THREE GREAT BATTLES

Before answering the questions put to me, especially since they all have to do with World War II, I would like to congratulate the readers of SOVIET LIFE, as well as the American people generally, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of our common victory over nazi Germany and to wish them a quiet and happy life for many years to come.

QUESTION: We must have known both the enemy’s potential and how well prepared the Soviet Armed Forces were. How do you explain the temporary success of the German troops in 1941?
ANSWER: Some war historians in the West insist that the Soviet Union was not ready to repulse the Nazis. They go so far as to attribute our victory over nazi Germany to «military luck» and «pure accident».
In answering your question, I am expressing my personal views on the subject, of course. The years immediately preceding the war are fresh in the memory of our older generation and the veterans of our army and navy. That was a time of a nationwide effort to build a reliable economic potential that would guarantee the country’s defense. New defense plants began operating, new industrial complexes were built in the Trans-Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. The complexes comprised the greater part of the country’s nonferrous metals production capability. At the same time new industrial enterprises, duplicates of those producing machine tools, chemicals and oil products in the western parts of the Soviet Union, were under construction in these regions. By the beginning of the war our armed forces, as a result of improvements in organization, equipment and armaments, had been transformed into a fully modernized army. It was able to hold out under the most difficult conditions of the initial period of the war, to inflict enormous losses on the enemy in the defensive battles it fought, and to launch decisive offensive operations that routed the well-armed well-seasoned forces of our formidable adversary.
The war started under adverse conditions for our country. The Soviet Command, by miscalculating the time of the attack planned by nazi Germany, missed the opportunity to mobilize our armed forces in good time and to concentrate them at the main strategic directions so they might be deployed to absorb the nazi offensive. The fact that many important measures aimed at strengthening our armed forces had not been fully implemented by the time the war began, as well as our inadequate know-how in stagmg modern large-scale operations, put us at a disadvantage. That explains why the large formations of enemy tanks with mass support from the Luftwaffe were able in a short time to penetrate the Soviet hinterland in complexes were built in the Trans-Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. The complexes comprised the greater part of the country’s nonferrous metals production capability. At the same time new industrial enterprises, duplicates of those producing machine tools, chemicals and oil products in the western parts of the Soviet Union, were under construction in these regions. By the beginning of the war our armed forces, as a result of improvements in organization, equipment and armaments, had been transformed into a fully modernized army. It was able to hold out under the most difficult conditions of the initial period of the war, to inflict enormous losses on the enemy in the defensive battles it fought, and to launch decisive offensive operations that routed the well-armed well-seasoned forces of our formidable adversary.
The war started under adverse conditions for our country. The Soviet Command, by miscalculating the time of the attack planned by nazi Germany, missed the opportunity to mobilize our armed forces in good time and to concentrate them at the main strategic directions so they might be deployed to absorb the nazi offensive. The fact that many important measures aimed at strengthening our armed forces had not been fully implemented by the time the war began, as well as our inadequate know-how in stagmg modern large-scale operations, put us at a disadvantage. That explains why the large formations of enemy tanks with mass support from the Luftwaffe were able in a short time to penetrate the Soviet hinterland in spite of the strong resistance we offered.
Nor are these the only factors responsible for our plight in the initial stage of the war. Other important factors had even a greater effect, I believe, on the progress of the war. The German economy and the entire life of that country had been placed on a military footing-that was a temporary advantage the Hitlerites vmade full use of. They were also at a great advantage in planning their war of aggression well in advance. The experience they had acquired in conducting military actions in the West cannot be disregarded either. Then nazi Germany had at its disposal the immense stocks of armaments and impressive stockpiles of strategic materials it had seized in Europe, including metals of all kinds. In addition, the metal smelting and rolling mills, as well as the war industry of the greater part of Europe, were working to supply the Wehrmacht.
A heavy blow was sustained by our country in the first days of the war. When it attacked, Germany and its satellites enjoyed a superiority in strength and arms over our forces. As many as 190 divisions with a numerical strength of 5.5 million men were deployed against the Soviet Union. All this force was concentrated in large formations on our western frontiers, exceeding many times over the strength of our troops at the directions of the enemy’s main effort.
From the first days of the invasion our country was mobilized. An immense crash program created impressive strategic reserves and put the country’s economy on a war footing. For the second time in the Soviet Union’s history it was turned into an immense military camp. The war effort came first on our list of national priorities.
It was our ability to mobilize all the country’s resources within a very short time and to convert to a wartime economy that laid the foundations for our future victory.
QUESTION: In your capacity as a representative of the Stavka (The supreme war council of the state, created at times of war as the highest policy-making body to conduct all military operations) you took part directly In the conduct of operations. Which of the battles the Soviet Army fought do you think were the most successful?
ANSWER: The battle of Moscow has to come first. It took place during the autumn of 1941 and the winter of 1941-42. I must mention in passing that I was neither a representative of Stavka nor Chief of the General Staff at the time.
Moscow was one of the biggest battles of the war. The nazi armies, believed to be invincible all through the first two years of the fighting, the armies that had marched unopposed through so many European countries, suffered their first serious defeat in Moscow. The aura of invincibility around the Wehrmacht was stripped, never to be restored again. The blitzkrieg strategy was a complete flop. The routing of the nazi hordes marked the beginning of the turning point in the war between the Soviet Union and nazi Germany and in World War II as a whole.
Moscow endea the first and the most difficult war year for the Soviet Union. The beginning of the second year-an important stage of the war also-did not favor the Soviet Union either. Making use of the absence of a second front in Europe and trying for the same political ends they had missed with their 1941 Barbarossa Plan, the nazi strategists, in the summer of 1942, were able to deploy their second offensive on their Eastern Front. The Soviet Armed Forces fought back hard against the large concentration of enemy troops and paid a heavy toll in lives and suffering. Though the Nazis reached the banks of the Volga at Stalrngrad and advanced as far as the foothills of the Caucasus, their offensive ended in another fiasco. The Soviet Army, having bled the enemy white in defensive actions, created a favorable strategic climate for a decisive counteroffensive that began at Stalingrad in November 1942. The Battle of Stalingrad on the snowbound banks of the Volga lasted six and a half months and had no equal in the history of warfare. From June 17, 1942, to February 2, 1943, the armies of nazi Germany and its allies lost a quarter of their total strength engaged on the Soviet-German front. The scale was tipped in our favor not by the heroic feats of individuals but by the valor and courage of whole battalions, air force wings, regiments, divisions, corps and entire armies.
The last salvos in the battle on the Volga were fired on February 2, 1943. The «invincible» sixth nazi Army that had marched through Belgium, France and Yugoslavia stringing up one easy victory after another, was captured by Soviet troops. Its commander, Paulus, had been promoted to the rank of field marshal only the day before.
There is no overestimating the importance of the victory at Stalingrad. It was a blow that shook the whole structure of the Axis bloc. The enemy lost 32 divisions and 3 brigades completely, and 16 of its divisions were heavily battered.
The victory on the banks of the Volga was a radical turn in the war. The Soviet Armed Forces finally took the strategic initiative and went over to a general offensive on a wide front stretching from Leningrad to the foothills of the Caucasus. In the autumn and winter of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 the offensive forced the enemy out of the Northern Caucasus, the Kuban area and the upper reaches of the Don and lifted the blockade of Leningrad.
The famous Kursk Battle took place in the summer of 1943. It lasted 50 days. Up to 30 enemy divisions were routed in the course of the operation, seven of them being tank formations. The counter-offensive operations and the general offensive of a number of our fronts liberated the left-bank-of-the-Dnieper area in the Ukraine and subsequently forced the river with the seizure of large bridgeheads on its right bank.
The strategic operation at the Kursk Bulge was planned well in advance; all the experience we had gained by that time went into the planning. The enemy, having lost by then its capacity for wide-front offensive action, had concentrated all the attack forces it could muster for action on a narrow front. Banking on the fact that the layout of the defense area of our troops favored their plans, the German generals decided to first smash the Soviet grouping concentrated at the Kursk Bulge by rolling up its flanks in a series of powerful blows. The Soviet Supreme Command saw through the intentions of the enemy in good time and discarded its plan for preventive offensive operations. The new plan was to wear down the enemy forces while they were on the offensive, to destroy its tanks and then embark on an offensive of our own to smash the enemy grouping. In persuance of the plan, the Soviet Command built up on the Kursk Bulge stable, organized in depth defenses with the special aim of providing enough antitank protection to absorb the thrusts of the German Panzer. Stavka had also ordered an impressive buildup of strategic reserves in the area. The units of the reserve Steppe Front were deployed in the rear of the troops of the Central and Voronezh fronts that defended the Kursk Bulge. The reserve front units were to provide a greater troop density in the defense area and lend greater momentum to our counteroffensive when it was mounted.
As a result of these measures, the German advance in the Kursk-Orel direction was caught in the tactical zone of defense positions, while in the Belgorod-Kursk direction it got stuck in the first zone of the operational depth of our defenses. Consistent with the plan, our armies mounted vigorous counteroffensive actions that initiated a number of large-scale offensive operations at a later stage.
The back of the nazi Wehrmacht was broken in the Kursk battles. The armies of Hitler Germany now faced the cjear-cut perspective of losing the war they had started in 1939.
The turn in the war that had started with the battle for Moscow and reached its peak during the battle for Stalingrad was completed in the battles at the Kursk Bulge. Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk thus became three historic landmarks on the Soviet Union’s way to its victory over nazi Germany. The struggle the Soviet Armed Forces had waged for the two years from June 1941 to July 1943 to take the initiative was won. Beginning with Kursk, the Soviet Army held the initiative on the Soviet-German front. In all subsequent operations there was no question of our superiority.
The battle at Kursk that developed from three large-scale strategic operations –a defensive operation at the Kursk Bulge and offensive operations in the Orel and the Belgorod-Kursk directions-was notable for the tremendous territory it ranged over and the intensity and fierceness of the fighting.
Large and powerful troop concentrations took part in the battles at Kursk. The Soviet Command committed to action on that sector of the front the troops of six fronts, long-range bombers and guerrilla forces in the enemy rear. At certain periods of the battle three million men were involved on both sides, 45,000 cannon and minethrowers, about 7,000 tanks and self-propelled guns and 6,000 combat aircraft.
The tank battles in the Kursk Bulge area were unprecedented; never before in the history of warfare was armor used in such concentrations. All five tank armies we had were committed to action in the battle as well as most of our separate tank and motorized corps. The battle at Kursk is by right ranked as the greatest tank battle of World War II.
At Kursk the Wehrmacht Command and the political leadership of nazi Germany sought revenge for the defeat they had suffered at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43. These plans were scrapped as the gigantic battle drew to an end. So were the offensive and defensive strategic doctrines of the nazi Wehrmacht, the latter of these being based on the employment in strength of the mass tank formations that had been routed by our army.
The defeat spelled the collapse of nazi Germany; it could not possibly make good the staggering losses it had suffered. These losses and the failure of the offensive at Kursk touted by their propaganda machine forced the Nazis into positions of strategic defense all over the Soviet-German front.
The Soviet offensive got under way to deny the enemy any breathing spell; it drove the Nazis westward in headlong, relentless pursuit.
In 1944 a series of crippling blows forced the aggressor out of the Soviet Union and shifted hostilities to the territory of the East European countries Hitler had enslaved. Special mention is due here to the Korsun-Shevchenkovskaya,Bye-lorussian and Yassko-Kishenevskaya offensive operations that encircled and routed large enemy formations. We must also mention the blows dealt the enemy in the Western Ukraine and between the Tissa and the Danube rivers.
In 1945, the closing stage of the war, these offensive operations – East-Prussia, Vistula-Oder, Budapest, Vienna, Prague – ended the nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. The Soviet offensive culminated in the seizure of Berlin. The mortal blow that sealed the fate of Hitler Germany was administered in the German capital. The enemy’s «Drang nach Osten» campaign ended not in the march of triumph in Moscow so lavishly promised by the nazi propaganda machine in 1941 but by capitulation inside its own capital.
QUESTION: Berlin, some commentators say, could have been captured by our troops several months earlier. What are your thoughts on the subject?
ANSWER: Opinions that Berlin could have been taken in February 1945 have been expressed in books on the history of the war. The fault, it is alleged, was Stalin’s; he was supposed to have forbidden troops of the First Byelorussian Front to stage an offensive to capture the city.
The allegation is played up in Western historiography on World War II. It is made by Erich Kuby and Cornelius Ryan, among other writers. In their re-pective books, The Russians and Berlin, 1945 and The Last Battle, these gentlemen distort the background facts. They claim that the Soviet Army could have mounted an offensive to capture Berlin in February 1945 but did not. This, Kuby and Ryan want us to believe, led to unnecessary losses and suffering at the closing stage of the war by exposing the German people to intensive air raids by the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Force in March and April of 1945.
As I see it, this is an attempt to discredit the Soviet Army, its Supreme Commander Joseph Stalin and the Command of the First Byelorussian Front.
The story of the Berlin operation with all the planning that went into its preparation and launching is told by Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Deputy Supreme Commander and Commander in Chief of the First Byelorussian Front, in his book Reminiscences and Reflections. Marshal Zhukov, one of the main draftsmen and military leaders of the operation, declares that the troops of the First Byelorussian and the First Ukrainian fronts made repeated attempts in February 1945 to mount an offensive in the Berlin direction from the Oder line. He describes the logistics difficulties for actions that were launched immediately after the completion of the Vistula-Oder operation in January of the same year which involved deep penetration into the enemy’s strategic defenses.
There is well documented evidence that the resistance offered by the Nazis to our troops at the Berlin direction stiffened considerably in the first half of February, that the Luftwaffe stepped up its activities at that time all over the theater of operations, taking full advantage of the well-equipped air bases it had at its disposal, some of them being of the stationary type in the Berlin area. At the same time the Soviet Air Force was forced to base itself on distant and temporary airfields that had been laid out when the preparation of the Vistula-Oder operation was still under way. The main logistics depots of both fronts were likewise still stationed on the Vistula line. Both fronts initiated offensive operations against Berlin as early as the first days of February. The remoteness of supply bases was responsible for a serious shortage of ammunition, fuel and other logistics. In addition, the combat and support units, especially those stationed on the bridgeheads beyond the Oder, were badly understaffed. Understrength notwithstanding, they did their best to carry through the advance on Berlin uninterruptedly.
Neither can one disregard another very pertinent fact to the decision the Soviet Command was compelled to take in postponing attempts to advance in the Berlin direction. By resorting to extreme measures, the nazi leadership managed a massive buildup in eastern Pomerania that included tank formations. The concentration hung heavily on the right flank of the Soviet troops advancing toward Berlin.
Summing up, we see that the following reasons made it imperative for the Soviet Supreme Command to delay its advance on Berlin in February 1945: the enemy buildup immediately vis-avis the Soviet troops advancing in the Berlin direction, the greater activity of the Luftwaffe, the under strength of the Soviet troops, lack of continuity in logistical support and, last but not least, the tank grouping the enemy concentrated in strength on the right flank of the First Byelorussian Front.
The subsequent events proved the wisdom of this decision. Soviet armies were engaged during March and April in well-planned preparation for the final assault on the lair of the nazi beasts and did capture Berlin in May 1945.

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