The Road to Berlin (18 page)

To fight the battle of Kursk, Stalin was assembling not only quantity but quality. The
‘Stavka
representatives’ for the operations were the Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevskii: Malenkov acted as the State Defence Committee
(GKO)
‘representative’, his duties and responsibilities connected with the non-operational side though nonetheless important for mobilizing resources. Most of the rifle armies in the Kursk salient were veteran formations, many from Stalingrad, like the commanders—Batov, Chistyakov, Shumilov, Zhadov. Vatutin, who was enormously experienced, had taken over Golikov’s command at the Voronezh Front; for the moment, Col.-Gen. Popov was in charge of the ‘Reserve Front’, but in May he was transferred to the Bryansk Front (to take over from Col.-Gen. Reiter) and Col.-Gen. Koniev finally assumed command of the Steppe Front (the ‘Reserve Front’), which became fully operational in June. Koniev received explicit instructions from the
Stavka
to ensure that his army, corps and divisional commanders had not only a deal of war experience behind them but also some practice in peacetime troop training. As long as the lull lasted, the Steppe Front trained, as Stalin intended that it should; Lt.-Gen. Rotmistrov (in his pre-war days one of the lecturers at the Stalin Academy of Mechanization and Motorization), now with 5th Guards Tank Army under him, was responsible for training the armoured forces assigned to Koniev. The battle of Kursk (and the related complex of operations) in 1943 did in fact represent the ultimate graduation of the ‘class of “36”’, the first intake in the autumn of 1936 to the new General Staff Academy: the first graduates included Vasilevskii, Antonov, M.V. Zakharov, Vatutin, Bagramyan. And taking men out was as important as putting them in; two changes for the better were the removal of Rumyantsev from the Cadres (Personnel) Administration in the Defence Commissariat and the removal of Shchadenko from the Training Administration, both disastrous appointments which had done no small amount of damage.

At this time also the General Staff ‘stabilized’ its position, owing to the regime imposed by Antonov at the turn of the year. Stalin himself organized the work of the General Staff on a 24-hour basis; Antonov was relieved from duty from 0600 to 1200 hours, Shtemenko (head of Operations) from 1400 to 1800 hours each day. Three times a day the General Staff reported to Stalin, in his presence or by telephone; the first report went in at 10–1100 hours, usually by telephone and from Shtemenko, and Antonov delivered the evening report at 16–1700 hours. The night report, accompanied by a map presentation on a 1:200,000 scale map for each front with positions down to division (in some cases down to regiment), was made by Antonov, accompanied by Shtemenko, who made their way after a summons by telephone either to the
Stavka
, the Kremlin warroom, or to Stalin’s
dacha
(some little drive out of Moscow). Once in the Kremlin, the officers made their way to Stalin’s own quarters, to which they were admitted
by Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s secretary, after passing the small personal guard:

In the left part of [Stalin’s]
kabinet
a small way from the wall stood a long, rectangular table. We spread out the maps on it and delivered a report on each Front separately, beginning with those where the main events were taking place. We made no preliminary notes, since we knew the situation from memory and it was outlined on the map. Behind the table, in the corner, a large globe of the world stood on the floor. [Shtemenko,
Soviet General Staff
, pp. 120–21.]

This was the scene that met Antonov and Shtemenko so often; usually in attendance at these sessions, which ended round about 3 am, were Marshal Voronov, Fedorenko (armoured forces commander), Yakovlev (head of the Main Artillery Administration), Khrulev (chief of Rear Services) and Novikov (for the air force), as well as members of the
Politburo
.

The next item after the report was drafting the
Stavka
directives. Stalin’s practice was to refer to all fronts, armies, tank and mechanized corps by the names of their commanders, to divisions by their designation only; once back at the General Staff, the whole thing had to be sorted out into formal language. Stalin would dictate the
Stavka
directives himself, with Shtemenko noting them down; they would then be read back, corrected on the spot and finally transmitted by a signals unit situated only yards away.

Over the projected attack on the German bulge at Orel, Stalin was inclined to jump the gun. In April, Reiter’s Bryansk Front command received instructions to prepare an offensive operation against Orel, the
Stavka
itself suggesting a three-Front attack—concentric blows by the Western, Bryansk and Central Fronts, with the Bryansk Front playing the principal part. The Western Front would use its left-flank 11th Guards Army (Bagramyan’s old 16th), Rokossovskii his right-flank formations. A plan was duly worked out, but it was rapidly overtaken by events and, even as late as June, by the personal intervention of Col.-Gen. Fedorenko, who examined the proposals to use Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army for the attack. This army was still not fully reconstituted after the battering it received south of Kharkov in March—its tank crews were newly arrived and still arriving, and the three corps (12th and 15th Tank, 2nd Mechanized) were still reforming. Fedorenko advised a change of plan and recommended this to the
Stavka
, adding that as such it would be accepted. Meanwhile Col.-Gen. M.M. Popov took over the Bryansk Front; Fedyuninskii, who had been wounded in the leg in the Volkhov Front operations in January, was now posted south as his deputy commander. Mekhlis—apparently much chastened after his folly at Kerch—was the political member of the Military Soviet. Popov found the Front ‘gone stale in defence … it has dug itself into the ground’. But none of the commanders were ‘hopeless cases’, as Popov chose to call them.

On the left flank of Sokolovskii’s Western Front, Bagramyan was unhappy about the attack plans for 11th Guards, now a formidable force with twelve rifle divisions (three corps), two tank corps, four tank brigades, four High
Command Reserve artillery divisions plus
AA
and engineer units. Bagramyan was sure that, as it stood, the plan meant that 11th Guards would hit empty air; the Orel bulge should be cut into a circle, but this meant more formations for the job. Upon none of his seniors, however, did his views prevail. Early in May, Sokolovskii, Reiter, Bagramyan and 61st Army commander were summoned to the
Stavka
, where Antonov submitted the operational plan for the Orel attack. With no objections raised, and after a few perfunctory questions from Stalin, the latter was about to close the briefing when Bagramyan seized the opportunity to raise his objections. Stalin instructed him to proceed with a presentation. To his own astonishment, Bagramyan’s ‘variant’ was accepted as a valid basis for revised operational planning and he received fresh instructions from Sokolovskii, with twenty days in which to make 11th Guards ready to attack. On 24 May, Bagramyan reported in the evening that 11th Guards was ready. The proposed attack was, however, postponed as Stalin now waited to follow through the strategy of wearing down a German offensive before launching on his own. The counter-offensive design had become, through its interlinking with the Kursk defensive battle, even more vast; two groups of fronts would operate in two directions, the left flank of the Western Front, the Bryansk Front and the Central Front against Orel, the Steppe and Voronezh Fronts against Belgorod–Kharkov. Vasilevskii and Voronov ‘co-ordinated’ the plans for the first, Zhukov those for the second.

Throughout the month of May, during the pleasant spring days, the plans and ‘co-ordination’ were increasingly advanced; in the Kursk salient itself the troops, between attending their frequent tactical exercises, shovelled alongside the civilians in the trenches, fire positions and bunkers; the infantry commanders reconnoitred the ground for their several ‘variants’; the tank officers rehearsed their movement; and the gunners and engineers laboured on all their variously complicated installations. Early in May the tension suddenly increased. On 2 May Stalin sent out an alert about the forthcoming German offensive and ordered a full state of readiness. But the attack did not materialize at this moment (although the German plan timetabled it for the first half of May). More time was needed on the German side to fit out their
Panzer
divisions with more Tiger-2 68-ton tanks—Tiger battalions had already fought with
SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
and
Gross Deutschland
at Kharkov—as well as the Panther medium tank and Ferdinand 88mm
SP
guns. Massed both in and behind the salient were the T-34s, the new KV-85s (the immediate counter to the Tiger-Is), growing numbers of
SP
guns, the SU-76, the SU-122 and the SU-152, the
samokhodnyi ustanovki (SU)
to provide mobile medium and heavy-gun support. When it came, and as both sides reached their fighting peak, Kursk provided for many ghastly days the greatest clash of armour ever seen, a monsterish confrontation which consumed men and machines in one appalling, fiery nightmare. On the eve of it, the Russians in the salient were under no illusions over what was about to hit them.

*   *   *

Entering now on its third year, though it had lost none of its terror and agonies, the war had finally ceased to be a matter of the rawest improvisation or of Stalin’s broad lunges for a speedy kill, two of which had already failed to come off. In his February and May Day statements Stalin emphasized that triumph was on its way, but while measuring off present gains—not without the standard exaggeration of enemy losses—he made it plain enough that the expulsion of the Germans would mean more very heavy fighting. With the battle of Kursk looming over them, the Russians needed little reminder of what they were presently facing. On the eve of Kursk the Red Army mustered 6,442,000 officers and men; 93,500 trained officers were in reserve. In equipment, the Soviet forces could field 103,085 guns and mortars, 9,918 tanks and
SP
guns and 8,357 combat aircraft—although more than half the guns and mortars were of 76mm and 82mm calibre only, and a third of the tank force consisted of light tanks. An enormous effort was now going into turning out a massive increase, less in manpower than in firepower and mobility—a struggle to win the battle of quality as well as quantity. The scientific and technological war in which the Russians engaged was dictated by the nature of their battlefield commitments: unlike the British military–scientific effort, which was directed to compensating for lack of manpower through advanced machines, the Russian activity aimed to augment rather than to displace purely physical resources.

The Soviet Academy of Sciences had been mobilized for war work on the second day of the war; in July 1941 the Presidium at its plenary session announced that the transition to war work was already ‘basically successful’. The Seismological Institute under corresponding member P.M. Nikiforov, was engaged entirely upon ‘defence work’, which included participation in the huge surveying operation in the Urals for new sources of energy and raw materials, research on the anti-aircraft defence of Moscow and the construction of bomb shelters, as well as developing ‘military technology’, particularly aircraft. Individual scientists were sent out to plants to advise on special projects. Academician Grebenshchikov supervised the construction of a factory for optical glass and visited all evacuated optical–mechanical factories to supervise their operation; the Physics, Chemical and Technical Institutes of the Academy advised on the demolition of factories and on the reorganization in the east. Institute work was now done in the plants themselves, much as the General and Inorganic Chemistry Institute’s analytical laboratory worked in one factory on new methods of producing aluminium. In the autumn of 1941 a great enterprise was launched—Komarov’s ‘commission for the mobilization of the Urals resources for defence purposes’. The State Defence Committee set up a ‘Scientific–Technical Soviet’ under the chairmanship of S.V. Kaftanov to deal with the problems of the chemical industry, part of which was also handled by the All-Union Scientific Chemical Society. In the east, in the heart of the new and the recently evacuated plants, Soviet scientists worked on a whole range of ‘military–technological problems’; in Magnitogorsk, K.I. Burtsev and his engineers were engaged in improving the armour plate for tanks, while
out in the field the geologists expanded their surveys, not the least successful of which was Trofimuk’s discovery of large oil deposits in Bashkir. From 1942 Soviet designers were engaged on constant modification to existing weapons and the design of new models. Ya.I. Baran and A.I. Shlaikter improved the T-34 tank (which in 1943 was up-gunned with an 85mm weapon), Engineer Kipgart worked on new light tanks, E.V. Sinilshchikov on producing the SU-122 self-propelled gun on the basis of a T-34 tank chassis, N.N. Kuznetsov on a more powerful M-30
‘Katyusha’
rocket-launcher. Gone were the days when German infantrymen enjoyed their terrifying monopoly in light automatic weapons. Shpagin had produced the Soviet
PPSh
, the machine-pistol liberally distributed among Soviet infantrymen, so that both the veterans (the tough
frontovniki)
and the fresh riflemen were their own walking arsenals. Degtyarev and Tokarev continued to turn out improved models of first-class infantry weapons.

In spite of the increase in aircraft production in the second half of 1942, still more aircraft were needed, and their performance needed to be improved. Lavochkin’s
LA-5
fighter was modified and its weight reduced; in 1943 the
M-28-FN (FN
—
forsirovanie neposredstvennim
, ‘boosted engine’) was fitted to the
LA-5
to improve its performance, the modified machine going into service as the
LA-5 FN
. Large numbers of these fought at Kursk. The
LA-5 FN
led in turn to the development of the
LA-7
with three 20mm cannon and a speed in excess of 400 mph. Yakovlev’s
Yak-7
fighter (the modified
Yak-1)
also underwent drastic and very rapid modification in 1942, but now the State Defence Committee demanded a fighter aircraft capable of mounting the heavy 37mm aerial cannon. In record-breaking time a new fighter, the
Yak-9
, was in quantity production by May 1943; the
Yak-9
was also produced as a long-range escort fighter (the
Yak-9D
, minus the heavy cannon) and, as a ‘tank-buster’, the
Yak-9T
. Petlyakov, who was killed in an air crash in 1942, had already produced his twin-engined bomber, the
Pe-2
, though the first models could not be used in dive-bombing roles; in the second half of 1943 the aircraft was modified and its speed increased, and it went into quantity production. The
Tu-2
, Tupolev’s twin-engined bomber, with a bomb-load of some two tons and a range of 800 miles, also went into production after modification to the prototypes. On the orders of the State Defence Committee, Ilyushin set about improving the
Il–2
, the famous ground-attack plane, which in February 1943 was fitted with an AM-38f engine and equipped with a 37mm cannon. Soviet aero-engine designers were bringing their power plants up to the 2,000hp mark (and after 1943 they surpassed this, achieving the boost in half the time expended elsewhere on similar efforts). Yakovlev’s fighters rolled in growing quantities from Factory No. 153 under V.N. Lisitsyn, Ilyushin’s ‘tank-busters’ from Belyanskii’s Factory No. 18, the Yakovlev, Ilyushin and Lavochkin designs marking great strides towards technical superiority.