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The human cost of the war in the east, one of its distinguishing features, was determined in these opening months. By now, the Wehrmacht had suffered one million casualties of its own on the Eastern Front. The Germans rallied, however, partially due to an order from Hitler forbidding retreat under any circumstances. For a time, it appeared the mighty Wehrmacht might dissolve altogether under Zhukov’s hammer blows. Zhukov launched a vast counterstrike in early December that inflicted punishing losses on the invader and that sent German forces-exhausted, freezing, understrength, and undersupplied-reeling back in some confusion. Coolly amassing 17 fresh armies in front of the Soviet capital, General G. Assault guns rolled forward and broke the Soviet resistance.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. “Along with hours of co-ordinated attacks by the Air Force, tank units attacked. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. German tanks advance through the Soviet Union. Hopes were high, both in the German high command and at the front, that the Third Reich had won the war. By December 1941, the Red Army had suffered four million casualties, three million of whom were starving in German POW camps. The Soviets hung on, grimly and barely, in this opening phase, as the Germans drove towards Moscow. That last one trapped four complete Soviet armies, the 5th, 37th, 26th, and 21st, and netted nearly 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war.ĭramatic swings of fortune? Once again, there is nothing like the German-Soviet War. You want great battles? The German-Soviet war has got them: great encirclements by the Germans at Bialystok and Minsk in the opening weeks, and a mega-encirclement at Kiev in the opening months. Again, it isn’t easy to find any campaign in World War II that even comes close to this size. Examining the deployment zones, however, we can say that the USSR had 228 divisions in Barbarossa’s path.
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The Red Army consisted of 304 divisions at the time, spread around over the massive area of the Soviet Union (a country that sprawled across 11 time zones in that era). Toss in eight Hungarian brigades-hard to translate precisely into divisional equivalents-and you’re probably near 180 divisions.
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Divisions? The Germans employed 138 divisions, plus 36 of their allies (16 Finnish, 15 Rumanian divisions, three Italian, and two Slovakian). And Soviet mobilization wasn’t finished by a long shot-soon there would be more than 14 million men and women called up for the war against the Germans. That adds up to a lot of wars, and making overly bold claims is rarely a good idea.īe careful about superlatives, that is, until you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, the surprise German invasion of the Soviet Union on Jand the nearly four years of war that followed on what the Germans called “the Eastern Front.” With some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops (Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and others) facing off against a Red Army that numbered some 5.5 million men, the opening phase of Barbarossa saw nearly 10 million human beings locked in mortal combat from the outset. Human beings have been making war on one another since the origin of the species. If you’re discussing military history, using phrases like “the greatest tank battle in history” can get you in real trouble. You have to be careful about superlatives. “At dawn, countless Stuka squadrons dived on the Kerch Peninsula (in eastern Crimea), attacking the arrays of supposedly-impregnable concrete defensive positions built by the Russians.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
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Top Image: Stuka squadrons dive on the Kerch Peninsula (in eastern Crimea), attacking the arrays of supposedly-impregnable concrete defensive positions built by the Russians.