@Frontovik:
@Hobbes:
@Axistiger13:
Choose your side(axis or allies) and your strategy
Russians - one of the main factors concerning the success of Barbarossa was that Stalin actually believed that the Germans would not attack before 1942 and ignored the reports of the German build-up. The Soviet High Command also made a serious strategic mistake after the Soviet-German Pact by moving its armies from their prepared defensive positions to new areas on their now extended borders (E. Poland, Bessarabia, Baltic States) where they were vulnerable to an attack.
I think it was 3 days before the German attack that a German deserter turned itself to the Soviets at the border and said the date of the German attack. Upon hearing the report, Stalin ordered him shot for spreading false rumours - imagine what could have happened if he had finally listened.
he would have ordered an assault, which the germans could easily counter causing huge damage and many casualties to soviet forces…
Stalin and the Soviet High Command knew that the Red Army in 1941 was in no condition of mounting an assault but it could have started its mobilization earlier and move to protect the airforce and pull back major units from frontier, avoiding their encirclement and destruction at the beginning of the German offensive. By October/November 1941 the Germans started realizing that they had greatly underestimated the number of Soviet divisions that could be deployed, even with the huge Soviet losses during the initial invasion. With those forces alerted and properly deployed against a German invasion, and the Germans could have probably been stopped sooner or forced to focus their advance on a single axis towards Moscow/Leningrad/Kiev. Germans could win an operational victory but would suffer a strategic defeat by failing to bring down the Soviet Union as quickly as possible before it turned into a war of attrition that it couldn’t win.
