Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello History Buffs, Scott Burry here in the Red Beard Studio. Today, release day 22nd June 2026, is the fourth anniversary of the day the first episode of Beyond Barbarossa hit the podwaves. And, perhaps more significantly, it is also the 85th anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the greatest land invasion in history, when the Third Reich attacked its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. honor of this jewel anniversary, I'm re-releasing that first episode of Beyond Barbarossa with full video mode. All the images and maps that are normally available only through Patreon. And there's a lot more than just this one episode available through Patreon. You can get them all with images and maps and other little goodies through Patreon itself. Just go to patreon.com slash beyond barbarossa. and choose whatever level of support you feel comfortable with. And now, enjoy episode 103, or the re-release, the replay of episode 1 of Beyond Barbarossa, the first English-language podcast in the world to tell the full story of the Eastern Front of World War II. Enjoy Beyond Barbarossa, episode 1, Blitzkrieg. Evening, 22nd June, 1941. In what is now Lithuania, cows and horses sleep or lazily crop grass. The neat farmhouses are dark. Crops sprout in the fields. As the day ends, on radios in the cities, dance music plays. The longest day of the year leads, naturally, to the shortest night. At just past 3 a.m., the first glimmers of light appear on the eastern horizon. Tinting faint orange and yellow. Far overhead, the drone of airplanes, bombers, pass toward the east. At precisely 3.05 a.m., the loudest thunder ever heard bursts the bucolic. Dawn becomes bright as midday for an instant before it is swallowed by the lights. In the words of one who was there, it is as if the jaws of hell, the peaceful fields are... torn apart by exploding bombs and shells. Airplanes scream lower to drop thousands of fragmentation bombs on the unprepared defenders. This is the opening of Operation Barbarossa, the greatest land invasion in the history of humanity. Along a 2,000-kilometer front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, nearly 4 million men in tanks, planes, and armored cars, and millions on foot, assaulted the largest nation in the world without warning. It was the invasion of Nazi-controlled Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Joseph Stalin. A clash of two brutal, murderous autocrats, but also of two hostile ideologies. A clash that would result in over 20 million deaths, several times that in other casualties, and the redefinition of the world order, a world order that persists to this day more than 80 years later. Welcome to Beyond Barbarossa, the Eastern Front podcast. My name is Scott Burry, and I'm the author of the Eastern Front trilogy, The True Story of a Canadian Drafted into the Soviet Red Army in World War II, as well as about 15 other books. If you think you've heard this before, you're right. This is the beginning of an experiment for Beyond Barbarossa. Two and a half years after launching the podcast, it's still the only one in English that focuses on the eastern front of World War II. What's different this time around is that I'm re-recording and re-releasing the early episodes exclusively for Patreon supporters. For now, anyway. What makes them different is that now they have a video component. If your podcatching platform supports video, and most of them do, like Apple and Spotify, you'll be able to see maps and historical photographs appear as they become relevant to the description. So every few weeks, Patreon members can see a new episode come out with the video component included. So the other reason I'm doing this is that I hope I've learned a few things about podcasting, about controlling sound, about sound muffling. and how to control my own voice. And in listening to those early episodes, again, I got a little embarrassed, I have to admit. So I'm hoping that this time around with the new recordings and the new visuals, the listener experience is going to be so much better. I'd love to hear your feedback on that. So drop me a line, will you? You can contact me by email, scott at beyondbarbarossa.ca or through the Facebook Beyond Barbarossa page. You can also find me on Blue Sky, Scott the writer. And here's Ragnar, my stalwart assistant. Now, these video episodes, for now, this experiment will also be in addition to the special bonus episodes that appear from time to time on your Patreon feed, such as the series about... Soviet Marshal Zhukov and Timoshenko, the Winter War against Finland, and some planned future episodes about Soviet tanks and warplanes. But as I said, it's an experiment. I'm going to do a few video episodes to see how well it goes. If it does go well, I'm going to make it a regular feature for new episodes in the future. And now, with that explained, let's get to Beyond Barbarossa and why I started this podcast. in the first place. As I explained once before, I'm a journalist and author. Through my life, I've learned a lot about the history of the Second World War. Through my research in writing the Eastern Front Trilogy, I learned a lot about the history of the Second World War. and in particular, the Eastern Front. A lot of things that were new to me. There must be thousands of books, films, articles, and yes, podcasts about the Second World War, its result, and it's understandable. The results of that war reshaped the world after 1945. And to a large extent, that new shape persists to this day. The illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2014 to 2024, continuing now, echoes the outcome of the Titanic struggle from 1941 to 1945, which itself was the biggest, most costly, and bloody war in human experience. Even so, most of the material available and read in the West focuses on, of course, the West. The battles fought by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, and the other countries of Western Europe and North America. While students and history buffs in the West know about the Siege of Leningrad, the impact of winter, and the Battle of Stalingrad, they don't know as much about equally important events like Operation Typhoon, the Lviv-Saint-Dominguez Offensive, or Operation Aggression. In my research, I found a number of podcasts about the Second World War, the Battle of Britain, and other Western-focused events. but nothing dedicated specifically to the war in the East. This is ironic. By far, this was the biggest part of the war in terms of numbers of soldiers, equipment, and casualties. In fact, from the time Germany launched its invasion of the USSR, it devoted five times as much resources in terms of people, munitions, and materiel to the Eastern Front as it did to the West. 75% of German losses in the entire war were on the Eastern Front. In other words, we cannot hope to really understand or appreciate the entire Second World War without a good understanding of the history of what is popularly called the Russian Front, but which I'm going to insist on calling the Eastern Front because it wasn't just Russians. So that's what I'm going to try to do with this podcast. spotlight the important events of the biggest part of the greatest war in history. I will also try to explore the background behind the war and the various events, the combatants, because there were more than just the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. and historical implications. Now, I am by no means a professional historian. I'm a journalist, editor, and author with an interest in history. Full disclosure, my interest in history sharpened when I met my wife, Roxanne. Her father, Maurice Burry, was born in Canada to Ukrainian immigrants. How he came to be in Ukraine in 1941 and then drafted by the Red Army is something I explain in my book. Army of Worn Souls. As of April 1941, Maurice Burry was in training as a junior officer in the Red Army. His memories of his experiences in that conflict became the starting point for three books, Before a Mansion, Army of Worn Souls, Under the Nazi Heel, and Walking Out of War. Together, these comprise the Eastern Front Trilogy. So, what's this podcast about? Beyond Barbarossa, the Eastern Front podcast will proceed roughly chronologically, starting, as you heard at the beginning, with the first day of the war. I will try to describe events as they unfolded to reflect at least a little the experience of the people of the time. That being said, the next episode will break that pattern. To understand how Germany and the Soviet Union became locked in this death struggle, a struggle that ground millions of people between them. We have to go back a few years. That's for the next episode. For now, let's focus on the first day. 21st June 1941 was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year followed by the shortest night. As a result, especially in the northern reaches of the German-Soviet border near the Baltic Sea, the first graying of the eastern sky began as early as 3 a.m. According to sun charts, The sun rose before 5 a.m. and set as late as 10.23, giving long hours of light for an attacking army. Nazi Germany had amassed 3.8 million men with 7,000 heavy artillery pieces, 17,000 mortars, over 3,700 tanks, some 3,000 aircraft, and thousands of other weapons, vehicles, not to mention more than a half million horses, along a front that stretched nearly Peace. 3,000 kilometers, or 1,800 miles, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. There were more also in the far north, and we'll get to that. The forces along that long front were organized into three major groups. Army Group North, set up near Tilsit in East Prussia, now called Svetsk in Kaliningrad Oblast, Army Group Center in German-occupied Poland, and Army Group South, headquartered in eastern Poland. Army Group Center made two main thrusts into Belorussia, led by two panzer groups commanded by Generals Hermann Hoth and Heinz Guderian. They advanced on either side of a westward bulge in the border called the Bialystok Salient, then joined again east of Smolensk, trapping immense numbers of Soviet soldiers before driving on Moscow, capital of the Soviet Union. Credit? where credit is due, I'm going to draw on a book called The First Day on the Eastern Front, written by Craig Luther and published in 2019 by Stackpole Books. It has all the detail you could want, and there's a link and full bibliographical information in the webpage for this episode. Operation Barbarossa had been meticulously planned. During the short, dark hours of the night between 21st and 22nd June, 1941, German saboteurs slipped across the frontier to cut telephone and telegraph lines and murder unsuspecting border guards and sentries. Just before 3 a.m., bombers and fighters of the Luftwaffe took off. Between 3.05 and 3.15, depending on their location, thousands of German guns, mortars, howitzers, and cannon opened fire simultaneously as the first hints of gray appeared on the eastern horizon at the same time from emel in the north to as far south as sevastopol in the crimean peninsula luftwaffe bombers dive bombers and fighter planes attacked soviet airfields and destroyed thousands of their planes on the ground As stated in the War Diary of the Panzer Division of Army Group North, 03.05 hours, the attack begins with the enormous concentrated blow of our artillery firing from all barrels. The roar of the shells as they leave the guns virtually shakes the heavens. End quote. At the northernmost wing of the front, the German 16th Army concentrated its artillery fire in key areas. Elsewhere, most of its forces crossed silently across the border and caught the Soviet defenders completely. completely by surprise. In less than two hours, they had captured all the major bridges in the mostly flat Lithuania intact. Likewise, the 12th Infantry Division of the 2nd Army Corps encountered no resistance from the Soviets until they passed hidden pockets of fighters that is, who then opened fire from behind. This became a pattern along the 1800-mile front, but more on that later. All along the 300-kilometer front of Army Group North, the attackers managed to seize almost every bridge intact. Every division advanced at least 15 to 20 kilometers by the end of the day. Panzer Division 8 made 90 kilometers. Army Group Center's two main thrusts experienced similar, if not quite as spectacular results. Led by two complete panzer or tank groups, they captured every bridge across the Niemen River, the main border between the German and Soviet occupation zones in the east. General Guderian, called Fast Heinz or Hurrying Heinz, broke with convention by leading with his tanks and motorized forces. And he also captured every bridge across the Bug River. His forces encountered difficult terrain but still penetrated deep into Soviet territory without encountering significant resistance. Army Group South, by contrast, quickly ran into stiff opposition. It was attacking in territory that is now Ukraine. with the longest front of the three army groups. stretching thirteen hundred kilometers from the headwaters of the pripet river to the mouth of the danube its forty-one divisions including twenty-five infantry five panzer three motorized infantry and altogether comprising nine hundred and seventy-two thousand men launched its attack at exactly o three fifteen as the sun was just rising further south from the journal of german soldier hans roth of the two hundred ninety nine infantry division all of a sudden at exactly 0315 hours, and apparently out of the blue, an opening salvo emerges from the barrels of hundreds of guns of all calibers. It is impossible to comprehend one's world in such an inferno. End quote. However, unlike in the north and center sectors, the invaders of Army Group South encountered early, heavy resistance. From the War Journal of the 17th Army, quote, But in front of the customs shed, The Russians were already offering stubborn resistance. Lieutenant Alika was killed. He was the division's first fatal casualty, the first of a long list. The men laid him beside the custom shed. The heavy weapons rolled on by him over his bridge. In the south, the Soviet alarm system functioned with surprising speed and precision. Only the most forward pickets were taken by surprise. The 457th Infantry Regiment had to battle all day long. with the soviet n c o training school of visokoya only a mile beyond the river the two hundred and fifty n c o cadets resisted stubbornly and skillfully not till the afternoon was their resistance broken by artillery fire the four hundred and sixty sixth infantry regiment fared even worse no sooner were its battalions across the river than they were attacked from the flank by advanced detachments of the soviet one hundred ninety nine reserve division In the fields of Stubienka the tall grain waved in the summer wind like the sea. Into the sea the troops now plunged. Both sides were lurking, invisible. Stalking each other, hand-graded ace pistols and machine carbines were the weapons of the day. Suddenly they would be facing one another amid the Rye, the Russians and the Germans. Eye to eye. Whose finger was quicker on the trigger? Whose spade would go up first? Only with the fall of dusk did this bloody fighting in the Rye fields come to an end. End quote. At the village of Olegzhysia in Galicia, the area known in Ukrainian as the historic kingdom of Halachina, the invaders tried a more stealthy approach. German sharpshooters killed Soviet border sentries, individual artillery shells destroyed Soviet watchtowers, and combat engineers blasted through barbed wire to allow infantry to move quickly. Until 0400, they encountered virtually only small arms resistance. until the Soviet artillery responded. As the day wore on all along the front, the resistance got heavier and heavier, and German losses mounted. For example, at around midday, when the 11th Panzer Division crossed the Bug River at Sokal, their advance was held up when they encountered Soviet bunkers. To quote General-Major Ludwig Kruel's war diary, despite deployment of a battery of 88mm flak guns, the indomitable Russian bunker crews would doggedly continue their resistance. and eventually require an infantry Stoss troop to neutralize them. End quote. Northeast of that position, the 57th Infantry Division encountered well-camouflaged bunkers, quote, of the most modern type. Unable to subdue them after protracted and bitter fighting, the infantry regiments simply bypassed the bunkers and continued to advance, leaving the destruction to follow on assault teams. End quote. That was a risky tactic. As mentioned, the Soviet soldiers had a habit of hiding, for example, under haystacks, letting the enemy pass, and then attacking from their rear. My father-in-law, Maurice Burry, who I mentioned earlier, told me about a time he used this tactic. He was the commander of a small anti-tank unit, and in August 1941, they took a position behind the Pesol River in eastern Ukraine. But the shallow river did not even slow the panzers down. Maurice ordered his men to hunkered down in a trench. When the panzers passed, They aimed at the back of the exposed fuel tanks. Their shots destroyed panzers and allowed Maurice and his men to escape with the rest of the survivors of the battalion. Quote, In more than a few cases on 22nd June, Russian soldiers, concealed in farmsteads, wooded areas, or fields of tall grain, let their attackers go by, only to fire on them from behind. They feigned death or surrender, then tossed hand grenades or shot at their startled adversaries. It was a way of war that General Gotthard-Henrissi, commander-in-chief of 43 Army Corps and many other Germans, labeled insidious. In other instances, captured German soldiers were tortured, killed, and horribly mutilated by enraged Red Army soldiers, while German doctors and their stretcher bearers soon discovered that their Red Cross armbands or ambulances offered no protection from Russian guns. End quote. Army Group South did not experience the sweeping success of Army Groups North and Center. Where the Germans penetrated as much as 90 kilometers into Lithuania, as I mentioned, in Ukraine, they advanced only 10 to 25 kilometers along most of the front. This is due to a number of factors. Terrain, including marshes at the northern end and mountains on the south, poor roads, and the fact that Stalin had thought the Germans would focus on capturing Ukraine's agricultural and industrial resources, so ordered the biggest buildup of defenses on the southern and southwestern fronts. And here I'm hinting at something we're going to delve into in later episodes, just how well the communists had anticipated the attack. But as I said, we'll get to that aspect in a future episode. One other thing to point out before I go on, I said that Army Group Center only penetrated up to 25 kilometers. While that's less than Army Group North made, it's still a long distance in one day. for a military invasion across a border. And the death and destruction of that day was incredible by any historical standards, even up to today. On that first day, German forces destroyed more than 700 Soviet aircraft, most of them on the ground. In the first 18 days of the operation, the Germans inflicted at least 747,870 casualties on the Soviet forces. They destroyed more than 10,000 tanks and almost 4,000 aircraft. According to historian David Glantz in Barbarossa, Hitler's Invasion of Russia in 1941, these losses were both unprecedented and astounding. But the losses were far from one-sided. Craig Luther states that in the first nine days of the war, by the end of June 1941, more than 25,000 Germans were dead. An average of almost 2,800 every day. That first day set the pattern for the next two years. By the late fall, the Germans, with their reluctant Finnish allies, had virtually encircled Leningrad in the north, reached deep into Russia, captured Kiev and two-thirds of Ukraine. By the end of 1941, they had come to within 80 kilometers of Moscow itself and captured virtually all of Ukraine and Crimea. But just as that first day showed, the farther they went, the slower the Germans advanced. and the greater became their losses. German Army Chief of Staff Halder admitted in November that the army would never again be as powerful as it was on 21st June 1941. In 1942, Hitler would turn his attention in the east southward, and the Wehrmacht advanced to the Caucasus oil fields and the city of Stalingrad at the bend of the Volga River. In the north and center, they made no further progress. It was the high water mark for Nazi Germany. But that's for later episodes. Next episode, we're going to back up to the 1930s for a look at what brought Germany and Russia to their situation in 1941. It will look at their evolving relationship you and the context of the whole war. So for now, I want to thank you for supporting the podcast to this point. And I want to thank everyone who listens to Beyond Barbarossa. Original music was composed and recorded by Nicholas Burry. As you know, I'm Scott Burry. Until next episode, as the canoeists say, keep your paddles in the water. Slava Ukraina i heroim slava. back. Thanks everyone for watching this replay of the first episode of Beyond Barbarossa, the first English language podcast in the world to to focus on telling the full story of the Eastern Front of World War II. I'll see you in July. Goodbye.