Last year we kicked off the season with SAGA Summer, a series showcasing articles focused on a single, awesome game system. This year, we’re instead going to focus on a particular theater of the Second World War, but open it up to lots of different kinds of content that touches on that theater. So strap on your best boots and try not to get bogged down in the rasputitsa, we’re about to get involved in a land-war in Asia.
Yesterday marked the 84th anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. This massive operation saw millions of soldiers from Germany and its Axis-aligned partners like Romania, Hungary, and Finland cross the border in an attempt to cripple Russia in the same kind of rapidly moving blitzkrieg that they had performed so successfully in France and the Benelux countries a year earlier.
The invasion of the Soviet Union was a major undertaking. Approval for the operation was given in December of 1940, but planning and preparation took months. Millions of men and thousands of vehicles needed to be moved to staging areas on the border, a huge logistical undertaking. The Soviets were aware of this massive build-up, but despite all the warnings of Germany’s impending invasion, Josef Stalin took an uncharacteristically cautious response; He avoided a build-up of his own so as to prevent handing Germany a reason to attack, trusting in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed between the two countries in 1939. The results of this decision would be disastrous for the Soviet Union, at least in the short run, and would set the stage for the next four years of conflict.
But nothing ever goes according to plan, and what began as lightning Axis advances across the Russian steppes would eventually turn into a grinding and bitter war of attrition. And ultimately, it would lead to Nazi Germany’s downfall.
What the Heil, Hitler?
Having a hate-filled, drug-addled megalomaniac running your country is sure to produce some questionable decisions. With the benefit of hindsight, the very idea of invading a country as massive as Russia seems like complete and utter madness – and it was – but at the time things looked very different to Hitler and the OKW (the German General Staff). Nowadays we think of Operation Barbarossa as the opening of a dreaded “two-front war” for Germany, and knowing how disastrous that had been in 1914 it seems like a lesson that shouldn’t need repeating.
But it’s important to understand that in the summer of 1941, there was no Western Front yet. France had fallen and the Vichy government had proven sufficiently malleable that the Nazis had no need to garrison all of France. The British army had been driven from the continent. Yes, the Battle of Britain had been lost and Operation Sea Lion was aborted, but England was completely isolated, with Greece as its only remaining ally on the European mainland. Sure, some German forces had been committed to Africa, but just two divisions there had pushed the Allied forces back across the Egyptian-Libyan border. Tobruk was under siege by mid-April and by the end of May the stunning capture of Crete had deprived the British of that island as a key base in the eastern Mediterranean. And perhaps most importantly, it would still be nearly six months until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would bring the United States into the war. Absent anywhere else pressing to point it, the steppes of Russia looked like as good a use of the Wehrmacht as any at that particular time.
How It Started, How It’s Going
The early stages of the operation saw stunning successes by Axis forces, whose formations drove deep into Russia with dizzying rapidity. Entire Soviet divisions and army groups were encircled and captured. Kiev fell by mid-September, Kharkov by late October. By November the Axis forces had reached the Don river, captured most of Crimea, and laid siege to Sevastopol. And by the first week of December, the Germans were just 20 kilometers from Moscow.
But in a pattern that would become all too familiar for Nazi Germany throughout the war, the logistical realities of waging war across such distances would prove impractical and extremely costly. And far from simply rolling over and playing dead, the Soviet Union adopted the very deliberate and canny (some might say callous and cynical) strategy of trading territory for time – time to equip, train, re-organize, and re-arm the Red Army. On 05 December 1941 with the Germans knocking on the door of their nation’s capital, the Red Army launched the first of what would be many counterattacks, bringing Operation Barbarossa to an unsuccessful end. Germany would struggle to recapture the strategic initiative in any significant way on the Eastern Front ever again.
There was still plenty of fight left to be had; in 1942 the Germans would once again take to the offensive and drive deep into southern Russia and the Caucasus. But these gains only served to feed more men into the meat-grinder in places whose names would become synonymous with military disaster: Kursk and Stalingrad. By late 1944 the tables had turned and it was the Soviets advancing back across the border, first in occupied Poland and then in early 1945 into Germany itself. By mid-April of 1945 the Red Army – by that time the most experienced, efficient, and lethal armed force on the planet – battered their way into Berlin, forcing Germany’s capitulation and ending the war in Europe.
Why the Eastern Front?
For all that western popular culture/history lionizes European theater battles like D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, the truth of the matter is that from the point that Allied forces landed in Normandy and opened the Western Front, the war lasted just 10 short months. But on the Eastern Front the fighting went on for almost 4 years and was fought across a wider variety of terrain types. A huge number of battles were fought on the Eastern Front, so the number and types of actions that it can inspire on the wargaming table are impressive.
Further, the number of nations involved in the fighting on the Eastern Front is surprising. In addition to the Germans themselves, Romanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Estonians, Latvians, Finns, and even the Italians got involved fighting the Russians. Further, the rapid territorial gains seen by the Axis forces in the early days of Operation Barbarossa would mean huge areas of land only lightly controlled by Axis powers and veritably overflowing with partisans and other irregular resistance forces. This gives you plenty of latitude to do something cool like paint up a Slovak force or game out some interesting asymmetric warfare scenarios with partisans in the Pripyat Marshes or Carpathian Mountains.
And if you want urban warfare? Stalingrad is the grand-daddy of them all in that regard! The terrain modeling possibilities there are nearly endless. Or perhaps armored warfare across the open steppe is more your speed? The largest tank battle ever fought was at Prokhorovka during the Kursk offensive.
Whether your primary hobby interest is in modeling, painting, gaming, scenario design, or even just historical research, there is guaranteed to be something on the Eastern Front that will prove fascinating.
What Should We Expect?
Over the coming weeks we’ll be releasing articles to fit with the theme, including fantastic “How To Paint Everything” articles for most of the combatant nations, game system and miniature reviews, scenario ideas, reading recommendations, and maybe a few “After Action Review” battle reports.
And if you have more suggestions of things you’d like us to cover, let us know with a comment below!
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