Hitler Moves East, 1941-1943 (36 page)

The spacious military airfield near the spa of Lipetsk was situated on high ground overlooking the town. Since 1924 it had been developed into an entirely modern air base. Officially the 4th Squadron of a Soviet Group was stationed there

—but the language in the 4th Squadron was German. Only the liaison officer and the airfield guard were Russians.

And, of course, the few ancient Soviet reconnaissance machines with their conspicuously large Soviet markings outside the hangars were Russian. Otherwise everything was German.

Lipetsk was listed in the Reichswehr budget with 2,000,000 marks annually. The first hundred fighters used for the training of German pilots were bought from the Fokker works in Holland. Between 200 and 300 German airmen were stationed at Lipetsk. Here the first German fighter-bombers were tested. In realistic manœuvres, under simulated wartime conditions, the "Lipetsk fighters" practised the technique of low-level bombing and thereby laid the foundations for the much-feared German Stukas of a later date.

The first types of light bombers and fighter aircraft, which were fully developed for serial production when the build- up of the German Luftwaffe started in 1933, had all been developed and tested in Lipetsk. The first 120 magnificently trained fighter pilots, the core of the German fighter force, came from Lipetsk; the same was true of the first hundred officer observers. Without Lipetsk Hitler would have needed another ten years to build up a modern air force. Lipetsk was the kind of adventure that could scarcely be imagined nowadays. While the mistrustful eyes of the Western allies and the pacifist-minded German Left wing were searching Germany for the slightest indication of any prohibited rearmament, far away, in the Arcadia of the German Communists and Left-wing Marxists, the Lipetsk fighter squadrons were roaring over the Don, dropping dummy bombs on practice targets, testing new bomb-sights, screaming at low level over Soviet villages in central Russia, right up to the edge of Moscow itself, and co-operating as artillery spotters with Soviet ground forces in full-scale manœuvres on the army training-grounds of Voronezh. The military achievement of Lipetsk was equalled by the organizational one. Everything, down to the last nail, had to be supplied from Germany. The Russians supplied the earth and the stones—nothing more.

The necessary materials and supplies were shipped to Leningrad from the free port of Stettin. Particularly secret or dangerous equipment, or goods which could not easily be camouflaged, could not be loaded in Stettin. They were put on board small sailing-ships, manned by officers, and sailed across the Baltic in secret. Naturally, now and then an entire shipment would be lost. Traffic in the opposite direction included such items as the coffins containing the bodies of airmen crashed at Lipetsk: they were packed in cases, declared as machinery spares, and shipped to Stettin. Customs officers in the confidence of the Reichswehr helped to smuggle them out from the port.

All officers leaving for Russia were first discharged and officially crossed off the army lists. They were, of course, promised reinstatement upon their return, but there was no legal claim of any kind. Certainly it would have been impossible to enforce such a claim in the courts, especially if the camouflage system should have broken down in the meantime. That was the personal risk each officer underwent by going to Russia for training.

What Lipetsk meant for the Air Force, Kazan meant for the tankmen. There, on the middle Volga, the foundations were laid for Guderian's, Hoepner's, Hoth's, and Kleist's armoured divisions. This fact was one of the main reasons why, until Hitler's rise to power, no Russian and no German military leader ever considered the possibility of war between Germany and the Soviet Union, let alone worked out a plan for this contingency. The Reichswehr, with its founder and guiding spirit, Colonel-General von Seeckt, was anxious to liquidate the results of the Treaty of Versailles in alliance with Russia. It wanted to wipe out the consequences of the defeat in the West and to restore the old Western frontier of Germany. Even more so it wanted to reestablish the ancient frontier in the east by smashing Poland.

In the summer of 1922, when the newly appointed German Ambassador to Moscow, Count BrockdorfE-Rantzau, opposed a unilateral pro-Russian policy on the part of Germany and warned against military collaboration with the Red Army, von Seeckt replied to him in a memorandum dated llth September:

The existence of Poland is intolerable; it is incompatible with Germany's vital needs. Poland must disappear, and it will disappear through its own internal weakness and through Russia—with our help. Poland is even more intolerable to Russia than it is to us; no Russian Government will ever reconcile itself to the existence of Poland. With Poland, one of the strongest pillars of the peace of Versailles will have fallen—the hegemony of France.

And what about the Soviets? What did the alliance with the Prussian generals mean to them? To them it meant the strengthening, development, and modernization of the Red Army for "the last battle"—an end for which they were

prepared to do anything. They were, moreover, interested in preventing at all costs an alliance between Germany and the Western Powers, since both Lenin and Stalin regarded a renewed Western intervention with German troops as a mortal danger. And finally, the ami of the German Right wing, the destruction of Poland, was Moscow's aim too. Thus the Reichswehr's anti-Western attitude suited Lenin's political concept, and later that of Stalin. Above all, it suited the man who, on the Soviet side, was the military partner of the German Army Directorate, the man who was increasingly becoming the personification of the Red Army—Marshal Tuk-hachevskiy.

Who was that man Tukhachevskiy? A hero and military genius, as was claimed for a whole decade until 1936? A traitor, a spy for the German Reichswehr, a "mangy dog," as Stalin called him after he had ordered him to be shot? Or a patriotic anti-Stalinist, the first and most fateful victim of the wicked old man, as Khrushchev maintains today?

Which of these pictures is true?

On 5th December 1941, when Colonel-General Guderian from his snowed-in headquarters at the Tolstoy estate of Yas-naya Polyana instructed his Second Tank Army to suspend its attack on Moscow, the 45th Infantry Division, which was Second Army's linking division on its right wing, was furiously fighting for the possession of the town of

Yelets. It was an unimportant little town, but it stood on the intersection of the great road from Moscow via Tula to the Don region and the east-west railway-line from Orel via Lipetsk to Stalingrad. Lipetsk, the former secret training base of the Reichswehr, where the young men of the German Luftwaffe had been taught their craft prior to 1933, was 40 miles away.

The combat-hardened regiments of 45th Infantry Division, mentioned earlier in this account during the fighting for Brest Litovsk, penetrated into Yelets in fierce street battles in severe cold, and dislodged the Russians. The division was thus 15 miles from the upper Don—1300 miles from its starting-point. Thirteen hundred miles of marching and fighting, covered within five months and two weeks.

Two days before the attack on Yelets the monitoring unit of 135th Infantry Regiment succeeded in hooking itself into a Russian telephone-line and listening in to the conversations between the Soviet commanders in the field. There were frequent references in these conversations to a formation on the western edge of the town—"the Khabarovsk lot." At 135th Infantry Regiment's headquarters this designation was at first regarded as a code name until it was discovered from the evidence of a few prisoners that this was in fact part of a once top-secret military formation, long since dissolved. The officers of this unit were nicknamed "the Khabarovsk lot": they were the so-called Special Corps of the Far Eastern Army, the keystone of Marshal Tukhachevskiy's long-forgotten military policy.

The history of this Corps holds the key to the Tukhachev-skiy mystery. It began in the summer of 1932. Germany then had 6,000,000 unemployed. The Soviet Union was in the grip of the greatest famine in modern history. Stalin's compulsory collectivization of agriculture, the expropriation and mass deportation of the wealthier peasants, had led to the complete collapse of agricultural production. Millions of Soviet citizens were dying of starvation. The domestic disaster was made worse by an international crisis.

In Asia, in 1931, the Japanese had leapt from their poor overpopulated islands on to the Chinese mainland in order to conquer a market for their manufactures and raw materials for their industry. In 1932 they occupied Manchuria with its fertile soil and rich ore deposits and made this country on the frontier of Eastern Siberia a Japanese satellite—the Man- churian Empire. In this way Tokyo demonstrated to the world that it was determined, if need be by force of arms, to set up a greater East Asian economic bloc.

This was a serious threat to the Soviet Union's Far Eastern interests. A Russo-Japanese conflict along the Far Eastern border became a real possibility. This happened at the very moment when Stalin's empire was faced with starvation.

At that moment in Moscow the First Deputy War Commissar, General Gamarnik, conceived an idea and put it into effect with General Tukhachevskiy's help. He set up the Far Eastern "Special Corps," also known as the Collective Farm Corps, whose officers very soon began to call themselves the "Khabarovsk lot," after the town of Khabarovsk on the Manchurian frontier.

Gamarnik and Tukhachevskiy's idea was both simple and ingenious: the members of this Corps were soldiers and at the same time peasants—peasants in uniform, as it were. In the event of war with Japan they were to make the Far

Eastern Army independent of food and fodder supplies along the single-track trans-Siberian Railway. It was the only possible solution of the vital problem of supplies. Marshal Blyukher, the autocratic Commander-in-Chief of the Far Eastern Army, had prohibited the expropriation of the rich peasants and the collectivization of agriculture in Siberia because he was worried about the morale of his recruits, 90 per cent, of whom came from peasant homes. Thus the only way to ensure a reliable agricultural supply basis for the Far Eastern Army was the one chosen by Gamarnik— military settlements which the soldiers would join with their families after completion of their normal active service. They formed large farming communities, but at the same time retained their military organization and were kept under arms and ready for action. Many farm labourers and sons of peasants from Central Russia volunteered for the Special Corps. Here they received their own house, a large plot of land for their own private use, complete with one cow, chickens, exemption from taxes for ten years, and other privileges.

By 1936 the "Collective Farm Corps" numbered 60,000 men on the active list and 50,000 reservists settled on the army farms. That was a battleworthy force of altogether ten divisions, with its own structure, virtually independent of the Red Army chain of command, and a long way removed from the heart of the regime in Moscow—an ideal tool for a general with political ambitions. And Gamarnik certainly was that. But even more so his friend Tukhachevskiy. Tuk- hachevskiy was likewise Deputy War Commissar, and, ever since the famine and the liquidation of the peasants, had been a resolute opponent of Stalin, the leader of a clique of generals actively opposed to the dictator. A man waiting for the moment when the despot could be overthrown. The "Collective Farm Corps" was ideally suited to his plans and played a decisive part. In the event of an armed clash with pro-Stalin forces of the Army and Party, the remote East Siberian Special Corps would hold a kind of rebel fortress and, if necessary, a safe area of retreat.

In the light of all these facts Marshal Tukhachevskiy acquires features differing from the picture painted either by Stalinist propaganda or by superficial Western biographers. Anyone viewing this man merely as a "fallen angel," as a Tsarist Guards officer who had embraced Bolshevism although the blood of French counts and Italian dukes coursed through his veins, closes his eyes to a proper understanding of this fascinating and in a way outstanding personality in Soviet history.

He was a worthy opponent of Stalin. He alone would have been able to overthrow the tyrant, to replace him, and to turn the course of Soviet and world history into a different direction. Tukhachevskiy's whole life showed him to be an exceptional man. Born in 1893, he was taken prisoner in August 1915 as a second lieutenant in the battle of Warsaw

—the very city where, almost exactly five years later, he was to suffer once more a military defeat. He was taken to No. 9 POW camp near Ingolstadt. In 1917 he escaped and made his way to St Petersburg. When he arrived there the city on the Neva was no longer the capital of Russia. The Tsar had been deposed. The war was over. Lenin's Bolsheviks were in power, and fighting against the counter-revolution of the White generals.

Tukhachevskiy, the Guards officer, the kinsman of half a dozen West European noble families, did not join the Whites but the Reds. Why? It has been said that it was pure accident. Others have attributed this surprising decision to the political inexperience of a young man. Others yet have ascribed it to pure opportunism. None of these explanations is true. Tukhachevskiy went Red from conviction and ambition.