June 22 1941: a Preemptive War?

What is “Preemptive War”? If anyone has a “right to strike first”, before becoming a victim of supposedly imminent aggression? Well, when a war already started, it seems perfectly acceptable to initiate any strike, attack, or offensive, if necessary. But can we extrapolate preemptive actions on tactical and operational levels, appropriate in a war time, to the situation, which existed before the start of the hostilities? If the answer is “yes”, any war can be interpreted as preemptive and then, as justifiable.

Let’s take, for example, Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. Japanese military rulers always stated that Admiral Nagumo’s strike was preemptive, as a result of it American threat was diminished, and offensive capabilities of US Pacific Fleet were effectively crippled, at least for the time being.

Germans also stressed that both first and second world wars were in fact preemptive strikes against Russia. On June 22 1941, and again on October 3 1941 Adolph Hitler justified his campaign in the East by mentioning laundry list of Soviet divisions, mind-boggling numbers of tanks and airplanes, amassed on the western borders of the USSR by the beginning of his “Unternehmen Barbarossa”.

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Certainly, “Do not fall for any provocations” set of orders pushed Soviet battle readiness back to extremes. Soviet fighters let German air reconnaissance planes roam above the whole length of the new common border between Soviet Union and German Reich with impunity; ammunition stayed locked in the Red Army “Special Military Districts” warehouses; frontier fortifications were not prepared properly and many not even manned by the beginning of hostilities; airfields were not moved back and were not camouflaged; military signal nets, which relied heavily on the civilian phone lines, was easily put out of action by saboteurs; Red Army officers were sent on the regular summer vacations as far away as to Crimean and Caucasian resorts; artillery units were conducting training exercises in the summer camps, where most of it was bombed to smithereens and overrun by the German onslaught; units were not supplied with maps, so sometimes they had to use school atlases or trophy maps, taken from Germans, etc. On and on this list goes.

But all this contributed to the Allied point of view at Nuremberg Trials, where Germany was charged as an aggressor. Receiving comments from the German defenders that they waged not aggressive, but preemptive war  against Russia, American judge responded that fact of the matter is: Germany, not Russia started the war in the East. Simply put, “intention” to be prepared for war, does not count the same as actually going to war. And that settles the matter.

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