Well, that series had a companion book and I read that a while back (March 2012, to be exact) and, as long as I'm on this track I thought I'd work through it here on this blog.
The Unknown War
Harrison E. Salisbury
1978, Bantam Books
As a companion to the television series this book serves an invaluable service as a supplement and even a corrective. Where the series is a very controlled narrative this book allows for nuances and, frankly, truths, that aren't included in the films. It still glosses over a lot, but then it's a little over 200 pages about four years of conflict and so it is by nature a very quick review of a very large topic.
The photos are a bit uneven in quality (I've always wondered about black and white photos that are just a page of black and what purpose they serve.) but do help illustrate the story and give faces to the many names and the maps are easy to navigate and very useful. Of course, the opening of many records after the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed for a lot of revelations that are missing in this work, so that is one thing missing here.
Let's start with the author.
Harrison Evans Salisbury (1908-1993) was in Moscow as a war correspondent from 1944-1945 and he went back from 1949-1954. His book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (1969) is a monumental work (and is heavily recycled in this book) and so he is authoritative in the subject matter and also benefits from being a primary witness. Salisbury's work other work as a reporter was also excellent and is worth looking into. He creates a vivid narrative in this book and is a good storyteller.
Note
Of the 243 film photographers assigned to the front, thirty-three, nearly one-fifth of them, died in action. The casualty rate for still cameramen was equally high.
I know it's a cliche to be staggered by numbers, but the numbers are aways staggering. Starting right off the bat with this is a good reminder to viewers of the film and readers of the book that the images they see in both captured the immediacy of the events at a high cost to the people capturing those images.
I: A Quiet Sunday
The morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941, was unusually fine in Moscow...In Leningrad boys and girls strolled the boulevards for hours in the romance of the white nights. In all of European Russia the weather was perfect, the skies clear.
Like the first episode of the series the book starts on that fateful longest day of the year in 1941 when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, lingering on the images of that last peaceful day. The attack had already been launched but the news of it wouldn't be announced until noon. It's a gripping bit of drama. Foreign Minister Molotov makes the announcement. And then all hell breaks loose.
Molotov spoke less than five minutes, but when he had finished it was as though the sun had been blacked out and the June fragrance vanished from the air. There was a brief pause in the streets. People flooded into the food stores, the meat shops, the jewelry stores, the hardware stores, the state banks. They bought everything they could lay hands on and drew out every kopek of their savings. The banks ran out of currency and had to close by 3:00pm. The Russians knew what war meant and they transformed their paper money into flour, sugar, salt, kerosene, sausage and lard.
[Note the lack of an Oxford comma on the phrase 'sausage and lard' and how by context you know that what is meant there is a continuation of the series and not some combination of sausages packed in lard.]
Well, alright. Now you might see why this book has been of some bizarre comfort in the COVID Quarantine. That image of people packing into the food stores is very familiar to me. And yet, there's something about this passage that sticks out to me and which reminds me of the reactions we have had here in Texas and the US at large and in other places and how different they are.
The Russians knew what war meant.
Think about that. One of the things that I've thought a lot about is how many people I know who have a very real experience of being in a country at war (a real war on their own doorsteps and not an expeditionary war far away) and how this quarantine has created a kind of panic that reveals the luxuries of privileges of a society that has been insulated from the real experience of conflict.
The Russians knew what war meant.
This is a short book and Salisbury doesn't elaborate so let me fill in the ellipsis. The Russians (and other people in the USSR) on June 22, 1941 were living in a day of peace. But that day of peace was not a lifetime of peace for most of those people. War had come before. The war that started in the summer of 1914 for the Russians had turned into a revolution by 1917 and a civil war shortly after that which went on and expanded into a series of wars and conflicts that continued until as late as 1923 (and into the 1930s in Central Asia). Forced collectivization and other internal disruptions were to wreak havoc for much of the populace in the 1930s. (The ones who didn't die in the famine, of course.) There were border wars, of course, like the conflicts with Japan around Mongolia in the late 1930s and the Winter War with Finland in 1939-1940 and the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic countries and Bessarabia in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Germany.
So, it is true that there was a younger generation that had been born in the aftermath of the Civil War, but there were plenty of people who knew what real war meant. And the rest of Europe already provided a taste of what was to come for those who had no first hand experience yet.
Salisbury now backtracks to give us some of the background to the invasion and the diplomatic activity during the period of the pact. Stalin ignored intelligence reports pointing to German activity as early as the summer of 1940 indicating preparations for an attack and dismissed many such reports as disinformation. Most famously, Stalin's agent in Japan Richard Sorge sent his first warning of an attack to Moscow on November 18, 1940. It was dismissed.
On May 15 Richard Sorge reported that the German blow would come June 20-22 and four days later he advised it would be carried out by nine armies and 150 divisions. A bit later he forwarded the German order of battle.
Sorge was ignored and for his trouble was arrested and eventually executed by the Japanese as a spy in 1944.
II: Stalin's Blunder
Never had a government information so comprehensive, so accurate, so timely concerning the plans and intentions of its enemy as did Stalin of Hitler.
Stalin had all the intelligence handed to him on a plate. Several plates from several different sources, in fact. So why did the paranoid dictator ignore all of this evidence? One theory is that he was so paranoid that he dismissed any information as calculated to throw him off and thus was to be distrusted as provocation. In the end, the problem (one which is deeply familiar right now) is that ultimately Stalin wanted to believe whatever he wanted to believe and had the power and privilege of ignoring facts until the facts came rolling across the border in incontrovertible fashion. The capability for self-delusion runs deep in some people. (Ahem)
It's not that Stalin was completely deluded though.
"Considering the disturbing situation," Stalin instructed, "you should bring the Moscow antiaircraft forces to 75 percent readiness for action."
I'm not even sure what 3/4 readiness looks like. Um, we're sort of ready, but not really. Be prepared to shoot down at least 3 out of 4 enemy planes but not all 4?
Other warnings were also issued. The navy was put on alert and eventually the Army commands got warnings between 2am and 3am but by the time they sent representatives to actual troops near the border they had already gotten the invasion before the warnings.
Ultimately, this chapter is aptly named because there was no failure of intelligence gathering, there was a command failure at the very top when it came to interpreting the intelligence and acting upon it. The failure was one of judgment and the responsibility rested on one person and a system that gave that one person complete control and which instilled (and enforced) fear on the parts of the subordinates in that system. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. We're living in it now.
Shortly before 4:00 A.M. Marshal Voronov, Chief of Antiaircraft Defense, reported to Timoshenko that the Germans were bombing Ventspils and Libau on the Baltic. He was given a big notebook and told to write down his report word for word. Behind him checking on it all stood L.Z. Mekhlis, Chief of Army Political Police and a crony of Police Chief Beria.
"I left the office with a stone in my heart," Voronov recalled. "I realized that they did not believe that war actually had started."
Again, observe the system at work and notice how all they care about is who is loyal and if they are accepting the narrative they are pushing. Change the names and locations and we can see their faces all around us today.
It was then that Stalin, in the words of Nikita Khrushchev, turned to his associates and said: "All that Lenin created we have lost forever!"
With those words Stalin, the world's greatest dictator, vanished from the scene. He retired to his villa at Kuntsevo and there he sat for days. He did not answer the telephone. He sent no messages to his associates. Nor would he see them...He sat motionless in his chair, his desk covered with papers, staring into space. They brought him meals but he did not eat. Sometimes he seemed to be asleep but his eyes were open.
And this is what I mean when I say that Salisbury is such an excellent narrator. That portrait of Stalin sitting like a useless log while the world collapses around him is vivid and chilling. Granted, as we look carefully it is filtered through a source (Khrushchev) who had an interest in portraying Stalin as a useless log once he was safely dead, but still it's a very vivid portrait of the failure of command that Stalin exhibited in this crisis as outlined in this chapter. And it's an important object lesson in the ways in which that failure was allowed to multiply.
III: Bravery at Brest
"I am dying but I do not surrender. Farewell Motherland."
Salisbury picks up his narrative now with the first moves along the border in the big invasion. The chapter is titled for the fortress at Brest on the western border which held out for much longer than expected as German troops tried again and again to assault it even as the rest of the army had bypassed it and moved deep into the interior.
The chapter is (as is most of the rest of the book) filled with names that require a set of trading cards to keep track of and places that require constant checking on the map and stats that necessitate a bulletin board to keep track of. It is the story of a military disaster and (unlike the documentary series) highlights the failures of the system that endured it and magnified the disaster.
The Soviet Air Force on the Western Front was almost wiped out in the first day--900 planes on the ground and 300 in the air. Lieutenant General P.V. Rychagov, Air Commander of the Baltic Military District, was called to Moscow and shot. Lieutenant General Kopets, chief of Bomber Command, committed suicide June 23. He had lost 800 bombers in two days.
Just look at the scale of catastrophic loss. It's no wonder that the Germans were overconfident in their success given how huge that success had been. It's kind of an object lesson in the illusions of aggressive war. You might think you've been very successful when the big strategic error of your actions are blurred by the huge tactical successes.
Sometimes valiantly fighting...In a hundred, two hundred, possibly three hundred different areas Red Army units fought on behind the Nazi lines, out of touch with their commands (which often had been destroyed), resisting as well as they could against this enemy which had struck with such surprise.
And right there we see the dawn of the partisan insurgency and a new reality of warfare that we have come to know well in the 21st century.
The story of Brest is an interesting one as it shows a development of heroic narrative over time. At first the story of Brest was suppressed.
Not a word of the bravery of the Brest defenders appeared in the Soviet press, although some members of the garrison escaped, fought with the Byelorussian partisans and gradually made their way back to the Red Army lines.
Little by little the legend of the defenders spread by word of mouth. The year 1941 was a year when the Red Army needed such legends for the troops who reeled back under Nazi blows.
Salisbury speculates on motives for this suppression.
Perhaps Stalin thought the legend of Brest would remind people of the terrible disasters of the war's first days.
Yep. That sounds about right. The post-Stalin legend of Brest is, of course, another exercise in heroic narrative that requires its own criticisms. Still, it's an interesting story and gives us a foreshadowing of the tenacity that would make the later chapters of this story possible.
Of course, it was still a story of a massive military catastrophe. And, of course, also a story of competing dictatorships.
To the north the Germans raced through Lithuania and Latvia, most of whose inhabitants greeted them as liberators.
And Stalin is definitely the idiot of the next couple of chapters.
...on July 29 Marshal Zhukov had candidly warned Stalin that he was courting disaster unless he immediately abandoned Kiev and ordered the troops of the Southwest Front withdrawn eastward beyond the Dnieper.
Stalin exploded. Within forty minutes Zhukov had been removed as Chief of Staff and sent out to command the Reserve Front.
And again Stalin is the cause of much of the disaster that is about to come in the next chapter.
IV: The Tragedy Of Kiev
Words do not win battles. For all Stalin's exhortations, the danger to Kiev steadily grew.
Things go from bad to worse as Salisbury takes us through the disastrous decisions that led to the loss of Kiev and the destruction of another big chunk of the Red Army. Basically, Stalin wanted to hold on to Kiev at all costs and could not be persuaded to retreat until it was too late. Also, there was an ill-timed counterattack that cost a lot of lives with almost nothing to show for it.
Mikhail Kirponos and other commanders are killed trying to escape the German trap around Kiev and we are told about the commanders who were captured and then after the war sent to the gulag by Stalin. There's a famous photo here of Stalin's son, Yakov Iosifovich Dzugashvili who was captured in July 1941 and who died in a POW camp during the war as well as an interesting picture of a German soldier being loaded down with food by smiling Ukrainian women. There's also an appearance by Khrushchev who is a political commissar for Kirponos and who tries to organize the defense of Kiev.
Again, Stalin is the ill-tempered dictator at the heart of the disaster as people (named and nameless) die because of his bad leadership. And, of course, Hitler is also making some boner decisions as well, as we are told that his objectives keep changing and he can't decide if he wants Leningrad or Moscow more desperately. Still, he gets Kiev.
Stalin had promised that Kiev, Leningrad and Moscow would be Held. He was afraid of the propaganda consequences of Kiev's surrender. For this he gambled--and lost possibly a million fighting men, the whole of the Ukraine and brought Moscow itself to the brink of catastrophe.
V: The Russian Dunkirk
The Russian Dunkirk is a harrowing tale of a fighting evacuation of the Soviet fleet from its Baltic bases back to Leningrad, which is then shortly put under siege. The losses are constant. Salisbury adapts much of this chapter and the subsequent Leningrad chapters from his longer book about the subject. The result is that there are some very detailed personal anecdotes here from witnesses to the event that make this chapter feel much more on a human scale.
We get a glimpse here of the fact that the Soviets were an occupying force in the Baltics and just what that meant.
...the Soviet had prepared itself to fight the kind of offensive war Hitler had unleashed against Russia. But it had not prepared itself for defense against such a lightning attack.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the Baltic region where the population, with unconcealed impatience, awaited the arrival of the Germans.
And it's not just passive impatience we're talking about here. There was an active resistance at work.
Hardly a night passed without a murderous attack on Soviet officials, soldiers and naval men. This had been going on long before June 22. It did not halt with the outbreak of war. Wives of naval officers were not encouraged to join their husbands.
What follows is an abridged version of an escape story as the Baltic fleet evacuates its forward bases and makes for Leningrad.
The passage to Kronstadt was like a passage in Dante's hell.
And just to remind you how bad it was there's the story of Captain Vyacheslav Kalitayev of the transport Kazakhstan who was knocked unconscious when his she was hit by bombers destroying the ship's bridge. He was picked up by a submarine and made his way to Leningrad where he was then executed by a firing squad. It took 20 years for him to be exonerated posthumously.
So, the fleet was late to evacuate because everyone was afraid to make the call to do so because Stalin didn't want to retreat but also was going to shoot people if they did retreat and then also shoot people if they failed because they didn't evacuate in time.
Rather than risk a firing squad they subjected their commands and their country to the greater risk of total disaster.
And just in case you think this was craven, just look around you and look at what is being done in the name of preserving careers and jobs in the face of a homegrown tinpot who doesn't even have the juice to put people up in front of a firing squad and who probably couldn't assemble a firing squad if you spotted him a dozen rifles and a wall.
VI: Leningrad In Danger
This chapter is also adapted from Salisbury's 900 Days and it takes us to the Leningrad front where the Germans are making their main effort to take the city. Resistance stiffens. Leningrad's citizens are formed up into volunteer militia units and the Germans overconfidently imagine that they are brushing away the last bits of resistance before taking their prize. They were badly mistaken.
German passes for cars entering the city had been printed. So had invitations for a victory banquet at the Winter Palace.
Meanwhile, Stalin was still Stalin and he was wary of Leningrad's leadership and paranoid about anything they did. Even after the war he would enact a final purge of Leningrad's leadership lest they grow too powerful.
The Germans take Mga, cutting off Leningrad from the rest of Russia. Now the siege begins.
VII: The Circle Closed
This chapter begins with continuing the tale of intrigue as Salisbury lays out the case for us that Stalin was more interested in assigning blame for the loss of Leningrad than in doing what was most effective for defending the city.
Meanwhile Stalin is communicating with his newly found ally Churchill and he delivers this line in a letter to Winston:
"...Experience has taught me to look facts in the face, however unpleasant they are, and not to fear to express the truth however unwelcome it may be."
What the Trotsky's balls are you talking about, Stalin?
In Leningrad Marshal Voroshilov is losing ground and having failed to gain it back realizes his life is on the line and he is probably already headed to a firing squad.
Finally the old cavalryman went to the front near Krasnoye Selo himself. He had a detachment of marines, clad in their traditional long black cloaks, hidden in the underbrush...The marines stood behind Voroshilov, some in steel helmets, some with their blond hair tousled by the wind...They crossed a highway and drove the Nazis out of the small village of Koltselevo. The Nazis counterattacked. The marines fought back. They returned again and again. But the Nazis were too strong.
Were all the marines in this unit blond, or just the ones without helmets? Or were the blond ones the only ones whose hair was cinematically tousled by the wind?
Word of Voroshilov's action spread across the front. Was it an act of pure heroism? Or did the old fighter expect--and perhaps hope--to go down under Nazi fire rather than face disgrace and possible execution...
Voroshilov ended up getting off without being executed, though he had to sweat it out when Zhukov was sent in to replace him and he was called back to Moscow.
"They've called me to headquarters," Voroshilov brokenly told his colleagues. "Well, I'm old and it has to be!"
VIII: The Crisis Deepens
A very short chapter that transitions us from the resistance at Leningrad which stiffens under Zhukov's command to the German push for Moscow. Stalin turns out to have saved enough reserves and could also release the Red Banner Far Eastern Army because now he suddenly decided to believe his spy Richard Sorge's information that the Japanese would not attack in the east. Hitler decides to take away forces from the drive on Leningrad for the assault on Moscow and thus von Leeb can't really take the offensive and Leningrad is left to air assaults and famine. There's also a bit here where US envoy Averell Harriman visits with Stalin on September 28th and makes some observations. (Harriman was also interviewed for the documentary series.)
Stalin makes a revealing comment about Ukraine.
He said the situation there was difficult (Kiev had been lost September 20) and that Russian forces were fighting in territory which was not altogether friendly to the Soviets. This was an allusion to the fact that many Ukrainians had since the 1920s been hostile to Soviet rule and had welcomed the Germans, sometimes villagers offering the traditional platter of kleb i sol, bread and salt.
So, one of the drawbacks of such a short history is that you don't get much depth when it comes to monumental issues such as the one noted above. Just like the very brief mention in the earlier chapter about the atmosphere in Estonia this note about Ukraine conceals a huge story. Admittedly, it's actually mentioned here as opposed to the documentary series which doesn't even concede this much, but it's important for us to know that there's a bigger story here than this book can or will cover.
There's one more great line which is worth remembering when it comes to modern punditry and predictions.
Harriman noted in his diary that the British were consistent in one thing: for the last three and a half months they had been saying the Russians would hold out for three more weeks.
IX: The Battle Of Moscow
If the last chapter felt a little bit like a break, then this chapter is a true epic. The Germans are driving on Moscow in full force and the Soviets are putting up a desperate resistance. Zhukov is called in from Leningrad to organize the defense of Moscow. He is now, more than ever, the Red Army firefighter being called in at key moments.
We get a curious incident that was revealed in the postwar memoir fights as Konev and Rokossovsky sparred over who was responsible for another Russian disaster at Vyazma, which was no doubt another case of people so afraid of being held responsible for a retreat that they risk encirclement and destruction of their forces for which they are then also held responsible. It's hard being the minion of a ruthless and paranoid dictator.
Speaking of which...
Hitler believed that Moscow was his. Goebbels proclaimed that the annihilation of the Soviet armies at Vyazma had "definitely brought the war to a close."
Hitler was, as he would be so many times, wrong and Vyazma definitely didn't bring the war to a close.
Smoke belched from the chimneys of the Lubyanka headquarters of the secret police as thousands of files were burned. Some people found their own dossiers, half burned, floating through the air.
Eerie.
By now the Soviet forces were concentrated. They were fighting with their backs to the capitol. Supplies and ammunition were no trouble. Command was simplified.
Resistance stiffens. The Germans are stalling out.
In the twenty days of the second Moscow offensive the Germans had lost 155,000 dead and wounded, 800 tanks, 300 guns and 1,500 planes.
And that's it. The Battle for Moscow was over. Anytime someone tells you that fascism is an idea that can be fought on the intellectual plane show them the stats above and remind them that fascism is a dangerous idea and that it was fought on the frozen ground of Tula and Aprelevka until there weren't so many people carrying that idea around with them.
On December 5 Field Marshal Guderian entered this note in his journal: "The offensive on Moscow has ended. All the sacrifices and efforts of our brilliant troops have failed. We have suffered a serious defeat."
X: Leningrad In Blockade
This is another chapter basically digested from Salisbury's 900 Days. It's the story of Leningrad under siege and an epic of survival against hunger.
For October nonworkers and children got a ration of one-third of a pound of poor-quality bread a day. They got one pound of meat a month, plus a pound and a half of cereals, three-quarters a pound of sunflower-seed oil and three pounds of cookies or candy. Nothing more. And much of the time even these rations were not available or substitutes were issued--fish for meat, cheap candy for fats and oil. Into the bread went larger and larger quantities of substitutes, cellulose, straw, god-knows-what.
So, yeah, this was far worse than substituted cucumbers at the HEB curbside pickup and went beyond a run on toilet paper.
Horses were slaughtered. Twigs were collected and stewed. Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Moldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped from the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10 percent cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove the poisons. Five hundred tons of flour was gathered by sweeping out old warehouses.
Salisbury draws from a lot of eyewitness reporting for this chapter and it again gives us a more visceral experience of the war than the dry technical history of maneuvers and tactics.
"Today it is so simple to die," Yelena Skryabina wrote in her diary. "You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on the bed and you never get up again."
Or you can treat yourself to this bit of cheeriness:
One day a Ladoga driver, Filip Sapozhnikov, came back late to his barracks after delivering his load of flour. He found a note: "Driver Sapozhnikov. Yesterday, thanks to you, 5,000 Leningrad women and children got no bread ration."
It's a far cry from "Support the troops." And the crisis didn't bring everyone together into a united community.
...murderers, criminals of all kinds, even cannibals ranged the city. Gangs preyed on the young, on lonely pedestrians, women on the street at night. They entered unguarded apartments. Some haunted the stacks of corpses piled up around the hospitals and carved off arms and legs...There were no longer rats or mice in the city. They, too, had starved or been caught and eaten.
But the people organized. They fought for their lives. Shostakovich wrote a symphony and also picked up a shovel and worked on the fortifications with everyone else.
Leningrad survived. Hitler did not achieve his ambition of leveling it to the ground. Nor did the city open its gates in the spring and let the starving survivors out to meet the uncertain mercy of their Nazi enemies.
At the end of the chapter Salisbury quotes the last lines that are inscribed at the Piskarev Cemetery (Piskaryovskoye) which was written by Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz (1910-1975):
Here lie Leningraders
Here are citydwellers -- men, women and children
And next to them, Red Army soldiers
They defended you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the Revolution
With all their lives.
We cannot list their noble names here,
There are so many of them
under the eternal protection ofgranite.
But know this, those who regard these stones:
No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten
XI: The Red Army Attacks
...Karl von Clausewitz, called the "culminating point" of battle that moment when, as a result of his losses in the depth of enemy territory, an opponent must go over to the defense.
"For the other side," Clausewitz declared, "this point is the crisis, the moment to strike."
The Germans have been halted at Moscow, Leningrad is holding on and Zhukov's initial counteroffensives knock the Germans back and by December 18th this wind down. Zhukov would claim in his memoirs that he could have done a lot more at the time had he gotten reinforcements at this moment. December 7th, 1941 would bring the US into the war and now there would be a grand alliance.
For the first time since Hitler had begun his march across Europe in 1933 the Nazi armies had not only been halted, they had been driven back, defeated in open fighting by an enemy whom Hitler had proclaimed a dozen times to be "finally defeated."
Meanwhile, Stalin is starting to lay the diplomatic framework for the Cold War as he is buoyed by the first victories.
Stalin had won back his self-confidence--not necessarily an entirely desirable development. No longer was he shifty and uncertain...
Now, he was shifty and too certain.
Anthony Eden comes to Moscow and is presented with two treaties and a secret protocol that would require the British to recognize Soviet territorial changes to the map of Eastern Europe, especially the swallowing of the Baltic states.
Stalin offered to support British bases in Denmark, Norway and France in return for British support of his proposals. Eden mumbles politely and goes home and in the conferences to come Stalin would basically get the map of Eastern Europe that he presented at this meeting.
Meanwhile, the newly confident Stalin launches a full scale counteroffensive against the advice of Zhukov and others who maintain that more materiel and preparation would be needed for a general counterattack like that
As Zhukov commented dryly: "Stalin was very attentive to advice but, regrettably, sometimes took decisions not in accordance with the situation."
The counterattacks are blunted with massive loss and the Germans get the ball back in their court for another try. But Stalin isn't done making bad decisions.
XII: Hitler Tries For Stalingrad
So, this is the least unknown part of the "Unknown War" as the German drive for Stalingrad and the subsequent counterstroke are some of the most familiar parts of the story of the "Eastern Front."
Salisbury gives us some insights into Stalin's process that we don't get in more generic histories.
Two misconceptions possessed Stalin's mind in the spring of 1942. The first was that Hitler was certain to renew the battle for Moscow. The second was that the Red Army possessed the strength to thwart Hitler's intentions with a spoiling attack.
An offensive in the Crimea fails and instead Sevastopol, which had been under siege for 9 months, had to capitulate. Then came the latest disaster.
What follows is the brief story of the Kharkov offensive, which starts off strangely successful until Timoshenko and Khrushchev realize that they've walked into a trap. The reason they met no opposition was that the Germans were preparing for their offensive against Stalingrad and thus allowed the Red Army to advance into the area unopposed and then jump right on them. When the Russian commanders realized this they begged Stalin to let them pull back but Stalin refused.
The only thing, Khrushchev thought, which made it difficult for Stalin to order him shot was that there were many witnesses to the fact that he had tried to persuade him to withdraw the stoops before it was too late.
This was a mistake that cost as many as 200,000 lives. Thanks again, Stalin.
Now the Germans make their move. Hitler orders a drive on Stalingrad and the epic begins.
Here we meet Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov who commands the 64th Army and who manages to stop Hoth's 4th Panzer Army near Stalingrad. He is then given command of the remnants of the 62nd Army and this is the force that holds on tenaciously to the crumbled remnants of the city.
Khrushchev got a telephone call from Stalin: "What's this about you starting to evacuate the city?" Khrushchev protested there wasn't a word of truth in it. They would fight to the end. After he hung up he began to wonder who had planted this lie in Stalin's mind. When he found that Stalin had called two other members of the military committee he realized it was just Stalin's way of putting fear into his subordinates.
I'm sure there are some middle management folks taking note of this bit to use later.
Zhukov is called in again to organize things. He and Vasilevsky work out a plan. The Germans are being worn down. If they can be held at Stalingrad long enough then reserves could be organized for one single counterstroke.
Stalin was antsy.
On the evening of September 3 Stalin saw the commanders at 10:00P.M. He was not in good temper.
"Tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the fight against fascism and Churchill is haggling over twenty Hurricanes. And the Hurricanes aren't that good anyway," he snapped.
Meanwhile Chuikov was holding onto a sliver of territory on the bank of the Volga, backed by a ton of artillery on the other side of the river which kept the pressure on the Germans who were fighting for every block.
But before we come back for the thrilling conclusion to the Battle of Stalingrad, Salisbury takes a pause to digress with a chapter about diplomacy.
XIII: Stalin And Churchill
So, here is where we get to read about the Lend-Lease program and the complicated relationships of the Allies.
Stalin had no love for Winston Churchill...He regarded Churchill, correctly, as one of the chief authors of the implacably anti-Soviet policy of the British Government at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. He had never forgotten the British military intervention in 1918-1920 which had almost beaten the fledgling Soviet state to its knees...
And, of course, there was the complication of the pre-war maneuvering that brought Munich and the subsequent Soviet-German pact and the war with Finland that made all sides a little wary of each other.
...he had a feeling what Churchill really wanted was to see Russia bled white so that even if Germany was defeated the Soviet Union could not play a major role in postwar Europe.
While Churchill certainly had other motives for delaying an invasion of Western Europe and the opening of the Second Front that Stalin demanded it is doubtful that Churchill would have disliked the above result. Of course, it is true that US forces weren't really prepared for an invasion of mainland Europe in 1942 and that Churchill was concerned about the real and political results of expending British lives for that cause.
There are many books worth of material condensed in this chapter that bounces from Stalin sending Molotov to London and Washington and then Churchill going to Moscow and then covering the story of convoy PQ 17, one of the Murmansk convoys that was attacked with large losses and then ending with a tally of material sent to the USSR from the US and UK.
Of particular interest to me in this chapter is the very brief mention of the Persian Corridor which was the major source of supplies from the US and UK to the USSR during the war and which was available as a result of the Anglo-Soviet Invasion of Iran in August 1941 (which is not mentioned in the book or in the documentary). The scant mention that this route gets (compared with the tragic story of a convoy) and the epic stories planes being delivered via Alaska in the film series isn't just accidental. Is it that the story isn't that interesting to audiences? Or is it that the story is just too complicated? In either case it is a deliberate act of editorial erasure and I've always found it annoying that I have to be satisfied with a little side anecdote about Averell Harriman making observations about the ways in which the rail transport on the Iranian railroad could be made more efficient.
XIV: Victory At Stalingrad
And now back to the main story...The thrilling conclusion to the Battle of Stalingrad.
The Red Army assembles a giant amount of troops, weapons, equipment and ammunition and Salisbury repeats the phrase "The Germans did not detect this movement" to great effect.
It was, in a sense, a reprise of the successful Moscow operation. The long wait until the enemy wore out his strength and bogged down. The painful, dangerous fighting to hold off the Nazi advance while enormous strike forces were collected. The sudden blow just as the enemy's last offensive vigor was spent and it was too late for him to withdraw from his dangerous overextension.
It took 4 days of fighting for the pincers to meet and trap the German 6th Army. And then it was Hitler's turn to be the dumb stubborn dictator. He ordered Paulus to stay in place. Goering assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could keep Stalingrad supplied. He couldn't.
Now, von Manstein sent Hoth's 4th Panzer Army to break through and relieve the 6th Army but Rokossovsky's 2nd Guards Army under Malinovsky held them off. Now was the time for Paulus to attempt a breakout, but thanks to his chief of staff, Arthur Schmidt, he holds his positions. The relief forces pull back further. And that's it. Salisbury relates the story of the surrender and that of Lieutenant Fyodor Yelchenko who had the distinction of taking the German commander to Rokossovsky and Marshal Voronov.
There is something gratifying about the crushing defeat of the fascists at Stalingrad. But it's horrible too.
Khrushchev gathered army forces and prisoners to gather up the frozen corpses. They were stacked like cordwood on alternate layers of railroad ties, then set afire.
"I went once to watch," Khrushchev recalled, "but I didn't go a second time. Napoleon or someone once said that burning enemy corpses smell good. Well, speaking for myself I don't agree. It was a very unpleasant smell and altogether a very unpleasant scene."
And that's the end of the turning point. From here on out it's mostly the story of the inevitable destruction of Hitler's army.
XV: The Greatest Battle Of The War
A lot of simplistic high school versions of history treat the Russian front as the story of Germans being overwhelmed by superior numbers thrown at them until they were just buried by the weight of it. But more detailed analyses, such as even the rudimentary version we get in this chapter show the ways in which the Red Army's staff managed to use tactical, operational, and strategic thought to decisively defeat the Germans.
The chapter starts with reminding us that Stalin was now fully confident and that meant he was once again overconfident.
Meanwhile we are treated to a basic military science class where we look at the Kursk salient and why it looked like a juicy target to Hitler and his staff looking for a chance to get a win after Stalingrad and why the Soviet staff looked at it and saw exactly what the Germans saw and knew that it would prove to be irresistible bait for a trap.
Revisionist historians have started to reevaluate the size and scope of Kursk recently and some are trying to lower its importance from what older histories like this chapter claim for it, but what is basically known is still true. Kursk was the last full scale German offensive in the east. After Kursk the initiative was entirely with the Russians and the Germans could only mount tactical counterattacks at best.
Guderian responded: "How many people do you think even know where Kursk is? It's a matter of profound indifference to the world whether we hold Kursk or not."
But Hitler cared. And a lot of people would die for that reason.
Tank after tank bogged down. Tank after tank burst into flame. Tank after tank blew up, sending fragmented armor plate over the fields. The German tank crews had orders not to halt to help disabled comrades. If disabled they were to stay in their paces and continue to fire. This made them sitting ducks for the registered fire of the Soviet guns. The Russians had set up tank-destruction commandos, squads that darted into the battlefield under the noses of the immobilized German monsters, blasting off turrets and nozzeling the occupants to death with liquid fire.
War isn't pretty. And it's not a movie. The figures sometimes given for Kursk are unbelievable and certainly the ones put out by Stalin in the midst of the battle were only for the most credulous, but there's no denying that something big and gruesome did happen there.
Never again would the Germans muster an offensive operation in the East. Never again would the Third Reich seriously threaten its great Soviet opponent. No one after Kursk could doubt the final outcome.
XVI: Babi Yar
Those who are inclined to look at the war in the east as two evil dictatorships and ideologies going back and forth with little to distinguish them should go to Babi Yar. They should imagine themselves there. They should think really hard about it.
This chapter is about the inexorable tide of the Red Army as it marched west and took back the territory it had lost to the Germans back in 1941.
It is also about the very specific evil of the Nazis. And whatever Stalin did do (and he did a lot of evil) you can't deny one thing. Before the war there were something like 170,000 Jews in Kiev and while many had already evacuated with others before the Germans took the city there were enough so that when the Einsatzgruppe C. Sonderkomanndo 4a put out a notice requiring all of the cities Jews to show up near a railway station some 30,000 showed up thinking they would be deported. Instead they were marched off to a ravine called Babi Yar.
Here they were run through a gauntlet, beaten with sticks and truncheons by polizei from the Western Ukraine. In batches they were compelled to lie face down at the bottom of the ravine and shot with automatic rifles. A little earth was shoaled over the bodies and another row was made to lie down. Some were simply machine-gunned. Small children were thrown in alive. The ravine rapidly filled with what one of the participants was to call "a glutinous mass."
There were no "both sides" at Babi Yar. There is no heritage of the killers to be celebrated. To those they murdered they were just murderers and it is left to us to choose which side we would choose for ourselves.
And as we ourselves face our own moral and ethical crises today let's reflect on this.
Mercy was a word erased from the vocabulary of German official orders. Keitel ordered his troops December 16, 1942: "If the repression of bandits in the east...is not pursued by the most brutal means the forces at our disposal will before long be insufficient to exterminate this plague. The troops, therefore, have the right and the duty to use any means, even against women and children...Scruples of any sort are a crime against the German people and against the German soldiers.
So, for those who would change the names and nationalities of the statement above and follow the orders because they would support the idea if it meant "supporting the troops" or "obeying the law" then there is nothing left to debate about.
Salisbury closes with an excerpt from Yevgeny Yevtushenko's famous poem about Babi Yar that was published in 1961.
The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar
The trees look ominous as judges,
Here all things scream in silence....
And I myself am one massive, soundless scream
Above the thousand thousand buried here
I am each old man here shot dead
I am every child here shot dead
Nothing in me shall ever forget.
XVII: Warsaw And Other Battles
And now we go back to our regularly scheduled war. This chapter opens up with Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt meeting in Tehran in late November 1943 for the first big meeting. Churchill tries to get everyone to agree to an invasion in the Balkans. Nope.
Generally things went as expected. But Poland was about to get a big kick in somewhere uncomfortable because they just came out of this meeting agreeing to disagree but with each party knowing they would be looking to get their own way if they could get away with it.
Meanwhile the siege of Leningrad is finally lifted on 29 January 1944, the drive across Ukraine goes all the way to Odessa and the Crimea is retaken.
Three U.S. air bases are built to help facilitate shuttle bombing of the oil fields of Ploesti by B-17s based out of Italy. The Free French operate a fighter squadron on the front as well.
The retreating Germans leave a wasteland in Byelorussia. The Russians take Lublin on 27 July 1944 and they capture several bridgeheads across the Vistula and on 31 July they reach the outskirts of Warsaw. And that's when things get complicated.
The Polish Home Army stages an uprising against the German occupiers, most likely in the hopes of liberating their homeland before the Red Army gets to take the credit as well as control of the ground.
But the Germans reorganized and proceeded to put down the Polish uprising and destroyed Warsaw and the Red Army gave then a couple of months to do it.
Were the Russian forces really so exhausted at the end of July 1944 that they couldn't continue into Poland? Salisbury presents the controversy and the tragedy. The obvious political result of the Soviet delay was that the Polish Home Army was destroyed and the Red Army alone took possession of Poland and thus the Lublin government they installed was able to get the jump on the London based government in exile. It's hard not to draw the obvious conclusion, despite Salisbury's inclusion of the following bit of retrospective commentary from Heinz Guderian.
Guderian, in his memoirs, noting the bridgeheads which the Russians pushed across the Vistula, gave his opinion that the Russians were actually trying to reach Warsaw (at least as of August 12) but had been halted by fierce Nazi resistance.
Mmm-hmm. Yeah. Doesn't explain why they sat on the other side of the Vistula and just watched for 5 months.
Meanwhile, we get a brief history of the "liberation" of Eastern Europe.
In Romania King Michael organized a coup against Ion Antonescu and switched from the Axis to the Allies as the Red Army drove through Bucharest.
Bulgaria never declared war on the USSR but did declare war against the Western Allies and was host to German troops so there was a bit of a dance as the Red Army made plans to invade Bulgaria while the Bulgarians tried to come up with a solution. The Russians went ahead with an invasion but then there was a communist uprising and another successful resolution.
Each time the Red Army approached a foreign capital, military action took second place to political action.
While Salisbury relishes in details of the Bulgarian diplomatic shenanigans before the armistice he gives pretty short mention of what went on with Hungary and puts a good deal of blame for the lack of agreement on Stalin for putting L.Z. Mekhlis in charge of negotiations so that they would be sure to fail. There's a fascinating series of actions that led to the Germans staging their own coup in Budapest and the Red Army didn't take Budapest until 13 February 1945 in heavy fighting.
Every effort by anti-Nazi elements in Hungary to cooperate or collaborate with the Russians failed. In the end a puppet Communist regime, manned by carpetbaggers from Moscow, was installed.
The same pattern is repeated in Austria.
The Red Army entered Vienna April 13, after 10 days of desperate fighting. Blame for the breakdown of efforts to surrender the city without damage and without casualties was placed by Soviet propagandists on the Austrians and, as an added touch, on Allen Dulles, then chief of American intelligence in Switzerland who was said to have plotted against the Russians with non-Communist Austrian elements.
You know, I was ready to dismiss the postwar Soviet propaganda right up until the name of Allen Dulles popped up and now I really want to know what shenanigans he was up to.
Then there's the strange story of the liberation of Prague, which started on 5 May 1945 after the Czechs themselves rose up and then got some help from the Russian troops of General Andrei A. Vlasov who had been a hero in the defense of Moscow but who was then taken prisoner by the Germans and who had subsequently organized an army of Russian POWs who fought against Stalin. Now, Vlasov was desperate to surrender to the British or Americans.
On May 7 they captured the Prague airport and forty-six planes. They fought their way through SS detachments to the center of Prague and 5:00 P.M. the afternoon of May 7 the Vlasov blue-and-white banner was raised beside that of Czechoslovakia on the Prague City Hall...
The next day it was announced that the American advance on Prague had been halted in the vicinity of Pilsen, the agreed chuckling. Pictures of Vlasov and his national banner began to disappear in Prague and were replaced with red flags and pictures of Stalin.
Vlasov and his men surrender to the Americans but most them are handed over to Stalin. Vlasov is executed and many of his men never make it out of the gulags, if they even made it into the gulags alive. The Red Army eventually saunters into Prague on 11 May. They were sitting around for a week.
XVIII: On To Berlin
This chapter starts with the gala celebrations of 7 November 1944, the anniversary of the October Revolution. It's like the catalog of ships, or Herodotus's catalog of Xerxes's army.
We begin with the rivalry over who would be in command of the troops that would take Berlin. At first it looks like it will be Rokossovsky, but then Zhukov is given the prize and Stalin announces that he'll be doing all the coordinating personally, which was a powerful sign that he was confident he wouldn't need any scapegoats to blame things on in case something went wrong.
What follows is the story of the horserace of Zhukov, Konev, and Rokossovsky for Berlin and then an interlude to tell the story of the Yalta conference.
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are all maneuvering to get the most they can in the postwar situation while also getting what they need for the present. Roosevelt needs a hand against the Japanese. Stalin wants Eastern Europe and the prize of taking Berlin. Churchill wants to keep as much of the British Empire intact as he can while also keeping a hand in as much of Europe as he can get away with.
Meanwhile, the preparations are being made for the final drive across the Oder. But something goes awry. Stalin calls Zhukov on February 6 and changes the priority from Berlin to clearing out Pomerania first. Years later Chuikov would write a criticism that the defenses they would face in April were not there in February and they could have taken Berlin with fewer losses. Unfortunately this criticism was written in the last year of Khrushchev's rule (when criticism of Stalin was encouraged and criticism of Zhukov was allowed) but shortly thereafter Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev and Zhukov would say that Chuikov was mistaken about the military situation. The truth is once again probably a political issue was at stake and in this case it would cost another huge number of lives as the defenses around Berlin were strengthened during this delay.
XIX: The Last Days Of Berlin
Now Stalin sets up a horse race between Zhukov and Konev to take Berlin, although this is a terrible analogy because horses don't have to start the race with an artillery barrage and also aren't being shot at during races.
About 3:00 A.M. on the morning of April 16 Zhukov went to Chuikov's observation post...
About 4:45 A.M. very strong hot tea in glasses was served by a young girl named Margo...
At 5:00 A.M. the thousands of guns opened up.
I want to hear more about Margo.
The battle for Seelow Heights is fierce. Konev makes big progress south of Berlin and now turns north. The defenses crack. April 20 is Hitler's Birthday and his present is Zhukov's army crushing what's left of Berlin's defenses.
Hitler in his last days starts issuing even more delusional orders than his regular delusional orders.
30 April the Red Banner goes up on the Reichstag but there's still fighting going on.
XX: Hitler Kaput
This chapter opens with Marshal Chuikov's grand dinner at the 8th Shock Army Headquarters in Schulenburgren on the evening of April 30.
His guests included some old friends: the writers Vsevolod Vishnevsky, Konstantin Simononv, the poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, the composer Tikhon Khrennikov and Matvei Blanter, artist and composer who wrote the song "Katyusha."
There was schnapps and vodka on the table, caviar and salmon, German sausage, Polish ham, radishes, onions, chocolate cake.
Okay, the company is really good but that's a weird combo feast.
The dinner is interrupted by General Hans Krebs who is trying to get an armistice and who informs Chuikov that Hitler is dead. Yep. Dead.
Zhukov is informed. He calls Stalin.
"So that's the end of the bastard," Stalin replied. "Too bad it was impossible to take him alive. Where is Hitler's body?"
Himmler and Goering are gone from Berlin trying to cut their own deals.
Goebbels is mad at them for leaving.
Within a day Krebs and Goebbels are dead.
There was some wrangling around the surrender. Eisenhower signs at Rheims on May 7 but Stalin wants his own ceremony so there's a surrender on 9 May. That becomes Victory Day.
Stalin has a big feast and makes a speech.
"Our Government made no few mistakes and there were desperate moments in 1941-42 when our armies retreated, evacuating our native villages and cities of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Moldavia, the Leningrad region, the Baltic states and the Karelo-Finnish Republic, evacuated them because there was no other choice.
Another people might have said to the Government: You have not fulfilled our expectations. Get out and we will form another Government which will conclude peace with Germany and secure our peace.
But the Russian people did not do that because they believed in the correctness of the policies of their Government and made the sacrifices which made certain the defeat of Germany. And in this confidence of the Russian people for the Soviet Government lay the decisive force which secured the historic victory over the enemies of mankind, over fascism."
Well, yeah. We should have a long talk about that one after we mull it over.
We skip ahead to the big parade in Red Square on June 24th. It's the mirror of an earlier parade a couple of years earlier when 57,000 German POWs were marched through Moscow in eerie silence.
Now the victorious Red Army has its big day.
What follows is a very gratifying image.
The music halts. Total silence in the vast square. Silently the rain pours down. Suddenly hundreds of drums rattle in a tattoo. Silence again. Two hundred Red Army men in dress uniform appear. Heads high. They march in cadenced steps, each carrying a Nazi war banner, the flag and emblem of a Nazi fighting unit.
Each trooper marches to the Mausoleum, makes a right turn, hurls the swastika banner to the wet granite at the foot of Lenin's tomb. The flags, the emblems, the swastikas pile up. One on the other at the feet of Russia's rulers.
The war against Germany is over.
XXI: The Last Act
But there's one last chapter left. Stalin promised a war with Japan and he delivers, looking to grab as much of the east as he can get away with in the bargain.
This is the even more unknown part of the unknown war and it only gets a few pages here.
Actually, the Japanese had been trying since February 1945 to get out of the war. They wanted Russia to act as an intermediary in peace talks with the United States. Foreign Minister Togo tried repeatedly to persuade the Russians to let him come to Moscow to talk about peace. The Russians resolutely ignored these proposals. The Japanese persisted. As late as July 12, on the eve of the Potsdam Big Three meeting, Emperor Hirohito was trying to get the Russians to let Prince Konoye come to Moscow to start peace talks. The Russians cold-shouldered this move as they had the others. Stalin was not going to be denied his revenge for 1905.
Stalin gets his revenge and the Japanese surrender, though the Russians have to do some serious fighting in Manchuria to earn this last victory.
Salisbury sums up the war on the last page. The staggering cost of the war and the result of the war as it laid the foundations for the Cold War that was to follow.
Russian strength had been tested as never before in the history of the modern Russian nation and it had proved strong enough despite every obstacle: the paranoia of its leadership which had wiped out the whole commanding corps of the Red Army only three years before World War II: the failure of Stalin to employ effectively the breathing spell against Hitler which he won by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939; his incredible failure of judgment in misevaluating the stunningly accurate intelligence which piled up on his desk concerning Hitler's decision to attack, including the scope of his plans and the date for the beginning of the war; and Stalin's criminal mishandling of the Red Army's valiant forces in the early months of the war, leading to the stupendous losses at Kiev, Leningrad and Moscow.
All of this the Russian people had managed to survive. They had fought without their best leaders and in spite of blindly stupid leadership. They had died in numbers so vast the Soviet government for years would seek to conceal the totals--probably 20,000,000 of them at the front alone.
So that's the story of the Unknown War as told in the companion book. It ends with a lot more of a critique then the documentary series does, but both conclude with the staggering sense of cost in human terms. Salisbury reminds us that so much of this cost was avoidable.
Lessons learned? Can we begin to apply some of these lessons as we look at our own leadership today and at the ways in which they have stumbled into avoidable problems? Can we at least take some pride in fighting fascism? I hope so. It may be at some cost to us to wait too long to take down its latest iterations.
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