Thus by 1940 the Soviet western frontier had moved hundreds of miles west, and Stalin and Timoshenko had bought some time to put the armed forces in order. This was a huge task, one that had many complications. In 1935 the Soviets had realized that they had the ability and need to finally turn the Red Army into a mass army with a peacetime strength of one-and-a-half million men; in 1939, Stalin ordered an increase in the size of the army to three million. The expansion followed in short order, but the inevitable result was that the soldiers, and particularly the officers, were poorly trained and inexperienced. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and junior officers were only a step away from the villages. For many soldiers, their rifle was the first really modern piece of equipment that they had ever seen. The army purge of 1937–38 only made things worse, especially at the level of high command. Here lay the explanation of the army’s poor performance in the Winter War. Furthermore, the army’s equipment was no longer up-to-date. After the great push in the early 1930s, Soviet military production had stagnated and new designs were not forthcoming. Thus the appearance of the German Messerschmidt fighter over Spain in 1937 was a great shock to the Red Air Force, for their best planes were no match for it. German tank technology was moving quickly as well, and all this came at just the moment when the Soviet design bureaus and the armed forces were paralyzed by the purges. Starting in 1938, new designs came into being, but they had to be tested and then put into mass production. Thus by the summer of 1941, the USSR had the first of its modern weapons, the Ilushin-2 ground attack fighter, the T-34 and KV tanks, and the Katiusha rocket artillery. The tanks and rockets were way ahead of the German equivalents, but there were not nearly enough of them or of any modern aircraft.
As the Soviet factories furiously put the new weapons into production and the army struggled with the problems created by rapid expansion and new borders, Hitler was planning his assault. In 1940 he had overrun France and the Balkans. He had failed in the Battle of Britain to bring the English to their knees, but the British Empire, dangerously overstretched by the need to defend the Far East and the Mediterranean as well as the home islands, seemed to the Führer doomed. He would turn his attention to Russia.
All through the winter Wehrmacht units moved east into Rumania, Finland, and what had been Poland. Hitler’s tactical intelligence was excellent, for he knew exactly where the Soviet units were stationed, their strength, and their defensive positions. What he did not know, or even care about, was the economic and military potential of the USSR. To Hitler, the Soviet state was simply a Jewish-Mongol horde that would fly apart at the first blows. His generals, who thought in terms of the Russia of 1914, were only slightly less contemptuous of the enemy. Stalin was perfectly aware of the German moves, for his spy network was just as good as Hitler’s. His interpretation of the German moves, however, was completely wrong. Stalin never fully grasped the radicalism of the Nazi regime, still seeing it in the light of older German rightist movements, or perhaps as a German version of Mussolini’s fascism. He also was convinced that Hitler would not invade the Soviet Union until he had defeated Britain, for Stalin could not imagine that Hitler would be stupid enough to repeat the Kaiser’s mistake and fight a war on two fronts at the same time. Thus Stalin interpreted the troop movements as a bluff: he expected that Hitler would hold off for a year or two, and in the meantime perhaps try to bluff the Soviets into delivering much needed raw materials to the Reich. His worst fear was that Soviet troops along the border might provoke Hitler too soon; hence he ordered them to ignore German overflights and other suspicious actions. Soviet military intelligence believed differently, but when their reports reached their top commanders, they were shelved as not consistent with the policy and analysis that emanated from the Kremlin. Nevertheless, in April 1941, Stalin ordered nearly a million additional men mobilized under the cover of large-scale maneuvers and he moved more troops west. The Red Army now had a theoretical strength of some five million men. Only in the last days before the war were orders issued to put some of the troops into a state of greater readiness: the night before the invasion Timoshenko ordered the air force to disperse the planes on the air strips so that they would not make an easy target. Only the Odessa military district obeyed the orders, for even in Stalin’s Russia, commands from the center did not necessarily get through in time or call forth instant obedience.
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at first light – 3:30 in the morning – Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, named after the medieval German warrior emperor. Some three million German soldiers crossed the border, together with nearly a million allies, Finns, Rumanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, and small volunteer and collaborationist units from nearly every country in Europe, including neutral ones like Sweden (SS Nordland). Hitler’s army was fresh from victory all over the continent, from Norway to Greece, backed by an economic machine greater than that of the USSR (if not by much) and the resources of occupied Europe. Facing them were the five million men in the Soviet armed forces, but almost half of them were either deployed far in the rear or were still only in the process of formation and training. In addition to being caught in the middle of mobilization and learning to use new equipment, the Soviet forces were placed too close to the border and were easy targets for the Luftwaffe and the German armor. The placement was a relic of the long-standing offensive orientation of the Soviet army, which assumed that soon after an attack the Soviet forces would move to make a series of deep incursions into enemy territory to spoil the attack as the Red Army moved to full mobilization. To make things worse, the Soviets erred in predicting the main direction of the German attack. Until 1940 all Soviet war plans had assumed that the German army would attack directly east through Belorussia toward Moscow, as indeed turned out to be the case. In 1940, however, Timoshenko, the new chief of staff general Georgii Zhukov, and Stalin had decided that Hitler would more likely strike south into the Ukraine. Along the central axis there were only farms and large forests, while the Ukraine was still the most important industrial area of the USSR and a major agricultural region to boot. Surely Hitler would go for needed resources. Thousands of troops were moved south into the Ukraine.
Instead the main blow came directly forward the east. German armor repeated its tactics from France and slashed through Soviet defenses along the main roads and rail lines, pushing deep into the country. Lithuania and much of western Belorussia fell in days. The Luftwaffe destroyed most of the Soviet air force on the ground in the first few days, leaving the army with no air cover and no ability to move without German knowledge. With the weight of the German advance directed toward the center, the Soviet front was overrun within weeks and nearly a million and a half Soviet soldiers found themselves in captivity. Almost none of them survived, for the Germans, as part of their racial policies, chose not to feed them and simply let them die. To the north and south, the Germans advanced almost as swiftly, and by the end of the summer they were at Kiev and the gates of Leningrad.
Conditions on the Soviet side of the front were chaotic as poorly designed communications collapsed under the onslaught, command posts were destroyed, and large bodies of Soviet troops desperately tried to retreat east. The Soviet commander in Belorussia was out of communication with his men as well as with Moscow for days. The orders from Moscow at first followed the old and now utterly irrelevant scheme of counterattack against the invaders. Local commanders were lucky if they never got the orders and just followed their instincts. Some units fought to the end, others until food and ammunition ran out. The next orders from Moscow were to hold on long after the situation was hopeless, and commanders who led their troops out of entrapment found themselves under suspicion or worse for retreating without orders. In July Stalin ordered the trial and execution of a number of the generals whose armies had been destroyed in the first weeks of the war.