Ivan’s War (20 page)

Accounts like this, from Soviet times, reflect the sense of awe that the catastrophe inspired. Stalin, like Churchill in Britain at the same time, understood and responded to the emotional intensity of the moment. But the leader’s strong words did not impress everyone. The ‘bitter truth’ that Stalin told was far from accurate. It was true, as he said, that thousands of troops were ‘fighting heroically’, but it was also true that tens of thousands more were missing or captured, striking out towards their homes or waiting in depots for transport to take them anywhere at all. Nor could the leader’s speech help people stranded in the mosquito-haunted marsh. Among these was a
politruk
called Nikolai Moskvin.

Moskvin’s war had begun with the same fine words and lofty hopes as any loyal citizen’s, words written in the collective national trance. ‘I profoundly believe in the rightness of our cause,’ he wrote in his diary on 22 June. ‘I love my motherland, I will defend it to the last ounce of my strength, and I will not begrudge my life for my people.’ That night he kissed his family goodbye as they joined the long convoy of evacuees. He did not think they would be separated long. Two days later, he was with his regiment and preparing to defend Belorussia. But disturbing rumours of loss – 850 planes and 900 tanks – soon began filtering east, and the shrewd
politruk
already guessed that these estimates might prove to be low. ‘Who tells the truth in wartime?’ he wondered. Moskvin began to weigh the odds. ‘We’ll win for sure,’ he still believed. ‘But the cost will be colossal.’ Ten days later, on 4 July, the truth had dawned. ‘Our situation is very bad,’ he wrote in despair. ‘How could it have turned out that we, preparing to fight on enemy soil, absolutely failed to consider that we might have to mount some kind of defence? Something was up with the doctrine of our armed forces.’
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Moskvin’s main job was to maintain morale. After a short delay, he
received a transcript of Stalin’s speech with instructions to read it to the men. But by this stage his regiment had little time for meetings. ‘No time to write,’ the
politruk
noted on 15 July. ‘It is possible that we are not completely defeated yet, but the situation is extremely difficult … The enemy’s aviation is destroying absolutely everything. The roads are littered with the bodies of our soldiers and the civilian population. Towns and villages are burning. The Germans are everywhere – in front, behind, and on our flank.’ A couple of new recruits from western Ukraine were calling on the men to surrender their arms. Their situation seemed hopeless enough. By 23 July, the regiment had been encircled. ‘What am I to say to the boys?’ Moskvin asked in a scribbled note. ‘We keep retreating. How can I get their approval? How? Am I to say that comrade Stalin is with us? That Napoleon was ruined and that Hitler and his generals will find their graves with us? … It seems that I didn’t do a good job of convincing them,’ he added the next day. The previous evening, after his pep talk to the men, thirteen of them had slipped away into the forest.
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The Red Army collapsed in the first weeks of the war. This is no criticism of its individual troops; it is a statement about bureaucratic rule, coercion, lies, fear and mismanagement. The problems were not new, nor were they unfamiliar. Transport, for instance, which was identified by nearly every frontline officer as the reason why retreat turned into rout that June, was like a running sore for units based along the Soviet border. ‘It is absolutely unknown to us where and when we will receive the motorized transport we need for newly mobilized units,’ the commander of an infantry division in the 4th Army had written on 12 March 1941. That same month, another report found no unit with more than four fifths of the required transport strength. Even then, spare parts, fuel and tyres remained impossible to guarantee.
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Four months later, when the crippled armies of the western region needed transport to bring fresh reserves up to the front, they found themselves short by at least one third of the required strength.
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Gabriel Temkin, a Jewish refugee from Hitler who would later fight in the Red Army, witnessed the impact of the transport shortage from his lodging near Bialystok. The soldiers he saw on their way to the front that first week made a depressing spectacle: ‘Some in trucks, many on foot, their outdated rifles hanging loosely over their shoulders. Their uniforms worn out, covered with dust, not a smile on their mostly despondent, emaciated faces with sunken cheeks. Equally miserable,’ he added, ‘were the small trucks pulling
the vehicles with ammunition, food and personal belongings.’
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The men’s morale was desperately low. It was a matter of poor leadership, inadequate training and lack of faith in their own cause, but the long marches and even longer bivouacs, sometimes in the open air, made the whole nightmare worse. ‘Sometimes,’ Fedyuninsky wrote of the retreating armies, ‘bottlenecks were formed by troops, artillery, motor vehicles and field kitchens, and then the Nazi planes had the time of their life … Often our troops could not dig in, simply because they did not have the simplest implements. Occasionally trenches had to be dug with helmets, since there were no spades …’
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Red Army soldiers receiving their supply of shells before battle, 1941 

 

Other equipment was in short supply as well. The Germans genuinely feared Soviet bayonets, and troops were encouraged to use them for that reason. The problem was, for many, that they had no other choice. That June, soldiers in Belorussia and Ukraine ran out of cartridges and bullets. Anastas Mikoyan recalled his government’s surprise when it learned that the army had run out of rifles, too. ‘We thought we surely had enough for the whole army,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘But it turned out that a portion of our divisions had been assembled according to peacetime norms. Divisions that had been equipped with adequate numbers of rifles for wartime conditions held on to them, but they were all close to the front. When the Germans crossed the frontier and began to advance, these weapons ended up in the territory they controlled or else the Germans simply captured them. As a result, reservists going to the front ended up with no rifles at all.’
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Retreating troops also abandoned all the things they could not carry, which included wounded men as well as Maxim guns.

The Red Army had been restructured in the last few months of peace. The debacle in Finland had provoked an initial programme of reforms, but it was the fall of France in 1940 that inspired the General Staff to focus on their preparations for land-based attack. If they should happen to be faced with a massive strike from German planes and tanks, they reasoned, their strategy should now incorporate the deployment of large anti-tank artillery brigades in support of the infantry. The huge formations must have looked impressive, but when the attack came in 1941 they were good for little more than show. The front line would soon be so broad that the best the large armoured brigades could do was to huddle in their deep consolidated rows, unable to predict or respond to the movements of an enemy whose measure they had yet to take. Infantry divisions faced German tanks without the consistent support of their artillery. Since their air cover had also been utterly destroyed, many soldiers concluded that the back-breaking effort of Soviet industry in the 1930s, the pride of Stalin’s revolution, was now as good as wasted, lost. Soviet troops had been expecting to enjoy the science-fiction spectacle of their own machines in battle. Instead, they watched as the horizon filled with the fruits of German modernity. A new word – ‘tank fright’ – was soon coined by the General Staff to describe the conscripts’ terrified response.
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The story might have been quite different. Soviet tanks should have been world-beaters. Many had been tested during the civil war in Spain in 1936, and some designs had been refined as a result. The heavy KV model, named after Kliment Voroshilov, was a redoubtable machine, almost impervious to German fire at this stage in the war. It would, indeed, provide the model for the Germans’ own ‘Tiger’ in 1943. The lighter, more manoeuvrable T-34 eventually proved itself the best field tank in the Second World War, but at this stage the Red Army still had more of the older BT light tanks in service, as well as the obsolescent T-26 and T-28s. These machines were old, and few had been reliably maintained. The KV had a tendency to break down anyway, but every model suffered from a shortage of spare parts, to say nothing of skilled mechanical attention. In 1941, nearly three quarters of the Soviet Union’s 23,000 tanks were thought to need rebuilding or capital repairs. They would not make it to the workshops that summer. More Soviet tanks were lost in 1941 through breakdown than through German fire, and overall the Soviets lost six tanks to every German one.
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The same story could be repeated for artillery in 1941. The Red Army was
well-equipped, but its sclerotic command structures deprived it of flexibility in field conditions. There were never enough men with the right skills to operate complex equipment, but the inexperienced officers who commanded them were also unlikely to give them much chance to learn for themselves. Heavy guns of every kind were hoarded by officers for whom men might be cheap but new equipment was too valuable to lose.
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Men, too, were easier to move. Tractors were sometimes used to drag the heaviest equipment into place, but horses were the main source of draught power. In 1941, the Red Army still used the civil-war
tachanka
, a three-horse cart, to draw some of its lighter guns to the front line. But the horses were slaughtered with the men in 1941, and though the June grass had been sweet, forage for the survivors was soon running low. Supplies of food were a problem along the entire front. Horses and men grew thinner at the same accelerated pace.

The other fatal logistical problem that summer was radio communication. Again, the difficulty came as no surprise. Poor field communications had dogged the Soviet army in the Finnish campaign, but plans to provide equipment and train new operators had not yet been fulfilled. The Red Army relied on wire far more than radio. The system was inflexible and centralized. Tank drivers, for instance, were seldom in contact with their comrades or even their commanding officers on the battlefield. The radio operators that did work at the front had not been adequately trained. As a former SS officer recalled after the war, the Soviets ‘used only simple codes and we nearly always were able to intercept and decode their radio messages without any difficulty. Thus we obtained quick information on the front situation, and frequently also on Russian intentions; sometimes I received such reports from our monitoring stations earlier than the situation reports of our own combat troops.’
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In 1941, some units were not even using code. At Uman that summer, vital messages from staff officers in the 6th Army were conveyed in clear text. ‘What else are we supposed to do,’ a lieutenant enquired, ‘when they want everything sent without delay?’
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Finally, there was little prospect of help for weak and injured soldiers at this stage. The suddenness of the German attack pre-empted plans to move hospitals and medical supplies away from the front line. Then transport difficulties strangled their retreat. By 1 July 1941, the South-Western Front could call on just 15 per cent of its planned medical facilities. In the Tarnopol garrison hospital, which would have been the first point of call for Volkov and his tired crew, more than 5,000 wounded and exhausted men were crowded into facilities intended for 200 people within five days of the first
attack.
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On 30 June, a report marked ‘absolutely secret’ catalogued the losses of one week. ‘In the course of military action none of the sanitary establishments located in the western parts of Belorussia was mobilized,’ it began. ‘As a result, the [Western] Front lacked 32 surgical and 12 infection hospitals, 16 corps hospitals, 13 evacuation points, 7 administrative centres for evacuation, 3 motorized sanitary companies … and other medical facilities.’
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It added that the equipment, drugs and other supplies that these facilities controlled had been destroyed in the bombing and fires. The staff, too, frequently, were dead.