Barbarosa Essay

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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'.

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. 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 total; 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 deployments 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, other historians

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. For

example here are reasons...

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