The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  During the first month, German troops would advance about 450 miles, a staggering pace that reflected the disarray they encountered in most of the areas under attack. Morale among the invaders rose in proportion to the confusion they encountered as they moved steadily deeper into Soviet territory. “I feel born anew,” Lance Corporal Henry Nahler wrote in a letter home on June 26. Describing the initial assault four days earlier, he noted, “it seemed as if all the weapons along the front line were fired at the same time.” As German bombers appeared in the skies, “people ran like mad along the roads with their belongings.” He added that he found a bucket of fresh milk and two fresh eggs in a barn, which allowed him to drink and eat by way of celebration. “Generally speaking, everything was very cozy and festive,” he concluded. “The Russians didn’t direct their artillery against us.”

  His upbeat mood was echoed in other letters from soldiers. “We will send big Russia to hell,” an NCO by the last name of Bering wrote on the same day. “If the Führer has decided to do something like this, he will certainly succeed.” A Lance Corporal von Dirdelsen added, “We will defeat the country with the mad government and beat the Red Army. Our company first crossed the Bug, destroyed three bunkers and advanced 40 kilometers [twenty-five miles] during the first three days.” While he conceded that many officers perished during that drive, he claimed that their bravery only inspired their men to keep moving forward. In other letters, soldiers described how they watched German planes shoot out of the skies the Soviet planes that managed to confront them. “Yes, our pilots are great fellows!” Nahler wrote. “I just saw one German fighter attack a group of enemy fighters, bringing down four Russian planes. It was unforgettable.”

  Back in Moscow, the average Soviet citizen had no idea just how bad things looked on the front lines. Georgy Kumanev, who was ten at the time, went with some friends to the mobilization office and listened to the crowd assembling there. Kumanev, who has been long ensconced in the Center for Military History in Moscow and has conducted interviews with many of the key figures of the wartime era, recalls that people were full of bravado. “We will knock Hitler’s teeth out,” they were saying. Others asked, “Have you heard? Our troops are approaching Königsberg,” the East Prussian port city. Or “Have you heard that the Red Army is already in enemy territory?” Some of the young men were in a hurry to enlist to have a chance to take part in the war, because they were convinced that it would end very quickly and they might miss it if they didn’t join up immediately.

  Children chanted the new ditties that arose for the occasion. “Here and there—Hitler beware! Bet your boots—Hitler’s kaput!” one of them went. But along with other Muscovites, the novelist Yuri Druzhnikov, who remembers reciting that line as an eight-year-old at the time of the invasion, saw that optimism quickly evaporate. His father, Ilya Druzhnikov, a book illustrator in his mid-forties, was immediately called up and sent to the front with other recruits in cattle cars. Once there, he found himself in a scene of “total chaos,” where no one seemed to know what was going on.

  As Ilya Druzhnikov would tell his son long after the war, there was only one rifle available for every ten men in his unit, which meant that unarmed men trailed behind each armed man. Whenever one of the armed men fell, the next man was expected to pick up his weapon. The officers, he pointed out, were ready to shoot any of their own men who dared move in the wrong direction—away from the fighting instead of right into it. Periodically, the order was issued for the recruits to go to the fields and strip the corpses of everything they could carry—weapons, ammunition, and clothing. One reason for these shortages was that the Germans had quickly captured or destroyed large stockpiles of Soviet weapons and other supplies near the western border, which Soviet planners had stored there apparently with no consideration of the possibility that this would make the job of the invaders all that much easier.

  Druzhnikov was at the front for a very short time. During a period of heavy rains, he came down with a skin disease that army medics feared could be infectious. Sent back to Moscow, he recovered and was put to work, along with other artists, painting the roofs of the capital’s buildings. Carting buckets of green, yellow, and brown paint, they tried to camouflage the buildings as best they could, making them look like a forest—at least to German bombers at a considerable distance.

  Doing what he was told and keeping silent about what he had seen during his brief stint at the front came naturally to Druzhnikov. As an illustrator who also was skilled in retouching photographs, he knew that one slip of the tongue could cost him his life in Stalin’s Russia. In the late 1930s, two NKVD agents had arrived at his apartment. They ordered Druzhnikov’s wife to take young Yuri and his sister outside while they stayed behind with the terrified husband and father. Both Ilya and his wife were convinced he was about to be arrested. Instead, one of the agents pulled out a photograph of Stalin, a close-up of his face, which—unlike the face in every photo that had ever been published—was visibly pockmarked, probably from his childhood bout of smallpox. The agents asked if he could retouch the photograph to make the unsightly pockmarks disappear. Standing over him as he painstakingly did so, they watched the leader’s cheeks become smoother and smoother. When Druzhnikov was done, they handed him a document to sign. It stated that he was in possession of a state secret that must never be revealed. The illustrator signed and only told this story to his son Yuri long after Stalin died.

  At the time, the disastrous rout of Soviet forces that were unprepared for the German onslaught was considered as big a secret as Stalin’s pockmarks. Ilya Druzhnikov was schooled enough in the Soviet system to remain absolutely silent about both of his chilling experiences, whether or not he had signed an oath of secrecy. He was lucky to have survived each of those harrowing ordeals—and he was acutely aware of that fact.

  The leader who inspired such terror, who presided over a state built on fear, suddenly looked paralyzed by his own fear when the Germans invaded. He had persisted in his state of denial about German intentions right up to the moment the enemy struck. On June 20, two days before the invasion, the supervisor of the Baltic port of Riga had called Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan with news that could hardly be misinterpreted: the twenty-five German cargo ships in the port at that moment had received instructions to leave the next day, whether or not they had completed their loading and unloading of cargo. Mikoyan went straight to Stalin and urged him to order that the German ships not be allowed to depart. “It’s going to be a provocation,” the Soviet leader responded angrily. “We cannot do it. Instruct them not to impede the ships and to let them go.”

  Even when the invasion started, Stalin’s first instinct was to disbelieve it. When General Georgy Zhukov, Chief of the General Staff, called Stalin’s dacha at 4 A.M. to wake the leader and inform him of the reports of heavy German shelling and bombing raids coming in from all across the western part of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s first instructions were to avoid striking back. Arriving at the Kremlin a short time later, he speculated that the German military might be acting on its own. “Hitler surely doesn’t know about it,” he declared. Then he ordered Molotov to meet with German Ambassador Schulenburg to find out what the reports from the border could mean—as if there was still a chance that they could be wrong.

  In fact, the German envoy had already requested a meeting with Molotov to deliver a clear-cut message from his government. When he arrived at 5:30 that morning, Schulenburg didn’t hide his own disappointment about its contents, which undid all his efforts to keep the peace between their two countries. The statement explained that the threat posed by the growing number of Soviet forces on the border had compelled the German government “to take immediate military countermeasures.” Incredibly, Molotov asked the ambassador what this statement could mean. As the Soviet note taker at the meeting dryly reported, “Schulenburg replied that in his opinion it meant the beginning of the war.” Molotov protested that, in fact, there was no build-up of Soviet troops at the
border and that the only military activity consisted of routine maneuvers. The ambassador said there was nothing he could add on the subject. Molotov went back to Stalin to relay the message that “the German government has declared war on us.” The Soviet leader muttered, “Ribbentrop deceived us, the scoundrel!”

  The German army that launched the attack numbered 3.05 million men and included 3,550 tanks, 2,770 aircraft, and about six hundred thousand horses; despite the Nazi military machine’s modern equipment, horses were still essential for transporting weaponry and other supplies. Another half-million troops were provided by Finland and Romania, which were allied with Germany. This was the biggest military force ever assembled but only begins to suggest how large a conflict the Soviet-German war would prove to be. Over the next four years, on average about nine million troops were involved in this epic conflict at any one time.

  The Germans divided their invasion force into three parts: Army Group North, Army Group Center, and Army Group South. Army Group North was to direct its assault through the Baltic states, with Leningrad as its ultimate target. Army Group South was to focus its efforts on reaching Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. But it was Army Group Center that was the most heavily equipped, boasting half of the German armored divisions and its most famous panzer units. Its assignment was to encircle and take Minsk and then continue the drive due east toward Moscow. As the fighting moved in that direction, the single largest concentration of troops would be involved in the battle for Moscow.

  But with communications spotty—German saboteurs had cut telephone and telegraph wires wherever they could, and many Soviet divisions were overrun in the initial fighting—Stalin and his entourage in the Kremlin still had little idea of the power and size of the invading forces. Or just how unrealistic the Soviet leader’s initial orders must have sounded to those who received them. True, many of the troops had been equally clueless. As General Ivan Fedyuninsky admitted later: “When the showdown came, the might of the German Army came as a complete surprise to many of our officers.” But they quickly realized that they were up against an onslaught that their leaders hadn’t prepared them to face.

  The Kremlin leaders were still reluctant to concede the magnitude of their mistakes. As he was receiving reports from all over that the Luftwaffe was bombing and strafing military and civilian targets during the morning of the invasion, General Ivan Boldin, the deputy commander of the western military district, received a call at his headquarters in Minsk from defense commissar Semyon Timoshenko.

  “Comrade Boldin, remember no action is to be taken against the Germans without our knowledge,” Timoshenko told him. “Will you please tell [General Dmitry] Pavlov that Comrade Stalin has forbidden to open artillery fire against the Germans.”

  “But how is that possible?” Boldin yelled. “Our troops are in full retreat. Whole towns are in flames, people are being killed all over the place.”

  Timoshenko wasn’t about to relent, since Stalin was still unwilling to believe what he was hearing. But within a few hours, Stalin could no longer doubt that the country was facing a full-scale invasion. He then started issuing orders that reflected even more ignorance. Frontier troops were instructed “to attack enemy forces with all the strength and means at their disposal, and to annihilate them wherever they had violated the Soviet border.” The air force was ordered to strike “mighty blows” and “smash the main enemy troop concentrations and their aircraft on its airfields.” Soviet bombers were supposed to hit Königsberg and Memel, and the Soviet forces in the southwestern region were supposed to capture Lublin, the Polish city thirty miles across the border. With much of the Soviet air force in the west already destroyed and whole armies disintegrating, Stalin could just as well have been ordering his generals to fly to the moon.

  The orders were signed by Timoshenko, Zhukov and Georgy Malenkov, a member of the Kremlin inner circle—but not by Stalin, who undoubtedly understood that he was facing a situation that could reflect badly on him. In the early morning hours, Soviet radio had continued to air innocuous programming, ignoring the alarming news from the front. But the assembled political and military brass in the Kremlin realized they had to announce the fact that the war had started, and they urged Stalin to do so. “Let Molotov speak,” he replied. His aides argued that the people would expect Stalin “at such a significant historical moment.” To no avail, since Stalin wouldn’t budge. “That was certainly a mistake,” Mikoyan recalled later. “However, Stalin was so depressed that he didn’t know what to tell the nation.”

  So Molotov spoke, delivering the radio address at noon that every Soviet citizen who was alive then still remembers. Stalin helped him draft his address, which reflected the leader’s sense of shock that Hitler had turned against him. “This unheard-of attack on our country is an unparalleled act of perfidy in the history of civilized nations,” Molotov declared. “This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union.” Disregarding his country’s acquiescence in German aggression up to that point, he denounced Germany’s enslavement of “the French, the Czechs, the Poles, the Serbs, and the peoples of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Greece and other countries.” He vowed that the “arrogant Hitler” would meet the same fate as Napoleon in Russia. And, wrapping it up, he uttered the words that would stick in the minds of most of his listeners. “Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.”

  But the news from the front hardly justified such optimism. With the Kremlin still issuing senseless orders for Soviet troops to go on the offensive, German forces of Army Group Center, the troops assigned to drive straight east through Belorussia, were making rapid progress. On June 28, the Belorussian capital of Minsk fell to the invaders, trapping four hundred thousand Red Army troops. The city may not have been that significant a strategic target, but Stalin had been determined to defend it, and its collapse sent him into a psychological tailspin. The next day he informed his entourage, “Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up!”

  As the news only got worse, the leader retreated to his dacha and didn’t show up in the Kremlin the next day. Callers were told, “Comrade Stalin is not here and is unlikely to be here.” For two days, the Politburo members wondered whether he was still in charge. Finally, a delegation of them nervously made their way to his dacha. When they entered, Stalin looked at them and asked, “What have you come for?” As Mikoyan recalled, “He had the strangest look on his face, and the question itself was pretty strange, too.” The thought flashed through Mikoyan’s mind that Stalin assumed they were about to arrest him.

  Instead, Molotov told Stalin that there was a proposal to set up a State Defense Committee that would preside over the war effort. “With whom as its head?” the leader asked. Both Molotov and then secret police chief Beria promptly told him that he would be in charge. Stalin looked both surprised and relieved. “Fine,” he said.

  Stalin resumed his leadership role, but he hardly inspired confidence in his ability to lead his country out of its mortal crisis. To be sure, he had taken some sensible steps during the very first days of the invasion. On June 24, for example, he created the Council of Evacuation, charged with the task of transporting entire factories, their workers, and supplies to eastern regions of the country beyond the reach of the Germans. This was the start of a process that would eventually lead to the dismantling of thousands of factories, from small workshops to major enterprises, and their reassembly in their new locations.

  But in those early days, Khrushchev observed that he was “a different Stalin, a bag of bones in a gray tunic.” When Khrushchev told him that things were going badly because of the shortage of weapons, the leader offered a sardonic response. “Well, they talk about how smart Russians are. Look how smart we are now.”

  Khrushchev wasn’t amused, especially when later he called from Kiev to ask for weapons for
factory workers who were demanding them. He got Malenkov on the line. According to his account, that led to the following testy exchange:

  “Tell me, where can we get rifles?” Khrushchev asked. “We’ve got factory workers here who want to join the ranks of the Red Army to fight the Germans and we don’t have anything to arm them with.”

  “You’d better give up any thought of getting rifles from us,” Malenkov replied. “The rifles in the civil defense organization here have all been sent to Leningrad.”

  “Then what are we supposed to fight with?”

  “I don’t know—pikes, swords, homemade weapons, anything you can make in the factories.”

  “You mean we should fight tanks with spears?”

  “You’ll have to do the best you can. You can make fire bombs out of bottles of gasoline or kerosene and throw them at the tanks.”

  Khrushchev felt “dismay and indignation.” As he put it, “Here we were, trying to hold back an invasion without rifles and machine guns, not to mention artillery or mechanized weapons!”

  The Stavka, or main command headquarters, may have been providing few satisfactory answers to such frantic appeals, but from the moment that Stalin returned to the Kremlin after his near breakdown, he was once again clearly in charge. On July 3, he finally addressed his countrymen. It was a remarkable performance on several levels. But the most important part of the speech was its opening. “Comrades! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!” Stalin declared.

  For the despot to address his people as “brothers and sisters” and “my friends” was unprecedented. His listeners knew something fundamental had changed. He was appealing to them as partners in the common struggle, not just as subjects. That was truly revolutionary, and his listeners felt it. This was different from Molotov speaking. The dual message was that Stalin was fully in charge and that he needed everyone’s help in fighting back against the German invaders.