Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  But all this planning was one thing, and the actual results were quite another. These, as the History admits, were still extremely disappointing by the end of 1940; nor were they spectacular by any means by the middle of 1941, at the time of the German invasion.

  The new Soviet models—the Yak-1 and Mig-3 fighters and the Pe-2 bombers—began to

  be produced in 1940, but only in very small quantities. Thus only twenty Mig-3's, sixty-four Yak-l's and one or two Pe-2's were produced in 1940. The position improved

  somewhat in the first half of 1941, when 1,946 of the new fighter planes—the Mig-3's, Lagg-3's and Yak-1's—were produced, as well as 458 Pe-2 bombers and 249 Il-2

  stormoviks.

  But these quantities were totally insufficient to increase substantially the proportion of modern planes in the army, and, by June 1941, the great majority of army planes

  consisted of obsolete models.

  [ IVOVSS. vol. I, p. 415.]

  The performance of the tank industry was no better. In June 1941 the Red Army had a

  very large number of tanks, but nearly all of these, too, were obsolete.

  The new tanks, the KV and the T-34—which were later to prove more than a match for

  the German tanks—were not yet in production in 1939; in 1940 only 243 KV tanks and

  115 T-34 tanks were produced; not till the first half of 1941 was there an impressive increase; during that period 393 KV's and 1,110 T-34's came off the assembly line.

  Similarly, the production of guns, mortars and automatic weapons proceeded at "an intolerably slow pace". For this the Deputy Commissars for Defence, G. I. Kulik, L. Z.

  Mekhlis and A. E. Shchadenko are blamed; Kulik, in particular, is taken to task for

  having neglected the production of automatic rifles, the value of which he persisted in denying, and the lack of which was to put the Russian infantryman at a great

  disadvantage. The production of ammunition in 1941 was lagging behind even that of the guns. Although the first special anti-tank rifles were made in Russia in 1940-1, these had not yet been supplied to the Army by the beginning of the war.

  [Ibid., p. 416.]

  Another very serious weakness of the Red Army was the absence of a large-scale

  automobile industry in the Soviet Union; in June 1941 the Soviet Union had a total of only 800,000 motor vehicles, and a large proportion of guns had to be drawn either by horses or by wholly inadequate farm tractors.

  On the other hand Russian artillery is estimated by Russian experts to have been better than German artillery; jet rockets, first used in the Finnish War, began to be produced on a large scale in 1940-1, and Kostikov's famous katyusha mortars were extremely popular with the Red Army almost from the very beginning. They first came into action at

  Smolensk about the middle of July.

  Radar was still in its infancy in the Red Army, and even ordinary wireless

  communications between army units were not the general rule. "Even the minimum

  requirements were not fulfilled in this respect. As a result a lot of obsolete material was used. Many officers did not know how to handle wireless communications ... and

  preferred the old-fashioned telephone."

  [ Ibid., p. 455.]

  In a highly mobile war this often proved quite useless.

  This is just one example in many of the widespread professional inferiority of the Russian soldier and officer as compared with their German opposite numbers in 1941, and it was, in fact, not till 1943 that, in the estimation of the Russian military leaders themselves, the Russian soldier and officer became professionally as competent as the German, if not more so.

  Very few officers or soldiers in 1941 had had any direct experience of war, and many of them were novices who had only lately been trained as "replacements" for the thousands of officers who had been purged back in 1937 and 1938. Although the officer's "single command" had been re-introduced in August 1940 through the eclipse of military

  commissars, an uneasy relationship continued to exist between many officers and those Party and Komsomol cadres in the Army which were expected to go on "helping" the officers; and, in July, the fully-fledged military commissars were reintroduced again.

  Although (in July 1940) fifty-four per cent of officers were Party members or Party

  candidates and twenty-two per cent were Komsomols, there remained, among the

  officers, a constant after-taste of the Tukhachevsky affair, and a feeling of strain between them and certain Party bosses in the army with their anti-officer complex. It was not till the autumn of 1942, as we shall see, that the officer fully came into his own rights.

  The training of specialised troops—notably tank crews and airmen—had also been

  seriously neglected. There are some quite astounding admissions on this score in the official History. Not only was there a shortage of modern tanks and planes in the frontier areas on the day the Germans struck, but there was also a serious shortage of properly trained airmen and tank crews:

  The new tanks did not begin to arrive in the frontier zones until April-May 1941, and, on June 22, in all the five Military Districts, there were no more than 508 KV's and 967 T-34's in all. True, there were considerable numbers of old tanks (BT-5's, BT-7's, T-26's, etc.) but by June 15, only twenty-seven per cent were in working

  order.

  Worse still—

  The training of specialists for the new tanks required a considerable time. Since there was a shortage of tank crews, it was necessary to transfer to the tank units officers, sergeants and soldiers from other army formations—from infantry and

  cavalry units. But time was too short to let these learn their job properly. By the beginning of the war, many tank men had had only one-and-a-half to two hours'

  experience in actual tank driving. Even many officers in tank units were not fully qualified to command them... Similarly, our airmen had not become properly

  familiarised with the new planes.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 475-6.]

  Thus, in the Baltic Military District those operating the new planes had had, by June 22, only fifteen hours' flying experience, and those in the Kiev Military District as little as four hours— extraordinary figures when one considers that in the US air force, for

  instance, 150 hours' flying experience are required before combat.

  Such were some of the extraordinary shortcomings in the Red Army on the day the

  Germans attacked. There were many others, with which the History deals in some detail.

  The frontier was an extremely long one—the Finnish frontier, between the Arctic and the Gulf of Finland about 750 miles long, and the "German" frontier, between a point just east of Memel on the Baltic and the mouth of the Danube in Rumania, over 1,250 miles long.

  No doubt the Soviet Government took a few belated precautions in May 1941; but the

  troops that were moved nearer the frontier "were neither fully mobilised nor at full strength, and they lacked the necessary transport. The railways worked according to a peacetime schedule, and the whole deployment of these troops was carried out very

  slowly, since it was not thought that the war would start in the immediate future."

  By June 22, most of the troops in the frontier areas were scattered over wide spaces.

  In the Special Baltic Military District they were scattered over a depth of 190 miles from the frontier; in the Western District over a depth of 60 to 190 miles, in the Kiev District over a depth of between 250 and 380 miles.

  The General Staff of the USSR assumed that these troops would be brought up to full

  strength during several days that would elapse between mobilisation and the actual

  beginning of military operations.

  The whole defence of the State frontier was based on the assumption that a surprise attack by Germany was out of the question, and that a powerful German offensive

  would be preceded by a declaration of war, or by
small-scale military operations, after which the Soviet troops could take up their defensive positions... No

  operational or tactical army groups had been formed to repel a surprise attack.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 474.]

  The History goes on to quote a table showing that in the main invasion areas the Germans had a clear four or five-to-one superiority over the Russians; but, in addition to this numerical superiority, they also enjoyed great qualitative superiority, many of the Soviet soldiers in the frontier areas being fresh conscripts—youngsters without any knowledge or experience.

  There was also, as already mentioned, an appalling shortage of modern tanks on the

  Russian side, and of properly trained tank crews. The equipment of the frontier troops, says the History, "was not to be completed until the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942".

  Even grimmer is the story of how the modern Russian planes in the western areas were destroyed, mostly on the very first day of the invasion.

  The fast new planes required longer runways than had existed before; and it so happened that in the summer of 1941 a whole network of new airfields was being built in the

  frontier zones. This building of new airfields and the reconstruction of the old ones was in the hands of the NKVD. And here comes, in the History, the suggestion of perhaps deliberate sabotage on the part of Beria's organisation. Taking no notice of the warnings from the military, Beria proceeded to build and rebuild a large number of airfields in the frontier areas simultaneously.

  [In reality, there appears to be no "objective" proof that Beria was a traitor or a German agent, but he has always been available when in recent years awkward facts have had to be explained. This footnote should not suggest that the author has ever had any kindly feelings for Beria.]

  As a result, our fighter aircraft were concentrated, on June 22, on a very limited number of airfields, which prevented their proper camouflage, manoeuvrability and dispersal. Also, some of the new airfields ... had been built much too close to the frontier, which made them specially vulnerable in the event of a surprise attack. The absence of a proper network of airfields on June 22 and the overcrowding of a small number of the older airfields—the location of which was perfectly well known to the enemy—account for the very grave losses our air force suffered during the very first days of the war.

  [IVOVSS, vol. I, pp. 476-7.]

  Everything else at the frontier went wrong on that 22nd of June. The carrying capacity of the railways in the frontier areas—all acquired since 1939—was three or four times lower on the Russian side than on the German side. Also, the building of fortifications along the

  "new" borders was only at an initial stage in June 1941. A plan had been drawn up in the summer of 1940 for fortifying this border, but it was a plan stretching over several years.

  The fortifications on the "old" (1938) border had been dismantled, and, on the "new"

  frontier only a few hundred pillboxes and gun emplacements had been built by the time the war started. Anti-tank ditches and other anti-tank and anti-infantry obstacles had been built to the extent of less than twenty-five per cent of the plan. The Germans were, of course, very well informed about these fortifications, airfields, etc. The History mentions not only numerous German commando raids that had taken place since 1939, but also the more than 500 violations of Soviet airspace by the Luftwaffe, 152 of them since January 1941. To avoid any unpleasantness with Hitler, the frontier troops, according to the History, had been given strict orders not to shoot down any German reconnaissance planes over Soviet territory.

  [ The History actually attributes this order not to Stalin or Molotov, but to "traitor Beria"

  who had the frontier guards under his jurisdiction.]

  A significant conclusion made by the History is that the Soviet General Staff had some perfectly sound plans for "making the frontier much less vulnerable by the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942", but that, in view of the German menace in 1941, everything had been done "too slowly and too late". And there follows the assertion that neither the General Staff, nor the Commissariat of Defence would have shown such incompetence

  "if there had not been those wholly unjustified repressions against the leading officers and political cadres of the Army in the 1937-8 Purge".

  This reference to Tukhachevsky and the other victims of the Purge is, of course, a

  monumental understatement when one considers that perhaps as many as 15,000 officers

  —probably about ten or fifteen per cent of the total, but with a higher proportion of purgées in the higher ranks—were either temporarily, or finally eliminated. Among those temporarily eliminated were such distinguished soldiers as the future Marshals Govorov and Rokossovsky.

  The mess and muddle on the Russian side of the frontier was, of course, in striking

  contrast with what was going on on the German side. Here, since the middle of 1940, i.e.

  even before Plan Barbarossa had been finally adopted on December 18, the Germans had been thoroughly preparing their ground for a possible attack on the Soviet Union. Roads, including autobahnen, railways and a large network of airfields had been built during the year preceding the invasion; during that period the Germans had built or modernised no fewer than 250 airfields and fifty landing strips in Poland for their deadly Heinkels, Dorniers and Messerschmitts.

  In the words of a German chronicler, "millions of German soldiers broke into Russia in June 1941, without enthusiasm, but with a quiet confidence in victory".

  [ Philippi and Heim, Der Feldzug gegen Sowjetrussland (The Campaign against Soviet Russia) (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 11.]

  Chapter II THE INVASION

  And now began for the Russian people Vannée terrible—the most terrible it had ever known. In a matter of a few days and weeks death and destruction swept over vast parts of the country. In the frontier zones, and, indeed, much further inland, the concentrated German onslaught smashed, captured or wholly disorganised the Red Army units facing

  it; the Soviet air force was as good as wiped out in the western areas on the very first day of the German invasion; within five days the German forces had already captured Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, well within the Soviet Union's 1938 borders; nor did it take much longer for the German armies to occupy all the areas incorporated by the Soviet Union since 1939— Western Belorussia, the Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and

  Estonia. In the north, the Finns smashed through to the old 1939 border just north-west of Leningrad. By July 8, the Germans were already crowing that the war in Russia was

  "practically" won.

  There is no doubt that Russia was dazed by these terrible initial reverses, and yet, almost from the first day, it was clear that it was a national war.

  [This was something that was understood by the best foreign observers of Russia. Thus a few days before I left London for Russia on July 2, 1941, I had a long talk with the late Sir Bernard Pares who said: "I can already see it's going to be a tremendous national war, a bigger and better 1812." Similarly, at the end of June,

  G. Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to The Times that, with Stalin now on our side, we were sure to win the war. On the other hand, British military experts at War Office or Ministry of Information briefings very clearly suggested that they did not think the war in Russia would last more than a few weeks or, at most, months.]

  A feeling of consternation swept the country, but it was combined with an under-current of national defiance and the apprehension that it would be a long, hard and desperate struggle.

  Everybody realised that millions of lives would be lost, and yet only very few people seem to have visualised the possibility of utter military defeat and a total conquest of Russia by the Germans. In this respect the contrast with France during the German

  invasion of 1940 is very striking.

  This fundamental confidence was characteristic of the attitude of the Russian people and of the large majority of the Ukrainians and Belorussia
ns; it did not exist in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or in the Western Ukraine, where pro-Nazi and other anti-Soviet

  influences were strong. In these areas the German invasion was either welcomed or

  suffered with relative indifference.

  [B. S. Telpukhovsky, Velikaya otechestsvennaya voina Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1941-5. (The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union). (Moscow, 1959), p. 39.]

  The hostility with which the Russians were surrounded in parts of the Western Ukraine only recently incorporated in the Soviet Union, is well illustrated in the memoirs of General Fedyuninsky, who tells of how, in May 1941, his car broke down in a village

  near Kovel:

  There gathered around us a crowd of about twenty people. No one was saying

  anything. Some, especially the better-dressed ones, smirked maliciously at us. No one offered to help. No doubt, there were among them some poor people, who

  sympathised with us, who had received land from the Soviet authorities, and who

  were later to fight bravely in the Red Army or in Partisan units. But now they were silent, frightened by rumours of an early arrival of the Nazis and by threats from the kulaks and the Bandera boys.

  [General I. I. Fedyuninsky, Podnyatyie po trevoge (Raised by the Alarm). (Ministry of Defence Publishing House, Moscow, 1961). Bandera was a "Ukrainian Nationalist" who later openly collaborated with the Nazis.]

  *

  What were the first days of the war like in the frontier areas invaded by the Germans?

  The memoirs of some of the Russian soldiers published in the last few years, especially those of General Fedyunin-sky and of General Boldin, give a striking picture of those events.

  [General Fedyuninsky, op. cit., General I. V. Boldin, Stranitsy Zhizni (Pages from my Life). (Ministry of Defence Publishing House, Moscow, 1961).]

  In April 1941 Fedyuninsky (who was later to play a distinguished role in the war—

  especially in breaking the Leningrad blockade) was appointed commander of the 15th

  Infantry Corps of the Special Kiev Military District, with his headquarters in the West-Ukrainian town of Kovel, some thirty miles east of the border between the Soviet Union and German-occupied Poland, and on the main line to Kiev.