Operation Barbarossa, in which Germany invaded the Soviet Union, was the largest surprise attack in the history of world warfare. It probably won't be in the future. It was also the largest battlefield during World War II.
The invasion of the Soviet Union turned out to be Germany's greatest strategic defeat. But for Hitler, the invasion of the Soviet Union was both a set goal and an inevitable move.
As for the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, both the Soviet Union and Germany knew that it was an expedient measure, and no one took it seriously. Hitler, on the other hand, rashly attacked the Soviet Union without dealing with Britain, putting Germany in a passive situation of fighting on two fronts, the Soviet Union in the east and Britain in the west. Surrounding. Despite the great victory of the Germans in Operation "Barbarossa", this was only tactical, and the loss was strategic.
In June 1940, the German General Staff Headquarters began to formulate a plan for the war against the Soviet Union, but it was still in the conceptual stage and had not yet been put into actual combat deployment. On December 18 of that year, Hitler signed and approved the Soviet war plan. The core operation of "Operation Barbarossa" was to carry out powerful assaults from the northwest, southwest, and due west of the western border of the Soviet Union, divide and encircle and annihilate the main forces of the Soviet army, and then drive straight into the hinterland of the Soviet Union to end the war against the Soviet Union within six weeks to two months.
From July 1940 to June 1941, Germany mobilized 157 divisions of elite troops. Including its servant ** team, there are a total of 166 divisions. The total strength of the German offensive forces deployed under the "Operation Barbarossa" plan was 5.5 million, including 4,300 tanks, 47,000 artillery pieces, and 5,000 warplanes. Although the Soviet side was wary of Germany's large-scale offensive deployment, it was completely unprepared at that time. In order not to provoke the displeasure of Germany, the Soviet border guards did not even distribute excess ammunition.
The fact that the Soviet army was not fully prepared for the battle provided a good opportunity for Hitler to realize the "Operation Barbarossa" plan. At 5:30 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Schulenburg, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union, presented his war book to the Soviet Union. The Soviet top was at a loss for what to do about it. And before that, the Soviet Union had already learned from the front that several million units of the German army had broken through the borders of the USSR on all fronts. The Red Army was defeated.
At midnight on June 22, 1941, the 4,500-kilometer border between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea in the western part of the Soviet Union was as dark as ink. Millions of officers and men of the 170 Red Army divisions stationed along the western border still slept soundly in their sleep as usual. Tens of thousands of valuable combat planes are lined up in neat and winged formations at airfields near the border, without any special protection. There are no precautions.
For a time, thousands of German planes broke the midnight silence and rumbled over thousands of kilometers of Soviet borders, and fighter planes swept and bombers dived, and bombs rained down on Soviet barracks, strongholds, front-line airfields, railway junctions, and rear supply centers. At the same time, tens of thousands of German field guns and tank guns were fired together along the border of several thousand kilometers and fiercely bombarded the forward positions of the Soviet army, opening up a way for the attacking troops. Led by tanks, several million German invading troops took the opportunity to swarm in, breaking through the Soviet Union's several thousand kilometers of national borders and advancing on all fronts in the Soviet hinterland. This was the first horrific act of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and the implementation of the "Barbarossa" plan.
On the first day of the war alone, the Soviets lost 1800 aircraft. Only three weeks after the start of the war, 109 Red Army divisions were wiped out. By the end of the same year, the Red Army had lost 7 million men and 18,000 tanks, and the front-line troops were forced to retreat 800 to 1,200 kilometers to the east. The Germans captured Kiev in the south, surrounded Leningrad in the north, and approached Moscow in the center, achieving a stunning victory.
Operation Barbarossa "really took the world by surprise. However, Hitler still failed to achieve his strategic goals. Germany had only won a tactical victory, but strategically, Germany had completely failed because they had fought an opponent they should not have hit, just as Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Hitler's final end was not as good as Napoleon's entry into Moscow, and he began to retreat. Its dream of trying to take the Soviet Union in World War I came to naught.
I am Gillian Shimizu, the watchman of history. Looking forward to your attention and comments.