On September 1, 1939, Germany unleashed the full force of twentieth-century technology in a devastating attack on neighboring Poland. What followed was the most destructive conflict in human history, drawing men and women from nearly every nation on Earth into the bitter struggle known as World War II. For six long years, the fate of the world teetered on a razor’s edge of pivotal moments, victories and defeats, mistakes and heroes. While Hitler’s invasion of Poland had already sparked a crisis, it began as a purely continental affair, confined to Eastern Europe.
But the war would not stay contained for long. By the spring of 1940, the conflict had erupted across the West, and by the summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain raged in the skies. Twelve weeks of aerial combat over the Channel and the English countryside would forever be remembered as a decisive moment in the war. The British victory was a turning point.
For the first time, Hitler’s seemingly unstoppable war machine had been halted. Though the threat of invasion faded by September 1940, the long-term consequences were significant. The Allies retained a base of operations on Germany’s doorstep, from which they could eventually launch an attack on Europe. But they weren’t the only players eyeing a shift to the offensive.
Mussolini watched his military idol, Adolf Hitler, carve his way through Western Europe. He believed the time had come to maintain the balance with Germany and build the great Mediterranean empire he had promised the Italian people. After easily occupying weak, nearly defenseless Albania in 1939, his gaze turned toward neighboring Greece. Imagining himself as Julius Caesar, “Il Duce” proved closer to a reckless clown.
The Italian invasion of Greece was poorly planned. What they didn’t anticipate was fierce resistance from the Greeks. They expected a leisurely march through the country, but the Greeks were determined to repel the invaders. Not only did they stop the Italian offensive at the Albanian border, they pushed the Italian forces deep back into Albanian territory.
It was October 28, 1940, and a stunned Hitler was in Spain when he first learned of the Italian attacks. His plan for a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 depended on stability in the Balkans. Why did the Eastern Mediterranean matter so much? Oil, the Suez Canal, and control over the soft underbelly of Europe.
Now, with one stroke and without warning, Mussolini had destabilized Germany’s entire southern flank. Hitler had no interest in expanding the German empire into the Mediterranean, but he had no choice but to intervene in the messy affairs of his Italian ally, who had gotten himself into serious trouble in the Balkans. Hitler resisted immediate, unplanned intervention, content to watch what he called the sheer chaos that unfolded over three long months. Mussolini’s poorly equipped and badly managed army suffered one embarrassment after another.
Then the worst winter in two decades arrived, creating a scene that seemed like a horrible reenactment of World War I conditions. Men shivered together in trenches carved from ice and frozen mud, with thousands suffering amputations due to frostbite. By late February 1941, Greece, which had remained neutral before the invasion, was begging Britain to send reinforcements. Britain answered the call.
Once Italy dragged Greece into war, it brought the British along with it. And once the British established themselves in Greece, Germany’s vital interests in the south were under threat. So they had to respond to the British threat in the Balkans. And they did so devastatingly.
On Sunday, April 6, 600,000 German soldiers and 2,000 tanks launched a blitzkrieg assault, sweeping into Greece through neighboring Bulgaria. Within three days, the 2nd Panzer Division entered Salonika, Greece’s second-largest city and port, breaking through the Greek defenses and trapping 70,000 Greek soldiers who were forced to surrender. A small Allied force of 60,000 troops, mostly Australians and New Zealanders, stood alongside what remained of the Greek army against nearly impossible odds. In a curious echo of the ancient Persian Wars, they attempted to hold the same passes that had been defended millennia before, like Tempe and Thermopylae, but none held.
They were in constant retreat. The speed and brutality of the German advance mirrored what had happened in the invasion of France. Within just three weeks of crossing the Greek border, the Germans were raising the swastika over the Acropolis. Hitler’s only instructions to Mussolini after his move were effectively a demand to stay out of the way.
In fact, that moment marked the turning point in Italy’s war. From then on, Italy became a vassal of Germany. Meanwhile, in September 1940, five Italian divisions had begun a rapid advance into Egypt, but it ground to a halt against the main British defenses at Mersa Matruh. Despite being outnumbered, the British launched a crushing counter-offensive six weeks later.
By February 1941, they had captured nearly all Italian territory along the North African coast, including the strategically vital Libyan port of Tobruk. Holding Tobruk meant you eliminated the problem of transporting supplies, ammunition, and fuel to the front lines. It drastically reduced reliance on roads for logistics. With Britain committed to supporting Greece, a large portion of their North African forces were reassigned.
This left Libya defended by the under-equipped and inexperienced Australian 9th Division, joined by the remnants of the British Army’s 2nd Armoured Division, which was similarly short on equipment. Hitler, frustrated by Italian defeats, quickly dispatched one of his boldest generals, Erwin Rommel, with the newly formed Afrika Korps to stabilize the situation. Rommel launched his offensive from Tripoli on March 24. In what could only be described as a stunning defeat for the British, he swept aside their forces within a week.
He chased them back across Libya toward the sea and, strikingly, toward the old town of Tobruk. When the Allies retreated into the city in early April, they quickly began building upon what was already there. The only line of defense was what was available, but gradually the outer perimeter was reinforced with successive defensive positions in depth. If a breakthrough occurred on the outer ring, there was another line of defense to stop it.
Tobruk was attacked by German and Italian forces on April 13. Rommel followed the tried-and-tested method of sending his tanks in first to open a gap, followed by infantry. The tanks met little resistance, but once the infantry advanced, they were hit with fierce attacks. The Allies had made a strategic decision to let the tanks pass and only attack once they were trapped inside the defensive line.
Rommel was forced to withdraw with heavy losses, but he attacked again on April 15 with similar results. And so began the siege. A siege that would last nine months and would prove a massive drain on Rommel’s already strained resources. Rommel was fighting on two fronts.
He wanted the fortress, and he wanted the port, which was more important than the fortress itself. It was a thorn in his side because he also had to watch and check the British who were fighting on their front here. So, from Rommel’s perspective, most of his forces were spread along the Libyan-Egyptian border trying to hold back the British army, while he also tried to muster his forces and focus on capturing Tobruk. Tobruk provided a major boost to British morale after the devastation of Western Europe.
For the first time in the war, the supposedly invincible German panzer units had been stopped. Now, we can’t say that if Tobruk hadn’t held, Rommel would have swept into Egypt, taken the Suez Canal, and seized the Middle East’s oil. But by holding Tobruk, they prevented Rommel from advancing further into Egypt and bought time to reinforce their ranks and develop defenses to retake the territory he had captured. The Allies eventually succeeded, just as Hitler’s attention turned toward a much larger conflict in the East.
In Hitler’s mind, communism and Judaism were intertwined as one evil force threatening Germany. Despite signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviets in 1939, the question was never whether he would attack Russia. The question was simply when. That moment came on June 22, 1941, when the German army launched the largest armed invasion in history, Operation Barbarossa.
There are many fronts they are fighting on. The Eastern Front is the war Germany is fighting. Since June 22, 1941, no fewer than 75% of the German army’s total forces have been operating on the Eastern Front. If we look at the ideological side, this is pure Nazi doctrine.
There is no restraint in this war. The Germans commonly thought in terms of 30 to 40 million people dying in the Soviet Union during the first year of German occupation alone. So, the invasion plan they began developing became a plan for the most unimaginable mass genocide campaign in human history. Barbarossa divided the German forces into three distinct battle groups, each led by panzer divisions.
Army Group North would attack from the northwest toward Leningrad. Army Group Center would drive toward Moscow. And Army Group South would move through the Balkans. The panzer’s objective was to break through the Soviet border where the vast majority of the Red Army was concentrated, execute large-scale blitzkrieg maneuvers, encircle Soviet armies, then crush the trapped forces, leaving Russia defenseless.
The tanks were supported along a front stretching 2,900 kilometers by over 3 million infantry soldiers. And initially, it was stunningly successful. Within a week, they had captured Riga in Latvia. A week later, they forced 290,000 Red Army soldiers and 2,500 tanks to surrender at Bialystok in northern Poland.
But the Russians retreated, and the Germans were drawn ever eastward into the Soviet Union. And as the Red Army, which had lost its effective leadership due to Stalin’s purges, continued its retreat, the harsh conditions began to take a toll on the German operational elite, the units that blitzkrieg tactics heavily depended on. The fine sands and rough terrain, coupled with a lack of replacement engines and spare parts, weighed heavily on German tanks, leading to a decrease in their operational capability. Hitler had sincerely hoped to destroy the Red Army with lightning speed.
When the Soviet Union didn’t collapse, Hitler’s plan for a swift war suddenly stumbled. At this point, Hitler clashed with his generals who wanted to advance toward Moscow, the Russian capital. But Hitler overruled them and directed the main German force toward Kiev. Although the shock of the attack nearly toppled the Soviet state, and the German forces destroyed most of the Red Army and Russian air force, without their tanks at full strength, they failed to deliver the decisive blow needed to break Soviet resistance.
There’s a useful analogy to understand all this: the spear. If you imagine the spearhead has been cut off, the spear still exists and the shaft remains, holding the majority of the force. But it no longer functions as a spear. That was the real problem the Germans faced.
They were losing their operational superiority and could no longer regain it. By early October, it was clear that Operation Barbarossa, which was in many ways a bold success, could not achieve the swift victory the Germans had hoped for. As Hitler redirected his army toward Moscow, the very reason for this urgency, the Russian winter, began to bare its fangs. The overwhelming success of the high-risk blitzkrieg approach in France during May 1940 was what drove Germany to gamble even more on invading Russia.
But that strategy failed, and as they approached Moscow in October 1941, they found themselves facing a very familiar prospect: a war of attrition. Now, the front line in October 1941 was about 300 kilometers from Moscow. With the massing of three new armored groups, the objective was to break through Soviet lines to execute new encirclements, destroy Soviet forces, and then advance again toward Moscow. If that hadn’t worked in Operation Barbarossa, you might say it was unlikely to work here either, especially since we’re launching this attack in October.
That’s completely different from launching it in the height of summer. To beat the weather and avoid a prolonged campaign, the Germans launched Operation Typhoon. It was a final attempt, a ruthless push toward Moscow that began with astonishing success once again. Smashing through Russian lines at the Battle of Vyazma, the Germans executed an encirclement that captured around 550,000 Soviet soldiers.
At the same time, in the south, another decisive victory at the Battle of Bryansk captured an additional 100,000 Soviets. In just 10 days, over a million Russians had been knocked out of the battle. 650,000 as prisoners, the rest either killed, wounded, or missing in action. But as October turned to November, the weather deteriorated rapidly.
Heavy rain turned the battlefield into a swamp, and the German army, so close to complete victory, had to halt and reassess. The situation was not promising. The Wehrmacht by the end of 1941 was in a desperate state. They had been fighting a costly and heavy campaign despite their successes since June 22.
When they launched their invasion, they outnumbered the Soviets 1. 4 to 1. By the time they reached Moscow, the Soviets outnumbered them 1. 2 to 1.
On November 15, 1941, the ground froze enough to allow German tanks to move. Despite only a third of their vehicles being operational, infantry divisions at half or a third strength, and serious logistical problems preventing winter equipment from reaching the front, they attacked again. However, the Red Army had used its time well. Moscow was now protected by a triple defensive ring.
But perhaps the greatest enemy the Germans faced was the Russian winter, which would be the coldest of the twentieth century. Vehicles had to be heated for hours before they could be used effectively, and German soldiers began dying in alarming numbers as temperatures dropped below minus 40 degrees Celsius. By early December, despite Moscow being clearly in sight, the German advance ground to a halt. On December 5, 1941, the German offensive, Operation Typhoon, was finally stopped.
The German forces were overextended, exhausted, at the end of tenuous supply lines, and had no idea what was coming. The Soviet offensive would begin on the evening of the 5th, but it would start in earnest in the following days as more and more troops arrived at the front. The Germans would then begin a massive retreat, either north of Moscow or south toward Tula. A retreat that would prove catastrophic.
The German army had already suffered enormous casualties, with more than 25% of the initial invasion force killed or wounded. The final toll was over 35,757 killed in action, 128,716 wounded, and thousands missing. Committed to a world war and fighting in North Africa and the Atlantic, Hitler’s ideological war in Eastern Europe and his desperate desire to cleanse the land of communism and Slavic peoples had failed. And this failure would have long-term consequences.
It’s an economic war at this point, a war based on an abundance of resources, and they’re trying to move as many troops as possible to the Eastern Front. They don’t have enough to replace their losses, and they never will. The consequences of the 1941 failure would continue to affect every other operation for the rest of the war, and it is without a doubt the turning point.
