BARBAROSSA ( June 22–December 5, 1941) in force on July Soviet forces in the Baltic, now renamed Northwestern Front, were split in two by the crossing Each half fell back pell-mell along Leeb’s expanding flanks Kuznetov was sacked on July 4, after just two weeks of fighting Stalin and the Stavka sent General Nikolai Vatutin to oversee the failing defense, to little avail Soviet forces in the northwest quickly lost a total of 75,000 men, 4,000 guns, 2,500 tanks, and over 1,000 aircraft Army Group North would destroy still more Soviet armies before being halted before Leningrad in November Army Group Center conducted a spectacular double encirclement of Western Military District forces They caught the first contingent inside an exposed salient at Bialystok (Belostok), and the rest around Minsk Punching through the frontier crustal defense in two places, Grodno and Brest, Bock’s Panzers raced ahead 200 miles to close a steel circle behind Minsk German leg infantry closed the inner circle around three Soviet armies at Bialystok These operations together trapped more than 30 Soviet divisions in a deep pocket, or “Kessel” (“cauldron”) as the Germans called it Army Group Center proceeded to cook hundreds of thousands of Russians inside the Kessel with massed air and artillery pounding and steady infantry and armored compression of the perimeter The 22 Soviet rifle divisions trapped at Minsk were crushed, and the survivors surrendered Two huge sections of the Soviet frontier gaped open by July 8, with most of the men, tanks, and guns prepositioned there destroyed or captured Red Army losses on the central front included nearly 5,000 tanks, 9,500 guns, and at least 340,000 men The great majority of casualties were prisoners of war Nearly all would be malignantly neglected to death by the Wehrmacht in the months that followed Nor was it safe for those who refused to surrender General Dimitri G Pavlov and most of the senior staff of the Western Military District were arrested and executed by the NKVD The real culprit of the great collapse in the center was Stalin Not everything went the way of the Wehrmacht in the weeks that followed The hard crust of frontier static defenses was broken in the north and center, but Army Group South ran into the largest number of defenders and had a harder time against tough resistance in Ukraine Soviet frontier forces fought back into August before succumbing Overall, the Panzers raced across the southern steppe and the lightly forested belts of central Russia They moved more slowly but still steadily into the deeply forested and swampy regions of the northwest Millions of infantry and support troops followed their tracks, fanning out to burn and kill Massive tank battles were fought in which hundreds of Mark II, III, and IV Panzers fought thousands of T-26s, supplemented by hundreds of T-34s and KV-1s Savage, swirling armored fights chewed up hundreds of square miles of hot and dusty steppe Others took place in open spaces between great swatches of burning forest In a four-day tank fight near Lepel’ from July 6–9, the Soviets lost over 800 armored vehicles, mostly to air and armor attacks Hundreds of bombers and fighters clashed overhead or dived to strafe and bomb long columns of panicking Soviet conscripts, some abandoned by officers who fled in stolen divisional vehicles Local counterattacks were mounted but were beaten back by weight of German metal: by massed artillery and nearly unopposed air power However, whereas Polish and French armies ceased fighting when casualties became pointless in face of deep 131