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Fabricated Stories About World War II Still Known by Many

Khalid Elhassan November 15, 2019 35 min

German soldiers pulling a car through the mud of the autumn Rasputitsa in November, 1941. Bundesarchiv Bild

27. An Earlier Operation Barbarossa Would Not Have Changed Things

If Operation if Barbarossa had been launched two months earlier, in April, 1941, instead of June, it would have been even less successful and ground to a halt earlier, after advancing a shorter distance. The Germans advanced as rapidly and plunged as deeply into the USSR during the summer of 1941 because the months-long dry weather perfectly suited their Blitzkrieg style of maneuver warfare.

They needed good weather to make the best of their breakthroughs, followed by aggressive exploitation via deep armored thrusts. They needed dry roads to enable them to rush supplies forward to maintain the advance and allow the infantry to rapidly follow and consolidate the gains. They would not have had such weather had they invaded in April.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.