Russia at war
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civilians had been mobilised, early in July, to dig three lines of trenches, anti-tank ditches, and other, admittedly rudimentary, defences on the approaches to Leningrad. The
"outer" line of defence was along the River Luga.
As it is now openly admitted, no fortifications of any kind existed in that part of Russia; for even though the Soviet Government had been extremely concerned about the security of Leningrad, and had even embarked on its Winter War of 1939-40 to push the Finnish frontier back, "it had never even occurred to anybody before the war that Leningrad might be threatened from the south or southwest".
[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 210.]
The Germans pushed on relentlessly, and reached the Luga river long before the Russian defences were complete. Nevertheless, by July 10, a long stretch of the Luga Line had been manned by the so-called Luga operational group, consisting of four regular infantry divisions and three divisions of Leningrad opolcheniye. The German advance was, indeed, slowed down, but the Germans succeeded in establishing a number of
bridgeheads on the north side of the Luga.
Meanwhile, other German forces were overrunning Estonia on the west side of Lake
Peipus. Breaking through to Kunda on the Gulf of Finland east of Tallinn on August 7, the Germans cut off the Russian forces who had retreated to the Estonian capital. Even before that, other German forces had pushed north to Kingisepp along the east bank of Lake Peipus, and the threat to Leningrad had grown immensely. The Germans had forced the Narva river and were not only advancing on the former Russian capital from the
Narva-Kingisepp area, where the Russians had already suffered terrible losses in heavy fighting, and from the Luga area, but were also advancing to the east of Leningrad, both north and south of Lake Ilmen, with the obvious purpose of isolating Leningrad from the east and joining with the Finns on the east side of Lake Ladoga.
In July, the Finns had already struck out in two directions— across the Karelian Isthmus up to the frontier, and to the east of Lake Ladoga, towards Petrozavodsk, on the banks of Lake Onega.
A particularly harrowing episode was the attempt of the Soviet troops marooned at
Tallinn to escape by sea. For over a month they had tried to stop the Germans capturing Tallinn from the south. A large part of the Soviet Baltic Navy was still at Tallinn, and the greatest possible number of troops were to be evacuated by sea. It was a kind of Dunkirk, but without air cover, all available Russian aircraft being concentrated in and around Leningrad, where the situation was already highly critical, as the Germans had by this time practically cut off Leningrad from the east.
At Tallinn there were 20,000 Russian troops, and these, together with the Baltic Navy, had tied up substantial German forces within a radius of ten to twenty miles for over a month. 25,000 civilians were mobilised to strengthen the defences to the south of the city, though how enthusiastic these Estonians were may be questioned.
The Germans started their all-out attack on Tallinn on August 19, but the Russians,
supported by the guns of the coastal defences and warships, were able to hold their
ground for nearly a week. On August 26, however, the Germans broke into the city, and the Russian Supreme Command ordered the evacuation of Tallinn, all the more so as
Leningrad badly needed what troops and ships could still be rescued. After two more
days of intensive street fighting, the convoy of troop transports and warships sailed from Tallinn harbour. The Germans claimed that "not a single ship" would be able to leave Tallinn; but, according to the Russians, "most" of the ships, including the flag-ship Minsk, got through, despite constant attacks from German aircraft and torpedo boats, and floating mines which the Germans had scattered throughout the Gulf of Finland. The
biggest losses were suffered by the trawlers and destroyers trying to take the convoy through the German minefields. In the end, the "greater part" of the ships, carrying several thousand soldiers, landed in Kronstadt or Leningrad.
The Russian naval garrisons of Dago and other islands off the Estonian coast, held out till the middle of October, when the 500 survivors of the defence of Dago succeeded in
sailing under cover of night to Hangö, the Russian naval base in Finland, which was then still in Russian hands.
It was, in fact, not until the Russian armies had retreated—or fled might be the right word
—to the immediate vicinity of Leningrad after the collapse of the "Luga Line", that they began to contain the Germans with any success. Voroshilov had lost his head completely, and it was not until General Zhukov was rushed to Leningrad at the beginning of
September and reorganised the troops on the spot that the defence of Leningrad began in real earnest... It was to become the greatest of all the great Russian stories of human endurance. Never yet had a city of the size of Leningrad been besieged for nearly two-and-a-half years.
Chapter VIII ROUT IN THE UKRAINE "Khrushchev versus
Stalin"
Meantime, as we have seen, Hitler had decided to strike his main blow, not at Moscow, but at the Ukraine. Abandoning, for the time being, the drive on Moscow, he had
transferred some troops to the north to speed up the capture of Leningrad, and even larger reinforcements were sent to the Ukraine, which, together with the Crimea, he planned to overrun within a few weeks.
Early in July, the Russians had had a few local successes in the Ukraine; thus they had checked a German breakthrough to Kiev some ten or twelve miles outside the city. But at the end of July and the beginning of August, the blitzkrieg had been resumed. On August 17 the Germans occupied Dniepropetrovsk, at the far end of the Dnieper bend, and forced the Dnieper, despite the Soviet Supreme Command's order to hold the Dnieper Line at all costs. Kherson, Nikolayev and the iron-ore centre of Krivoi Rog were captured.
In the south-west Odessa was cut off by the Rumanians from the Soviet "mainland".
Meanwhile, north of Kiev, the Germans had started another offensive in the general
direction of Konotop, Poltava and, ultimately, Kharkov. Thus, by the beginning of
September, Kiev formed, in fact, the tip of a long and constantly narrowing salient, the Germans having advanced far to the east both north and south of the Ukrainian capital.
It is here that we come to one of the major controversies of the war—a controversy
involving not only Hitler and his generals, but also Stalin and Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a Member of the War Council attached to the staff of Marshal Budienny, the C.-in-C.
of the "South-Western Direction".
[ It should be explained, to avoid confusion, that the " South-Western Direction" was one of the three "Directions" into which the whole Front had been split in July. Several
"Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups) came under the authority of each "Direction". One of the
"Fronts" that came under the authority of the "South-West Direction" was the "SouthWest Front", the principal victim of the Kiev encirclement. By October 1941, the Front was no longer divided into "Directions", but only into "Fronts" (i.e. Army Groups). In September the commander of the "Direction" was Budienny, the commander of the
"Front" was Kirponos.]
Present-day histories are untiring in their praise of Khrushchev who, as a member of the Politburo and as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, aroused everywhere, they say, the patriotic fervour of the people of the Ukraine, and of Kiev in particular—even though, lacking the great proletarian and revolutionary
traditions of Moscow and Leningrad, the levée en masse seems to have been considerably less spectacular there than in the other two cities. Moreover, Kiev had a peculiar
mentality. Only some twenty years before it had been occupied in quick succession by the German and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoro-padsky,
at the head of the Ukrainian "state", by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in
1920, even by Pilsudski's Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 had not been
as terrible as all that.
As by September 9, the Germans were advancing on Nezhin [ Seventy miles ENE of
Kiev.] from the north, and other German armies had penetrated far into the Dnieper bend in the south, and as no Russian reserves were available to check these two German
advances, Budienny and Khrushchev decided to pull out of the Kiev salient.
On September 11, they informed Stalin that his previous instructions to despatch two infantry divisions from Kiev to stop the German advance in the north could not be carried out; that the Soviet armies in the Ukraine had been badly weakened by weeks of heavy fighting, and that, despite the Supreme Command's opinion to the contrary, they
considered the time ripe for withdrawing to a new Une in the east.
On that same day, in speaking to General Kirponos, commander of the South-Western
Front, Stalin "emphatically rejected the proposal to abandon Kiev and to withdraw the troops from the Kiev salient to the River Psyol [in the Kursk-Poltava area]. He insisted that troops be taken from other sectors of the Front and thrown against the Germans
advancing on Konotop [east of Nezhin]..." He also relieved Budienny of his command and replaced him by Timo-shenko, who arrived in Kiev on September 13 to take up his
new duties.
On that day, the bottleneck from which the four armies of the South-Western Front could have pulled out was only twenty miles wide—between Lokhvitsa and Lubny... Two days
later, German tank formations closed this bottleneck.
Here we come to the climax of the Stalin-Khrushchev controversy, of which so much is made in the present-day History:
On September 14 Major-General Tupilov, Chief of Staff of the South-West Front,
considered it his duty to inform General Shaposhni-kov, the Chief of Staff in
Moscow, of the catastrophic situation... There were, he concluded, only a couple of days left. General Shaposhnikov called this report "panicky", asked the commanders of the South-West Front not to lose their heads and to carry out
Comrade Stalin's orders of September 11.
[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 108.]
But on September 16, the Germans closed the bottleneck, and the four Soviet armies were surrounded... One of them, the 37th, was still holding the Kiev bridgehead on the west bank of the Dnieper. All these troops, says the History, had already suffered very heavy losses, "were disorganised and had lost most of their fighting capacity. All this could have been avoided if Budienny's and Khrushchev's advice had been followed in time."
[Ibid., p. 108.]
After pointing out that the Supreme Command had a very erroneous idea of the whole
situation, the History goes on:
Since the Supreme Command still would not order a general retreat, the War
Council of the South-Western Direction accepted N. S. Khrushchev's proposal to
abandon Kiev and to lead the troops of the South-West Front out of the
encirclement. Since the enemy had not yet consolidated his front along the Psyol, this seemed the only reasonable solution. On Budienny's and Khrushchev's behalf,
this decision was transmitted verbally by General Bagramian to General Kirponos,
who was then at Priluki, the headquarters of the South-West Front... Instead of
immediately carrying out this order, Kirponos finally asked Moscow whether or not to carry out the instructions of the War Council of the South-Western Direction.
[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 109.]
It was not till 11.40 p.m. on September 17 that Shaposhnikov replied that the Supreme Command had authorised the abandonment of Kiev, but still said nothing about breaking across the river Psyol. Thus, two days were wasted in which substantial Russian forces could have broken out, but did not. What followed was an incoherent attempt to break out of the encirclement; it was all the more incoherent since communications between the various army headquarters were non-existent. Thus, separated from the other armies, the 37th Army continued its hopeless fight for Kiev during the next few days, and only then began—without any hope of success—to fight its way out.
Only some units succeeded in breaking out—for example one of 2,000 men with General
Bagramian at their head. The General Staff of the South-West Front and members of its War Council, having been unable to find a single plane, followed Bagramian with 800
men, but were cut off by German tanks. Near Lokhvitsa, a battle raged for two days in the course of which General Kirponos was mortally wounded and M. A. Burmistrenko, a
member of the War Council and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian
Communist Party, as well as the Chief of Staff of the Army Group, General Tupikov,
were killed. Only very few members of the General Staff escaped. Tens of thousands of soldiers, officers and political personnel died in the unequal struggle, or were taken prisoner, many of them wounded.
[Ibid., p. 110, It is understood that Budienny, Timoshenko and Khrushchev escaped by air from Kiev.]
The Germans claim that the Wehrmacht captured no fewer than 665,000 prisoners in the Kiev encirclement. According to the History there were 677,085 men on the South-Western Front at the beginning of the Kiev operation. But of these a total of 150,541 men had escaped encirclement. The troops that were encircled fought on through the greater part of September and suffered very heavy losses, while others succeeded in breaking out. Not more than one-third of the number of troops who had been originally surrounded were taken prisoner.* These Russian statistics would reduce the number of prisoners
taken to about 175,000. One cannot help suspecting that the truth must lie somewhere half-way between the Russian and the German figures.
The question remains whether Stalin was not perhaps right, after all, to have clung to the Kiev salient for as long as he did. Paradoxically, the History suggests that this German victory in the Ukraine hopelessly upset Hitler's time-table.
[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 111.]
This, indeed, coincides with the prevalent German view. In the opinion of some of the leading German generals, the time wasted on the Kiev operation very largely upset the plans of the German High Command to reach Moscow before the winter had set in. Thus
Haider considered that the Battle of Kiev was the greatest strategic mistake in the Eastern campaign, an opinion shared by Guderian, who spoke of the Battle of Kiev as a great
tactical victory, but doubted that great strategic advantages were to be derived from it.
[Guderian, op. cit., pp. 225-6.]
Guderian found some comfort, though not very much, in the thought that although "the planned assault on Leningrad had to be abandoned in favour of a tight investment" the prospects for occupying the Donets Basin and reaching the Don were now good. It is not quite clear, though, whether, at the time, he entirely agreed with the OKH's belief "that the enemy was no longer capable of creating a firm defensive front or offering serious resistance in the area of Army Group South".
In any case, however, the Germans had torn a 200-mile gap in the Russian front in the Ukraine, and, in the next two months, they occupied the whole Eastern Ukraine and
nearly the whole Crimea, and were not thrown some distance back until after they had captured Rostov.
Although Odessa was to rank officially among the four "hero cities" (the others being Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad), its defence against one German and eighteen
Rumanian divisions between August 5 and October 16 by the Special Maritime Army
under General Petrov was in reality something of a side-show in the general pattern of the war in 1941.
[ It was long after the war that, on Khrushchev's initiative, Kiev was added to the "hero cities". In military quarters this decision was sharply criticised, one colonel, who had gone right through the whole war, telling me: "Hero city, my foot! It was one of
our worst skedaddles."]
Reaching the Black Sea coast at the beginning of August, the enemy had cut off Odessa from the Russian "mainland", but this main Russian naval base in the western part of the Black Sea was able to maintain communications by sea with both the Crimea and the
Caucasus. The Black Sea Navy and Marines played an important part in the defence of
Odessa where extremely heavy fighting was raging at the end of August and losses in
effectives reached as much as forty per cent overall, and in the case of the marines, as much as seventy to eighty per cent. In order to hold Odessa as long as possible, for this tied up considerable enemy forces, reinforcements were sent by sea, including a number of those invaluable katyusha mortars, whose mass production had only just begun.
It is remarkable, in view of the German air superiority, that the Russians should have been able to maintain, as they claim, regular sea communications from Odessa
throughout the siege of the city. They even claim that they managed to evacuate by sea to the Caucasus 350,000 civilians, that is about half of the population, and some 200,000
tons of industrial equipment.
When practically the whole of the Crimea, with the exception of Sebastopol, had been overrun by the Germans, 80,000 soldiers and a considerable amount of military
equipment were successfully transported by sea from Odessa to Sebastopol and the
Caucasus—and this despite a large-scale attempt at sabotage by enemy agents who, at the height of the evacuation, set fire to numerous port installations.
[ IVOVSS, vol. n, p. 118.]
Odessa fell after two and a half months of extremely fierce fighting, and losses were heavy on both sides. The Russians were very surprised by the toughness of the Rumanian troops, since Rumania's military record, particularly in World War I, had not been exactly glorious. According to the Russians—always prone to exaggerate enemy losses—the