6
The Cauldron Boils:
Stalingrad, 1942–43
At the bottom of the trenches there lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes, and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among the brick debris… How anyone could have survived was hard to imagine. But now everything was silent in this fossilized hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.
Alexander Werth, in Stalingrad, February 1943
When the spring thaw in 1942 turned the battleground into mud the two sides paused to draw breath after eight months of almost continuous, draining conflict. Though Moscow and Leningrad had both been saved from the annihilating fate intended for them by Hitler, the Soviet Union found itself in a position of acute weakness. In the terrible battles of attrition more than 3 million soldiers had been captured and 3.1 million killed.1 The tank and air forces which had been available in June 1941 were severely depleted, and replacements were slow to arrive. Soviet economic strength was a fraction of what it had been the previous year. German forces now occupied the Soviet bread-basket, the rich grainlands of the Ukraine; in 1942 bread and meat supplies were halved for the 130 million people living in the unconquered territories. One-third of the rail network was behind enemy lines. Soviet heavy industrial production – coal, steel and iron ore – was cut by three-quarters with the loss of the Donbas industrial region. The materials vital to the production of modern weapons – uminium, copper, manganese – fell by two-thirds or more. Millions of skilled workers were killed or captured. Against an enemy with
Table 1 Soviet and German wartime production 1941–45
* * *
A: MILITARY OUTPUT
1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
Aircraft USSR 15,735 25,436 34,900 40,300 20,900
Germany 11,776 15,409 28,807 39,807 7,540
Tanks* USSR 6,590 24,446 24,089 28,963 15,400
Germany 5, 200 9,300 19,800 27,300 ——
Artillery USSR** 42,300 127,000 130,000 122,400 62,000
(over 76mm) 49,100 48,400 56,100 28,600
Germany** 7,000 12,000 27,000 41,000 ——
* * *
B: HEAVY INDUSTRY
1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
Coal USSR 151.4 75.5 93.1 121.5 149.3
(m. tonnes) Germany 315.5 317.9 340.4 347.6 ——
Steel USSR 17.9 8.1 8.5 10.9 12.3
(m. tonnes) Germany 28.2 28.7 30.6 25.8 ——
Aluminium USSR —— 51.7 62.3 82.7 86.3
(th. tonnes) Germany 233.6 264.0 250.0 245.3 ——
Oil USSR 33.0 22.0 18.0 18.2 19.4
(m. tonnes) Germany* 5.7 6.6 7.6 5.5 1.3
* * *
four times more industrial capacity at its disposal Soviet prospects were bleak indeed.2
The most remarkable part of the story of Russia's war lies here, in the revival of Soviet fortunes from a point of near collapse. Few would have gambled on a Soviet victory, faced with the cold statistics of Soviet decline. The Soviet war effort began to resemble the ramshackle structure of the Tsarist war twenty-five years before, which ushered in the Revolution. There was worse to come. In April 1942, confident that German forces on the southern end of the front were weaker than the armies facing Moscow and Leningrad, Stalin ordered an offensive to retake the city of Kharkov, a vital rail junction for the German front. Warned by their intelligence service, German forces drew the Soviet armies into a well-prepared trap. The attack was launched on May 12, with Soviet units poorly prepared and, because of a late thaw, some not even in place. Ten days later German forces encircled them, capturing the equivalent of three Soviet armies. The disaster at Kharkov was a humiliating failure for Stalin's personal leadership. Further south a Soviet attempt to drive German forces out of the Crimea met with a similarly tragic conclusion. The offensive was repulsed at great cost, with three more Soviet armies, the 44th, 47th and 51st, driven into the sea from the Kerch Peninsula, where German forces took savage reprisals against the helpless civilian population. During June the heavily fortified city of Sevastopol, perched on the edge of the Black Sea, was slowly reduced to rubble by systematic German air and artillery bombardment, until it surrendered on July 4. Its conqueror, General Erich von Manstein, was presented with a Field Marshal's baton for his efforts.
The scene was set for a repeat of the disasters of 1941. Hitler was determined to complete during the summer of 1942 the job that had eluded him the year before. His own commanders wanted to complete the seizure of Moscow at the centre of the front, for they believed that the psychological impact of the loss of the Soviet capital, allied to the destruction of the main weight of the Red Army, would bring a quick end to the war. Hitler disagreed. He was dreaming of greater things. Victories in North Africa, which brought Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to within striking distance of the Suez Canal and the vast oil reserves of the Middle East, and Japanese victories in the Far East against American and British Empire forces made him much more ambitious. His aim was to drive Soviet forces from the southern steppes and the Caucasus region, so that Axis forces could link up in the Middle East and also make a final annihilating sweep northward behind the Soviet lines to Moscow and the Urals. Throughout the vast southern region was fresh mineral wealth, above all oil, the key to Germany's final apocalyptic conflict with the resource-rich West. On 5 April 1942 Hitler issued Directive Number 41; its aim was ‘to wipe out the entire defence potential remaining to the Soviets’.3
The plan, code-named Operation Blue, was to sweep east to Stalingrad and south to the high mountain passes of the Caucasus, then on to Astrakhan and Grozny on the Caspian Sea. The Soviet Union would then be cut off from her own supplies of oil, and her war effort would wither on the vine. The preparation was veiled in absolute secrecy, but the British passed on details of the forthcoming offensive culled from intercepted German signals. Stalin was no more receptive to these warnings than he had been to the warnings about Barbarossa. When on June 19 a light plane crashed behind Soviet lines carrying the precise order of battle for the German operation, Stalin thought it could only be a deliberate and clumsy attempt at disinformation.4 Habitually suspicious, Stalin preferred to rely on his own intuition, even though it had served him so poorly over the past year. He insisted that the main weight of German attack would be brought to bear on Moscow. This was not an irrational expectation; it was what German generals wanted to do, and many of Stalin's own military leaders concurred with their chief. The irony was that only a year before Stalin had insisted on strengthening the south in the mistaken belief that Hitler wanted oil and grain more than he wanted Moscow; now the south was weaker, and the centre strong.
When the blow finally fell on 28 June 1942 Soviet forces were as ill-prepared to meet it as they had been the previous June. German forces punched forward behind a shield of aircraft and tanks, supported on their flanks by more weakly armed, and less fanatical, allies – Hungarians, Italians and Romanians. By July 9, the northernmost German armies on the southern front reached the River Don opposite Voronezh. They then swung south to join up with armies moving from the Crimean area. Soviet resistance crumbled. Small groups of stragglers, cut off from their commanders, moved eastward, followed by a train of desperate refugees. Many were simply swallowed up by the vast steppeland, easy prey to the Axis troops who followed in the wake of the fast-moving tank columns. Others struggled to construct makeshift defensive lines, until these, too, melted away. On July 23 Rostov-on-Don, at the mouth of the great river, was abandoned by the panicking soldiers. A few NKVD troops fought to the death before the city fell into German hands. There was no repeat of the frantic defence of Soviet cities witnessed the year before. The demoralization was infectious. By the end of July Hitler was so confident of another victory that he divided his forces in half: von Kleist took the 1st Panzer Army with Army Group A to conquer the Caucasian oil fields; von Weichs's Army Group B moved eastward across the Don with orders to take the city of Stalingrad on the Volga, mo
re than 1,500 miles from Berlin.
The new wave of failures could not be hidden from the Soviet people. In Moscow observers felt a fresh shudder of panic through the population. The news that Rostov had fallen with barely a fight after the terrible sacrifices in Moscow and Leningrad produced feelings of anger and dismay. In the headlong retreat army discipline began to break down. Units abandoned their guns and equipment. Soldiers wounded themselves rather than face the German giant. The authority of the officers and military commissars threatened to disappear. On July 28 Stalin moved to stop the collapse. He issued Order 227, Ne Shagu Nazad! – ‘Not a Step Back!’ The publication of the order came at a time of acute crisis. Stalin told the armed forces that retreat must end: ‘Each position, each metre of Soviet territory must be stubbornly defended, to the last drop of blood. We must cling to every inch of Soviet soil and defend it to the end!’5
After the war it was forbidden to publish any details about Order Number 227, though it had been distributed to all fighting units. Not until 1988 was its existence first revealed to the Soviet public. The order did not fit with the post-war image of Soviet heroism and self-sacrifice, for it not only called for a fight to the death, but promised
Caption
Map 5 Operation Blue: The German Southern Offensive, June–November 1942
the severest punishments for those who flinched. Anyone caught within the net of the order, the ‘panickers’ and ‘cowards’, were liable to summary execution or service in shtrafbaty, penal battalions. There were penal units for senior officers who shirked their duty and separate units for junior officers and privates, modelled, according to the order, on German practice during the winter fighting in 1941. Stalin also authorized so-called ‘blocking units' (otryadi zagrazhdeniye) from the regular Red Army troops, whose task was to prevent panic and desertion and keep soldiers fighting. They were supposed to co-operate with the thousands of NKVD troops who had been performing the same task without a specific order. In practice these new units found themselves carrying out menial tasks or guard duty in the rear when they were needed desperately at the front. On October 29 they were cancelled by a fresh order. The NKVD troops continued to track down anyone accused of slacking or cowardice. Guilt did not need to be clear. The practices of the pre-war terror were reimposed to keep Soviet soldiers fighting.6 The slightest infringement could be interpreted as sabotage; desertion was punishable by a death sentence, meted out by hundreds of summary courts-martial. Over the course of the war 442,000 were forced to serve in penal battalions; a further 436,000 were sentenced to periods of imprisonment. How many died at the hands of their own side, either shot, or lost in the suicidal missions assigned to penal battalions, may never be known with any certainty. Latest Russian estimates put the figure as high as 158,000 sentenced to be shot during the war.7 The penal battalions were given the most dangerous work. They were sent ahead through minefields or on air attacks into the teeth of German defences. They could be reinstated only if they were wounded. ‘Atoned with his own blood' was added to their reports.
It is easy to argue that from the summer of 1942 the Soviet army fought because it was forced to fight. Yet the impact of Order Number 227 can be exaggerated. It was aimed primarily at officers and political commissars, rather than the rank and file, which had always been subject to very harsh discipline. The order also applied only to unauthorized retreats, not to retreats in general. No doubt legal niceties did not play a great part with the NKVD interrogators, but it was not an order that was applied entirely without discrimination. There was at the time a sense that desperate circumstances called for desperate measures. One soldier later recalled his reaction to ‘Not a Step Back!’: ‘Not the letter, but the spirit and content of the order made possible the moral, psychological and spiritual breakthrough in the hearts and minds of those to whom it was read…’8 Nor should it be forgotten that there was indiscipline and demoralization in the Red Army, which grew in volume as Soviet military incompetence exposed soldiers to unbearable pressures. Stalin was not tilting this time at counter-revolutionary phantoms, but at real soldiers plunged into a nightmare of defeat and uncertainty.
The revelations of terror in the armed forces focus on an evident historical truth, but they also distort our view of the Soviet war effort. Not every soldier stood with a gun to his back; not every instance of self-sacrifice and courageous defiance was a product of coercion or fear. To believe this diminishes the exceptional heroism of thousands of ordinary Soviet men and women, whose voluntary commitment to the Soviet cause can scarcely be in doubt. In the summer and autumn of 1942 Soviet people were animated by more than fear of the NKVD. Stalin called on his people to mobilize the resources of an entire society, to turn the Soviet Union into a single ‘war camp’. Soviet propaganda prepared to turn the war into a crusade to save not just the Soviet system, but Mother Russia herself. The war became not simply a defence of Communism, about which many Russians felt uneasy, but a patriotic struggle against a feared and hated enemy.
The mobilization of popular Russian patriotism was forced by circumstances. By 1942 it was evident that the Communist Party alone could not raise the energies of the people for a struggle of this depth and intensity. The war with Germany was not like the war against the kulaks, or the war for greater production in the 1930s, although the almost continuous state of popular mobilization which these campaigns produced in some ways prepared the population to respond to emergency and improvisation. During 1942 the war was presented as a war to save historic Russia, a nationalist war of revenge against a monstrous, almost mythical enemy. The words ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘Communism’ appeared less and less frequently in official publications. The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Motherland’ took their place. The ‘Internationale’, the anthem of the international socialist movement played on state occasions, was replaced with a new national anthem.9 The habits of military egalitarianism ingrained in the Red Army were swept aside. New medals were struck commemorating the military heroes of Russia's past; the Tsarist Nevsky Order was revived but could be won only by officers. Aleksandr Nevsky, the Muscovite prince who drove back the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, was a singularly apt parallel.10 In 1938 Stalin had ordered Sergei Eisenstein to produce a film on Nevsky. He interfered with the script to make the message clear about the German threat (and the virtues of authoritarianism). In 1939 the film was withdrawn following the Nazi-Soviet pact, but in 1942 it again became essential viewing.11
The mobilization of tradition did not stop with past heroes. During 1942 the Russian Orthodox Church, persecuted ceaselessly by an atheistic regime, was suddenly rehabilitated. For years Russian Christians were forced to live a subterranean existence like the Christians of the ancient world. Churches and monasteries were closed down and their communities disbanded. Before the Revolution there were 50,000 priests and 163 bishops in the Russian Church. By 1941 there were around one hundred priests and only seven bishops.12 Their lives were closely monitored by the regime. Thousands of practising Christians received communion in secret masses, but the risks they ran were enormous. With the outbreak of war the attitude of the regime began to change. Metropolitan Sergei, head of the Church, appealed to the faithful on the very day of the German invasion to do everything to bring about victory. He published no fewer than twenty-three epistles in the next two years, calling on his flock to fight for the godless state they lived in. Stalin, the ex-seminarian, may never have entirely lost his faith. He told the British ambassador that, in his own way, ‘he too believed in God’. The word began to appear in Pravda with a capital letter.13
Stalin's motives were not primarily spiritual. Religion was allowed to flourish again because it was what ordinary Russians wanted. Even Hitler, who was utterly irreligious, mobilized the Orthodox Church in the conquered areas, where he hoped it would dull the senses of the local population and make German rule more tolerable. When the puppet bishops became too independent-minded they were dispensed with. Metropolitan Sergei Voskrensk
y of Riga was first recruited by the Germans to preach for a German victory, but ended up being murdered in 1944 by his patrons on the road between Riga and Vilnius.14 Stalin, like Hitler, appreciated what religion could do. He permitted the reopening of churches and of a number of seminaries. Money was made available to revive church ritual. In 1943 he finally agreed to the appointment of a Patriarch of the Church, the supreme authority, an office left empty since 1926. The Church authorities responded by raising money from the faithful to fund a Soviet armoured column. Priests and bishops exhorted their congregations to observe the faith, God's and Stalin's. The churches soon had larger congregations than they could cope with. Observers in Moscow found crowds standing outside the cathedrals waiting to get in. The end result was a curious blend of traditional Christianity and socialist religiosity. One cold day at a Moscow railway station an elderly Siberian off to the front was observed listening intently to a voice over the loudspeaker, a voice ‘low and muffled, yet curiously penetrating’. On hearing the voice he made the sign of the cross, and cried out, ‘Stalin!’15
Russia's War Page 20