Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (33 page)

Another source of important intelligence data to the Stavka was the frequent reports of the aerial intelligence service, which had improved
enormously since the battle for Stalingrad. Aerial sightings of enemy positions below and of units on the move (and, even better, aerial photographs) were extremely valuable for many obvious reasons: they were more or less immediate, and they could be verified far more efficiently than could a radio message from the Belarusian forests. They thus could give the Russian commanders an earlier chance to alter the balance of their forces, and the Stavka the chance to move around its reserve armies. Finally, they were useful to the Soviet Air Force in targeting its tactical air missions.

As with the other elements mentioned above, the Red Air Force also grew immensely in numbers and capacity during the years after 1942. Assessing its real effectiveness, however, is a different matter. How important was the contribution of Soviet airpower to the campaigns along the Eastern Front during the war? The historian has to peel back layers of contemporary and then Cold War propaganda that obscure the real story. Additionally, many of the archives on the Russian side are still inaccessible, while the memoir literature is often unconvincing. This in its turn leads to a very heavy reliance upon German sources. Yet some things are clear.

The first is that the roles played by the Red Air Force were much more specific than the far more numerous tasks that had to be carried out by the American and British air forces. There was, obviously, no air war at sea, so no carrier aircraft, and therefore no carriers nor their necessary escorts. There were no massive deployments of Coastal Command–type airpower—not just planes but crews, ground staff, air bases, intelligence and training personnel, production lines, fuel and ammo supplies—needed to carry out the grinding, titanic fight against the U-boats. Nor was there any real effort at strategic air warfare, employing massively expensive long-range four-engine bombers, which were key elements in American and British grand strategy. The Soviet air contribution was restricted to two elements: fighter forces, to defend against Luftwaffe attacks on the homeland and to gain aerial control over the battlefields, and tactical air forces, to bomb, strafe, and otherwise
interdict the Wehrmacht’s efforts in the field as the Russian forces advanced.

Even within these more limited fields, it still remains difficult to assess the effectiveness of the Red Air Force, for two reasons. The first is that we lack really sustained, high-quality comparisons of their fighting capacities. It is quite easy to accept that the performance of all Russian planes steadily improved, especially from 1943 onward, but that was the story everywhere. What is harder to establish are the claims made near and after the end of the war that, for example, the Yakovlev-3 (Yak-3) was as good as the latest Spitfires, for the simple reason that the two aircraft never fought each other, let alone engaged in a sustained aerial tussle like the Battle of Britain in summer 1940 or the massive operations of Allied fighter forces across western Europe to destroy the Luftwaffe squadrons from February through April 1944. Where were the battles like the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot (see
chapter 5
), where the Hellcats’ superiority over the Zeros was complete? If what we have learned about the T-34 is any guide, then mere figures regarding Soviet fighters’ respective speed and engine horsepower are simply not enough. Was the Yak-3 better than the enemy in real aerial combat? We will never know.

The second difficulty for scholars in this field is even greater: how is one to assess the Soviet Union’s gradual ascendancy in the air in the final eighteen months of the Great Patriotic War when most of the Luftwaffe’s fighter groups, and all of their best aces, had been pulled away to fight across western Europe? Once Barbarossa unfolded, the German air force was fighting on three fronts (eastern, western, and southern), yet until the end of 1942, 50 percent of its air forces were campaigning in the East. Then came the British and American bombing of the cities of the Third Reich, especially the RAF’s devastation of Hamburg in July and August 1943, which in particular seems to have shaken up Speer, Goering, Milch, Galland, and the others a great deal. All of them felt, in consequence, that many more resources had to be devoted to the defense of Germany’s industrial core, even if they needed to be withdrawn from elsewhere. As is detailed in
chapter 2
, the American and British bombing efforts over Germany were blunted, though in part by a relocation of Luftwaffe squadrons from the east.

This relocation intensified with the Allies’ massive aerial campaigns over western Europe in early 1943. The impact upon the Ostfeldzug was clearly great. By April 1944, the German air force had denuded the Eastern Front, leaving only five hundred aircraft of all types to confront more than thirteen thousand Soviet planes.
⁵⁷
At the same time, of course, Germany had to concentrate the vast bulk of its dual purpose antiaircraft/antitank batteries (more than ten thousand guns and half a million men) on the defense of its own cities, rather than trying to shoot the Red Air Force out of the sky and bring Zhukov’s advances on land to a grinding halt. Stalin always complained to Churchill that the West was not doing enough to bring Germany down. He never acknowledged that the air war over Russia might have been won, albeit indirectly, by the air war over the Ruhr.

So, was the achievement of the Soviet air force, the VVS, really that of a first-class service, or was it pushing against a weakened German air force increasingly manned by novice fliers? The VVS may have become ascendant only when the war was essentially won. More particularly, it is hard to find an occasion (better, repeated occasions) when a squadron of eighteen Fw 190s fought it out with a squadron of eighteen Yak-3s and the latter won decisively. The respected Russian fighter pilot Kozhemyako records in his memoirs a single occasion when his Yaks spotted four Fw 190 fighters, but the latter simply increased speed and flew away (they could not have outrun a Spitfire or a Mustang). Actually, one wonders how many Fw 190s were left on the Eastern Front by late 1944, apart from those squadrons being reluctantly converted to fighter-bomber status to replace the ailing Stukas and engage in the land war. For Operation Bagration, the Red Air Force–to–Luftwaffe ratio on fighter aircraft may have been as lopsided as fifty-eight to one, which if true makes nonsense of any real comparative assessment. When the fabled “Red Phoenix” rose, was it because there was no opposition and the remaining Luftwaffe groups were supplying garrisons and bombing pontoon bridges, not fighting for control of the skies?
⁵⁸

This particular aspect of air conflict in the Second World War therefore remains unclear, despite some impressive scholarly studies.
⁵⁹
Clearly, the Red Air Force was a nonentity early in the war. On the first day of Barbarossa operations alone, the Russians lost around twelve hundred aircraft (almost all probably hit on the ground) to the German
loss of a mere thirty-five planes. Then came the gradual Russian comeback. By the closing stages of the Battle of Stalingrad (when the street fighting was so dense that Stukas could not be used in close-support operations), the soldiers of the Red Army could see a few planes above them bearing a red star. Simultaneously, the inter-Allied pressures played their part. The Luftwaffe now faced a collapsing North African/Mediterranean front, the arrival of the American bombers in England, and Harris’s tearing apart of cities such as Cologne, all of which forced the high command to pull the better pilots and swifter fighters back to the Reich. And the VVS was at last getting better planes, the Yak-9 fighter and the greatly improved Ilyushin Sturmovik, an exceptionally tough, rather slow, low-flying tank-buster of an aircraft that was designed to assist the Red Army’s advance to the west.
⁶⁰
By 1944 the Yak-3 was in service and playing havoc with German transport aircraft, light bombers, and those awkward Focke-Wulf 190 conversions. The Red Air Force was also acquiring its own aces (including female fliers), although even as late as Operation Bagration it continued to lose more planes than did the Luftwaffe. Overall, though the real significance of Soviet airpower during the Great Patriotic War remains shrouded in mystery, it probably played far less of a role in the turning of the tide on the Eastern Front than its early propagandists proclaimed.

On June 22, 1944, as the Western Allies were slowly advancing beyond sight of the Normandy beaches, and as American troops fought yard for yard across Saipan, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a massive assault upon the German-held central front that involved several times as many ground-based forces as the combined totals of all those involved in the Marianas and D-Day attacks. On the Eastern Front, nothing was small in scale, but the size of the Red Army and Air
Force’s commitment to Bagration exceeded anything that had gone before, whether Moscow, Stalingrad, or Kursk. Appropriately, the operation was named by Stalin after imperial Russia’s most aggressive general, Piotr Bagration, who died of his wounds while blocking Napoleon at the great Battle of Borodino. It may not have been a coincidence that Bagration, like Stalin, came from Georgia, nor that the operation named after him was launched exactly three years to the day after Operation Barbarossa. It was the Soviet Union’s massive return blow.
⁶¹

The numbers of troops, tanks, and guns involved in this enormous Soviet surge from the Ukraine to Poland are difficult to comprehend from the perspective of post-1945 limited war, and impossible to count with accuracy. Should we include all the Soviet forces facing their German counterparts from north to south, or just those involved in the punch into the center? Should we include the vast follow-on divisions initially held in reserve, or just those used in the initial Bagration assaults? Probably it makes no difference; though the varied and conflicting figures simply baffle the mind, all arrive at a massive total. According to one account, “At the commencement of the offensive, Stavka had committed approximately 1,700,000 combat and support troops, approximately 24,000 artillery pieces and mortars, 4,080 tanks and assault guns and 6,334 aircraft. German strength at the outset was approximately 800,000 combat and support troops, 9,500 artillery pieces, but only 553 tanks and assault guns and 839 aircraft.”
⁶²
At the Second Battle of El Alamein, Rommel had a mere 27,000 German troops; the comparatively large British Empire force of 230,000 men was far smaller than any one of the five Russian army fronts (that is, full army groups) pushing westward in June 1944.

But Operation Bagration was not just a matter of brute force. At long last, the Red Army had reached its full potential. It was still feeling the effects of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s when the Germans attacked, and then had to suffer greatly in all the early battles, with disproportionate losses. The service had had many failures, and from top to bottom it had been slow to learn important lessons from its humiliations or even from its bruising victories. Yet the high command had eventually learned to put all the pieces together in the most impressive battlefield recovery of the entire war. By the time of Bagration, Stalin was
willing to entrust two members of the Stavka, Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Zhukov, with coordination of the key central section of those five gigantic fronts that stretched from the Baltic to the Ukraine—provided, of course, Zhukov gave his suspicious boss daily updates.

In this vast battle, the Red Army encountered the reverse problem of the “expanding torrent”: the defender’s lines were contracting and becoming more concentrated in the troops-to-land ratio. Yet even in June 1944 the length of the German Eastern Front was still enormous, and the sheer size of the Soviet ground forces was overwhelming. Ironically, the more the Wehrmacht retreated, despite Hitler’s raging counterorders, the more the Ostfeldzug came to resemble the Western Front of 1914–18. But this time the attacking side had a force advantage of at least three or four to one; in many individual encounters, it was more like ten to one.

Every piece of the elaborate machinery that was needed in a major land operation worked for the Red Army. The
maskirovka
was superb. While the OKW was anticipating a further large Soviet offensive during the summer months, it had no idea where the main assault would be launched—their best guess was that it would come in the south or perhaps on the Baltic Front. The OKW greatly underestimated the size of the force that would be deployed against Minsk in the center. The T-34-85, now in vast numbers and with its many defects corrected, was virtually unstoppable. On a one-against-one basis, a single Tiger or Panther tank was still more powerful, but by this stage Soviet armor tactics were much better developed, with the faster T-34s nimbly moving around the slower Nazi tanks or leading them into an antitank ambush. The river-crossing engineer battalions were at their peak, and much helped by intelligence from partisans on the other side as to where, and where not, to attempt a landing across the Berezina and the Dnieper.