Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Already acting like something of a Provisional Government, the delegates of the National Council conferred on General Berling, on the Council's behalf, the Grunwald Cross 1st class.

  Among other things the delegates had come to Moscow to ask for arms. They received

  some satisfaction from the Russians but none from the British and the Americans who

  continued to supply the Armija Krajowa. But the political significance of the arrival in Moscow of this "delegation" was much greater than its military significance. They were, in fact, a nucleus of that "Lublin Committee", which was, before long, going to be the de facto government of Poland. In the course of his interview with Tass, Morawski expressed his gratitude to the Red Army and his affection for Stalin.

  Nor were the Yugoslavs being neglected in this bid for Slav Unity. In April a regular military mission from Tito arrived in Moscow, and on May 20 it was announced that

  Stalin had had a long meeting the day before with Generals Terzic and Djilas,

  "representing the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia". Terzic, it was explained, was

  "the head of the Yugoslav Military Mission in the USSR". Whether this was recognised by the Royal Yugoslav Government no longer mattered; the Soviet Union had already

  given de facto recognition to Tito. Simic, the Yugoslav Ambassador had declared himself a Titoite some time before, and when two members of the Yugoslav Embassy, returning

  to Moscow, were met by the Embassy car flying the Tito flag with the red star, they

  ordered the chauffeur to take it down. This he refused to do, and told the two diplomats they could walk into Moscow for all he cared. It is not recorded how they reached town, but they refused to accept the Embassy's fait accompli, and stayed for some days at the Hotel National, whereupon they were recalled by the Royal Government.

  On the same day as the announcement of Stalin's meeting with the Yugoslav generals, an interview, given by Tito to the A.P. was prominently published in the Soviet press. Tito explained that 50,000 square miles and five million people were under his jurisdiction; he asked for UNRRA help, and for the recognition of the National Liberation Committee as the Government of Yugoslavia. A few days later Lieut.-Gen. Milovan Djilas published a long article in the Russian press on the four years of the war of liberation in Yugoslavia.

  In the course of it he violently denounced Mihailovic. He also commented on Stalin's shrewdness and clarity of vision, and his hatred of empty phrases:

  He takes a problem and you can just see him polishing it and sharpening it. He did not ask us a single irrelevant question, and he answered our questions remarkably quickly and to the point. He has an excellent knowledge of Yugoslavia and her

  personalities, and he interprets these men with remarkable correctness and

  shrewdness.

  [ In retrospect Djilas was to paint a very different picture of Stalin in his Conversations with Stalin, published in 1962.]

  Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—the future was taking shape.

  Chapter VI THE RUSSIANS AND THE NORMANDY LANDING

  Officially, relations continued to be excellent between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies at the time of the Normandy Landing. Only a few days before, the American

  shuttle-bombing bases in the Ukraine had come into operation. Flying Fortresses started coming in from Italy after dropping their bombs on Debrecen, Ploesti and other

  Hungarian and Rumanian targets; and then flying back to Italy and dropping more bombs on the way.

  It was strange to see there, at Poltava and Mirgorod, in the heart of the Gogol country, those hundreds of G.I.'s eating vast quantities of American canned food—spam, and

  baked beans and apple-sauce —drinking gallons of good coffee, making passes at the

  giggly Ukrainian canteen waitresses, and commenting flatteringly on the Ukrainian

  landscape, which was "just like back home in Indiana or Kentucky". Many of them, it is true, had serious doubts about the usefulness of these shuttle-bombing bases, and thought them more in the nature of a political demonstration of "Soviet-American solidarity", or as a precedent which might come in useful in the Far East if and when...

  Judging from General John R. Deane's account, [ The Strange Alliance.] the Russians had never been very keen on the whole idea and had been difficult and obstructive for months before the bases actually came into operation in early June 1944.

  Soon afterwards, in a surprise night raid on the principal (Poltava) base the Germans destroyed forty-nine out of the seventy Flying Fortresses on the ground.

  [Two Americans and thirty Russians were killed in this raid, mostly by anti-personnel mines with which the Germans had peppered the airfield before dropping their heavy

  bombs.]

  My own impression at the time was that the Russians were extremely embarrassed at

  having failed to protect the base effectively with either fighters or anti-aircraft guns but that they were, on the whole, relieved when, before very long, these American bases were scrapped altogether, despite the enormous effort and money that had been sunk into them.

  The very idea of American air bases on Soviet soil somewhat went against their grain; nor did they care for the idea of the Ukrainians in a war-devastated part like the Poltava Province (Poltava itself had been completely destroyed) being able to observe at close quarters the "high living" of the American G.I.'s, with their P-X, and their enormous meals.

  The shuttle-bombing bases came into operation only a few days before the Normandy

  Landing. I happened to be at the Poltava base when the news broke, and immediately

  flew back to Moscow, arriving there in the afternoon of June 6.

  The first wave of excitement over the Second Front had subsided, but people were happy.

  The newly-opened "commercial" restaurants were packed that night with people celebrating—not only British and Americans, but many Russians, too. (A party of Jap

  diplomats and journalists also came to one, and behaved and danced provocatively and ostentatiously and were nearly beaten-up by some Americans.)

  The news of the Normandy landing had missed the morning papers, but Moscow radio

  had been giving news of it in successive bulletins. On the night of the 6t.h General Deane and General Burrows, heads of the American and British military missions, spoke on

  Moscow radio, the latter in Russian (of sorts). On the 5th, there had been enthusiastic articles in the Russian press on the capture of Rome, and now, on the 7th, the great news of the Normandy landing was splashed over four columns, with a large picture of

  Eisenhower. But there was no comment yet. The Russians wanted to be absolutely sure

  that the landing was a success. A curious feature of this Russian reporting on the Second Front was that, although facilities had been given to Russian correspondents to be on the spot, no news from any Russian correspondent was published.

  The articles were mostly by military and naval experts, and dealt with the technicalities of the landing operations, the part played by the allied air-forces, etc., and for some days rosy forecasts were avoided. Almost the only non-technical article was written by

  Ehrenburg, and, in the circumstances, it was particularly inept. It was a sloppy, emotional piece on France, which would have been all right, if only there had been something on the same lines about Britain and America; but, as it was, it lacked all sense of proportion.

  It was all about the French people, the French Resistance, French paratroops that had landed in Normandy, the tradition of Verdun, the Unknown Soldier who had now risen

  from his tomb to fight le Boche, etc. Those really responsible for the operation he swept aside in a polite sentence: "We admire the valour of our Allies— the British, Canadians, Americans." And then he immediately proceeded to wallow in his Francophilia.

  Was this a purely personal reaction of Ehrenburg's, the old habitué of the Rotonde?

  Perhaps, and yet in a fi
lm produced some time later on the liberation of France, the British and Americans were also made to play a sort of incidental role—or something that could be taken for granted—while the men who played the most prominent part in saving France were—the French, assisted by the Red Army, the heroes of Stalingrad, etc.

  Rather more legitimate were the frequent suggestions in the Soviet press that the

  Russians had, in fact, enormously facilitated the task of the Allies, and had already done the greater part of the work in smashing the Germans. Patrick Lacey, of the BBC, was quoted with pleasure as saying that "but for the Russians, D-Day would have been impossible." A Kukryniksy cartoon, on June 11, showed Hitler as a rat, with its head already caught in the Russian trap and the British-American sword then descending upon its hind quarters.

  A week passed before Stalin indicated the official line. This was wholly unlike

  Ehrenburg's.

  In a statement to Pravda, Stalin said:

  After seven days' fighting in Northern France one may say without hesitation that the forcing of the Channel along a wide front and the mass-landings of the Allies in Northern France have completely succeeded. This is unquestionably a brilliant

  success for our Allies. One must admit that the history of wars does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and

  mastery of execution.

  Invincible Napoleon shamefully failed in his plan to force the Channel and to

  conquer the British Isles. Hitler the hysteric, who, for two years, boasted that he would force the Channel did not even venture to carry out his threat. Only the

  British and American troops succeeded with flying colours in carrying out the

  gigantic plan of forcing the Channel and of landing in force on the other side.

  History will record this action as an achievement of the highest order.

  After this statement the press became very warm to the Allies and, on the initiative of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, only a few days after the opening of the

  Second Front, the Soviet press published for the first time (and not merely in the form of a statement by Roosevelt or Stettinius) a long list of arms and other deliveries received since the beginning of the war from Britain, the United States and Canada.

  [This list of deliveries from the three countries up to April 30, 1944, is given on pp. 625-6.]

  Not long after D-Day all Russian attention was again focussed on the Soviet-German

  Front. In a way, this was natural, for now the Red Army was making an all-out bid to put all Germany's satellites out of action, and to break into Germany itself. Only four days after D-Day the Russians, under Marshal Govorov, struck out at Finland and, after eleven days of heavy fighting on the Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri was captured. On June 23 began the great offensive in Belorussia, that was to carry the Red Army far into Poland. And no sooner had the front become more or less stabilised there in August than the Russians struck out at Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary—and, in Russian eyes, the war in the west again became relatively small stuff.

  At first the Allies, held up at Caen and Saint-Lo, had made little progress—which

  produced some critical notes in the Russian press; then it became "extraordinarily easy"; and when Paris was liberated, it was the French Resistance who received most of the

  credit in the Russian press (even though only a few days before, à propos of Warsaw, an official Soviet statement ridiculed the suggestion that, in conditions of modern warfare, any city could be liberated by forces inside it). Indeed, it was not long after the Russian summer offensive had begun in Belorussia that Pravda wrote on July 16:

  The Red Army's offensive has not only made an enormous gap in the eastern wall of Hitler's European fortress, but has also shattered the arguments of Nazi

  propaganda. The myth that Germany's main front is now in the west has burst like

  a soap bubble... German commentators are now speaking with terror of the battle in the east which, they say, has taken on apocalyptic proportions.

  Naturally, the suggestions put forward by some military commentators in Britain that the Germans were deliberately pulling out of Belorussia as a result of the Normandy landing, were strongly resented by the Russians. As the Russian commentator was to say, "this nonsensical talk did not stop until we had paraded 57,000 newly-captured German

  prisoners, complete with dozens of generals, through the streets of Moscow." That was on July 17, after the enormous German routs at Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Minsk.

  Even when the campaign in France was developing highly favourably, the Soviet press

  still published little more than the official communiqués from the Western Front, and few despatches from the Russian correspondents attached to SHAEF appeared in print. It was not until the end of 1947 that one of them, A. Kraminov, wrote a long retrospective

  account of the Second Front, and if the sentiments and ideas he expressed then were the same as they had been in 1944, it would scarcely have been good inter-allied manners to publish his cables while the war was still in full swing. He treated the institution of SHAEF war correspondents as a gigantic publicity machine for armies and even for

  individual generals (Montgomery, in his view, was the worst publicity-monger of all); of Montgomery's military gifts he spoke with some disdain, gave the British army no credit for holding the Allies' left flank at Caen, and wrote with typical Russian anger of both the conception of strategic bombing and of the "barbarous and futile" use made of the air force in Normandy where cities like Caen were wrecked and thousands of civilians killed for no valid military reason. It is true that he spoke with admiration of both Patton and Bradley, but treated Eisenhower as a "good chairman", and no more.

  In 1944, however, it was not yet the fashion to speak in rude terms of the Second Front.

  Though terribly belated, it was still regarded as a real help and as a guarantee that the war would end soon. It made the imminent collapse of Germany more tangible than ever; and the Russians were not altogether surprised at the attempt made on July 20 to assassinate Hitler.

  The failure of the attempt was received in Russia with undisguised relief. Although the Russians had, in a way, prepared for such an eventuality with their Free German

  Committee, the setting up of a "respectable" (i.e. pro-Western) German Government, with the British and Americans now firmly established on the Continent, might have

  created a situation which would almost certainly have turned out detrimental to Russia.

  There was nothing the Red Army wanted more at this stage than to "finish off the fascist beast in his lair".

  This did not prevent them from letting, or even encouraging, Field-Marshal Paulus (who had kept silent until then) publish a statement calling on the German people to "change the State leadership". The wide use made of this statement in leaflets showered over the enemy lines was intended to demoralise the German soldiers, even though the results of similar attempts in the past had been disappointing, especially if measured by the number of Germans voluntarily surrendering to the Red Army.

  Chapter VII GERMAN ROUT IN BELORUSSIA: "WORSE

  THAN STALINGRAD"

  The great Russian summer offensive started a little over a fortnight after D-Day in the West, and, somewhat symbolically, on June 23, the day after the third anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The rôles had now been completely reversed. In

  the last two years, despite extremely heavy losses in both men and equipment, the

  Russians had gone on building up a tremendously effective, competent and powerfully

  equipped army, while Germany's reserves in manpower were now in constant decline.

  [Some very interesting percentage figures are published in Vol. V of the Soviet History, showing that between Stalingrad and the end of the war the Russians increased only slightly the number of soldiers in their Army, but increased enormously the quantity of equipment
. (IVOVSS, Vol. V, p. 467).

  The following table illustrates this point admirably:

  Guns and

  Date

  Effectives

  Tanks Aircraft

  Mortars

  Nov. 19,

  100

  100

  100

  100

  1942

  Jan. 1, 1944

  111

  180

  133

  200

  Jan. 1 .1945

  112

  217

  250

  343

  The increase in the number of trucks must have been greater still.]

  Whereas the Soviet Union now had her British and American allies fighting a major

  campaign in France, and tying down (according to Russian estimates) thirty percent of Germany's combat troops, the troops of all Hitler's remaining allies were becoming more and more unreliable and their governments were hoping to get out of the war at the first convenient opportunity. It is ironical that one of the reasons why Hitler was determined to cling on to the Vitebsk-Mogilev-Bobruisk Line at the east end of the great

  "Belorussian Bulge" penetrating deep into Russia was that its loss would have a demoralising effect on the Finns who, since the loss of the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri earlier in the month, were sorely tempted to resume their armistice talks with the

  Russians.

  Field-Marshal von Busch, the commander of Army-Group Mitte which occupied

  Belorussia, had been pleading with Hitler to pull out of Belorussia, or at least to "shorten the line". All that Hitler did, after five days of inevitable German defeats, was to sack von Busch and replace him by Field-Marshal Model, one of the losers of the Battle of Kursk.

  The Russian offensive began in the best possible conditions. For one thing, until the very last days of the May-June lull, the Germans had expected the next big Russian blow to fall, not in Belorussia, but in the southern part of the front, between the Pripet Marshes and the Black Sea. The Russian concentration of no fewer than 166 divisions in

  Belorussia had been done with the utmost secrecy and discretion, and when the blow fell the Germans were taken almost completely by surprise.