The Road to Berlin (11 page)

The final, and irrevocable, transition to military orthodoxy meant more than gold braid. A few months later, on 24 July 1943, ranks from corporal to lieutenant-colonel were formalized, and if the
pogon
associated the Red Army with the traditions of the Imperial officer corps, the rehabilitation of what had been once one of the most hated words and which had endured as a rigid class taboo—‘officer’,
ofitser
—closed the circle completely. Side by side with the privileges, however, went the penalties; during the autumn of 1942 penal-battalions, the
strafbats
(with special officer penal-battalions) were introduced into the Red Army.
Discipline was screwed tighter and tighter; the commissars were militarized; the less the obligation to ‘socialism’, the greater the duty to sheer professionalism and strict military orthodoxy. At the same time, the party organs within the armed forces were restructured to compensate for the loss of direct influence: the battalion party organization became the fundamental unit of party activity (previously it had been at regimental level), with the object of bringing the widest range of ‘officers, sergeants and men’ into the circle of party influence. The Central Committee pronouncement of 24 May assigned to the battalion party organization the position of ‘primary party organization’. There was also a defensive as well as a compensating aspect to this reorganization, for the officers were now inclined to press their military advantages to the full and already by February 1943 some of the previous army–party tension had begun to reassert itself. One of the chief targets of discontent within the military was the ‘military soviet’ system (with its separate representation for the political apparatus), which senior officers sought to displace.

Far-reaching though this face-lift was, the crucial change had come with the stabilization of the very highest level of the Soviet command, within the compass of Supreme Commander–Deputy Supreme
Commander–Stavka
. In August 1942 Zhukov had taken over as Stalin’s ‘deputy’, a post formalized as Deputy to the Supreme Commander, and Vasilevskii had only just taken over the General Staff. Almost at once, Vasilevskii spent a great deal of time away from Moscow, involved as he was with the planning of the Stalingrad operations. This, in turn, threw an immense strain on the General Staff, in particular upon the head of the Operations Section, where there was a rapid turnover in officers. A.I. Bodin held this post in June–July 1942 (he was later killed on the Trans-Caucasus Front), then came A.N. Bogolyubov, V.D. Ivanov (who in January 1943 was severely wounded on the Voronezh Front), as well as P.G. Tikhomirov, P.P. Vechnyi, and Sh.N. Geniatulin. At one point even the commissar attached to the General Staff, Maj.-Gen. F.E. Bokov, took over the duties of chief, a post far beyond his capabilities for all his amiableness and his career as a party official. While at the front, Vasilevskii kept in contact with Front commanders through the General Staff signals units that followed him on his travels. At noon he reported to Stalin on developments which had taken place during the previous night, and at 21–2200 hours he reported on the day’s events. Urgent matters were signalled at once. Vasilevskii’s report was based on information received from Operations Section, where each officer responsible for a ‘sector’ or ‘axis’—the
napravlentsy
—compiled the data. While out of Moscow, Vasilevskii confined his basic report to the operations he was presently ‘co-ordinating’, though he found it ‘a rare day’ when Stalin had no question about the other fronts or raised no query about the movement of reserves. The
Stavka
was a personal staff which served Stalin as Supreme Commander, and the General Staff in turn served the
Stavka
as an operational planning group. For this reason, the head of the Operations Section, as well as the other administrations of the General Staff (transport, signals,
intelligence) and the Defence Commissariat, had a key role. The Chief of Operations and the heads of administrations kept their
nachalniki napravlenii
, specialists for given theatres and fronts, always on call; these officers assembled in what they called ‘the dressing room’, working or resting, ready to answer a summons from Stalin at a
Stavka
session in the Kremlin war-room. Either they supplied the requisite information to their chiefs or else they attended the
Stavka
session in person to present detailed situation reports.

The news in December 1942 that Lt.-Gen. A.I. Antonov, chief of staff to the Trans-Caucasus Front, was to become Chief of Operations raised a few sceptical eyebrows and prompted remarks that he would probably last as long as the others—after two or three ‘journeys’ to the
Stavka
, they were marched out for good on Stalin’s orders, hence the rapid turnover in personnel. Forty-six years of age, Antonov had emerged from the pre-war staff courses generally recognized as a very talented staff officer. In June 1941 he was chief of staff in the Kiev military district, served as chief of staff to the Southern Front (August 1941) and then in the Caucasus. His reputation with Stalin and the senior officer ‘permanent members’ of the
Stavka
was already high when in December 1942 Vasilevskii recommended him as Chief of Operations with the General Staff. Unlike his predecessors, Antonov did not rush to put in an appearance at a
Stavka
session; he worked for a full week, familiarizing himself with the overall situation before presenting himself to a summons. The critics and sceptics, sure that it would be a case as before of ‘a few visits and then—out’, were confounded. The first encounters with the
Stavka
passed off very smoothly and Antonov quickly put an end to the vigils in the ‘dressing room’ where so many officers had previously kicked their heels.

So well did Antonov acquit himself that within a month Stalin despatched him as
Stavka
representative to the Voronezh Front, where he arrived on 10 January, first to assist Vasilevskii and second to prepare recommendations for the
Stavka
on future operations. None of this impinged in the slightest on Stalin’s methods of command control, which demanded absolute obedience and ruthless punishment if caught in any infringement of ‘the rules’. During the liquidation of the Stalingrad pocket, Voronov was not allowed to begin the second stage of his operations since Karpovka had to be taken first; in fact, Voronov had launched the second phase but Stalin demanded that Voronov report ‘specially’ on the capture of Karpovka. Earlier, during the critical Kotelnikovo fighting, Stalin had refused to accept Vasilevskii’s recommendations about switching 2nd Guards Army from the inner encirclement. If Stalin was not better informed, he was at least now better advised; under Antonov’s new regime he usually asked for ‘the General Staff evaluation’ while weighing the reports of the Front commanders. Antonov presented his materials for Stalin in three sets of files, red for urgent matters (draft directives and orders), blue for matters of lower priority, and finally the green (which needed careful choice about the moment to present them), covering promotions and appointments.

On the fronts, Stalin had two sets of representatives, those from the
Stavka
and his civilian supervisors who joined military soviets as the political member (in addition to the commander and the chief of staff). For critically important operations, the top officers were on hand as
Stavka
representatives, either to supervise preparation or ‘co-ordinate’ execution (or both). Marshal Zhukov had supervised the preparations for the Voronezh Front attack on the middle Don, after which he moved to the north-west even though Marshal Voroshilov had been sent to the Leningrad area by Stalin as
Stavka
representative. Marshal Timoshenko had also taken over the North-Western Front but this did not preclude the ‘co-ordination’ of Marshals Zhukov and Voronov. Vasilevskii, joined by Antonov, remained with the Voronezh and Bryansk Fronts as the focus of attention shifted from the south itself into the northern Ukraine. From the
Politburo
or the State Defence Committee
(GKO)
Stalin also sent out his representatives; Malenkov of the
GKO
had already held a watching brief at Stalingrad during the critical days of the defence. Mekhlis, reduced since May 1942 in rank to corps commissar (lieutenant-general), returned to the front as a member of the Volkov Front military soviet; Lt.-Gen. Bulganin joined the military soviet of the Bryansk Front, and Zhdanov (a lieutenant-general at the beginning of 1943 but well ahead in the prestige race as a colonel-general by the end of it) formally sat on Govorov’s Leningrad Front military soviet as the third member. Lt.-Gen. Khrushchev soldiered on as the political member of the Southern Front.

Victory at Stalingrad was immediately and perceptibly decisive in terms of the survivability of the Soviet Union. Hitler had proclaimed that ‘a decision’ was mandatory on the’ Eastern Front in 1942 and he had invited his allies to join in this ‘crushing blow’. But the blow was spent and still the decision eluded him—for ever, as it transpired. Militarily, the results of the Russian triumph were impressive in scale—the amputation of a crack army from the
Wehrmacht
, the destruction of a whole segment of the
Ostheer
, the damage inflicted on the
Luftwaffe
, and the annihilation of large bodies of Axis satellite troops, Italians, Hungarians and Rumanians (who had not always served Germany so badly)—though not with such catastrophic short-term effect upon German arms as the Soviet command tended to believe. Politically, Stalingrad was a victory full of long-term potency, a slow-burning fuse which worked its way through the subsequent history of the war both on the Eastern Front and at large. If the battle of Poltava in 1709 turned Russia into a European power, then Stalingrad set the Soviet Union on the road to being a world power. In Germany, Stalingrad wrought immense psychological havoc as a harbinger of defeat. Mussolini quaked immediately. In 1943, Germany presented Japan with a plain
démarche
at the transfer of Soviet troops to the European theatre without any hint of Japanese ‘threat’, still less an aggressive move. Turkey had now to reckon on the Soviet Union as a potential victor.

In one of the most nightmarish battles of modern war, its duration matched by its ferocity, the Red Army had ground down a crack German army to
unparalleled defeat. It was now Stalin’s turn to capitalize upon disaster, to seek decisive strategic success. Exuberance there was certainly over Stalingrad, in abundance and at all levels—German intelligence reports underlined the movement of
kampflustig
Soviet formations to the front—but the Soviet command did not as yet draw definite distinctions between confidence, overconfidence and miscalculation. At the end of January, vastly overrating the present capabilities of the Red Army and seriously underestimating the ability of the
Wehrmacht
to recover itself, Stalin prepared for the transition to a massive, multi-front counter-offensive aimed along three strategic axes: south-western, western and north-western. One year ago, in the winter battles of early 1942, he had tried a simultaneous assault on all three German army groups only to fail. Now he was about to repeat the strategy and, with it, the blunder (as costly as ever to the Red Army) of failing to concentrate decisively on clearly prescribed objectives—either the destruction of enemy forces in the field or the recapture of territory (with vital fuel supplies, sources of power and raw materials). Stalin wanted both. Therefore the ‘main blow’, the
glavnyi udar
, would unroll in staggered offensives across the entire face of the Eastern Front.

2

The Duel in the South: February–March 1943

With the German line from Voronezh to the foothills of the Caucasus ripped apart, and confident that the strategic initiative rested with the Red Army, the Soviet command planned to entomb an estimated seventy-five German divisions in the Ukraine. The
Stavka
assigned the liberation of the second greatest political unit in the USSR after the Russian Federal Republic (RSFSR) itself, the Ukraine, to three fronts, the Voronezh, South-Western and Southern. The Voronezh Front would seize north-eastern Ukraine, including Kharkov, its left-flank armies (40th, 69th and 3rd Tank) aimed at Kharkov itself, the right flank (60th and 38th Armies) pointed at Kursk and Oboyan respectively; the final objective was the line running from Rylsk to Lebedin to Poltava. The eastern Ukraine including the Donbas would be liberated by the South-Western and Southern Fronts. Vatutin’s South-Western command would play the principal part, using 6th and 1st Guards Armies with ‘mobile groups’ to strike out from Starobelsk through Slavyansk and on to Mariupol, outflanking German forces in the Donbas from the west and pinning them to the sea of Azov, while the Southern Front would advance westwards along the coast also in the direction of Mariupol. Next would come the turn of Army Group Centre, whose destruction was also planned at the end of January as five more Soviet fronts were alerted for large-scale offensive operations. The basic idea was to use the Bryansk Front and the left wing of the Western Front to destroy Second
Panzer
Army in the Orel area. Once the Central Front (formed out of Rokossovskii’s divisions pulled away from Stalingrad) attacked, fresh Soviet armies, stiffened with new reserve formations, would drive through Bryansk and on to Smolensk to break into the German rear, whereupon the Kalinin and Western Fronts would first encircle and then destroy the main forces of Army Group Centre. Meanwhile to the north the armies of the North-Western Front would wipe out German troops in the Demyansk area and ensure the passage of powerful mobile formations into the rear of German troops operating against the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts. At the beginning of February 1943 the Front commanders were already in possession of the main outlines of this plan and their orders instructed them to begin operational preparations.