by Paul Kennedy
The second difficulty for scholars in this field is even greater: how is one to assess the Soviet Union’s gradual ascendancy in the air in the final eighteen months of the Great Patriotic War when most of the Luftwaffe’s fighter groups, and all of their best aces, had been pulled away to fight across western Europe? Once Barbarossa unfolded, the German air force was fighting on three fronts (eastern, western, and southern), yet until the end of 1942, 50 percent of its air forces were campaigning in the East. Then came the British and American bombing of the cities of the Third Reich, especially the RAF’s devastation of Hamburg in July and August 1943, which in particular seems to have shaken up Speer, Goering, Milch, Galland, and the others a great deal. All of them felt, in consequence, that many more resources had to be devoted to the defense of Germany’s industrial core, even if they needed to be withdrawn from elsewhere. As is detailed in chapter 2, the American and British bombing efforts over Germany were blunted, though in part by a relocation of Luftwaffe squadrons from the east.
This relocation intensified with the Allies’ massive aerial campaigns over western Europe in early 1943. The impact upon the Ostfeldzug was clearly great. By April 1944, the German air force had denuded the Eastern Front, leaving only five hundred aircraft of all types to confront more than thirteen thousand Soviet planes.57 At the same time, of course, Germany had to concentrate the vast bulk of its dual purpose antiaircraft/antitank batteries (more than ten thousand guns and half a million men) on the defense of its own cities, rather than trying to shoot the Red Air Force out of the sky and bring Zhukov’s advances on land to a grinding halt. Stalin always complained to Churchill that the West was not doing enough to bring Germany down. He never acknowledged that the air war over Russia might have been won, albeit indirectly, by the air war over the Ruhr.
So, was the achievement of the Soviet air force, the VVS, really that of a first-class service, or was it pushing against a weakened German air force increasingly manned by novice fliers? The VVS may have become ascendant only when the war was essentially won. More particularly, it is hard to find an occasion (better, repeated occasions) when a squadron of eighteen Fw 190s fought it out with a squadron of eighteen Yak-3s and the latter won decisively. The respected Russian fighter pilot Kozhemyako records in his memoirs a single occasion when his Yaks spotted four Fw 190 fighters, but the latter simply increased speed and flew away (they could not have outrun a Spitfire or a Mustang). Actually, one wonders how many Fw 190s were left on the Eastern Front by late 1944, apart from those squadrons being reluctantly converted to fighter-bomber status to replace the ailing Stukas and engage in the land war. For Operation Bagration, the Red Air Force–to–Luftwaffe ratio on fighter aircraft may have been as lopsided as fifty-eight to one, which if true makes nonsense of any real comparative assessment. When the fabled “Red Phoenix” rose, was it because there was no opposition and the remaining Luftwaffe groups were supplying garrisons and bombing pontoon bridges, not fighting for control of the skies?58
This particular aspect of air conflict in the Second World War therefore remains unclear, despite some impressive scholarly studies.59 Clearly, the Red Air Force was a nonentity early in the war. On the first day of Barbarossa operations alone, the Russians lost around twelve hundred aircraft (almost all probably hit on the ground) to the German loss of a mere thirty-five planes. Then came the gradual Russian comeback. By the closing stages of the Battle of Stalingrad (when the street fighting was so dense that Stukas could not be used in close-support operations), the soldiers of the Red Army could see a few planes above them bearing a red star. Simultaneously, the inter-Allied pressures played their part. The Luftwaffe now faced a collapsing North African/Mediterranean front, the arrival of the American bombers in England, and Harris’s tearing apart of cities such as Cologne, all of which forced the high command to pull the better pilots and swifter fighters back to the Reich. And the VVS was at last getting better planes, the Yak-9 fighter and the greatly improved Ilyushin Sturmovik, an exceptionally tough, rather slow, low-flying tank-buster of an aircraft that was designed to assist the Red Army’s advance to the west.60 By 1944 the Yak-3 was in service and playing havoc with German transport aircraft, light bombers, and those awkward Focke-Wulf 190 conversions. The Red Air Force was also acquiring its own aces (including female fliers), although even as late as Operation Bagration it continued to lose more planes than did the Luftwaffe. Overall, though the real significance of Soviet airpower during the Great Patriotic War remains shrouded in mystery, it probably played far less of a role in the turning of the tide on the Eastern Front than its early propagandists proclaimed.
The Beginning of the End: Bagration to Berlin
On June 22, 1944, as the Western Allies were slowly advancing beyond sight of the Normandy beaches, and as American troops fought yard for yard across Saipan, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a massive assault upon the German-held central front that involved several times as many ground-based forces as the combined totals of all those involved in the Marianas and D-Day attacks. On the Eastern Front, nothing was small in scale, but the size of the Red Army and Air Force’s commitment to Bagration exceeded anything that had gone before, whether Moscow, Stalingrad, or Kursk. Appropriately, the operation was named by Stalin after imperial Russia’s most aggressive general, Piotr Bagration, who died of his wounds while blocking Napoleon at the great Battle of Borodino. It may not have been a coincidence that Bagration, like Stalin, came from Georgia, nor that the operation named after him was launched exactly three years to the day after Operation Barbarossa. It was the Soviet Union’s massive return blow.61
RED ARMY ADVANCES DURING OPERATION BAGRATION, JUNE–AUGUST 1944
Although less well known than the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, this Soviet victory over the Wehrmacht was the largest during the entire war on the Eastern Front. The detail in the map on the next page illustrates the sheer size of this assault, involving as it did 1.7 million Soviet troops. It coincided with the campaign in Normandy, the capture of Rome, and the seizure of the Mariana Islands.
Click here to download a PDF of this map.
The numbers of troops, tanks, and guns involved in this enormous Soviet surge from the Ukraine to Poland are difficult to comprehend from the perspective of post-1945 limited war, and impossible to count with accuracy. Should we include all the Soviet forces facing their German counterparts from north to south, or just those involved in the punch into the center? Should we include the vast follow-on divisions initially held in reserve, or just those used in the initial Bagration assaults? Probably it makes no difference; though the varied and conflicting figures simply baffle the mind, all arrive at a massive total. According to one account, “At the commencement of the offensive, Stavka had committed approximately 1,700,000 combat and support troops, approximately 24,000 artillery pieces and mortars, 4,080 tanks and assault guns and 6,334 aircraft. German strength at the outset was approximately 800,000 combat and support troops, 9,500 artillery pieces, but only 553 tanks and assault guns and 839 aircraft.”62 At the Second Battle of El Alamein, Rommel had a mere 27,000 German troops; the comparatively large British Empire force of 230,000 men was far smaller than any one of the five Russian army fronts (that is, full army groups) pushing westward in June 1944.
But Operation Bagration was not just a matter of brute force. At long last, the Red Army had reached its full potential. It was still feeling the effects of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s when the Germans attacked, and then had to suffer greatly in all the early battles, with disproportionate losses. The service had had many failures, and from top to bottom it had been slow to learn important lessons from its humiliations or even from its bruising victories. Yet the high command had eventually learned to put all the pieces together in the most impressive battlefield recovery of the entire war. By the time of Bagration, Stalin was willing to entrust two members of the Stavka, Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Zhukov, with coordination of the key central section of those five gigantic fronts
that stretched from the Baltic to the Ukraine—provided, of course, Zhukov gave his suspicious boss daily updates.
In this vast battle, the Red Army encountered the reverse problem of the “expanding torrent”: the defender’s lines were contracting and becoming more concentrated in the troops-to-land ratio. Yet even in June 1944 the length of the German Eastern Front was still enormous, and the sheer size of the Soviet ground forces was overwhelming. Ironically, the more the Wehrmacht retreated, despite Hitler’s raging counterorders, the more the Ostfeldzug came to resemble the Western Front of 1914–18. But this time the attacking side had a force advantage of at least three or four to one; in many individual encounters, it was more like ten to one.
Every piece of the elaborate machinery that was needed in a major land operation worked for the Red Army. The maskirovka was superb. While the OKW was anticipating a further large Soviet offensive during the summer months, it had no idea where the main assault would be launched—their best guess was that it would come in the south or perhaps on the Baltic Front. The OKW greatly underestimated the size of the force that would be deployed against Minsk in the center. The T-34-85, now in vast numbers and with its many defects corrected, was virtually unstoppable. On a one-against-one basis, a single Tiger or Panther tank was still more powerful, but by this stage Soviet armor tactics were much better developed, with the faster T-34s nimbly moving around the slower Nazi tanks or leading them into an antitank ambush. The river-crossing engineer battalions were at their peak, and much helped by intelligence from partisans on the other side as to where, and where not, to attempt a landing across the Berezina and the Dnieper.
Moreover, possessing much better trucks and supply services than before, the Red Army’s capacity for tactics of deep penetration and exploitation were at last feasible. (Proposals for such operations had been hammered out as early as 1935, only to be discarded in the purges.) And, ironically, while the Russian armies moved from stupefying Stalin-driven rigidity to greater flexibility, the German land forces abandoned their historical Bewegungskrieg (fluid warfare) for a nonsensical clinging-on to every redoubt, because their Fuehrer had ordered no retreat—thus making the Soviet encirclements easier.63 By now, also, the Red Air Force’s ground attack squadrons were in control of the airspace above the battlefield. Above all, the Russian infantry—the Russian common soldier and his sergeant, really—had great experience of how to fight, house by house, street by street, hedgerow by hedgerow. Just as the Red Army had more and more tough, experienced divisions, the Germans had fewer and fewer.
While the Stavka ensured that all five army fronts would be constantly probing, to keep the enemy unsure, it then ordered the attacks, always in variegated timing (the Polotsk offensive on July 1, the Vilnius offensive on July 7, etc.), with the chief punch to be in the center, to capture Minsk and then to head westward to the Polish border. The fighting here was more ferocious than anything since Stalingrad, and the result was the same—an entire German army captured and another mauled. In the twelve days between June 22 and July 4, 1944, Army Group Centre lost twenty-five divisions and 300,000 men, in what Zaloga calls “the most calamitous defeat of all the German armed forces in World War II.” The overall German losses in Operation Bagration were a numbing 670,000 killed, wounded, or captured, though the Russian losses were even higher (178,000 killed and 587,000 wounded). Truly, the road from Moscow to Berlin ran with blood. The difference was that the USSR still had millions of men to draw upon, and for a single strategic purpose. And it was not fighting alone, because at long last the Anglo-American-Canadian armies were fully engaged in battle. By the time the Normandy campaign in the West was over, in August 1944, the Wehrmacht in France had lost another 450,000 men. Little wonder that Allied forward divisions were reporting that most of the German soldiers captured in the final year of the war were either older men or Hitler Youth, recruited in desperation to replace the depleted able-bodied battalions.
Now the ring was closing. When Bagration began, Soviet armies were about 750 miles from Berlin. At the same time, Patton’s armies in western Normandy were approximately 650 miles from Berlin. Two months later Paris was liberated, and Red Army units, which had moved a far greater distance, were looking at Warsaw from the other side of the Vistula. Meanwhile, Allied armies in Italy were bumping up against the Gothic Line, well north of Rome. All of them were tired, slowing down, and needing replenishment from the vast supplies coming up from the rear. Yet all were consoled by the fact that in June 1944 the Third Reich had suffered colossal and irreversible defeats in the field. It was, as one historian puts it in the title of his recent book, “blitzkrieg no longer.”64 It had not really been lightning warfare for a while, but now it was truly over.
Thus, when Bagration ended in August 1944, with the Red Army’s hard-fighting frontline troops exhausted and adequate supplies of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts once again some way behind, everyone knew who had won this campaign. The Finns nimbly extricated themselves from Nazi thrall and signed a peace deal with Moscow in September, while in the south Romania and Bulgaria also parted company with the Thousand-Year Reich. Now it was on to Berlin, a story of astounding German resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.65 It was of course a hopeless resistance, like that in the West, but one still fueled by ideological passions that gripped Wehrmacht units as well as the soldiers of the Waffen-SS, and by a pathological fear that surrender would mean a death not unlike those the Germans had inflicted upon their own defeated foes on the Eastern Front in the preceding years. It was also gripped by revolting, and rising, atrocities against any domestic foes of the doomed Reich.66
The overwhelming significance of this titanic campaign stands out. If one couldn’t defeat the German army in the field in Russia, as well as weakening it in North Africa, Italy, and France, then the war would not be won. Victory at sea and victory in the air, as critical and absolutely necessary as they were, simply were not enough. One of them gave protection to the Allied lines across the seas. The second gave aerial protection for the vital counterattack points of Britain and North Africa and allowed the buildup of the thousands of Allied bombers that would cripple the Third Reich’s industries and infrastructure. If Hitler refused to surrender, though, somebody’s army had to crush Germany’s formidable ground forces, march into the Fuehrer’s bunker, and end the war. In the main, it was the Red Army that did it. As a consequence, 85 percent of all Wehrmacht losses occurred on the Eastern Front.
Clearly, the Germans had never anticipated that Russian soldiers would be so tough, and that Russian designers and engineers would supply those soldiers with increasingly effective weaponry. And, with a few exceptions mentioned below, they also ignored the geographic folly of what they were attempting. One of those exceptions was Halder. Before he was dismissed as army chief of staff, he had repeatedly voiced concern about this overstretch. His famous diary entry (see this page), on having reckoned with around 200 Soviet Army divisions at the onset of war and now counting at least 360, is followed by this lament: “Time … favors them, as they are near their own resources, while we are moving further and further away from ours. And so our troops, sprawled over an immense frontline, without any depth, are subjected to the incessant attacks of the enemy. Sometimes these are successful, because too many gaps must be left open in these enormous spaces.” A month later, Halder was retired, von Rundstedt had been dismissed for suggesting a winter pullback, and the fatal advances toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus were going ahead. By 1943 and 1944, many more generals had come to realize that they had occupied too much space, but if they spoke out or retreated from their fronts, they too would be dismissed.
Halder’s replacement as army chief of staff from 1942 until 1944 was Kurt Zeitzler. Long after the war was over, Zeitzler sat down and made some geographic calculations in an intriguing essay called “Men and Space in War.” When Barbarossa began, the Ostfront was approximately 438 miles long. By Christmas 1941 the Wehrmacht had advanced 625 miles and, with its a
llies, held a front of about 1,125 miles, with significantly smaller manpower totals. By the summer of 1942 they spanned 1,250 miles, by which time Zeitzler was pleading for Hitler to give up space—but in vain. By the end of 1942 the Eastern Front was roughly 1,800 miles long, while at the same time German troops had to garrison an Atlantic Wall that encompassed 1,250 miles, and Danish-Norwegian coasts stretching to about 1,500 miles. That still left the North African boundaries, the Balkan coasts, Crete, Rhodes, and other islands. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the hyperenergetic Zeitzler had a nervous breakdown in July 1944, and could only write about this fatal overstretch long afterward.) In theory, all the fronts of the Nazi empire were defensible, provided the Wehrmacht had the sort of technological and tactical superiority over its foes that for generations the Roman army possessed against the barbarians outside its gates. But that was never true for Germany in the air and at sea during the Second World War, and by 1943–44 operational and logistical superiority on land was also distinctly moving to the Allied side.67
The Eastern Front and the North Atlantic
Strange though the comparison might initially seem, the Ostfeldzug resembled another epic, long-lasting campaign of the Second World War: the Battle of the Atlantic. They took place in roughly the same latitudes, one in the western reaches of Germany’s military endeavor, the other on its eastern extremities. Hitler’s twin enemies here, Britain and the Soviet Union—and their respective warlords, Churchill and Stalin—regarded their struggle as existential. By continuing to fight on despite early disasters, each of them drained German resources (armaments, steel, ball bearings, trained personnel, detection equipment, air cover) to the west or the east. Then the RAF bombing of German cities and factories exacerbated the Third Reich’s resources dilemma, even before the Americans joined in. Russia’s land effort was always connected, distantly but definitely, to Britain’s naval and aerial actions, because each forced Berlin into allocation decisions.