Vitman himself was saved because he had learnt German at school and was able to act as a translator for the doctor. ‘I noticed later that if a Russian could speak German then their attitude was quite different. When the man couldn’t speak a foreign language the Germans thought it indicated that he was from an inferior race. But when they heard me speak German, they brought us water and didn’t shoot us down.’ Vitman was able to understand the conversations the Germans had amongst themselves, most notably when two senior SS men arrived in a headquarters car and stood nearby, looking at the mass of prisoners. ‘I could hear one of them saying, “It’s a shame Marshal Timoshenko is not present to see all this. The Führer has reserved a medal for him – the iron cross with oak leaves – to thank him for making such a big contribution to the German victory.”’
Timoshenko had indeed made a large contribution to the German victory. Despite superiority in numbers, his attack had been crushed. By 28 May 1942 he had lost over a quarter of a million troops. The two Soviet armies caught around Barvenkovo (in what became known as the Barvenkovo ‘mousetrap’) were almost completely destroyed. ‘It was a real disaster, a big disaster,’ says Makhmud Gareev, a Red Army officer during the war who went on to the highest reaches of Soviet command in the post-war era. ‘The failures of 1941 could be put down to the unexpected nature of the invasion and our unpreparedness, but in 1942, after we had carried out some defensive operations and after the front line had stabilized, all of a sudden such a major defeat.’ And it was clear to soldiers like Gareev what one of the key reasons for this failure had been: ‘It is linked to what happened in 1941 – to Stalin’s incompetence, his lack of understanding of a strategic situation and his unwillingness to listen to others.’
‘We [the German soldiers] were proud that we had managed to succeed so quickly,’ says Joachim Stempel. ‘I have to say that we all shared in the belief and the feeling that what we’re doing will work. There’s nothing we can’t do, even if it’s difficult and we’re ill-equipped. We still believed and had faith that the leadership would provide, and then we’d make up the rest. And again, after the Kharkov cauldron [encirclement] where, once again, we were able to leave the battlefield victoriously, we were in high spirits and looked forward to what lay ahead.’
The German victory that soldiers like Stempel hoped for was not an impossibility in 1942. The Germans already held the agricultural heartland of the Soviet Union – the Ukraine – as well as the Donbas (Don River Basin) region, which had been the Soviets’ main centre for coal and steel. With Stalin demonstrating at Kharkov that he appeared to have learnt nothing from the military disasters of the previous year, eventual Soviet defeat looked conceivable.
Hitler capitalized on the Soviet defeat at Kharkov with his own ambitious Operation Blue – the plan to advance in the south towards Stalingrad, the mountains of the Caucasus and down to the Caspian Sea. This would deprive the Soviet war machine of access to its supply of oil and, Hitler believed, deal it a crushing economic blow from which it would not recover. The campaign’s aim, he stated, was ‘finally to annihilate what vital defensive strength the Soviets have left and to remove from their grasp as far as possible the principal sources of energy for their war economy’. A glance at the map shows how grandiose Operation Blue actually was – yet if Stalin had carried on leading the Red Army in such a foolhardy way, the German campaign could well have succeeded.
On 28 June 1942 the Germans attacked along virtually the whole southern front, with the 4th Panzer Army pushing on to Voronezh and the 1st Panzer Army advancing out from south of Kharkov. The Blitzkrieg moved swiftly, attempting as before to encircle whole Soviet armies, and initially as the Red Army fell back, the signs were that this might be a repeat of 1941. ‘The main reason [for the German success] was that after we suffered defeat near Kharkov, a big gap appeared,’ says Makhmud Gareev. ‘The stability of the front had broken down. We didn’t have any ready reserves. They had been used up for the offensives in different directions. Reserves had to be transferred from the Moscow direction, from the Leningrad direction, but the trouble was that these reserves were sent into combat immediately. Sending every new division into combat without proper preparation led to a worse and worse situation.’
At the end of July, after his troops had pushed on towards the River Don, Hitler decided to split his forces in two. Whilst Army Group A turned south to the oilfields of the Caucasus, the other spearhead, Army Group B, continued towards Stalingrad on the Volga. By this action Hitler demonstrated not just his impatience to accomplish several military objectives simultaneously but his own contempt once again for the Red Army.
Stalin watched the progress of Operation Blue and reacted with fury. He had preferred to believe that the German attack in the south was a mere diversionary thrust preparatory to the main attack on Moscow; now he searched for scapegoats amongst his intelligence officers. Then, as the Soviet forces fell further back, he issued his infamous order 227 – ‘Not a step back’ – which, amongst other harsh measures, confirmed the power of the ‘backmarker’ divisions to shoot any Soviet troops who tried to retreat without authorization, and formally introduced penal battalions to punish cowardice. Once again, at a moment of crisis, he believed the Red Army was best motivated by fear of terrible retribution if it failed.
The brutality of Soviet discipline – particularly the personal experience of those who survived the penal battalions (shtrafbaty) – is an aspect of the war that the Communist Party historians preferred not to publicize. Only since the fall of Communism have men such as Vladimir Kantovski, who was sent to a penal battalion in 1942, felt free to tell their extraordinary true story.
Kantovski’s troubles began in the spring of 1941 when, as an eighteen-year-old student in Moscow, he learnt that one of his teachers had been arrested. (Only recently has he been allowed access to the secret NKVD file that shows, ironically, that his teacher was imprisoned because he had been overheard voicing the view, just before the German invasion, that ‘the Hitler/Stalin pact was dangerous for the safety of the Soviet Union’.) So angry were Vladimir and his school-friends at their teacher’s arrest that they typed out a leaflet of protest and circulated it around the neighbourhood. They were all committed Communists and felt that the purity of their ideals had been sullied by this arbitrary oppression. ‘We had our own understanding of Communism,’ says Kantovski, ‘and this honesty demanded that we act . . . We didn’t take Stalin and his henchmen seriously. But at the same time we remained patriots and in essence Communists. Although not Communists in the way Stalin understood it.’
Shortly after the war had begun, the NKVD came to Kantovski’s flat and arrested him. By July he had been transferred to Omsk prison, east of Moscow, where he stayed for several months. ‘You can write novels or poems about Omsk prison,’ he says. ‘Imagine a cell which has nine bunks. And there were between 50 and 60 of us in that room with nine beds and people were sleeping in the beds, under the beds, between the beds and in the gangway. We could leave the cell twice a day to go to the toilet and once a fortnight we were taken to the bath-house. But we were never allowed to walk in the courtyard and go out into the open air.’
For writing the pamphlet protesting at his teacher’s arrest Kantovski was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. But as soon as he was transferred from Omsk, he asked to be sent to the front line, since ‘while the country was at war we felt guilty about sitting in prison’. To those in the West who want to believe that the undoubted brutality of the Soviet system was the sole reason the Red Army was capable of sacrificing so many of its soldiers in battle, Vladimir Kantovski’s action will be inexplicable. For here is a man who volunteered to serve in one of Stalin’s notorious penal battalions. What his story demonstrates is that the terror prevalent in the Soviet system is only part of the reason the Red Army fought as it did. In 1942 even prisoners unjustly held in the gulag could feel motivated to fight the Germans by their own patriotism and belief in the Communist ideal.
After Stalin issued order 227 in the summer of 1942, Kantovski learnt that his request had been granted; he would be sent to the front line, his sentence commuted from ten years to five. He became one of the 440,000 Soviet soldiers who served in penal battalions; how many survived the war is not known for sure, but it is likely to be the merest handful.1
Once at the front line he met the other members of his battalion: ‘I was the only one who was convicted on political charges – usually the penal battalions were made up of people who had committed various minor crimes like being late for work, which was a crime at that time. If you were more than 21 minutes late, it meant a year in prison, but instead of that you could go to a penal battalion. Or a small theft or if you were rude to someone in the street – that could all be considered a crime and you could be sent to a penal battalion.’
Kantovski knew that in a penal battalion ‘my old sins could only be pardoned through my blood’ – and that the only realistic chance he had of survival was to be wounded in combat. Yet he ‘never regretted for a single minute’ that he chose to join. ‘It’s my nature. I don’t like to muse over decisions I’ve taken – I never do it on principle. And in spite of everything, some opportunities were opening up for me. There was a small chance of survival – even if 10 people survived out of 250 it meant that you had a chance.’
After receiving ‘no training whatsoever’, Kantovski’s unit was marched to the front line and told they would have the opportunity of serving the Motherland by ‘reconnaissance through combat’. They were required to advance towards the German lines and ‘make the enemy’s weapons fire so that our reconnaissance people could spot the sources of the enemy’s fire and later destroy them’. They were ordered forward at dawn towards a wood occupied by Germans about 400 metres from the Soviet positions. ‘As soon as we showed ourselves, the enemy opened fire. And our officers shouted, “Onwards, onwards!” I don’t think you can feel any patriotism when you are participating in such an attack. I think the over-riding feeling is one of bluntness – your feelings are blunted. You feel fatalistic. You know what’s happening is unavoidable, fatal, and it’s like a game of Russian roulette. Well, what is your lot going to be?’
As the penal battalion advanced, the German machine gun fire intensified. The four or five Soviet tanks that accompanied them were swiftly destroyed. Then Kantovski felt bullets hit his arm and shoulder: ‘I was wounded and I began to bleed. You had to be heavily wounded to be pardoned, but how can you know whether you are badly wounded or not badly wounded? Until I became convinced that I was heavily enough wounded I didn’t dare set off towards the first aid centre. It was very hard to move – my arm was not working, so I had to crawl lying on my back.’
Out of his unit of 240, only nine escaped being severely wounded or killed. Luckily for Kantovski, his wound was considered serious enough for him to be medically treated and released from the penal battalion. He then returned to Moscow where he was able to continue as a student. But his story does not end there. In 1944 he was arrested again and charged with the same offence he had committed in 1941. His NKVD investigator just told him, ‘In 1941 you were sentenced to ten years. All right, go back and do your time and you’ll finish in 1951.’ Kantovski never knew why he had been sent back to the gulag. ‘We lived under Stalin’s personal dictatorship,’ he says. ‘I didn’t query whether Stalin was just or unjust – he was simply a tyrant. All of it rested on fear, on cruelty, on informing – on sticks without any carrots.’
In the course of making the television series on which this book is based some truly exceptional people emerged. But Vladimir Kantovski was one of the most impressive. Sitting in his small Moscow flat, he unravelled a personal story that was rife with injustice at every turn. Yet all his personal misfortune – even the wounds whose scars he still bears today from his experience of ‘reconnaissance through combat’ – stemmed from writing that pamphlet of protest in 1941 about the arrest of his teacher. It was hard to see what that pamphlet had achieved apart from his own suffering. Looking back, didn’t he regret ever having written it? ‘I don’t regret having done it,’ he replied. ‘Because not everyone could say at the time that he had the liberty to express himself. My personality grew stronger.’ He paused for a moment, trying to find the exact words that would convey his feeling. Then he finally said, ‘I don’t regret it because it gives me self-respect.’ In a war that is rich in stories of suffering which have no redemption, it is worth remembering the personal experience of Vladimir Kantovski – a man who was prepared to die not just for his country, but for his own sense of self-worth.
Yet no amount of personal sacrifice seemed able to stem the advance of the Germans in the summer of 1942. On 23 July Panzer divisions advanced into Rostov as far as the bridge across the River Don. ‘The Germans were so confident,’ says Anatoly Mereshko, a Soviet officer who fought against them that summer, ‘which was natural because they moved from Kharkov to the Don . . . It would make anyone confident. They walked, having rolled up their sleeves, wearing shorts and singing their songs. As for our retreating units, they were really completely demoralized people. They didn’t know where they were going and they didn’t know where to look for their units. For example, they were told to reassemble in Marinovka, but where was Marinovka? About five or six soldiers would turn up and ask: “Where is Marinovka?” So they just walked and walked, carrying their weapons with them – because without weapons they would be interrogated.’
Tamara Kalmykova, then an eighteen-year-old student, witnessed the Soviet retreat: ‘There was terrible panic – each was frightened for his life. And I used to say that if I had a machine gun I would have killed all those who were retreating. Because every step of the retreat doubled the amount of blood that needed to be shed – afterwards you will need two or three times the casualties to win it back.’
Stalin must have felt similar sentiments – that was why he issued his order: ‘Not one step back.’ But that summer he also accepted that on occasion it would be necessary to conduct staged withdrawals to prevent his forces being encircled. It was a breakthrough – the first significant sign that he was prepared to learn from his earlier mistakes and listen to the generals around him. Only by a fighting retreat could similar disasters to Kharkov that spring and to Kiev and Vyazma the previous year be avoided.
That summer Anatoly Mereshko commanded an élite unit of officer cadets in the fight against Operation Blue. For him and his unit, each day had the same essential pattern. ‘Usually the Germans attacked twice and then waited for the main forces to pull up for a larger attack the next morning. When the evening came, all warfare stopped. But they sent their motorcyclists to the flanks where they fired light rockets – they just did it to give the impression of encirclement. The Germans did everything according to schedule. At dawn their reconnaissance plane usually arrived. Then the bombers came. They bombed the front line, and then the shelling began, and then infantry and tanks attacked. If you could withstand the bombing and the shelling, it was fine because you could always fight back against the tanks and the infantry. If they had no success, they stopped their attacks.’ During the night, whilst the Germans called up more reinforcements, the Red Army melted away. ‘We had no strength to hold the defence,’ says Mereshko. ‘If we had been given the order to hold out and stay, we would have stayed, but the command preferred to save us.’ Ironically, these new pragmatic tactics did not please either him or his men: ‘We felt desperation and anger because of our helplessness, and we also wondered: “Why do they not let us properly fight the enemy? Why do we have to keep on withdrawing?” And we kept withdrawing, as far as the River Don.’
‘Our initial impression was that the Russians were fleeing,’ says Joachim Stempel who, as a German tank officer, fought his way across the steppes in Operation Blue. ‘But that turned out to be a mistake.’ The Red Army was, of course, making a strategic retreat – though to many of the soldiers on the ground the impression must have been that this was a repeat
of 1941. But this time there were no great German encirclements, and the hit-and-run Soviet defensive tactics sapped the strength of the German advance. ‘If we caught up with the Russians during the day,’ says Gerhard Münch, who fought in Army Group B, ‘then during the night they’d go further away from us. This is the time when I first heard the term “The Russians fighting by space”, which means he lets us enter and our difficulties with supply get bigger and the ways of supply get more complicated.’ Münch’s regimental commander expressed similar doubts to him during the advance to Stalingrad. ‘He was very sceptical after Kharkov because he said, “This huge space – what on earth are we supposed to do here?” And when we were not able to get at the enemy, he made the point that our opponent was using space against us.’
That summer the Red Army was careful about choosing the moment to mount a defence against the Germans and the moment to withdraw. Bridgeheads and other important strategic positions would be held and fiercely defended until the threat of encirclement became too great. Joachim Stempel and his men saw at first-hand this new sophistication in Red Army tactics once they crossed the River Don and encountered a Soviet defensive obstacle the like of which they had not seen before. ‘Here we experienced incredibly heavy losses,’ he says. ‘Behind every little hill, every little rise, there were built-in T.34 tanks. Only the gun barrels were visible, and we were really surprised when they opened fire – we hadn’t really recognized them. And particularly terrible were the Russian flame-thrower divisions, who, at temperatures of 40 degrees, just lit up everything that was at all flammable and we had the most terrible injuries and burns . . . And the closer we got to Stalingrad, the harder was the resistance of the Soviet troops.’
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 24