Capra's Battle of Russia does exactly what you would expect it to. It tells the story of the german invasion of the Soviet Union during the second world war, accompanied by the great combat footage we've come to expect from Capra, in addition to good narrating and an interesting backstory. The documentary doesn't just start up right away and immediately start telling viewers why Hitler thought it was a good idea to attack a country so much bigger than his own. In order to comprehend why he did this, you have to go back much further. In the film, the narration lets us know that Adolf Hitler never hid the fact that communism was going to be his country's ultimate nemesis. However, like many world leaders before him, he became obsessed with power and gained something of a god complex. Once all the other countries around germany had been subdued, Hitler turns his attention to his greatest test thus far: invading the Soviet Union. The enormous expanses of this country would provide Lebensraum, or living space for the germanic people. Unfortunately for germany, Mussolini had decided to invade greece around roughly the same time and his invasion force had been pushed back by the smaller but extremely resilient greek army. Hitler is forced to come to the aid of his bumbling ally, delaying the attack on russia by several crucial days. The documentary also says how when Operation Barbarossa does begin, the germans still manage to do extremely well. In the first day or two, hundreds of russian planes are blown up, mostly on the ground. With their air cover gone, the badly led soviet armies faltered and melted away. The german strategy of Blitzkrieg (the same strategy that subdued all the other countries Hitler invaded) only gets the germans so far this time. Using very entertaining animation sequences, we learn how blitzkrieg failed in russia because of the same thing that had stopped Napoleon over a century earlier: the weather. The brutal cold and mud combined with the vast size of the USSR meant that Hitler's forces were now bogged down fighting an enemy that never seemed to give up. Not only this, but the soviets also had a strategy of their own for dealing with blitzkrieg tactics. They would keep falling back and running away from the germans on purpose, because the germans had traditionally used their tanks to punch through enemy defenses, splitting them into smaller sections and picking them off once they were cut off from each other. The soviets didn't fall for this, and kept retreating until it reached a point where the germans encountered one gigantic defensive line that was too thick to break through with any number of tanks. We also see how Leo Tolstoy (who wrote War and Peace) had his house converted into a museum, and it was later burned by the nazis. The germans would continue to commit horrible atrocities against soviet citizens during their conquest of russia, and this no doubt contributed to the crimes soviets would later commit against german civilians. Given russia's long history of repelling invading armies, it seemed like the germans were destined to fail when they invaded. The film even begins by showing various previous attempts to conquer russia in the 1200s, 1700s, and 1800s. They all failed. Capra managed to put together a well made and enjoyable world war 2 documentary just like how he expertly made the other "Why We Fight" films. In this one specifically, we are shown the reason why the nazis failed in russia: the soviets were willing to sacrifice everything they had in order to win.
Review of The Battle of Russia
