by John Keegan
Stalin does indeed seem to have come close to breakdown in the first weeks of Barbarossa. ‘For a week’, describes Professor John Erickson,
it was all the anonymity of ‘the Soviet government’, the ‘Central Committee’ and ‘Sovnarkom’, the clamour of organisation, and the rattle of Party exhortations. . . . Stalin, committed irrevocably to war in spite of himself, ‘locked himself in his quarters’ for three days at least after the first, catastrophic week-end. When he emerged, he was, according to an officer who saw him at first hand, ‘low in spirit and nervy’. . . . [He] put in no more than rare appearances at the Stavka in these early days; the main military administration was, for all practical purposes, seriously disorganised and the General Staff, with its specialists dispatched to the front commands, functioned with tantalisingly persistent slowness. . . . The Stavka discussions ground into an operational-administrative bog; while trying to formulate strategic-operational assignments, Stalin and his officers busied themselves with minutiae which devoured valuable time – the type of rifle to be issued to infantry units (standard or cavalry models), or whether bayonets were needed, and if so should they be triple-edged?
In fairness it must be said that Hitler also took refuge in the discussion of military minutiae as an escape from the pressure of crisis and often, if the crisis protracted, refused to discuss anything else, as the surviving fragments of his Stalingrad Führer conference records reveal. Stalin, by contrast, returned quickly to realities. On 3 July 1941, the eleventh day of the war, he broadcast to the Soviet people – an almost unprecedented event – and addressed the ‘comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters’ as his ‘friends’. Moreover, he moved at once to put the government of the Soviet Union on a war footing. The way in which he did so is almost incomprehensible to Westerners, attuned as they are to a strict separation between organs of state and political parties, civil power and military authority, bureaucrats and commanders. In peacetime the Soviet system blurred such distinctions; Stalin heightened this ambiguity in the structure he erected for war. His first move, on 30 June, was to create a State Defence Committee to oversee the political, economic and military aspects of the war; its membership, later slightly broadened, consisted of himself, Molotov, the Foreign Minister, Voroshilov, who had been Commissar for Defence from 1925 to 1940, Malenkov, his right-hand man in the party organisation, and – significantly – Beria, head of the secret police (NKVD). On 19 July he nominated himself as People’s Commissar for Defence and on 8 August secretly assumed the post of Supreme Commander; as Supreme Commander (though he continued to be identified only as Commissar for Defence) he controlled the Stačka, in effect the executive organ of the State Defence Committee (GKO), which oversaw both the General Staff and the operational commands or fronts. As the acts and decisions of the GKO automatically carried the authority of the council of People’s Commissars, of which Stalin was head, and as he could also detach officers of the General Staff, notably and most frequently Zhukov and Vasilevsky, to run fronts or direct specified operations, Stalin dominated the direction of the Great Patriotic War from top to bottom (the designation ‘patriotic’ had been used in his broadcast of 3 July). Though he cautiously disguised from the Soviet people his ultimate responsibility for command decision, and would emerge as Marshal, Generalissimo and ‘the great Stalin’ only when a roll of substantial victories had been secured, Stalin was effectively commander-in-chief from the beginning of July 1941 onwards. He was implacable in that role. When Army Group Centre resumed its advance on Moscow in October, his confidence was shaken almost as severely as it had been in June, but he never relaxed the grip of fear in which he held his subordinates: dismissal, disgrace, even execution were the penalties which awaited failures. General Ismay, Churchill’s military assistant who visited Moscow in October, noted the effect: ‘as [Stalin] entered the room every Russian froze into silence and the hunted look in the eyes of the generals showed all too plainly the constant fear in which they lived. It was nauseating to see brave men reduced to such servility.’
A few held out. Zhukov was notably robust, appearing not to be frightened by Mekhlis, the chief political commissar used by Stalin to bring others down. Zhukov had the advantage of having successfully commanded tanks against the Japanese in a brief and undeclared Russo-Japanese border war in Mongolia in 1939; more important, he was naturally tough, able to accept dismissal by Stalin from the post of Chief of the General Staff and to proceed to an operational command without diminished confidence in his own abilities, which he knew Stalin recognised. Others of Zhukov’s stamp were to appear, notably Rokossovsky and Konev. By the time all three were commanding fronts in 1944, Stalin’s difficulties in finding able subordinates were largely solved.
In the meantime, however, he had to do most of the work of directing the Great Patriotic War and running the Red Army himself; to a greater extent than was true of the high command of any other of the combatant powers, Stalin dominated Russia’s war effort. Hitler and his generals coexisted in a constant state of tension. Churchill imposed his will by argument, which prevailed less and less as the Americans took over an ever greater share of the fighting. Roosevelt largely presided over rather than directed his chiefs of staff. Stalin, however, dictated. All information flowed to him, wherever he was to be found during the day or night, whether in the Kremlin, at his country dacha at Kuntsevo or, while German bombs threatened Moscow, in an improvised headquarters on a platform of the Moscow underground railway; from him all orders flowed back. He held a situation conference three times a day, in a routine curiously similar to Hitler’s, hearing reports first at noon, then at four in the afternoon, and finally dictating orders directly to officers of the General Staff but in the presence of the Politburo between midnight and three or four in the morning.
Vasilevsky, in effect Stalin’s operations officer, playing a role equivalent to that of Jodl in Hitler’s headquarters, perceptively observed and later recorded the dictator’s methods of command. He noted that Stalin established his dominance over the military in the first year of the war, that is to say far more quickly than Hitler did over the Wehrmacht, perhaps because of his previous experience of operations as commissar of the First Cavalry Army during the Civil War. In the early months he took his confidence too far: in 1941 he was almost wholly responsible for the disaster at Kiev, having refused permission for withdrawal until it was too late for the defenders to escape encirclement; in 1942 he dismissed the danger of a renewed German offensive into southern Russia and committed Timoshenko’s fronts to the Kharkov counter-offensive, an altogether premature seizure of the initiative which resulted in over 200,000 Russians being taken prisoner – almost a repetition of the encirclements of the year before. Thereafter he was more cautious. It was eventually Zhukov and Vasilevsky who proposed the double envelopment at Stalingrad; they outlined the concept to Stalin in his office on 13 September 1942 and he accepted it only after they had reasoned away his cautious objections.
Zhukov’s highly retrospective assessment of Stalin’s worth as a commander was that he excelled above all as a military economist who knew how to collect reserves even while the front was consuming manpower in gargantuan mouthfuls. Certainly his achievement both at Stalingrad and in the two years that followed was to have such reserves at hand – he estimated to the British a consistent surplus over the Germans of some sixty divisions, probably an overestimate – whenever the Ostheer gave him the opportunity to profit by a strategic mistake. He deployed such a reserve in a counter-attack when the Germans had exhausted themselves in the offensive phase of the Kursk operation in July 1943. He sustained the success at Kursk by using his reserve in August to recapture Kharkov, the most fought-over city in the Soviet Union. By October his autumn offensive, fuelled by the units he held in reserve, had retaken all the most valuable territory won by the Ostheer during its advance into Russia in the two previous years – an enormous tract 650 miles in breadth from north to south, 150 miles in depth, beyond which only the Dnieper
, the last truly substantial military obstacle on the steppe, lay to oppose the Red Army’s advance. By the end of November the Red Army had secured three enormous bridgeheads on the European side of the Dnieper, had cut the Crimea off from contact with the Ostheer and stood poised to open its advance into Poland and Romania.
Ironically, victory brought Stalin a dilemma. Until Stalingrad he had been staving off defeat; until Kursk he still faced the risk of a disabling German initiative; until the advance to the Dnieper he fed, supplied and manned the Red Army by wartime improvisation. Thereafter he knew, like Churchill, that he ‘had won after all’. Germany’s armoured masse de manoeuvre no longer existed, while he had regained possession of his country’s most productive agricultural and industrial regions. Moreover, he could now count upon shifting much of the burden of destroying the Wehrmacht from the Red Army to the Allies. At Tehran on November 1943, Brooke, Churchill’s chief of staff, noted that in his quick and unerring appreciation of opportunity and situation he ‘stood out compared to Churchill and Roosevelt’. By one of the most brutal contrivances of public embarrassment recorded in diplomatic history, he shamed Churchill into conceding his total commitment to Overlord and to agreeing to name both a commander and a date. Thereafter he could be certain that from mid-1944 Hitler would be caught between two fires, and he could let that in the west blaze while he chose where he could most profitably apply the heat elsewhere. As events turned out, he chose to attack on his northern front, destroying Army Group Centre and driving the Germans back to the Vistula. However, that decision did not commit his hand. He still retained the option of either (like the Western Allies) committing all his strength to a final throw designed to destroy the Wehrmacht in a final battle for eastern Germany and Berlin, or diverting a major part of the Red Army’s force into southern Europe, there to build a Soviet equivalent of Hitler’s Tripartite Pact and so assure the Soviet Union against invasion for decades to come.
It was a tantalising choice. Stalin had not chosen to enter the Second World War; but he had chosen, even before it began, to profit from the tensions that brought it about. In the twenty-one months during which the war had raged while he stood on the sidelines, he had greatly profited from its unfolding. From his alliance with Hitler he had gained in turn eastern Poland, then – through the freedom the non-aggression pact had allowed him to attack Finland – eastern Karelia, then the Baltic states, finally Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Barbarossa had engulfed his country in the worst of the fighting brought on by the Second World War. By the summer of 1944, however, he could begin to consider again how best the Soviet Union might profit geopolitically from the war’s concluding stage. Stalin, even more than Hitler, was committed to a view of war as a political event. Between Barbarossa and Kursk the ‘correlation of forces’ had worked against him. Thereafter they began to operate to his advantage. Even as Hitler was laying the groundwork for his last offensive in the west, Stalin was considering where he might best seize the opportunities presented by the collapse of Hitler’s strategy in the east.
TWENTY-FIVE
Kursk and the Recapture of Western Russia
The disastrous Stalingrad campaign of 1942-3 left Hitler a debilitated and shaken man. Guderian, visiting him at his Ukrainian headquarters on 21 February 1943 on his unexpected reappointment to command as Chief of Panzer Troops, found him greatly changed since their last meeting in December 1941: ‘His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but lacked their former lustre, his cheeks were flecked with red. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure and was prone to angry outbursts and ill-considered decisions.’
His will to make decisions had also been weakened. In the year between the onset of the Battle of Moscow and the Russian encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad Hitler had exercised the Führerprinzip at its fullest. He had peremptorily dismissed generals who failed or displeased him and held the rest of the Generalität strictly obedient to his orders. Apart from the failure to advance boldly southward from Voronezh in July – and Bock had been sacked for that – his generals had done his will to the letter; that was precisely the problem. The triumphs of the 1942 campaign belonged exclusively to Hitler, but so too did the disasters, both the over-extension into the Caucasus and the defeat of Stalingrad. The consequent loss of twenty of the Ostheer’s divisions lay on his conscience, so that even two years afterwards he would confess to one of his doctors that his sleepless nights were filled with visions of the situation map marked with the positions occupied by the German divisions at the moment they were destroyed. The unspoken reproaches of his military intimates – Jodl and Keitel – were hard enough to bear; his self-recrimination was still more painful.
During the spring of 1943, therefore, in planning the Ostheer’s strategy Hitler conceded a freedom of action to his subordinates they had not known since his first exercises in command in 1940 and were certainly never to know again – although in other areas of policy he continued to make demands. Believing that Rommel lacked both ‘optimism’ and ‘staying power,’ he intervened heavily in the conduct of the battle against the Anglo-American armies in North Africa in the spring of 1943, releasing precious armoured units from his central reserve and requiring Goering to transfer air squadrons from Sicily to Tunisian airfields. He meanwhile hectored Goering’s subordinates about the worsening of the air war over Germany – Allied ‘round the clock’ bombing began on 25 February and heavy British or American raids on Berlin, Nuremberg, Essen, Bremen, Kiel and the Möhne-Eder dams followed in the next weeks. He demanded and got a measure of retaliation against Britain, commissioned Guderian to multiply German tank production and approved Goebbels’s programme for the promulgation of ‘total war’, outlined to him at a meeting with the Nazi Party’s Gauleiters at Rastenburg on 7 February. However, in the immediate direction of operations on the Eastern Front, his principal theatre of war-making, during the first half of 1943 he took a curiously tentative and indecisive part.
This was not to prove wholly to the Ostheer’s disadvantage. In Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, it had a battlefield commander of the highest quality, acutely sensitive to the tactical opportunities offered by the Red Army’s lumbering style of manoeuvre, yet strongly resistant to the psychological intimidation by which Hitler overcame the intellectual independence of his lesser generals. During February, however, in the aftermath of the Stalingrad surrender and his own aborted attempt to relieve Paulus’s Sixth Army, Manstein was discountenanced by an unexpectedly successful Soviet attack on the key city of Kharkov, west of the Don.
The Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad, and the subsequent disorder caused to the whole of the German southern front, had presented the Stavka for the first time with the prospect of seizing the initiative and throwing the Ostheer clean out of the Ukraine, Germany’s most valuable territorial acquisition in the Soviet Union. By the end of January a plan had been conceived for the Southern and South-West Fronts to advance as far as the line of the Dnieper, the third great river line beyond the Don and Donetz, by the spring thaw. Thereafter their neighbouring fronts would advance and swing north-westward to unseat Army Group Centre from the northern Ukraine and roll it back to Smolensk. The first and crucial move in the great offensive would be played by a Front Mobile Group, commanded by General M. M. Popov and consisting of four tank corps, which was to attack in the vanguard of Vatutin’s South-West Front and drive on Kharkov.
The Stavka plan was superficially well judged, for the Russian victory at Stalingrad had created three crises for the Germans. The Red Army’s advance from Stalingrad had thrown Manstein’s Army Group Don (renamed South on 12 February) back on to Rostov, the ‘gateway’ of the southern front. The enforced withdrawal of Kleist’s Army Group A from the Caucasus had carried it to the shore of the Sea of Azov, leaving a gap a hundred miles wide between his front and Manstein’s. Moreover, the continuation of Vatutin’s attack on the Hungarians def
ending Voronezh, north-west of Stalingrad, threatened after 14 January to detach Manstein’s northern flank from contact with Kluge’s Army Group B (Centre after 12 February). The opening stages of the Stavka’s offensive augured well for its success. Between 2 and 5 February Russian pressure on the lower Don was so intense that Hitler, at Manstein’s insistence, was forced to agree to the abandonment of Rostov, while a simultaneous advance from Voronezh on the upper Don brought Vatutin’s South-West Front to Kharkov on 14 February. A bitter battle for the city erupted, in which the population took part, and, despite the efforts of the elite I SS Panzer Corps (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and Das Reich divisions), the Germans were defeated and forced to abandon it on 16 February. As a result a gap nearly 200 miles wide yawned between Army Groups South and Centre.
The Stavka had, however, made two fatal miscalculations. One was to overestimate the Red Army’s capabilities. The other was to underestimate Manstein. ‘Both the Voronezh and South-West Fronts’, comments Professor John Erickson, the leading Western historian of the Great Patriotic War, ‘had done some prodigious fighting and covered great stretches of ground, following nothing less than a trail of destruction as retreating German units blew up bridges, buildings and airfields, tangled railway lines and damaged the few roads as much as possible.’ However, by mid-February the Popov spearhead, which had begun the offensive with only 137 tanks (no more than a single German Panzer division normally fielded), could put only fifty-three into action, while the so-called Third Tank Army of the Voronezh Front could find only six.
