One of the major events of WW2 the German invasion of Russia.
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/barbarossa.aspxhe purpose of military strategy is to diminish the possibility of resistance. It should be the aim of every leader to discover the weaknesses of the enemy, and to pierce his Achilles' Heel. This is how battles and wars are best won.
This advice goes back at least to Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C., but it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to follow. The attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, is the most powerful example in the twentieth century of how a leader and a nation -- in this case Adolf Hitler and Germany -- can ignore clear, eternal rules of successful warfare, and pursue a course that leads straight to destruction.
Attacking Russia head-on was wrong to begin with, because it guaranteed the greatest resistance, not the least. A direct attack also forces an enemy back on his reserves and supplies, while it constantly lengthens the supply and reinforcement lines of the attacker. The better strategy is to separate the enemy from his supplies and reserves. That is why an attack on the flank is more likely to be successful.
Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union's weakness, instead of its strength.
His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions had died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances to work long hours, under terrible conditions, and little compensation in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.
Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler's legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.
With such a policy, Hitler would not have gained the Lebensraum , or living space for the German people, that he coveted, but once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to in the pieces that remained.
Hitler, however, followed precisely the opposite course of action. His "commissar order" called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent Einsatzgruppen or extermination detachments to come behind the army and rout out and murder Jews. He resolved to deport or allow millions of Slavs to starve in order to empty the land for future German settlers.
Two days before the Germans struck, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's commissioner for the regions to be conquered, told his closest collaborators: "The job of feeding the German people stands at the top of the list of Germany's claims in the east....We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people."
The genuine welcome that German soldiers received as they entered Soviet towns and villages in the first days of the campaign was quickly replaced by fear, hatred, and a bitter guerrilla war behind the lines that slowed supplies to the front, killed thousands of Germans, and increasingly hobbled the German army.
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Hitler's actual military plans also were so false strategically that they could only succeed if the Red Army collapsed from internal stress. That, in fact, is what Hitler counted on. He did not expect to win by a superior method or concept, but by relying on the Russian army to disintegrate after a series of initial battles.
Great generals don't win wars in this fashion. They don't depend upon their enemies to make mistakes or give up. A great general relies upon his own ideas, initiative, skill, and maneuvers to put the enemy in a position where he must do the general's bidding.
Hitler's greatest strategic mistake was his refusal to concentrate on a single, decisive goal. Instead he sought to gain---all at the same time---three widely distant objectives: Leningrad, which he sought to smash because it was the birthplace of Russian Communism; the Ukraine and the Caucausus beyond, which he wanted for its abundant foodstuffs, 60 percent of Soviet industry, and the bulk of the Soviet Union's oil; and Moscow, which he desired because it was the capital of the Soviet Union and its nerve center.
Hitler wanted all of them. Indeed, he expected to reach the line Archangel-Caspian Sea in 1941. That is 300 miles east of Moscow, and only about 450 miles from the Ural mountains. But Germany did not have the strength to achieve all of these goals in a single year's campaign. At best, it had the strength to achieve one.
Hitler scorned such a limitation, and ordered Army Group North to go for Leningrad, Army Group Center for Moscow, and Army Group South for the Ukraine. These objectives spread over the entire western face of the Soviet Union could not possibly be coordinated. Each army group would be required to conduct a separate campaign. And, because resources were to be divided in three directions, no single effort would have the strength to achieve a war-winning decision on its own.
The task Hitler set for Germany was almost inconceivable. He hoped to seize a million square miles of the Soviet Union in 1941, a region the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. The campaign in the west, on the other hand, had been fought out in an area of 50,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Carolina or New York State. Therefore, the ratio of men to space was twenty times greater in the east than it had been in the west.
Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, commander of the army, and General Franz Halder, chief of staff, wanted the primary objective to be Moscow, and wanted forces concentrated overwhelmingly in the center. They rightly contended that conquest of Leningrad, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus depended on defeating the Red Army. And an essential part of this army would be met on the road to Moscow. Moscow was the hub of railroads, mecca of world Communism, headquarters of a highly centralized government, and a great industrial center employing more than a million workers.
Moreover, an attack into the center of the Soviet Union would turn the nation's vastness---generally thought of as its greatest asset---into a liability. Once the Germans possessed Moscow's communications node, Red Army forces on either side could not coordinate their efforts. The Germans in the central position between the two could have been defeated each separately.
The German army and economy could support a drive on Moscow. Though 560 miles east of the German frontier, it was connected to the west by a paved highway and railroads.
This would have still been a direct, frontal assault against the strength of the Red Army, but the ratio of force to space was so low in Russia that German mechanized forces could always find openings for indirect advance into the Soviet rear. At the same time the widely spaced cities at which roads and railways converged offered the Germans alternative targets. While threatening one city north and another city south, they could actually strike at a third beyond. But the Russians, not knowing which objective the Germans had chosen, would have to defend all three.
Hitler understood that he could not defeat the entire Red Army all at once. But he hoped to solve the problem by committing two of his four panzer groups under Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth to Army Group Center, commanded by Fedor von Bock, with the aim of destroying Red Army forces in front of Moscow in a series of giant encirclements—Kesselschlachten or caldron battles. The Russians, to his thinking, could be eliminated in place.
Army Group Center was to attack just north of the Pripet Marshes, a huge swampy region 220 miles wide and 120 miles deep beginning some 170 miles east of Warsaw that effectively divided the front in half. Bock's armies, led by the panzers, were to advance from East Prussia and the German-Russian frontier along the Bug river to Smolensk.
Army Group North under Wilhelm von Leeb, with one panzer group under Erich Hoepner was to drive from East Prussia through the Baltic states to Leningrad.
Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group South with the last panzer group under Ewald von Kleist was to thrust south of the Pripet Marshes toward the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 300 airline miles from the jumpoff points along and below the Bug, then drive on to the industrial Donetz river basin, 430 miles southeast of Kiev.
The first great encirclement was to be in Army Group Center around Bialystok, fewer than sixty miles east of the German-Soviet boundary in Poland, the other around Minsk, 180 miles farther east. The two panzer groups then were to press on to Smolensk, 200 miles beyond Minsk, and bring about a third Kesselschlacht . After that, Hitler planned to shift the two panzer groups north to help destroy the Russians in that region and capture Leningrad.
Only after Leningrad was seized, according to his directive of December 18, 1940, ordering Barbarossa, "are further offensive operations to be initiated with the objective of occupying the important center of communications and of armaments manufacture, Moscow."
However, Hitler showed his intention of gaining all three objectives by directing that, when the caldron battles were completed (and Leningrad presumably taken), pursuit was to proceed not only toward Moscow, but also into the Ukraine to seize the Donetz basin.
In summary, Hitler's original directive required massive strikes deep into the Soviet Union in three directions by three army groups, followed by a shift of half the army's armor 400 miles north to capture Leningrad, then a return of this armor south to press on Moscow, while Army Group South continued to drive to the far reaches of the Ukraine, over 700 miles from the German-Soviet frontier.
This was an impossible burden for the German army. In the event, Hitler made it worse because he seized an opportunistic chance to destroy a number of armies in the Ukraine around Kiev, and abandoned his original strategy. Once the Kesselschlachten were completed in Army Group Center, he sent only one panzer group north toward Leningrad, and ordered the other south to help create the enemy pocket east of Kiev.
Army Group North did not have enough strength to seize Leningrad. And, by the time the diverted panzers got back on the road to Moscow, the rainy season had set in, and after that the Russian winter. As a consequence the strike for Moscow failed as well. With insufficient armor remaining in the south, the effort to seize all of the Ukraine and open a path to the oil of the Caucasus also collapsed.
Therefore, Hitler, by trying for too much, and then altering his priorities by sending a panzer group from the center into the Ukraine, failed everywhere . These failures meant that Germany had lost the war. By December 1941, there was no hope of anything better than a negotiated peace. And this Hitler refused to consider.
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