Russia at war 1941-1945

wounded) during the 250 days' siege, but avoided all reference to the number of Russians left behind, including the 26,000 wounded left in the ruined town or on the beaches—

without a ship to take them away...

The men and women of Sebastopol had rendered a great service to the rest of the Russian forces by tying down von Manstein's 11th Army for so long and preventing it from

operating on the "main" front.

Chapter IV THE RENEWAL OF THE GERMAN ADVANCE

Though Sebastopol did not finally fall until the beginning of July, its fate was already sealed at the time of the meeting of the Supreme Soviet on June 18 to ratify the Anglo-Soviet Alliance. There had, too, been the disasters at Kerch and Kharkov in May. And yet on June 21 the Army paper Red Star wrote:

The German Army is still stubborn in defence. But it has been deprived of that

offensive drive it had before... But though the enemy is still strong, one thing is clear. There cannot be a German offensive like last summer's. The question facing Germany now is not to conquer the Soviet Union, but to hang on, to last out

somehow. Not that it will stick to defensive warfare throughout... But its offensive operations cannot go beyond the framework of limited objectives.

Equally surprising, in the light of the real situation, was the publication by

Sovinformbureau on June 22 of A Review of The First Year of the War giving the following figures for casualties in support of the statement that the Red Army had shaken the German war machine so badly that the ground had been prepared for the smashing of the German Army in 1942:

Germany

USSR

Killed, wounded and prisoners

10,000,000 4,500,000

about

Guns lost over

30,500

22,000

Tanks lost over

24,000

15,000

Planes lost over

20,000

9,000

These figures for German casualties were, to say the least, improbable and have not been reproduced in post-war Soviet histories. At the time even the most credulous readers took them with a large pinch of salt. Much more plausible are the figures given in General Haider's diary for German casualties (excluding the sick):

Up to 15.2.42— 946,000

Up to 10.5.42—1,183,000

Up to 20.5.42—1,215,000

Up to 10.6.42—1,268,000

Up to 30.6.42—1,332,000

Up to 10.7.42—1,362,000

Up to 20.7.42—1,391,000

Up to 31.7.42—1,428,000

Up to 10.8.42—1,472,000

Up to 20.8.42—1,528,000

Up to 31.8.42—1,589,000

Up to 10.9.42—1,637,000

This means that, by the end of the winter campaign, the Germans had suffered nearly a million casualties; then, after a relative lull, between February and May (which had, however, still cost them some 200,000 casualties), the Germans had half-a-million

casualties between the beginning of the May operations and the beginning of the Stalingrad Battle. So even the pre-Stalingrad phase of the 1942 campaign was very far from having been a walkover for the Germans.

The figure in the Russian Report of June 22 for Soviet casualties is less fantastic, and is if anything an under-estimate. And though the German losses in heavy equipment are

grossly exaggerated, the Russian losses, curiously enough, may also have been exaggerated, considering the great shortage of planes and tanks from which the Russian armies had suffered almost from the outset, and the very slow rate at which these were being produced, especially between October 1941 and March 1942.

The stupendous losses of equipment given in the table may have been calculated to

impress upon Soviet industry the gigantic size of reinforcements and replacements

required from it, and upon the Western Allies the wholly inadequate help they had been sending up till then.

Naturally [the Sovinformbureau statement went on] on a front as long as this the

German High Command can concentrate here and there a sufficient number of