Barbarossa (7 page)

In 1930, Hitler had written, "Armies for the preparation of
peace do not exist. They exist for triumphant exertion in war."
And in the spring of 1941 the Wehrmacht stood victorious, hardly
blooded; trained and equipped to perfection; a beautifully balanced
and coordinated fighting machine now at a pinnacle of martial
achievement. Where was it to go from there? Sheer gravitational pull
must, it would seem, direct it against its one remaining opponent in
the European land mass; draw it like Napoleon's armies, which also
had stood in frustration on the Channel, eastward, to the dark
unconquered steppe of Russia.

two
| MOTHER RUSSIA

DISPOSITION
OF THE SOVIET ARMIES AT THE START OF
Barbarossa,
22ND JUNE,
1941

In the summer of 1941 the Red Army presented an enigma as much
to the Western intelligence services as to those in Germany. Every
facet by which military quality is assessed seemed to have an
opposite. Its equipment, by all accounts, was lavish (in fact, it
disposed of more tanks and as many aircraft as the rest of the world
put together), but how much of this machinery was up to date, and how
capable were the Soviet commanders of handling it? Its reserves of
manpower seemed inexhaustible, but sheer mass was valueless without
proper leadership, and Communist timeservers chosen for their
political reliability would be as ineffective on the field of battle
as the court favourites who had enjoyed the patronage of the Tsar.
Even the innate courage and resilience of the Russian soldier, to
which successive European wars bore testimony, was thought by some to
have been jeopardised by political indoctrination. The "ordinary
Russian," it was claimed, would show himself only too anxious to
escape, by laying down his arms, from the menacing supervision of the
commissars.

These problems faced foreign observers in 1941, and even today,
with all the advantages of hindsight, it is not easy to resolve so
many apparent contradictions. There are three distinct elements which
must be considered: first, the paper strength of the Red Army, the
state of its training, and its tactical doctrine; second, the impact
of Party control on its leadership and its strategic posture; third,
the reality of Soviet strength, as demonstrated by operational
experience in the period immediately preceding the German invasion.

The modern Red Army was essentially the creation of two
architects, Trotsky and Tukhachevski (both of whom were to pay with
their lives for achieving such prominence).

[Leon Trotsky, Commissar for War in March 1918. Ousted 1925;
exiled 1928; assassinated 1940.

Marshal M. N. Tukhachevski, Chief of the Red Army Staff 1926-28.
Other appointments, and promoted to the Military Soviet (
q.v.
)
1934; demoted May 1937; executed June 1937.]

Trotsky had imposed form and discipline upon an amorphous
proletarian rabble. Tukhachevski had evolved tactical and strategic
doctrines which, although not so revolutionary as those of some
British tank experts, were nonetheless far in advance of current
thinking in other European armies.

[Notably Captain B. H. Liddell Hart and Major General J. F. C.
Fuller, whose writings had greatly influenced the formation of the
first Panzer division in the German Army (although they made little
impression on the German General Staff until much later).]

However, in the late 1930's domestic politics and the shifting
orientation of the Soviet Union in the European power complex led to
corresponding (and damaging) changes in its military attitude.

The problem of defending Russia was dominated by the physical
characteristics of her western frontier and the fact that Soviet
economic and administrative centres were concentrated in a relatively
small part of the country—within five hundred miles of this
same western frontier. Furthermore, the eastern zone was effectively
divided into two halves by the Pripet Marshes—a sprawling
region of reed and forest, nearly two hundred miles across, which
covers the area where the great rivers of European Russia take their
source.

Besides their value as an obstacle to the invader the Marshes pose
problems to the defence. For they effectively break the western zone
into two halves, each of which must operate independently, being
served by different rail complexes and protecting separate
objectives. On a front of such length it is impossible to maintain
strength everywhere, and the problem which had always confronted the
Russian staff, and which was aggravated by the growing concentration
of industrial power in the eastern Ukraine, was the according of
priorities between the defence of the north, the twin capitals of
Leningrad and Moscow, and the south, whence the country drew the bulk
of its food, its machinery, and its armament.

In the early 1930's Marshal Tukhachevski had drawn up a master
plan for the conduct of this defence, and this scheme, curiously,
survived the execution of its author on a charge of German-inspired
espionage. He had suggested a relatively light concentration in the
north, with the bulk of the mobile forces to be placed on the
Dnieper, where they could menace the right flank of an invader and,
if all went well, undertake a rapid occupation of the Balkans.

By this reckoning it was estimated that the sheer physical
difficulties of distance and supply would protect the capital; the
enemy would be drawn into a wide and desolate corridor between the
Pripet Marshes and the fortress area of Leningrad, and the defence
would be given time to regroup and to select its point for
counterattack. This notion was originally conceived in the context of
a threat from Poland or, at worst, an alliance between Poland and the
rump of the German Army that remained after Versailles. But by 1935
three new factors had altered the scope of the appreciation. The pace
of German rearmament under Hitler was rapidly accelerating, the
emphasis in German training was on mobility and the use of armour,
and the political attitudes of the other Western powers seemed
clearly to indicate their hope for and encouragement of a move by
Germany against the Soviet Union at some point in the future.

It was accordingly decided that a fortification system be extended
southward from the Baltic to the northern fringe of the Pripet
Marshes, and this work was started in 1936. At this time the doctrine
of the all-powerful defence was firmly rooted in the armies of the
West. The theory of the deep armoured thrust, although it originated
in England, had taken root only among a few of the more enlightened
of the officers in the German Army. The whole of military science was
applied to the problems of devising and perfecting permanent defence
systems against which the opponent would batter himself to
exhaustion—systems which found their exemplar, if not their
most perfect consummation, in the Maginot Line. Many details of the
Maginot system were disclosed to the Russians, who had enjoyed
intermittent good relations with France, at both military and
diplomatic levels, for periods during the thirties, and it was not
difficult for their intelligence to collect additional material from
elements among the French military and the administration that were
sympathetic to the Soviet ideology.

The result was that the Russians were able, by starting several
years later, and with a considerable mass of data and experience at
their finger tips, and with unlimited space and depth of ground to
use, to construct a system—it was known as the Stalin Line—that
was in places even more formidable than its French prototype. An
appreciation by OKH intelligence made after the line had been overrun
described it as:

A dangerous combination of concrete, field works and natural
obstacles, tank traps, mines, marshy belts around forts, artificial
lakes enclosing defiles, cornfields cut according to the trajectory
of machine-gun fire. Its whole extent right up to the positions of
the defenders was camouflaged with a consummate art. . . . Along a
front of 120 kilometres, no less than a dozen barriers, carefully
camouflaged and proofed against light bombs and shells of 75 and 100
mm. had been constructed and sited in skilfully chosen fire
positions. Thousands of pine trunks masked ditches which the attacker
could not discover until it was too late. About three kilometres
behind, over stretches of ten or twelve kilometres, three ranges of
pines had been driven more than a metre into the ground. Behind this
obstacle stretched out abatis made of trees sawn to within a metre of
the ground, and whose tops, turned towards the enemy, had been
entangled with barbed wire. Concrete pyramids strengthened this
barrage.

But although stretches of the Stalin Line were extremely
formidable, it was in no sense a continuous belt of fortification.
Certain areas—notably around Lake Peipus, and between the
Pripet Marshes and the upper Dniester; and the approaches to a number
of key cities near the frontier zone—Pskov, Minsk, Korosten,
Odessa—were heavily protected. The fortified districts were not
linked, however, by any connecting strip of field works, and the term
"line," although it may have denoted an ultimate goal, was,
in 1941, no more than a geographical illusion founded on the presence
of a sequence of fortified districts all in roughly the same
longitude.

Then, following the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 and the
agreement to partition Poland, the Red Army had deserted its fixed
defences in White Russia and pushed westward, up to and beyond the
line of the river Bug. And in July of the following year the Russians
annexed Bessarabia and Bukovina. These measures, together with the
"absorption" of the Baltic states in the north, advanced
the western frontiers of the Soviet Union by hundreds of miles, and
keeping step with the new geography, the Army went forward also,
leaving empty its old training areas, its supply dumps, and the
permanent emplacements of the Stalin Line.

Stalin believed that space was more important than fixed defences,
but he ignored the fact that the Army was not trained in the sort of
fluid defensive battle that alone makes the use of space profitable.
And if any of the Red Army generals disagreed with him they had the
sense, by 1939, to keep their thoughts to themselves. For still more
important than his obsession with space (but equally disastrous) was
the Russian dictator's conviction that the primary requirement in an
army, and particularly in its senior officers, was that of political
reliability. Communism teaches that the internal enemy is the most
dangerous, and in a society as repressive as was prewar Russia the
presence of three million men permanently under arms could become a
source of anxiety to the regime unless they and their officers were
ruthlessly disciplined into toeing the Party line.

In theory, the chain of command ran downward from the Committee of
the Defence of the State (GOKO), which was presided over by Stalin
and included Molotov, Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Beria.