Hitler kept his pact with Russia until he had conquered western Europe and reduced the small countries in the east to vassal states. Then without warning, on June 22, 1941, he launched an attack on the Soviet Union. Russia’s Red army fought desperately and skillfully, organizing a “defense in depth”. Nevertheless, the Nazis advanced rapidly across the vast Russian plains. In September they entered Kiev, capital of the Ukraine.* In October they took Odessa and Kharkov and stood within 30 miles of Moscow.* On November 22 they entered Rostov, key to the oil of the Caucasus.* Then bitter winter weather came to Russia’s aid. The Red army recaptured Rostov and started driving the Germans back from the vicinity of Moscow, almost to the day when the United States was brought into the war.*
In the spring of 1942 the Nazis reopened their drive to the Caucasus. On July 1, after a 245-day siege, they entered the naval fortress of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. In August they stood before Stalingrad on the Volga,* determined to choke off the commerce of that great river. Here the Russians made a heroic stand, dying by thousands in the ruined city, until winter again gave them an advantage. Then they encircled and captured some 22 Nazi divisions. On Feb. 2, 1943, the battle ended in ruinous defeat for Germany.
* That is, capital of the Ukrainian SSR, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, an autonomous Ukrainian government had sprung up, which in 1918 declared independence; but in 1919, it was dissolved and the Ukraine returned to Moscow’s control as a republic within the USSR. Nationalists such as Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) resented this, and collaborated with the Nazis.
* This might be slightly misleading. Odessa, a strategically vital port founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1794 and dubbed ‘the Pearl of the Black Sea’, lies about 700 miles south and a little west of Moscow; Kharkov, then as now a major industrial and commercial centre, is about 400 miles south of the capital. The Nazis reached a point much closer to Moscow than this: indeed, on December 2nd a reconnaissance battalion made it as far as Khimki, only 19 miles or 30km from the Moscow Kremlin.
* Rostov-on-Don is a major port city about 650 miles south of Moscow, standing on the Sea of Azov, an inland shelf sea connected to the Black Sea by the Kerch Strait. This Rostov is not to be confused with Rostov Veliky (the Great), about 130 miles northwest of the capital. The Caucasus is a mountain range between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the east; Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and parts of southern Russia are spread across it.
* The United States was brought into the war by Japan’s surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour naval base on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. Washington announced the country’s entry into the war the following day. In August 1942, the first US troops arrived in Britain, and that November they joined in Operation Torch in North Africa.
* Stalingrad was the Communists’ name for the city of Volgograd, an industrial and commercial city of immense importance on the River Volga. The Volga rises in the Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow, and flows first east through Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan, and then south to the Caspian Sea through Samara, Saratov, Volgograd and Astrakhan.
