The Road to Berlin (20 page)

In 1943 the Armoured Forces Administration complained to Mikoyan that they were receiving ‘no great quantity’ of tanks from Lend-Lease, and that among present deliveries the percentage of medium tanks fell constantly, so that light tanks predominated. By 1942 more than 2,000 American tanks and upwards of 2,500 British machines had been delivered to Russia: for the whole period
from June 1941 to April 1944 the Red Army was sent 3,734 American tanks, 4,292 British tanks and a further 1,400 tanks from Canada. The Soviet command was not overly impressed with the performance of these machines, the British tanks in particular coming in for some harsh remarks. For their battle equipment, the Russians relied mainly on the products of their own factories. In 1942 Stalin himself had said that he wanted lorries before tanks. Lorries and jeeps did flood the Russians and were eagerly snapped up. Food and petroleum products were delivered in massive bulk and provided support for Soviet stamina. By mid-1943 the Americans had shipped in over 900,000 tons of steel, 1.5 million tons of food, 138,000 trucks and jeeps, boots, industrial equipment, raw materials—in all a highly variegated military–industrial shopping list which included 12,000 tons of butter sent for Soviet troops convalescing in military hospitals, shipped specifically at Russian request. It was not for the tanks or even the aircraft that Stalin pressed so furiously over interruption of delivery, but for the food and industrial supplies—metals (aluminium, steel billets, steel sheets, steel strip and tubing, copper and zinc), chemicals and machine-tools ($150 million worth of which were sent to the Soviet Union by mid-1943).

Innovation and modernization in organization and weapons, proof that Soviet commanders had learned much and were not inclined merely to copy, whetted several appetites for very drastic change. In effect, two armies were emerging in the Soviet establishment, the army of ‘quality’, the élite tank arm, the Guards and the crack formations, behind which the army of ‘quantity’ formed up in its solid ranks. The tank arm had finally liberated itself from the shackle of infantry-support roles. The new tank armies, bulging with modern tanks, were to become both the shock-force and the spearhead of the Red Army, whatever the doctrine about ‘harmonious development’, which itself was mainly a rationalization of binding fast, mobile formations to slower-moving rifle troops. There were other shackles, however, that irked the senior commanders, who were now enjoying the freedom of
edinonachalie
and the prestige of victory, a prestige with which Stalin was carefully aligning himself. The army had forced concessions, major ones like ‘unitary command’, subtle ones like having security officers wear standard uniform and military insignia. But there were limits. Stalin wanted his army ‘run by the book’—
golye prikazy
, ‘straight orders’—and this was now being done. There were senior officers, among them Gordov, who began to read these signs of the times very literally, judging that now was the moment to shove the party political apparatus aside and the political officers along with it. In June 1943 General Gordov (then commanding 33rd Army) wrote to Stalin and Zhukov suggesting that ‘the Military Soviet of Armies should be liquidated, as an organ which had outlived its usefulness and which brought no advantage’; the political sections should be incorporated into the military staff, their right of contact with political organs in higher echelons eliminated and the local army newspapers produced by the military staff. Such a suggestion probably did not rub Stalin
too much the wrong way; he had already pushed the Party out of the way himself, brutally if it suited his purposes, and he showed very consistently that the kind of ‘control’ he preferred was that exercised by the
NKVD
mechanism rather than through the Party agencies. In 1941, when all seemed lost, he used the
NKVD
to move in behind the military commissars as the real controlling agency and he kept the secret police at it, whether to keep a persistent eye on commanders or on the armed forces at large. The military soviet at army level (comprising the commander, chief of staff and the ‘political member’) was not formally abolished as Gordov suggested, though, as a captured Soviet lieutenant-general explained to his German interrogators, the operation of the military soviet turned increasingly on the personality of the commander himself. The system looked as clumsy as ever, but if not actually discarded it became less unwieldy as the authority of the officers continued to grow. Gordov’s letter of June 1943 nevertheless remains an enigmatic document with only the tip of the iceberg showing. Though it had no immediate sequel, in 1946 Gordov was abruptly removed from his command. Either in 1943 or subsequently, he had gone further with his ‘suggestions’, advocating not merely kicking the Party out of the army but even the elimination of the communist imprint itself, by establishing a ‘national’, explicitly ‘Russian’ army—a move Stalin would never have countenanced.

The Red Army was presently being geared for massive offensive operations. Marshal Vasilevskii put it succinctly to Tolbukhin and Biryuzov at the end of May: it was plain that Germany was weakened, that Soviet troops overshadowed the enemy ‘in quality and in quantity’, that the Soviet command had ‘solid experience’ of waging offensive operations on a grand scale, that discipline had been strengthened, order instituted and that
organizovannost
(‘being lined up’) prevailed. The slump that all authority, military governmental and party political, had suffered was a thing of the past. Basically Vasilevskii was right, if a little over-sanguine. From its atom-bomb project to the roaring factories of the east, or the frantic work to put the liberated areas to rights, the country was economically enormously stretched, but it was turning out the weapons and bringing up the supplies. The cost was appalling and continued to rise, an enormous toll of men, machines and resources; one part of the country wrecked by a fearsome and greedy enemy occupation, the other stripped by its own authorities for war. The old, the women and the youngsters took over from the men who had vanished, on the land (where ninety per cent of the lorries and a third of the tractors were ‘mobilized’ for transportation and gun-towing) and in the factories, where even children worked a few hours a day on uncomplicated jobs, for which their meagre rations were fractionally increased.

In the early summer of 1943 a point of balance was reached, which each side hoped to tip decisively in its favour. The Russians could not now lose the war, but the Germans could scarcely count on winning. For all the relative quietness
of the front, as both sides massed their men and concentrated their most modern weapons, moments of profound significance were passing. Finally, on 16 June, Hitler decided that
Citadel
, the attack on Kursk that was to bring a victory ‘to shine like a beacon round the world’, the momentous offensive which the
Führer
confessed to Guderian made his ‘stomach turn over’, was to open early in July.

3

Breaking the Equilibrium: Kursk and its Aftermath

On Friday, 4 June 1943, Stalin learned officially of ‘certain decisions on strategic matters’ taken by the American President and the British Prime Minister. The cross-Channel invasion, proposed for August–September 1943, was now postponed until the spring of 1944. It was a decision which, as Stalin underlined in his reply of 11 June, created ‘exceptional difficulties for the Soviet Union … and leaves the Soviet Army, which is fighting not only for its country, but also for its allies, to do the job alone, almost single-handed …’; the postponement would produce ‘a dishearteningly negative impression’ among the Soviet people and in the army. The message, mild enough in its phrasing, was nevertheless laden with the gravest implications, a point Stalin himself underscored in his final sentence; from Moscow the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, warned his government not to mistake this mildness for anything but badly shaken confidence in the coalition. The subsequent exchange between Stalin and Churchill was certainly tart. Prime Minister Churchill in his communication of 19 June reminded Stalin that he would not be a party to a ‘useless massacre’ which would scarcely aid the Soviet armies; the ‘Mediterranean strategy’ with German defeat in North Africa and ‘the consequent threat to Southern Europe’, was itself bringing results, having already delayed Hitler’s plans for a major attack in Russia. Stalin had complained that he had not been consulted over these decisions: this was the outcome of the failure to meet earlier with Churchill and Roosevelt, though all understood that Stalin could not abstract himself—‘even for a week’—from the direction of an ‘immense and victorious campaign’. But now there must be a ‘Big Three’ meeting. Five days later Stalin replied, opening in legalistic style with a list of Anglo-American ‘undertakings’ (including the
aide-mémoire
of June 1942) to attack across the Channel; Stalin was not asking for the slaughter of ‘a hundred thousand men in a disastrous cross-Channel attack’, because he understood that an Anglo-American force ‘exceeding one million men at the very start of the operation’ would be involved. This was not mere ‘disappointment’, but the issue of preserving Soviet confidence in its Allies, a confidence ‘being subjected to severe stress’. Lives in occupied Europe and Russia must be saved, the ‘enormous sacrifices
of the Soviet armies’—compared to which Anglo-American losses were ‘insignificant’—must be reduced.

These were reproaches that left Churchill, on his own declaration in the 27 June message, ‘unmoved’; everything that could be done had been done, there was still only one American division in England, landing craft were in short supply and war with Japan made additional demands. Stalin himself had described the ‘Mediterranean strategy’ as ‘militarily correct’. So far, no major German attack in Russia had materialized and it was already deep into June; should it not materialize at all, this would demonstrate that ‘the Mediterranean strategy’ was not only ‘correct’ but in essence decisive. Here, for the moment, the Churchill-Stalin exchange rested, though the tussle continued through other events interlinked with the correspondence—Soviet recognition of General de Gaulle’s French National Committee of Liberation (which the British and Americans would not recognize), and one issue of far wider significance and even greater sensitivity, the problem of Poland, which Stalin now seemed determined to solve in his own fashion. In the early spring of 1943 a separate Polish national–political organization (separate, that is, from the ‘London Poles’) had been set up in Moscow; this
SPP
, ‘Union of Polish Patriots’, then ‘suggested’ to the Soviet government that a formation of Polish fighting troops be organized on Soviet soil, an ‘initiative’ that the Soviet government found admirable and was prepared to support, according to a decision made public on 9 May. The Soviet government bore all costs, and assigned a military camp near Ryazan for the forming and equipping of the First Kościuszko Division, trained by Soviet officer–instructors and manned by Polish volunteers. On 13 May, the first six men of the Polish division arrived at the Ryazan camp: the next day the commander-designate, Colonel Berling (promoted colonel the day of the Soviet governmental announcement), arrived, followed within the month by 10,000 men, who on 15 July took the military oath. The Kościuszko Division was formed, the military core of the ‘new Poland’ which the
SPP
itself foreshadowed.

The Germans had already inserted themselves with some skill into the tripwires of what was a very delicate Anglo–Russian–Polish relationship. At 9:15 pm on the evening of 13 April 1943, Berlin radio announced the discovery near Smolensk—at Kosogory, part of Katyn wood—of ‘a great pit … 28 metres long and 16 metres wide, filled with 12 layers of bodies of Polish officers, numbering about 3,000’ mummified bodies ‘clad in full military uniform … many of them had their hands tied, all of them had wounds in the back of their necks caused by pistol shots’. New layers were being found under those already exhumed: the total figure of the murdered officers ‘is estimated at about 10,000, which would more or less correspond to the entire number of Polish officers taken as prisoners of war by the Bolsheviks’. Goebbels was overjoyed at the success of this propaganda
coup
(though on 8 May he confided to his diary that ‘German ammunition has been found in the graves at Katyn’, one item of information to be kept ‘a top secret’, else ‘the whole Katyn affair would have
to be dropped’). The Soviet press vehemently (if somewhat confusedly) denied that there was evidence of a Soviet crime: relations between the Soviet government and the London Polish government underwent an ‘interruption’, while at the end of April (the twenty-eighth) Wanda Wassilevska forecast in
Izvestiya
a new Polish army, raised on Soviet soil and independent of the London government. Ten days later that became an accomplished fact. Stalin’s message of 4 May explained ‘the Soviet government’s view of Soviet–Polish relations’ to the British Prime Minister. Sikorski, ‘helpless and browbeaten’, could not keep the ‘vast pro-Hitler following’ of the London government in order, the German version that ‘a new Polish government’ was being formed in the Soviet Union was a ‘fabrication’ which scarcely needed a denial, but nevertheless the time had come ‘to improve the composition’ of the present Polish government—‘the sooner this is done, the better’. Three days later in a talk with the British ambassador in Moscow Stalin made this point once again, that the Polish government would have to be ‘reconstructed’.