Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s attempted invasion of the Soviet Union, was launched 75 years ago today with an air and ground attack at several locations on what became the Eastern Front. More than three million Axis soldiers faced off against a similar number of Soviet soldiers.

Ultimately, it did not work. The USSR withstood and eventually repelled the invasion, but Nazi Germany’s invasion set a record which still stands: it was the largest invasion force ever mounted, the single largest military operation ever mounted, with four million total soldiers on one side alone, along the longest front line: 1800 miles. When it was all over, the invasion led to the fight over the Eastern Front, a years-long fight which saw more death and destruction than was seen in the entire rest of World War II: 26 million individuals lost their lives in the fight for the Eastern Front.

Adolph Hitler thought the Soviet Union would fall in three months. He was wrong.

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The Beatles (above, with Pete Best) participated in the group’s first-ever studio recording session 55 years ago today in Hamburg, Germany. Among the songs recorded were “My Bonnie” and “Cry for a Shadow,” an instrumental that remains the only song credited to the songwriting pair of George Harrison and John Lennon. “Cry for a Shadow” (after the jump):
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Today is the first full day of summer. The summer solstice came last evening at 6:34 p.m. EDT.

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It took two ratifying conventions for New Hampshire to accept the United States Constitution, one in February and one in June, but on this date in 1788, by a vote of 57–47, New Hampshire ratified the Constitution. With New Hampshire, nine of the 13 states had ratified the document as the law of the new land, which set in motion the process of forming the new nation’s federal government.

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John Lee Hooker died 15 years ago today.
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U.S. Patent Number 1647 was granted on this date in 1840 to Samuel Morse for his “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” It was for the signals, the “dots and dashes”—the “Morse Code,” as it was referred to later—that was used in communicating via the telegraph.

The idea of the telegraph, as well as the idea that such a communications invention was needed, was pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic: no one inventor can truly be credited with the invention. Several inventors, Morse included, worked independently of each other in designing and constructing the machines and laying out longer and longer lengths of wire to test them.
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