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Operation Barbarossa In WWII Essay Research Paper

Operation Barbarossa In WWII Essay, Research Paper


“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


fai

lure 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.



BIBLIOGRAPHY


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

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