The largest military operation in history — 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union on a 1,800-mile front. Three army groups drove toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. Soviet forces collapsed in catastrophic encirclements; 3.5 million Soviet soldiers were captured in the first five months. But the vast distances, early winter, and fierce Soviet resistance slowed the advance. German forces were stopped short of Moscow in December.
Hitler's greatest strategic blunder. By attacking the USSR, Germany created the alliance of convenience — Britain, America, and the Soviet Union — that would inevitably destroy it. The Eastern Front would kill 30 million people and consume the vast majority of Germany's military strength for four years.
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From June to August 1976, the Lebanese Forces and allied Maronite militias besieged Tel al-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee camp in East Beirut holding some 30,000 residents. The camp was systematically shelled and its supply lines cut for over fifty days. When the camp fell on August 12, 1976, Phalangist fighters massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians and fighters attempting to flee along designated evacuation corridors.
Tel al-Zaatar was the most lethal single event of the early war. It demonstrated Maronite militia willingness to wage total war on Palestinian civilian populations and foreshadowed the Sabra and Shatila massacre six years later.
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Seven B-2 Spirit bombers flew from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, as part of Operation Midnight Hammer. The strike package dropped GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Fordow and Natanz. The Pentagon said Iran did not fire on the package; public reporting did not establish a reliable site casualty count.
Fordow housed thousands of advanced IR-6 centrifuges enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels. Its depth made it the hardest target on Iran's nuclear map. Whether the strikes destroyed the facility or merely its top levels became the central post-strike intelligence debate, with implications for whether further strikes would be needed.
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B-2 bombers dropped GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on the underground Natanz facility during Operation Midnight Hammer. The official briefing did not describe the B-52, F-15E, and surface-ship combination previously claimed here.
Natanz had been sabotaged twice before — by the Stuxnet computer worm (2010) and by a physical explosion attributed to Israeli intelligence (2021). A direct US military strike was categorically different in scale and international consequence. Iran's entire centrifuge inventory was concentrated here.
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A United States guided-missile submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawk land-attack missiles against infrastructure at Isfahan as part of Operation Midnight Hammer. The IAEA reported no increase in off-site radiation levels and did not provide a casualty count.
Isfahan represented the upstream end of Iran's nuclear supply chain. Destroying conversion capacity alongside enrichment facilities was intended to prevent rapid reconstitution — the lesson of previous, more limited strikes on Iran's program.
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