Russia at war 1941-1945

difficulties. The Nikopol miners, who had brought to the east their mining equipment, started producing manganese ore, with the help of locally conscripted labour, in a remote part of Sverdlovsk province, where manganese mining had been only tentatively begun

shortly before the war. The gradual organisation of the large-scale smelting of

ferromanganese at the Kushvisk plant, in the Kuzbas and at Magnitogorsk was later

described as "a stupendous industrial victory equal in importance to a major military victory". No more remarkable as a fact of human endurance was the development of molybdenum mines in the waterless steppe near Lake Balkhash in Central Asia.

When the Germans had overrun the Donbas, the Soviet Union lost over sixty per cent of her coal output, and the production of coal had to be stepped up in the Urals, the Kuzbas and Karaganda areas; in December 1941 it was decided to sink forty-four new mines

within the next three months. Desperate efforts were also made to increase the output of aluminium, nickel, cobalt, zinc, oil, chemicals, etc., in the east.

The critical situation is best summarised in the second volume of the official History: In the late autumn of 1941 our country lived through its most difficult days, both militarily and economically. The front required more and more armaments and

munitions, but owing to the evacuation of so many plants, the number of factories producing war equipment had sharply fallen... By the end of October, not a single plant in the south was working. Of the blast furnaces in operation on June 1, only thirty-eight per cent were now working; of the open-hearth furnaces, only fifty-twoper cent; of the electric-steel-smelting furnaces, thirty-eight per cent, of the rolling-mills, fifty-two per cent. Compared with June 1941, we were producing by the end

of October 1941, thirty-three per cent of pig-iron, forty-two per cent of steel, forty-two per cent of rolled-iron. By December, the output of steel had dropped by two-

thirds. We had lost all the coal mines of the Donbas and of the Moscow Basin; rolled non-ferrous metals were down to practically nothing, and the total industrial output had dropped since June by over fifty per cent.

It was the lowest point reached throughout the war.

The migration of the aircraft industry had a disastrous effect on the output of

planes. This dropped in November to about thirty per cent of its September output; there was no means of replacing the heavy losses suffered by our air force in the battles of Moscow, Leningrad, etc. Only by concentrating all aircraft reserves on the most decisive sectors of the front could the Soviet air force carry on at all in thewinter fighting of 1941-2.

Owing to evacuation, there was also a heavy drop in the output of tanks during the late autumn and winter months, and the same applied to the production of guns and munitions.

Nor was the conversion of peace production to war production easy: out of the

thirty agricultural machinery plants earmarked for such conversion, only nine had the necessary equipment for doing so.