World War II and Epic Fantasy

Epic fantasy is, arguably, a form of storytelling highly influenced by the Second World War. World War II remains unusual in military history for being a conflict which can clearly be divided between the “bad guys” (Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) and the “good guys” (the plucky Brits, the brave French Resistance and the heroic-if-a-bit-tardy United States of America) with a minimum of moral uncertainty. Popular narratives of the Second World War show the heroic, democracy-loving Brits and Yanks storming the beaches of Normandy to save Europe from the diabolical and evil rule of the brutal Third Reich.

Christopher Lee as Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Lee fought in the British special forces in WWII, in operations that he refused to discuss even decades afterwards.

This is of course monstrously simplistic, and ignores the morally murkier elements of the conflict, such as the Allied mass bombing campaign that was designed to slaughter as many German civilians as possible, and of course the involvement of the Soviet Union in the war. The USSR committed many atrocities of its own (including being complicit in Germany’s invasion of Poland which started the war in the first place) and was willing to accept staggering military and civilian losses to finally defeat the Germans and capture Berlin (a fact glossed over in western accounts of the conflict, which tend to suggest that the US and UK were the primary architects of Hitler’s downfall rather than relative bystanders). Still, the sometimes almost cartoonishly evil nature of the Nazi regime (“Are we the bad guys? If not, why do our uniforms have skulls on them?”) allows it to be presented as an irredeemable foe who must be destroyed at all costs with a minimum of moral qualms, very useful for propaganda, morale and rousing novels, films and video games.

Epic fantasy written in the post-war era feels like it is influenced by this conflict. People writing fantasy in this period either fought in the war directly, were children during it or were born in the aftermath of the conflict and grew up with stories of it from their parents and grandparents.

The fantasy saga sometimes said to have been most influenced by the war is The Lord of the Rings, although J.R.R. Tolkien was scornful of this. He started writing the book in late 1937, two years before the conflict even began, and the story and themes of the book developed out of The Hobbit, mostly written in 1930-32 or thereabouts. The titular One Ring itself is sometimes compared to a nuclear bomb (in its ability to end the War of the Ring in a single stroke rather than actual destructive power) and much is made of the Scouring of the Shire and its similarity to the military occupation of a formerly peaceful territory. However, the Ring was created for The Hobbit and its powers established long before the outbreak of the conflict. Tolkien himself was furious with the idea of the book being an allegory (noting he detested allegory wherever it was found), but did acknowledge the idea of “applicability,” and the disturbing feeling that real events were conforming (somewhat) to those in the book rather than vice versa. Tolkien did acknowledge a much greater influence on the book by his own experiences in World War I, particularly the several months he spent on the Western Front during the Battle of the Somme. The Frodo-Sam relationship is reminiscent of that between a gentleman soldier and his batman, and the Dead Marshes with their hordes of corpses (and semi-undead) lying face-up in the flooded marshlands being an image that stuck with Tolkien from the aftermath of bloody engagements.

Skipping ahead a few generations, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles feels like a revamp of the Second World War. The forces of evil gain a series of military advantages from the return of the dark goddess Takhisis and the ability to control evil dragons in battle. This allows them to overrun half the continent of Ansalon and push the remaining nations and our heroes to the brink of defeat. However, our heroes gain the favour of the god Paladine, the allegiance of the good dragons and then the ability to use the fabled dragonlances in battle. This turns the tide and routs the enemy. This can be seen as a reflection of the military technology in WWII: the Germans’ early innovation and technical ingenuity gave them a keen early edge that allowed them to defeat everyone they faced in battle, but later in the conflict the Allies first matched and then exceeded their technological advantage, which the Germans could not sustain and ultimately lost.

Many epic fantasies feature narratives not dissimilar to this. The Wheel of Time shows a growing threat from a powerful opponent who is allowed to go unchecked because the nations that should be unifying against them can’t stop their squabbles with one another, even when the threat becomes blatant. This is an echo of the way Hitler expertly exploited inter-war rivalries between nations such as Russia and Poland to stop opponents joining forces against him (and, indeed, struck an unlikely alliance himself with Russia which prevented them from joining France and Britain in the war). The decision of the forces of “Light” in the books to join forces with the morally highly dubious Seanchan to fight the Dark One can be seen as a reflection of the reluctance with which nations like Britain (whose leader, Churchill, held a deep and abiding hatred of Communism) allied with Russia to fight the greater threat, and the repeated warning that this alliance could sow the seeds of a greater conflict later on (as it very nearly did, with the Cold War almost going nuclear-hot on several occasions, and various visions in The Wheel of Time showing a future where the Seanchan and the other nations resume their conflict).

George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is rather different, however. The conflict between the Great Houses is of course most strongly influenced by the Wars of the Roses, but there is also a strong influence from World War I: the Houses go to war against one another in a manner reflecting their inter-war alliances and fuelled by grievances (just and unjust) extending back generations, with Jon Arryn’s death and then Tyrion Lannister’s arrest setting in motion a series of falling dominoes leading to conflict as much as Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in August 1914.

The most notable fantasy novel series directly based on World War II is Harry Turtledove’s Darkness series, a six-volume series set on a continent resembling Eurasia which is riven by war. Technological developments are replaced by discoveries in the field of sorcery but every nation has its real-world analogue (albeit often inverted; the war in the desert in Africa is replaced by a war on a southern polar continent) and the conflict unfolds in a very similar manner. Turtledove of course likes to revisit WWII in his alternate history fiction, with his splendidly readable, pulp Worldwar series being set during a WWII interrupted by the arrival of an alien invasion fleet, and his darker Southern Victory series in which the Confederacy survives the Civil War as an independent state and becomes embroiled in further conflicts leading to the establishing of a North American theatre in WWII (which, due to a German victory in WWI and no rising of the Nazi Party, unfolds very differently).

A recent fantasy which directly echoes the war is the video game series Valkyria Chronicles. Set on the continent of Europa, the story charts the outbreak of war between the East Europan Imperial Alliance (a blending of Nazi Germany in ideology and Soviet Russia in size and manpower) and the Atlantic Federation (a mixture of western European nations such as Britain and France, and NATO of the Cold War period, albeit with an American analogue which is very reluctant to get involved in the fight). The war opens with the Empire invading the Federation and the small neutral nation of Gallia (based loosely on the Netherlands and Belgium), the latter both to seize its deposits of ragnite (a valuable ore which powers advanced technology) and to allow it to invade the Federation on a second front. Unlike the real war, where the Low Countries were overrun quickly, in the game the much smaller Gallian army is able to rally around the nation’s complex geography (particularly its rivers and canals) and prevent the numerically superior Imperial army from seizing the country. The Empire’s insistence on deploying increasingly insane and impractical tanks on the battlefield and its constant hunt for superweapons is an echo of Hitler’s insistence on deploying increasingly unreliable new technology during WWII rather than refining existing designs, not to mention his increasingly desperate search for “doomsday weapons” that could end the war quickly. Even the Mamota, an insane “land battleship” which the Empire uses at the end of the game, is based on a real idea, the Landkreuzer P.1000 Ratte, a 1,000-ton tank Hitler heartily endorsed but whose development was cancelled by Albert Speer on the reasonable grounds it was ridiculous.

Valkyria Chronicles (2008) is unusual in combining both direct WWII elements – guns, artillery, grenades, tanks, propaganda and pogroms against a scapegoated minority (the Darcsens replacing the Jews) – and traditional fantasy tropes. There is an ancient magical race, the Valkyrur, whose power lingers into the modern age and at key moments both protagonists and antagonists gain access to their power. There are magical items and hopeless struggles by a plucky band of up-against-the-odds heroes against monstrous enemies (although some of them are shown to have a code of individual honour at odds with the atrocities their forces commit). Surprisingly cynically, the Federation, which becomes prominent in Valkyria Chronicles 4 (2018), is shown to sometimes be brutal and cold as well, willing to sacrifice vast numbers of civilian lives and infringe the borders of sovereign nations in order to get an upper hand against the Empire and is secretly developing a weapon of mass destruction behind the scenes. The oddest element of the Valkyria universe, given how closely it parallels WWII, is the near-total absence of aircraft from the conflict, with the few aircraft mentioned or appearing being WWI-style biplanes.

Of course, the straightforward (if not exactly accurate) good vs. evil nature of WWII gave rise afterwards to much more morally murky conflicts where the notions of good, evil, justice and injustice became far more fluid: Suez, Vietnam, Bosnia, the Iraq War and clashes of religious fundamentalists. This can be seen in the type of fantasy fiction that has followed: the Black Company (by Vietnam vet Glen Cook) and Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen (inspired by a lot of war fiction, and indeed The Black Company) are much less clear-cut tales where good and evil are less of an issue. Joe Abercrombie explores some of the same issues of morally flexible real politik in his First Law world. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series (including the Prince of Nothing and Aspect-Emperor sub-series) delves deep into religious fundamentalism and fanaticism. Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire series presents the world with a monstrously damaged human being who commits atrocities but who, ultimately, may end up saving the world. The moral relativism of post-WWII conflicts has been well matched and explored by fantasy fiction, perhaps too much for some as we’ve also seen a re-emergence of throwback fantasy, more concerned with more straightforward tales of good vs. evil (such as Michael Sullivan’s Ririya series and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere works).

WWII will remain a rich source of inspiration for fantasy fiction, although it is refreshing (if perhaps a tad depressing) to see other, less clear-cut conflicts being mined for different kinds of stories.

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The 70th anniversary of the Battle of Kursk

On 5 July 1943, the armed forces of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany met in the biggest and most significant battle since the German defeat at Stalingrad. The Battle of Kursk, though not as well-known as Stalingrad, proved to be as significant for the destruction it caused amongst German personnel and material. The battle ended all chances for the Germans to retake the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front and grimly set the stage for two years of heavy fighting that would eventually lead to the Soviet capture of Berlin.

The Battle of Kursk, noted as one of the biggest field battles of the war.

Background

During the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russians successfully encircled the German Sixth Army fighting within the city, allowing them to prepare a grander offensive to cut off the German forces trying to seize Russian oil supplies in the Caucasus region. As it turned out, the tenacious German defence of Stalingrad allowed their comrades the time needed to evacuate: hundreds of thousands of German troops retreated from the Caucasus and managed to establish a new defensive line several hundred miles to the west, running from Rostov in the south to Leningrad in the north. This line was almost straight apart from one major protrusion: the Red Army had successfully retaken the city of Kursk, forming an immense (180 miles wide) salient into the German lines.

The German generals immediately saw an opportunity to retake Kursk and eliminate the Russian forces surrounding the city. The nature of the salient would allow German forces to attack simultaneously from the north and south, cutting off the city and forcing it to surrender. This was the classic German strategy, although it was also one that the Russians had used to devastating effect on the Germans at Stalingrad. Despite the likelihood of success, some German generals (such as Manstein and Guderian, the architects of blitzkrieg) thought the plan was too risky, as it mean using hundreds of thousands of German troops to retake a target that was, on its own, of limited value. Hitler, surprisingly, agreed but also noted that this was the last opportunity for the Germans to undertake an offensive campaign that they had a good chance of winning on the Eastern Front. If they succeeded, they could regain the initiative. If they failed, the war would likely be lost.

Unfortunately for the Germans, the Russians were well aware of their preference for attacking salients. Once it became clear that Kursk was a target the Germans could not ignore, the Russians began pouring men, tanks and artillery guns into the area. They established a defence in depth consisting of artillery pieces, minefields and anti-tank guns, with huge numbers of T-34 and KV-1 tanks ready to sweep in and knock out the advancing enemy panzers. And as the Germans dithered, so the vast area surrounding Kursk became even more impregnable.

Offensive Delayed

The original German plan had been to launch the offensive at the start of April 1943, only two months after their defeat at Stalingrad. At this point Kursk was still fairly vulnerable to attack, with the Russian military build-up only just getting underway. Hitler was finally persuaded into approving the operation, but was unhappy with the performance of the German Panzer IV tank against the T-34, the Russian mainstay. He wanted the heavier tanks that had been in development for some time available for use.

The first of these tanks was the Panther, a formidable machine designed to directly rebuff the T-34. Equipped with a heavier gun and better armour (though this resulted in less speed), the Panther was - eventually - the outstanding German tank of the Second World War. Even more formidable - at least on paper - was the Tiger. Larger, more heavily-armoured and better-armed than either the T-34 or Panther, the Tiger was a monstrous machine capable of causing immense damage. The expense of building them meant they would always be some what rare, but they were a much-needed force-equaliser against the numerically superior Russian tanks.

The problem was that the deployment of both tanks was running behind schedule, and the Kursk offensive was delayed several times due to the manufacturers not meeting their delivery targets. The Germans finally received enough of both tank to satisfy Hitler, who set the date for the offensive to begin as 5 July 1943.

The Plan

The German plan called for the 2nd Army to hold the Russians at bay on the west-facing side of the salient whilst the 9th Army under General Model attacked the salient from the north and the 4th Panzer Army (under General Hoth) and Army Detachment Kempf (under General Kempf) attacked from the south. As early as the end of April Model had become concerned over aerial reconnaissance that showed the scale of the Soviet build-up, pictures which convinced even Manstein that the plan was probably too ambitious, but Hitler had become committed to 'Operation Citadel'. General Guderian, infamous for his seeming total disregard for Hitler's formidable temper, suggested that Hitler abandon the operation and indeed all offensive plans for 1943. Instead they could use Manstein's plan to lure the Russians to attack on the southern front and then destroy them with a counter-offensive. Hitler's response was surprisingly downbeat: he agreed with Guderian and said the thought the operation turned his stomach. But it was the only option on the table and he was determined to see it through rather than do nothing.

Soviet signal flares are fired ahead of an armoured assault.

Military Forces and the Opening of the Battle

The three-month delay proved costly for the Germans, as the Russians had time to almost quadruple their own armoured forces in the salient and lay immense minefields. They brought in 300,000 civilian workers to help construct these defences rapidly. They constructed a defensive zone almost 190 miles in depth, the result of an almost unprecedented amount of preparation time: three months in the fast-moving war was almost luxurious. Just under 2 million men and just over 5,000 tanks were deployed in the Kursk region, backed up by over 25,000 artillery pieces and mortars. More than 3,000 aircraft were also assigned to the defence of the region. Startlingly, the Russians were able to deploy a minefield density of over 3,000 mines per square kilometre throughout the forward areas of the salient, enough to immensely slow down the German advance (or so it was hoped).

On the German side, some 900,000 troops, 3,000 tanks (including 240 Tigers and over 200 Panthers), 2,000 aircraft and 10,000 artillery pieces and mortars were deployed for the offensive. Not only were the Germans attacking a numerically superior enemy (not unusual for them), they were also attacking with a deficiency in material and a lack of available reinforcements (which was more unusual) if things went wrong.

In terms of tanks, both sides brought an unusually high number to the battle. The Germans committed 70% of their total available tank forces on the Eastern Front to the operation. The Russians brought in just under half of their total tank forces in existence at that time. The Russians also deployed considerable numbers of anti-tank mines, anti-tank artillery pieces and anti-tank rifles, resulting in a Russian superiority of both armoured numbers and also other anti-tank forces. Hitler was relying on the superiority of the Tigers and Panthers (as well as the newly-deployed Ferdinand tank destroyer) to turn the tide of numbers.

On the aerial side of things, the air superiority that the Germans had enjoyed throughout the war was beginning to wane. Constant British (and now American) air raids on Germany had called away fighters to defensive duties, and operations in North Africa were also putting a heavy toll on the Luftwaffe. The Red Air Force had also been compromised by poor equipment, but by the time of Kursk this had been remedied by the introduction of the Yak-9 and La-2 fighters and especially the Sturmovik IL-2 ground attack aircraft (arguably the outstanding Russian aircraft of the war). The Germans were slower to bring new equipment to the battle, though an upgraded Stuka and more Focke-Wulf FW-190s did help. Overall, neither side enjoyed air superiority in terms of equipment over the battlefield, though the Russians did enjoy numerical superiority.

Probing attacks by German scouts and pioneers were launched on the evening of 4 July. This resulted in a Russian artillery bombardment just after midnight which proved less effective than hoped. A major Red Air Force attack on German airfields was also fought off with heavy Soviet losses. On the southern face of the salient the Luftwaffe was able to quickly achieve local superiority to cover the ground offensive, but in the northern sector the Russians were able to hold the Germans at bay, resulting in aerial stalemate. The Germans returned fire with their own artillery bombardment, but this also failed to make much impact on the Russian positions, which were too well-dug-in.

The Offensive in the North

On the northern sector the Germans launched an overwhelming attack with mobile artillery and infantry, with Model's plan being to break open holes in the Russian lines that their panzers could exploit. Given that the weight of the defences was oriented towards resisting armour, this proved to be a reasonable decision, though it was criticised at the time. The northern forces achieved a breakthrough when they successfully identified a weak spot in the Russian lines between two divisions and drove into the gap, spearheaded by two dozen Tigers. The Russians fought them off by deploying 90 T-34s, but the Tigers made a formidable impression: 42 T-34s were destroyed to the loss of seven Tigers. Despite this impressive showing, the three-hour tank battle delayed the Germans and allowed the Russians to reinforce and beat off the attack.

Elsewhere in the northern sector the Germans ran into repeated problems: the sheer mass of the minefields slowed their advance to a crawl, which made them easy prey for enemy artillery and mortars. In one area the Germans achieved a breakthrough by using their Ferdinand tank-destroyers in an offensive capacity to attack a Russian artillery position, but the destroyers' lack of machine guns weapons left them easy prey for Russian small arms and anti-armour weapons.

With the German advanced slowed - only 5 miles' progress was made on the first day, astonishingly feeble by German standards - the Russians counter-attacked in force on the second day across the northern sector. The T-34s spearheading the attack enjoyed superior speed and manoeuvrability to the Tigers, but were now facing an enemy who could destroy them at range and shrugged off counter-fire (for too long, the T-34's advantage over the Panzer IV). The Russians suffered devastating losses in the attack and had to pull back.

The next few days saw heavy exchanges of fire, but Model refused to mass his tanks for a sustained assault, fearing the depth of the Russian minefields and the formidable anti-tank forces arrayed against him. On 12 July he - reluctantly - began preparations for a major armoured offensive but was caught off-guard by a Red Army advance  on Orel to the north which threatened to encircle him. With little choice, Model withdraw the entire German 9th Army from the battlefield. Whilst his caution had preserved his forces remarkably well (only 143 vehicles lost), it had also failed to achieve anything of note, only to prove the impressive nature of the Soviet defences. Still, Model's deployment of the Tiger tank was successful, achieving a kill-to-loss ratio against the until-then superior T-34 that served as a nasty wake-up call to the Russian commanders that their front-line tank need improving.

Though limited in speed and number, the superior firepower of the German Tiger inflicted tremendous losses upon the Russian forces during Kursk.

The Offensive in the South

The Germans launched a major assault from the south of the Kursk salient on 5 July. Unlike the more cautious attacks in the north, the southern German forces arrayed their tanks in concentrated spearheads. They brought large amounts of fire to bear on single parts of the Russian line. The Russians had also failed to anticipate the likely main axis of attack on the southern front, forcing them to spread out their defences. In short, the attack in the south allowed the Germans to unleash one of their favourite tactics: bringing maximum offensive power to bear against a single part of the enemy line, overwhelming the enemy's superior overall numbers on a local level.

These attacks in the south were impressive, but also exposed some serious problems. 200 Panthers were ordered into the fight, only for a dozen of them to break down before they even started action. After further thirty-three suffered mechanical breakdowns on the battlefield, leading to a failure rate of almost 25% without taking into account enemy action. The reason for this was simple: the Tiger had been deployed on a small level since late 1942 (though Kursk represented its first deployment on a mass scale) and some of its mechanical kinks had been ironed out (though others remained). The Panther had been rushed almost straight from the factory to the battlefield with little time for testing. The Panther's mechanical unreliability proved to be a major headache for the Germans, with battlefield-reliable Panthers not entering service until August 1944, far too late in the day to change the outcome of the war.

Despite the Panthers' teething troubles, the Germans did succeed in penetrating the Russian positions and getting to the second defensive line. Unfortunately, they could not follow up on this success: reinforcements were slow to arrive and in some cases were halted by katyusha strikes knocking out the bridges behind the German front units. Unexpected German tank successes forced some of the Russian armour to dig in. Helped by camouflage, these dug-in tanks worked as stationary (and hard-to-spot or hear) gun turrets and slowed the German offensive even further. Russian armour continued to counter-attack, achieving great successes against the weaker German tanks but continuing to face stiff resistance from the Tigers: one German Tiger destroyed 22 T-34s single-handed, winning its commander the Knight's Cross.

German progress in the south was slow but steady, but on 12 July, the same day the northern front collapsed and had to withdraw, they broke through the Russian lines near the town of Prokhorovka. The Russians had rushed as much armour as possible to meet the incursion, putting the pieces in place for the greatest tank battle in history.

The Battle of Prokhorovka

On the morning of 12 July, General Hoth's 4th Panzer Army advanced on Prokhorovka, its tanks clustered in one powerful spearhead. The Russian 5th Tank Guards Army responded, and the two massive armoured forces collided south-west of the town.

The resulting tank battle was fought on a flat plain extending across seventeen miles and lasting eight hours in stifling heat. The numbers involved are disputed, with conservative estimates stating that only about 900 tanks were involved (593 Russian tanks and 37 self-propelled guns versus 300 German tanks and guns), and more outlandish ones putting the figures closer to 2,000. Whatever the numbers, it was the biggest tank engagement of the Second World War. Hundreds of tanks advanced  across a relatively narrow front, resulting in a lengthy, sustained exchange of fire. The fighting was fierce and at close-quarters, allowing the T-34s to close with and engage the Tigers on a more equal footing. The Germans achieved aerial superiority over the battlefield and inflicted tremendous damage on the Russian forces. Despite the German tenacity and their strength of their tanks, the Russian lines held and the Germans were forced to withdraw. Both sides left hundreds of tanks smouldering on the battlefield, but the losses were more devastating for the Germans, who could ill afford to lose them and were slower replacing them.

Though still formidable, the Battle of Kurk proved the need for an upgraded, more powerful variant of the T-34 to answer the new German tanks.

The Closing Stages

By 16 July the Germans had won some ground and were holding it, but the lack of reinforcements compared to a steady replenishment of Russian tanks and troops began to tell. The German breakthroughs were impressive, but also not as significant as they first appeared: in some places the Germans still had five rings of defences to penetrate before they could capture the salient, and they had exhausted themselves battling through the first two. The Germans had also suffered devastating tank losses, with their problems compounded by the extremely poor performance of the Panther: out of the 200 present in the southern sector on 5 July, only 38 were still operational on the morning of 10 July, to the fury of the tank commanders. Only a few had been destroyed or captured, with the rest simply failing to work.

On 16 July the attack was called off and the Germans, exhausted, fell back to their start line. On 3 August the Soviets launched Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev, a major military operation designed to retake the city of Kharkov. Despite German resistance, the city fell on 23 August. The Germans were forced to retreat towards Kiev, meaning that not only had they failed to take the Kursk salient, but the Russians were able to successfully use the salient as a springboard for further, successful offensives into the southern part of the German lines and begin the re-conquest of the Ukraine.

In the north the Russians had launched Operation Kutuzov, an effort to liberate the city of Orel north-west of the Kursk salient, on 12 July. This operation forced the Germans to completely abandon the northern assault on Kursk or risk being encircled. On 5 August Orel itself fell, driving the Germans even further back and opening up a possible route for the Russians to advance on Smolensk.

By the end of the Battle of Kursk, the Germans had suffered a serious strategic reversal on the Eastern Front. It had lost a substantial number of its tanks on the Eastern Front, lost two major conquests (Orel and Kharkov) and was in danger of losing two, much more important cities (Smolensk and Kiev itself). The technological superiority of the Tiger and - when it worked - the Panther was proven, but both tanks were expensive to build and ineffective against the T-34 when it was fielded against them in superior numbers. Even the technical superiority of the German tanks was lost a few months later when the Russians (for a modest increase in price) upgraded their tanks with a new, heavier gun, resulting in the T-34/85. Once again, the T-34 was able to engage German armour at longer ranges without sacrificing their superior speed.

Kursk was the last throw of the dice for Hitler on the Eastern Front. Never again would the Germans be able to mount a large and sustained offensive in the east, and the stage was set for the infamous Russian offensives of 1944, Operation Bagration.

The 70th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad

The 23rd of August, 1942, is a significant date in history. Seventy years ago, the German Sixth Army began its assault on a remote, obscure city in southern Russia called Stalingrad. This battle - begun as a mere sideshow to a grander attempt to cut off Russia's supplies of oil - proved the most significant turning point of the war and became - arguably - the most famous single battle of the conflict. Two totalitarian superpowers clashed for control of a city bearing the name of one of their leaders, fighting a gruelling battle lasting six months and costing over one and a half million lives.

Russian Katyusha rocket batteries during the Red Army's counter-attack at Stalingrad.

Background
As related in my article on Barbarossa last year, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union on 21 June, 1941. They attacked on a vast scale, using over three million troops and thousands of tanks and aircraft. By the autumn they had taken or besieged most of Russia's major cities but Hitler proved uncharacteristically timid when the time came to advance on Moscow (likely due to Hitler's obsession with the story of Napoleon's defeat in Russia). By the time he finally authorised the attack it was too late in the year, and the German armies were finally halted by freezing temperatures. An unexpected Russian counter-attack in December threw the Germans back almost a hundred miles from Moscow, the first significant tactical defeat suffered by the Germans in the war, but failed to rout them. A new front was stabilised, and both armies reinforced and prepared for a resumption of hostilities in the spring.

As 1942 opened, the Russians anticipated a renewed offensive on Moscow and concentrated a significant portion of their resources on defending the city. However, Hitler believed that Moscow was, in itself, not a strategically worthwhile target. With the Red Army focused in the north, Hitler believed an opportunity existed for a stunning victory in the south. He divided the former Army Group South into two forces, Army Group A and B, and planned for them to advance eastwards, along the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the basin between the rivers Don and Volga, one group would turn south into the Caucasus Mountains with the objective of capturing almost all of Russia's major oil fields, in what is now Chechnya and Armenia. The other would turn north and take and hold the city of Stalingrad, to be used to secure the German flanks against a possible counter-attack.

It was an impressive plan, concentrating the Germans' offensive power against the weakest part of the Russian line and designed to cut off the Red Army from the source of its fuel. If the Germans could pull one more rabbit out of the hat, they might simply starve the Russians into surrender due to a lack of supplies, rather than face a battle of attrition that the numerically superior Russians could win.

The plan - Operation Blue - began unexpectedly early on 19 May 1942. Marshal Timoshenko of the Red Army launched an offensive designed to recapture the city of Kharkov, but in doing so exposed his flank and was comprehensively defeated, losing a quarter of a million men in the process. Maintaining the momentum of the counter-attack, the Germans advanced eastwards. On 23 July the city of Rostov fell, allowing the Germans to advance swiftly eastwards towards the Volga.

The task of taking Stalingrad fell to the Sixth Army under General von Paulus, a notable formation which had already won impressive victories in France and the initial invasion of the USSR. In accordance with blitzkrieg doctrine, which required an overwhelming aerial bombardment to soften up the target ahead of an infantry and armoured attack, the German Luftwaffe launched a massive bombing raid on Stalingrad on 23 August, 1942. The attack flattened a large portion of the city, killing upwards of 40,000 civilians. Elements of the Sixth Army entered the city's suburbs on the same day, marking the beginning of the battle.


The Sixth Army Advances

Reducing the city to rubble proved to be a costly error. The closed-in streets of the city had now been turned into a bewildering warren of collapsed walls, bombed-out streets and half-fallen buildings. The Germans found it almost impossible to deploy their tanks with any effectiveness, whilst the close nature of the fighting restricted the use of both air power and heavy artillery. They were also confounded by the unusual layout of the city.

Stalingrad - formerly Tsaritsyn and today called Volgograd - was only about two miles wide, but extended along the Volga's shores for about seventeen miles. The German plan for taking the city involved multiple incursions from the suburbs to the river, reducing the city to several small pockets of resistance which could then be eliminated in detail. The problem was that the Volga - almost two miles wide at Stalingrad - proved a straightforward (if extremely hazardous) way of reinforcing the city. Red Army troops would pour across the river on a daily basis, braving aerial and artillery bombardment to reinforce the troops already in the city. The Germans found it difficult to seal off each pocket from reinforcements, especially the core of the city where the bulk of the 62nd Army, commanded by the formidable General Chuikov was concentrated. Chuikov was a charismatic commander who would allegedly break off from key radio conferences with his commanders to run outside his bunker and personally drive back German assaults with a machine gun before nonchalantly rejoining the conversation (although sadly this is probably apocryphal).

As a result of the ferocious Russian defence, the Battle of Stalingrad descended into a grinding battle of attrition, something the Germans had purposely avoided in WWII up to this point. Their key weapons of blitzkrieg, speed and movement were denied to them by the terrain and by Hitler's insistence that the city had to be captured and fortified, rather than simply razed. In addition, the Sixth Army found itself at the end of a very long, very tenuous supply chain (Stalingrad was 1,380 miles from Berlin), with every bullet, can of fuel and replacement soldier having to travel a long way to reach the troops. Russian reinforcements were able to enter the city almost at will, however.

The result of this was a gruelling infantry battle, with some buildings being captured, recaptured, bombed and then reoccupied multiple times during the same day. On both sides snipers wreaked havoc on enemy morale, with several of them becoming extremely famous (Vasily Zaitsev - the main character in the movie Enemy at the Gates - is the most famous, although his famous 'sniper duel' with a German counterpart appears to be apocryphal). To the Germans' shock, a significant number of the Russian soldiers they faced were women: more than 75,000 women fought at Stalingrad, as medics, snipers, pilots and (despite official policy to the contrary) as front-line combat troops. A large number of civilians who'd been trapped in the city during the battle were also pressed into military service. Bolstered by such factors, the Russian defence was tenacious and impressive, but still the defenders gave ground. By the start of October over 80% of the city was in German hands.

However, Stalin and his most skilled general, Marshal Zhukov, had concocted an utterly audacious scheme to defeat the Germans. Rather than flood the city with reinforcements, as they could have done, they only sent in enough men to hold the city and pin the Germans in place. At the same time, they assembled two immense formations, one to the north and the other to the south, of Stalingrad. As von Paulus became more desperate for victory, he reassigned all of his elite units into the city itself, leaving the flanks of the Sixth Army to be guarded by allied troops: Hungarian, Italian and Romanian forces supplied by Hitler's erstwhile allies to help make good Germany's lack of manpower (at least compared to the USSR). Unfortunately, these troops were known to be of inferior quality to the German soldiers, lacking their training and equipment.

On 19 November 1942 - the day the Second World War apparently spun on a dime - the Red Army hit the demoralised, under-equipped Hungarian and Romanian forces on the flanks of the Sixth Army with everything they had. In less than two days the Russians shattered the flanks and overran them, sweeping around the Sixth Army in two huge waves which met at the town of Kalach, the main river crossing over the River Don directly on the Sixth Army's line of retreat. The Sixth Army was completely surrounded, and the besiegers had suddenly become the besieged.


The Sixth Army Besieged

Immediate efforts were launched to relive the Sixth Army, but the German armies operating in the Caucasus were too far away to immediately respond. The Sixth Army itself was massively outnumbered - by at least three-to-one, not counting the Russian troops inside Stalingrad itself - and could make no headway. Initially there was panic at the German high command about how the Sixth Army could feed itself, leading Goering to declare that he could keep the entire army fed and resupplied by the air. In the event, the Luftwaffe never managed to deliver enough supplies to keep even half the Sixth Army fed for one day.

The only hope was for a German army to relieve Stalingrad. Field Marshal Manstein led three Panzer divisions in a relief effort which got to within 30 miles of the city, but suddenly had to abandon the attack when the Russians set in motion an even larger operation, this time designed to retake Rostov and trap the entirety of the former Army Group South in the Caucasus. This would have been a catastrophe of unprecedented scale for the German army, but the Russian effort was thwarted and the German forces in the Caucasus were able to escape the trap before it could be sprung. However, this now put the German armies hundreds of miles to the west of Stalingrad, unable to offer even a glimmer of hope for the besieged Sixth Army.

Despite this, Hitler refused to permit the Sixth Army to surrender. He encouraged von Paulus and his men to fight on to the bitter end and die gloriously in the name of the Reich. He even promoted Paulus to Field Marshal, noting that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered or been take alive, a subtle hint as to how he hoped Paulus would comport himself. Paulus declined to die a 'heroic' death, however. On 1 February 1943 he offered unconditional surrender. Somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner and the Sixth Army ceased to exist, the first time an entire German field army had been completely destroyed during the Second World War. Less than 6,000 of those troops would survive to see home again, the majority dying of disease in Soviet gulags. As the defeated soldiers were marched out of the ruined city, Russian soldiers and civilians jeered at them and the prescient insult of, "This is how Berlin will soon look!" was commonly made.

The defeat shocked the Germans. The size of the calamity could not be covered up, and unusually pessimistic Nazi leaders such as Goebbels took to the airways to warn German citizens that they would now face 'total war'. For the Russians, it was a morale boost on an unprecedented scale. It passed the strategic initiative in the war to them and it also showed the value of planning long. Stalin's insistence on constant attacks was now replaced by patient planning, something that paid off just a few months later in the Battle of Kursk (a victory for the Russians as great, if not moreso, as Stalingrad's).

Overview
Stalingrad was a significant defeat for the Germans. It wasn't their first major defeat in the war (they'd been beaten by the British at El Alamein in October 1942 and at Moscow in December 1941)  but it was the first time an entire German field army had been comprehensively destroyed. Whilst the destruction of the Sixth Army was impressive, it was more significant in forcing the hasty German evacuation of the entirety of southern Russia, ending the threat to Russia's oilfields, without which the Soviet Union could not stay in the fight. It also restored faith and hope to the Allies that the Russians could prevail: even after the Russian victory at Moscow, expectations that the Russians could win the conflict had still been low in London and Washington. The battle became a symbol of Russian defiance, and even during the Cold War when the USSR's role in Hitler's defeat was underplayed in the West, the name of Stalingrad was still infamous.

The 70th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa

On 22 June 1941, seventy years ago yesterday, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, beginning one of the most bloody struggles in human history. In terms of the number of men and materials committed, the casualties sustained (military and civilian), the development of fresh technologies and its grand strategic importance, the war between Germany and Russia was the Second World War. Everything else - the Pacific, D-Day, the Battle of Britain - was a mere sideshow (which is not the same as saying that they were unimportant or irrelevant, and indeed they were vital in many ways, but the scale of the war in Eastern Europe was considerably vaster in scale and scope).

A streamlined map of the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa.

The war in the east is relatively little-known in the UK and USA. The Cold War led to a general playing down of the Russian contribution to the Allied victory in the war for several decades, something that was only lifted with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent opening of the Soviet historical archives. Since then a lot of work and research has been done, ultimately proving that the war in the east was considerably more titanic and horrific than even first thought, as the Soviets themselves had downplayed their own colossal losses during the conflict. In WW2 overall, somewhere between 50 and 70 million people were killed. Of those killed, at least 27 million died in Russia alone, and even that figure is probably low-balling it. That's not counting the millions of German soldiers who died fighting on the eastern front, or the hundreds of thousands of German civilians killed in the Russian counter-invasion of Germany during the closing months of the war. All-told, around half and possibly considerably more of the total casualties of the conflict were incurred in this one theatre. To put the scale of things into context, at the battle for Kiev alone, the Russians lost more men killed and captured than the United States lost in the entire war. At the Siege of Leningrad alone, the Russians lost more lives than the USA and UK incurred combined in the entire war.

These numbers, to Western eyes used to discussing with horror the thousands killed in the bombing of Coventry or on the beaches on D-Day, are almost impossible to comprehend. Russia was only able to withstand and bear them only because it was in the grip of a regime as brutal and possibly even more cynical than that of the Nazis themselves.

Backdrop
In WWI, Russia, France and Britain fought against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Russia invaded Germany from the east but was halted at two huge battles (at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes) and thrown back. Over the course of three years, the Germans pushed deep into Russian territory. After the Russian Revolution, Lenin sued for peace, giving up a huge amount of territory in western Russia to the Germans. When Germany was defeated in turn by Britain, France and the United States, it had to give that land back to the Soviet Union and cede even more territory to an independent Poland, something that rankled. Germany was a small, over-populated state squeezed in by surrounding European powers. The idea of having open spaces to live in, particularly the vast, lightly-populated fields and plains of the Ukraine not that far to the east, was very attractive. In his 1924 book, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler made a great play of this idea, calling it lebensraum ('living space') and making it a cornerstone of Nazi ideology and German political and military aims.

Under Lenin and then Stalin, the Soviet Union was under no allusions that Germany presented a long-term threat. Stalin instituted a series of policies to modernise Soviet agriculture and industry, transforming it from a backwater to an industrial superpower in just over a decade of constant - and extremely costly - effort. With the threat of a new war growing through the 1930s, Britain and France attempted to forge a new alliance with Russia, similar to the one that was in place in 1914. The Soviets were open to the suggestion, but pointed out that in order to attack Germany, they would need to cross Poland. The Polish government vehemently opposed this, fearing they'd be occupied-by-proxy if millions of Soviet soldiers crossed through their territory. The severity of this argument reached new heights in 1938 at the Munich Conference, when Chamberlain used the threat of a Russian attack to try to coerce a peace agreement from Hitler. The outcome of the conference was the effective partition of Czechoslovakia and France standing down from its prior commitment to defend Czechoslovakia with military force. Stalin was furious, believing that this was a betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

Stalin instead pursued a plan for a separate peace with Hitler, culminating in the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, in which the two diametrically-opposed regimes agreed to a close alliance. The cynicism of this move shocked the world, and was soon put into practice when the two powers jointly invaded Poland and carved the country up between them. Britain and France went to war regardless but Germany, with no need to worry about its eastern frontier, was able to bring its full might to bear against them, defeating and conquering France and driving the British army from the continent.

However, right from the start, Hitler planned to betray the pact. His goal was the lebensraum which could only be gained from Russian territory, the annihilation of the Slavic people (whom he considered to be sub-human), the extermination of the millions of Jews living in the Soviet Union and Germany's acquirement of Russia's immense oil reserves and other natural resources. To this end the Red Army would have to be destroyed. Emboldened by the unexpected success of the blitzkrieg tactics used against Poland and France, Hitler gave the order on 18 December 1940 formally confirming that Germany would invade the Soviet Union no later than May 1941.

The Russians knew that the Germans would turn on them, but Stalin believed that it would not be for some time. He believed he had until 1943 before the Germans would be ready to mount a war against him and that Germany would not launch a war in the east with Britain still undefeated in the west, so whilst the Red Army began making preparations to defend against an invasion, there were not very far-advanced by the time the spring and summer of 1941 rolled around.

Countdown
As it turned out, the Germans were unexpectedly delayed by unfolding complications on their southern front. Britain landed significant numbers of troops in Greece to aid that country against an Italian offensive, whilst a massive uprising in Yugoslavia threatened to destroy Axis influence in that country. Hitler had to break off a number of forces earmarked for the Russian operation to put down the revolt and retake Greece (as well as taking Crete to stop the British using it to reinforce their Greek bridgehead). The importance of this delay has been debated at length: the weather conditions on the frontier between Germany and the USSR were atrocious for much of May 1941, and a delay into June would likely have been warranted anyway.

During the countdown to the conflict, the Germans began moving immense numbers of men and material eastwards. They established three huge Army Groups along the frontier, and sent significant numbers of troops north to Finland to bolster the Finnish army there. These movements could not escape the attention of Stalin, but Stalin remained convinced that Hitler would not invade Russia as it would mean a two-front war, something Hitler was as ideologically opposed to as he was in favour of war with the Soviets. Stalin was not aware that Hitler had convinced himself that Britain, whilst still in the fight, was effectively neutralised and besieged, and thus could play no further significant role in the conflict. Stalin instead became convinced that Hitler was bluffing in the hopes of winning further economic and political concessions from the Russians and would not be convinced otherwise, even when plans for the invasion fell into Russian hands and multiple Russian agents in Berlin and elsewhere reported that the German military and politicians were openly discussing the coming invasion.

As such, on the evening of 21 June 1941, the Red Army was unprepared for combat. Its divisions and formations along the frontier with Germany were under-strength and in some cases under-equipped. They were not in a line of battle, and some divisions were scattered over dozens of miles. They'd even been warned that Germans might stage 'provocations' for political purposes and they were not to fire back if fired upon by the German forces.

At Nuremberg, various Nazi officials and generals suggested that they knew the attack on the USSR was foolhardy and that they tried to argue Hitler out of it. For the most part, this was untrue. The German military had a very poor opinion of the Red Army following Stalin's purges, which had left most of the officers dead and the new officers untrained and untried. The Red Army's showing against Finland in the Winter War had been shambolic at best, the Russian victory only coming about due to overwhelming superiority of numbers. Russian equipment also appeared to be inferior to the Germans, most notably with regard to aircraft. This opinion was shared elsewhere: analysts in Washington and London both believed that the Russian state was so rotten it would collapse if a German invasion was successful and not quickly repelled. On the eve of the war, the Germans had near-total expectations of a swift and stunning victory.

German forces invading Kharkov.

Barbarossa
At approximately 2am on 22 June 1941, the German military launched an assault on the Soviet Union that was unprecedented in scale and scope. Over 3.3 million men crossed the frontier, backed by thousands of aircraft and tanks. The Luftwaffe launched huge air raids on Sevastopol and other Russian cities in the south of the country, whilst the German navy had mined the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland, throwing Russian shipping into chaos. The generals and political leaders in Moscow flatly refused to believe an invasion was happening, and it was some hours before the reality sank in. At this point Stalin, apparently so shocked by the invasion that he'd been rendered near-insensible, went to ground for several days, leaving the Soviet leadership unsure about what action to take.

The Germans invaded in three formations. Army Group North, under General von Leeb, advanced northwards through the Baltic States towards Leningrad. With the Baltic States recently conquered by the Russians, the natives welcomed the Germans and assisted them in identifying collaborators and providing intelligence on the Red Army's positions. Army Group Centre under Field Marshal von Bock invaded on a north-easterly axis towards Minsk, whilst Army Group South under Field Marshal von Runstedt advanced to the south-east towards the southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula.

Virtually the entire Russian air force was obliterated in the opening salvos of the attack: five thousand planes were destroyed in the first week, most of them on the ground. This allowed the Luftwaffe to concentrate on attacking Red Army formations on the ground, pounding them almost unimpeded. This was blitzkrieg in its purest form, across a territory so huge that the Germans could employ it to staggering levels. The aircraft would hit the enemy formations first, sometimes devastating them with few to no losses taken, before German Panzers and ground troops went in in waves, encircling and surrounding thousands of Russian troops at a time and forcing them to surrender. This process was repeated again and again, quickly and efficiently.

German progress was impressive: nine days into the attack, the ancient Latvian capital of Riga fell. Less than a week later Minsk fell, with 290,000 Russian prisoners taken. On 10 July the Finns, backed up by German reinforcements, crossed the frontier and retook the Karelian isthmus, cutting off Leningrad from the north. The German forces at Minsk then moved out and took a relieving Soviet army by surprise, encircling it and capturing an additional 394,000 soldiers. By 5 August, Smolensk to the north-east, halfway between the frontier and Moscow, had fallen. In mid-August Stalin vowed to Churchill that the Soviet Union would never surrender Kiev and would defend the ancient Ukrainian capital to the last drop of its blood. Instead, it had fallen by 19 August, with more than 650,000 Red Army soldiers taken prisoner. Sevastopol was under siege soon afterwards. On 27 August Army Group North reached the outskirts of Leningrad and began establishing siege lines around the southern side of the city, whilst the Finns cut off the city from the north.

Eight weeks into the invasion, the Germans had inflicted incredible losses on the Russians: millions of Russian troops had been killed, wounded or captured and millions more civilians had been killed, wounded, captured, put under occupation or forced to flee. The Russians had lost thousands of tanks and aircraft. Riga, Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Leningrad and Sevastopol, some of the greatest cities in the Soviet Union, were in enemy hands or under siege.

The Russian T-34 tank, their most formidable weapon against the Nazi invasion.

The Germans were pleased by their successes, but now started noted what these victories had cost them. German losses were higher than anticipated, due to the fanatical zeal of the Russians in fighting to the last man (as the Russian commissars had made it clear that any soldier who surrendered was a traitor and any who retreated would be shot), meaning that sometimes each enemy force had to be exterminated in its entirety, rather than simply convinced into surrendering once it was surrounded, as had happened in France and elsewhere. The Germans were also concerned that they had badly underestimated the strength of the Red Army: they had expected to face 200 enemy divisions but had counted well past 360. Finally, the Germans' much-vaunted technical superiority had been matched by the Russian deployment of rocket artillery batteries, the katyushas, which were easily mobile and extremely deadly. Even more of a shock was the Russian deployment of the KV-1 and T-34 tanks, which completely outstripped anything in the German arsenal. Stories of it taking several Panzer IVs to stop a single T-34 abounded, and only the extremely piecemeal nature in which the new Soviet tanks were deployed stopped them from becoming a bigger problem.

In addition, the swiftness of the German advance had left tens of thousands of Russian partisans behind the German lines, and these partisans now proved to be a huge nuisance, disrupting supply convoys, waylaying reinforcements and destroying infrastructure that the Germans urgently needed to keep the front line moving. Essentially, by the late summer of 1941 the Germans had expended their initial momentum and inertia and were becoming bogged down, especially at Leningrad and Sevastopol.

The Advance on Moscow
The German generals now urged Hitler to move decisively on Moscow with Army Group Centre and take the city. Originally, Moscow had been labelled as a secondary target at best, its capture or destruction desirable for political and propaganda purposes, but militarily valueless. This was a questionable decision by Hitler, since Stalin (now back in the saddle following his initial breakdown) was directing the entire war effort from Moscow. Capturing or killing him, or forcing him to flee the city, would effectively decapitate the Red Army and be of military value. However, Hitler was somewhat obsessed with the story of Napoleon (he had visited Napoleon's tomb in Paris after the French surrender and had said it was the finest moment of his life) and in particular with his war with Russia, when Napoleon had taken half a million troops to capture Moscow, succeeded, but then forced to retreat by a bitter winter which killed most of his men before they saw home. Hitler, rather uncharacteristically at this stage of the war, dithered, and lost valuable days and weeks before he finally ordered the assault on Moscow.

The time lost proved critical. It wasn't until 2 October, with the temperature already starting to fall, that Army Group Centre began its advance. Initially it was business as usual, with the Germans taking another 650,000 prisoners at Vyazma and Bryansk. Soviet resistance stiffened, and the pace of the German advance slowed. In mid-October huge rainfalls turned the area the Germans were crossing into a miasma of mud and rain. By mid-November the mud had frozen, which allowed better progress, but it also brought new problems. The Germans lacked proper winter clothing, and the fuel in their trucks was freezing solid overnight, meaning they could only be started by soldiers lighting fires underneath their vehicles to thaw them out.

Fighting outside of Moscow.

Nevertheless, the army approached the outskirts of Moscow. The plan was to entrap the city in a classic pincer movement, with Guderian advancing southwards to Tula and Reinhardt north to the Moskva River. The two armies would then turn and meet beyond Moscow. Unfortunately, the weather made the plan unworkable. Temperatures hit -20 C at the end of November. By 5 December, Guderian was reporting -30 and Reinhardt -38. The German forces were essentially frozen solid and could not advance. Hitler, fuming, was forced to call a temporary halt whilst the generals debated whether to try to press on, stay where they were, or try to withdraw to a safer line.

These discussions were quickly rendered moot. On 6 December the Red Army launched a major counter-offensive. The Germans were completely taken by surprise, convinced they had driven back all of the Red Army units in the area. They were not aware that Stalin had received intelligence from his top agent in Tokyo that the Japanese were about to launch a huge offensive against Britain and America in South-East Asia and the Pacific, leaving them no forces to menace the eastern Soviet frontier. Taking an uncharacteristic gamble, Stalin withdrew tens of thousands of fresh troops from the Soviet Far East and shuttled them to Moscow. Under the command of the formidable General Zhukov, these forces reformed into two wings and launched their counter-thrusts, their soldiers equipped with winter clothing (and, where necessary, skis) and their already-superior tanks operating with fuel that didn't freeze.

The Germans suffered their first major reversal on the eastern front, but not easily. The Germans fought hard, giving ground only when absolutely necessary. On 15 January 1942 Hitler authorised a withdrawal to a stable line 90 miles from Moscow and repulsed Russian attempts to breach it. Never again would an attack on Moscow be attempted, for the next year's campaign Hitler's attention turned to the southern front...and a city on the distant Volga called Stalingrad.

Aftermath
Operation Barbarossa was over. The Germans had killed over four million Red Army soldiers, but lost more than a million men themselves in the process. They had taken millions of Red Army troops prisoner, killed millions more Russian civilians and expended vast amounts of resources, only to find the Russians still capable of raising fresh armies and still capable of mounting huge counter-offensives. Hitler's hopes for victory diminished even further when, twenty-four hours after the Russian counter-offensive began, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, drawing the United States into the war. In possibly his most demented decision of the entire war (but it has tough competition), Hitler chose to declare war on the United States four days later, sealing his own doom by pitting Germany simultaneously against the two greatest economic powers in the world.

Seventy years on, Operation Barbarossa remains one of the largest military operations in history (strong arguments suggest it is still the biggest single military incursion of its kind) and the turning point of the Second World War. Without it, and if the Germans had never attacked the Soviet Union, the shape of history would have been very different indeed. The fact that it remains obscure amongst the general population of the UK and USA remains stunning.

WW2+70

Seventy years ago today, Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, thus triggering the Second World War (although various other countries, most notably China, dispute this date rather heavily). Six years and somewhere in the region of 70 million lives later, the war ended with Germany's defeat but the outcome was not entirely positive: in its counter-attack against Germany, Soviet Russia had overrun most of Eastern Europe and was in no particular hurry to leave, thus setting the scene for half a century of the Cold War.

"You may indeed be victorious in war, Winston, but only one of us shall live on as a YouTube video phenomenon. The greater glory is mine!"

As always tends to happen when the anniversary rolls round, 'revisionist' commentators like to start spouting opinions about how the war was avoidable, how it was a disaster for the West because it empowered the expansion of the Soviet Union (which was clearly inevitable anyway) and so on. Pat Buchanan and Peter Hitchens are the latest armchair politicians trying to suggest that Hitler was actually telling the truth in 1939 when he said all he wanted was Danzig and the Polish Corridor, and if he'd gotten that the war would never happened, the USSR wouldn't have rolled halfway across the continent, the British Empire would never have collapsed (when even in 1939 it was clearly doomed) and (especially ludicrously) even the Holocaust would never have taken place. Since Hitler was a compulsive liar and a sociopath, I am sceptical about taking his word for anything, especially when his true ambitions of expanding Germany to the east and eliminating the Slavs and Jews are clearly set out in Mein Kampf (a book clearly neither of the aforementioned journalists have read). War was inevitable, maybe not when and where it happened, but certainly with Hitler in power and with Germany resentful of the terms of the ending of WWI, it was always going to happen. Fortunately for us, it happened in a way and at time that led to Nazi Germany's defeat.

The war's impact on speculative fiction (trying to tie in the anniversary and the point of the blog ;-) ) was colossal. Many of our formative writers fought in the war. Arthur C. Clarke was working on radar technology for the RAF, whilst Isaac Asimov worked as a civilian contractor for the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station (alongside Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp). J.G. Ballard grew up as a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp near Singapore, whilst Brian Aldiss fought in Burma as part of the Royal Signals regiment. J.R.R. Tolkien was too old to fight, but his lighter workload (the result of Oxford University's normal curriculum being suspended for the duration of hostilities) allowed him to complete the bulk of The Lord of the Rings by the end of the conflict. Jack Vance penned several of the stories in The Dying Earth to alleviate boredom whilst sailing back and forth across the Pacific as a member of the US Merchant Marine.

The conflict has played a significant role in the content of spec fic as well. Christopher Priest's astonishing The Separation is set during the war, and famously the Earth-bound portions of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia also take place during the conflict. Refighting the war with a different outcome is a favourite past-time of alternate history writers : Harry Turtledove's Worldwar saga is set in a world invaded by a powerful alien race in 1942, whilst John Birmingham's recent Axis of Time trilogy has a 21st Century naval battle-group accidentally transported to the Battle of Midway, radically altering the outcome of events. Robert Harris' Fatherland and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle are the standard-bearers for alt history, although they do take rather different viewpoints (Harris' vision of a victorious Germany fighting an insurgency in Russia and locked in a cold war with the US being more grimly persuasive than Dick's rather fanciful notion of a Japanese-occupied North America).

As the anniversary proceeds, it will be interesting to see what other pieces of spec fic about the conflict I can find.