Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 22:02:23 -0700
From: Mark Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Party, People, Army....


The Barbarossa timetable began to falter. 

Hitler was nervous about the undiminished resistance 
of Soviet forces encircled in the German rear. The Wehrmacht had 
advanced more than 200 miles and their lines were extended.To 
Guderian's wrath the Panzers had to sit tight while large Red 
Army formations in the Minsk-Bialystock pocket were eliminated. 
During the delay Zhukov and Defence Commissar Marshal Timoshenko 
rushed new forces to the Smolensk area. Here, on the banks of 
Dniepr, the Red Army planned to stop Hitler's blitzkrieg on 
Moscow.

At the same time catastrophe continued to envelop the Red Army. 

Leeb's Army Group North avalanched on Leningrad- the city's
 population was dumbfounded by the suddenness of the threat, 
which left the civilian and military authorities paralysed in disarray. 
On the central front Guderian was already forcing the Dniepr, and at 
Kiev three doomed Soviet armies were sucked into a vortex as Army 
Group South swept around them. The Red Army had suffered major 
losses of men and materiel: the disastrous consequences of Stalin's 
pre-war strategy which only envisaged offensive operations on 
enemy territory were increasingly apparent. The bulk of fuel, 
ammunition and other stores had been- at Stalin's instigation- 
kept on or near the front, and were now lost.

Compounding the critical shortage of ammunition and weapons and
the extreme muddle and confusion both on the fronts and in the Defence 
Commissariat, was the absence of any prearranged defensive 
strategy. Tactics were improvised and making a virtue out of 
necessity, the High Command took advantage of the decimation of 
its forces to remodel its huge and unmanageable prewar force 
structures into smaller more mobile armies.

The Germans estimated that the 'mass of the operationally-
effective Russian Army has now been destroyed'. This however was 
not the case. Despite its losses the Red army was by no means a 
spent force, as was soon revealed to the Germans in the battle 
for Smolensk. 

By 20 July Panzergruppen II and III had taken Orsha, Smolensk, 
Yelnya and Krichev. But slowly what Halder called the 'fierce and 
dogged resistance' of the Soviet soldiery was beginning to meld 
the desperate, fragmented battles of the first weeks into a 
continuous resistance which here and there made it possible to 
take the initiative. Two armies encircled west of the Dniepr 
managed to extricate themselves, withdrawing to the eastern bank. 
Towards the end of July a flurry of fierce Soviet counter-attacks 
drove in the German bridgehead over the Dniepr at Smolensk. The 
Germans, pushing on to Roslavl to the South, managed to encircle 
and maul Soviet 28th Army. Yet time was passing; Barbarossa's 
apocalytpic timetable began to slip. At immense cost the Red Army 
was absorbing the first shock of the blitzkrieg.

Planes of the Red Airforce ('Stalin's falcons') were also 
fighting back. The skies were filled with dogfights, and there 
were many instances of Soviet planes ramming enemy aircraft. One 
of the first exploits was that of former Moscow factory-worker, 
Captain Gastello who, in a story known to every Soviet 
schoolchild and subject of many songs and poems, plunged his 
burning plane onto a column of German fuel lorries.

But already in the villages west of Moscow people were living as 
slaves to the Germans. Army Group Centre ploughed on towards 
Moscow;by now 28 Soviet divisions had been destroyed, another 70 
suffering more than 50 per cent losses. Still more grievous 
losses were to come. 

On 29 July a fierce row about strategy broke out between Stalin 
and Zhukov during a Kremlin meeting. Georgy Zhukov, victor of 
Khalkin-Gol in the Soviet-Japanese border conflict of 1939, was 
one of the Red Army's few battle-tested leaders. Surveying the 
status of each sector of the Front Zhukov concluded that in the 
Moscow and Leningrad areas the Germans had sustained too serious 
a level of losses to resume the offensive in the immediate 
future. He proposed withdrawing behind the Dniepr and 
strengthening the fronts to the South of Moscow.This meant 
weakening the Moscow defences at least until reinforcements could 
be brought in from the Far East- 'So then, you want us to give 
the Far East to Japan', Stalin said.

Undeterred, Zhukov made plain it would also be necessary to 
abandon Kiev. At the same time he wanted to counter-attack in the 
Yelnya-Smolensk direction, to relieve the potential pressure on 
Moscow. 'What counterattacks?' Stalin exploded. 'What nonsense!' 
'If you think the Chief of the General Staff is only able to talk 
nonsense', Zhukov snapped back, 'then he has no business here'. 
And Zhukov asked to be relieved of his duties forthwith and sent 
to the front 'where I shall be of more use to the motherland'. 
'Don't get heated', Stalin said, 'but now you mention it, we can 
manage without you'. Zhukov was sent to organise the counter-
attack at Yelnya which he himself had proposed.

Within days, as Zhukov predicted, Guderian swung south on the 
exposed Central Front. 

Throughout August and into early September the carnage of 
Smolensk spilled North and South as the Germans tried to find a 
way round stubborn Soviet resistance; Zhukov's counter-attacks 
meant that in effect the Wehrmacht found itself fighting 
defensive battles.At Smolensk Barbarossa had become a dead 
letter; already the vaunted Wehrmacht had lost more than half its 
tanks and one-third of its infantry. Vehicles, spares, ammunition 
and even food were in short supply; winter was approaching, but 
the Germans had no winter clothing. As early as mid-July GHQ had 
ordered footwear to be seized from captured Red Armymen. German 
boots, superbly constructed from soft leathers, with a special 
box for the great toe, were marching boots with which socks could 
not be worn. The 32 nails in each sole were rods which would 
conduct the 20, 30 or 40 degrees of Russian frost into the feet 
of German footsoldiery as winter deepened.

In early September, as the Ostheer paused for resupply, Hitler 
and his General Staff took stock.Hitler insisted, over their 
opposition, that operations in the Leningrad sector and the 
economically-vital Ukraine must now come first. Another month 
slipped by before Bock's army group was ordered 'to end the war' 
by taking Moscow.

More than 90 per cent of Soviet young men aged between 18-21 
when the war started died during it; the inferno before Smolensk 
consumed 100,000 of them- three Soviet armies- before burning 
itself out under the clear skies of a glorious autumn. 

Zhukov had been right in his confrontation with Stalin at the
 end of July: right in thinking the Japanese would not attack in the 
Far East and right in his appreciation of the balance of forces along
 the immense western front and how this would affect German 
intentions. Zhukov had wanted to withdraw beyond the Dniepr and 
then commence spoiling counter-attacks. Stalin meant to hang on 
to Kiev, the key to the Ukraine, at all costs yet was too alarmed 
by the threat to Moscow to divert the necessary forces from 
there. 

Stalin had scant confidence, anyway, in the ability of the 
Red Army to conduct orderly retreats or wage defensive battles. 
At this stage of the war Stalin was crushed by omnipresent 
defeat, by fear of German superiority and doubts about the 
loyalty and capabilities of the Red Army and its leaders 
(visitors to the Kremlin were shocked by the aged, crumpled 
figure which greeted them, almost unrecognisable from the 
ubiquitous posters and portraits).Stalin's early policy of static 
defence, which led to one army after another being encircled and 
annihilated, and the equally desperate policy of the counter-
offensive pursued regardless of circumstances, were both 
immensely costly in men and materiel.From these baleful 
beginnings however a synthesis grew out of Stalin's strategic 
preoccupations and Zhukov's operational genius. It first saw the 
light of day in the counter-offensive before Moscow, but before 
then the crisis of Leningrad had to be dealt with.

Stalin called Zhukov to the Kremlin on 8 September, told him 'You 
were right about the Yelnya salient business' and gave him new 
instructions: the northern front was collapsing and 'if the 
Germans seize Leningrad and link up with the Finns, they could 
strike Moscow from the northeast. Then the situation will be even 
more complicated'. Next day Zhukov flew from Vnukovo to the 
beseiged first city of socialism. There he found chaos, 
demoralisation and disintegration. A few days after his arrival 
the Germans completed their encirclement of the city. 700,000 
German and Finnish soldiers were investing the city; they were 
stopped on the last defensive perimeter with the inner city 
directly behind, by remnants of the Red Army and by tens of 
thousands of untrained, ill-equipped but determined Home Guard 
volunteers.

The city itself had become an armed camp, with its own arsenals, 
shipyards and factories providing a stream of tanks, artillery 
and small arms and ammunition. As the front neared, frantic 
preparations for a seige had begun. Military facilities were 
hidden and camouflaged, as were architectural masterpieces, 
hospitals and schools. Civilians worked round the clock digging 
trenches and bomb shelters. 

Rationing was introduced. 

Nearly a third of the city's three million population was evacuated; 
whole research institutes down to the doorman; offices, theatres 
and factories went East by train. Treasures from the Hermitage and 
other museums were carted off in hundreds of freight wagons. 92 
entire factories were transshipped beyond the Urals. The last two 
evacuaion trains slipped through Mga station in the early hours 
of 29 August; by noon the Germans had arrived there. On 8 
September the took Schlissselburg on the shores of Lake Ladoga, 
cutting off the last land route. The blockade had begun. 

Hitler had planned to take the city and raze it, exterminating 
the populace. On 12 September they began a final assault. Civic 
buildings and plants were prepared for demolition as the 
defenders dug into their last emplacements; in Smolny Zhukov tore 
at the Military Soviet, throwing the profusion of operational 
maps off the table and beginning anew, with dire threats to shoot 
'forthwith' any slackers or cowards. 

In the words of a survivor, Daniil Granin, himself a historian of 
the seige- "Workers from Leningrad's Narva district dug and 
fought to the last because they understood only too well that 
everything depended on them... with Stukas howling overhead, and 
the rye fields and villages burning all around: the heat, the 
choking smoke, the sour smell of explosives, and the rattle of 
German machine guns everywhere- and we, who were no soldiers at 
all, had to fire back and let the tanks come in close..."




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