Three Million Men: The Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941 (The Second World War Chronicles)

The German army did not lose the Soviet Union in the snow outside Moscow. It lost in August, in warm weather, on dry roads — and the snow arrived afterwards to take the blame.

On 22 June 1941, more than three million men crossed the Soviet frontier on a front of eighteen hundred miles, on a timetable of ten weeks. The timetable rested on an estimate of roughly two hundred Soviet divisions. By 11 August the identified count stood past three hundred and sixty, with the Red Army still forming more, and the chief of the German general staff wrote in his diary that the colossus had been consistently underestimated — six weeks before the mud, four months before the cold. The failure on the other side was its mirror image: Stalin had been warned dozens of times, by sources that did not know of one another's existence, and dismissed every warning inside a theory that made the warnings themselves proof of a British trap.

Beneath both failures sits the arithmetic that decided the campaign. Soviet railways ran on a wider gauge, so every mile of track had to be relaid before a single supply train could follow the tanks. The truck pool came from half of occupied Europe in dozens of incompatible types. Six hundred thousand horses had to be fed every day. One combatant could not move rations two hundred miles forward; the other hauled its factories fifteen hundred miles east and had them running by winter. The culminating point was passed near Smolensk in July, five months before the first snow.

This book also states plainly what the campaign was. By written order, issued before the frontier was crossed, it was a war of extermination: the Einsatzgruppen and the beginning of the Holocaust, the Hunger Plan, the starvation of Leningrad, and the deaths of more than three million Soviet prisoners of war. These events are covered directly, in the narrative where they happened, and treated as crimes rather than as factors in a campaign.

What you'll learn:

• Why the campaign was lost in August 1941, and how the winter alibi was built — by whom, when, and for which audience
• How dozens of specific, independent warnings failed to move Stalin, and why no officer could carry them the last three hundred yards
• How an estimate of two hundred Soviet divisions became an identified count past three hundred and sixty
• What the railway gauge, the truck pool, and six hundred thousand horses did to the supply arithmetic
• How the Soviet Union dismantled more than fifteen hundred factories and restarted them beyond the Urals while the battles were fought
• How December 1941 — the counter-offensive, Pearl Harbor, and an unforced German declaration of war — made the war global

This book is for you if:

• You want the mechanism behind the largest military operation ever mounted, not the myth
• You suspect "General Winter" explains less than it claims
• You want contested numbers given as ranges, with the disagreements named
• You want the crimes of the campaign kept in the story where they happened

Volume 4 of ten in The Second World War Chronicles. It stands alone — the opening pages compress 1919–1941, and no earlier volume is required.