Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The emergency programmes were bound together by a single, common theme: the necessity of using anything and anyone to promote war production at the expense of everything else. This was a great simplifier, but it brought its own problems. Voznesensky had to fight off military demands for valuable manpower. Gradually a set of priorities was worked out which exempted skilled men from the call-up. In the wave of fear and panic that gripped the Soviet Union in 1942, the NKVD stepped up its search for scapegoats – workers guilty of ‘economic misconduct’, saboteurs, spies. As German armies neared the Volga in the late summer of 1942 a second wave of evacuation began; in some instances factories were moved a second time. Improvisation yielded enough dividends for the Red Army to survive, but by the autumn of 1942 widespread confusion and inefficiency accentuated the need to return to greater central planning. In November a centralised Manpower Committee took over the allocation of labour supplies; on 8 December Voznesensky was appointed head of national planning once again, and in addition the planners were given real teeth for forcing the plans through. In 1943 a single national plan could once again be drawn up.13

  The great strength of Soviet planning lay in the scale and simplicity of the goals set. There was nothing sophisticated about Soviet ambitions. The war required large numbers of weapons produced as simply and quickly as possible. In November 1941 the State Defence Committee ordered the production of 22,000 aircraft and 22,000 tanks for 1942. These were the benchmarks. It was up to the engineers, managers and workers to fulfil the requirements as best they might. The Soviet Union could not afford the luxury of employing a wide range of different types of weapon; there were two main tank types, the T-34 and the kv-1, and five main aircraft types, three fighters, one bomber, one fighter-bomber.14 Technical development was confined to improving chosen models, which enabled Soviet engineers to catch up with German standards very quickly. Modifications were kept to the most essential; crude mass-production ensured large numbers and robust construction. During 1942 Soviet industry in the Urals-Volga-Siberia region supplied not 22,000 tanks and 22,000 aircraft, but 25,000 of each.

  Soviet factories displayed the same priorities of scale and simplicity. When the industry of the Urals region was first developed in the 1920s, Soviet planners, uninhibited by the usual pressures of the free market, were able to build giant factories and furnaces, huge complexes producing everything from the molten metal to the finished machines and tools. The model for Stalinist industrialisation, and the later heart of the eastern war economy, was the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk, on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains, 300 miles east of Kuibyshev. The project begun there in 1928 was to build a single steelworks capable of producing more than the whole pre-1917 Tsarist empire: 5 million tons of steel, 4.5 million tons of iron. The city took its name from the high-grade magnetic iron ores on the surrounding ironfield. It was built with the help of American engineers, and was equipped with American and German machinery.15 By the time the war started the steelworks had six blast furnaces and twenty open-hearth furnaces, and it was expanded with the addition of evacuated equipment which was appended untidily during 1942. The whole vast complex employed 45,000 people.

  Magnitogorsk was dominated by the steelworks; a perpetual dark haze hung over the city. Around the barracks and houses of the workers lay a patchwork of small allotments where they grew potatoes to supplement the meagre meals served in the vast works canteen. By American or even European standards, the plant was not very productive. It was untidy and dangerous. When the president of the American Chamber of Commerce, Eric Johnston, visited it in 1944 he found a vast inferno, filled with choking fumes, with canals of unprotected molten metal, and piles of slag and iron scrap cluttering the roadways between each workshop. In the part of the plant making shells the absence of a moving conveyor belt was compensated for by the use of long inclined wooden racks down which the shells were rolled on their way along the production line. But throughout the plant, directed by a 35-yearold blacksmith’s son, Gregor Nesov, the Americans found a constant bustle and drive. Clean premises were not a priority for the war effort.16 Magnitogorsk concentrated everything on production. Over the whole course of the war vast, dirty, ill-lit plants all over central Russia were worked day and night using standard equipment and simple procedures. While the rest of the economy remained at the crisis point reached in 1941, the output of each worker in Soviet war industry increased two- or three-fold over the course of the war.17

  In the other Ural cities around Magnitogorsk Soviet planners sited other giant factories. At the Ural capital of Sverdlovsk, set amid rich pine forests which provided much of the fuel and building materials, there grew up a major machine tool production centre, known in Sovietspeak as ‘Uralmash’. Home to a million people by the time of the war, the city became a major centre for tank and artillery production. With an increase in the size of the workforce in the gun plant from six thousand to ten thousand, the output of heavy artillery increased six-fold between 1941 and 1944. At the neighbouring city of Chelyabinsk, a vast tractor works set up during the collectivisation drives of the 1930s was turned over to the mass production of T-34 tanks. Equipment from the tank factories at Leningrad and Kharkov was married to the existing plant. The whole complex became known as ‘Tankograd’, ‘tank city’. In three giant plants in the east two-thirds of all Soviet tanks were produced. Improvements in the production process – the tank turrets were stamped out by huge presses, rather than cast, and automatic welding replaced handwork – reduced the man-hours on each tank from eight thousand in 1941 to 3,700 by 1943.18 Wherever possible scarce skilled labour was replaced by machines, and production standardised and simplified. The resulting weapons looked rough-hewn by western standards but refinements were an unmerited luxury. Mass-production, borrowed from American practice in the 1920s, developed in the 1930s to accelerate Soviet development, was the key to the wartime production record.

  The real heroes of the Soviet Union’s economic revival were the Soviet people themselves, managers, workers and farmers. The war made quite exceptional demands on the civilian population. The great majority of men between 18 and 50 were conscripted into the armed forces during the war. One million Soviet women joined them in uniform. This left a workforce made up of women, old men and teenagers. By 1943 women made up just over half the industrial labour force. On the collective farms their share was almost three-quarters. By 1944 able-bodied males made up only 14 per cent of the workers on state farms. There was nothing new about female labour in the Soviet Union – women made up two-fifths of the labour force in 1940 – but what was new were the appalling conditions in which all workers laboured in wartime Russia.19

  The gruelling regime of work imposed on the Soviet people was not deliberately inflicted but was the product of the sudden crisis following the invasion. All holidays and leave for workers was cancelled indefinitely for the duration. Hours worked were fixed at twelve to sixteen per day; three hours compulsory overtime was introduced. On Stalin’s exhortation to turn the Soviet Union into ‘a single war camp’, large sections of the workforce were placed under military law, first the country’s building workers, then munitions workers, and, finally, in April 1943, the railway workers.20 When the cavalcade of limousines drove the director of the Magnitogorsk plant and his American guests through the ‘teeming, unpainted slums’ of the city, they passed a long column of workers, marching four abreast towards the steelworks. At the front and sides of the column were military guards with fixed bayonets. The workers turned out to be hundreds of ‘ragged women in makeshift sandals’.21 For these women and for millions of other Soviet workers, the factory became a battlefield. Absenteeism and lateness were treated like desertion. Repeated offences meant the labour camp, though the conditions of everyday life were so drear for most workers that life in the camps and outside them became increasingly difficult to distinguish.

  The greatest source of hardship was the food supply. Though the authorities managed to organise a nationwi
de rationing system, it did little more than impose malnutrition equitably across the working population. For the miners and metalworkers, engaged on heavy war work, there were 2 pounds of bread a day, eked out with a meagre 5 pounds of meat, a pound of sugar and a pound of fats each month. For the average consumer a pound of bread a day, and scraps of fat and meat, were all that could be spared. This was a quarter of German rations, one-fifth of British, for a work day that was longer and harder to endure. Hunger was averted only by sowing every garden with vegetables and potatoes. By 1943 some seven million cottage gardens kept the Soviet workforce going.22 For those who produced the food on the collective farm the situation was worse. Rural labourers got only half a pound of bread and a potato or two each day. Farm workers were forced to work long hours. Most of the horses and a great many tractors were taken away by the army. Women workers were trained to use what machinery remained, and by 1944 over 80 per cent of tractor drivers were female. But for many farmers ploughing was done with oxen, or even, in extremes, by teams of women and youths who pulled the ploughs themselves. After hours in the fields, tired and in bitter weather, they took their turn at felling timber to feed the local factories with power.23

  How Soviet workers kept going, month after month, exhausted, hungry, terrified that any slip or dereliction might be classified as sabotage, defies belief. No other population was asked to make this level of sacrifice; it is unlikely that any western workforce would have tolerated conditions so debilitating. The story of the Soviet people is one of epic endurance, that needs no embellishment of Soviet propaganda to make it convincing. Why did they do it? This might have seemed a curious question to the war-workers, not just because they were the victims of state conscription which limited freedom of choice, but also because the expectations, outlook and experiences of Soviet workers and farmers were entirely different from those of their more privileged western cousins. The characteristics of the war economy – large, crudely constructed factories, a harsh barrack room existence, poor food and tough discipline – were the features of Russian working life since the late nineteenth century when the Tsars began to modernise the Imperial economy. They persisted in the four years of civil war following the Russian Revolution in 1917; the forced industrialisation of the Five-Year Plans was an upheaval every bit as exceptional and distorting as the rush for war production in 1942. Russians of sixty or more would have seen it all. This tough history did not make wartime conditions any easier to bear, but it helps in understanding why they were borne.

  There are other less speculative explanations. The workforce was subjected to a barrage of propaganda that generated an ethos of struggle and commitment. In the 1930s the enemy was Soviet backwardness, socialist progress the goal; in the war the enemy was the Fascist Beast, ‘Everything for the Front’ the aim. Every workshop was decorated with banners promoting economic heroism and posters advertising the names of plant workers who exceeded their work norms. In a society where material incentives made little sense, since there was almost nothing to buy in the shops, there developed a popular culture of achievement; workers vied with each other to perform extraordinary feats of labour, to be rewarded with public praise and the occasional medal. Every factory had its small assembly place, the wooden stage and the dais where the plant managers announced the roll of honour for the over-achievers and castigated slackers in front of their workmates.24 Every worker knew the name of the legendary steel-worker Bosyi who arrived in Nizhny Tagil from Leningrad in 1941 where he proceeded to produce his five-month quota in fifteen days. Bosyi got the State Prize. The spirit of what was known as ‘socialist emulation’ spread throughout the economy, echoing the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930s when incentives had been given to workers to exceed work norms by a wide margin. The women tractor drivers got their own hero, driver Garmash, whose team completed a year’s ploughing by June through the simple expedient of keeping the tractor shifts going for over twenty hours a day.25

  No doubt the competitive pride that fuelled the emulation programme owed a good deal to official encouragement. Other incentives were developed to keep the workforce going. Large factories had kindergartens and schools, and canteens in which the workers could get three meals a day for 5 roubles, outside the regular rationing system. Since cash had little value even on the black market, where goods were beyond the reach of the most prosperous worker by 1943, factories began to reward their workers in kind, with additional food and fuel, and to punish them by withholding food.26 Work took on a new meaning once it was linked directly to the food supply. For a great many Soviet citizens the workplace became the literal source of sustenance, of food, warmth and companionship. Wartime collectivism, like wartime planning, was more than just a party slogan.

  In the end the motives that kept workers at their ploughs and lathes through years of profound suffering and physical exhaustion can only be guessed at. Few families were unaffected by losses on the battlefield. The refugees had the bitterness of enforced exile and the wild stories of German atrocity to fire their efforts. There was no shortage of ideological enthusiasm, however naive it now seems. Teams of energetic Young Communists acted as economic shocktroops, shaming their elders into greater efforts, and spreading the socialist gospel. For those resistant to such blandishments there was Soviet patriotism, simple-minded perhaps, unduly credulous, but real enough. To attribute the suffering and efforts of the Soviet workforce simply to a sullen acceptance of coercion is to diminish both. When the American visitors to Magnitogorsk were introduced to a sour-faced young woman, an exceptional over-achiever, they asked her why she did it. Instead of a stock Marxist-Leninist answer, she explained that she worked from hatred, born of the death of her parents under German rule.27

  Planning, mass production and mass mobilisation were the pillars of Soviet survival and subsequent revival. The Soviet Union was turned into Stalin’s ‘single war camp’. The costs were high for the Soviet people as they struggled to come to terms with life in an economy where there was little left over for civilians once the forces were equipped and fed. Theirs was an exceptional, brutal form of total war. The resilience of the Soviet people in the face of the German assault and the remorseless demands of their own regime needs a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky to do it justice. Here was Ilya Ehrenburg’s ‘deep war’, sustained, he later recalled, by an ‘unobtrusive day-to-day heroism’.28

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  The situation facing the United States economy could hardly have been more different. There was no doubt that America had the resources for a prodigious war effort. British leaders had longed before Pearl Harbor to have that abundance at their disposal. ‘There is one way, and one way only’, the British economist Sir William Layton told an audience of American industrialists in October 1940, ‘in which the three to one ratio of Germany’s steel output can be overwhelmed and that is by the 50 to 60 million ingot tons of the United States.’29 In 1941 America produced more steel, aluminium, oil and motor vehicles than all the other major states together.

  The problem was how to turn this abundance from the purposes of peace to those of war. The United States had no tradition of military industry. Intervention in the First World War came too late to build up war production of any real size. The ‘military-industrial’ complex was the product of a later age. By the 1930s twenty years of disarmament and detachment left the world’s richest economy with an army ranked eighteenth in size in the world, and an air force of 1,700 largely obsolescent aircraft and a mere twenty thousand men.30 In 1940 military expenditure made up just 2 per cent of America’s national product. Military weakness was a consequence of an isolation both geographical and political. The American public displayed a deep-felt hostility to war and militarism. In 1937 comprehensive neutrality legislation passed through Congress, intended to keep the United States out of other people’s wars, and to limit the trade and production of armaments. Many Americans regretted the intervention of 1917 and were determined not to make the same mistake twice.

  This was not
the only political issue. America’s was a free market economy, emerging in the late 1930s from a decade of economic hardship into the full glare of a consumer boom. The American government could not simply suppress its people’s expectations and turn butter into guns. Both business and labour distrusted state power, no more so than when the state was planning to spend their money on arms. The effort to increase federal responsibilities under Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ for economic recovery in the 1930s brought bitter disputes. Unlike in Germany or the Soviet Union, the growth of the military economy depended on reaching a broad consensus across the whole political spectrum, from hard-nosed Republican bosses to tough-minded Democrat unions. This remained the case even after Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the perfect opportunity to cut across all the objections to economic mobilisation at a stroke. The American people reacted with a fiery indignation to the Japanese attack in the early months of 1942, but the United States itself was not threatened with invasion; no bombs fell on American cities. The conflicts were an ocean away, and sustaining a popular commitment to production and economic sacrifice was an altogether different issue from how it appeared in Britain or the Soviet Union.