Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Yelnya salient were doomed to encirclement.

  Although, until then, foreign correspondents had not been allowed at the Front, the

  Yelnya victory was something that called for worldwide publicity, and seven or eight were taken in cars on a week's trip, beginning on September 15. What, in retrospect, was so striking about it was a certain tragic pathos of the whole scene. Tragic was the town of Viazma, exposed to constant air attack from near-by German airfields; more tragic still were the young airmen at the small fighter airfield near Viazma—who, with their seven or eight sorties a day over the German lines, were on a constant near-suicide job; tragic, too, was the completely devastated countryside of the "Yelnya salient", where every village and every town had been destroyed, and the few surviving civilians were now

  living in cellars or dugouts.

  Viazma, where we arrived in the late afternoon, looked almost normal, in spite of a large number of soldiers and bombed houses. It was a harmless little town, with its few

  government buildings in the central square, and a few derelict churches, and a statue of Lenin, and the rest of the town a mass of quiet provincial streets, with wooden houses and little gardens in front of them, and rows of rough wooden fences. In the gardens grew large sunflowers and dahlias; and old women, with scarves round their heads, chatted in front of the garden gates. The place could not have changed much since the days of

  Gogol.

  The interview we had on that first night at Viazma with General Sokolovsky, at that time General Konev's Chief of Staff, was in the circumstances reassuring. He spoke in a quiet, even voice, describing what the Russian army had done on this Central Sector during the past few weeks. He attached the greatest importance to the fact that the Russians had stopped the German advance beyond Smolensk; claimed that "several German armies"

  had been smashed up in the last month, and that, in the first days of September alone, they had suffered 20,000 casualties; several hundred German planes had been shot down in this sector over a number of weeks. The blitzkrieg as such, he said, was over, and the process of "grinding down" the German war machine had now started in real earnest, and the Russians had even succeeded in recapturing a considerable slice of territory in this sector. To check the Russian counter-offensive, the Germans had had to bring up

  reinforcements in the last few days.

  He thought German communications were being seriously interfered with by the

  partisans in the enemy rear. He also thought that Russian artillery was greatly superior to German artillery, though he admitted that the Germans still had great air and tank

  superiority. Another important point he made was that the Russian troops all had

  polushubki (sheepskin jackets) and other adequate winter clothes and they could stand even fifty degrees of frost; the Germans could not stand up to it. It was significant that he should, already then, have attached the greatest importance to the part winter was soon going to play. As an afterthought he said that he could only speak of the Central Front, and could not speak with first-hand knowledge of Voroshilov in the north and Budienny in the south, where, indeed, the situation was then extremely serious.

  Asked whether, in view of what he had said, a new German offensive against Moscow

  was now impossible, he said: "Of course not. They may always try a last desperate gamble, or even a few 'last desperate' gambles. But I don't think," he added firmly, "that they will get to Moscow."

  At sunset we drove to a small fighter base outside Viazma. Here were the "Stalin Hawks"—the Stalinskie sokoly—in their own surroundings. The moment we arrived, we heard the drone of engines and, despite the growing darkness, a Russian fighter swooped down and landed gracefully on the airfield.

  A crowd of airmen on the ground ran up to the new arrival. The newly-landed plane was a fighter, but had been fitted with a bomb bay... The young pilot was, by now, busily examining one of the wooden wings which had been pierced by an anti-aircraft shell. He had dropped his bombs on a German airfield near Smolensk, and there had been some

  heavy anti-aircraft fire. He had set fire to a hangar, and seemed very pleased with the result. He was about twenty, but had done a good deal of flying. When asked how much flying a day he did, he said: "From here to the German lines—oh, five, six, seven raids a day; only takes about an hour or so, there and back." There was another young, fair-haired airman whom I asked how he liked the dangerous life; "I love it. It may be dangerous, but every moment of it is exciting. It's the best life there is. It's well worth it."

  (Did he really mean it? I wondered.)

  Later we were shown a rocket that was used by these planes against tanks. Even so, there was something pathetic about these slow obsolete planes being used as supposed fighter-bombers—with probably very little effect, but at a terribly high cost in Russian lives.

  That week spent in the Smolensk country—the Smolenshchina— was, in a sense, a

  heartening but also a highly tragic experience. This was, historically, one of the oldest of Russian lands, not Estonian, Latvian or even Belorussian or Ukrainian; this was very nearly the heart of old Muscovy. The ancient city of Smolensk was already in German

  hands, and the front was running some twenty or twenty-five miles east of it. There were villages through which we travelled where the Germans had not yet been. There were

  hardly any young men left in these villages; only women and children and a few very old men, and many of the women were anxious and full of foreboding. Many of these

  villages in the frontal zone had been bombed and machine-gunned. Some villages and

  small towns, like Dukhovshchina, had been completely wiped out by German bombing,

  and the fields of rye and flax around them had remained unharvested.

  And then there were the soldiers. We visited many regimental headquarters, some of

  them only a mile or two from the front line, and with shells frequently falling around. For the last month these men had been advancing, though at heavy cost. Many of the officers, like Colonel Kirilov, who received us on a wooded hill overlooking the German lines on the other side of a narrow plain, were like something out of Tolstoy—brave, a little gruff, taking war in their stride; some of these men had retreated hundreds of miles, but now they were happy to have stopped and even driven back the Germans. Kirilov had adopted as a "son of the regiment" a pathetic little fourteen-year-old boy, whose father and mother had both been killed in the bombing of a near-by village.

  One night we stayed at a field hospital consisting of several large dugouts; two of them were still crowded with men who had been too severely wounded to be transported—men

  who had lost both their eyes, or both legs; only a week before, there had been hundreds of wounded in these dugouts. All the nurses were pupils of the Tomsk medical school, all young and extraordinarily pretty, as Siberian women usually are. There was a staff of seven surgeons, six doctors and these forty-eight nurses, and, only a week before, they had had to handle as many as 300 wounded a day. The operating dugout was well-equipped, and there were X-ray and blood-transfusion outfits. As yet, the chief surgeon, a Moscow man, said, they had not been short of any medical supplies.

  But perhaps the optimism among the soldiers was more on the surface. I had a talk one day with a captain, whose home town was Kharkov, and who had studied history and

  economics at Kharkov University. He had been engaged in some heavy fighting round

  Kiev during the previous month, until his regiment had been moved to this Smolensk

  sector. He was in a gloomy mood. "It's no use pretending that all is well," he said: "The flag-waving, the hurrah-patriotism of our press are all very well for propaganda purposes to keep up morale; but it can be overdone—as it sometimes is. We shall need a lot of help from abroad. I know the Ukraine; I know how immensely important it is for our whole

  national economy. Now we have lost Krivoi Rog and Dnepropetrovsk, and without the

&nbs
p; Krivoi Rog iron ore, Kharkov and Stalino, if we don't lose them too, will find it hard to work at anything like full capacity. Leningrad, with its skilled labour, is also more or less isolated. And we just don't know how much further the Germans are going to push—with their troops already at Poltava, we may well lose Kharkov. We've been hearing for weeks about the Economic Conference that's to meet in Moscow; they say Lord Beaverbrook is on his way; I wonder what good it'll do..."

  He went on: "This is a very grim war. And you cannot imagine the hatred the Germans have stirred up among our people. We are easy-going, good-natured people, you know;

  but I assure you, they have turned our people into spiteful mujiks. Zlyie mujiki—that's what we've got in the Red Army now, men thirsting for revenge. We officers sometimes have a job in keeping our soldiers from killing German prisoners; I know they want to do it, especially when they see some of these arrogant, fanatical Nazi swine. I have never known such hatred before. And there's good reason for it. Think of those towns and

  villages over there," he said, pointing at the red sunset over Smolensk; "think of all the torture and degradation these people are made to suffer." There was a flicker of mad hatred in his eyes. "And I cannot help thinking of my wife and my own ten-year-old daughter in Kharkov." He was silent for a time, controlling himself, and hammering one knee with his fingers. "Of course," he said at last, "there are the partisans; they are at least a personal solution to thousands of people over there. There comes a moment when people can't bear it any longer. They go off into the woods, in the hope that they may murder a German some time. Often it's like suicide; often they know that, sooner or later, they are almost sure to be caught, and to be put through all the beastliness the Germans are capable of..."

  He then talked about the partisans generally, thought they were important, though not as important as they might be. And sooner or later, if the Russians went on retreating, the partisans would lose touch with their sources of supply, and would soon be short of arms.

  "No doubt they can continue to carry on sabotage in a small way, and various forms of passive resistance, but they may no longer constitute a serious armed force. If only we had fully prepared the partisan movement, if only we had piled up thousands of arms

  dumps throughout Western Russia. Something was done, but not nearly enough; and in

  the south there are, unfortunately, no woods... "

  It was during this visit to the Front that I first met Alexei Surkov, the Russian poet., who was there as a war correspondent. Later during the war we recalled those days. "Those were fearful days," he said. "Do you know that we wanted to show you people some of our tanks—well, I can now tell you, we didn't have a damned thing! "

  The town of Dorogobuzh—famous before the war for its cheeses— on the banks of the

  Upper Dnieper, which we reached one night, after travelling for hours along terribly muddy, bumpy roads, had been bombed by the Germans, and now nothing was left of it

  but the shells of the stone and brick buildings and the chimney stacks of the wooden houses; of its 10,000 inhabitants, only about 100 people were still there. In July, in broad daylight, waves of German planes had dropped high explosives and incendiary bombs

  over the town for a whole hour. There were no troops there at the time; men, women,

  children had been killed—nobody knew how many.

  After spending the night in an army tent outside the town—we saw the next morning

  some fifty people, mostly women and some pale-looking children, lining up for food

  outside an army canteen in one of the few only half-destroyed buildings of the town—we drove to Yelnya through what was now "reconquered territory". There had been heavy fighting there. The woods were shattered by shellfire; there were, here and there, large mass-graves, with crudely-painted wooden obelisks on top of them, in which hundreds of Russian soldiers had been buried. The village of Ushakovo, where some of the heaviest fighting had taken place for over a month, had been razed to the ground; and only from the bare patches along the road could one roughly imagine where the houses had stood. In Ustinovka, another village some distance away, most of the thatched roofs had been torn away by bomb blast; the people in the village had fled before the Germans came; but now there were faint signs of life again. An old peasant and two little boys had returned since the Russians had recaptured the village, and were working in the deserted fields, digging up potatoes—potatoes that had been sown long before the Germans had come. And there

  was nobody else in the village, except an old woman, a blind old woman who had gone

  insane. She was there when the village was shelled, and had gone mad. I saw her

  wandering barefooted about the village, carrying a few dirty rags, a rusty pail and a tattered sheepskin. One of the boys said that she slept in her shattered hut, and they gave her potatoes, and sometimes soldiers passing through the village would give her

  something, though she never asked for anything. She just stared with her blind white eyes and never uttered any articulate words, except the word "Cherti" —the devils.

  We drove on to Yelnya, through more miles of uncut fields. Once we drove off the road into a wood, because there were three or four German planes overhead. In the wood there were Russian batteries and other signs of military activity. Yelnya had been wholly

  destroyed. On both sides of the road leading to the centre of the town, all the houses—

  mostly wooden houses—had been burned, and all that was left was piles of ashes and

  chimney-stacks, with fireplaces some way down. It had been a town of about 15,000

  inhabitants. The only building still intact was a large stone church. Most of the civilians who had been here during the German occupation had now gone. The town had been

  captured by the Germans almost by surprise, and very few civilians had had time to

  escape. Nearly all the able-bodied men and women had been formed into forced-labour

  battalions, and driven into the German rear. A few hundred elderly people and children had been allowed to stay on in the town. The night the Germans decided to pull out of Yelnya— for the Russians were closing in, threatening to encircle the town— the

  remaining people of Yelnya were ordered to assemble inside the church. They spent a

  night of terror. Through the high windows of the church black smoke was pouring in, and they could see the flames. For the Germans were now going round the houses, picking up what few valuables they could find, and then systematically setting fire to every house in the town. The Russians drove into the town through the burning wreckage, and were able to release the now homeless prisoners.

  In the course of this one and only visit to the Front we had talked to three German

  airmen, the crew of a German bomber that had been shot down almost immediately after their raid on Viazma.

  [They had just missed the house where we were staying, but had killed several people in the house across the street. The episode is described in Moscow '41.]

  All three were arrogant, boasted of having bombed London, and were quite sure that

  Moscow would fall before the winter.

  They argued that the war against Russia had been rendered inevitable by the war against; England; it was part of the same war; and once Russia had been knocked out, England

  would be brought to her knees. "And what about America?" somebody asked. "America, that's a long way away: Amerika, das ist sehr weit." They also said that it had taken five Russian fighters to bring down their Heinkel...

  Chapter VII ADVANCE ON LENINGRAD

  While the Red Army succeeded in stabilising the Front east of Smolensk, events in the north and, before long, in the south, took a turn for the worse. The unequalled tragedy of Leningrad will be related in some detail later in this book, and the German advance on Leningrad need be mentioned only briefly here. The German plan was to make one rapid thrust through Pskov, Luga and Gatchina to Leningrad, and to capture t
he city, while the Finns were expected to strike from the north. A second enveloping movement was to be carried out round Lake Ilmen, and then on to Petrozavodsk, east of Lake Ladoga, where the German troops were to join with the Finns. The Russian troops of the "North-West Direction", under Voro-shilov, had been routed in the Baltic Republics, and the Wehrmacht crashed through to Ostrov and the ancient Russian city of Pskov on their way to Leningrad, some 200 miles to the north. They had captured Ostrov on July 10 and

  Pskov two days later. Another German force, after capturing Riga and occupying the

  whole of Latvia, was rapidly advancing into Estonia, with the Russians retreating in disorder to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia and one of the most important Soviet naval bases on the Baltic. Of the original thirty divisions of the North-Western Front only five were now fully manned and fully armed, the rest were left with a ten to thirty per cent complement of either men or equipment.

  [ IVOVSS, vol. II, pp. 78-79.]

  By July 10, the position was as disastrous as during the worst stages of the Russian retreat through Belorussia. The Germans had a 24 to one superiority in men, four to one in guns and nearly six to one in mortars, not to speak about tanks and aircraft.

  [In this, as in most other cases, there is a discrepancy between the Russian and the German estimates of the German forces involved. According to Telpukhovsky, op. cit., the Germans had assembled for their thrust against Leningrad 700,000 men, 1,500 tanks and 1,200 planes. The Germans, without giving any figure for the number of men in

  Heeresgruppe Nord, claim that it had only 900 tanks and 350 planes in its drive on Leningrad. (See footnote by its German editors, A. Hillgruber and J. A. Jacobson on p. 56

  of the German translation of Telpukhovsky's book, Die Sowjetische Geschichte des Grossen Vaterländischen Krieges, 1941-5 (The Soviet History of the Great Patriotic War 1941-5), (Frankfurt, 1961).]

  To slow down the German advance on Leningrad, not only were some regular reserve

  troops thrown in, especially along the River Luga, but also freshly improvised

  opolcheniye units, consisting of workers' battalions, student and even schoolboy battalions, so characteristic of that levée en masse spirit which was to prove stronger in Leningrad than in almost any other Soviet city. Moreover, several hundred thousand