Opening Impact of Barbarossa on the Red Army I

As the headlong advance of the German Army into the USSR continued, the Red Army collapsed in chaos all along the front. Its communications were severed, transport broke down, ammunition and equipment, fuel, spare parts and much more besides quickly ran out. Unprepared for the invasion, officers could not even guess where the Germans would strike next, and there was often no artillery available to blunt the impact of the incoming German tanks. Many of the Red Army’s own tanks, from the BT to the T-26 and 28, were obsolescent: more of the total of 23,000 tanks deployed by the Red Army in 1941 were lost through breakdowns than to enemy action. Radio communications had not been updated since the Finnish war and were coded in such a basic manner that it was all too easy for Germans listening in to decrypt them. Worst of all, perhaps, medical facilities were wholly inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of dead and treat the scores of thousands of injured. In the absence of proper military planning, officers could think of little else to do than attack the Germans head-on, with predictably disastrous results. An orderly retreat was made almost impossible by the Germans’ prior destruction of roads, railways and bridges behind the lines. Desertion rates rocketed in the Red Army as demoralized soldiers fled in confusion and despair. In a mere three days in late June 1941, the Soviet secret police caught nearly 700 deserters fleeing from the battle on the south-western front. ‘The retreat has caused blind panic,’ as the head of the Belarus Communist Party wrote to Stalin on 3 September 1941, and ‘the soldiers are tired to death, even sleeping under artillery fire . . . At the first bombardment, the formations collapse, many just run away to the woods, the whole area of woodland in the front-line region is full of refugees like this. Many throw away their weapons and go home.’

Some idea of the depth of the disaster can be gauged from the diary of Nikolai Moskvin, a Soviet political commissar, which records a rapid transition from optimism (‘we’ll win for sure,’ he wrote on 24 June 1941) to despair a few weeks later (‘what am I to say to the boys?’ he asked himself gloomily on 23 July 1941: ‘We keep retreating’). On 15 July 1941 he had already shot the first deserters from his unit, but they kept on fleeing, and at the end of the month, after being wounded, he admitted: ‘I am on the verge of a complete moral collapse.’ His unit got lost because it did not have any maps, and most of the men were killed in a German attack while Moskvin, unable to move, was hiding in the woods with two companions, waiting to be rescued. Some peasants found him, nursed him back to health, and conscripted him into helping with the harvest. As he got to know them, he discovered they had no loyalty to the Stalinist system. Their main purpose was to stay alive. After battles, they rushed on to the field to loot the corpses. What in any case would loyalty to Stalin have brought them? In August 1941, Moskvin encountered some Red Army soldiers who had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp. ‘They say there’s no shelter, no water, that people are dying from hunger and disease, that many are without proper clothes or shoes.’ Few, he wrote, had given a thought to what imprisonment by the Germans would mean. The reality was worse than anyone could imagine.

Opening Impact of Barbarossa on the Red Army II

Soviet soldiers and civilians began to listen to Stalin’s new, patriotic message and fight back. Encouraged by Stalin, more and more young men took to the woods to form partisan bands, raiding German installations and intensifying the vicious circle of violence and repression. By the end of the year, the overwhelming mass of civilians in the occupied areas had come round to supporting the Soviet regime, encouraged by Stalin’s emphasis on patriotic defence against a ruthless foreign invader. Escalating partisan resistance went along with a dramatic recovery of the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. The cumbersome structure of the Red Army was simplified, creating flexible units that would be able to respond more rapidly to German tactical advances. Soviet commanders were ordered to concentrate their artillery in anti-tank defences where it seemed likely the German panzers would attack. Soviet rethinking continued into 1942 and 1943, but already before the end of 1941 the groundwork had been laid for a more effective response to the continuing German invasion. The State Defence Committee reorganized the mobilization system to make better use of the 14 million reservists created by a universal conscription law in 1938. More than 5 million reservists were quickly mobilized within a few weeks of the German invasion, and more followed. So hasty was this mobilization that most of the new divisions and brigades had nothing more than rifles to fight with. Part of the reason for this was that war production facilities were undergoing a relocation of huge proportions, as factories in the industrial regions of the Ukraine were dismantled and transported to safety east of the Ural mountains. A special relocation council was set up on 24 June and the operation was under way by early July. German reconnaissance aircraft reported what to them were inexplicable massings of railway wagons in the region – no fewer than 8,000 freight cars were employed on the removal of metallurgical facilities from one town in the Donbas to the recently created industrial centre of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, for example. Altogether, 1,360 arms and munitions factories were transferred eastwards between July and November 1941, using one and a half million railway wagons. The man in charge of the complex task of removal, Andrej Kosygin, won a justified reputation as a tirelessly efficient administrator that was to bring him to high office in the Soviet Union after the war. What could not be taken, such as coalmines, power stations, railway locomotive repair shops, and even a hydro-electric dam on the Dnieper river, was sabotaged or destroyed. This scorched-earth policy deprived the invading Germans of resources on which they had been counting. But together with the evacuation, it also meant that the Red Army had to fight the war in the winter of 1941-2 largely with existing equipment, until the new or relocated production centres came on stream.

Stalin also ordered a series of massive ethnic cleansing operations to remove what he and the Soviet leadership thought of as potential by subversive elements from the theatre of war. More than 390,000 ethnic Germans in the Ukraine were forcibly deported eastwards from September 1941. Altogether there were nearly one and a half million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. 15,000 Soviet secret policemen descended upon the Volga to begin the expulsion of the ethnic Germans living there, removing 50,000 of them already by the middle of August 1941. Similar actions took place in the lower Volga, where a large community of German descent was living. In mid-September 1941, expulsions began from the major cities. By the end of 1942, more than 1,200,000 ethnic Germans had been deported to Siberia and other remote areas. Perhaps as many as 175,000 died as a result of police brutality, starvation and disease. Many of them spoke no German, and were German only by virtue of remote ancestry. It made no difference. Other ethnic groups were targeted too – Poles, as we have seen, were deported in large numbers from 1939, and, later in the war, up to half a million Chechens and other minorities in the Caucasus were removed for having allegedly collaborated with the Germans as well. In addition, as the German forces advanced, the Soviet secret police systematically murdered all the political prisoners in the jails that stood in their path. One hit squad arrived at a prison at Luck that had been damaged in a bombing raid, lined up the political prisoners, and machine-gunned up to 4,000 of them. In the western Ukraine and western Belarus alone, some 100,000 prisoners were shot, bayoneted, or killed by hand-grenades being thrown into their cells.

Whatever their impact on the war effort, such actions stored up a bitter legacy of hatred which was to lead within a very short time to horrific acts of revenge.

Ost 1942 Command Failure

At senior command level, trends at OKW and OKH ran counter to those at STAVKA. Where Stalin began to appreciate the limitations of his military expertise, Hitler, from an initial position of mere arbiter of strategy, became increasingly involved in tactical decision-making. From his order of December 1941 for Army Group Centre to stand fast, and his decision to dismiss `defeatist' commanders, he concluded that he above all had the wisdom and the will to force a final victory. From his decision that II Corps should hold fast at Demyansk, and the subsequent successful defence of the pocket, he concluded that large formations of encircled German troops could be adequately supplied by the Luftwaffe while continuing to pose a significant threat to the enemy rear. After the resignation of Brauchitsch on 19 December 1941 Hitler assumed the post of Commander in Chief OKH thereby eliminating the army's last vestige of service independence. Thereafter he began to appoint politically loyal generals to senior command positions, and increasingly he began to micromanage combat operations. In doing so he undermined one of the strengths of the German army, the delegated authority of commanders on the battlefield to make independent command decisions and their ability to respond flexibly to changes in operational circumstances. 

Having anticipated a conflict of around eight weeks duration, prior to 1942 there had been little planning by the German High Command for a prolonged conflict. Weapon development projects during 1941 had been scaled back or cancelled and virtually no preparation had been made for the possibility of the conflict continuing into the depths of a Russian winter. Yet having faced a larger, better-equipped and more resilient foe than it had anticipated, as the winter of 1941 approached OKH found that it was facing an enemy whose morale was still unbroken, that was, unlike the Ostheer, fully equipped for winter fighting, and that was adapting its tactics in light of bitter experience. An example of evolving Soviet tactics was the clash that took place between Eberbach's 5 Pz Bgd and Katukov's 4 Tank Bgd southwest of Mtsensk in October 1941. Katukov concentrated his force and used advantages of surprise, terrain and armament range to good effect. Clashes of this sort prompted the Wehrmacht to revive pre-war plans for the development of a heavy tank, and for the development of a new medium tank that could emulate the combat capability of the T34. Until such new weapons could be both developed and produced in quantity, the Ostheer would be left to fight using tanks designed in the 1930s. 

Fortunately for Germany, in the PzKpfw Mk IV it had a machine that was capable of extensive development in its power train, its armament and its armour. During its development the Mk IV became the backbone of the panzer forces, and for a time gave the Ostheer a renewed qualitative edge. The Mk III was too small and too light for such major upgrading, but there remained an urgent requirement for thicker armour and an improved gun. The most immediate improvement to the Mk III and the Mk IV was a doubling of their armour protection through the fitting of face-hardened spaced plates, and the acceptance of a consequent reduction in their mobility. The Mk IV was up gunned through the replacement of its short-barrelled 7.5cm infantry support weapon with a highly effective 43-calibre variant of the new 7.5cm anti-tank gun. The Mk III was not capable of taking the 7.5cm anti-tank gun, but its armament was improved somewhat by the replacement of its 42-calibre 5cm gun with a variant of the long-barrelled (60-calibre) 5cm Pak 38 (L/60) anti-tank gun that was being issued to the infantry. The deficiencies of the infantry's standard 3.7cm anti-tank gun had been recognised since 1940. Though light and manoeuvrable, it was almost useless in dealing with the T34 and KV1 and was a factor in the rout of 112 Inf Div by part of 32 Tank Bgd supported by 239 Rifle Div southeast of Tula in November 1941. In response, the process, begun in 1940, of replacing the infantry's 3.7cm gun with the Pak 38 (L/60) was accelerated. Also available was a variant of the 7.5cm anti-tank gun developed for infantry use (the Pak 40). Although the 7.5cm was an effective weapon it was too heavy to be manoeuvred manually and had to be towed into position by motorised transport, severely limiting its operational flexibility. The highly effective 8.8cm dual-purpose anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun was even more unwieldy, and at 4.4 tonnes was nearly ten times the weight of the early 3.7cm gun. In 1940 the Wehrmacht had begun the development of the self-propelled gun, a turretless armoured fighting vehicle based on the chassis of a tank with a gun fitted to a fixed casement. Such weapons generally had a lower profile than a tank, were easier and cheaper to manufacture and, depending on their configuration, could be used as mobile indirect fire artillery, as direct fire infantry support weapons, or as `tank-killers'. In the direct fire infantry support assault gun role, Germany developed in 1940 the StuG III based on the PzKpfw Mk III chassis and armed with the short-barrelled 7.5cm infantry support gun. In the same year the Panzerjäger I, the first `tank-killer' self-propelled gun, was developed based on the PzKpfw Mk I tank chassis and armed with a 4.7cm Pak(t) gun. These weapons were the first of a range of increasingly powerful self-propelled guns developed by Germany during the course of the war. 

The main weapons of the German artillery arm were developed in the early 1930s. At regimental level, two infantry support guns predominated - the short-barrelled 7.5cm leIG18 and the somewhat cumbersome 15cm sIG33. At divisional level, artillery support was based primarily on the 10.5cm sK18 field gun, the 10.5cm leFH18 howitzer and the 15cm sFH18 heavy howitzer. In the early period of the war these artillery pieces, used in conjunction with the German army's efficient and effective fire control system, proved to be eminently fit for purpose, and they were subject to little further development. The leFH18 was upgraded in 1941 to achieve a modest increase in range, and to improve the range of the sFH18, the ammunition for the gun was modified to provide a rocket propulsion element to the shell's propellant system. The German army had a range of larger calibre artillery pieces (15cm and above), and significant use was made of captured guns, but the mainstay of the artillery arm remained the regimental and divisional artillery weapons with which Germany went to war in 1939. 

As a means of countering the improved armour protection of tanks, in conjunction with the introduction of faster and heavier anti-tank projectiles, considerable development went into the design of the projectiles. The first improvement from the simple solid shot was the addition of a softer metallic cap to prevent the break-up of the armour penetrating component on impact. Further improvements were achieved by the use of tungsten carbide in the main shot, and the streamlining of the shot to achieve higher muzzle velocities by the fitting of a ballistic cap to the impact cap. Such developments were pursued by both sides during the early period of the war and the result of this work had a considerable impact on force structure and tactics as the war progressed. 

In the air, both sides strove to improve the performance of their aircraft, neither side gaining a distinct technological advantage. The Red Army took some time to recover from the devastating aircraft losses of the first few days of the war, but in a combat zone as large as the Eastern Front neither side would ever achieve true air superiority. All that could be achieved was local and often merely temporary advantage on a particular strategic axis.

Ost 1942 Soviet Recovery

On its own, military manpower could not have saved the Soviet Union. But by early 1941 the Red Army had at its disposal a raft of new military equipment with the potential to match anything in the Wehrmacht's arsenal. The best of the new fighters, the Yak-1, proved capable of taking on the Me-109s, and the new Il-2 ground attack aircraft was to prove to be devastatingly effective in the battles ahead. 

German troops were to find the T34 medium tank and the KV1 heavy tank to be perhaps the worst surprises of the early months of the war. With each passing month the reliability of the T34s improved and the competence of the Soviet tank commanders in the use of these battle-winning weapons increased. In the summer of 1941 the Red Army also acquired a highly effective new anti-tank gun. This was the long-barrelled 57mm ZiS- 2 that was easily capable of destroying any tank that the Ostheer could place on the battlefield. Unfortunately for Soviet forces the production costs of the weapon were high and production was discontinued at the end of November 1941 in the mistaken belief that the standard Soviet 45mm anti-tank gun was sufficient for current and future purposes. Soviet infantry also possessed some useful new weaponry. For close quarter and urban fighting the PPSh submachine gun was introduced in 1940 and, subject to ongoing development, was to remain in use throughout the war. 

It may have been outclassed by the equivalent German weapon, the MP40, but unlike the MP40 the PPSh was simple and cheap to manufacture and was subsequently produced in prodigious numbers. Another highly successful infantry weapon introduced in 1940 was the 120mm heavy mortar. This mortar was so effective that the Germans copied it almost exactly. In 1941 two different types of 14.5mm anti-tank rifle were introduced, the PTRS and the more common PTRD. These weapons, nearly half a million of which were manufactured during the war, were reasonably effective against light tanks and were a threat to the German medium tanks if they could score a hit in the sides or rear at short range. At the outbreak of the war Soviet artillery was also being upgraded, with the 76mm F-22 USV divisional gun, the 122mm M-30 divisional howitzer and the 152mm ML-20 corps gun-howitzer already in quantity production. 

The continuing availability of these weapons depended entirely on the ability of Soviet industry to maintain their production, and the ruthlessly efficient transfer of military productive capacity from the vulnerable areas of the Ukraine and western Russia to the safety of the Volga and beyond, was another key factor in the survival of the Soviet Union. Despite its vicissitudes, during the second half of 1941 Soviet industry produced 4,177 tanks, a figure that exceeded the 3,796 tanks and self-propelled guns produced in Germany in the whole of that year. By the end of March 1942 Soviet tank production had been increased to nearly 2,000 machines per month, a rate of production that Germany would never match. 

Another key factor in the survival of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the speed with which the Red Army adapted its structure in response to the realities of the conflict with the Wehrmacht. As early as 15 July, with the war just twenty-three days old, Zhukov issued the first of what would be a series of directives on the revised structure of Soviet units. Mechanised corps were disbanded, and motorised rifle divisions were converted to conventional rifle divisions. Tank divisions and subsequently the rifle divisions were reduced in size to around 10,000 personnel, though in the battle for Moscow a rifle division was typically half that size. Only a few of the new tank divisions were actually formed, new tank formations being based on the smaller tank brigade of nine tank companies, six of them composed of light tanks, and the size of a tank company, particularly the medium tank company, was standardised at ten tanks. This process was formalised in an order of 23 August 1941. Also, at the insistence of Voronov, the artillery support to rifle divisions was reduced to one artillery regiment, the other being withdrawn for use in `strategic artillery' formations. Most of the higher level organisational changes in the Red Army were driven by the chronic shortage of experienced or qualified senior commanders. The shortage was due in part to Stalin's purges, but losses at the front and the rapid expansion of the Red Army as the hundreds of new divisions and brigades were created were major contributory factors. As a result, the Fronts needed to create formations more easily handled by inexperienced middle-rank commanders. This was achieved by steadily disbanding the rifle corps so that by the end of 1941only six of the original sixty-two remained and the armies, designated `Rifle Armies', were reduced in size to five or six rifle divisions with appropriate tank brigade and strategic reserve artillery reinforcement as was required for a particular task. Below army level the lack of experienced or qualified commanders and the long lead times needed to create new rifle divisions led to the need to create smaller autonomous combat units. The solution, one that persisted through to 1943, was the rifle brigade. Initially a somewhat ad-hoc formation based on a rifle regiment with assigned artillery support, some 250 rifle brigades were raised in the first year of the war and by the summer of 1942 their structure had been formalised to four rifle battalions, an artillery battalion of twelve 76mm regimental guns, an antitank battalion of twelve 45mm anti-tank guns, a heavy mortar battalion of eight 120mm mortars, and a separate submachine gun company. With a little over 5,000 personnel, these brigades had become well balance `half-divisions' having a substantial headquarters staff with signals, reconnaissance, engineering and transport companies. 

In an effort to compensate for the almost total destruction of the Soviet tank park in the early months of the war, the Red Army saw a dramatic expansion of cavalry forces during this period. Based on a pared-down cavalry division structure of just 2,600 men these forces, used in combat as mobile light infantry, offered Soviet commanders a degree of operational mobility that was simply unavailable to them in the form of mechanised formations. The result of the suite of structural changes during the second half of 1941 was a Red Army in which the army and subordinate units could be more efficiently commanded by a smaller number of commanders obliged to work with inexperience headquarters staff.

During the first period of the war, the Red Army was on a steep learning curve and the lessons were bought at high cost. Yet steadily through experience, by adopting and adapting the things that worked and discarding, irrespective of conventional wisdom, those that didn't, the effectiveness of Soviet combat units began to rise. To his credit, Stalin was prepared to learn from his own mistakes. After the appointment of a raft of politically loyal NKVD officers to senior combat command positions had proved to be generally disastrous, there evolved a more meritocratic system of promotion that rewarded the strategically perceptive and tactically effective, as a result of which the frequency of change at senior command level began to decline. The command abilities of Zhukov, Vatutin, Voronov and Vasilevsky, had been recognised from the start. Others such as Rokossovsky, Konev, Tolbukhin and Malinovsky, deemed competent for moderately senior command prior to the outbreak of hostilities, were to demonstrate an outstanding ability for command at the highest level. Others, Cherniakhovsky, Katukov, Grechko and Pliev among them, through their demonstrable ability on the battlefield, rose from relative pre-war obscurity to become outstanding senior commanders. There were many others, such as Major-Gen M T Romanov whose 172 Rifle Div conducted a skilful and determined defence of Mogilev in July 1941, whose potential could only be glimpsed before they were killed or taken prisoner in the early months of the war. Stalin himself gradually came to recognise that his senior generals often knew better than he what was required to win a campaign, and he increasingly came to trust their judgement over his own.