At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German
Army Group Center's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and
Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of
Germany's Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed
would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union.
Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his
Wehrmacht's massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation
Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union's Red Army, conquer
the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22
June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into
Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army
soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr
Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa
that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and
destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind
those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most
Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles
in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once
across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered
five fresh Soviet armies. Despite destroying two of these armies
outright, severely damaging two others, and encircling the remnants of
three of these armies in the Smolensk region, quick victory eluded the
Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk
stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July,
August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven
newly-mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing
Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped
by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will.
Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet
actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds
inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in
the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead
turned his forces southward to engage 'softer targets' in the Kiev
region. The 'derailment' of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became
the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa. Serving as both a
companion to the previous three text volumes in this monumental study,
and as a standalone battlefield atlas, this volume provides over one
hundred specially-commissioned color maps that trace the course of the
campaign, each accompanied by a detailed caption.
