Russian Phoenix

Few Americans will observe this coming June 22. Of course, it is not a holiday, not in this country nor in any other, it would appear. (Oh, yes, it is Teacher's Day in El Salvador.)

Did anything noteworthy happen on June 22? 

Sort of. This June 22 marks the 75th anniversary of the most audacious and certainly the most significant military gamble in human history.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his war against the Soviet Union, sending between 3 and 4 million Axis soldiers across the Polish-USSR border.

With the proverbial hindsight, this action seems idiotic. Everyone mentions the historical failures to conquer Russia--e.g., Napoleon and Charles XII.

But it did not seem idiotic to Hitler or his generals, most of whom enthusiastically applauded his action.

Of course, Hitler and his generals had different objectives.

Hitler was an ideologue; for him war against the Soviet Union was essential for three reasons deeply rooted in Nazi doctrine.

First, Germany needed raw materials and agricultural land. Nazi doctrine held that the only way to obtain secure access to these commodities was by evicting the Slavic inhabitants of the Ukraine, who were deemed "useless eaters," and colonizing the area with German farmers.

Second, Nazi doctrine held that Jews had to be eliminated because they were internationalists who undermined the struggle of the Aryan race to establish the global hegemony to which it was entitled. Since most of Europe's remaining Jews were concentrated in the Soviet Union or in Soviet-held territories, that was the place to conquer.

Third, Bolshevism had to be destroyed. Of course, this third objective was linked to the second, since in Hitler's mind Bolshevism was Jewish, a notion that might have appeared somewhat strange to the anti-Semitic Stalin.

For the generals who supported the invasion, these reasons were irrelevant. Their only concern was whether a war against the Soviet Union was winnable.

Most felt it was. Napoleon might have failed, but they, the German generals or their predecessors, had virtually conquered all of Russia in 1918.

Some twenty years later, the Russians, or their Soviet successors, still seemed militarily weak. Their army was under-trained, under-equipped and, most importantly, after Stalin's purges of its top officers, under-led. It had deeply embarrassed itself in the Winter War of 1939-1940, waged against poor, unaided Finland.

If winning is defined as destroying the army of your enemy, then how could the German generals, who led an army that had crushed the French and driven the British into the sea in six weeks in 1940, not achieve a similar triumph over the Soviets in 1941?

Of course, they could. 

Of course, they did.

By the end of the summer of 1941, the Germans had effectively destroyed the existing Red Army, killing or capturing nearly four million souls. (Capture was equivalent to death because the Germans neither fed nor housed their Soviet prisoners; they let them rot in open pens.) 

The Red Army was dead. Yet it lived.

Apparently unknown to the Germans, the Soviets had a contingency plan for "entire force regeneration." That is, they planned to replace within two months their entire army, should it be destroyed.

They did so from a pool of 14.5 million trained reservists.

The Soviet Army was larger, if not stronger, at end of 1941 than at the beginning.

Just as, or even more, surprising, although, in 1941, the Germans conquered territories that housed most of the Soviets' raw materials and heavy industry, Soviet tank output in 1941 was actually greater than that of the Germans.

Battered and bleeding, the Soviets achieved miracles of organization and production. By the time the Allies landed in Normandy on D-Day, the Soviets had already won the war, not entirely single-handed, but mostly single-handed. They had lend-lease aid, but, not as most believe, weapons aid. They made about 90 percent of their weapons.

How the Soviets managed these miracles will be the subject of subsequent blogs.