Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"Stalin at first refused to believe what was happening. He had established a sophisticated intelligence network to give him long advance warning of a decision by Hitler to wage war in the frozen wastes of Russia.
His key indicators were breathtakingly simple. For an army to survive the winter, every man would have to possess a thick sheepskin greatcoat. Soviet agents therefore kept a close watch for a sudden rise in the demand for sheepskins and a fall in the price of mutton as slaughtering was stepped up.
Meanwhile, other agents scoured rifle ranges for scraps of cloth used by German soldiers to clean their weapons. Soviet chemists then analyzed them in order to find out whether the Germans had developed a gun oil which would not freeze in the harsh weather.
There was still no sign of such an oil - or a non-freezing diesel engine oil - in June 1941, so Stalin was convinced that Hitler had no intention of attacking him. Hitler would have his forces concentrated in France, or even fighting in England, as the Red Army cut off their only source of fuel, crashed into the virtually undefended Reich and then "liberated" the whole of western Europe.
Hitler, of course, had not ordered such preparations because he had not planned on a war against Russia. Only in the spring of 1941 did intelligence reports of troop concentrations and Soviet moves to cut Germany's oil lifeline with Rumania force Hitler to take the desperate chance of opening a second front with a hasty pre-emptive strike.
Initially, at least, the gamble paid off. Caught in transit or crammed together in their own start-off positions, whole Soviet Armies were annihilated. Most of the air force was destroyed on the ground. The thousands of lightly armoured assault tanks were virtually helpless; forced to operate in the roadless wastes of Russia, they were easily outmaneuvered by the Germans' conventional cross-country tanks.
All this makes "Icebreaker" the definitive account of the build-up to Operation Groza ("Thunderstorm"), the Soviet conquest of Europe scheduled to begin early in the morning of Sunday 6th July 1941.
Suvorov's revelations about the massive expansion of the NKVD - blood-soaked forerunner of the KGB - are particularly chilling, as these killers would have moved in behind the assault troops to liquidate "class enemies." The Bolshevik torture chambers and death pits which claimed millions of victims in the enslaved nations of the East would have spread throughout the West as well. With Germany and France under the Soviet jackboot, Italy and Spain would quickly have fallen, too. And Stalin's one million paratroopers would have made short work of seizing the airfields of southern England to clear the way for a full-scale invasion.
Lenin and his pupil Stalin never made any secret of their desire for a second World War to establish a Communist Europe. For the fact that this monstrous plan failed, the democrats, simpering priests and court historians have no one to thank but Adolf Hitler. Without the man they love to hate, they would have been first against the wall."Thought for the Day:
"The Nazi command succeeded in forestalling our troops literally two weeks before the war began."
(General S. P. Ivanov, Chief of the General Staff Academy of the Armed Forces of the USSR, 1974)