Plan Barbarossa
When Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany, began planning Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1940, Germany had been at war for almost a full year. Before the Second World War began on 3 September 1939, the German Führer’s diplomatic and military audacity had exploited his foes’ weaknesses and timidity, producing victories that belied the true strength of the German Wehrmacht [Armed Forces].1 Defying the victor countries of the First World War, in March 1936 Hitler renounced the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the war. Then, in rapid succession, Germany’s fledgling armies reoccupied the Rhineland in the same month, annexed Austria in March 1938, dismembered Czechoslovakia in fall 1938 and early 1939, annexed the city of Memel’ in March 1939, and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, all but the latter bloodlessly and with tacit Western approval. By mid-1939 perceived British and French “appeasement” of Hitler at the Munich Conference finally convinced Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, that the Western powers were simply encouraging Hitler’s ambitions to extend German dominance toward the East. This, in turn, prompted Stalin to negotiate a cynical non-aggression treaty with Hitler in August 1939, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, whose provisions divided Poland and much of the remainder of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union and granted Stalin his desired “buffer” zone with a potentially hostile Germany.
Once the Second World War began, Hitler’s armies quickly conquered its half of Poland in September 1939, occupied Denmark and invaded Norway in April 1940, and vanquished the West’s most respected armies and occupied Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and France in May and June 1940, driving the British Expeditionary Army from the continent at Dunkirk in utter defeat. Protected by its formidable moat, the English Channel, and its vaunted High Seas Fleet, Britain survived Hitler’s vicious and sustained air attacks during the ensuing Battle of Britain from September 1940 through June 1941, but only barely.
It was indeed ironic yet entirely characteristic that military failure in the Battle of Britain would inspire Hitler to embark on his Crusade against Soviet Bolshevism. Even though German defeat in the skies during the Battle of Britain frustrated his plans to invade the British Isles in Operation Sea Lion, Hitler reverted to his characteristic audacity. Inspired by his army’s unprecedented string of military successes, he set out to achieve the ambitious goal he had articulated years before in his personal testament Mein Kampf [My Struggle], the acquisition of the “living space” [lebensraum] to which he believed the German people were historically and racially entitled. Conquest of the Soviet Union would yield that essential living space and, at the same time, would also rid the world of the scourge of Bolshevism.
Militarily, a German ground invasion and conquest of the Soviet Union was a formidable task. The Wehrmacht had achieved its previous military successes in East-Central and Western Europe, relatively small theaters of operations that were crisscrossed by a well-developed communications network. It had done so by employing so-called Blitzkrieg [lightning war] tactics, employing armies spearheaded by highly-mobile and maneuverable panzer and motorized forces, supported by dense waves of ground attack (Stuka – assault) aircraft to defeat large but essentially immobile forces of France, Great Britain, and Belgium, which were completely unsuited to counter or endure these sorts of tactics and whose parent governments lacked the will to fight and risk replicating the carnage of the First World War.
Hitler’s conquest of the Soviet Union was an entirely different matter. Although German military planners began contingency planning for an invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, Hitler did not issue Directive 21 for “Fall [Case or Operation] Barbarossa” until 18 December 1940. Once fully developed in separate plans and orders prepared by the Wehrmacht’s service arms in early 1941, Plan Barbarossa required the Wehrmacht to defeat the largest standing military force in the world and ultimately advance to a depth of up to 1,750 kilometers along a front stretching for over 1,800 kilometers from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea. In addition to being larger than all of Western and Central Europe, the eastern theater of military operations was also an underdeveloped theater lacking the dense and efficient road and rail network so characteristic of the West. Nonetheless, Hitler and his senior military planners assumed that Blitzkrieg tactics would produce quick resolution of the conflict and planned accordingly.
The overriding assumption of Plan Barbarossa was that Stalin’s Bolshevik Soviet Union would indeed collapse if and when the Wehrmacht destroyed the Red Army’s forces deployed in the Soviet Union’s border military districts, that is, when German forces reached the line of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers. Hitler himself noted at his final planning conference on 5 December 1940 that the Red Army would likely collapse faster than the French Army had collapsed in 1940.2 During the same planning conference, Hitler also clearly stated his preference for orienting the Barbarossa campaign on the destruction of the Red Army rather than achievement of specific terrain or political objectives when he declared:
The mass of the [Red] army stationed in Western Russia is to be destroyed in bold operations involving deep penetrations by armored spearheads, and the withdrawal of elements capable of combat into the extensive Russian land spaces is to be prevented. By means of rapid pursuit a line is then to be reached from beyond which the Russian air force will no longer be capable of attacking the German home territories.
Consequently, the [central] army group aiming toward Moscow was to be made strong enough to be able to pivot northward with substantial forces… A decision whether or not to advance on Moscow or to an area east of Moscow could not be made until after the destruction of the Russian masses trapped in the anticipated northern and southern pockets. The cardinal point was the Russians must not be permitted to establish a rear defense position.3
The German Army High Command’s [Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH] final amendment to Directive No. 21, which it prepared on 31 January 1941, accurately reflected Hitler’s strategic intentions:
3. Concept. The first and foremost intention of the High Command of the Ground Forces, in accordance with the objectives articulated above, is to chop up the front of the Russian Army’s main forces concentrated in the western parts of Russia by rapid and powerful blows by mobile groups and, by exploiting this penetration, destroy the broken up groups of enemy forces.
South of the Pripiat Marshes, Army Group South, under the command of General Field Marshal Rundstedt, by exploiting the decisive attacks of powerful panzer formations from the Lublin region, will cut off Soviet forces located in Galicia and Western Ukraine from their communications on the Dnepr, seize crossings across the Dnepr River in the vicinity of Kiev and to the south, and, in that fashion, secure free maneuver for the resolution of subsequent missions in cooperation with forces operating to the north or fulfill new missions in southern Russia.
Army Group South, under the command of General Field Marshal von Bock, will attack north of the Pripiat Marshes. By introducing powerful panzer formations into combat, it will carry out a penetration from the Warsaw and Suwalki region in the direction of Smolensk and then turn the panzer forces to the north and, in cooperation with Army Group North (General Field Marshal von Leeb), attacking from East Prussia in the general direction toward Leningrad, will destroy Soviet forces located in the Baltic region. Then the forces of Army Group North and the mobile forces of Army Group Center, together with the Finnish Army and German forces transferred from Norway for this purpose, will finally deprive the enemy of his last defensive possibilities in the northern part of Russia. As a result of these operations, freedom of maneuver will be secured for the fulfillment of subsequent missions in cooperation with German forces attacking in the southern part of Russia.
In the event of surprise and the complete destruction of Russian forces in the north of Russia, the turn to the north will fade away and the question about an immediate advance on Moscow can arise…
Only by such means will we be able to stand in the way of a timely withdrawal by enemy forces and destroy them west of the Dnepr and Western Dvina River lines.4
To achieve this victory, the German military planners sought to annihilate the bulk of the peacetime Red Army in the forward area, that is, the Soviet Union’s western military districts, before Stalin’s state could mobilize its large pool of strategic reserves. The German OKH planned to do so by orchestrating a series of dramatic encirclement battles inside the Soviet Union’s new western frontier.
To destroy the Red Army, Hitler massed 151 German divisions (including 19 panzer and 15 motorized infantry divisions) in the East and equipped them with an estimated 3,350 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces, and 2,770 aircraft.5 The Finnish government promised to support Operation Barbarossa with a force totaling 14 divisions, and the Romanians offered to contribute four divisions and six brigades to the effort, backed up by another nine divisions and two brigades.6 The German OKH, which controlled all Axis forces in the Eastern Theater, organized these forces into an Army of Norway, which was to operate in far northern Scandinavia, and three German army groups (designated North, Center, and South), which included four powerful panzer groups and three supporting air fleets, deployed across a broad front extending from the Baltic Sea southward to the Black Sea.
Plan Barbarossa required Bock’s Army Group Center, which included German Fourth and Ninth Armies and Second and Third Panzer Groups, supported by Second Air Fleet, to conduct the Wehrmacht’s main offensive thrust. Spearheaded by its two panzer groups, which were to advance precipitously eastward along the flanks of the Belostok salient, Bock’s forces were to conduct the campaign’s first major envelopment operation in the Minsk region, destroy the encircled Red Army forces, and then proceed eastward through Smolensk to Moscow. Operating to the north, Leeb’s Army Group North, which included German Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies and Fourth Panzer Group, supported by First Air Fleet, was to advance from East Prussia through the Soviet Union’s Baltic Republics to capture Leningrad. On the southern wing of the Barbarossa offensive, Rundstedt’s Army Group South was to advance eastward from southern Poland and northeastward from northern Romania to seize Kiev and the Soviet Ukraine. This army group consisted of German Sixth and Seventeenth Armies and First Panzer Group operating north of the Carpathian Mountains and a combined German-Romanian command formed from German Eleventh and parts of Romanian Third and Fourth Armies operating south of the Carpathians. The Fourth Air Fleet was to provide air support to Army Group South. Thus, the mass of German offensive power was located north of the Pripiat’ Marshes, the almost-impassible swampy region that divided the theater into distinct northern and southern halves.
The plan for Operation Barbarossa sought to exploit the Soviet Union’s lack of adequate communications route, that is, roads and railroads extending laterally across the front as well as into the depths, by employing panzer forces, rapidly advancing cross country, to encircle and destroy Red Army forces in the forward area before they could regroup from one sector to another or withdraw eastward to escape encirclement and destruction. In this fashion, planners believed the three German army groups could destroy most of the peacetime Red Army’s force in their forward defensive positions before mobilized reinforcements could reach the forward area. However, this belief proved to be incorrect because German intelligence overestimated the number of Red Army divisions concentrated in the forward area and was totally ignorant of Soviet mobilization capabilities, specifically, the quantity of reserve armies the Soviet Union could raise and deploy forward into new defensive positions east of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers.
According to the Barbarossa Plan, once the Wehrmacht won the battle of the frontiers (in Soviet terms, the border battles) and destroyed the Red Army’s forces in the forward area, the three German army groups could advance northeastward and eastward relatively unhindered, with Army Group North heading toward Leningrad, Army Group Center marching against Moscow, and Army Group South pushing on to Kiev. Thus, from its inception, Plan Barbarossa anticipated its three army groups would be able to seize all three of Hitler’s most vital objectives virtually simultaneously and without dangerously dissipating the Wehrmacht’s military strength.
Soviet War Planning: Defense Plan-41 (DP-41) and the “Answering” Strike
Ironically, the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact, which Stalin negotiated with Hitler in August 1939, actually contributed to the catastrophic defeat the Red Army suffered during the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa. By signing the infamous pact, Stalin hoped to forestall possible German aggression against the Soviet Union and, while doing so, create a “buffer” or security zone by seizing eastern Poland and the Baltic States. However, the subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939 and the Baltic States in the fall of 1940 brought the Soviet Union into direct contact with German-occupied territory. This, in turn, compelled Stalin’s government to reevaluate potential strategic military threats to the Soviet Union and adjust its war, defense, and mobilization plans accordingly. In short, by July 1940, the Soviet Union assessed Germany as its most likely future strategic opponent, and the Red Army General Staff identified Hitler’s Wehrmacht as the most dangerous military threat to Stalin’s Communist state. Based on its analysis, when preparing its defense plan, the Red Army General Staff, then headed by its chief, Marshal of the Soviet Union Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov designated the region north of the Pripiat’ River and its adjacent marshes as the most likely axis of any future German military aggression.7 Stalin, however, disagreed with Shaposhnikov’s assumptions and, in October 1940, insisted the General Staff prepare a new plan based on his assumption that, if Hitler attacked, the Wehrmacht would likely strike south of the Pripiat’ Marshes to seize the economically vital region of the Ukraine.8 With minor modifications, the October variant of the defense plan became the basis for the Soviet Union’s Mobilization Plan (MP) 41 and associated war plans, specifically, State Defense Plan 1941 (DP-41).
Mandated by Stalin and prepared in early 1941 by Army General Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, who was appointed chief of the General Staff in January 1941, the provisions of DP 41 were based on the cardinal assumption that “the Red Army would begin military operations in response to an aggressive attack.”9 Although clearly defensive in a strategic sense, because of the largely offensive focus of Soviet military thought in the 1930s, which was a period dominated by the development of the tactical and operational offensive concepts of “deep battle” and “deep operations,” DP-41 contained many offensive features, couched in terms of necessary and inevitable offensive reactions, that is, “counteractions,” to potential enemy aggression. For example, a contingency plan (predlozhenii or proposal) prepared by chief of staff Zhukov on 15 May 1941, which recommended the Soviet Union launch a preemptive attack against Germany in reaction to a perceived German military build up on the Soviet Union’s western borders, was ultimately incorporated as an “answering strike” in the Kiev Special Military District’s (wartime Southwestern Front’s) portion of DP-41.10
State Defense Plan 1941 and its associated and supporting mobilization plan required the Red Army to deploy 237 of its 303 active rifle, cavalry, tank, and motorized divisions in the Baltic, Western, and Kiev Special Military Districts and the Odessa Military District’s 9th Separate Army, which, when war began, were to become the Northwestern, Western, Southwestern and, ultimately, Southern Fronts (a front is equivalent in size to a Western army group).11 As a whole, the Red Army organized its forces in the western Soviet Union into two strategic echelons both to provide depth to its defenses and reinforcements to strengthen any counteroffensive operations it undertook. The first strategic echelon was supposed to consist of 186 divisions assigned to its four western military districts (four operating fronts in wartime), while the second strategic echelon was to consist of 51 divisions organized into five armies, which, after mobilization, were to operate at greater depth, specifically, east of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, under the control of the wartime headquarters of the Soviet High Command (Stavka).
In turn, the four military districts (operating fronts) making up the first strategic echelon were to deploy their forces in three successive operational echelons, in essence, three broad defensive belts arrayed along and behind the Soviet Union’s post-1939 western border. The first operational echelon consisted of relatively light covering forces in the form of fortified regions (consisting of artillery and machine gun battalions in fixed defensive positions) and the forward regiments from first echelon divisions of the military district’s armies deployed along the frontiers, cooperating with detachments of NKVD border-guards troops. The second and third operational echelons, of relatively equal size and strength, consisted, respectively, of the main forces of the military district’s armies and mechanized corps subordinate to these armies and the reserves of these armies cooperating with mechanized corps subordinate to the military district itself. These operational echelons added depth to the defense and provided forces with which to conduct the counterattacks and counterstrokes or full-fledged counteroffensives required by DP-41.
However, many problems marred the Soviet Union’s seemingly coherent defense plan during the period from April through June 1941, the most serious of which were associated with a supporting mobilization plan that precluded full and timely implementation of DP 41. These included an inordinately slow alert notification process and frequent transportation difficulties that produced tardy concentration of forces. For example, when Stalin tried to orchestrate a covert partial mobilization of five armies between April and June 1941, the mobilization fell well behind schedule. As a result, by 22 June 1941, the Red Army’s first strategic echelon was not backed up by the strong second echelon envisioned by the Soviet dictator.
By 22 June the first strategic echelon’s three operational echelons consisted of 57, 52, and 62 division equivalents, respectively, and 16 of the Red Army’s 25 mechanized corps stationed in the European Soviet Union. This was short of the 186-rifle division force envisioned by DP-41.12 Since Stalin’s partial preliminary mobilization of five armies from the Soviet Union’s internal military districts was incomplete, on 22 June the first strategic echelon was backed up by roughly 57 divisions assembling along the Western Dvina and Dnepr River lines. Partially compensating for the incomplete mobilization, the five new under-strength armies were virtually invisible to German intelligence. This fact largely negated the twin German assumptions that the bulk of the Red Army was situated in the Soviet Union’s western military districts and destruction of Soviet forces west of the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers would remove any military obstacles to a further advance to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
Once fully concentrated, the mission of the Red Army’s second strategic echelon was to mount a general counteroffensive in conjunction with counterattacks and counterstrokes organized and conducted by the four forward operating fronts. However, since neither the forward military districts nor the five mobilizing reserve armies had completed their deployments in accordance with their mobilization and deployment plans by 22 June, the Barbarossa invasion caught the Soviet Union’s political and military leaders totally by surprise.13 The invasion also caught the Red Army in a transitional period, when the so-called Timoshenko reforms, which Stalin had instituted in the wake of the embarrassing Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40, were only half complete, and it was not able to implement its mobilization and defense plan effectively. Exacerbating the situation, Stalin had fundamentally misjudged the strategic situation, and, since senior generals followed Stalin’s instructions to the letter, Soviet war planners concentrated the forces of the Red Army’s first strategic echelon too far forward and in areas vulnerable to quick envelopment, such as the Belostok salient. Worse still, since these planners expected the Germans to conduct their main attack south of the Pripiat’ Marshes, they concentrated the Red Army’s strongest forces along the southwestern axis. As a result, the offensive by the bulk of the Wehrmacht’s panzer and motorized forces further to the north left the Red Army totally off balance and conditioned to disastrous defeat.
Opposing Forces
Even though its stunning victories in 1939 and 1940 made it seem as if the Wehrmacht was at the height of its power in June 1941, it was by no means invincible. The German officer corps had traditionally prided itself on its doctrine, a unity of training and thought that allowed junior officers to exercise initiative because they understood their commander’s intentions and knew how their peers in adjacent units would react to the same situation. Although disagreements about the correct employment of armor had disrupted doctrinal unity in the mid-1930s, subsequent victories vindicated the faith of a minority of younger German theorists in mechanized warfare. The Wehrmacht’s panzer arm, supported effectively by a blanket of Luftwaffe assault aircraft, primarily Ju-87 Stukas, clearly demonstrated that massed mobile, offensive power could penetrate enemy’s defenses in narrow front sectors, exploit deep into his rear area to disrupt his logistics and command and control, and encircle large enemy forces. While follow-on infantry destroyed the encircled forces, the panzers then continued to exploit success deep into the enemy’s operational or strategic rear.
In practice, however, earlier campaigns also demonstrated that some enemy forces could escape from these encirclements if the follow-on German infantry failed to advance quickly enough to keep up with the panzers and seal the encirclement. This frequently occurred because the German Army never had enough motor vehicles to equip more than a small portion of its infantry troops. Instead, the vast majority of the German Army throughout the Second World War consisted of foot-mobile infantry and horse-drawn artillery and supplies, which often forced the Army’s panzer and motorized spearheads to pause while their supporting units caught up by forced marches.
Since panzer forces were vital to the implementation of German offensive doctrine, Hitler created even more of them prior to Operation Barbarossa by reducing the number of tanks in existing and new panzer divisions. For example, on paper the 1941 panzer divisions consisted of two to three tank battalions each, with an authorized strength of 150 to 202 tanks per division. In practice, however, many these divisions averaged 125 operational tanks apiece, and many of their tanks were under-gunned and virtually obsolete.
At the time, most German panzer divisions were equipped with a mixture of the Pz. (Mark) I and Pz. (Mark) II light tanks, Pz. (Mark) III, and Pz. (Mark) IV medium tanks, and Pz. Befehl (command) tanks, plus Pz. 38t Czech-built medium tanks, with 37mm main guns, as substitutes for Pz. III models in many divisions. However, the light and command tanks, which constituted as much as one third of the divisions’ combat strength, were seriously under-gunned (with machine-guns and 20mm main guns) and, therefore, unable to contend with new model Red Army tanks such as the T-34 and KV. On the other hand, although the dependable second-generation Pz. III and Pz. IV tanks were more than a match for the older Soviet tanks, such as the T-26 light, T-8 medium, and T-35 heavy models, even they experienced difficulty destroying T-34 and KV-1 and 2 tanks. In 1941 Germany was in the process of re-arming all Pz. III’s with a medium-velocity 50mm main gun, while the Pz IV’s still retained a low-velocity 75mm gun. The velocity of these weapons was at least as important as the size of the shell because high velocity was necessary for effective armor penetration. Neither German weapon could penetrate the thick frontal armor of the T-34 medium tanks and KV-1 heavy tanks that were just coming off the assembly lines in Russia.
In addition, the panzer division included five infantry battalions, four truck-mounted and one on motorcycles. Few of these motorized infantry units were equipped with armored personnel carriers; hence they inevitably suffered higher casualties. The panzer division, which also included armored reconnaissance and armored engineer battalions and three armored artillery battalions equipped with guns towed behind trucks or tractors, and communications, antitank, and antiaircraft units, totaled roughly 17,000 men. The slightly smaller motorized infantry divisions consisted of one tank battalion with roughly 30 tanks or assault guns, seven motorized infantry battalions, and three or four artillery battalions.14 The organization of the first four Waffen [combat] SS [Schutzstaffel – Hitler’s personal bodyguard] divisions was identical to that of regular army motorized infantry divisions, although they later evolved into lavishly-equipped panzer divisions. The 1941 motorized (panzer) corps consisted of two panzer divisions and one motorized infantry division, and two to four of these motorized corps formed a panzer group. During the battle for Smolensk and latter stages of Operation Barbarossa, several panzer groups were augmented by the addition of army (infantry) corps and renamed panzer armies.
Since German operations in 1939 and 1940 were predominantly offensive, the German Army based its defensive doctrine largely on 1918 practices. Defending infantry relied on deep and elaborate prepared defenses, kept the bulk of forces in reserve, and relied on elastic defense and rapid counterattacks to defeat the attacker. Defensive doctrine rested on three assumptions, all of which proved invalid in Russia. The assumptions were that sufficient infantry would exist to establish defenses in depth, the enemy would make his main attack with dismounted infantry, and German commanders would be allowed to choose where to defend and be permitted to defend flexibly as the situation required. The typical German infantry division consisted of three regiments of three infantry battalions each plus four horse-drawn artillery regiments, for an overall strength of 15,000 men. Since the division’s principal infantry antitank weapon, the 37mm antitank gun, had already proven inadequate against French and British heavy armor, infantry divisions had to employ their 100mm or 105mm medium artillery battalion and the famous 88mm antiaircraft guns against enemy tanks.15
The German Luftwaffe (Air Force) shared in the German Army’s lofty reputation. The 2,770 Luftwaffe aircraft deployed to support Barbarossa represented 65 per cent of Germany’s first-line strength.16 Although the Messerschmidt Bf-109f fighter was a superb aircraft, other German models were rapidly approaching obsolescence. The famous Ju-87 Stuka dive bomber could survive only when the enemy air force was helpless and the Dornier-17 and Ju-88, Germany’s primary bombers, and the versatile Ju-52 transport were inadequate both in range and load (bomb) capacity. Since German industry had not made up for losses during the Battle of Britain, Germany actually had 200 fewer bombers in 1941 than it had possessed the previous spring.17 Given these shortages and the requirement to operate from improvised forward airfields, it was exceedingly difficult for German pilots to provide effective air superiority or offensive air strikes over the vast expanse of European Russia. In short, the Luftwaffe was primarily a tactical air force, capable of supporting short-term ground offensive operations but not a deep and effective air campaign.
Germany’s greatest weaknesses lay in the logistical realm. Only 40,000 miles of hard-surfaced, all-weather roads and 51,000 miles of railroads spanned the vast Soviet Union, and the railroads were of a wider gauge than those found in Germany. Even though they frantically converted captured railroad lines to Western gauge as they advanced, German logistical organs had to transfer most of their supplies forward employing whatever Soviet-gauge rolling stock they could capture. The same applied to vital railroad bridges, which often required long periods of time to repair and whose repair severely impeded adequate resupply of panzer and infantry forces alike.
Nor did the German panzer and motorized divisions possess adequate maintenance capacity for a long campaign. The mechanical complexity of the tanks and armored personnel carriers, coupled with numerous models with mutually incompatible parts, confounded the German supply and maintenance system. Complicating matters, earlier campaigns had depleted stocks of repair parts, and trained maintenance personnel were also in short supply. Therefore, combined with fiercer than anticipated Red Army resistance, it was no wonder that German Blitzkrieg had lost much of its sharp armored tip by late 1941.
Perhaps Germany’s most fundamental logistical vulnerability was the fact that it had not mobilized its economy for war. Severe shortages of petroleum and other raw materials limited German production and transportation throughout the war. This problem was exacerbated by the weak communications network in the Soviet Union, which often prevented timely resupply of German panzer and motorized forces with essential fuel and ammunitions stocks. Manpower for the German industrial economy was also a problem. Because of the Wehrmacht’s mobilization requirements, German industry was already dependent on three million foreign workers by June 1941, and this labor shortage became more acute with each new draft of conscripts for the army.
As in the previous campaigns, for these and other reasons, Hitler was banking on a quick victory rather than preparing for a prolonged struggle. In fact, he was already looking beyond the 1941 campaign, planning to create new mechanized and air formations for follow-on operations in North Africa and Asia Minor. Hitler dedicated virtually all of German new weapons production to such future plans, leaving the forces in the east chronically short of materiel. Therefore, the Wehrmacht had to win a quick victory or none at all.18
Despite its imposing size and paper strength, the Red Army was actually in serious disarray in June 1941. It was attempting to implement a defensive strategy with operational concepts based on the offensive deep battle [glubokii boi] and the deep operations [glubokaia operatsiia] theory developed in the 1930s to the detriment of effective defense at the operational (army) level. In addition, it was attempting to expand, reorganize, reequip, and reform its Armed Forces, simultaneously, in the wake the Red Army’s abysmally poor performance in Poland (1939) and the 1939-1940 Finnish War. Thus, the so-called Timoshenko reform program, which was to create a large and more effective Red Army with an armored nucleus of 29 powerful mechanized corps by the summer of 1942, was only half completed by June 1941. Complicating matters, Stalin’s military purges, which began in 1937 and were continuing when the Second World War began, produced a severe shortage of trained and experienced commanders and staff officers capable of implementing any concepts, offensive or defensive. In contrast to the German belief in subordinate initiative, the purges and other ideological and systemic constraints convinced Red Army officers that any show of independent judgment was hazardous to their personal health.19
The Red Army’s troops also suffered from the political requirement to defend every inch of the existing frontier while avoiding any provocation of the Germans. The Red Army had already largely abandoned and cannibalized their pre-September 1939 defenses (the so-called Stalin Line) along the former Polish-Soviet frontier and was now erecting new “fortified regions” in the western portions of the so-called “Special Military Districts.” Despite prodigious efforts, however, the new defenses were woefully incomplete when the Germans attacked, while the older Stalin Line of fixed defenses had been stripped of most of its forces and heavy weaponry. The bulk of the Red Army’s forward rifle forces were garrisoned as far as 80 kilometers east of the frontier, and the NKVD’s (Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs) border troops and scattered rifle elements manned frontier defenses alongside specialized fortified regions.
While the Red Army’s logistical system was in disarray, its soldiers were at least fighting on their own terrain. Even before the harsh Russian winter arrived, the Red Army’s soldiers demonstrated their ability to fight and survive with far fewer supplies than a typical Western soldier required. As German forces lunged ever deeper into European Russia, Soviet supply lines shortened, while German forces struggled with ever-lengthening lines of communication and with dealing with millions of prisoners and captured civilians. At the same time, the rapid German advance overran many of the Red Army’s logistical depots in the Western Soviet Union. In addition, since much of the Soviet Union’s vital defense industry was located west of Moscow, Soviet authorities had to evacuate 1,500 factories eastward to the Urals, often in near combat conditions, before German forces arrived. Although the evacuation effort was ultimately judged successful, the Soviets abandoned vital mineral resources and suffered enormous disruption of their wartime production in the process.
Organizationally, the Red Army’s structure reflected its doctrinal and leadership deficiencies. First, it lacked any equivalent to the panzer group or panzer army that was capable of conducting sustained deep operations into the enemy rear area. Its largest armored formation was the mechanized corps, a rigid structure that contrasted unfavorably with the more flexible German motorized corps. Formed hastily in late 1940 and still forming when war began, each mechanized corps contained two tank divisions, one motorized division, a motorcycle regiment, and a wide variety of logistical units. Since the former, which theoretically fielded 10,940 men and 375 tanks, was tank-heavy and lacked sufficient support, the mechanized corps also included a motorized division and various support units. At least on paper, each of the unwieldy mechanized corps totaled 36,080 men and 1,031 tanks.20 In addition, most mechanized corps were mal-deployed, occupying scattered garrisons with the corps’ divisions often up to 100 kilometers apart. Some of these corps were subordinated to the headquarters of armies, with the mission of conducting local counterattacks in support of their parent army’s rifle corps, while others were to conduct major counterstrokes under the control of fronts. This made it impossible for the corps to perform the decisive offensive operations required of them by the State Defense Plan.21
At least superficially, the Soviet rifle division, which was authorized 14,483 men organized into three rifle regiments of three battalions each plus two artillery regiments (one gun and one howitzer), a light tank battalion, and supporting services, was similar to the German infantry division. However, in reality, few of the rifle divisions fielded any tanks because the People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO) had used them to equip its new mechanized corps. On paper, a Soviet rifle corps consisted of two-three rifle divisions, and a field army included three rifle corps (with three divisions each), one mechanized corps, several artillery regiments, and an antitank artillery brigade. In practice, however, the Red Army was woefully under-strength, with most divisions numbering 8,000-10,000 men or even less before the German onslaught.22 In late May 1941, the Soviet government attempted to remedy this problem by calling up 800,000 additional reservists in a covert training exercise (BUS – bol’shoi uchebnyi sbor) and accelerating the graduation of various military schools. Most of these additional personnel, however, had not yet joined their units when the attack came. In practice, most field armies mustered only six to ten divisions organized in two rifle corps, with an incomplete mechanized corps and little maintenance support.
In addition, beginning in April 1941, Stalin ordered a covert partial mobilization of the Red Army. Under the cloak of a so-called “special threatening military period,” Stalin mandated “creeping up to war,” by conducting a concealed strategic deployment of forces. In practice, this involved the mobilization of five armies (16th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd) in the Soviet Union’s internal military districts and their deployment forward to second strategic echelon positions along and behind the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers across the broad front extending from Polotsk in the north southward to the Kiev region. However, this partial mobilization was incomplete on 22 June and was finished in early July only after hostilities had commenced.23
Thus, although Germany possessed clear qualitative and even quantitative advantages over the Soviet Union in a short struggle, if its first onslaught failed to knock out the Red Army west of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, the Soviet Union was capable of overwhelming Germany in the long term. In the first place, but unrecognized by the over-confident Germans, the Soviets had sizeable forces available in the internal military districts and Far East and an immense mobilization potential. In addition, the Red Army was beginning to field a new generations of weaponry, including multiple rocket launchers (the famous Katiushas) and new tanks (T-34 medium and KV heavy models) that were markedly superior to all current and projected German vehicles.
The Red Air Force (Voenno-vozdushnikh sil – VVS) posed little immediate threat to the Luftwaffe, even though its approximate 19,533 aircraft, 7,133 of which were stationed in the western military districts, made it the largest air force in the world. Its equipment, however, like that of the Red Army, was obsolescent and suffering from prolonged use. The Great Purge had struck aircraft manufacturers and designers as well as military commanders, ending the previous Soviet lead in aeronautics.24 Newer types of aircraft, such as the swift MiG-3 fighter and the excellent Il-2 Shturmovik ground attack airplane, which were, in some ways, superior to their German counterparts, were just entering service in spring 1941, leaving the Air Force with a mixture of old and new equipment. Transition training to qualify pilots to fly these new aircraft lagged since Air Force commanders feared that any training accidents would lead to their arrest for “sabotage.”25 When Operation Barbarossa began, many Soviet fighter pilots in the forward area had as few as four hours’ experience in their aircraft. The changeover to new equipment was so confused that numerous Soviet pilots had not become familiar with the appearance of new Soviet bombers and erroneously fired on their own aircraft on 22 June.
Doctrinal concepts for the employment of massed air power expressed by A. N. Lapchinsky, the “Russian Douhet,” the occupation of eastern Poland in 1939, and Soviet successes in the air during combat against Japan and Finland in 1939 and 1940 generated a false sense of superiority among many senior aviation officers. In the event of war, they expected to launch a massive air offensive from the new territories. However, relatively few airfields in the forward area were operational, with many being torn up for expansion in the spring of 1941, and the few that were lacked revetments and antiaircraft defenses to protect the crowded parking aprons. The VVS was also plagued by disunity of command and severe command turbulence. Some air divisions supported specific ground armies or fronts, others were directly subordinate to the Red Army General Staff, and still others were dedicated to the regional air defense of the homeland (PVO Strany). In the context of the chaotic opening campaign, where tenuous communications and chains of command evaporated, such divisions made it difficult to bring coordinated air power to bear at key points. Nor did most Soviet aircraft have radios in 1941. Further complicating matters, Stalin’s purges liquidated three successive Air Force commanders and many other senior officers, and the rippling effect of promotions left inexperienced officers in command at all levels. Few of these officers were capable of correcting the VVS’s overly rigid and essentially outdated tactics.26
The Border Battles, 22 June–5 July
Nowhere was the destruction produced by Operation Barbarossa more readily apparent and total than in the sector north of the Pripiat’ Marshes, where the Wehrmacht made its main attack with Bock’s Army Group Center.27 The army group’s initial mission was to penetrate Soviet defenses on both flanks of the Belostok salient, advance along the Minsk-Smolensk axis, and envelop, encircle, and destroy Red Army forces in the Minsk region west of the Dnepr River. Subsequently, it was to “achieve the prerequisites for cooperating with Army Group North…with the objective of destroying enemy forces in the Baltic region and proceeding to Moscow.”28
See Map 1. The Border Battles, 22 June-7 July 1941
Bock’s army group consisted of Colonel General Adolf Strauss’s Ninth and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Fourth Armies and Colonel General Herman Hoth’s Third and Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s Second Panzer Groups.29 The Third Panzer Group included General of Panzer Troops Rudolf Schmidt’s XXXXIX and General of Panzer Troops Adolf Kuntzen’s LVII Motorized Corps, cooperating with Colonel General Richard Ruoff’s V and General of Engineers Otto-Wilhelm Förster’s VI Army Corps. Hoth’s panzer group was to advance eastward through Vilnius, north of the Belostok salient, and then wheel southeastward to reach Minsk. The Second Panzer Group consisted of General of Panzer Troops Heinrich-Gottfried von Vietinghoff’s XXXXVI, General of Panzer Troops Joachim Lemelsen’s XXXXVII, and General of Panzer Troops Leo Dietrich Freiherr [Baron] Geyr von Schweppenburg’s XXIV Motorized Corps, cooperating with General of Infantry Walter Schroth’s XII Army Corps. Guderian’s panzer group was to attack eastward across the Bug River from south of Brest, advance eastward through Slonim and Baranovichi, and then turn northeastward to link up with the forces of Hoth’s panzer group at Minsk.
Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Second Air Fleet [Luftflotte], with 1,500 aircraft, more than half of the total 2,770 aircraft committed to Operation Barbarossa, provided Bock with air support. Finally, Colonel General Maximilian Reichsfreiherr [Reich Baron] von und zu Weichs an der Glon’s Second Army was in OKH [Oberkommando des Heeres – Army High Command] reserve, with orders to prepare to deploy forward at the boundary between Army Groups Center and South.
Opposing Army Group Center, Army General Dmitrii Grigor’evich Pavlov’s Western Special Military District, which became the Western Front the moment war began, was to deploy in a single echelon formation when war began, with three armies forward and the field headquarters of Lieutenant General Petr Mikhailovich Filatov’s 13th Army far to the rear.30 Lieutenant General Konstantin Dmitrievich Golubev’s 10th Army, supported by Major General Mikhail Georgievich Khatskilevich’s powerful 6th and Major General Petr Nikolaevich Akhliustin’s virtually tank-less 13th Mechanized Corps, was to defend the apex and immediate flanks of the Belostok salient. Lieutenant General Aleksander Andreevich Korobkov’s 4th Army, with Major General Stepan Il’ich Oborin’s 14th Mechanized Corps, was to deploy on 10th Army’s left flank, and Lieutenant General Vasilii Ivanovich Kuznetsov’s 3rd Army, supported by Major General Dmitrii Karpovich Mostovenko’s 11th Mechanized Corps, was to deploy on 10th Army’s right. The Western Special Military District’s reserve consisted of Major General Mikhail Petrovich Petrov’s 17th Mechanized Corps, which was stationed near Slonim, and Major General Andrei Grigor’evich Nikitin’s 20th Mechanized Corps and Major General Aleksei Semenovich Zhadov’s 4th Airborne Corps, which were stationed in the vicinity of Minsk.