CHAPTER 9
THE Russo-German treaty of August 1939 served its German purpose for almost two years. During that period Hitler made himself virtual master of the whole of continental Europe outside the borders of the USSR. A few neutrals existed on the fringes and one – Switzerland – in the middle, but nowhere was there opposition to Germany. These conquests had not been achieved without alarming Stalin. He had shared in the spoliation of Poland, annexed the three Baltic states after the fall of France and taken Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Rumania. Hitler then carved up Rumania and forced it, together with Hungary and Slovakia, to adhere to the Tripartite Pact. After Mussolini’s unsuccessful invasion of Greece he added Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact and moved into Bulgaria. Stalin protested – he had protested the previous year that the partition of Rumania was a breach of the Russo-German treaty of 1939 only to be met with the obvious retort that he himself had already broken it by helping himself to northern Bukovina. When the Simovic government in Belgrade repudiated the Tripartite Pact Stalin made a formal declaration of friendship with it but did not commit the USSR to go to its aid against a German attack. The two pseudo-allies were manoeuvring for positions in the one sizable undistributed area in Europe and the Germans were getting the better of the game because they did not mind provoking the Russians, whereas the Russians were still anxious not to provoke the Germans.
Stalin’s agents abroad were reporting that Hitler was about to attack the USSR, the British and American governments were repeating the warnings, and German troop movements told the same tale. Most tellingly of all, German deserters were crossing what had become a Russo-German front line in Poland to give warning of the German attack. A week after the opening of the German campaign in the Balkans and on the day when Belgrade fell, Stalin concluded a neutrality pact with Japan. But he did not trust Japan to keep it and even after Hitler’s attack he hesitated for some time before moving troops from his Asian to his European fronts. On 5 June he became President of the Council of Commissars or, as we would say, Prime Minister, in place of Molotov who became Deputy Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister. (Stalin had hitherto held only the post of Secretary General of the Communist Party.) But during these last months Stalin continued to do everything he could to avoid or postpone the German attack. The ease of the German conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece showed him that the turn of events in south-eastern Europe would do little or nothing to interfere with Hitler’s plans to attack the USSR. He increased Russian supplies to Germany, promising and punctually providing special facilities for the transit of rubber from the Far East and making other economic agreements favourable to Germany; he stopped arguing about the Russo-German frontier in the Baltic area; he expunged all criticism of Germany from the Russian press; he withdrew recognition of the Norwegian and Belgian governments in exile, expelled the Yugoslav Ambassador from Moscow, refused to recognize the Greek government in exile and recognized Rashid Ali’s pro-German régime in Iraq. None of these things had been asked for by Hitler and the German press was told to make no mention of them.
At home Stalin had two paramount problems. The first was the state of the Soviet armed forces and the second was strategic. The USSR’s western frontier was a long one. At no great distance behind it lay Leningrad in the north and the mineral and agricultural riches of the Ukraine in the south. In the centre Moscow, although more distant, was not beyond the reach of a powerful, mechanized enemy determined to seize it within six months. This central front was bisected by the Pripet marshes which impeded switches between one sector and another. In spite of the misgivings of his professional advisers Stalin had moved forces into newly occupied territories Bessarabia, Poland, Finland, the Baltic states – and out of the so-called Stalin Line (whose powerful guns and tangles of barbed wire in difficult forest country later impressed the Germans who overran it), until by May 1941 170 Russian divisions were stationed outside the pre-1939 frontiers of the USSR. Stalin may have been hoping that Hitler’s adventures in the west would give him a chance to attack again on the Finnish front (where he had twenty-seven divisions, including five armoured) or win further ground in the Balkans but this is surmise. The fact is that well over half the Russian army was occupying new positions whose fortifications and rearward communications were incomplete.
Furthermore, the forces which would be called upon to take the shock of the German attack were still recovering from the great purges. Where Hitler had tamed his officer caste, Stalin had killed his. The purges of the armed forces were a part of the Great Purge of the civilian and military establishments which Stalin began in 1936. An officer corps constitutes by its very nature a possible alternative to civilian government and Stalin was afraid of it. The Russian army had no tradition of revolution; its sole attempt to usurp the civil power – the Decembrist coup of 1825 – had collapsed after a day; but Stalin was obsessed with the example of Bonapartism and he proceeded in the thirties to emasculate the civil war generation whose leaders, military or civilian, might conspire against him. Because of his fears he was quick to lend an ear to accusations that his officers were plotting against him. One of his agents in Paris provided false evidence against Marshal Tukhachevski, the Chief of Staff of the Army, who was alleged to be in treasonable correspondence with German officers. This evidence was planted on Beneš who guilelessly passed it on to Moscow where it was used as reliable confirmation from an untainted source of prefabricated charges. In addition Russian agents persuaded German Intelligence to forge supporting documents which were likewise sent to Moscow to build up the case against Tukhachevski even further. Tukhachevski was arrested and executed after a trial lasting one day. Six of the eight officers who constituted the court martial were also executed. The further victims of the purge embraced three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union, all eleven deputy Commissars for Defence (that is to say, deputy Ministers), seventy-five of the eighty members of the Military Soviet, all the commanders of the military districts into which the country was divided in peacetime, thirteen of fifteen army commanders, over half the corps commanders and 20–40 per cent of all officers below brigade. They were replaced by retired stalwarts or young party enthusiasts who were either too out of touch or too unprofessional to inspire confidence or to understand the new equipment which the army was beginning to receive.
This stupendous amputation of head and members, which affected the political as much as the military side of the Soviet army’s dual control, disorganized and dispirited the services more than enough to prevent them from being a threat to the régime but also almost enough to prevent them from being a threat to an enemy. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 posed no fighting problem since the Poles had already been beaten by the Germans (it did, however, disclose organizational and logistic inefficiency), but the Finnish war was an inglorious shock, forcing the Russians to employ one and a half million men and to take three months over the sort of operation to which Hitler would have allotted a week or two. But this shock was also perhaps a boon. It forced Stalin to accelerate the reorganization of his defences. In May 1940 S. K. Timoshenko was made a Marshal and Defence Commissar at the age of forty-five, replacing the veteran Bolshevik K. E. Voroshilov. New training programmes were introduced. So were professional titles for ranks. Military commissars were abolished (they were reintroduced in 1941 and abolished again in 1942) and steps were taken to boost the prestige of the armed services. In February 1941 G. K. Zhukov, who had recently concluded a successful campaign against the Japanese in contrast to the deplorable performance of some of his colleagues on the Finnish front, was promoted full general and Chief of Staff of the Army; he became the pre-eminent figure among Stalin’s Marshals but, like Marshal Soult whom he in some ways resembled (including the possession of a political temperament), was as heartily disliked by some of his fellows as he was lauded by others.
In the field, however, only a few of the army’s new leaders had emerged, its divisions were below strength and its preparations – especially in frontier districts – had been impeded up to the last moment by Stalin’s continuing obsession with avoiding provoking the Germans and so prolonging the respite. By ill chance the Russian forces were caught in the process of changing over to the T 34 tank which was only beginning to emerge from the factories. In addition they were, not for the first time, changing their tank tactics. In earlier years the Russians, like the Germans, had imbibed some of the new ideas about tank warfare propounded by Liddell Hart, Fuller and Martel, but in the thirties Stalin had changed his mind. The defeat of the Italians at the battle of Guadalajara in the Spanish civil war, perhaps also Marshal Tukhachevski’s support for the new doctrine, and Russian experience in Mongolia and Finland, all undermined Stalin’s faith in large tank formations and he decided that tanks should not be concentrated in tank corps and tank armies but should be spread through other formations in accordance with an older doctrine. Then the German successes in France made him change his mind again, although not in time to enable the Russian forces to be regrouped before suffering severe defeats.
Hitler’s attack was launched on 22 June, two days earlier than the date on which Napoleon had led the Grand Army across the Niemen in 1812. It was the biggest military operation ever mounted. Although Hitler believed that the USSR would collapse, he was taking no chances and in any case he loved sheer size. His hosts, which included contingents of a dozen nationalities, attacked in three directions. Northern and Central Army Groups under Field Marshals von Leeb and von Bock headed towards the cities of Leningrad and Moscow, Southern Army Group under Field Marshal von Rundstedt for the Ukraine, the Don basin, the Crimea and the Caucasus with their wealth of grain, coal and oil. Their main objective was to surround and destroy the Russian forces in western Russia and prevent any ‘battleworthy elements’ from escaping into the interior: the capture of cities and provinces would then follow automatically. Surprise was complete: psychological surprise, because the Russian public had been allowed no hint of what was in store; tactical surprise, because the Russian forces in western areas were not forewarned. So began the most appalling, devastating and savage conflict in the history of warfare.
It was conducted on both sides by obsessively ruthless tyrants, battering one another like a pair of rabid rhinoceroses – with this difference that they used not their own bodies but those of millions of men whom, by the exercise of will, they committed to every kind of suffering, mutilation and death. Until nearly the end of its four years this fearful contest was remote from the other theatres of war, so that when it ended its impact on the rest of the world – on those who were neither Russian nor German – was incommensurate with its hideous actuality.
Stalin has been heavily blamed for his inept dispositions in the face of an invasion which was easily foreseeable. Apologists have suggested that he believed American and British warnings to be a ruse to induce him to mobilize and so provoke Hitler much as the Kaiser had been provoked to attack in 1914 by Russian mobilization. But this argument discounts the warnings received by Stalin from other quarters. While the timing of Hitler’s invasion was a matter for conjecture until almost the last moment, it was virtually inevitable and, from several months earlier, imminent. Hitler had himself proclaimed his intention to annex parts of the Soviet Union as living space for the German race and he was deflected neither by his pact with Stalin in 1939 nor by his failure in the Battle of Britain to secure peace in the west before attacking in the east. For Stalin the pact of 1939 was never more than a means to a respite, a way to gain time not peace. The charge against him is that he made such poor use of the time he bought. He was already suffering from the two great diseases of the autocrat: vanity and isolation. His brutal domination over colleagues in the Communist party and the armed services deprived him of honest deliberation and advice; absurdly confident of his ability to fend off Hitler he was prone to play down warnings which clashed with his preconceptions, while some intelligence never reached him from subordinates who were too scared to tell him things likely to be unwelcome. From the winter of 1940–41 his own agents (notably Richard Sorge working in Japan for Red Army Intelligence) were reinforcing the warnings conveyed by the American and British governments but apart from his neutrality pact with Japan in April 1941 Stalin’s attitude was almost entirely passive. Delay was his tactic and it was ineffectual.
Stalin’s armed forces and his frontier defences, although in the process of reorganization and re-equipment, were hopelessly and chaotically inadequate when Hitler sent four fifths of his armies – three million men – across the dividing line in Poland, confident of making mincemeat of his enemy and of capturing Moscow, Leningrad and the Caucasus before the end of the year. Hitler was to be proved nearly right but yet disastrously wrong. The Russian fronts were broken in several places within hours of the opening attack. Whole armies and Fronts (the Russian equivalent of Army Groups) were annihilated in spite of desperate, if ill coordinated, resistance and suicidal counter-attacks. Stunned by the magnitude of disaster on every front, and perhaps fearful for his own life, Stalin stayed silent until 3 July but on that day he took control of the war. In a broadcast speech he appealed to Russian patriotism; in the field he dismissed generals and had them shot. From this point onward he functioned as supreme war lord. Although often suspicious of his generals he did not make Hitler’s mistake of dismissing the best of them. At the end of July he removed Zhukov from the post of Chief of Staff and recalled the aged, infirm and only dubiously competent Marshal Shaposhnikov who might be expected, like Keitel on the German side, to do his master’s bidding; but Zhukov, having been sent to take charge of the defence of Leningrad, was brought back in October to save Moscow and was thereafter uninterruptedly at the centre of war planning until the capture of Berlin.
The main weight of the German attack was in the centre. The striking power of each Army Group was concentrated in Panzer Groups. Army Group Centre had two of these; each of its neighbours one. The Panzer Groups struck swiftly and directly, disrupting the enemy front and outdistancing the rest of the German forces which advanced as a second wave in encircling movements to trap the Russian forces which had been severed from each other by the slicing Panzers. In this way the Russians were cut up into sections and surrounded in pockets, and the speed and success of the German Panzer Groups were so great that the pockets were very large. Some of them contained up to fifteen Russian divisions. Huge numbers of prisoners were taken. On the Russian side there was almost total disorganization. Roads and railways were made unusable by the Luftwaffe. Every kind of communication failed. Frantic reports from the front and appeals for instructions, sent en clair for want of time to encipher them, dismayed incredulous staffs at higher echelons which retorted that the reports must be wrong and reprimanded the senders for not using their codes. But amid this confusion the Russians faced forward and even counter-attacked, driving their tanks suicidally into German artillery fire and pouring uncoordinated masses of men into the path of the unstoppable Germans. Others retreated or fled, destroying such installations and livestock as they could, often themselves destroyed either by the Luftwaffe or by the machine guns of the NKVD. Their officers were summoned back to Moscow to be shot there. The Germans, advancing up to fifty miles a day, were equally amazed by their own success and by the violent, valiant and often ferocious resistance of men who should have been totally demoralized. They began from the start to perceive that the war in the east was going to be different from the other campaigns of the past two years.
In mere numbers the Russians could match the Germans at many points. They had more men and more tanks, field artillery and aircraft. They had about 20,000 tanks, of which some 7,000 were in forward areas, but most of them were obsolescent and according to Marshal Konev, writing after the war was over, losses were so heavy that by September there were only forty-five serviceable modern tanks between the Germans and Moscow. Konev, one of Stalin’s outstanding tank commanders, regarded the Russian T 34 as the best tank in any army during the entire war, but it did not become the mainstay of the Russian forces until 1943. Russian manpower was immense but infantry divisions were still not motorized and shortages ranging from radio equipment to medical supplies were crippling. Large areas of the USSR passed into German hands. Goebbels proclaimed on 10 July: ‘The eastern continent lies like a limp virgin in the mighty arms of the German Mars.’ As whole armies surrendered and cities fell (Minsk 28 June, Smolensk 16 July) the German victory in the field seemed complete. But the Russians were not quite overwhelmed. Their armies were not destroyed. Nor were their air forces.
The Russian air forces (the largest in the world) and Russian aircraft production were, like the Russian army, in a stage of re-equipment and expansion in the years immediately before war came. Although markedly inferior to the German and British air forces – in machines, output, design, technical equipment, training, maintenance, ground organization and airfield construction – the Russian air forces had reached a point where improvement in all these departments could be rapid. The most important feature of the air war in the east after 1941 was that this improvement was not only astonishingly rapid but far more so than the Germans or anybody else had believed possible. In the first half of the war the Russians were able to offset their all-round inferiority by superiority in one thing – numbers. In the second half of the war they had air forces which were not only bigger but better than the Luftwaffe.
Russian aircraft production passed German production about the end of 1937, that is to say, before Munich. It then rose steadily from around 800 a month to 900 in 1939 and 1,000 by the time of Barbarossa. The first deliveries from new factories built in the Urals in the early thirties began to reach units in 1939, but when production and assembly plants in the west were overrun by the German armies total output was halved. It recovered by the middle of 1942 and then rose remorselessly to a peak of 3,000 a month. First line strength was 3,000–3,500 at the beginning of 1938, 4,000–5,000 a year later; after surmounting the crisis of 1941–2 it reached 10,000 by mid-1943, 15,000 by mid-1944 and over 20,000 before the war ended. But when war began reserves were poor. There was no pool of aircraft on which operational units could draw in order to replace their losses; new aircraft had to go straight from factory to units, so that the operational strength of units depended directly on the irregular factory flow and was sometimes down to half the prescribed establishment – with depressing effects on morale as well as on strengths. There were acute shortages of high-octane fuel at the front and essential raw materials for the factories. The Russian air forces had no radar, no ground control, not enough fighters and very few night fighters. Such fighters as could be spared from the fighting at the front were concentrated on airfields round Moscow for the defence of the capital. Strategic bombing of targets in the enemy’s rear was impossible in 1941 and hardly developed at any time. Russian long-range bombers, unequipped with radar, engaged in dangerous and largely ineffective missions in which a half to three quarters of modest forces of about one hundred aircraft failed to find their targets. Bomb loads never exceeded two tons, a light load compared with the ten tons carried by the British Lancaster. Finally, the Russian air forces were still divided in 1941 between a western front against the Germans and an eastern front against the Japanese, and in spite of Stalin’s growing assurance that he had nothing to fear in the east he hesitated to denude his eastern front until the threat to Moscow forced him to transfer 1,000 fighters and fighter bombers westward in the autumn of 1941.
The first three months of the campaigns of 1941 were catastrophic but just not fatal. The Russian air forces, attacked by an enemy who was technically much superior, were caught by surprise, inadequately camouflaged, undispersed, unsure of their supplies and communications: Russian fighters, 20–100 m.p.h. slower than the German Me. 109s, were outfought, frequently in the course of retreating from one airfield to another further back. Great numbers were destroyed on the ground, either by surprise attack or because they had to be left behind owing to shortages of fuel or spare parts. The Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed 1,489 aircraft on the ground on the first day; a first attempt to retaliate by bombing German targets cost the Russians 500 aircraft. On the day after the battle opened one commander of a Russian bomber group committed suicide after losing 600 aircraft against only twelve German. Russian losses by the end of August probably amounted to more than 5,000 aircraft. A month later their front line strength in the west had been halved and the Germans believed that the Russian air force had ceased to exist. Significantly, they were puzzled by the continued arrival of reinforcements. They were handicapped by their inability to reach and bomb the factories in the east where many of these aircraft were being turned out. They continued to shoot down the new aircraft which were thrown by the Russians desperately into the battle as soon as they arrived, but the flow never ceased and the Luftwaffe itself began to feel the strain.
German front line strengths shrank too, sometimes to half establishment. Space and snow came to the help of the Russians. The Luftwaffe, however excellent, was too small for a 2,000-mile front. As units were switched from Leningrad in the far north to the Ukrainian or central front, operational efficiency declined. The Luftwaffe could not keep up its initial effort of 1,500–2,000 sorties a day. It was farther away from its bases at home than it had ever been, its communications longer and more precarious, its flying conditions more testing. Once again it was short of fighters, and although the Stukas made their final onslaught of the war they too were too few to deliver along this huge front the series of packed punches which had drilled holes in the armies on the western fronts. When the snow came and the airfields froze, the High Command of the Luftwaffe failed to provide its men with the right clothing or its machines with anti-freeze. Its difficulties were accentuated by the makeshift nature of some of the airstrips which it was obliged to use and which were inferior to the airfields round Moscow being used by the Russians. By the end of the year German operational strength along the whole front had fallen to 1,500 and in the Moscow sector the Russians had assembled twice as many aircraft as the Luftwaffe.
But this capacity of the Russian air forces to survive was secondary. The decisive fact was the survival of the Russian ground forces. At the end of the first four weeks of the campaign the Germans paused for breath – and for argument. The Panzer units were farther ahead of the infantry than had been expected and some of them were 200 miles from their depots in eastern Poland; spare parts had to be flown to them since many roads were only unsurfaced tracks and there were hundreds of thousands of armed Russians behind the German lines. How many it is impossible to say: certainly 250,000, perhaps twice that number, whole armies cut up and disoriented but not eliminated. Guderian and other tank commanders wanted to resume their advances as soon and as fast as possible in order to keep on hammering the Russians, prevent the consolidation of a new line of Russian defence, exterminate the enemy’s fighting capacity and capture Moscow. Hitler on the other hand wanted to hold in the centre, strengthen his northern and southern Army Groups, bypass and isolate Leningrad with the one, and push south with the other until he was in a position to sweep round behind Moscow and the Russian armies to the west of it. Besides this strategic problem Hitler and his generals were worried by the gap which had already developed between the Panzers and the rest of the army and would be yet further increased if the Panzers were given their head, and they were worried because their advance not only extended their lines from west to east but also, fanwise, on a north-south axis – owing to the fact that the starting line of June had been considerably shorter than the line along which they were forced by geography to operate by the end of July.
The German forces were becoming stretched in all directions and it was not impossible to envisage the Russians inserting unused reinforcements between the Panzers and their supporting units, while at the same time breaking out of one or two pockets farther west and starting effective guerilla action against the German lines of communication. To give point to their fears several thousand Russian troops did break out of the Smolensk pocket. So from mid-July to mid-August the debate went on; the Germans failed to make the best of some of the most favourable weather of the summer or to exploit the chaos reigning in western Russia where local commanders and local party officials tussled with problems of discipline and administration and no firm directives reached them from the top (except simply to attack Germans whenever they were seen); the battered Russians had time to breathe, to re-group and to rush reserve divisions into the gaps. These divisions were half-trained, poorly equipped, sometimes still in civilian clothes, but they arrived and played their part; the Germans had not thought that they could be brought into the line so quickly. So great was the urgency on the Russian side that when trains reached their destinations the locomotives were uncoupled and sent back post haste without waiting for the rolling stock.
During these weeks Stalin’s authority became assured. It is not certain that it was so in the first disastrous weeks of war, or that he believed it to be so. A few days after the German invasion a defence committee to run the war was established under his chairmanship. The other members were Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria. Below this committee was the Stavka, a supreme planning staff which controlled the Fronts. The Stavka consisted originally of a dozen senior officers but Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were added to it soon after the outbreak of war. In July Stalin became, like Churchill, Defence Minister as well as Prime Minister; in August, like Hitler, Commander-in-Chief too. But titles do not make victories and his plight, as he himself saw it in this month, is revealed by his avowal to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s special emissary, that he would welcome American troops on any part of Russian soil under unrestricted American command. But by the autumn, he, like Russia, had weathered the first storm and was ready to face the next. He reorganized the higher commands and imposed his will on his commanders. The system of dual military and party control in the armed services, abolished shortly before the war began, had been reintroduced a few weeks after the German attack and command of three Fronts entrusted to Voroshilov and Zhdanov in the north, Timoshenko and Bulganin in the centre and Budyenny and Kruschchev in the south. Budyenny, a dashing hero with a big moustache but a little brain, was later relieved and succeeded by Timoshenko, who was replaced in the vital central sector first by Konev and then by Zhukov.
On 23 August the pause on the German side ended. The attack was resumed – in the south Guderian’s armour was switched from Bock’s Army Group Centre to Rundstedt’s Army Group South. Two days later Dnepropetrovsk fell and the Russians blew up the great dam at Zaporozhe which supplied the power for the mass of industries in the Dnieper bend, a self-mutilation which proclaimed that they had little hope of recapturing lost territory in the near future. Kiev was now at the western tip of a Russian salient, half encircled and urgently threatened. To Budyenny and Kruschchev its loss seemed certain and its abandonment a strategic necessity, but Stalin insisted on a fight to the finish. This was not pure stubbornness. Stalin may have reasoned that Budyenny, whose forces were larger than those facing him, ought to be able to hold Kiev; that in any case any delay was worth while in order to check an advance which threatened to envelop Moscow; and that the retreat of so large a force at this juncture would be psychologically disastrous. Kiev had to pay the price, which turned out to be very high. Four Russian armies were surrounded and when they surrendered on 17 September the number of prisoners who fell into the German bag (even if they were fewer than the German claim of 665,000) was immense. Here, as elsewhere in this savage war, the prisoners were worse off than the dead, for the Germans frequently failed to give them medical assistance or to feed them properly. From Kiev the Germans swept on over the Ukraine; Odessa was abandoned, Kharkov taken; Rostov was lost but recovered.
In the centre Guderian’s armour, switched back to this sector after a mere couple of weeks in the Ukraine, prepared for its last thrust of the year, the drive for Moscow. It was launched at the beginning of October. Again the Russians were taken by surprise – their air reconnaissance and their wireless intelligence were poor – and they suffered enormous losses. Something like panic developed in Moscow, accentuated by reports of how the Germans were treating prisoners and civilians and the NKVD shooting deserters. Some two million Muscovites were evacuated in due order and others simply fled. But Stalin and his principal military advisers and civilian subordinates remained. Reinforcements were rushed up from Mongolia – a switch which was less of a gamble than it appeared on the surface because Stalin had been told by the spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo that Japan had decided to attack in the Pacific and not in north Asia.
After the first week of the German October offensive the weather broke and converted the battlefields into mud swamps so thick that tanks and vehicles struggled in them in vain. The Germans slithered and stuck and prayed for frost to harden the going again. But they were unlucky once more. The mud was late in freezing over, and when it did in November the temperature fell not only late but sharply, causing them terrible suffering. In December came blizzards which reduced visibility to fifty yards. Clothing was inadequate. A request by Guderian for winter supplies had earned him a rebuke for implying that they might be needed. The men stuffed their clothes with paper to keep warm, often with leaflets sent to the front to be showered upon the enemy and tell him that surrender was his only sane course. By Christmas the Germans had 100,000 cases of frostbite. Dysentery was rife. Like their comrades in the Luftwaffe the army had no anti-freeze. Their guns would not fire. Yet they were constantly harassed, usually by small parties of Russians at night. The intense cold and snow also prevented supplies of food from reaching them. What food they had often had to be cut with axes or saws. Soup froze if a man paused for a minute in getting it into his mouth. The medal earned by these afflicted men was nicknamed the Order of Frozen Flesh. Some committed suicide. Looking back over the war when he came to write about this time Guderian recalled ‘the endless expanse of Russian snow during this winter of our misery… the icy wind that blew across it… too thin shelter… insufficiently clothed, half-starved men’.
By the first week in November the Germans were within fifty miles of Moscow; by the end of the month twenty miles. The final German assault came on 1 December and failed. Stalin had already decided to counter-attack before the year ended. Local and limited counter-attacks during November had not been able to stem the German advance but a stronger and more coordinated attack launched on S December pushed the Germans back as Stalin harried his generals and these in turn drove their men forward. This was the first appreciable Russian victory and there were more crumbs of comfort in the south where the Kertch peninsula was recaptured and Sebastopol held. Hitler failed to emulate Napoleon’s feat – in 1941 or ever. Perhaps if he had taken Guderian’s advice to concentrate on Moscow he might have succeeded; and perhaps he would then have won his war in the east. But neither of these propositions is certain. What is certain is that in the first week of December 1941 one of the most precarious moments of the war was reached and passed.
Leningrad too survived, although threatened by famine as well as arms. The siege of Leningrad became one of the epic events of the war. The magnificent capital of Peter the Great, built on either side of the Neva and on the islands in its estuary, contained three million inhabitants, of whom close on one million died in the siege. When the German invasion was launched desperate but belated preparations were made to withstand an assault and the Russian forces renewed their attack on the Finns, who, despite protestations of neutrality, were expected to make common cause with the Germans. Finnish forces re-occupied territory lost in the war of 1939–40 but Field Marshal Mannerheim was unwilling to overstep the 1939 frontiers (which his troops reached in August) and, partly in response to American pressure, refused persistent German requests for an alliance and joint operations against Leningrad.
The northern group of German armies advanced rapidly. It reached the river Drina in four days, pressed on to Pskov after a short pause and might perhaps have captured Leningrad before the end of July. Its leading units, which had covered 470 miles in three weeks, were only sixty miles from the city but at this point they halted and did not resume the advance until 8 August. Hitler – in a mood not unlike the one which had allowed the British to escape from Dunkirk wanted to nurse his armour and reduce the city by siege and air attack, after which it was to be razed to the ground as a symbolic extirpation of its eponymous guardian, the founder of the bolshevist state. He seems always to have been in two minds about Leningrad. On the one hand he willed its obliteration, but when he was thinking in broad strategic terms he did not want to waste before it large forces which should be advancing into the heart of Russia. The first shells fell on it in the first days of September. Zhukov arrived to direct the defences on the 11th. The city had been all but completely invested a few days earlier.
Leningrad had been the scene of the most celebrated episodes in the overthrow of the Tsars (whose capital it had been) and the jealous defender ever since that date of all that was purest in communist tradition and doctrine. Inside this city men, women and children now laboured ceaselessly on civil defence and emergency fortifications; to seaward the Russian Baltic fleet, whether riding the waters or imprisoned in the ice, provided an extra ring of guns; even the guns of the ancient cruiser Aurora which had been turned into a museum were removed and put into the first line; industries and population were evacuated to the east; patriotic enthusiasm was fanned by propaganda lectures. Leningrad was besieged from September 1941 to January 1944. It had at the outset only one to two months’ supply of basic foods, much of which was then destroyed by air attack. Unlikely substitutes were turned into eatables. Uneatables were eaten. Equally catastrophic was the shortage of water for elementary cleansing and of medicines. Deaths from hunger began to occur before the end of 1941 and the monthly rate soon reached the annual average; deaths from privation ran at the rate of several thousands a day and created a serious threat to the morale as well as the health of the survivors, who were already exhausted by extreme cold, hard work, hunger, disease, and the collapse of public services. On Christmas Day 1941 about 4,000 died. The most serious threat came in November 1941 when Tikhvin was taken by the Germans. This town, due east of Leningrad, was on the railway by which the Russians hoped to keep the city supplied, and when it was lost the Russians were compelled to begin the construction of a road from a point safely east of Tikhvin to the eastern shore of Lake Ladoga, whence supplies would be taken across the water or the ice to the south-western corner of the lake thirty-five miles from the city. The first plan was to build a railway line across the ice but a large frozen lake is far from being a flat surface and the first train left its rails near the beginning of its journey. Next came a plan to tear up the city’s tramlines and re-lay them on the lake but this scheme was abandoned almost as soon as it was thought of. Finally, the Russians began to build a road and collect lorries – from Moscow and from the American and British vehicles arriving in the far north – to make the passage by night, in the bitter cold of an exceptionally bitter winter (the temperature averaged twenty degrees below freezing over a whole month) and against the fierce north-east winds which constantly swept the surface of the lake. Some supplies got in this way but it was a desperate expedient which could hardly have saved the city. Fortunately the Russians recaptured Tikhvin in December. The encirclement of Leningrad was never complete because the Russians kept possession of the south-western corner of Lake Ladoga. Nevertheless starvation was sometimes only one or two days off during this first and most exacting winter of the war. In Berlin invitations to a reception in Leningrad to be attended by Hitler were printed but never sent out.
Leningrad won a further reprieve in 1942 owing to the resistance of Sebastopol where the German 11th Army, which was designated to switch to Leningrad after the fall of Sebastopol, was not freed from its southern task until July and then only moved north partially. A German attack on Leningrad in the autumn of 1942 was forestalled and nipped in the bud by a Russian counter-offensive and shortly afterwards 11 th Army was again concentrated in the south. A Russian operation at the beginning of 1943 eased, though it did not remove, the German blockade by opening a new corridor for supplies from across the lake but complete relief had to await the general collapse of the Germans. Leningrad was not freed from attack until January 1944. It received the Order of Lenin. Its endurance and its sufferings and triumph have been immortalized in Shostakovich’s seventh symphony, not the greatest work of that great composer, but written and first performed in the most extraordinary circumstances – in the city during the siege. (The most poignant musical cries of the war are Richard Strauss’s lament over the destruction of Munich, Metamorphosen, the thrilling pathos of the middle movement of Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and Britten’s setting of poems by Wilfred Owen in his War Requiem.)
At the end of 1941 the German conquests in the USSR were vast, but Hitler had not defeated the Russians. He had failed to take Moscow or Leningrad, had taken Rostov and lost it again, had overrun the Crimea but been baulked before Sebastopol, and had suffered in the USSR casualties of about three quarters of a million, of whom one in four were dead. The very arguments about priorities – Moscow or Leningrad, Leningrad or the Ukraine, Sebastopol or Leningrad – prove that from the very beginning the German forces were stretched. Once Russian resistance was not wholly broken within weeks, the German command faced choices because the tasks were too many. The same applied to the Luftwaffe. In the first four weeks of the campaign a force of 3,000 aircraft averaged 2,500 sorties a day and thereafter 1,500–2,000 a day for the rest of the year. Their performance was excellent (the Me. 109F, faster but less heavily armed than the Me. 109E, was making its first operational appearance) but in spite of this remarkable effort the force was too thinly spread for its commitments and again switches told the tale – to Leningrad at one moment and then back again to the central front for the main assault on Moscow. Air raids on Moscow were hardly more than token gestures. The city was attacked seventy-six times between the beginning of the campaign and the end of 1941 but the weight of the attack was often trivial. The largest force employed in a single night was 127 and in far more cases than not the bombers could be counted in single figures. The Luftwaffe’s reserves were sometimes worryingly low and at the end of the year the mercurial Udet committed suicide. Thus the startling achievements of 1941 on the ground and in the air had by December essentially failed, and a fresh advance in 1942 was to culminate in the disaster of Stalingrad, whereafter the two great land powers of Europe were measured against one another until the Germans were utterly repulsed.
On the Russian side crippling casualties – at least three million men and probably 18,000 tanks in the first disastrous three months – were offset by patriotic determination and furious despair which mounted as the Germans resorted to monstrous cruelties. Sadistic and debauched proconsuls and their henchmen were invested with authority in the rear of the advancing armies (whose commanders preferred to turn a blind eye to proceedings which disgusted them – within limits). Mass executions and the deliberate burying alive of half killed victims united and fired all Russians who escaped this appalling demonstration of the dark side of human nature. At the top Stalin’s nerve held, a new layer of brilliant field commanders was moving into the crucial positions and Soviet Intelligence from agents in Switzerland and Germany itself as well as Tokyo was providing a reliable basis for the conduct of the war. One of these agents was Richard Sorge in Tokyo, a handsome and talented German in Russian pay who had become a personal friend and confidant of the German Ambassador and had the almost incredible experience of discovering the answer to one of Stalin’s most vital questions on the very eve of Barbarossa and on the day before the Japanese police arrested him as a spy. From his contacts with the Japanese cabinet Sorge was able to tell Stalin that the Japanese were not going to attack the Russians in Mongolia, but the Americans in the Pacific. When Sorge’s information was confirmed by Japanese inactivity, Stalin began to nerve himself to denude his eastern frontiers. He did so just in time, although he still hesitated until he was within sight of the end of the short Siberian campaigning season. Reinforcements from the east, including 1,700 tanks and 1,500 aircraft, reached Zhukov on the Moscow front at the beginning of November at the point when the Russians had drained the last reserves from their training schools and the Germans thought that the Russians were finished.
The German failure to defeat the Russians in 1941 was the second and greatest turning point in the war in Europe. If Hitler could not beat the Russians in six months he could not beat them at all. He had prepared for a short war. He had not prepared for and he could not win a long one. Nor could his relations with his generals survive a long one. At the end of 1941 he took over command of the army himself from Brauchitsch and nine months later he would dismiss Haider, his Chief of Staff. More important perhaps, the handling of the 1941 campaign had produced quarrels with more highly respected field commanders and had deepened the mutual distrust between Hitler and the officer corps. By the end of the year Guderian, Rundstedt and Hoepner had all been dismissed. Others would follow later. In assuming personal command in the war in the east Hitler jettisoned his ablest generals.
It was at this point – the end of 1941 – that the European war begun in Poland in September 1939 was converted into a world war. On 7 December the Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor opened the war in the Pacific and made the United States a belligerent in that theatre. With one of the most startling gestures of the whole war Hitler immediately made the Americans belligerents in the Atlantic and Europe as well by a declaration of war. Germany was thenceforward engaged in a war that had spread right round the world.