Ivan’s War (21 page)

Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942 

 

The Wehrmacht also rolled into the Russian steppe with more horses than tanks. In a few weeks, its supply lines had begun to stretch and thin across the unimaginable miles. The invader was not always invincible that June. At times, Soviet troops found German infantry without transport or air cover. Fascists, they discovered, could panic just as easily as
komsomols
in the right conditions. But in those early days the Wehrmacht enjoyed support from a portion of the local population. It was not yet on ancient Russian or even long-held Soviet soil. Civilians in cities like Lvov had been baiting Red Army troops for months. ‘The Germans are coming, and they’ll get you,’ they whispered in the narrow streets of the Galician town.
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Now soldiers from the same background, as well as the thousands who despaired of resisting Germany’s advance, turned tail, surrendered or fled the front line. By July,
the reports were already piling up of soldiers who drew swastikas on their clothes, refused to fire on Germans and talked admiringly of Hitler.
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Desertion rates were so high that no one could be sure of the numbers, let alone the breakdown of culprits by ethnic group. In three days at the end of June, NKVD special troops behind the lines on the South-Western Front caught nearly 700 soldiers on the run. Elsewhere, 5,000 men were caught fleeing one of the catastrophic battles of those first few days. But it probably was true that soldiers from the western regions were the most likely to disappear. They were anxious for their families, for theirs were the first homes the Germans overran that year. And some of them deserted because they saw no reason to die for Soviet power. Four thousand ‘westerners’ had fled the 26th Army by 6 July, and in one unit eighty men had refused their orders to fire.
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By 12 August, the army’s political administration considered the situation to be so dangerous that citizens of the western territories – Ukraine, Belorussia – and also the three Baltic states were specifically barred from the membership of new tank crews.
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All this translated into murderous confusion in the field. Neither Red Army men nor officers had expected this war. No battle followed a thoughtful preconceived plan. The men resented their officers, mistrusted their orders and suspected that some of their own comrades were traitors waiting to desert. If they had paused to consider their reasons for fighting, they would probably have found that fear – of their officers, of the unknown and of secret police as much as of the German invaders – played a large part. Then came their rage against the entire world. At the front, lofty ideas of other kinds seldom survived for long. But these same men were expected to go on fighting, without hope, day after day. The 117th rifle division of the 21st Army, for instance, retreated and then fought repeatedly for weeks. By 6 July, it had reached the town of Zhlobin on the Dnepr river. There it fought one of the first engagements in the defence of Kiev, a doomed campaign that would cost the 21st Army alone, on the most conservative estimates, well over 1,000 lives each day.
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The battle lasted for eight hours. At the end of it Zhlobin itself had fallen and the remnants of the division had withdrawn to the Dnepr’s eastern bank.

Before their retreat, the men had succeeded in destroying Zhlobin’s bridge, buying more time for the next day, and they had also blown up eight enemy tanks. But their morale was low. They were exhausted, hungry, sleepless, already haunted by all that they had seen. Many were injured. The next day, as usual, they faced combat again. Their officers had no plan other than head-on attack. As on the previous day, and every day, they threw men at the
German tanks. The men’s only morale-booster was their unanimous roar, the terrifying ‘Hoorah!’ that struck real fear into their enemy. Apart from that, few soldiers had any weapon more effective than an 1890s rifle and a bayonet. Even Molotov cocktails were hard to obtain, since Moscow had yet to sign the order that would soon have women stuffing glass bottles with wicks at a rate of 120,000 a day.
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At this stage, lacking bottles or bombs to throw, soldiers had only their bare hands. Wave after wave they ran in to attack, for hours, always amid the din of German shelling, screaming, and the crunch of steel on bone.

It was a style of warfare – hopeless and head-on attack – that ground entire divisions to dust. It sickened the men involved, especially where they had endured weeks of it already. Ten communists at Zhlobin threw their party cards away as soon as the firing started. At least one other man shot himself in the leg in an attempt to escape from combat altogether. A soldier said to be Georgian tried to kill the commanding officer by firing on the troops as they attacked. A Volga German was thought to have gone over to the enemy as soon as he could slip away. But the real renegades made their escape with more style. Two senior officers ran twenty miles to get away from the front line as the dawn broke, while the commander who had ordered the first antiaircraft attack ‘got in his car and left’ as soon as the operation had begun. To date, the report of the day added, none had been punished because the local military judge, reared in the hard school of purging and lies, refused to investigate anything unless he had sufficient papers on his desk.
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Even the Germans were surprised by the level of chaos. It was as if the entire population, soldiers and civilians, had run wild. Whenever the Wehrmacht captured a place where supplies of food and consumables were held, they could expect looting to start. In one town several women and children were crushed to death by the mob as it swept towards the army warehouse. ‘If a man could not carry a bag of sugar,’ the German army’s observer reported, ‘he simply cut it apart and poured half of its contents on to the floor, carrying home the rest.’ The citizens of Pukhovichi plundered half the military supplies in their town in a single day, taking, as their new masters observed, ‘an average per family of 200 kilos of sugar, 200 kilos of fats, almost 350 kilos of grits, and then a quantity of fish, individual rations, and vegetable oils … The population had not seen such opulence for a long time.’ The Red Army itself joined in at Bobruisk. ‘The only difference,’ wrote the German reporter, ‘was that while the inhabitants were plundering the shops, the soldiers were looting the homes of the inhabitants.’
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The Stalinist regime of the late 1930s met its nemesis in Ukraine and
Belorussia in those early months. Eventually, its near collapse led to a rethinking of policy and leadership, to changes in the way war would be waged and people ruled. But one tool in its armoury would prove essential for the duration. On 15 July, Lev Mekhlis issued a directive to the army of political workers at the front. It was the prelude to an order, signed the following day, that reinstated the political commissars in all their pre-1940 authority. Morale, the report tacitly admitted, had collapsed entirely. The
politruks
had failed to convince their men that this war could be won, or even, perhaps, that there was any point in fighting on at all. And yet, Mekhlis insisted, these were the soldiers whose task was ‘to decide by force of arms whether the Soviet people would be free or become the slaves of German princes and barons’.

The bracing, epic formula behind these words might well have given heart to the people back at home, and also to the new recruits still training in their camps, but at the front, for now, the words had a hollow, even an insulting, ring. It was a mistake to tell soldiers, as Mekhlis prescribed, that Hitler’s blitzkrieg had failed and that the best divisions of his army were already defeated. And then came the depressing part on tactics, formulaic nonsense borrowed from the sloganeering days of civil war. ‘Teach all personnel how to rush into attack,’ the order continued. ‘Teach them implacable hatred and rage against the enemy, ardently to crush the fascist cur, to grind his face into the earth, to be prepared to fight to the last drop of their blood for every inch of Soviet soil. Tell them that tanks are not frightening for a brave and experienced soldier. Tell them that abandoning their posts without a direct order is a crime.’
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The words were hollow that summer, but they pointed to one of the ways that this war was conceived and fought, the war in soldiers’ minds and in the hopes of their civilian families. By saturating public discourse with simple, much-repeated formulas, the government forged new resolve to replace the lost innocence of 1938. It also helped to exclude all the other words, the panic-stricken, angry ones, that might have crowded into people’s conversations. On 19 July, a further order called for the mass recruitment of political officers to replace the hundreds who had been lost since 22 June.
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There never was a moment when the propaganda effort flagged. Red Army troops were presented, effectively, with two wars simultaneously. The first, the one that they alone could know, was the war of the battlefield, the screaming war of shells and smoke, the shameful one of terror and retreat. But the other war, whose shape was crafted by writers, was the one that propaganda created. Soldiers and civilians alike could learn about it in newspapers,
the most popular of which,
Red Star
, was read aloud to small groups at the front. Serving troops also saw film shows that included newsreel, some of which, because it was carefully staged, could seem more vivid than their own fragmented memories of combat. Fighting might seem to take place outside real time, in terrifying moments that later defied recall, but Stalin’s official war unfolded with an epic certainty, in regular and well-planned episodes.

Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942 

 

 

In all, over 1,000 writers and artists joined the campaign to report the front, 400 of whom would die in the fighting.
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Their work was controlled by yet another new body, the Sovinformburo. This monitored everything from
Pravda
to the news-sheets that soldiers were given at the front. Each captured or disabled German tank and plane was recorded, often with a
photograph, but the blank space where Soviet losses should have been, padded with slogans and even short verse, was noticed by newspaper readers everywhere.
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The trouble was that no one could get to the censors’ offices to find out more. Security was so tight that even full-time members of the Sovinformburo’s staff sometimes discovered that their passes were not valid for its central building.
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Inside, trusted officials combed draft front-line reports for ideological mistakes, correcting even punctuation that might not conform to the official line. The famous correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg nearly resigned in protest at the pettifogging rules. When an editor changed the word ‘victories’, meaning real successes at the front, to ‘progress’ in an article he saw, the future voice of Stalin’s propaganda war declared that it was all a waste of time. ‘We spend so long on corrections,’ he complained, ‘that we lose the whole day, all our creative time.’
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One victory, or maybe piece of progress, that the Sovinformburo chalked up for Red Army troops that summer was the battle of Smolensk. The losses were devastating – 300,000 prisoners captured and 3,000 more tanks lost – but the Soviet papers remained silent about these. They focused on the fact that the Germans had been held up in their advance on Moscow.
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It was at this moment, too, that a desperate Red Army deployed its most impressive weapon for the first time. So secret that it had no real name until the troops gave it the feminine ‘Katyusha’, the BM-13-16 multiple rocket launcher and its descendants proved that Soviet designers could produce hardware to rival any in the world. ‘We first tried out this superb weapon at Rudnya, near Smolensk,’ remembered Marshal Yeremenko. ‘In the afternoon of 15 July the earth shook with the unusual explosion of jet mines. Like red-tailed comets, the mines were hurled into the air … The effect of the simultaneous explosion of dozens of these mines was terrific. The Germans fled in panic; and even our own troops … who for reasons of secrecy had not been warned that this new weapon would be used, rushed back from the front line.’
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Katyushas were quite inefficient for their range, consuming prodigious quantities of propellant to hurl rocket mines less than ten miles at this stage in the war, but the gratifying sight of German soldiers running from the field gave Stalin’s propagandists something they could really write about.