Armor and Blood Read online

  In that matrix, a rising generation of technocrats saw the Soviet Union’s military future in terms of a mass mechanized army. In the mid-1920s, instructors at the Red Army Military Academy described the total destruction of enemy forces by a series of “deep operations”: shock armies for breakthrough, mobile echelons for exploitation and pursuit. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, appointed deputy people’s commissar for military and naval affairs in 1931, was the focal point of a school of thought arguing that mechanization vitalized and extended revolutionary war. A technologized mass army could export communism as well as defend it. “Reluctant soldiers” would be transformed into enthusiasts by experiencing directly what the Soviet Union could do to its enemies. They would become part of a new proletariat, able to make optimum use of the military technologies created under communism.

  Stalin internalized and epitomized the conviction that the non-Communist world embodied an irreconcilable hatred for the Soviet system. Even the Great Depression did not change his mind: capitalism in its death throes might be even more willing to undo history by turning its armed forces against the USSR. However intensely managers, soldiers, and officials might dispute specific policies or details of production, the basic assumption of isolation in a mortally hostile world went unchallenged throughout the period. Moderation in defense planning was criminal. Cycles of purge, disruption, and reorganization characterized the defense industry well before they became a general norm in the late 1930s.

  The Red Army’s unwavering support for Stalin in the intraparty struggles of the 1920s reflected its appreciation for Stalin’s support of military spending at the expense of balanced budgets and civilian production, to a permanent “half war, half peace” level. “Deep battle” became a comprehensive doctrine that included air-supported, fully mechanized mobile groups taking the fight into the enemy’s rear at a rate of twenty-five or thirty miles a day. By 1938, the Soviet order of battle included four tank corps and a large number of tank brigades. But in November 1939, these formations were disbanded, replaced by motorized divisions and tank brigades designed essentially for close infantry support.

  One reason for this measure—the public one—was that the Spanish Civil War had shown the relative vulnerability of tanks, while large armored formations had proved difficult to control both against the Japanese in Mongolia and during the occupation of eastern Poland. Reinforcing operational experience was Stalin’s concern for the armored force as a potential domestic threat. Not only were the top-level advocates of mobile war, men like Tukhachevsky, eliminated—all but one commander at brigade level and 80 percent of the battalion commanders were replaced as well.

  The successes of Hitler’s panzers combined with the winding down of the purges to encourage reappraisal. Beginning in 1940, the People’s Commissariat of Defense began authorizing what became a total of twenty-nine mechanized corps, each with two tank divisions and a motorized division: thirty-six thousand men and over a thousand tanks each, plus twenty more brigades of three hundred light T-26 tanks intended for infantry support. The numbers are mind-boggling even by subsequent Soviet reckoning. But low maintenance standards kept field strength down, and the sheer size of the mechanized corps defied all but the best efforts at command and control.

  As the Germans drove toward Moscow in 1941, the Red Army began rebuilding virtually from the ground up. Infantry, the rifle divisions, remained the backbone, but their authorized strength was reduced to around eleven thousand and their supporting arms and services were cut to minimums. Even vehicles were reduced by two-thirds, and most of those were horse-drawn. These frugal formations were supplemented by a large number of brigades less than half their size. The new structures reflected not only the heavy losses in men and equipment during Barbarossa, but also the fact that effective command of more complex formations was simply beyond the skill of the colonels and junior generals who took the places of those killed, captured, or replaced.

  Higher command structures were correspondingly simplified. Divisions—four or five, sometimes more—were for a time assigned directly to rifle armies, which also controlled most of the service and support elements. During 1942, as supplies of armor and artillery increased, communications improved, and staff work grew more competent, the rifle corps reemerged to enhance flexibility. A rifle army might field three or four of them, each with three or four divisions, sometimes upgraded from the independent brigades, which disappeared in their turn.

  Divisional allocations of guns and automatic weapons increased, but the bulk of supporting assets remained pooled at army level, assigned as needed. Throughout 1942, Soviet rifle formations were seldom anywhere near their authorized numbers. In theory and practice, they were regarded as expendable: to be kept in the line until reduced to cadre strength, then either broken up or completely rebuilt. Shock troops or cannon fodder? It depended on perspective. Nineteen-year-old Boris Gorbachevsky entered the army in January 1942. He first saw combat in August, in front of Rzhev, in a mixed-bag rifle company of “Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and Uzbeks…. We now no longer belong to ourselves; we have all been seized by the incomprehensibly savage element of battle. Shell bursts, shell fragments, and bullets are sweeping away the infantry lines…. The remnants of former companies and battalions have turned into a senseless mass of onward-charging, desperate men.” Like so many Red Army attacks in 1942, this one collapsed in a welter of blood and bodies. Wounded and hospitalized, Gorbachevsky encountered his regiment’s Communist Youth organizer, also a casualty: “How are we fighting? Everyone from the army commander down to the company commander … drives the soldiers forward into the chopping machine. And the result! We don’t have enough paper for all the funeral notices!”

  Yet many a veteran Landser has recalled that for all the high-tech terrors of the Eastern Front, the T-34 tanks, the Shturmovik attack planes, the Katyusha rockets with their eldritch scream, nothing was worse than the deep-throated “Urraa! Urraa!” accompanying the charge of the Red Army’s infantry.

  The armored force, prime target on all of Barbarossa’s fronts, was eviscerated in a matter of weeks. On July 15, 1941, the elephantine mechanized corps were disbanded. The signature unit became the tank brigade: initially around two thousand men and ninety-three tanks, two-thirds of them light T-60 tanks, whose 20 mm popguns and thin armor made them meat on the table for the panzers. Even that low strength proved materially unsustainable and beyond the capacity of most commanders. In December, the brigade was cut back to eight hundred men and forty-six tanks, about the strength of a Western battalion.

  These small formations made predictably little headway in the winter counterattacks. In March 1942, the first four tank corps were authorized. Between April and September 1942, twenty-five more joined the order of battle. Their final configuration on paper was three tank brigades and a motorized rifle brigade: just short of ten thousand men and 165 tanks. A third of those tanks were T-60s. Their more complex stablemates, the medium T-34s that became the Red Army’s signature armored vehicle, were still entering mass production.

  The 1942 order of battle remained the standard tank corps framework for the rest of the war. Light tanks were replaced by T-34s in a structure that was armor-heavy by developing Western standards, lacking both artillery to deal with German infantry and antitank guns and infantry to hold the ground it might gain. The former shortcoming would eventually be modified by increasing the number of turretless assault guns, the latter by creating mechanized corps built around truck-borne infantry. But the tank corps’s structure was a function of its mission: exploiting the breakthroughs made by infantry- and artillery-heavy “shock forces” as described before the war.

  That mission was easier defined than accomplished. The new tank corps underwent their first serious test in the Soviet Kharkov offensive in May 1942. Over thirteen hundred armored vehicles were concentrated for the attack. Early successes gained by mass could not be sustained against a flexible German defense built around coordinated air and armor strikes.
The tank corps lagged too far behind the fighting lines to intervene quickly, then kept going as a German counterattack closed off the neck of the salient they formed.

  A similar, albeit smaller-scale, armored debacle took place in the Crimea, where a single understrength panzer division took the measure of superior forces employed piecemeal. As Russian survivors fought delaying actions on the long retreat to the Don River, Russian staffs emphasized surprise, exploitation, and improved logistic support for future offensives. All of these appeared in the Stalingrad offensive. The rally and the counterattack orchestrated by Manstein showed that the Germans still mastered the armored battlefield. Mastered—but no longer dominated. Beginning with the new year, frontline commanders were reporting unpleasant tactical surprises. Red armor was no longer following its familiar pattern of engaging German strongpoints and exposing itself to paralyzing local ripostes by the panzers. Instead the tankers were bypassing the “hedgehogs,” driving past them deep into the German rear. Lower-unit leadership was becoming more flexible, more situationally oriented.

  Four hundred thousand tankers were trained during the war. More than three hundred thousand died in battle—a ratio matching the often-cited losses of the Nazi U-boat service, but in numbers ten times greater. The execution squads of the security police, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, were seldom to be found riding with the tankers. And the fatalism characteristic of the Red Army for almost a decade was beginning to develop among the tank crews into a determination, still unfocused but increasingly powerful, to take as many Hitlerites as possible along with them.

  The armored force attracted quality recruits—country boys who had dreamed of driving tractors for the machinery collective, factory workers attracted by the technical and mechanical aspects: socialist modernization on treads. Russia’s military heritage included elements other than brute force. It had a raiding culture as well, a concept of freewheeling mobility dating back to the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich, the flying columns that devastated Napoleon’s army during its retreat from Moscow, the mounted buccaneers of Semyon Budenny’s Konarmia (Cavalry Army) during the Russian Civil War. Given the right catalyst, a Red Army tank corps was a potentially lethal compound.

  The Red Army was also developing a supporting infrastructure—most significantly in its artillery. Guns had been important in the Russian army since the eighteenth century. Stalin would call artillery “the Red god of war.” And here if anywhere, mass was dominant. Western armies emphasized fire mobility. The Soviets emphasized tubes. The Red Army lacked the electronics and the technicians to implement a Western-style approach. Decentralization was in any case not a part of Soviet principle or practice. Guns, on the other hand, were easier to manufacture than tanks, and heavy mortars were even simpler than conventional artillery pieces. By October 1943, there were enough of them that Stavka authorized twenty-six artillery divisions, each with over 200 guns and howitzers plus 108 heavy (120 mm) mortars. At the same time, four rocket-launcher divisions were created. By the end of 1943, there were seven, each able to fire a salvo of over 3,400 rockets.

  The effect was an ability to saturate a battle zone in the fashion attempted by the Allies on the Western Front in 1916–17. It was as sophisticated as a baseball bat to the kidneys, and just as effective. Even when the guns were deployed in forward, exposed positions, German counter-battery fire and air strikes (when these were available) were simply absorbed by the sheer number of targets. Artillery commanders were responsible to artillery superiors, creating a chain of command and control that enabled artillery to be used independently, without particular and changeable commitments to the infantry and armor. The potential of the adjusted system was only marginally apparent during the Stalingrad campaign. At best it had its limits. Against stationary targets or massed formations, it could have effects prefiguring those later projected for a tactical nuclear bomb. The best counters were dispersion, mobility, flexibility. At Kursk the Germans would deny themselves all three, and Soviet gunners would make them pay.

  For the men in the Red Army’s ranks, the war’s second summer seemed to offer “neither victory nor hope.” Another third of a million men, another two thousand tanks, had been lost. The survivors were caught up in what seemed an endless retreat across the steppes, broken by last stands on temporary stop lines. Sergey Bondarchuk, himself a veteran of four years’ wartime service, presented a sanitized dramatization in his 1975 epic film, They Fought for Their Country. It follows the remnants of a shattered rifle regiment as they make their way toward the Don and Stalingrad, facing the scorn of the civilians they abandon and wondering why their efforts so far have been so futile, until finally they turn and fight, unfurling their banner and following it to glory on the Volga.

  The film’s tone of determined optimism interspersed with bits of comedy and nostalgia parallels that of its Western counterparts of the 1940s and 1950s in that it reflects an official policy that endured virtually until the Soviet Union’s final implosion. Russia’s soldiers and Russia’s people behaved heroically. Should they not in fact live up to the trope—that was why the police system existed, and from privates to generals, all went in fear of the NKVD. Its presence was ubiquitous, but its behavior remained random until July 28, when Stalin issued Order No. 227, which called for an end to retreat and demanded that every foot of Soviet soil be defended. Penalties ranged from service in a penal battalion to summary execution: more than 150,000 Red Army soldiers were formally sentenced to death. The number of summary executions will never be known.

  High morale was a soldier’s duty, not his right. But Stavka did not base morale on executions alone. Part of the mythology of Soviet recovery from Barbarossa involves Stalin’s willingness to call on religion and nationalism. Orthodox prelates met with Stalin himself. Churches were opened, seminaries authorized. Accompanying this was a near cultic emphasis on the “motherland,” its heroes and its symbols. Motherland became a form of “sacred space,” combining emotional abstraction with geographic reality. Films and lectures celebrated legendary generals such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov—and Stalin, revolutionary defender of the city that now bore his name. Uniforms were smartened up with shoulder boards and standing collars. Military bling returned to fashion: a structure of medals, orders, and decorations that could literally cover the entire chest of senior officers such as Zhukov and his counterpart and rival, Ivan Konev. Enlisted men from cooks to snipers had their own badges recognizing “distinguished” service.

  As early as September 1941, the title of “Guards” was reintroduced. Not Red Guards, as might have been expected—just Guards, referring both to the revolutionary formations and to the elite troops of the czarist empire. Units from independent battalions to entire armies that distinguished themselves in combat were rechristened and renumbered. Members of the units were titled Guardsmen—and the honorific accompanied them if they were transferred.

  The new spectrum of recognitions was welcome enough. But for the surviving veterans of 1941, for the wartime conscripts, and for the recovered wounded returning in increasing numbers, the sting of defeat was beginning to mask the cultures of buck passing and scapegoating developed under two decades of postrevolutionary terror. The material and human devastation left in the Nazis’ wake had become general knowledge. For some in the ranks, it generated anger at losing the results of generations of sacrifice and deprivation. The impulse to spiral into nihilism was counterbalanced by a growing conviction, even among the cynical and the disaffected, that nothing was wrong with the Soviet Union that the Germans could fix—or wanted to.

  A comprehensive and enduring propaganda campaign worked tirelessly to encourage and systematize hate—to make killing Germans a pleasure and a habit. Training, never exactly a humanitarian enterprise in the Red Army, inculcated toughness by such exercises as having tanks drive over recruits in slit trenches—sometimes trenches they had dug themselves. An “accident” or two was a sovereign cure fo
r reluctance to dig in and dig deep.

  A common Red Army type never developed even in the homogenizing context of total war and despite an official Soviet policy of stressing the collective nature of its sacrifice and victory. Age and ethnicity, background and culture, sustained individual identities. Confidence and comradeship, hope of recognition and fear of punishment, ideology and tradition—all played roles in renewing and refocusing combat motivation. Underpinning them all, even at the war’s middle stage, was the frontline soldiers’ increasing hope that their sacrifices would bring about postwar reform—“communism with a human face,” purged of prewar hatreds and misunderstandings, productive capacities adjusted to civilian needs and wants, leaders and people committed to the same goals.

  Boris Gorbachevsky, by then a captain, recalls a postwar discussion with half a dozen of his men around the kind of campfire that inspired swapping confidences even with an officer present: “If only the authorities would give us freedom, spare us from Kolkhoz troubles and think up something like the NEP. If only they’d set us free, we could rebuild all of Russia within five years.” Illusion and delusion were not Third Reich monopolies.

  III

  The Red Army’s background is best understood in the context of disconnects: between the party and the military, and among the major combat arms. The German army of 1943 is best understood in terms of synergies: among army, party, and society and within the army’s fighting components.

  The Nazi Party has been compared by scholars with almost every possible human organization, even medieval feudalism. The one adjective that cannot be applied is “patriarchal.” Change and progress were the movement’s flywheels. Nazi nostalgia found its essential expression in domestic kitsch. It had no place in military matters. Hitler’s initially enthusiastic wooing of the soldiers was based on his intention of using them first to consolidate his hold over both the Nazi Party and the German people, then as the standard-bearers of territorial and ideological expansion until they could safely be replaced by the SS. National Socialist views of war differed in important, arguably essential, respects from those of the Reichswehr. But on such subjects as anti-Marxism, anti-pacifism, and hostility to the Versailles Treaty, the military’s values were not incongruent with those avowed by Nazi theorists and propagandists.