The 900 Days (19 page)

‘ Actually,” Sobennikov observed, “at this time almost all the air force of the Special Baltic Military District was being destroyed on the ground.”

Within twenty-four hours of the outbreak of war Sobennikov reported to Colonel General Kuznetsov:

“The Army [the Eighth] is in a helpless situation. We have no communications with you, nor with the rifle and mechanized corps. I beg you to do all that you can to provide me with fuel. As for what depends on me —I am doing it.”

The problem of the Soviet command in the first hours of the war was compounded by the fact that at higher echelons there persisted the strange feeling that
this might not be war
. The commander of the 125th Division was not alone in this. General Fedyuninsky, who commanded the 15 th Soviet Infantry Corps along the Bug River, had the definite impression that many hours after the German attack his chief, General M. I. Potapov of the Fifth Army, was “still not quite sure that the Nazis had started a war.”

The same atmosphere prevailed at the headquarters of the Special Western Military District at Minsk, where Army General D. G. Pavlov was attending the theater June 21 when the first reports of an attack came in. “It can’t be,” he said. “It’s just nonsense.”

Colonel General Leonid M. Sandalov was chief of staff of one of the armies of Pavlov’s command—the Fourth Army with headquarters at Kobrin near the Bug River. Sandalov reported to Pavlov repeatedly during the night of June 21–22 signs of German preparations for attack. The same information had come in from all the frontier points, including the Brest garrison. This information was sent both to Pavlov and to the General Staff in Moscow.

At 2
A.M.
Kobrin and many other points reported interruptions of communications. A Fifth Column was at work. This information, also, went to Pavlov and to Moscow.

Nonetheless, at 3:30
A.M.
Pavlov telephoned the Fourth Army commander, Major General A. A. Korobkov,
⁷
that a “raid by Fascist bands” might be expected on the Bug River frontier during the night. Korobkov was ordered to give no provocation, to seize the “bands” if possible, but not to pursue them across the frontier.

Pavlov did order the 42nd Division moved up to fortified positions and told Korobkov to issue a general alert.

Within the hour Lieutenant General V. I. Kuznetsov, Commander of the Third Army, communicated with Pavlov, using the radio since telephone lines had been severed. He reported that the Germans were attacking on a wide front and bombing Grodno. Similar information came from Major General K. D. Golubev commanding the Tenth Army at Bialystok.

Pavlov told his deputy front commander, Lieutenant General I. V. Boldin, that he “couldn’t quite make out” what was happening.

With the telephone at Pavlov’s headquarters constantly ringing with reports of German attacks, Defense Commissar Timoshenko called from Moscow and ordered Pavlov to take no action against the Germans without prior notification to Moscow.

“Comrade Stalin has forbidden opening artillery fire against the Germans,” Timoshenko said.

The confusion grew worse and worse as the day wore on. Unable to get a picture of what was going on at the front, General Boldin proposed to fly to Tenth Army headquarters at Bialystok. But the airports had been bombed. No planes were available. He decided to drive despite reports of Nazi paratroop landings. He managed to get to Tenth Army headquarters Sunday evening. By this time the Tenth Army had been moved out of Bialystok to escape savage German dive-bombing. General Golubev reported that his Tenth Army had almost ceased to exist. He was unable to get through to forward units and had only occasional communication with General Pavlov at Minsk.

“It’s hard, very hard, Ivan Vasilyevich,” General Golubev told Boldin. “Where there is a chance of clinging to something we hold on. The frontier guards are fighting well, but few of them are left and we have no way of supporting them. And this is the first day of the war! What will happen next?”

²
The authoritative Soviet study of the Baltic campaign gives the German superiority as 1.66 to 1 in divisions, 1.3 to 1 in armor, 1.8 to 1 in weapons, 1.37 to 1 in planes. (Orlov,
op. ck.
_y
p. 40.)

³
John Erickson,
The Soviet High Command
, estimates them at 28 rifle divisions, 3 mechanized corps, 4 cavalry divisions, 7 mechanized brigades, 1,000 tanks. Pavlov
{op. cit
., 3rd edition, p. 10) gives the figures as 12 rifle, 2 motorized, 4 armored divisions. Orlov
(op. cit
., p. 40) makes it 22 divisions, including a separate rifle brigade.

⁴
In 1944 General Morozov by great good fortune found his daughter. She had made her way into Latvia and there had survived the Nazi occupation. (Boris Gusev, Dmitri Mamleyev,
Smert Komissara
, Moscow, 1967, p. 84.)

⁵
Typically, Colonel General I. Lyudnikov, commanding the 200th Rifle Division, was moving his troops on forced march to a concentration point six to ten miles northwest of Kovel. About midnight June 22 he heard heavy aircraft overhead. At 3:40
A.M.
a flight of nineteen German JU-88’s, their black swastikas plainly marked, appeared just north of his column. At about 4
A.M.
he heard heavy firing to the west, and
five
minutes later nine JU-88’s attacked Lyudnikov’s 661st Regiment. Lyudnikov had no orders. He put his troops under cover and told them not to fire on any planes without special instructions. He got through to 31st Corps about 6
A.M.
, but his commander, Major General A. I. Lopatin, had no instructions. All day Lyudnikov waited for orders. None came. (I. Lyudnikov,
Voyenno-lstoricheskii Zhurnal
, No. 9, September, 1966, pp. 67–69.)

⁶
R. Velevitnev, A. Los,
Krepost bez Fortov
, Moscow, 1966, p. 27. Another account gives the date of the meeting as June 20.
(Na Strazhe Morskikh Gorizontov
, Moscow, 1967, p. 146.)

⁷
General Korobkov was removed from his command July 8 and shot a few days later as a penalty for permitting the destruction of his army by the Germans.

WITH A HISS OF STEAM AND A SLOW FINAL TURN OF THE driving wheels the Red Arrow express came to a halt in the train shed of Leningrad’s October Station. A small delegation of officers had arrived a few minutes before, and now they stood on the platform, waiting for General Meretskov to emerge from the International sleeping car, the last car on the train. The hour was 11145
A.M.
, June 22. The usual Sunday morning bustle filled the station.

There had been little sleep for Meretskov during his night-long journey to the north. His mind was filled with deep worries. All day Saturday he had worked in the Defense Commissariat, sharing the rising concern of his colleagues over the threatening reports. At midevening he had been instructed to go immediately to Leningrad to act as the High Command liaison in carrying out urgent preparations for meeting a German attack which might come at any time, possibly within a few days.

Few Soviet commanders were more familiar than Meretskov with modern warfare. He had been a military adviser in Spain during the Civil War, along with men like Marshal Rodion Ya. Malinovsky (Comrade Malino), the artillery specialist; Marshal N. N. Voronov; Tank General A. I. Rodimtsev (Captain Pavlito); the Navy Commissar, Admiral Kuznetsov; and Generals P. I. Batov, Georgi M. Shtern and Dmitri G. Pavlov. Indeed, Meretskov, as “Comrade Petrovich,” had been an architect of the great Loyalist victory at Guadalajara.

Meretskov, an imposing, bulky man (his blond complexion, his wide Slavic face and his bearlike figure had looked almost comic in the beret and wide cape which he affected in Spain), had acquired a healthy respect for Nazi military power and the striking force of Nazi Panzers on the battlefield of Spain.

None knew better than he the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet Army. He knew, of course, as did every Red Army officer, the terrible toll taken by the purges of 1937–38. The roll of the victims was endless— three of the five Soviet marshals who at that time held this rank: M. N. Tukhachevsky, V. K. Bliicher and A. I. Yegorov; every officer who then commanded a military district, including such men as I. P. Uborevich and I. E. Yakir; two of the four fleet commanders, Admirals V. M. Orlov and M. V. Viktorov. Every commander of an army corps had been shot. Almost every division commander had been shot or sent to Siberia. Half the regimental commanders, members of military councils and chiefs of political work in the military districts had vanished. The majority of military commissars of corps, divisions and brigades had been removed. One-third of the regimental commissars had been lost. How many individuals did this total? Not Meretskov nor any surviving high officer could estimate the number. Certainly one-third to one-half of the 75,000 officers in the Red Army in J938 had been arrested. The percentages were far higher in upper ranks.

Among Meretskov’s companions in Spain the casualties were striking.
¹
The results could everywhere be seen. By the beginning of 1940 more than 70 percent of the divisional commanders, almost 70 percent of the regimental commanders and 60 percent of the political commissars were newly promoted. In the autumn of 1940 a tally of 225 regimental commanders disclosed not a single officer who had completed a course in a higher military institution. Only twenty-five had even been to military academies (high-school grade). The remainder of the two hundred had only finished courses for junior lieutenants. The results were appalling. In the army as a whole only 7 percent of the officers had had higher military education; 37 percent had never even had a course in a military institution.

When Lieutenant General S. A. Kalinin arrived at Novosibirsk in 1938 to take up his duties as commander of the Siberian Military District, he was astounded to be met by a captain, serving as acting commander. The captain was the highest-ranking man left in the command. The Chief of Political Administration, Captain V. V. Bogatkin, had arrived in Novosibirsk a few months earlier. On the very night of Bogatkin’s arrival two NKVD men called with orders for the arrest of the Siberian District Commander. Bogatkin put the NKVD men off, flew to Moscow the next day and at great personal risk got the orders for arrest withdrawn.

To be sure, some commanders had been returned from exile.
²
Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, soon to become the hero of the defense of Moscow, had come back from Siberian exile, having successfully overturned false evidence, supposedly given by a Red Army Commander, Adolf Yushkevich, who had been dead for more than ten years at the time he allegedly gave his testimony. General A. V. Gorbatov, a magnificent commander, survived two years of physical torture by the NKVD and exile to one of the worst camps in the Far East. On March 5, 1941, at 2
A.M.
he was released from prison. That very day he was named by Marshal Timoshenko to command the 25th Rifle Corps in the Ukraine. Timoshenko himself, now Defense Commissar, had been denounced as an “enemy of the people” in 1938 at the spring Communist Party conference in Kiev. It took intervention by Khrushchev to keep the Commissar from the black wagons of the secret police. As late as May, 1941, when General Leonid A. Govorov (who had been Meretskov’s chief of staff with the Seventh Army during the Finnish war and whose name soon would be inextricably linked with that of Leningrad) was appointed chief of the principal artillery school, the Academy named for Dzerzhinsky, the secret police put him on the list for arrest. The chargé was that he fought in the White Russian forces under Admiral Kolchak. In a sense, this was true. Govorov, a poor peasant lad in the Vyatka Gubernia, was impressed into the Kolchak army when his village was captured by the Whites in 1918, but at the first opportunity he led his comrades over to the Communist side. Personal action by Mikhail I. Kalinin, the Soviet President, spared Govorov from possible execution.

Marshal Ivan Bagramyan had a similar experience. In December, 1940, he was named deputy chief of staff to Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, then commander of the Kiev Military District. In January, 1941, he was summoned before the new District Commissar, Nikolai N. Vashugin, who coldly informed him that he had an “uncertain” past. Bagramyan was outraged. “What’s bad about my biography?” he demanded. “My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country.”

Vashugin chargéd that Bagramyan had fought for the Dashnaks, the Armenian nationalist movement. Bagramyan managed to show that he led a local Communist uprising against the Dashoaks rather than the reverse.

On the very eve of war, in the first days of June, B. L. Vannikov,
³
Commissar for Arms Production, was arrested, after an ugly dispute over weapons production that involved Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov and G. I. Kulik, then head of the Chief Artillery Administration. B. I. Sharurin, another Soviet arms specialist, narrowly escaped arrest. Kulik was an associate of Police Chief Beria. He was responsible for Vannikov’s arrest and was blamed by Red Army commanders for a variety of errors. Vannikov described him as “incompetent and light-minded.” Marshal Voronov, who worked with him on artillery matters, called him “disorganized.” Kulik’s style was called “Prison or a Medal.” If a subordinate pleased him, he got an award; if not, he went to jail. The constructors of the best Soviet tank, the 60-ton KV, blamed Kulik for endless delay in acting on their proposal to fit the machine with a diesel motor. Finally, at personal risk, they went ahead with a diesel-motored machine after General D. G. Pavlov (soon to be shot for the disaster which befell Soviet arms on the Western Front), who had seen tank warfare in Spain, warned that a gasoline-powered tank was nothing but a “flaming torch.”

It was not only officers who were caught up in these tragic events. Colonel D. A. Morozov, serving in the east in 1938, recalled going into a big grocery store. The wife of General Georgi Ye. Degtyarev
⁴
was coming out, tears streaming from her eyes. “What’s happened?” he asked. “They won’t sell anything to me,” she replied. Her husband had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” a few days before. Morozov went into the store with her and bought the food she needed. He heard the clerks whispering, “There goes another. They’ll get him next.”

Now, as Meretskov well knew, the Soviet Army faced its most critical test. To say that it had not been affected and would not be affected by the tragic events of the past two or three years was ridiculous. The cream of the military cadres, the best and most experienced commanders, had been eliminated, and the morale of the remainder had suffered wounds which would require years in the healing—if, indeed, this generation was ever to recover.

Speaking long after these tragic events, Konstantin Simonov, the Russian novelist, who came to know the Red Army as did few other individuals, concluded that the performance of the Soviet Army against the Germans in World War II had to be examined through the “prism of the tragic events of 1937–38.”

“The matter is not only that in these years we lost a pleiad of major military leaders,” he said, “but that hundreds and thousands of honest people among the higher and middle echelons of commanders were subject to repression.

“The matter lies in the spirit of the people who remained to serve in the army, in the force of the blow that had been dealt against them. At the beginning of the war this process had not yet been finished, it was still going on. The army found itself not only in the most difficult of times incompletely rearmed but in a no less difficult period with its moral values, confidence and discipline incompletely restored after the destructive events of 1937–38.”

If thoughts of his martyred comrades and of the strength which they might have brought to the Soviet Army this moment passed through the mind of Meretskov, it would hardly be surprising.

And he had other food for thought. Leningrad was inextricably connected with his personal fortunes. He had commanded the Leningrad Military District in 1938, and he held this post at the outbreak of war with Finland November 30, 1939. It was upon his shoulders and the striking force of his Seventh Army that the task of bringing the Finns to terms had initially fallen.

The early period of the Finnish war had not gone well for the Russians— or for Meretskov. This was not exactly his fault. Plans for the Finnish campaign had originally been drafted in detail by the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris M. Shaposhnikov. They were based on careful estimates of Soviet capabilities and took into full account the strength of the Mannerheim Line and the righting potential of the Finnish Army. Shaposhnikov calculated (correctly) that the Red Army would meet strong and stubborn opposition from the Finns and that a major offensive would be required.

Stalin was furious when Shaposhnikov submitted his plan to the Supreme War Council. He said Shaposhnikov underestimated the Red Army and overvalued the Finns.

The Shaposhnikov plan was junked and the task was turned over to the Leningrad Military District, headed by General Meretskov. Acting quite possibly on Zhdanov’s advice, Stalin decided to set up a Finnish government in exile under the veteran Russian-Finnish Communist, Otto Kuusinen. Stalin was certain that a demonstration by Russian border troops and the propaganda of the Finnish “liberation” movement would bring the Finns to their knees. What Meretskov thought is not known. He was given two or three days to draw up a plan and then was sent into action.

Less than a month’s fighting demonstrated the unreality of Stalin’s conception. On January 7, 1940, Marshal Timoshenko took command of the Finnish front. Meretskov remained in chargé of the Seventh Army. He enlisted the cooperation of Zhdanov in developing a new and effective mine detector, capable of locating Finnish mines under the ice and snow. He also developed a better means of reducing Finnish concrete defenses, principally by point-blank fire of heavy-caliber 203-mm and 280-mm cannons. As an outgrowth of these activities he established a firm and—as it was to prove— an enduring friendship with Zhdanov.

With Timoshenko’s takeover new troops were brought in, Shaposhnikov’s original plans were put into motion, and on March 12, 1940, the war came to an end with the signing of a treaty which pushed the Soviet frontier about a hundred miles north of Leningrad and gave Russia what she had originally wanted, a thirty-year lease on the Hangö Peninsula (to guard the Gulf of Finland approaches to Leningrad) and a few minor territorial concessions.

Meretskov could consider himself fortunate. He came out of the bitter March, 1940, post-mortem by the Central Committee on the Finnish operations in fairly good order. Many had been sharply criticized, especially the Defense Commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. L. Z. Mekhlis, Beria’s secret police crony, who was sent by Stalin to advise the Ninth Soviet Army, arrested many commanders and sought to shift the blame from himself but underwent some criticism as well.

A series of decisions flowed from the spring post-mortem, many of them useful and sound. Young commanders with battle experience in Spain, the Manchurian border war with the Japanese at Khalkin-Gol and the Finnish campaign were promoted to new responsibilities.
⁵

The fact that Meretskov was given only three days to work out a plan for his offensive against Finland probably saved him from serious consequences. In any event, he was promoted to the rank of full general in June and became Chief of Staff in August, 1940.

Now, in the last minutes before his arrival in Leningrad, Meretskov could look back on the past two years and, speaking as a military man, find much for which to be thankful.

The defensive position of Leningrad, for example, was infinitely better, at least on paper, than it had been in 1939. Before 1939 the frontier had lain only twenty miles to the north. Leningrad had been within long-range artillery fire from the Finnish frontier. The sea approaches had been equally vulnerable. Finnish forts commanded the entrance to the Gulf of Finland from Hangö and the nearby shore. Soviet warships came in and out of the Kron-stadt base at their peril.