A World at Arms (57 page)

Mussolini personally joined Hitler in reviewing some of these troops when he visited his headquarters at the end of August. He hoped that Italian participation in what he recognized was the main project of the whole war for Hitler would assure his country a significant role in the peace settlement, which he expected to be dominated by the Germans. Quickly recognizing that the campaign would last far longer than the Germans-or he himself–had anticipated, he soon offered additional forces for the coming year and saw this offer accepted. While thus showing some insight into the reality of the campaign, he had no sense for the realities of his own country and the situation of his soldiers. They fought hard under difficult conditions with wretched equipment, impossible supply lines reaching all the way back to Italy, and no goal even remotely visible as they quickly lost their initial enthusiasm. The eagerness with which Mussolini squandered the lives of his soldiers only contributed to the further weakening of the Fascist regime at home.

It was ironically in part to ward off Italian aspirations at domination over the Axis puppet state of Croatia established on the ruins of pre-war Yugoslavia that the government of that new creation offered to send troops to the Eastern Front. Such a contingent might increase German interest in the slaughterhouse the Ustasha, the extreme Croatian nationalist organization, was organizing,
⁵¹
provide them with German equipment, and also serve as protection against Italy. The Germans accepted this unsolicited offer of cannon fodder for a front where the members of the Croatian regiment fought and died with few ever noticing this drop in the sea of blood.
⁵²

Minimal groups of volunteers were recruited elsewhere, especially in France,
⁵³
but a full division, called the Blue Division and carried on German rolls as the 250th, was sent by Franco’s Spain. Seen as an outlet for Spanish anti-Bolshevik enthusiasm, a form of repayment to Germany for her aid in the Spanish civil war, and as a reinsurance against German demands for entering the war, the division came to include some 45,000 Spanish volunteers. Some of them may have been either amused or aghast when greeted by a German air force band playing the wrong national anthem–that of their Republican civil war opponents–but they soon found little amusement in the desperate fighting on the northern section of the Eastern Front where they were committed.
⁵⁴
In subsequent years, the division would be at the center of controversies within Spain and between Spain and the British and
Americans, but until 1944 Spanish soldiers fought hard alongside Germans on the approaches to Leningrad.
⁵⁵

The Germans had wanted the participation of Finland and Romania. Sweden and Turkey would have been welcomed but both declined suggestions that they participate.
⁵⁶
The other partners to the fighting were accepted without initial enthusiasm. The disasters suffered by the German army in the winter of 1941–42 greatly increased Berlin’s interest in and pressure for enlarged contributions by her allies and satellites for the heavy fighting expected in 1942; it is to these disasters inflicted by a resurgent Red Army that we must now turn.

The big Soviet counter-offensive of December 1941 came at the end of a series of military defeats which in their size and extent have no known parallel in the history of warfare. If the Germans had miscalculated their Soviet victims, the Soviet leadership had made different but equally enormous miscalculations. If German leaders had imagined the Russians to be inferior Slavs directed by incompetent Jewish Bolsheviks who could neither organize nor lead effective fighting forces, Stalin had been similarly blinded by his own ideological preconceptions. Looking toward the conquest of markets and investments as the tools of monopoly capitalism, the Germans certainly had plenty of prospects for booty elsewhere, especially after their speedy victory over the other capitalist countries of the West. Hitler might drive a harder bargain now that he was at a peak of strength; and since the Germans had not responded to the Soviet offer to join the Tripartite Pact, they obviously wanted even more than the Soviet Union had promised in the new economic treaty of January 1941 or offered in the spring months of 1941; but in Soviet eyes they had no reason to risk a two-front war.

Only this set of views, combined with a recognition of the horrendous danger in which Soviet policy had placed the country now isolated in a Europe from which it had helped Germany drive all others, can explain the determination with which Stalin rejected all warnings of German plans for an attack and insisted into the early hours of the invasion that the Red Army hold its fire and not allow the Germans to stage a provocation. For months the American government, which had early received inside information on the German plans, had been trying to warn the Soviet Union of what was coming, and in considerable detail. For months Soviet intelligence and diplomatic sources had been providing analogous warning. In the spring, Churchill had tried to caution the Russians, and
although British Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps botched delivery of the key message, clear indications had come from London. In the last hours before the attack several deserters from the German army revealed the imminence of invasion. Nothing could shake the Soviet leader. In spite of the recent record of German attacks on neutrals without prior demands or warnings, he was certain that in this case Hitler would act differently.
⁵⁷

The disaster which overtook the Red Army and air force on June 22 was compounded by three other factors. In the first place, the purges had decimated the officer corps of army, navy, and air force. In the spring and summer of 1940, as the Russians evaluated first their own war against Finland and then the great German victories in the West, some 4000 officers who had survived in labor camps or disgrace were returned to duty and many others were rapidly promoted. But there was little time to train the officers who had replaced those slaughtered in prior years, and the whole procedure was not likely to induce self-confidence in the officers’ corps. The new models of airplanes and of tanks, primarily the T-34 and KV-I, were just beginning to come off the assembly lines and there had been practically no time for their effective integration into the army.

The second contributing factor was a faulty set of defense plans which played directly into the hands of the Germans. Not only had defense in depth and preparations for partisan warfare been neglected because these were seen to be defeatist, but the major defensive field works and positions along the 1939 border of the Soviet Union had been denuded for a concentration of Soviet forces in the newly acquired territories. Spread over these areas without adequate communications and supplies or new field positions, the Red Army was positioned in a manner and in locations best suited for the German plan to cut through, surround, and destroy the forces facing them. The annexations, ironically, contributed to the initial defeats rather than assisting in the defense of the country.
⁵⁸

The third factor grows out of the combination of the one just mentioned with the incapacity of Stalin to react quickly and reasonably to the German onslaught in the early hours of June 22, 1941. Unable or unwilling to believe what was happening, Moscow provided no useful orders or guidance to its desperately fighting forces on that crucial day. It took until noon for the government to announce to its people that war had started, and the orders given that day culminated in the evening in a directive which completely unrealistically called for a large series of counter-offensives to drive back the German army immediately. This meant that Soviet armored forces were committed to combat in hasty
and ill-prepared battles in which heavy losses accomplished little (with a minimal exception in the south) except to weaken the Red Army’s ability to develop a coherent defensive strategy.
⁵⁹

Soviet resistance continued in spite of frightful losses in the first six weeks of fighting. With a repeatedly reorganized command structure, generally referred to as the Stavka from the first word in its Russian names, Stalin tried to rally his forces by a combination of exhortation to the public and the army with ruthlessness and improvisation toward the command structure. Unlike the French, the Russians were not completely demoralized by the initial German victories; orderly if rushed movements of forces to the front or reluctantly ordered pull-backs began to replace confusion. In spite of great losses in casualties and prisoners, Soviet forces, often supported by literally tens of thousands of civilians, hastily threw together new defensive positions and regrouped even when these in turn were pierced. In the process they steadily inflicted losses on the Germans, who could ill afford them, and gave them some real shocks with their heavy tanks, which the Germans could not yet match with a comparable tank of their own and which were almost invulnerable to most anti-tank guns as well. The greater success of the Soviet southern front in holding the Germans combined with the massive sending of reinforcements in stabilizing the center in July and early August.

Refusing to listen to Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov’s warning of a German push to encircle the Red Army in the Ukraine, Stalin replaced him on July 29 with the ailing Boris Shaposhnikov as Chief of the General Staff with General Vasilevsky as deputy. The catastrophic defeat around Kiev in the south followed, but in the north a combination of Soviet generalship and tenacity with German hesitation in view of Hitler’s plans to destroy Leningrad physically made it possible to hold the German onrush there in September. On the Central front, however, the resumption of German offensives in early October destroyed the laboriously rebuilt Soviet defenses and seemed to open the road to Moscow. By mid-October, as much of the government was evacuated from the capital, the Red Army with 2.3 million men had reached its smallest size in World War II,
⁶⁰
and weapons, especially the new tanks as well as the excellent katyusha multiple rocket launchers, were in short supply. Experienced officers were now so scarce that more were released from labor camps, and increasingly the numbered armies were reorganized to direct smaller numbers of divisions directly without corps staffs at all.

Much of the industrial and agricultural capacity of the country had been lost to the German occupiers. The available supply of workers and potential soldiers had also been drastically reduced as a result of the
German occupation of so much of the country. But the Russians not only held on grimly before Moscow right after driving the Germans out of Tikhvin in the north and Rostov in the south, they were preparing a substantial counter-offensive against the German army which was heaving itself forward at the end of its offensive strength, had no substantial reserves whatever, and believed that the Soviet Union too had no further reserves which might be thrown into battle. Not since their belief that an invincible air force could quickly crush England in the late summer of 1940 had the Germans been so wrong in their understanding of the situation.

The Soviet Union was in a position to launch a major counter–offensive for several reasons. The holding of a front, whatever the difficulties and the costs, was obviously the most important one. Secondly, in the territory not occupied by the Germans, the control system of the Soviet state functioned, if not efficiently, certainly effectively–a point of special importance by contrast both with what had happened to the Tsarist regime and the Provisional Government in World War I and with what the Germans had confidently expected to happen in World War II. In the third place, the Soviet Union had initiated major industrial development in the Urals and portions of Central Asia and Siberia during the 1930s; and while these were by no means able to make up for the losses at the front and the loss of industrial capacity in the West, they did provide a substantial base for continued industrial production. Furthermore, there were certain industrial areas in the European U.S.S.R. either still functioning without German interference, as in the Gorki and Stalingrad areas, or in spite of German bombing and shelling, as around Moscow and even in Leningrad. In addition, a massive program of evacuating industrial equipment along with technical specialists had rescued substantial industrial capacity from destruction or seizure, and was now leading to the reestablishment of the evacuated plants in secure areas, frequently in the vicinity of other factories.
⁶¹
The remaining capacity of the Soviet Union to produce the needed weapons and other equipment was therefore far greater than the Germans had ever imagined, even if there were still desperate shortages only slowly beginning to be remedied.

Two additional factors contributed to the survival and revival of Soviet military power in the last critical months of 1941. The decision of Japan to strike south against Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, rather than north against the Soviet Union which was discussed in the preceding chapter, came to be known in Moscow. Much credit for this has been accorded to Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy in Japan whose informants had apprised him of the Japanese choice long before the police
arrest of October 18, 1941, ended his career in Soviet intelligence.
⁶²
In view of Stalin’s reluctance to believe agent reports about the imminence of a German invasion, it is by no means clear what role the messages from Tokyo played in the decisions reached in Moscow, but it is doubtful that a retrospective recognition of the accuracy of the Sorge ring’s warnings before the German attack lent added credibility to its subsequent assertions that the Japanese had decided not to attack the Soviet Union.

Only blown espionage networks make the news, and there may well have been other ways in which Japanese preparations to strike in the south came to Soviet attention in the period July-September 1941. Furthermore, it was surely clear to Soviet intelligence that there simply was no massive Japanese building up of troops and supplies in Manchuria, an obvious necessity for Japan if it had planned to attack the Soviet Union, in view of the earlier defeats she had suffered at Soviet hands. Whatever the cause, the decision was made in Moscow in early October to begin a major replacement of Soviet units in the Far East by newly raised, less well equipped and trained divisions. The last stages of the defense of Moscow already saw the first Siberian divisions in action, but more were on the way and could be included in the planned Soviet counter-offensives. At the same time that these soldiers, many of them battle hardened in prior fighting against the Japanese, were now available for employment against the tiring Germans, replacements sent to the Far East kept the paper strength of the Red Army there high enough to discourage any Japanese change of mind.