Between Giants (12 page)

The Supreme Military Soviet convened a review of the performance of the Red Army, and Semon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, who had been sent to Leningrad by Stalin to take control of the Winter War and bring it to a successful conclusion, made wide-ranging recommendations for reform, covering topics as varied as clothing, radio equipment and operational tactics. However, many of these had not yet been implemented by the summer of 1941, while others had been watered down to preserve political control of the army. The Red Army would enter its most testing war in a poor shape.

Soviet armour was organised into mechanised corps, which had first been formed late in 1940. Each corps had two tank divisions and one motorised division, with a total strength of about 36,000 men and about 1,000 tanks.
²³
The rifle divisions of the Red Army consisted of three infantry regiments, two artillery regiments, and a light tank battalion of 16 tanks. Although the paper strength of the division was over 14,000, most divisions had between 8,000 and 10,000 personnel, and their tank and artillery support was frequently non-existent. Each Soviet army was intended to possess one mechanised corps, three infantry corps each with two or three infantry divisions, and additional artillery and anti-tank units, but as was the case at lower levels, most armies had neither the men nor the equipment for all these army-level formations.

The equipment of the Red Army varied greatly in quality. In 1930, a Soviet delegation to Britain visited the Vickers factory and placed an order for a small number of Vickers Mk.E tanks, together with a licence to build them in Russia. The 6-ton tank was developed into the Soviet T26, which was then manufactured in vast numbers, with over 10,000 being produced over the years. Its original armament – machine guns in twin turrets, designed so that it could fire in both directions as it broke through enemy lines – was upgraded to a single 45mm gun, and its armour, and consequently its weight, also increased over time. Like the German Pz.II, it was essentially an obsolete design by 1941, lacking both the protection and firepower to survive on the battlefield, but it formed a large proportion of Soviet armoured forces.

Like all armies in the 1920s, the Red Army followed the concept of breakthrough tanks, which would force a breach in the enemy front line, and exploitation or cavalry tanks, lighter and faster vehicles that could exploit the resultant breach. The BT7 was a 14-ton vehicle with a 45mm gun, and perhaps 5,000 were built. Their light armour – only 22mm at the thickest point – left them vulnerable to enemy fire, and large numbers of the vehicles, more complex than the T26, were immobile at the start of
Barbarossa
due to a chronic shortage of spare parts.

The T26 was generally regarded as too light a vehicle to be an effective breakthrough tank, and several prototypes of larger vehicles were produced. Three prototypes were tested in combat during the Winter War, and the KV tank was selected as the best. Named after Kliment Voroshilov, it was produced in two forms, the 45-ton KV1 with a 76mm gun and (in smaller numbers) the 53-ton KV2, mounting a 152mm howitzer in a huge slab-sided turret. Heavier than any of its German opponents, its armour – over 70mm thick in places – rendered it almost immune to German anti-tank fire. But despite its good cross-country performance, it was not popular with tank crews. The fighting compartment was badly designed, and the gearbox was particularly difficult to use, often requiring the driver to hit it with a hammer.
²⁴
Its weight prevented it from using many of the bridges in the Soviet Union, and it was expensive to build and difficult to maintain. Several hundred of these nevertheless formidable tanks were available to the Red Army’s formations in the Baltic States.

The most famous Soviet tank of the Second World War was the T34. At first, the Soviet designers sought to design a new cavalry tank to replace the BT7, but its designer, Mikhail Koshkin, developed the concept into what became the T34. At 26 tons, and equipped with a powerful diesel engine and wide tracks, it was more manoeuvrable than any other Soviet tank of its day, and its powerful 76mm gun – the same weapon that was fitted to the more complex, heavier and more expensive KV1 – was capable of killing any German armour it might encounter. Its revolutionary sloping armour gave it excellent protection, and it was present in significant numbers at the start of the German invasion; but as with so many Soviet weapons, many T34s were inoperable due to mechanical problems and a lack of spares. Most Soviet tanks also lacked radios – only the commander’s vehicle had a set, for communication with higher authorities, and even these sets were often faulty. All communication between the unit commander and his subordinate tanks was meant to be via flags waved from the turret, something that was hardly practical in the middle of an intense battle, and in any event likely to fail as the subordinate tanks would be too busy to keep an eye on any flags being waved from the command tank. Consequently, communication between commanders and their juniors was almost impossible once battle began, resulting in almost total inflexibility in their use; unable to contact their superiors, Soviet tank crews had little choice but to struggle on with their original battle plans, even if it was clear that these were not going to succeed.

The Red Army Air Force was, on paper at least, a formidable force, with nearly 19,000 combat aircraft. Although a large proportion of these were obsolescent or obsolete models, there were several squadrons of newer aircraft like the MiG3 and Il2. But the air formations were hamstrung by the same constraints as all other parts of the Soviet military machine. Firstly, spare parts shortages reduced the number of combat aircraft by about 15 per cent. Secondly, many pilots had very few hours’ experience of flying their planes, particularly the newer models – training had been limited by the fear of crashes, which would have exposed commanding officers to charges of sabotage. Thirdly, tactical doctrine was based upon outdated concepts from the early 1930s about mass deployment of air power. Even if such concepts had not already been shown to be invalid, for example during the Battle of Britain, the Soviets lacked sufficient front-line airfields to allow such a mass deployment. This resulted in planes being crowded into a small number of airfields, making them easy targets should the Luftwaffe get the opportunity to attack first.
²⁵

The forces deployed in the Baltic States formed the Baltic Special Military District, the first line of defence of Leningrad. Commanded by Fyodor Isidorovich Kuznetsov, the Baltic District was probably the weakest of the three Soviet military districts along the border. It was made up of Lieutenant General Petr Petrovich Sobennikov’s 8th Army in western Lithuania, Lieutenant General Vasili Ivanovich Morozov’s 11th Army to the east, and 3rd and 12th Mechanised Corps. In reserve, Kuznetsov had 27th Army, commanded by Major General Nikolai Erastovich Berzarin. The numerical strength of the force was impressive, with nearly 370,000 men and over 1,500 tanks; by contrast, Army Group North possessed 655,000 men and nearly 1,400 tanks. Like all Soviet armoured forces, large numbers of the tanks in Kuznetsov’s mechanised corps were disabled due to shortages of spare parts. By contrast, although the Wehrmacht too faced logistic problems, it would at least start the campaign with all of Army Group North’s tanks operational. This, combined with the poor level of training in nearly every part of the Red Army, meant that the advantage lay hugely with the Germans.

Soviet plans for a possible war with Germany had been in existence for several years. The primary concern in the north was the defence of Leningrad, which was seen as a centre for the mass mobilisation of Soviet forces. Both Kuznetsov’s Baltic Special Military District and the Leningrad Military District would seek to protect the city from early attack. Kuznetsov’s forces were expected to contain any German attack and bring it to a standstill between the frontier and the River Daugava, while General Markhian Michailovich Popov’s Leningrad Military District dealt with any incursion by the Finns. Once these initial objectives had been achieved, the two districts would seek to achieve air superiority over the attackers, and then stand ready to participate in centrally directed counter-offensives.
²⁶
The plan assumed that it would take the Wehrmacht at least 15 days to prepare for a war, and that the Soviet Union would be aware of these preparations; the reality was that despite repeated warnings from a variety of sources, the Soviet leadership was taken completely by surprise by the start of
Barbarossa
. Kuznetsov’s local plans were to use these 15 days to move his troops to the frontier – most divisions had only a single regiment on the border, with the rest of their personnel in peacetime billets some way to the rear. Once the fighting began, he intended to use his two mechanised corps to mount an early and decisive armoured counter-thrust to break up and destroy the advancing German spearheads. It does not appear to have occurred to anyone within the Soviet chain of command that they might not have the precious 15 days to prepare for war. In any event, the deficiencies in ammunition, fuel and spare parts could not possibly have been remedied in such a short time. The Red Army would enter a desperate struggle for survival with huge handicaps.

Soviet operational doctrine in 1941 was in a confused state. During the inter-war years, visionary officers like Mikhail Tukhachevsky perceived that the scale of modern war prevented the more traditional approach of seeking a single decisive battle:

Since it is impossible, with the extended fronts of modern times, to destroy the enemy’s army at a single blow, we are obligated to try to do this gradually by operations which will be more costly to the enemy than to ourselves … In short, a series of destructive operations conducted on logical principles and linked together by an uninterrupted pursuit may take the place of the decisive battle that was the form of engagement in the armies of the past, which fought on shorter fronts.
²⁷

As Soviet doctrine developed – often in the face of considerable resistance from more traditionally minded senior officers – the engagement and attrition of the enemy’s forces as outlined by Tukhachevsky became combined with the concept of deep operations, devised and described in detail by contemporaries such as Georgi Isserson and Vladimir Triandaffilov, which required semi-independent mobile formations to operate against the enemy’s supply and command lines, in order to disrupt and paralyse the enemy throughout the depth of his deployment.

Heavily involved in the restructuring of the Red Army in the early 1930s, Tukhachevsky developed airborne units, equipped with light armour and artillery, that were far ahead of their contemporaries. He was an outspoken proponent of combined arms formations, and his leading role in modernising the Red Army earned him promotion to field marshal in 1935. The following year, he formalised his views in
Vremmenyi Polevoi Ustav RKKA
(‘New Field Service Regulations of the Red Army’). As a result of this document, he has often been credited with being the author of the ‘deep operations’ theories that were first articulated and developed by Isserson and Triandaffilov, which he attempted to build into future Red Army doctrine. Nevertheless, he had clearly given some thought to such concepts himself, writing in 1924:

The setting up of a deep battle – that is the simultaneous disruption of the enemy’s tactical layout over its entire depth – requires two things of tanks. On the one hand they must help the infantry forward and accompany it; on the other they must penetrate into the enemy’s rear, both to disorganize him and to isolate his main forces from the reserves at his disposal. This deep penetration by tanks must create in the enemy’s rear an obstacle for him onto which he must be forced back and on which his main forces must be destroyed. At the same time this breakthrough must destroy the enemy’s artillery, cut his communications and capture his headquarters.
²⁸

Whilst his reputation as a ground breaking military theoretician has benefited from his incorporation of the ideas of others, there can be no question of his own revolutionary views, as can be seen in his observations about the future development of air warfare, written in 1931:

The achievements in modern technology, which include automatic stabilisation of aircraft aloft, open new possibilities in conducting large-scale air operations even in adverse weather conditions. The combination of automatic stabilisers, television and the utilisation of infrared equipment will soon permit conducting complex operations, regardless of fog or cloud cover.
²⁹

In addition to understanding the developments that were changing the nature of each component of the military machine – air power, artillery, tanks, infantry weapons etc. – Tukhachevsky grasped the importance of integrating these different weapons together, in order to maximise their efficacy. Such integration, he argued, would require a mindset amongst officers that was not dissimilar to the German requirements for
Auftragstaktik
:

The best results will be achieved in battle when all commanders, from the highest to the lowest, are trained in the spirit of bold initiative.
Personal initiative is of decisive importance
. Proper control on the part of the senior commander involves: a clear and succinct manner of setting forth missions; the proper selection of the direction of attack and the timely concentration of sufficiently strong forces for the purpose; provision for proper cooperation of units and for the greatest possible utilization of personal initiative; [and] support and exploitation of success at any particular point of the front.
³⁰

Unfortunately, Tukhachevsky was one of the first victims of Stalin’s purges of the Red Army. He was arrested in 1937, and confessed under duress that he was working with German spies. It has been suggested that he had in fact contacted anti-Stalin groups during a visit to the west in 1936, but it seems that he was the victim of high-level plotting. Stalin was determined to purge the Red Army, which he regarded as the only institution capable of overthrowing him, and an agent working for the NKVD passed forged documents to the Germans implying that Tukhachevsky was plotting against Stalin. The Germans saw an opportunity to discredit a visionary and powerful Soviet senior officer, and forged further documents to implicate Tukhachevsky.
³¹
Found guilty of treason, he was executed on 11 June 1937, less than three weeks after his arrest.