Stalin's General (20 page)

While the catastrophe at Kiev was unfolding Zhukov led a successful operation at Yel'nya, near Smolensk. Zhukov's offensive was one of a complex series of Red Army operations in the Smolensk region in summer 1941 designed to block the Germans' path to Moscow. Smolensk itself fell to the Germans in mid-July but huge battles continued to rage in the surrounding area. The Red Army did not fight a defensive battle at Smolensk; its strategy was offensive and took the form of numerous counterstrokes, counterattacks, and counteroffensives like the one at Yel'nya. The Germans were held up at Smolensk for two months but the cost was very high. The Red Army's total losses approached half a million troops dead or missing with another quarter of a million wounded.

The Reserve Front that Zhukov commanded from the end of July 1941 consisted of six armies—some fifty divisions, mostly rifle divisions but with some tank, cavalry, and motorized forces as well. It was deployed about sixty miles behind Timoshenko's Western Front on a broad front stretching from Rzhev to Viazma. Its task was to liquidate a strong German bridgehead east of the River Desna. At Khalkhin-Gol in 1939, Zhukov had prepared his offensive very carefully. In 1941 he did not have that luxury and his 24th Army was forced to launch its attack prematurely in mid-August.
⁴⁸
On August 21 Zhukov reported to Stalin that the attack had so far failed to surround and destroy the enemy. He emphasized that during the ten days of the battle he had visited all the army's divisions and observed their conduct, which for the most part was very good. To continue with the battle, however, would result in casualties that would undermine the battle-worthiness of the units involved in the fighting. Zhukov asked permission for a pause of three or four days to regroup and study the situation before resuming the offensive. In the meantime the Germans would be subjected to continuous artillery and aerial bombardment. If possible, Zhukov wanted to use the 303rd Rifle Division from his reserve in the next attack.
⁴⁹
The offensive was resumed on August 30, this time with the support of the Reserve Front's 43rd Army. By September 6 Yel'nya had been recaptured and the Germans forced to withdraw. (See
Map 8
: The Yel'nya Offensive, August–September 1941
.)

So keen were the Soviets to talk up the success of the Yel'nya offensive that they took the unprecedented step of inviting a group of western journalists to visit the battlefield. Among the participants were Alexander Werth of the London
Sunday Times
and the Associated Press's Moscow correspondent, Henry C. Cassidy, who wrote:

After the operation was over Shaposhnikov wrote a critique of the Reserve Front's offensive:

Zhukov's view of the operation was very different. In his report to Stalin on September 8 he stressed the good performance of his divisions. He pointed out that enemy casualties as a result of the battle numbered between 45,000 and 47,000 while Soviet losses were about 17,000. Above all, there was the psychological impact of the victory at Yel'nya: “As a result of this operation morale has risen in all our forces, as has the belief in victory. Now, units have the confidence to meet the attacks of the enemy, the confidence to face his fire and then quickly counterattack.”
⁵²
It seems Stalin agreed with Zhukov's evaluation. On September 18 he issued an order designating Zhukov's 100th, 127th, 153rd, and 161st Divisions as the first Soviet “Guards” divisions. These were divisions that had proved themselves in battle and were to be rewarded with better pay and better supplies. Scores of divisions were so designated during the course of the war and later there were Guards armies as well.

Zhukov's conduct of the Yel'nya operation added to his reputation as a field commander and gave Stalin the confidence to make him his trusted military troubleshooter. Notwithstanding his apparent failure as Chief of the General Staff, Zhukov emerged from the disaster of June 22, 1941, with both his status and his reputation enhanced. That Zhukov escaped contemporary censure for the initial failure of the Red Army seems surprising in retrospect, but it evoked no comment at the time. Contemporary observers were not particularly surprised by
German military successes—these were to be expected from a combat-hardened army that had conquered Poland, France, and most of the rest of Europe.

After Stalin's death in 1953 a critical discussion of the disaster of June 22, 1941, did develop, but most criticism focused on Stalin's personal culpability in ignoring the many warnings about an imminent German invasion and for hindering the mobilization of the army to meet the coming attack. Zhukov, who by then had returned to Moscow from his postwar exile to the provinces to become deputy and then minister of defense, did not emphasize this particular aspect of the Khrushchevite critique of Stalin, preferring instead to concentrate his own critique on the negative effects of the Soviet dictator's prewar purge of the Red Army. However, after he and Khrushchev fell out in 1957 the attack on Stalin was broadened to include Zhukov's role in the failure to anticipate or prepare adequately for the German “surprise” attack.

Zhukov was not allowed to respond to that criticism until after Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964. In his memoirs, first published in 1969, Zhukov mounted a robust defense of his brief tenure as CGS, arguing that, in fact, the Red Army was well prepared for war and substantially mobilized by the time of the German attack. There had been some mistakes, admitted Zhukov, notably the miscalculation of the main direction of the German attack, which the Soviet High Command, and especially Stalin, believed would be aimed at occupying the rich lands, raw materials, and industrial resources of Ukraine rather than, as turned out to be the case, the capture of Leningrad and Moscow. Secondly, Stalin had also gravely miscalculated the timing of the German attack. Stalin, said Zhukov, believed war could be avoided and was suspicious that reports of an imminent German attack were the work of British and American agents provocateur. Stalin also feared that premature Soviet mobilization could accelerate the outbreak of hostilities with Hitler. “Mobilization means war,” he told Zhukov, mindful of the precedent of the July Crisis of 1914 that led to the First World War.

Stalin's caution made him reluctant to allow the General Staff to complete mobilization and bring the Red Army to full combat readiness. The failure to mobilize fully, argued Zhukov, was a major factor
in the short-term success of the German attack. But he was loath to embrace the Khrushchevite critique completely and to scapegoat Stalin for the disaster, pointing out that the High Command should have done more to convince “the boss” of the danger of an imminent German attack.

The General Staff's focus on counteroffensive action rather than on defense was the result of the deeply ingrained offensivist ethos and doctrine of the Red Army that dated back to the civil war and had ossified into dogma when the deep battle concept was elaborated in the 1930s. As Zhukov said in a passage of his memoirs omitted from the Soviet era edition: “We did not think that our armed forces would be such a failure at the start of the war and suffer such serious defeats in the first battles that they would be forced to retreat into the interior of the country.” In another unexpurgated passage Zhukov noted that “at that time our military-theoretical science generally did not consider the profound problems of strategic defence, mistakenly considering it not so important.”
⁵³

Zhukov was not the only one of Stalin's generals to share his leader's illusions about the defensive capabilities of the Red Army. Nor was he unique in seeking, after the event and after the dictator's death, to distance himself from the disastrous consequences of that fundamental miscalculation. But Zhukov was more honest than most in accepting a share of responsibility. He was also perceptive enough to see that the origins of the error lay deep in the Red Army's history and culture.

His frankest exposition of his and the High Command's failings is not to be found in the various editions of his memoirs or even in his more private conversations with people like the Soviet writer and journalist Konstantin Simonov. In both settings he was defensive and circumspect, anxious to avoid giving ammunition to his Khrushchevite critics. A better source is the unpublished writings in his personal files in the Russian Military History Archive. As Zhukov noted in one manuscript: “Soviet military science in the prewar period considered only that offensive action could destroy the enemy, that defence would play a purely auxiliary role in protecting offensive groupings striving to achieve designated goals.” The result was that the Red Army neglected training for defense, especially at the operational-strategic
level, and was unprepared for the defensive war it was forced to fight in 1941–1942—a “serious mistake,” says Zhukov, that led to high casualties. The error was compounded by the failure to learn the lessons of the early years of the Second World War. The German victories in Poland, France, and other countries showed that a sudden attack by concentrated armored forces backed by a strong air force could “quickly overrun defences, swiftly cut off enemy lines of retreat and surround his basic groupings.” Naturally, the General Staff had studied the Germans' tactics but, Zhukov admitted, the reality did not really dawn on them until the Wehrmacht's armored forces smashed through Soviet defenses like giant battering rams. At the same time, he did not think the German invasion could have been halted at the frontier. Better defenses could have reduced Soviet casualties and increased German losses, but the initial success of the surprise attack was primarily a function of the quantitative and qualitative superiority of the Wehrmacht. “It is crystal clear,” wrote Zhukov, “that our forces could not have contained the powerful blows inflicted by the enemy during the first days of the war, that we did not have the capacity to oppose such powerful enemy blows, that the strategic initiative was in the hands of the enemy during the early days of the war.”

Neither is Zhukov very complimentary about the Soviets' top military leaders. Kiril Meretskov, his predecessor as CGS, he described as experienced and knowledgeable but overcareful and with a tendency toward passivity, while Semyon Timoshenko, the people's commissar for defense, was, Zhukov wrote, “no more than a dilettante” when it came to grand strategy and preparing the country for war. As for himself: “I say directly that I was not prepared for the role of Chief of the General Staff (and told Stalin so when he appointed me). In spite of all my hard work, by the beginning of the war I had still not mastered the principal question of the defence of the country and the operational-strategic preparedness of the armed forces for war with such a powerful and experienced enemy as fascist Germany.”
⁵⁴

Zhukov was also scathing of those historians and memoirists who sought to second-guess Stalin's actions and decisions with the benefit of hindsight: “More often than not people blame Stalin for these errors and miscalculations.… Now that the consequences are known, nothing is easier than to return to the beginning and expound all sorts
of opinions. And nothing is more difficult than to probe to the substance of the problem in its entirety—the battle of various forces, the multitude of opinions and facts—at the given moment in history.”
⁵⁵

Zhukov's defense of Stalin tended to obscure a more important issue: why was a person said to be unsuitable for staff work put in charge of the General Staff on the eve of war? The answer is both simple and revealing: when the Germans attacked, the Soviets planned to respond with a strategic counterinvasion of enemy territory, and Zhukov—the victor of Khalkhin-Gol and a strong advocate of offensive warfare—was seen by Stalin as the man to direct such operations. While the failure of the Red Army's initial counteroffensive in late June 1941 had cast doubt on Stalin's judgment, the success at Yel'nya had restored the dictator's faith in Zhukov.