Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, involved a number of breakthroughs and encirclements by motorized forces.

Many historians now hold the position that blitzkrieg was not a military theory, and the campaigns conducted by the German military in 1939 to circa, 1942 ( with the exception of Operation Barbarossa ) were improvised invasions put together and modified at the last moment and therefore was not a proper military strategy.

It was only after the Battle of France German thinking reverted to the possibility of a blitzkrieg method for the Balkan Campaign and Operation Barbarossa.

The initial, formal killings of the Final Solution were undertaken by the SS Einsatzgruppen ( Task Forces ) death squads who followed the Wehrmacht during the Operation Barbarossa invasion of the USSR in June 1941.

On the Eastern Front, Soviet fighter forces were overwhelmed during the opening phases of Operation Barbarossa.

In 1941 the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.

* 1941: Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

His special directive, the " Guidelines in Special Spheres re Directive No. 21 ( Operation Barbarossa )", read: " In the operations area of the army, the Reichsführer-SS has been given special tasks on the orders of the Führer, in order to prepare the political administration.

During the early morning of 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler broke the pact by implementing Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet held territories and the Soviet Union that began the war on the Eastern Front.

* 1941 – German troops capture the city of Białystok during Operation Barbarossa.

* 1941 – Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

On 29 March 1941, during a conversation with Matsuoka, Ribbentrop as instructed by Hitler told the Japanese nothing about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler believed that he could defeat the Soviet Union on his own and preferred that the Japanese attack Britain instead.

It was Ribbentrop's hope that a striking German success in Iraq might lead to Hitler abandoning his plans for Operation Barbarossa, and focusing instead on the struggle with Britain.

Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference for focusing the war effort against Britain, on 28 June 1941, Ribbentrop began a sustained effort to have Japan attack the Soviet Union without bothering to inform Hitler first.

Philby provided Stalin with advance warning of Operation Barbarossa and of the Japanese intention to strike south at Singapore instead of attacking the USSR as Hitler had urged.

The invasion was cancelled in December 1940, when Hitler ordered preparations to be made for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

This was a fortunate position since the Luftwaffe's strategy of focusing its striking power on one front started to unravel with the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Situation in Europe by May / June 1941, immediately before Operation Barbarossa

* 1941 – World War II: In Slonim, German forces engaged in Operation Barbarossa murdered 9000 Jews in a single day.

Operation Barbarossa, or Case Barbarossa, was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.

Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history in both manpower and casualties.

Most importantly, Operation Barbarossa opened up the Eastern Front, to which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history.

Reinhard Heydrich was killed after an attack by British trained Czechoslovak soldiers on behalf of the Czechoslovak government in exile in Operation Anthropoid, and knowledge from decoded transmissions allowed the U. S. to carry out a targeted attack, killing Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto while he was travelling by plane.

Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, was almost killed by his own officers, and survived various attempts by other persons and organizations ( such as Operation Foxley, though this plan was never put into practice ).

In 1986, U. S. President Ronald Reagan ( who survived an assassination attempt himself ) ordered the Operation El Dorado Canyon air raid on Libya in which one of the primary targets was the home residence of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi.

It was soon used in combat — in March 1986 against a Libyan SA-5 site in the Gulf of Sidra, and then Operation Eldorado Canyon in April.

HARM was used extensively by the United States Navy and the United States Air Force for Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War of 1991.

The occupation of these facilities in October 1943 was codenamed Operation Alacrity by the British.

The most recent overseas operation of the Navy was along the coast of Libya as part of Operation Unified Protector.

He was in command of all Allied ground forces during Operation Overlord from the initial landings until after the Battle of Normandy.

After Gott was killed flying back to Cairo Churchill was persuaded by Brooke, who by this time was Chief of the Imperial General Staff to appoint Montgomery, who had only just been nominated to replace Alexander as commander of the British ground forces for Operation Torch.

The conquest of Libya was essential for airfields to support Malta and to threaten the rear of Axis forces opposing Operation Torch.

The Battle of Peleliu, codenamed Operation Stalemate II, was fought between the United States and the Empire of Japan in the Pacific Theater of World War II, from September – November 1944 on the island of Peleliu, present-day Palau.

In 2002, it was a primary combat zone in Operation Defensive Shield, a major military offensive by the Israeli Defense Forces ( IDF ).

After the Taliban government was toppled during Operation Enduring Freedom, Rabbani returned to Kabul and served as a temporary President from November to December 20, 2001, when Hamid Karzai was chosen at the Bonn International Conference on Afghanistan.

For the next five years he and the Northern Alliance were busy fighting the Taliban until the 2001 US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in which the Taliban government was toppled.

Indeed, the final German blitzkrieg operation in the west, Operation Wacht am Rhein, was planned to take place during poor weather which grounded Allied aircraft.

By the summer of 1944 the reversal of fortune was complete and Operation Bagration saw Soviet forces inflict crushing defeats on Germany through the aggressive use of armour, infantry and air power in combined strategic assault, known as deep operations.

Germany's last offensive on its Western front, Operation Wacht am Rhein, was an offensive launched towards the vital port of Antwerp in December 1944.

To stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Albanians by nationalist Serbs in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's province of Kosovo, Clinton authorized the use of American troops in a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, named Operation Allied Force.

The administration then launched a four-day bombing campaign named Operation Desert Fox, lasting from December 16 to December 19, 1998.

He named it after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the site of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon tests in July that year.

Hermann Göring had promised the Luftwaffe would complete the destruction of the encircled armies, but aerial operations did not prevent the evacuation of the majority of Allied troops ( which the British named Operation Dynamo ); some 330, 000 French and British were saved.

Himmler took over leadership of the RSHA and stepped up the pace of the killing of European Jewry in Aktion Reinhard ( Operation Reinhard ), named in Heydrich's honour.

D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commences with the landing of 155, 000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France.

In 1983 L. Ron Hubbard was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in an international information infiltration and theft project called " Operation Snow White ".

In the single-player game, the player assumes the role of a Marine named Bitterman taking part in " Operation Alien Overlord ", a desperate attempt to protect Earth from an alien invasion by launching a counter-attack on the home planet of the hostile cybernetic Strogg civilization.

Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in an operation code named Operation Anthropoid.

The project was named Operation Reinhard after Heydrich.

The United States Navy contributed extensive special operations assets to the invasion of Panama, code named Operation Just Cause.

The Lavon Affair refers to a failed Israeli covert operation, code named Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the Summer of 1954.

Britain's first airborne assault took place on February 10, 1941 when, what was then known as II Special Air Service ( some 37 men of 500 trained in No. 2 Commando plus three Italian interpreters ), parachuted into Italy to blow up an aqueduct in a daring raid named Operation Colossus.

Britain ’ s first airborne assault took place on February 10, 1941, when ' X ' Troop, No 11 Special Air Service Battalion ( which was formed from No 2 Commando and subsequently became 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment ) dropped into southern Italy from converted Whitley bombers flying from Malta and demolished a span of the aqueduct near Tragino in a daring night raid named Operation Colossus.

Operation Fortitude was the codename for a World War II military deception employed by the Allied nations as part of an overall deception strategy ( code named Bodyguard ) during the build-up to the 1944 Normandy landings.

The fund, named " Operation Jabotinsky ", is named after Russian Vladimir Jabotinsky.

The operation — code named Operation Reservist — failed as the two Banff class sloops were shattered by crossfire from the French vessels there.

Starting in 1995, Hampshire Police began a series of at least 56 raids, code named ' Operation Washington ', that eventually resulted in the August to November 1997 Portsmouth trial of Green Anarchist editors Booth, Saxon Wood, Noel Molland and Paul Rogers, as well as Animal Liberation Front ( ALF ) Press Officer Robin Webb and Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group ( ALFSG ) newsletter editor Simon Russell.

A project of Marks ', named by him " Operation Gift-Horse ", was a deception scheme aimed to disguise the more secure WOK code traffic as poem code traffic, so that German cryptographers would think " Gift-Horsed " messages were easier to break than they actually were.

The wing provided photographic intelligence for the Son Tay prison camp raid named Operation Ivory Coast, in North Vietnam, November 1970.

Survivor ( with Purple Heart ) of the fierce World War II Battle of Anzio ( Italy ) Operation Shingle ; coach of the Canton Warriors High School Football team for 32 years-their home field is named in his honor.

The two Miss Golden Globes named that year were Eva Six ( of the films Operation Bikini and Beach Party ) and Donna Douglas ( of television's The Beverly Hillbillies ), respectively.

During the Second World War, Bexhill was named as a point to attack as part of Operation Sea Lion by Nazi Germany.