The Bloody Triangle Page 2
It is common nowadays to lambaste German military planners for underestimating Soviet military capabilities. The often-quoted Heinz Guderian, godfather of German panzer operations, estimated the Soviet tank park at over ten thousand in 1937, knowing that these numbers would only grow yearly at an ever-increasing pace. In 1933 he visited one tank factory in the Soviet Union, producing twenty-two tanks a day.6 Extrapolating from this figure and allowing for a modest five-day week, fifty-two weeks per year, these numbers amount to an output of 5,720 tanks per year. And these numbers are just for one factory in 1933. Doubtless, the German planners made projections of what the Soviet tank strength would be in 1941. In a similar vein, a Luftwaffe officer, Maj. Rudolf Loytved-Hardegg, tasked with preparing intelligence estimates about the Red Air Force, placed the number of Soviet combat-ready aircraft at fourteen thousand.7 The two men were echoed by Halder:
Comments on Russian tanks: Redoubtable; 4.7cm gun (AT) a good medium weapon; bulk of tanks obsolete. Numerically Russia’s tank strength is superior to that of any other nation, but they have only a small number of new giant types with long 10cm guns (mammoth models, 42 to 45 tons). Air force very large in number, but mostly outdated; only small number of modern models.”8
This mention about the “new giant types” of tanks dispels the notion that Germans were unaware of the new generation of large Soviet tanks. However, this particular entry was not clear to which model Halder was referring; KV-1 armed with a long gun but 76mm in caliber, or KV-2, which was armed with a heavier but shorter 152mm howitzer.
Despite being contemptuous of Soviet combat capabilities and leadership, the German planners were wary of the sheer numerical enormity of their future opponent. Underscoring that it would be a giant undertaking to topple the Soviet colossus, a terse entry in Halder’s famous war diary on January 28, 1941, read: “Commit all available units.”9 It appears that Hitler himself placed his support behind the best possible chances of success: “AAA (Anti-Air Artillery). Führer wants no serviceable piece to remain inactive. Personnel for thirty batteries. AAA Corps, of six battalions, for Sixth Army (Panzer Group 1) and Panzer Group 2.”10
Nor were logistics underestimated; another entry on the same day: “Satisfaction is possible only when the point of main effort is prepared through the collaboration of all forces in order to solve the most significant supply issues concerning transportation, tires, fuel, and storage. The air force and army must use the available transportation through careful, coordinated effort.”
Halder comments on the sheer size of the Soviet state:
Problems of Russia’s vastness: Enormous expanse requires concentration of critical points. Massed planes and tanks must be brought to bear on strategic points. Our air force cannot cover this entire huge area at one time; at the start of the campaign, it will be able to dominate only parts of the enormous front.11
Immensely hampering German planning efforts was the closed nature of the Soviet society. Tourism by private western citizens into the Soviet Union was practically at zero, virtually negating German efforts to explore the Soviet defensive and industrial capabilities lying in the hinterland of the vast country. Even the most basic building block of any planning, maps, was in short supply: “Difficulty with Russian maps. Especially the tactical maps (1:100,000) are very poor. Lower echelons must be warned on how staff work will be affected by such bad maps.”12 However, the new territories which Soviet Union acquired after the 1939 partition of Poland contained large numbers of locals either sympathetic to Germans or hostile to the Soviets, providing German intelligence with accurate tactical information about the border areas.
Overall, German planners were well aware of the effects Stalin’s purges had on condition, capabilities, and morale of Soviet military in general and its officer corps in particular. German intelligence rightly determined the Soviet command and support structures to be slow to respond, bulky, cumbersome, and not ready to adapt to rapidly changing tactical situations.
GERMAN ORGANIZATIONS
The striking power of Army Group South rested with its five panzer divisions, all veteran formations. Impressed with the performance of armored units in 1939 and 1940, Hitler ordered the number of panzer divisions doubled from twelve to twenty-four for the 1941 campaign. However, this increase in numbers of divisions was not matched by a proportionate increase of total number of tanks. In 1940, the maneuver portion of a panzer division was composed of two panzer regiments and one motorized infantry regiment. The doubling of panzer divisions was achieved by shuffling the balance of regiments within a division. The 1941 panzer division had one panzer regiment with two motorized infantry regiments.
Suffering from chronic shortages of raw materials, production capacity, and availability of specialist workers, the German armament industry was not able to deliver the number of tanks required for twenty-four panzer divisions. While a panzer division of 1940 numbered close to 300 tanks, the start of the campaign against the Soviet Union in 1941 saw German panzer divisions numbering less than 160 tanks each.13 The table below is based on A. V. Isayev’s book, in turn quoting Thomas Jents:14
Table 1.
Tank Strength of Panzer Group 1
In addition, there were two battalions of assault guns and two more of tank destroyers assigned to Panzer Group 1, numbering approximately 180 more armored vehicles.
A typical German panzer entering Soviet Union in 1941 numbered just short of fourteen thousand men, roughly 150 tanks, 50 cannons, and howitzers ranging from 75mm to 150mm, and 30 81mm mortars. These heavy weapons were supplemented by 42 37mm and 9 47mm or 50mm antitank guns, virtually noneffective against the new and heavy Soviet tanks, but plenty deadly to older and lighter models. In addition to field artillery, each German tank division possessed 12 20mm flak guns and 8 to 12 88mm guns. Adding to the deadly cocktail were the heavy artillery and self-propelled assault gun battalions, belonging at the corps level and distributed to individual divisions in mission-oriented battery packages.
While panzers received the lion’s share of glory, the mainstay of the German army remained infantry, some motorized, but overwhelmingly regular, of a foot-slogging, gravel-agitating variety. Motorized infantry divisions, although lacking tanks, had the same number of combat battalions, six, as a panzer division, also with roughly fourteen thousand men, while regular infantry division numbered over sixteen thousand men with nine infantry battalions. However, both motorized and regular infantry divisions possessed stronger artillery than their panzer brethren. While the motorized divisions had roughly the same numbers of guns as panzer ones, they were of heavier calibers. The regular infantry divisions, on the other hand, had an additional twelve-gun 105mm battery.
Despite being regularly portrayed as a mechanized force par excellance, the German army brought 625,000 horses with it into the Soviet Union in 1941, more than Napoleon did in 1812. Equally difficult was the situation with wheeled transport. While a shortage of wheeled vehicles before the opening of the campaign was partially made good by captured or commandeered French trucks, their suspensions, developed for well-maintained European highways, did not last long on the rutted roads of the western Soviet Union. While the bulk of the German army marched on foot, almost all of its artillery was horse-drawn, and the typical Landser of 1941 did not look much different from his father in 1914. Still, a significant advantage that German troops enjoyed over their Soviet counterparts was the fact that they were at almost full manning levels, were well-provisioned and superbly trained, and experienced and enjoyed inspiring and confident leadership.
CHAPTER 2
Soviet Military on the Eve of War
STARTING IN THE LATE 1930s, the Soviet military experienced dramatic growth. Its numbers rose from over 1.5 million men in 1937 to 5.2 million by June 22, 1941, a more than three-fold increase. However, this drastic increase in quantity was not paralleled by an increase in quality. This dilution of fighting capability can be underscored by taking a closer look at the prewar Soviet officer
corps.
By 1936 Stalin’s bloody hand had already raked through the Communist Party and the country’s administrative apparatus. Concerned with “Bonapartism,” the fear of a charismatic military leader arising to lead a successful challenge to his authority, Stalin turned his jaundiced eye towards the military.
Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevskiy was one of the earliest and the most prominent victims of military purges. Implicated along with Tukhachevskiy, many other officers connected to him socially or professionally were swept away. Unfortunately for the Soviet armored forces, many of its proponents were found among Tukhachevskiy’s circle of friends and colleagues and perished along with him. Not only the theoreticians of tank warfare were affected. In a wave of paranoia seeing saboteurs and enemies everywhere, access of enlisted Soviet tankers to their machines was severely restricted to minimize or prevent them from damaging their equipment and stealing parts and supplies.1
The men swept up by the purges were normally dubbed “enemies of the people.” Their arrests were regularly followed by arrests of their wives, siblings, friends, and adult children. Minor children were generally placed into state orphanages. Elderly parents were often turned out of their homes without means to support themselves. An arrest of one man created expanding ripples of arrests among people associated with him, in turn creating more waves of arrests.
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgiy K. Zhukov was later to describe the atmosphere of fear in the country:
The Soviet people and [Communist] Party had to pay a heavy price for the unprincipled suspicion of the political leadership of the country, headed by J. V. Stalin. Horrible situation existed in the country. Nobody trusted anybody, people became afraid of each other, avoided meetings and any conversation, and if such were necessary—attempted to talk with a third party present as witnesses. An epidemic of false denouncements unfolded. Often crystal-clear honest people were falsely denounced, sometimes among close friends. All this was done out of fear to be suspected of disloyalty. This horrible situation continued getting worse.
The Soviet people, from young to old, could not comprehend what was happening, why the arrests among our people were so wide-spread. Not only [Communist] Party members, but even non-party affiliated people, with incomprehension and internal doubt, watched the rising tide of arrests and, of course, nobody could openly voice their incomprehension, their doubt that those arrested were indeed involved in any anti-Soviet activity or membership in counter-revolutionary organizations. Every honest man, going to bed, could not be sure that he would not be taken that same night under some false denouncement.”2
Unfortunately, human nature being weak, false accusations were often used to settle scores or to clear an avenue for advancement. General Grigorenko made a somewhat generalized observation: “Those who were crude and of limited intelligence seemed to avoid being purged. Those destroyed were mainly cultured, tactful, thoughtful people.”3
In his memoirs, Zhukov described his own close brush with the deadly menace of the purges in 1937. Danilo Serdich, commander of III Cavalry Corps, in which Zhukov commanded a cavalry division, was arrested. Upon Zhukov’s arrival at corps’ headquarters in Minsk, he was met by F. I. Golikov, commissar of the Belarusian Military District. This district just had its commander and Golikov’s predecessor arrested. Golikov presented Zhukov with a report by commissar of III Cavalry Corps Nikolai Yung, full of false accusations, including a charge that Zhukov’s wife baptized their daughter Ella in church. He also grilled Zhukov about his associations with officers already arrested. The hot-blooded Zhukov was ready to explode, with quite possibly deadly consequences for himself. This scene was interrupted by acting commander of Belarusian Military District V. M. Mulin. He calmed Zhukov down and sent him back to his division. Zhukov spent two very uncomfortable months waiting for the outcome of his confrontation with Commissar Golikov. When he was finally appointed to command the III Cavalry Corps, he found out that his accuser, Yung himself, was arrested.
By then, Zhukov’s new command was in shambles:
Two weeks later I managed to familiarize myself in detail with situation in all the subunits of the [III Cavalry] Corps and, unfortunately, had to admit that majority of units, due to arrests, suffered severe drop in combat and political readiness of command and political personnel, accountability lowered and, as follows, discipline and service of all personnel weakened.4
Besides sheer numerical losses of experienced and capable men, the pool of knowledge that was lost was staggering. A prime example of this was the General Staff Academy. The disgraced Marshal Tukhachevskiy was a great proponent of this institution and personally selected many talented military educators and theoreticians to staff the faculty at the academy. After the fall of Tukhachevskiy, a wave of arrests swept through the General Staff Academy in late 1936 and 1937, decimating the faculty.
Arrests were not limited to faculty but included students as well. Future marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Khristoforovich Bagramyan, whose memoirs will be extensively quoted in this work, was a student at the General Staff Academy during the purges. Normally, the first step before arrest was denouncement at a Communist Party meeting, followed by expulsion from the Communist Party. At one such meeting, Bagramyan was accused of being a former member of Dashnaks, an anti-revolutionary Armenian military formation during the Civil War. Despite documented proof that Bagramyan, in fact, fought against this organization, he was expelled from the Communist Party and was expecting an arrest to come at any minute. Following a friend’s advice, Bagramyan appealed the expulsion and, astonishingly, was fully cleared and reinstated.5 However, a black mark stuck to him, and this episode slowed down his rise through the ranks before the war.
During the late 1920s, Bagramyan attended an advanced course for cavalry officers in which two of his classmates were the future Marshals Georgiy Zhukov and Konstantin K. Rokossovskiy. Rokossovskiy was later arrested for his association with Marshal Tukhachevskiy. He underwent severe beatings and tortures at the hands of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) interrogators and, during multiple brutal beatings, all of his teeth were knocked out. Miraculously, Rokossovskiy was released shortly before the war and appointed to command a mechanized corps. Some men, like still-pugnacious Rokossovskiy, with his mouth full of gold teeth to replace the ones knocked out by NKVD men, survived the purges with their characters intact. Others, like the former Chief of General Staff General Kiril A. Meretskov, emerged from the NKVD basements broken men. During his two months of imprisonment, Meretskov’s tortures were so particularly brutal that even the sinister NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria described them as a “meat grinder.” Even though released and reinstated like Rokossovskiy, Meretskov was nonetheless a changed man, meek and indecisive.
Men, who unflinchingly faced death on multiple battlefields during World War I and the Russian Civil War, were tortured into signing false confessions, implicating themselves and other innocent men for nonexistent crimes. The most common charge was “agent of foreign power.”
The havoc created in the Soviet military by the purges was terrifying. Men who replaced those shot or dismissed the previous year would find themselves similarly dealt with, and their successor would often share the same fate. The extraordinary upheaval moved men several steps up the command chain in a space of a year or two, resulting in young and inexperienced officers promoted far beyond their competency and ability.
The effect of the loss of so many senior officers had a tremendous effect on Soviet enlisted personnel. The generally poorly educated Soviet enlisted men were more susceptible to trust Communist Party propaganda. Many of them believed that their former superior officers were traitors and “enemies of the people,” which undermined their trust in their commanding officers and drastically lowered discipline and combat readiness in the armed forces.
In the Soviet Far East, another charismatic Soviet commander, Marshal Vasiliy Blyukher, was in a position of great power, far from Moscow’s reach. This popula
r and capable commander shared Tukhachevskiy’s fate and was executed. The officer ranks under his command suffered particularly heavy cleansing. Then-Colonel Grigorenko, upon assignment to the Far East in 1940, found the situation to be dismal:
Almost two years had passed since the mass arrests had come to an end, but the command pyramid had not yet been restored. Many positions remained unfilled because there were no men qualified to occupy them. Battalions were commanded by officers who had completed military schools less than a year before. Some battalion commanders had completed only courses for second lieutenants, and their experience had been limited to several months of command of platoon or company. . . . In the 40th Infantry Division, not only had the officers of divisional and regimental administrations been arrested, but also the commanders of battalions, companies, and platoons.6
Stalin’s purges cost the Soviet military close to fifty thousand officers, mostly in field-grade and general ranks, who were executed, imprisoned, or cashiered. While some of them were nothing more than Communist Party hacks in uniform, an overwhelming greater part of them were men with military experience. A majority of them saw service with the old Russian Imperial Army and fought during World War I and the Russian Civil War. In the aftermath of World War I and immediately following the communist takeover of Russia, virtually all the former czarist officers were driven out of the military. Listed among “class enemies,” allegedly hostile to the nascent Communist regime, the officers of the old army were slaughtered in large numbers during the Red Terror. Numerous others immigrated, joined the burgeoning counter-revolutionary “White” royalist formations, or melted into civilian society.
In 1918, as the young Communist government was faced with the life-or-death struggle against armed insurrections of various anti-Bolshevik military formations, foreign interventionists, and home-grown peasant rebellions, the need for qualified officers to lead the brand-new Red Army became dire.