The only other alternative was to sit and wait for Hitler to attack first. Domestic and foreign intelligence sources had concluded that the Germans would indeed strike, probably in the third week of June. “How long to defeat the fascists?” the Soviet dictator asked. “Thirty days,” replied Zhukov. “Only thirty days to defeat 100 German divisions?” Stalin asked incredulously. “And when would you attack?” he asked next. “In June, before the Germans can launch Barbarossa,” Zhukov replied. “Too early,” Stalin observed. “We won’t be ready until at least July. By then we will have more than five million men under arms, including an additional fifty divisions.” Fifty divisions to backstop you in case you fail, he thought. “August would be better still,” he continued, “allowing us to generate another 150 divisions,” although he recognized that arms and equipment for those divisions were another matter.
“Submit a plan within the next two weeks,” he ordered. “Plan the attack for early or mid-July.”
“Comrade Stalin, a German attack may be only weeks away,” the protégé reminded his mentor.
“Yes, so our sources tell us,” repeated Stalin calmly. “But we are simply not ready. As for the Germans, leave Hitler to me. He will give us the time we need. You have two weeks to plan, no more.” He was still looking at the map when the Chief of Staff turned to depart. “And Zhukov!” the Soviet leader said.
“Yes, Comrade Stalin?” he responded automatically as he turned.
“Thirty days, you say? I will give you everything you need. But do not fail me! Do you understand? We must bury them!” Stalin growled menacingly.
Zhukov returned to his own operations map depicting German units in blue and the Soviets in red. The detailed enemy deployment was a priceless gift from the Soviet spy ring, Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), operating out of Western Europe and Scandinavia. Operation Storm called for Lt. Gen. M. P. Kirponos’s Southwestern Front to attack across southern Poland to separate Germany from her southern allies. In the meantime, Lt. Gen. D. G. Pavlov’s Western Front would destroy the German main body and capture Warsaw.
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The immediate mission of the Red Army during the first phase of the operation was to break up German forces east of the Vistula River and around Krakow, advance to the Narew and Vistula Rivers, and secure Katowice. The Southwestern Front would strike the main blow toward Krakow and Katowice, aimed at separating Germany from her Hungarian and Romanian allies. The secondary attack would be conducted by the left wing of the Western Front toward Warsaw and Deblin. Its missions were to fix German forces in and around Warsaw and to secure the Polish capital as well as destroy enemy forces in and around Lublin in cooperation with the Southwestern Front. Gen. M. M. Popov’s Northwestern Front was to conduct an active defense against Finland and East Prussia, while the left wing of the Southwestern Front would do the same against Hungary and Romania and be prepared to conduct offensive operations against Romania if favorable conditions arose there.
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Zhukov recognized the Red Army was not ready for war against Germany. Its performance during the 1939 Russo-Finnish War and its occupation of eastern Poland had been disastrous. The list of failures encompassed leadership, coordination, training, logistics, and maintenance. True, the Red Army’s physical strength had grown dramatically as a result of the high output of the armaments industry. It now possessed some 24,000 tanks of all types, including more than 1,800 of the latest model tanks, almost 150,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and some 30,000 aircraft, including almost 18,000 produced in the last two years.
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But the spiritual strength of the army had been shattered by Stalin’s purges, which eliminated the bulk of the army’s corps, division, brigade, and regimental commanders. Of the 6,000 senior officers arrested, 1,500 were tortured and executed. The remainder disappeared into the concentration camps.
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The purges decapitated the Red Army at all levels, stifled initiative, and ended all meaningful training. Zhukov faced the daunting task of taking on the legendary Wehrmacht with an army that was well equipped but lacked professional leadership and training. Still, it was better to strike first and hard than to wait and be devoured piecemeal.
Zhukov was confident he could defeat or at least severely damage the German Army. He sought to offset the army’s shortcomings in four ways. First was surprise, both in the air and on the ground. Although tactical surprise had been lost, strategic surprise had not. The Wehrmacht neither expected nor was positioned to receive a large-scale Russian attack, a fact confirmed by its shallow deployment. Next he would use mass to overwhelm the Germans, both in the air and on the ground. As Stalin was fond of saying: “Quantity has a quality all of its own.” Intelligence reported that the Luftwaffe had deployed to the east short of fuel and spare parts. Zhukov planned on launching round-the-clock air operations as soon as possible to overwhelm the German Air Force while masking the movement of his troops and collecting intelligence on enemy deployments. The Chief of Staff hoped to desynchronize the German air-land battle combination.
On the ground, the Red Army would overwhelm the Wehrmacht by striking hard at the flanks of Army Groups Center and South. Soviet intelligence had recently learned that almost half of the German divisions were equipped with captured Czechoslovakian and French equipment. These units were positioned in the gaps between the Panzer groups. What German propaganda portrayed as a homogeneous and powerful Panzer force was really a patchwork army. The Czech and French tanks, with their light armor and puny guns, were no match for any of their Soviet counterparts, from the light and fast BT-5s and BT-7s to the heavier T-34s and KV-1s. Even the bulk of German Panzers would be powerless to stop the Red Army’s armored onslaught. Superior technology and the correlation of forces dictated that the enemy line would break. The Red Army’s initial echelons would undoubtedly suffer heavy losses, but so would the Germans. Zhukov planned on pounding them relentlessly with air strikes and artillery, then dropping the bulk of two airborne corps into their rear to seize and hold crossings across the Vistula River until the arrival of the fronts’ mobile groups. He counted on the first attacking waves to force the defenders to reveal their positions, expend their ammunition, and wear them down. And then he would commit his breakthrough formations to drive deep into the enemy rear.
But Zhukov was counting on more than surprise, mass, and superior technology to beat the Germans. He planned on concentrating the best commanders and equipment into select units and then holding them until a breakthrough had been achieved. Already, thousands of seasoned Soviet officers and NCOs were en route from the Far East to the country’s western borders. They would man the elite mechanized corps of the first strategic echelon. At the heart of each mechanized corps were two tank and one motorized division. Each tank division consisted of two tank, a motorized rifle, and a howitzer regiment, and deployed 375 tanks. Each motorized division consisted of two motorized rifle, a tank, and an artillery regiment, and deployed 275 light tanks. Each mechanized corps was comprised of more than 36,000 men, 1,000 tanks, and 250 artillery pieces.
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Zhukov also planned on massing almost 2,000 of his newest tanks in his leading breakthrough formations.
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There were, however, serious problems with the Red Army’s most elite units. The mechanized corps had only half the tanks and tractors, and a third of the trucks they were authorized.
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Furthermore, more than two-thirds of the older model tanks, which made up the vast bulk of the armor fleet, were down for maintenance.
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Finally, although ammunition was plentiful, fuel and spare parts were not. Zhukov had less than two months to bring the mechanized corps to full strength and rectify these deficiencies. He planned on ruthlessly stripping the formations of the second and third strategic echelons to make up the shortages in the first and second. Robbing Czar Peter to pay Czar Paul, the chief of the Soviet General Staff thought. What would Stalin say? But Stalin did not interfere.
June 22 came and went without a German invasion. Reports indicated that the Wehrmacht would attack in mid- or late July. In the meantime, a steel curtain had descended over the Soviet border. NKVD Border Troops and the Red Army had thwarted attempts to infiltrate additional agents and even airdrop special operations forces into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Red Air Force and Air Defense Forces had turned back growing efforts by the Luftwaffe to conduct armed reconnaissance. There had been heavy losses on both sides, with “Stalin’s Falcons” coming out much the worse. Still, the Soviets, with their preponderance of aircraft, retained the upper hand. The Red Army High Command continued to reinforce the border region with antiaircraft and air defense units, and by the end of June, German pilots were reporting the heaviest concentration of antiaircraft guns they had ever seen.
German low and medium altitude reconnaissance had failed to penetrate Soviet air space to any significant degree. More ominously, the Red Air Force’s own attempts to penetrate the skies over Poland were clumsy affairs entailing the use of obsolete reconnaissance aircraft escorted by hundreds of fighters aimed at overwhelming the Luftwaffe at multiple points along the border. The Germans responded in kind, and the race was on to see which side could throw more fighters and fighter-bombers into the air. Clumsy or not, the Luftwaffe was on the verge of being overwhelmed, and calls went out to Berlin for additional units. The element of surprise and, with it, the hopes of destroying the Red Air Force on the ground had disappeared. The tempo and scale of air operations over the border region continued to grow. Huge air battles, involving hundreds of German and Soviet fighters, began to take place on a regular basis over the skies of eastern Poland and the western Soviet Union, with the Russian pilots coming out worse.
The German pilots, who had only recently been chasing and dodging British fighters over the English Channel, initially called it the “Battle of Russia,” or more simply, Das Tontaubenschiessen (The Pigeon Shoot). They soon recognized, however, that it was no joking matter. Ivan did not shy away from aerial combat. Franze Schiess of Stab/JG.53 later recalled: “They would let us get almost into aiming position, and then bring their machines around a full 180 degrees, till both aircraft were firing at each other from head-on!”
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What Ivan lacked in finesse, he made up in sheer doggedness. On June 22 three pilots of the Western Military District’s 123rd Fighter Regiment, 43rd Fighter Division, sacrificed themselves in ramming attacks, destroying or damaging three Bf 109s.
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In the meantime, the Soviet High Command continued to rotate fresh fighter regiments into the fray. Losses were high, but the Luftwaffe was being worn away, albeit gradually, and the Germans were left wondering where all these infernal machines were coming from and how long the Red Air Force could continue losing aircraft at this rate.
Soviet pilots had succeeded in downing several dozen German fighters in air-to-air combat. Still others were lost to the concentrated air defense forces, even though these tended to blast away at friend and foe indiscriminately. But it was the high operations tempo that was taking the heaviest toll of German aircraft, leaving scores of fighters down for maintenance. In June alone Soviet pilots flew more than 7,000 sorties, the bulk against Army Group Center.
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The Luftwaffe, which had to respond to these incursions, paid the price. By June 28 the Germans had only 1,21.3 of an authorized 1,401 Bf 109s on hand, and only 858 of these were operational.
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Parts and fuel, already insufficient for the planned invasion of Russia, were becoming scarce, forcing units to cannibalize inoperable aircraft, ensuring they would never fly again. OKL (Luftwaffe High Command) was forced to fly in aircraft and spares directly from factories in the Reich as well as from France and Italy. A perturbed Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commander of Luftflotte 2, reported to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, “It is a hell of a way to fight a war.” Still, German pilots managed to hold their own, shooting down Russians in droves and adding to their tally. By the end of June air ace Werner Mölders had exceeded Richthofen’s First World War score of eighty victories and was well on his way to 100 kills.
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By the end of June the Red Air Force had accomplished only one of its three missions, that of wearing down the Luftwaffe, albeit at a heavy price. Almost 1,500 Soviet aircraft, including a large number of newer model Yak-Is and MiG-3s, had already been lost in the fighting. This was not part of the initial plan. The Red Air Force had been suffering attrition at an alarming rate. Zhukov, however, considered the price well worth the effort for he mistakenly believed that the Soviet pilots had not only succeeded in wearing down the Luftwaffe by some 500 machines, but had also denied the Germans intelligence on the deployment of the Red Army.
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More than four million Russian soldiers awaited the final order that would set Operation Storm into motion in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 6, 1941. Two hours earlier, at 0300, 35,000 artillery pieces and mortars had begun delivering their preparatory fires, lighting up the border from one end to the other. Stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the Red Army was organized into 200 divisions and supported by more than 15,000 tanks and 10,000 combat aircraft.
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In the north, the Western Front’s 11th and 10th Armies would attack southwest toward Warsaw to envelop German forces from the north. The 13th Army constituted the second echelon, while the Northwestern Front’s 27th Army and the Western Front’s 22nd and 20th Armies constituted the third. In the south, the Southwestern Front’s 6th and 26th Armies would attack west and northwest toward Kielce to envelop German forces from the south. The 16th Army constituted the second echelon, the 21st and 19th Armies constituted the third. The strategic reserve consisted of seventeen divisions located around the Pripet Marshes. Operation Storm called for an attack force of 149 divisions, with another forty-eight conducting defensive operations in support of the attack.
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