Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  War in the East would be very largely the province of the army, with the other two services in a supporting role, and, although the high command of the army, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), had recommended earlier that friendly relations with Russia should be maintained to avoid a war on two fronts, its representatives raised no objection to Hitler’s stated aims at the Berghof. Army intelligence was of the view that, while there was no direct threat to Germany now (although there might be to Romania and Finland, which fell within the Soviet sphere of influence according to the 1939 pact but were regarded by Germany as her client states), there were signs that the Red Army was embarking on a programme of modernization which would in time enable it to engage in large-scale mobile offensive operations. Meanwhile, America was increasingly moving towards overt support for Britain, and, although Roosevelt would probably bring the USA into the war against Germany, this could not be before 1941 at the earliest. All this indicated that operations against Russia should begin as soon as possible while the Wehrmacht still had a qualitative advantage, and, although the generals took party functionaries’ ramblings about the racial inferiority of Slavs and Jewish plots with a pinch of salt, the military requirement to deal with Russia now, before it was too late, coincided completely with the political imperative for living space and the eradication of communism, and with Hitler’s wish, also expressed in Mein Kampf, to continue what the Teutonic Knights had begun in the fourteenth century. From the Berghof conference of July 1940 onwards, the focus of Wehrmacht thinking was towards a pre-emptive war in the East; all else was secondary. It was a colossal gamble in the Napoleonic style – all or nothing – and, while in the end it failed, in 1940 success seemed assured.

  General Halder now issued instructions to the planning staffs. The previous contingency plan to take but a part of western Russia as a source of supply of raw materials and food was scrapped, and a war of annihilation (as it was termed in March 1941) was to be prepared. The rundown of the army to 120 divisions was cancelled: instead it would increase to 180 divisions and the armaments industry was to step up several gears to provide the necessary weapons, vehicles and equipment. To German economists and diplomats, this represented a major about-turn. The economists had planned for a continuation of the arrangement with the USSR and a diversion of the russian war manpower from the armed forces to industry; now they had to produce the materiel that the eastern adventure, codenamed Case Barbarossa, would require. The army agreed to release 300,000 skilled workers to be employed in the armaments industry,35 but even so it would be a mammoth task to fully equip the existing divisions, many of which were armed with captured vehicles and artillery pieces, never mind the projected new ones.

  For his part, the foreign minister, Ribbentrop, who averred that foreign policy should be conducted free of ideological considerations, had since 1939 proposed the creation of an anti-British bloc which would bring Britain down, or at least neutralize her, and discourage American involvement without going to war with Russia. The German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich von der Schulenburg, thought a war with Russia would be a disaster. The Tripartite Pact, signed between Germany, Italy and Japan in September 1940, was designed to warn off the United States,* and Ribbentrop hoped to enlarge this into a Quadripartite Pact to include the USSR. He saw much merit in drawing Franco’s Spain and Vichy France closer to Germany in a Continental coalition against Britain. But both these plans crumbled, the first because Hitler and the army saw war with Russia as inevitable, and the second because not only were Spanish and Italian territorial claims on France irreconcilable, but also Franco and Pétain were far too clever to become any more aligned with Germany than perforce they already were.

  After reluctantly accepting the need for a Russian war, the German Foreign Office now had to make certain adjustments in preparation for it. A boundary dispute between Hungary and Romania, which could lead to war between the two, was subjected to swift German arbitration, with Germany and Italy guaranteeing Romania’s frontiers, and Finland, to which country Germany had refused any assistance in the Winter War with Russia of 1939/40 in accordance with the German–Soviet Pact, was now courted with the offer of assistance in rearming. Neither action was taken to kindly by Stalin, who considered them to be interference in matters properly the concern of the USSR. Meanwhile, as plans were drawn up and forces deployed, a German corps in Austria was instructed to ready itself to thrust through Hungary to occupy the Romanian oil fields should there be any indications of a Russian coup de main and German forces in Norway were required to develop a plan to seize the nickel-producing region of Finland should Russia make any moves to do so.

  While Hitler was of the view that the Red Army was a paper tiger, the army staff were more realistic. Their assessment of the Red Army, distributed to units in January 1941 as The Wartime Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, drew its information from a variety of sources, covert and overt, including the reports of Major-General Ernst August Köstring, who had been the German military attaché in Moscow since 1935, spoke fluent Russian and had a wide variety of contacts. On mobilization it was thought that the Red Army could muster between 11 million and 12 million men in twenty armies with twenty rifle (infantry), nine cavalry, and six motorized or mechanized corps, comprising 150 rifle divisions, between thirty-two and thirty-six horsed cavalry divisions and thirty-six motorized or mechanized brigades. The number of armoured fighting vehicles (tanks, armoured cars and self-propelled guns) and heavy artillery units as army and corps troops (that is, those not in divisions but available to the army or corps commander) was not known. When divisions facing Finland and in Leningrad, in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East were deducted, then 120 rifle divisions and most of the armour would face a German invasion. Much Soviet equipment was considered inferior, but was being rapidly replaced. This replacement programme could run into bottlenecks, however, owing to the shortage of skilled industrial workers. There was a shortage of transport and Russian tanks were generally seen as being of poor quality, mainly copies of foreign models, and their crews lacking in training and in the initiative necessary for a war of manoeuvre. The Russian soldier was seen as being frugal, brave, loyal and tough with the ability to hold out ‘even in defeat and under heavy pressure’. Unlike his performance in the Winter War, where the average Russian was unenthusiastic about the cause, he was expected to fight to the finish for his motherland. After the Winter War, however, the Russian state and army had taken note of the lessons from its less than distinguished performance and the command structure had been reorganized to reduce the influence of the political commissar and return it to where it should be – with the military commander. A new military code emphasized the importance of discipline and gave commanders authority to use any methods necessary (including shooting their own men) to enforce an order. The biggest weaknesses, thought the German army, were in the middle and senior officer ranks, where the effects of the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938 had not yet been made good, and in the reliance by the Red Army on numbers rather than movement.

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  In 1939 the Soviet president, Mikhail Kalinin, described Stalin as‘Father, teacher, great leader of the Soviet people, heir to the cause of Lenin, creator of the Soviet constitution, transformer of nature, great helmsman, great strategist of the revolution, genius of mankind, the greatest genius of all times and peoples.’36

  Despite the hyperbole, by 1940 Stalin had consolidated his rule. Rationing had ended, there was food in the shops, the Moscow underground railway had been completed, new factories provided jobs, new schools were being built, and culture and the arts were being supported. The hated collective farms were still there, of course, but, while life in the people’s paradise was still extremely grim by Western standards, things were better than they had been at any time since the revolution. The Great Terror had removed any threat to the regime from within and while people were still arrested for the most trifling offences – or for none at all – the Commissa
r for Internal Affairs, and head of the secret police, the NKVD, had been removed from office (and shot) in 1939 and replaced by Laventi Beria. Seen in hindsight as a monster, by contemporary standards Beria was a bleeding heart liberal and his brief was to moderate the activities of the NKVD and concentrate on solving murders, fraud and sabotage by agents inserted from without rather than in seeking out traitors and counter-revolutionaries. The course of the war in the West was well covered by the newspapers (all government-run) with a very fair balance between British and German reports. The overwhelming view amongst Russians who knew or cared about such things was that they had no wish to be involved in the war, but if it did come there was great confidence in the mighty Red Army with its superlative air arm and swarms of tanks.

  Stalin knew perfectly well that the reality was very different. He was well aware of Hitler’s oft-stated intent towards the East and his views on Bolshevism, and, at the time of Munich and after, he calculated that neither Britain nor France was in any position to offer meaningful military support to Russia. Russia should therefore buy time to build up her armed forces by placating Germany. The capitalist powers would fight each other to exhaustion, and Russia could then act as she pleased. The German–Soviet Pact of August 1939 was the obvious result of Soviet thinking and gave the USSR a buffer in the form of eastern Poland and the Baltic States. Yet the sudden and spectacular German victories in the Battle of France threw all Stalin’s calculations into disarray. Far from being fought to exhaustion, Germany was stronger than ever, with France defeated and the British forced to abandon the Continent. The Russian military build-up would now have to be accelerated and in the interim all possible means to appease the Germans would have to be implemented.

  The lessons of the Winter War with Finland, where the Red Army had not done well, and the Russo-Japanese clashes of 1939, where it had (eventually), were pored over. The Red Army was to be doubled, design of the new tanks was to be accelerated, new aircraft would replace the ageing veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and nine mechanized corps were to be formed immediately and another twenty as soon as possible thereafter. From May 1940 general ranks were reintroduced* and to partially address the shortage of senior officers, many of whom had been imprisoned as a result of the purge but against whom nothing substantive could be proved, were released and reinstated. These included the future Marshals of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky, Georgi Zhukov, Semyon Timoshenko, Semyon Budenny and Ivan Koniev, all of whom had been NCOs in the Tsarist army and sided with the Bolsheviks in the revolution. The one general who might have been able to put the Red Army on a war footing rather more swiftly had been Marshal Mikhail Tukachevsky, who, although born of a noble family and an officer in the Tsarist army, had also sided with the Bolsheviks in the revolution. He was a reformer and an advocate of armoured warfare, but as People’s Commissar for Defence in 1937 he fell victim to Stalin’s purge and was shot. His replacement was a party hack, Marshal Klim Voroshilov, who understood little of modern warfare and achieved less, although he did introduce compulsory folk-dancing lessons for officers.† By 1941 the only officer with any real comprehension of the higher management of war was Marshal Shaposnikov, an ex-colonel of the Tsar and suspect because of it.

  From the spring of 1940 the Red Army was supposed to be preparing for a defensive war against Germany. Not only did Stalin and his generals realize that the pact could not last for ever but there was plenty of intelligence indicating that Germany was preparing to attack. The Russians had highly placed agents in Tokyo, London and Berlin, and the movement of German troops eastwards could not be concealed entirely. It is, however, one thing to collect raw intelligence and quite another to assess and interpret it. History abounds with examples of the discarding of useful information in favour of something more convenient, and of officers who only believe that which fits in with their own preconceived ideas, or conforms to what they wish to be true.*

  By early 1941 the intelligence being collated and assessed by the Red Army could be interpreted in two ways: either it indicated an attack on Russia in the near future or it could simply be a German attempt to put pressure on the USSR in order to extract more concessions. It was for the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Red Army, and its director to draw conclusions from the intelligence gathered and to brief Stalin and the Politburo accordingly. The director prior to and during the Winter War, General Ivan Proskurov, had been sacked for standing up to Stalin and rebutting the dictator’s criticisms of the GRU’s performance during that war. The new director, General Filipp Golikov, was by no means a fool but equally was going to look after his own career and had no intention of saying anything that did not support what Stalin already believed, or wanted to believe. Golikov duly described the German build-up as an attempt to blackmail the USSR while the Germans dealt with the British and avoided a war on two fronts – an interpretation that matched the misinformation being put about by German intelligence.

  The frontier between German-controlled territory and that of the USSR was approximately 800 miles north to south, with the 100 or so miles of the Pripet Marshes roughly in the middle. The Russian general staff considered that the Germans, when and if they did invade, would most likely attack either north or south of the marshes. In January a series of war games indicated that, wherever the Germans came, the defenders would be beaten. Stalin sacked the Chief of the General Staff, General Kirill Meretskov, and replaced him with General Georgi Zhukov. A man of tremendous willpower and fighting spirit, who browbeat any contrary argument into submission, Zhukov followed the old Tsarist tradition of slapping any officer or soldier who displeased him. He was not, however, a man of great acumen, nor greatly suited to administration, nor prepared to oppose anything Stalin wanted.

  As late as March 1941 Stalin was convinced, Golikov concurring, that the main sources of reports predicting an imminent attack were British and American and were designed to provoke a breakdown in German–Soviet relations. Stalin knew very well that it was in the British interest that Germany and Russia should fall out, and his suspicions of the British were fuelled when Rudolf Hess, hitherto the German deputy Führer, parachuted into Scotland on the night of 10/11 May 1941 in an attempt, so he claimed, to negotiate a peace between Britain and Germany.* Even at the last minute, Stalin still refused to accept that an attack was likely, although it would have made no difference if he had believed it was. Either way, there was never going to be enough time to put right the lack of professional knowledge in the officer corps and to replace obsolete weapons and equipment. Furthermore, any defensive plans drawn up before 1939 were useless as Russia now had to cover the new territories of Poland, the Baltic States and the annexed Romanian provinces, and Stalin had therefore ordered the demolition of the old frontier defences and the preparation of new ones to the west. The Red Army would fight forward, a policy that played into German hands, and when the time came it found itself with two incomplete lines of defences, neither of which was of much help. The Red Army owned the russian war more tanks than the rest of the world put together but the tank units had few radios and so could not be used for deep penetration or wide flanking manoeuvres. The level of technical understanding was still far too low, all-arms training was deficient and logistics systems were primitive. Some modern historians37 have suggested that Stalin was very well aware of Hitler’s real intentions and was in fact preparing for a pre-emptive strike by the Red Army into Poland and then Germany (as Zhukov urged him to), and it is true that the dispositions of the Russian forces in 1941 look more like preparations for an offensive than for defence. There is very little evidence for this, however, and what there is appears suspect: Russian doctrine in any case emphasized immediate counter-attacks, and so the location of the Russian fronts cannot of themselves be taken as evidence of aggressive intentions. But even if Stalin had pre-empted the Germans and launched an attack, the Red Army would have come off worse.

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  In Hitler’s Directive Number 21, issued in December 19
40 and amended by subsequent OKW and OKH orders, Case Barbarossa,* the invasion of the USSR, was set for 15 May 1941. Then came the inconvenient necessity to rescue Mussolini from his ill-judged invasions of Greece and Egypt, which forced a delay until 22 June 1941. As the spring thaw in Russia was late that year, this delay probably made little difference, and the effects of sending two panzer divisions to Libya were minimal, but the need to garrison the Balkans reduced the number of troops available for Russia, while the Luftwaffe’s losses in aircraft and in elite airborne troops in the Crete operation could not be made good in time. The armour had suffered from the bad roads and excessive track mileage in the Balkans and a large number of Germany’s total tank strength was in workshops being repaired when Barbarossa was launched. In June 1941 the German army deployed thirty-eight infantry divisions in garrison duties in the Low Countries, France and Germany, eight divisions in Norway† and seven in the Balkans, which left 120 available for Barbarossa plus nineteen panzer and sixteen motorized infantry divisions. Additionally, there would be thirty-six divisions provided by Germany’s allies, ranging from fourteen each from Finland and Romania to one division of Spanish volunteers.

  Armoured divisions had been reorganized as a result of the Battle of France, although not all had yet implemented the new establishment. They now had either two or three battalions of tanks, between four and six battalions of lorry-borne infantry, a reconnaissance battalion on motorcycles, an artillery regiment of thirty-six 105mm towed field guns, three anti-tank companies each of twelve 37mm or 50mm guns mounted on tank chassis, an armoured reconnaissance company in armoured cars, an engineer company and an anti-aircraft company. The tank battalions were supposed to have two companies each of Mk III tanks with either a 37mm or a 50mm gun, and one company of Mk IVs with a short-barrelled 75mm gun. In practice, of the 3,648 tanks that the German army deployed for Barbarossa, only 1,000 were Mk IIIs and but 450 Mk IVs. The remainder were either Mk IIs with a 20mm gun effective against only the thinnest of armour or captured Czech Panzer 35s and 38s. The infantry divisions which made up the bulk of the German forces had nine battalions of infantry, each of around 600 men, an artillery regiment of forty-eight field (105mm) and medium (150mm) guns and three anti-tank companies each with twelve 37mm anti-tank guns. Motorized divisions had six battalions instead of nine, but all were lorry-borne with their artillery towed by lorries or half-tracks.