Stalingrad

Georgy Zhukov, could achieve. In January 1941, Stalin was persuaded to promote Zhukov to Chief of the General Staff. He was therefore right at the centre when, on the day after the invasion, Stalin set up a supreme general-staff headquarters, under its old tsarist name of
Stavka.
The Great Leader then appointed himself Commissar of Defence and Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces.
    In the first days of Barbarossa, German generals saw little to change their low opinion of Soviet commanders, especially on the central part of the front. General Heinz Guderian, like most of his colleagues, was struck by the readiness of Red Army commanders to waste the lives of their men in prodigious quantities. He also noted in a memorandum that they were severely hampered by the ‘political demands of the state leadership’, and suffered a ‘basic fear of responsibility’. This combined with bad coordination meant that ‘orders to carry out necessary measures, counter-measures in particular, are issued too late’. Soviet tank forces were ‘insufficiently trained, and lacked intelligence and initiative during the offensive’. All of this was true, but Guderian and his colleagues underestimated the desire within the Red Army to learn from its mistakes.
    The process of reform was not, of course, easy or rapid. Stalin and his placemen, especially senior commissars, refused to acknowledge that their political interference and obsessive blindness had caused such disasters. Front and army commanders had been hamstrung by the Kremlin’s militarily illogical instructions. To make matters worse, the ‘dual command’ system of commissars approving orders was reinstituted on 16 July. The political controllers of the Red Armytried to escape their responsibility by accusing front-line commanders and their staff officers of treason, sabotage or cowardice.
    General Pavlov, the commander of the central part of the front, and the general yelling down the telephone that those at the top knew better what was going on, was not saved by having followed orders. Accused of treason, he became the most prominent victim to be executed in this second round of the Red Army purges. The paralysing atmosphere in headquarters can be imagined. A sapper expert in mines, who arrived at a command centre accompanied by NKVD border guards because they knew the area, was greeted by expressions of terror. A general babbled pathetically: ‘I was with the troops, and I did everything – I am not guilty of anything.’ Only then did the sapper officer realize that, on seeing the green tabs of his escort, these staff officers had thought that he had come to arrest them.
    During this hysteria of deflected blame, the groundwork for reorganization began. Zhukov’s
Stavka
directive of 15 July 1941 set down ‘a number of conclusions’ following ‘the experience of three weeks of war against German fascism’. His main argument was that the Red Army had suffered from bad communications and overlarge, sluggish formations, which simply presented a ‘vulnerable target for air attack’. Large armies with several corps ‘made it difficult to organize command and control during a battle, especially because so many of our officers are young and inexperienced’. (Even if the purges were not mentioned, their shadow was impossible to forget.) ‘The
Stavka
’, he wrote, ‘therefore believes it is necessary to prepare to change to a system of small armies consisting of a maximum of five or six divisions.’ This step, when eventually introduced, greatly improved the rapidity of response, largely by cutting out the corps level of command between division and army.
    The biggest mistake made by German commanders was to have underestimated ‘Ivan’, the ordinary Red Army soldier. They quickly found that surrounded or outnumbered Soviet soldiers went on fighting when their counterparts from western armies would have surrendered. Right from the first morning of Barbarossa, there were countless cases of extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice, although not perhaps as many as there were of mass panic, but that was largelydue to the confusion. The defence of the citadel of Brest-Litovsk is the most striking example. German infantry occupied the complex after a week of heavy fighting, but some Red Army soldiers held out for almost a month from the initial attack without any resupply of ammunition or food. One of the defenders scratched on a wall: ‘I am dying but do not