Operation Barbarossa — Invasion of the USSR
On 22 June 1941, Germany launched the largest military operation in history: three army groups of 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union across a front of nearly 3,000 kilometres. Stalin, who had received dozens of intelligence warnings he dismissed as British disinformation, was caught catastrophically unprepared; the Red Air Force lost over 2,000 aircraft in the first two days, mostly on the ground. By December, German forces had advanced up to 1,000 kilometres, encircling and capturing millions of Soviet troops in the battles of Kiev, Bryansk, and Vyazma — the largest encirclements in military history. Yet Moscow held; the Wehrmacht, fighting in Soviet conditions it had not prepared for, was within sight of the Kremlin when the winter counter-offensive under Zhukov drove it back in December 1941. Hitler's assumption that the Soviet state was a 'rotten structure that only needs one kick' had proved catastrophically wrong. Operation Barbarossa opened the Eastern Front, which would consume the great majority of Germany's military strength for the remainder of the war and decide its outcome through a combination of Soviet resilience, industrial mobilisation beyond the Urals, Allied material aid, and German strategic overextension.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Military
