Introduction
Along the boulevards and in the parks of the Soviet Union’s major cities in the summer of 1941 talk among Soviet citizens was of war. Much of Europe was either allied to Adolf Hitler, subjugated by him or in open conflict. With the Nazis now so firmly ensconced in western Poland, the question on everyone’s lips was what were Hitler’s intentions towards Mother Russia? The Soviet Union’s cultural elite, its artists, writers and filmmakers, had been harnessed to support Stalin’s propaganda: Berlin was Moscow’s friend. Nevertheless, while the Soviet press was heavily censored, there was no hiding what the Nazis had been up to in western Europe, Scandinavia and the Balkans. Hitler’s incredibly successful panzer-led Blitzkrieg could not be easily ignored.
From the old men playing chess on park benches to the babushkas in the bustling markets, talk was never very far from war. Sons had been fighting in the Far East and in Finland or were on liberation duties in the Baltic States. For the average Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian, it was hard to believe that Nazi Germany would be so foolish as to invade the well-armed Soviet Union. Besides, Stalin and his coterie of sycophants sitting in the Kremlin had made sure that Mother Russia was safe from attack by creating a buffer zone stretching through southern Finland, the Baltic States and eastern Poland. The Red Army’s doctrine of forward defence was assured – or so the public thought. If there were to be war, Poland would be where the panzers were stopped.
The Soviet public’s perception of the Red Army was that it was a massive, well-equipped force that the Nazis would be mad to attack. The Soviet press had been full of its heroic exploits in Spain, Mongolia and in neighbouring Finland. Only the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership knew the truth: that despite all the impressive window-dressing in the shape of military hardware, the Red Army was hardly a competent fighting force. There can be no denying that in 1941 it was far from a modern force; its treatment at the hands of Stalin and its performance on the battlefield in recent years were to lull Hitler into a false sense of security with disastrous results.
The German–Soviet Rapallo Treaty helped Germany sidestep the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, which had limited its armed forces to 100,000 men, banned conscription, and restricted the production of tanks, fighter planes and submarines. In return for diplomatic recognition, the Soviet government granted Germany access to much-needed Russian raw materials and food. The fledgling Red Army also granted the Germans training facilities where they could try out prohibited equipment. A tank school was set up at Kazan, a flying school at Lipetsk and a chemical warfare centre near Volsk, sowing the seeds for the panzerwaffe and Luftwaffe. Future field generals who attended these training schools included Heinz Guderian, father of Germany’s panzerwaffe.
This relationship stopped in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Within two years, he had effectively torn up the Versailles Treaty, reintroducing conscription, building panzers and other military hardware and reoccupying the demilitarised Rhineland. This heralded his policy of conquest through military creep. Britain and France stood by and did nothing, and Hitler took this as a sign of weakness and accelerated his policy of rapid military expansion throughout Europe.
In the meantime Stalin was not blind to Hitler’s stated aim of carving out living space or Lebensraum in the east, and turned to Britain and France for help. As far as they were concerned Stalin was worse than Hitler, who seemed to be working wonders with the German economy; besides the Soviets made no secret of their desire to regain lost imperial possessions. Stalin watched as Hitler annexed Austria and partitioned Czechoslovakia with impunity. Not invited to the Munich Conference, which let Hitler have his way with Czechoslovakia, Stalin was left with little option but to deal directly with the Nazis.
The Western Allies were completely taken by surprise when, on 21 August 1939, the Soviet news agency Tass announced that Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, was flying to Moscow to sign a non-aggression pact with Stalin. This pact, signed four days later, granted Hitler a free hand to invade Poland the following month. This action finally brought Britain and France into conflict with Hitler.
What nobody knew at the time was that the pact included a secret agreement for the ‘Fourth Partition’. Signed just two days after the pact, this called for the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania were also recognised as being in the Soviet sphere. Stalin was intent on regaining the tiny Baltic states as well as the Karelian Isthmus from Finland (to protect Leningrad), in an attempt to safeguard his western borders.
At dawn on 1 September 1939 Hitler’s Wehrmacht began the onslaught on Poland, a nation that both Britain and France had pledged to support in the event of a threat to her independence or territorial integrity. Sixteen days later the Red Army rolled into eastern Poland along an 800-mile front to link up with the victorious Wehrmacht, which in the preceding weeks had systematically crushed the Polish Army. Just ten days later Warsaw surrendered and by 6 October 1939 the fighting was over.
Two weeks after moving into Poland, Stalin ordered the Finns to hand over the Karelian Isthmus; when they refused, once more the Red Army rolled in only to receive an unexpected bloody nose. Alarmingly, Britain and France almost found themselves at war with Germany and the Soviet Union as they were poised to help the beleaguered Finns; however, after dogged resistance the Finns gave in to Stalin’s demands in March 1940.
Stalin now felt secure in the belief that Hitler would never dare fight a two-front war, but in just three months, from April to June 1940, the Wehrmacht overran Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, leaving Britain under threat of invasion. It soon became apparent that major German military preparations in German-occupied Poland, East Prussia, Romania and Finland all indicated Hitler was planning to strike the Soviet Union, but Hitler reassured Stalin that the troop movements eastwards were simply designed to mislead Churchill into lowering his guard. Stalin took him at his word.
Soviet Defence Minister Marshal Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko and Chief of the General Staff General Georgi Zhukov were not convinced, and in May 1941 sought Stalin’s permission for a pre-emptive attack, but the latter did not want to provoke Hitler’s battle-hardened Wehrmacht. Meanwhile Hitler moved into the Balkans, securing his southern flank ready to strike east. There can be no denying that the war that followed on the Eastern Front was foremost a tank war. Indeed, the Soviet Union witnessed some of the biggest and bloodiest tank battles the world has ever seen.