Russia at war
Alexander C Werth
ALEXANDER WERTH
RUSSIA AT WAR 1941-1945
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
1964
ALSO BY ALEXANDER WERTH:
France in Ferment (1934)
The Destiny of France (1937)
France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (1939)
The Last Days of Paris (1940)
The Twilight of France (1942)
Moscow '41 (1942)
Leningrad (1944)
The Year of Stalingrad (1946)
Musical Uproar in Moscow (1949)
France 1940-1955 (1956)
The Strange History of Pierre Mendès-France (1957)
America in Doubt (1959)
The de Gaulle Revolution (1960)
The Khrushchev Phase (1961)
Copyright, ©, 1964 by Alexander Werth. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
To the Memory of
MITYA KHLUDOV
aged 19
Killed in Action
in Belorussia
July 1944
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE
PRELUDE TO WAR
I Russia's 1939 Dilemma
II The Soviet-German Pact
III The Partition of Poland
IV From the Finnish War to the German Invasion of France
V Russia and the Fall of France—Baltic States and Bessarabia
VI Russia and the Battle of Britain: a Psychological Turning-Point?
VII Display of Russian Military Might—Molotov's Tragi-comic Visit to Berlin
VIII " 1941—it will be a Happy New Year"
IX The Last Weeks of Peace
PART TWO
FROM THE INVASION TO THE BATTLE OF MOSCOW
I Soviet Unpreparedness in June 1941
II The Invasion
III Molotov and Stalin Speak
IV Smolensk: the First Check to the Blitzkrieg
V Close-Up One: Moscow at the Beginning of the War
VI Close-Up Two: Autumn Journey to the Smolensk Front
VII Advance on Leningrad
VIII Rout in the Ukraine: "Khrushchev versus Stalin"
IX The Evacuation of Industry
X Battle of Moscow Begins—The October 16 Panic
XI Battle of Moscow II. Stalin's Holy Russia Speech
XII The Moscow Counter-Offensive
XIII The Diplomatic Scene of the First Months of the Invasion
PART THREE
THE LENINGRAD STORY
I The Dead of Leningrad
II The Enemy Advances
III Three Million Trapped
IV The Ladoga Lifeline
V The Great Famine
VI The Ice Road
VII Leningrad Close-Up
VIII Why Leningrad "Took It"
IX A Note on Finland
PART FOUR
THE BLACK SUMMER OF 1942
I Close-up: Moscow in June 1942
II The Anglo-Soviet Alliance
III Three Russian Defeats: Kerch, Kharkov and Sebastopol
IV The Renewal of the German Advance
V Patrie-en-Danger and the Post-Rostov Reforms
VI Stalin Ropes in the Church
PART FIVE
STALINGRAD
I Stalingrad: the Chuikov Story
II The " Stalingrad" months in Moscow—the Churchill visit and after
III Russians encircle the Germans at Stalingrad
IV Stalingrad Close-Ups. I: The Stalingrad Lifeline
II: The Scene of the Manstein Rout
V Stalingrad: the Agony
VI Close-Up III: Stalingrad at the Time of the Capitulation
VII "Caucasus Round Trip"
PART SIX
1943: YEAR OF HARD VICTORIES— THE POLISH TANGLE
I The Birth of "Stalin's Military Genius"
II The Germans and the Ukraine
III Kharkov under the Germans
IV The Economic Effort of 1942-3—the Red Army's New Look—Lend-Lease
V Before the Spring Lull of 1943—Stalin's Warning
VI The Technique of Building a New Poland
VII The Dissolution of the Comintern and Other Curious Events in the Spring of 1943
VIII Kursk: Hitler Loses His Last Chance of Turning the Tide
IX Orel: Close-Up of a Purely Russian City under the Germans
X A Short Chapter on a Vast Subject: German Crimes hi the Soviet Union
XI The Partisans in the Soviet-German War
XII Paradoxes of Soviet Foreign Policy in 1943—The Fall of Mussolini—The "Free
German Committee"
XIII Stalin's Little Nationalist Orgy after Kursk
XIV The Spirit of Teheran
PART SEVEN
1944: RUSSIA ENTERS EASTERN EUROPE
I Some Characteristics of 1944
II Close-Up I: Ukrainian Microcosm
III Close-Up II: Odessa, Capital of Rumanian Transniestria
IV Close-Up III: Hitler's Crimean Catastrophe
V The Lull Before D-Day—Stalin's Flirtation with the Catholic Church—"Slav Unity"
VI The Russians and the Normandy Landing
VII German Rout in Belorussia: "Worse than Stalingrad"
VIII What Happened at Warsaw?
IX Close-Up: Lublin—the Maidanek Murder Camp
X Rumania, Finland and Bulgaria Pack Up
XI Churchill's Second Moscow Visit
XII Stalin's Horse-Trading with de Gaulle
XIII Alternative Policies and Ideologies towards the End of the War
PART EIGHT
VICTORY—AND THE SEEDS THE COLD WAR
I Into Germany
II Yalta and After
III June, 1945: Berlin Under the Russians Only
IV The Three Months'Peace
V Potsdam
VI The Short Russo-Japanese War—Hiroshima
Selected Bibliography
Chronological Table
Acknowledgements
MAPS
The Partition of Poland
The Soviet-Finnish War
The Battle of Kiev
The German Offensive against Moscow
Moscow: the Russian Counter-offensive
The Leningrad Blockade
The Leningrad Lifeline
The Black Summer of 1942
The Battle of Stalingrad
The Germans Trapped at Stalingrad
The Russian Winter Offensive 1942-3
The Kursk Battle
The Russian Spring 1944 Offensive in the South
The Russian Summer 1944 Offensive in Belorussia and Poland
The Liberation of Poland and Invasion of Germany
Towards Victory
Folding maps:
The German Offensive 1941-2
The Russian Counter-offensive 1942-5
Endpaper maps:
The USSR
MAPS DRAWN BY FREDERICK BROMAGE
INTRODUCTION
In his speech before the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963—a speech that foreshadowed the Moscow test-ban treaty two months later—the late President
Kennedy said:
Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries (the USA and the Soviet
Union) have in common, none is stronger than the mutual abhorrence of war.
Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with
each o
ther. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the
Russians suffered in the course of the Second World War.
And he went on to say:
At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's [European] territory, including nearly
two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a waste-land.
Some six months later, in a less conciliatory-sounding speech at Kalinin, delivered in the presence of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev thundered against the "imperialists", urged them to clear out of Panama "before they got kicked out", swore that the Soviet Union could defend Cuba from rocket sites on Russian territory, and, with more than usual truculence, declared:
We are building communism in our country; but that does not mean that we are
building it only within the framework of the Soviet borders and of our own
economy. No, we are pointing the road to the rest of humanity. Communism is being built not only inside the Soviet borders, and we are doing everything to secure the victory of communism throughout the world.
But, having got that chinoiserie off his chest, he then declared, with a nod at Peking: Some comrades abroad claim that Khrushchev is making a mess of things, and is
afraid of war. Let me say once again that I should like to see the kind of bloody fool who is genuinely not afraid of war. Only a small child is afraid of nothing, because he doesn't understand; and only bloody fools.
He then recalled that his son, an airman, was killed in World War II, and that millions of other Russians had lost their sons, and brothers, and fathers, and mothers and sisters.
True, for Castro's benefit, he ended on an unusual note of bravado, saying that, although Russia did not want war, she would "smash the enemy" with her wonderful new rockets if war were to be inflicted on the Soviet people.
[ Izvestia, January 18, 1964.]
Which has, of course, to be read in the light of his usual line that it is no use trying to build socialism or communism "on the ruins of a thermo-nuclear war".
In all this there was much play-acting. Significantly, the passage in his speech which the Kalinin textile workers cheered more loudly and wholeheartedly than any other was that about the "bloody fools" who were not afraid of war. Kalinin, the ancient Russian city of Tver, only a short distance from Moscow, had been occupied by the Germans in 1941,
and its older people remembered only too well what it had been like.
Kennedy had spoken of the twenty million Russian dead of World War II. Officially, the Russians have been chary about mentioning this figure; when a speaker mentioned it at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in October 1959, Pravda omitted it in reporting his speech the next day.
[See the author's The Khrushchev Phase (London, 1961), p. 161.]
But whether the exact number of casualties that Russia suffered in the last war was
twenty million, or a little more or a little less, these appalling losses have left a deep mark on the Russian character, and have, whether we like it or not, been at the root of Soviet foreign policy since the war, both before and after Stalin's death. The Russian distrust of Germany, and of anyone helping Germany to become a great military power again,
remains acute. There is scarcely a Russian family which the German invasion did not
affect directly, and usually in the most tragic way, and if Germany remains divided in two, and we still have trouble over Berlin, it is partly due to the memories of 1941-5.
These are still fresh in every older Russian mind, and the young generation of Russians are constantly reminded by books, films, broadcasts and television shows of what Russia suffered and of how she had to fight, first for her survival, and then for victory.
It would be idle to speculate on what would have happened to Russia, Britain and the United States in 1941-5, if they had not been united in their determination to crush Nazi Germany. It may well have been a "strange alliance" (as it was described by General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow towards the end of the
war), and its breakdown after the job was done may have been inevitable, despite the formal twenty-year alliance that Russia and Britain had signed in 1942, and other good wartime resolutions. Whatever members of the John Birch Society and other politically certifiable people (to use rny friend Sir Denis Brogan's phrase) may say today about our having fought "on the wrong side", we must still say "Thank God for the Strange Alliance".
For a year, in 1940-1, Britain fought Hitler almost single-handed; and so, in a very large measure, did Russia between June 1941 and the end of 1942; and in both cases the danger of being destroyed by the Nazis was immense. Britain held out in 1940^1; Russia held out in 1941-2. But even several months after Stalingrad Stalin still declared that Nazi Germany could not be defeated except by the joint effort of the Big Three.
Perhaps the young generation in the West knows very little about those days. The French radio recently questioned some young people about World War II, and quite a number of them said: "Hitler? connais pas" When I taught at an American university a few years ago I found that many young students had only the haziest notion of Hitler, Stalin and even Winston Churchill. But do even most adults in the West have a clear idea of how victory over Nazi Germany was achieved? Not unnaturally, Britons have been interested chiefly in the British war effort, and Americans in the American war effort, and this interest has been kept up by the plethora of memoirs by British and American generals.
But these memoirs have, on the whole, tended to obscure the important fact that, in
Churchill's 1944 phrase, it was the Russians who "tore the guts out of the German Army".
It so happened, for historical and geographical reasons, that it was, indeed, the Russians who bore the main brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany, and that it was thanks to this that millions of British and American lives were saved. Not that the Russians chose to save these lives, and to sacrifice millions of their own people. But that is how it happened and, during the war, both America and Britain were acutely conscious of it. "A wave of national gratitude is sweeping England", Sir Bernard Pares said in 1942; and, even on the more official level, similar sentiments were freely expressed. Thus Ernest Bevin said on June 21, 1942:
All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children's children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian
people.
I doubt whether the children of Ernest Bevin's contemporaries, let alone the children's children, have any such feelings today; and I hope that this "history book" will remind them of a few of the things Ernest Bevin had in mind.
It should, of course, be added that the Russians were acutely conscious, throughout the war, of the "unequal sacrifices" made by the Big Three. The "little Second Front" (the landings in North Africa) did not materialise until the end of 1942, and the "big Second Front" not till the summer of 1944. The strangely mixed feelings towards the Allies among the Russian people during the war years are one of the recurring themes of this book.
What kind of book is this? It is least of all a formal history of the war. The very scale of the Soviet-German war of 1941-5, directly involving tens of millions and, indirectly, hundreds of millions of people, was so vast that any attempt to write a "complete" history of it is out of the question in one volume written by one man. A number of military
histories of this war have been written by both Russians and Germans; but even the
longest of them, the vast six-volume Russian History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union running to over two million words, and trying to cover not only the military operations, but "everything", is singularly unsatisfactory in many ways. It contains an immense amount of valuable information which was not available under Stalin; but it is overburdened with names of persons, regiments and divisi
ons and an endless variety of military and economic details. It is full of ever-recurring "heroic" clichés; and yet fails completely, in my view, to tell the story of that immense nation-wide drama in purely human terms. It has the failing common to much, though not all, Soviet writing on the war of making practically all Russians look exactly alike. Since this book is about the wair in Russia, it contains, of course, numerous chapters on the main military operations.
But, in dealing with these, I have, as far as possible, avoided entering into any minute technical details of the fighting, which only interest military specialists, and have tried to portray the dramatic sweep of military events, often concentrating on those details—such as the immense German air superiority in 1941-2, or the Russian superiority in artillery at Stalingrad, or the hundreds of thousands of American lorries in the Red Army after the middle of 1943— which had a direct bearing on the soldiers' morale on both sides.
Further, I have tried to treat all the main military events in Russia in their national and, often, international context: for both the morale in the country and inter-allied relations were very noticeably affected by the progress of the war itself. There is, for instance, nothing fortuitous in the intensified activity of Soviet foreign policy after Stalingrad, or in the fact that the Teheran Conference should have taken place not before, but after the Russian victory of Kursk— which was the real military turning-point of the war: more so than Stalingrad which, in the words of the German historian, Walter Goerlitz, was more in the nature of a "politico-psychological turning-point".
This book, therefore, is much less a military story of the war than its human story and, to a lesser extent, its political story. I think I may say that one of my chief qualifications for writing this story of the war years in Russia is that I was there. Except for the first few months of 1942, I was in Russia right through the war—and for three years after it—and what interested me most of all were the behaviour and the reactions of the Russian people in the face of both calamity and victory. In the fearful days of 1941-2 and in the next two-and-a-half years of hard and costly victories, I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People's War; first, a war waged by a people fighting for their life against terrible odds, and later a war fought by a fundamentally unaggressive people, now roused to
anger and determined to demonstrate their own military superiority. The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among the civilians as among the soldiers; although living conditions were very hard almost everywhere throughout the war, and
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