Description

Time flies. The veterans of the Great
Patriotic War are growing older. Many
of us are still under the impression that
the war ended only recently, whereas
forty years have passed since that moment. The further the events of that terrible time recede into history, the more
distinct they are in our memory and the clearer their historical significance.
The perfidious attack launched by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union put this country in a highly dangerous position. At the beginning of the war,
the Soviet Union was weaker than the aggressor in many respects: in numerical strength of armed forces, in quality and quantity of armaments and other military equipment, in combat experience, in
conversion of the economy to war production, and in production potential.
The aggressor’s enormous advantages, temporary though they were, enabled him to achieve major military successes in the initial stages of the war. Before the sudden attack on the Soviet Union,Nazi Germany and its satellites concentrated near our western borders 190 fully mobilized divisions,including 33 armoured and motorized ones. The
history of war had never known such a massive concentration of forces.
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, it had nearly all European states under its domination.Most of them had fallen to Hitler’s Wehrmacht,while others were Germany’s satellites. The entire
economic potential of the European continent was harnessed to serve the aggressor’s giant military machine. After the fall of Dunkirk in May 1940,Great Britain ceased to be a serious threat to Germany. In the summer of 1940, it had only 26 divisions to defend the British Isles. As Winston Churchill later admitted, Hitler would have needed no more than 150,000 troops to overrun Great Britain.
The British government was making preparations for an evacuation to Canada.The enemy’s vast hordes were faced by the considerably weaker Soviet forces stationed in the western military districts of the USSR. The Soviet forces were not only inferior to the enemy in the
numerical strength of their troops and technical equipment: they were also deployed some 200 to 400 km and more from the border. Most of the troops alerted at the time of the attack found themselves being battered by the massive enemy air and ground bombardment; they went into battle piecemeal,unit by unit as they arrived, taking up positions where the fortifications were not completed.The massive Nazi air raids put some 1,200 Soviet combat aircraft out of commission.