Since June 22, 1941, 83 years, but the key questions related to this date as before remain unanswered. More precisely, the reasons for the strange development of events on the first day of the Soviet-German war are not known. It is also not entirely clear why, despite the June disaster, when the success of the Wehrmacht exceeded its own expectations, the Soviet Union was not only able not to suffer defeat in 1941, but was also able to turn the course of history 180 degrees.
The attack on June 22 was sudden, is one of the few reliable things known about that date.
Even Directive N 1, adopted at 9 p.m. on June 21, 1941, says that no one seriously expected the attack. The phrase “on the morning of June 21, 1941, all aviation, including the military, should be deployed at the field airfields” it is difficult to pronounce in the conditions of preparation for a rising conflict. The directive was signed by military personnel who undoubtedly knew that Soviet aviation (neither the personnel nor the material part) was not ready for night flights. Another point of the directive also speaks of this: “soldiers should be spread out and camouflaged”. It is impossible to prepare to cover a large-scale surprise attack and keep the army scattered. First, the army must concentrate in the directions of the expected main strikes.
That the directive was made hastily is shown by the words: “on the night of June 22, 1941, to secretly occupy the firing points of the fortified areas along the state border”. Often this was impractical – a night march from the places where the RKKA units were located was in a number of cases too long. More than anything, the drafters of the directive expected only air and artillery strikes. In such a case, camouflage and dispersion is the optimal option. So, on the evening of June 21, they did not expect a large-scale invasion, although at first glance it seemed impossible.
It is not easy to explain the surprise of the events of June 22.
In 1940, no documents from the Soviet side were published, and it could be said that all the fault lay with the perfidious Hitler. At the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the public secret was revealed: the USSR had intelligence that warned of the treachery of the enemy. To explain the suddenness, it was decided to attribute everything to Stalin. With Brezhnev, historians partially rehabilitate him by referring to the contradictions of the intelligence data. It is silent on the fact that the date of the attack changes to and after June 22, and this has not surprised anyone.
In the 1990s, historiography made another round in this field. First there is the version that the effort to transfer everything to conflicting intelligence is the usual transfer of blame to the command staff. Starting from 1999, the trend slowly changed to “New Brezhnev“. “The information about the directions of the Wehrmacht's advance was too inconsistent,” writes one of the best military historians, Mikhail Meltyukhov.
In June 1941, Soviet intelligence suggested that the Germans had 122 divisions on the border with the USSR,
which corresponded to the truth (on June 21 they were 123). But it was impossible to draw correct conclusions from these exact figures. In reality, the German armed forces had a total of 206 divisions, of which 123 were transferred to the border. Therefore, knowing the real number of German divisions, the Soviet side expected them to be twice as many and considered that they were not ready to strike.
Because of the classified archives of the special services, it is difficult to establish the reasons for such a strange systematic error. No one in the USSR could have guessed that the Germans, having won great victories, would deploy an insignificant military force and all the while risk defeat.
One can go wrong with the total number of divisions, but there are many other indirect indicators that never fail. If a foreign army is preparing to attack, its embassy is always in the loop. Already on June 11, the NKGB reported that the German embassy in Moscow was preparing for evacuation, and archival documents were being burned in the “basement of the embassy”. On June 16, Soviet listening devices recorded the words of the German ambassador about an attack on the USSR in the coming days. The Russian historian Meltyukhov suggests that the Soviet leadership knew about the attack from that point on. Also, in a collection of documents of the NKGB, there is talk of a mass departure from June 10, 1941 of employees of the Axis embassies. To put it bluntly, there are few examples in history of such vanity in a diplomatic mission as to turn out to be a false alarm.
On June 17, Stalin swearing, expressed his doubts about the truth of the reports,
in which the following was stated as the first point: “All military measures of Germany in preparation for an armed offensive against the USSR are completely completed and a strike can be expected at any moment”. The resolution that puts the head of the Soviet state reads like this: “To Comrade Merkulov. Your "source" from the headquarters of the German Air Force to be the mother. This is not a "source", but a misinformer. J. Stalin".
To finally close the question of suddenness, it is worth recalling how on June 21, 1941, Ivan Bunin, living in France, simply by reading the Saturday newspapers, wrote the following in his diary: “Alarm everywhere. Germany wants to attack Russia? Finland evacuates women and children from cities. ...The front against Russia is from Murmansk to the Black Sea? We bought Swiss newspapers in the city: relations between Germany and Russia have entered a particularly acute phase.
And yet there is an explanation for the “impossible suddenness”.
The reason is two simultaneous mistakes of Hitler and Stalin. The latter assumed that Hitler could not attack him because that would contradict elementary logic. By the spring of 1941, England had not solved the problem and had no navy to deal with it in the near future. An attack on the USSR would create a situation in which Britain would open a second front. To this must be added the fact that until June 22 the USSR played an important role in providing Germany with materials for war.
In the first half of 1941, 72% of German imports passed through the USSR. A blow to Moscow would, on the one hand, put Hitler in the vise of a blockade, and on the other, under the sword of Damocles on the second front. And yet, Stalin did not take something into account. The Führer, deciding to attack the USSR, did not know what Stalin knew.
That is why Hitler did not think that the USSR was the strongest land power in the world.
He started from the idea, spread in the West, that because of the shortcomings of its regime, communist Russia is extremely weak. Therefore, Hitler assumed that the war with the USSR would last for weeks, during which the British could not influence the situation. Therefore, his plan was perfectly structured and logical, but fundamentally false.
Precisely in the first weeks after the attack, the well-known ugly scene took place when Zhukov was kicked out of the building of the People's Commissariat of Defense by Stalin and Beria because of sarcastic remarks.