(2) NAZI-SOVIET WAR / GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR

(22 JUNE 1941 – 8 MAY 1945)

 

Wait – what?

Wasn’t the Nazi-Soviet War – called the Great Patriotic War by the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia – essentially just the Second World War, as in the central or primary theater of military conflict of the war? The First Front, as Winston Churchill readily admitted in his history of the war?

Yes – and that’s my point. The Nazi-Soviet War might well be viewed as THE Second World War – with all the other conflicts in the Second World War overlapping or as prelude or aftermath to the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

And it is a war that can effectively be considered or studied in isolation from other theaters or conflicts, as a subject all of itself. Or indeed, many subjects, including as subject or subjects of its own top ten lists – notably battles, but arguably even of a top ten wars list or continuity iceberg like this.

It was fought, on land and in air, between the armed forces of the Soviet Union and those of Germany with its European allies – the latter often overlooked, albeit Germany remains of primary importance – with little overlap, at least in terms of military forces, with the other conflicts or theaters elsewhere. Yes – there were also naval forces involved but they were peripheral to the scale of conflict on land and in air.

The primary overlap – in terms of military forces was of course the increasing drain of military commitments imposed by the Western allies on Germany or its European allies in other fronts – albeit for Germany’s European allies that included their increasingly desperate search to desert their alliance with Germany for exit strategies from the war.

However, those commitments remained secondary, even arguably a sideshow, to Germany’s primary conflict on its Eastern Front. Sometimes I quip that the Second World War was, for the Western allies, a timely Anglo-American intervention in a Nazi-Soviet War. Timely that is, for the fate of western Europe and Germany itself, that might otherwise have seen more extensive Soviet occupation and one or two irradiated cities – as at the time of the Normandy invasion, the Soviet Union was quite capable of defeating Germany on its own.

Note that I am speaking in terms of military forces. The Western allies did of course also provide extensive economic support to the Soviet armed forces but I’m speaking strictly in terms of armed forces in actual fighting – as per Stalin, “how many divisions has he got?”. However, it is a pet peeve of mine when people attribute the survival of the Soviet Union in 1941 or even 1942 to Allied economic support or Lend-Lease. Such things are difficult to quantify and Allied economic support certainly aided Soviet victories from 1943 onwards – but is far less clear for the successful Soviet defense of itself in 1941 or 1942 as the large majority of Lend-Lease was from 1943 onwards.

There is also its sheer scale of combatants and casualties – still the largest invasion and land war in history.

In terms of scale of combat, the Soviet Union mobilized over 34 million men and women for its armed forces – almost twice as many as the next largest combatant, Germany (as well as more than twice as many than either the United States or China.

Indeed, the Soviet Union represented more than a quarter of men or women mobilized in the entire war (over 127 million). And when one considers that the large majority of men mobilized by Germany (about 18 million) were for its war with the Soviet Union, as it was for its European allies, then easily over a third of all men and women mobilized for armed forces in the Second World War were or in for the Nazi-Soviet War.

Not to mention the scale of casualties – the Soviet Union had almost 27 million people killed, at least a third of the highest estimates for 80 million people killed in the whole war. When you consider once again the large majority of those killed for Germany and its European allies were in the Nazi-Soviet War, then you’d be getting close to half all casualties in the entire war – particularly if one were to include casualties for Poland (and I think there’s a strong argument for that).

There’s also the sheer scale of impact – which can be simply stated that on any account of it, the Nazi-Soviet war was the decisive conflict within the Second World War. It’s instructive to recall the ideologies underlying this impact – and perhaps a bit humbling to reflect how much the victory of liberal democracy in the twentieth century depending on the contigency of the casualties communism could sustain fighting fascism (as well as the concentration of economic power in the United States).

And then there’s the narrative of the Nazi-Soviet war, reasonably well known in broad outline albeit somewhat distorted or obscured in historiography until recently.

The broad outline essentially follows each year of the war. The first year of war – from 22 June 1941 to June 1942 essentially follows the German invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa – and its defeat in its advance on Moscow.

The second year of war – from June 1942 to June the following year – essentially follows the German campaign in Case Blue against Stalingrad and the Caucasus Mountains – and its defeat.

The first two years of the Nazi-Soviet War often seem to present something of a paradox, as observed by H.P. Willmott:

“From today’s perspective, it seems incredible that Germany could have conquered so much of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942 and that on two separate occasions could have brought her to within measurable distance of defeat. Hindsight provides the element of inevitability that suggests German defeat in his campaign was assured because the first time, Hitler raised the scale of conflict to levels that Germany could not sustain…and herein lies a paradox: before the campaign began there would seem to have been no means whereby Germany could prevail, yet once the campaign started it would seem impossible for her to lose”.

That paradox is resolved by a closer study of the war, but a large part of it is that the Soviet Union fought back from the outset, if not always well then certainly hard – imposing costs in casualties and time which Germany and its allies ultimately could not pay.

Something of this can be observed in the diminishing returns of Germany’s successive campaigns – that whereas the German campaign in 1941 was on all three parts of the front (north, central, and south – albeit shuffling between them as it went), the German campaign in 1942 was only on one part of the front, in the south.

Those returns diminished further with the German campaign that commenced the third year of the war – Operation Citadel against Kursk – where the German campaign was not only on one part of the front, the centre, but a smaller part even of that. And for the first time, the German campaign was defeated in the summer when it was launched.

Thereafter, the Germans were on the defensive or outright retreat from the relentless Soviet advances, albeit slowly in that third year. While it was the Soviet army that had originated (prior to the war) the true ‘blitzkrieg’ of the war – the concept of the ‘deep battle’ or ‘deep space battle’, a strategy aimed at destroying enemy command and control centers as well as lines of communication – it lacked the means to employ this strategy fully until the fourth year of war, when it had sufficient elite or experienced armored and mechanized formations as well as the logistics and mobility to support them.

And oh boy, it showed with the Soviet campaign that opened the fourth and final year of war – Operation Bagration, named for a Russian general in the Napoleonic Wars, on the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June. The Red Army took one of Nazi Germany’s three army groups on the Eastern Front, Army Group Center in Belorussia and Poland, completely by surprise – effectively destroying it, while exposing Army Group North to siege in the Baltic states and Army Group South to attack in the Balkans.

Operation Bagration well deserves to be compared as equal to the success of Operation Barbarossa for Nazi Germany, but without the same sting of ultimate defeat as the latter – although at least one subsequent Soviet campaign was arguably even better.

Indeed, by 1945, it is possible to argue, as Willmott does, the complete transposition of the German and Soviet armies in terms of military proficiency. By 1945, “the operational and technical quality of the Soviet army was at least the equal of the Wehrmacht at its peak” (with the Soviet Vistula-Oder offensive in January 1945 “perhaps the peak of Soviet military achievement in the course of the European war”).

On the other hand, “the German army of 1944-45, for all its reputation, had the characteristics so meticulously catalogued when displayed by the Soviet army in 1941: erratic and inconsistent direction, a high command packed with place-men and stripped of operational talent, the dead hand of blind obedience imposed by political commissars upon an officer corps despised and distrusted by its political master, failure at every level of command and operations”.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)