Russia at war 1941-1945

The Soviet Union had the largest engineering industry in Europe, and some 9,000 large new industrial enterprises had been set up under the three Five-Year Plans—1,500 under the first, 4,500 under the second, and 3,000 during the first three years of the third (that is, up to 1941). In 1940 she produced 18.3 million tons of steel, 31 million tons of oil and 166 million tons of coal—these production figures were, moreover, to be substantially increased in 1941. Military expenditure had represented only 12.7 per cent of the budget during the Second Five-Year Plan, but had, since the beginning of World War II, risen to 26.4 per cent, and, in 1941, "there was a further increase in connection with the technical re-equipment of the Army". Since September 1939, in particular, measures had been taken by the Party and the Government to increase in the next one-and-a-half to two years the productive capacity of certain armaments industries, and particularly of the aircraft industry, by at least 100 per cent.

But all this planning was one thing, and the actual results were quite another. These, as the History admits, were still extremely disappointing by the end of 1940; nor were they spectacular by any means by the middle of 1941, at the time of the German invasion.

The new Soviet models—the Yak-1 and Mig-3 fighters and the Pe-2 bombers—began to

be produced in 1940, but only in very small quantities. Thus only twenty Mig-3's, sixty-four Yak-l's and one or two Pe-2's were produced in 1940. The position improved

somewhat in the first half of 1941, when 1,946 of the new fighter planes—the Mig-3's, Lagg-3's and Yak-1's—were produced, as well as 458 Pe-2 bombers and 249 Il-2

stormoviks.

But these quantities were totally insufficient to increase substantially the proportion of modern planes in the army, and, by June 1941, the great majority of army planes

consisted of obsolete models.

[ IVOVSS. vol. I, p. 415.]

The performance of the tank industry was no better. In June 1941 the Red Army had a

very large number of tanks, but nearly all of these, too, were obsolete.

The new tanks, the KV and the T-34—which were later to prove more than a match for

the German tanks—were not yet in production in 1939; in 1940 only 243 KV tanks and

115 T-34 tanks were produced; not till the first half of 1941 was there an impressive increase; during that period 393 KV's and 1,110 T-34's came off the assembly line.

Similarly, the production of guns, mortars and automatic weapons proceeded at "an intolerably slow pace". For this the Deputy Commissars for Defence, G. I. Kulik, L. Z.

Mekhlis and A. E. Shchadenko are blamed; Kulik, in particular, is taken to task for

having neglected the production of automatic rifles, the value of which he persisted in denying, and the lack of which was to put the Russian infantryman at a great

disadvantage. The production of ammunition in 1941 was lagging behind even that of the guns. Although the first special anti-tank rifles were made in Russia in 1940-1, these had not yet been supplied to the Army by the beginning of the war.

[Ibid., p. 416.]

Another very serious weakness of the Red Army was the absence of a large-scale

automobile industry in the Soviet Union; in June 1941 the Soviet Union had a total of only 800,000 motor vehicles, and a large proportion of guns had to be drawn either by horses or by wholly inadequate farm tractors.

On the other hand Russian artillery is estimated by Russian experts to have been better than German artillery; jet rockets, first used in the Finnish War, began to be produced on a large scale in 1940-1, and Kostikov's famous katyusha mortars were extremely popular with the Red Army almost from the very beginning. They first came into action at

Smolensk about the middle of July.

Radar was still in its infancy in the Red Army, and even ordinary wireless

communications between army units were not the general rule. "Even the minimum

requirements were not fulfilled in this respect. As a result a lot of obsolete material was used. Many officers did not know how to handle wireless communications ... and

preferred the old-fashioned telephone."

[ Ibid., p. 455.]

In a highly mobile war this often proved quite useless.

This is just one example in many of the widespread professional inferiority of the Russian soldier and officer as compared with their German opposite numbers in 1941, and it was, in fact, not till 1943 that, in the estimation of the Russian military leaders themselves, the Russian soldier and officer became professionally as competent as the German, if not more so.

Very few officers or soldiers in 1941 had had any direct experience of war, and many of them were novices who had only lately been trained as "replacements" for the thousands of officers who had been purged back in 1937 and 1938. Although the officer's "single command" had been re-introduced in August 1940 through the eclipse of military