22. An Unexpected Attack That Should Have Totally Been Expected
The Soviets suffered horrific losses during the opening months of the German invasion in 1941. The seeds were planted years earlier, during Stalin’s Military Purge. It began in 1937 and threw the Soviet military into turmoil by removing its most experienced commanders: 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 corps commanders, all 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars. The Purge also decimated the country’s best middle-rank officers. Until 1937, the Soviet military had been innovative, and the intellectual ferment within the Red Army, such as the Theory of Deep Operations, was as creative as anything the Germans were doing at the time.
The Soviets had their equivalents of Guderians and Mannsteins, brimming with ideas and confident that they would revolutionize warfare. They suffered the most, because the Purge fell heaviest on the most creative and free-thinking officers, since they stood out and were thus prime suspects of harboring the deviationist tendencies that Stalin wanted to be stamped out. Thus, when Hitler attacked, the Soviet military was poorly officered and led. Worse, Stalin ignored warnings of impending invasion. Those who raised the alarm were punished, as Stalin insisted it was a plot engineered by the British to instigate a war between the USSR and Germany.
