Russia at war Read online

  Russia at war

  Alexander C Werth

  ALEXANDER WERTH

  RUSSIA AT WAR 1941-1945

  NEW YORK

  E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.

  1964

  ALSO BY ALEXANDER WERTH:

  France in Ferment (1934)

  The Destiny of France (1937)

  France and Munich: Before and After the Surrender (1939)

  The Last Days of Paris (1940)

  The Twilight of France (1942)

  Moscow '41 (1942)

  Leningrad (1944)

  The Year of Stalingrad (1946)

  Musical Uproar in Moscow (1949)

  France 1940-1955 (1956)

  The Strange History of Pierre Mendès-France (1957)

  America in Doubt (1959)

  The de Gaulle Revolution (1960)

  The Khrushchev Phase (1961)

  Copyright, ©, 1964 by Alexander Werth. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  To the Memory of

  MITYA KHLUDOV

  aged 19

  Killed in Action

  in Belorussia

  July 1944

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  PRELUDE TO WAR

  I Russia's 1939 Dilemma

  II The Soviet-German Pact

  III The Partition of Poland

  IV From the Finnish War to the German Invasion of France

  V Russia and the Fall of France—Baltic States and Bessarabia

  VI Russia and the Battle of Britain: a Psychological Turning-Point?

  VII Display of Russian Military Might—Molotov's Tragi-comic Visit to Berlin

  VIII " 1941—it will be a Happy New Year"

  IX The Last Weeks of Peace

  PART TWO

  FROM THE INVASION TO THE BATTLE OF MOSCOW

  I Soviet Unpreparedness in June 1941

  II The Invasion

  III Molotov and Stalin Speak

  IV Smolensk: the First Check to the Blitzkrieg

  V Close-Up One: Moscow at the Beginning of the War

  VI Close-Up Two: Autumn Journey to the Smolensk Front

  VII Advance on Leningrad

  VIII Rout in the Ukraine: "Khrushchev versus Stalin"

  IX The Evacuation of Industry

  X Battle of Moscow Begins—The October 16 Panic

  XI Battle of Moscow II. Stalin's Holy Russia Speech

  XII The Moscow Counter-Offensive

  XIII The Diplomatic Scene of the First Months of the Invasion

  PART THREE

  THE LENINGRAD STORY

  I The Dead of Leningrad

  II The Enemy Advances

  III Three Million Trapped

  IV The Ladoga Lifeline

  V The Great Famine

  VI The Ice Road

  VII Leningrad Close-Up

  VIII Why Leningrad "Took It"

  IX A Note on Finland

  PART FOUR

  THE BLACK SUMMER OF 1942

  I Close-up: Moscow in June 1942

  II The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

  III Three Russian Defeats: Kerch, Kharkov and Sebastopol

  IV The Renewal of the German Advance

  V Patrie-en-Danger and the Post-Rostov Reforms

  VI Stalin Ropes in the Church

  PART FIVE

  STALINGRAD

  I Stalingrad: the Chuikov Story

  II The " Stalingrad" months in Moscow—the Churchill visit and after

  III Russians encircle the Germans at Stalingrad

  IV Stalingrad Close-Ups. I: The Stalingrad Lifeline

  II: The Scene of the Manstein Rout

  V Stalingrad: the Agony

  VI Close-Up III: Stalingrad at the Time of the Capitulation

  VII "Caucasus Round Trip"

  PART SIX

  1943: YEAR OF HARD VICTORIES— THE POLISH TANGLE

  I The Birth of "Stalin's Military Genius"

  II The Germans and the Ukraine

  III Kharkov under the Germans

  IV The Economic Effort of 1942-3—the Red Army's New Look—Lend-Lease

  V Before the Spring Lull of 1943—Stalin's Warning

  VI The Technique of Building a New Poland

  VII The Dissolution of the Comintern and Other Curious Events in the Spring of 1943

  VIII Kursk: Hitler Loses His Last Chance of Turning the Tide

  IX Orel: Close-Up of a Purely Russian City under the Germans

  X A Short Chapter on a Vast Subject: German Crimes hi the Soviet Union

  XI The Partisans in the Soviet-German War

  XII Paradoxes of Soviet Foreign Policy in 1943—The Fall of Mussolini—The "Free

  German Committee"

  XIII Stalin's Little Nationalist Orgy after Kursk

  XIV The Spirit of Teheran

  PART SEVEN

  1944: RUSSIA ENTERS EASTERN EUROPE

  I Some Characteristics of 1944

  II Close-Up I: Ukrainian Microcosm

  III Close-Up II: Odessa, Capital of Rumanian Transniestria

  IV Close-Up III: Hitler's Crimean Catastrophe

  V The Lull Before D-Day—Stalin's Flirtation with the Catholic Church—"Slav Unity"

  VI The Russians and the Normandy Landing

  VII German Rout in Belorussia: "Worse than Stalingrad"

  VIII What Happened at Warsaw?

  IX Close-Up: Lublin—the Maidanek Murder Camp

  X Rumania, Finland and Bulgaria Pack Up

  XI Churchill's Second Moscow Visit

  XII Stalin's Horse-Trading with de Gaulle

  XIII Alternative Policies and Ideologies towards the End of the War

  PART EIGHT

  VICTORY—AND THE SEEDS THE COLD WAR

  I Into Germany

  II Yalta and After

  III June, 1945: Berlin Under the Russians Only

  IV The Three Months'Peace

  V Potsdam

  VI The Short Russo-Japanese War—Hiroshima

  Selected Bibliography

  Chronological Table

  Acknowledgements

  MAPS

  The Partition of Poland

  The Soviet-Finnish War

  The Battle of Kiev

  The German Offensive against Moscow

  Moscow: the Russian Counter-offensive

  The Leningrad Blockade

  The Leningrad Lifeline

  The Black Summer of 1942

  The Battle of Stalingrad

  The Germans Trapped at Stalingrad

  The Russian Winter Offensive 1942-3

  The Kursk Battle

  The Russian Spring 1944 Offensive in the South

  The Russian Summer 1944 Offensive in Belorussia and Poland

  The Liberation of Poland and Invasion of Germany

  Towards Victory

  Folding maps:

  The German Offensive 1941-2

  The Russian Counter-offensive 1942-5

  Endpaper maps:

  The USSR

  MAPS DRAWN BY FREDERICK BROMAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  In his speech before the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963—a speech that foreshadowed the Moscow test-ban treaty two months later—the late President

  Kennedy said:

  Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries (the USA and the Soviet

  Union) have in common, none is stronger than the mutual abhorrence of war.

  Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with

  each o
ther. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the

  Russians suffered in the course of the Second World War.

  And he went on to say:

  At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's [European] territory, including nearly

  two-thirds of its industrial base, were turned into a waste-land.

  Some six months later, in a less conciliatory-sounding speech at Kalinin, delivered in the presence of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev thundered against the "imperialists", urged them to clear out of Panama "before they got kicked out", swore that the Soviet Union could defend Cuba from rocket sites on Russian territory, and, with more than usual truculence, declared:

  We are building communism in our country; but that does not mean that we are

  building it only within the framework of the Soviet borders and of our own

  economy. No, we are pointing the road to the rest of humanity. Communism is being built not only inside the Soviet borders, and we are doing everything to secure the victory of communism throughout the world.

  But, having got that chinoiserie off his chest, he then declared, with a nod at Peking: Some comrades abroad claim that Khrushchev is making a mess of things, and is

  afraid of war. Let me say once again that I should like to see the kind of bloody fool who is genuinely not afraid of war. Only a small child is afraid of nothing, because he doesn't understand; and only bloody fools.

  He then recalled that his son, an airman, was killed in World War II, and that millions of other Russians had lost their sons, and brothers, and fathers, and mothers and sisters.

  True, for Castro's benefit, he ended on an unusual note of bravado, saying that, although Russia did not want war, she would "smash the enemy" with her wonderful new rockets if war were to be inflicted on the Soviet people.

  [ Izvestia, January 18, 1964.]

  Which has, of course, to be read in the light of his usual line that it is no use trying to build socialism or communism "on the ruins of a thermo-nuclear war".

  In all this there was much play-acting. Significantly, the passage in his speech which the Kalinin textile workers cheered more loudly and wholeheartedly than any other was that about the "bloody fools" who were not afraid of war. Kalinin, the ancient Russian city of Tver, only a short distance from Moscow, had been occupied by the Germans in 1941,

  and its older people remembered only too well what it had been like.

  Kennedy had spoken of the twenty million Russian dead of World War II. Officially, the Russians have been chary about mentioning this figure; when a speaker mentioned it at a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in October 1959, Pravda omitted it in reporting his speech the next day.

  [See the author's The Khrushchev Phase (London, 1961), p. 161.]

  But whether the exact number of casualties that Russia suffered in the last war was

  twenty million, or a little more or a little less, these appalling losses have left a deep mark on the Russian character, and have, whether we like it or not, been at the root of Soviet foreign policy since the war, both before and after Stalin's death. The Russian distrust of Germany, and of anyone helping Germany to become a great military power again,

  remains acute. There is scarcely a Russian family which the German invasion did not

  affect directly, and usually in the most tragic way, and if Germany remains divided in two, and we still have trouble over Berlin, it is partly due to the memories of 1941-5.

  These are still fresh in every older Russian mind, and the young generation of Russians are constantly reminded by books, films, broadcasts and television shows of what Russia suffered and of how she had to fight, first for her survival, and then for victory.

  It would be idle to speculate on what would have happened to Russia, Britain and the United States in 1941-5, if they had not been united in their determination to crush Nazi Germany. It may well have been a "strange alliance" (as it was described by General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow towards the end of the

  war), and its breakdown after the job was done may have been inevitable, despite the formal twenty-year alliance that Russia and Britain had signed in 1942, and other good wartime resolutions. Whatever members of the John Birch Society and other politically certifiable people (to use rny friend Sir Denis Brogan's phrase) may say today about our having fought "on the wrong side", we must still say "Thank God for the Strange Alliance".

  For a year, in 1940-1, Britain fought Hitler almost single-handed; and so, in a very large measure, did Russia between June 1941 and the end of 1942; and in both cases the danger of being destroyed by the Nazis was immense. Britain held out in 1940^1; Russia held out in 1941-2. But even several months after Stalingrad Stalin still declared that Nazi Germany could not be defeated except by the joint effort of the Big Three.

  Perhaps the young generation in the West knows very little about those days. The French radio recently questioned some young people about World War II, and quite a number of them said: "Hitler? connais pas" When I taught at an American university a few years ago I found that many young students had only the haziest notion of Hitler, Stalin and even Winston Churchill. But do even most adults in the West have a clear idea of how victory over Nazi Germany was achieved? Not unnaturally, Britons have been interested chiefly in the British war effort, and Americans in the American war effort, and this interest has been kept up by the plethora of memoirs by British and American generals.

  But these memoirs have, on the whole, tended to obscure the important fact that, in

  Churchill's 1944 phrase, it was the Russians who "tore the guts out of the German Army".

  It so happened, for historical and geographical reasons, that it was, indeed, the Russians who bore the main brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany, and that it was thanks to this that millions of British and American lives were saved. Not that the Russians chose to save these lives, and to sacrifice millions of their own people. But that is how it happened and, during the war, both America and Britain were acutely conscious of it. "A wave of national gratitude is sweeping England", Sir Bernard Pares said in 1942; and, even on the more official level, similar sentiments were freely expressed. Thus Ernest Bevin said on June 21, 1942:

  All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children's children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian

  people.

  I doubt whether the children of Ernest Bevin's contemporaries, let alone the children's children, have any such feelings today; and I hope that this "history book" will remind them of a few of the things Ernest Bevin had in mind.

  It should, of course, be added that the Russians were acutely conscious, throughout the war, of the "unequal sacrifices" made by the Big Three. The "little Second Front" (the landings in North Africa) did not materialise until the end of 1942, and the "big Second Front" not till the summer of 1944. The strangely mixed feelings towards the Allies among the Russian people during the war years are one of the recurring themes of this book.

  What kind of book is this? It is least of all a formal history of the war. The very scale of the Soviet-German war of 1941-5, directly involving tens of millions and, indirectly, hundreds of millions of people, was so vast that any attempt to write a "complete" history of it is out of the question in one volume written by one man. A number of military

  histories of this war have been written by both Russians and Germans; but even the

  longest of them, the vast six-volume Russian History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union running to over two million words, and trying to cover not only the military operations, but "everything", is singularly unsatisfactory in many ways. It contains an immense amount of valuable information which was not available under Stalin; but it is overburdened with names of persons, regiments and divisi
ons and an endless variety of military and economic details. It is full of ever-recurring "heroic" clichés; and yet fails completely, in my view, to tell the story of that immense nation-wide drama in purely human terms. It has the failing common to much, though not all, Soviet writing on the war of making practically all Russians look exactly alike. Since this book is about the wair in Russia, it contains, of course, numerous chapters on the main military operations.

  But, in dealing with these, I have, as far as possible, avoided entering into any minute technical details of the fighting, which only interest military specialists, and have tried to portray the dramatic sweep of military events, often concentrating on those details—such as the immense German air superiority in 1941-2, or the Russian superiority in artillery at Stalingrad, or the hundreds of thousands of American lorries in the Red Army after the middle of 1943— which had a direct bearing on the soldiers' morale on both sides.

  Further, I have tried to treat all the main military events in Russia in their national and, often, international context: for both the morale in the country and inter-allied relations were very noticeably affected by the progress of the war itself. There is, for instance, nothing fortuitous in the intensified activity of Soviet foreign policy after Stalingrad, or in the fact that the Teheran Conference should have taken place not before, but after the Russian victory of Kursk— which was the real military turning-point of the war: more so than Stalingrad which, in the words of the German historian, Walter Goerlitz, was more in the nature of a "politico-psychological turning-point".

  This book, therefore, is much less a military story of the war than its human story and, to a lesser extent, its political story. I think I may say that one of my chief qualifications for writing this story of the war years in Russia is that I was there. Except for the first few months of 1942, I was in Russia right through the war—and for three years after it—and what interested me most of all were the behaviour and the reactions of the Russian people in the face of both calamity and victory. In the fearful days of 1941-2 and in the next two-and-a-half years of hard and costly victories, I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People's War; first, a war waged by a people fighting for their life against terrible odds, and later a war fought by a fundamentally unaggressive people, now roused to

  anger and determined to demonstrate their own military superiority. The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among the civilians as among the soldiers; although living conditions were very hard almost everywhere throughout the war, and