Land Leviathans

Under pressure from Stalin to hold Smolensk, Yeremenko was desperate to halt the German offensive. On 1 July, he committed his sole armored reserve: the 1st Moscow Motorized Rifle Division. It was a crack unit, the pride of the STAVKA. Equipped with new T-34 and KV-2 tanks, …

1941-07-03

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Under pressure from Stalin to hold Smolensk, Yeremenko was desperate to halt the German offensive. On 1 July, he committed his sole armored reserve: the 1st Moscow Motorized Rifle Division. It was a crack unit, the pride of the STAVKA. Equipped with new T-34 and KV-2 tanks, the division moved off to meet and defeat the 18th Panzer Division, the spearhead of Guderian’s 2nd Panzergruppe. On 3 July at Lipki, six miles east of Borisov, contact was made. Stunned by the appearance of the two armored monsters not encountered before on the Army Group Center front, the German infantry scattered. A handful of German tanks were all that stood in the path of the Soviet advance.

Lipki, Russia

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