As in France, the Germans again gambled on assembling all their available resources in hopes of deciding the outcome of the battle in the first few weeks. Ironically, while in 1914 the German military had overestimated the Russians and underestimated the French, in 1940–1941 it would prove to be the other way around. If France, the great foe of the First World War, had been defeated easily, the reasoning now went, the Soviet Union, weakened by communism and Stalin’s irrational purges, must surely collapse at the first blow. If, however, the Red Army did not disintegrate and survived the first weeks of combat, the Wehrmacht would not have the resources to pursue and destroy it. Barring the expected Soviet collapse, the German forces were simply too small, too poorly equipped, and too badly supplied to accomplish their task of defeating the Red Army before the onset of winter.
The initial assault, however, matched German expectations of a rapid campaign. “Tactical surprise of the enemy has apparently been achieved along the entire line,” Halder noted drily in his diary. “As a result of this tactical surprise, enemy resistance directly on the border was weak and disorganized, and we succeeded everywhere.” That the Soviets had been caught unawares despite numerous warnings to Stalin throughout 1941 has long been recognized by historians, who have struggled to shed light on his seemingly erratic and illogical behavior. Most have dismissed the Soviet dictator’s actions as a futile attempt at appeasement of Hitler, while a few have argued that he actually intended a preventive strike against Germany but that the Führer simply beat him to the punch. In reality, a complex mix of factors influenced Stalin’s assessment of the situation, with the relative significance assigned to them largely depending on the perspective of the observer. The most common interpretation, that Stalin simply could not bring himself to believe the warnings or believed them to be an attempt by the British to draw the Soviet Union into the war, have focused on Russian weaknesses. The purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s that resulted in a decimation of the officer corps, the poor performance against Finland that seemed to confirm Soviet military haplessness, the seeming constant reorganization that left the Red Army in a state of disarray, the prompt delivery of food and raw materials to Germany: all these indicated to many observers a policy of abject appeasement.3
Stalin’s actions and decisions can be considered from another perspective, however, one that, if not absolving the Soviet dictator, both better illuminates his view of the situation and sheds significant light on the scale of the task facing the Germans. Although still guilty of miscalculations, Stalin, in this view, acted largely from a sense of strength rather than weakness. Thus, he almost certainly understood that Germany would attack; the key questions in his mind were when and where. On numerous occasions, he had dismissed notions that Hitler would launch an attack on the Soviet Union with the (not incorrect) observation that Germany did not have the resources to win a two-front war and, thus, would not risk starting one. He expected that Germany would end the war in the west before entering any conflict with Russia. In the spring of 1941, he most feared being drawn into the war through British duplicity or being the victim of a sudden peace between Germany and England. The flight of Rudolf Hess to England, which most historians dismiss as merely a bizarre episode, appeared to him to raise the prospect of just such a peace. As late as 1944, Stalin still maintained to Churchill that Hess had been involved in a plot to organize a joint Anglo-German crusade against Russia. “All believed,” recalled Maxim Litvinov, “that the British fleet was steaming up the North Sea for a joint attack, with Hitler, on Leningrad and Kronstadt.”4
Given previous German behavior toward its intended victims, Stalin also thought that any military action would be preceded by an ultimatum, which would provide time for a Soviet military response. This assumption was important since from the mid-1930s Soviet military doctrine had stressed the notion of quickly transferring a war to the enemy’s territory. The task of defense, then, involved absorbing the attacker’s initial blow on the frontier while establishing the preconditions necessary to wrest the initiative away through a counteroffensive. Unknown to Stalin, however, Hitler intended to act differently this time, as Goebbels noted in his diary on 16 June: “We will take a completely different approach than usual… : we will not polemicize in the press, we will wrap everything in deepest silence and simply attack on X-day.” Still, in anticipation of a possible German attack at some point, and in accordance with Red Army doctrine, Stalin had ordered large numbers of Soviet troops to the border areas.5
This concentration of force was also intended as a deterrent to any German attack. In early April, when Soviet intelligence had identified only seventy-two German divisions on the border facing over three hundred Red Army divisions, Stalin’s brash reply to rumors of a German attack, “Let them try it,” seemed appropriate. Similarly, Stalin rejected a mid-May proposal by Timoshenko and Zhukov to launch a preemptive strike against Germany, arguing that mobilization for such an action might provoke the very attack he thought he could avoid. Since the Wehrmacht deliberately brought units in at the last moment so as to avoid detection, Stalin’s exchange with Timoshenko and Zhukov on the night of 13–14 June also revealed confidence rather than weakness. When Timoshenko requested that more units be moved into the border areas, Stalin refused, then asked how many divisions were in place already. When told 149, he replied, “Well, isn’t that enough?… According to our information the Germans do not have so many troops.” At roughly the same time, Molotov expressed similar confidence in Russian strength, telling an associate, “Only a fool would attack us.”6
From these and other such statements, the conclusion can be only that, although Stalin and the Soviet High Command were aware of the German military buildup, they thought that they had more than matched it and were, thus, acting from a position of strength, not weakness. Stalin’s miscalculation, then, was believing that the Germans would be deterred by these massive Russian forces. His angry remark to Churchill in late 1943—“I did not need any warnings. I knew war would come, but I thought I might gain another six months or so”—was in line with his expectations that Hitler could not wrap up the war with England before 1942 and would not dare launch an assault on Russia in late June. Undone by an odd combination of intense suspicion and rational calculation, Stalin feared stumbling into war through outside provocations but at the same time could not bring himself to believe that Hitler would disregard the evidence of Soviet strength and risk a two-front war. The mood of confusion and anxiety noted by Zhukov on 21 June reflected a man struggling to make sense of the inexplicable.7
As the Germans were soon to discover, Stalin’s assumption of Soviet power had a great deal to recommend it. From the outset, the Wehrmacht confronted an adversary with a remarkably high level of equipment that could draw on eight times the number of tanks, with the newest models superior in armament, speed, and fighting power. Most Soviet tanks were obsolete, to be sure, but they had to be destroyed nonetheless, a process that cost the Germans time, effort, and staggering quantities of munitions. Moreover, in the second Five-Year Plan (1933–1938), the Soviets had significantly increased the size of their armaments industry, with the result that by 1941 the Soviet Union had come to resemble an armed camp. This militarization had produced a “warfare state” whose goal was to be in a position “to wage war from a running start.” The Soviet Union possessed not only the largest military-industrial complex in the world but also one with a trained cadre of administrators already experienced in managing a war economy. As a result, despite its serious flaws, the Soviet system and the Stalinist apparatus of control proved far more resilient than the Germans anticipated. This enormous expansion of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union, both in size and in geographic distribution, was decisive in 1941, as the Soviets absorbed extraordinary losses but kept fighting. The Germans did, indeed, kick in the front door, but, contrary to Hitler’s expectations, the structure wobbled but did not collapse. The Wehrmacht’s qualitative edge in terms of training, leadership, and equipment provided it an advantage in a short struggle, but, if the initial onslaught failed, the Soviets had the capability of overwhelming Germany in the long term.8