STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Get a low APR NextCard Visa in 30 seconds! 1. Fill in the brief application 2. Receive approval decision within 30 seconds 3. Get rates as low as 2.99% Intro or 9.99% Ongoing APR and no annual fee! Apply NOW! http://www.bcentral.com/listbot/NextCard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday June 17, 10:47 AM Hitler's Soviet campaign: a monumental military folly remembered PARIS, June 17 (AFP) - It began in a blaze of patriotic glory as the largest invasion in history, only to descend into a protracted, scrappy combat the Nazi army could never hope to win. Hitler's Soviet campaign, which began 60 years ago next Thursday will always be remembered as one of the greatest military follies of all time. But the failure was largely due to a serious miscalculation on the Germans' part of the severity of the Russian winter and the resilience of the Red Army and the Russian people themselves. The Nazis were to find, just as Napoleon Bonaparte had done more than a century earlier, that territorial ambition and operations in the frozen north were largely incompatible. When Hitler decided to tear up the Germano-Soviet non-aggression treaty signed in Moscow two years earlier, which had effectively carved up eastern and northern Europe between Hilter and Stalin, it was to further the Fuhrer's dreams of a Third Reich from the Mediterranean to the Caucusus. So, on a sunny Sunday morning in June 1941, German troops massed along an enormous front from the Arctic to the Caucasian mountains and launched Operation Barbarossa -- its objective to crush Soviet Russia into submission in a lightning campaign which would take everyone by surprise with its speed and ruthless efficiency. To that end, a force of 8.7 million men, six million troops and 1.7 million airmen backed by 3,000 tanks and gun carriers and 5,000 aircraft, were pressed into action and deployed in three strategic groups. The first group, concentrated in what had been the east of Prussia, had a double objective: one faction was to scythe its way through the Baltic republics and capture Leningrad, going on to Karelia; the other was to take Murmansk. A second offensive from occupied Poland was to advance on Vitebsk, Smolensk and Gomel, thus encircling and destroying Soviet forces in White Russia and opening the way to Moscow. The strongest grouping was in the south, between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, which was ordered to strike against Kiev and Odessa, forge on to Dniepr and by taking Ukraine, Crimea and Donbass, open the way to the rivers Volga and Don. But that was all on paper. What the Nazis had not counted on was Stalin's ability to sway public opinion and get the weight of the entire Soviet Union behind him. He launched a counter-offensive he called the Great Patriotic War, which would last until 1945 and result in massive Soviet casualties -- an estimated 20 million, only nine million of them military personnel. The fighting thus effectively wiped out 10 percent of the population, but it meant that the Soviets were never mastered on their own territory. >From the very first, it became obvious that the invasion would not be over as quickly as Hitler and his advisors had anticipated. By the time the Germans had pushed on to the Gulf of Finland and launched the Battle of Leningrad in early July, they were more than aware of how the Soviets would stop at nothing to repel them, however ill-organised they might have been. The Germans considered the taking of Leningrad the key first step in conquering Russia, but the defence forces stopped them in their tracks in the city's suburbs and held out for 83 days before the Germans retreated and regrouped. The Siege of Leningrad, between November 1941 and October the following year, saw nearly 650,000 inhabitants die of starvation, before surviviors could be evacuated across the frozen Lake Ladoga. Early in the campaign, the German newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, reported: "The Russian soldier surpasses our adversaries in the West in his contempt for death. Endurance and fatalism make him hold out until he is blown up with his trench or falls in hand-to-hand fighting". There was surprise, too in the Frankfurter Zeitung, which reported on July 5: "The mental paralysis which usually follows after the lightning German breakthrough in the West did not occur to the same extent in the East. In most cases the enemy did not lose his capacity for action but tried in his turn to envelop the arms of the German pincers." Had they but known it, for the next four years, the Germans would again and again run into such determination and suffer a long series of setbacks in the abortive attempts to capture Leningrad, Kursk, Moscow and, the greatest humiliation of all, the retreat from Stalingrad. It was, in hindsight, an irrevocably lost cause from the very first day they set foot on Soviet soil. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Spot the hottest trends in music, movies, and more. http://buzz.yahoo.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
