CHAPTER 22

The Victory of the USSR

THE USSR presented Hitler with a problem which was not only different in scale from his British problem but, militarily, diametrically opposite to it. Stalin had resources – of manpower, raw materials and space – which were greatly superior to Germany’s. Against them Hitler had to pit superior skill and superior organization in a bid to win a quick victory. He had to break the USSR, not wear it down. In the west he could lose the Battle of Britain but still hope to win the long-drawn-out Battle of the Seas. In the east time was not on his side. He not only hoped to win in six months but needed to win in not much more. He threw the immensely efficient armed forces of a thoroughly modern industrial power against a colossus which had not reached the same stage of industrial sophistication and was, in addition, weakened both materially and psychologically by a generation of turmoil: revolution and civil war, followed by ostracism, the destruction of the peasantry, political and military purges, and a police tyranny and an inquisitorial system of government extremely ill calculated to elicit loyalty. Hitler relied on his military engine to destroy the enemy’s power to resist and, at second remove, to encourage the peoples of the USSR to turn against their own government. Although at the end of 1941 he had failed to achieve the decisive victory which he had hoped for, the successes of German arms had been so great that the USSR was like a man who has had his weapon dashed from his hand and does not know where to turn to get himself another. A third of the USSR’s industrial capacity had been overrun and another third was under fire from the German armies and air forces, its output gravely cut. The next three years produced fighting more ferocious and devastating than any experienced by man. Both in scale and temper and therefore in its consequences the war in the USSR was altogether different from any of the other campaigns embraced by the Second World War.

Although Stalin had played every available political card in order to fend off a war with Germany and although his military dispositions could be criticized for unpreparedness, he had taken a number of steps to prepare the USSR for war on the industrial front. He introduced measures at the end of 1938 to curb absenteeism in factories and restrict the excessive movement of labour which were a debilitating feature of the Soviet economy: absenteeism became grounds for dismissal and eleven months’ employment in one job a prerequisite for two weeks’ holiday. In 1940 new measures punished slacking and forbade certain changes of job without permission. In the same year the government took power to direct workers from one place to another. The costs of transporting and re-housing the worker and his family were to be paid by the state; he was to receive six days’ pay on arrival at his destination; and he was promised that his wages would not fall. The government also tackled the problem of training. It had an alarming shortage of technicians, especially below the top ranges. It established vocational schools to take nearly a million trainees a year who were then assigned to jobs and were required, military service apart, to stay in them for four years. Young people who were not exceptionally clever or exceptionally privileged were diverted into these schools and away from high schools and universities, where fees were introduced for all but the favoured few; in the face of the emergency created by the threat of war higher education was denied to all but a small élite.

With the advent of war the armed services made big demands on manpower and their losses were so heavy that they continued to do so to the end. The population of the USSR in 1941 was about 200 million but at least one in ten of these died, in uniform or out of it, before the war was over. The territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–40 – an area larger than the United Kingdom – added to its population a million Poles and perhaps half a million Baits, but the total labour force fell from a pre-war total of 28 million to below 20 million by 1943. Half the workers in war industry were women and the proportion of women in agriculture was much higher. Something like half the male peasantry was conscripted into the army, leaving the fields to be worked by women, children and old men, or not worked at all. Millions of these peasants never returned to the countryside, for when the war ended the survivors among them were needed in the towns and factories and for many years after 1945 women continued to provide two thirds of agricultural labour.

The labour available for war industries was not only reduced by the needs of the fighting services and, by western standards, inadequately trained; it was also in the wrong places because industry itself was to a very large extent in the wrong places for a war which began with a German invasion. The removal of industry from threatened areas under the stress of war and the expansion of production in eastern regions of the USSR became a crucial factor in the USSR’s victory – the most crucial factor after the Soviet armies had survived the first six months of war. This effect has been presented as nearly a miracle. Like all miracles it had a basis in hard fact.

The USSR was not in 1941 an industrial power like Germany or Great Britain or, least of all, the United States, but it was in process of becoming one. The industrialization of Russia had begun in the nineteenth century, albeit patchily, later than in western Europe and under the heavy disabilities of an ailing political and social system. The revolutionary régime which came to power in 1917 had ambitious ideas about modernizing and urbanizing the USSR and making it self-sufficient but the government’s plans were severely hampered by the destruction caused by the First World War and the ensuing civil war and by its own political and economic isolation. The conditions were harsh and the base low. Capital was scarce; communications were poor; technical skills, even secondary education, were thinly spread; the USSR was rich in natural resources but they had never been properly surveyed. But a poor beginning makes for (statistically) impressive achievements, and during the first Five Year Plan (1928–32) and again during the second Plan capital investment, industrial output and gross national product were all doubled and transport facilities increased in even greater proportion. Education was extended and the shift of the population as a whole rose by a third between 1914 and 1940, the urban population from the country to the towns was accelerated while the population was multiplied by 2.4. There was therefore a considerable alteration not only in the number of people at work but even more so in what they were doing.

The main industrial effort remained where it had been – in the areas round Moscow and Leningrad, in the Ukraine and the Don basin. The development of existing facilities had first priority. Nowhere else was there an adequate supply of skilled labour. But the development of other areas – the Urals, western Siberia and Kazakhstan – was a theme which appealed to communist propagandists as well as to the romantic imagination. These areas were known to be rich in minerals. The pre-revolutionary regime could be blamed for doing too little about them. Lenin had said that the right thing to do was to create industries where raw materials were to be got. Consequently the repair and extension of industry in the traditional centres in European Russia was to be matched by exciting new schemes farther east. This eastward trend was gradually intensified. Up to 1930 the traditional centres absorbed the bulk of the effort. During the thirties they still retained their primacy but at the same time vast sums began to be lavished on other areas, particularly the Urals and the Siberian district round Kuznetsk (the Kuzbas), and under the third Five Year Plan, which began in 1939, other areas in western Siberia and central Asia were promised increased attention of the same kind. Railways were built, electric power provided, resources surveyed and populations moved to where labour was required. In the new development areas there was not only a total lack of skilled labour but a considerable shortage of any labour at all, to remedy which the government compelled migrations and used convicts and political prisoners ruthlessly. (In 1941 the NKVD was responsible for a sixth of all new construction in the USSR.)

This relocation of industry, which was to prove strategically vital, was at first economically irrational. Thus coal was mined in the Kuzbas in Siberia and iron ore round Magnitogorsk in the Urals, but there was no iron ore near Kuznetsk or coal near Magnitogorsk and the two centres were well over a thousand miles apart. This situation was, however, later redeemed by supplying Magnitogorsk with coal by rail from Karaganda in Kazakhstan (half the distance away) and by opening up the new ironfields of Gornaya Shoriya in Siberia to be fed with Kuzbas coal. Thus nature justified the huge expenditure of capital and labour and the USSR found itself endowed with two new industrial complexes in place of one barely cohesive one. (The development of the Kuzbas illustrates the pace of expansion. In the decade 1928–38 its production of coal rose from 2 million to 16 million tons a year.) As the production of iron and coal rose upon the basis of improved communications and technology, more power and more labour, so the USSR began to be supplied with the quantities and the varieties of steel to sustain its expanding industries and, an increasingly more urgent preoccupation, its armament as well.

This wider distribution of the steel industry was the most important single element in the development of the eastern regions, but not the only one. Western Russia is poor in non-ferrous metals, which Tsarist Russia had imported on a significant scale. But copper had been mined in the Urals and the Caucasus since the seventeenth century, and the USSR planned to exploit the copper, lead and zinc of Kazakhstan. This work was put in hand before the war and greatly developed during it, so that Kazakhstan became second only to the Urals in sustaining the Russian war effort. The chemical industry was also diffused, although it remained preponderantly European, and was so severely damaged that American, British and Canadian imports were required to make good the losses. The radio industry was also expanded. Besides 120 large broadcasting stations the USSR was operating 2,000 local stations before the war and had begun a public television service in 1938 (discontinued during the war).

In sum, the Ural, Siberian and central Asian areas, which had been opened up as ancillary industrial enterprises primarily in order to modernize the USSR and make it economically independent of capitalist countries, had become in addition an alternative arms base. Without this alternative the USSR might well have collapsed at the beginning of 1942. The German victories of the previous year had eliminated much of the fruits of the Russian industrial effort of the thirties: between a half and two thirds of its productive capacity in coal, pig iron, steel and aluminium, a quarter of its engineering output. Over 300 ammunition factories had been put out of action. By November 1941 the USSR’s overall industrial output had been halved, and during November and December no coal whatever was delivered from the Moscow or the Donets minefields. Industry in the Urals and eastward could not immediately fill the gap but it supplied a base.

A gigantic movement of people and plants took place. The number of people involved may have been as high as 12 million. From Leningrad more than two thirds of the city’s capital equipment, building excepted, were conveyed away. According to N. A. Voznesenski, the head of Gosplan (the State Planning Commission), these movements involved ‘millions of people… hundreds of enterprises, tens of thousands of machine tools, rolling mills, presses, hammers, turbines and motors… 1,360 large enterprises – mostly war enterprises – were evacuated to the eastern regions of the USSR.’ The impressive aspect of this undertaking was its hugeness, not its organization. The railways, although they had been singled out for improvement under the third Five Year Plan, were reduced to chaos as west-bound trains carried men to the armies at the front while east-bound trains, loaded with machinery, workers and deported Volga Germans and Polish prisoners of war, were pushed into sidings where some of the equipment stayed to rot and men and women to die. At the new sites wooden structures were thrown up to house machinery, but there was often neither time nor materials to build houses for the workers. They sometimes set to work, in temperatures below zero, before the roof was on their makeshift factory and they slept on the floor among the machines. Their privations were terrible. Food was scarce, hospitals (and schools) non-existent. They just worked as long as they could. Mortality was high, output per head poor. The wonder was that they were not worse. By their efforts war industry kept going. But the early months of 1942 were critical. Thereafter production in these regions expanded dramatically until their aggregate war production reached 2.5 times the total pre-war production of the entire USSR. Labour, while it declined overall, rose in 1940–43 from 1 million to 1.5 million in the Urals and by similar degrees in western Siberia and Kazakhstan, each of which had employed nearly half a million in industry on the eve of war.

The principal features of this victory on the home front were two: the rigours which an authoritarian government (aided by the appeal to patriotism) could impose on the people, and the adaptability of the Soviet economy, which partly made up for its technical weaknesses by its ready response to central planning and direction. Once the corner was turned and production resumed, expansion was astonishingly rapid. By the middle of 1942 arms production exceeded its pre-war level. In the next years output in the east continued to rise, while industry in the occupied western areas was rehabilitated with amazing vigour as fast as they were liberated. The Moscow coalfields, for example, whose pre-war production was 35,000 tons a day, resumed output in January 1942 at the rate of 590 tons a day, increased it to 22,000 tons by May and were back to normal by October 1942. Electrical generating capacity, nearly half of which was physically destroyed by the Germans, was also back to its pre-war volume before the war ended. Russian production of tanks and aircraft surpassed German production in 1943. At their peak they reached 40,000 aircraft and 30,000 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles a year – alongside an output of 150,000 pieces of artillery, 500,000 machine guns and at least 2 million sub-machine guns and 3 million rifles. Stalin had won, by however narrow a margin, the fight for the material resources of war; but there was also the question of human responses.

The response of the people of the USSR depended not only on how they were treated during the war but also on how they had been treated before it. Wartime privations, however severe, were expected and attributable to the enemy, but the history of pre-war relations between government and governed gave rise on the German side to hopes of rebellion and, one may suppose, to equivalent fears on the Russian side.

The intensive industrialization of the thirties was Stalin’s special contribution to the evolution of Soviet society. Through it he established his totalitarian authority and because of it he waged a savage fight against the peasantry which had been one of the protagonists in the revolution of 1917. The question of the peasants is the question of food. The food which peasants produce can either be bought or seized. During the confused years of revolution and civil War after 1917 it was most frequently seized but seized with some justification and consent, since the struggling revolution – to which the peasants adhered – had no money to pay for it and no means to produce the goods which the peasants might have taken in exchange for their produce. The peasants understood this, but they also learned the strength of their position and when the civil war ended they in effect bargained with the central government and forced it to reward them for their labours instead of merely appropriating its fruits.

For the next six years (1921–7) the New Economic Policy sought to provide goods to satisfy and stimulate the peasants, but some of the richer peasants continued to demonstrate their power by keeping food off the market when they were dissatisfied with the returns offered to them. A series of good harvests increased their power and the temptation to hold back supplies for the towns and play the markets, so much so that the government had to import grain to save the towns from starvation. The New Economic Policy not only derogated from the basic principles of the Bolshevik Party by making concessions to private operators and to the profit motive, so that bolsheviks like Stalin came increasingly to resent the power of the peasants and to determine to destroy it, even at the cost of another revolution; it also made the peasantry a rising power opposed to the party and opposed to the towns. So instead of running consumer industries to pay for peasant produce the government would force the peasants to pay for heavy industry by reverting once more to the civil war practices of exploiting their labour and taking their produce on the state’s own terms. There was in fact no other way of paying for industrialization, since the USSR was neither forming the needful capital within its borders nor able to borrow it abroad. Peasants had paid for industrialization before – for example, in the Industrial Revolution in western Europe – but not nearly so harshly or so fast as Stalin made the Russian peasants pay.

They paid for internal reasons, but the way they were forced to pay was largely dictated by failures in foreign policy, in particular the rupture with Great Britain and the collapse of the attempt to foster communism in China. These failures were all the more dangerous, given the failure to promote communism in Europe a decade earlier. Industrialization could no longer wait and so with the first Five Year Plan the peasants were brigaded into collectives in order the better to be coerced. In the course of his war on the peasantry Stalin sharpened the totalitarian machinery and police terror of the state and converted the Bolshevik Party from a policy-making organization, which to some extent it still was in the twenties, into an apparatus of arbitrary power to be used not only against the peasants but also against townspeople and enemies or imagined enemies of all kinds. The more prosperous peasants were ruined, great numbers of peasants were killed and agricultural production was disastrously reduced. The horrors of these years made their contribution to the industrialization which Stalin had resolved to effect, but at a price which raised the question of how far the peoples of the USSR could be counted loyal to it in war. Unable to pay the Russians to work harder or inspire them to do so as perhaps Lenin or Trotsky might have done, Stalin had been left with only the modern equivalent of flogging them – a police régime in which the workers, trapped by informers and false accusations, were consigned wholesale to hard labour camps. Stalin was not blind to the risks inherent in this ferocity. His first wartime speech on 3 July 1941 appealed, in terms unwontedly similar to the appeals to patriotism made by democratic leaders, for sacrifices, ruthlessness and unity, for a scorched earth policy and guerrilla warfare to help the desperately struggling armed forces.

The sacrifices which the peoples of the USSR may have braced themselves to make in 1941 can hardly have been as gruelling as they turned out to be in fact. Life in the USSR during the war became not only grim but so difficult to sustain that about a million people died of starvation. The armed services and workers in war industry got enough to eat. By and large other people did not. The total amount of food provided and purchased was almost halved. Personal consumption fell below that of the frightful famine year in 1932. The sugar ration, to take an extreme example, was reduced to half a pound a year. The supply of vegetables was cut by nearly two thirds, of meat by more than half, of flour by nearly half. There was no attempt to keep up tobacco stocks, which fell by three quarters, nor the flow of vodka, which was halved. Production of consumer goods was not much more than adequate for the needs of the armed services. Real earnings were cut by a half or more. Compulsory saving was increased by contributions to war bonds which were to be redeemed after the war – but lost nine tenths of their value when the currency was reformed in 1947. Prices had begun to rise with fear of war in 1939 and rose sharply during 1940. After the outbreak of war in 1941 prices of rationed foods and goods were pegged at their, already enhanced, pre-war levels, but they were scarce in the state shops which sold rationed and price-controlled commodities, while in other shops prices rocketed upwards and reached by 1943 about fourteen times their 1940 levels. (After the war the prices of price-controlled commodities were re-adjusted, in a number of cases by trebling them. When rationing ended in 1947 basic prices were about three times what they had been in 1940. But vodka had gone up ten times.)

Hours of work were lengthened. Holidays, other than the weekly day of rest, were cancelled. The seven day week was reintroduced in 1940 – that is to say, one rest day in seven instead of one in six or (before 1929) one in five. The normal working day was extended from seven hours to eight, but plant managers could extend it up to eleven hours, for extra pay at higher rates. The state offered some palliatives. The USSR had a well-established, comprehensive social insurance scheme which worked on a non-contributory basis, was financed by central and local government authorities and the state’s business enterprises, provided sickness and other benefits graded according to wages and length of service, and gave pensions to men at sixty and women at fifty-five: pensions ranged from 50 per cent to 100 per cent of the basic wage (the latter for the lower paid), but there was a ceiling which, although not ungenerous in the thirties, became niggardly with wartime inflation. The state also recognized the need for solace of a different kind. From the outbreak of war, churches became packed with people praying that their country would be saved from its enemies and that they themselves would have the fortitude to bear their increasingly intolerable burdens of mental anguish and physical pain. In 1943 Stalin re-established the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox church and allowed it to elect a patriarch and re-open seminaries.

A large proportion of the population of the USSR lived outside big towns and their attitudes were specially difficult to control or predict. While Stalin appealed to them from the one side, the Germans were hoping to find among them a substantial number of disaffected who would take the first opportunity to turn against their government. Both sides wanted them to take an active part in the war, the one as guerrilla partisans against the invaders, the other as auxiliaries on the German side.

Stalin seems to have envisaged guerrilla resistance before the German invasion took place, for instructions for it were issued within a few days. The civil wars after 1917, still a living memory in the USSR, had made partisan warfare less esoteric than it was in the west, and communist doctrine tended to blur the sharper distinction made in more traditionalist societies between professional and popular campaigning. The rapid advances made by the Germans in 1941 placed them in control of large areas from which the inhabitants had not had time to flee. German control was unevenly spread and Stalin could have ordered the civilian population to escape eastward; broad corridors, more or less unpoliced by the Germans, could be traversed without much danger. But no such withdrawals were made. Many of the inhabitants may have been unwilling to leave their homes, even though they were in enemy occupied territory, in order to be drafted into Stalin’s armies, but it seems that Stalin did not in any case want to use them that way. They could be more useful as guerrilla fighters within the enemy’s lines.

Bands were quickly formed to harass German units and communications, to collect intelligence and to exact vengeance upon anybody who collaborated with the enemy. From these beginnings a considerable force grew, although not without some initial setbacks. Moscow’s first plan was to provide a core of organizers, with some elementary training in partisan warfare and of indubitable party loyalty, who would be reinforced by local anti-German patriotism and enthusiasm. This plan was not at first very successful. Local enthusiasm was not as marked as had been hoped and the first groups had to contend with some pro-German attitudes as well as the attentions of the S D. Problems of supply and communication were extremely severe during 1941 and these first groups achieved little beyond a few hit-and-run raids and enough reprisals against collaborationists to make people think twice before helping the Germans. A number of these bands were completely eliminated. In the same period other bands came spontaneously and haphazardly into existence. Out of the flotsam and jetsam of the defeated Russian armies, groups 300–1,000 strong formed, but their first aim was survival rather than further action against the Germans who, until the end of 1942, still looked like the winning side. During 1942, however, the government was able to impose a degree of organization and direction on the bands and began to draft the local peasantry into an effective, if subordinate and ancillary, fighting force.

The Germans employed around 250,000 security troops (usually sub-standard or foreign conscripts) in the USSR, partly in response to this activity, but shortages of men and materials limited their anti-partisan operations. The partisans harassed German communications and retarded reinforcements, notably in conjunction with the Kursk offensive in 1943 and before the Russian attacks in White Russia in the summer of 1944; they also inflicted about 35,000 casualties. They were helped from the start by the Germans themselves. The horrors, already related, perpetrated by the S D and the Einsatzkommandos, the destruction of over three million prisoners of war, the deportations to extermination camps and forced labour, the killing of a further million partisans and civilians in the USSR, the burning of villages and shooting of villagers by way of reprisal – on one occasion 158 villages were burned down as a single act of reprisal – all these things inflamed anti-German hatred and made villagers think that they might as well join the partisans instead of waiting to be killed or enslaved by the Germans. Thus, although the Germans sent agents (operation Zeppelin) to infiltrate the bands and the Volksdeutsche; although the Ukraine contained the seeds of a separatist and anti-Soviet movement; although the Germans appointed a Russian civilian governor of Bryansk as an experiment; and although they captured a potential anti-Soviet leader in General A. A. Vlasov, their excesses (like those of the Poles in the same parts in 1920) ruined whatever chances they may have had of subverting any appreciable number of Soviet citizens and swelled the active ranks of their adversaries.

By mid-1942 the partisans probably numbered about 150,000. Their strongest ground was White Russia, where wooded country provided the best terrain; Bryansk became a principal base and from it they extended their operations into the Ukraine. But the government still could not spare them much in the way of up-to-date equipment. A year later the Germans put their strength at 200,000 and eventually they may have reached half a million. From 1943 they received new equipment from the USSR’s reorganized factories, including mortars and artillery, special anti-tank guns for attacking locomotives, radios which kept them in touch with one another and with the Russian High Command, and medical supplies which had been almost totally lacking. They were supplied by air and constructed and maintained airfields for this purpose. Most of them were between seventeen and thirty-five years old, conscripted peasants with a sprinkling of army officers and other ranks and party officials. Whereas in the early days the emphasis was on reliable party members, the proportion of these inevitably fell as the movement became bigger; the consciously and actively political element may have been around one tenth in the later years. Towards the end of the war partisan brigades moved into other countries as an advance guard of Russian retribution and in order to help form local committees of reliable residents. In Poland they fought some minor engagements against the Polish Home Army and in Slovakia some 3,000 of them joined with Slovaks parachuted from the USSR in the Slovak rising against the Germans at the end of 1944, but in Rumania and Hungary their activities were insignificant and in Latvia they were driven out again.

The partisan movement had also a political purpose. The Germans occupied areas of the USSR containing a population of 70 million. These areas included large tracts, with a population of 20 million, which had only very recently come under Russian rule, and where anti-Russian feeling was intense. In all these areas, temporarily lost, Stalin was concerned to preserve some vestiges of the presence of the Soviet state. He had no reason to assume that the peasantry of the USSR would remain loyal to his régime and even less reason to suppose that the population of the Baltic states and eastern Poland would not jump at any chance, even a chance presented to them by the Germans, to repudiate it. The destruction by the Germans of the apparatus of government was a threat to the communist system, especially in areas where local separatism – political as in the Ukraine or religious as among the USSR’s Muslim peoples – reinforced dislike of Stalin’s communist autocracy and police rule, dislike of forced collectivization and dislike of war. The partisan movement was a reminder, if necessary a forcible one, that the government of the USSR was still in being and still in the fight. The partisans actively combated German attempts to subvert local leaders. Village elders appointed by the Germans were killed, so that fear of the German conqueror was more than offset by fear of the continuing capacity and omniscience of the central government of the USSR and its servants.

Yet a number of Soviet citizens did collaborate with the Germans or take service with them. There is more than a suggestion of severe disaffection in the fate of the Tartars, Kalmucks, Chechens and other minorities, about a million of whom were deported from the Caucasus in the winter of 1943–4, charged with collaborating with the Germans. The brutality with which they were treated (later acknowledged by Khrushchev), the thoroughness with which all traces of their homes and even their cemeteries were obliterated, and above all the date, betray a grim punitive intent persisting after all need for precautions had disappeared. In more lastingly occupied territories perhaps half a million or a million Russians, the so-called Osttruppen, took German pay. Their main reason was not a desire to serve against their own country but the appalling way in which the Germans behaved in the areas which they occupied. Joining the Osttruppen was a way out. Most of the Osttruppen were used as rear units in various parts of Europe but the Germans also made some attempts to form more active Russian fighting forces. In 1941 they established a Russian National Liberation Army (R O N A) for anti-partisan warfare. It was later converted into the SS Division Kaminsky. In 1944 it participated in the suppression of the Warsaw rising where, even by current SS standards, its barbarous behaviour was outstanding and caused Guderian to protest to Hitler himself; its commander, Kaminsky, was killed by the SS themselves. There were one or two other formations of this nature, such as the XXSS Cossack Cavalry Corps. The SS overcame their prejudices against Slav sub-men by dubbing any Slavs who came over to their side Cossacks and pretending that Cossacks were not Slavs.

Another Russian formation on the German side was the Russian Liberation Army (R O A), which is connected with the name of General Vlasov. Vlasov began the war by deserving well of his country. Like Zhukov he had seen service in the Far East. After commanding a corps on the southern front in 1941 he was posted to the Moscow front as commander of the Twentieth Army at the age of forty-one and had a share with Zhukov in saving the capital. He became appalled by Stalin’s ruthlessness in the sacrifice of lives and when, in the following summer, he was captured by the Germans on the Leningrad front he was ready to be transformed into an anti-communist leader.

The ROA was more of a scheme than an army. Hitler was afraid of creating a substantial all-Russian force and he refused to incorporate the Osttruppen in the ROA. He preferred to use it in non-combatant, paramilitary roles; it was a piece of window-dressing which was meant to imply massive Russian disaffection within the USSR, serving Goebbels’s anti-Russian propaganda and helping to keep up the morale of the Osttruppen who might begin to wonder how prudent it was to go on working for the Germans. Late in 1944, however, Hitler toyed with the idea of assembling all his Russian bits and pieces into an army under Vlasov and recognizing Vlasov as the head of a Russian government in exile. As a result Vlasov found himself in 1945 in command of two divisions totalling about 50,000 men. A part of this force was sent into action on the eastern front in March. Whether designedly or not, it suffered very heavy casualties. In May further units under Vlasov himself went to the Prague front where they joined the Czechs and turned against the Germans. The commander of a Russian force moving south from Berlin towards Prague proposed joint action with a neighbouring American force, but the American commander refused, and when it became clear that Prague was about to fall to the Russians alone, Vlasov tried to escape to the west. He was caught and hanged by the Russians with nine of his associates. Several thousand of his army were turned over to the Russians by the Americans.

Vlasov was one of those Russians who had imagined that nothing could be worse than Stalin’s rule. Before the Germans undeceived him on this point by their own bestialities he and others who thought like him had welcomed and incited desertions from the Russian forces to the German side. His supreme aim was another Russian revolution, to be achieved if necessary with the help of the Germans (he was never interested in cooperation with the Americans or British who were Stalin’s allies). His crime and ultimately his fate lay in continuing to hold to this course after the Germans had displayed their own beastliness and had moreover become the losing side. He regarded Stalingrad as a defeat. He was therefore a traitor in the strict sense of the word. He was moreover a traitor who found in the end that he had misplaced his trust, so that he had doomed himself to a death without compensations. Like a number of traitors with a cause he is entitled to be remembered as a tragic figure. He was a premature anti-Stalinist whose anti-Stalinism involved aiding the invaders of his country.

In the field the decisive events, after Hitler’s failure to score a knock-out victory in 1941, were the bitter, yard by yard struggle for Stalingrad in the following winter and then the huge tank battles of the Kursk salient in July 1943.

Stalin’s aims for 1942 were to repel Hitler’s central Army Group, relieve Leningrad and recover the Ukraine. These plans, which probably assumed a second front to be opened by his allies in the west that year, were not fulfilled. In January the Russians attacked with determination on all fronts against an enemy who was pitifully ill-equipped for the Russian winter, but Stalin was so over-ambitious that these attacks were damaging without being decisive, and so ruthless that they inflicted on his own armies losses as heavy as those suffered by the Germans. As in the previous year large Russian formations were often surrounded and had to be rescued (or not) by further attacks which detracted from Stalin’s main aim of inflicting a major defeat on the Germans in the central sector. The German armies, although badly battered, remained in being and in March Stalin was compelled to desist. The rest of the year was coloured by the ill-directed exertions of the first quarter which left Stalin without the men or munitions needed for anything but defensive operations. In addition Stalin made a series of serious mistakes. He refused to allow Timoshenko to break off his offensive towards Kharkov in May although it was evident that the Russian attack had been forestalled. Large Russian losses included the capture of 200,000 men. Furthermore, and in spite of convincing evidence to the contrary, Stalin insisted on believing that major German preparations in the southern sector were merely a feint to cover a second attack on Moscow.

This was a complete misreading of Hitler’s intentions, all the more fateful since Hitler, in spite of his disappointments the year before, still held the initiative. His plan was to clean up the Crimea, capture Stalingrad and occupy the Caucasus up to the Turkish border. Thus the main weight of the renewed German attack was to be in the north and south, with the centre remaining relatively static. In the south the programme – the Crimea, Stalingrad, the Caucasus – entailed a number of differing and ultimately diverging operations. The whole of the Crimea was overrun by May except Sebastopol which, having heroically sustained a siege of 250 days, did not fall until July. Manstein’s Eleventh Army, which had won these victories, was then switched to the Leningrad front although Manstein himself would have preferred to cross the straits of Kerch (which run along the eastern shore of the Crimea), strike northward with the sea of Azov on his left, make contact with the forces designated for the capture of Stalingrad and preserve the contacts between these forces (Army Group B) and others (Army Group A) which were heading south-eastward into the Caucasus.

In July 1942 Hitler moved his headquarters to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, whence he had the satisfaction of seeing his armies advance without serious check across the Don to the Volga and to the Caucasus mountains. But these favourable beginnings were the end of Hitler’s joy. Very unwisely Hitler had succumbed to the temptation to attempt simultaneously two operations which he had originally planned to put in motion one after the other and which, the more either of them succeeded, were bound to open a gap between Army Groups B and A, the one making for Stalingrad and the other disappearing right-handed into the Caucasus.

In the air the Luftwaffe was still supreme. Although the Russians had two or three times as many aircraft as the Germans (and four or five times as many fighters), and although they were also receiving American Tomahawks and British Hurricanes, and although the Germans had relinquished some squadrons for the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe was able, when called on to make a maximum effort, to fly as many as 3,000 sorties a day – ten times as many as the larger Russian forces. But on the ground the Russian armies, reorganized, backed by reorganized industries and enjoined by Stalin in an order of the day of 1 July to yield no more ground, met their enemies with a new effectiveness and a new confidence. The German advances slowed down. Army Group A failed to reach the Caucasian oilfields before it had to turn round and fight its way back again. Army Group μ crossed the Don, won a series of engagements in the narrow zone between the easternmost sweep of the Don and the Volga, and reached the Volga in the last days of August. But the capture of Stalingrad, which would put Hitler in command of one of the most important points in the rail and waterways system of the USSR, proved just too much for it.

The battle for Stalingrad has become one of the most celebrated episodes of the war. Its importance was realized at the time. In the summer, as the Germans approached, Stalin relieved Timoshenko who commanded what had become the South-west Front and appointed General V. N. Gordov in his place. In August Zhukov was dispatched to the Front with special powers – which caused, among other things, jealousies and disputes which had to be referred to Stalin. Stalin may have recalled how he had himself been a commissar on this front in 1919 and had attached to himself a group of officers and commissars antagonistic to the supreme warlord, Trotsky: Khruschchev was now unwittingly building a similar group of loyal friends who would stand by him in the decade after Stalin’s death. As German pressure increased the South-west Front was divided into two, confusingly named, new Fronts: the Stalingrad Front, subsequently renamed the Don Front, and the South-east Front, subsequently Stalingrad Front, the latter commanded in turn by Generals A. I. Eremenko and K. K. Rokossovski. But the most famous name on the Russian side was to be that of General V. I. Chuikov, second in command of the Sixty-fourth Army and then picked by Khrushchev on 12 September to command the Sixty-second Army. Chuikov had been an army commander before the war began. He was relegated early in the war but was soon reinstated. He was still an army commander when the war ended. He was ready in criticism of his superiors and sometimes unfair, and like a number of Stalingrad heroes he fancied that too much of the credit for that famous victory was taken after the event by Stalin, Zhukov and to a lesser extent Rokossovski.

Chuikov and the Sixty-second Army were penned into a city which was in the grip of the Germans; all industry within it and all traffic along the Volga were stopped. From the middle of September the city itself was the battleground and its principal buildings, which sometimes changed hands as many as five times in a day, the tactical objectives. The German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus occupied seven eighths of it and twice – in the third week of October and again on 11 November – almost succeeded in overrunning the defenders. The Germans still had a definite superiority in the air. Although their sorties dropped from about 2,000 a day during the autumn to half that figure during the height of the siege, and although the Russian effort was growing, the Luftwaffe was flying about twice as many sorties as the Russians. The Sixty-second Army, inspired by its commander who was always in the thick of the battle, maintained itself by winning back by night ground lost during the day. It was never completely cut off, for it had its back to the river which the Germans failed to control at every point and beyond which was sited all the Russian artillery.

In November the Sixth Army was itself surrounded, when the Russians attacked and defeated the armies on its left and right. This stroke had been planned by the Russian command in September and nervously anticipated by the German generals, but they had been unable to get Hitler to guard against it and when it happened they were taken by surprise. Hitler had dismissed the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Franz Haider (he also took over personal command of Army Group A in the Caucasus from Field Marshal List, who was also dismissed), and replaced him by General Kurt Zeitzler who – although not noted for disagreeing with Hitler – warned him that his forces were dangerously strung out, especially in the Stalingrad sector where the Sixth Army, the spearhead of Army Group B, was worried about its flanks. Hitler refused to withdraw the Sixth Army and abandon the attack in Stalingrad. Instead he tried to buttress it by sending the Rumanian Third and Fourth Armies into positions to the left and right of the Sixth Army and by putting in some Luftwaffe Field Divisions, of whose value the army generals were rightly dubious. Army Group μ consisted therefore of the Sixth Army with a Panzer army (Fourth Panzer) on its right, this German core being flanked on either side by the two Rumanian armies and, on the left, by Italian and Hungarian forces. The Army Group’s contacts with Army Group A to the south were very tenuous. This was the position when the Russians attacked on 19 November (twelve days after the Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria). The Rumanian Third Army was routed at once. So was the Rumanian Fourth Army the next day. There was now a gap between the Sixth Army and the Italians and Hungarians further to the left and a wider gap than ever between Army Groups μ and A. And the Sixth Army, which consisted of twenty-two divisions and 220,000 men, had to be supplied by air or extricated.

The strains of the autumn months of 1942 made Hitler singularly moody and intractable. He stayed at his headquarters conducting the war on paper, refusing to allow his plans and his hopes to be upset by reports of what was actually happening in the field. The German staffs had good intelligence about the Russian forces and their dispositions; their intentions were not difficult to guess. But Hitler, pitting his will against the Russians’ resources, continued to believe that he could prevail by insisting that that was how it was to be. The arguments of his generals failed to persuade him that he must give up the idea of taking Stalingrad and concentrate on saving the Sixth Army. By November the generals, now deeply pessimistic, were reduced to hoping that something would happen to change Hitler’s mind before it was too late, but even after Paulus had been surrounded Hitler found arguments for sticking to his guns: the new Tiger tank would do the trick and meanwhile the Luftwaffe would keep the Sixth Army supplied.

But the Tiger was not yet in service and the Luftwaffe could do nothing of the sort. Goering, confronted with the question whether he could deliver 700 tons a day to the Sixth Army, declared that he could. This irresponsible pledge was partly the result of a successful supply operation earlier in the year to other forces surrounded on the Russian front. This operation, however, had been conducted in much better weather and before the Luftwaffe had had to send squadrons (including Ju. 52 squadrons) from Russia to Africa; and it had cost crippling losses. But Goering preferred to undertake, however vainly, to save the Sixth Army than to incur reproaches for not stepping forward to say he could. The generals at Hitler’s headquarters knew that Goering’s promise was absurd but their protests, muted by fear of the Führer, were passed over. The daily target of 700 tons was reduced to 300, but the Luftwaffe never came anywhere near it. It had no adequate landing grounds near the Sixth Army or within its shrinking perimeter, and the cold, which set in early in November and was accompanied by thick fogs from the middle of the month, made flying extremely hazardous when at all possible and the servicing of aircraft on the ground a torture for frozen mechanics. The lift began on 25 November. On that day and the next sixty-five tons were delivered, on the third nothing. A big effort was made in mid-December but the fog came down again and although a few F.W. 200s continued to drop a few tons on most days until the end, the Luftwaffe’s contribution was wholly ineffectual. The total supplied by drops and landings was 3,295 tons. The Luftwaffe lost 488 machines and 1,000 men.

At the end of November Manstein was given command of Army Group B (renamed Army Group Don) but it was still not clear whether he was to save the Sixth Army by opening an escape route for it to the west or by breaking the Russian ring round it and so enabling it to remain on the Volga. Hitler equivocated. Manstein’s own plan was twofold: an eastward offensive by the Fourth Panzer Army and a simultaneous westward attack by a part of the Sixth Army, leaving however the rest of the Sixth Army still on the Volga; and, at a later stage, a break-out by the whole of the Sixth Army to the west. The operation began on 12 December and the German armour advancing from the west got to within forty miles of the Sixth Army’s position, but nine days later it was halted. Neither Manstein nor – still less, since he was Manstein’s subordinate – Paulus was willing to give the order to the Sixth Army to break out without Hitler’s approval, which they could not get. Without it the first part of Manstein’s plan was pointless and, as the events showed, also impracticable. By mid-December therefore the fate of the Sixth Army was sealed. The Russians, after inflicting further defeats on Italian, Hungarian and German armies north-west of Stalingrad, offered Paulus on 8 January honourable terms of surrender. Hitler made Paulus a Field Marshall and told him to stand his ground.

By this time the city had been turned into something which none of those who fought there had ever imagined and none who survived could ever forget. The closest and bloodiest battle of the war was fought among the stumps of buildings burnt or burning. From afar Stalingrad looked like a furnace and yet inside it men froze. Dogs rushed into the Volga, to drown, rather than endure any longer the perils of the shore. The no less desperate men were reduced to automatons, obeying orders until it came to their turn to die, human only in their suffering. The Germans were on half rations from the end of November. By the middle of January the German zone, which had measured twenty-five miles by twelve when Paulus was first surrounded in November, had been halved. A little later it was cut in two. Again the Russians called for surrender and again Hitler refused to permit it. The final capitulation came on 2 February. Ninety-one thousand survivors, including a Field Marshal and twenty-four generals, were taken captive. The Russians had already taken 16,700 prisoners during the last weeks of the fighting. Some 70,000 Germans died during the siege, many of them from exposure or starvation, some by suicide.

At Stalingrad the Russians first demonstrated the material strength which was to overwhelm the German armies in 1943 and 1944. They concentrated over a million men against German armies which were numerically slightly stronger and, although still inferior in aircraft, they had the measure of the Germans in tanks and guns. Even in aircraft the balance was shifting. A new Russian fighter, the La. 5, made (like the British Mosquito) of wood, came into service and helped the Russians to achieve local air superiority. Although at Stalingrad the Luftwaffe committed 1,000 aircraft – about half its strength in the Russian theatre but diminished in October when Hitler ordered some squadrons to Leningrad – its numerical superiority was beginning to be offset by growing experience, skill and morale on the Russian side and by anxieties about repairs, reserves and replacements on its own. From 1943 onwards the Germans continued to keep between a half and two thirds of the Luftwaffe in the east, but some of its best pilots, newest aircraft and latest equipment were reserved for the defence of the Reich and for other theatres, and the shortage of pilots and aircraft gradually increased to the point where at times new aircraft, even new types, were given to the Rumanian and Hungarian air forces, which had pilots to fly them, while at other times German squadrons were obliged to make do with obsolescent machines. The Russian air force on the other hand was not only growing in quantity and quality but, since it undertook very little strategic long range bombing, was able to devote almost its entire strength to attacking the German armies and their installations and communications.

There was after Stalingrad also a qualitative change in the war in the USSR. The importance of Stalingrad was much more than statistical. This battle destroyed the idea that the German army could not be beaten: here, on the contrary, was defeat unmistakable. The surrender of the Sixth Army was a tremendous psychological as well as military blow to the Germans and an equally powerful boost to Russian morale and to Stalin’s campaign to show that Russia’s great patriotic war could be won. The effect on Hitler was to accelerate his physical and mental decline. In 1942 his speech and handwriting began to show the effects of Parkinson’s disease, a general decay of the nervous system which destroys a man’s coordination and eventually his understanding. A year later he had become a shambling, shaking wreck, pathologically suspicious of his generals, contemptuous of the qualities of his fighting men, driven increasingly to substitute his personal stubbornness for the divisions which he pretended to direct but which were often not really there. He showed at Stalingrad, in catastrophic degree, his inability to accept even the concept of defeat. His astonishing memory and grasp of detail, his energy and quickness, his serious application to the art of war and the way with men which he sometimes displayed – all these things were destroyed, first, by the distortions induced by failure in a mind of terrifying rigidity and irrationality, and then by disease. The nemesis of will was upon him and his people.

The defeats of Army Group μ in the winter of 1942–3 exposed Army Group A to the risk of being bottled up entire in the Caucasus. The Russians planned to advance from the Don to the Donets and then turn about and capture Rostov at the mouth of the Don from the west. This manoeuvre would have established a Russian line from Stalingrad to Rostov, cutting off Army Group A’s line of retreat. The Russian plan was, however, frustrated and the Fourth Panzer Army succeeded in making contact with Army Group A and opened an escape for it, thereby enabling its forces to survive and fight another day. The thaw in March eased the pressure on the Germans who recaptured Kharkov which they had lost a few weeks earlier. Thus the Russian victories, although massive, were not decisive and the Germans were able to regain the initiative and hold much of the Donets basin. This, if anything, was the Sixth Army’s posthumous reward. But the losses of the German armies could not be replaced; after the middle of 1943 the eastern fronts had even to surrender units for Italy, the Balkans and the west, and by the end of that year thirty divisions – 15 per cent of those on the Russian fronts – had been disbanded for want of replacements to fill the gaps in their ranks.

As a result of the fighting in February and March 1943 the Russians held Kursk, a hundred miles south of Orel and a hundred miles north of Kharkov, both of which cities remained in German hands. The Russian position was therefore a huge bulge extending westward from Kursk for seventy miles and measuring some hundred miles from north to south at its eastern end. After some hesitation Stalin decided to wait for Hitler to attack first. By this time his air reconnaissance had greatly improved his intelligence about German dispositions and he was also receiving valuable information from an infiltrator in German headquarters and from the spy ring in Switzerland called Lucy which had excellent contacts in Berlin and elsewhere and provided him with the date chosen by Hitler for his attack.

Hitler’s aim was to re-establish German mastery and morale by eliminating the Kursk salient. The German attack was launched on 5 July by Kluge in the north and Manstein in the south with a combined force of a million men and 2,700 tanks. The Luftwaffe, despite its commitments in other theatres, was able to fly 3,000 sorties a day and Hitler hoped that after cutting off the Russian armies in the bulge he would be able to turn about and dash for Moscow, 200 miles north-east of Orel. On the Russian side two Fronts, commanded by Rokossovski and Vatutin, were backed by a reserve Front under Konev which had been constituted in their rear. The Russian armies were plentifully supplied by Russian industry, and although the Russian Marshals had somewhat fewer tanks than their opponents, the Russian air forces were for the first time able to put many more aircraft into the air than the Luftwaffe. Russian field intelligence was detailed and accurate.

The ensuing battles in the Kursk salient were the main encounter of the war between the Russian and German armies and they were astonishingly short. The German attack in the north was held from the beginning and by 10 July Kluge was forced onto the defensive, partly by the weight of Rokossovski’s artillery and the effectiveness of his anti-tank weapons, and partly in anticipation of a Russian counter-attack on his left flank. The Russians also used air to ground rockets which, although not much more destructive than other weapons, were more demoralizing. In the south Manstein was initially more successful and Konev’s reserves had to be called upon to help Vatutin. The result was the biggest tank battle of the war. By 12 July it was a clear Russian victory. The German offensive had failed. The Russians counter-attacked, took Orel and Kharkov and extended the fighting along the whole front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their gains included Kiev which fell to them in November.

The battles for the Kursk salient cost Hitler half a million men and when they failed, all possibility of avoiding total defeat had gone. The rest was retreat. The Russian armies, under the meticulously competent overall direction of Stalin (who achieved a more effective relationship with his generals than Hitler did) now outnumbered the Germans. The German Tiger tank, which had appeared in the previous autumn, and the Panther, which made its first appearance in these battles, failed to give Hitler the decisive superiority in the tank war which he had hoped for and which had been eluding him ever since 1941. His Tiger II, first used in 1944, was too late to affect the issue. The Russians, with the heavy Joseph Stalin tank, the medium T 34 (which had reached units just in time in 1941) and the light Æ 70, proved themselves at least the equals of the Germans in quality, and in 1942 Russian production outstripped German. The Russians were great war builders, the peers – given the circumstances – of the Americans. From 1943 their annual production of armoured fighting vehicles (that is to say, tanks, armoured vehicles and assault guns) was around 30,000. In Germany, where after Stalingrad Hitler had charged Guderian and Speer jointly to overhaul and increase the output of armoured fighting vehicles, production reached a peak of 19,000 in 1944.

Despite defeat Hitler maintained his refusal to sanction any withdrawal, rationalizing his stubborn strategy by his need to keep Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary in the war and Turkey from joining his enemies – none of which he succeeded in doing as he was pushed back from the Dnieper to the Bug to the Dniester. A fresh Russian winter offensive, beginning in December, relieved Leningrad early in 1944, cut off a German army in the Crimea and brought the Russians to the Carpathians and into Rumania. As his entire southern front collapsed Hitler dismissed Manstein and other senior commanders.

The Russians paused before beginning a new series of attacks in the summer. These began on 22 June – the third anniversary of the launching of Barbarossa – in White Russia where the German Army Group Centre had been instructed to hold and protect Lithuania, East Prussia and northern Poland. Hitler was deceived into expecting that the main Russian attacks would be in the north and south rather than the centre. Army Group Centre was first split into two and then destroyed in a couple of weeks. The German losses were around 400,000 and this huge defeat left Poland and eventually Germany itself defenceless. In the north Army Group North, defending Latvia and Estonia, was cut off as the Russians advanced to the sea west of Riga. In the autumn it was pressed back into the Courland peninsula where it survived until the general capitulation. In Finland a Russian attack in June led to an attempt by the Finns to negotiate peace and a visit by Ribbentrop to Helsinki to stop them. President Ryti gave Ribbentrop his personal promise not to make peace but this was a trick to enable Finland to get German aid for a few more weeks and then come to terms with the Russians, as occasion served, by changing president. In August President Ryti was replaced by Field Marshal Mannerheim and an armistice was signed in September. Finland had to pay an indemnity, lease the naval base of Porkkala, ten miles from Helsinki, to the USSR for fifty years, and provide the Russians with other military facilities so long as the war against Germany lasted. In the farthest north the Russians forced back German troops until they crossed into Norway and operations were suspended by the weather.

The Russian victories in the summer of 1944 posed a grim problem for the Polish government in exile in London and its forces in Poland, the Home Army (A K). They regarded the advancing Russians with at least as much dread and hatred as the defeated Germans. The Russians’ winter offensive of 1943–4 had carried them across Poland’s pre-war frontier and the ensuing summer offensive across the dividing line fixed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The commander of the AK, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, first instructed his men to harass the Germans and neither attack the Russians nor be drawn into the Russian army. He later ordered them to occupy towns abandoned by the Germans and, if absolutely necessary, to defend themselves against the Russians rather than allow themselves to be evicted from their positions. These later instructions amounted to a recognition of the fact that the Polish army might be required to fight the Russian army in order to assert the Polishness of Poland’s eastern territories. The Russians for their part declared these territories to be Russian, refused to recognize the AK as a regular combatant force (as the United States and Great Britain did), arrested AK commanders in their westward progress and sponsored in July the Polish Committee of National Liberation (the Lublin Committee) which at the end of the year they recognized as the provisional government of Poland. In this situation the London government decided to play a major card. In order to gain control of the Polish capital before the Russians, and to prevent its rivals within Poland from taking the lead in opposing the enemy, it ordered Warsaw to rise. In doing so it gravely underestimated the German opposition. It also failed to notify either its western allies or the Russians, from all of whom it would quickly be obliged to beg desperately for help. Its 20,000 armed insurgents had ammunition for only seven days. When the battle ended half of them had been killed as well as some 200,000 of Warsaw’s population of one million. The survivors were transported to the extermination camps. Nine tenths of the city itself was destroyed.

Preliminary signals for the rising were sent out by radio in the last week of July and the rising began on 1 August. It lasted two months. It was met and defeated by the Germans with an appalling barbarity, particularly on the part of the SS which used half-crazed gangs of criminals and prisoners of war (notably the SS Kaminski brigade) to gas whole clutches of people trapped in the city’s underground workings and to burn others alive after sousing them with petrol.

At Teheran in the previous November Roosevelt and Churchill had tacitly accepted that the imminent invasion of Poland by the Red Army left them with few weapons to gainsay Stalin’s plans for post-war Poland. The Poles’ hope that Churchill would send a British army to Poland was no more than a measure of their political incomprehension and Churchill, with mounting irritation, failed repeatedly both before and after the rising to get the London Poles to see that they must take the Russian victories into account. At Teheran the three leaders agreed in imprecise terms that Poland should be shifted westward to an area between the Curzon line in the east and the river Oder in the west (but with the city of Lvov switched to the Russian side of the Curzon line). At this time Stalin was, if only for tactical reasons, willing to arrange some cooperation within Poland with the AK and to allow the London Poles a minor position in the new embryonic Polish government; but he was plainly determined not to allow the London Poles, whom he rootedly distrusted, to restore pre-war Poland and become its government, nor could he be forced to do so except possibly by an extreme Anglo-American threat tantamount to the determination of the anti-German alliance.

The stronger Stalin’s military position became, the weaker was his need to cooperate with the AK or accommodate the London Poles, while his distrust was accentuated by Polish attempts to get arms by air from the west – arms which, in Stalin’s view, were designed for use against his forces rather than Hitler’s. On 21 July he unveiled the Polish National Committee (the Lublin Committee) which was to be as subservient to him as the London Poles were hostile. At Churchill’s prompting Mikolajczyk flew to Moscow where he found Stalin obdurate and engaged in fruitless wrangles with the Lublin Poles as Warsaw’s sacrifice began.

That the London Poles should have failed to take Moscow into their confidence about the rising is hardly surprising since it was in large part an anti-Russian venture. That Stalin should prove unhelpful is no more surprising. He disliked most Poles and most distrusted the London Poles and the A K. He was certainly irritated and possibly embarrassed by their sudden and unheralded initiative which happened to come at a moment of strategic debate about the next phase of his general offensive. He had some justification for his repeated accusation that the rising was reckless. He may have been expecting to take Warsaw himself by the end of the first week in August but he was disconcerted by local German successes which dislocated his planning. General V. I. Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad and now serving on the central front under Marshal Rokossovski, later testified that German air attacks were intense in the Warsaw area, that the Russians lacked bridging equipment vital for forcing the passage of the Vistula and that Rokossovski believed (erroneously, as it turned out) that the Germans had an armoured force east of the Vistula which might attack southward and endanger any Russian positions established across the river. Finally, Stalin may be credited with some ignorance of the barbarous nature of the German suppression of the rising. Nevertheless his refusal to help or to facilitate Anglo-American aid is one of the grisliest examples of the triumph of calculation over humanity in the history of Realpolitik. Stalin had some excuse for some inactivity at the beginning of the rising, but thereafter it is impossible to avoid the judgement that Stalin saw the rising as an opportunity and took it. The rising played into his hands. The responsibility of the London Poles for what happened to Warsaw is great. So is Stalin’s.

The London Poles had asked for and been refused Anglo-American air and parachutist support before the rising began. Such aid, they were told, would be too costly without Russian cooperation. This judgement was proved correct. From Italy Air Marshal Sir John Slessor reported that, in the absence of permission to land in Russian-held territory and refuel (which was not granted), operations to Poland were so impossibly dangerous and comparatively useless that he would not undertake them unless ordered to. He made, however, an exception in favour of a Polish squadron under his command. It suffered very heavy losses. The R A F and South African Air Force later joined in a desperate attempt to supply the insurgents and, with the Poles, dropped 233 tons. When the Poles pleaded for direct and massive American air drops to supplement this inevitably meagre effort, the Russians refused (15 August) to allow the aircraft to land at Russian airfields before returning to base. At one point Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that aircraft should land on Russian airfields without Russian permission and see what happened, but Roosevelt was not willing to go as far as that. On 10 September Russian ground forces made a successful attack on the suburb of Praga. They then began an attempt to cross the Vistula, established a number of bridgeheads but were forced by the Germans to retreat. On 13 September Russian aircraft began dropping food and ammunition to the Poles in Warsaw. At least fifty tons – perhaps considerably more – were dropped, most of it accurately but in damaged condition because parachutes were not used. At the same time Stalin lifted his veto on the use of Russian airfields by the Americans and on 18 September the US Air Force undertook a single daylight operation with 110 Flying Fortresses, most of whose drops fell wide of the mark. By 2 October there was nobody left in the city to save or help.

Later that month, in Moscow, Churchill tried to persuade Stalin to accept the revised Curzon line as a de facto arrangement to be reviewed at a peace conference but Stalin would have none of it. His armies were now not merely in Poland but, since mid-August, on German soil too, and Finland and Rumania were suing for armistices. Churchill’s efforts to persuade Mikolajczyk that all these things were part and parcel of Poland’s future fate led to angry scenes between the two men, as the one berated the other for betraying the undertakings given by Great Britain to Poland in 1939. By the time the three leaders met for the second and last time at Yalta in February 1945 Poland was completely occupied by Stalin’s forces. Warsaw, held by the Germans for three months after the defeat of the rising, had just been entered by the Russians, Polish contingents under their command leading the way. At Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt continued their expostulations about the composition of the new Polish government but they held even fewer cards than they had held at Teheran: Stalin was in Poland and they were not. The AK had been dissolved by the Russian winter offensive and in March seventeen non-communist Polish leaders, proceeding under safe conduct and at Russian invitation to meet a Russian general, were dispatched to Moscow where all were imprisoned and some died.

Upon recovering the Ukraine the Russians entered Rumania as well as Poland and posed an increasingly awkward problem for Germany’s other allies: Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. These allies had already seen the writing on the wall. The German defeats in 1943 and the capitulation of Italy in the same year had set them thinking about how to secure their future in a Europe which was going to be dominated by the USSR in place of Germany.

In Rumania Ion Antonescu’s attempt to concert action with Mussolini in 1943 was fruitless. He was then recaptivated by Hitler and his talk of secret weapons but in August 1944 he was dismissed by King Michael after a stormy interview. Attempts to secure western help against the Russian wrath to come were fruitless, for there was nothing the western allies could do for the Rumanians and they were left to make the best terms they could. The king broke off relations with Germany and made contact with the Communist Party (which had been outlawed before the war). After a short period of confusion, during which Bucharest was bombed by the Germans and the German Ambassador committed suicide and his colleagues disappeared for good into the Soviet Union, a new and essentially communist government was installed under Petru Groza. Rumania was required to ratify its territorial losses to the USSR in 1940 but was promised the return of what it had lost to Hungary (but not what it had lost to Bulgaria); it was also required to pay an indemnity to the USSR and fight against Germany.

In Bulgaria, which was at war with Great Britain and the United States but not with the Soviet Union, the government declared itself neutral but failed none the less to stave off a Russian invasion and declaration of war. Bulgaria, under a new government, was compelled in September to declare war on Germany. In the same month Russian troops entered Yugoslavia. They shared with Tito’s partisans in the capture of Belgrade in October and then retired a few days later.

The Slovaks, like the Poles, rose against the Germans as the Russian armies approached. Slovakia was an ally of Germany and a co-belligerent but in October 1943 an entire Slovak division had come over to the Russians and in the same period partisan warfare flared up inside eastern Slovakia. In 1944 the country was in a state of general revolt. National committees emerged and commandeered factories and the property of collaborators. An army 65,000 strong engaged the Germans. It hoped to be joined by the Russian army and there is still controversy about why it was not. Marshal Konev seems to have been approached by Slovak officers with a plan for a rising in conjunction with a Russian attack, and to have recommended Stalin to adopt this plan. A Russian advance began early in September. But the Russians had to cross the formidable Carpathians against stiff German opposition and it was the middle of October before they set foot on Slovak soil. By this time the Germans, who had been forewarned of the rising, had defeated it and burned sixty villages and filled at least 200 mass graves with slaughtered Slovaks. The Russians later complained that they had been given too little advance notice of the actual date fixed for the rising. They may also have been sceptical about Slovak estimates of the importance of the operation.

In Hungary the Regent, Admiral Horthy, Europe’s senior head of state (he had been one of the leaders of the movement which overthrew Bela Kun’s communist regime in 1919), was forced by events to try to abandon the German alliance which had served him well for a number of years. He had joined it because he belonged to a small, nostalgic and illiberal ruling caste for whom anti-Bolshevism was an overriding issue. He had benefited from the two awards of 1939 and 1940 which had given him chunks of his neighbours’ territories, he had been happy to help Hitler invade Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1941 and he had been gratified to find that Hitler did not want to oust him in favour of the leader of the local equivalent of the Nazi Party – Ferenc Szalasi of the Arrow Cross (who wanted even more of his neighbours’ territories than Hitler was prepared to concede). Up to 1944 Horthy tried to persuade himself that Hitler, after abandoning the Balkans, might succeed in holding the Carpathians and Transylvania and so keep the Russians away from central Europe, but the impending collapse of Rumania showed him that he had no choice and he prepared – too late – to make his escape from the war, even at the price of turning to the communist USSR.

For Hitler, however, Hungary had exceptional strategic significance. He had to hold it so long as he had troops in south-eastern Europe and even if these were safely withdrawn the loss of Hungary would set the Russians well on the way into Vienna. He therefore took over Hungary (thereby initiating anti-Jewish razzias) and sent Otto Skorzeny, the saviour of Mussolini, to kidnap Horthy. Skorzeny first kidnapped the Regent’s son and then, in a singularly bold escapade, seized the citadel of Budapest with one car and four tanks. The Regent escaped but immediately afterwards resigned and was taken to Germany under guard. The Germans installed an Arrow Cross government under Szalasi, who was however an incompetent visionary and was hated by the Hungarian army. At the end of 1944 Budapest was beleaguered by Marshal Malinovski. The Germans tried to relieve it but failed, and the city surrendered on 12 February 1945. In this case the Russians made no effort to restrain their troops, who proceeded to eliminate the ancien régime in the most direct and gruesome manner. Horthy’s long reign ended, as it had begun, with terror and bloodshed, and Hungary virtually lost its independence too.

The Russo-German campaigns were the most terrible war that has ever been waged. The numbers of the dead were huge. The great sieges of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Sebastopol recalled the war-making of other times but the field campaigns were something new. They were the acme of (pre-nuclear) industrial warfare. The mechanized armies of tanks and workshops were industrial plants in motion attended by hundreds of thousands of technicians. These ponderous devastators, made of steel and moved by oil, churned up the countryside and at intervals blazed away at each other, leaving the land covered with warped steel, stinking oil and corpses. In between these armadas men in various kinds of armoured or unarmoured transport, and sometimes still on foot, covered great distances because they were winning or losing or simply because they were required to shift themselves laterally from one part of the front to another. Sometimes there were long lulls, passages of normalcy embedded in senselessness and horror, and if the weather was fine, men might go through the motions of ordinary life and, with their singing and their horseplay, behave as though they were on an excursion rather than a highly organized killing. But then for many months there would be slush and mud and clothes never really dry, or the intense cold which made it dangerous to take off a glove. The most remarkable thing about this war was that, on both sides, men went on fighting it for nearly four years.

Part of the price demanded by Stalin was the repatriation to the USSR, after the war, of all those who had given aid to the Germans and were captured, or could be tracked down and apprehended, in the allied sphere of operations. That deserters and persons who had served the enemy should be tried and sentenced by the state which they had betrayed was nothing new. What was new was a situation in which such traitors should be apprehended not by their own state but by an allied state. This situation raised questions, juridical and political, which gave rise to embarrassment and heartsearching when the war ended and, a generation later, to bitter controversy. The surrender to the Russians of Soviet citizens who had put on German uniforms did not, during the war, seem outrageous or even unusual, and the case for doing so was fortified by two things: many of the persons concerned were known to have behaved with a brutality exceptional even in so awful a war, and there was on the British side an awareness that the advancing Russian armies would soon have in their power British citizens liberated from German prisoner-of-war camps. All these circumstances contributed to the agreement, finally concluded in 1944 and affirmed at Yalta, to exchange all nationals accused of desertion or treason. It was obvious that the Soviet victims of this agreement would receive harsher treatment than their western counterparts and might well be shot without trial, but these surmises were deemed to be irrelevant (as pertaining to the internal jurisdiction of another state) or, if not irrelevant because outrageous, then so impossible to reconcile with the political imperatives of the alliance as to be best forgotten. What was overlooked at the time was that the captured Soviet citizens were in law the nationals of a state with which neither Great Britain nor the United States had an extradition treaty, so that there was no sound juridical basis for their repatriation, however justified the USSR might be in treating them as criminals once they were within its jurisdiction. (Persons who had not become legally Soviet citizens after 1917 were not covered by the agreement.)

Decades later attempts were made to stigmatize this agreement as a piece of political cynicism or disgraceful kowtowing to Stalin. When the war ended British and American tribunals lent over backwards to rule that individuals sought by the Soviet authorities were not liable to repatriation because they were not Soviet citizens as defined by the agreement, while in the field many fingered for repatriation to the USSR were encouraged to jump off the backs of lorries or trains and take to the woods. Nevertheless appalling scenes took place as those destined for repatriation, aware of what was in store for them, committed or tried to commit suicide; and in the general post-war chaos some persons not covered by the agreement (mostly Ukrainians) were wrongly included among the repatriated and so presumably consigned to penal settlements or death.