German Bicycle Soldiers Before Barbarossa

German soldiers on bicycles (Radfahrtruppen) driving towards the German-Soviet demarcation line to their deployments before the attack on the USSR a.k.a. "Unternehmen Barbarossa" (Operation Barbarossa), June 1941. The Wehrmacht did invest in bicycle troops for Barbarossa, but the soviet road system was bad enough that most bike columns looked like this and mobility was effectively foot mobile with perhaps slightly greater combat load per soldier. As well, German bike troops frequently lacked organic artillery and engineers that the giant kessels that Barbarossa created forced the infantry to use to grind them down, and this further limited bike troop’s utility.

Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_infantry
https://www.feldgrau.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22483
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/h0afzb/why_no_bikes_in_barbarossa/
https://www.themodellingnews.com/2015/05/build-review-135th-german-military.html