offers another reason the high command found it so difficult to get food and winter clothing to the fighting troops that winter. At the big supply depots in Greater Germany, trains were put together with specific unit-destinations in mind. That is, if a supply train were being prepared for the 14th Panzer Corps, the various cars would be loaded according to a certain formula for supplying a panzer corps: so much food, so much clothing, so much POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants), so much ammunition.

As each car was loaded and sealed, its lock had a color-coded tag placed on it, identifying its contents as belonging to one of those four major supply categories. The trouble occurred as the trains plowed their way toward the front. Each time they stopped for service along the route, the local troops (often with their command's connivance) would examine the tags and ''liberate" some food, clothing and POL for themselves. Invariably, by the time a mixed-supply train reached the unloading stop for its destination combat unit, all that was left aboard was ammo. The rear area personnel had no need for that stuff, and were only too glad to see the frontliners had as much of it as they could use.

Two expedients were employed in an attempt to overcome this problem. First, a few of the most outrageous pilferers were hanged at easily seen places near the stations. That worked wonders to instill "National Socialist Ardor" among their cohorts. Second, though the mixed-train loading practices were continued, the packing authorities began labeling all cars as ammunition carriers. The ruse didn't always work, but it did result in a good many trains being shunted directly to the front without cargo loss.

By Ty Bomba

A German veteran of the Barbarossa campaign once told me the three factors he believed brought about his nation's defeat in the USSR: 1) the Soviet Union was too big to be campaigned across in one year; 2) the winter climate there was too harsh to allow for continued offensive operations; and 3) the Red Army was too huge to be destroyed before that winter came.

As soon as he'd finished with his explanation, I realized I'd been given the kind of succinct "I was there" look at the bottom line truth about something so big it continues to elude scholars who spend whole careers on it. So I will warn you here, the rest of this chapter does no better than explain some of the details and telling points that lay behind the veteran's summation.

The Soviet Union Was Too Big

This was probably the single greatest factor contributing to the German failure. In all their campaigning prior to Barbarossa, the Germans had taken on opponents whose countries were of a size small enough to allow their geographic vitals to be gobbled in one giant clap-shut of the armored pincers' jaws. Poland, the low countries, France and the Balkans were each geographic areas small enough to be taken by the invaders in one mechanized lunge. That is, after the Germans' panzers broke into those places, and after their mechanized spearheads met, they had always managed to cut off the defenders' heartlands from the rest of their territories.

The western and central Europeans had literally no room in which to get a breathing space, no time to learn how to defeat a Blitzkrieg before it was already over. Likewise, working in theaters of those limited sizes, the panzers were able to complete their job before attrition both human and mechanical got to be too debilitating a problem.

That phase of the war came to an end for the Germans as soon as the Barbarossa project was put on the drawing boards. The area of the European portion of the Soviet Union alone was greater than the sum total of all acreage previously conquered by the Nazis. The changed perspective, and the Germans' perplexity over it, is made apparent by examining the various plans Hitler's staffs came up with after he set them to work.

Gen. Erich Marcks' plan called for the reconcentration of the central and southern army groups, once the operational barrier of the Pripyet Marshes had been bypassed, for a grand drive on Moscow. Walter Warlimont's Operations Department of the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) prepared another plan (the "Lossberg Study"), which took cognizance of the potential Soviet threat to the Reich's vital oil resources in Romania. That document stipulated the southern army group be strong enough to ensure its ability to initiate and complete large pincer operations in the western Ukraine, before it too joined the other groups for the climax around Moscow. Gen. Franz Halder, at the Army High Command (OKH), first wanted a huge, 1914 Schlieffen-style "wheel" across northern Russia to the Black Sea. But when confronted with the sheer logistical impossibility of that he changed his mind, and called instead for a direct, concentrated push straight through Belorussia to Moscow, with secondary and tertiary efforts to the north and south, primarily for flank protection.

Hitler himself came tip with a plan calling for strong drives along the Baltic coast to Leningrad and through the Ukraine to Kiev and the Crimea. With the flanks thus secured, the best way to finally dispose of Moscow (and, one assumes, the final destiny of the entire USSR), could be decided at the time of execution.

The one thing all the plans agreed on was the necessity of carrying out the decisive battles of annihilation west of the Dvina and Dniepr River lines. From the German point of view that was vital because to the east of those rivers the geography opened, fan like, to such an extent that when the invaders spread out to overrun and occupy it they would have to sacrifice the concentration of force needed to maintain momentum in any further pitched battles. The Red Army would obligingly stand west of the rivers and be annihilated, the plans explained, because for it to retreat farther east would be to risk the loss of the vitally productive industrial and Russian-ethnic heartlands.

The exact pathways the advances took after crossing the Dvina and Dniepr lines were seen as less important than that their essential characteristic would be more like a pursuit and mop-up than serious combat. The Soviets' cohesion was already to have been smashed what followed east of the two rivers was really hoped to be post-climactic, with its exact details variable and flexible even during execution, because there would be no more serious opposition.

The German planning process for Barbarossa shows how even the most professional organization can fall prey to wishful thinking when forced to carry out tasks beyond its means. The various studies and wargames held during Barbarossa's planning phase clearly showed geography and logistics would begin to work against the invaders once the Dvina/Dniepr line was crossed. But Hitler demanded a plan and a victory; therefore obviously and inescapably the basic assumption taken up had to be that the Soviets would fight where the Germans needed them to if the big win were to be gained.

Their organizational drift toward wishful thinking was compounded by the fact the Germans were forced to conduct their planning with incomplete data. Even today we're far from having all the documentation we'd like on the Soviet situation in 1941. That was, of course, even more true for the Germans then. Stalin's regime was the archetype of what political scientists call a "closed society" (even compared to the Nazis). The Germans had no real idea about the actual size of the Red Army, and the most recent detailed maps of Russia they had available were those made by the Kaiser's army during the First World War.

Thus the plan finally adopted was really an awkward compromise that tried to combine the best features of the preliminary outlines. The southern-most forces would at first stand on the defensive in Romania to ensure the safety of the oil fields there. Army Group South, springing from southern Poland, was strengthened enough to give it the ability to drive alone into the rear areas of any forces the Soviets might throw into such an oil offensive, yet it was not reinforced enough to become the primary driver of the whole invasion. (Also unknown to the Germans, the Soviet high command had recently wargamed an oil invasion scenario, and even the most zealous proponents among them for the offensive had to admit the results showed the inability of the Red Army to carry out such cross-border moves in 1941.)

Army Group North was given enough strength so it too it was hoped could operate without needing reinforcement from its neighbor in the center. That left Army Group Center with insufficient resources to smash directly to Moscow on its own. So allowance was made for its later reinforcement from the north and south once Smolensk was taken, provided circumstances indicated such a move would guarantee success in a quick blitz to the Kremlin.

If all that seems muddled, it was. The Germans knew there was a good chance they were finally over-reaching their armed forces' grasp. However, or so the countering rationalizations went, that had always seemed to be the case in the earlier campaigns. Those previous victories, though looking like acts of clockwork precision in retrospect, had actually been carried out in improvised, chaotic and unsure fashion. In the end, victory had gone to the bold not to the over-cautious. In sum, as the invasion's launch date approached, the German high command was confident it had come up with enough of a plan; the rest was detail, really, and could be dealt with as it came up. The overall excellence of the Wehrmacht was to be depended on to generate a big win one more time.

The Winter Was Too Harsh

One of the often repeated misconceptions about this campaign goes that because the Germans planned and counted on the war in the east being a short one, they didn't take steps soon enough to begin the manufacture of needed winter uniforms and gear. Yet anyone who's spent a winter anywhere in Europe north of the Alps knows an army doesn't have to go to Russia to experience a need for seasonal equipment and clothing. That equipment and clothing in fact existed, and in the needed amounts, but they existed in the wrong places at depots in Germany far from the front.

The transportation infrastructure east of the Soviet-German border was less developed than that west of it, and the destruction caused by the invasion did nothing to improve capacity. One official of the German Railway Authority noted gloomily in a report to Berlin in August that, no matter how often commanders made the point to combat troops about the desirability of capturing Soviet rolling stock intact, there seemed nothing the soldiers enjoyed more than shooting up trains.

At first the decrease in carrying capacity eastward could be made up by directly trucking (and hauling in horse-drawn wagons) the materiel from the depots to the front. The Luftwaffe could also be counted on to keep key spearhead units in supply via air drops. But as the distance from the border to the front increased beyond the 300-400 kilometer mark, the efficiency of those stopgaps rapidly fell.

The situation can be likened to an individual's blood flow on a cold winter day. In the abdomen, close to the heart itself, the blood-carrying arteries are many and thick; but the farther one goes toward the extremities, the scarcer and finer the transport arteries become. The result is the fingertips and toes get cold.

On a vastly larger scale, that was what was happening to the German army in the east by late October, as they got ready to carry out their final offensives around Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov. By then they were far enough from the Reich's logistical heart to be down to mere capillary carrying capacity. In terms of movable tonnages, the Germans were faced with the choice of shunting forward enough of all kinds of supply to sustain their forces for less demanding defensive operations, or bringing up enough ammunition and POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants) supplies, at the cost of everything else, to allow for continuation of the attack. The decision, made in the well heated rooms of high command headquarters, seemed obvious.

Even under such constraints, though, one of the radio-telephone conversations between Hitler and Gen. Heinz Guderian in late December is instructive in showing how a good army can make one kind of supply serve another purpose. Guderian was complaining to Hitler about having trouble stopping the Soviets' T-34-led breakthroughs. The FĂźhrer asked why he didn't use the 88mm Flak guns to destroy them as in previous encounters. The general explained the ground was now frozen so hard he needed to save his artillery rounds to blast holes for the infantry to sleep in at night. Experience had already shown if he didn't get his Landser below ground level they'd freeze to death.

The panzer men also proved masters of innovation during the winter crisis. They got by the necessity of painfully starting each tanks' cold engine from scratch by designing a ''cold water exchanger," which pumped warmed coolant from one engine to another. They also devised track extenders, called "east chains," which increased their narrow-treaded machines' mobility across snow and ice (though even the best east chains failed to bring the panzers up to the T-34's fabled cross-country mobility standards).

Taken on its own, then, the Russian climate was important, but probably not decisive, in bringing about the German failure.

The Red Army Was Too Huge

If one were to sum up Operation Barbarossa in one sentence, the best thing that could probably be said is it was what happened when the best army in the world attacked the biggest army in the world.

By the summer of 1941, the German army stood unrivaled as wizards of mechanized warfare. They were thoroughly practiced in the most advanced tactical doctrine in the world, and that, coupled with bold (if incomplete) strategic planning at the top, had honed those soldiers into a so far unstoppable instrument for the carrying out of their government's policies anywhere in Europe, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, that tank treads and hobnail boots could reach.

Beyond the day-to-day motivation for fighting well so as not to let down his buddies (Waffenbrudern), the German soldiers were also steeped in what seemed to them the great historic justice of their cause. That is, English language sources often make the point Hitler used the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty as a propaganda standard around which he could rally his countrymen, obtaining their support for all kinds of aggression. That is true as far as it goes, but it does not really go far enough.

To the Germans of the post-World War I era, Versailles, loathsome as it was to them, was really no more than the tip of a great historic iceberg of injustices, indignities and horrors that the accident of geography had placed upon them. Located in the center of the continent in such a way that any European nations making war would virtually have to go through Germany to do it, the Vaterland had for over 500 years served as the cockpit of western civilization. That era or so the founding of the Third Reich seemed to promise was finally at an end, and the German soldiers were well aware and proud of their role in that ending. They knew the job of conquering the Soviet Union was to be a big one indeed, the biggest one but if they couldn't do it no one could.

In 1941, even the Soviet high command knew their forces were no real match for the Germans in any kind of even fight. In January, after a general staff wargame was held in Moscow pitting the German Army against the Red on the sand table, with the latter getting clobbered, a silence fell over the room. Then the chief of staff at the time, Gen. K. A. Mertskov, attempted to break the gloomy spell by claiming no wargame could reflect the true ''qualitative superiorities" of the Soviet rifle divisions over the enemy. Stalin instantly shut him up by countering that such "bragging" was "the stuff for agitators, not realists."

Of course, the Soviets didn't have to fight on anything like even terms. They used the advantages given them by their country's size and climate, coupled with their numeric superiority, to first outlast and then repel the invaders. What they lacked in tactical sophistication they more than made up in firepower and grim tenacity. In essence, the Red Army or at least that part of it the Germans knew to exist when they attacked did stand and was destroyed west of the Dvina/Dniepr line. The trouble for the Germans lay in the fact that destruction amounted to only about a third of the actual Red Army.

The typical Red Army soldier also had his own sources of deep motivation. Though it seems hard to believe now, from the vantage point of a time when Communism has been repudiated in its national birthplace, in 1941 there were still many who believed the USSR was germinating the world's glorious socialist future within its borders. When revolutionary romanticism flagged, there was still old fashioned Russian patriotism and the tradition of stoic heroism to draw on. Most important of all, when even those things failed, there still remained the bald fact the Soviet armed forces and populace lacked any practical alternative to resistance, much as they might have liked to find one.

A few months into the invasion, German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South, remarked to Hitler that his intelligence staffers estimated about 2.5 million Ukrainians would come forward to bear arms for the Greater Reich if they were treated decently. The FĂźhrer curtly dismissed the idea by stating he had "not invaded the east to give rifles to the Slavs." He had, in fact, invaded it to kill them if not all of them right away at least enough (30 million by GĂśring's estimate) to make for rapid clearing of the place for German colonization.

At the time, the infamous "final solution" death camp system that would blossom and expand after 1942 was not yet in place. But their earlier campaigns in central Europe and the Balkans had already shown the Nazis to be masters at improvisation when it came to race war, and they outdid themselves in the USSR. Four motorized "Special Action Groups" (Einsatzgruppen), each of about battalion size followed the combat troops into the east. Their assignment was to eliminate any and all "undesirables": Jews, Gypsies, Communists, the intelligentsia, along with anyone else who even remotely looked like they might pose some threat to the coming new order.

The Special Action Groups unleashed a frenzied ethnic and political slaughter behind the advancing front. Their zeal often inspired the local populations to join in with their own spirited pogroms. By winter, the Germans expanded the killing beyond racial, ethnic and political boundaries, setting in motion policies aimed at simply depopulating entire areas, such as intercepting all food shipments into selected occupied cities. The madness reached, and was maintained at, a level that eventually led one non-Jewish Ukrainian survivor of the war to calculate he'd had to commit some 40 capital offenses (as defined by the Germans: curfew violations, owning winter boots, harboring anti-German sentiments, etc., etc.) just to survive.

Soon even the most politically apathetic and unpatriotic Soviet soldiers had an excellent reason to go on fighting to the bitterest of ends: revenge. Revenge for massacred and starved family and destroyed homes; revenge for executed friends and raped sweethearts revenge, finally, just for the hell of it, the satisfaction of it.

Even a cursory study of the idiotic, evil and self-defeating policies the Germans put into practice in the east leaves a modern reader in total disbelief. The Germans later came to call what happened to them and their country in 1945 the Niederschlagenliterally, the "beating down." Taken in perspective, though, the fact there are any Germans at all left alive today can probably serve as an indicator that the Russians are at heart a basically compassionate people. (Cynics would say they are merely pragmatic.)

Of all the factors the Germans had the power to manipulate during the invasion, it was undoubtedly their Nazi racism that doomed them. They gave their eastern opponents no real alternative to death or, at best, slavery. Of course, the amazing fact some quarter-million "easterners" still volunteered to fight for the Germans between 1941 and 1945 bears stark testimony to the brutality and bankruptcy of Stalinism too.

Stand Fast

Another misconception sometimes presented in the literature dealing with the end of the Barbarossa campaign has to do with Hitler's "stand fast" order to his troops that winter. The line of argument goes that the German dictator was indeed correct to insist on a no-retreat policy before Moscow once the Soviets began their counteroffensive in earnest. To have given in to the generals and ordered a retreat would have proven disastrous, this argument runs, since the hitherto offensively oriented Wehrmacht would have been unable to make a smooth psychological switch to retreat mode. The idea is that once told to withdraw, the German army would simply have fallen apart and never been able to reform.

Not only does that line of reasoning lack any logic of its own, but numerous examples belie it from later in the war when German armies and ones far more wasted than those before Moscow in 1941did survive strategic retreats.

Had Hitler ordered a general retreat late in 1941, and had even a worst case collapse of the front resulted from it, his Reich would still have had its overall survivability enhanced by the experience. As the Germans fell back westward, the same logistical constraints that had tripped them up would have begun operating against the Soviets.

Again, taking performances from later in the war as a measure, the very best line the Soviets could have expected to reach by spring was Riga-Minsk-Odessa. When 1942's summer campaigning season arrived with the chastened Germans hunkered down on that line the line they were not beaten back to historically until mid-1944 there could not have been much serious thought given to resuming the strategic offensive. Hitler just as he shut down the nascent Sea Lion operation when the Luftwaffe disappointed him over Britain would probably have looked for an out. After such a reversal he could no longer have kidded himself an offensive solution was even remotely possible against the USSR. He might have tried for a compromise treaty, or at least set up a rationalized and reserve-backed eastern defense policy.

Imagine, then, the task before the Western Allies when all those hundreds of thousands of troops, and thousands of tanks, lost in the east from 1942 through 1944 were instead available for the defense of Fortress Europe, or even for Mediterranean expeditions. As late as November 1943, Gen. Eisenhower feared the Germans might go over to such a strategy in the east and thereby create for themselves an unbeatable reserve.

Conclusions

As explained early in this article, the old German veteran had gained through personal experience a succinct understanding of the broad historical factors at work in the USSR during the campaign of 1941. But it was probably British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery who capsulated the whole thing best when, at a press conference shortly after V-E Day, he was asked what new additions to the science of warfare had been generated by World War II. He answered there were at least two new axioms given certification: "One - never invade China; and two - never invade Russia."

And there was another battlefront where the same sorry saga of the Stuka was, it seemed, about to be played out for yet a third time - the initial spectacular successes, followed by the inexorable growth of enemy air opposition, and then the inevitable relegation to night operations. But in Russia things were to prove different. Armed with a pair of 37 mm cannon underwing, the Ju 87 enjoyed a new lease of life as a specialised anti-tank aircraft. And on the eastern front at least - albeit in relatively small numbers - the Stuka would remain in action by day until war's end.

Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was the last and most ambitious Blitzkrieg of them all. But despite the enormity of the undertaking, such were the Luftwaffe's commitments elsewhere by that summer of 1941 - the defence of the occupied western territories and the fighting in the Mediterranean - that it launched the attack on Russia with far fewer aircraft than had been available to it for the assault on France and the Low Countries in the spring of the previous year.

The disparity between Stuka strengths on the eves of the two invasions was particularly striking. One source quotes the number of serviceable Ju 87s deployed in readiness for the Blitzkrieg in the west as having been 301. The comparable figure for Barbarossa is given as just 183 (with a further 24 up in the far north above the Arctic Circle).

The main assault force of Stukas - seven Gruppen in total - all came under the command of Luftflotte2 on the central sector of the front. They were divided between the air fleet's two Fliegerkorps. Subordinated to VIII. Fliegerkorps on the left, or northern, flank of the sector were Stab StG 1 with II. and IIl./StG 1, plus Stab StG 2 with I. and IIl./StG 2. On the right, or southern, flank under II. Fliegerkorps were all three Gruppen of StG 77.

The task of the two Fliegerkorps) Stuka units was to support the armoured divisions of Panzergruppen 3 and 2 respectively as they drove eastwards in a series of giant pincer movements towards their ultimate goal - Moscow.

Accounts of the opening day of Barbarossa are nearly always dominated by the astronomical scores achieved by the Luftwaffe's fighters both in the air and on the ground. Some 325 Soviet aircraft were shot down on 22 June 1941, the vast majority of them falling to Bf 109s. The German ]agdgruppen were also responsible for a sizeable proportion of the nearly 1500 Red Air Force machines destroyed on the ground, either by low-level strafing or by dropping hundreds of the devilish little 2-kg SD 2 'butterfly bombs'.

A number of Stukas also flew missions on this day armed with the 'butterfly bomb's' larger counterpart, the 10-kg SD 10 anti-personnel bomb. These were carried in underwing containers and dropped indiscriminately on enemy airfields and known troop concentrations. But such scattergun tactics were a waste of the Ju 87's unique capabilities, and during the early morning hours of 22 June most Stukas were employed in their more traditional role delivering precise attacks on pinpoint targets. III./StG 1, for example, was ordered to knock out three Red Army H Q buildings at dawn;

'As each aircraft's engine sprang into life, its dispersal pen was fitfully illuminated by the flickering flames from the exhaust stubs. Red, green and white lights wove through the darkness as the machines taxied to their assigned take-off positions. 'The three aircraft of the HQ flight lifted off together at 0230 hrs, leaving a thick cloud of dust in their wake. Despite their total lack of visibility, those following all got off safely. One by one, they emerged from the dust cloud, their position lights indicating their passage as they closed up on the leaders until the Gruppe formation was complete. In the pale half-light of pre-dawn, villages, roads and railway lines could just be made out through the layers of mist blanketing the ground.'

III./StG 1 was to have rendezvoused with II. Gruppe before entering Russian airspace, but the two units failed to link up. After circling for a few minutes, Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke, the Gruppenkommandeur ofllI./StG 1, assumed - quite rightly, as it turned out - that Hauptmann Anton Keil's II. Gruppe must have gone on ahead. He set out after them; 'We crossed the border - a peculiar feeling. A new theatre ofwar, a new foe, but at first all remained quiet. The Soviets appeared to be fast asleep! The first bombs from II./StG 1 detonate some way off in front of us. Then it's our turn. A few stray puffs of smoke blossom in the sky. The enemy flak has finally woken up. But the gunners' aim is so wild and uncertain that old Stuka hands such as ourselves pay it little heed.

'The pilots have spotted their targets. Attack! We dive almost vertically, one after the other in quick succession. In a few seconds it's all over. The ruins of the H Q buildings are shrouded in dust, smoke and flames. We get back into formation and head for home.'

The Gruppe landed back at Dubovo-South at 0348 hrs, its first mission in-theatre having lasted just 78 minutes. Just under two hours later the aircrews set out again. This time their job was to block the approaches to the bridge spanning the River Niemen at Grodno to prevent its being blown up by the Russians. This second operation was also successful. The Grodno bridge - a potential bottleneck on Panzergruppe 3's planned advance on Minsk, capital of white Russia - was saved from demolition and III./StG 1 again returned to base without loss.

Three more missions were flown before the day was out, two of them safeguarding further important river crossing points. The last Stuka touched down back at Dubovo-South at 2108 hrs - five operations in just under 19 hours - with the next take-off scheduled for 0330 hrs the following morning! But such was to be the norm rather than the exception during the opening rounds of Barbarossa, with all the other Stuka units being worked equally as hard. On StG l's immediate left, the two Gruppen of Major Oskar Dinort's StG 2 'Immelmann' spent the entire 22 June ceaselessly pounding away at the Soviet frontier defences to the east and southeast of Suwalki.

Meanwhile, in II. Fliegerkorps' sector, StG 77's three Gruppen were engaged in smashing a breach through the Red Army's fortified positions along the line of the River Bug. This was the jumping-off area for Panzergruppe 2's advance eastwards along the northern edge of the Pripyet Marshes. It was here that the Soviet air force seemed to rally more quickly than elsewhere along the front. Back at their bases between missions, the Stukas of StG 77 themselves became the targets for constant waves of enemy bombers. But the unescorted Tupolevs were hacked down in droves by the defending fighters of JG 51. At Byala Podlaska alone, one pilot of II./StG 77 reported seeing 21 bombers crash nearby. Not one Stuka was damaged.

In fact, on the opening day of Barbarossa only two Ju 87s were lost to enemy action (and a third damaged from other causes) along the entire 170-mile (270 km) stretch of the central sector from the Rivel Memel down to the Pripyet.

Within 24 hours the armoured spearheads of Panzergruppen 2 and 3 were through the Soviets' rapidly disintegrating frontier defences and racing for Minsk. Most Stuka units now reverted to their more usual role of 'flying artillery', supporting the German armies in the field by blasting the way clear ahead of them, and preventing the enemy from mounting counter-attacks by disrupting his lines of communication and supply.

On the northern flank of the central sector, for example, 23 June found the Ju 87s of VIII. Fliegerkorps attacking - among other objectives - rail targets 90 miles (150 km) inside enemy territory. StG 1 destroyed a number of trains carrying guns and light tanks along the stretch of line from Vilna (Vilnius), near the Lithuanian border, down to the important junction at Lida, while StG 2 targeted stations and marshalling yards, including that at Volkovisk, between Bialystok and Minsk.

On the southern flank, however, there was an added complication. Although the leading elements of Panzergruppe 2 were already well on their way towards Minsk, the frontier fortress citadel of Brest-Litovsk was still holding out. It posed a significant and ongoing threat to the Germans' own main supply route, which passed within range of the fortress's heavy guns. The capture of the citadel had therefore become a priority. But its metre thick walls proved impervious to artillery and mortar bombardment, and StG 77 was called upon to do its job. Yet not even the Stukas could pound the stubborn defenders into submission.

A weeklong bombardment culminated in the entire Geschwader - very nearly 100 Ju 87s in all - being despatched against the citadel's east fort on the morning of 29 June. Although numerous direct hits were scored, the Junkers' 600-kg (1100-lb) bombs had little effect. That afternoon a Staffel of twin-engined Ju 88s carrying 1800-kg (4000-lb) 'Satan' bombs was sent in and Soviet resistance was finally broken.

Meanwhile, 24 June had seen the first four Knight's Crosses awarded to Stuka pilots serving on the eastern front. The recipients, however, all members of StG 2, were not being honoured for their actions against the Soviets over the last 48 hours, but for their previous exploits - primarily on anti-shipping operations - during the recent Greek and Cretan campaigns.

It was also on 24 June that III./StG 1 fell foul of Russian fighters. The Gruppe had already flown two missions that day without incident, but during the third (a raid on the northern outskirts of Minsk) it was attacked by half-a-dozen 1-16s. The Soviet pilots claimed six Stukas shot down, but III./StG l's loss returns give details of only one victim - a 9. Staffel machine that went down in flames some 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Minsk. Another Ju 87, flown by Gruppenkommandeur Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke, was reportedly hit by quadruple flak and forced to land behind enemy lines. Mahlke and his gunner evaded capture and succeeded in returning to their unit three days later.

27 June was also the date on which Panzergruppen 2 and 3 closed the ring around Minskwhen their leading armoured Korps- XXXXVIL from the south and LVII. from the north -linked up on the far side of the city. Over a third of a million enemy troops were trapped in the huge pocket, or 'cauldron', that stretched more than 220 miles (350 km) westwards from the white Russian capital back to Bialystok and beyond.

For the next 12 days, while Luftwaffe fighters blocked every attempt by Red Air Force bombers to blast open an escape route for their encircled armies, all seven of Luftflotte 2's Stukagruppen hurled everything they had into the battle to annihilate the Minsk-Bialystok cauldron. From their landing grounds at Lyck and Praschnitz in East Prussia, the Ju 87s of I. and III./StG 2 attacked the northern perimeter of the elongated eastwest pocket. And before the month was out, elements of StG 1 would be transferred down to Baranovichi to reinforce StG 77's operations over the southern half of the cauldron.

But whether north or south, the targets were the same - enemy troop movements, concentrations of armour, river crossings and railway lines. Yet amid all the mayhem and destruction there was still the odd moment of humour. On one occasion a small group of German troops fought their way across a railway bridge and gained a toehold on the enemy riverbank, only for the Soviets to bring up an armoured train. Pinned down by heavy fire, the infantry called for assistance from the Stukas.

A single Staffel duly arrived on the scene and began their work with clinical precision. The first two bombs cratered the railway embankment in front of and behind the train so that it was unable to move. Then the rest of the Staffel dived down to take out the train itself. This they accomplished in short order. But two pilots were baffled as to why their bombs exploded in a wood some distance away from the track. How could they have missed a sitting target - stationary, no defensive fire, no fighters in the vicinity, their bombs not released until almost on top of the middle wagon of the armoured behemoth - by such a wide margin?

Back at base, the Staffelkapit채n, who had been observing the attack, put them out of their misery. They had indeed hit the middle wagon as intended, but their bombs had bounced off the domed cupola on its roof and described a graceful parabola through the air before coming down in the trees over a hundred metres away from the track!

Like the armoured train in its final moments, the Soviet forces in the Minsk-Bialystok pocket had nowhere to go. And so they more often than not stood their ground and sent up a wall of anti-aircraft and small-arms fire whenever the Stukas appeared. Losses among the Gruppen inevitably began to mount. One casualty was future Oak Leaves winner Oberleutnant Helmut Leicht of StG 77, who was shot down and severely wounded on 28 June during his first operation on the Russian front.

By 9 July, however, it was all over. The cauldron had been reduced and nearly 324,000 Soviet troops had been taken prisoner, together with 3332 armoured vehicles and 1809 artillery pieces either captured or destroyed. Even more importantly, perhaps, the first objective had been achieved. Minsk was the western terminus of the Moscow highway. And roughly halfway along this main artery, only some 230 miles (370 km) from the Soviet capital, lay the next great prize - Smolensk.

Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky was the bright star of the Red Army in the early 1930s. His execution in May 1937, accused amongst other crimes of sabotage, began the avalanche of murder known as the Great Purges. One reason Stalin considered the marshal a saboteur was the weak state of the defenses on the approaches to Leningrad.

Thanks to its extensive and effective spy network the USSR learned of Barbarossa soon after Wehrmacht leaders. Initially, the Soviets planned to defend critical axes of advance using their fortified regions. That plan ceased to be workable when the Soviet Union extended its borders west in 1939-40. The decision to deploy defending units so far forward also robbed the Red Army of room to maneuver - a traditional Russian strength.

As Red Army Chief of Staff and member of the Military Soviet from 1926-34, Tukhachevsky focused on defending the Ukraine and the twin "capitals" of Moscow and Leningrad. By 1940, however, much had changed and the German Blitzkrieg campaigns had turned the military world on 16 its head. While Stalin acted the good neighbor to assuage Hitler, Soviet military thinkers put Tukhachevsky's offensive doctrines on hold until they had found a way to halt the Blitzkrieg.

The Red Army began planning in earnest immediately following Hitler's "secret" 31 July 1940 meeting. Following Stalin's contributions, Mobilization Plan 41 (MP 41) was published in October 1940. Results of wargames in December and January of 1941 painted a gloomy picture. On 13 January Stalin asked "Who won here?" None of his generals answered satisfactorily. Stalin made General G.K. Zhukov Red Army Chief of Staff two weeks later.

Even the USSR's best general could not work defensive miracles in less than five months. His State Defensive Plan 41 (DP 41) stated "that the Red Army would begin military operations in response to an aggressive attack." While remaining on the strategic defensive it would unleash operational offensives that might penetrate into the Reich; the Soviets were also aware of the panzer thrusts' lack of mutual support and vulnerable flanks.

Fatefully, Zhukov's plans also called for the forward deployment of 237 out of 303 divisions. The opening of the Barbarossa offensive on 22 June came too soon for MP 41 and DP 41 to take effect. On that date the Red Army was deployed as follows: First Echelon (6-30 miles deep) - 57 divisions, Second Echelon (30-60 miles) - 52 divisions, Third Echelon (60-240 miles) - 62 divisions. This positioning of so much of the Red Army in forward areas played into the Germans' hands.

Initial planning in the north assumed that Leningrad would only be threatened from Finland and that German thrusts would aim for Moscow. By 18 November 1940 the Soviets learned of the existence in German planning of a supporting attack heading for Leningrad. A defensive plan from that date identified an attack axis through Pskov and anticipated the Finns advancing via Vyborg against Leningrad. Responsibility for defending the Pskov-Ostrov approaches to Bolshevism's birthplace shifted to the Baltic Special Military District from the Leningrad Military District. Unfortunately for the Soviets, neither headquarters gave the issue its full attention.

Such plans as did exist identified two phases of defensive fighting: first at the frontier and along the Dvina River, second on the line Riga-Pskov-Luga-Novgorod. This took advantage of natural obstacles like the Velikaya and Luga Rivers, as well as marshes and forests in the area. A later plan, dated 15 May 1941, maintained Leningrad Military District responsibility for defending Leningrad and the Murmansk rail line. The same plan gave the Baltic Special Military District the mission to halt the enemy between Riga and Vilnius and hold the Baltic Islands. The "Leningraders" would accomplish their assigned mission. Their comrades on the East Prussian border would not.

The "1941 Plan for the Defense of State Borders" assumed Germany would need 10-15 days to finalize their invasion. However, Stalin preferred to look the other way as the Wehrmacht prepared for 11 months. One observer called Hitler the only man Stalin ever trusted. The dictator's wishful thinking was not the Soviets' sole intelligence weakness. They over-estimated German strength at 260 divisions, 10,000 tanks and 15,000 aircraft (real numbers: 150, 3,300, and 2,510 respectively). However, 500,000 untrained recruits and reserve armies sent to die front in the weeks prior to Bartarossatag could not stave off disaster.

In most regions the initial Wehrmacht ground advance encountered weak and patchy resistance. German assault troops overran many border posts before the NKVD border guards could assemble, although in some regions troops assigned to local fortified regions fought to the last man, delaying the Germans for a few hours while Red Army divisions struggled frantically to man their assigned forward defensive positions.

The Brest Citadel was defended by seven battalions of the 6th and 42nd Rifle Divisions, elements of the 17th Red Banner Border Guards Detachment and specialized elements of the 28th Rifle Corps, numbering about 3,500 men.

The Russians built the Brest fortress between 1833 and 1842, at the confluence of the Bug and Mukhavets rivers; they improved the fortifications in 1878-88, and again in 1911-14. The fortress stood on four islands: central, northern, western and southern. The Treaty of Riga (1921) awarded Brest to the newly independent state of Poland, but the Red Army occupied it on September 22, 1939. (German troops under Guderian had captured it five days earlier, but had to hand it over to the Soviets.) The city and fortress stood in Guderian's way again in 1941, and would have to be reduced quickly.

The Soviet defenders belonged to elements of the 6th and 42nd Rifle Divisions, the 17th Frontier Guard Detachment, plus engineer, antitank, antiaircraft and other support units, totaling 7,000-8,000 men. The Austrian 45th Infantry Division provided most of the attackers, from I and lll/IR 135 plus I and III/1R 130. Firing in support were 12 artillery batteries, 4th Nebelwerfer Regiment, 210mm howitzers, and two 600mm "Karl" siege guns firing rounds weighing over two tons.

German artillery fire began at 0305hrs on Barbarossatag, and pioneers crossed the Bug in assault boats at 0319hrs, capturing bridges intact. By noon l/IR 135 had occupied much of the northern island and taken the city's rail station, while l/IR 130 took the southern island and five bridges over the Bug and Mukhavets - thus bypassing most Soviet gun positions and opening the Rollbahn for Guderian's XXIV Panzer Corps. However, attempts to take the citadel by coup de main failed. By the 23rd most Soviet defenders had fallen back to the central island, destroying bridges behind them. Pockets of resistance held out under the command of majors and captains, and the front lines surged back and forth in seesaw fighting at the shortest ranges, while the ordnance of both sides destroyed the old brick fortifications around them.

Still by 25 June Fortress Brest still held out despite the pounding of 210mm howitzers, the two 600mm siege guns and Nebelwerfer rockets.

The combination of bunker-busting German heavy howitzers and mortars, flamethrowers, and the sheer exhaustion of relentless close-quarter fighting took their toll by June 29 and 30. The final blow fell on the 29th, when seven Junkers Ju 88 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 3 dropped two-ton bombs on the last pockets still holding out. Shell-shocked survivors, including wounded in the hospitals and the wives and children of Red Army officers, began to surrender. The garrison commander and the commissar committed suicide, but some 400 men went into captivity. By the end of June the Germans considered the battle officially over, although some defenders held out until the second half of July. Capturing Brest cost the 45th Infantry Division 414 dead.

Like a defiant shoal in a hostile sea, the citadel at Brest defiantly held out against the invading forces until 12 July.

By Chris Perello

Like the Germans, the Soviets fielded an army formed largely of foot-mobile infantry divisions. On paper, the Soviet division was similar to the German, using the 3-plus-1 fractal organization with supporting arms at each level. But there were important differences on the ground.

Soviet doctrine, though paying lip service to the idea of initiative at all levels, was wedded to operations by massed formations on a large front. Command was exercised from the top down; subordinate units were tied to the movements of their parent formations.

This tendency was exacerbated by Stalin's purges. In raw numbers, the Soviet officer corps had been severely reduced. Worse, those remaining were less willing to take the initiative, preferring the safer route of obeying orders explicitly Soviet tactics became cumbersome and predictable, reducing effectiveness and increasing losses. The problem only got worse after the severe losses during Barbarossa. It was not until 1943 that Soviet leadership became generally competent, and even then it could not match that of the Germans.

The Soviets also did not have enough technical specialists and equipment to properly man so sophisticated an organization. In particular, radios, radiomen and trained artillery observers were in short supply. Before, and especially after, the start of Barbarossa, the Soviets began stripping their infantry divisions of specialist formations, consolidating them at higher headquarters. The division became a mass of rifle and submachinegun armed infantrymen. They were supported by a mass of mortars and light field pieces, but these were used primarily for direct fire. This not only limited the flexibility of the division's firepower, but increased losses, as the artillery had to be placed in the forward battle zone to be used in that way.

Still, the Russian infantry could fight effectively. The individual Soviet infantryman was physically hardy, fatalistic, and needed less material support than his German opponent. He was especially effective in the many forests of northern and central Russia. The sheer volume of firepower generated by the rifle divisions exacted a heavy toll on the Germans.

More importantly, the Soviets had a military age male population twice as large as Germany's. They could go on feeding full-strength units into the fight long after the Germans were exhausted.

By Chris Perello

Of the 141 divisions taking part in Operation Barbarossa, 108 of them (76%) were non-motorized infantry. These divisions, plodding along at the speed of a marching man, were incapable of the rapid concentration and deep exploitation that made the blitzkrieg possible. The Germans were aware of their infantry's shortcomings, but their economy was incapable of producing the motor vehicles needed to motorize them, and even less capable of supplying the fuel to run all those vehicles.

After the successful conclusion of the 1940 campaign, the German General Staff had drawn up plans to motorize the entire army, but that would have meant reducing its size to no more than 70 divisions. The invasion of Russia required greater numbers than that, so the marching divisions were retained. In fact, to help equip the 18 new panzer and motorized divisions formed after the fall of France, the infantry divisions lost many of the motor vehicles they had, their place being taken by more horsedrawn vehicles. Thus the infantry of 1941 was less mobile than it had been in France the year before.

The tactics chosen by the Germans for the invasion, the Kesselschlacht or cauldron (pocket) battle, were based on the division of the army into mobile and non-mobile portions. The infantry divisions simply couldn't keep up with the mobile formations on the deep and fast drives called for by the Blitz theorists, but there were too few mobile divisions to defeat the Soviets alone.

Not only could the German economy not motorize the entire army, it could not really support an army of the size fielded in 1941. Few divisions outside the eastern front could be maintained at their full authorized strength. There were only 130 replacement battalions available, representing less than 10 percent of the invading army's strength. In 1942, thousands of skilled workers were scheduled to be returned to the civilian economy they had been "borrowed" from industry to maximize the number of divisions available.

The shortage of trained officers and NCOs was even worse. The limitations of the Versailles Treaty meant a whole generation of Germans had never received military training. The tiny peacetime army of 100,000, though trained to a high standard, was insufficient to lead the mass army of 1941. Only by calling up World War One veterans, Austrian officers, and policemen, could the shortage be made up. Even so, the rapid expansion came at the cost of quality leadership, especially in the infantry divisions, which were at the bottom of the priority list for officers, as they were for manpower, motor vehicles and equipment.

Starting in the mid-1930s, new divisions had been added to the army in "waves." Each wave was organized and equipped in a similar fashion to ease administrative burdens, but the army as a whole had a wide variety of organizations and equipment lists. Only the 42 divisions of the first two waves (plus the mobile divisions, some of which were formed by converting first-wave divisions) had anything like a full complement of leaders and technical specialists. Many officers thought the new divisions compared unfavorably with those of 1914 in marksmanship, nightand close-combat training and fieldcraft.

Organization

The basic German infantry fighting unit was the squad of 10 men, armed with a light machinegun (LMG), a submachinegun and eight rifles. Nearly every major combatant power in WWII used a similar organization, but there was one critical difference: in every other army, the LMG (or automatic rifle) was used to supplement the rifle fire of the squad; in the German army, the LMG was the squad.

On defense, the LMG provided the firepower to stop enemy attacks; the riflemen protected the LMG and helped carry ammunition for it. On the attack, the LMG would pin enemy defenders while the riflemen worked their way forward to assault enemy positions with grenade and bayonet. Built around the concepts of the WWI Stosstruppen (Shocktroops), the squad was expected to operate independently, calling for help only when absolutely necessary.

Each commander above squad level was expected to accomplish much the same. That is, at each command level, the commander was given three or four maneuver units and one or two support units with progressively heavier weapons. Those weapons could be employed en masse or detached to reinforce a subordinate unit for a particular mission. German doctrine emphasized the formation of ad hoc battle groups at every level, which made German units more flexible than comparably-sized units in other armies.

The infantry regiment was the smallest permanent infantry organization. Companies were formed and disbanded at the discretion of the regimental headquarters, and were often transferred from battalion to battalion as the situation demanded. Platoons and squads were consolidated within the company as needed. After mid-1941, battalions also were disbanded and reformed.

The machinegun (or heavy weapons) companies could be deployed as whole units, or could be broken up to provide direct and indirect fire support to the line companies. The machineguns used were identical to the LMGs in the infantry squads, but were mounted on tripods for greater stability and accuracy. They also had larger crews to carry more ammunition and more spare barrels to enable constant firing. (Squad MGs had to fire a series of short bursts or risk overheating). Early in the war, some of these companies were even capable of conducting indirect machinegun fire to create dead zones.

This was an old and honored World War I tactic that disappeared as training standards fell.

The regimental artillery company was equipped with light artillery pieces that were used for direct fire. The purpose of the company was to give the regimental commander heavy fire support for assaults, not as a supplement to divisional indirect fire.

The regimental anti-tank companies were equipped mostly with inadequate 37mm guns or captured French 47mm pieces. The new 50mm gums were still in short supply, so were being parceled out to all units in ones and twos as they became available. After encountering the Soviets' T-34 and KV-1 tanks, these companies were often supplemented by field pieces from the divisional artillery, again in ones and twos.

The remaining support platoons of the regiment were not found in all units. The engineers were actually "pioneers," specialists in the use of explosives and mines rather than construction or bridging. The reconnaissance unit was likely to be bicycle-mounted rather than motorized.

The artillery regiment formed the core of the division's firepower on both attack and defense. In fact, some officers felt the infantry had become too dependent on artillery support, sacrificing speed and wasting ammunition. The artillery's effectiveness was hampered by the fact the guns were horsedrawn, and because the shortage of trained personnel, radios and vehicles prevented formation of observation battalions in most divisions. It was therefore difficult to achieve rapid and flexible concentrations of artillery fire.

Nearly every division had the authorized battalion of truck-towed anti-tank guns, mostly 50mm plus some of the new 75mm pieces. Again, captured French and Czech equipment was used to fill some gaps. The remaining support battalions were found in the 42 first-class divisions, but were weaker or non-existent in the others.

Though the infantry divisions moved no faster than their predecessors in the Kaiser's army, they were trained using the same concepts as the mobile units. The emphasis was on infiltration of enemy lines and exploitation of opportunities. Mission orders were given in broad terms, with subordinate commanders expected to use their initiative in carrying them out, and with the assumption the larger formations would follow and support a successful subordinate unit. The purpose of combat was as much to shock the enemy into submission as to kill him outright.

The underlying weaknesses of the German war machine were brought home by the heavy losses during Barbarossa. By September, the average infantry division in Army Group Center was about 1,600 men under-strength. This represented only 10 percent of total personnel strength, but more than half the riflemen, who incurred most of the casualties. Administrative and support troops were drafted into the squads, but they were inadequately trained and insufficient in number to maintain combat strength for long.

By early December, the average infantry company could field no more than 60 men: platoons, companies, and even battalions were consolidated to maintain company strength. Those under-strength units proved adequate for defense, since the firepower of the LMG was undiminished. In one example from early 1942, a German company of only sixteen men occupied a front of nearly a mile, with each man armed with his own LMG. This company stopped several attacks by a full Soviet regiment.

But attacking was a different story. The machineguns could only pin defenders; they could not take ground. That required assault parties of riflemen. The failure of the final German offensive around Moscow was as much due to a lack of riflemen as anything else.

The German infantry never recovered from the losses of 1941. For the 1942 offensive, only those divisions in the spearhead were brought to anything near full strength. For the rest, official strength was reduced to nine men per squad, 90 per company and two battalions per regiment: a total rifle strength less than half the original. Even that existed only on paper. Many regiments could keep only one battalion on the line, leaving the other in the rear as a depot unit. Companies increasingly became small combat groups formed around a few LMGs and one or two mortars or anti-tank guns, with the regiments constantly forming new companies to maintain a fresh reserve, however small.

From 1942 on, the infantry divisions formed a thin and brittle line, and the brunt of the battle fell to the mobile divisions. The German infantry bled to death in Russia.

Running Total of German Casualties During Operation Barbarossa 6/22/41 - 1/1/42

These figures include killed, wounded and missing. The numbers in parenthesis represent the percentage of the total

German armed forces fighting in the east.

13 July - 92,120 (3.6%)

13 August - 389,924 (10.0%)

26 August - 441,100 (11.6%)

30 September - 551,039 (16.2%)

13 November - 699,726 (20.6%)

31 December 1941 - 930,903 (26.00%).

It is often assumed that German tactics only rarely required the use of firepower, an instrument otherwise preferred both by the Allies and the Soviets. As a matter of fact, the use of firepower was not unusual in the German Army, although at least in the first years of the war it was mainly restricted to circumstances such as the seizure of a fortress or the crossing of a river, such as at Sedan in May 1940. Also, firepower was mainly used to suppress enemy positions and prevent them from opening fire on advancing units. Therefore, in spite of the availability of armoured spotting vehicles for the Artillerie Regiment, the Panzer Divisions made extensive use of area fire, with their artillery firing on carefully preselected map coordinates.

During the Smolensk encirclement, 20. Panzer Division, spearheading Panzergruppe 3, advanced on the northern prong of the pincer, and eventually faced a major obstacle in its path: the Dvina River. Since the division had been slowed down by heavy rainfall, the Ic (intelligence officer) reported that Red Army units had had time to set up well-prepared defences (reinforced by artillery and anti-tank guns) on the north-eastern bank of the river, particularly in the area of Ulla. Having ruled out a surprise attack, the divisional commander Generalleutnant Horst Stumpff decided instead on an all-out attack with full fire support. Schützen Regiment 59 was to cross the Dvina north of Ulla, in the Komatschino area, following air attacks led by units of VIII Fliegerkorps, and after a 15-minute artillery bombardment performed by Artillerie Regiment 92 and other attached artillery units, including III. Abteilung of Nebelwerfer Regiment 51. As scheduled, the air bombardment began at 2:00 p.m. on 7 July 1941, followed 45 minutes later by the artillery one. Finally, at 3:00 p.m., the first assault boats of the Landungsboot Pionier Bataillon began to carry the Schützen across the river. The short but intense air bombardment and artillery fire succeeded in pinning down the enemy troops, who put up only scant resistance. With the enemy defences already distracted by the attack and under cover of direct fire from I./Schützen Regiment 112, men of II./SR 112 crossed the Dvina north of Nadeschino, where the enemy defences stood far from the riverbank. In the meantime Kradschiitzen Bataillon 20 carried out a feint attack at Ulla. Soon the men of the Soviet 62nd Rifle Division reorganized and started to fire on the two battalions of Schützen Regiment 59, which had already crossed the river. Schützen Regiment 112 faced only light resistance, which enabled it to bring its heavy weapons across the river. At 4:50 p.m. Komatschino fell into German hands, while to the south, Schützen Regiment 112 advanced to the main road. Eventually Schützen Regiment 59 attacked the bridge area of Ulla at 7:30 p.m., seizing it shortly thereafter. Its success cost 200 killed and wounded. Bridging elements of Panzer Pionier Bataillon 92 began erecting a bridge over the river, which was opened at 9:00 a.m. on 8 July. Two minutes later the leading elements of the division began their advance to Vitebsk, which 20. Panzer Division seized in the afternoon of 9 July.

The early stages of Operation Barbarossa were still ruled by blitzkrieg-style warfare. On 23 June 1941 XXXXVIII Panzer Korps started its drive to the 'Stalin' line, as part of Kleist's Panzergruppe 1 advance in the southern part of the Eastern Front. After infantry had broken through the Soviet border defences in the early morning of 23 June, 11. Panzer Division began its march with its Panzer Aufkärungs Abteilung in the lead. A few hours later it seized the village of Stojanow, opening the way to advance for other units. Panzer Regiment 15, in the lead, switched south toward the village of Radziechow, only to face a Soviet armoured brigade (part of the 15th Mechanized Corps) heading north. What followed was one of the first tank battles on the Eastern Front, which lasted for about six hours and saw Panzer Regiment IS, supported by Schützen Regiment 111 and Artillerie Regiment 119, struggling to annihilate the Soviet threat. By midday Soviet forces were compelled to withdraw, having lost some 30 tanks, although German losses had also been high. This did not slow down the advance of the rest of the German division. Having taken the lead, Schützen Regiment 110 advanced toward Chmielno and, after a brief fight for control, moved on to Lypatin, which was taken without a struggle. At about the same time, Kradschützen Bataillon 61, which advanced north of the Styr River without encountering any serious enemy resistance, reached Merwa and Beresteczko and seized the bridges on the Styr intact. Panzer Regiment 15 established a small bridgehead and resumed its advance and, at 6.30 p.m., Schützen Regiment 110 reached Sczczurowjce only to find that the bridge had been destroyed. Nevertheless, small parties crossed the river.

At 7:00 a.m. on 24 June aerial reconnaissance reported large armoured enemy units to the south of 11. Panzer Division's line of advance to the west and the east of the Styr; their leading elements were already in the Brody area and moving toward Radziechow. To face the threat, elements of Panzer Regiment 15 and Schützen Regiment 111 were sent to the Lypatin area, but their advance was slowed by congestion on the roads and Soviet air raids. Meanwhile, both battalions of Schützen Regiment 110 formed a bridgehead to the east and the south of Sczcurowjce. 16. Panzer Division, part of XIV Panzer Korps, was sent after 11. Panzer Division on the road to Radziechow to help face the Soviet threat, but its advance was halted on roads blocked by Soviet support troops. Only Kradschützen Bataillon 61 was able to reconnoitre forward, seizing Ostrow in the morning. Late in the afternoon of 24 June, after Pionier Bataillon 209 had built a bridge at Sczczurowjce, 11. Panzer Division resumed its advance. At dusk the leading elements of I./ Schützen Regiment 110 reconnoitred the road leading east, seizing Kozyn and reaching Plycza at night, which lay only 12km from Dubno. In the meantime Panzer Regiment 15 and Schützen Regiment 111 crossed the Styr and began their own advance, without waiting for 16. Panzer Division. At dawn on 25 June Schützen Regiment 110 attacked the enemy positions at Plycza and overcame them, opening the path for the further advance east. While the bulk of 11. Panzer Division massed to the south of Dubno, to the north Panzer Aufkärungs Abteilung 231 advanced toward Mlynow and seized it without a fight. The double pincer attack against Dubno started at 11:00 a.m., and the town was eventually seized shortly after 2:00 p.m. Meanwhile, forward elements of 16. Panzer Division reached the Chmielno area, ready to face the Soviet counter-attack.

Kubelwagens and assorted medium and It-ton trucks advance into Russia, summer 1941. The divisional 'Stahlhelm' marking is clearly visible, as are the tactical markings denoting vehicles of the motorcycle recce company from the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion. Note also the white formation keeping markers on the outer corners of each vehicle to simplify travel by night.

Only the regiment's armoured and artillery elements took part in the initial assault on Russia on 21 June 1941, co-operating with 7th Panzer Division in their attack over the River Bug at Janow, but the remainder of the units soon followed, crossing the Soviet frontier north of Brest Litovsk on 27/28 June and advancing on Minsk, which they reached on 6 July.

Again under command of the 10th Panzer Division, Infantry Regiment 'GD' continued to advance until the middle of July, over the River Beresina to the Dnepr, with occasional fierce hand-to-hand fighting against the stubborn but poorly led Soviet defenders. Transferred to a reserve position, the regiment was moved to the vicinity of Jerva, where it took part in the frantic defensive battles around the level crossing at Waskovo, for which the 1st Battalion's commander, Oberleutnant Hanert, received the Knight's Cross.

In September 1941 the regiment was again moved-something to which it was to become accustomed !-to Kiev, where it helped in the securing of the German bridgeheads over the River Desna, before being sent up to the north to take part in the desperate fighting for Orel and Tula during the Nazi advance on Moscow. Rain brought the inevitable clinging mud towards the end of October, which slowed progress, and at the beginning of December, when the cold really clamped down, the regiment was chiefly involved in defensive delaying actions along the Orel-Tula railway line. During 1941 the regiment had a hard time, with a great deal of marching and fighting punctuated by some brilliant successes as well as some dismal defeats (almost the entire motor cycle company was wiped out at Kolodesnaja, near Tula, at the beginning of December) . The tally up to 6 January 1942 was 900 men killed, 3,056 wounded and 114 missing; 1942 would also be hard, but it would see the reconstitution of the regiment as a fully-fledged division.

During its first surge eastward in 1941, the Wehrmacht only allowed towns and villages to impede the advance if their capture was vital - for instance, in order to secure a river crossing. Even then many were taken at the run, shock being regarded as more important than preparation. However, whereas in 1939 there had been a general expectation of avoiding committing armour to built-up areas, German tacticians now seemed more ambivalent. A German document on armoured divisions, translated early in 1942, set out the general parameters:

Except where necessary, tanks should not be employed in built-up areas, since their movements are restricted and they are easy targets for anti-tank weapons. When the armoured division is compelled to fight in a built-up area, the task should be assigned to the motorized infantry... [these] may be strengthened by single heavy tanks, heavy anti-tank guns, and engineer assault detachments [to] give support by engaging particularly strongly fortified defended areas. Built-up areas can be overcome more rapidly and with fewer casualties if smoke is used to blind the enemy, if he is paralyzed by artillery and bombing attacks, or if the area is burned down. Tank and motorized infantry units following in the rear of the first wave will be employed to flank the locality and take it from the rear. Liaison must be insured between forces carrying out the frontal and flank attacks.

How this worked in practice was demonstrated by an account of how a Panzergrenadier company dealt with the village of Krutojarka in the Ukraine. Once action was imminent the company moved at speed in its armoured carriers, dispersed in both width and depth with at least 20 yards between vehicles:

Guns can be seen flashing at the edge of the village. The Russian force is engaged. We hear the fire of the Russian anti-tank guns and our own tank cannon, and, in between, the sound of both sides' machine gun fire. The Panzergrenadier company commander gives his orders by radio: as soon as the grenadiers see Russian soldiers, they are to fire on them direct from their carriers, or else dismount quickly and fight on the ground... The first tanks enter Krutojarka, but presently reappear. The company commander radios the order 'Clear the town!' The personnel carriers advance past the tanks, which are firing with all their guns, and move towards the edge of the village ...

A personnel carrier's track is hit by a flanking anti-tank gun. The grenadiers jump out and assault the gun crew with machinegun fire, while the driver and the man beside him get out and, under fire, change the link of the broken track. The attacking grenadiers have now reached a street at the edge of the village. Startled by the suddenness of the assault, the Russians take cover in houses, bunkers, foxholes and other hideouts. The grenadiers jump out of the carriers and advance along the street, making good use of grenades, pistols and bayonets. The driver and the second man remain in each carrier. The carriers skirt around the sides of the village, with the men beside the drivers delivering flanking fire against the buildings. Soon the roofs of the houses are on fire; the smoke grows thicker and thicker. Three tanks push forward along the main street to support the attack of the grenadiers.

We find the smoke an advantage, as it prevents the Russians discovering that there are relatively few of us. Also, as a result of the poor visibility, the Russians cannot employ their numerous machine guns with full effect. We, for our part, are able to engage in the close fighting in which we excel. It is no longer possible to have one command for the company; officers and NCOs have formed small shock detachments, which advance from street corner to street corner, and from bunker to ditch, eliminating one Russian nest after another. A lieutenant holds a grenade until it almost explodes, and then throws it into a bunker...

As explained in the British Periodical Notes on the German Army, where villages lay in the path of an armoured division it was the job of the lorried or armoured infantry to clear them, 'engineers armed with explosives and flamethrowers' giving valuable support. While fire against the outskirts - supplemented by generated smoke or burning buildings occupied the defenders from various quarters, the main attack came in from 'an unexpected direction'. The hard slog was then the job of dismounted troops, 'organized for street fighting', commonly using 'one company with support weapons under command' concentrated to deal with a row of houses. Where resistance was stiff it might be necessary to use as much as a battalion with attached troops for a single street.

As the German offensive faltered in the East the whole campaign became less of a Sichelschnitt ('sickle cut') through the opposition, and much more a matter of 'take and hold'. Protracted fighting in built-up areas was a symptom of this change, and it is arguable that extensive street fighting was one of the first signs of German failure in the East. Urban battles cost large numbers of men, and in comparison with Germany the USSR's human resources appeared almost limitless. Many towns would be fought over during four years of war, notably Orel, Odessa, Zhitomir, Rostov, Kharkov, Sevastopol and finally Berlin itself; but one battle for a city naturally stands out, and it was during the struggle for Stalingrad that Russian street-fighting methods would be immeasurably improved.