Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [85]
What is there now, she asked, if England becomes just a satellite of the European community? And not a respected one at that, unwilling to curry favor with the Germans the way the French had, unable to maintain élan and faith in the face of industrial collapse like the Spanish, or discard government after government the way the Italians had. What the hell have I lived for-- and what do I continue to live for?
"Ms. James?"
Private George's whisper seemed to come from another world. It brought her back to the midget submarine.
"Yes?"
"We've got a ten-hour stretch ahead of us and it's too dark to study the maps," George said. "Could I impose on you to start me on that crash course in Russian?"
She looked at George's eager young face. Where does his enthusiasm come from? she wondered. Managing to smile at him for the first time, she said, "It's not an imposition. Why don't we start with some basic questions."
"Such as?"
She said slowly, "Khak, shtaw, and puhchehmoo."
"Which means?"
Peggy smiled. "How, what, and-- perhaps most important-- why?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Tuesday, 2:30 A.M., Russian/
Ukraine border
Operation Barbarossa was the largest military offensive in the history of warfare. On June 22, 1941, German troops invaded Russia, shattering the Nazi-Soviet Peace Pact. Their objective: to capture Moscow before winter. Hitler sent 3.2 million troops in 120 divisions against 170 Soviet divisions spread along 2,300 kilometers from the shores of the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea.
As German panzer divisions pushed toward the Russian rear with incredible speed, the Luftwaffe blasted their inexperienced and badly trained Russian counterparts. As a result of this Blitzkrieg, the Baltic states were swiftly overrun. The damage inflicted by the Germans was catastrophic. By November, vital agricultural, industrial, transportation, and communications centers had been destroyed. More than 2 million Russian soldiers had been captured. Three hundred and fifty thousand Russian troops had been killed. Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand were missing. And 1 million had been wounded. In Leningrad alone, 900,000 civilians were killed during the enemy siege. It wasn't until the last days of December that the battered but resilient Russians-- helped by -20° temperatures that shattered German boot soles, froze their equipment, and destroyed morale-- were able to mount their first successful counterattack. As a result of this counteroffensive, the Russians were just able to keep Moscow from enemy hands.
Ultimately, Operation Barbarossa was a disaster for the Germans. But it taught the Soviets an important lesson about the desirability of fighting an offensive rather than a defensive war. For the next forty years, their military grew with the almost fanatical goal of being able to launch and sustain an offensive war-- as General Mikhail Kosigan had once put it in a speech to his troops, "to fight the next world war, if it comes, on everyone else's territory." To this end, missions for commanders of first-echelon tactical units were comprised of three components designed to destroy or capture enemy troops and equipment and seize and control key territory: the immediate mission, or blizhaiashcha zadacha; the subsequent mission, or posledyushchaia zadacha; and the follow-up mission, or napravlenie dal'neishego nastupleniia. Within those broad missions, regiments were often assigned a key mission of the day, or zadacha dnia, which were goals that had to be completed within a specific time frame-- no excuses accepted.
Whether it was in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, or Chechnya in 1994, Moscow relied on its military and not on diplomacy to solve problems in its own backyard. Its guiding principles