Review: Operation Barbarossa, by Christer Bergstrom

I have already remarked the common view of Operation Barbarossa, which some have criticized as badly flawed, among them Christer Bergstrom in his recent book by that name. Here he argues from the outset that the Axis attacked the Soviet Union with a 2-to-1 advantage in troops, and similar advantages in tanks and aircraft, especially at the outset and frequently through the rest of the period, as well as having a great edge in battle experience.1 It was also of consequence that Soviet forces were in the process of a hasty expansion, and at a particularly vulnerable point in a reequipment cycle--particularly where their air force was concerned. (Had the timing of the attack differed by as little as two weeks, the German air operations might not have been nearly so successful, and gone so far to winning air superiority for their side as a result.)

However, in spite of all these advantages (and sometimes disastrous military leadership by Stalin) the Germans inflicted fewer casualties and losses than they have sometimes been credited with (2-to-1 rather than 6-to-1).2 They also took fewer prisoners than is often claimed, due to their counting of the huge numbers of civilians they rounded up as prisoners-of-war; while those actual captures of prisoners of war were never in mass surrenders--as these simply did not occur.3 Indeed, as the initial surprise war off the Wehrmacht came to suffer high losses of equipment and manpower in stalling offensives that ended the hopes of quick victory, and only a real, though decreasing, advantage in air power enabled its further progress, while the Soviets won their first tactical victory in the Yelnya offensive in early September.4 Later that year, despite the Soviet defense still being outnumbered, it beat the invader back from Moscow in a victory that was the true turning point of the war, after which a German triumph over the Soviets, and with it an Axis triumph in Europe or anywhere else, was an increasingly remote prospect.5

In assessing the Soviet victory Bergstrom also pays ample tribute to the tenacity of a not merely patriotic but ideologically committed Soviet people in resisting them; Soviet skill in relocating industrial plant eastward before the Germans could capture it; and the Soviet armed forces' doctrinal innovations, both the "deep operations" doctrine, and the Soviet system for rapid regeneration of their fighting forces, that fortunately did not die with Mikhail Tukachevsky when he became a victim of the purges, but rather endured, and if the Soviet leadership implemented them less quickly than they might otherwise have done, still put them to use in time to stave off defeat.6

As Bergstrom promised, this is a very different account than the one we are accustomed to seeing in the West--one which goes beyond merely debunking the "superman" image of German forces to rating the Soviet defense much more highly than is usual. As Bergstrom points out, they did no worse than their Western counterparts in the Battle of France, with Soviet doctrinal and operational failings rather less appalling than those of the French in 1940, and as Bergstrom's statistics make clear, the losses of the Soviets less lopsided, even in the face of a more formidable offensive than the Western allies ever faced. (If the Germans made three or even five casualties or prisoners of the Soviets for every loss of their own, the vast number of French prisoners the Germans took made the proportion more like nineteen to one in their western campaign.) Indeed, given their disadvantages in numbers, equipment, and other areas, it is the Soviets who appear to have overcome the greater odds than the ostensible supermen.

Especially as Bergstrom's account is not only more than usually positive in its assessment of the Soviet performance, but reflects specific factors much more stressed in Soviet historiography than Western, some will be tempted to dismiss Bergstrom's book out of hand as merely substituting Soviet conventional wisdom for Western. However, the fact remains that Bergstrom does not minimize the technical and operational proficiency of the Germans, whom he argues could not have fought any more skillfully they did on this level (even if tactical success was mooted by a dismal strategic conception--Hitler's expectation the Soviets would simply collapse at the first blow).

Moreover, Bergstrom makes much of factors that the Soviet writing on the subject I have seen tend to slight--like the way the purges and the readiness of at least some elements within the Soviet Union to collaborate with the Axis helped its advance, or favorable weather aided the Soviet defense.7 (Indeed, just as Bergstrom argues that Western writers have made too much of the weather, he criticizes Soviet writers as having made too little of it.) Bergstrom is especially profuse and withering in his criticism of Stalin, of whom he takes the conventional Western view--whether discussing the purges, his failure to heed the signals that Hitler was about to attack, or his handling of the war, refusing to order timely retreats that might have extracted badly needed forces for later use, and scapegoating able and loyal generals for defeats.8 In fact, in Stalin's missing many an opportunity to defeat Hitler more quickly, Bergstrom assigns him equal responsibility with the Nazi dictator for the deaths of tens of millions.

Only someone completely unfamiliar with the conventional Soviet view could see all of that as simply a conveyance of it. One might more plausibly charge Bergstrom with deliberate striving for a compromise view, attempting to create a "balanced picture" at the expense of the truth (the way that the mainstream media does when it pretends there is a "debate" about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a fact). However, this too strikes me as unfair, especially where the more fully military aspects of the discussion are concerned. The detailing of the operational history (some four-fifths of the text) is not only comprehensive, but backed up by ample statistics, lavishly sourced, and thoroughly contextualized. This does, admittedly, come at some cost to the book's readability--even those who can cope with such perhaps tempted to skim quite a few stretches--but it makes Bergstrom's case for his position a very formidable one indeed, sufficient to show, yet again, that a good deal of rethinking of the view of the Nazi-Soviet conflict taken for granted in the West is long overdue.

1. The count is 3.35 million Wehrmacht troops, backed by 1.1 million Finns and Romanians, versus 2.3 million Soviet troops in the key theater. The Soviets had 24,000 tanks--but over 21,000 of these were outdated light tanks (the largest portion of them 6-ton T-26s), so that in medium and heavy tanks the Soviets were outnumbered. Moreover, only a portion of the tank force was present in the relevant region (some 12,000 tanks of all types).
2. The Axis inflicted 2 million casualties on Soviet forces in the relevant phase--while suffering 1 million of their own, a 2-to-1 ratio. Even when prisoners taken are counted, this amounts to a 3-to-1 or at most 5-to-1 ratio. The Germans destroyed 7 Soviet tanks for every one they lost (20,500 to 2,800), but again, most of those were the aforementioned light tanks rather than the advanced T-34s and KVs then available only in small numbers. The situation was more favorable to the Germans in the air--a 9-to-1 exchange rate in aircraft (16,000 to 1,700), and 20-to-1 in aerial combat (7,000 to about 360)--but this reflected the massive destruction of Soviet planes on the ground and the shooting down of numerous unescorted bombers in the early period of the war rather than the norm over the course of 1941.
3. Of 3.3 million Soviet "prisoners" taken in this phase of the war, Bergstrom estimates 500,000 were actually civilians.
4. The first month alone saw 300,000 Axis casualties, as well as a quarter of its tanks out of action and half its aircraft destroyed or damaged.
5. The Soviet forces were outnumbered 2-to-1 in manpower and 3-to-1 in armor in the battle for Moscow, and only had an advantage in the air (important as that admittedly proved). By the end of the year the Axis armies' casualties were in the range of one million, while their tank and plane losses were equivalent to two-thirds of the Axis' initial stock.
6. Examples of these include the propensity of Soviet pilots for ramming their planes into attacking German aircraft to destroy them, and the voluntarism and self-organization manifest in the Military Soviet for the Defense of Leningrad in late 1941, which helped save that city. Bergstrom recounts numerous expressions of shock and even admiration on the part of the Germans in response to the resistance they encountered, down to Hitler's dismayed expression as the German offensive underperformed that the "rotten" and "subhuman" Soviet Union was in fact a "colossus and strong."
7. Bergstrom emphasizes that where the purges did not actually eliminate capable officers, they made many of them hesitant to take the initiative, and reversed earlier progress in doctrine with regard to the use of armor.
8. Soviet writers--like Marshall Zhukov in his memoirs--do not deny Stalin's missing the warning, but argue that the West had long been trying to push the Soviets into war with Germany, so as to make it bear the brunt of defeating the Nazis, making his overcaution plausible. Notably Bergstrom does not take this view.