A New Kind of Foe

By nightfall of June 22nd, the German V Infantry Corps had broken through the Soviet border defenses and established a bridgehead across the Nieman River some 40 miles away. Later that night a bridging column of the 5th Infantry Division was ambushed while passing a forest near Seirijai – …

1941-06-24

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By nightfall of June 22nd, the German V Infantry Corps had broken through the Soviet border defenses and established a bridgehead across the Nieman River some 40 miles away. Later that night a bridging column of the 5th Infantry Division was ambushed while passing a forest near Seirijai – and soon afterward it was reported that intermittent fighting against armed civilians, both near the forest and in the town, was blocking the main road to the bridgehead. Thinking the resistance could comprise no more than a few lightly armed civilians and Red Army stragglers, an infantry company attempted to clear the woods at dawn the next day but was solidly rebuffed, as were a second and later a third company thrown in to reinforce it. So on the next morning, following a bombardment by an entire artillery battalion, two infantry battalions attempted to flush out the enemy while elements of a third sealed off the forest edges to prevent any escape.

Seirijai, Lithuania

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered as slave labour for the Axis war effort, to acquire the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories, and eventually through extermination, enslavement, Germanization and mass deportation to Siberia, remove the Slavic peoples and create Lebensraum for Germany.

German

Russian Partisan

Scenario Type = Standard