Russia at war 1941-1945

From the Invasion to the Battle of Moscow

Chapter I SOVIET UNPREPAREDNESS IN JUNE 1941

In the early morning hours of June 22, 1941, Plan Barbarossa—on which Hitler and his generals had worked for the last six months— came into action. And the Russians were not prepared for the onslaught.

The three-pronged German invasion, aiming at Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the

middle, and the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the south, with the ultimate object of

occupying within a short time practically the whole of European Russia up to a line

running from Archangel to Astrakhan, was to prove a failure. But the first weeks of the war and, indeed, the first three-and-a-half months were, to the Russians, an almost

unmitigated disaster. The greater part of the Russian air force was wiped out in the first few days; the Russians lost thousands of tanks; hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in a series of spectacular encirclements during the first fortnight, and by the second week of July some German generals thought the war as good as won.

How was this possible? Stalin's interpretation of these initial disasters—which was to remain the official version for many years afterwards—was that the element of surprise had been overwhelmingly in the Germans' favour. No doubt, Stalin himself later admitted that "certain mistakes" had been made on the Russian side; but there was no mention of these "mistakes" at first, and the only explanation given in July was the "suddenness and perfidious-ness" of the German attack.

This explanation did not entirely satisfy the Russian people at the time; they had been told so much for years about the tremendous might of the Red Army that the non-stop

advance of the German steam-roller during the first three weeks of the war—to

Smolensk, to the outskirts of Kiev and to only a short distance from Leningrad —came as a terrible shock. There was much questioning and heart-searching as to what had gone wrong. But, in the face of the fearful threat of the destruction of Russia, and despite much sotto-voce grumbling, this was not a time for recrimination, and, whatever had gone wrong, and whatever the mistakes that had been made, the only thing to do was to fight the invaders. The mystique of a great national war, of a life-and-death struggle took deep root in the Russians' consciousness within a very short time; and the "national war"

motifs of Stalin's famous broadcast of July 3 made such a deep impression precisely

because they expressed the thoughts which, in the tragic circumstances of the time, the Russian people—consciously or unconsciously—wanted to hear clearly stated. Here at

last was a clear programme of action for a stunned and bewildered nation.

But the fact remains that at first Russia proved totally unprepared to meet the German onslaught, and that in October 1941 the Germans very nearly won the war.

While Stalin was alive, no serious attempt was made openly to analyse the numerous

long-term, as well as immediate causes of the military disasters of 1941; and it was not, in fact, till after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in 1956, and Khrushchev's sharp, and at times even exaggerated, criticisms of Stalin's

"military genius" that Soviet military historians got down to the job of explaining what really happened.

The explanations given for the disasters of 1941 are numerous and touch on a very wide range of subjects. Among the principal long-term causes some were historical (e.g. the 1937 purges in the Red Army); some were psychological (the constant propaganda about the invincibility of the Red Army); some were professional (lack of any proper

experience of war among the Red Army as compared with the Germans and, in many

cases, a low standard of training); some, finally, were economic (the failure of the Soviet war industries, despite the breathing-space provided by the Soviet-German Pact, to turn the Red Army into a well-equipped modern army).

Whether, as seems likely, the Red Army would have been perfectly fit to fight the

Germans in 1942, it was obviously not in a condition to do so in 1941.

One of the most important recent Russian publications, printed in 1960, is the first volume of the official History of the War. This explains with refreshing candour many of the things that went wrong in 1941. In particular, it deals in considerable detail with the bad psychological conditioning for the "next" war of both the Red Army and the Soviet people generally.

Thus, it draws particular attention to the wishful thinking pervading the famous Draft Field Regulations of 1939 which said:

Any enemy attack on the Soviet Union will be met by a smashing blow from its

armed forces;