David Campbell - German Infantryman vs Soviet Rifleman: Barbarossa 1941

The whole thing should be over in three or four weeks, they said, others were more cautious and gave it two or three months. There was even one who said it would take a whole year, but we laughed him right out. Why, how long did the Poles take us, and how long to settle France? (quoted in Kershaw 2010: 22). So said Schtze Benno Zeiser, recalling the bright confidence with which he and most of his comrades greeted the idea of invading the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, launched at 0315hrs on Sunday 22 June 1941, was the largest invasion in the history of warfare in the midst of probably the most significant war in modern human experience. It was the defining act of the European theatre of war, setting the course of the conflict for the next four years in a struggle whose vast scope often disguises the reality of the conflict as much as it explains it.

German infantry catch an impromptu ride, sitting on the folded-down side panels of an SdKfz 10/4 mounting a 2cm FlaK 30/38 cannon. For the Wehrmacht, motorization was not just a matter of equipping infantry with trucks to allow them to move about more quickly. Using mobility, flexibility and the rapid concentration of force and firepower to achieve decisive results, the motorized-infantry regiments were an integral part of the complex and highly trained combined-arms teams that made the great tactical and operational successes of Blitzkrieg possible. In the first six weeks of the invasion the men of Infanterie-Regiment (mot.) 41, Infanterie-Regiment (mot.) 15 and Infanterie-Regiment (mot.) Grodeutschland would fight their way through three echelons of increasingly vicious and resistant Soviet armies. The three engagements featured in this book an encounter battle, contesting a city and then clashing along a dangerously stretched perimeter show the Germans shift from offensive to defensive fighting, as well as the limitations of motorized-warfare tactics. (Nik Cornish at www.stavka.org.uk)

For the ordinary German infantryman or Soviet rifleman, though, the enormity of such a stage was all but invisible, an abstraction for the most part that bore only a tangential relationship to the practical and immediate reality of movement, attack and defence. The success of ones army or nation was seen and understood through the prism of everyday experience, an experience that had been rather harsh for Soviet soldiers who had endured the relative failures of the Polish campaign and the outright embarrassments of Finland a few months later. However, to be a German soldier in the early summer of 1941 was quite something. The nation fielded a professional, experienced army, the Heer, with successful campaigns in Poland, Norway, France and the Low Countries, Yugoslavia and Greece, an army that had employed new armoured and combined-arms tactics to great strategic effect.

For the Germans, the prospective war in the East was from the very beginning ideological, its reasoning knotted together from policies like Lebensraum (living space, the idea that superior races would have the need and the right to expand into lands of inferior races), virulent anti-communism, disgust at the perceived racial inferiority of the Slavic peoples, and an ideal of a pan-Germanic state that would stretch through East Prussia and Poland into Byelorussia and the Ukraine, uniting ethnic Germans across the East. For the men and women of the Soviet Union the rapacity of their Teutonic neighbours raised few qualms, however, protected as they felt they were behind the practical buffer of eastern Poland and the political buffer of 1939s MolotovRibbentrop Pact. That they were ideological enemies was never in doubt, and there was certainty that war would be inevitable at some stage, but it seemed unlikely that Hitler would open a new front while still fighting against Britain in the West, and while the German state still received so many vital goods (e.g. petroleum, chromium) from the Soviet Union in trade.

The decision to invade the Soviet Union was confirmed by Hitlers Directive 21 on 18 December 1940. The plan called for a massive invasion across the frontier; there were two thrusts, split by the Pripet Marshes. To the north, Heeresgruppe Nord would make for Leningrad and Heeresgruppe Mitte would attack towards Minsk, then Smolensk and ultimately Moscow, while to the south Heeresgruppe Sd would strike into the Ukraine towards Kiev. All three Heeresgruppen were tasked with the destruction of the Soviet Unions armed forces and the subsequent capture of economically and strategically valuable targets, with the majority of the Wehrmachts might being concentrated in Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bocks Heeresgruppe Mitte, a force of 51 divisions that included two great armoured formations, Generaloberst Heinz Guderians Panzergruppe 2 and Generaloberst Hermann Hoths Panzergruppe 3.

Opposing the Germans was the Red Army, formally known as the RKKA (Raboche-krestyanskaya Krasnaya armiya, or Workers and Peasants Red Army). This vast force of over five million men well over two million of whom were defending the western approaches of the Soviet Union was equipped with reliable weapons, significant mechanized forces (including many modern tanks) and excellent artillery in copious quantities. Even with the benefit of surprise, the German forces would expect to be hard pressed in a fight with such a large and dangerous foe, and yet their plans called for the destruction of all western Soviet armies within six weeks, followed by a series of strategic advances that would take the invaders all the way to the Ural Mountains. Such ambition would seem extraordinarily hubristic if taken without regard to the almost miraculous-seeming series of victories that had brought the Germans to this point.