What ' historical blunder' invited Britain and USSR into war against Nazi Germany
Answers
Answer:
The first light touched the Kremlin's towers and the bulbous steeple of St. Basil's on Red Square. The rising sun cast long shadows across the sleeping cities and villages that lay between Moscow and the frontier that Stalin and Hitler had drawn across a conquered Poland.
The silence of that Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, was shattered at 3:15 A.M. by the thunder of 7,000 German guns firing along 3,000 miles of frontier from Finland to the Black Sea. Beneath that earsplitting barrage and escorted by 2,700 warplanes, 186 divisions - 154 German, 18 Finnish and 14 Rumanian - smashed forward into Russia.
The invasion of the Soviet Union, 40 years ago tomorrow, was one of the turning points of World War II. The hitherto invincible German Wehrmacht, after a series of stunning victories, was bled into impotence by the long, agonizing Russian national effort. Four years later, as the Russian armies rolled westward, the Soviet Union emerged as the most powerful state on the Eurasian land mass and the long duel with the United States began.
Unity in victory for the Soviet Union established the country as a superpower. The United States, also emerging from World War II as a superpower, was a capitalist state and consequently an enemy of Russian Communism, or so Stalin thought.
At a cost of 20 million casualties, Russia won her war. The suspicion and anxiety which its leaders show today toward American military and political policies go back to that titanic Soviet effort and the memories of its dead. A combination of ideological hostility to capitalism, those memories and chronic Russian xenophobia and envy are the mainsprings of current Communist international attitudes.
Hitler's decision to invade Russia was the product of the convictions and illusions of the dictator's demonic psyche. Since the 1918 Armistice ending World War I, he had been convinced that Bolshevism had helped defeat Wilhelmine Germany and that the German Communist Party, which he fought as the Nazi leader, would deliver the Reich to Moscow.
Explanation: