Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The story might have been quite different. Soviet tanks should have been world-beaters. Many had been tested during the civil war in Spain in 1936, and some designs had been refined as a result. The heavy KV model, named after Kliment Voroshilov, was a redoubtable machine, almost impervious to German fire at this stage in the war. It would, indeed, provide the model for the Germans’ own ‘Tiger’ in 1943. The lighter, more manoeuvrable T-34 eventually proved itself the best field tank in the Second World War, but at this stage the Red Army still had more of the older BT light tanks in service, as well as the obsolescent T-26 and T-28s. These machines were old, and few had been reliably maintained. The KV had a tendency to break down anyway, but every model suffered from a shortage of spare parts, to say nothing of skilled mechanical attention. In 1941, nearly three quarters of the Soviet Union’s 23,000 tanks were thought to need rebuilding or capital repairs. They would not make it to the workshops that summer. More Soviet tanks were lost in 1941 through breakdown than through German fire, and overall the Soviets lost six tanks to every German one.68

  The same story could be repeated for artillery in 1941. The Red Army was well-equipped, but its sclerotic command structures deprived it of flexibility in field conditions. There were never enough men with the right skills to operate complex equipment, but the inexperienced officers who commanded them were also unlikely to give them much chance to learn for themselves. Heavy guns of every kind were hoarded by officers for whom men might be cheap but new equipment was too valuable to lose.69 Men, too, were easier to move. Tractors were sometimes used to drag the heaviest equipment into place, but horses were the main source of draught power. In 1941, the Red Army still used the civil-war tachanka, a three-horse cart, to draw some of its lighter guns to the front line. But the horses were slaughtered with the men in 1941, and though the June grass had been sweet, forage for the survivors was soon running low. Supplies of food were a problem along the entire front. Horses and men grew thinner at the same accelerated pace.

  The other fatal logistical problem that summer was radio communication. Again, the difficulty came as no surprise. Poor field communications had dogged the Soviet army in the Finnish campaign, but plans to provide equipment and train new operators had not yet been fulfilled. The Red Army relied on wire far more than radio. The system was inflexible and centralized. Tank drivers, for instance, were seldom in contact with their comrades or even their commanding officers on the battlefield. The radio operators that did work at the front had not been adequately trained. As a former SS officer recalled after the war, the Soviets ‘used only simple codes and we nearly always were able to intercept and decode their radio messages without any difficulty. Thus we obtained quick information on the front situation, and frequently also on Russian intentions; sometimes I received such reports from our monitoring stations earlier than the situation reports of our own combat troops.’70 In 1941, some units were not even using code. At Uman that summer, vital messages from staff officers in the 6th Army were conveyed in clear text. ‘What else are we supposed to do,’ a lieutenant enquired, ‘when they want everything sent without delay?’71

  Finally, there was little prospect of help for weak and injured soldiers at this stage. The suddenness of the German attack pre-empted plans to move hospitals and medical supplies away from the front line. Then transport difficulties strangled their retreat. By 1 July 1941, the South-Western Front could call on just 15 per cent of its planned medical facilities. In the Tarnopol garrison hospital, which would have been the first point of call for Volkov and his tired crew, more than 5,000 wounded and exhausted men were crowded into facilities intended for 200 people within five days of the first attack.72 On 30 June, a report marked ‘absolutely secret’ catalogued the losses of one week. ‘In the course of military action none of the sanitary establishments located in the western parts of Belorussia was mobilized,’ it began. ‘As a result, the [Western] Front lacked 32 surgical and 12 infection hospitals, 16 corps hospitals, 13 evacuation points, 7 administrative centres for evacuation, 3 motorized sanitary companies… and other medical facilities.’73 It added that the equipment, drugs and other supplies that these facilities controlled had been destroyed in the bombing and fires. The staff, too, frequently, were dead.

  Artillery moving into firing position, Southern Front, 1942

  The Wehrmacht also rolled into the Russian steppe with more horses than tanks. In a few weeks, its supply lines had begun to stretch and thin across the unimaginable miles. The invader was not always invincible that June. At times, Soviet troops found German infantry without transport or air cover. Fascists, they discovered, could panic just as easily as komsomols in the right conditions. But in those early days the Wehrmacht enjoyed support from a portion of the local population. It was not yet on ancient Russian or even long-held Soviet soil. Civilians in cities like Lvov had been baiting Red Army troops for months. ‘The Germans are coming, and they’ll get you,’ they whispered in the narrow streets of the Galician town.74 Now soldiers from the same background, as well as the thousands who despaired of resisting Germany’s advance, turned tail, surrendered or fled the front line. By July, the reports were already piling up of soldiers who drew swastikas on their clothes, refused to fire on Germans and talked admiringly of Hitler.75

  Desertion rates were so high that no one could be sure of the numbers, let alone the breakdown of culprits by ethnic group. In three days at the end of June, NKVD special troops behind the lines on the South-Western Front caught nearly 700 soldiers on the run. Elsewhere, 5,000 men were caught fleeing one of the catastrophic battles of those first few days. But it probably was true that soldiers from the western regions were the most likely to disappear. They were anxious for their families, for theirs were the first homes the Germans overran that year. And some of them deserted because they saw no reason to die for Soviet power. Four thousand ‘westerners’ had fled the 26th Army by 6 July, and in one unit eighty men had refused their orders to fire.76 By 12 August, the army’s political administration considered the situation to be so dangerous that citizens of the western territories – Ukraine, Belorussia – and also the three Baltic states were specifically barred from the membership of new tank crews.77

  All this translated into murderous confusion in the field. Neither Red Army men nor officers had expected this war. No battle followed a thoughtful preconceived plan. The men resented their officers, mistrusted their orders and suspected that some of their own comrades were traitors waiting to desert. If they had paused to consider their reasons for fighting, they would probably have found that fear – of their officers, of the unknown and of secret police as much as of the German invaders – played a large part. Then came their rage against the entire world. At the front, lofty ideas of other kinds seldom survived for long. But these same men were expected to go on fighting, without hope, day after day. The 117th rifle division of the 21st Army, for instance, retreated and then fought repeatedly for weeks. By 6 July, it had reached the town of Zhlobin on the Dnepr river. There it fought one of the first engagements in the defence of Kiev, a doomed campaign that would cost the 21st Army alone, on the most conservative estimates, well over 1,000 lives each day.78 The battle lasted for eight hours. At the end of it Zhlobin itself had fallen and the remnants of the division had withdrawn to the Dnepr’s eastern bank.

  Before their retreat, the men had succeeded in destroying Zhlobin’s bridge, buying more time for the next day, and they had also blown up eight enemy tanks. But their morale was low. They were exhausted, hungry, sleepless, already haunted by all that they had seen. Many were injured. The next day, as usual, they faced combat again. Their officers had no plan other than head-on attack. As on the previous day, and every day, they threw men at the German tanks. The men’s only morale-booster was their unanimous roar, the terrifying ‘Hoorah!’ that struck real fear into their enemy. Apart from that, few soldiers had any weapon more effective than an 1890s rifle and a bayonet. Even Molotov cocktails were hard to obtain, since
Moscow had yet to sign the order that would soon have women stuffing glass bottles with wicks at a rate of 120,000 a day.79 At this stage, lacking bottles or bombs to throw, soldiers had only their bare hands. Wave after wave they ran in to attack, for hours, always amid the din of German shelling, screaming, and the crunch of steel on bone.

  It was a style of warfare – hopeless and head-on attack – that ground entire divisions to dust. It sickened the men involved, especially where they had endured weeks of it already. Ten communists at Zhlobin threw their party cards away as soon as the firing started. At least one other man shot himself in the leg in an attempt to escape from combat altogether. A soldier said to be Georgian tried to kill the commanding officer by firing on the troops as they attacked. A Volga German was thought to have gone over to the enemy as soon as he could slip away. But the real renegades made their escape with more style. Two senior officers ran twenty miles to get away from the front line as the dawn broke, while the commander who had ordered the first antiaircraft attack ‘got in his car and left’ as soon as the operation had begun. To date, the report of the day added, none had been punished because the local military judge, reared in the hard school of purging and lies, refused to investigate anything unless he had sufficient papers on his desk.80

  Even the Germans were surprised by the level of chaos. It was as if the entire population, soldiers and civilians, had run wild. Whenever the Wehrmacht captured a place where supplies of food and consumables were held, they could expect looting to start. In one town several women and children were crushed to death by the mob as it swept towards the army warehouse. ‘If a man could not carry a bag of sugar,’ the German army’s observer reported, ‘he simply cut it apart and poured half of its contents on to the floor, carrying home the rest.’ The citizens of Pukhovichi plundered half the military supplies in their town in a single day, taking, as their new masters observed, ‘an average per family of 200 kilos of sugar, 200 kilos of fats, almost 350 kilos of grits, and then a quantity of fish, individual rations, and vegetable oils… The population had not seen such opulence for a long time.’ The Red Army itself joined in at Bobruisk. ‘The only difference,’ wrote the German reporter, ‘was that while the inhabitants were plundering the shops, the soldiers were looting the homes of the inhabitants.’81

  The Stalinist regime of the late 1930s met its nemesis in Ukraine and Belorussia in those early months. Eventually, its near collapse led to a rethinking of policy and leadership, to changes in the way war would be waged and people ruled. But one tool in its armoury would prove essential for the duration. On 15 July, Lev Mekhlis issued a directive to the army of political workers at the front. It was the prelude to an order, signed the following day, that reinstated the political commissars in all their pre-1940 authority. Morale, the report tacitly admitted, had collapsed entirely. The politruks had failed to convince their men that this war could be won, or even, perhaps, that there was any point in fighting on at all. And yet, Mekhlis insisted, these were the soldiers whose task was ‘to decide by force of arms whether the Soviet people would be free or become the slaves of German princes and barons’.

  The bracing, epic formula behind these words might well have given heart to the people back at home, and also to the new recruits still training in their camps, but at the front, for now, the words had a hollow, even an insulting, ring. It was a mistake to tell soldiers, as Mekhlis prescribed, that Hitler’s blitzkrieg had failed and that the best divisions of his army were already defeated. And then came the depressing part on tactics, formulaic nonsense borrowed from the sloganeering days of civil war. ‘Teach all personnel how to rush into attack,’ the order continued. ‘Teach them implacable hatred and rage against the enemy, ardently to crush the fascist cur, to grind his face into the earth, to be prepared to fight to the last drop of their blood for every inch of Soviet soil. Tell them that tanks are not frightening for a brave and experienced soldier. Tell them that abandoning their posts without a direct order is a crime.’82 The words were hollow that summer, but they pointed to one of the ways that this war was conceived and fought, the war in soldiers’ minds and in the hopes of their civilian families. By saturating public discourse with simple, much-repeated formulas, the government forged new resolve to replace the lost innocence of 1938. It also helped to exclude all the other words, the panic-stricken, angry ones, that might have crowded into people’s conversations. On 19 July, a further order called for the mass recruitment of political officers to replace the hundreds who had been lost since 22 June.83

  There never was a moment when the propaganda effort flagged. Red Army troops were presented, effectively, with two wars simultaneously. The first, the one that they alone could know, was the war of the battlefield, the screaming war of shells and smoke, the shameful one of terror and retreat. But the other war, whose shape was crafted by writers, was the one that propaganda created. Soldiers and civilians alike could learn about it in newspapers, the most popular of which, Red Star, was read aloud to small groups at the front. Serving troops also saw film shows that included newsreel, some of which, because it was carefully staged, could seem more vivid than their own fragmented memories of combat. Fighting might seem to take place outside real time, in terrifying moments that later defied recall, but Stalin’s official war unfolded with an epic certainty, in regular and well-planned episodes.

  Soldiers near Leningrad receiving a consignment of books and paper, 1942

  In all, over 1,000 writers and artists joined the campaign to report the front, 400 of whom would die in the fighting.84 Their work was controlled by yet another new body, the Sovinformburo. This monitored everything from Pravda to the news-sheets that soldiers were given at the front. Each captured or disabled German tank and plane was recorded, often with a photograph, but the blank space where Soviet losses should have been, padded with slogans and even short verse, was noticed by newspaper readers everywhere.85 The trouble was that no one could get to the censors’ offices to find out more. Security was so tight that even full-time members of the Sovinformburo’s staff sometimes discovered that their passes were not valid for its central building.86 Inside, trusted officials combed draft front-line reports for ideological mistakes, correcting even punctuation that might not conform to the official line. The famous correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg nearly resigned in protest at the pettifogging rules. When an editor changed the word ‘victories’, meaning real successes at the front, to ‘progress’ in an article he saw, the future voice of Stalin’s propaganda war declared that it was all a waste of time. ‘We spend so long on corrections,’ he complained, ‘that we lose the whole day, all our creative time.’87

  One victory, or maybe piece of progress, that the Sovinformburo chalked up for Red Army troops that summer was the battle of Smolensk. The losses were devastating – 300,000 prisoners captured and 3,000 more tanks lost – but the Soviet papers remained silent about these. They focused on the fact that the Germans had been held up in their advance on Moscow.88 It was at this moment, too, that a desperate Red Army deployed its most impressive weapon for the first time. So secret that it had no real name until the troops gave it the feminine ‘Katyusha’, the BM-13-16 multiple rocket launcher and its descendants proved that Soviet designers could produce hardware to rival any in the world. ‘We first tried out this superb weapon at Rudnya, near Smolensk,’ remembered Marshal Yeremenko. ‘In the afternoon of 15 July the earth shook with the unusual explosion of jet mines. Like red-tailed comets, the mines were hurled into the air… The effect of the simultaneous explosion of dozens of these mines was terrific. The Germans fled in panic; and even our own troops… who for reasons of secrecy had not been warned that this new weapon would be used, rushed back from the front line.’89 Katyushas were quite inefficient for their range, consuming prodigious quantities of propellant to hurl rocket mines less than ten miles at this stage in the war, but the gratifying sight of German soldiers running from the field gave Stalin’s propagandists something they could really write abou
t.

  ‘The retreat has caused blind panic,’ the head of the Belorussian Communist Party, Ponomarenko, wrote to Stalin on 3 September. To make things worse, ‘the soldiers are tired to death, even sleeping under artillery fire… At the first bombardment, the formations collapse, many just run away to the woods, the whole area of woodland in the front-line region is full of refugees like this. Many throw away their weapons and go home. They regard the possibility of being surrounded extremely anxiously.’90 This frank report would translate for secret police into a case of collective ‘betrayal of the motherland’, but moralistic talk was wasted on the leaderless and lost. Millions of men that summer were simply encircled, trapped. Others, with little training and scant knowledge of their companions, let alone the foibles of their equipment, were thrown into battle against an enemy that was still, until the first snow fell, as confident as it had been when it marched into Paris thirteen months before. The ones who simply made for home were the most natural of all. ‘In June 1941 our unit was surrounded by some German troops near the town of Belaya Tserkov,’ an ex-soldier explained. ‘The politruk mustered the remaining troops and ordered us to leave the encirclement in groups. I and two other soldiers from our unit… changed into civilian clothes and decided to go home where we used to live. We took this decision,’ he explained, ‘because, according to rumour, the German troops moving up towards us had advanced far away to the east.’91

  The Germans themselves were unprepared for the number of prisoners they took. By the end of 1941, at a conservative estimate, they held between 2 and 3 million Red Army troops. No thought had been given to these men’s accommodation, for their lives, in Nazi thinking, had never been worth a plan. As the Wehrmacht swept eastward, many of its prisoners were herded into their own former barracks or prisons; others squatted in the open air, enclosed by nothing more protective than barbed wire. The shock that June was so severe that it took time for the tales of atrocity to circulate, the stories of Jews and communists singled out for torture and illegal execution, the tales of beatings, hunger, crude sadism and collective slow death. In the first few days of the war, Red Army soldiers simply gave up when they found themselves surrounded and outgunned.