Russia's War

by Richard Overy

  The sentiments aroused by popular patriotism in 1942 proved anything but Christian. Russian society was roused to a fever pitch of hatred and vengeance. Hating the Germans and everything German became the central message of the propaganda machine. Soldiers and citizens were encouraged to give way to a blind patriotic rage. The word ‘German’ or ‘fascist’ assumed a satanic dimension. ‘If you don't want to give away/ all that which you call your country,’ wrote the poet Konstantin Simonov, ‘then kill a German, kill a German/ every time you see one.’16 The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a former anti-Bolshevik who returned from exile in Paris to be rehabilitated by Stalin in 1939, was recruited to fan the flames. In August 1942 he wrote in the army journal Red Star:

  Now we know. The Germans are not human. Now the word ‘German’ has become the most terrible swear word. Let us not speak. Let us not be indignant. Let us kill. If you do not kill the German, he will kill you… If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.17

  Ehrenburg's own hatred was genuine enough: he had visited areas liberated during the Moscow counter-offensive. The hatred of thousands of other ordinary Russians was not simply manufactured by the state but was born of the sufferings inflicted in a year of defeats. The summer of hate orchestrated in 1942 drew on an incoherent revulsion against the enemy and gave it force and focus, but the patriotism and the grim thirst for revenge had their own source in the Soviet people. The writer Vyacheslav Kondratyev, a veteran of the conflict and a bitter critic of the post-war sanctification of the Soviet war effort, believed that the revival of morale had little to do with Stalin and the Party: ‘It was a pure burst of love for our fatherland. That sacrificial incandescence and readiness to give one's life for it are unforgettable. Nothing like it ever happened again.’18

  In the autumn of 1942 people armed themselves spiritually for the struggle. The summer panic in Moscow appeared to subside. Stalin placed himself at the head of a patriotic rallying unthinkable a few years before. Stalingrad was now to play the role played out by Moscow a year earlier. Its survival became not just a military and economic necessity: the city came to symbolize the new spirit of defiant nationalism conjured up after the disaster at Rostov. The city bore Stalin's name, a gift from grateful fellow-Communists in 1925 in memory of Stalin's alleged role during the civil war in saving the town, then called Tsaritsyn, from counter-revolutionary armies.19 Within the space of a dozen years the sleepy Volga port was transformed into a sprawling industrial city, populated by giant engineering plants turning out machine tools and tractors – the Red October Factory, the Barricades Works, the tractor plant. A new urban landscape of tall apartment buildings, dull Party offices and workers' housing stretched for forty miles along the riverbank. Along the Volga flowed oil and food from the Caucasus to feed the industrial cities of the north. With the loss of the Ukraine, these southern resources were vital to the Soviet war effort. The rest of Russia could have continued to fight after the loss of Stalingrad and the south, but prospects of victory would have been remote. Both sides knew this. Defender and attacker came to see the struggle for Stalingrad as decisive.

  In July the odds were heavily in Germany's favour. Stalin still refused to see the south as the major battleground for 1942 and kept the bulk of Soviet forces farther to the north. The balance on the southern front strongly favoured the attacker: 250,000 troops of Germany and her allies against 187,000, 740 tanks against 360, 1,200 aircraft against 330.20 Army Group B moved remorselessly forward across the Don River towards Stalingrad. Before them stretched an endless steppe. ‘It was,’ recalled a German survivor, ‘easily the most desolate and mournful region of the East that came before my eyes. A barren, naked, lifeless steppe, without a bush, without a tree, for miles without a village.’21 Across the bleak terrain drove the German 6th Army, commanded by General Friedrich Paulus. Resistance melted in front of him. Desperate Soviet counter-attacks in the last two weeks of July did little to slow up the German advance and proved costly in men and tanks. Soviet commandeers began to lose control over the battle as communications broke down. Late in July Stalin sacked Marshal Timoshenko, who was struggling to create a coherent defensive line in front of Stalingrad, and appointed General Gordov as commander of the Stalingrad Front. On July 23 6th Army encountered Gordov's two armies, the 62nd and the 64th, along the Chir River, eighty miles from Stalingrad. These two Soviet armies bore the brunt of the savage battle for the next four months.

  Against heavily armed mobile forces Gordov's troops could do little. Bleak though it was, the dry steppe country suited German commanders. The Red Army was pushed back towards Stalingrad day by day. By August 19 Paulus was ready to mount his first assault on the city, supported now by the 4th Panzer Army, which had been detached from Army Group A in the Caucasus. The attack almost produced disaster. On August 23 German forces reached the Volga north of Stalingrad and created a salient five miles wide along the riverbank. The same day German units reached the outskirts of the city. The German air force launched a 600-bomber attack on the city, creating a blazing inferno across the centre and killing, according to Soviet estimates, 40,000 of the inhabitants, who had been ordered to stay in the city rather than clog the military supply lines.22 At Hitler's headquarters in the Ukraine, where his southern strategy had aroused bitter criticisms from senior generals, there was, according to one eyewitness, an ‘exultant mood’. Paulus confidently expected to seize the city and cut the Volga route in a matter of days.23

  Once again Stalin stared calamity in the face. This time, Zhukov recalled, Stalin did not lay the blame on his subordinates. The strong implication was that, at last, he blamed himself for all the shortcomings of the first year of war. On August 27 Zhukov was summoned to Moscow from his command of the Western Front defending the capital. Late that evening he arrived at the Kremlin, where Stalin was discussing the crisis with the State Defence Committee. Stalin's study was a dimly lit room, dominated by a large map table. At one end of the room stood a large globe. On the walls hung pictures, not of the leaders of world revolution, but of Russian military heroes. Stalin never beat about the bush. He told Zhukov that he must travel to Stalingrad himself and try to rescue the situation. He then announced that Zhukov was to be made Deputy Supreme Commander to Stalin. Zhukov's reply is not recorded. He accepted the new post, drank tea with Stalin and left to ascertain the facts.24

  Zhukov responded with his usual energy. On August 29 he flew south to the banks of the Volga. At the headquarters of the Stalingrad Front he met Stalin's new chief of staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who had replaced the despondent Shaposhnikov in July. The two men set about stabilizing the front, but they were faced with critical shortages of men and munitions. Three reserve units released by Stalin from the rear were to be used to try to break the 6th Army's grip on the Volga north of Stalingrad. The attack, launched on September 5, achieved little in the face of furious German air attacks. Stalin continued to hound his new deputy to find some way of plugging the gap. On September 12 Zhukov flew back to Moscow to report in person. Accompanied by Vasilevsky, he told Stalin that with existing forces the front could not be held. Reserves were needed. While Stalin stared grimly at the maps spread out before him, Zhukov and Vasilevsky muttered to each other about the need to find ‘another solution’. Stalin abruptly looked up. ‘What “other solution”?’ he asked. He sent both men away with orders to return the following day with a clear picture of what needed to be done to save Stalingrad.25

  When Stalin met them on September 13 he was livid with rage at his British ally for arguing over military aid. ‘Tens, hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the struggle against fascism, and Churchill is haggling over twenty Hurricanes.’26 It was over a year since Britain and the United States had pledged to send the Soviet Union the military and economic aid necessary to keep the Soviet front from collapsing. Though there was popular hostility in both Western states to co-operation with Communism, the alternative of a German vict
ory in the East was regarded as even less palatable, since it would leave Britain at the mercy of a military giant and the United States with little realistic prospect of fighting a major war 3,000 miles distant from its shores. Yet for all the importance attached to Soviet resistance, neither Western power contributed enough during 1942 to ensure Soviet survival. Churchill candidly told the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, that all Britain could offer was ‘a drop in the ocean’. The American Lend-Lease aid programme, begun in March 1941 for the British Empire and extended to cover the Soviet Union in August that year, provided $5.8 billion of goods for Britain by the end of 1942 but only $1.4 billion for the Soviet Union.27 Throughout the year Stalin had pressed Britain and the United States to provide direct assistance by opening a ‘second front’ in Europe to divert German forces away from the Eastern campaign. The war with Japan and the immature state of American rearmament made it difficult for the West to do more. The British army was hard pressed to keep a small Italian-German force from conquering Egypt, and the Royal Navy was fighting the Battle of the Atlantic, on which the future of any Western war effort depended. The only direct pressure Britain applied came from a long-range bombing offensive against Germany's western industrial cities, which because of its modest scale had achieved only meagre results by the end of 1942.

  In July 1942 Churchill suggested to Stalin that a face-to-face meeting between them might help to smooth the path of inter-allied coalition. A meeting was arranged for early August. Stalin had scant respect for the British, whom he regarded as opportunists and cowards. ‘We must be guarded in relations with the English,’ he had told Maisky a year earlier. ‘They want, it seems to me, our weakening.’ He was blunt and ungracious when he met Churchill in an awkward confrontation on August 12. Churchill seemed ill at ease, fidgety; Stalin gazed impassively at his guest, insultingly restrained. He outlined the grim news from the south and assured his guest that he was ‘determined to hold Stalingrad’.28 Churchill then had the unhappy responsibility of telling Stalin that no ‘second front’ could be opened in 1942. Stalin was visibly angered. He was patronizing and insulting about British resolve and competence, to an extent that reduced his guest to a scarcely suppressed fury. After the first meetings Churchill was all for returning home rather than face further humiliation at the hands of a man he cursed as a ‘brigand’. But he stayed on, and a greater cordiality was established. Churchill revealed details of planned Allied landings in North Africa – Operation Torch – and for the bombing of Germany, which pleased Stalin, though nothing could assuage Stalin's evident disappointment that his allies could not relieve the pressure on Stalingrad by attacking in force in the west. That night, in the Catherine Hall of the Kremlin Palace, Stalin entertained his guest at another lavish state banquet. As they sat drinking coffee after the meal, Churchill asked Stalin if he could forgive his consistent hostility to the Soviet system. Stalin could not bring himself to say yes. His eyes narrowed, and he stared silently at Churchill before replying: ‘It's for God to forgive – not me. In the end, history will judge us.’29

  Stalin was left to fight for Stalingrad on his own. He accepted Churchill's arguments against risking a premature invasion of continental Europe with manifest resentment. Vasilevsky and Zhukov's ‘other solution’ held the field. They brought a map to the Kremlin, which they laid on the table. Zhukov did the talking. He proposed a counter-offensive across the long exposed flanks of the German thrust towards Stalingrad that would encircle Paulus and break the German front. The counter-attack would take forty-five days to prepare thoroughly, drawing on strategic reserves which Stavka had garnered for the expected German assault on Moscow that had failed to materialize. The Soviet operation had to penetrate far to the German rear to be sure of opening up an impregnable corridor between Paulus and the rest of the German front. Stalin was critical, but not dismissive. Zhukov and Vasilevsky were sent away again to produce clear plans.

  There has always existed a dispute over who first thought of the counter-offensive plan. The commander of the Voronezh Front, General Vatutin, whose forces stood opposite the long northern German flank, may have been the initial author. Vasilevsky played a central role as chief of staff in drawing up the detailed plans. The operational conception owed something to Zhukov's clear battlefield mind. There was no single inspiration behind the plan; it was a collective effort. This in itself was a revolutionary development. Stalin left the rescue of Stalingrad to the experts. The offensive plan still needed his final approval, but by mid-October both its technical feasibility and its prospects for success were clear, and Stalin did nothing to obstruct it.30

  The advantages of the operation were many. Along the flanks of the German advance had been posted weaker Romanian, Italian and Hungarian divisions. They were less well armed than the German units and had less stomach for a do-or-die contest with an angry Red Army. They were stretched taut along the edges of a salient in which there were now few reserves. German forces themselves were running out of steam. With only one usable railway line, the supply system struggled to cope. Shortages of fuel and spare parts made it difficult to keep German tanks and vehicles going. Aircraft were forced to operate from rough grass airstrips, and their attrition rate was high. In the Caucasus the rapid advance of Army Group A was halted on a line in front of the oil city of Grozny. German soldiers reached the snow-clad passes of the Caucasus mountains but could advance no further. The balance of forces still favoured the attacker at Stalingrad – Paulus fielded twenty-five divisions against the ten under-strength divisions of the 62nd Army in the city itself. But in the second half of 1942, against every reasonable expectation, the rump Soviet economy, a triumph of improvised and urgent revival, began to produce larger quantities of tanks, aircraft and artillery than the Germans, who had four times as much steel.

  The Soviet military revival in 1942 and 1943 was inextricably linked to the recovery of the battered industrial economy. The Soviet war effort was saved only by a most remarkable exodus of machines, equipment and manpower from the areas under German attack in 1941. Two days after the German attack a Committee of Evacuation was set up, with a staff of eighty-five planners and officials under the leadership of a Party favourite of Stalin's, Lazar Kaganovich. Unable to cope with the scale of the emergency, he was replaced in July by the trade union leader, N. M. Shvernik. Evacuation was carried out under exceptional difficulties. Subjected to air attack, with German forces often at no more than a few hours' distance, thousands of engineers and workers swarmed like ants over their factories, dismantling machinery and hauling equipment and vital materials to the nearest railhead. Here it was loaded, often manhandled, onto flatcars or into boxcars, for the long journey east. Whenever possible, each train carried a whole plant and its workforce. The workers were packed into cars equipped with rows of bunks and a stove. At their destination in the Urals, Kazakhstan or Siberia, they poured out of the cars and began the arduous work of reassembling their workplace.31

  They worked with few tools in almost impossible conditions, in snow or permafrost, short of food and shelter. Where possible the refugee factories were coupled to an existing plant. In many cases they were set up on undeveloped sites where amenities were non-existent; two-thirds were restarted in the open countryside. At one tank factory the 8,000 female workers lived in holes carved out of the earth, industrial bunkers that unintentionally mirrored the harsh trench conditions at the fighting front.32 During the second half of 1941, the latest Russian estimates suggest, at least 2,593 enterprises were moved eastward; the final tally was almost certainly higher. As many as twenty-five million workers and their families went with them, a human exodus without parallel that was to prove vital to the revival of the industrial economy and Soviet agriculture.33 Priority was given to men of military age, skilled workers and engineers and Communist Party workers, but millions of women and children were moved as well, many in long, gruelling marches on foot, to escape an invader whose reputation for brutality preceded him. With the influx, the />
  work-force in the Urals industrial region increased by 36 per cent; in western Siberia and the Volga basin the increase was almost one-quarter.34

  Inevitably, mistakes were made in the chaotic conditions. Machines were left rusting by railway tracks. Trains loaded with equipment spent weeks trying to find a route to the east. Some factories, moved only a short distance, were threatened by the next German advance and had to be moved again. Yet an extraordinary amount was achieved despite the lack of a central plan, the shortage of railway equipment and the threat of enemy attack. By the end of 1942 only 55 out of the 1,523 major factories moved to the east were still idle. The rest were either in full operation, or on the way to achieving it. By concentrating everything on the single task of producing weapons at the expense of almost all civilian production, the shrunken Soviet economy in the second half of 1942 produced over 13,000 tanks and 15,000 aircraft, as against 4,800 and 9,700 for the same six months of 1941. In these six months Soviet industry turned out as much as, or in some cases more than, the German economy produced during the whole year.

  The Soviet plan of attack, which was given the code name Operation Uranus, hinged on one critical factor: the defenders of Stalingrad had to hold out for the forty-five days Zhukov needed to organize the campaign. This seemed at the time an improbable ambition. In early September Stalin expected the city to fall in a day or so. German forces penetrated south of Stalingrad and reached the Volga once more, splitting the Soviet defence, and leaving the hapless 62nd Army encircled in the city, with its back to the river, relentlessly battered by aircraft and artillery. The German army began to move forward through the deep ravines that led to the outskirts of Stalingrad, sealing off and capturing successive sections of the city. By September 3 some German units were only two miles from the river. The Soviet defenders were confined to the workers' estates and factories to the north, the area around the Central Railway Station and river quays in the central zone and the small hill that dominated the centre of Stalingrad, Mamayev Kurgan. Around them the city collapsed. Bombing and shellfire reduced buildings to stark, twisted skeletons. Wooden houses were reduced to ashes, their metal stovepipes still standing amidst the debris. In the dark, recalled Konstantin Simonov, who immortalized the conflict in his novel Days and Nights, the city looked like a flat, undulating plain: ‘It seemed as though the houses had sunk into the ground and that grave mounds of bricks had been heaped over them.’35