fanatical anti-Germans, and there was also no getting away from the fact that millions of Ukrainians were on the "other" side— fighting in the Red Army, or working in the Soviet war industries.
But to the German soldiery Kharkov was something of a metropolis, and here many of
them were having a good time. The theatres were patronised chiefly by Germans and the programmes were arranged accordingly. They had Viennese operettas, grand opera (Aida and Don Quixote) and, frequently, a Grosses Wagner Konzert. Most of the performers were German or Austrian. There were many restaurants, cafés and brothels; and whole
German families had come here to open businesses. Some local inhabitants also managed to get licences for small shops and booths, and a number of Armenians had opened
restaurants and night-clubs in various parts of the city. The occupation, clearly, had its profiteers—and they were not all Germans.
It was part of the German policy in the Ukraine to wipe out the intellectuals. The
Ukrainian nationalists were treated badly enough; but even worse was the fate of those whom the Germans thought pro-Soviet. I saw several professors and teachers of Kharkov University and of some of the thirty-five technical and other colleges that had existed here under the Soviets. These rnen had survived the occupation; but many of their
colleagues had died. Some had been shot, either because they were Jews or were Party members, or suspected of being Party members; some had committed suicide. Others had died of starvation, especially in the winter of 1941-2. Several university buildings were destroyed by the Germans before they left; but even while they were here, they had
looted the libraries and the laboratories. The teachers who had survived had lived from hand to mouth, making home-made matches or soap, and selling them in the black
market. Except for a few small laboratories, all higher education had been closed down; so had all the 137 secondary schools of Kharkov; only twenty-three elementary schools had been allowed to open under the Germans. Hospitals had either been taken over by the German army, or had come almost completely to a standstill owing to lack of food and medical supplies. One story—hard to verify—was that there was one flourishing school, in which the Germans trained adolescents as spies—not only Ukrainians, but even some Jewish children, who were to act as agents provocateurs.
There was no constructive planning to speak of. Everything in the Ukraine was being
more or less destroyed and dissolved, with nothing to take its place. Local administration was run by Germans, or Ukrainian adventurers, or a few White émigrés, usually with no understanding or experience. The Ukraine was nothing but a source of food, raw
materials and slave labour, and the raw materials and food were not produced in the
quantities the Germans had hoped for. The Soviet scorched earth policy in the industrial areas had created immense difficulties for the Germans from the outset; labour willing to work for them was short, and, in the Donbas in 1943 they were reduced to turning tens of thousands of Soviet war prisoners into improvised miners.
Nor was the return of the Russians an occasion for unanimous rejoicing in Kharkov. I saw two large letter-boxes marked U.N.K.V.D.—the Ukrainian Security Police—into
which people were invited to drop denunciations and other relevant information. Here was scope for some ugly vendettas. And at the former Gestapo prison, now burned out, I could see civilian prisoners being escorted into the basement for questioning by the NKVD. Scared relatives were hanging about the prison, some of them with parcels of
food.
The atmosphere in Kharkov was becoming more and more depressing during those three
days. There was no further mention of the Ukrainian Government being there. Had they already left? For there were more and more rumours of a great German counter-offensive having started—and this was soon to be officially confirmed. The railway to Kharkov had not been restored and an early thaw had set in, which made the Russian soldiers shake their heads. Kharkov was as good as cut off from the Russian rear.
True, the Russians were re-opening schools and hospitals in a small way, and tearing down German street signs; but, with every hour, the feeling of uneasiness grew.
*
It was a harrowing experience to go to the main market on my third afternoon. Most of the trading was over. But at one stall they were still selling little glasses of millet or sunflower seed, and, at another, battered tubes of German toothpaste or tins of shoe-polish, and primitive lighters made of aluminium scrap, and selling at sixty roubles apiece. All the same there were still large crowds in the market, dismally eyeing this junk. Among them were many soldiers. The women behind the stalls looked shabby.,
worried, underfed.
Then I noticed two weird ghost-like figures in terrible rags. I remember one of them particularly: he had a long face that was nothing but bone and a dirty-white skin, and long red stubble grew from his chin; his eyes were blue and enormous and in them was a look of helpless suffering; his lips were parched and cracked, and his breath smelled of death.
The rags he was wearing were the remains of a discarded Italian uniform. He was a
Smolensk peasant, and had been captured by the Germans at Millerovo in the summer of 1942. He and the other man had come from a war prisoners' camp in a place called
Sobachi Pitomnik, or Dog Farm. For months they had lived there on starvation rations, and most of their pals had died. Now when the Russians had come, they had been let out, but had to go back to the camp every night. Nobody was taking care of them, and they had wandered about Kharkov, looking for food. No one in the market had given them
anything, and the military were treating them with suspicion.
This widespread callousness was another product of the German occupation, plus the
NKVD. For to the Russian authorities, they had surrendered to the Germans, and could not be treated as deserving cases before closer investigation. One Russian soldier
remarked: "Don't you get het up about them. For all we know, they may have been left here by the Germans as spies or diversionists." "They don't look like it, do they?" "Maybe not," he replied, "But one can't be too careful these days. The NKVD had better find out who they are. And anyway," he added, "there are plenty of other things to worry about..."
These Russian war prisoners could still have been saved by their own people; but they weren't. No doubt, conditions in Kharkov that afternoon were exceptional, but still the harrowing episode made one think of the whole ghastly tragedy of Russian war prisoners.
The soldiers in our house that night were no longer as cheerful as they had been. The Germans, they said, were attacking strongly at Kramatorsk and elsewhere west of
Kharkov, and large numbers of wounded had started pouring into the town. These
wounded were saying that the SS Panzer divisions were attacking in great strength.
We left Kharkov the next day, with a feeling of foreboding. The Germans returned, not at once but over a fortnight later, on March 15. One of the first things the SS did was to butcher 200 wounded in a hospital, and set fire to the building.
This recapture of Kharkov was their "revenge for Stalingrad"; but it was only a relatively small revenge. The early thaw, which had caught the Russians on the hop, and had forced the Soviet High Command to abandon Kharkov, was now beginning to work in the
Russians' favour. The ice on the Donets had become so thin that the German tanks could no longer cross it, and the Russians had by now dug in along the Donets fine. Here the front became more or less stabilised till July.
Chapter IV THE ECONOMIC EFFORT OF 1942-3— THE RED
ARMY'S NEW LOOK-LEND-LEASE
The Red Army of 1943 was very unlike the Red Army of 1941 or even 1942. We have
already described the post-Rostov reforms to smarten up the officer corps, to increase its authority through the abolition of dual command, and to heighten the discipline among the troops. In 1942, there had been many
heroic episodes in the Red Army, but also many cases of demoralisation and even panic; Ehrenburg in his Memoirs recalls a colonel, in the summer of 1942, saying bitterly to him: "There has never been such a skedaddle yet."
[ Novyi Mir, January 1963, p. 87.]
After Stalingrad, the overall morale of the Red Army was incomparably better than it had been either in 1941 or in 1942; there were many desperately difficult moments still, and some serious setbacks, such as the loss of Kharkov in March 1943; but the ultimate defeat of the Germans was no longer in doubt. Secondly, the quality of the troops was far better than it had been in 1941 and 1942; as Stalin said to Churchill in August 1942: "They are not so hot yet, but they are learning, and they'll make a first-class army before long." It was, indeed, during 1942 that the type of the hardened soldier, the frontovik, gradually developed.
But this general improvement in the quality of the Red Army was not only due to
psychological causes. In 1941 and 1942 the Russian troops had had the deeply depressing feeling of having to fight against a stronger enemy; heroism, guts, self-sacrifice were all very well, but what could they do against an enemy whose infantry, with its variety of automatic weapons, had far greater fire-power than themselves, and who had far more
tanks and planes?
Today it is admitted that Soviet armaments production did not reach a satisfactory level until the autumn of 1942. The evacuation of hundreds of plants from west to east in the autumn and winter of 1941 had resulted in an almost catastrophic drop in arms
production, which largely accounted for the disappointing results of the Russian Moscow counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2 and for the disasters of the summer of 1942.
After the loss of the Krivoi Rog iron ore, the Donbas coal, and the Ukrainian electric power-stations, there was a serious shortage in the east (where most of the armaments industry was now concentrated) of both power and metals. The total fuel resources were only half of what they had been before the war. The engineering works of Siberia and the Urals could not work at full capacity, and, during most of 1942 the output of tanks, planes, guns and ammunition was well below the Red Army's requirements. Draconian
measures had to be taken to increase output. New coal-mines had to be speedily sunk; new power-plants had to be built; the People's Commissariat for Coal had some 200,000
more or less "improvised" new miners placed at its disposal, and a special food reserve had to be constituted to keep them going. Tens of thousands of new miners were sent
from various parts of the country to the Karaganda coal area in Kazakhstan—nearly all of them women and very young people, who had to be trained in the shortest possible time.
The morale of the Russian women, conscious of working for their husbands or sons or
brothers in the Army was particularly admirable. Though less spectacular than the Battle of Stalingrad, the stupendous mass-effort made by the women of Russia during the war, whether in industry or agriculture, had nothing to equal it.
Despite these efforts, the shortage of coal, metals and electric power was still serious even in 1943. Though coal production in the east increased substantially in 1943 the total produced was still nowhere near the 166 million tons produced in 1941.
[In 1943, the principal coal areas in the east produced the following amounts: Karaganda, 9.7 m. tons (an increase by 2.5 m. tons over 1942); Kuzbas, 25 m. tons (4 m. tons more than in 1942); Urals, 21 m. tons (5 m. more than in 1942 and 9 m. more than in 1940).
Finally, the "Moscow coal basin", with its very inferior coal, produced in 1943 14 m.
tons. After the liberation of the Donbas its badly-wrecked mines were producing only 35,000 tons a day at the end of 1943—i.e. at the rate of 11 million tons a year.]
In 1943 oil resources were very low, too; Maikop had been put out of action by the
retreating Russians; Grozny, with its refineries, had suffered severely from German
bombing; and during the temporary breakdown of communications, in the Stalingrad
period, many of the Baku wells had to be temporarily closed down. Instead, a special effort was made to develop the "Second Baku" in the east at top speed.
The coal shortage had to be met (particularly for transport and urban needs) by the
substitution of peat and timber; in Moscow, thousands of students, office and factory workers were made to spend their summer holidays in improvised timber camps.
New industrial "giants" had to be speedily built—thus an enormous new power station was built in 1942 at Cheliabinsk to supply dozens of armaments works over a large area, and a gigantic new blast furnace (the famous "No. 6") was completed during the year at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine. Altogether, although the Soviet engineering
industry had lost half its potential through the German occupation of the Ukraine and other areas, it had, in the main, overcome its difficulties by 1943.
[IVOVSS, vol. III, p. 161.]
All this had a decisive effect on Soviet arms production. A tremendous effort was put into creating an air force superior to the Luftwaffe; gone were the grim days of 1941 when most of the Russian planes were suicidally obsolete. The principal planes that began to be produced in quantity in 1942 were the Il-2 stormovik (low-flying attack plane), and the Pe-2 operational dive-bomber; and the La-5 fighter, which was better than the
Messerschmidt 109, but not as good as the Messerschmidt 109F or 109G. In 1943 the La-5-FN, which proved better than any German fighter, including the Fokke-Wulf 190, went into mass-production, and, in May, so did the Yak-9, with a 37 mm. gun, which was
superior to German fighters with their 20 mm. guns. The Tu-2 dive-bomber went into
mass-production in September, and the Il-2 stormovik was steadily improved and was
developed by the end of the year into a two-seater plane, with increased fire power. The average monthly production of planes rose from 2,100 in 1942 to 2,900 in 1943, of which 2,500 were combat planes. Altogether, in 1943, 35,000 planes were produced, thirty-seven per cent more than in 1942, and including eighty-six per cent of combat planes.
The proportion of stormoviks and fighters was particularly high. At the height of the summer battles of 1943 more than 1,000 Il-2's were produced every month—over one-third of the total of aircraft produced.
A little grudgingly the present-day History adds that there were also some Western planes in the Red Army; but the Hurricanes and Tomahawks were obsolete, and much inferior to both Russian and German fighters; the Airocobras and Kittyhawks which began to be
used on the Russian front in the autumn of 1943, were excellent, "but there weren't enough of them."
[ IVOVSS, vol. Ill, p. 216.]
The output of tanks had also been seriously slowed down by the evacuation of industry to the east; nevertheless, great progress was made in tank construction throughout 1942.
Two-thirds of all Soviet tanks were made by three "giant plants" in the east—the Ural-mashzavod, the Kirov Plant at Cheliabinsk, and Plant No. 183. Some spectacular
improvements were made in 1942 for speeding up the production of tanks; thus the
turrets of the T-34 medium tank were stamped instead of being cast. The T-34 was,
altogether the best medium tank of World War II—as many German experts were to
agree—and it continued, throughout 1943, to undergo various further improvements. In September 1943, to meet the challenge of the new German Tiger tank, the Russians
began mass-producing the heavy JS ("Stalin") tank, with armour one-and-a-half times thicker than that of the Tiger, and described in the Soviet History as "the best heavy tank in the world."
The average monthly output of Soviet tanks in 1943 was over 2,000, which was a little less than in 1942; but in 1943 the production of light tanks was almost discontinued, whereas, at the beginning of 1942, these still accounted for half the total. Altogether, in 1943, 16,000 heavy and medium tanks were made; 4,000 mobile guns and 3,500 light
&n
bsp; tanks. This total was eight-and-a-half times more than in 1940 and nearly four times more than in 1941.
A substantial number of tanks was received from Britain and the USA in 1942 and 1943, but Soviet historians are even more critical about them than about the British planes.
Fifty-five per cent of the tanks received in 1942 were light tanks; in 1943 the proportion of light tanks was even higher—seventy per cent. The quantities received were described as "mediocre", and the quality left much to be desired.
[ IVOVSS, vol. Ill, p. 214. The History adds that Allied authorities, e.g. Liddell Hart, now readily admit that "the tanks the Russians used were almost entirely home-made."
Some of the tanks the Russians had received in 1941-2, particularly the Matildas, had proved to be particularly bad, and "as inflammable as a box of matches", as a disgruntled colonel told me at the Rzhev front in the summer of 1942.]
The output of guns and mortars was also greatly increased by 1943, that of guns of
different calibres amounting that year to no less than 130,000; altogether, as D. F.
Ustinov, the Minister of Armaments wrote in 1943: "A great density of fire for every kilometre of front is now the usual thing." From the beginning of 1943, there was also a vast improvement in the fire power of the infantry: in 1943 the number of submachine-guns was three times, and of light and heavy machine-guns two-and-a-half times, that of 1942. The vast superiority in fire-power of the German infantry of 1941 was now a thing of the past. One can well imagine the difference this made to Russian morale. The
German avtomatchik was no longer, as he was in 1941, an object of terror or despair; practically every Russian soldier was now an avtomatchik himself.
*
Food production presented another major problem. Many of the Soviet peasants may
have remained fundamentally hostile to the kolkhoz system; but there is no doubt that, by and large, they were as deeply affected as the working-class by the patrie-en-danger mystique of 1941-2. Almost all able-bodied men from the villages were drafted into the Army in the course of the war, and very many tractors and horses were requisitioned by the Army. Yet the remaining village population, consisting almost entirely of women, adolescents and old people, worked heroically, often in the most appalling conditions, to produce food. Cows were often used as draught animals, and some cases are even known of women drawing ploughs themselves. Even more than in the factories was there a deep consciousness of working "for" the sons and husbands and brothers who had gone to fight the Germans.
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