World War II with Tom Hanks: Episode 3

Episode 3: Barbarossa

The story in a nutshell.

Stalin deemed the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in August 1939 as a master stroke.

Very belatedly he realized it was a huge mistake. Just how belated? It was the phone call from his chief of staff to Stalin in early 22 June 1941 informing him that the Germans had attacked. Stalin did not speak, but his breathing was audible.

Imagery

Before we discuss the sinews of the episode, the quality of the images and their editing is a stunning achievement in my opinion. The German still and motion imagery gives a furious velocity to the story, radiating shock and terror to the defenders. Part of the German archive breaks from combat and movement to pause for a camera eye lingering over examples of destroyed and abandoned vehicles, guns, and other equipment. The Soviet imagery, such as it survived from these months, is overwhelmed in a sense of confusion, disorder, and sometimes bewildered panic.

The Narrative

The episode begins the story from September 1940.

At this point, Stalin believed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact will endure. It will give him even greater global influence. He thinks the Western Allies and Germany will fight each other to exhaustion and open way for revolutionary opening with Soviet Union as it patiently sat on the sidelines. As a young revolutionary he believes conflicts within West will create opening for revolutionary regime.

In the 1920s, after Lenin died Stalin became dominant leader and suppressed opposition to his leadership.

In 1936,he embarked on purges called The Great Terror. The NKVD secret police implemented the purges and killed “millions.” Others were deported to exile in concentration camps in the Gulag. It was a full terrorist police state. No one seemed safe. Not mentioned but very telling was that the first and then the second head of the NKVD during the purges were executed.

In 1939, Stalin makes deal with Hitler. This was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact . They carved up Eastern Europe and Poland was erased. Stalin gained immense resources, notably petroleum. By mid-1940, with Germany overrunning western Europe, Stalin believed he chose wisely.

But then on September 27, 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan sighed the Tripartite Pact. Who was the target for the Tripartite Pact? Was it just Great Britain? How did the Soviet Union figure in this new order?

November 12, 1940, Stalin sends his Foreign Minister Molotov to Berlin. Hitler gave Molotov two audiences that quickly deteriorated. Molotov was passed to German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop but Ribbentrop made little impression on Molotov. At an air raid warning the party went down into the air raid shelter. Ribbentrop tried to continue his sales pitch and dismissed the British as defeated. Molotov replied then whose bombers had sent us to the shelter?

But Molotov did not yet fathom that Hitler was already planning an attack on the Soviet Union.

On December 18, 1940, Fuhrer Directive Number 21: Germany will attack the Soviet Union to seize living spaces to the East.

This was top secret, but sources immediately leaked the plan to attack the Soviet Union to Moscow. In fact, the German plan was disclosed to Moscow from British, American, German, and Soviet agents in Tokyo.

It seemed obvious that all these sources must be convincing to Stalin that Hitler would attack. But Stalin does not believe the multiple reports. In his paranoid thinking, all of these reports were part of a plot to get the Soviet Union into war with Germany. Stalin thinks Hitler is a Bismarckian statesman who would not risk the folly of a two-front war. But Hitler sees himself as an agent in destiny, and with his arrogant attitude he thinks he is better than all the historical figures. Hitler plans to attack in May and conquer the Soviet Union in two months.

Plan is to attack the Soviet Union with three great army groups:

Army Group North across the Baltic states with objective of Leningrad;

Army Group Center, the largest army group, with the objective of Moscow;

And Army Group South through what is Ukraine to Kiev.

But in spring 1941, Hitler has to delay Barbarossa to deal with a diversion to south to the Balkans with panzer and mechanized units into Yugoslavia and Greece. This created five-week delay in start of Barbarossa. During this period, Stalin keeps sending Germany steel and petroleum.

22 June 1941, Barbarossa begins with over three million “German” troops, the largest land invasion in history. There are 300 divisions, but only 19 Panzer and mechanized divisions, less than ten percent of all divisions. At first, the invasion seems to follow the plan.

In Moscow, early on 22 June, Stalin’s chief of staff calls him with word of German invasion. The Red Army and air force were unprepared.

23:23 this looks like British gun camera film from Battle of Britain.

The opening day is Hitler’s dream come true. In the first week German advance 300 miles capturing 400,000 Soviet soldiers.

Stalin’s purges of the Red Army devastate the senior leadership. By the numbers: three of five field marshals; thirteen of fifteen army commanders; fifty of fifty-seven corps commanders; forty-five percent of brigadier generals; and fifty percent of colonels. The men who replace those purged officers were junior and inexperienced. Many were hesitant to issue orders least they get purged. Across the breadth of the Soviet fronts, some Soviet units mount some resistance, particularly in south, but the common story was ineffectiveness .

On 28 June, Army Group Center reaches Minsk, capital of Belorussia. This is just 400 miles from Moscow.

In these opening days, Soviet command is in chaos. Stalin orders counter attacks that fail or never start. Fear materializes that the Germans will reach Moscow. Stalin confides to Molotov that massive lands were lost and the whole socialist state has been “flushed down the toilet.”

Stalin retreats to his dacha outside Moscow and shuts himself out.

The Soviet Union now has no effective leader.

Panic grips Moscow.

Molotov talks to other high officials and convinces them they must go out to Stalin’s dacha and urge him to come back to Moscow to lead them. Stalin at first thinks they have come to arrest him. But when they plead him to take leadership, Stalin returns to Moscow.

Stalin speaks to the people. He does not talk of communism, but of Mother Russia. He couches his appeal to Russian history and national honor. The people listen to Stalin’s voice instilling their cause is of a “Patriotic War of Liberation.”

Stalin gets unexpected support from West. One of the most acute voices against communism, Churchill depicts this new war as a heroic struggle of patriotic Russians against Nazism, not of conflict between communism and fascism. President Roosevelt sends his most trusted aide, Harry Hopkins, to Moscow. The details are important. Hopkins met with Stalin. In those meetings, Stalin convinces Hopkins the Soviets will withstand the German onslaught. When Hopkins asks Stalin what he needs most, the answer was antiaircraft guns and aluminum. Hopkins also meets with Foreign Minister Molotov who demands that the US publicly announce if Japan attacks the Soviet Union, the US will declare war on Japan.

Hopkins persuades Roosevelt the Soviets would survive, but also that as Molotov emphasizes, the Soviets want the US to prevent Japan to join the Germans in attacking the Soviet Union. Hopkins mission and messages to Roosevelt is of supreme importance but not conveyed in the episode. It will be a key driver of the oil embargo on the road to Pearl Harbor.

By mid-July 1941, the Soviets have lost 4,000 tanks, 6,000 aircraft and two million soldiers killed or captured.

Sir Antony Beevor calls this “the most pitiless campaign in Modern history.” Complementing these words is images of huge masses of starving Soviet soldiers. Their German captors laughed as they tossed loaves of bread to demonstrate to the prisoners of their helpless, desperate plight. Of this scene of many hundreds of Russian prisoners, we know that very few would ultimately survive.

Both the German Army and the SS target masses of civilians. The Fuhrer Directive Number 21 demanded ruthlessness against political agitators, saboteurs, and Jews. The army had carte blanc to do whatever they needed to do. Civilians were expressly targeted.

The narrative intoned that Soviet resistance commenced behind German lines. An image appears of partisans with Maxim machine gun and bolt action rifle. Few partisans are well equipped in 1941. They made raids on German outposts and were told to employ scorched earth tactics. Burn everything of value. But if they deny Germans shelter against the winter, what shelter is available to the civilians?

By this phase of the German advance, German forces entered vast, level plains like Nebraska or Iowa. The width of the front expanded from 1,000 miles to 2,000 miles. German and allied troops cannot maintain a continuous front.

By the end of July, the advance was 400 miles deep into the Soviet Union, but slowing. (Actually, the front largely stabilized.)

The pause was due to a combination of the Germans outpacing their logistics, and the Soviets mounting counterattacks, especially in the south.

Hitler faces “perhaps his greatest test of leadership.”

By August, Army Group Center is nearly 200 miles from Moscow, but well ahead of Army Group North and South. Some Generals want to push ahead to Moscow. But Hitler believes Ukraine is key to the Soviet economy. He has Army Group Center divert to south to encircle Kiev. By 18 September 1941, Kiev and 600,000 Soviet troops were captured.

Now Hitler turned main thrust toward Moscow with resupplied forces.

By October 1941, German forces closing in on Moscow. Spires of central Moscow can be seen.

Moscow’s population turned to fortify and defend the capital to the last drop of blood.

Stalin packs up his library and parts of government evacuated. But Stalin grasps if he leaves, Moscow will fall. He stays at the last moment.

At this point, the first Russian historical defender intervened General Mud. Few roads and glutinous mud bogged the German surge towards Moscow.

Second behind General Mud is General Winter. Temperatures dropped in November to minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. Soldiers lacked adequate clothing. Their mechanical equipment becomes unserviceable. Fires kept beneath vehicles to keep lubrication working.

Hitler orders them to keep attacking toward Moscow.

Stalin on November 7, 1941, celebrates the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in front of assembled troops in Moscow. But in November, Soviet agents in Japan determine that Japan’s leadership decides not to join the German attack on the Soviet Union. Instead, Japan will strike east and south against British, Dutch and American territory with the prime strategic objective of seizing the oil in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and Borneo.

With this intelligence revelation, Stalin musters large formations from the Far East to mount a counterattack on 5 December. In the narrative in this episode the Soviet forces are characterized as the “Siberian divisions.” These are large, well equipped and supported units, famously clad in white parkas and boots, some of them using skies. Note the imagery of Soviet units in the frantic days from June to December 1941 are seldom of the high quality of the “Siberian divisions.” That is very likely a “tell.”

More recent scholarship belies the “Siberian Divisions” narrative. Only about two Siberian divisions participated in Moscow; most had already been expended around Leningrad earlier in the year. Another scholar advised me to see Walter Dunn, Stalin’s Keys to Victory, p. 79, and Nigel Askey, “The ‘Siberian’ Divisions and the Battle for Moscow in 1941-42”, http://www.operationbarbarossa..., retrieved 3 January, 2016. The best summation states :“Whichever way data is analyzed, the whole Siberian transfer story is a myth in all respects: including timing, numbers, source of personnel and overall combat performance.”

The Soviet Union survives. It was a huge victory against the Axis forces.

But the Soviet Union has lost enormous territory, population, and much of the war economy.

Can the Germans mount another campaign in 1942 and will the Soviet Union survive? No one knows for certain.