Operation Barbarossa
 
"When Operation Barbarossa is launched, the world will hold
its breath!" 

Adolf Hitler
 
On the night of June 22, 1941, more than 3 million German
soldiers, 600 000 vehicles and 3350 tanks were amassed
along a 2000km front stretching from the Baltic to the
Black Sea. Their sites were all trained on Russia. This
force was part of 'Operation Barbarossa', the eastern front
of the greatest military machine ever assembled. This
machine was Adolf Hitler's German army. For Hitler, the
inevitable assault on Russia was to be the culmination of a
long standing obsession. He had always wanted Russia's
industries and agricultural lands as part of his Lebensraum
or 'living space' for Germany and their Thousand Year
Reich. Russia had been on Hitler's agenda since he wrote
Mein Kampf some 17 years earlier where he stated: 'We
terminate the endless German drive to the south and the
west of Europe, and direct our gaze towards the lands in
the east...If we talk about new soil and territory in
Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its
vassal border states'i Hitler wanted to exterminate and
enslave the 'degenerate' Slavs and he wanted to obliterate
their 'Jewish Bolshevist' government before it could turn
on him. His 1939 pact with Stalin was only meant to give
Germany time to prepare for war. As soon as Hitler
controlled France, he looked east. Insisting that Britain
was as good as defeated, he wanted to finish off the Soviet
Union as soon as possible, before it could significantly
fortify and arm itself. 'We only have to kick in the front
door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling
down'ii he told his officers. His generals warned him of
the danger of fighting a war on two fronts and of the
difficulty of invading an area as vast as Russia but,
Hitler simply overruled them. He then placed troops in
Finland and Romania and created his eastern front. In
December 1940, Hitler made his final battle plan. He gave
this huge operation a suitable name. He termed it
'Operation Barbarossa' or 'Redbeard' which was the nickname
of the crusading 12th century Holy Roman emperor, Frederick
I. The campaign consisted of three groups: Army Group North
which would secure the Baltic; Army Group South which would
take the coal and oil rich lands of the Ukraine and
Caucasus; and Army Group Centre which would drive towards
Moscow. Prior to deploying this massive force, military
events in the Balkans delayed 'Barbarossa' by five weeks.
It is now widely agreed that this delay proved fatal to
Hitler's conquest plans of Russia but, at the time it did
not seem important. In mid-June the build-up was complete
and the German Army stood poised for battle. Hitler's drive
for Russia failed however, and the defeat of his army would
prove to be a major downward turning point for Germany and
the Axis counterparts. There are many factors and events
which contributed to the failure of Operation Barbarossa
right from the preparatory stages of the attack to the
final cold wintry days when the Germans had no choice but
to concede. Several scholars and historians are in basic
agreement with the factors which led to Germany's failure
however, many of them stress different aspects of the
operation as the crucial turning point. One such scholar is
the historian, Kenneth Macksey. His view on Operation
Barbarossa is plainly evident just by the title of his book
termed, 'Military errors Of World War Two.'iii Macksey
details the fact that the invasion of Russia was doomed to
fail from the beginning due to the fact that the Germans
were unprepared and extremely overconfident for a
reasonable advancement towards Moscow. Macksey's first
reason for the failure was the simply that Germany should
not have broken its agreement with Russia and invaded its
lands due to the fact that the British were not defeated on
the western front, and this in turn plunged Hitler into a
war on two fronts. The Germans, and Hitler in particular
were stretching their forces too thin and were
overconfident that the Russians would be defeated in a very
short time. Adolf Hitler's overconfidence justifiably
stemmed from the crushing defeats which his army had
administered in Poland, France, Norway, Holland, Belgium
and almost certainly Great Britain had the English Channel
not stood in his way.iv Another important point that
Macksey describes is the lack of hard intelligence that the
Germans possessed about the Russian army and their
equipment, deployment tactics, economic situation and
communication networks. They had not invested much time and
intelligence agents in collecting information from a
country which was inherently secretive by nature and kept
extremely tight security. He also states that it was far
from clever that the General Staff officer in charge of
collecting information about the Soviet Union had many
other duties, was not an expert on Russia or the Red Army
and he couldn't even speak Russian.v Therefore it was
hardly surprising that the only detailed intelligence
reports concerned the frontier regions of Russia that were
frequently patrolled by German patrols and spied upon by
airborne reconnaissance. These were the products of
over-confidence. The German army plunged into Russia under
the impression that there were 200 Russian divisions ! in
tot al; only to discover in the following months that there
were 360 and this figure was later revised to over 400
divisions. The Germans also knew that the Russian roads
were inferior for their vehicles and that the Russian
railway tracks were of a different size than what they were
using yet, no department or planning logistics ever took
these factors into account before the invasion took place.
Before the German army was poised to strike towards Moscow,
one of the vital units of Operation Barbarossa was
diverted. Army Group South, which was to secure the Ukraine
and Romania was partly diverted to join in the theatres of
battle in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Initially, the
Army Group South had been safeguarded by Hitler as he used
power diplomacy instead of force to take Hungary, Romania
and Bulgaria into the German fold yet, now he was
unwittingly using these countries as a spring board for the
diplomatic takeover of Yugoslavia and an invasion of
Greece. At the same time, two mechanized divisions know as
the Africa Corps (Lt.General Erwin Rommel) were sent to
Tripoli to help the defeated and panicking Italian Army in
North Africa, and later, a costly invasion of the island of
Crete would further detract from the German effort because
of the heavy losses suffered by thousands of elite troops.
These deployment were significant because each expansion !
to the south was a subtraction from the troops of
Barbarossa as well as a cause of delay in its execution.
This troop subtraction was brought to alarming levels when
the British, through diplomatic intrigue, managed to ins
tigate a coup d'etat in Yugoslavia which overthrew the
government and canceled out the agreement the country had
with the Germans for unresisted submission. With every
indication that British bombers and troops would be within
range of Romania and the Barbarossa supply lines, a major
invasion of Yugoslavia as well as Greece had to take place
at short notice.vi This invasion however distracting, added
fuel to Hitler's confidence when his forces conquered both
Yugoslavia and Greece in a matter of weeks, but, these
delays would eventually prove costly as the unprepared and
poorly supplied German troops marched on towards Moscow.
While Macksey gives several valid reasons for the failure
of Barbarossa before the action is conducted, authors
Nicholas Bethell and Michael Wright both stress the fact
that the operation failed due to the Russian peoples
tenacity and the harsh weather and terrain conditions
during the invasion. They do not agree that the attack was
doomed from the start as Macksey contests. In Wright's book
'The World At Arms' , he describes many factors which led
to the failure of Hitler's plan. The first was the
ferocious fighting zeal of the Russian troops. This
fighting spirit had little to do with the communist
regime's inspiration but with the fact that the Russian
people had been so used to intimidation and suffering under
Stalin's iron fist that they had absolutely nothing to lose
by fighting to the death, particularly if your only
alternative was to be executed by your own government for
treason. When Stalin addressed his people, he spoke to them
as fellow citizens and brothers and sisters and not with
the demands of obedience and submission which was
commonplace in earlier times. He spoke of a 'national
patriotic war...for the freedom of the motherland' and he
initiated his scorched earth policy which would not leave
'a single railway engine, a single wagon, a single pound of
grain, for the enemy if they had to retreat.vii To the
Germans, t! his staunch and often sui cidal determination
was unnerving and it had a negative effect on their
fighting morale. Stories of this Russian tenacity spread
widely among the Germans. Tales of Russian fighter pilots
who wouldn't bail out if shot down but would crash into
German fuel trucks; of tanks that were on fire but the
burning troops driving would press on into battle. It was
said that Russian women had even taken up arms and that
troops would find pretty teenage girls dead on the
battlefield still clutching weapons. The Germans started to
complain about Russians who were fighting unfairly. They
said soldiers would lie on the ground and pretend they were
dead and then leap up and shoot unsuspecting Germans who
were passing byviii. Or they would wave white flags of
surrender and then shoot the soldiers who came to capture
them. Having heard these actions, many Germans would kill
anyone who tried to surrender. These tales became
battlefield horror stories and raised the wars already high
le! vel of hatred and barbarity. Hitler wrote to Mussolini
shortly after the invasion and said: " They fought with
truly stupid fanaticism...with the primitive brutality of
an animal that sees itself trapped"ix As a result, in the
opening weeks of Barbarossa the Germans lost some 100 000
men which was equal to the amount lost in all their
previous campaigns so far. Another significant factor
outlined by Bethell and Wright was the fact the Russian
troops were well aware of the advantages they had in their
climate and rugged terrain. Bethell outlines excellent
examples of this in the dense Forests of Poland and the
soggy lands of the Pripet Marshes. No German tanks could
operate in these hazardous areas and there was ample cover
for small groups. Russian infantry would superbly
camouflaged themselves and infiltrate the German positions
through the forests and they even displayed their
resourcefulness by communicating to each other by imitating
animal cries. They would dig foxholes and dugouts which
provided a field of fire only to the rear and when the
unsuspecting German infantry walked pass them , the
Russians would pick them off from behind. In open battle,
the Russian people would devise ingenious weapons with what
little resources they had available. They made 'Molotov
cocktails' which were flammable liquid in bottles which
were lit and thrown at German tanks. The glass would break
and the flaming liquid would flow into the tank and ignite
the interior.x Combined with the willingness to fight at
any odds and the intimate knowledge of their own terrain it
is plain to see that the Russian were definitely not going
to fall as easily as Hitler had first thought. Besides the
brutal tenacity of the resistance, Germany had another
problem, the climate. In the summer of 1941, the Ukraine
was suffered a scorching summer which saw a large amount of
rainfall. In the intense heat, the German tank tracks
ground the baked earth to powdery fine dust which clogged
machinery, eyes and mouths and made it hard for troops to
function. When it rained, it brought short relief to the
heat but, the roads turned into axle-deep mud paths that
halted all movement while horses got stuck in mud and
troops had their boots sucked right off them only to stay
in the ground. Thousands of vehicles had to be left as they
were because they ran out of fuel to get out of the mud and
the supply paths were choked as well. These road conditions
combined with partisan forces behind German lines stifled
supply lines by destroying railway tracks and making all
kinds of re-armament and food delivery impossible.xi While
the Germans were being delayed and they struggled to get a
solid foothold, figuratively and literally, in Russia, the
months passed by and eventually gave way to the harsh
'general winter' which froze everything to the core. As
Germany pressed on towards Moscow, the cold weather really
took its toll. All too often the Germans didn't have enough
supplies to survive let alone fight. Some units only had
about 1/4 of their ammunition while shipments of coats used
to combat the cold, only provided 1 coat per crew. The food
supplied was often frozen solid in the -40(C cold and one
night spent by German soldiers in their nail studded boots
and metal helmets could cripple a man for life. Machine
guns froze, oil turned thick, batteries died and vehicle
engines had to be kept running which wasted precious fuel
supplies. One German officer wrote home to his wife: "We
have seriously underestimated the Russians, the extent of
the country and the treachery of the climat! e...th is is
the revenge of reality."xii At this stage, the Russians had
the obvious advantage. On December 5 1941, with troops that
were used to the cold weather all their lives and had the
proper clothing to stay outdoors for days on end, the
Russians counter-attacked along a 960 km front and had
great success. The 'do-or-die' Russian troops would send
out groups of darkly clad men to sacrifice themselves and
draw German fire while white-clad, camouflaged Russian
troops would come in along the snow and attack. While the
German suffered great losses, they were able to hold on to
key towns that they had previously occupied and the war in
Russia swung back and forth. As the front settled into a
stalemate, the Red Army could be satisfied with what it had
accomplished. Despite the numerous defeats it had suffered
in the early part of the invasion, Russia had managed to
somehow survive, pulling back and regrouping long enough
for the German Army to overextend itself and allow the
winter to take its toll. It is said that hindsight is
20/20, and it is simple to point out the many factors which
led to the failure of Barbarossa and we can see that the
authors, Bethell, Macksey and Wright all had valid points
but they just emphasized different aspects and time frames
which all fit together to construct a much larger picture.
It is fair to say that not one particular circumstance
contributed to the failure but, a culmination of all the
events mentioned. Hitler truly was confident that the delay
in launching the invasion was of no consequence and he had
no way of knowing just how fiercely the Russians would
oppose him. The combination of! these factors led to the
failure. Near the end, Moscow and Leningrad had been saved,
and enough reinforcements had been scraped together to
enable the Red Army to go on the offensive. Operation
Barbarossa had been halted, and the myth of German military
invincibility had been shattered forever. 
 
i Whaley, Barton, pg. 12
 
ii Wright, Michael, pg. 104
 
iii Macksey, Kenneth, "Military Errors Of World War II",
Stoddard Publishing Co., 

Ontario, Canada, 1987
 
iv ibid, pg. 47
 
v ibid, pg. 48
 
vi ibid pg.51-54
 
vii Wright, Michael, "The World At Arms", Readers Digest
Association Ltd., London, 

1989. Pg. 108
 
viii Bethell, Nicholas, "Russia Besieged", Time-Life Books,
Canada, 1977 pg. 72
 
ix Wright, Michael, pg. 107 
 
x Wright, Michael, pg. 108-109
 
xi Bethell, Nicholas, pg . 90
 
xii Wright, Michael, pg. 118