Posted on 06/22/2007 3:56:26 AM PDT by mainepatsfan
1941 : Germany launches Operation Barbarossa--the invasion of Russia
On this day in 1941, over 3 million German troops invade Russia in three parallel offensives, in what is the most powerful invasion force in history. Nineteen panzer divisions, 3,000 tanks, 2,500 aircraft, and 7,000 artillery pieces pour across a thousand-mile front as Hitler goes to war on a second front.
Despite the fact that Germany and Russia had signed a "pact" in 1939, each guaranteeing the other a specific region of influence without interference from the other, suspicion remained high. When the Soviet Union invaded Rumania in 1940, Hitler saw a threat to his Balkan oil supply. He immediately responded by moving two armored and 10 infantry divisions into Poland, posing a counterthreat to Russia. But what began as a defensive move turned into a plan for a German first-strike. Despite warnings from his advisers that Germany could not fight the war on two fronts (as Germany's experience in World War I proved), Hitler became convinced that England was holding out against German assaults, refusing to surrender, because it had struck a secret deal with Russia. Fearing he would be "strangled" from the East and the West, he created, in December 1940, "Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa"--the plan to invade and occupy the very nation he had actually asked to join the Axis only a month before!
On June 22, 1941, having postponed the invasion of Russia after Italy's attack on Greece forced Hitler to bail out his struggling ally in order to keep the Allies from gaining a foothold in the Balkans, three German army groups struck Russia hard by surprise. The Russian army was larger than German intelligence had anticipated, but they were demobilized. Stalin had shrugged off warnings from his own advisers, even Winston Churchill himself, that a German attack was imminent. (Although Hitler had telegraphed his territorial designs on Russia as early as 1925--in his autobiography, Mein Kampf.) By the end of the first day of the invasion, the German air force had destroyed more than 1,000 Soviet aircraft. And despite the toughness of the Russian troops, and the number of tanks and other armaments at their disposal, the Red Army was disorganized, enabling the Germans to penetrate up to 300 miles into Russian territory within the next few days.
Exactly 129 years and one day before Operation Barbarossa, another "dictator" foreign to the country he controlled, invaded Russia--making it all the way to the capital. But despite this early success, Napoleon would be escorted back to France--by Russian troops.
I believe this is also the day the French fries surrendered a year earlier.
It’s kind of a shame we didn’t let the Germans deliver the k/o blow to the commies before we took them out.
My favorite part of Marxism - fascists killing communists and vice-versa.
it’s because the commies won. They overthrew the ‘best’ part of the german wehrmacht.
Then patton came to sweep away the rest.
Stalin would have made a parking lot out of europe if it wasn’t for D-Day.
Euphemism for carving up Poland and each taking half.
One of Hitler’s reasons for attacking the Soviets when did was precisely because of fear of the growing Anglo-American threat.
The communists across the globe must have had their heads spinning. First the Soviets hate the Nazis, then they’re friends, then they hate them again and then love the western democracies.
True but a cross channel invasion of Hitler’s empire would have been a bit more tricky if he’d conquered the USSR.
A young congressman at the time named Harry Truman said “We should arm whichever side seems to be losing, and let them kill each other off..”
That and a few other bits of territory.
Evidently, ol’ Harry was a lot smarter congressman than he was a president.
after all, in 1941 the Nazis were Stalin's long time allies...
Our American commies like Pete Seeger did some major-league spinning.
Well if you consider two years to be a long time.
Pete Seeger:
“Franklin D., listen to me,
You ain’t a-gonna send me ‘cross the sea,
‘Cross the sea, ‘cross the sea, You ain’t a-gonna send me ‘cross the sea.
You may say it’s for defense,
But that kinda talk that I’m against.
I’m against, I’m against,
That kinda talk ain’t got no sense.
Lafayette, we are here, we’re gonna stay right over here...”
The German-Soviet cooperation went on a lot longer than the 2 years of the Hitler-Stalin pact. When we go back to 1917, it was Imperial Germany which brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power, in order to take out Tsarist Russia as an enemy. During the Weimar era it was the Soviet Union which secretly jointly cooperated, trained and held exercises with the German Army. A lot of German and Soviet officers and generals, who in WW2 would be enemies, were partners during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.
Also after 1933 the Soviet Union was a key economic partner of the German Reich. The Soviets delivered tons of essential ressources for the German military built-up.
It was more or less since 1936, with the Spanish civil war, when the relations between them dropped to the bottom and became real (not just propgandistically) hostility.
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