Barbarossa and Its Lessons for the Living

75 years ago this morning at 0315 Central European Time, the valiant and ruthless German race was thrust into a war of annihilation against the Soviet empire, in what became the dominant theatre in the largest-scale conflict in world history, World War II.  Named after Frederick I, the red-bearded King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor in the 12th century known for his military conquests and shrewd leadership, Operation Barbarossa involved an attack in three army groups across what soon became an 1800-mile front from the Baltic to the Caucasus.  German war aims, spelled out initially in the Führer’s War Directive #21 on December 18, 1940, were fully commensurate with Adolf Hitler’s boldness: the Führer sought domination of the entirety of European Russia and the smaller intermediary Soviet states all the way out to the Ural Mountains, including the natural resources and oil-rich regions in the Caspian Basin. 

The 1941-45 German-Russian war, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, is of a genus of conflict that the United States need never experience and indeed the world may never witness again.  Technology has made an anachronism of massed armored formations supporting mobile infantry and buttressed by extensive air combat capabilities, all arrayed against each other and sponsored by great powers in an existential fight to the death. Yet a review of the nature of this war in the east and how it proceeded, while sadly foreign to American audiences still to this day, confers seminal lessons for 21st century students of foreign affairs in a still-cruel world.

Hitler’s War Aims

The German dictator had telegraphed his intentions years before, in Mein Kampf, his personal memoir and political manifesto for the future of Germany led by National Socialism. In the second volume of this oeuvre, published in 1926 after his release from Landsberg prison (where he had served time following a conviction for treason), Hitler wrote an entire chapter on his policy for the east. In his view the German people had an historic destiny to fulfill as a master race, and in support of this divine mission needed geographic territory for expansion (which he referred to as more “living room,” or, lebensraum).  Fortuitously in his view, the Slavs to the east were inferior degenerate peoples (or, “untermenschen”) ripe for subjugation, in lands rich with natural resources and agricultural bounties that were exploitable for a German empire.  Further, the Russian state was now in his mind consumed by an inferior political ideology, “Jewish Bolshevism”, which was brittle and easily eviscerated in any war with the superior Germans.  Hitler stated:  

And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.

If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.

Hitler could not have been any more transparent, and his subjugations of Czechoslovakia and Poland – both Slavic peoples as well – were in line with his eastward vision.  Indeed the outbreak of war with Poland in September 1939 was the first of his many miscalculations, as he assumed, wrongly, France and Britain would not honor their mutual defense pact with the Poles, after having effectively ceded Czech independence the year before.  For months afterward Hitler hoped to achieve a truce with the western Allies in order to have a free hand in the east: the unwillingness of the British to quit the war, followed by the entry of the United States, spelled eventual doom for the Third Reich in the multi-front war that revised German doctrine expressly forbade.  But on June 22, 1941, all this was far into the future.

The Order of Battle and Soviet Response

When German heavy artillery began pounding Russian units in eastern Poland early that morning, soon to be accompanied by Luftwaffe bombing raids of Soviet troops and installations in Poland as well as Red Navy targets as far away as Kronstadt in the Baltic and Sebastopol on the Black Sea, the Russians could not have realized they faced the largest and most formidable invasion force in world history – then or since.  German and allied Axis forces (including rebellious Lithuanians and Ukrainians along with troops from Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia all joining the attack eastward) comprising nearly 4 million men, 3,600 tanks, over 4,000 aircraft, and 7,200 artillery pieces attacked the Soviet Union along a front that soon stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  The world will never again see such an onslaught, but as big as it was in scale, it nonetheless caught the Red Army largely unawares.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin had received reports from multiple sources as to the German build-up in the east and even as to battle plans pursuant to the German line of attack including the exact day, from sources as diverse as Winston Churchill in England all the way to a well-placed spy in Tokyo.  The Soviets had considerable forces at their disposal, with roughly 2.9 million men, 11,000 tanks, and roughly 8,000 aircraft.  But the paranoid Soviet leader had purged his officer corps in the 1930s and had not yet fully revamped his army in the wake of this; thus, the Soviet forces on his western frontier were not well slotted or coordinated.  Additionally, the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact signed in August, 1939, while seen as a postponement of hostilities by both sides, had effectively lulled the Soviet leader into a false complacency: after all, Germany had had to tangle with France and Britain and was still engaged with the latter in the summer of 1941.  This had afforded Stalin the opportunity to worry more about what he considered a greater potential threat in mid-1941: the movement of Japanese forces into far eastern Russia.

Hitler’s directives had been for two strike forces to advance northward of the Pripet marshes (vast wetlands across the Belarus/Ukraine border),one to drive 650 miles to capture the Baltic states and then Leningrad, while the other attacked into the Russian heartland pointed toward Moscow; these were commanded by Feldmarshals Wilhelm von Leeb and Fedor von Bock, respectively. A third army group, led by Feldmarshal Gerd von Rundstedt, headed toward the capture of Kiev, and was then to point to southern Russia and the Caucasus oil fields.

The Germans began their invasion in the east with high confidence: coordinated air/ground assault and rapid manoeuver warfare had subdued their foes in Western Europe and in Poland in weeks; and they had observed Soviet forces perform poorly against Finland in the winter war of 1939-40.  “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,” Adolf Hitler gleefully told his general staff during the planning process.

And indeed, after some units advanced 50 miles on the first day, the first several weeks went spectacularly well.  So well, in fact, Stalin is said to have sat in brooding silence for more than a week in the beginning, and did not address the Soviet people in public until July 3.  Meanwhile the Luftwaffe gained air superiority almost immediately through massive bombing raids on Soviet air forces while at their airfields; this permitted uncontested close air support of German armor and motorized infantry in executing the encirclement and pincer movements that were core German doctrine at the time.

The Germans bagged 300,000 prisoners in the first ten days that included the trapping encirclement and conquest of Minsk, and Smolensk fell soon after with 180,000 taken prisoner.  At the Battle of Kiev in September, the Red Army suffered 500,000 casualties. Things were going so well that German invitations to a formal victory ball in Leningrad at the Hermitage in December were drawn up.

But Russian defenses eventually stiffened, and indeed Army Group Center’s drive to Moscow was completely halted in late summer, while its Panzer units were diverted north and south to help breakthroughs elsewhere across this enormous battlefront. When Feldmarshal Bock retrieved his armored units, he organized a renewed drive to the Soviet capital in an operation called Typhoon, that began on October 2 and ten days later was within 90 miles of the great strategic prize of the Soviet capital (that Stalin, to his credit, never left).  But ever-hardening Soviet resistance combined with horrible rains and an early winter stopped the Germans before the snows of Moscow.  A Soviet counterattack on December 5 turned the Germans to the defensive just 15 miles short of the city, even as their advance units had spied the towers of the Kremlin.  Never again were the Germans to get so close to what would have been a decapitation strike.

Leningrad meanwhile was surrounded and besieged for 900 days, enduring appalling suffering, but never overrun in the north.  In the south, German forces were again split in two the following summer. One unit was to attack and take Stalingrad, a largely symbolic city but still an important shipping locus on the Volga River; the second attacking force was to proceed to the oil fields of the Caucasus all the way to Baku.  But with ever increasing American and British aid and materiel through Russia’s northern port of Murmansk as well as via Tehran and the Persian Corridor up the Volga, along with a return of most all Russian troops stationed in the Far East, a static front in central Russia in 1942 ended in the German disaster at Stalingrad.  The Germans never again regained the initiative in the east, and never again launched a major attack after their defeat in the largest tank battle of the entire world war at Kursk in July 1943.  By then, they were outnumbered across the front by approximately 6.8 million to 3.9 million men, and had lost advantages in tanks, planes, and guns as well.  For the rest of the war they were on the defensive everywhere, headed toward doom.

Lessons from the War in the East

While estimates vary widely, it is now thought that upwards of 16 million combatants from both sides died in the east, more than 10 million were taken prisoner, with civilian deaths pushing the total to at least 30 million, and perhaps far more due to famine. The Soviet Union easily lost the most people in the war, with at least 40% of all killed in World War II (China was second).  While such a massive conventional war is unlikely to ever occur again, and certainly never again an invasion of the size and scale as what began 75 years ago today, there are nonetheless priceless insights from the German-Russian war even for the current day’s guerilla-style conflicts:

I. Never Become Overextended Globally.  The Germans had learned the hard way during the First World War that a two-front war was a recipe for failure, if not disaster.  They had certainly planned to avoid this in 1939, but were consumed by Hitler’s arrogance (the USSR, meanwhile, was able to avoid an expected war with Japan throughout the conflict with Germany, and thus could concentrate its forces and resources in a single front fashion).  While only a rough analogy to today, the insight is still striking: the United States has fought recent wars on multiple fronts, attacked in multiple countries, and has literally hundreds of military and naval establishments around the globe, along with multiple commitments to maintain in various alliances or for various countries. Our armed forces are exhausted from multiple deployments, and our equipment and combat assets need re-fitting.  The Iraq and Afghanistan wars will cost at least $4 trillion and perhaps up to 50% more than that, with negligible gains to our geostrategic position. It is imperative that the U.S. regroup and reconfigure our defense posture and commitments abroad: it appears evident that the role of global policeman is not only not possible but not desirable.

II. Strong Morale on the Homefront and Sustained Success are Corollary Necessary Conditions of a Winnable War.  The German people were stunned when war with the Soviet Union came in June of 1941.  Commercial relations with Russia had actually been good for the prior few years, and in fact negotiations had been held in Berlin in November 1940 about the Soviet Union joining the Axis Pact.  But as long as Hitler had induced victories, the German people and warriors collectively followed him.  When the war turned against the Germans after Stalingrad, the combat effectiveness of forces in the east steadily declined, and by late 1944 the German army was a spent force everywhere. Conversely, the Russian people were able to endure enormous hardships as first their resistance stiffened and then turned to the offensive.  Looking at the situation in the United States today, there are grave questions among both the people and the armed forces as to why we are fighting in various conflicts, what “success” even looks like, and what the end game is all about.  The “war on terror” is for example the very definition of a vacuous expression – it is essentially meaningless, and dangerously open-ended for exploitation by unscrupulous American politicians.  A “war” being fought wherein the American people cannot agree as to its necessity or even whom the enemy is (viz., ISIS today, Bashar Assad tomorrow!) will by definition be unwinnable.    

III. A War of Any Decent Length that is Not an Existential Conflict Cannot be Won.  Similar to the above finding, morale is everything in any long conflict, and is itself dependent upon the stakes involved. Russian morale was that of initial shock and horror in June of 1941, but that was replaced by a steely resolve and ironclad indomitable will over time. This high morale indeed impelled the Soviet Union on to victory all while enduring unfathomable suffering and loss of life. For the Russians, the German threat was of course existential.  This motivated the high morale that led to the steely determination and grit of victory.  The Germans were the converse of this: initially arrogant and over-confident, their morale sagged and died in the Russian winters and combat brutality of a war that was for them not an existential conflict initially, but instead a war of choice.  Today, looking at the depth of hatred in the Muslim world for American interventions in the region there going back decades, as well as for current day drone and missile strikes and bombings in several countries that bring endless videos shown across the Muslim world of Americans raining death on innocent women and children, it is obvious who has high morale for the long haul, and who does not.  The longer these conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on, the harder it is for ordinary Americans to muster any concern for them at all, let alone discern any hint of an existential threat from some set of caves halfway around the world. The lesson is, Russian victory was very much sown into the story of June 22, 1941.  Conversely, there can never be any sort of American “victory” over Muslim guerrilla terrorists that would eventuate in a fall-of-Berlin style vanquishing. America would actually be better off cultivating long term friends in regional war zones now, which is fortuitously a strong possibility in many cases of young, western-leaning populations.      

The war that began 75 years ago today was the most violent and ruthless human conflict of all time. Fought without the “protection” of the Geneva Conventions, it was truly a war of annihilation. Through the mists of time we salute all who fought and endured and suffered or died on the Eastern Front of World War II.  But let us never look upon such enormous conflicts in vain, as we instead seek to gain wisdom for brighter tomorrows through the tears of yesterday.

Mr. Chapman is an economist and merchant banker with Hill & Cutler Co. in Washington, D.C.