Blocking Action at Lipki

During the opening stages of Barbarossa, the first great pincer movement on the Central Front occurred between the cities of Bialystok and Minsk. As a result of the encirclement of four Soviet armies in the pocket, the high command was forced to commit whatever units were available in an …

1941-07-03

A044

During the opening stages of Barbarossa, the first great pincer movement on the Central Front occurred between the cities of Bialystok and Minsk. As a result of the encirclement of four Soviet armies in the pocket, the high command was forced to commit whatever units were available in an effort to form a new defensive line. To gain more time, a crack unit – the 1st Moscow Motor Rifle Division – was sent to intercept Guderian’s 18th Panzer Division as it struck towards Smolensk. The enemy had to be slowed if they could not be stopped. A little more than six miles east of Borisov, near the village of Lipki, the two armored spearheads met in a series of clashes.

Borisov, Belarus

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.

Russian

German

Scenario Type = Standard