In James Holland's work The War in the West: The Rise of Hitler (Volume 1 of 3), he manages to take a broad view of Allied and Axis outlooks. That said, he also looks at how the war affected individuals in all countries, military and civilian. Toward the end of the book in his discussion of Barbarossa and the lead up to it, he makes what I think is as good an observation about this ill-fated attack as I have come across He claims that no matter when it was begun, Barbarossa was doomed to failure. While he talks about the problems of the problems of supply and adventures elsewhere, this seems to be at the heart of Germany's reason for failure. The truth was, those same old problems that had plagued Prussia and then Germany for centuries had not gone away: the lack of natural resources and the geographical isolation from the world’s sea lanes meant the Reich had to avoid long, attritional conflicts at all costs. The booty plundered from the early victories had provided a short-term fillip and not much more, so that by midsummer 1941 Germany was growing short of all manner of materiel – even manpower. There were now 7.3 million men in the Wehrmacht, including teenagers, who accounted for some 660,000 recruits a year, but that was it as far as trained young men of military age was concerned; by June 1941, the manpower barrel was beginning to be scraped, and because BARBAROSSA was yet another do-or-die, go-for-broke gamble, the best available manpower was now either committed to the initial assault or already in action elsewhere, such as North Africa and the Mediterranean. Reserves for the Army amounted to 385,000 men.
