Barbarossa (8 page)

[Vyacheslav M. Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister 1939-52. A
convinced Stalinist disgraced by Khrushchev after the 20th Party
Congress.

Marshal K. E. Voroshilov, an early member of the Communist Party
(1903), fought with distinction in the civil war. Commissar for
Defence 1934-40. Commanded Leningrad armies 1941 (see Ch. 6). Removed
from operational command 1942 and held various ceremonial posts until
disgraced by Khrushchev 1959.

G. M. Malenkov, successful career in security and political sides
of the military organisation, 1920-41. An intimate of Stalin's;
succeeded him briefly as Premier after Stalin's death. Ousted by
Khrushchev and Bulganin, and branded as "anti-Party" at
20th Congress.

L. P. Beria, Chief of the NKVD 1935-52. Circumstances of death
mysterious, but believed to have been shot on Khrushchev's orders,
the only member of the anti-Party group to be "liquidated."]

Subordinate to this was the
Stavka
, a kind of GHQ.
Nominally a "committee of equals," the
Stavka
comprised eight army officers, with four commissars (among whom was
Bulganin) to keep an eye on them; in fact, administrative control of
the
Stavka
was in the hands of the Chief of Staff, Marshal
Shaposhnikov, and his deputy, General Zhukov, both of whom consulted
directly with Stalin. Neither GOKO nor the
Stavka
impeded the
direct and autocratic sovereignty of Stalin himself, nor could they
diminish the power of Beria and the NKVD, whose dossiers and firing
squads, reaching along the web of commissars and "political
education officers," were what kept the Army in line. They had
been introduced in wartime in an attempt to revive the Red Army from
the lethargic and apprehensive torpor into which it had fallen in the
period following the great purges of 1937-38.

The high point of the Red Army's prestige and influence can be
fixed at 22nd September, 1935, when a decree introduced formal
distinctions and marks of rank to its officers. Majors and above were
granted immunity from civil arrest, and the political commissars were
obliged from that time on to pass the exams of the normal military
school. And at the pinnacle, to flaunt this new professionalism, were
created five "Marshals of the Soviet Union." These were
Blücher, the "Emperor of the Far East"; Yegorov and
Tukhachevski; and those two sly and durable toadies of Stalin's,
Budënny and Voroshilov.

Among the marshals Tukhachevski had stood paramount. And in the
year following the September Decree he was allowed to travel
extensively in Western Europe. On his tour Tukhachevski had behaved
with that particular indiscretion which seems, unless vigorously and
continuously suppressed, to be a national characteristic. He had
acted at the same time the part of diplomat, roving military attaché,
and socialite. He wined and dined with Madame Tabouis, and she quoted
him in her column; he made contact with General Miller, the head of
the Tsarist officers in exile.

[Madame Tabouis was a journalist who moved freely in Parisian high
society in the 1930's. She appears to have combined with equal
facility the role of
femme fatale
, procuress, and oracle (she
also dabbled in astrology), and tidbits of information derived from
the resulting intimacies were passed on in her column as revelations,
or "predictions."]

The Germans he lectured that ". . . if it came to war,
Germany would not be meeting the old Russia." Although
qualifying his overtures with the formal disclaimer, "We are
Communists, and you have need not to forget that we must and will
remain Communist," Tukhachevski went on ". . . if Germany
adopted a different position, nothing need stand in the way of
further Soviet-German collaboration—if both countries enjoyed
their friendship and political relations as in the past, they could
dictate peace to the world."

To the French, on the other hand, Tukhachevski declared that he
"would like to see an intensification of the relations between
the French and the Red Army." He spent a week as guest of the
French General Staff, and at the end boasted to Gamelin (apropos of
ordering new equipment), "As for me, I get all I ask for."

What he was asking for, in the strictly colloquial sense,
Tukhachevski was shortly about to receive. For Death was already
standing at his shoulder, as it was for more than half of his senior
colleagues. Less than a year after Tukhachevski's return the first
cloud appeared in the sky, which immediately began to darken with
nightmare speed. On 28th April, 1937, an article in
Pravda
on
the necessity for the Red Army man "to master politics as well
as techniques" and the assertion that the Red Army existed "
to
fight the internal as well as the external enemy
" carried
implications that were sinister in the extreme. Stalin had decided
that the time had come when the Army was to be purged, in conformity
with the ruthless pattern which had been set the previous year, when
the "old guard" was driven out of the Party and shot; that
the certainty of political reliability was more important than the
risk of a loss of martial efficiency.

There is also some evidence that the Russian dictator had become
alarmed by developments in Spain, where the Red Army contingent
fighting against Franco (besides acquiring valuable tactical
experience) was beginning to show its teeth in conflict with the
members of the NKVD who were attached to it.

Whatever Stalin's motives, and whether or not he intended to go as
far as he did, the final figures were staggering. Only Budënny
and Voroshilov survived among the marshals. Out of eighty members of
the 1934 Military Soviet only five were left in September 1938. All
eleven Deputy Commissars for Defence were eliminated. Every commander
of a military district (including replacements of the first
"casualties") had been executed by the summer of 1938.
Thirteen out of fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven out of
eighty-five corps commanders, 110 out of 195 divisional commanders,
220 out of 406 brigade commanders, were executed. But the greatest
numerical loss was borne in the Soviet officer corps from the rank of
colonel downward and extending to company commander level.

Before the purge the Red Army had been a vigorous and perceptive
body, abundantly equipped and alert for new ideas. Now innovation
slowed down to walking pace; technique disappeared, the "Mass
Army" reclaimed its position as the proletarian ideal—but
the trained reflexes which can quicken a mass and make it formidable
had been eliminated. Its training and indoctrination were primarily
offensive. But, unlike the Germans, who were the only European army
to consider the offensive concept with any optimism, the Russians had
not absorbed the teachings of Liddell Hart and Fuller on the correct
employment of armour. Thus, although by 1941 they had accumulated no
fewer than thirty-nine armoured divisions (compared with the German
strength of thirty-two) these were not grouped, as were the German,
in independent corps and armies, but distributed evenly, in close
support of the infantry divisions; duplicating with a heavier weight
the tactical principles of close support that were indoctrinated in
the tanks and artillery directly attached to the infantry.

This may be explained by three factors. During the early thirties
the Russians, unlike the conservatively inclined staffs of the
Western powers, had paid considerable attention to the development of
tactics and design in the United States Army. The Americans, who had
arrived late on the scene in World War I, at a time when the German
armies were already breaking, had not the same traumatic memories of
frustrated attacks on fixed defence systems as had the British and
the French. In 1918 use of the tank in "packets," with
groups of infantry and backed by a huge weight of artillery, had
seemed the key to all fortifications, however complex, provided only
that the two arms did not become separated and the tanks did not
"outrun" the soldiers on foot. Since then the Americans had
adopted the idea of using tanks not simply as nutcrackers, but in
reconnaissance and as "cavalry." They had developed a
number of lightly armoured fast tanks, and one of these, the
Christie, was sold to the Russians.

[ In fact, this design was to form a working basis, through the BT
series, for the famous T 34; "the best tank in any army up to
1943," Guderian called it.]

But although they were groping in the right direction, the
Americans had never really taken hold of the Panzer concept in its
essence, as conceived by Liddell Hart and developed by Guderian—the
heavy, balanced force, moving on tracks not to "reconnoitre"
but to strike and to exploit. Consequently the Russians gradually
built up a "tank park" with machines eminently suitable for
mobile armoured warfare (in 1932 they had also bought from Britain
the Vickers Six-Ton tank, from which they developed their own T 26
series), but they remained wedded to an offensive principle which
rejected—if it ever considered—the radical notion of
independent operations by a single arm.

In 1937 a "number of Russian officers had been attached to
the Republican forces in Spain, and here they saw these principles
given practical endorsement. Except under conditions of street
fighting the defence was everywhere overcome by the relentless
pressure of a balanced force of tanks, infantry, and artillery: The
Iron Ring of Bilbao, the Ebro Line—a system of permanent
emplacements seemed capable of imposing only a delay, never a
stalemate. General Pavlov, the tank expert who had gone to Spain (and
who was to be shot in the opening weeks of the war, for incompetence)
had reported to Stalin and Voroshilov, "The tank can play no
independent role on the battlefield," and he recommended that
the tank battalions be distributed in an infantry-support role.

Finally, as a reminder that the offensive though sound in concept
must not be foolhardy in execution, came the Finnish war of the
winter of 1940. Here, underestimating the courage and adaptability of
the defenders, the Russians had tried to circumvent the permanent
defences of Lake Ladoga by wide and deep outflanking movements in the
north. The columns of the Red Army thrust deep into Finnish
territory, were surrounded and annihilated. Then in the second stage
of the war it was found that the permanent Finnish defences on the
Karelian Isthmus could gradually be eroded by steady pressure from
tanks and infantry acting in close support.

In this way, by ignoring the effect of local conditions in each
case, the Russians drew on their experience to formulate a doctrine
of the general offensive, an integrated "steam roller" of
all arms that was nothing more than their traditional military
posture dressed up with modern equipment. This attitude was firmly
grounded in the personal experience of the two soldiers who would be
primarily responsible for the direction of the Red Army when the
German attack came.

Marshal Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff since 1937, had
been called in to supervise the planning of the final stages of the
attack on the Mannerheim Line. The Chief of the Army Staff, General
Zhukov, had been appointed after the disastrous winter of 1939-40,
and he, too, had moved to close quarters with the "Finnish
question" at the very moment when orthodox mass tactics were
finally producing results. Moreover, Zhukov's appointment owed much
to his successes in the most important engagement fought by the Red
Army up until the German invasion, the previous year against the
Japanese in the battles of Khalkin Ghol.

[This operation, coming after seven years of intermittent but
bloody jockeying for position between Russia and Japan in the Soviet
Far East, finally settled the issue in favour of Russia. Although
over a quarter of a million men were engaged, the battle received
scant attention in the West, coinciding as it did with Hitler's
attack on Poland and the outbreak of World War II. But it had a
profound strategic importance. The Japanese never moved—nor
looked as if they would—against Russia again, even in the dark
hours of November 1941. They had learned the painful lesson of
underestimating the Soviets and, unlike others, had no desire to
repeat it.]

This costly operation had been executed with competence rather
than originality; and although tanks had been employed extravagantly
(Zhukov had disposed of nearly five hundred), the rewards seemed due
chiefly to "persistence," i.e., the dismissal of
subordinates who were squeamish about casualties, and rigid
co-operation between all arms, especially with the artillery.

While the Soviet Union was engaged against opponents who fought
along orthodox military principles, sheer weight of flesh and metal
would guarantee its victory in the end. But against the fast-moving,
highly trained Panzers with their tremendous volume of fire power the
Russians were going to have to learn, and learn very fast, if they
were to survive.

To make matters worse for the Red Army its disposition in Eastern
Europe at the start of the German attack was extravagantly
vulnerable. It was the compromise product of a continuing and barely
articulate disagreement between some of the senior generals and
Stalin, which was itself a function of the hesitant approach to
tactics.

Zhukov had agreed that it was desirable to occupy the western
territories in order to forestall entry by the Germans, but wished to
do so with a light screen and revise Tukhachevski's plan by dividing
the strategic reserve between Kiev and the Novgorod-Lake Ilmen region
in the north.

During the summer and autumn of 1940 it seemed as if Zhukov were
getting his way, as there were only fourteen Russian divisions in
Poland and seven in Bessarabia, while the Novgorod region was
becoming a substantial concentration area with upward of twenty
divisions, of which eight were armoured. But following on the Vienna
Award and the mounting evidence of German infiltration into the
Balkans this pattern of concentration altered.