Seventy years ago today the two most vile systems the world has yet produced locked themselves in a deadly embrace. Along an 1,800-mile front, 4.5 million soldiers of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and its allies commenced Operation Barbarossa, launching themselves against Stalin’s Communist regime. At the time, not many gave the Soviet Union much chance of survival, and the results of the first few months of fighting seemed to bear out those estimations.
By early December, German forces had surrounded Leningrad and pushed deep into the Ukraine; men in one of the German infantry divisions could see the spires of Moscow’s churches. The Soviets had lost at least 802,000 killed, 3 million wounded, and another 3.3 million captured. These 7 million losses, in just the first months of a war that would last four years, were double the number of troops German intelligence had reported the Soviets possessed at the start of the war. They also represented over seven times America’s killed and wounded during all of World War II. But the Germans paid a steep price for their initial successes, with over three-quarters of a million of their own men dead or wounded.
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By late fall, the Soviet Union seemed to be on its last legs, and those were wobbly. At one point early in the invasion, Stalin, “the man of steel,” had a nervous breakdown. When a group of party officials came seeking his guidance, he cowered, believing that they had come to execute him for his mishandling of the war. But the Germans and the rest of the world had underestimated Soviet recuperative powers. As the old adage goes, “Russia is never as strong as she looks; nor as weak as she looks.” Through a superhuman effort the Soviets picked up most of their major industries, put them on trains, and moved them to the other side of the Ural mountains, where they spit out tens of thousands of tanks, cannons, and aircraft. Moreover, a first-class spy network informed Stalin that the Japanese were not going to attack Siberia, allowing him to reinforce his beleaguered forces on the western front with 14 crack Siberian divisions. Finally, by early December, the greatest of all Russian generals had arrived at the front — General Winter.
The Germans, who had expected to be demobilizing by December, were caught unprepared for the intensity of the Russian winter. As the Russians began their counteroffensive on December 5, German tanks and guns literally froze. They could only be started or made workable by lighting fires under them. Worse, many of the Germans still had only their summer uniforms to protect them from the cold. They fell by the thousands from frostbite. Under relentless Soviet pressure, the Germans began pulling back. They were on the point of breaking when Hitler issued Directive 39, ordering his army to stand, fight, and die where it stood.
In obedience to Hitler’s “stand and die” order the Germans paid a heavy price, but they eventually halted the Soviet offensive. The war was to continue for almost four bloody years. Before it was over at least 25 million Russians and other Soviet subjects had perished, the majority of them civilians. In the process, the Red Army ground the Wehrmacht into dust. In June 1944, the Allies confronted 59 German divisions in France, while the Russians were fighting more than three times that number. Moreover, in late July, while the Allies were struggling to make headway against 20 German divisions holding them at bay in Normandy, the Russians swept away that many in a mere two weeks of Operation Bagration.
The Cold War and an understandable pride in our own achievements during World War II has tended to mask the contributions the Soviet Union made to the Allied victory. But what Russia brought to the alliance was clearly understood at the time. Churchill, who despised Stalin and was keenly aware of the threat Communism posed to the free world, was once called to account for his support of the Soviet Union in World War II. He replied, “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Roosevelt, meanwhile, never forwent an opportunity to materially and morally prop up the Soviets and “Uncle Joe,” as he naïvely referred to Stalin. Simply put, Britain and the United States were only too happy to see Europe’s two great totalitarian powers bleed themselves white on the plains of Central Europe.
Unfortunately, there had to be a victor. In World War II the German “Drang nach Osten” was decisively ended. But Eastern Europeans can be forgiven for not seeing much reason for cheer. They had merely traded one oppressive regime, led by a butcher of men, for an equally evil regime, led by a man who was every bit the equal of Hitler when it came to genocidal mass murder.
For the next 45 years the Russian people and those in their conquered empire lived in bondage, while the rest of the world devolved into two armed camps that stood each other down through the long years of the Cold War. Hitler, of course, had to be destroyed. An impartial judge would probably even declare that living with the evils of the Soviet Empire was an acceptable price for destroying the Nazis. Still, one must regret that the winning formula for World War II did not also include the demise of Stalin and Communism. It is simply a shame that the great struggle between Nazism and Communism that started 70 years ago today did not lead to the immediate demise of both.
— Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He is the author of the recently released The First Clashand Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The opinions in this article are entirely his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any of its members.
The objective of Barbarossa was to eliminate Russia and the intent of the 1940 Triparte Axis was to discourage America from an active partipation in the European War and ensure that the US would be preoccupied with Japanese agressive intentions in Asia and the Pacific. The objective of conquering Russia and neutralizing the US was to discourage the British from continuing the war and suing for peace. The initial success of Barbarossa can be attributed to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Even though Russia had the largest tank army and airforce in the world Stalins stubborn suspicions that the West was trying to embroil him into the British war blinded him to the overwhelming evidence of impending agression. However in Dec 1941 Stalin was able to shift Siberian divisons from the Mongolian frontier to Moscow because his spies (Richard Sorge) informed him that Japan intended to strike the US instead of at Vladivostock. The US was already supplying Lend Lease to Russia and Pearl Harbor risked that supply. Stalin during the time of the Nazi pact congratulated
Hitler on his easy conquest of France. Hence the second front that the Soviets clamored so vehemently for a year later disappeared in 2 weeks.
The good performance of Zhukov on the Mongolian fronter in 1939 made the Japanese wary of the Russians. But the poor performance of the Russians in the Finnish War gave Germans the false idea that the "house of cards" was rotten.
The Russians were really playing with fire prior to June 22 and were scorched pretty badly. Unbeknownst to the world as David Gansk points out the Smolensk campaign from July to Sept 1941 crippled the German Army far worse than anyone realized. The turning point wasn't Moscow or Stalingrad it was Smolensk. Napoleon met the same fate in 1812.
The British entered WWII in September 1939 to honor their treaty with Poland to protect its sovereignty. The war should not have ended until that sovereignty was restored.
Was it because the Germans and Russians were "locked in a deadly embrace" that they "bled themselves white," causing them to "pay a steep price?" Or did they "pay a steep price" because of their "deadly embrace?"
The worst mistake ever made by the United States was that the Cold War never went hot. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation, recognizes that Nazism is evil. However, to this day more people will consider socialism in general and communism in particular a preferable system to capitalism. Of course, they never will support what is going on in North Korea and Cuba explicitly, but they will give the Norks credit for being the healthiest people and to Cuba for having the best healthcare system.
How on Earth would American aggression have proved capitalism to be a better system? If anything, the opposite is true. If communism was defeated militarily, instead of collapsing due to being an economic and political failure, it would have been far less discredited than it is now.
Not to mention, like I said in my post below, we would've had a hell of a tough time of it. I guess we had a window from 1945 till 49, before they got the bomb, and we could've nuked them until they cried for mercy, but that would've put us on the same level with Nazism and Communism.
War can do good, but in it of itself, it is a huge evil.
Spoken like a true libertarian. If war is always evil, then who can be good?
Communism collapsing economically has in no way discredited it. All you need to do is see whose faces are on T-shirts, listen to the various far left celebrity, go to a San Francisco parade, witness the Virginia museum and read a NYT article that extolled the virtues of a Communist Monopoly club to realize that communism was not discredited as an economic philosophy.
As for whether we would have had a tough time of it, of course we would have. Who said any of this would have been easy? If you think that the world we live in is any easier because we didn't forcefully confront communism then libertarianism is even more of a fool's utopia than progressivism.
Indeed, what was never proven was that fascist economies are likewise unworkable. Because unlike the communist Soviet Union, fascist Germany and Italy were defeated militarily. Who knows if they too would have ever collapsed of their own accord.
And the upshot of that is that we now have a brand-new fascist power: China. While still calling themselves a "People's Republic," they're now fascist--private business heavily regulated and forced to serve the purposes of the state, with a dictatorship in charge of it all. AFAIK, nobody in China is worried that their economic system may prove unworkable.
Will China ever collapse like the U.S.S.R did? Hard to say. The Soviet Union never produced much (other than military hardware) that anybody wanted to buy. Clearly, that's not China's problem.
We didn't really win the Cold War, except for Eastern Europe gaining freedom from the Soviets, and the Soviet Union imploding.
Marxists should receive the same stigma that Holocaust deniers rightly receive. But they don't. Not by a long shot. As you say, we've got a long way to go to change the minds of the Useful Idiots who think that any form of Marxism is OK. And its vital for the survival of our country that we succeed in this.
Unlike what Marxists will tell you, Karl Marx himself was not some benevolent guy whose ideas were misinterpreted. His ideas necessarily result in oppression, dictatorship and class warfare.
For a few, the Marxist dream of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a moral ideal that they will never abandon to their dying day. (Example: Howard Zinn)
But for many others, the peaceful end to the Cold War included events they could not rationalize: Namely, the wholesale abandonment of Communism by Eastern Europe as soon as the threat of Soviet invasion was removed.
Socialists can rationalize the fall of the U.S.S.R. in a number of ways: CIA machinations, U.S. military power, and (when they are forced to) the inherent inefficiency of the Soviet Russian system. A "hot war" between the West and the Soviet Union would only enhance those rationalizations.
But what they can't rationalize is that not a single nation in Eastern Europe freely chose to live under a Soviet system, once they had the opportunity to choose.
Socialism is not the same thing as Communism necessarily. There are quite a few nations that are avowedly socialist, but which have multiparty political systems, the rule of law, and even market economies to some extent. Sweden is not a Communist country.
But the Eastern European experience has discredited Communism. It's dead, despite a few here and there who (like neo-Nazis) refuse to accept that their god has failed.
I've thought about theory, and I don't buy it. Stalin executed 40% of the officer corps before the War, and the Soviet Union was really just wholly unprepared for a war. Yes, I've heard the argument that you can either prepare for an offensive or a defensive war, but not to such a dramatic extent that preparing for one completely undermines the other...besides, Stalin was so shocked and dismayed when the Germans attacked that he didn't let his Generals give the order to fire back. If he was really planning to invade Germany, he wouldn't have been as surprised at Hitler's treachery.
Also, thank heavens we didn't fight a land war without the Soviet Union. I'm as patriotic as anyone here, but we would've lost that one, and badly. The Warsaw Pact had a huge land army advantage over NATO.
Likewise, if we invaded Japan, and didn't have the nuke to drop on them, we would've gotten beat there too; MacArthur estimated ONE MILLION casualties from the invasion, and the war weary American public wouldn't have stood for it.
In fact, they manufactured so many Purple Hearts in preparation for the invasion that we still have a ton left over today.
Sometimes you have to take your allies as you find them. Stalin was every bit as evil as Hitler, and the Communist system is even worse than fascism. However, Communist Russia's territorial ambitions did not collide as much with the U.S. and Britain as did Nazi Germany's territorial ambitions. We had no choice other than to make common cause with Stalin against Hitler.
President Roosevelt was terribly naive about Stalin and Communism, as was much of the Democrat Party from the 1920's through today. That doesn't mean that the U.S. made a mistake by refusing to go to war against Russia in 1945 to free eastern Europe. The situation in eastern Europe worked out about as well as it possibly could have with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Saving eastern Europe from Communism for 45 years was simply not worth the war with Russia that would have been necessary to achieve this end.
JL: "Britain and the United States were only too happy to see Europe’s two great totalitarian powers bleed themselves white on the plains of Central Europe."
Mine: One of the two totalitarian powers, the Soviet, did not bleed itself white. It reemerged more powerful and more menacing to the free and civilized world. What a miscalculation and misplaced optimism!
JL: "An impartial judge would probably even declare that living with the evils of the Soviet Empire was an acceptable price for destroying the Nazis."
Mine: "An impartial judge"? Give me a break! What is the basis of making such a fallacious and flawed statement? If Hitler was a monster which he probably was, Stalin was a evil at least ten times more demonic, fiendish, sinister, hideous and heinous than Hitler, literally with no exaggeration. Stalin killed, persecuted and destroyed lives several times of those done by Hitler who at least treated his countrymen much much better than Stalin. The Anglo-American establishment hated Hitler more because the Fuehrer had more guts and gumption to confront them and challenge their hegemonic order more directly. That's all.
Yes the 22 June each doesn't pass without an internal reference to this fateful event. The largest land assault in history.
I have never heard about Smolensk being pivotal in 1941 whilst the Red Army was still collapsing before the assault of the Wermacht in 1941 under Stalin's tactical and strategic ineptitude. But then again Stalin refused to believe Hitler's intentions with massive troop concentrations on his border and daily aerial incursions into Russian airspace. He really was a fool who thought England engaged in WWII for the convenience of 'tricking' Russia.
The German army was not prepared for war in 1939 or 1941. Only half of its formations had been supplied with the modern equipment required for blitzkrieg warfare. Despite the setbacks of 1941, the summer of 1942 still saw the German army with the initiative.
With the front was still on the Volga. I don't see how any other turning point can be pinpointed other than the encirclement and destruction of the German VI Army, the largest formation in the German Army, at Stalingrad.
The Russian people and European Jewry bore the brunt of defeating Hitler.
Whilst 3 million frontline German troops required rolling stock to supply their needs, the trains were being used to transport the cream of European intelligence into death factories with no other military purpose other than to execute the insanity of racial policy.
It was rather lamentable that after the war there were still 60 million Germans alive.
The Soviet war effort against Germany was colossal, and heroic on the part of the soldiers.
But it shouldn't be exaggerated. As of D-Day, there were 163 German divisions on the Eastern Front, 58 on the Atlantic coast - and 26 in Italy.
26 + 58 = 84; 163 is less than twice 84, not three times as many.
And in late July 1944, the western Allies were not "struggling to make headway" in Normandy - they smashed through the German lines at St. Lo and Avranches, and swept out to overrun France in the next month.
Also, the western Allies carried the whole burden of the bombing campaign against Germany, which tied down the equivalent of 30-50 divisions in AA defenses.
to follow up Rich Rostrum's comments, let's also not forget the massive influx of lendlease aid to the Soviet Union from the Wester Allies, all while building their own war machines up. Without such mundane shipments as the Studebaker truck, the Soviets might still be lugging up supplies to the fron by dog wagon and oxen yoke. So while I would never belittle the Soviet efforts in defeating the Germans, neither would I lessen those of the democracies in doing so. Especially when, all things considered, letting the two fight to the death would have been a fairly easy thing to do.
I was surprised to see the 9 million dead, captured, wounded figure for the Reds in Barbarossa.
The way I've read several of the various histories, I thought the Soviets suffered 4.5 million dead/wounded/captured between June 22, 1941, and the end of the battle of Stalingrad, and another 4.5 million Soviets dead/wounded/captured during the remaining years of World War II.
The Soviets lost more men defending Moscow in December, 1941, than we lost in every war we fought in the twentieth century. Nobody is undercutting their sacrifice in defeating Nazism.
But that doesn't take away from our contributions either. And I doubt the Red Army could have pulled off an amphibious operation on the order of magnitude of Overlord, or even Torch. Each had different problems, different strengths and different solutions.
cdscott1968, I would agree with your comment that "President Roosevelt was terribly naive about Stalin and Communism, as was much of the Democrat Party from the 1920's through today" with the exception of President Truman, whose impromptu actions in the immediate aftermath World War II against the USSR served as an apt physical demonstration of the "containment" policy (see VDH: External Link). One could argue that containment itself was too conciliatory a strategy, but its implication that, if we waited long enough, communism would simply collapse, was proven right in the end. Yet more debate ensues as to how much of that collapse can be ascribed to the more aggressive efforts of Reagan (and Thatcher), but what would history be without rigorous discussion and debate?
