Stalingrad to Kursk

Triumph of the Red Army

Geoffrey Jukes

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781848849204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

An acclaimed WWII historian presents a provocative reassessment of the Eastern Front battles that turned the tide against Hitler's advance. The epic battles fought at Stalingrad and Kursk were pivotal events in the war on the Eastern Front. After the catastrophic failure of the German offensives of 1942 and 1943, the Wehrmacht was forced onto the defensive. Never again would it regain the initiative against the seemingly inexhaustible forces of the Red Army. The cause of the decisive shift in the balance of military power has intrigued historians ever since. In this original and thought-provoking new study Geoffrey Jukes reconstructs Soviet strategy and operations at Stalingrad and Kursk in vivid detail. He looks behind the scenes at the workings of the Soviet high command, at the roles played by the principal Red Army generals, and at the overriding influence of Stalin himself. Jukes also offers acute insight into German military planning as Hitler's armies prepare for their sequence of massive offensives.

Chapter One

Descent into Conflict

Pre-war relations between the Soviet Union and Germany had fluctuated from close cooperation to latent and overt antagonism. After signing the Treaty of Rapallo with Weimar Germany in 1922, the Soviet Union for 11 years actively assisted the Reichswehr to circumvent the bans that the Versailles Treaty had placed on German possession of tanks or military aircraft, by allowing it to establish secret training schools, for aircraft pilots and observers at Lipetsk in 1925, for tank crews at Kazan and for chemical warfare at Tomsk in 1926. At all three schools Soviet officers trained alongside Germans, but the installations were all closed within six months of Hitler’s appointment as Reichskanzler in January 1933, in reaction to overtly anti-Soviet pronouncements and actions by the new Nazi regime.¹² The numbers of Germans who underwent some training in the USSR were not large, but included several who became prominent in the Second World War, including for example in 1929 Colonels Keitel and Brauchitsch and Major Model, and in 1932 Lieutenant-Colonel Manstein,¹³ all of whom would become field marshals during the war. Interaction between the two armies had been profound enough that as late as 1935 Colonel Koestring, the German military attaché in Moscow, observed, after attending Soviet manoeuvres, ‘all these commanders and leaders are our pupils’.¹⁴ But by 1939 many of them would have been removed, imprisoned or shot, and any lessons they had absorbed from the Germans would have to be relearned in the coming war.

The post-First World War German and Soviet armed forces had both come into existence as a result of regime change engendered by defeat in war. Initially both depended heavily on officers from the previous regime’s armies – the Reichswehr recruited the most capable for the very limited numbers of posts permitted under the Versailles Treaty, and the new Soviet government relied heavily on the skills and experience of former Tsarist officers (the so-called voyenspetsy, ‘military specialists’) to win the Russian Civil War of 1918–20. But once that war was over, their paths began to diverge. The Reichswehr and later Wehrmacht as far as possible maintained continuity with the customs and traditions of the Kaisers’ armies, particularly in officer education, but by 1931 most ex-Tsarist officers had been dismissed from the ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’, and education of officers was neglected during Voroshilov’s headship of the defence structure (1925–40). For example, the highest-grade institution for training senior officers, the General Staff Academy, was not established until the summer of 1936,¹⁵ and the purge of 1937–38 removed many of those who attended its first courses, as well as several of those who taught them. After Timoshenko replaced Voroshilov as the People’s Commissar (Minister) for Defence in May 1940, he instituted assemblies during that summer of officers commanding regiments (mostly colonels), where it was found that 200 of the 225 participants had had no formal training other than in courses for junior lieutenants – in other words, they had been taught how to command a platoon, but not a company or a battalion, let alone a regiment. The other 25 had completed courses at military training schools (when they were lieutenants or at most captains), but none had attended a Military Academy.¹⁶ The average standard of Soviet officers in 1941 therefore compared poorly with their German counterparts, even before the effects of the purges of the Soviet military in 1937–39 are taken into account.

Some post-Soviet accounts have maintained that the abandonment of Tsarist military methods and standards of training was largely responsible for the early disasters, but this ignores historical reality. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 Russia fought successful wars only against mostly small and uniformly technologically inferior opponents in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East. Its three wars against industrially advanced powers – Britain and France in the Crimean War of 1854–56, modernising Japan in 1904–05, and Germany in 1914–17 – all ended in humiliating defeats. Its most successful strategic-scale operation of the First World War, Brusilov’s 1916 offensive, had been achieved against Austro-Hungarian, not German, forces and its gains did not survive the German intervention that followed Romania’s entry into the war.

It was these wars that Stalin had in mind when in 1931, in the early stages of industrialisation, he referred to Russia’s being defeated in the past because of its ‘backwardness’, and his invocation during the war of inspirational figures of past Russian military glory included none more recent than Suvorov, who died in 1800, and Kutuzov, who died in 1814. Probably the most that can be said is that the General Staff’s overall maintenance of good standards throughout the Second World War owed much to four former Tsarist officers, Tukhachevsky and Yegorov (both shot in the ‘purges’), who headed it for most of the 1930s, and Shaposhnikov and Vasilevsky, its heads for most of the period 1938–45. But where the field forces and their commanders were concerned, the results obtained against major opponents by Russia’s pre-revolutionary army in its last hundred years of existence do not seem to have offered much that merited perpetuating.

After Hitler came to power, Stalin began seeking allies to contain Germany’s resurgent militarism, and intensified his efforts in 1938, after Hitler first annexed Austria in March, then in September created a crisis over the alleged oppression of the predominantly German population of Czechoslovak Sudetenland, and threatened to invade it. Stalin brought 76 divisions and smaller formations equivalent to another 14 up to full strength, arranged with the head of the Czechoslovak Air Force to send 700 aircraft to Czech airfields, and on 25 September 1938 had the French military attaché notified of the steps he had taken, clearly in hopes of encouraging similar action by France and Britain, as he was not prepared to be the only one to stand up to Hitler. Besides, Soviet ground forces could reach Czechoslovakia only through Poland or Romania, and heavy British and French pressure on both countries, especially on Poland, would have been needed to obtain acquiescence to such transit.

A group of German generals, horrified at the risk of war Hitler was courting, plotted to overthrow him, and in August sent an emissary to London to urge Chamberlain’s government not to give in to him. Chamberlain was notified within two days of the emissary’s arrival and was informed of the content of his message, but both the British and French governments doubted the German generals’ ability to mount a successful coup, and both feared Communism more than Nazism. In both countries, still emerging from the Great Depression, the Communist parties were attracting far more voter support than their Nazi/Fascist counterparts, and, in a mirror image of Stalin’s own views of British and French intentions, both governments suspected that the Soviet Union was trying to drag them into a war with Germany. They were also sceptical about the Red Army’s capabilities, following Stalin’s purge of its leaders in 1937–38, in which 3 of the 5 marshals, 15 of the 16 army commanders, 60 of the 67 corps commanders, and all 17 of the most senior political officers had been court-martialled and shot, and thousands of other officers executed or imprisoned. So the only pressure Britain and France applied was on Czechoslovakia; their ambassadors woke President Benes in the middle of the night, and told him to cede the Sudetenland.¹⁷ Had the Chamberlain and Daladier governments done what the German generals requested, either Hitler would have been deposed or the Second World War would have broken out in October 1938. In the latter event Germany’s 51 divisions (only two of them armoured, with a third in process of formation) would have faced 38 Czech, 65 French and about 90 Soviet divisions in a war on three fronts, coupled with at the least a British naval blockade, air raids and financial pressure. The German generals might then have succeeded in disposing of Hitler and negotiating peace within a few weeks. Instead, a meeting, to which neither Stalin nor any Czechoslovak delegation was invited, resulted on 29 September in the notorious Munich Agreement, by which the British and French prime ministers and the Italian dictator gave Hitler everything he had demanded, proving his apprehensive generals wrong, convincing some of them and many of their colleagues that he was a genius at obtaining results by merely threatening military action, and raising his domestic prestige to levels that made his removal unthinkable for the foreseeable future.

For Stalin, who believed (not without some justification) that what the British and French governments really wanted was to point German ambitions eastward, the lesson of Munich was ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’. As a dual signal to Germany, he replaced his Jewish Foreign Minister Litvinov, who favoured cooperation with the UK and France to restrain Germany, with Molotov, who was more anti-Western, less anti-German and not Jewish (though his wife was), and began the switch in policy that culminated in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty with secret clauses delineating the signatories’ respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. The pact was signed on 23 August 1939; nine days later Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR followed suit on 17 September, the invaders abolishing the Polish state and dividing it between them. Over the next 20 months Germany invaded eight more countries (Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, France, Yugoslavia and Greece), and the USSR five (annexing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia completely, and taking territory from Romania and Finland). The political quasi-alliance was complemented by agreements under which the Soviet Union supplied oil, grain and minerals to Germany, and provided facilities in the Murmansk area, including a naval base, intended for use by German submarines. In the event they did not use it, though a supply ship was stationed there for some months, but in September 1939 Germany’s prestigious transatlantic liner Bremen succeeded in evading the Anglo-French naval blockade when returning from New York by heading for Murmansk, and stayed there until March 1940 before slipping down the Norwegian coast to Hamburg. But perhaps the most blatant case of Soviet aid to the German war effort at sea occurred in July and August 1940, when the disguised commerce raider Komet was provided with Soviet pilots and the services of an icebreaker to transit via the Northern Sea Route to the Pacific, where it sank several Allied merchant ships before returning home via the Cape of Good Hope.

The outbreak of the Second World War was soon followed by economic measures against Germany, in particular the British imposition of an economic blockade. Restrictions on British and French trade with the Soviet Union also ensued, especially in the provision of modern equipment, as requirements for their own war efforts took priority over exports. This situation created a mutual interest between the two dictatorships, for the Soviet Union to provide Germany with raw materials, food and oil, German deliveries in return including items as such as lathes, optical equipment and armour plating. The first economic agreement was signed on 21 August, two days before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Under a second agreement, signed in February 1940, the Soviet Union undertook to deliver in 12 months a million tonnes of foodstuffs, 900,000 tonnes of oil, 500,000 tonnes of iron ore and 300,000 tonnes of scrap iron and steel, 100,000 tonnes each of chrome ore and of cotton, plus smaller but significant amounts of precious metals such as platinum. In addition, it helped in two ways to reduce the effects of the British blockade, first by providing a 50 per cent reduction in charges for rail transits between Germany and Iran, Afghanistan or Japanese-occupied Korea and Manchukuo, and secondly by making some purchases on Germany’s behalf in countries where dealing with Germany was embargoed.¹⁸ How much these goods and services contributed to Germany’s war effort may be debatable, but they certainly diminished the effects of the Anglo-French blockade.

Communist dogma of the time held that the capitalist world would ultimately attempt to avert its inevitable doom by uniting to attack the Soviet Union, but Germany’s invasion of Poland and the consequent British and French declarations of war appeared to postpone this indefinitely. It seemed that this would enable the Soviet Union to digest the territories the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had allowed it to swallow, and to build up its strength while the major capitalist powers weakened theirs by fighting each other. For Stalin this appeared a splendid outcome; not only had he apparently succeeded in postponing the inevitable war indefinitely, he had weakened the Soviet Union’s potential attackers and divided the capitalist world, turned German military power away towards the west, where he expected it to be bogged down for several years, as it had been in 1914–18, and acquired a buffer zone to protect the Soviet heartland of Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine. At a meeting on 7 September 1939 Dimitrov, of the Communist International (Comintern), noted Stalin’s satisfaction that ‘A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries … we see nothing wrong in their having a good fight and weakening each other.’¹⁹

However, after eight months of inactivity in the west, Hitler’s armed forces shattered Stalin’s expectations by achieving in just six weeks the conquest of France that the Kaiser’s armies had sought vainly for over four years, and forcing the British off the continent. They remained in the war and brusquely rejected Hitler’s peace offer, but they could not successfully reinvade mainland Europe single-handed, so Hitler could now direct the bulk of the German army and the Luftwaffe towards the objective he had defined over a decade earlier in his book, Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), of gaining Lebensraum (‘living space’) for the German people by expansion to the east. At the end of July 1940, one month after the French surrender and only a week after issuing the Directive for the planned invasion of the United Kingdom (Operation ‘Sealion’), he ordered the army staff to begin at once making plans for invading the Soviet Union within the next 12 months.²⁰

Despite the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin still saw Germany as a threat, and his preoccupation with creating a buffer zone prompted him to attack Finland in the ‘Winter War’ (December 1939–March 1940) after it rejected his offer of territory in Karelia in exchange for an eastward move of the border (then only about 21 miles from Leningrad) in the Karelian Isthmus, cession of some small islands in the Gulf of Finland, and provision of land for naval and air bases from which to control access to it. It was an historic irony that when war did come, his series of aggressive westward moves merely gave him borders with the Germans, who in 1941 overran his new ‘buffer zones’ in a matter of days, while the outstanding performance of the vastly outnumbered Finnish Army reinforced future enemies’ and allies’ already low opinions of Soviet military competence – enough in Hitler’s case for him to stake everything in 1941 on a campaign meant to produce complete victory in only five months. American military forecasts in 1941 held that Moscow would fall within a month and a British prognosis gave it only six weeks, and on 31 May, after the evidence of German preparations to invade the Soviet Union had become overwhelming, London instructed its commanders-in-chief in the Middle East to make plans for seizing Mosul and its important airfield in northern Iraq to use as a base for future bombing raids aimed at destroying the oil wells, storage tanks, refineries and pipelines at Baku in Soviet Transcaucasus before their anticipated swift capture by the Germans.²¹

The final German plan for the invasion (Operation ‘Barbarossa’) was contained in Führer Directive 21, issued on 18 December 1940. Its basic concept was one that had already proved successful in the previous campaigns: deep penetrations by pincer movements of armoured and motorised infantry divisions woul...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• Chapter One – Descent into Conflict
• Chapter Two – ‘Industrialise or go under’
• Chapter Three – ‘Stand Fast!’
• Chapter Four – Victory at Stalingrad
• Chapter Five – Germany under Pressure
• Chapter Six – The Battle for Kursk
• Conclusions
• Notes and Sources