and 2,700 planes. This included fourteen
Romanian divisions. With the Panzers racing
ahead in best Blitzkrieg tradition, the Soviet
armies in the west were to be smashed by a three-
pronged attack. The Germany army was divided
into three groups – north, centre and south. The
army of the north drove through the former
Baltic states with Leningrad as its goal. The army
of the centre made its thrust in the direction of
Smolensk and Moscow, and the army group
south invaded the Ukraine.
The purpose of these deep thrusts was to
encircle and to destroy the Red Army in western
Russia, and to prevent a Russian retreat into the
vastness of Soviet territory. The victorious
German armies expected to control European
Russia from the Volga to Archangel. A ‘military
frontier’ could then be established against Asiatic
Russia, where the Japanese ally later might be
encouraged to colonise parts of Siberia.
Territorially, Germany almost achieved her objec-
tive of conquering the whole of European Russia
in 1941 and 1942. Yet the Soviet Union was not
defeated and the Blitzkriegturned into a war of
attrition, during which the greater Soviet reserves
of manpower and the increasing output of her
armament industry turned the tide of the war
against Hitler’s Germany.
After the initial and spectacular victories of the
battles of the frontiers during the first weeks of the
war, when the Germans took hundreds of thou-
sands of Russian prisoners and whole Russian
armies disintegrated, the German generals and
Hitler disagreed on which of the three offensives
was to be the main effort. Thus already in August
of 1941 the basic weakness of Germany’s latest
Blitzkriegbecame evident. Speaking to Goebbels
on 18 August, Hitler bitterly complained about280 THE SECOND WORLD WAR
One million African Americans served in the armed forces. They were rigidly segregated and only some were
allowed to fight at the front. © National Archives, Washington