Russia at war
Page 27
People worked because they knew that it was absolutely necessary—they worked twelve, thirteen, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day; they "lived on their nerves"; they knew that never was their work more urgently needed than now. Many died in the
process. All these people knew what losses were being suffered by the soldiers, and they
—in the "distant rear"—did not grumble much; while the soldiers were suffering and risking so much, it was not for the civilians to shirk even the most crippling, most heartbreaking work. At the height of the Siberian winter, some people had to walk to work—sometimes three, four, six miles; and then work for twelve hours or more, and
then walk back again, day after day, month after month.
There was little or no exaggeration in the stories published in the press—for instance the story of how, on an empty space outside Sverdlovsk, two enormous buildings were
erected in a fortnight for a factory being brought from the Ukraine.
Among the mountains and the pine forests there is spread out the beautiful capital of the Urals, Sverdlovsk. It has many fine buildings, but I want to tell you of the two most remarkable buildings in the area. Winter had already come when Sverdlovsk
received Comrade Stalin's order to erect two buildings for the plant evacuated from the south. The trains packed with machinery and people were on the way. The war
factory had to start production in its new home—and it had to do so in not more
than a fortnight. Fourteen days, and not an hour more! It was then that the people of the Urals came to this spot with shovels, bars and pickaxes: students, typists, accountants, shop assistants, housewives, artists, teachers. The earth was like stone, frozen hard by our fierce Siberian frost. Axes and pickaxes could not break the
stony soil. In the light of arc-lamps people hacked at the earth all night. They blew up the stones and the frozen earth, and they laid the foundations... Their feet and hands were swollen with frostbite, but they did not leave work. Over the charts and blueprints, laid out on packing cases, the blizzard was raging. Hundreds of trucks kept rolling up with building materials... On the twelfth day, into the new buildings with their glass roofs, the machinery, covered with hoar-frost, began to arrive.
Braziers were kept alight to unfreeze the machines... And two days later, the war factory began production.
[ Pravda, September 18, 1942.]
At the time, however, the press scarcely ever referred to the special difficulties arising from war-time shortages. For example, a Government Instruction of September 11, 1941, laid down that steel and reinforced concrete were to be used very sparingly, "and only in cases when the use of other local materials, such as timber, was technically wholly out of the question". So, especially in 1941, many of the factory buildings were made of wood: These buildings were architecturally displeasing, and often altogether puny to look at; but... usually even large factory buildings were erected in a matter of fifteen to twenty days... People worked day and night—the scene of their work being lit by arc lamps or by electric bulbs suspended on trees... In one of the Volga cities the new buildings of the largest aircraft factory in the country were being built in this way...
Even before the roof had been completed, the machine-tools were already
functioning. Even when the thermometer went down to forty degrees below, people
continued to work. On December 10, fourteen days after the arrival of the last trainloads of equipment, the first Mig fighter-plane was produced. By the end of the
month, thirty Mig planes were turned out... Similarly, the last lot of workers of the Kharkov Tank Works left Kharkov on October 19; but already on December 8, in
their new Urals surroundings, they were able to assemble their first twenty-five T-34 tanks, which were promptly sent to the front.
[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 151.]
Though a very high proportion of Soviet heavy industry, and especially war industry, was successfully moved to the east within four or five months, there was an inevitable drop in production in the meantime. There was, in fact, a gap of nearly a year—roughly from
August 1941 to August 1942 when the Red Army was extremely short of equipment, and
this shortage was very nearly disastrous between October 1941 and the following spring.
It was, as we shall see, one of the principal reasons why the Battle of Moscow was only a partial, and not a complete victory. It also largely accounts for the Russians' grievous reverses of the following summer.
Even so, the increase in armament production immediately after the invasion was very considerable. In the whole of 1941 the aircraft industry produced a total of nearly 16,000
planes of all types, of which more than 10,000 were produced after the invasion, but mostly between July and October. The figures for the production of tanks and other
weapons were equally striking, and the production of munitions of all kinds in the second half of 1941 was almost three times what it had been in the first. The tragedy of it was that, by October, all this progress came virtually to a standstill.
The difficulties facing the Soviet armaments industry in the east were enormous. Not all the workers of the evacuated plants could be transferred at the same time as the
machinery; in many cases, for a variety of reasons, only forty or fifty per cent of the workers followed. There was also at first a very serious shortage of certain raw materials.
High-grade steels for armour-plating, had, in the main, been produced in the Eastern Ukraine; this meant a fundamental reconversion of the various production processes in the east. This reconversion resulted in a temporary lowering of the output of the blast and open-hearth furnaces. There was an extreme shortage of molybdenum and manganese. A
high proportion of the manganese had been produced in the Nikopol area, which was now under German occupation. New manganese mining areas had to be opened up in the
Urals and Kazakhstan, where conditions of terrain and climate presented incredible
difficulties. The Nikopol miners, who had brought to the east their mining equipment, started producing manganese ore, with the help of locally conscripted labour, in a remote part of Sverdlovsk province, where manganese mining had been only tentatively begun
shortly before the war. The gradual organisation of the large-scale smelting of
ferromanganese at the Kushvisk plant, in the Kuzbas and at Magnitogorsk was later
described as "a stupendous industrial victory equal in importance to a major military victory". No more remarkable as a fact of human endurance was the development of molybdenum mines in the waterless steppe near Lake Balkhash in Central Asia.
When the Germans had overrun the Donbas, the Soviet Union lost over sixty per cent of her coal output, and the production of coal had to be stepped up in the Urals, the Kuzbas and Karaganda areas; in December 1941 it was decided to sink forty-four new mines
within the next three months. Desperate efforts were also made to increase the output of aluminium, nickel, cobalt, zinc, oil, chemicals, etc., in the east.
The critical situation is best summarised in the second volume of the official History: In the late autumn of 1941 our country lived through its most difficult days, both militarily and economically. The front required more and more armaments and
munitions, but owing to the evacuation of so many plants, the number of factories producing war equipment had sharply fallen... By the end of October, not a single plant in the south was working. Of the blast furnaces in operation on June 1, only thirty-eight per cent were now working; of the open-hearth furnaces, only fifty-two per cent; of the electric-steel-smelting furnaces, thirty-eight per cent, of the rolling-mills, fifty-two per cent. Compared with June 1941, we were producing by the end
of October 1941, thirty-three per cent of pig-iron, forty-two per cent of steel, forty-two per cent of rolled-iron. By December, the output of steel had dropped by two-
thirds. We had lost all the coal mines of the Don
bas and of the Moscow Basin; rolled non-ferrous metals were down to practically nothing, and the total industrial output had dropped since June by over fifty per cent.
It was the lowest point reached throughout the war.
The migration of the aircraft industry had a disastrous effect on the output of
planes. This dropped in November to about thirty per cent of its September output; there was no means of replacing the heavy losses suffered by our air force in the battles of Moscow, Leningrad, etc. Only by concentrating all aircraft reserves on the most decisive sectors of the front could the Soviet air force carry on at all in the winter fighting of 1941-2.
Owing to evacuation, there was also a heavy drop in the output of tanks during the late autumn and winter months, and the same applied to the production of guns and munitions.
Nor was the conversion of peace production to war production easy: out of the
thirty agricultural machinery plants earmarked for such conversion, only nine had the necessary equipment for doing so.
In the munitions industry there was a serious shortage of ferroalloys, nickel, and non-ferrous metals. There were also desperate shortages of aluminium, copper and
tin. The loss of the Donbas with its highly-developed chemical industries, and the evacuation of the chemical industries of Moscow and Leningrad, resulted in a sharp drop in the output of explosives. Out of the twenty-six chemical plants evacuated to the east only eight had reached their destination by the beginning of December, and only four of these had started production.
Between August and November 1941, 303 munitions plants were out of action; these
used to produce every month many millions of shells, air bombs, shell-cases,
detonating fuses, hand-grenades and some 25,000 tons of explosives.
There was a growing disproportion between the number of guns produced and the
amount of ammunition available for each gun. In the second half of 1941 the front was chiefly using the ammunition reserves accumulated in peace-time. But after six months, these reserves were practically down to zero, while current production was fulfilling the army's needs only up to fifty or sixty per cent...
Apart from these heavy losses, Soviet industry also suffered from a serious shortage of manpower. The annual average of workers and employees in the national economy had
dropped from 31.2 million in 1940 to 27.3 million in 1941; in November this figure had dropped to 19.8 million. Some had been left behind in the occupied areas; others were still on their way to the east. But on November 9, while the Germans were still
prophesying the imminent fall of Moscow, the State Defence Committee laid down
precise plans for the speeding up of production in the east, and, in particular, it stipulated that, in 1942, 22,000 planes and 22,000 to 25,000 heavy and medium tanks be produced.
Just as Russia was becoming industrially more and more dependent on the east, by the end of 1941 she had become almost equally dependent on the east for food.
The war had seriously lowered the efficiency of agriculture. Most of the men in the
villages had been called up, including the tractor drivers who had been called up to drive tanks. Many of the horses, automobiles and tractors had been requisitioned for the Army.
Practically all the agricultural work in Russia during the war was done by women and adolescents. In many kolkhozes the ploughing was reduced to the most elementary forms, while at harvest-time the population of the whole neighbourhood, including town-dwellers, was mobilised to help. Horses were used when they were still available, and when there were still tractors, they were usually fitted with gas generators, because of the oil shortage.
The territorial losses suffered in 1941 had an almost catastrophic effect on Russian food supplies. Before the war, the territory overrun by the Germans by November 1941 had
produced thirty-eight per cent of the cereals, eighty-four per cent of the sugar, and contained thirty-eight per cent of the cattle and sixty per cent of the pigs. By January 1, 1942, the number of cows in the Soviet Union (not counting those in the occupied areas) had dropped from 27.8 million to 15 million and the number of pigs had dropped by over sixty per cent.
The Volga country, the Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan were to become the
Soviet Union's "food base" for the greater part of the war. The areas under cultivation were greatly extended, and crops which had not been grown in these parts before, like sugar-beet and sunflower, were introduced. With the loss of the Don and Kuban country in the summer of 1942, the dependence on the "eastern food base" was to become even greater.
Chapter X BATTLE OF MOSCOW BEGINS— THE OCTOBER
16 PANIC
In his statement to us at Viazma in the middle of September, General Sokolovsky had
made three important points: first, that despite terrible setbacks the Red Army was
gradually "grinding down" the Wehrmacht; secondly that it was very likely that the Germans would make one last desperate attempt, or even "several last desperate
attempts" to capture Moscow, but they would fail in this; and, thirdly, that the Red Army was well-clothed for a winter campaign.
The impression that the Russians were rapidly learning all kinds of lessons, were
dismissing as useless some of the pre-war theories, which were wholly inapplicable to prevailing conditions, and that professional soldiers of the highest order were taking over the command from the Army "politicians" and the "civil war legends" like Budienny and Voroshilov was to be confirmed in the next few weeks. Some brilliant soldiers had
survived the Army Purges of 1937-8, notably Zhukov and Shaposhnikov, and had
continued at their posts during the worst time of the German invasion; Zhukov had
literally saved Leningrad in the nick of time by taking over from Voroshilov when all seemed lost. Apart from him and Shaposhnikov, Timo-shenko—a first-class staff officer who had started his career in the Tsar's army—was almost the only one of the pre-war top brass to prove a man of ability and imagination.
The first months of the war had been a school of the greatest value to the officers of the Red Army, and it was above all those who had distinguished themselves in the operations of June to October 1941 who were to form that brilliant pléiade of generals and marshals the like of whom had not been seen since Napoleon's Grande Armée. In the course of the summer and autumn important changes had been made in the organisation of the air force by General Novikov, and in the use of artillery by General Voronov; both Zhukov and
Konev had played a leading role in holding up the Germans at Smolensk; Rokossovsky,
Vatutin, Cherniakhovsky, Rotmistrov, Boldin, Malinovsky, Fedyuninsky, Govorov,
Meretskov, Yeremenko, Belov, Lelushenko, Bagramian and numerous other men, who
were to become famous during the Battle of Moscow or in other important battles in
1941, were men who had, as it were, won their spurs in the heavy fighting during the first months of the war. Distinction in the field now became Stalin's criterion in making top army appointments. It is, indeed, perfectly true that "the summer and autumn battles had brought on a military purge, as opposed to a political purge of the military. There was a growing restlessness with the incompetent and the inept. The great and signal strength of the Soviet High Command was that it was able to produce that minimum of high calibre commanders capable of steering the Red Army out of total disaster".
[Erickson, op. cit., p. 624.]
Undoubtedly some of the commanders had only a purely nominal Party affiliation, and
some of the new men, such as Rokossovsky, had actually been victims of the Army
Purges of 1937-8, and so could not have had any tender feelings for Stalin.
The Stavka, the General Headquarters of the Soviet High Command was set up on June 23, and a few days later the State Defence Committee (GKO), consisting of Stalin,
Molotov, Voro-shilov, Malenkov and Beria; on July 10 the
"Stavka of the High Command" became the "Stavka of the Supreme Command", with Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Budienny, Shaposhnikov and General Zhukov, the Chief of Staff, as
members. On July 19 Stalin became Defence Commissar and on August 7 Commander-
in-Chief.
The Commissar system was greatly reinforced; the commissars, as "representatives of the Party and the government in the Red Army" were to watch over the officers' and soldiers'
morale, and share with the commander full responsibility for the unit's conduct in battle.
They were also to report to the Supreme Command any cases of "unworthiness" amongst either officers or political personnel. This was a hangover from the civil war, and, indeed, from the much more recent period when the officer corps was suspected of unreliability.
In practice, in 1941, the commissars proved, in the great majority of cases, to be either men who almost fully supported the officers, or were, at most, a minor technical
nuisance; but inspired by the same lutte à outrance spirit, and, faced daily by pressing military tasks, the old political and personal differences between officer and commissar were now usually less harsh than in the past. Even so, the dual command had its
drawbacks, and, at the time of Stalingrad, the commissars' role was to be drastically modified.
Whether or not there was any serious need for giving the officer a "Party whip", there was certainly even less need for the NKVD's "rear security units" to check panic through the use of machine-gunners ready to keep the Red Army from any unauthorised
withdrawals. "What initial fears there might have been that the troops would not fight were soon dispelled by the stubborn and bitter defence which the Red Army put up
against the Germans, fighting, as Haider observed, 'to the last man', and employing
'treacherous methods' in which the Russian did not cease firing until he was dead".
[Erickson, op.-cit., p. 598.]
These "rear security units" were a revival of a practice inherited from the Civil War, and proved wholly unnecessary in 1941, the Army itself dealing rigorously with any cases of cowardice and panic.