The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  Apart from his role as a Soviet agent, Sorge also hid the fact that he was far more seriously worried that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union than he let on. Since Ott routinely confided in him, Sorge knew that the German ambassador was trying to sort out the mixed signals he was receiving from his hosts. At times they suggested that Japan would act like a good German ally and jump into the conflict with the Soviet Union and at other times Japan’s rulers appeared extremely hesitant. The Japanese remembered that General Zhukov had defeated their forces in Mongolia in 1939, which made at least some of them skeptical about German claims that Germany would achieve an easy victory against the same commander. But those memories made the politicians pause more than the military leaders, who were primed for action. “Now the opportunity to destroy the U.S.S.R. has arrived,” proclaimed General Sadao Araki.

  In July, the Japanese started a new mobilization, sending more troops north to Manchuria. Ott wanted to believe that this meant that Tokyo was preparing to attack Russia. As for Sorge, he later conceded that this “gave us cause for anxiety.” But the Japanese were also intent on pursuing their imperial ambitions to the south, deploying troops to expand their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, despite mounting tensions with the United States and Britain. On July 28, their forces took over French bases in Indochina. The question was whether Tokyo was ready to move in both directions.

  Pressed by his superiors in Moscow, Sorge still couldn’t provide a clear answer. On July 30, he reported, “Japan will be able to begin war from the second half of August, but will only do so should the Red Army actually be defeated by the Germans, resulting in a weakening of defense capabilities in the Far East.” He added that a key Japanese informant “is convinced that if the Red Army stops the Germans in front of Moscow, Japan will not make a move.” In other words, the battle for Moscow would be the single most crucial factor in Japan’s decision.

  This left the Kremlin in a Catch-22 situation. If it pulled a significant number of troops out of the Far East and sent them to defend Moscow, this would provide desperately needed reinforcements that might determine the outcome of that battle. At the same time, it would prove to be a grievous miscalculation if it served as an invitation to the Japanese to attack from the east, possibly delivering the coup de grace to the beleaguered Soviet regime. But that conundrum would evaporate if Sorge could provide the reassurance that the Kremlin so urgently needed that the Japanese weren’t going to attack.

  Sorge had no doubts about the importance of his mission, and he pushed his Japanese collaborators and unwitting sources hard to pick up any intelligence they could. He endlessly discussed the conflicting signals with Hotsumi Ozaki, a left-wing Japanese journalist he had befriended and then enlisted as an accomplice in espionage. In early August, Ozaki had picked up reports that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union on August 15. Sorge told him that Ott had heard the same reports and believed them. But Ozaki noted that the Japanese were well aware of the fact that the German offensive was encountering more resistance than expected in some places, which argued for caution. And if the Japanese were to attack, they knew they had to do so very soon or risk fighting a winter war in Siberia.

  On August 11, Sorge wrote another ambivalent note to Moscow reflecting those considerations. He pointed out that the Japanese were carefully monitoring the German-Soviet fighting and the losses the Germans were incurring even as they continued their advance. He also noted the growing tensions with the United States, which were increasing the pressure for a decision on what Tokyo’s priorities should be. With winter approaching, he added, “In the coming two to three weeks, Japan’s decision will be made.” But if the tone of his report suggested that Japan was unlikely to attack, he hedged his bets in a way that was hardly reassuring. “It is possible that the General Staff will take the decision to intervene without prior consultation,” he wrote.

  A couple of weeks later, Sorge and Ozaki were picking up far more encouraging signals. The German naval attaché, Paul Wenneker, told Sorge that the Japanese navy wanted to push south and rule out an attack on the Soviet Union, at least for the current year. And while reporting on Japanese troop strength in Manchuria, Sorge proudly added some vital information he had learned. “Many soldiers have been issued with shorts…and from this it can be assumed that large numbers will be shipped to the south.” Specifically, he mentioned that the Japanese were discussing plans to occupy Thailand and Borneo. In another message, he relayed news that Ozaki had learned from top government officials about their attitude toward an attack on the Soviet Union. “They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year.” It was a line that radiated triumph and relief.

  Would Stalin believe him? The Soviet dictator was as suspicious as ever of a spy who blended so fully into the German community in Tokyo and was well known for his freewheeling lifestyle. Ever since Sorge had angered Stalin with his accurate reports predicting the German attack on the Soviet Union, his own bosses in military intelligence had speculated that he might be an agent for the other side. During the purges, some officers who were convicted of trumped-up charges of spying for Germany or Japan had mentioned Sorge, which was enough to establish guilt by association.

  But this time, Sorge was reporting something that the Kremlin hoped was true. And by the middle of September, Ott and other German diplomats were conceding that there was no chance that the Japanese would respond positively to their pleas for intervention. Instead, Tokyo was determined to expand its reach in Southeast Asia, and it saw the United States as the main obstacle to its ambitions. Back in Moscow, General Aleksei Panfilov, a tank commander who was serving as the temporary chief of military intelligence, offered a rare endorsement of Sorge. “Considering his great possibilities as a source and the reliability of a significant amount of his previous reporting, this report inspires confidence,” he wrote.

  As Sorge would admit later, it was only in September that the Kremlin began to have “complete trust in my reports” that the invasion wasn’t about to happen. As a result, Stalin finally felt free to make the decision to send a large part of the forces in the Soviet Far East to defend Moscow. Starting in October, the Siberians, as they were called, were transported to the Soviet heartland. A total of about four hundred thousand troops were redeployed in this period of late 1941 and early 1942, making the one-to-two-week journey in hastily organized special trains. Approximately 250,000 were dispatched to defend Moscow, and the rest were sent to Leningrad and other embattled regions. The arrival of these fresh troops, most of whom were outfitted with proper winter clothing, would dramatically change the situation for Moscow’s defenders and shock the Germans, who had fought their way to within striking distance of the city.

  In mid-October, Sorge wrote what proved to be his last dispatch to Moscow. Once again, he demonstrated the reliability of his Japanese sources by predicting that “war with the United States will begin in the very near future.” But the report was never sent. The Japanese finally caught on and arrested him along with Ozaki and other members of his espionage ring on October 18. During relentless interrogation sessions, he admitted his role, and he was sentenced to death. But his captors were in no hurry to execute him. In fact, they kept him alive in prison until late 1944.

  By then, the war was going badly for Japan and it had little interest in further antagonizing the Soviet Union, which it feared might join the war in the Pacific. Japanese officials had suggested several times that they’d be willing to exchange Sorge for a Japanese prisoner held by the Soviet side. Each time they were rebuffed. The standard response, in one case reported as coming directly from Stalin, was, “Richard Sorge? I do not know a person of that name.”

  The Soviet leader wasn’t about to save someone who knew so much about the warnings he had received and ignored when Hitler was preparing to invade his country. And he wasn’t moved at all by the fact that Sorge’s intelligence coup a few months later, confirming that the Japanese wer
e not going to attack the Soviet Union in 1941, was a critical factor in the battle for Moscow. On November 7, 1944, which happened to be the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Sorge was hanged.

  9

  “O Mein Gott! O Mein Gott!”

  The fighting in October hadn’t produced any decisive breakthroughs for either side. German units were about forty miles outside Moscow and in some places even closer. Although the invaders were tired, battered, and overextended, they still threatened to make good on Hitler’s vow to seize and then annihilate the Soviet capital. The panic in the city had subsided, but Stalin and his entourage were far from convinced that the worst was over. Even with fresh troops arriving from Siberia, there was no assurance that Moscow could stave off disaster.

  It was at this moment that Stalin insisted on carrying out his most dramatic gesture of defiance: a full-blown celebration of November 7, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was convinced that precisely because Moscow’s fate was still uncertain, such a stage-managed event could provide the city’s defenders with a much-needed boost of confidence. That is, if something didn’t go wrong, producing exactly the opposite result.

  The first part of the ceremonies sent somewhat of a mixed message. On November 6, the Soviet leaders assembled in the Mayakovsky metro station for an address by Stalin to delegates of the Moscow City Soviet and other civilian and military officials. Sitting on chairs brought from the Bolshoi Theater for the occasion, the assembled dignitaries applauded as Stalin, along with Molotov, Mikoyan, and other Kremlin leaders, arrived on a subway train they had taken from a nearby station. Broadcast on radio and loudspeakers, the proceedings began with a burst of patriotic music and were followed by the leader’s address to the nation. All of which was designed for maximum inspirational effect.

  This may have worked for those listening on the radio but not necessarily for the officials gathered below ground in the metro station. British correspondent Alexander Werth pointed out that everyone knew that the venue had been chosen because of the danger posed by German bombers to anything aboveground. “As many who attended the meeting later told me, the underground setting of the meeting was uncanny, depressing, and humiliating,” he wrote. Stalin’s speech, he added, “was a strange mixture of black gloom and complete self-confidence.”

  That it was. Talking about the danger facing the country since the Germans first launched their attack, he declared: “Today, as a result of four months of war, I must emphasize that this danger—far from diminishing—has on the contrary increased. The enemy has captured the greater part of the Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, and Estonia, and a number of other regions, has penetrated the Donbass, is looming like a black cloud over Leningrad, and is menacing our glorious capital, Moscow.” He also warned that the enemy “is straining all his strength to capture Leningrad and Moscow before the winter sets in, for he knows that the winter holds nothing good in store for him.”

  But if that part of his speech painted a bleak picture, he also claimed that heroic Soviet troops had “compelled the enemy to shed streams of blood” and that the Blitzkrieg had already failed. He then reeled off statistics that were supposed to prove how badly the Germans had been beaten, although only moments before he had effectively conceded that it was his armies that had suffered a devastating series of defeats. “In four months of the war we lost 350,000 killed, 378,000 missing, and have 1,020,000 wounded men,” he asserted. “In the same period, the enemy lost over 4,500,000 killed, wounded and prisoners.”

  As Western historians have pointed out, the Red Army routinely lost more men than the Wehrmacht even later in the war when they were scoring victory after victory and driving the Germans out. For the entire period of the conflict, on average the Red Army lost three times more men than the Germans did. Stalin’s numbers, purportedly reflecting the losses during the string of German early victories, were nothing more than fantasy. “It is extremely doubtful that anyone in Russia could have believed those figures,” Werth wrote. But as the British correspondent noted, they were meant to buttress Stalin’s broader assertion that the Blitzkrieg had fallen short, failing to produce the swift collapse of Germany’s intended victim that it had achieved in Poland and Western Europe.

  To explain “the temporary military setbacks” of the Red Army, Stalin offered a variety of excuses. Although he trumpeted the fact that Britain and the United States were now allied with the Soviet Union, the first excuse he gave was “the absence of a second front in Europe,” which allowed the Germans to focus on the Eastern front. “The situation now is such that our country is waging the war of liberation alone without anyone’s military aid,” he said. Of course, he never mentioned that the Germans were able to invade Poland thanks to their alliance with Russia or how long Britain had fought alone before Operation Barbarossa.

  Similarly, he blamed the setbacks on “the shortage of tanks and partly also of aircraft,” presenting the problem solely as one of production capabilities, never acknowledging the huge losses that were a direct result of his refusal to believe that the Germans would attack when they did. He vowed that Soviet industry would achieve a “several-fold” increase in the production of tanks and other weaponry, and, in fact, this would prove to be an accurate forecast of what would happen later in the war, wiping out the initial German superiority in firepower.

  But the balance sheet of evasions and promises was less important than his invocation of a patriotic duty to resist the invaders who “have already sunk to the level of wild beasts.” Portraying the conflict as another in a long line of defenses of Mother Russia, he reminded his listeners of the great figures of Russian history, everyone from Pushkin and Tolstoy to the legendary military commanders Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov. Not coincidentally, Kutuzov was the general who defeated Napoleon’s armies. “Napoleon’s fate must not be forgotten,” he intoned. He mentioned Lenin as well, but the focus was on the national—not the ideological—struggle for survival.

  And finally there was his vow of far more than victory. “The German invaders want a war of extermination against the peoples of the U.S.S.R. Well, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they shall have it.” It would be an eye for an eye or, more accurately, vengeance at any price.

  The traditional military parade in Red Square, the riskiest part of the ceremonies, was scheduled for eight o’clock the following morning, though only those directly involved, who were all sworn to secrecy, knew the timing and details. Most of the commanders of the military units slated to take part received word about those plans at 2 A.M., just a few hours before they had to muster their troops. As the troops, tanks and artillery assembled in the early-morning cold, fears of a German air raid receded. While Soviet planes still patrolled the gray skies, a heavy snowfall had started by the time of the parade, making air strikes highly unlikely. From the Kremlin gate, Marshal Budenny emerged on a white horse with saber drawn and joined Stalin and the other Kremlin leaders on the Lenin Mausoleum to review the troops.

  During the night, sand had been scattered on Red Square and the nearby streets, but it disappeared in the morning winds and snowfall. This made the job of the artillery and tank brigades particularly difficult, since they had to deal with slippery surfaces and snowdrifts. With Stalin and the rest of the brass looking on, some of the troops had to push recalcitrant artillery pieces. Two heavy tanks stopped in the square and turned in the wrong direction, triggering a moment of alarm, followed by visible relief when it became clear that this was due to a miscommunication. But most of the soldiers marched through Red Square without incident—and immediately marched out of the city to rejoin the fighting at the nearby front.

  With strong winds whipping up the snow that morning, Stalin’s voice didn’t carry well. Most of those who were marching in Red Square that day registered only his presence, not his message. “We marched past the mausoleum and we saw him,” Aleksandr Zevelev, a member the NKVD special forces known as OMSBON, recalled
. “He was waving his arm.”

  But it was precisely Stalin’s presence that mattered. On the eve of the parade, Leonid Shevelev, a new recruit, couldn’t understand why his instructors were wasting time on marching drills. “For us it was incredible: the enemy was near Moscow and we were practicing our marching!” he said. But early in the morning on November 7, they found out the reason, and their participation gave them a huge morale boost. “We had heard that Stalin had left the capital,” Shevelev said, referring to the rumors that had circulated earlier. “It was very important for us to see that our leader chose to stay with us in Moscow. This made us march with the kind of determination as if we were nailing down the coffins of the advancing Nazis.”

  Another young OMSBON volunteer present that day, Yevgeny Teleguyev, pointed out that the importance of the parade was that it took place at all. When his unit arrived at the front straight from Red Square, the soldiers they were coming to assist had already heard reports of what had happened. “Is it true that there was a parade in Moscow?” they asked. Teleguyev and the others replied, “There was and we even participated in it.” As Teleguyev recalled, the soldiers were awed by their testimony.

  But Stalin wanted much more than just to prove that he was there. Since the sound technicians had been unable to get a clear recording of his speech at the parade and the cameramen had problems getting decent shots of him, he agreed to deliver his speech again the next day to get a good recording and sound track. The speech that most Soviet citizens heard broadcast on November 8 and the newsreel footage of Stalin that they saw of him reviewing the troops came from this staged session in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader wasn’t about to let the bad weather mar his effort to get his message out.