INVASION

When Germany and her allies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the war changed in several ways. One change that not everybody recognized right away but that is certainly clear in retrospect is that from that date until the end of the war in Europe in May, 1945, the majority of the fighting of the whole war took place on the Eastern Front: more people fought and died there than on all the other fronts of the war around the globe put together. This was due to three factors which will be the theme of much of the rest of this account of the conflict: the massive size of the forces engaged, the nature of the fighting which made it unlikely that the two sides would return to peaceful relations, and the ability of Germany's enemies to stick together and thereby insure Germany's eventual defeat.

The attack on the Soviet Union was launched in the early hours of June 22 and was a total surprise. There had been a last-minute alert to Soviet units on some sectors of the front, but orders generally were to hold fire in case this was all a German provocation. The German air force, using about 60 percent of its total strength, employed over 2700 war planes; in carefully planned strikes that morning it destroyed a large portion of the Soviet air force on the ground, damaged its forward fields, and shot down most of the Red Air Force planes that got into the air. The combination of surprise with experience in prior campaigns enabled the German air force to destroy over 4000 Soviet planes in the first week of the campaign. The resulting near total German control of the air did not last long, but it was in effect in the early months of fighting and greatly facilitated the advance of Germany's ground forces.

The German army with over three million men together with more than half a million soldiers of countries allied with Germany (and over 600,000 horses) attacked according to plans that had been carefully worked out in the preceding months.“