Barbarossa

On this day in 1941, Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union.  Nearly 3 million German soldiers attacked in three main groups over a 1500 mile front.  Within days most of the Soviet air force was destroyed by German planes as they sat on their air fields - and soon the Germans had surrounded entire Soviet armies, taking massive tracts of territory.

Germany's plan was to knock the Soviets out of the war, then turn to the West and take on Britain - or force them to sue for peace.  They had already conquered France, Denmark and Norway.  Recall that the U.S. was not yet in WWII, as Pearl Harbor was still more than 5 months away.

For the first 5 months it seemed nothing could stop the Germans and that the Soviets would be crushed.  They captured more than a million Soviet soldiers and killed nearly as many in just the first 10 months of the campaign code named Barbarossa, after the German Holy Roman Emperor of the middle ages, Frederick Barbarossa - "red beard" - who perished in the Third Crusade.

Of course, the Soviets held even with tremendous losses, and counter-attacked at Stalingrad to inflict a mortal wound on the German Army.  From that point on, the Germans were on the defensive, eventually overwhelmed by the Soviet armies and rebuilt air force.  We supplied our ally, the Soviets, with thousands of pieces of  equipment plus trucks and weapons that Stalin, the Soviet leader, never would acknowledge as important to Soviet victory.

Hitler's master plan of conquering the east and resettling it with millions of good Germans was shattered, as was Germany after this greatest of miscalculations.

Waterloo

The Battle of Waterloo – June 18, 1815

Yesterday was the 203rd anniversary of the famous and pivotal Battle of Waterloo.  Napoleon Bonaparte, having escaped from his exile, led a French army of 73,000 against the allied force of 120,000 mainly from Britain, the Netherlands and Prussia.  The Allies led by British general Arthur Wellesley defeated Napoleon and ended his dominance over Europe once and for all. 

Waterloo was important for many reasons.  The great powers that had fought Napoleon met to reinstate the French king, and tried to put the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution back in the bottle.  They succeeded for the most part and there was a general European peace for 100 years, until the outbreak of the cataclysmic Great War in 1914 - World War I.  So, European kings and emperors survived another century.  Britain became the dominant industrial and naval power of the world, whose empire included Canada, India, Australia and large parts of Africa. 

But the disruptive ideas unleashed by the French and American Revolutions – individual rights, rule of law – simmered under the surface.  They boiled over on occasion, especially in 1848 as uprisings challenged the old order in many nations.  If you have seen the play Les Miserables you have a sense for the passions that ignited confrontations between citizens and rulers.  And World War I not only overthrew several empires, it resulted in creation of many new nations whose founding ideas and documents harkened back to Napoleonic France.

Napoleon was sent to exile to St. Helena far in the south Atlantic, guarded by the British fleet.  The great powers were taking no more risks to face him on the battlefield, where he had defeated them again and again.  He died in 1821 and eventually his remains were returned to France and rest under a dome in the Invalides in Paris.  He remains influential (through his law code, for example) and famous to our day.