Russia (42 page)

There were intimations that Hitler might order an invasion. Army intelligence warned of the possibility in April; other disturbing rumours came through diplomatic channels. The Kremlin’s response was sluggish. Construction work was started on defensive positions, a few more units were moved into the Baltic region, but Stalin was sceptical of the warnings, suspecting that the Western Powers were trying to trick him into war with Germany. When the blow fell, on 22 June 1941, it caught him by surprise and most of the Red Army unprepared.
³⁷

The invading German armies were joined by substantial contingents of Romanian, Hungarian, Italian and Croatian formations, so that, as with Napeolon’s invasion, the operation took on the appearance of a crusade. As the crack panzer divisions rolled forward there were prospects of their being joined by a ‘Fifth Column’ of the disaffected, not least among the subject nationalities, particularly in the newly Sovietized Baltic states, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The next four months saw a series of unmitigated military disasters for the Soviet regime.
³⁸
Enemy forces advanced on every front, Moscow was threatened, and Stalin fell out with his own Chief of Staff, Zhukov. The issue concerned high strategy. Zhukov advised the transfer of units from the Far East to stiffen the defences of Moscow. Stalin would not have it and made the ailing Shaposhnikov Chief of Staff while assuming direction of the war himself. Yet he was soon to contemplate having to abandon Russia and seeking asylum with his new-found Western ally Britain. Soviet losses were already enormous in terms of both men and material. By September Leningrad (as St Petersburg was now called) was under siege, Moscow itself was in danger, and in the south German forces were racing towards the lower Volga. Survivors of the army purges were quickly released, fed a meal or two, and pressed back into service.

This war was not like the others, and Marshal Tukhachevskii, executed nearly three years earlier, had foreseen what form it would take:

Operations will be inestimably more intensive and severe than in the First World War. Then, frontier battles in France lasted for two or three days. Now, such an offensive operation can last for weeks. As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandized by the Germans, this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want… to fight it out. If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the offensive himself… [the] struggle would be bitter and protracted … In the final resort it would depend on who had the greater moral fibre and who at the close of operations disposed of operational reserves in depth.
³⁹

Already Tukhachevskii’s prognostications were being borne out, and the outlook seemed increasingly bleak. Yet, despite the losses and the panic, there were some more hopeful indications of the moral fibre which Tukhachevskii had thought might be decisive. Some desperate counterattacks were somehow organized; some units had continued to fight doggedly on although surrounded; others operated as partisans in the invader’s rear. All this slowed the tempo of the invader’s progress. At the same time a vital operation finally got under way — to evacuate such war
industry as had not already fallen into enemy hands out of the line of the enemy’s advance into the safety of Central Asia and Siberia. The scale of the effort is reflected in statistics:

In the first three months of the war … [the railways] moved two and a half million troops up to the front lines, and shifted 1,360 heavy plants … 455 to the Urals, 210 to Western Siberia, 200 to the Volga and more than 250 to Kazakhstan and central Asia … The evacuation had used 1,500,000 trucks, and by mid-November 914,380 waggons had shifted 38,514 loads for the aviation industry, 20,046 for ammunition plants, 18,823 for weapons factories, 27,426 for steel plants, 15,440 for the tank industry …

In Saratov, machinery began operating and the walls of a new factory went up around it; fourteen days after the last train-load of machines were unloaded, the first MiG fighter rolled out. On 8 December, the Kharkov Tank Works turned out its first twenty-five T-34 tanks, just short of ten weeks after the last engineers left Kharkov, trudging along the rail tracks.
⁴⁰

Over the winter of 1941—2 the industrial plants in the Urals were to produce about 4,500 tanks, 3,000 aircraft and 14,000 pieces of artillery. Supplies were also shipped from Britain and, under Lend-Lease arrangements, from the United States - especially lorries, jeeps, machinery, munitions and corned meat. But these had to take perilous routes to Murmansk or the Far East through seas infested with enemy submarines.

Once again a Russian migration was in progress. Troops and factories were not the only items on the move. The transportation of entire peoples was soon under way. Its Canadian and American allies may have interned citizens who were ethnic Japanese, the British detained German and Italian citizens, but the Soviet Union deported Chechens, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachais, Crimean Tatars and even the Volga Germans, who had been domiciled there since the eighteenth century, to put them beyond reach of the invaders. These measures may have reflected Stalin’s suspicious nature or perhaps his caution, for there is little evidence that the regime was popular among these peoples.

Moscow’s defences held despite the battering, and a carefully timed counter-offensive was launched on 5 December. Within two weeks it succeeded in breaking the German front and relieving the pressure on the capital. Attention turned north to Leningrad, which, though surrounded and subjected to unremitting pounding, still held out. A fresh German offensive against it, launched in January, achieved only limited success and soon ran out of steam. Meanwhile, under cover of the dark days, something very like a revolution was taking place in the senior command. Generals like Pavlov, who had been found wanting, were replaced, Mekhlis
was demoted, Voroshilov (who was said never to have opened a book on his trade) was sidelined. The new men — Vasilevskii, Sokolovskii, Vatutin, Malinovskii, Koniev, Rokossovskii, Chuikov — were more competent, and had proved themselves in the crucible
of
battle. Yet Stalin, like Hitler, still kept command in his own hands, and his most brilliant general, Zhukov, though involved in the high command, was still excluded from the top post that would have given him the direction of operations.

Meanwhile, in December 1941 the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side, and in February 1942 they had struck south against Singapore. This finally diminished fears of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union, allowing more troops to be transferred from the Pacific to the European front. Even so it was to be a close call.

In May 1942 a Soviet offensive at Kharkov failed, and over twenty divisions guarding the Crimean front were routed. This reverse finally convinced Stalin of the incompetence of the commander, Mekhlis. Sevastopol was cut off except for perilous submarine runs, and was subjected to pulverizing attacks. When the defending guns finally ran out of ammunition, the surviving gunners blew them up; Sevastopol succumbed. Voronezh fell, and in July Rostov-on-Don. Enemy units crossed the Don and threatened to wheel south into the Caucasus. Had they succeeded, the prospects for the Soviets would have been grim. Not only would the Baku oilwells be at Hitler’s disposal, but he would be able to call on the help of local peoples who would be as grateful as many Ukrainians had been at first for liberation from Communism. But General von Manstein’s thrust was stopped on the river Terek. He had run out of fuel.

Attention now centred on Stalingrad, and it was a measure of the importance Stalin attached to this battle that Zhukov was brought in as his deputy. The fighting was as grim as any battle fought in this war or any other. The German command fully expected the city to fall before long; attempt after attempt to relieve it failed, and Soviet security troops are said to have executed as many as 14,000 Soviet soldiers for cowardice in order to stop flight and prevent desertion.
⁴¹
The two sides fought building by building through late September and early October - and still the terrible struggle was not ended. At this point preparations, supervised by Zhukov personally, were made for an offensive to start in November 1942. Reserves were brought in, and what remained of shattered units were re-formed into new ones and re-equipped; wounded soldiers released from hospital were posted in to provide a leavening of battle-hardened men.

In the Stalingrad operations Soviet artillery loosed off as much ammunition as in the rest of the war.
⁴²
Five million German troops were deployed
over the front — with dive-bomber support at crucial times. The Soviet forces lacked air support - but the Soviet command mustered over 6 million men against the invader.

The eventual Soviet assault was heralded by salvos of rockets. Then 3,500 guns and mortars roared and thundered out their bombardment along a 14-mile front. After an interval, tanks bearing sharpshooters began to trundle forward through the freezing fog. The Germans counterattacked, sending in the Romanian Third Army, which quickly met its doom. The Soviet tanks moved forward. The most convenient point for crossing the river Don was seized, and at 2 p.m. on 26 November units of the Stalingrad front joined up with tanks of South-Western Command to surround between 80,000 and 90,000 men of the German Sixth Army under Friedrich von Paulus. He thought of breaking out. Hitler ordered him to stay firm. In the end he was forced to surrender.

By the end of January 1943 it was clear that the invader’s southern front had been shattered and preparations went forward for an offensive to break its backbone. The triumph at Stalingrad had given a huge fillip to morale, and the fresh troops rushed up to front-line positions were no longer merely dour and determined but eager for battle. The elation, however, led to overconfidence on Stalin’s part. Rather than concentrating resources on the achievement of one objective and against one of the three enemy army groups, he ordered a series of offensives along the entire front.
⁴³

This onslaught, which began in late January and early February, was overambitious and soon ground to a halt. The Germans regained some territory; the scales of war tipped one way, then the other, until eventually a state of equilibrium was reached. In August the city of Kharkov was finally retaken, and then a battle which was to take its name from the Kursk salient began to take shape. It covered a vast area of the steppe, lasted from August to the beginning of October, involved multiple armies, and was directed on the Soviet side by Zhukov and on the German by Field Marshal von Manstein. It is regarded by some specialists as the decisive battle of the Second World War, and it ended in complete Soviet victory. The German general staff itself concluded that from that point on Soviet Russia would surpass Germany in the mobilization of men and the production of equipment, and in the field of propaganda.
⁴⁴
It was not long before yet another mass offensive was started and Soviet troops were crossing the Dnieper and racing towards the western frontier. The tide of war had changed decisively.

This awesome result, which had seemed so unlikely less than two years earlier, was the product of many factors. Chief, perhaps, was what Tukhachevskii had termed ‘moral fibre’ - the grit and determination not only of the Soviet forces, but of the civilian population, not least the women. But for the patience and fortitude of its people in the face of many months of bombardment and privation, the ruined city
of
Leningrad could not have withstood the siege; but for the unremitting efforts of workers, even in the hardest circumstances, the front-line soldiers would never have been supplied. As the danger had increased, the Soviet population — including most of the national minorities, peasant kulaks, and even victims of the purges — seemed to acquire a commitment which had not existed in the beginning. As in 1812, the war had become a genuinely patriotic struggle. The invaders, it seems, had themselves generated the antibodies which would smother them.

Yet in retrospect it also seems that the Soviet regime was aided by some strokes of good fortune. One was Japan’s refusal to co-ordinate its war plan with Germany’s. Another was Hitler’s faulty direction of strategy, especially in the case of Stalingrad. Another self-imposed handicap was his racial doctrine. Many Ukrainians had welcomed the invaders, greeting them with bread and salt. Yet Nazi racial theory classified Slavs as inferior, and barred their acceptance on equal terms as some army officers had advised. Ukraine had at first proved a good recruiting ground for the invaders, but the punitive actions taken in response to partisan activity alienated the bulk of the population who had initially seemed so well disposed.

Some Chechens joined the invaders, though some were decorated for gallantry in fighting against them. Perhaps because they had easier access to the Germans, numbers of Cossacks collaborated — and in April 1942 Hitler did sanction the formation of Cossack volunteer units. Some served in police detachments on the Don, but there were several requests to form a Cossack army to fight the Communists, and eventually the request was granted, though the Germans set their face against Cossack independence. An army major of Cossack origins who joined the Germans was allowed to form a squadron from Cossack prisoners and deserters and was employed in front-line propaganda, encouraging desertion with promises that collective farming would be abolished. And a Russian major-general, Vlasov, who had been taken prisoner, opted for the Germans. He set about recruiting an ‘All-Russian Army of Liberation’ from prisoners of war, hoping to raise a million men. Fewer than 200,000 joined him.
⁴⁵
It was 1943, and the tide
of
war had changed. Few factors are as efficient as success in shoring up loyalties.

The scale of the victory came as a surprise to the world, and even to Stalin’s allies. But once the message sank into consciousness that the neophyte, half-ruined, economically crippled Soviet Union had thrashed the hitherto invincible war machine of Europe’s strongest economic power, together with its satellites, attitudes were revolutionized. The erstwhile pariah suddenly acquired immense prestige, even legitimacy. At the same time a genuinely Soviet patriotism had emerged. Participation in the most total of total wars to date also resulted in a liberation of sorts. Realizing that the circumstance demanded compromise, Stalin restrained his ruthless security forces, for there was now a general commitment to the cause against the common enemy.