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Radio War Nerd EP #559 — Operation Barbarossa, pt. 4: Invasion, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-06 03:55:11
Imported:
2025-11
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Guest: AnnibaleRecorded: November 3, 2025

In part 4 of our series on Operation Barbarossa, Annibale describes the initial phase of the German invasion, from June 22, 1941 - July 10.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE NEW WAR NERD BOOK: THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN HANGED: WAR NERD ESSAYS ON THE U.S. CIVIL WAR

Annibale's Operation Barbarossa:-Operation Barbarossa, pt 1: German Military Mindset (EP #552)-Operation Barbarossa, pt 2: Germany's Allies & Poland (EP #554)-Operation Barbarossa, pt. 3: Soviet Military Preparations (EP #555)

-Maps:*Invasion

*Opening battles of German Army Group Center

*Bialistok (Белосток) - Minsk (Минск) сauldron

*Encirclement west of Minsk (Минск)

Bibliography:

Glantz, David M. Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia, 1941. Tempus/History Press, 2001

Stahel, David. Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.). Germany and the Second World War. Volume IV: The Attack on the Soviet Union. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Isaev, Alexey. Вторжение. 22 июня 1941 года. Яуза-Каталог, Moscow, 2016.

Drabkin, Artem; Isaev, Aleksey; Summerville, Christopher. Barbarossa Through Soviet Eyes: The First Twenty-Four Hours. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2012.

Total time: 1:47:55Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Files

Comments

James Whale

Thank you Annibale. Do you have a few films on Barbarosa?

James Whale

John please dont rush back! Don't do it for us at least. Health is more important than anything . Everybody here im sure would agree that you should take your time.

SepticTankie

This is the best RWN series since the Civil War, maybe the best one ever.

Annibale

May be even longer than that!

Annibale

Yes, but none of them is great. There are ,a few done in Russia recently but they tend to tell individual, stories and not always accurately imho

theWalrus

My sincerest wishes for a swift recovery to John. The first time I heard him speaking (on another podcast) around 2018 was a revelation to me and I have been a listener since that day.

THEKILLERWHALE

"I have a bias, I don't like the Nazis."

a clash of purple

Annibale busting out the controversial takes... That's going to spark even more debate than Blumenthal's "wokeness makes white boys become Nazis" statement.

NYCM&AHole

DIE NEUNTE ARMEE!! ::downfall Hitler shouting::

a clash of purple

(and before anybody gets the wrong idea, I'm being facetious, I don't actually think Blumenthal literally said "wokeness makes white boys become Nazis.")

Terry Dunk

He did all but say that though lol

Terry Dunk

Fellow CTH->RWN pipeline traveler 🤝

Danny McShane

Grazie infinite Annibale once again for your great work! What is your assessment of the Anthony Beevor Stalingrad book? It was my first reading about this period years ago, but I imagine this account may have limitations

Joseph Mabrey

I will tolerate no Stalin slander

Annibale

As a history book is incredibly sloppy and dated, paradoxically more so than William Craig's "Enemy At The Gates", which was released in 1973. And so it has almost no value as the real story of the battle. For instance, Beevor popularised the idea that the Red Army executed 13.000 Soviet soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad. At the same time, after the NKVD archives were released, it turns out that there's evidence for fewer than 100 executions. Beevor insisted he had "archival evidence" to support his numbers, but he never provided a credible source. Read Michael K. Jones "Stalingrad" for an excellent debunking of many myths regarding Stalingrad and some of Beevor's errors (and Jones is absolutely not forgiving when it comes to the Soviet side)

Annibale

Stalin won't as well!

Danny McShane

This is helpful thank you, I will seek out the Jones book. Its regrettable if unsurprising that such examples of liberal-western cold war historian 'big dogs' dominate the popular historical accounts

ExtraJudicial Pod

Just ordered some copies of "TheyShould Have been Hanged" for the public library!

George Georgiadis

Really want to get my pops this series but he is so bad with tech and won’t be able to figure out an RSS feed, what do you guys think?

JDF

routine plug for David Glantz’s incredible work on the Red Army (matchless analysis of operational and doctrinal aspects)

JDF

Setting aside his massive study of Leningrad , the “colossus” trilogy is a great place to start

JDF

pak 37 : affectionately known as the “Heeresanklopfgerät” (army door-knocking device)

Alec

I got my pre-order copy of John’s book! It’s great so far. I’ve been reading it out loud for my girlfriend. She says that John is a dork but she appreciates a leftist perspective on this topic. It’s been long needed.

JoR

You should be able to download the episode(s) as a file and email it to him.

Annibale

Actually I should have said "Pak 3 point 7", because "Pak 37" doesn't exist

Tuan O'Carroll

That's pretty much exactly what he said lol 'wokes asked me to declare my pronouns and wear a mask once so now I'm only friends with nazis' was the thrust of a lot of what he was saying in general

parker

I will say annibale that as a hardware nerd who cares about historical accuracy aka actually using real data and strategic use i literally just had an entire argument with a guy who literally tried to argue that the t34 was below the reliability of the panther if ti was actually made properly and he used the oil change rotation and small maintenance cycles for the t34 being shorter as an example. And he used the wrong numbers........ He literally didn't even know the avg t34 expected service life was like 100km more than the panther and that many t34s went well over it. And what's insane is he was initially arguing with a guy who's blog is about archived tank data...... He legitimately tried to argue that the panthers automotive issues where only the transmission and that if you skipped the third gear it would be okay. . Just fantasy shit all around. Never understood the bias against Soviet tanks. The is3 for example is considered a an unreliable mess but for some reason people seem to not compare it to the horrible records of other countries heavy tanks at the end of the war. Sometimes people just get an idea in there head from forums or one or two documents that complain about an issue and extrapolate it to mean the entire platform is bad. Similar to how so many think the t34s transmission was awful even though it arguably was in the top five in terms of life expectancy.

electradescending

Annible touched lightly on this this, but a modern war nerd might go down a list of top aces and see so many Luftwaffe pilots listed (like Hartman ) and think "oh, the Luftwaffe had such better pilots" But many of their "air to air" kills were during the first few weeks of Barbarossa, when many of the kills were on planes taking off and landing (which the Germans counted air to air) from airfields and on inexperienced and uncoordinated pilots flying obsolete planes. It was easy for those guys to rack up kills in a situation that we Americans would call "like shooting fish in barrel" It was not difficult to get 20+ victories if you survived long enough while flying a sortie or two per day.

Annibale

There's indeed some strong sign of a correlation between high rates of dogfight scores and the overall lacklustre operational and strategic performance of an army - as tactical airforces under enormous pressure (either because they're fighting an offensive too big for their size, like Barbarossa, or being pressured in defence by an advancing enemy) will flight many sorties per day and thus find more opportunities for low-quality targets. Isaev discusses it in his book on the biggest myths of WW2 (unfortunately not yet translated in English)

Annibale

I'll think about it!

Annibale

A clear example of the phenomenon you describe is the non-stop and tedious online discussions about the contrasting merits of IS2 and Tiger II at the tank battle of Kielce (January 1945, at the start of the Vistula-Oder operations, despite the fact that there was no IS2 at Kielce and Nehring's Tiger II were slaughtered by a bunch of "regular" T34-85 with subcaliber ammunition

parker

I would say the biggest cause of people not understanding equipment is not understanding the production process. For example on the same guys blog tank archives some guy on his comments argued with him that Soviet super heavy projects like the is4 wouldn't have done anything because the Germans would of produced apds for the pak 12.8cm Yes someone seriously tried to argue that if Germany survived to 1946 they would of had reliable apds ammunition for 128mm guns and that it would slice through armor that was equivalent to 260 mm at thousands of meters. And I literally told him how the hell would Germany go through one of the most difficult research and development projects for ammunition you could do in like one year aka producing apds on mass like the British. And his literal response was the Germans had very good engineers and started work on it already. People just look at impossible hurdles of development and production and go eh what the hell they could do it in a year it only took the British empire who had the most experienced gunnery experts and material science experts in the world multiple years to get adps down but hey the Germans could do it in a year.

Danny

Get well soon John

CR

The more I think about how the Red Army didn't kill every German and Nazi collaborator (uniformed or not) between Minsk and the Elbe, the more I realize that evil will always win because good is dumb

CR

10% mechanized. Anyone who thinks the Wehrmacht was worth a fuck is the same kind of idiot who thinks that NATO could have sustained a war with the USSR for more than 24 without immediately resorting to nukes

CR

This is like every idiot American online coping (i.e. self-bullshitting) that the PRC's 30 years of national industry and manufacturing system that is integrated vertically from the rawest of raw materials all the way to offloading the goods in San Pedro and horizontally in that the infrastructure exists to support the industry logistics from plants in Urumqi to the docks Shanghai to the Port of Los Angeles/San Pedro can be overcome in a year or two because the Chinese don't have an Elon Musk (swear to God I saw that twice yesterday on X). Shorter: Carlin said it 30 years ago that the only thing the U.S. produces, but produces a ton of, is bullshit. And we have gotten so high on our own supply we are genuinely living in a different reality.

CR

The movie was dogshit, too.

Annibale

What you get from war memoirs and from what I was told by Russians of my generation who had parents/grandparents fighting the war was that in 1945, everyone was sick and tired of violence, and they just wanted to get done with the whole thing. Primo Levi (who was a staunch liberal but definitely not a Communist) briefly addresses this issue in "The Truce" when he wrote about the Soviet soldiers "The war was about to finish, the long war that had devastated their country; for them it was already over. It was the great truce; for the other harsh season which was to follow had not yet begun, nor as yet had the ill-omened name of Cold War been pronounced. They were cheerful, sad and tired, and took pleasure in food and wine, like Ulysses’ companions after the ships had been pulled ashore. And yet, under their slovenly and anarchical appearance, it was easy to see in them, in each of those rough and open faces, the good soldiers of the Red Army, the valiant men of the old and new Russia, gentle in peace and fierce in war, strong from an inner discipline born from concord, from reciprocal love and from love of their country; a stronger discipline, because it came from the spirit, than the mechanical and servile discipline of the Germans. It was easy to understand, living among them, why this former discipline, and not the latter, had finally triumphed."

drizzly_november

I think in Richard Overy’s latest he makes a similar point in the Pacific war that Japanese pilots who showed some skill were sent out again and again until they inevitably got killed, whereas top American pilots would get rotated back to rest and train newer pilots. So on paper the IJN had standout aces but really an inferior overall force.

SB

How about also war time and post-war Greece?

Annibale

I take the comment above back - 1964 "The Living And The Dead" (it's three films actually), it is great. I had completely forgot about that

Adam Murphy

Thought Mr Ed joined the podcast for a second. Great impression by Mark.