Russia at war 1941-1945

Stalingrad is an Armed Prisoners' Camp, and its position is hopeless. The

liquidation of the "cauldron" has begun, and the enormous losses the Germans will have suffered in Stalingrad will have a decisive effect on the war. Their attempts to supply Stalingrad from the air now that it is outside the reach of their fighters have been a complete failure.

He thought the Germans were still strong in the air, for all that, and also still had a very great number of tanks. The Waffen-SS were ferocious fighters; but the quality of the other German troops varied greatly.

He was cautious in his forecast for 1943: he was pretty sure that Rostov would be

liberated, but would not commit himself to more "for the present". He thought limited German counter-offensives still possible, but none of any decisive importance. But he stressed that the Russians were still going to have a very hard time, that their sacrifices were "unprecedented in history", and he appealed for a much greater effort in the west.

North Africa, he suggested, was only a small beginning, with little direct effect on German pressure in the east. He said that no allied equipment had yet been used on this front, except some American lorries.

Malinovsky treated us to a generous lunch (with "trophy" French brandy and German cigars to conclude), and talked wittily and informally, again recalling some of his

experiences in France in World War I. His toast was uttered with great warmth and

friendliness:

Victory (he said) is the sweetest moment in the life of every soldier, and I am sparing no effort to achieve it. We Soviet people realise the technical difficulties of a Second Front in Europe; we are, for the present, fighting without it, but we firmly believe it will come very soon. Show your people how pure and clear our aims and motives

are. We want freedom—and let us not quibble over certain differences in our

conception of freedom; these are a secondary matter—and we want victory so that

there may be no war again.

That evening, after seeing some more German airmen who had just been brought down—

we travelled through a blizzard back to our Kotelnikovo "base".

There were many heavy snowfalls throughout the first half of January, but the weather was relatively mild—usually between minus 5° and minus 10° centigrade. It was not till towards the end of the Stalingrad mopping-up, i.e. the second half of January and the early days of February that the frost became truly ferocious: minus 30° and minus 40°

centigrade. I was, indeed, going to find this out for myself; for a fortnight later I was to return to the Stalingrad area. And this time to Stalingrad itself.

Chapter V STALINGRAD: THE AGONY

On January 1, Sovinformbureau published a very long special communiqué on the results of the first six weeks of the Russian offensive in the Stalingrad and Don areas. Not only, it said, had twenty-two enemy divisions been surrounded, but thirty-six had been

smashed in the six weeks' fighting. We need not quote here the figures of the enemy

tanks, planes, guns, et cetera, captured or destroyed; they were obviously exaggerated—

for instance 3,250 tanks and 1,800 aircraft.

[ In an interview on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, published in Pravda on February 10,1963, Marshal Malinovsky gave the following figures for German losses including all that was finally captured or destroyed in the Stalingrad "bag"

during that battle, i.e. up to February 2: 2,000 tanks, 2,000 planes, over 10,000 guns and mortars and 70,000 motor vehicles. Except for the last, these figures are less than the Sovinformbureau statement claimed on January 1, 1943—a statement which did not

cover what was to be captured later in the "cauldron".]

What was interesting, in the light of subsequent attempts to minimise Zhukov's role in the planning and execution of the Battle of Stalingrad, was the concluding statement:

These operations took place under the command of Colonel-General Vatutin,

Commander of the South-West Front; Colonel-General Yere-menko, Commander

of the Stalingrad Front; Lieut.-General Rokossovsky, Commander of the Don

Front; Lieut.-General Golikov, Commander of the Voronezh Front, and under the

general leadership of Army General Zhukov, Colonel-General Vassilevsky and

Colonel-General of Artillery Voronov.

There now remained the job of liquidating the German Stalingrad Cauldron. The trapped Germans had nothing more to hope for. Not that the troops in the Stalingrad trap were yet fully aware of the whole ghastly truth. The officers kept telling them not to be unduly disturbed by the rapidly diminishing food rations; the Führer would see to it that

everything turned out all right, despite von Manstein's failure to break through. And in any case, they were told, their presence in Stalingrad was a great embarrassment to the Russians and, in the general scheme of things, a great service to the Führer and the Fatherland.

Paulus's forces had been encircled since November 23 and their supplies were running down. Goering's promises to fly 500 tons of food, fuel and ammunition a day to

Stalingrad had proved a mirage. Before long the Luftwaffe was only bringing in 100 tons a day and, towards the end of December, even less. The number of planes lost was

growing daily. By the middle of December the troops began to eat what was left of the Rumanian cavalry division's horses.

The Germans' growing shortage of ammunition made an enormous difference to the

troops of the Russian 62nd Army still holding the Stalingrad bridgeheads. It was now almost safe to carry large dishes of hot food to the front-line troops in broad daylight, barely forty yards away from the German lines. It was equally safe— according to

Stalingrad standards of safety—for whole convoys of horse-sleighs to cross the Volga during the day.

At the end of December Grossman wrote in Red Star.

Those Germans who, in September, broke into houses and danced to the loud music

of mouth-organs, and who drove about at night with their headlights full on and

who, in broad daylight, would bring up their shells in lorries—these Germans are

now hiding among the stone ruins... Now there is no sun for them. They are rationed to twenty-five or thirty rounds a day, and they are to fire only when attacked. Their food ration is four ounces of bread and a little horse-flesh.

There, like savages grown over with wool, they sit in their stone caves, gnawing at a horse's bone... Fearful days and nights have come to them. Here, in the dark cold ruins of the city they have destroyed they will meet with vengeance; they will meet it under the cruel stars of the Russian winter night.

Such was the outlook inside Stalingrad itself; it was no better in the open steppes, nearer the centre of the "ring", at Gumrak, or that airfield of Pitomnik which so few of the Junker 52's were now succeeding in reaching. The Germans in the west had been driven far away—into the Salsk steppes and beyond the Donets, and the Germans at Stalingrad were hopelessly isolated.

During the first week of January the troops of the Don Front under Rokossovsky and

Voronov were preparing, in the steppes between the Don and the Volga, for the final

onslaught. Knowing, however, that the Germans still had much equipment inside the ring, and in order to avoid "unnecessary bloodshed", General Voronov, "representative of the general headquarters of the Supreme Command of the Red Army", and General

Rokossovsky, commander of the Don Front, sent an ultimatum to Colonel-General

Paulus, on January 8.

The German 6th Army, formations of the 4th Panzer Army and units sent to them

as reinforcements have been completely surrounded since November 23... The

German troops rushed to your assistance have been routed, and their remnants are

now retreating towards Rostov... The German air transport force which kept you

supplied with starvation rations of food, ammunition and fuel, is frequently

compelled to shift its bases and to fly long distances to reach you... It is suffering tremendous losses in planes and crews and its help is becoming ineffective...

Your troops are suffering from hunger, disease and cold. The severe Russian winter is only beginning... You have no chance of breaking through the ring surrounding

you. Your position is hopeless and further resistance is useless.

Voronov and Rokossovsky therefore offered a termination of hostilities and a capitulation on the usual terms:

Arms, equipment and munitions to be turned over to the Russians in an organised

manner and in good condition; Life and safety guaranteed to all soldiers and

officers who cease hostilities; and upon the termination of the war their return to Germany or to any country the prisoners of war may choose.

All prisoners may retain their uniforms, insignia, decorations and personal

belongings and, in the case of high officers, their side-arms. All prisoners will be provided with normal food, and all in need of medical treatment will be given it.

The ultimatum finally stated where Paulus's representative, travelling in a passenger car flying a white flag, was to appear at 10 a.m. on the following morning, January 9. The ultimatum ended with the warning that if it was rejected, "the Red Army and Air Force will be compelled to wipe out the surrounded German troops" and that "you will be responsible for their annihilation".

The ultimatum was rejected. But not quite off-hand. The German generals must have

taken time to consult Hitler and to think it over. Afterwards, Russian officers at

Stalingrad told me that, after the presentation of the ultimatum there was a short uncanny truce, when no guns were fired on either side. Not only the official Russian envoys but also some other Russians (including a staff officer I knew) ventured right across the no-man's-land and actually talked to some Germans urging them to lay down their arms. But Hitler would not hear of any capitulation, and von Manstein, too, now thought it in his own interests to sacrifice the German and Rumanian troops in the Stalingrad "Bag", and failed to inform Paulus of the real situation, thus leaving him to grope in the dark.

[H. M. Waasen. Was geschah in Stalingrad? Wo sind die Schuldigen? (What happened at Stalingrad? Where are the guilty men?). (Salzburg, 1950), p. 69.]

At 8 a.m. on January 10, the Russian attack was begun with a barrage from 7,000 guns and mortars along the southern and western side of the pocket, the density of the barrage reaching in some places 170 guns or mortars per kilometre. Russian planes were

meantime bombing the German positions farther inland. After an hour, Russian tanks and infantry were thrown in. Despite some desperate resistance from the Germans, who had strongly fortified the whole area, the Russians advanced in some places during the first day between three and five miles. As a Russian writer wrote:

The enemy suffered enormous casualties from our barrage. Our infantry swiftly

advanced through the enemy front lines. At every step there were blackened

German bodies, wrecked enemy guns and mortars, shattered dugouts and pillboxes.

The country, white the day before, was now grey with soot and smoke and dotted

with thousands of black shell-holes... And yet the Germans, frightened by "Russian atrocity" stories, continued to resist like hounded wolves.

[Zamiatin, Stalingradskaya Bitva (The Battle of Stalingrad) (Moscow, 1946), p. 56.]

It took three days of heavy fighting to snip off the western extremity of the pocket—some 250 square miles. During the following days the advance was much more rapid; the

Russians captured the whole middle part of the pocket, including Pitomnik, with the

Germans' largest airfield.

On January 17, the Russian command sent Paulus another capitulation offer, and

although at least two German generals—von Seydlitz and Schlömmer—were in favour of

accepting it, Paulus still had no authority to do so. By this time the Russians had

recaptured nearly half the cauldron; but German resistance was still stiff; the western part of the cauldron was studded with hundreds of pillboxes and other firing points;

Sovinformbureau's interim report of January 17 spoke of 1,260 pillboxes and fortified dugouts, 75 fortified observation posts and 317 gun or mortar batteries that had been captured or destroyed during the first week's fighting; it also gave a long list of

equipment captured or destroyed, including 400 planes, 600 tanks and 16,000 trucks,

most of which had, however, been out of action through lack of petrol. The Germans

killed during that first week were put at 25,000, but, significantly, the number of

prisoners taken—less than 7,000—was still very low, and even many of these appear to have been Rumanians.

On January 22 the Russians started on their final onslaught. The Germans were now

retreating in disorder to Stalingrad, and by the 24th, the Russians had reached that line of Stalingrad's "outer defences" which they had themselves held till September 13. "The German troops, suffering incredible hardships," a Russian military expert, Colonel Zamiatin, wrote, "now began to realise more fully the complete hopelessness of their position, and began to surrender in groups." At the same time, some of the sick and wounded in the area the Germans were abandoning, were being killed off rather than

being left to the Russians.

But Hitler and Manstein were still insisting that the Germans in the Stalingrad pocket continue their resistance. Paulus was promoted to the rank of Field-Marshal, even though he continued to inform Manstein of the hopelessness of resisting any longer. According to some German accounts the demoralisation among both soldiers and officers was now

rapidly growing, and there were ugly scrambles at Gumrak, the last German airfield,

where officers paid large bribes to airmen for a seat on the last departing planes.

[Heinz Schröter. Stalingrad... quoted by IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 60.]

On January 26 the Russian troops both from the north and the west broke into Stalingrad itself, and at last, at Mamai Hill, joined with units of Chuikov's 62nd Army which,

throughout December and January, had continued to harass the Germans, especially in

the Mamai Hill, Barricades and Red October areas.

[During the big Russian counter-offensive in November, troops of the Don Front broke through to Colonel Gorokhov's little bridgehead north of Stalingrad, in the Rynok area; but had failed to reach Chuikov's main bridgehead. As a result, for two more months, the bulk of the 62nd Army was still isolated from the rest of the Russian forces. Although, during these two months, the Germans were unable to attack the 62nd Army in force,

Chuikov speaks with some bitterness in his book of the "others'" failure to break through to Stalingrad from the north in November, when the conditions for doing so had greatly improved.]

Although the Germans and especially the Rumanians (including General Dimitriu) were

now surrendering in much larger numbers— the Rumanians appear, for one thing, to

have been deprived even of their starvation rations since January 20—some heavy

fighting still continued in the streets of Stalingrad for the next five days, and it was not till January 31 that Field-Marshal Paulus surrendered at his H.Q. in the basement of the Univermag department store.

Later, when I got to Stalingrad, I heard the story from the man who had captured Paulus: a youngster with a turned-up nose, fair hair and a laughing face, Lieutenant Fyodor

Mikhailovich Yel-chenko, whom one could not imagine being called anything but

"Fedya". He was bubbling over with exuberance as he told his story—the lieutenant who had captured the Field-Marshal.

On January 31—the day after the tenth anniversary of the Hitler régime, a day on which the Führer had failed to speak—the Russians were closing in on central Stalingrad from all directions. The Germans were frozen, starving, but still fighting. First, after a heavy artillery and mortar barrage, the whole square in front of the Univermag was captured by the Russians, who then began to surround the building. From time to time, flame-throwers also came into action. Yelchenko said that, in the course of the day, he had learned from three captured German officers that Paulus was in the Univermag building.

"We then began to shell the building (my unit was occupying the other side of the street, just opposite the side entrance of the Univermag), and as the shells began to hit it, a representative of Major-General Raske popped out of the door and waved at me. It was taking a big risk, but I crossed the street and went up to him. The German officer then called for an interpreter, and he said to me: 'Our big chief wants to talk to your big chief.

So I said to him: 'Look here, our big chief has other things to do. He isn't available. You'll just have to deal with me.' All this was going on while, from the other side of the square, they were still sending shells into the building. I called for some of my men, and they joined me—twelve men and two other officers. They were all armed, of course, and the German officer said: 'No, our chief asks that only one or two of you come in.' So I said:

'Nuts to that. I am not going by myself.' However, in the end, we agreed on three. So the three of us went into the basement. It is empty now, but you should have seen it then. It was packed with soldiers—hundreds of them. Worse than any tramcar. They were dirty

and hungry and they stank. And did they looked scared! They all fled down here to get away from the mortar fire outside."

Yelchenko and the two other men were ushered into the presence of Major-General

Raske and Lieut.-General Schmidt, Paulus's chief of staff. Raske said that they were going to negotiate the surrender on Paulus's behalf, since Paulus "no longer answered for anything since yesterday". It was all a bit mysterious, Yelchenko said; he couldn't quite figure out who was in charge. Had Paulus passed his authority on to Raske, or was he simply avoiding a personal surrender, or had there been some disagreement between

Paulus and the others? Probably not, for Raske and Schmidt kept going into Paulus's

room, apparently consulting him on the coming capitulation. Perhaps Paulus was merely unwilling to negotiate with the little Russian lieutenant direct. However, Yelchenko was, in the end, shown into Paulus's room. "He was lying on his iron bed," said Yelchenko,

"wearing his uniform. He looked unshaved, and you wouldn't say he felt jolly. 'Well, that finishes it,' I remarked to him. He gave me a sort of miserable look and nodded. And then, in the other room—the corridor, mind you, was still packed with soldiers— Raske said: 'There's one request I have to make. You must have him taken away in a decent car, under proper guard, so the Red Army soldiers don't kill him, as though he were some

vagabond.'" Yelchenko laughed. "I said 'Okay'". Paulus had a car duly sent for him, and was taken to General Rokossovsky's place. What happened after that I don't know. But for two days afterwards we were gathering in prisoners all over the place. And the other fellows, on the north side, also surrendered three days later. But even in this part of Stalingrad there was still some fighting for a few hours after Paulus had been caught; however, when they learned what had happened, they began to surrender without any

further trouble."

[It is amusing to note that there should be no mention in the official History of Lieutenant Yelchenko, or of his unconventional and presumably "undignified" story of how the German C. in C. at Stalingrad surrendered. Instead, it merely says that the Univermag was surrounded, and that while the firing was continuing, Paulus's A.D.C. "came out of the basement and expressed his willingness to negotiate. Soon afterwards representatives of the Soviet Command arrived on the spot and presented an ultimatum which was

accepted by the German command. After all formalities had been completed, Field-

Marshal Paulus, his Chief of Staff Lieut-General Schmidt, and his A.D.C. Colonel Adam, together with a group of staff officers, were delivered to the H.Q. of the 64th Army."

(IVOVSS, vol. 3, p. 61.)]

One of the sulking ones in the background then said something about hunger and cold.

When somebody suggested that the Russian Army was perhaps better than the German

Army and certainly better led, von Arnim snorted and went almost purple with rage. I then asked how he was being treated. Again he snorted. "The officers," he said reluctantly, "are correct. But the Russian soldiers— das sind Diebe, das sind Halunken.

So eine Schweinerei!" He fumed. "Impudent thieves! They stole all my things. Eine Schweinerei!" Vier Koffer! Four suitcases, and they stole them all. The soldiers, I mean,"

he added as a concession. "Not the Russian officers. Die Offiziere sind ganz korrekt,"

These people had looted the whole of Europe; but what was that compared with his four suitcases? When a Chinese correspondent asked about Japan, he said stiffly, with another devastating glare: "We immensely admire our gallant Japanese allies for their brilliant victories over the English and the Americans, and wish them many more victories." Then he was asked what all those crosses and mantelpiece ornaments were, and he rattled them off one after another—the golden frame with the black spider of a swastika was, he said, the Deutsche Kreuz in Gold, and the Führer himself had designed it. "One would have thought that you'd have a slight grudge against the Führer," somebody suggested. He glared and merely said: "The Führer is a very great man, and if you have any doubts, you will soon have occasion to put them aside." The man was one of the few German generals who was to keep completely aloof, during the rest of the war, from the Free German

Committee.

One thing was astonishing about these generals. They had been captured only a couple of days before—and yet they looked healthy and not at all undernourished. Clearly,

throughout the agony of Stalingrad, when their soldiers were dying of hunger, they had continued to have more or less regular meals. There could be no other explanation for their normal, or almost normal, weight and appearance.

The only man who looked in a poor shape was Paulus himself. We weren't allowed to

speak to him [ I later learned that he had firmly refused to make any statement.]; he was only shown to us so that we could testify that he was alive and had not committed

suicide. He stepped out of a large cottage—it was more like a villa— gave us one look, then stared at the horizon, and stood on the steps for a minute or two, in a rather awkward silence, with two other officers, one of whom was General Schmidt, his chief of staff.

Paulus looked pale and sick, and had a nervous twitch in his left cheek. He had a more natural dignity than the others, and wore only one or two decorations. The cameras

clicked and a Russian officer politely dismissed him, and he went back into the cottage.

The others followed and the door closed behind him. It was over.

In the village the soldiers were joking about some of the German generals. "They're damn lucky.," one of them said, "living in decent nouses, and getting three big meals a day.

And some of them have still got plenty of cheek. I must tell you a funny story. It's a fact.

They have a girl barber—a Russian Army girl—to go and shave them every morning.

One of them got fresh with her the very first day, and pinched her bottom. She resented it and slapped his face. He's now so scared of having his throat cut that he won't shave any more, and is growing a beard! "

We were driven to another village where we were received by General Malinin, General Rokossovsky's chief of staff. Malinin had a strong, typically North-Russian face; he was a native of Yaroslavl, and was now forty-three. He had fought in the Civil War, and had attended the Military Academy for two years in 1931-3; he fought in Finland, and had been with Rokossovsky during the Battle of Moscow. Later, he was to become Zhukov's

chief of staff and, in that capacity, took part in the capture of Berlin.

For the last two or three days "Cannae" had suddenly become a catchword with the Red Army; the papers were full of it and Stalingrad was being described as an ideal "Cannae"

operation, the most perfect since Hannibal's. Malinin also talked about it; it seemed almost as odd to hear this former Yaroslavl peasant lad talk of Cannae, here in the middle of the Don steppes, as if he had suddenly started reciting the Aeneid... He then paid a tribute to Stalin, under whose direction this operation had been carried out and then spoke with obvious feeling of the ordinary Russian soldiers:

The network of roads and railways (he said), was very weak; and yet there was

never a shortage of food, munitions or petrol. Every soldier, every driver, every railwayman understood the tremendous aim before us. The railwaymen ran more

trains than seems humanly conceivable. The lorry-drivers who, normally, should

not work more than ten hours a day in winter, often went on working on our

transport columns for twenty-four hours on end.

He was certain that the Germans could have broken out of Stalingrad at the early stages of the encirclement, if Hitler had allowed it.

Asked about allied equipment and supplies, Malinin said that there were "a certain amount of American food", a few Dodge lorries, and a few Churchill tanks—they were good, but there were only very few of them.

As we now know from German sources, one of the immediate consequences of the

encirclement of the German forces at Stalingrad in November was an extreme shortage of winter clothing there. In November, seventy-six railway wagons of winter clothing had got stuck at Yasinovataya railway station, seventeen at Kharkov, forty-one at Kiev, and nineteen at Lwow. The German High Command, not wanting to give the Stalingrad

troops the idea that they would not win the battle before winter, had been in no hurry to send them winter clothing. The combination of cold and very low rations— towards the end, these were reduced to two ounces of bread a day and scraps of horse-flesh (with the generals receiving, in theory, five ounces of bread)—enormously increased the death-rate among the Germans especially in January. Not that the cold was uniformly intense. It was very cold (minus 20° to minus 25° centigrade) in the second half of December; it was much milder during the first half of January (usually between 5° and 10° below), but became extremely cold after that, the temperature falling at times to minus 25 °, 30° and 40°. And even 45°.

On the night of February 4 I learned what 44° of frost means in practice, and what it must have meant to the Germans at Stalingrad—and to the Russians for that matter; for it

would be a great mistake to imagine that a Russian—no matter how well clad— likes 44°

of frost...

We set out at 3 p.m. on our fifty mile trek from General Malinin's headquarters to

Stalingrad. Our Army driver said we would make it in four to five hours; it took us nearer thirteen.

There were half-a-dozen of us in a wretched van, without any seats or benches, sitting or half-lying on bags or pieces of luggage. Every hour it became colder and colder. To add to our misery the back door of the van had no glass in it; it was almost as cold as driving in an open car.

It was a pity not to travel through this battle area during the day, but it couldn't be helped.

Even so, I remember that night as one of my strangest experiences during the whole war.

For one thing, I had never known such cold in all my life.

In the morning it had been only minus 20°, and then it was minus 30°, then minus 35°, then minus 40° and finally minus 44°. One has to experience 44° of frost to know what it means. Your breath catches. If you breathe on your glove, a thin film of ice immediately forms on it. We couldn't eat anything, because all our food—bread, sausage and eggs—

had turned into stone. Even wearing valenki and two pairs of woollen socks, you had to move your toes all the time to keep the circulation going. Without valenki frostbite would have been certain, and the Germans had no valenki. To keep your hands in good condition, you had to clap them half the time or play imaginary scales. Once I took out a pencil to write down a few words: the first word was all right, the second was written by a drunk, the last two were the scrawl of a paralytic; quickly I blew on my purple fingers and put them back in the fur-lined glove.

And as you sit there in the van all huddled up and feeling fairly comfortable, you cannot bear to move, except your fingers and toes, and give your nose an occasional rub; a kind of mental and physical inertia comes over you; you feel almost doped. And yet you have to be on the alert all the time. For instance, I suddenly found the frost nibbling at my knees: it had got the right idea of attacking the tiny area between the end of my additional underwear and the beginning of the valenki!... Your only real ally, apart from clothes, on such occasions is the vodka bottle. And, bless it, it didn't freeze, and even a frequent small sip made a big difference. One could see what it must be like to fight in such conditions. For the last stage of the Battle of Stalingrad had been fought in weather only a little milder than it was on that February night.

The nearer we got to Stalingrad, the more bewildering was the traffic on the snow-bound road. This area, in which the battle had raged only so very recently, was now hundreds of miles from the front, and all the forces in Stalingrad were now being moved— towards Rostov and the Donets. About midnight we got stuck in a traffic jam. And what a

spectacle that road presented—if one could still call it a road! For what was the original road and what was part of the adjoining steppe that had been taken in by this traffic—

most of it moving west, but also some moving east—was not easy to determine. Between the two streams of traffic, there was now an irregular wall of snow that had been thrown up there by wheels and hoofs. Weird-looking figures were regulating the traffic—soldiers in long white camouflage cloaks and pointed white hoods; horses, horses and still more horses, blowing steam and with ice round their nostrils, were wading through the deep snow, pulling guns and gun-carriages and large covered wagons; and hundreds of lorries with their headlights full on. To the side of the road an enormous bonfire was burning, filling the air with clouds of black smoke that ate into your eyes; and shadow-like figures danced round the bonfire warming themselves; then others would light a plank at the

bonfire, and start a little bonfire of their own, till the whole edge of the road was a series of small bonfires. Fire! How happy it made people on a night like this! Soldiers jumped off their lorries to get a few seconds of warmth, and have the dirty black smoke blow in their faces; then they would run after their lorry and jump on again.

Such was the endless procession coming out of Stalingrad: lorries, and horse sleighs and guns, and covered wagons, and even camels pulling sleighs—several of them stepping

sedately through the deep snow as though it were sand. Every conceivable means of

transport was being used. Thousands of soldiers were marching, or rather walking in

large irregular crowds, to the west, through this cold deadly night. But they were cheerful and strangely happy, and they kept shouting about Stalingrad and the job they had done.

Westward, westward! How many, one wondered, would reach the end of the road? But

they knew that the direction was the right one; perhaps few were yet thinking of Berlin, but many must have been thinking of their homes in the Ukraine. In their valenki, and padded jackets, and fur caps with the earflaps hanging down, carrying tommy-guns, with watering eyes, and hoarfrost on their lips, they were going west. How much better it felt than going east! Yet from the west others were coming—these were merely a trickle. But they also had their story to tell—these peasants in horse-sleighs and horse-carts, and these citizens of Stalingrad walking or driving home through the night—driving home into the ruins. And around all this bustle of trucks, and horse-sleighs, and covered wagons, and camels, and soldiers shouting, and soldiers swearing, and soldiers laughing and dancing joyfully round the bonfires filling the air with acrid smoke, lay the silent snow-covered steppe; and, as the headlights shone on the steppe, and you looked, you saw dead horses in the snow, and dead men, and the shattered engines of war. We were now in the

"pocket". And, ahead of us, the searchlights were spanning the sky —the sky of Stalingrad.

It was not till 4 a.m. that we reached Stalingrad. It was terribly cold, and the night was pitch-black, except for a few dim lights here and there. Dazed with cold, we stepped out of our van. Somebody shouted a few yards away; somebody else waved a lantern. "Two here," the man with the lantern said, "two more farther along." He lit up a hole in the ground. "Go down there, and get warm." The hole was little wider than a man's body.

Sliding on the slippery boards, and clutching at the ice-covered sides of the tunnel, we slithered down into the dugout, a drop of twenty or twenty-five feet. Warmth! How cosy the miserable hole looked, and how sweet the fumes of the makhorka smelled! There were four men down there— two of them sleeping on bunks, the other two crouching by

the small iron stove. Both of these were young fellows—one almost a boy, with a little fair down on his chin. The other one, Nikolai, was a tougher soldier, though scarcely more than twenty-three. The other two yawned and fell asleep again. We were offered

two of the bunks, covered with thick brown army blankets; but the dugout, lit by a

kerosene lamp made of a shellcase, with its top flattened to catch the wick, was crowded, and we sat up most of the time. Nikolai treated us to hot tea out of old cans and, once we had thawed, we vaguely began to take things in. These men belonged to one of the guards regiments that had just completed the liquidation of the German 6th Army, and were now having a few quiet days before being sent on to the front. "When it gets light," said Nikolai, "you'll be able to see the Barricades and the Tractor Plant over there; it looks as if they were standing, but they're gone. There's nothing left of Stalingrad; not a thing. If I had any say in the matter, I'd rebuild Stalingrad somewhere else; it would save a lot of trouble. And I'd leave this place as a museum."

"It's funny," said the younger boy, "to think how quiet it is now. Only three days ago there was still fighting going on. This is a lousy dugout; it's one our people built. The German dugouts are much better. In these last weeks, they hated coming into the open; they can't stand the cold... Filthy, dirty; you wouldn't believe in what filth they lived there. Scared of the cold, and scared of our snipers, and of katyusha, of course." The lad shook his head and gave a boyish giggle. "Funny blokes, really. Coming to conquer Stalingrad, wearing patent-leather shoes. Thought it would be a joy-ride. Just go and have a look at them at Pitomnik. Parasites!" he concluded with that favourite Red Army man's word, a word coined back in '41.

"Katyusha", said Nikolai, "has done a wonderful job. We got an enormous crowd of them encircled at Gumrak, and they wouldn't surrender. So we got fifty or sixty katyushas round them, and let fly... My God, you should have seen the result! Or else we gunners would go up to their pillboxes and smash them up at thirty yards. It was really the guns that did the main job in this liquidation; we had complete superiority in artillery. But they can be tough, for all that. No, they don't like surrendering, not they! On the last day we got to a house where there were fifty officers; they kept firing and firing. It was only when four of our tanks came right up to the house that they put up their arms. Ah, well,"

he said, sipping hot tea out of the can, "just one more Stalingrad, and they'll be finished!"

"They were in a bad way all right," said the third man, who now woke up—a dark Armenian with a hooked nose, dark beady eyes and a funny accent. "Down at Karpovka, the Germans were eating cats. They were hungry and very cold, and many died of the

cold. The local people somehow managed to survive: they had hidden chunks of frozen

horse-flesh; and had to manage on that. It was better than cats, anyway. An old woman who lived in a dugout there said the Germans took her dog away and ate it. Yet the

German Commandant kept a cow, and he wouldn't allow it to be slaughtered; it made the Fritzes very angry. In the end he had to give way, though. There was also an old priest there, and back in August the Germans opened a church for him. He used to pray for the victory of the Christ-beloved Hosts—which might have meant anything. Some of the

people thought it was a great joke."

The soldiers laughed. "Never mind," said Nikolai. "It may now soon be over. I am a factory worker and when we recapture Kharkov, I hope I get my old job back. All very well sitting in trenches and dugouts. But I've been at it since 1940. It's been a long road to Stalingrad, seeing I started this war at Lwow. I was stationed there before the war. Queer lot, the Poles. Before the war, we had to deport the more unreliable elements—all sorts of people. They kept saying: 'We don't want to be either German or Soviet'. That's

understandable. But then why, I ask you, when the Germans were coming in at one end

of the city, and we were leaving from the other end, did the Poles—youngsters mostly, boys and even girls of fifteen—keep firing at us from every window? Of course, there are different kinds of Poles; some were very friendly and hospitable; it's a question of class, I suppose... "

It was odd to hear again about this old, old Russo-Polish enmity, even here, in a dugout in the ruins of Stalingrad...

In the end, we snatched a couple of hours' sleep, and about 8 a.m. crawled up the slippery tunnel. Here was Stalingrad.

*

It wasn't quite what I had expected. For a moment, I was dazzled by the sun shining on the snow. We were in one of those Garden Cities which the Russians had lost in

September. Most of the cottages and trees had been completely smashed. To the right, in the distance, there were large imposing-looking blocks of five or six-storey buildings; they were, in reality, the shells of the buildings of central Stalingrad. On the left, a couple of miles away, there rose a large number of enormously high factory chimneys; one had the impression that there was, over there, a live industrial town; but under the chimneys there was nothing but the ruins of the Tractor Plant. Chimneys are hard to hit, and these were standing, seemingly untouched. It was still very cold, though a little less so than during the night.

At length we drove off, down towards the Volga, through the wreckage of the Garden

City and past some smashed warehouses and railway buildings. The wind from across the Volga had swept much of the country bare, and the earth was deadly-frozen with patches of snow here and there, and a pale-blue sky above. A few frozen dead Germans were still lying by the roadside. We crossed the railway-line. Here were railway carriages and

engines piled on top of each other, in an inextricable tangle of metal. High cylindrical oil tanks standing alongside the battered railway-line were crumpled up like discarded old cartons and riddled with shell-holes, and some had fallen down completely. On the other side of the road was a honeycomb of trenches and dugouts and shell-holes and bomb-craters; and then, beyond the railway, the road made a sharp hairpin bend, and before us was the white icebound Volga, with the misty bare trees of the delta-land on the other side, and, beyond it, the white steppes stretching far into Asia.

The Volga! Here was the scene of one of the grimmest episodes of the war: the Stalingrad lifeline. The remnants of it were still there: those barges and steamers, most of them smashed, frozen into the ice. Now a thin trickle of traffic was calmly driving across the ice: cars and horse-sleighs, and some soldiers on foot. The Volga was frozen over, but not entirely—not even after the fierce frost of the past fortnight. There were still a few shining blue patches of water, from which women were carrying pails. We drove down

from the cliffs to the Volga beach, crowded with hundreds of German "trophy" cars and lorries, and were now on Russian soil that the enemy had never taken.

That night we saw General Chuikov, a tough, thick-set type of Red Army officer, but

with a good deal of bonhomie, a sense of humour and a loud laugh. He had a golden smile: all his teeth were crowned in gold, and they glittered in the light of the electric lamps. For there was electric light in this large dugout built into the cliff facing the Volga, which had been his headquarters during the latter stages of the battle. With him was General Krylov, his chief of staff, who had also survived the siege of Sebastopol.

Chuikov gave us his whole evening and talked solidly for at least an hour and a half describing the whole progress of the Battle of Stalingrad. Since then he has published a full account of the battle, from which I have quoted in an earlier chapter; so I shall mention here only a few specially characteristic points of his story, as told immediately after the German capitulation. The story he told us then was, in essence, the same as that in the book, though then he did not allow himself various indiscretions, particularly about his fellow-generals and about the very uneven morale in the Red Army during the earlier stages of the 1942 campaign, which do appear in the book. There was, however, one

small but significant detail. When asked whether Stalin had visited the city during the siege, as rumour had it, Chuikov then replied: "No. But Khrushchev and Malenkov were both here, practically all the time between September 12 and December 20. Stalin,

meantime, was working on the gigantic offensive operation of which you can now see the first results.

[ Malenkov's presence is not mentioned either in the official history or any other recently published accounts. Though not yet a Politburo member, he was, as member of the GKO, even more important.]

He spoke of the important role played by the 62nd Army in slowing down the German

advance through the Don country in July and August, then of the great German onslaught on Stalingrad on September 14, and of various stages of the battle.

Then he came to the story of the 14th of October:

It was the bloodiest and most ferocious day in the whole battle. Along a front of four to five kilometres, they threw in five brand-new infantry divisions and two tank divisions, supported by masses of infantry and planes... That morning you could not hear the

separate shots or explosions; the whole thing merged into one continuous deafening

roar... In a dugout the vibration was such that a tumbler would fly into a thousand pieces.

That day sixty-one men in my headquarters were killed. After four or five hours of this stunning barrage, the Germans advanced one and a half kilometres, and finally broke

through at the Tractor Plant. Our men did not retreat a step here, and if the Germans still advanced, it was over the dead bodies of our men. But the German losses were so great that they could not keep up the power of their blow, and were not able to widen their salient along the Volga.

He paid tributes to several of the Stalingrad divisions—to Zholudev's which had

defended the Tractor Plant almost to the last man, to Ludnikov's, to Rodimtsev's, and many others, adding rather pointedly that although Rodimtsev's division had played an enormous part in "saving" Stalingrad in September, "there was no division which had not also "saved" Stalingrad at one time or another.

[Then, as later, Chuikov felt that Rodimstev had been given a disproportionately large share in the press accounts of the Battle of Stalingrad—at the expense of others whose military record was at least as remarkable. In his book he explains how this happened: at the height of the fighting in October and November, Soviet correspondents were not

allowed to enter the most dangerous areas in Stalingrad, and had to stay in the more quiet southern part of the city, then held by the remnants of the Rodimtsev Division. They had plenty of time to talk to Rodimtsev—and to write him up.]

Chuikov also said that after the great counter-offensive had started to the north and south, things inside Stalingrad became much easier; all the same, the 62nd Army had been

ordered to "activise" its front with constant attacks on the Germans now encircled in the Stalingrad "pocket". Chuikov spoke of his men with a note of fatherly affection. He was also popular with the soldiers; many Stalingrad soldiers later told me that they admired him immensely for his extraordinary personal bravery, and for his self-control— "There isn't another man in a thousand who wouldn't have lost his head on that 14th of October."

I was not to see Chuikov again until June 1945; by then he was one of the conquerors of Berlin. The prosperous abandoned Nazi villas with their rose and jasmine bushes and the motor boats on the Wannsee seemed a million miles away from the dead frozen winter

soil of that night at Stalingrad, from that icebound Volga, into which the wreckage of barges and steamers was frozen.

"It's been a long and a hard way," said Chuikov that day in Berlin. "But mind you," he added, flashing his gold teeth, "speaking of those barges and steamers, it wasn't as bad as you think. It was a devil of a job getting the stuff to Stalingrad, but we got ninety per cent across for all that! "

The morning after our evening with Chuikov I climbed up to the little war memorial they were putting up on top of the cliff. A Russian soldier and two German prisoners were working on it. One had a growth of black beard, the other of reddish beard. A little Bashkir soldier with a strong humorous Mongol face and deep laughing slanting eyes

came up to me and started telling me in broken Russian how he had fought at the Red

October Plant during the worst of the Stalingrad Battle. Then he said, pointing at the two Fritzes digging the frozen earth round the memorial: "Can you talk their language?"

"Yes." "Then come and talk to them." "Na, wie geht's?" Cheerfully, with a look of surprise, but emphatically the dark German said: "Ganz gut.'" "So you haven't been murdered by the Russians after all?" "No," he said, cheerfully again. I translated to the Bashkir. "To think what they've done. During the evacuation they sank a steamer on the Volga, with three thousand women and kids. Nearly all killed or drowned," he said, "and now they're wearing our valenki." True enough, both of them were wearing valenki. One was wearing a dirty German grey-green overcoat, but below it were all sorts of bits of clothing, and the other wore a padded Russian army jacket, and they both had fur caps of sorts. "Yes," said Black Stubble, "the Russians gave us these valenki. Die sind prima!"

They were both from Berlin; I asked if they still thought Hitler the greatest man in the world. They protested vigorously; Red Stubble said he had once been a Young

Communist, and Black Stubble said he had been a Social Democrat. "Ach, all the misery that Hitler has brought to the world and to Germany," Red Stubble said sen tenuously.

"Stalingrad—yes, but in Germany it's just as bad: Cologne and Düsseldorf and parts of Berlin, and it's going from bad to worse." They were both on the skinny side, but looked reasonably fit, and said they were getting plenty of food now, and were surprised at being so well treated. The Russian sergeant who was in charge of the two Germans had been

listening to our conversation with a touch of tolerant amusement. Now he called them back to get on with the job. "How are they?" I said to him. "They're all right, nichevo.

Ludi kak ludi. (Like any other people)".

In and around the Red October Plant fighting had gone on for weeks. Trenches ran

through the factory yards and through the workshops themselves; and now at the bottom of the trenches there still lay frozen green Germans and frozen grey Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes; and there were helmets, Russian and German, lying among

the brick debris, and now half-filled with snow. There was barbed wire here, and half-uncovered mines, and shell cases, and tortuous tangles of twisted steel girders. How anyone could have survived here was hard to imagine; and somebody pointed to a wall, with some names written on it, where one of the units had died to the last man. But now everything was silent and dead in this fossilised hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure.

It was still 30° below zero. That afternoon we also went up the deadly slopes of Mamai Hill along a narrow path about 100 yards long. Already on the summit the Russians had erected a rough wooden obelisk painted bright-blue, with a red star on top. Among the fractured stumps of fruit-trees lay more helmets, and shell-cases, and shell splinters and other metal junk. There were patches of snow on the ploughed-up frozen ground, but no dead except for a solitary large head, completely blackened with time, and its white teeth grinning; had he been a Russian or a German? A major said that the Russians had been buried, but that 1,500 Germans were still stacked up on the other side of the hill. How many thousands of shells had pierced this ground where only six months before the

water-melons were ripening? A Russian tank was standing there, half-way up the hill, facing the summit, and burned-out.

I remember, we then drove into central Stalingrad, along a long, long avenue with

shattered trees on either side, running parallel to the Volga. We passed tramcars—many of them, all blasted, smashed and burned out; had they been standing here since the great bombing of August 23? ... One could see it now: Stalingrad was one of the modern cities of Russia; its entire centre, like its factories, had been built in the last ten or twelve years.

Here were large blocks of flats, all burned out, of course, and public buildings in the main square, with the wrecked railway station at one end. This, too, had changed hands several times in deadly fighting in September... In the centre of the square there was a frozen fountain with the half-shattered statues of children still dancing round it.

We got out here. There was an enormous heap of litter piled up in one corner of the

square—letters, and maps and books, and snapshots of German children, and of German

middle-aged women with smirking self-contented faces standing on what looked like a

bridge over the Rhine, and a green Catholic prayer book called Spiritual Armour for Soldiers, and a letter from a child called Rudi writing that "now that you have taken die grosse Festung Sewastopol the war will soon be ended against die verfluchten Bolschewiken, die Erzfeinde Deutschlands."

We walked down the main avenue running south, between enormous blocks of burned-

out houses, towards the other square. In the middle of the pavement lay a dead German.

He must have been running when a shell hit him. His legs still seemed to be running, though one was now cut off above the ankle by a shell, and, with the splintered white bone sticking out of the frozen red flesh, it looked like something harmlessly familiar from a butcher's window. His face was a bloody frozen mess, and beside it was a frozen pool of blood.

In the other big square some houses had been wrecked, but two were standing there,

squat and solid, though burned-out: the Red Army House and the Univermag Department

Store.

After visiting the scene of Paulus's surrender and talking to Lieutenant Yelchenko who had captured the Field-Marshal, we went out into the street again. Everything around was strangely silent. The dead German with his leg blown off was still lying some distance away. We crossed the square and went into the yard of the large burned-out building of the Red Army House; and here one realised particularly clearly what the last days of Stalingrad had been to so many of the Germans. In the porch lay the skeleton of a horse, with only a few scraps of meat still clinging to its ribs. Then we came into the yard. Here lay more horses' skeletons and, to the right, there was an enormous horrible cesspool—

fortunately frozen solid. And then, suddenly, at the far end of the yard I caught sight of a human figure. He had been crouching over another cesspool, and now, noticing us, he

was hastily pulling up his pants, and then he slunk away into the door of a basement. But as he passed, I caught a glimpse of the wretch's face—with its mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension. For a moment, I wished the whole of Germany were there to see it. The man was perhaps already dying. In that basement into which he slunk there were still two hundred Germans—dying of hunger and frostbite. "We haven't had time to deal with them yet," one of the Russians said. "They'll be taken away tomorrow, I suppose." And, at the far end of the yard, beside the other cesspool, behind a low stone wall, the yellow corpses of skinny Germans were piled up—men who had died in that

basement—about a dozen wax-like dummies. We did not go into the basement itself—

what was the good? There was nothing we could do for them.

This scene of filth and suffering in that yard of the Red Army House was my last glimpse of Stalingrad. I remembered the long anxious days of the summer of 1942, and the nights of the London blitz, and the photographs of Hitler, smirking as he stood on the steps of the Madeleine in Paris, and the weary days of '38 and '39 when a jittery Europe would tune in to Berlin and hear Hitler's yells accompanied by the cannibal roar of the German mob. And there seemed a rough but divine justice in those frozen cesspools with their diarrhoea, and those horses' bones, and those starved yellow corpses in the yard of the Red Army House at Stalingrad.

Chapter VII "CAUCASUS ROUND TRIP"

"Kaukasus— hin und zurück" —Caucasus round trip: that's what German soldiers used to say with a touch of irony and some bitterness when it was all over. The German invasion of the Caucasus had lasted six months; in August 1942 they overran vast territories there as quickly as they were to evacuate them again in January-February 1943.

Their hurried evacuation of the Caucasus was, of course, a direct result of the

encirclement of the Germans at Stalingrad and the subsequent recapture of the Don

country by the Russians. If the Russians had succeeded in January 1943 in closing the

"Rostov bottleneck" and, better still, in also occupying the Taman Peninsula, that Germany escape route to the Crimea across the Kerch Straits, all the German forces in the Caucasus would have been trapped.

In the last five months of 1942, with attention focused on Stalingrad, the Soviet press gave relatively little space to the fighting in the Caucasus, and, for many years

afterwards, very little was written about the Caucasus campaign. Coming on top of the loss of Rostov at the end of July 1942, its first phase was one of the Russians' bitterest and most humiliating memories. Despite Stalin's "Not a step back" order flashed to every unit of the Red Army at the end of July, the Russians were on the run, throughout August, in the Kuban and the Northern Caucasus as they had not been since some of the worst

days of 1941. The communiqués during August were unspeakably depressing: it was

clear that the Kuban country—the richest remaining agricultural area this side of the Urals—was being abandoned "under the pressure of superior enemy forces". By August 20 an enormous territory had been overrun by von Kleist's Heeresgruppe A; the whole of the Kuban country was now in German hands, and the Germans were penetrating into the Caucasus proper and driving on, in the west, to the Black Sea coast, after capturing Krasnodar, the capital of the Kuban, and Maikop, the third most important oil centre in the Caucasus. In the east, they were on their way to the two great oil centres, Grozny and Baku.

When the Russians had failed to stop the Germans on the Don at the beginning of

August, the German advance through the Kuban had assumed all the characteristics of the blitzkrieg. The Germans had overwhelming superiority in tanks and aircraft, and only here and there, particularly along the rivers, did the Russians fight a rearguard action of sorts, but without much effect. According to Russian accounts, the roads were crowded with thousands of refugees, trying to escape, with their cattle, to the mountains; others stormed trains at every railway station; but, in reality, the German advance was so rapid that probably not very many civilians actually got away.

[According to General Tyulenev, many thousands got away all the same, but in the worst possible conditions. "Even the smallest railway stations were cluttered with thousands of refugees. Despite intensive German bombing, and though having exhausted their meagre food supplies, all these people were trying to get away from the German avalanche."

There was, he further relates, such an influx of refugees—weeping women and children

—into the Caspian ports like Makhach-Kala and Baku, where they were desperately

hoping to be taken across the Caspian, that a serious danger of epidemics arose; the local Party organisations made a frantic effort to house a large number of these refugees in local kolkhozes and to ship the rest to Krasnvodsk, on the other side of the Caspian, and beyond. (I. V. Tyulenev, Cherez Tri Voiny (Through Three Wars) (Moscow, 1960), p.

176.)]

For the same reason it was practically impossible to evacuate any of the industries and the most the Russians could do in Maikop was to blow up the derricks and other

installations and destroy what oil reserves were still there; the German oil engineers who arrived soon afterwards found that it would take a very long time before Maikop could produce any oil again.

To the Russians, the abandonment of the Kuban and the northern fringes of the Caucasus proper were, sentimentally, a particularly painful and shameful memory; and yet, almost all German writers on the Caucasus campaign are agreed that the Russians did the only sensible thing they could do in the circumstances, which was not to allow themselves to be trapped by the highly mobile advancing German forces, and to escape to the relative safety of the mountains.

As it turned out, the German plan for the conquest of the Caucasus was over-ambitious. It was one of Hitler's less happy brainwaves. His original plan, as we have seen, had been to capture Stalingrad first, with far larger forces than were ultimately sent there, and then to overrun the Caucasus, chiefly from the Caspian side, to begin with, with Grozny and

Baku as No. 1 target. After the easy capture of Rostov, Hitler imagined that the Russians were so weak that he could divide his forces in two, one to capture Stalingrad and the other to conquer the Caucasus. He had long had his eye on the Caucasian oil and thought that, by cutting the Volga supply route and also capturing the three Caucasian oil cities, he could knock out Russia economically in a very short time. The capture of Baku was scheduled for the middle or end of August.

There is no doubt that the Germans again underrated the Russian capacity of resistance; in the Caucasus, as elsewhere, they tried to do too many things all at once: a) in the east, break through to Grozny and then, along the Caspian, to Baku; b) in the middle, break through to Vladikavkaz (Orjonikidze) and cross the great Caucasus mountain range along the Georgian Military Highway into Transcaucasia and, perhaps simultaneously, along

the parallel Ossetin Military Highway, as well as further west across the mountain passes of Klukhor, Marukh and Sancharo—a straight cut to the Black Sea coast between Sochi

and Sukhumi, whence the Germans could then overrun Transcaucasia from the west and

reach the Turkish border; c) in the west, to break through to the Black Sea at Novorossisk and, farther south—which was much more important—at Tuapse, whence they could

follow the Black Sea coast all the way to Batumi.

General Tyulenev, the Commander of the Transcaucasian Front, has since then written

that if, instead of trying to do too many things all at once, the Germans had concentrated the bulk of their forces in the east, they might have broken through to Grozny and even to Baku. Instead, Tyulenev argues, they were determined to grab the Black Sea coast as

well, partly in order to eliminate the Russian Black Sea Navy, which would have had to scuttle itself, and partly in order to get Turkey into the war on the German side. Tyulenev actually refers to certain units in the German armies invading the Caucasus which were held in reserve for "operations in the Middle East and for joining up with Rommel's forces in Egypt!" It is scarcely surprising that Churchill was extremely worried about the German advance into the Caucasus and offered Stalin a large Anglo-American air force which would "defend the Caucasus". And, as we have seen, Stalin did not reject the proposal off-hand.

The Russian command obviously felt that the danger of a German breakthrough to

Grozny and Baku was very real. Throughout August and September 90,000 civilians

were mobilised for day-and-night work on fortifications, gun emplacements, anti-tank ditches, et cetera, at Grozny, Makhach-Kala and the "Debrent Gate" on the Caspian, as well as at Baku itself, round which ten defence lines were built. In fact, however, the Germans were stopped at Mozdok, about sixty-five miles west of Grozny, and were

prevented, during weeks and months of intense fighting, from enlarging the bridgehead they had seized on the south side of the Terek river, and so driving on to Grozny. It came as a complete surprise to the Germans that the Russians had, in addition to the armies that had escaped them, sufficient reserves in the Caucasus to stop them at Mozdok—a place-name which, like Stalingrad, first appeared in the communiqué on August 25, and

continued to figure in subsequent communiqués right up to January.

The Russian troops at Mozdok belonged to the so-called Northern Group of General

Tyulenev's "Transcaucasian Front". The troops that had retreated from north to south belonged to two "Fronts", the "Southern Front" under the luckless Marshal Budienny, and the "North-Caucasian Front" under General Malinovsky. Malinov-sky was to play a very active part in the subsequent Caucasus fighting, but Budienny appears again to have soon faded out of the picture, since the troops of the "Southern Front" were merged on August 11 with Malinovsky's armies or with the "Black Sea Group" under General Petrov (of Sebastopol fame) which formed part of the "Transcaucasian Front". This "Black Sea Group" held the coast and the adjoining mountains between Novorossisk and Sochi.

Not only did the Russians have considerable reserves in the Caucasus, which stopped the Germans at the most crucial points-after everything, or nearly everything, that was

strategically expendable had been expended—but, from September right on to the end of the campaign, they succeeded in bringing very substantial reinforcements to the

Caucasus, despite enormous transport difficulties. Men and a great deal of heavy

equipment (guns, tanks, et cetera) came across the Caspian from Krasnovodsk to Baku, and thence by train or road; the Russian troops in the west were supplied, broadly, the same way. Mortars, small arms, ammunition and much else came from more or less

improvised factories and workshops in Transcaucasia. Transcaucasia also provided the Russian armies of the Caucasus front with much of their food. Both men and supplies

were also brought by sea from Batumi to Tuapse.

No doubt the German advance had been spectacular throughout August, and in

September the Germans scored a further success in the north-west by capturing the whole Taman Peninsula, as well as the naval base of Novorossisk. Not that they could use the port effectively, since the opposite side of the bay was still held by the Russians, who kept it under shell-fire. But the Germans' desperate attempts to break through to Tuapse, farther south, which was the real key to the Black Sea coast all the way to the Turkish border, failed completely. This failure is attributed by General Tyulenev to several factors; the extreme toughness of the Russian troops and sailors, the natural obstacles on the way to Tuapse (mountains and forests), but above all, perhaps, the stupendous amount of plain spade-work done by both soldiers and civilians in building gun emplacements, digging anti-trench ditches, and in some cases, felling century-old trees over threatened roads. This work was done not only on the road to Tuapse, but along mountain passes, on the road to Baku, and all along the Georgian and Ossetin Military Highways crossing the main mountain range.

Within a few weeks the entire Caucasian theatre of war became a network of defences.

People worked till they nearly collapsed, with bloody rags round their blistered hands.

Sometimes they had little or nothing to eat for days, but they still went on with the work even at night, and despite enemy air-raids... By the beginning of autumn about 100,000

defence works were built, including 70,000 pillboxes and other firing-points. Over 500

miles of anti-tank ditches were dug, 200 miles of anti-infantry obstacles were built, as well as 1,000 miles of trenches. 9,150,000 working days were expended on this work.

[ Tyulenev, op. cit., p. 188.]

Tyulenev pays a special tribute to General Babin, head of the engineering troops of the Transcaucasian Front who succeeded in "sealing up the Caucasus against the enemy's infantry and tanks". He succeeded in this despite the extremely difficult conditions arising from the shortage of implements and explosives.

[When in 1946 I travelled along the Georgian Military Highway, in an army truck from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi, I was indeed amazed at the number of pillboxes that had been dug into the mountainside, back in 1942.]

Thus the Germans failed to break through both to Grozny in the east and to Tuapse in the west. In the "middle", they tried to cross the Caucasus range along three famous mountain passes, but although, from the top of these 9,000-foot high mountains they

could see the Black Sea in the distance, they were held up there, too. Tyulenev describes some particularly ferocious fighting high up in the mountains throughout September, and the enormous difficulties of bringing up supplies to the troops there with little U2 planes or with mules and donkeys. A still more difficult problem was evacuating the wounded.

The blizzards that began to sweep the mountains at the beginning of October forced the Germans to abandon their attempt to break through to the Black Sea across the high

mountain passes.

At the beginning of November the Germans made one final bid to break through to both Grozny and Tbilisi by another route, and to outflank the Russian forces at Mozdok from the south. On November 2 they captured Nalchik, the capital of Kabarda, and pushed on to Vladikavkaz (Orjonikidze), the capital of Northern Ossetia at the northern end of the Georgian Military Highway, and also on the way to Grozny from the south-west. But the Russians had time to regroup, and only a few miles to the west of Vladikavkaz they

delivered a smashing blow at the advancing German armoured columns, and finally

hurled them back to Nalchik. Three well-manned defence lines had been built outside

Vladikavkaz, and Russian tanks and artillery, operating from here, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Germans. The Russians put the German losses during the five days' fighting at 140 tanks, 2,500 motor vehicles and much other equipment, and the German casualties at 5,000 dead.

In any case, the Germans undertook no further offensives after that and went over to the defensive at both Mozdok and Nalchik. They were hoping to resume their conquest of the Caucasus with renewed strength in the spring—if all went well at Stalingrad.

As we have seen, it did not. By the beginning of January, the troops of the "Stalingrad Front", shortly to be renamed "Southern Front" and to be placed under the command of Malinovsky, instead of Yeremenko, were advancing beyond Kotelnikovo towards Salsk

and Tikhoretsk, with the ultimate object of capturing Rostov and of closing the "Rostov Gap" to the German forces in the Caucasus. General Petrov's task was to strike east from the Black Sea coast towards Krasnodar and Tikhoretsk, and join up there with the troops of the "Southern Front", thus not only closing the Rostov Gap but also cutting off the German forces in the Caucasus from the Taman Peninsula, their escape route to the

Crimea. For a large number of reasons this Russian plan failed. The Germans, rapidly transferred strong armoured forces from the Caucasus to the Zimovniki-Salsk-Tikhoretsk area to slow down the Russian advance on both Rostov and Tikhoretsk. After their heavy fighting since the beginning of Manstein's Kotelnikovo offensive, the Russian troops of the "Southern Front" were short of tanks and other equipment, and the new tanks they were asking for were slow in arriving.

With the Stalingrad railway junction still inside the "Stalingrad Bag", there was no railway link with central Russia, and the road communications were slow and very long (about 220 miles from the nearest railhead). As for General Petrov's "Black Sea Group", it was also faced with supply difficulties; the gales on the Black Sea had rendered its chief supply lines precarious and, moreover, heavy rains and floods seriously slowed down its progress towards Krasnodar. This was not liberated by the Russians until

February 12, i.e. over a month after the offensive had begun.

There is much disagreement between German and Russian commentators on the German

withdrawal from the Caucasus; according to the Germans, it was a "planned" withdrawal; according to the Russians it was a "disorderly retreat". In particular, the Russians make much of the complete demoralisation among the Rumanian and Slovak troops which took

part in the German conquest of the Caucasus, and point to the large quantities of

equipment the Germans abandoned in a hurry at certain railway junctions like

Mineralnyie Vody, where the Russians captured 1,500 wagon loads of equipment. But

there is, in fact, little to show that, in their pursuit of the retreating Germans, the Russian troops of the "Northern Group" of the "Transcaucasian Front" (among them those who had fought for months at Mozdok) succeeded in either capturing or destroying many.

Most of the German troops in the Caucasus got away, either through the Rostov Gap, or to the Taman Peninsula. According to German commentators, it was Hitler's pet idea to hold this peninsula with the strongest possible forces as a springboard for a future reconquest of the Caucasus. This is today considered as a cardinal mistake on Hitler's part; instead of staying idle in the Taman Peninsula, these 400,000 troops could have made all the difference to the German's chances in the subsequent fighting on the Don and the Eastern Ukraine.

[ Cf. Pmlippi and Heim, op. cit., p. 203.]

The German withdrawal from the Caucasus was rapid, but still not rapid enough to

prevent the application of "scorched earth" methods on a very considerable scale. In their retreat, the Germans destroyed or half-destroyed a very large number of towns and

villages. Earlier on during their occupation of the Kuban they had confiscated or

"bought" from the population large quantities of food and livestock.

In invading the Caucasus, the Germans had laid great store on the "disaffection" towards Moscow on the part of the various Caucasian nationalities, and indeed the Russians

themselves were far from certain about the loyalty of these people, and some even had doubts about the Cossacks of the Kuban—that "Vendée" of the Russian Civil War where, moreover, the Soviets had had some particularly serious trouble at the time of the

Collectivisation drive.

I remember a significant conversation on the subject with Konstantin Oumansky on July 24, i.e. on one of the blackest days of the Black Summer of 1942.

I must say I am a little worried about the Caucasus. Even when a Russian or an

Ukrainian is not particularly pro-Soviet, he still remains patriotic; he will fight for a United Russia, or the Soviet Union, or whatever you like to call it. But the Tartars in the Crimea are, to a large extent, disloyal. They were economically privileged by the wealthy tourist traffic before the Revolution, and now they have not been so well-off. But they never liked us. It is well-known that during the Crimean War they

gladly "collaborated", as we'd now say, with the English and the French. And, above all, there are religious factors which the Germans have not failed to exploit.

Nor do I trust the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. Like the Crimean Tartars,

they are Moslems, and they still remember the Russian conquest of the Caucasus

which ended not so very long ago—in 1863. The only fully pro-Soviet and pro-

Russian nation in the Caucasus are—for obvious historical reasons—the

Armenians. The Georgians are not so hot.

"What, even with Stalin a Georgian?"

Yes, because a lot of Georgians—well, you know yourself what kind of people they

are. Southerners, like Italians, a lazy, wine-drinking, pleasure-loving bunch. No doubt we have several excellent Georgian generals in the Red Army, and some fine

Georgian soldiers, but they are not altogether typical of the Georgians as a whole...

"And the Cossacks?"

They have their grievances against us. But they are Russian, so they'll be all right.

Maybe a few will rat on us, but certainly not many.

The Soviet authorities were, indeed, rather worried about the Caucasus and, particularly, about the Moslem nationalities there. This uneasiness extended, to some extent, also to certain Moslem nations of Central Asia, particularly the Uzbeks, though not to the

Kazakhs who had much weaker historical and religious traditions of their own than the Uzbeks, and had proved the most "assimilable" of the Central Asian peoples, and had provided some of the toughest soldiers to the Red Army. Altogether, the Kazakh's

military record throughout the war was to prove outstandingly good, and in Stalingrad itself some of the finest soldiers were Central Asians—Bashkirs, Kirghizes and, above all, Kazakhs. The Tartars— i.e. the Volga Tartars, not the Crimean Tartars—also had an excellent record.

[During the first year of the war, military decorations were distributed much less lavishly than later. Up to October 5, 1942, 185,000 persons had been decorated. By nationalities, the list was headed by Russians (128,000), followed by Ukrainians (33,000),

Belorussians (5,400), Jews (5,100), Tartars (2,900), Mordvinians (1,100), Kazakhs

(1,000), Georgians and Armenians (900 each), Latvians, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Karelians

(400 each), Ossetins, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashs (300 each). There followed a dust of

various small or tiny nationalities of Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia, besides 14

Gypsies, 7 Assyrians, 230 Poles, 98 Greeks, 37 Bulgars, 10 Czechs and 9 Spaniards.

(Table from E. Yaroslavsky's Twenty-five Years of the Soviet Régime, Moscow, 1942.)]

Since the rapid loss, during the first weeks of the invasion in 1941, of non-Russian areas like the Baltic Republics, the war had been fought on Russian and Ukrainian territory whose populations could (except in the Western Ukraine) be considered wholly, or

almost wholly, loyal. But with the Germans breaking into the Caucasus and approaching the borders of Asia, the Soviet authorities were faced with a number of new problems.

Their experience of the Crimean Tartars had been an unhappy one, and the question arose how the Caucasus would behave. There also seemed, at this stage, some need to preach loyalty to the Uzbeks, among whom Moslem traditions were still strong. The propaganda among the Uzbeks took on some extravagant forms; thus, on October 31, 1942, the whole second page of Pravda was printed in Uzbek, with a Russian translation opposite. This missive "From the Uzbek People to the Uzbek Soldiers" and signed by leading personalities in Uzbekistan "on behalf of over two million Uzbeks", was an extraordinary piece of florid oriental prose:

Beloved sons of the people, children of our heart!... Remember, your ancestors

preferred to gnaw through the chains with their teeth, rather than live as slaves...

Remember, Hitler is not only the sworn enemy of all the European nations and,

above all, the Slav nations, but he is also the sworn enemy of the peoples of the east.

Behold the fate of the Moslem peoples of the Crimea and the Caucasus; their

peaceful villages are being burned and looted by the Germans. Quickly destroy the enemy, or these beasts will slay your grey-haired grandfathers, and your fathers and mothers, and violate your wives and brides, and crush your innocent babes

underfoot, and destroy your canals, and turn flourishing Uzbekistan into a sun-

scorched desert...

It went on and on for four columns, recalling all the national heroes of the Uzbek people who had valiantly fought against the Mongol conquerors, and the great writers and poets of the Uzbek people, who had lived in the ancient cities of Samarkand and Ferghana and Bokhara, all of which Hitler now intended to destroy. But the main point of this

"missive" was that Hitler was the deadly enemy of the Moslem peoples as could be seen from the atrocities he was committing against the Moslems in the Crimea and the

Caucasus.

Had some German propaganda, one could only wonder, reached Uzbekistan to show that

the Germans were favouring the Moslems in both the Crimea and the Caucasus?

Needless to say, this kind of Soviet propaganda among the peoples of the Caucasus had started even earlier, immediately after the German invasion of the Kuban. All over the Caucasus "anti-Fascist" meetings were being organised. Great publicity was given to the enthusiasm with which all the Caucasian peoples had supported these meetings;

particular prominence was given in the Soviet press to a vast "anti-Fascist" rally at Vladikavkaz at the end of July. There was a curiously appealing, not to say cringing, note in the flattery that was now addressed to the peoples of the Caucasus. Thus, on

September 1, Pravda published this appeal in enormous letters:

Mountain peoples of the Northern Caucasus, Cossacks of the quiet Don, swift

Kuban and stormy Terek; peoples of Kalmukia and Stavropol! Rise for the life-and-

death struggle against the German invaders! May the plains of the Northern

Caucasus and the Caucasus foothills become the grave of the Hitlerite robbers!

On September 3, in an article entitled "The Peoples of the Caucasus and the Stalin Constitution", Pravda wrote:

In the old days, that jewel among the nations—the Caucasus—shone but dimly.

Now it glitters in the constellation of Soviet cultures.

On September 6, in connection with another "anti-Fascist" rally, this time in Transcaucasia, it wrote:

Peoples of Transcaucasia! To the Germans you are merely "natives". The German monster wants to cut the Caucasus armies from the rest of the Red Army, and to cut off the Caucasian nations from the rest of the Soviet family of nations.

There was a clear suggestion in all this that the Soviet authorities were nervous about German policy in the Caucasus, not only vis-à-vis the Moslems, but also the Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis— and even the Cossacks.

This anxiety, as it turned out, was largely unjustified, all the more so as the Germans stayed only a short time in both the Kuban and the Northern Caucasus, and their policy was, to say the least, a confused and contradictory one. Nevertheless the anxiety was not entirely groundless.

We need not deal here with the various grandiose German "schemes" for the Caucasus, whether Rosenberg's or the others, all of which were to remain mere paper theories. All the same, some rather incoherent attempts were made to exploit the Cossacks' "anti-revolutionary past". Savagely anti-Bolshevik Cossack generals of the Civil War days like General Krasnov and General Shkuro were brought to the Kuban, and were expected to

help in converting the Cossacks to "collaboration". Whereas Rosenberg had expressed the view that the Cossacks were essentially Russians, and should, therefore, be treated more harshly than the Ukrainians (whom, unlike Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for the

Ukraine, he chose not to regard as Untermenschen), the German Army adopted the policy that the Cossacks were potential 'friends", who should be exempted from the

Untermensch status. Cossacks were, as far as possible, to be drafted into the German Army. As we have seen, for instance in Kotelnikovo, which was considered a Cossack or semi-Cossack town, the Germans refrained from committing any major atrocities, though they did, in fact, nothing to endear themselves to the population—which they treated with much disdain. As regards "reforms", like abolishing the kolkhozes, they did not go beyond vague promises.

It was, roughly, the same in the Kuban country, except that here certain German officers established an experimental "Cossack District" with a population of about 160,000. All kinds of promises were made, including that of an early dissolution of the kolkhozes.

Although Rosenberg's Ministry, as well as the SS objected to the experiment at first, the Army pursued it until the day in January 1943 when the Germans had to pull out of the Kuban.

A local police force was recruited. By January 1943 the District's borders were to be expanded, and a Cossack Army commander was to be appointed... Far-reaching

reforms were contemplated in agriculture, though, in practice, little was achieved.

Other plans called for the recruitment of 25,000 Cossack volunteers to fight with the German Army, but again there was no time to implement them.

[Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia (London, 1957), p. 300.]

The purpose of this "realistic" Army policy, was, as Alexander Dallin says, to secure as much cannon-fodder for the German Army as possible. He also argues that the

experiment was intended to show that once "the Soviet population was given a chance to work out its own problems... it was generally inclined to work more wholeheartedly with the Germans." He also notes that:

When Kleist's army withdrew from the Kuban considerable numbers of Cossack

refugees joined in the exodus, and by late 1943 more than 20,000 Cossacks—or

rather men claiming to be Cossacks—were fighting in various German-sponsored

formations.

Even so, it is fairly clear from Mr Dallin's account that the great majority of the Cossack population on the Don, Kuban and Terek did not collaborate, and that many, indeed,

offered passive and often active resistance to the Germans. Cossack partisan units were operating in many areas, and some took an active part in the liberation of Krasnodar in February. And even if the Germans succeeded in collecting 20,000 Cossacks—or pseudo-Cossacks—in a vast area of a few million people, the "achievement" can only be regarded as a relative failure. The very fact that many of these "Cossacks" only "claimed to be Cossacks" suggests that the number of real Cossacks of the Don, Kuban and Terek who joined the Germans was not large.

Over 100,000 Cossacks had been in the Red Army since the beginning of the war and

some, like the famous Dovator Corps, which had harassed the Germans for weeks in the Battle of Moscow, had acquired almost legendary fame. Many thousands—among them

most of the Dovator Corps—had died fighting the Germans. No doubt many Cossacks

had mental reservations about the Soviet régime, but in the patriotic atmosphere of 1942

it would have been absurd of the Germans to expect much co-operation from the

Cossacks, with their nationalist Russian traditions.

To expect a sinister émigré adventurer like General Krasnov, head of the "Central Cossack Office" in Berlin to win over the Cossacks and—in the words of another

Cossack adventurer in German pay, Vasili Glazkov—"to recognise the Führer Adolf Hitler as the supreme dictator of the Cossack Nation " was naive, to say the least.

The few "Cossack" bands the Germans did scrape together for the German army were later to become notorious, especially in the Ukraine, for their acts of banditry. Which, in itself, was not, of course, entirely alien to certain Cossack traditions either.

The German courting of the Moslems in the Caucasus was part of Hitler's lunatic

schemes for bringing Turkey into the war and for advancing from the Caucasus into the Middle East; Moslem fighting units were to be formed in the Caucasus and these were to take part in bringing the whole Middle East into the German orbit. On the other hand, Hitler appears to have treated with great scepticism Rosenberg's ideas about a "Berlin-Tbilisi Axis". In December 1942 he said:

I don't know about the Georgians. They do not belong to the Turkic peoples. I

consider only the Moslems to be reliable... I consider the formation of these battalions of purely Caucasian peoples as very risky, but I see no danger in the establishment of purely Moslem units... In spite of the declarations of Rosenberg and the military, I don't trust the Armenians either.

[Quoted by Dallin, op. cit., p. 251.]

The question whether the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis would have co-

operated with the; Germans never came to the test; all we know is that several divisions composed of these nationalities were formed in the autumn of 1942 to fight on the

Russian side, though there were, of course, a number of émigrés—mostly Georgians—

who had come to the Caucasus with the German Army and were waiting for the entry of

the German troops into Baku, Tbilisi and Erevan.

But the Germans did make contact with some of the Moslem nationalities in the Northern Caucasus, as well as with the more-or-less Buddhist Kalmuks to the east of the Kuban.

Their capital of Elista in the sparsely inhabited Kalmuk steppes was occupied by the Germans for about five months, and émigrés like the notorious Prince Tundutov were

busy knocking together Kalmuk military units of sorts for the German Army. Towards

the predominantly Moslem mountaineers of the Northern Caucasus—the Chechens,

Ingushi, Karachai and Balkarians—the German Army adopted a "liberal" policy.

Promises were made for the abolition of the kolkhozes; mosques and churches were to be reopened; requisitioned goods were to be paid for; and the confidence of the people was to be won by "model conduct", especially in respect of women. In the Karachai region a

"Karachai National Committee" was set up. The same happened in the Kabardin-Balkar area, though the Moslem Balkars were more outspokenly pro-German than the mostly

non-Moslem Kabardinians. Although the Germans did not penetrate far into the Chechen-Ingush ASSR (south of Grozny), these two peoples appear to have made no secret of their sympathy for the Germans. They were to suffer for it later, like the peoples who had actually collaborated.

The high point of German-Karachai collaboration was the celebration of Bairam,

the Moslem holiday, in Kislovodsk on October 11... High German officials were

presented with precious gifts by the local committee. The Germans ... pledged the early dissolution of the collective farms and announced the formation of a Karachai volunteer squadron of horsemen to fight with the German Army.

Similarly, on December 18:

The Kurman ceremonies were held at Nalchik, the seat of the local administration of the Kabardino-Balkar area. Again gifts were exchanged, with the local officials

giving the Germans magnificent steeds and receiving in return Korans and captured weapons. Bräutigam (of the Rosenberg Ministry) made a public address about the

lasting bonds of German friendship with the peoples of the Caucasus.

[ Dahin, op. cit., pp. 246-7.]

Exactly a fortnight after this moving ceremony, the Germans abandoned Nalchik and

were on the run.

The Germans apparently amassed only a very small number of soldiers from amongst

their Moslem friends in the Caucasus, and the most active collaborators naturally

followed the German Army in its retreat to the north. The grandiose scheme for the

conquest of the Middle East with the help of the Caucasus mountaineers was off.

The Moslem nationalities whose representatives had fraternised with the Germans were to suffer for it. The "liquidation" of the Moslem areas was decreed by the Supreme Soviet on February 11, 1944. When I visited Kislovodsk, Nalchik, Vladikavkaz and other towns in the Northern Caucasus in 1946, people were still talking of the "liquidation" of the Chechens, Ingushi, Karachais and Balkars. In a few days the NKVD had herded everyone of these nationalities into railway carriages and packed them off "to the east". As a frightened and embittered Kabardinian told me at Nalchik: "It was a terrible business seeing them all—men, women and children— being sent off like this; but you can say it was a tremendously efficient piece of organisation—yes, terrifyingly efficient." "And what about the Kabardinians?" I asked. "Well," he said, "we got away with a few bumps and bruises. Some of our people also did a few foolish things. One Kabardinian prince, who lived high up in the mountains, could think of notliing better than to send a superb white charger to Hitler personally."

In his "secret" report at the XXth Congress, Khrushchev was to refer to these mass deportations in the following terms:

At the end of 1943 ... a decision was taken to deport all the Karachai... The same lot befell, in December 1943, the population of the Autonomous Kalmuk Republic. In

March 1944 all the Chechen and Ingushi people were deported and their

Autonomous Republic liquidated. In April 1944 all Balkars were deported to

faraway places and the Kabardino-Balkar Republic was renamed Kabardinian

Republic. The Ukrainians avoided this fate only because there were too many of

them... Otherwise he (Stalin) would have deported them also.

Not only no Marxist-Leninist, but also no man of common sense can grasp how one

can make whole nations responsible, including women, children, old people,

Communists and Komsomols, and expose them to misery and suffering for the

hostile acts of individual persons or groups of persons.

[ The Dethronement of Stalin (Manchester Guardian reprint, 1956), p. 23.]

These five nationalities—or what was left of them—were, indeed, allowed to return to their homes after Stalin's death. Khrushchev's indignation would perhaps have been more convincing if he had extended it to the fate of two other nationalities, the Crimean Tartars and the Volga Germans; for these were not allowed to return to their homes, either then or later.

[Perhaps there is something in the argument that the German boasts, in 1943, of having left a "fifth column" behind in the Caucasus in the shape of Germany's Moslem friends convinced the Kremlin that something drastic should be done about the "disloyal"

nationalities. A particularly boastful article about Germany's "allies" in the Caucasus appeared in Goebbels's paper Das Reich of February 21, 1943 (cf. Dahin, op. cit., p.

251.)]

PART SIX 1943: Year of Hard Victories— the

Polish Tangle

Chapter I AFTER STALINGRAD.—THE BIRTH OF "STALIN'S

MILITARY GENIUS"

With the victory of Stalingrad the Soviet Union had won her Battle of Survival, and now the war entered an entirely new phase. Anxiety over the ultimate outcome of the war

vanished almost completely; and there were even moments of excessive optimism and

over-confidence, such as those after the Russian liberation of Kharkov in February. Less than a month later, Kharkov was again to be lost.

This setback acted as a reminder that, despite Stalingrad, the Germans were still far from finished, and that there was perhaps some justification, after all, for Churchill's forecast, made at the time of the Stalingrad victory, that the war might last till 1945—a forecast which greatly annoyed the Russians at the time. Nevertheless, nobody in Russia doubted any longer that ultimate victory was now a foregone conclusion; the only question was:

"How long will it take? " And this was inevitably linked with the other question of what Britain and the United States were going to do.

There were moments of optimism, after Stalingrad, when soldiers would say that the Red Army could smash the Germans single-handed, and that Russia would therefore not need to "share the fruits of victory" with anybody. This line was to be discouraged by Stalin himself, who, on one occasion in 1943, bluntly declared that Russia could not win the war by herself.

In 1943, the official Russian attitude to Britain and America was much better than it had been in 1942, when nervousness over the ultimate outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad tended to produce outbursts of bad temper like the whole Hess affair. In 1943, victory—

though still distant—was already in sight, and it was important to start making plans with Britain and America for a peace settlement. Discussions which were, in the end, to lead to the Teheran Conference, had already begun. The Allied victories in North Africa were being given considerable publicity in the Soviet press. Although this was "not the Second Front yet", it was very far from negligible, especially as it was certainly drawing away from the Russian front at least part of the Luftwaffe, as was also the bombing of

Germany. But there were still to be many ups and downs in the Russian appreciation of the Western war effort; the landing on "the island of Sicily" was deliberately to be played down, though, later in the year, maximum publicity was to be given to the fall of

Mussolini.

Another factor which greatly contributed to a more friendly attitude to the Allies was the very considerable increase, in the course of 1943, of lend-lease supplies. If there was still very little allied equipment in the Red Army at the time of Stalingrad, this was no longer true. Not only were there many Western bomber and fighter planes in the Russian air

force, but everywhere in the Red Army there were now hundreds of Dodges and

Studebakers and jeeps, and a considerable proportion of army rations was American food.

It gave rise to some wisecracks: thus, spam was invariably referred to as "Second Front", and egg-powder used to be called "Roosevelt's eggs" (yaitsa being the Russian word both for "eggs" and "testicles"). But they were pleased to have it, all the same.

After Stalingrad, too, Soviet foreign policy became much more active than it had been. In 1942, except for the "Second Front" and "Hess" campaigns, the Soviet Government had avoided any major unpleasantness with the world at large. There were occasional

criticisms of Turkey and Sweden, but these never assumed the proportions of a

"campaign"; the handling of Japan, then at war with Britain and the United States, was exceedingly tactful and cautious, as at least up to October the possibility of a Japanese stab-in-the-back could not be entirely ruled out. Much more remarkable was the great reticence, throughout 1942, in respect of the Polish Government in London, and almost no publicity was given to the departure from Russia of the Anders Army.

[See Part VI, Chapter 6.]

But, soon after Stalingrad, attitudes to foreign governments began to be more selective.

Apart from Japan, to which the Russians remained formal but polite, a sharp line began to be drawn between good and bad governments. The Polish Government in London soon

became the blackest sheep of all, and the campaign against it began in real earnest in February 1943, and soon led to the breaking off (or rather, "suspension") of diplomatic relations. This was followed by the formation of a Polish Army on Russian soil

independent of the London Government. That this trouble with the Poles was going to

create considerable complications with Britain and America could, of course, be

foreseen; but the Russians tried—not unsuccessfully—to "localise" the quarrel, at least for a time. At Teheran, indeed, the Polish Problem was going to be as good as shelved.

On the other hand, the real friends of Russia were proclaimed to be the Czechs, the

Yugoslavs and—the French. All three were represented by fighting units on the Russian Front, and the French Normandie Squadron was given particularly wide publicity. The

Czech and Yugoslav token forces fitted well into the general pattern of the "All-Slav solidarity" propaganda; as for the French squadron, which fought gallantly throughout 1943, and was to suffer very heavy casualties, it symbolised, as it were, the solidarity between the Soviet Union and all the nations of occupied Europe—not only the Slav

nations.

After Stalingrad the Russian attitude to Germany's satellites also changed sharply. The rout of the Rumanians and Italians in the Don country between November and January,

and the terrible losses inflicted on the Hungarians at Kastornoye a little later, had struck a fearful blow at Hitler's Grand Coalition. Although, in 1941, Lozovsky at his press

conferences, as well as the Russian press, used to ridicule Hitler's attempts to "make these people fight for him", it was well known that, numerically, at any rate, they represented a considerable contribution to Germany's armed strength, and there were times when both the Hungarians and the Rumanians had fought very well indeed. At Odessa, at

Sebastopol, and in the Caucasus, the Rumanian troops had been of considerable help to the Germans.

Now, in a military sense, Hitler's Grand Coalition had as good as ceased to exist. There were still some hardened Hungarian troops, and the Finns; but the latter were a rather special case, since they were fighting their "own", "independent" war. In any case, as Mathias Rakosi, the Hungarian Communist leader, wrote in Pravda in February 1943, two-thirds of the Hungarian forces in the Soviet Union had been wiped out; there was a political crisis in Hungary; and the Government was already trying to "get out of the war". The Russians began to pay more and more attention to signs of rebellion against the Germans in the satellite countries.

In short, after Stalingrad the stage was set for a big Russian international game.

Significantly, it was in 1943, only a few months after Stalingrad, that the Comintern, dormant for at least two years, was called upon to dissolve itself. This was an essential preliminary to the international policies on which Stalin and Molotov were now

embarking.

The Stalingrad victory brought about a number of other changes. Whereas in 1941 and

1942 the whole emphasis in Soviet propaganda was on Russia, on the great Russian national heritage that was in danger, and so forth, after Stalingrad, the word Soviet came into its own again. More and more was made of the fact that a victory like Stalingrad was not just a question of "Russian guts"; these "guts" would have been quite helpless—as the 1914-18 war had shown— but for the stupendous Soviet organisation behind them. And who was the real backbone of this organisation but the Party!

Another development after Stalingrad was the systematic build-up of Stalin as a military genius. After Stalingrad, but not before.

We may here usefully look back a little. Russia, in terms of personal security and habeas corpus, had never been a comfortable place to live in, either under Lenin or under Stalin.

The ruthless collectivization drive had brought about fearful hardships, but by 1936—the year of the "Stalin Constitution"— zhit' stalo legche, zhit' stalo veselei: life had become

"easier and more cheerful". Stalin was taking the credit for it, and the vast propaganda machine of the Party had by now embarked on the "personality cult" in earnest. And there was a Five-Year Plan mystique in the country.

Then came the Purges: in the Party, in the Army, among the intelligentsia. There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, who were directly affected ("many thousands"

of officers in the Red Army alone, Khrushchev said), and millions more who had lost

relatives and friends in the Purges. "Thirty-seven"—the height of the Purges—became a fearful memory. And yet Stalin's personal prestige had been surprisingly little affected.

There was a kind of obsession with "capitalist encirclement" and, above all, with Nazi Germany, and it seems that countless people believed, or half-believed that there could be no smoke without fire, and that there must have been "some" reason for the great public purge trials of Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Piatakov, Bukharin, Radek and the rest. In many minds, Trotsky had been built up into a diabolical figure with countless

accomplices inside Russia. There were also many—including many of those arrested—

who were genuinely convinced that much injustice was being done without Stalin's

knowledge, and that it was the fault first of Yagoda and then of Yezhov. When the Purges more or less came to an end, and Yezhov vanished in 1939, to be replaced by Beria, the story was put about by Party propagandists, that Stalin himself had stopped the Purges.

[In reality the purges continued, though on a smaller scale, even in 1939. Kosarev, for example, head of the Komsomol for several years, was shot on Stalin's instructions, in March 1939, for having more or less openly protested about the earlier purges. This was revealed in Pravda in December 1963.]

The glorification of Stalin—helped by better economic conditions, a sense of great

industrial achievement and the feeling that Russia had become "invincible"—reached quite fantastic proportions in 1939. For Stalin's 60th birthday, Prokofiev wrote an

exquisite piece of music, called Ode to Stalin, with incredible words like these: Never have our fertile fields such a harvest shown,

Never have our villagers such contentment known.

Never life has been so fair, spirits been so high,

Never to the present day grew so green the rye.

O'er the earth the rising sun sheds a warmer light,

Since it looked on Stalin's face it has grown more bright

I am singing to my baby sleeping in my arm,

Grow like flowers in the meadow free from all alarm.

On your lips the name of Stalin will protect from harm.

You will learn the source of sunshine bathing all our land.

You will copy Stalin's portrait with your tiny hand.

[S. Prokofiev. Zdravitsa {Ode to Stalin). For Chorus and Orchestra. State Music Publishers, Moscow (1946 reprints of both orchestral score and piano score). It is not stated who was responsible for the English translation of the "folk texts", described as being of Russian, Ukrainian, Kurdish, Belorussian, Mariisk and Mordva origin. The rest of the libretto is at least as adulatory of Stalin as this short quotation.]

No doubt Prokofiev wrote the music to this with his tongue in his cheek, making the

rapturous kolkhozniks sing some of their words in a C-major scale going up and down and up and down again; but he wrote it all the same.

Propaganda had also drummed into the people that the Soviet-German Pact had been an

act of wisdom—or at any rate the least of all evils, and, for a time, there was undoubtedly some satisfaction at the thought that, with the occupation of Western Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia, Russia had virtually regained her old frontiers. At the same time, there was unquestionably a growing feeling of anxiety, especially after the rapid collapse of France and, even more, after the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Yet there was still the widespread feeling that Stalin—the boss, the khoziain—knew what he was doing.

Then came the Invasion which seemed at first like an apocalyptic kind of disaster.

Millions wondered how "Great", "Wise" Stalin had allowed all this to happen. Had there not been some fearful miscalculations somewhere? It is said that Stalin lost his head at first, and even uttered in a moment of despair that—perhaps genuine —phrase about "the whole work of Lenin being destroyed." But if he felt desperate, he certainly did not show it—except once in a letter to Churchill in August 1941. His broadcast of July 3, for all its alarming undertones, had a reassuring effect on the country. The general feeling among the people seems to have been that, for better or for worse, Stalin was with them, that he, like the country, had been let down, and that he was now asking for the country's

confidence. And, since there was nowhere else to turn to, the people "accepted" Stalin's leadership.

In the first few months of the war—right up to the Moscow Victory—the references to

Stalin in the press became much fewer and the pictures of him were now few and far

between. But after the Moscow victory his prestige was again largely restored—though there were still a great many mental reservations about him, above all in Leningrad. Two points undoubtedly counted in his favour: first, that he had not lost his nerve on October 16, and had not fled from Moscow; and the idea that "Stalin had stayed with us" had a very important psychological effect on both the Moscow population and on the Army.

Secondly, there was that Red Square parade on November 7 at which his Russian

nationalist speech made a tremendous impression.

[ See pp. 247-9.]

To the Army, Stalin became, more than before, something of a father-figure. And the

soldiers did go into battle crying "za rodinu, za Stalina". Victor Nekrasov, the novelist, who did not like Stalin—for he had lost many of his friends in the Purges —told me in 1963 that he, too, had led his men into battle with that cry. Stalin, as he put it, had bungled things terribly at the beginning of the war; and yet, later, people instinctively felt that here was a man with nerves of steel, who, when things looked blackest of all, had pulled himself together and had not lost his head.

After the Battle of Moscow Stalin's stock went up and the poets began to sing his praises again. But by that time Stalin was willing to share the credit for the victory of Moscow with others, particularly with generals like Zhukov and Rokossovsky.

Then came the Black Summer of 1942. In a sense, Stalin's position was even more

difficult then than it had been in 1941. His great argument in 1941 had been that a

powerful army launching a surprise attack on a country, however strong, had an immense initial advantage. But now, in 1942, this argument no longer held good, except that

Russia was still suffering economically from the "surprise attack". So when the black days came—first with Kerch, Kharkov and Sebastopol, and then with the German

advance on Stalingrad and the breakthrough to the Caucasus—explanations were needed.

As we have seen, scapegoats were found: first, the Allies who had not started the Second Front, and secondly, the Army itself. What was happening was not the fault of the Party, still less of Stalin, but was due to lack of discipline in the Army, bad leadership, and so on.

There may well be very good reasons to suppose that the post-Rostov army reforms,

which began to work wonders, were in reality much more the work of Zhukov and

Vassilevsky than of Stalin, and that things had come to such a pass that he had to agree to them whether he liked them or not. But the credit for them was given to Stalin. This, with his "not a step back" order, was built up into the idea that all would be well now that Stalin had taken things in hand.

In view of Khrushchev's allegations in his "Secret Report" to the XXth Congress that Stalin was a military ignoramus, and of the comments of foreign observers that though he was polite to foreigners he was extremely rude to Russians of whatever rank, it is

interesting to have Marshal Yeremenko's account of a Defence Committee meeting in the first week of August 1942, just before Stalingrad. Yeremenko had been in hospital,

recovering from a leg wound, when he was summoned to the Kremlin:

Leaving my stick in the hall, I carefully but briskly entered the study of the

Commander-in-Chief and Head of the State Defence Committee. .. Standing at his

desk, Joseph Vissarionovich had just finished a telephone conversation. Several

other members of the Defence Committee were in the room.

... J. V. Stalin came up to me, shook hands, and closely looking at me said: "So you consider you are fit again?" "Yes, I have fully recovered," I replied.

One of those present then said: "Looks as if his wound was still bothering him; he's limping badly." "Please don't worry," I said, "I am quite all right."

"That's fine," said Stalin, "Let's consider that Comrade Yeremenko has fully recovered, and let's get down to business. We need you very badly."

... The Defence Committee was working on the measures to be taken for

straightening things out in the Stalingrad area. The problem under discussion was the appointment of the commander to a new Front.

Summing up the discussions, J. V. Stalin turned to me: "The situation at Stalingrad calls for urgent measures... The Defence Committee has decided to divide the

Stalingrad Front into two distinct fronts, and to appoint you commander of one of them."

Yeremenko accepted the post, and Stalin then told him to go to the General Staff and study there all the necessary operational and organisational details, and to return in the evening with Vassilevsky, the Chief of Staff. The final decisions would be taken then.

Saying good-bye, Stalin then said: "Will you work out a schedule, so as to be able to leave for Stalingrad the day after tomorrow."

Yeremenko then relates how he spent the day at the General Staff and what he learned there about the very threatening outlook in the Stalingrad area.

In the evening I returned to the Commander-in-Chief. Here were also the Chief of

Staff, General Vassilevsky, Major-General Ivanov, also of the General Staff, and

General Golikov... After the usual welcome, J. V. Stalin ordered Comrade

Vassilevsky to report on the draft decision about the new re-arrangement of the

army groups.

While Comrades Vassilevsky and Ivanov were spreading out the maps, J. V. Stalin

came up to me and feeling the two gold wound stripes on my tunic, remarked: "It was quite right to introduce these wound stripes. People should know those who

have been shedding their blood fighting for the country..."

After Vassilevsky's clear and laconic report, there was a long discussion, in the course of which Yeremenko argued against the splitting of the Stalingrad Front in two, since the border between two fronts always tended to be vulnerable.

Having said my piece, I stopped, waiting for observations, if any. Rather to my

surprise, and apparently to that of the others, Stalin reacted rather nervously to my suggestion. This nervousness may well have been caused by the telephone

conversations he had just had, in our presence, with a number of fronts... We could feel that he was being given bad news, and that they were all asking for help. The situation was, indeed, very tense. Our troops were continuing to retreat. At that moment I could not help thinking of the great responsibility for the future of our country, of the fearful burden that had been placed on the shoulders of Joseph

Vissarionovich, who was both head of the Government and Commander-in-Chief.

After a few minutes, Stalin said to Vasilevsky, with a touch of irritation:

"Let us stick to our decision. Cut the Stalingrad Front in two, with the river Tsaritsa ... as the border-line."

There followed a discussion on how the new fronts were to be named; and when

Yeremenko again asked for permission to speak, Stalin smiled, and now said very

calmly: "Go ahead." Yeremenko then asked that he be appointed to the command of the South-East Front, i.e. to the right flank of the two army groups at Stalingrad, since it was from this area that the main blow could be struck at the Germans.

I added that my "soldier's heart" was more attuned to offensive than even to the most responsible defensive operations.

All those present carefully listened to me. Having stalked up and down the room,

Stalin then said: "Your proposal deserves serious attention; but it's a matter for the future. Our present job is to stop the Germans."

Filling his pipe, he paused. I took advantage of this and said: "I mean the future, and I agree that now we must stop the Germans at any price."

"You understand the position correctly," said Stalin. "That is why we decided to send you to the South-East Front, where they are advancing from Kotelnikovo to

Stalingrad. The new front must be built up quickly and along new lines. You have

the necessary experience; you did it with the Briansk Front. So go off, or rather fly off, to Stalingrad tomorrow... " In concluding, Stalin stressed, as he turned to me, that it was essential to reinforce discipline among the troops, and to take the most drastic measures.

At 3 a.m. all questions were settled, and Stalin wished me military success... We all left filled with thoughts of our immense responsibility. . .

[A. I. Yeremenko. Stalingrad (Moscow, 1959), pp. 33-39.]

Although later, in 1963, Yeremenko joined in the fashionable game of criticising Stalin as a war leader, and made much of his "erroneous" decision to split the "Stalingrad Front"

in two (a decision which, as we have seen, was to be reversed a few weeks later), several important points emerge from Yeremenko's 1959 description of his meeting with Stalin.

First, that the Defence Committee was doing important team work, and that the

"erroneous" decision about the Stalingrad Front may have been taken by others, and only endorsed by Stalin; second, that he had a good grasp of military affairs (an impression borne out by Churchill, Hopkins, Deane and many others); thirdly, that he and his team were in direct communication with the entire Front and had to take vitally important decisions every day; finally, that, despite moments of "nervousness" and "irritation", understandable in the highly critical atmosphere of August 1942, Stalin could be a good listener when his generals had anything to say. Nor does the Yeremenko story suggest that in the grim days of 1942 Stalin was either arrogant or overbearing; on the contrary, he could be both friendly and considerate. His closest associates in 1942 were, as we know, Zhukov and Vassilevsky, and it was they, in fact, who planned the Stalingrad

counter-offensive—with Stalin's blessing.

This was made perfectly clear in the official announcements on the Stalingrad operations; and it was not till February 1943 that new phrases like "Stalinist strategy", the "Stalinist military school of thought" and even "the military genius of Stalin" first made their appearance in the Soviet press, and not least in the Red Star. What the military artisans of the victory of Stalingrad—men like Zhukov, Vassilevsky, Voronov and Rokossovsky—

thought of this in private is anybody's guess. But these very first phrases in the Soviet press, soon after Stalingrad, about "Stalin's military genius" started a new process which was to lead to some curious and, in the end, some highly pernicious results.

The destruction of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad was part of a vast military plan, the "ideal" aim of which was to carry the Red Army along a wide front all the way to the Dnieper before the spring. Long before the Germans had capitulated at Stalingrad, the Russians were moving westwards in a number of places. But German resistance in the

Don country and east of Rostov had stiffened very considerably since the beginning of January, and the plan for closing the "Rostov Gap" had failed. The Russians did not capture Rostov until the middle of February; and by this time the German forces in the Caucasus had either entrenched themselves on the Taman Peninsula, or had slipped

through the Rostov Gap.

[See pp. 570 ff.]

Much more successful for the Russians—at least until the German counter-offensive

began—were their operations in the Upper Don and East-Ukrainian areas. On January 26, Voronezh (now a heap of ruins) was liberated by troops of General Golikov's Voronezh Front, and the first half of February was marked by a quick succession of Russian

victories. After their liberation of Voronezh, they inflicted a major rout on the Hungarian 2nd Army at Kastornoye, west of Voronezh—where, according to the Russians, over

100,000 Hungarians were killed or taken prisoner; German commentators do not deny

that the Hungarians were virtually eliminated from the Eastern Front by the Kastornoye rout. Although in the south (i.e. north of the Sea of Azov) the Germans firmly held the Mius Line defending the southern part of the Donbas, the Russians were now on the

move along a wide front in the north, between Voronezh and Boguchar, overrunning the Kursk province and penetrating into the North-Eastern Ukraine and the northern Donbas from the east and north-east. Valuiki, Lisychansk, Izyum and the great engineering centre of Kramatorsk (though now reduced to another heap of ruins) were recaptured during the first week of February, and, a few days later, Volchansk, Chuguyev and Lozovaya. On

the 16th, after heavy fighting, Golikov's troops entered Kharkov, the fourth-largest city in the Soviet Union. Meantime, farther south, Vatutin's troops of the South-West Front

liberated the great industrial centre of Voroshilovgrad, while Novocherkassk and Rostov were hberated by the troops of the Southern Front under Malinovsky.

After the capture of Kharkov, Golikov's and Vatutin's troops continued their advance, and, with the capture of Pavlograd on the 17th, the Russians were almost in sight of the Dnieper Line, barely twenty miles to the west. It was at this stage that the Germans began preparing their counter-offensive, their "revenge for Stalingrad". In March, caught on the hop, the Russians were, indeed, going to lose some of the territory gained in the winter offensive, including Kharkov.

Between Stalingrad and the first indications of the coming German counter-offensive the mood in Russia was exuberant, and it was during this period that phrases like "Stalin's military genius" began to be used in the press. The prospect of recapturing the whole of the Donbas and reaching the Dnieper Line before the spring was alluring, and the capture of Kursk and Kharkov seemed to exceed even the rosiest hopes. The Soviet press was full of articles on the importance of recapturing the Donbas—which meant coal and steel. The tone of the press became even more exuberant after the liberation of Kharkov; Red Star wrote on February 16:

The capture of Kharkov is... another triumph of that Stalinist strategy which has already achieved so much during the past winter. Frantically the enemy clung on to Kharkov... The Germans tried to hold us on the Donets river... but all the fortified unes were broken, one after another... Finally, the battle continued inside Kharkov itself, but here also those divisions with arrogant names like Grossdeutschland,

Reich and Adolf Hitler were smashed... And now it is we, and not the Germans, who are going to plan the future course of the war.

Two days later, the same paper exalted the skill of the Red Army: not only had it

liberated immense territories, but in doing so it had been constantly encircling and destroying the enemy; thus, the Italians had been encircled and routed at Millerovo and the Hungarians at Kastornoye, not to mention the Germans at Stalingrad. And again it referred to Cannae, "where Hannibal, with his 50,000 Carthaginians had routed 70,000

Romans." "Cannae" had become part of the Red Army's strategy. Red Star went on to say that all that had happened in the last months had finally shown that "the vaunted superiority of German military thought" had proved a myth, even though it was a myth that had even survived the 1914—18 war. Now "Stalinist strategy" was triumphant. It is significant that it was soon after the capture of Kharkov that Stalin assumed the rank and title of Marshal of the Soviet Union.

During these exuberant weeks of February 1943 more credit began to be given to the

Communist Party than ever before. Here were the first signs of a renewal of the old

tensions between "Party" and "Army", although, right to the end of the war the two continued to be identified with each other, rather than contrasted. The Party was, as it were, now living in the reflected glory of the Army, or was it vice versa, since the official propaganda now went out of its way to point out that all that was best in the Army was

"Party"?

Thus, at the height of the rejoicing over Kharkov, Red Star wrote on February 19: The Party has thrown its best sons into the fray. How many times in moments of

crisis, both at Moscow in 1941 and at Stalingrad in 1942, did the courage and

toughness of Communists save the situation! The Party organisation is the real

backbone of the Army. All the magnificent achievements of our Army are due to the fact that the Red Army's military doctrine is based on the well-tested principles of the wisest doctrine in the world—that of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

In short, "innate Russian virtues" were indispensable, but they were merely the raw material with which the régime was forging victory. More and more, as the war

approached a victorious conclusion, did the concept of "Soviet patriotism" take the place of "Russian patriotism" of the dark days of 1941-2. And Stalin was increasingly built up into the symbol of this Soviet patriotism.

It is, however, significant that Stalin never quite forgot the fearful days of 1941 and 1942, when he had to depend almost exclusively on specifically Russian nationalism to save the situation; and, at the end of the war, he singled out the Russian people as those whose determination to win the war and defend the Soviet State had been greatest of all.

Chapter II THE GERMANS AND THE UKRAINE

Now that the Red Army had begun to drive the Germans out of the Soviet Union and, in particular, out of the Ukraine, we must look at German policy in the occupied areas—if it can be called a policy. For, in reality, this policy was a story of almost unrelieved bestiality, occasionally mixed up with the more farcical aspects of Nazi ideology.

Thus, as early as 16 July, 1941, Hitler had already decided that the Crimea was to

become a purely German colony, from which all "foreigners" were to be deported or evacuated. It was to become the "German Gibraltar" in the Black Sea. To Robert Ley, Chief of the German Labour Front and the Strength Through Joy movement, it was to

become a gigantic spa, a favourite playground for German youth. Later, Hitler also

played with the idea of settling the South-Tyrolean problem with Mussolini by resettling in the Crimea the German-speaking inhabitants of the Italian part of the Tyrol.

After the fall of Sebastopol in July 1942, Manstein, "the Hero of the Crimea", was to be presented with one of the former Imperial palaces on the Crimean "Riviera". One of Rosenberg's more lunatic discoveries was that the Crimea was, "geo-politically", part of the Germanic heritage, since it was in the Crimea that the last Goths had survived as late as the 16th century. In December 1941 he had proposed to Hitler that the Crimea be

renamed "Gotenland":

I told him that I had also worried about the renaming of the cities. I thought of renaming Simferopol Gotenberg, and Sebastopol Theodorichhafen...

[ Dallin, op. cit., pp. 254-5.]

In reality, whatever Hitler's post-war plans were, it was awkward, while the war was still on, to proceed with a total evacuation of all "foreigners" (i.e. non-Germans) from the Crimea, especially as the Crimean Tartars were not only gladly collaborating with the Germans, but were actually supplying the Wehrmacht with a certain number of soldiers.

But the Crimea was still a minor sideshow, compared with the Ukraine. This was an

immense territory with nearly forty million inhabitants before the war, a proverbial

"bread-basket", and a source of coal, iron ore and steel.

It would be idle to deal here in detail with all the conflicting policies that existed amongst the Nazi hierarchy in respect of the Ukraine. Rosenberg clearly tried to distinguish at first between the "evil" Great-Russians and the Ukrainians who could be used as a bulwark against the Russians. Early in 1941 Rosenberg argued, in his usual insane way, that Kiev had been the centre of the Varangian State, which accounted for the strongly Nordic and superior racial features of the Ukrainian people.

Then, in May, he drafted instructions for the future German rule in the Ukraine.

Retreating slightly from his goal of immediate statehood, he now envisaged two stages: during the war, the Ukraine was to provide the Reich with goods and raw materials; after that "a free Ukrainian state in closest alliance with the German Reich" would assure German influence in the east:

To attain these goals, one problem... must be attacked as rapidly as possible:

Ukrainian writers, scholars and politicians must be put to work to revive an

Ukrainian historical consciousness, so as to overcome what Bolshevik-Jewish

pressure has destroyed in Ukrainian Volkstum in these years.

A new "great University" in Kiev, technical academies, extensive German lecture tours, the elimination of the Russian language and the intensive propagation of German

language and culture were integral parts of this programme. He spoke in terms of

extending the future "Ukrainian State" all the way from Lwow to Saratov on the Volga.

[Dallin, op. cit., pp. 108-9.]

This seemingly "liberal" Rosenberg Plan, as well as all its subsequent variants, met with no favour from Hitler, Goering, Himmler or, for that matter, Erich Koch,

Reichskommissar for the Ukraine, who pointedly set up his headquarters in the provincial town of Rovno, and not in Kiev, which was not to be given even the semblance of a

"capital". The various émigrés, who had been hanging round Rosenberg for years, such as the senile Skoropadsky, who had been the German-appointed Herman of the Ukraine

back in 1918, were not taken seriously by any of the top Nazis—except by Rosenberg

himself. Even Bandera, the ferociously anti-Polish and anti-Jewish Ukrainian

"nationalist" leader in the Western Ukraine, was arrested by the Germans at the beginning of the war, and sent to Berlin, where he was interned till 1944 when the hard-pressed Germans decided that he might still have his uses. Meantime Galicia (i.e. the Western Ukraine) was simply incorporated in the German-ruled Government-General of Poland.

Melnik, another Ukrainian nationalist leader, was no luckier than Bandera.

To Hitler, to Goering, to Himmler and to Erich Koch the Ukrainians were

Untermenschen, just like the Russians. Goering is quoted as having said: "The best thing would be to kill all men in the Ukraine ... and then to send in the SS stallions.

[Dallin, op. cit., p. 123.]

He also cheerfully envisaged the possibility in 1941 of twenty or thirty million people dying of hunger in Russia during the following year. Koch, a representative of the most extreme Untermensch school of thought, was appointed overlord of the Ukraine at Goering's insistence.

For a short time after the German occupation of the Ukraine a small number of Ukrainian

"nationalists" still tried to make their voice heard, especially in parts of the Ukraine, such as Kharkov, still nominally under the jurisdiction of the Army and not of Koch. But they received no serious encouragement from anybody.

The Ukraine was, to the Germans, first and foremost a source of food; secondly, of coal, iron and other minerals; and thirdly, of slave labour.

Yet, the agricultural deliveries from the Ukraine turned out much smaller than the

Germans had budgeted for, while the German attempts to revive the Donbas, Krivoi Rog and other industrial areas, was to prove a complete failure; the Germans actually had to send coal to the Ukraine from Germany! Both in agriculture and industry they met with great passive resistance; moreover, agriculture was short of machinery, and the Germans had to export certain quantities of such machinery to the Ukraine; the industrial plants had largely been evacuated to the east, and in those coal and iron ore mines which had not been put out of action by the retreating Russians, there was both a shortage of skilled labour (many of the miners having been evacuated) and various kinds of passive

resistance from the miners who were still there.

According to German statistics, non-agricultural deliveries from the east (i.e. from all the occupied Soviet territories, and not just the Ukraine) totalled 725 m. marks' worth; these were offset by an export of 535 m. marks' worth of equipment and coal to the east, thus leaving a net profit of 190 m. marks! To this should be added various local deliveries to the German Army, estimated at 500 m. marks; but even so, the total balance remains

unimpressive. According to Dallin's calculations, based on the available German

statistics, and even including the east's agricultural deliveries, "the contributions of the occupied east to the Reich ... amounted to only one-seventh of what the Reich obtained during the war from France! "

[Dallin, op. cit., p. 407.]

Even if the greater part of what the Germans got out of the occupied Soviet territories came from the Ukraine, that enormous and wealthy country cannot have supplied to the Reich more than one-tenth of what the Germans had pumped out of France. The desire

for even plain economic collaboration was lacking.

For two things characterised the German occupation of the Ukraine: the massacre of the Jews, and the deportation of millions of young Ukrainians to Germany as slave labour.

Even assuming that industrial production in the Donbas, Krivoi Rog and Zaporozhie

could be made to work (and the "proletariat", or what was left of it was even more anti-German than the rest of the Ukrainian population) any such possibility was made even more remote by Sauckel's policy of draining all industry in the east of its manpower and deporting it to Germany.

The deportation of slave labour from the Ukraine began in a big way as early as February 1942.

We shall have to return to the topic of German occupation policy and methods in Soviet territories, and in the Ukraine in particular. But here is a sample of what they looked like in purely human terms. It is an account of my visit to the great city of Kharkov after its first—and only brief—liberation by the Russians in February 1943, at the height of the post-Stalingrad offensive.

Chapter III KHARKOV UNDER THE GERMANS

There was some argument before the war whether Kharkov was the third-largest or only the fourth-largest city in the Soviet Union; according to some figures, it had just a few thousand more inhabitants than Kiev. But be that as it may, Kharkov was, in February 1943, the first city with a population of nearly a million to be liberated from the Germans, and this, in itself, was extraordinarily interesting. How had such a city lived under the Germans for a year and a half?

Before the war, it had been a great industrial city, but practically all its heavy industry had been evacuated in the autumn of 1941; ethnically, it was predominantly Ukrainian, but nearly a third of the population were Russians.

When I went there in February 1943 the Russian liberation of Kharkov was still highly precarious; the Red Army's communication lines were long and very bad, and the danger of a German counter-offensive could not be ruled out. The high spirits among the Russian soldiers noticeably declined even during the three days I was there.

The German occupation of Kharkov (which was in the Military Zone, and not under the

authority of Erich Koch) was marked by the following features:

Acute hunger among civilians, especially during the first winter of the occupation;

Terror, especially against suspected Soviet sympathisers;

Extermination of the Jews;

The toleration of a Black Market, in which the German soldiers played a very active part; No encouragement given by the German authorities to any Ukrainian nationalist

movements, but, at the same time, a readiness to sow discord between Ukrainians and

Russians;

The stamping out of Russian and Ukrainian cultural life, and the abolition of all

education, except some elementary schools;

A certain encouragement to the artisans and to shopkeepers, but only the most half-

hearted attempt, by German Big Business, to revive Kharkov as a great industrial centre; A readiness on the part of some of the Ukrainian petite bourgeoisie (artisan and shopkeeper types) to adapt themselves as best they could to a difficult situation, and, above all, to survive;

Acute resentment against the Germans because of the deportation of so many of the

younger people as slave labour to Germany;

The existence of a Soviet underground, and a widespread anti-German feeling in the city, above all among children and adolescents deprived of their education;

What "local government" there was—the Ukrainian Burgomaster and his town council—

was completely under the thumb of the German military authorities. The Burgomaster,

Alexander Semënenko, who followed the Germans when they left, and then returned with them in March 1943, was later, in 1944, to play a minor part in Berlin in the various attempts to set up an Ukrainian National Committee.

That evening, a few days after the Russians had entered Kharkov, the front was still only a very short distance away; and for half-an-hour before landing our plane had been flying under fighter escort. It was thawing. The large blocks of houses near the airfield had all been burned out. A wrecked Heinkel was lying on the airfield; but here also were half-a-dozen Russian fighter planes—not wrecked, but very much alive. Two of them had just

escorted us here. But the airfield was in a mess; all hangars gone, and all the other buildings gone. A young air force sergeant, shaking his head, remarked:

"We're in a real jam here. With this thaw, communications have gone to hell, and we even have to fly the petrol here... Before leaving, they wrecked everything at this airfield.

They also caused great damage to Kharkov with their air-raid the day after they were thrown out..."

It was a long way from the airfield to Kharkov. Most of the larger buildings on the way had been burned out, though the small cottages with their vegetable gardens were

standing. We stopped at one of these cottages which had been turned into an air force officers' mess. Our host was a handsome air force colonel with a fair beard, Neomtevich by name, who had distinguished himself in many battles, and had started fighting back in 1941, in Belorussia.

"What a wollop we got from the Germans then!" he remarked. "They were really expecting us to give up the ghost; and, I can tell you: it was a job keeping the show going. Now we are doing well, but not nearly as well as we should like to. It's all very well talking about 'Kiev next month'. No; we've got to regroup. Our communications are absurdly long, and very bad indeed. Our nearest railway that's functioning is over sixty-five miles away. The Germans have certainly buggered up the railway; and you should

see what they've done to Kharkov railway station—a mountain of wreckage which will

take weeks to clear... "

He was not at all optimistic about the immediate prospects of the Russian offensive; he thought it had come near the end of its tether, and after three months' continuous fighting the Russian soldiers were physically exhausted. "As it is," he said, "we are living mostly on 'trophy' food; with so few roads, our supplies have gone to pot. Not that this selection is bad," he added, pointing at the table and pouring me out a glass of reasonably good mousseux. The wine was French or Hungarian, the sardines Portuguese; there were chocolates from Vienna and pickled lemons, probably from Italy. "At Valuiki," he said,

"we captured an enormous food dump. My men and I just stacked a couple of tons into planes, and brought it here."

"The Ukrainian Government," he said, "arrived in Kharkov yesterday. They intend to set up the Ukrainian capital here, till Kiev is liberated." Then he made a face. "Don't know that it's a good idea," he added. "Maybe they're in too great a hurry..."

After sampling some of this produce of Hitler's New Order, we drove on. Kharkov

seemed endless; we drove for miles through suburban and town areas before we reached the centre of the city, marked by the high tower of an onion-domed church, and, further to the left, high up on the hill, by an agglomeration of fourteen- or sixteen-storey skyscrapers built during a brief constructivist period in the late '20's. These were the skyscrapers of Dzerzhinsky Square. But, as we were to discover the next day, most of them had been burned out by the Germans before they left, and only two—which had

housed some of the central industrial administration of the Ukraine—were still intact, except that the Germans had mined them before leaving.

We were put up in a small well-built house in the residential and almost undamaged part of Sumskaya Street, the main street of Kharkov. The house was guarded by half-a-dozen tough soldiers with pistols and tommyguns. Kharkov was still considered far from safe as there might be many German spies and agents around. These soldiers belonged to

General Zaitsev's division, which had been the first to break into Kharkov, and were very pleased with themselves. The house, like most houses in Kharkov, had neither electricity nor water. We had to live by candle-light, and water was brought from somewhere in

pails.

There had been 900,000 people in Kharkov before the war, but when the war spread to

the Ukraine, and the refugees started pouring in from the west, this figure swelled to 1,200,000 or 1,300,000. Later, in October 1941, with the Germans approaching, the

evacuation of Kharkov began in real earnest. Most of the larger plants were more or less successfully evacuated, among them the great Tractor Plant, with nearly all its workers.

By the time the Germans came, some 700,000 people were left in the city. Now there

were only 350,000. What had happened to the rest?

According to the Russian authorities, the disappearance of half the population of October 1941 is accounted for as follows: it has been established that 120,000 people, mostly young people, had been deported as slaves to Germany; some 70,000 or 80,000 had died of hunger, cold and privation, especially during the terrible winter of 1941-2; some 30,000 had been killed by the Germans, among them some 16,000 Jews (men, women

and children) who had remained behind in Kharkov; the rest had fled to the villages.

Various checks I made in the next few days suggested that the figure for deaths from hunger, et cetera, was slightly, but not greatly, exaggerated; so too was that for non-Jews shot, but the figure for the Jews was correct. On the other hand, the figure for slave-labour deportations was, if anything, an under-estimate.

The next day the lime-trees and poplars in Sumskaya Street were white with hoar-frost.

Poplars! This was the Ukraine, the south, two-thirds of the way from Moscow to the sea.

Everywhere there were still German notice-boards: Parken Verboten, and this verboten and that verboten. The street signs were in German, too, and on one house was the ominous notice-board "Arbeitsbehörde Charkow". This was where they mobilised people to be sent to Germany.

In Dzerzhinsky Square, with its enormous burned-out or mined skyscrapers, there were large crowds of people; most of them were shabby, undernourished, haggard, and with a look of great nervous strain. Only the crowds of young boys looked normal; and they

were lively and talkative. But, looking at the adults, one could readily believe that many thousands had died of undernourishment—even here, in this rich part of the Ukraine.

These people in the streets of Kharkov were enormously talkative; one felt that all of them wanted to tell some story. I remember, for instance, a misshapen, very sick-looking little man. He said he was arrested soon after the Germans came; they kept him locked up at the International Hotel (now burned out) in this very square, and they kept him there, almost without food, for a fortnight. Then he was released. But it had been a harrowing experience; because every night he could hear people being taken away to be shot; many of them were communists who had been denounced to the Germans. He had been an

optician before the war; in the end, he got a job from the Germans in the big Kharkov electrical plant, which a big German concern had taken over; but since the Russians had evacuated all the machinery, the Germans had had to bring their own, and never

employed more than 2,500 workers there, as against 25,000 before the war. Once a day there was a hot meal, and the bread ration was 11 ounces. "The pay." he said, "was supposed to be one rouble seventy kopeks an hour, but at the end of a fortnight I went to collect my wages, and the German clerk handed me seventy-five roubles. When I

objected, the German said: 'There were taxes to deduct, and you can take it or leave it; and another word from you, and you'll get your face knocked in.' Finally I couldn't stand it any longer, and the Germans let me go, because I was a sick man." Later he made a meagre living by selling spectacles in the market.

It was clear that thousands of people had managed to keep body and soul together by

selling and buying in the black market; people with jobs, people without jobs—all had to do it. "If you had money," one woman said, "you could buy anything you wanted from the German soldiers. They had wrist-watches by the dozen. They'd take them off people in the street, and then sell them in the market." "And not only wrist-watches," another woman joined in, "In broad daylight my daughter was stopped by a German soldier; he had taken a fancy to her shoes, and ordered her to take them off. He sold them in the market, or sent them home." "Your daughter was lucky," said the little man, "or else she must be very ugly. They would often compel girls to follow them." Many of those standing around shouted that that was true, and, worse still, many girls were forced into army brothels; they'd just go and pick up the good-looking ones in a queue at the

Arbeitsamt. And, of course, there was now a lot of v.d. in the city...

Then people talked about the hangings. Public hangings. It was that which seemed to

have left the deepest impression of all. At the corner of Sumskaya and Dzerzhinsky

Square there was a large burned-out building which had been the Gestapo headquarters.

Now several women told excitedly how in November 1941 the population was

summoned to the square to hear a German announcement; and when a crowd had

gathered, several people inside the Gestapo building were thrown over the balconies, with ropes tied round their necks, and the other end tied to the balcony rail. That day many people were hanged in many parts of Kharkov. There were quite a lot of traitors, who had denounced these Reds to the Germans...

Two or three other women talked about how the children had become undisciplined and

demoralised. The schools had been closed, and little boys had to beg in the street, or else they'd have little handcarts and carry the German soldiers' kit, and luggage, and black-market packages, and earn a few roubles that way. "Half the people," one pale-faced woman said, "expected their small children to work for themselves... Small children, hungry, having to fend for themselves; have you heard anything like it? Under Stalin children get the best of everything, but not under these German swine. And now a lot of them will be good-for-nothings, thieves and little hooligans. But then how could you help it, with bread costing 150 roubles a kilo in the black market?"

I then got into conversation with a man called Cherepakhin, a working-class type who claimed to have been in the Communist underground during the occupation, and told

many harrowing stories about the Gestapo. "It may be un-Marxist to say so," he said, "but the Germans are a bad lot—practically every one of them. If there are exceptions, I haven't come across any." But he had met some Italians in Kharkov, and they were really quite different from the Germans. They hated the Germans, and he was sure the Italians would soon get out of the war. "A lot of these Italians were really decent chaps," he said.

"I managed to get a set of guitar strings for one of them, and he asked me, on the quiet, to the house where he and a number of other Italians were living; and there they would

curse Hitler, and play the guitar and sing. They had little to eat, but they gave me some nice wine from a straw-covered bottle. Good chaps. But they were miserable, and they hadn't even any proper shoes, and suffered from the cold. I also talked to a lot of

Hungarians; and although a lot of them are thieves and black-marketeers, most of them were good fellows at heart, and hated the Germans.

"There was no love lost between the Germans and their allies," Cherepakhin said. "Only Germans were admitted into the principal restaurants in Kharkov—not their so-called

Allies."

He then told me how the Germans discriminated between the Russians and the

Ukrainians; many Ukrainians served in the local police—many of them were more or less forced into it. Somehow, the Germans preferred Ukrainians to Russians, though, in

reality, most of the Ukrainians hated them as much as the Russians did; even the

Ukrainian nationalists, who thought they'd have a wonderful time under the Germans,

were soon going to be disappointed.

I happened to talk to one of them in the street that day. He was an elderly man with a small red nose, and round face, and wore a shabby coat and frayed grey flannel trousers, and shoes that were split on the sides. He said he had taken a job on the town council, but had found it didn't pay. The Germans paid him only 400 roubles a month, and he had a wife and child to keep, and he couldn't live on that. So he took to black-marketing, too.

He would travel beyond Poltava, and bring bags of flour to Kharkov. As we passed a new picture of Stalin and another of Voroshilov stuck up on a bombed wall, he gave a faint shrug. "The Germans certainly made a mess of things," he said. "They promised us a New Europe, but then everything went wrong." Maybe, he said, the Germans would

come back, but that would no longer do any good to anybody. They'd missed their

chance. Even this little collaborator had received mighty little satisfaction from the Germans... He had wanted one of his brothers in France and another in Yugoslavia to

"come home" to Kharkov, but now it was useless.

Of course, there were people, especially of the artisan and shopkeeper class who, without being "unpatriotic", had tried to adapt themselves as best they could to the German occupation.

One such citizen was the lady barber who used to come in the mornings to shave us and the Red Army officers living in the same house. With her came her "assistant", a pretty boy of fifteen with blue eyes and long eyelashes. He was much more anti-German than

she was. He told the familiar story of how the Germans used to hang people from

balconies; and one day he saw—this was early in the Occupation—how they marched

fifteen Red Navy sailors through the streets. Hitler had said, the boy declared, that Bolshevik sailors were not to be shot, but drowned. They were manacled, and as they

were being led along, there were crowds of people on either side of the street, weeping.

The sailors sang the song of the Black Sea Fleet, Raskinulos' more shiroko. And still weeping, people joined in the song. "The Germans," the boy said, "took them handcuffed to the river, and there they drowned them. I didn't see it myself, but others told me... "

"The kids in Kharkov," the boy went on, "used to sing a song, and the Germans got furious whenever they heard it—

Doloi tserkov, doloi khram,

Doloi Hitlera trista gram,

Davai kluby i kino

Davai stalinskoye kilo.

[To hell with the church,

To hell with the cathedral,

To hell with Hitler's 300 grammes;

Let's have workers' clubs and cinemas,

And Stalin's kilogram (of bread).]

He also told me how they took 16,000 Jews, kids and grandmothers and all, to the brick-works outside the town and there after a fortnight in a camp, they killed the lot; they also sent thousands and thousands of people to Germany—pushed them into railway carriages like a lot of cattle.

The buxom young lady barber, with rouge, lipstick, manicure and perm, and now wearing a red beret and a white overall, admitted that she had lived better than most people under the Occupation. She had worked in a barber's shop near the main railway station, paying fifty per cent of the takings to her Ukrainian boss. It was a small place, but very busy.

The boss was a good man; she didn't know what he was doing now. The barber's shop

had been destroyed the week before, along with the railway station and all the

surrounding buildings. She was as talkative as barbers are. "Germans or no Germans,"

she said, "one's got to live. With a ration of 11 ounces of bread, you just couldn't do it.

I've got a child of four, and my husband has been away for over three years. And the prices in the market were just awful—130 or 150 roubles a kilo of bread. You should

have seen how happy people were last May, when they thought the Red Army was

returning. But it didn't, and I had to go on with my job in the barber's shop. A lot of the Germans, I must say, were quite nice people. There was a major who, for a long time, used to come in for a shave every day, and once or twice I cut him slightly, and I'd say:

'Ach, entschuldigen sie bitte, Herr Major!' and he'd laugh and say: 'Ach, das tut nichts.'

And the German officers certainly tipped very well. The face-cream, the eau de Cologne and the powder we'd buy from German soldiers in the black market... Of course, awful things used to happen. All those hangings; made one ill for days... And it was awful about the Jews, too. They'd drive them in an endless procession through the streets, many of them pushing wheelbarrows or prams with babies inside, and they'd all weep and wail. I could understand their wanting to send the Jews away somewhere—but to kill them all in this awful way, that was going a bit far, don't you think?" Then she said: "Yes, the Germans can be very cruel people. But some were nice. And some of the officers were

quite crazy about our women; positively sentimental. .. But then our women are so much more attractive than German women. And these German women were certainly bitches.

They behaved as if the place belonged to them. There were hundreds of them here. The best flats were commandeered for German families, and they and some Ukrainians would open shops and restaurants... If any Russian had a decent flat, he was sure to be thrown out..."

I also heard something of the tragi-comedy of the Ukrainian nationalists. When the

Germans first came to Kharkov, a bunch of Ukrainian nationalists started a newspaper called Nova Ukraina. On the face of it, there wasn't a single known person among the contributors; they wrote under pseudonyms. The principal writer signed "Petro

Sagaidashny"—the name of an old Ukrainian hero. He was head of a self-appointed Ukrainian Propaganda Department, and, for a short time, the Germans patronised these people. But two months later, several of the ringleaders were shot by the Germans

themselves. To the survivors the Germans made it quite clear that they were the bosses.

This was rubbed in in a thousand different ways: for example, all sign-posts and street-names were written in German first and only then (and not always) in Ukrainian.

Although an Ukrainian operetta was performed at the theatre the programmes were

printed in German only.

A professor of the Kharkov Technical Institute, Kramarenko, who became burgomaster

of one of the Kharkov districts, at first conducted a strong pro-German campaign; he made speeches in favour of developing a "Ukrainian national consciousness". Then, when he and his friends realised that the Germans were not interested in Ukrainian

independence or autonomy, they rebelled; Kramarenko was dismissed from his post and

shot soon afterwards.

Lubchenko and other Ukrainian intellectuals who ran the Nova Ukraina paper also soon realised that they were kidding themselves; it was the last straw when, in March 1942, the Germans ordered them to remove from the front page of the paper the Herman's Trident, a token of Ukrainian autonomy or independence. For even if Rosenberg's Ostministerium was sympathetic to such Ukrainian ambitions, it had very little influence either with the military authorities in the Eastern Ukraine, or with Erich Koch in the Western and

Central Ukraine; since the beginning of 1942, when the Ukraine began to be treated first and foremost as a reservoir of slave labour, there could no longer be any doubt about dominant German attitude to the Ukraine.

The fact that, in some of the surviving elementary schools pictures were displayed not only of Hitler but also of "Hetman" Petlura, who had been assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1928, could be considered no more than a piece of primitive anti-semitic propaganda.

It did not imply any promise of Ukrainian autonomy or independence.

To the German Army, the Ukraine was colonial territory in which the position of

Ukrainian adolescents, who eked out a meagre living by carrying the Germans' luggage, was rather like that of young Arabs in Algiers in the heyday of French colonialism. The very young, who had benefited most from the Soviet régime, were among the most

fanatical anti-Germans, and there was also no getting away from the fact that millions of Ukrainians were on the "other" side— fighting in the Red Army, or working in the Soviet war industries.

But to the German soldiery Kharkov was something of a metropolis, and here many of

them were having a good time. The theatres were patronised chiefly by Germans and the programmes were arranged accordingly. They had Viennese operettas, grand opera (Aida and Don Quixote) and, frequently, a Grosses Wagner Konzert. Most of the performers were German or Austrian. There were many restaurants, cafés and brothels; and whole

German families had come here to open businesses. Some local inhabitants also managed to get licences for small shops and booths, and a number of Armenians had opened

restaurants and night-clubs in various parts of the city. The occupation, clearly, had its profiteers—and they were not all Germans.

It was part of the German policy in the Ukraine to wipe out the intellectuals. The

Ukrainian nationalists were treated badly enough; but even worse was the fate of those whom the Germans thought pro-Soviet. I saw several professors and teachers of Kharkov University and of some of the thirty-five technical and other colleges that had existed here under the Soviets. These rnen had survived the occupation; but many of their

colleagues had died. Some had been shot, either because they were Jews or were Party members, or suspected of being Party members; some had committed suicide. Others had died of starvation, especially in the winter of 1941-2. Several university buildings were destroyed by the Germans before they left; but even while they were here, they had

looted the libraries and the laboratories. The teachers who had survived had lived from hand to mouth, making home-made matches or soap, and selling them in the black

market. Except for a few small laboratories, all higher education had been closed down; so had all the 137 secondary schools of Kharkov; only twenty-three elementary schools had been allowed to open under the Germans. Hospitals had either been taken over by the German army, or had come almost completely to a standstill owing to lack of food and medical supplies. One story—hard to verify—was that there was one flourishing school, in which the Germans trained adolescents as spies—not only Ukrainians, but even some Jewish children, who were to act as agents provocateurs.

There was no constructive planning to speak of. Everything in the Ukraine was being

more or less destroyed and dissolved, with nothing to take its place. Local administration was run by Germans, or Ukrainian adventurers, or a few White émigrés, usually with no understanding or experience. The Ukraine was nothing but a source of food, raw

materials and slave labour, and the raw materials and food were not produced in the

quantities the Germans had hoped for. The Soviet scorched earth policy in the industrial areas had created immense difficulties for the Germans from the outset; labour willing to work for them was short, and, in the Donbas in 1943 they were reduced to turning tens of thousands of Soviet war prisoners into improvised miners.

Nor was the return of the Russians an occasion for unanimous rejoicing in Kharkov. I saw two large letter-boxes marked U.N.K.V.D.—the Ukrainian Security Police—into

which people were invited to drop denunciations and other relevant information. Here was scope for some ugly vendettas. And at the former Gestapo prison, now burned out, I could see civilian prisoners being escorted into the basement for questioning by the NKVD. Scared relatives were hanging about the prison, some of them with parcels of

food.

The atmosphere in Kharkov was becoming more and more depressing during those three

days. There was no further mention of the Ukrainian Government being there. Had they already left? For there were more and more rumours of a great German counter-offensive having started—and this was soon to be officially confirmed. The railway to Kharkov had not been restored and an early thaw had set in, which made the Russian soldiers shake their heads. Kharkov was as good as cut off from the Russian rear.

True, the Russians were re-opening schools and hospitals in a small way, and tearing down German street signs; but, with every hour, the feeling of uneasiness grew.

*

It was a harrowing experience to go to the main market on my third afternoon. Most of the trading was over. But at one stall they were still selling little glasses of millet or sunflower seed, and, at another, battered tubes of German toothpaste or tins of shoe-polish, and primitive lighters made of aluminium scrap, and selling at sixty roubles apiece. All the same there were still large crowds in the market, dismally eyeing this junk. Among them were many soldiers. The women behind the stalls looked shabby.,

worried, underfed.

Then I noticed two weird ghost-like figures in terrible rags. I remember one of them particularly: he had a long face that was nothing but bone and a dirty-white skin, and long red stubble grew from his chin; his eyes were blue and enormous and in them was a look of helpless suffering; his lips were parched and cracked, and his breath smelled of death.

The rags he was wearing were the remains of a discarded Italian uniform. He was a

Smolensk peasant, and had been captured by the Germans at Millerovo in the summer of 1942. He and the other man had come from a war prisoners' camp in a place called

Sobachi Pitomnik, or Dog Farm. For months they had lived there on starvation rations, and most of their pals had died. Now when the Russians had come, they had been let out, but had to go back to the camp every night. Nobody was taking care of them, and they had wandered about Kharkov, looking for food. No one in the market had given them

anything, and the military were treating them with suspicion.

This widespread callousness was another product of the German occupation, plus the

NKVD. For to the Russian authorities, they had surrendered to the Germans, and could not be treated as deserving cases before closer investigation. One Russian soldier

remarked: "Don't you get het up about them. For all we know, they may have been left here by the Germans as spies or diversionists." "They don't look like it, do they?" "Maybe not," he replied, "But one can't be too careful these days. The NKVD had better find out who they are. And anyway," he added, "there are plenty of other things to worry about..."

These Russian war prisoners could still have been saved by their own people; but they weren't. No doubt, conditions in Kharkov that afternoon were exceptional, but still the harrowing episode made one think of the whole ghastly tragedy of Russian war prisoners.

The soldiers in our house that night were no longer as cheerful as they had been. The Germans, they said, were attacking strongly at Kramatorsk and elsewhere west of

Kharkov, and large numbers of wounded had started pouring into the town. These

wounded were saying that the SS Panzer divisions were attacking in great strength.

We left Kharkov the next day, with a feeling of foreboding. The Germans returned, not at once but over a fortnight later, on March 15. One of the first things the SS did was to butcher 200 wounded in a hospital, and set fire to the building.

This recapture of Kharkov was their "revenge for Stalingrad"; but it was only a relatively small revenge. The early thaw, which had caught the Russians on the hop, and had forced the Soviet High Command to abandon Kharkov, was now beginning to work in the

Russians' favour. The ice on the Donets had become so thin that the German tanks could no longer cross it, and the Russians had by now dug in along the Donets fine. Here the front became more or less stabilised till July.

Chapter IV THE ECONOMIC EFFORT OF 1942-3— THE RED

ARMY'S NEW LOOK-LEND-LEASE

The Red Army of 1943 was very unlike the Red Army of 1941 or even 1942. We have

already described the post-Rostov reforms to smarten up the officer corps, to increase its authority through the abolition of dual command, and to heighten the discipline among the troops. In 1942, there had been many heroic episodes in the Red Army, but also many cases of demoralisation and even panic; Ehrenburg in his Memoirs recalls a colonel, in the summer of 1942, saying bitterly to him: "There has never been such a skedaddle yet."

[ Novyi Mir, January 1963, p. 87.]

After Stalingrad, the overall morale of the Red Army was incomparably better than it had been either in 1941 or in 1942; there were many desperately difficult moments still, and some serious setbacks, such as the loss of Kharkov in March 1943; but the ultimate defeat of the Germans was no longer in doubt. Secondly, the quality of the troops was far better than it had been in 1941 and 1942; as Stalin said to Churchill in August 1942: "They are not so hot yet, but they are learning, and they'll make a first-class army before long." It was, indeed, during 1942 that the type of the hardened soldier, the frontovik, gradually developed.

But this general improvement in the quality of the Red Army was not only due to

psychological causes. In 1941 and 1942 the Russian troops had had the deeply depressing feeling of having to fight against a stronger enemy; heroism, guts, self-sacrifice were all very well, but what could they do against an enemy whose infantry, with its variety of automatic weapons, had far greater fire-power than themselves, and who had far more

tanks and planes?

Today it is admitted that Soviet armaments production did not reach a satisfactory level until the autumn of 1942. The evacuation of hundreds of plants from west to east in the autumn and winter of 1941 had resulted in an almost catastrophic drop in arms

production, which largely accounted for the disappointing results of the Russian Moscow counter-offensive in the winter of 1941-2 and for the disasters of the summer of 1942.

After the loss of the Krivoi Rog iron ore, the Donbas coal, and the Ukrainian electric power-stations, there was a serious shortage in the east (where most of the armaments industry was now concentrated) of both power and metals. The total fuel resources were only half of what they had been before the war. The engineering works of Siberia and the Urals could not work at full capacity, and, during most of 1942 the output of tanks, planes, guns and ammunition was well below the Red Army's requirements. Draconian

measures had to be taken to increase output. New coal-mines had to be speedily sunk; new power-plants had to be built; the People's Commissariat for Coal had some 200,000

more or less "improvised" new miners placed at its disposal, and a special food reserve had to be constituted to keep them going. Tens of thousands of new miners were sent

from various parts of the country to the Karaganda coal area in Kazakhstan—nearly all of them women and very young people, who had to be trained in the shortest possible time.

The morale of the Russian women, conscious of working for their husbands or sons or

brothers in the Army was particularly admirable. Though less spectacular than the Battle of Stalingrad, the stupendous mass-effort made by the women of Russia during the war, whether in industry or agriculture, had nothing to equal it.

Despite these efforts, the shortage of coal, metals and electric power was still serious even in 1943. Though coal production in the east increased substantially in 1943 the total produced was still nowhere near the 166 million tons produced in 1941.

[In 1943, the principal coal areas in the east produced the following amounts: Karaganda, 9.7 m. tons (an increase by 2.5 m. tons over 1942); Kuzbas, 25 m. tons (4 m. tons more than in 1942); Urals, 21 m. tons (5 m. more than in 1942 and 9 m. more than in 1940).

Finally, the "Moscow coal basin", with its very inferior coal, produced in 1943 14 m.

tons. After the liberation of the Donbas its badly-wrecked mines were producing only 35,000 tons a day at the end of 1943—i.e. at the rate of 11 million tons a year.]

In 1943 oil resources were very low, too; Maikop had been put out of action by the

retreating Russians; Grozny, with its refineries, had suffered severely from German

bombing; and during the temporary breakdown of communications, in the Stalingrad

period, many of the Baku wells had to be temporarily closed down. Instead, a special effort was made to develop the "Second Baku" in the east at top speed.

The coal shortage had to be met (particularly for transport and urban needs) by the

substitution of peat and timber; in Moscow, thousands of students, office and factory workers were made to spend their summer holidays in improvised timber camps.

New industrial "giants" had to be speedily built—thus an enormous new power station was built in 1942 at Cheliabinsk to supply dozens of armaments works over a large area, and a gigantic new blast furnace (the famous "No. 6") was completed during the year at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine. Altogether, although the Soviet engineering

industry had lost half its potential through the German occupation of the Ukraine and other areas, it had, in the main, overcome its difficulties by 1943.

[IVOVSS, vol. III, p. 161.]

All this had a decisive effect on Soviet arms production. A tremendous effort was put into creating an air force superior to the Luftwaffe; gone were the grim days of 1941 when most of the Russian planes were suicidally obsolete. The principal planes that began to be produced in quantity in 1942 were the Il-2 stormovik (low-flying attack plane), and the Pe-2 operational dive-bomber; and the La-5 fighter, which was better than the

Messerschmidt 109, but not as good as the Messerschmidt 109F or 109G. In 1943 the La-5-FN, which proved better than any German fighter, including the Fokke-Wulf 190, went into mass-production, and, in May, so did the Yak-9, with a 37 mm. gun, which was

superior to German fighters with their 20 mm. guns. The Tu-2 dive-bomber went into

mass-production in September, and the Il-2 stormovik was steadily improved and was

developed by the end of the year into a two-seater plane, with increased fire power. The average monthly production of planes rose from 2,100 in 1942 to 2,900 in 1943, of which 2,500 were combat planes. Altogether, in 1943, 35,000 planes were produced, thirty-seven per cent more than in 1942, and including eighty-six per cent of combat planes.

The proportion of stormoviks and fighters was particularly high. At the height of the summer battles of 1943 more than 1,000 Il-2's were produced every month—over one-third of the total of aircraft produced.

A little grudgingly the present-day History adds that there were also some Western planes in the Red Army; but the Hurricanes and Tomahawks were obsolete, and much inferior to both Russian and German fighters; the Airocobras and Kittyhawks which began to be

used on the Russian front in the autumn of 1943, were excellent, "but there weren't enough of them."

[ IVOVSS, vol. Ill, p. 216.]

The output of tanks had also been seriously slowed down by the evacuation of industry to the east; nevertheless, great progress was made in tank construction throughout 1942.

Two-thirds of all Soviet tanks were made by three "giant plants" in the east—the Ural-mashzavod, the Kirov Plant at Cheliabinsk, and Plant No. 183. Some spectacular

improvements were made in 1942 for speeding up the production of tanks; thus the

turrets of the T-34 medium tank were stamped instead of being cast. The T-34 was,

altogether the best medium tank of World War II—as many German experts were to

agree—and it continued, throughout 1943, to undergo various further improvements. In September 1943, to meet the challenge of the new German Tiger tank, the Russians

began mass-producing the heavy JS ("Stalin") tank, with armour one-and-a-half times thicker than that of the Tiger, and described in the Soviet History as "the best heavy tank in the world."

The average monthly output of Soviet tanks in 1943 was over 2,000, which was a little less than in 1942; but in 1943 the production of light tanks was almost discontinued, whereas, at the beginning of 1942, these still accounted for half the total. Altogether, in 1943, 16,000 heavy and medium tanks were made; 4,000 mobile guns and 3,500 light

tanks. This total was eight-and-a-half times more than in 1940 and nearly four times more than in 1941.

A substantial number of tanks was received from Britain and the USA in 1942 and 1943, but Soviet historians are even more critical about them than about the British planes.

Fifty-five per cent of the tanks received in 1942 were light tanks; in 1943 the proportion of light tanks was even higher—seventy per cent. The quantities received were described as "mediocre", and the quality left much to be desired.

[ IVOVSS, vol. Ill, p. 214. The History adds that Allied authorities, e.g. Liddell Hart, now readily admit that "the tanks the Russians used were almost entirely home-made."

Some of the tanks the Russians had received in 1941-2, particularly the Matildas, had proved to be particularly bad, and "as inflammable as a box of matches", as a disgruntled colonel told me at the Rzhev front in the summer of 1942.]

The output of guns and mortars was also greatly increased by 1943, that of guns of

different calibres amounting that year to no less than 130,000; altogether, as D. F.

Ustinov, the Minister of Armaments wrote in 1943: "A great density of fire for every kilometre of front is now the usual thing." From the beginning of 1943, there was also a vast improvement in the fire power of the infantry: in 1943 the number of submachine-guns was three times, and of light and heavy machine-guns two-and-a-half times, that of 1942. The vast superiority in fire-power of the German infantry of 1941 was now a thing of the past. One can well imagine the difference this made to Russian morale. The

German avtomatchik was no longer, as he was in 1941, an object of terror or despair; practically every Russian soldier was now an avtomatchik himself.

*

Food production presented another major problem. Many of the Soviet peasants may

have remained fundamentally hostile to the kolkhoz system; but there is no doubt that, by and large, they were as deeply affected as the working-class by the patrie-en-danger mystique of 1941-2. Almost all able-bodied men from the villages were drafted into the Army in the course of the war, and very many tractors and horses were requisitioned by the Army. Yet the remaining village population, consisting almost entirely of women, adolescents and old people, worked heroically, often in the most appalling conditions, to produce food. Cows were often used as draught animals, and some cases are even known of women drawing ploughs themselves. Even more than in the factories was there a deep consciousness of working "for" the sons and husbands and brothers who had gone to fight the Germans.

The scale of the food problem can be seen from the fact that, in 1942, only fifty-eight per cent of the pre-war area under cultivation was in Soviet hands; the rest had been occupied by the Germans. With the recovery of the Northern Caucasus and other areas, the

proportion was sixty-three per cent in 1943; but the number of cattle was sixty-two per cent of the low pre-war total; that of horses, thirty-seven per cent; that of pigs, twenty per cent. The production of artificial fertilisers was down to very little, and there was often no petrol for the remaining tractors. It is one of the wonders of Russian character plus Russian organisation that a still worse food shortage should have been avoided. Although food supplies continued to be very poor in the cities, especially for "dependents" with their miserable rations, the fact remains that the Army was reasonably well fed,

especially from 1943 onwards, and so too were most of the skilled industrial workers.

It is quite obvious that lend-lease supplies played an important part in improving the Army's diet, especially from the beginning of 1943. Of very great importance to the Red Army, too, were the growing numbers of Studebakers, Dodges and Willys jeeps—

commonly known in the Red Army as villises—which so greatly increased its mobility.

They were still not in great evidence at the time of Stalingrad, but, as I know from my own experience, they became an integral part of the Russian military landscape after about March 1943. These lorries and jeeps certainly contributed to the "new look" and to the tremendous and constantly-growing fighting power of the Red Army after Stalingrad.

This question of American, British and Canadian help to the Soviet Union had both

political and psychological aspects.

In 1942, Allied aid was certainly not taken very seriously; in 1941-2, American

shipments still amounted to only 1.2 m. tons and British shipments to 532,000 tons. Some of the heavy equipment sent that year (Hurricanes, Matilda tanks, etc.) was

unsatisfactory. In 1943 British shipments remained stable but American shipments were enormously stepped up, rising to 4.1 m. tons (and over 6 m. tons if one includes the first four months of 1944). This included over 2 m. tons of food. Besides this, the U.S.A. sent the Soviet Union between 22 June 1941 and 30 April 1944:

6,430 planes

3,734 tanks

10 minesweepers

12 gunboats

82 smaller craft

210,000 automobiles

3,000 anti-aircraft guns

1,111 oerlikons

23 m. yards of army cloth

2 m. tyres

476,000 tons of high octane petrol

99,000 tons of aluminium and duraluminium

184,000 tons of copper and copper products

42,000 tons of zinc

6,500 tons of nickel

1.2 m. tons of steel and steel products

20,000 machine-tools

17,000 motor-cycles

991 m. cartridges

22 m. shells

88,000 tons of gunpowder

130,000 tons of TNT

1.2 m. km. of telephone wire

245,000 field telephones

5.5 m. pairs of army boots

Other industrial equipment: $257 m. worth (including oil refinery equipment, electrical equipment, excavators, cranes, locomotives, et cetera)

Between June 22, 1941, and April 30, 1944, Britain dispatched 1,150,000 tons, of which 1,041,000 tons arrived. This included:

5,800 planes

33,000 tons of copper

4,292 tanks

12 minesweepers

103,000 tons of rubber

35,000 tons of aluminium

29,000 tons of tin

48,000 tons of lead

93,000 tons of jute

besides relatively small quantities of other raw materials, explosives, shells and other army equipment, as well as over 6,000 machine tools and £14 m. worth of other industrial equipment. The total value of Canadian deliveries for the same period was about 355 m.

dollars, and included 1,188 tanks, 842 armoured cars, nearly a million shells, 36,000 tons of aluminium and 208,000 tons of wheat and flour, besides a number of smaller items.

[Commissariat for Foreign Trade Statement published in Pravda in June, 1944, a few days after the Normandy Landing.]

By the end of the war the figures were higher still. According to General Deane, over fifteen million tons were shipped to Russia between October 1941 and the end of the war.

In his view the most important items were:

1) 427,000 trucks, 13,000 "combat vehicles", over 2,000 Ordnance vehicles and 35,000

motor-cycles;

2) Petroleum products (2,670,000 tons);

3) Food (4,478,000 tons), including flour. "Assuming that the Red Army had an average strength of 12 m. men, this meant a half pound of fairly concentrated food for each per day";

4) Railways equipment.

Altogether, he says, including a vast number of other items (medical supplies, clothing, boots, et cetera), "our supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.

They may not have won the war, but they must have been comforting to the Russians."

[ John R. Deane. The Strange Alliance (London 1947), pp. 93-95.]

These figures are, in their own way, highly impressive; for instance those showing that a high proportion of the boots and clothing-material of the Red Army was American-made, and that America and Britain also delivered important quantities of strategic raw

materials, aviation petrol, and much else. The planes and tanks, though of uneven value, were not to be sneezed at either. But they still constituted a relatively small proportion of all the planes and tanks used by the Red Army. According to Stalin's election speech in 1946, the Soviet Union produced about 100,000 tanks, 120,000 planes, 360,000 guns,

over 1.2 m. machine-guns, 6 m. tommyguns, 9 m. rifles, 300,000 mortars, some 700 m.

shells, some 20 billion cartridges, etc., during the last three years of the war.

Assuming that Stalin's figures are correct, they would suggest that the Allied heavy equipment (tanks and planes) amounted to between ten and fifteen per cent of the total.

N. Voznesensky, the head of the Gosplan, argues in his book, The War Economy of the Soviet Union, published in 1948, that the Allied deliveries in 1941, 1942 and 1943

amounted to only four per cent of the Soviet Union's total production. This purely

quantitative statement was misleading, since 1941 could not be considered a "lend-lease"

year at all, and 1944, a peak year in allied deliveries, was omitted altogether.

From my personal observation I can say that, from 1943 on, the Red Army

unquestionably appreciated the help from the West— whether in the form of Airocobras, Kittyhawks, Dodges, jeeps, spam, army boots, or medicines. The motor vehicles were

particularly admired and valued. And the fact remains that the Allied raw materials

enormously helped the Soviet war industries. But this still does not dispose of the

profound emotional problem created by the simple fact that the Russians were losing

millions of men, while the British and Americans were losing much fewer people.

[ An important exception were the Russian airmen who warmly appreciated the Allied

bombings of Germany, and the fact that many German fighter planes were immobilised

in Germany.]

It was partly because of this feeling in the country that the Soviet Government liked to say as little as possible about Western deliveries; nor did it probably particularly like to advertise its dependence on the capitalist West for certain forms of equipment. This attitude was, understandably, resented in the West, and the first major incident over Russian "ingratitude" occurred in March 1943 when the US Ambassador, Admiral Standley, complained at a press conference of the "ungracious" Soviet attitude to both private Aid-to-Russia donations and American help generally.

The Russians were extremely annoyed by this protest; nevertheless, a few days later, the press published a very full account of a statement by Stettinius showing just how much had been sent to the Soviet Union since the beginning of the war. For one thing, as

Standley had pointed out, it was essential to appease Congress, where much was being made of these charges of Russian ingratitude.

[ In my Diary entry for March 9, 1943, I find the following: "The Russian censorship, after five hours' high-power telephoning, passed the text of the Standley statement. The people at the press department looked furious. Kozhemiako, the chief censor, was white with rage as he put his name to the cable. His mother had died of starvation in

Leningrad... Another Russian remarked tonight: "We've lost millions of people, and they want us to crawl on our knees because they send us spam. And has the 'warmhearted'

Congress ever done anything that wasn't in its interests? Don't tell me that Lend-Lease is charity!"]

But this sudden generous acknowledgement of Western aid in the Soviet press in March 1943, though provoked by the Standley incident, had a long-term purpose as well. In a sense, Stalin was already on his way to Teheran with a Big-Three peace at the back of his mind. Apart from the extremely unpleasant "special" problem of Poland which was on the point of blowing up, the Soviet Government was much more "pro-Western"

throughout 1943 than it had ever been. Paradoxically, it was in its official utterances more pro-Western during that year than were the Soviet people as a whole.

Chapter V BEFORE THE SPRING LULL OF 1943— STALIN'S

WARNING—THE GERMANS' "DESERT POLICY"

The great Russian drive in the winter campaign of 1942-3 from Stalingrad to Kharkov

and beyond, and the Germans' forced withdrawal from the Caucasus were not the only

major Russian successes during that period. After all the losses the Germans and their allies had suffered in the south, they were visibly more and more short of trained

manpower. This largely accounts for their decision, in March 1943, to abandon the

Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard, that "dagger pointing at Moscow", to which they had clung so desperately ever since their first setbacks in Russia in the winter of 1941-2.

It will be remembered that although the Russians had driven the Germans back from

Moscow along a wide front, they had failed to dislodge them from their Gzhatsk-Viazma-Rzhev springboard barely 100 miles from the capital.

Throughout the Black Summer of 1942 this remained a potential threat to Moscow; but

the Russians' main concern was less an attack on the capital than a German attempt to hold the "springboard" with the minimum number of men, and to transfer the rest to the south—to Stalingrad and the Caucasus. So, throughout the summer and autumn of 1942

the Russians did their utmost to tie up as many German troops as possible west of

Moscow by constantly attacking and harassing them. Those battles outside Rzhev were

among the most heartbreaking the Russians ever had to fight. They were attacking very strong German positions; Russian losses were much higher than the Germans, and so

bitter was the fighting that very few prisoners were taken.

I visited the Rzhev sector during the rainy autumn of 1942 after the Russians had

recaptured a few villages at fearful cost, but had each time been repelled from the

outskirts of Rzhev. I was struck by the intense bitterness with which the officers and men spoke of their thankless task.

The roads that autumn were like rivers of mud, and countless ambulances had to travel over a "carpet" of felled tree-trunks covering the road, an agonising bone-rattling and wound-tearing experience for the wounded.

That autumn I saw something of the German "desert" policy in a few of the villages recaptured by the Red Army. Thus, in the village of Pogoreloye Gorodishche, a large part of the population had died of hunger; many had been shot; others had been deported as slave labour, and the village had been almost completely destroyed.

Now, in March 1943, fearing to be outflanked by the Russians from the south (and,

eventually, of being trapped in that great "twixt-Moscow-and-Smolensk" encirclement which the Russians had failed to carry through in February 1942) the Germans simply

pulled out of the "Moscow springboard", though with some heavy rearguard actions, notably at Viazma, and destroying as much as time would permit them.

The official Soviet report, published on April 7, 1943, on the effects of the "desert policy" the Germans had systematically carried out in the newly-liberated areas west of Moscow was a harrowing catalogue of mass shootings, murders and hangings, rape, the

killing or starving to death of Russian war prisoners, and the deportation of thousands as slave labour to Germany. Kharkov was almost mild in comparison. The report noted that most of the shootings of civilians had been done by the German army, not by the Gestapo or the SD. The towns were almost totally obliterated—as I could indeed see for myself soon afterwards. At Viazma, out of 5,500 buildings, only fifty-one small houses had

survived; at Gzhatsk, 300 out of 1,600; in the ancient city of Rzhev, 495 out of 5,443. All the famous churches had been destroyed. The population was being deliberately starved.

15,000 people had been deported from these three towns alone. The rural areas were not much better off: in the Sychevka area, 137 villages out of 248 had been burned down by the Germans. The list of war criminals appended to the Report was headed by Col.-Gen.

Model, commander of the German 9th Army and other army leaders who had "personally ordered all this". The report noted that the destruction was "not accidental, but part of a deliberate extermination policy," which was being carried out even more thoroughly in these purely-Russian areas than elsewhere.