On this day 22 June in 1941 Adolf Hitler, announcing (conveniently) that the 1939 non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union was a "stain on Germany’s record" and that it was time to have a pop at the ‘untermensch’, sent three million men, supported by more than 3,000 tanks, 7,000 guns and nearly 3,000 aircraft across Nazi Germany’s border into the Soviet Union. The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, was, by all accounts, astonished - he had not been expecting any German visitors until 1942 and had not even ironed a tablecloth in preparation. The Germans, of course, quickly over-ran the border posts enabling Herr ‘Noballs’ Goebels to announce a great victory on national radio the "greatest the world has ever seen". Dear old Winston had a handle on things, of course, he told parliament that Hitler was a "bloodthirsty guttersnipe" and announced "The Russian danger is our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe", which wasn’t bad for a man who only days before had been expressing his own outspoken opposition to communism in no uncertain terms "A communist" he said "is like a crocodile: when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up". Operation Barbarossa - anyone for crocodiles?
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