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Whether the Battle of Russia would turn out to be also the most important battle in man's books was out of the German soldiers' hands. That depended on the performance of the Russians.
How long would the Russians last? Almost no one except the Russians was convinced that they could trounce the Germans. But if the Russians could put up a long and bitter fight on their own soil, if they could make Hitler pay far more than he thought he was going to have to pay, especially if they could prolong the war into one more winter, then they might give the Battle of Russia a glory commensurate with its size.
What were the chances of their doing this? The Russian chances of holding out indefinitely were conditioned by timing; by geography; by the quantity and quality of the opposing armies; by the quality of the opposing leaders. On these grounds their chances were not too bright.
Death Before the Deadline. The crisis came at a time chosen by Adolf Hitler. He apparently recognized that U.S. entry into the war would make the struggle a long one. He recognized, after the assault on Crete, that the invasion of an island which was defended by airplanes as well as Navy and ground forces would not be easy; he might have to choke Britain by attrition. He recognized that he would need food, fuel and factories of a large part of Russia. He further recognized that his pact with Joseph Stalin was not worth a ruble. For a long war he had to be sure of Russian supplies. If Stalin could not be bluffed into letting Germans take charge of Russia's economy, Germans would have to take it by force.
The clash, therefore, was bound to come. The Russians evidently knew it too. They took steps to prepare. They reformed their Army, redesigned their equipment on the basis of the latest lessons of the war. According to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germans in Belgrade found a report to the former Government of Yugoslavia from its military attaché in Moscow, dated Feb. 17, 1940:
"According to information received from Soviet sources, armaments for the Air Force, tank corps and artillery in accordance with the experiences of the present war are in full progress and will, in the main, have been completed by August 1941."
Adolf Hitler decided to catch Russia before the deadline. As soon as his armored divisions had finished their work in Yugoslavia and Greece, he swung them around in a sharp arc, let them pause for amazingly swift refitting and reorganization in Austria and Bohemia, then sheered them into eastern Poland alongside divisions already there. He concentrated infantry divisions from France and Germany in Poland and East Prussia. He built eight strategic roads and many air-dromes in Slovakia. He seized Lemnos and Samothrace, Aegean islands at the mouth of the Dardanelles which served to bottle the Russian Black Sea Fleet. He won Turkey to benevolent neutrality. He persuaded Finland and Rumania, where he had kept large pools of troops for months, to prepare to get back lands taken by Russia.