User:Hungrydog55/sandbox/military/russianfront/1941-06 Barbarossa oob
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in history, was the invasion of the USSR by the Axis powers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.
Along a 1,350-mile border stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, German, Romanian and Italian forces consisting of 3,300 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, 2,770 aircraft and three million men began the assault at approx. 3:30 am (Russian time) on 22 June 1941 with an unprecedented artillery barrage. The immediate results for the Soviet Union were devastating.
"Her losses, by mid-July, had reached staggering proportions. Of her air force, over 3,000 planes had been destroyed, most within the first five days, and that was a conservative figure ... Army Group Centre was able to show that it had taken 300,000 prisoners, 2,500 tanks and 1,400 guns, in the process virtually destroying four Soviet Armies. In the battle of the Smolensk pocket ... Army Group Centre was to take another 310,000 prisoners, 3,200 tanks and 3,100 guns."
— John Keegan, Barbarossa: Invasion of Russia 1941 (1970)
Within a month, one high-level Soviet general had been executed by his own government for "cowardice" and "criminal incompetence."
Historians consider Barbarossa to have ended on December 5, 1941 at the conclusion of Operation Typhoon.