Stalin's General (30 page)

In mid-April 1943 at a series of meetings between Stalin, Zhukov, and Vasilevsky it was agreed the Red Army would remain on the defensive until the Germans attacked. In his memoirs Zhukov wrote, in italics: “
Thus, by mid-April the Supreme Command had already taken a preliminary decision on deliberate defence
.”
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He was keen to emphasize this because during the Khrushchev era Zhukov had found himself written out of the history of the Kursk battle by Khrushchevites who claimed that Khrushchev—political commissar of the Voronezh Front—was the architect of Soviet strategy.

Another participant in the April discussions was the General Staff's chief of operations, General A. I. Antonov, shortly to be appointed Vasilevsky's deputy chief of the General Staff. Like Shaposhnikov and Vasilevsky, Antonov was a calm and cerebral general and much admired by Zhukov: “Antonov was a peerlessly able general and a man of great culture and charm. It always delighted me to hear him present the strategic and tactical ideas of the General Staff.… Antonov had a brilliant gift for putting material into shape.”
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That was a quality Stalin admired, too, and during Vasilevsky's frequent and prolonged absences at the front as Stavka representative, Antonov functioned as de facto chief of the General Staff—a post to which he was formally appointed in February 1945 when Vasilevsky was placed in command of the 3rd Belorussian Front. Stalin, Zhukov, Vasilevsky,
and Antonov—these were the strategic brains who would guide the Red Army as it advanced
na zapad
(to the west) in 1943–1944 from Kursk to Kiev, from Viazma to Smolensk, and from Minsk to Warsaw.

After the April discussions Zhukov was sent on a mission to the north Caucasus, accompanied by Shtemenko, who had served in the area before joining the General Staff. Shtemenko remembered Zhukov's habit of playing the accordion—which he learned to play during the war—at the end of each day, usually well-known wartime tunes of a soulful character. “The musician was lacking in skill,” wrote Shtemenko, “but he made up for it by the feeling he put into his music.” Shtemenko also recalled Zhukov's calm under fire. On one occasion Zhukov's party came under air attack but rather than waiting on the side of the road until the danger had passed Zhukov insisted on continuing the journey. In another incident Zhukov continued to observe an artillery barrage even when return enemy fire began to hit the area around his observation post.
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Zhukov's mission was to supervise an operation to drive the German 17th Army off the Taman Peninsula linking the Crimea to the north Caucasus coast near Novorossiisk. The Germans had been forced out of Transcaucasia as a result of the Stalingrad counteroffensive but retained a foothold on the Taman, allowing them to protect their position in the Crimea and to threaten the Soviets from the rear. Zhukov's mission was not very successful. The Germans remained entrenched on the Taman and a second major operation later in the year was required to finally dislodge them. Shtemenko returned to Moscow fearful that Stalin would castigate him and Zhukov for failure. But there were no recriminations, at least not directed against Zhukov. Indeed, the day he returned to the Soviet capital—May 12—Stalin issued an edict stating that apart from himself only Zhukov and Vasilevsky had the right to give orders to commanders of Fronts. This edict was directed at the heads of the various branches of the armed forces—Artillery, Air Force, Cavalry, Mechanized Forces, Engineers, and so forth—and was designed to stop them from interfering in Front affairs.
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Zhukov's next job was to oversee the defensive and offensive preparations being made by the Central and Voronezh Fronts. The Soviet plan was simple: to construct an in-depth defense able to withstand
the coming German attack and then stage a counteroffensive.
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To this end the Soviets established several belts of defense within and behind the Kursk salient extending to a depth of 200–250 miles. Each defensive position was a maze of trenches and concrete blockhouses. Particular attention was paid to establishing antitank strongpoints since the Germans were expected to attack using a lot of armor. Between them the Central and Voronezh Fronts had available some 1.3 million troops, 19,794 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3,489 tanks and self-propelled guns. Also at their disposal was the 17th Air Army with 2,650 aircraft and the Steppe Front (commanded by Zhukov's rival, Konev) with another half million men and 1,500 tanks—a designated strategic reserve tasked to respond to enemy breakthroughs and to support Soviet counterattacks.

During preparations for Kursk the Soviets paid a lot of attention to
maskirovka
disguising their defensive buildup and their assembly of forces for counterattack. The location of command posts was kept secret. Troops were transported and redeployed only at night. Radio communications were manipulated to deceive the enemy. Airfields, defensive fortifications, and troop assembly areas were camouflaged and mock versions created to distract enemy attention. So while German intelligence detected most of the Soviet preparations it did not grasp the full depth and strength of the Red Army's defenses nor, more importantly, its capabilities to mount a counterattack.
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For the first time Soviet partisans were integral to a major Red Army operation. They provided extensive intelligence on German preparations and disrupted those preparations with hundreds of small attacks and acts of sabotage, many aimed at the Wehrmacht's transportation network. When the time came to launch the Soviet counteroffensives, partisan attacks on German command and control systems lent support.

Zhukov's role in these preparations was to conduct inspections, provide progress reports to Stalin, and use his authority as Stavka representative and deputy supreme commander to deal with problems on the ground. In command of the Central Front was Rokossovsky, who recalled that “Zhukov spent quite a long time at the Central Front in the preparatory period, and we jointly decided questions of principle pertaining to the organisation and conduct of defensive action and the
counteroffensive. Thanks to him many of our requests addressed to Moscow were met.”
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Another observer of Zhukov during the Kursk buildup was his driver, Buchin: “Day after day, week after week, Zhukov traversed the Kursk bulge, inspecting the smallest details of the construction, consolidation and installation of [defensive] obstacles.”
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The Soviets had good intelligence on the Wehrmacht's intentions and attack preparations, including from their own spies in Britain who had gained access to the Ultra decrypts of high-level German codes.
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What they did not know was exactly when the attack would begin. This uncertainty led in May and June to a series of false alerts about an impending German attack.
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In this tense and nervous atmosphere some commanders preferred to strike preemptively rather than wait for the Wehrmacht to make its move. One such advocate was Vatutin, the commander of the Voronezh Front. “We'll miss the boat, let the moment slip,” he reportedly told Vasilevsky. “The enemy is not going to move, soon it will be autumn and all our plans will be ruined. Let's get off our backsides and begin first. We've enough forces for it.”
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Stalin and the High Command held their nerve, however, and waited.

The final alert came from Stavka on July 2, warning Fronts to expect an attack sometime during July 3 to 6. Operation Citadel—the German attack on the Kursk salient—began on July 4–5. The German plan was a double envelopment, by Army Group Center and Army Group South, of Soviet forces stationed in the Kursk salient. Hitler committed to battle eighteen infantry divisions, three motorized divisions, and seventeen panzer divisions, including large numbers of his new Tiger and Panther tanks, which outgunned anything the Soviets had in their arsenal. (See
Map 19
: Operation Citadel, July 1943
.) By this time Zhukov had been appointed to coordinate the operations of the Central, Briansk, and Western Fronts (where the main action was expected to take place), while Vasilevsky was to look after the Voronezh Front. When Operation Citadel began Zhukov was with Rokossovsky at the headquarters of the Central Front. Zhukov vividly recalled the beginning of the long-prepared and intense aerial and artillery barrage the Red Army rained down on the attacking Germans:

The German attacks made some progress, but for the most part Soviet defenses held. The battle's climax came at Prokhorovka on July 11–12 when General P. A. Rotmistrov's 5th Guards Tank Army clashed with two panzer corps. More than a thousand tanks did battle, with hundreds of losses on both sides. The Soviets lost more tanks than the Germans, but they could afford it, and Hitler was forced to call off the attack.

Shortly after the clash at Prokhorovka Zhukov visited Rotmistrov at his command post and inspected the battlefield. According to Rotmistrov, Zhukov stopped the car several times to look at the sites of recent tank battles:

Kursk was Hitler's last throw of the dice, an attempt to regain the initiative in the Soviet-German war. After Kursk there was no possibility of the Germans surviving the grinding war of attrition the Soviets had the power and the will to inflict on them. The Red Army's road to Berlin would be long and arduous but there was no longer any doubt that it was a journey it would complete in the next two or three years.

Having absorbed the German attack at Kursk it was time for the Soviets to go over to the offensive. The Soviets planned two operations: Operation Kutuzov, an attack by the Western, Briansk, and Central Fronts on Army Group Center in the Orel salient, and Operation Rumiantsev, an attack by the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts on Army Group South in the Belgorod-Kharkov area. (See
Map 20
: The Soviet Counteroffensives at Kursk, July–August 1943
.) Kutuzov began on July 12 and by August 5 Orel had fallen to the Red Army, but not before the Germans managed to withdraw many forces from encirclement. Zhukov claimed that had additional forces been deployed the Germans could have been completely encircled in Orel but Stalin insisted that for the time being the priority was driving the Wehrmacht back, not its encirclement and destruction.

Zhukov was not directly involved in Operation Kutuzov since he had been transferred to the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts to supervise Operation Rumiantsev. Stalin had wanted to start this operation on July 23 but Zhukov persuaded him a preparatory pause was required, so Rumiantsev did not begin until August 5.
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Belgorod fell to the Red Army that same day, prompting Stalin to order a 120-gun salute in Moscow to mark its recapture along with the contemporaneous liberation of Orel. This was the first of 300 such celebratory salvos ordered by Stalin as the Red Army advanced toward Berlin.
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The rest of the operation did not progress so smoothly and Kharkov was not recaptured until August 23. In the meantime the Red Army had launched a third operation—Suvorov—to recapture Smolensk. That was achieved by September after a 150- to 200-mile advance by the Western and Kalinin Fronts.

British journalist Alexander Werth visited Kharkov not long after it was liberated. He found some grim statistics. When the Germans first took Kharkov in October 1941 the population was 700,000. By
the time they had left the population had nearly halved: 120,000 people were deported to Germany as slaves; 80,000 had died of hunger, cold, and deprivation; 30,000 had been shot; and many others had fled to the countryside.
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