That spring, however, Hitler unexpectedly had to divert Wehrmacht divisions to the Balkans, both to help his Italian allies, who ran into stiff resistance from Greece after Mussolini’s ill-planned invasion of that country, and to put down nationalist resistance in Yugoslavia. The original date for the invasion, which the Germans codenamed Operation Barbarossa, had been May 15, five weeks earlier. Within a month they had gone two-thirds of the way to Moscow. Finland retained independence, but had to cede to Moscow ten percent of its territory.Īs Nagorski writes, no matter what reasons Stalin had for disregarding the reports of impending invasion–certainly, Nagorski says, he was playing for time to strengthen Soviet defenses–it was “a monumental failure of leadership.” The German army crossed the Soviet border on Jand crushed the Soviet defenders. The agreement also put Finland within the Soviet sphere of influence, but the Finnish army resisted with considerable success the Soviet attack on them late in 1939.
Later Stalin incorporated Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the USSR.
The partition had begun when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, precipitating World War II, and Stalin seized eastern Poland. Certainly he did not want to see an end to the agreement that he had concluded in 1939 with Hitler’s Germany, that led to the partition between the two regimes of much of Eastern Europe. Stalin dismissed the reports, and no one has ever been able to learn definitively what was in his mind when he did so.
Nagorski describes in useful detail the numerous reports that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin received of an impending German attack. (The Mongol army that invaded Russia from the east in 1237 may have numbered only 150,000, but the Russian population was far smaller, too.) The invading Nazi army numbered about three million, which as Nagorski might usefully have mentioned was six times larger than Russia’s last previous major invader, Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812.
In this battle seven million men took part, and of these 2.5 million were killed, taken prisoner, wounded, or went missing. He focuses on the assault on Moscow, the largest battle in history between two opposing armies. He has written an engrossing and well documented book about the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. CLR Hitler, Stalin, and MoscowĪndrew Nagorski is a former Newsweek bureau chief in Moscow and one of the most experienced American correspondents. The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II by Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 384 pp.
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