The great Patriotic war - From incompetence to victory.

        With the knowledge of a coming confrontation with Germany, it was unwise to wait to strengthen the Red Army.  It was reprehensible to cripple the Red Army by purging its officer corp.  An estimated 40,000 officers under went repression during 1937/38 and another 40,000 for the years 1939-1941.  About 90 percent of the generals and 80 percent of the colonels suffered repression, most of them shot.  The repression did not end with the war’s beginning.  In 1941, for instance, during the battle for Moscow, numerous high-ranking officers-300 according to Marshal Zhukov- were shot after having been imprisoned since before the war.  The Red Army had enormous problems in supplying its units with qualified officers, essentially decapitating it.  The purges not only decimated the experience of the officer corps, but it silenced most, if not all, of its forward thinking strategists.  One of these was Marshal of the Soviet Union M. N. Tukhachevskii, First Deputy Commissar for Defense, Chief of Red Army Ordnance and potential commander-in-chief in the event of war.  In the winter of 1935 Tukhachevskii proposed a special war game to the general staff, with the intention to investigate the situation arising out of a German attack on the Soviet Union.  He wrote numerous papers to Marshal Voroshilov, Defense Commissar of the Soviet Union, detailing serious strategic problems of the Soviet Union only to have his war game neutered.  Voroshilov would not allow the German side of the war game to have a qualitative advantage or surprise attack.  This, as history has shown, was precisely what happened six years later.  Tukhachevskii stated that Germany’s preparations for war made it imperative that the defense of the Soviet western frontiers be undertaken in all seriousness and it was clear that the “classic” form of entry into war with phases of concentration was a thing of the past.  War could begin with large-scale operations with sudden, surprise initiation, conducted by the belligerents on land, at sea and air.  It followed that an enemy could forestall the Russians and strike first. Tukhachevskii, along with many other Russian military visionaries were shot during 1937 to 1939.  This partially fostered the errant Soviet military doctrine that never envisioned fighting on the defensive for very long against an aggressor, but instead anticipated quickly blunting the enemy attack and then rapidly moving to offensive warfare in order to carry the battle onto enemy territory.  They could not see, as Tukhachevskii and others did, that modern warfare would not be like WWI with trench warfare.  They could not foresee that modern opponents would have the ability to maneuver at high speed and rapidly capture large amounts of territory.  Another indicator of Russian ineptness was how they let their machines of warfare become outmoded and useless for modern warfare.  Although the Russian military had a 5 to 1 advantage in planes and tanks, most were WWI era obsolete death traps for the brave crews that manned them.

        The German military also had its share of problems and failures that contributed to the Wehrmacht going from the offensive to the defensive.  The German high command took the Red Army too lightly.  They thought that the Soviet Union would capitulate in a matter of weeks, thus not properly providing their soldiers with proper winter equipment when they attacked in June of 1941.  In the middle of November the temperature dropped sharply, and the ground froze.  The Germans were delighted – at last the Panzer tanks could move again.  But soon they realized just how cold it would become and how ill equipped they were for the Russian winter.  The soldiers had not been issued with cold weather clothing because Hitler insisted that the Wehrmacht would be in Moscow before the cold weather set in.  During the next few days the barometer continued to drop.  At 20 degrees below freezing, German vehicles and artillery could no longer function.  By the end of November the Russian climate was killing more Germans than the artillery of the Red Army.  The error of taking the Red Army too lightly further compounded the German military’s problems in two other areas: men and equipment.  First, by becoming stalled and kept from a quick victory the same German troops had to continue to fight on the frozen eastern front without proper supplies against a continuous stream of fresh Russian troops from Siberia.  Secondly, unable to strike Soviet factories in the east due to being bogged down with the Red Army, the German war machine was eventually out produced by the Soviet Union in terms of armament. 

The turn from incompetence to competence, and eventually how the Red Army repelled the Wehrmacht, seemed to many to start in December of 1941 with the Russian counter-offensive at Moscow.  In reality, the actual turn towards competency started around the beginning of 1940.  Russia started to transform its workforce, step by step, into a mobilized working army by restricting the freedom of movement of workers and other measures.  Eventually, workers could no longer leave work freely and could be transferred to other jobs without their consent.  The workday was extended from seven to eight hours and the workweek from five days to six days.  They were turning the relationship at the place of work into a military one.  At the same time the Red Army started to grow in response to the growing threat from Germany.  Its size almost quadrupled from 1.1 to 4.2 million soldiers between 1937 and 1941.  Consequently, the armaments production had to be increased, and reached its peak in 1941.  Even more important was the fact that the Soviet Union armament production had been partially transferred to the eastern regions and many farm-producing factories were changed to armament producing ones in order to equip the newly formed mechanized corps.  The competency continued after the start of the war with the Council for Evacuation, which was formed to organize the removal of industrial plants away from the fighting.  The evacuation began within days of the invasion; dozens of factories in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic Republics and Moldavia were evacuated, usually under fire.  Other industries were converted for wartime purposes.  The Gorky Automobile Plant concentrated on the production of tank engines, and a vast Volga-Urals combine for mass-producing tanks was established.  One factory, evacuated on 9th August, was relocated in the Urals on the 6th September and was in full production again by 24th September.  From Kiev alone 197 major industrial plants were evacuated in just two months.  Altogether, between July and November 1941, 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large armament plants, were moved to the east. 

Despite the extraordinary difficulties it faced, the achievements of the Soviet industry during the war were remarkable.  Up until 1943 it was still recovering from the evacuation, but thereafter tank production was phenomenal.  In that year they produced eight and a half times more tanks than in 1940 and nearly four times more than in 1941.  The output of aircraft increased by 37 percent from 1942 to 1943.  Between 1942 and 1945 the Soviet Union produced about 100,000 tanks, 120,000 airplanes, 360,00 guns, over 1,200,000 machine guns, 6,000,000 Tommy guns, some 700,000,000 shells and some 20 billion cartridges.  From the end of 1941, the USA and Great Britain sent weapons, planes and tanks to help the war effort.  This equipment amounted to 4 percent of the Soviet total. It is clear to see, now, that a key reason for the reversal of fortunes for the Red Army was the Soviet Unions ability to out produce Germany and its war industry.  During the second half of 1941, despite all handicaps, the Soviet Union was able to produce more tanks than Germany in all of 1941.  This became apparent to German field generals in November of 1941 at the battle of Rostov near the Don River; during a Russian counter-attack they realized that they did not have enough men and tanks and ammunition to hold a front sixty miles long. 

A second key reason for the ability of the Red Army to begin to prevail against the German invaders was a vast superiority in the supply of troops.  Both sides started the conflict with roughly the same number of troops near the front line, but after the disastrous start in June in which nearly three million Russian soldiers fell into German captivity, the Germans had an extreme advantage. But, the Soviet Union was able to get new recruits to the front before their lines fell.  What turned the tide in was the movement of troops from the Soviet Far East.  For ten years, the strength of the Far Eastern forces had been steadily built up to be able to repel the Imperial Japanese Army if needed.  Their strength had reached some 30 divisions, three cavalry brigades, 16 tank brigades, and over 2,000 tanks and aircraft.  All were considered front line troops.  Stalin began to move these assets in October. The effect of this move was felt in December with the first Soviet counter-attack south of Moscow.  A young German second lieutenant expressed the common frustration in a letter to his mother in Hamburg: “These Russians seem to have an inexhaustible supply of men. Here they unload fresh troops from Siberia every day; they bring up fresh guns and lay mines all over the place.  We attack, but then need to retreat.  We needed only another eight miles to get the capital within gun range-but we just could not make it. As the Russian divisions were getting stronger with a constant supply of fresh troops; the stalled German divisions were being sapped of their strength by inadequate supplies, the weather, and Russian soldiers.

The main reason for the Soviet Unions ability to go from incompetence to victory was its citizens.  The largest factor in the Soviet Union, being initially decimated, not sustain larger loses than they had was due to the average Russian citizen helping the Red Army buy time to regroup and eventually triumph. The evidence of this lies in Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow and the other besieged cities of the Soviet Union.  The Russian citizen was one of Russia’s most powerful weapons because of their convictions, they believed in their country.  They were the first to stop the German military machine.  Normal citizens stopped their lives to take up arms, work in factory’s, dig and erect defense’s, and performed many other services that were course and bitter work, but needed to be done.

        Therein lay the answers to how Leningrad was able to resist nine hundred days of siege and why the people Leningrad, in spite of the shelling and bombing, the cold and the starvation, refused to break and turn into some sort of demoralized subhuman mob.  On the contrary, they continued to read and write poetry, to compose and listen to music, and to perform their daily acts of heroism.  Therein lay the answer to why, when Stalingrad was in fact in enemy hands, when endless shelling and bombing turned the city into pure hell, when by all human logic the city could not be saved, it was not taken.  The desire to help was almost universal.  The new open churches in Moscow and other towns were conducting services and offering prayers for victory over the enemy.  Peasants wrote that they wished to help the Motherland more; they had already donated 18,000 rubles to the Defense Fund, but could do more if they had a pastor.  Contributions came not only from young men, but also from children, women, and people of all ages.  Women enlisted willingly and served as partisans, fighter pilots, factory workers, and numerous other vocations.  Children worked in factories building munitions, tanks, and support equipment.  Women and children worked along side soldiers building defenses for the cities that were to come under attack.  It should be noted that there were some citizens that were excited about the German invasion and looked upon them not as invaders or oppressors, but as liberators.  Many Ukrainian villagers offered the advancing Germany army plates of salt and bread, a traditional gift of welcome.  But this group was an extremely small part of the population.

        It was the Soviet citizen that rebuilt the Dnieper Dam, moved 84% of Soviet industry to the east, and replaced plough horses with themselves to work the land when there were no more horses.  It was the Soviet citizen that donated blood even when they were to weak to spare any, worked in their homes to knit millions of scarves and socks for the soldiers of the Red Army, and sold what little valuables they had to donate the funds to the defense fund.  It was the Soviet citizen that refused to give up the fight even though it meant sleeping with their families on the ground in burnt out homes, consistently coping with starvation and freezing, and burying their children.  The reason for the rise from incompetence to Soviet victory lies in the unparalleled heroism, in the indomitable spirit of the Soviet people, demonstrated both at the front and at the rear.  It lies in their will to win, increased tenfold by the atrocities committed against the people and their country. 

 

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