Russia at war 1941-1945

Braziers were kept alight to unfreeze the machines... And two days later, the war factory began production.

[ Pravda, September 18, 1942.]

At the time, however, the press scarcely ever referred to the special difficulties arising from war-time shortages. For example, a Government Instruction of September 11, 1941, laid down that steel and reinforced concrete were to be used very sparingly, "and only in cases when the use of other local materials, such as timber, was technically wholly out of the question". So, especially in 1941, many of the factory buildings were made of wood: These buildings were architecturally displeasing, and often altogether puny to look at; but... usually even large factory buildings were erected in a matter of fifteen to twenty days... People worked day and night—the scene of their work being lit by arc lamps or by electric bulbs suspended on trees... In one of the Volga cities the new buildings of the largest aircraft factory in the country were being built in this way...

Even before the roof had been completed, the machine-tools were already

functioning. Even when the thermometer went down to forty degrees below, people

continued to work. On December 10, fourteen days after the arrival of the last trainloads of equipment, the first Mig fighter-plane was produced. By the end of the

month, thirty Mig planes were turned out... Similarly, the last lot of workers of the Kharkov Tank Works left Kharkov on October 19; but already on December 8, in

their new Urals surroundings, they were able to assemble their first twenty-five T-34 tanks, which were promptly sent to the front.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 151.]

Though a very high proportion of Soviet heavy industry, and especially war industry, was successfully moved to the east within four or five months, there was an inevitable drop in production in the meantime. There was, in fact, a gap of nearly a year—roughly from

August 1941 to August 1942 when the Red Army was extremely short of equipment, and

this shortage was very nearly disastrous between October 1941 and the following spring.

It was, as we shall see, one of the principal reasons why the Battle of Moscow was only a partial, and not a complete victory. It also largely accounts for the Russians' grievous reverses of the following summer.

Even so, the increase in armament production immediately after the invasion was very considerable. In the whole of 1941 the aircraft industry produced a total of nearly 16,000

planes of all types, of which more than 10,000 were produced after the invasion, but mostly between July and October. The figures for the production of tanks and other

weapons were equally striking, and the production of munitions of all kinds in the second half of 1941 was almost three times what it had been in the first. The tragedy of it was that, by October, all this progress came virtually to a standstill.

The difficulties facing the Soviet armaments industry in the east were enormous. Not all the workers of the evacuated plants could be transferred at the same time as the

machinery; in many cases, for a variety of reasons, only forty or fifty per cent of the workers followed. There was also at first a very serious shortage of certain raw materials.

High-grade steels for armour-plating, had, in the main, been produced in the Eastern Ukraine; this meant a fundamental reconversion of the various production processes in the east. This reconversion resulted in a temporary lowering of the output of the blast and open-hearth furnaces. There was an extreme shortage of molybdenum and manganese. A

high proportion of the manganese had been produced in the Nikopol area, which was now under German occupation. New manganese mining areas had to be opened up in the

Urals and Kazakhstan, where conditions of terrain and climate presented incredible