Stalin's General (25 page)

The Russians have a saying: while success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. The Rzhev-Viazma operations were Zhukov's major preoccupation in 1942. Even after he left the Western Front to become Stalin's deputy supreme commander in August 1942 he continued to devote a lot of time and attention to these operations. Yet in his memoirs he preferred to focus on his role in the Red Army's momentous victory at Stalingrad in November 1942. The little attention he did give to the Rzhev-Viazma operations was largely devoted to explaining how the failures had nothing to do with him. Zhukov argued the first Rzhev-Viazma operation failed because he was not allocated sufficient forces.
⁵⁰
The record shows, however, that Zhukov was given quite a lot of troops, more than was allocated to other fronts.

Strong doubts must also be voiced about Zhukov's account of Stavka's strategic decision-making in spring 1942. The failure of the winter offensive, wrote Zhukov, persuaded Stalin and the General Staff that the Red Army should avoid major offensive action and adopt a stance of active strategic defense, aiming to respond to German attacks as and when they occurred. At the same time, notwithstanding Shaposhnikov's objections, Stalin thought it necessary to mount a small number of offensive operations. Zhukov agreed with Shaposhnikov on the need to remain largely on the defensive but he also wanted to launch a major attack in the Rzhev-Viazma area. “With one or perhaps two more armies at our disposal we could have combined with the Kalinin Front under General I. S. Konev and defeated the enemy not only in the Rzhev area but the entire Rzhev-Viazma German force and substantially improved the operational situation in the whole Western strategic direction. Unfortunately, this real opportunity was missed by the Supreme Command.”
⁵¹

The opportunity was missed, according to Zhukov, because Stalin
succumbed to lobbying from Timoshenko and the Southwestern Front for a major operation in the Kharkov area. That operation was launched on May 12 and aimed to retake Kharkov—Ukraine's second city. Not only did the Soviets fail to recapture Kharkov but the three armies involved in the operation were encircled by the Germans and largely destroyed. The battle was over by May 28 and Soviet casualties numbered nearly 280,000 troops, including 170,000 killed, missing, or captured. Around 650 tanks and nearly 5,000 artillery pieces also were lost.

The party boss in Ukraine at the time was Nikita Khrushchev, who also served as the Southwestern Front's political commissar. In his Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev blamed Stalin for the Kharkov disaster, claiming that he and Timoshenko had asked Stalin's permission to call off the operation before Soviet forces were encircled by the Germans.
⁵²
Khrushchev's self-serving version of events was duly incorporated into the official history of the Great Patriotic War published in the early 1960s when he was still leader of the Soviet Union.

Zhukov flatly denied Khrushchev's story in his memoirs and laid blame for the disaster on the leadership of the Southwestern Front, who had misled Stalin about their capabilities and then misinformed him about what was going on during the battle itself. Zhukov's critique of Khrushchev and Timoshenko was supported by Marshal K. S. Moskalenko, one of the army commanders involved in the operation. In his view the Southwestern Front underestimated the German opposition and exaggerated the capabilities of their own forces.
⁵³
In his memoirs Vasilevsky concurred with the Zhukov-Moskalenko view of events but also confirmed Khrushchev's story of efforts made to persuade Stalin to call off the offensive. Vasilevsky argued that Stavka could have done more to help the Southwestern Front.
⁵⁴
This latter point was also made in the memoirs of Marshal Bagramyan, chief of staff of the Southwestern Front, who felt the main problem was Stavka's under-resourcing of the operation.
⁵⁵

Stalin's verdict on the failure of the operation was delivered in a missive to the Southwestern Front on June 26 announcing that Bagramyan had been sacked as chief of staff because of his failure to provide clear and accurate information to Stavka, which “not only lost
the half-won Kharkov operation, but also succeeded in giving 18 to 20 divisions to the enemy.”
⁵⁶
Stalin compared the “catastrophe” to one of the tsarist army's biggest disasters during the First World War and pointed out that it was not only Bagramyan who had made mistakes but Khrushchev and Timoshenko. “If we had reported to the country fully about the catastrophe … then I fear they would deal with you very sternly.”
⁵⁷
Stalin, however, treated the guilty parties more leniently. While Bagramyan was demoted he later reemerged as one of the most senior Soviet commanders of the war. In July 1942 Timoshenko was transferred to Leningrad to become commander of the Northwestern Front, but it is difficult to see this as a punishment or even a demotion. Khrushchev remained in charge of Ukraine and after the war was brought to Moscow by Stalin and groomed as one of his successors.

Stalin's treatment of the leadership of the Southwestern Front tacitly acknowledged that the Kharkov catastrophe was a collective responsibility of the High Command, including himself as supreme commander. In this respect the proposals and reports submitted by the Southwestern Front to Stavka in March–May 1942 are highly revealing.
⁵⁸
These documents show that in proposing the operation the Front was confident of success and extremely ambitious, aiming not only to retake Kharkov but to reach the Dnepr—the river that bisected Ukraine and ran through the capital, Kiev. Even when it became clear during the course of the battle that the Germans were much stronger than expected and that the goals being achieved fell far short of operational expectations, the Front continued to submit optimistic reports to Moscow on its progress.

The Southwestern Front was not alone in formulating ambitious plans and displaying such optimism—in spring 1942 Stavka was bombarded with proposals for offensive action from front-line commanders asking for additional forces.
⁵⁹
These proposals did not come out of the blue but reflected Stalin's and Stavka's optimism that the renewal of the Red Army's offensive action in the spring and summer of 1942 would lead to the expulsion of German forces from the USSR by the end of the year. Kharkov was only one of a number of ambitious offensives authorized by Stalin and Stavka in spring 1942. Arguably, it was Stavka's strategic orientation toward the offensive that lay at the
root of the Kharkov disaster rather than specific operational errors by Stalin or the Southwestern Front. This deeper truth about Kharkov has tended to be obscured by the memoir blame game and by the widespread acceptance of Zhukov's claim that in spring 1942 Stavka decided to remain on the defensive. The credibility of Zhukov's version of events was reinforced by Vasilevsky's memoirs (published after those of Zhukov), which stated that Stavka's policy was

If this sounds more like a rolling program of offensive action than strategic defense, it is because that was the concept embodied in the General Staff's planning documents of spring 1942. These envisaged the local actions mentioned by Vasilevsky, but they were to be followed by ever more ambitious offensives and by an advance to the USSR's western frontier by the end of 1942, at which point the Red Army would
then
assume the defensive.
⁶¹
This strategic perspective found public expression in Stalin's Order of the Day on May 1, 1942, which defined the current phase of the war as “the period of the liberation of Soviet lands from Hitlerite scum” and called upon the Red Army “to make 1942 the year of the final rout of the German-fascist troops and the liberation of the Soviet land from the Hitlerite blackguards!”
⁶²

Not for the first time, nor the last, was Stalin being overoptimistic. As the battle of Kharkov showed, the Germans were far from finished. Indeed, the greatest test for Stalin and his generals was yet to come. Hitler was planning another Barbarossa, this time in southern Russia. Once again, Stalin turned to Zhukov to save the day.

IN 1942 HITLER'S STRATEGIC OPTIONS WERE MORE LIMITED THAN IN 1941
. He would have preferred to launch another multipronged strategic offensive like Barbarossa but he was not strong enough to do so. The Wehrmacht had taken a severe battering at the hands of the Red Army. By March 1942 German forces had suffered 1.1 million dead, wounded, missing, or captured—some 35 percent of their strength on the Eastern Front. Only a handful of divisions were at full strength and German mobility was severely impaired by the loss of 40,000 trucks, 40,000 motorbikes, and nearly 30,000 cars, not to mention thousands of tanks. Notwithstanding its image as a modern, up-to-date army, the Wehrmacht relied on horses and other draft animals for transport, and their losses numbered 180,000 with only 20,000 replaced.
¹

Hitler's only realistic option was an offensive on a single front and his choice fell on the southern direction. South of the Caucasus Mountains were the Baku oilfields—source of nearly 90 percent of Soviet fuel. If the Germans could seize those fields the Soviet war machine would soon grind to a halt. En route to Baku the Germans could also capture the agricultural lands and mineral-rich resources of Ukraine, southern Russia, and Transcaucasia. Hitler did not necessarily expect to win the war in 1942 but he hoped to enable Germany to survive a long war of attrition on the Eastern Front. This was critically important now that the United States had formally entered the conflict following
Japan's attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States in support of his Japanese ally. It was clear the Americans would soon bring to bear their enormous industrial and military power in support of their Russian allies.

The goals of the German summer campaign were set in Führer Directive No. 41, dated April 5, 1942:

The Soviets had intelligence the Germans would attack in the south in summer 1942 but the information was not definitive and the fact that the seventy divisions of Army Group Center remained encamped less than 100 miles from Moscow weighed heavily in Stalin's and Stavka's calculations. A major German advance in the south was not ruled out by Stalin but it was seen as mainly aimed at contributing to a flanking attack on Moscow. Defense of Moscow was, therefore, given top priority and Stavka's reserves were placed in appropriate locations.

The idea that Hitler aimed to capture Moscow prevailed throughout 1942. Stalin, in his speech in November 1942 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—when the German advance in the south was at its height—denied the German summer campaign had been primarily about oil and insisted that the main goal was (still) to outflank Moscow from the east and then to strike at the Soviet capital from the rear.
³

Before the start of their main campaign the Germans completed their conquest of the Crimea. Despite having conquered virtually all the Crimea in 1941 they lost control of the Kerch Peninsula in early 1942 as the result of a series of counteractions by the Red Army designed to relieve the embattled defenders of the city-fortress of Sebastopol. The German 11th Army began its campaign to recapture the
Kerch Peninsula on May 8 and within a fortnight had destroyed three Soviet armies with a total of twenty-one divisions and taken 170,000 prisoners.

The Red Army's expulsion from Kerch opened the way for a final German assault on Sebastopol, which began on June 2 with a massive aerial and artillery bombardment. During the course of a month-long siege the Luftwaffe flew more than 23,000 sorties and dropped 20,000 tons of bombs on the city. The Germans also transferred from the Leningrad Front their heaviest artillery, including guns that fired 1-ton, 1.5-ton, and even 7-ton shells. Following infantry and amphibious assaults Sebastopol fell in early July but the city's defenders had put up an awesome fight that was to be a harbinger of the titanic struggle about to begin at Stalingrad.