The new commanders were rushed through staff college and other training schemes in the hope of equipping them for command in time. But the critical juncture was only months away and, though the feared security agency itself was also purged, the leadership of the Soviet Union’s defences had been much weakened.
Stalin, the controlling genius of Russia’s fortunes, no doubt had his moments of paranoia, confusion, even panic, when confronting situations of which he was not the master. He also had the destructive capacities of a believer. He was, however, aware of the costs of his action. He subsequently confessed that the protracted struggle with the peasants over collectivization was the fiercest he had known: ‘It was terrible,’ he told Churchill. ‘Four years it lasted.’ 30 The economic transformation cost the Soviet Union heavily in lives, although manipulation of the census figures for the late 1930s distorted the truth for some time. The scale of the deception has been calculated to have been as high as 2.9 million deaths, and it was most pronounced for provinces like Komi and Karelia, where GPU hard-labour camps had been sited. Such camps had been used ‘on a gigantic scale.’ 31 Furthermore, what Stalin saw as political stabilization achieved by the purges of the later 1930s was highly destructive of talent and expertise in every imaginable field. Such was the price. What had it bought?
The chief benefit was in large quantities of military hardware and capacity. By 1941 the Red Army could field more than half of all the tanks in the world, including a thousand excellent T-34 tanks. A further forty T-34S were rolling off the production lines every week. There were almost 2,000 fighter aircraft in service, including numbers of the MiG-3. 32 At its best, the standard of weapon design was excellent. Nevertheless, there were serious problems. Production of the better models was too slow, and the equipment was not distributed to best advantage. The ideas of the Red Army’s leading tanks specialist, D. Pavlov, had prevailed over those of Tukhachevskii. 33 And after the purges there were problems of leadership, personified by the incompetent Marshal Voroshilov, who was responsible for a series of organizational mistakes which were to show up when hostilities began.
The Second World War was preceded by two curtain-raisers. The first clash to involve the Soviet Union came in August 1939, over the territory of Khalkhin-Gol in the Far East, which was in dispute with Japan. 34 The second, in the autumn and winter of 1940, was with Finland. In the first, Soviet troops, deploying several hundred of the new tanks under General Zhukov, were successful in heavy fighting. In the second, Soviet forces were out-manoeuvred and badly mauled by Finnish troops who were seriously outnumbered. Although the Finns were eventually ground down by overwhelming force, 35 the encounter did not bode well for the Soviet Union when Hitler ordered his surprise invasion in 1941.
After the Munich Agreement of 1938, France and Britain decided that they must make no more concessions to Hitler’s Germany and began to entertain the possibility of co-operating with the Soviet Union in defence of Poland and Romania. Eventually military talks were held in Moscow. However, the threatened states were reluctant to allow Soviet troops to cross into their territory before hostilities actually began, which was understandable but impractical given the nature of mid-twentieth-century warfare. For their part, the Soviets were at least as worried about Japan as about Germany, and were disinclined to make sacrifices for powers which had been adamantly hostile to them until now. Irritated by the sluggish pace of negotiations, the Soviet diplomats became more and more ambivalent. Then the German government, with uncannily good timing, made an offer of attractive terms. A deal with Germany would remove the spectre of having to fight a war on two fronts. Besides, the Soviet Union had been ostracized for decades, and now a major Power was offering to treat with it on equal terms. Stalin was flattered, 36 and decided it would be better to sup with the German devil than with the stand-offish French and British.
Under the secret terms of the Nazi—Soviet Pact which was then drawn up, Stalin connived at a German invasion of Poland in return for territory on his western frontier — eastern Poland as far as the river Bug, and a sphere of influence that included the Baltic states. But Stalin did not move when German forces invaded Poland on 1 August 1939. Only when it became obvious that the Poles had been decisively defeated did he order Soviet troops in, and call in the promises under the Pact.
Much as Alexander I had done with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, Stalin had delayed a major war by concluding a spheres-of-influence agreement with Hitler. Not only had he delayed invasion, he had thrust out the Soviet Union’s western frontiers to create a useful screen against attack, and had regained old imperial territories lost in the aftermath of the Revolution. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became constituent republics within the Soviet Union. Finland remained independent, but after the winter war which followed it was forced to cede a strategically important area in Karelia, south of Murmansk and the northern shores of Lake Ladoga. For good measure Stalin also took the opportunity to take back Bessarabia. He did not expect to remain permanently at peace with capitalist powers — either Germany or, more particularly, Japan. But he now felt secure against any imminent attack from the West. He deceived himself.
There were intimations that Hitler might order an invasion. Army intelligence warned of the possibility in April; other disturbing rumours came through diplomatic channels. The Kremlin’s response was sluggish. Construction work was started on defensive positions, a few more units were moved into the Baltic region, but Stalin was sceptical of the warnings, suspecting that the Western Powers were trying to trick him into war with Germany. When the blow fell, on 22 June 1941, it caught him by surprise and most of the Red Army unprepared. 37
The invading German armies were joined by substantial contingents of Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Croatian formations, so that, as with Napeolon’s invasion, the operation took on the appearance of a crusade. As the crack panzer divisions rolled forward there were prospects of their being joined by a ‘Fifth Column’ of the disaffected, not least among the subject nationalities, particularly in the newly Sovietized Baltic states, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
The next four months saw a series of unmitigated military disasters for the Soviet regime. 38 Enemy forces advanced on every front, Moscow was threatened, and Stalin fell out with his own Chief of Staff, Zhukov. The issue concerned high strategy. Zhukov advised the transfer of units from the Far East to stiffen the defences of Moscow. Stalin would not have it and made the ailing Shaposhnikov Chief of Staff while assuming direction of the war himself. Yet he was soon to contemplate having to abandon Russia and seeking asylum with his new-found Western ally Britain. Soviet losses were already enormous in terms of both men and material. By September Leningrad (as St Petersburg was now called) was under siege, Moscow itself was in danger, and in the south German forces were racing towards the lower Volga. Survivors of the army purges were quickly released, fed a meal or two, and pressed back into service.
This war was not like the others, and Marshal Tukhachevskii, executed nearly three years earlier, had foreseen what form it would take:
Operations will be inestimably more intensive and severe than in the First World War. Then, frontier battles in France lasted for two or three days. Now, such an offensive operation can last for weeks. As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandized by the Germans, this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want… to fight it out. If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself… [the] struggle would be bitter and protracted … In the final resort it would depend on who had the greater moral fibre and who at the close of operations disposed of operational reserves in depth. 39
Already Tukhachevskii’s prognostications were being borne out, and the outlook seemed increasingly bleak. Yet, despite the losses and the panic, there were some more hopeful indications of the moral fibre which Tukhachevskii had thought might be decisive. Some desperate counterattacks were somehow organized; some units had continued to fight doggedly on although surrounded; others opera
ted as partisans in the invader’s rear. All this slowed the tempo of the invader’s progress. At the same time a vital operation finally got under way — to evacuate such war industry as had not already fallen into enemy hands out of the line of the enemy’s advance into the safety of Central Asia and Siberia. The scale of the effort is reflected in statistics:
In the first three months of the war … [the railways] moved two and a half million troops up to the front lines, and shifted 1,360 heavy plants … 455 to the Urals, 210 to Western Siberia, 200 to the Volga and more than 250 to Kazakhstan and central Asia … The evacuation had used 1,500,000 trucks, and by mid-November 914,380 waggons had shifted 38,514 loads for the aviation industry, 20,046 for ammunition plants, 18,823 for weapons factories, 27,426 for steel plants, 15,440 for the tank industry …
In Saratov, machinery began operating and the walls of a new factory went up around it; fourteen days after the last train-load of machines were unloaded, the first MiG fighter rolled out. On 8 December, the Kharkov Tank Works turned out its first twenty-five T-34 tanks, just short of ten weeks after the last engineers left Kharkov, trudging along the rail tracks. 40
Over the winter of 1941—2 the industrial plants in the Urals were to produce about 4,500 tanks, 3,000 aircraft and 14,000 pieces of artillery. Supplies were also shipped from Britain and, under Lend-Lease arrangements, from the United States - especially lorries, jeeps, machinery, munitions and corned meat. But these had to take perilous routes to Murmansk or the Far East through seas infested with enemy submarines.
Once again a Russian migration was in progress. Troops and factories were not the only items on the move. The transportation of entire peoples was soon under way. Its Canadian and American allies may have interned citizens who were ethnic Japanese, the British detained German and Italian citizens, but the Soviet Union deported Chechens, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachais, Crimean Tatars and even the Volga Germans, who had been domiciled there since the eighteenth century, to put them beyond reach of the invaders. These measures may have reflected Stalin’s suspicious nature or perhaps his caution, for there is little evidence that the regime was popular among these peoples.
Moscow’s defences held despite the battering, and a carefully timed counter-offensive was launched on 5 December. Within two weeks it succeeded in breaking the German front and relieving the pressure on the capital. Attention turned north to Leningrad, which, though surrounded and subjected to unremitting pounding, still held out. A fresh German offensive against it, launched in January, achieved only limited success and soon ran out of steam. Meanwhile, under cover of the dark days, something very like a revolution was taking place in the senior command. Generals like Pavlov, who had been found wanting, were replaced, Mekhlis was demoted, Voroshilov (who was said never to have opened a book on his trade) was sidelined. The new men — Vasilevskii, Sokolovskii, Vatutin, Malinovskii, Koniev, Rokossovskii, Chuikov — were more competent, and had proved themselves in the crucible of battle. Yet Stalin, like Hitler, still kept command in his own hands, and his most brilliant general, Zhukov, though involved in the high command, was still excluded from the top post that would have given him the direction of operations.
Meanwhile, in December 1941 the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side, and in February 1942 they had struck south against Singapore. This finally diminished fears of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, allowing more troops to be transferred from the Pacific to the European front. Even so it was to be a close call.
In May 1942 a Soviet offensive at Kharkov failed, and over twenty divisions guarding the Crimean front were routed. This reverse finally convinced Stalin of the incompetence of the commander, Mekhlis. Sevastopol was cut off except for perilous submarine runs, and was subjected to pulverizing attacks. When the defending guns finally ran out of ammunition, the surviving gunners blew them up; Sevastopol succumbed. Voronezh fell, and in July Rostov-on-Don. Enemy units crossed the Don and threatened to wheel south into the Caucasus. Had they succeeded, the prospects for the Soviets would have been grim. Not only would the Baku oilwells be at Hitler’s disposal, but he would be able to call on the help of local peoples who would be as grateful as many Ukrainians had been at first for liberation from Communism. But General von Manstein’s thrust was stopped on the river Terek. He had run out of fuel.
Attention now centred on Stalingrad, and it was a measure of the importance Stalin attached to this battle that Zhukov was brought in as his deputy. The fighting was as grim as any battle fought in this war or any other. The German command fully expected the city to fall before long; attempt after attempt to relieve it failed, and Soviet security troops are said to have executed as many as 14,000 Soviet soldiers for cowardice in order to stop flight and prevent desertion. 41 The two sides fought building by building through late September and early October - and still the terrible struggle was not ended. At this point preparations, supervised by Zhukov personally, were made for an offensive to start in November 1942. Reserves were brought in, and what remained of shattered units were re-formed into new ones and re-equipped; wounded soldiers released from hospital were posted in to provide a leavening of battle-hardened men.
In the Stalingrad operations Soviet artillery loosed off as much ammunition as in the rest of the war. 42 Five million German troops were deployed over the front — with dive-bomber support at crucial times. The Soviet forces lacked air support - but the Soviet command mustered over 6 million men against the invader.
The eventual Soviet assault was heralded by salvos of rockets. Then 3,500 guns and mortars roared and thundered out their bombardment along a 14-mile front. After an interval, tanks bearing sharpshooters began to trundle forward through the freezing fog. The Germans counterattacked, sending in the Romanian Third Army, which quickly met its doom. The Soviet tanks moved forward. The most convenient point for crossing the river Don was seized, and at 2 p.m. on 26 November units of the Stalingrad front joined up with tanks of South-Western Command to surround between 80,000 and 90,000 men of the German Sixth Army under Friedrich von Paulus. He thought of breaking out. Hitler ordered him to stay firm. In the end he was forced to surrender.
By the end of January 1943 it was clear that the invader’s southern front had been shattered and preparations went forward for an offensive to break its backbone. The triumph at Stalingrad had given a huge fillip to morale, and the fresh troops rushed up to front-line positions were no longer merely dour and determined but eager for battle. The elation, however, led to overconfidence on Stalin’s part. Rather than concentrating resources on the achievement of one objective and against one of the three enemy army groups, he ordered a series of offensives along the entire front. 43
This onslaught, which began in late January and early February, was overambitious and soon ground to a halt. The Germans regained some territory; the scales of war tipped one way, then the other, until eventually a state of equilibrium was reached. In August the city of Kharkov was finally retaken, and then a battle which was to take its name from the Kursk salient began to take shape. It covered a vast area of the steppe, lasted from August to the beginning of October, involved multiple armies, and was directed on the Soviet side by Zhukov and on the German by Field Marshal von Manstein. It is regarded by some specialists as the decisive battle of the Second World War, and it ended in complete Soviet victory. The German general staff itself concluded that from that point on Soviet Russia would surpass Germany in the mobilization of men and the production of equipment, and in the field of propaganda. 44 It was not long before yet another mass offensive was started and Soviet troops were crossing the Dnieper and racing towards the western frontier. The tide of war had changed decisively.
This awesome result, which had seemed so unlikely less than two years earlier, was the product of many factors. Chief, perhaps, was what Tukhachevskii had termed ‘moral fibre’ - the grit and determination not only of the Soviet forces, but of the civilian population, not least the wo
men. But for the patience and fortitude of its people in the face of many months of bombardment and privation, the ruined city of Leningrad could not have withstood the siege; but for the unremitting efforts of workers, even in the hardest circumstances, the front-line soldiers would never have been supplied. As the danger had increased, the Soviet population — including most of the national minorities, peasant kulaks, and even victims of the purges — seemed to acquire a commitment which had not existed in the beginning. As in 1812, the war had become a genuinely patriotic struggle. The invaders, it seems, had themselves generated the antibodies which would smother them.
Yet in retrospect it also seems that the Soviet regime was aided by some strokes of good fortune. One was Japan’s refusal to co-ordinate its war plan with Germany’s. Another was Hitler’s faulty direction of strategy, especially in the case of Stalingrad. Another self-imposed handicap was his racial doctrine. Many Ukrainians had welcomed the invaders, greeting them with bread and salt. Yet Nazi racial theory classified Slavs as inferior, and barred their acceptance on equal terms as some army officers had advised. Ukraine had at first proved a good recruiting ground for the invaders, but the punitive actions taken in response to partisan activity alienated the bulk of the population who had initially seemed so well disposed.
Some Chechens joined the invaders, though some were decorated for gallantry in fighting against them. Perhaps because they had easier access to the Germans, numbers of Cossacks collaborated — and in April 1942 Hitler did sanction the formation of Cossack volunteer units. Some served in police detachments on the Don, but there were several requests to form a Cossack army to fight the Communists, and eventually the request was granted, though the Germans set their face against Cossack independence. An army major of Cossack origins who joined the Germans was allowed to form a squadron from Cossack prisoners and deserters and was employed in front-line propaganda, encouraging desertion with promises that collective farming would be abolished. And a Russian major-general, Vlasov, who had been taken prisoner, opted for the Germans. He set about recruiting an ‘All-Russian Army of Liberation’ from prisoners of war, hoping to raise a million men. Fewer than 200,000 joined him. 45 It was 1943, and the tide of war had changed. Few factors are as efficient as success in shoring up loyalties.
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