Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

  From the Soviet perspective, the talks, inconclusive as they were, altered nothing. They had no dramatic consequences. Certainly, Molotov returned to Moscow with a sense of having achieved little. And the Soviet leadership remained particularly sour at what they saw as grave breaches of the pact in German action in Romania and Finland.71 They had been largely outmanoeuvred in the Balkans, and in Romania especially. And from July onwards, even before Hitler had announced to his generals the intention to invade the Soviet Union the following year, reports had been filtering through from the well-informed intelligence network of German preparations for war against the USSR and of the transfer and concentration of troops in East Prussia, close to the Russian border.72 But, whatever their suspicions about German intentions in the long run, Stalin and Molotov, the two key figures in shaping Soviet foreign affairs, expected no military conflict in the near future. Now as before anxious above all to gain time, maintaining the pact of 1939 remained their priority. In this, they had few options. The straitjacket of choice was in part a consequence of the speed with which Germany had established mastery over much of Europe since the spring. But it was also partly self-inflicted. Soviet options were mainly circumscribed by the poor state of the Red Army, which would not be fully prepared for war for another two years. And for this, Stalin himself, through the lethal purges he had launched against his experienced and talented military leaders three years earlier, bore the main responsibility.

  IV

  On 1 January 1938 the Soviet armed forces comprised 1,605,520 men, just under three-quarters of them in the army. This was not far removed from the planned size when Stalin expected to be ready for war, at the end of 1942.73 The plan was, however, rapidly overtaken by events once the European war began. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, and especially the war against Finland, saw the mobilization of large numbers of reservists, increasing the army size by little short of two million soldiers. Remarkably, however, almost 700,000 reservists were then demobilized following the end of the Finnish war as the Politburo ordered a return to peacetime status for many units. It took the shock of the German victory in France to reverse this trend and instigate the all-out drive for drastic and rapid expansion.74

  However, serious weaknesses in leadership and experience in the military command left by the purges could not be rapidly repaired. Around 4,000 officers arrested during the purges were released to take up command posts. But the thousand or so newly promoted senior officers had little time to gain the requisite experience before the German onslaught began.75 There were also organizational flaws (which the campaign in Finland had revealed). And the armed forces were seriously under-equipped in modern weaponry. Despite the intensification of war production that had followed the jolt caused by Hitler’s victory in the west that summer, industry was unable to meet the urgent need for armaments. Grave shortages still existed when Hitler struck. Part of the problem lay with Stalin’s leadership and the nature of the regime.

  Like Hitler, Stalin had a sharp mind (however warped), and his excellent memory gave him a good grasp on detail. His understanding of military affairs was, nevertheless, in essence that of an informed amateur. He lacked the training and expertise of the professional. This led to seemingly contradictory tendencies, both harmful. On the one hand, he was inclined to interfere in matters of detail, such as on specific artillery types, often on a whim.76 On the other hand, he was forced to rely heavily upon the judgement of those whom he trusted–and they were few in number–in the top echelons of military command. Once the big drive for expansion and reconstruction of the Red Army had begun in summer 1940, he had frequent briefings, usually late at night in his dacha, from his military leaders. They also sent in regular written reports on the state of the army.77 And Stalin checked up on the army leadership through reports from Beria, head of the secret police, and others.78 But since he seldom left the Kremlin or his nearby dacha to inspect the genuine condition of the armed forces, he was all the more dependent upon what he was told.

  Until he was sacked as Defence Commissar, in May 1940, following the poor performance of the Red Army in the Finnish war, Marshal Voroshilov had had Stalin’s ear on important military matters. But Stalin’s confidence had been misplaced. Voroshilov had been negligent, idle and incompetent when it came to addressing the urgent need of building up the armed forces. Matters improved greatly once Marshal S. K. Timoshenko replaced Voroshilov. But even now, Stalin was prepared to take military advice from such individuals as the odious L. Z. Mekhlis, former editor of the Party newspaper, Pravda, and by 1940 head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Khrushchev considered Mekhlis ‘a nitwit’ and was appalled that he enjoyed such influence over Stalin on military matters.79

  If Stalin had harboured any illusions about the quality of the Red Army following the debacle in Finland, they could only have been dashed by the devastating top-secret report presented in December 1940 by Timoshenko, outlining the grave deficiencies of the nation’s armed forces. The lengthy report, compiled on the basis of thorough assessments after Timoshenko had taken over from Voroshilov the previous May, cannot have made pleasurable reading for Stalin. The whole organizational support structure for administration and provisioning was inadequate, the report ran, and, in many aspects, out of date. So lacking had the central administration been, that not even exact figures for the strength of the Red Army at the point of Timoshenko’s takeover existed. Equally extraordinary was the fact that, under the heading ‘Operative Planning’, the first item stated: ‘At the time of the hand-over and takeover of the People’s Commissariat for Defence, no operational war plan is available; an operational total plan or partial plans do not exist.’ Nor had any training programmes for senior commanders and their staffs been conducted either by Voroshilov or by the General Staff, and no checks on operational training in military districts were in place. There were not enough airfields in key districts. There was even a shortage of maps. In addition, there were serious weaknesses in transport and communications. There was no updated mobilization plan, and no training programme for the three million ill-prepared reservists.

  Timoshenko also criticized the inability of the officer academies to produce an adequate military leadership, a shortage especially marked in the infantry. There were serious deficiencies in the training of the troops for battlefield action. And the weaponry was old-fashioned, not up to the needs of modern warfare. Aircraft lagged notably behind those of other states, and for the air force, too, the drastic shortage of trained personnel was highlighted. Similar weaknesses in modern weaponry were noted for motorized units and in artillery. One of the greatest deficiencies emphasized was the absence of organized and systematic intelligence on the state of the armies of other countries. Air-defences could not provide protection from attack from the skies. And ground defence preparations behind the front lines were poor.80 All in all, the picture was scarcely that of an army close to readiness for a major war, or capable of defending the Soviet Union from invasion, let alone itself launching any offensive operations.

  Timoshenko may well have exaggerated the shortcomings to save himself from future criticism by attaching blame to his predecessor for the magnitude of the task he was facing. Even so, it was a shocking indictment of the state of the armed forces. The failings could not be put right immediately. It would take a considerable time to make the Red Army ready for major combat. This in itself imposed the most decisive limitation on Stalin’s operative choices over the coming months. The only option, Stalin and Molotov agreed, was to do everything possible and with the utmost speed to prepare the armed forces for the inevitable showdown. But in the meantime, it was crucial to avoid any provocation that might give Hitler a pretext for attack.

  These twin considerations effectively framed Soviet policy in the months before the launch of ‘Barbarossa’. And, indeed, a huge amount was achieved in rearmament. Production of armaments was a third higher in 1940 than in the previous year. And the armed forces grew massively in si
ze to 5.4 million soldiers in 1941, compared with 1.6 million at the beginning of 1938.81 They were mostly deployed on the Soviet Union’s western borders, and became vastly better equipped. But morale and discipline were often poor.82 Relatively few of the tanks and planes were the latest models, and there were numerous obstacles to a smooth flow of production.83 Too much ground had been lost, gravely abetted by the purges, to make good the backwardness in technology and organizational deficits.84 More time was needed. Stalin thought he would gain it. He was convinced that Hitler would not attack in the east before the war in the west was conclusively won. The likelihood was in Stalin’s mind–and his judgement was shared by Molotov and the rest of the Soviet political and military leadership–that the invasion would come only when the Red Army was ready to meet it. Until then, ultimate caution and, where necessary, appeasement of Nazi Germany were the requirement. Winning time was of the essence: the overriding imperative.

  Under this extreme pressure, Soviet military strategy had to be reassessed. Soviet strategic theory had rested upon the ideas developed by Tukhachevsky in the 1920s and 1930s. These envisaged a modernized, technologically developed army capable of transforming defence into attack by absorbing the first enemy assault then swiftly transferring the war onto the enemy’s territory in what were dubbed ‘deep operations’. A lengthy defensive war was not envisaged. The emphasis was on the ability, having weathered the initial storm, to provide an immediate, decisive blow in an all-out strike of airborne and ground forces, supported by massed armoured and mechanized units.85 The theory was predicated upon a notion of how war would begin: with an ultimatum, a formal declaration, then full-scale mobilization lasting days, or even weeks (as in 1914), and with frontier battles allowing the ‘deep operations’ to come into play.86 The surprise attack, tactical brilliance and devastating speed of the German blitzkrieg in the west then cast serious doubt on such premisses. Nevertheless, the planning of the Soviet General Staff in 1940 and 1941 amounted to a modification, rather than radical revision, of Tukhachevsky’s ‘deep operations’ theories. Even when the later war hero General Georgi Zhukov took over as chief of the General Staff at the end of January 1941, the expectation remained that the Red Army would be able to contain the enemy during the initial attack, then turn defence into attack in a devastating counter-blow.87 The strategic plans of the General Staff proceeded on the basis of such thinking.

  Timoshenko, as we have noted, had been scathing in his criticism of the absence of an operational war plan when he took over from Voroshilov in May 1940. Indeed, the previous plan, designed in 1938 by Marshal V. M. Shaposhnikov, at that time chief of the General Staff, had been rendered mainly redundant by the changed circumstances that the European war had brought about. Despite Timoshenko’s dismissive remarks, however, there were strong elements of continuity with Shaposhnikov’s concept in subsequent plans.

  Shaposhnikov had seen a threat to the Soviet Union from Japan in the east, and a greater one from Germany and Poland, together with Italy and the Baltic countries, in the west. Working on the theory of strategic defence in depth to contain the enemy before conversion into an offensive, Shaposhnikov posited two variants for an attack against the Soviet western front. Soviet defences had to be ready for an attack, either to the north of the Pripet marshes in Poland towards Vilnius in Lithuania and on to Minsk, or to the south of the marshes, through southern Poland in the direction of Kiev. Shaposhnikov still held to notions of mobilization soon to be exposed as wholly obsolete. He thought the northern variant somewhat more likely since the enemy attack could take place on the twentieth day of mobilization, whereas 28–30 days would be needed for the southern variant. And he envisaged a Soviet decision on whether to place the weight of defence on the northern or southern variant being taken only around the tenth day of mobilization, when it was plain which direction the enemy offensive was taking.88

  By August 1940, when he was replaced as chief of staff by General K. A. Meretskov, Shaposhnikov’s plan was in need of stringent revision. Poland no longer existed, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were now part of the Soviet Union, Finland had fallen within the German orbit and Germany had extended her grip on the Danube basin so that Romania and Hungary could be regarded as her allies in any future conflict. Moreover, Italy had entered the war, and Axis influence in the Mediterranean and Balkans was substantially strengthened. Timoshenko and Meretskov now reversed Shaposhnikov’s precedence attached to the northern variant. In their reassessment, presented to Stalin on 5 October, they envisaged the main strike coming from the south. Stalin agreed. ‘I think the most important thing for the Germans is the grain in the Ukraine and the coal of the Donbas,’ he remarked.89 By the middle of the month, the revised plan, predicated on the main German attack coming south of the Pripet marshes, was adopted. The Balkans, in this scenario, played a central role in Soviet strategic thinking. Under the revised plan, the Red Army would engage ‘to the south of Brest-Litovsk in order, by means of powerful blows in the directions of Lublin and Cracow and further to Breslau, to cut Germany off from the Balkan countries in the very first stage of the war, to deprive her of its most important economic bases, and decisively to influence the Balkan countries on the question of their participation in the war’. This reassessment remained essentially intact as the basis of Soviet operational war planning until the eve of ‘Barbarossa’.90

  At the end of December 1940, bringing to a close a conference of top military leaders convened by Stalin following the depressing report on the state of the armed forces presented earlier in the month, Timoshenko summed up the proceedings by saying that ‘although the war with Germany might be difficult and long, the country had all it needed for a struggle to full victory’. Probably the optimistic assessment was what Timoshenko thought Stalin wanted to hear. Instead, it gave the Soviet dictator a sleepless night.91 His unease could not have been quelled by the results of two war games conducted in early January.

  They were concerned purely with defence strategy. Both games assumed aggression from the west: an invasion of the Soviet Union. And both, remarkably, omitted the vital initial stage of defence, starting their assessment only at the phase, presumed to be several weeks after the war had begun, when the ‘enemy’ had already penetrated into Soviet territory. The first of the games posited an attack in the north, with Zhukov leading the ‘enemy’ forces and General D. G. Pavlov commanding the Soviet army. Pavlov failed to repel the ‘enemy’, which ended well inside Soviet territory. In the second game, Zhukov and Pavlov swapped sides. Here, the southern variant was tested. Zhukov worked on ‘deep operations’ theory, contained the attack in the south, then destroyed twenty enemy divisions and was able to advance on one flank about a hundred miles into Poland. Even then, the German offensive could not be wholly contained. The results were not viewed as satisfactory. At a meeting soon afterwards in the Kremlin, with the Politburo present, Stalin severely berated the chief of staff, Meretskov, then sacked him on the spot. Zhukov, who had proved such an effective commander in the war games, was promoted to the new chief of the General Staff.92

  By March, influenced by the war games and by a recently completed blueprint for mobilization (which, again, in attempting to please Stalin had provided wildly optimistic and unrealistic figures on manpower and armaments), a revised operational plan was ready. It reaffirmed the decision taken the previous autumn and seemingly justified in the war games, that the main weight of Soviet defence would be directed towards the expected southern, not northern, variant of German attack. The assumption was that the key German thrust would be towards the Ukraine.93 It would prove a serious miscalculation.

  The frenetic months of planning revision and feverish expansion since the previous summer–and the tempo was to accelerate even more sharply–had produced ambivalent results. On the one hand, a massive amount had unquestionably been accomplished in a remarkably short time. On the other hand, there was still far to go before defences would be ready for the predicted ons
laught. The outcome of the war games had highlighted major deficiencies remaining in defence strategy. And projected estimates of manpower and armaments tended to inflate current strength and put the most positive gloss on future capability. The mobilization plan of February had outlined a staggering wartime strength of 8,700,000 soldiers in over 300 fully equipped divisions, 60 of them tank and a further 30 motorized divisions, and an air-strength of some 14,000 aircraft. The aims of the plan were meant to be fulfilled by the end of 1941. But the figures concealed much of the truth. Not enough vehicles could be produced to equip fully the tank and motorized divisions even by 1943. Even with optimal production, there would be a 75 per cent shortfall on the vital medium-sized tanks (mainly the later renowned T-34s) as late as 1 January 1942. The figures for aircraft were also wholly unrealistic in the short term. And when the war actually began in June 1941, a quarter of the divisions stipulated in the plan existed only on paper.94

  Stalin and his ‘inner circle’, who were fully briefed on the plans and their practical limitations, knew that any German attack during 1941 would pose extreme danger for the Soviet Union. The Red Army would still be ill-equipped to counter the threat. The country’s defences would be at the very least severely stretched. In so many vital spheres–tank and aircraft production, border fortifications, manpower–completion targets were scheduled for no earlier than the beginning of 1942.95 The problems had been compounded by Stalin’s decision, overriding opposition from his military advisers, to abandon the system of fortifications, known as the ‘Stalin Line’, begun in the 1920s and stretching across the Soviet Union’s former frontier, in favour of new fortifications to be constructed in forward positions on the new frontier. This would prove a serious error in June 1941. On the eve of the German attack, crucial defence areas were still unprovided with minefields, camouflage or effective fields of fire, and most of the strongpoints belatedly set up on Zhukov’s orders had no artillery. Meanwhile, when Stalin at last agreed that the old line of fortifications should at least be partly manned, the troops found them ‘overgrown with grass and tall weeds’, concrete shells with empty gun emplacements.96