Stalin's General (14 page)

Zhukov was happy to be posted to Ukraine; in his words, he “regarded it as a great honour to be put in charge of the biggest military district in the country.… The Kiev Special Military District was a first-rate military organisation … the armies, formations and staff were commanded by highly capable young officers and generals.”
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In reality the situation in Kiev was not nearly as rosy as Zhukov remembered it. The Kiev District was beset by problems typical of the Red Army at this time: low morale, poorly trained and ill-disciplined troops, high desertion rates, defective equipment and materials, housing shortages, and, above all, too few good officers. The expansion of the district to western Ukraine following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 was additionally disruptive, as was the dispatch of some of the best divisions and units to fight in the war with Finland.
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Such difficulties were another reason for sending to Kiev a commander
whose reputation had been built on knocking units into shape by the application of unrelenting discipline and rigorous training.

Zhukov faced another pressing task when he arrived in Kiev: preparing an invasion of Romanian territory. On June 26, 1940, the Soviet government presented an ultimatum to Romania demanding the return of Bessarabia (now part of modern-day Moldova)—a disputed territory occupied by the Romanians since 1918. Stalin also demanded the Romanians cede North Bukovina, a territory with a Ukrainian population the Soviets had never claimed before. Stalin did not expect war with Romania over Bessarabia and Bukovina but as a precaution Zhukov was ordered to create a “Southern Front” consisting of the 5th and 12th Armies from his district and a third drawn from the adjacent Odessa Military District. Before replying to the ultimatum the Romanians consulted Berlin. The Germans were not happy with the Soviet action but Hitler had conceded Bessarabia to Stalin when he signed the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939. The Romanians were advised to comply with the Soviet ultimatum and did so on June 28. Zhukov's troops crossed the border that same day. Two days later the newly annexed territories were under Red Army control.
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Zhukov was not impressed by his troops' performance during the occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina. On July 17 he issued a decree cataloguing a series of deficiencies, including lack of battle readiness, inadequate organization and control over units, poor intelligence work, and poor discipline and bad behavior toward the local population. In typical Zhukov fashion there followed detailed instructions on the training and reorganization necessary to bring units up to scratch. Commanders who did not succeed in their tasks were threatened with punishment. Backing threats with action, he relieved several divisional commanders of their duties and court-martialed one who had lost control of his division when his soldiers ran amok in Bessarabia.
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Among his commanders was Rokossovsky, posted to the Kiev District to resume command of the 5th Cavalry Corps—the unit he had commanded before he was purged. But because the 5th Cavalry was still en route to the Ukraine from another posting Rokossovsky was temporarily placed under Zhukov's direct command: “I was appointed
to a team of generals working directly with the District Commander. We spent most of our time with the troops. General Zhukov's assignments were extremely interesting and I was able to assess the strong and weak points of our troops.”
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Another who served under Zhukov in the Kiev District was a young tank driver named Mikhail Kalashnikov. In his memoirs Kalashnikov recalled that “we felt the will and energy of G. K. Zhukov straightaway.” Kalashnikov was working on improving the performance of Soviet tanks and a device he invented to record a tank engine's operation brought him to Zhukov's attention. Zhukov was so impressed by Kalashnikov's demonstration of the device that he decided to send him to the Tank Technical School in Kiev and then to Moscow where similar devices were being tested. This was the beginning of Kalashnikov's career as a world-famous weapons designer, most notably as the inventor of the AK-47 automatic rifle. As one biographer of Zhukov noted, “the atmosphere of innovation that Zhukov created provided a fertile breeding ground for the future designer.”
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Another person who made Zhukov's acquaintance in Kiev was Nikita Khrushchev, then party secretary in Ukraine. This was the first of many occasions on which the paths of the two men intersected. At that time Khrushchev had a high opinion of Zhukov and recalled that he “was more than satisfactory as Timoshenko's replacement.”
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Another important task for Zhukov in summer 1940 was coordinating his command's contribution to the revision of the overall Soviet war plan. Seven such meta-plans were drawn up between 1928 and 1941, outlining the Red Army's grand strategy—how in general terms the Soviet Union planned to counter an enemy attack. Each one identified potential enemies, assessed the scale and possible disposition of opponents' forces, and predicted the likely avenues for an enemy invasion. The last plan to be drafted before the outbreak of the Second World War was prepared in March 1938 under the supervision of the then chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. A former tsarist officer, Shaposhnikov was the Red Army's intellectual guru and author of
The Brain of the Army
, a detailed study of the
functioning of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff before the First World War that had served as a blueprint for the Soviet General Staff when it was formally established in 1935.
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Shaposhnikov's 1938 war plan identified the USSR's main enemies as Germany and its allies in Europe, and Japan in the Far East. Although the Soviet armed forces had to be prepared to fight a war on two fronts, Germany was identified as the primary threat and the west forecast as the main theater of operations. The Germans, said Shaposhnikov, would attempt an invasion of the Soviet Union either north of the Pripyat Marshes in the direction of Minsk, Leningrad, or Moscow, or south of the marshes, with the aim of advancing on Kiev and conquering Ukraine. Which route was taken would depend on the political situation in Europe and the precise lineup against the Soviet Union of Germany and its allies in Eastern Europe (including, possibly, Poland). The document then detailed two variants of Soviet operational plans to counter a German-led invasion. If the Germans attacked in the north the Red Army would counterattack in that sector and remain on the defensive in the south. If the Germans attacked in the south the Red Army would counterattack there and remain on the defensive in the north. In both variants the aim was to engage and destroy the main concentrations of the enemy's armed forces.
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The next version of the war plan was prepared in the very different circumstances of summer 1940. Although similar in outline to the 1938 document, the 1940 version predicted the Germans would attack in the north with a thrust from East Prussia (now, after the Nazi conquest of Poland, reattached to the main body of Germany) into Lithuania, Latvia, and western Belorussia (by then all three Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union). Therefore, the plan said, the bulk of the Red Army's forces should be concentrated in the north.
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Among the officers who worked on the plan was A. M. Vasilevsky, deputy chief of the General Staff's Operations Department, who would become Zhukov's closest colleague during the Great Patriotic War.

This version of the war plan was prepared by Shaposhnikov's staff officers before he stepped down as chief of staff in August 1940 because of ill health. He was replaced by Kiril Meretskov, the commander of the first, ill-fated attack on Finland. Further work was done on the plan and a new draft dated September 18 prepared. The September
version repeated the idea that the Germans were most likely to attack in the north but did not exclude the possibility they might concentrate their main forces in the south, thus reasserting the need for a plan with two variants of the Soviet strategic response. If the Germans concentrated in the south, the Red Army would also concentrate there and launch a counterattack that would head for Lublin and Krakow in German-occupied Poland and then on to Breslau, in southern Germany, with the aim of cutting off Hitler from his Balkan allies and from the crucial economic resources of that region. If the Germans made their move in the north the Red Army would invade eastern Prussia.
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The September plan was submitted to Stalin and the Soviet leadership for discussion. Out of this consultation there came, in early October, a crucial amendment: the Red Army's main attack forces were to be concentrated in the south and tasked with an advance on Lublin, Krakow, and Breslau. The reason for this change was not specified in the memorandum that Timoshenko and Meretskov sent to Stalin.
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There are several possible explanations. The one given by Zhukov in his memoirs was Stalin's belief that Hitler's priority would be to seize the economic and mineral resources of Ukraine and southern Russia, including the oil of the Caucasus. However, there is no direct evidence that the decision to concentrate in the south was specifically Stalin's, although he must have endorsed it. Another possibility is that when the 1940 war plan was being drawn up the Soviet leadership was obsessed with the situation in the Balkans, including Hitler's decision in August to guarantee the future security of Romania after the loss of Bessarabia. In this perspective the decision to concentrate in the south was perhaps driven more by political than strategic considerations.
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Another intriguing suggestion comes from Marshal Matvei Zakharov in his study of the prewar Soviet General Staff: that personal preferences and bureaucratic factors could have played a critical role. The main beneficiary of the decision to concentrate resources in the south was the Kiev District. Both Meretskov and Timoshenko were former commanders of the Kiev District. A number of the senior General Staff officers involved in drafting the war plans had also served in the Kiev District, including the highly talented General N. F. Vatutin, who was Zhukov's chief of staff before he transferred to Moscow in
July 1940.
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Certainly, under Zhukov's leadership the Kiev District became a very active proponent of the idea that the Germans were concentrating in the southwest, and lobbied heavily for more forces to counter that development.
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A more radical suggestion is that Stalin and his generals chose to concentrate in the south because the Red Army was planning a preemptive strike against Germany and the plains of southern Poland offered an easier invasion route than the rivers, lakes, bogs, and forests of East Prussia. But the most likely explanation is the most straightforward: the Soviets expected that when war broke out the main concentration of German forces would be in the south. In the months that followed this belief dominated Soviet perceptions about the coming war with Germany—perceptions reinforced by numerous intelligence reports that the Wehrmacht's buildup along the Soviet-German frontier was concentrated in the south. This mistaken assessment reflected the effectiveness of the German disinformation campaign to cover up their real intentions—to concentrate their attack in the north, in the direction of Leningrad and along the Minsk–Smolensk–Moscow axis.

The Soviet decision to plump for a southern concentration was fateful. When the Germans attacked in June 1941 the bulk of Soviet forces and armor were located in the southwest. One should note in passing, however, that Hitler's original intention was, indeed, to concentrate the German attack along the southern axis but his generals persuaded him otherwise. Even so, it was only during the German campaign in Russia in summer 1941 that Moscow emerged as the main objective.

At the end of September 1940 Zhukov was invited to present a paper to a forthcoming conference of higher command officers. His topic was “The Character of Contemporary Offensive Operations” and he was ordered to submit a draft to Timoshenko by November 1. “Owing to the complexity of my topic and the extremely high level of the conference,” Zhukov recalled, “I spent a whole month working on the report many hours a day. Valuable assistance was rendered to me by the District Chief of Operations, Ivan Bagramyan.”
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Unlike Zhukov,
Bagramyan—a future marshal of the Soviet army—had studied in the General Staff Academy. According to Bagramyan, Zhukov suggested that he enlist the aid of other members of the district command. The help he received from Bagramyan and others has led some of Zhukov's critics to the uncharitable conclusion that the credit for the high quality of the paper belongs to them. But no such claim was made by Bagramyan, who wrote in his memoirs: “Zhukov possessed not only remarkable military talent but the highest intellect and an iron will.” One trait of Zhukov's high intelligence was his ability to recognize and use the talent of officers like Bagramyan, who, far from resenting this, remained fiercely loyal to him.
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Zhukov had been selected to present this particular paper because he was the victor of Khalkhin-Gol and also the head of a military district that would play an essential role in the USSR's offensive war against Germany when the time came. Zhukov's main task was to evaluate the experience of German offensive operations in the west. In this respect his chief of staff, General M. A. Purkaev, was a major asset. He was fluent in German and French and had recently returned from a posting in Berlin as Soviet military attaché. Zhukov also had access to reports and articles on German operations published in a Soviet military bulletin, including translations of commentaries by foreign authors.
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The week-long conference took place in Moscow at the end of December 1940. In attendance were 270 high-ranking officers, including the commanders of military districts and armies and their chiefs of staff, heads of military academies, the inspectors-general of the armed forces, and numerous commanders of corps and divisions. The participants included twenty-four officers who had fought in the First World War, forty-three in the Russian Civil War, five in the Spanish Civil War, ten in the Soviet-Finnish War, and four at Khalkhin-Gol. Timoshenko opened the conference with a brief statement previewing the agenda. He was followed by Meretskov, who spoke on the General Staff's combat and command training preparations for war. Zhukov was next, followed by a paper on the battle for air superiority by General of Aviation P. V. Rychagov. General I. V. Tulenev, chief of the Moscow Military District, spoke on the character of contemporary defensive operations and General D. G. Pavlov, head of the Western
Military District, on the use of mechanized forces in offensive operations. Finally, there was a report by General A. K. Smirnov, inspector general of the infantry, on the role of rifle divisions in offensive and defensive battles. Each contribution was followed by extensive discussion from the floor—seventy-four speakers in all. The conference closed with a summation by Timoshenko.
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