Russia at war 1941-1945

[ The History actually attributes this order not to Stalin or Molotov, but to "traitor Beria"

who had the frontier guards under his jurisdiction.]

A significant conclusion made by the History is that the Soviet General Staff had some perfectly sound plans for "making the frontier much less vulnerable by the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942", but that, in view of the German menace in 1941, everything had been done "too slowly and too late". And there follows the assertion that neither the General Staff, nor the Commissariat of Defence would have shown such incompetence

"if there had not been those wholly unjustified repressions against the leading officers and political cadres of the Army in the 1937-8 Purge".

This reference to Tukhachevsky and the other victims of the Purge is, of course, a

monumental understatement when one considers that perhaps as many as 15,000 officers

—probably about ten or fifteen per cent of the total, but with a higher proportion of purgées in the higher ranks—were either temporarily, or finally eliminated. Among those temporarily eliminated were such distinguished soldiers as the future Marshals Govorov and Rokossovsky.

The mess and muddle on the Russian side of the frontier was, of course, in striking

contrast with what was going on on the German side. Here, since the middle of 1940, i.e.

even before Plan Barbarossa had been finally adopted on December 18, the Germans had been thoroughly preparing their ground for a possible attack on the Soviet Union. Roads, including autobahnen, railways and a large network of airfields had been built during the year preceding the invasion; during that period the Germans had built or modernised no fewer than 250 airfields and fifty landing strips in Poland for their deadly Heinkels, Dorniers and Messerschmitts.

In the words of a German chronicler, "millions of German soldiers broke into Russia in June 1941, without enthusiasm, but with a quiet confidence in victory".

[ Philippi and Heim, Der Feldzug gegen Sowjetrussland (The Campaign against Soviet Russia) (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 11.]

Chapter II THE INVASION

And now began for the Russian people Vannée terrible—the most terrible it had ever known. In a matter of a few days and weeks death and destruction swept over vast parts of the country. In the frontier zones, and, indeed, much further inland, the concentrated German onslaught smashed, captured or wholly disorganised the Red Army units facing

it; the Soviet air force was as good as wiped out in the western areas on the very first day of the German invasion; within five days the German forces had already captured Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, well within the Soviet Union's 1938 borders; nor did it take much longer for the German armies to occupy all the areas incorporated by the Soviet Union since 1939— Western Belorussia, the Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and

Estonia. In the north, the Finns smashed through to the old 1939 border just north-west of Leningrad. By July 8, the Germans were already crowing that the war in Russia was

"practically" won.

There is no doubt that Russia was dazed by these terrible initial reverses, and yet, almost from the first day, it was clear that it was a national war.

[This was something that was understood by the best foreign observers of Russia. Thus a few days before I left London for Russia on July 2, 1941, I had a long talk with the late Sir Bernard Pares who said: "I can already see it's going to be a tremendous national war, a bigger and better 1812." Similarly, at the end of June,

G. Bernard Shaw wrote in a letter to The Times that, with Stalin now on our side, we were sure to win the war. On the other hand, British military experts at War Office or Ministry of Information briefings very clearly suggested that they did not think the war in Russia would last more than a few weeks or, at most, months.]

A feeling of consternation swept the country, but it was combined with an under-current of national defiance and the apprehension that it would be a long, hard and desperate struggle.

Everybody realised that millions of lives would be lost, and yet only very few people seem to have visualised the possibility of utter military defeat and a total conquest of Russia by the Germans. In this respect the contrast with France during the German

invasion of 1940 is very striking.

This fundamental confidence was characteristic of the attitude of the Russian people and of the large majority of the Ukrainians and Belorussians; it did not exist in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or in the Western Ukraine, where pro-Nazi and other anti-Soviet

influences were strong. In these areas the German invasion was either welcomed or

suffered with relative indifference.