Soviet Military
How did Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union transform the military situation of the war?
have to write a quick essay on it and i have a term paper to write for english at the same time, any help would be great
~By launching Barbarossa, Hitler snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory. Operation Blue split German forces on the Eastern Front and sent Army Group B to Stalingrad, pulling the 4th Panzers out of Group B and attaching them to List’s Army Group A in the Caucassus, thereby dooming Paulus and the 6th Army to sure annihilation.
The myth of American history books is that the Germans were defeated by the Russian winter. Not true. (What, somehow the winter didn’t impact the Soviets?) The Wehrmacht was defeated by a larger force fighting on its own turf with far superior weapons. A single T-34, for instance, held off and destroyed 22 Panzers, delaying a German advance for a full day and allowing the Russians to reinforce a position that would have been otherwise overrun. (Do your own research for details on that battle.)
Hitler and the General Staff grossly underestimated the Russian resolve, the ability of the Russian soldier, the Russian equipment, the ability of Russian industry to relocate and produce war supplies and the ability of the Soviets to train and mobilize troops and they woefully overestimated the ability of Germans to maintain untenable supply lines without adequate fuel and munition reserves. They believed that after the purges of the ’30s, the Soviets would not fight for Stalin and would not have the leaders to organize a defense. They totally ignored the possibility that the Russians would fight to the death with pitchforks and clubs to defend the Rodina. The Germans were also unaware the the Soviets had a tank advantage of 4 to 1 and the Russian tanks and field guns were the best armored and artillery weapons of the war.
Not attacking Moscow immediately was a German masterstroke. Hitler and his staff studied the Napoleonic campaigns and realized how stupid it would be to begin the invasion with an attack on Moscow. That is why Stalingrad, Smolensk (followed by Moscow) and the Caucasus oil fields by way of Kiev were the objectives of the three prongs of the attack from the beginning and remained the objectives until the tide of the invasion turned. Stalin squandered a large portion of his tanks, artillery and best troops by sending them to Moscow to defend against an attack that was never an integral part of the German plan.
When Barbarossa appeared to progressing beyond even the most optimistic expectations in the north, the General Staff recommended advanced initiation of Operation Blue. That involved sending the 4th Panzers from Paulus to List, which caused a traffic jam that took more than a week to clear during a most critical stage of Barbarossa and when it was cleared, the 4th Panzer Group had most of the fuel and a large portion of the ammo and spare parts that were intended for Paulus and Army Group B. Since the Soviets became the bad guys after VE Day, the myth of the Russian winter was created. After all, those worthless Reds shouldn’t be able to fight worth a damn and only the lend-lease weapons they got from the US saved them, right? Yeah, right.
The USSR lost 10 million troops on the Eastern Front. The US and Britain combined lost fewer than 600,000 in the entire war. The eastern front was biggest theatre of war in human history, and witnessed the largest and bloodiest battles the world has ever seen. So, yes, the Russian invasion did in its own small way transform the military situation in Europe. Great Britain could not have held out against a German invasion and the US could not have prosecuted a war against Germany without bases in England. The invasion of the USSR saved Great Britain and gave the US the beach head it needed to participate.
Had the Germans not declared war on the US on December 8, 1941, American participation may not have happened in any event. The Tripartite Pact did not require the Germans to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor but the General Staff did not believe the US could react promptly to the declaration of war and they convinced Hitler that the war in the east would be won before the US would be a threat. Again, Hitler listened. Had the war in the east gone as the General Staff had predicted, they would have been dead on right about the US response. US military preparedness in 1941 was a joke.
Barbarossa was almost successful in any case, because Stalin had ordered his generals to fight a defensive war and not counterattack. This guaranteed that the Soviet forces could be encircled. The result was enormous loss of equipment and life on both sides, as, contrary to the German General Staff’s beliefs, the encircled Soviet forces did not easily give up. They fought hard and well and gave Stalin the time he intended to buy with his strategy and he used that time to bolster defenses in Stalingrad and Moscow and along the Volga, where he intended to make his stand, and to mobilize millions of troops and to move his industry beyond the Urals and step up production.
Mohammad Ali called the strategy “the rope-a-dope” when he used similar tactics on George Foreman.
Two misconceptions in American history books are that Hitler did not listen to his generals and Stalin did. Truth be told, Hitler did listen to his generals and they assured him of a quick victory. (Hitler must have been a madman, so he must have planned Barbarossa and Blue on his own without input from his generals, right? Absolutely untrue – Hitler relied on his army to hold onto his own power and, at least in the early stages of the war he listened to the generals. The Germans needed Ukraine to feed themselves and war against the Soviets was inevitable. Only when the generals couldn’t deliver in the east as promised did Hitler start to question their judgment and to ignore them – and only by mid ’43 did he start to exhibit signs of mental illness. There is no basis to question his sanity before that.) Stalin devised his own strategy against the advice of most of his generals and he was willing to lose a series of battles and give up huge chunks of ground in order to buy time for the USSR to recover from surprise attack and adequately prepare for the counterattack and the ultimate victory. There is nowhere west of the Volga that a sane military leader would try to make a stand against the onslaught of a surprise attack by the Wehrmact in 1941. Had Stalin tried, Barbarossa would have succeeded. The war against the USSR would likely still have been lost, but Barbarossa would have accomplished all of its goals. The purges of the ’30s allowed Stalin to rebuild the army and to bring Soviet tactics into the 20th century. The purges also gave the Soviet soldiers incentive to stand and fight because they had every reason to believe that they be shot as traitors to the Rodina if they surrendered or lost. The Germans missed these points completely. Stalin’s 5 year plans had overhauled Soviet industry, making the USSR second only to the US in industrial output by 1938. A large sector of that industrial might was devoted to weapons development and production. US history books ignore this fact entirely. Stalin’s Soviet Union was not the Romanov Russia.
Had the German General Staff given the Russians a little respect, Hitler may not have been convinced to invade and open the Eastern Front, at least until after he won in the west, and won he would have. Without the commitment of troops in the east, he could have held Africa, would not have had to worry about Sicily and the Italian landings and would have repelled what would have been a grossly outnumbered invasion force at Normandy. He would have had the money to accelerate his weapons development and would have had his jets and missiles (the V-2 was already made obsolete by the far superior missiles in production at the end of the war) in full production at least a year or two sooner. He would have owned the skies. He likely would have had an atomic bomb before Normandy.
Opening the Eastern front also added millions of Serbs, Romas, Slavs and others who were earmarked for either the concentration camps or the death camps, thus forcing the Germans to commit more and more fuel, supplies and troops to the “cleansing” operations and pulling badly needed supplies and reinforcements from the line. Contrary to popular belief, the Jews were a minority of the people interred in the camps and most of the Jews came from Poland. The invasion of Russia and Ukraine added millions to the camp totals.
Germany’s misjudgment of the enemy’s will and ability as well as her own ability to maintain untenable supply lines ought to be a lesson pounded into military and political leaders from the day they put on a uniform or assume office. Evidently such is not the case, as the fiasco in Afghanistan and Iraq clearly prove. The White House has made the same mistakes as were made in the Reichstag.
Soviet Military Psychic Uses – Part 1
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