Operation Barbarossa - the Drive on Smolensk Timeline

With conquests over Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete - Hitler now looks to taking down the Red monster in the East. Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union - is enacted. In doing so, he has now committed Germany to a second front that it could ill-afford. What follows is an early success for the German Army, encircling and annihilating Soviet army divisions until eventually taking Smolensk itself.

With momentum and weather on its side, the German Army has Moscow for the taking. Unfortunately for them, German High Command orders General Guderian (master of the Blitzkrieg) to now concentrate his forces to the south towards the Soviet Army near Kiev. This single strategic move would become the unraveling of any future German Army action on Soviet soil.

Though early returns of the massive operation faired comparatively well to early invasions schemes, Adolph Hitler had inevitably underestimated Soviet defiance within this simple statement:

"You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."