New book by a leading military historian! Rethinking the tragedy of 1941. Reassessment of the first battles of the Great Patriotic War. The whole truth about the great battle for Belarus. When it comes to the June catastrophe of the Western Front, flaming airfields immediately come to mind, the latest T-34 and KVs abandoned on the sidelines, dull crowds of prisoners - historians still present the Border Battle as a beating of a huge, poorly organized mass of Red Army soldiers by a few, but mobile and superbly controlled German troops. Do these ideas correspond to reality? Did the Red Army in June 41st have numerical superiority on the border? Did the border airfields "sleep"? Was the defeat of the Western Front an inevitable pattern - or a consequence of egregious command mistakes?