Russia at war
Page 71
The scale of the food problem can be seen from the fact that, in 1942, only fifty-eight per cent of the pre-war area under cultivation was in Soviet hands; the rest had been occupied by the Germans. With the recovery of the Northern Caucasus and other areas, the
proportion was sixty-three per cent in 1943; but the number of cattle was sixty-two per cent of the low pre-war total; that of horses, thirty-seven per cent; that of pigs, twenty per cent. The production of artificial fertilisers was down to very little, and there was often no petrol for the remaining tractors. It is one of the wonders of Russian character plus Russian organisation that a still worse food shortage should have been avoided. Although food supplies continued to be very poor in the cities, especially for "dependents" with their miserable rations, the fact remains that the Army was reasonably well fed,
especially from 1943 onwards, and so too were most of the skilled industrial workers.
It is quite obvious that lend-lease supplies played an important part in improving the Army's diet, especially from the beginning of 1943. Of very great importance to the Red Army, too, were the growing numbers of Studebakers, Dodges and Willys jeeps—
commonly known in the Red Army as villises—which so greatly increased its mobility.
They were still not in great evidence at the time of Stalingrad, but, as I know from my own experience, they became an integral part of the Russian military landscape after about March 1943. These lorries and jeeps certainly contributed to the "new look" and to the tremendous and constantly-growing fighting power of the Red Army after Stalingrad.
This question of American, British and Canadian help to the Soviet Union had both
political and psychological aspects.
In 1942, Allied aid was certainly not taken very seriously; in 1941-2, American
shipments still amounted to only 1.2 m. tons and British shipments to 532,000 tons. Some of the heavy equipment sent that year (Hurricanes, Matilda tanks, etc.) was
unsatisfactory. In 1943 British shipments remained stable but American shipments were enormously stepped up, rising to 4.1 m. tons (and over 6 m. tons if one includes the first four months of 1944). This included over 2 m. tons of food. Besides this, the U.S.A. sent the Soviet Union between 22 June 1941 and 30 April 1944:
6,430 planes
3,734 tanks
10 minesweepers
12 gunboats
82 smaller craft
210,000 automobiles
3,000 anti-aircraft guns
1,111 oerlikons
23 m. yards of army cloth
2 m. tyres
476,000 tons of high octane petrol
99,000 tons of aluminium and duraluminium
184,000 tons of copper and copper products
42,000 tons of zinc
6,500 tons of nickel
1.2 m. tons of steel and steel products
20,000 machine-tools
17,000 motor-cycles
991 m. cartridges
22 m. shells
88,000 tons of gunpowder
130,000 tons of TNT
1.2 m. km. of telephone wire
245,000 field telephones
5.5 m. pairs of army boots
Other industrial equipment: $257 m. worth (including oil refinery equipment, electrical equipment, excavators, cranes, locomotives, et cetera)
Between June 22, 1941, and April 30, 1944, Britain dispatched 1,150,000 tons, of which 1,041,000 tons arrived. This included:
5,800 planes
33,000 tons of copper
4,292 tanks
12 minesweepers
103,000 tons of rubber
35,000 tons of aluminium
29,000 tons of tin
48,000 tons of lead
93,000 tons of jute
besides relatively small quantities of other raw materials, explosives, shells and other army equipment, as well as over 6,000 machine tools and £14 m. worth of other industrial equipment. The total value of Canadian deliveries for the same period was about 355 m.
dollars, and included 1,188 tanks, 842 armoured cars, nearly a million shells, 36,000 tons of aluminium and 208,000 tons of wheat and flour, besides a number of smaller items.
[Commissariat for Foreign Trade Statement published in Pravda in June, 1944, a few days after the Normandy Landing.]
By the end of the war the figures were higher still. According to General Deane, over fifteen million tons were shipped to Russia between October 1941 and the end of the war.
In his view the most important items were:
1) 427,000 trucks, 13,000 "combat vehicles", over 2,000 Ordnance vehicles and 35,000
motor-cycles;
2) Petroleum products (2,670,000 tons);
3) Food (4,478,000 tons), including flour. "Assuming that the Red Army had an average strength of 12 m. men, this meant a half pound of fairly concentrated food for each per day";
4) Railways equipment.
Altogether, he says, including a vast number of other items (medical supplies, clothing, boots, et cetera), "our supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.
They may not have won the war, but they must have been comforting to the Russians."
[ John R. Deane. The Strange Alliance (London 1947), pp. 93-95.]
These figures are, in their own way, highly impressive; for instance those showing that a high proportion of the boots and clothing-material of the Red Army was American-made, and that America and Britain also delivered important quantities of strategic raw
materials, aviation petrol, and much else. The planes and tanks, though of uneven value, were not to be sneezed at either. But they still constituted a relatively small proportion of all the planes and tanks used by the Red Army. According to Stalin's election speech in 1946, the Soviet Union produced about 100,000 tanks, 120,000 planes, 360,000 guns,
over 1.2 m. machine-guns, 6 m. tommyguns, 9 m. rifles, 300,000 mortars, some 700 m.
shells, some 20 billion cartridges, etc., during the last three years of the war.
Assuming that Stalin's figures are correct, they would suggest that the Allied heavy equipment (tanks and planes) amounted to between ten and fifteen per cent of the total.
N. Voznesensky, the head of the Gosplan, argues in his book, The War Economy of the Soviet Union, published in 1948, that the Allied deliveries in 1941, 1942 and 1943
amounted to only four per cent of the Soviet Union's total production. This purely
quantitative statement was misleading, since 1941 could not be considered a "lend-lease"
year at all, and 1944, a peak year in allied deliveries, was omitted altogether.
From my personal observation I can say that, from 1943 on, the Red Army
unquestionably appreciated the help from the West— whether in the form of Airocobras, Kittyhawks, Dodges, jeeps, spam, army boots, or medicines. The motor vehicles were
particularly admired and valued. And the fact remains that the Allied raw materials
enormously helped the Soviet war industries. But this still does not dispose of the
profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the Russians were losing
millions of men, while the British and Americans were losing much fewer people.
[ An important exception were the Russian airmen who warmly appreciated the Allied
bombings of Germany, and the fact that many German fighter planes were immobilised
in Germany.]
It was partly because of this feeling in the country that the Soviet Government liked to say as little as possible about Western deliveries; nor did it probably particularly like to advertise its dependence on the capitalist West for certain forms of equipment. This attitude was, understandably, resented in the West, and the first major incident over Russian "ingratitude" occurred in March 1943 when the US Ambassador, Admiral Standley, complained at a press conference of the "ungracious" Soviet attitude to both private Aid-to-Russia donations and American help general
ly.
The Russians were extremely annoyed by this protest; nevertheless, a few days later, the press published a very full account of a statement by Stettinius showing just how much had been sent to the Soviet Union since the beginning of the war. For one thing, as
Standley had pointed out, it was essential to appease Congress, where much was being made of these charges of Russian ingratitude.
[ In my Diary entry for March 9, 1943, I find the following: "The Russian censorship, after five hours' high-power telephoning, passed the text of the Standley statement. The people at the press department looked furious. Kozhemiako, the chief censor, was white with rage as he put his name to the cable. His mother had died of starvation in
Leningrad... Another Russian remarked tonight: "We've lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us spam. And has the 'warmhearted'
Congress ever done anything that wasn't in its interests? Don't tell me that Lend-Lease is charity!"]
But this sudden generous acknowledgement of Western aid in the Soviet press in March 1943, though provoked by the Standley incident, had a long-term purpose as well. In a sense, Stalin was already on his way to Teheran with a Big-Three peace at the back of his mind. Apart from the extremely unpleasant "special" problem of Poland which was on the point of blowing up, the Soviet Government was much more "pro-Western"
throughout 1943 than it had ever been. Paradoxically, it was in its official utterances more pro-Western during that year than were the Soviet people as a whole.
Chapter V BEFORE THE SPRING LULL OF 1943— STALIN'S
WARNING—THE GERMANS' "DESERT POLICY"
The great Russian drive in the winter campaign of 1942-3 from Stalingrad to Kharkov
and beyond, and the Germans' forced withdrawal from the Caucasus were not the only
major Russian successes during that period. After all the losses the Germans and their allies had suffered in the south, they were visibly more and more short of trained
manpower. This largely accounts for their decision, in March 1943, to abandon the
Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard, that "dagger pointing at Moscow", to which they had clung so desperately ever since their first setbacks in Russia in the winter of 1941-2.
It will be remembered that although the Russians had driven the Germans back from
Moscow along a wide front, they had failed to dislodge them from their Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard barely 100 miles from the capital.
Throughout the Black Summer of 1942 this remained a potential threat to Moscow; but
the Russians' main concern was less an attack on the capital than a German attempt to hold the "springboard" with the minimum number of men, and to transfer the rest to the south—to Stalingrad and the Caucasus. So, throughout the summer and autumn of 1942
the Russians did their utmost to tie up as many German troops as possible west of
Moscow by constantly attacking and harassing them. Those battles outside Rzhev were
among the most heartbreaking the Russians ever had to fight. They were attacking very strong German positions; Russian losses were much higher than the Germans, and so
bitter was the fighting that very few prisoners were taken.
I visited the Rzhev sector during the rainy autumn of 1942 after the Russians had
recaptured a few villages at fearful cost, but had each time been repelled from the
outskirts of Rzhev. I was struck by the intense bitterness with which the officers and men spoke of their thankless task.
The roads that autumn were like rivers of mud, and countless ambulances had to travel over a "carpet" of felled tree-trunks covering the road, an agonising bone-rattling and wound-tearing experience for the wounded.
That autumn I saw something of the German "desert" policy in a few of the villages recaptured by the Red Army. Thus, in the village of Pogoreloye Gorodishche, a large part of the population had died of hunger; many had been shot; others had been deported as slave labour, and the village had been almost completely destroyed.
Now, in March 1943, fearing to be outflanked by the Russians from the south (and,
eventually, of being trapped in that great "twixt-Moscow-and-Smolensk" encirclement which the Russians had failed to carry through in February 1942) the Germans simply
pulled out of the "Moscow springboard", though with some heavy rearguard actions, notably at Viazma, and destroying as much as time would permit them.
The official Soviet report, published on April 7, 1943, on the effects of the "desert policy" the Germans had systematically carried out in the newly-liberated areas west of Moscow was a harrowing catalogue of mass shootings, murders and hangings, rape, the
killing or starving to death of Russian war prisoners, and the deportation of thousands as slave labour to Germany. Kharkov was almost mild in comparison. The report noted that most of the shootings of civilians had been done by the German army, not by the Gestapo or the SD. The towns were almost totally obliterated—as I could indeed see for myself soon afterwards. At Viazma, out of 5,500 buildings, only fifty-one small houses had
survived; at Gzhatsk, 300 out of 1,600; in the ancient city of Rzhev, 495 out of 5,443. All the famous churches had been destroyed. The population was being deliberately starved.
15,000 people had been deported from these three towns alone. The rural areas were not much better off: in the Sychevka area, 137 villages out of 248 had been burned down by the Germans. The list of war criminals appended to the Report was headed by Col.-Gen.
Model, commander of the German 9th Army and other army leaders who had "personally ordered all this". The report noted that the destruction was "not accidental, but part of a deliberate extermination policy," which was being carried out even more thoroughly in these purely-Russian areas than elsewhere.
It is scarcely surprising that, as the Red Army moved farther and farther west, it became increasingly angry at the sight of all this bestiality and destruction.
The Russians scored two other important military successes at the beginning of 1943: they captured the strategically important Demiansk salient north of Smolensk and, more spectacular, after several days' extremely heavy fighting—with the troops of the
Leningrad Front striking east and those of the Volkhov Front striking west across the German Lake Ladoga salient—the Russians cut a seven-mile-wide gap in the Leningrad
land blockade. It was through this gap, which included the town of Schlüsselburg, that a railway line was built within a few weeks, and so linked Leningrad with the "Mainland".
The trains had to travel through a corridor constantly exposed to German shell-fire, and the journey called for the greatest bravery on the part of the railwaymen. But though frequently shelled, this railway through what came to be known as "the corridor of death"
carried on, and the thought of no longer being entirely cut off by land from the
"mainland" had a very heartening effect on the 600,000 people still living in Leningrad.
The city was, nevertheless, to remain under German shell-fire for another year.
[See Part III.]
All this was satisfactory. Nevertheless, the violent German counter-offensive which
started at the end of February and led to the Russian loss of Kharkov, Belgorod and a large part of the northern Donbas was a disappointing conclusion to the glorious "Winter of Stalingrad".
In his Red Army Day order of February 23 Stalin spoke in glowing terms of the winter offensive, saying that "the mass expulsion of the enemy from the Soviet Union had begun." But he warned the army and the country against excessive optimism—no doubt foreseeing some major setbacks.
The figures he gave for total enemy losses were, as usual, improbably high. In three months, he said, the Germans and their allies had lost 7,000 tanks, 4,000 planes and 17,000 guns; 700,000 enemy soldiers had been killed and 300,000 taken prisoner. Since the beginning of the war, the enemy casualties had amounted to nine millio
n men, among them four million killed. In the Soviet Union things were going much better, both in the army and in industry, whose output of armaments had "enormously increased".
If, Stalin said, the German army was more experienced at first than the Red Army, the opposite was now true. The Red Army had now become a cadres army, and the quality and skill of the Soviet soldier had greatly increased. The German losses, on the other hand, were compelling the German High Command to draw low-quality soldiers into the
army. Also, Russian officers and generals were now superior to their German opposite numbers. The Germans' tactics were banal and when the situation no longer corresponded to one outlined in his Field Regulations, the German officer lost his head.
Yet this did not mean that the German Army was finished:
The German Army has suffered a defeat, but it has not yet been smashed. It is now going through a crisis, but it does not follow that it cannot pull itself together... The real struggle is only beginning... It would be stupid to imagine that the Germans will abandon even one kilometre of our country without a fight.
Stalin's statement was remarkable in two respects: it was a warning to the Red Army that very heavy fighting was still in store; and, as events were to prove before long, the Germans were already on the point of launching their counter-offensive. Russian
reconnaissance must have shown by February 23 that it was coming.
Secondly, of all Stalin's war-time statements, this one was by far the least pro-Ally.
Without mentioning North Africa—where the Allies' progress was admittedly slow at the time—Stalin said that the Soviet Union was "bearing the whole brunt of the war." The compliments he had paid the Allies in November 1942 on their North Africa landing