The Road to Berlin (19 page)

On the ground lay the challenge of the Tiger and Panther tanks. In Soviet tank factories (as in the aircraft plants) mass line production swelled output; in the Kirov Tank Factory at Chelyabinsk, with its sixty-four production lines, turrets
for T-34s were pressed from the metal instead of being cast. The T-34 was undergoing modernization, but meanwhile Kotin’s tank design team was working on a new heavy tank, the
IS (losip Vissarionovich)
, the ‘Joseph Stalin’, which made its appearance in September 1943. In October 1942 Uralmashzavod received orders to build a prototype self-propelled gun within one month; in January 1943 the first batch of these guns (the SU-122 was delivered to the front, after the State Defence Committee had decided in favour of quantity production in December 1942. Two regiments of
SP
guns were tested on the Volkhov Front in January, part of the process of forming thirty SP-gun regiments. The Korov Factory was allowed twenty-five days in which to build its SU-152, which in February went into production. Altogether, twenty-one new tank and SP-gun designs were produced in 1943, of which six (including the Joseph Stalin heavy tank) were accepted for production. As the battle for Kursk opened, the Red Army had 500 self-propelled guns organized in its new regiments (and treble that number by the end of that year), weapons that were more akin to the turretless tank than the self-propelled gun, the most orthodox of which was the SU-76, a 76.2mm gun on a T-70 tank chassis.

It was in the summer of 1942 that the State Defence Committee, issuing orders for new aircraft, tanks and guns, took one enormous new decision whose consequence ultimately far overshadowed all others. Soviet scientists would proceed to develop an A-bomb. The great dispersal of Soviet scientists and scientific institutes had thrown fundamental research for the moment out of gear; Professor Joffe’s own Radium Institute where research had previously been concentrated, was packed off from Leningrad to distant Kazan. The wartime research programme gave first priority to radar, followed by anti-mine protection for ships, and only then to ‘the uranium bomb’. In December 1941 Georgi N. Flerov travelled to Kazan in search of Professor Kurchatov, hoping to persuade him to renew the nuclear experimental programme at the evacuated institute, but as Kurchatov was not there (he was at that time ill), Flerov left notes for a possible experimental programme, and pursued the matter through talks with the Soviet physicists Joffe and Peter Kapitsa. Kurchatov had meanwhile left Kazan for Murmansk to continue work on mines for the Soviet Navy; even if he had wished to embark on an ‘experimental programme’, Kazan presented major difficulties for such an undertaking, the outcome of which would be highly problematical. Meanwhile news had filtered through to Moscow of German and American work on a ‘super-weapon’; Academicians Joffe, Kapitsa, Vernadskii and Khlopin were called to Moscow to discuss the question of the new weapon, while in June 1942 Flerov had written to the State Defence Committee about the urgency of embarking on a programme to build a ‘uranium bomb’. Flerov was ordered to report to Kaftanov, the science controller on the State Defence Committee; the Academicians were meanwhile called upon to nominate a director for the Soviet bomb programme, a choice that fell upon Kurchatov. Kurchatov, understandably, was awed at the magnitude of the task and by no means convinced of its utility; vast resources
would be consumed at a time when the front required anything and everything to hand.

The work began under the very worst conditions. Flerov started up the experiments with uranium in Kazan, while Leningrad was ransacked for its special equipment and for uranium. At a time when German troops were on the offensive against Stalingrad, there were some who saw no point in this highly recondite work, but at the close of 1942 Kurchatov was appointed director of atomic research and ordered to start operations in Moscow, his association with anti-mine defence and armour plate now ended. The project was given top priority and Kurchatov full powers; the men he wanted were brought back from the front or from the factories, the State Defence Committee supplying a small taskforce to bring the project into existence. In the Seismological Institute, Kurchatov’s scientists and engineers started on the design of a new cyclotron, and eventually overflowed into the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry. Once Kharkov was fully and finally liberated, in July 1943 (after Kursk), Soviet scientists set up ‘Laboratory No. 1’ in the city, while in Moscow Kurchatov sought a site for a completely new ‘Laboratory No. 2’. In spite of the grievous difficulties, not least having to organize research amidst the rubble and destruction of recent enemy occupation, the ‘bomb project’ went ahead into 1943–4—Sinelnikov in his Kharkov laboratory, Kurchatov in Moscow, with Kapitsa and Kurchatov holding main seminars in Moscow, including a secret seminar on nuclear fission and chain reaction.

While the scientists struggled for their long-term results, the soldiers had to master the priorities of the battlefield. By the summer of 1943 the Red Army was in the throes of a major reorganization. The Soviet infantryman had become a walking arsenal, equipped as no other for anti-tank fighting; by June 1943 there were 1,450,000 anti-tank rifles, with 21,000 small-calibre anti-tank weapons distributed among the infantry units (double the amount at the end of 1942). The new
RPG-43
anti-tank grenade was capable of knocking out a medium tank. The High Command artillery reserve regiments—over 200 of them—were equipped largely with 76mm guns. Soviet anti-tank guns enjoyed a good reputation—even Rommel had used captured Soviet anti-tank guns to great effect in the Western Desert. The 45mm and 57mm guns were now modernized and added to the anti-tank resources. At this time also the Goryunov heavy machine-gun replaced the old Maxim system, the trolleyed weapon that had been so prominent earlier in the war.

The structure of both the infantry and the artillery also underwent drastic revision. Among rifle troops, brigades were formed into divisions (with revised establishments) and the corps system was more widely adopted in order to facilitate mass offensive operations. In the artillery, anti-tank regiments were brigaded: for breakthrough operations, howitzer regiments (with the new 152mm and 203mm weapons) were also brigaded, and from the twenty-six artillery divisions raised late in 1942 sixteen were established as ‘artillery breakthrough divisions’ (with
356 guns as opposed to 168). In April 1943 ‘artillery breakthrough corps’ were introduced. ‘Guards mortar brigades’, handling the
Katyusha
rocket-launchers, were set up in November 1942; by the end of the year there were four
Katyusha
divisions, each division firing 3,840 projectiles with a weight of 230 tons. In July 1943 the State Defence Committee ordered the rifle armies to take on an artillery component of three artillery regiments and one mortar regiment.

In the offensive operations of 1942–3 the Red Army had been severely inhibited by the lack of lorries. Here Lend-Lease supplies, which pumped in 183,000 lorries and jeeps by mid-1943 (and a grand total of 430,000 by 1944), certainly relieved some of the Red Army’s chronic lorry starvation. Every operation, both in preparation and execution, had been impeded by the shortage of lorries; every armoured formation needed more lorries than it could muster. Because of the lack of lorries, the rail links were exploited to a fantastic degree, even to running small trains (a few wagons at the most) for the most diverse purposes. Horse-drawn columns were also used extensively. ‘Supplies’ of necessity consisted of basic items—ammunition, fuel and food, in that order. The ‘Rear Administration’, which had first been organized in August 1941, was now reorganized under Order No. 0379 issued by the Defence Commissariat on 12 June 1943, which was essentially a consolidation of all rear services (including the Red Army medical services) under the aegis of the ‘chief of the rear’,
Nachalnik tyla Krasnoi Armii
, a post Khrulev already held and which he continued to occupy.

In the course of 1943, Stalin added new ‘main administrations’ to Khrulev’s empire—the Main Motor Administration
(Glavnoe Avtomobilnoe Upravlenie)
and the Main Administration for Military Roads
(Glavnoe Dorozhnoe Upravlenie)
, responsible for maintaining supply roads and for shifting supplies by road. The Motor Administration supplied and serviced lorries. This reorganization gave Khrulev’s ‘Rear Administration’ a rail unit (Transport), road transportation units (Motors and Military Roads), its supply echelon (Quartermaster or Intendance, for food and clothing), Fuels and Lubricants, and finally Medical and Veterinary Administrations. At Front and army level, the administrative chain was maintained by officers operating as ‘chief of the rear’ and running similar organizations, with the operational function of relating supplies to Front and army assignments. Khrulev’s men supplied and shifted everything except ammunition, weapons and special military equipment. Ammunition, infantry weapons and artillery came under Yakovlev’s Main Artillery Administration, whose organization ran right through the artillery command-chain down to battalion: Fedorenko’s Armoured Forces Administration similarly controlled the supply (and maintenance) of armoured fighting vehicles; Peresypkin’s Signals Administration, the supply of signals equipment; and so on through each ‘administration’. The air forces relied on their technical and supply administrations for everything but food, which, like the shipping of air force supplies in general, came within Khrulev’s competence.

The Soviet ‘tail’ from 1943 absorbed just under one-fifth of the manpower of the field strength; by the late summer of 1943 the number of troops assigned
to the Main Military Roads Administration amounted to 125,000 men servicing 86,000 kilometres of ‘military highway’, with ‘technical servicing points’ overhauling some 185,000 lorries. The number of railway troops had meanwhile doubled. At Stalingrad, during the preparation of the counter-offensive, fixed ‘norms’ for supply and daily consumptions in ammunition and fuel were first laid down, all of which subsequently became standard practice; rifle-division ammunition was calculated in ‘issues’
(boekomplekty)
, fuel for the armoured formations in ‘fills’
(zapravki)
of diesel oil and petrol. These ‘norms’ could not always be met: Rokossovskii learned this as he prepared his Central Front offensive in February, when the trains failed to show up, when the rear unloading points were far from the concentration areas, when his infantrymen carried their heavy weapons on their backs for long marches and could carry no more. As often as not the Soviet rifleman, weighted with his own weapons and ammunition, would also lug artillery ammunition into the forward areas while horse-drawn columns dashed back into the unloading areas for the divisional supplies. There were never enough lorries, the railways never stretched far enough, but for all the enormous difficulties of terrain, distance, damaged and defective communications, Soviet supply troops shifted some staggering loads, not least as the great multiple offensives were unleashed after the summer of 1943. At Kursk, great quantities of weapons and ammunition were piled up to beat off the German attacks.

Meanwhile the Soviet tank arm, which in 1941–2 had undergone a baptism of fire that almost consumed it, made its massed, dramatic re-entry. Large tank formations had appeared once again in the summer of 1942, only to be ground to pieces in the enormous battles in the south. Their fate then hung in the balance, but it was the practice rather than the principle that was wrong; after November 1942 the large formations had come to stay and to grow. One great handicap, the paucity of equipment, was now being overcome and permitted real development in the tank forces. Lack of tank radios (with no individual radio communications at company level, save for the company commander himself) had made battle control a nightmare, lack of lorries had severely inhibited the tank divisions, and in the ‘mechanized’ formations the tanks could not synchronize their operations with ‘motorized infantry’ that lacked transport. The devotees of the tank may have been dispirited, but they were by no means discouraged, and they found an ally in Fedorenko, for all his previous reservations. As chief of the Main Administration for Armoured Forces, Fedorenko started in 1942 upon a major overhaul of the Red Army’s tank component after the disasters of the summer, operations that he had commanded in person at one stage. The sudden introduction of large armoured formations (corps) then had meant calling on infantry officers (and officers from other arms) to handle them, an improvisation that had disastrous consequences. One of Fedorenko’s first ‘reforms’ was Order No. 305 of 16 October 1942, laying down firm principles for the conduct of armoured operations, instructions that served the Red Army until the introduction of the combat regulations on armoured and mechanized troops in 1944. By the
autumn of 1942 experienced armoured corps commanders like Rotmistrov were convinced that the ‘mixed’ (tank and infantry) establishment was utterly wrong and that new, wholly armoured, unities must be built up. This was not a view Fedorenko shared, but he became persuaded of its validity. In turn, Fedorenko was able to persuade Stalin and the State Defence Committee at the end of 1942 of the need to form ‘tank armies’ made up of tanks alone (one–two tank corps, one mechanized corps)—unlike Romanenko’s 5th Tank Army, which was an infantry army with tanks attached to it. The ‘Front mobile groups’ such as Popov’s were more like true armoured concentrations. Romanenko’s ‘tank army’ had consisted of two tank corps, six rifle divisions, one cavalry corps, an independent tank brigade, a motorcycle regiment and artillery. Stalin was persuaded. At the beginning of 1943 five ‘tank armies’, new armoured shock forces, formed up—Katukov’s 1st, Rodin’s 2nd, Rybalko’s 3rd, Badanov’s 4th and Rotmistrov’s 5th, at a time when the Front commands disposed of 8,500 tanks (as of January 1943), the
Stavka
reserve 400, and non-operational commands and districts 4,300.

The T-34 medium tank, a machine of such basic excellence in design and performance that it lasted the war without major modification (and whose features were incorporated into new marks of German tanks, German engineers having discovered that making a straight copy of the T-34 would not pay off), was basic equipment for the tank armies. Now the new heavy tanks were coming into service. Since the autumn of 1942 the KV-1 had been produced as the KV-1S (thicker armour, a 76mm gun and three machine-guns), and by the summer of 1943 the KV-1S acquired yet more armour and an 85mm gun, emerging as the KV-85. Mounting a 152mm howitzer, the KV-1S chassis was used to produce the SU-152, a self-propelled gun nicknamed ‘the hunter’. The KV-85 had squared up to the Tiger-I, but the new heavy battle tank was the IS-1, the ‘Joseph Stalin-1’, utilizing the KV chassis but with modifications to the hull front and a larger turret, an 85mm gun and a weight of 44 tons. The IS-2 soon eclipsed the IS-1; with a 122mm gun, three machine-guns and a heavy-calibre
AA
machine-gun, strong armour, low profile and a weight of 45 tons, the IS-2 combined speed, protection, hitting power and relatively low weight. Only 102 IS-2s were produced in 1943, but in 1944 2,250 rolled out of the factories. Meanwhile the Soviet command proceeded to build up special tank formations. Already at Stalingrad ‘Guards special tank breakthrough regiments’ had appeared, and in 1943, as newer machines became available, no less than eighteen ‘High Command reserve independent heavy tank breakthrough regiments’ had been quickly brought into existence.