A critical strand in the Soviet Union’s response to Barbarossa was a commitment to the doctrine of total mobilisation, first articulated by Mikhail Frunze, the brilliant war minister under Lenin. Michael Howard has observed that, while the Russians suffered a stunning tactical surprise in June 1941, strategically and psychologically they had been preparing themselves since 1917 to fight a big war against Western capitalism. It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the eastward evacuation of key factories and workers, the fortitude of those who carried it out, and the importance of its success. Russia’s industrial migration eventually embraced 1,523 undertakings, including 1,360 major plants. Fifteen per cent were transferred to the Volga, 44 per cent to the Urals, 21 per cent to Siberia and 20 per cent to Soviet Central Asia, in 1.5 million railway wagon-loads. Some 16.5 million workers embarked on new lives in conditions of appalling privation, labouring eleven hours a day, six days a week, initially often under open skies. It is hard to imagine that British or American workers could have established and operated production lines under such handicaps.
Stalin could justly claim that his enforced industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, at the cost of imposing misery and death on millions of dispossessed peasants, alone made it possible for the country now to build the tanks and planes to resist Hitler. His prioritisation of heavy industries capable of undertaking weapons manufacture reflected his acceptance of Frunze’s total war concept. An American diplomat evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga was one day astonished to find himself in the midst of a vast, unidentified industrial area a few miles from the city, which the Russians had ironically christened Bezymyanny – ‘Nameless’. On a nearby airfield stood hundreds of newly completed aircraft, produced in its plants. The 1941 industrial evacuation proved one of the crucial achievements of Russia’s war. Every Soviet citizen over fourteen was declared eligible for mobilisation for industrial labour. With civilian rations cut to starvation levels, only the produce of private vegetable gardens enabled millions to survive. The nation was officially informed that squirrel meat contained more calories than pork, and those who could catch such prey ate it.
Though astonishing industrial output was achieved amid chronic hunger, it would be mistaken to idealise this: production of a Soviet aero engine required five times as many man hours as its US counterpart. Yet the evacuation represented part of what a British intelligence officer once called ‘the Russian genius for piecemeal improvisation’. Another feature of total war was the wholesale deportation of minorities whose loyalty was deemed suspect. Stalin accepted the drain on vital transport resources needed to remove – for instance – 74,225 ‘Volga Germans’ from their own little republic to remote Kazakhstan. Later, they would be followed by many more such outcasts, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars.
In western Russia, the invaders’ juggernaut still rolled forward, sustaining complacency in Berlin. Hitler busied himself with detailed planning for his new empire. He decreed the permanence of occupation, guided by three principles: ‘first to rule, second to administer, third to exploit’; all dissent was to be rewarded by death. As early as 31 July, Goering ordered preparations for a ‘total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews were slaughtered where they were found by the Einsatzgruppen killing squads which followed the Wehrmacht’s spearheads. Nazi officials began drafting plans for a transfer east of thirty million Germanic colonists. Hundreds of thousands of young women were shipped to the Reich from Ukraine and the Baltic states to become domestic servants and farm labourers. Some went not unwillingly: amid the ruin of their shattered homes and communities, they faced destitution. On 19 August, in his diary Goebbels expressed surprise that Hitler thought the war might end soon and suddenly: ‘The Führer believes a moment may come when Stalin will sue for peace … I asked him what he would do if that happened. The Führer replied that he would agree to peace. What then happened to Bolshevism would not matter to us. Bolshevism without the Red Army does not represent a threat.’
Since the 1917 Revolution, the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary injustice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the absolute human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of twenty-seven million of Stalin’s people, of whom sixteen million were civilians. A soldier named Vasily Slesarev received a letter, carried to the Soviet lines by partisans, from his twelve-year-old daughter Manya in their home village near Smolensk: ‘Papa, our Valik died and is in the graveyard … Papa, the German monsters set fire to us.’ The family home was burnt, and Slesarev’s son Valerii died of pneumonia while hiding from the invaders. Manya continued: ‘Many people have been killed in the villages round here. And all they think about is the bloodthirsty monsters, you can’t even call them humans, they’re just robbers and drinkers of blood. Papa, kill the enemy!’ If such missives were cynically exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine, they reflected real circumstances and passionate sentiments in thousands of communities across vast expanses of Russia.
Sergeant Victor Kononov wrote to his family on 30 November, describing his experiences after being taken prisoner by the Germans: ‘The fascists drove us on foot to the rear for six days during which they gave us neither water nor bread … After these six days we escaped. We saw so much … The Germans were robbing our collective farmers, taking their bread, potatoes, geese, pigs, cattle and even their rags. We saw farmers hanging on gallows, corpses of partisans who had been tortured and shot … The Germans fear every bush, every little noise. In every collective farmer, old or young, they see a partisan.’
The partisan movement, sustaining armed resistance behind the German lines, began in June 1941 and became one of the most notable features of Russia’s war. By the end of September the NKVD claimed that 30,000 guerrilla fighters were operating in Ukraine alone. It was impossible for the invaders to secure the huge wildernesses behind the front. But bands of desperate men, conducting a campaign dependent on starving civilians for food, were by no means acclaimed by them as heroes. One of their commissars, Nikolai Moskvin, wrote: ‘It’s not surprising that local people run off and complain to the Germans. A lot of the time we’re just robbing them like bandits.’ Later in the campaign he added an emotional postscript: ‘I am writing for posterity that partisans undergo inhuman sufferings.’ So did civilians. The struggle for survival, in a universe in which the occupiers controlled most of the food, caused many women to sell their bodies to Germans, and many men to enlist as auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht – ‘Hiwis’, as they became known: 215,000 Soviet citizens died wearing German uniforms. But partisan operations achieved a strategic importance in Russia, harassing the German rear and disrupting lines of communication, unmatched anywhere else in the Nazi empire save Yugoslavia.
Moreover, for all the Wehrmacht’s dramatic successes and advances, the Red Army remained unbroken. If many of Stalin’s soldiers readily surrendered, others fought on, even in hopeless circumstances. They astonished the Germans by their week-long defence of the frontier fortress of Brest in June; a divisional report asserted that its attackers were obliged to overcome ‘a courageous garrison that cost us a lot of blood … The Russians fought with exceptional stubbornness … They displayed superb infantry training and a splendid will to resist.’ The Soviets had some good heavy tanks. As Hitler’s commanders smashed one Soviet army, they were bemused to find another taking its place. On 8 July German intelligence reported that, out of 164 Soviet formations identified at the front, eighty-nine had been destroyed. Yet by 11 August the mood of Halder in Berlin was much sobered: ‘It is increasingly clear that we underestimated the Russian colossus … We believed that the enemy had about 200 divisions. Now we are counting 360. These forces are not always well-armed and equipped and they are often poorly led. But they are there.’
Helmuth von Moltke, an anti-Nazi working in the German Abwehr, w
rote to his wife, expressing regret that he had been foolish enough ‘in my heart of hearts’ to approve the invasion. Like many of his fellow aristocrats in France and Britain, his loathing for communism had exceeded his antipathy to Hitler: ‘I believed that Russia would collapse from within and that we could then create an order in that region which would present no danger to us. But nothing of this is to be noticed: far behind the front Russian soldiers are fighting on, and so are peasants and workers; it is exactly as in China. We have touched something terrible and it will cost many victims.’ He added a week later: ‘One thing seems certain to me in any case: between now and 1st April next year more people will perish miserably between the Urals and Portugal than ever before in the history of the world. And this seed will sprout. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind, but after such a wind as this what will the whirlwind be like?’
Initial bewilderment among the Russian people following the invasion was rapidly supplanted by hatred for the invaders. A Soviet fighter landed back at its field with human flesh adhering to its radiator grille, after a German ammunition truck exploded beneath it. The squadron commander curiously picked off fragments, and summoned the unit doctor to examine them. He pronounced: ‘Aryan meat!’ A war correspondent wrote in his diary: ‘Everyone laughs. Yes, a pitiless time – a time of iron – has come!’
Hitler repeatedly switched objectives: at his personal insistence, in July Army Group Centre, driving for Moscow, halted in the face of strong Russian resistance. This enabled German forces further north to push forward to Leningrad, while those in the south thrust onwards across Ukraine. At Kiev, they achieved another spectacular encirclement, and the spirits of the victorious panzer crews rose again. ‘I felt an incredible sense of triumph,’ wrote Hans-Erdmann Schönbeck. Once more, vast columns of dejected prisoners, 665,000 of them, tramped westwards towards cages in which they starved. In a hostel at Oryl, three hundred miles south of Moscow, on 2 October Vasily Grossman and some correspondent colleagues came upon a school map of Europe: ‘We go to look at it. We are terrified at how far we have retreated.’ Two days later, he described a scene on the battlefield:
I thought I’d seen retreat, but I’ve never seen anything like what I’m seeing now … Exodus! Biblical exodus! Vehicles are moving in eight columns, there’s the violent roaring of dozens of trucks trying simultaneously to tear their wheels out of the mud. Huge herds of sheep and cows are driven through the fields. They are followed by trains of horse-drawn carts, there are thousands of wagons covered with coloured sackcloth, veneer, tin … there are also crowds of pedestrians with sacks, bundles, suitcases. This isn’t a flood, this isn’t a river, it’s the slow movement of a flowing ocean … hundreds of metres wide.
The German Winter Offensives 1941
The rout described by Grossman was a consequence of the success of the German southern thrust. Meanwhile in the north, Leningrad was encircled and besieged. Russian morale was at its lowest ebb, organisation and leadership pitifully weak. Operations were chronically handicapped by the paucity of radios and telephone links. The Red Army had lost nearly three million men – 44,000 a day – many of them in the great encirclements at Kiev and Vyaz’ma. Stalin started the war with almost five million soldiers under arms; now, this number was temporarily reduced to 2.3 million. By October ninety million people, 45 per cent of Russia’s pre-war population, inhabited territory controlled by the Germans; two-thirds of the country’s pre-war manufacturing plant had been overrun.
Foreign observers in Moscow, especially British, assumed the inevitability of Russian defeat, and merely sought to predict the duration of residual resistance. But on the battlefield, Stalin’s soldiers fought doggedly on. They were half-starved, short of ammunition, sometimes deployed without arms and dependent on seizing those of the dead. Even Molotov cocktails, most primitive of anti-tank weapons, were in short supply until factory women began filling 120,000 a day. The Russians lost twenty casualties for every German, six tanks for every panzer; in October their losses were even worse than those of the summer, with sixty-four divisions written off. But other formations survived, and clung to their positions. On the southern front a Captain Kozlov, Jewish commander of a Soviet motorised rifle battalion, said to Vasily Grossman: ‘I have told myself that I will be killed whatever happens, today or tomorrow. And once I realised this, it became so easy for me to live, so simple, and even somehow so clear and pure. I go into battle without any fear, because I have no expectations.’ Kozlov may even have been telling the truth.
Russia was saved from absolute defeat chiefly by the size of the country and of its armies. The Germans seized great tracts of territory, but larger ones remained; the 900-mile initial front broadened to 1,400 miles when the invaders reached the Leningrad–Odessa line. They destroyed hundreds of Soviet divisions, yet there were always more. Moscow was shocked by the readiness of its units to surrender, and of subject populations – notably in Ukraine and the Baltic republics – to embrace the Germans. But the dogged animal stubbornness of some Red soldiers, which had initially bewildered the Germans, now began to alarm them; every Russian who died cost the Wehrmacht effort, ammunition and precious time to kill. Hitler’s young crusaders found it intoxicating to ride their bucketing tanks across hundreds of miles of enemy territory, but the strain on machinery was relentless; as men grew tired, so too did their vehicles: tracks wore out, cables frayed, springs broke. The strength of many formations was badly reduced: by autumn, 20 per cent of the original invasion force was gone, and two-thirds of its armour and vehicles; only thirty-eight tanks remained in one panzer formation, and barely sixty in another. A division commander wrote of the importance of reducing losses ‘if we do not intend to win ourselves to death’.
By September, Moscow was tantalisingly close. But if Russian counterattacks were clumsy, as at Smolensk between 30 August and 8 September, they remained amazingly persistent. Between June 1941 and May 1944, each month Germany suffered an average of 60,000 men killed in the east; though the enemy’s losses were far greater, this was a shocking statistic. One of its symbolic components was Lt. Walter Rubarth, killed on 26 October fighting for the Minsk–Moscow road; this was the man who, as a sergeant seventeen months earlier, led the triumphant German crossing of the Meuse. A worm of apprehension gnawed at his comrades: ‘Perhaps it is only “talk” that the enemy is broken and will never rise again,’ wrote Hans-Jürgen Hartmann. ‘I cannot help myself – I am totally bewildered. Will the whole war still be over before winter?’
Yet Hitler’s confidence was unimpaired. With Leningrad encircled and his armies triumphant in Ukraine, he had secured his flanks and was ready to resume the assault on Moscow. In an address on 2 October, he described the Wehrmacht’s drive on the capital as ‘the last large-scale decisive battle of this year’, which would ‘shatter the USSR’. Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr wrote: ‘If we don’t succeed this month we’ll never succeed.’ But it was perilously late in the season. The price of Germany’s advances elsewhere was that the Russians were granted time to strengthen their line before Moscow. Zhukov, Stalin’s ablest commander, had been sacked as Chief of the General Staff on 29 July for insisting upon the evacuation of Kiev; he then became commander of the Reserve Front, in which role he quickly made himself indispensable, and secured credit for organising the defence of Leningrad. Now, he was recalled to direct the salvation of the capital.
Six German armies – 1.9 million men, 14,000 guns, a thousand tanks and 1,390 aircraft – participated in Hitler’s Operation Typhoon, the ‘decisive’ assault on Moscow. Once more they swept forward, and once more the Russians suffered vast losses: eight Soviet armies reeled in the path of the offensive, many units broke, many more were cut off. Major Ivan Shabalin, a political officer struggling to lead a mass of stragglers out of an encircled pocket, wrote in his diary on 13 October, a few days before his death: ‘It is wet and cold and we are moving terribly slowly – all our vehicles are bogged down on the muddy roads … More than fifty had to
be abandoned in ground that resembled a quagmire; about the same number are stuck fast in a nearby field. At 0600 the Germans opened fire on us – a continuous bombardment of artillery, mortars and heavy machine-guns – and it went on all day … I cannot remember when I last slept properly.’ On 15 October German tank gunner Karl Fuchs exulted: ‘From now on, Russian resistance will be minor – all we have to do is keep rolling forward … Our duty has been to fight and free the world from this communist disease. One day, many years hence, the world will thank the Germans and our beloved Führer for our victories here in Russia.’
Yet the mud Ivan Shabalin complained of was already proving more dangerous to the Germans, as they struggled to advance, than to the defenders holding their ground. Autumn rains were part of Russia’s natural cycle, but those that began on 8 October 1941 astonished the commanders of the all-conquering Wehrmacht, which was strange, since several of them had fought there between 1914 and 1917. In a vast country with few and poor roads – only 40,000 miles of tarmac, less than 50,000 of rail track – they failed to anticipate the impact of weather upon mobility. Suddenly, the racing panzer spearheads found themselves checked, tank tracks thrashing ineffectually in a morass. The German supply system floundered under the strain of shifting food and ammunition across hundreds of miles in weather that deteriorated daily.
Soviet reinforcements were arriving from the east, for Stalin’s Tokyo agent Richard Sorge had convinced him that the Japanese would not attack in Siberia. The rains became heavier, and soon it grew cold. ‘We have had continuous sleet and snow,’ lamented German chaplain Ernst Tewes. ‘Our men are suffering – the vehicles are not properly covered and winter clothing has not yet arrived. We are struggling to move along terrible roads.’ Soldier Heinrich Haape bemoaned the difficulties of keeping supply wagons moving: ‘The men hauled and pushed, the horses sweated and strained – at times we had to take a brief ten-minute rest from sheer exhaustion. Then, back to the transport, our legs in black mud up to the knees – anything to keep the wheels moving.’
All Hell Let Loose Page 22