How the Red Army beat Hitler part one

THE RECENT commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in northern France were widely publicised and celebrated across the western world. The western media trumpeted the efforts of the armed forces of the US, UK, and Canada. Many commentators called it the most important battle of the Second World War, the turning point after which Hitler's occupation of Europe and his grip on Germany itself came to a violent end. World leaders from the lands involved in that war gathered to pay tribute to the efforts and sacrifices of the so-called 'Allied' troops, sailors and airmen of D-Day. Yet something was missing: any acknowledgment of the Soviet Union effort. The reality remains that it was the armed forces of the former Soviet Union who really defeated Hitler and ended his Third Reich. 

In four years of war from June 1941 to May 1945 The Soviet Union lost around 27 million dead - a quarter of its entire population - including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths. The largest portion of military dead were 5.7 million ethnic Russians, followed by 1.3 million ethnic Ukrainians. 10 million German soldiers were killed, wounded or captured.

The Red Army fought 80% of Hitller's Wehrmacht for those four continuous years. 

At its start - Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, - 3 million German troops assaulted the borders of the Soviet Union. It was a war of artillery, tanks and aircraft, but also of brutality, terror, racism and mass murder. It was a total war mobilising the entire populations of the Third Reich and the USSR - including women and in many cases children.

From September 1939 until the spring of 1941 Hitler's Wehrmacht had inflicted lighting war or 'Blitzkrieg' invasions of Poland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and in parts of north Africa. Everywhere they had invaded they had won, and occupied defeating each nation in turn. 

Blitzkrieg style war had been the German way of fighting quick, knock-out victories ever since Bismark's wars of the 1860s and 1870s.  The stalemate of trench warfare from the end of 1914 until 1917 demanded new tactics. The German army developed trench breaking techniques of going for weak spots using infantry storm troopers supported by hurricane artillery bombardments. Further on in the last hundred days of the Great War the British army invented a new way of fighting using tanks, artillery, aircraft, and infantry all in close support. Over the next two decades German military thinkers such as Heinz Guderian adopted and developed this close support method into Blitzkrieg. It proved devastating in the years 1939-41 as the German forces captured most of continental Europe. Hitler's only defeat in those years came in the air with his attempt to invade Great Britain that was thwarted by the British air force.

Hitler was reluctant however to launch a seaborne invasion of Great Britain and turned - like Napoleon did - to the east and to the Soviet Union for resources to plunder and for 'living space' for the German people. When Operation Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941 the Wehrmacht employed the same successful tactics against the Red Army as they had against their other European opponents. Initially they worked. What had been discounted though was the vast spaces of the Soviet Union, and its resources of manpower and material.

The invasion of the USSR was carried out with great ruthlessness by Germany and its allies. "Communism is a colossal danger for our future... this is a war of annihilation" Hitler told his senior officers. Planning made intentions for mass murder of civilians by killing squads and by starvation.  

Early successes by the German army were helped by the fact the Soviet Union's land force - the Red Army - was incredibly weak at that time. Soviet leader Stalin had purged the army of thousands of its best officers and leaders in the 1930s. More so Stalin's previous efforts at collectivisation, and industrialisation had resulted in many deaths and the alienation of millions of the USSRs people. German invaders were welcomed as liberators by Ukranians and many in the Baltic states. Along with this was the fact Stalin had ignored his spies intelligence on the coming Nazi onslaught and so his forces were not well deployed.

Soviet resolve did hold together despite the hammer blows of the Wehrmacht, including the loss of some 3 million men captured. Soviet industry was packed up and moved east of the Ural mountains where factories of war were built from scratch beyond Hitler's reach. The Red Army was stiffened by hatred of the invader, patriotism, communist zeal, and more sinisterly by NKVD blocking detachments who massacred many thousands of retreating Russian troops.

By the late autumn, and at the gates of Moscow, Hitler was halted as the severe Russian weather set in. His troops had advanced 400 miles , defeated large armies around the south of Russia at Smolensk and Kiev, besieged Leningrad in the north but now his supply lines were huge and his troops exhausted....