Barbarossa, We Hardly Knew Ye

At approximately 3am on Sunday, June 22nd 1941 Nazi Germany commenced its massive invasion of the Soviet Union, I`ve consulted Chris Bellamy`s excellent Absolute War on the Russo-German War on this, there being issues about local time, the two tyrannies sharing a border as a result of their shared depredation of Poland. 70 years later we live in a very different world, but, the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians refer to it - in succession to the Patriotic War, Napoleon`s own invasion, famed of War and Peace - remains a pivotal conflict that shaped the world we live in today. Operation Barbarossa classically illustrates a number of adages about war, perhaps most keenly, however, it illustrates how, in the face of the Eastern Front, with its vast distances, tenuous lines of communication, squabbling commanders, inadequately equipped air and land forces, it was ultimately hamstrung by its own, innate military limitations. The superlatives one associates with Barbarossa in the popular historical imagination - immense, massive, unparalleled, unprecedented - are set into stark relief by a map in Bellamy`s book showing the space taken by the size of the Barbarossa force as superimposed onto Western Europe, and then, diminishingly, at increasingly greater distances, in Eastern Europe and European Russia. It illustrates both the steppe, and its sheer distance, and inadequacy, of even the most feared war machine in Europe for the task its vainglorious Fuhrer had set it.

Can the result of this conflict be considered foreordained? Undoubtedly the Germans met with significant initial successes, Red Army soldiers in their millions rounded up and taken prisoner, a fair tranche of the - then inferior - Red Air Force destroyed on the ground, panic and chaos paralysing Stalin and, for a while, the Red Army`s response to the invasion. No less serious was the loss of resources, agricultural, industrial, in the invaded areas, those developed and rich parts of the Western USSR. This latter factor saw Stalin fight the first year or so with a fair proportion of the USSR`s industrial capacity out of commission, whole factories, previously, having been decommissioned and sent Eastwards, away from the envious, rapacious eye of the then putative, now actual, invader. If the Soviet Union was to be defeated then, what comparatively little Allied aid there was, aside, this was the time at which it should`ve collapsed, under the shock of invasion, grievous disaster having been visited upon it, the nadir of its fortunes reached. Yet, for all the fall of many a famous, Eastern city, Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, names known from Napoleonic lore, seemingly shattering blow, after seemingly shattering blow was withstood. Within weeks German appraisals were proved overly optimistic by facts on the ground. It was this, temporarily industrially disadvantaged giant, against which the colossal victories were won, this disquietened the OKW, more formations then they had surmised existed - even in the Red Army order of battle -had been encountered, and destroyed, and yet still, the Red Army was resisting. It would continue to resist as the advance to Moscow slowed, the victim of General Winter and a Wehrmacht ill-equipped to conduct operations in those conditions; the latter a result of Hitler`s own insistence, why worry the people with the grim prospect of a Winter campaign against the USSR?

The respective sides` equipment should also be considered. In time, and increasingly in sheer numbers, the Soviet`s would prove superior, the T-34, perhaps the best mass-produced tank of the war, besting the Panzer III`s and IV`s with which the Germans commenced the campaign, while, the Panther and King Tiger`s that the German`s developed proved better still, there were never enough of them, as Kursk, that key battle at which the Wehrmacht finally surrendered its battlefield ascendancy, attests. The Soviets had mass, and pugnacity when it came to casualties - on either side - on their side, they outproduced the Germans in sufficient quality, attributes which told increasingly from Stalingrad onwards. This was true of the aerial dimension, Soviet air power was never of the same quality as its Western allies, but it was able to overawe what airpower the Germans could deploy, which was in turn dependent on what it could spare from home defence/the west and never of sufficient type and number to make a significant impact on the Eastern front after those factories began coming back on line. Naturally enough those mid to longer-term dynamics of the war told against Nazi Germany, waging a war on more than one front as the war progressed, and, naturally, increasingly feeling it.

What of the human factor? Here we become really quite discomforted. In the Russians the Germans had an adversary, hardened by Stalinist brutality, motivated by Communist ideology, as well as more human concerns for kith and kin - people fight for a myriad of reasons - willing and able to take the casualties that the German Army, as well as the SS, was willing to give out; along with a smorgasbord of other European powers, which, to a greater or lesser extent, were motivated out of fear of Communism to join in this crusade, one thinks of the Romanians - ineffectually - at Stalingrad, or Franco`s volunteer Blue division, among others. Contrast this with France in 1940, a parliamentary democracy, riven by faction, that had surrendered; though it had paid quite the blood price (as I believe the phrase now has it) from 1914-18. There does seem to be a lazy assumption that merely because a people suffer casualties for a particular cause it equates with them being right. Nazi Germany lost more people than we did; I`m quite secure in my assumption that our victory was preferable. Returning to the main theme of our essay, however, the Russo-German War raises difficult questions from the perspective of a modern liberal democracy, given that `our` victory, or rather that of the western allies, was underwritten - beyond the money we paid, and the air and intelligence victories we had over the Germans, key elements of the overall enterprise - by the Soviet Union`s willingness to take and inflict casualties on a colossal scale. So we find ourselves, 70 years on, from the commencement of the most violent, all-consuming, genocidal war in human history; until this point, at least. I felt the events worthy of some consideration, hence this. Terrible times, terrible circumstances, terrible systems. Not being of an especially optimistic bent, I consider the outcome of the war, as enshrined at Yalta, with half the continent occupied by Stalin, as, given the options available at the time - and whilst I am aware of Operation Unthinkable (the clue is in the name) the plan Churchill ordered the chiefs of staff to draw up to outline a scenario for a war against the Soviet Union - and for all his blood thirstiness, preferable; preferable to have been alive under Stalin, than likely dead under Hitler. That`s the choice, if choice it was, that the result of the Russo-German War bequeathed many across our continent, thankfully not in my part of it.And all a scant seven decades ago.. . 21/6/2011