At dawn of June 22, 1941, Hitler struck in surprise attack at the Soviet Union. Thousands of German planes bombed Soviet airfields; thousands of tanks smashed over the border, followed by millions of motor-borne troops. “The greatest military march in world history,” claimed Hitler. He did not overstate. By that onslaught the world’s two largest armies were locked in mankind’s most decisive struggle.
The Germans came fresh from the conquest of Europe. They had laid the groundwork for nearly a year. By building strategic roads in Poland, occupying Romania, sending troops to Finland, they gained access to the entire 1,800 mile Soviet western border, equivalent to the Canadian border from Vancouver to Buffalo. In the north, they drove from Finland against Leningrad and the Arctic port Murmansk; in the center, from Poland toward Moscow; in the South, from Romania towards Kiev and Odessa. Hitler claimed that nine million men were locked in active battle; millions more waited as reserves.
The view in Berlin, London and Washington was that Russian resistance would be smashed in a one-month blitz. After a fortnight, Washington cautiously admitted: “The Russians have put up the strongest resistance the Germans have yet met.” In six weeks, America and Britain began to re-appraise the conflict. Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister, broadcast praise of the Russians’ “magnificent devotion” and noted the efficiency of their military organization. Raymond Clapper cabled from London August 20 (World-Telegram): “Russia has opened up a new pattern for victory. Never before … has there been put up against Hitler the manpower sufficient and willing to do the job.”
Khrushchev, in his 1956 attack on Stalin, says that the German assault took Stalin by surprise, that he had not properly prepared; that even when Germans invaded Soviet territory, Stalin had brushed it off as “provocative, undisciplined actions,” and had refused to fight back. Khrushchev should know. The Germans certainly smashed many Soviet airplanes on the ground, as the Japanese did with Americans at Pearl Harbor; any aggressor has this advantage. But the Red Army did not ignore that June 22 onslaught; its defense astonished the world. If Stalin ignored earlier frontier incidents, he had a reason that seemingly escapes Khrushchev. This war was not going to be decided by force of arms alone, but by the line-up of the world.
Stalin indicated this in his first wartime radio speech, two weeks after the Germans invaded. He told the Soviet people that the enemy had taken considerable territory; he implied that they would take more. But this, he said, was no excuse for panic. “There are no invincible armies and never have been.” Germany had gained important military advantage by surprise attack but had “lost politically by exposing herself … as a bloodthirsty aggressor.” The Soviet counter-strategy must be “a war of the whole people.” The Army must “fight for every inch of Soviet soil,” but “in case of forced retreat,” everything valuable must be evacuated or destroyed. He promised loyal allies “in the peoples of Europe and America.” “Our war for the freedom of our country will merge with the struggles of the peoples of Europe and America for democratic liberties.” He summoned them, not only to resistance, but “forward to victory.”
For more than twenty years the Soviet people had prepared for this onslaught, but it took a different form from what they most feared. They had dreaded a joint attack by all the earth’s capitalist nations; they had feared that a world line-up would form against the USSR. This might have happened if they had fought in Poland two years earlier, when Chamberlain was in power; it would almost surely have happened if the Finnish war had dragged on till an Anglo-French force arrived; it might have happened if Russia had attacked Hitler during his Balkan campaign, as a British diplomat told me they should have done—“before Hitler strengthens himself by victories.”
Stalin had a different view of it. He saw, no doubt, that Hitler had used the twenty-two months of the Non-Aggression Pact to seize the wealth and armaments of Europe, but these months had also taught the people of Europe and of the world the nature of Nazi rule. When Hitler’s conquests began, sections of the European tried to adjust to the German “New Order” hoping that it might upper class supported them. Even many of the common people unite Europe. Two years had shown that the Nazis brought no “United States of Europe” but stark slavery and hunger to all but the dominant “German race.” Millions of Jews and Slavs were dying in concentration camps. The ripening hate of Europe counted, as the world line-up formed. America’s deep commitment as arsenal against Hitler counted. And, as Stalin had said it would, the blatant aggression of that surprise attack counted in the world line-up, too.
The first sign of a new world line-up came when Hitler’s call to a “holy crusade against Bolshevism” flopped. Most people expected Pope Pius XII to denounce the Bolsheviks. He did not. Others thought that Churchill, that ancient foe of Bolshevism, would seek neutrality. But Churchill declared support for the Russians in ringing words: “Any man who fights against Nazi-ism will have our aid; the Russian danger is our danger.” In the fourth week, Britain signed an alliance with the USSR; in this, she was quickly followed by the various European “governments-in-exile,” which had taken refuge in London and which now for the first time saw a chance of some day going home.
“The six-weeks’ stand of Russia has changed the outlook of London, Washington and Europe-in-exile,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick in the N. Y. Times. It also changed the outlook of “Europe-in-prison.” It quickened the resistance movements in Europe’s underground. By autumn of 1941, Europe’s underground battlefield became important; the Russian resistance to Hitler, and the alliances with various govern men ts-in-exile had combined all anti-Nazis in Europe—from Communists to monarchists—in the Resistance. But when one recalls how strong the anti-Soviet forces were in America, Britain and Europe, when one recalls that Senator Harry Truman said, in the first days of the fighting: “If the Germans are winning, wc should help the Russians and if the Russians are winning, we should help the Germans, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”[9]—then Stalin’s slowness to fight until Hitler’s surprise attack drove deep into Russia, does not seem stupidity or neglect.
The world’s military experts did not share the view Khrushchev put forward in 1956 about the unpreparedness of the Red Army. They burst into astounded praise. “For the first time the Germans have been met by an army trained, not for the war of 1918, but for the war of 1941,” wrote George Fielding Eliot, July 29, 1941. He noted the USSR used “defensive positions of great depth, stoutly held every where, camouflage of remarkable skill, protecting Russian artillery from air attack, mobile counter-attack units against German panzer columns, and an air-force that fully supports the ground troops.“ “It is an army modern in structure, tactically efficient, strategically realistic,” wrote Max Werner in the New Republic, August 11.
The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
The blitzkrieg, on which Hitler relied for quick victory, thus failed to bring Russian collapse. Hitler was forced to a longer war, which the German economy could ill endure. “For the first time, Hitler is fighting in a new dimension,” said a N. Y, Times editorial. The writer was speaking o£ geography but the “new dimension” was more than geography. For the first time, Hitler was fighting an entire people, organized for total defense. In Soviet tactics, the activities of the army and of the people were coordinated. “The front is not only where the cannon roars,” was the slogan. “It is in every workshop, in every farm.”
The tremendous manpower of Russia had been conceded by everyone. But few people had realized how the quality of this manpower had changed. Socialized medicine, the care given to mothers and babies in childbirth, physical education and sports among young people had improved the national health. Army statistics had shown steady increase in height, weight, chest measurements. The education and military knowledge of recruits had also increased year by year. Millions of trained women took part in the defense; the medical service of the army was full of them, as were communications, supply and engineers. Civilians had prepared themselves physically to cooperate with the army. Six million people had passed the tests of the GTO badge—“ready for labor and defense”—which demanded all-round fitness in walking, running, swimming, jumping, rowing, ski-ing. Many had taken free courses in parachute-jumping and gliding—even small children loved to jump from the “parachute-towers” in the parks of culture and rest.
The form of the collective farm fitted admirably the needs of defense. Every farm had its working brigades with their leaders; these could act as labor battalions for the army, even bringing their own cooks and cooking equipment. Every farm had its summer-time nursery, run by the older mothers under trained nurses; this organization could handle the children in groups and evacuate them to the interior, in the returning box-cars that had brought up troops. Every farm had its civil defense group which had learned sharp-shooting and had weapons; here was a guerrilla band already formed.
As the Germans entered the Ukraine, a race began for the grain harvest. The farmers’ first job was to save this grain. Teachers, students, office workers went to the farms to help; even the army harvested in lulls between battles. By September 10, when the Germans reached the heart of the Ukraine, sixty percent of the grain had been moved east. Millions of fanners then also moved eastward, driving their trucks and tractors, or returning on army trains. They were not jobless, like refugees in Europe. They took their implements and found work elsewhere growing food. Some farmers, through choice or necessity, remained in the area held by Germans; these became irregular fighters, hitting the Germans from the rear.
The blowing up of the great Dnieper Dam startled the world with die realization that the Russians took this war far more seriously than other nations had. It was only one natural incident in the strategy which die Western press at once called “scorched earth.” Russians did not use those fatalistic words. They were not interested in “scorching” anything, but in saving things for themselves and taking them away from the enemy. In every industrial plant, as the enemy approached, the workers formed gangs to dismantle machinery, grease, pack and transport parts, and ship them east. The workers went east with their machines and set their factories up again in the assigned places in Siberia or the Urals.
When the city of Kharkov was occupied by the Germans, the Kharkov Tractor Plant took pride in the fact that it never stopped making tanks against Hitler—not even for a day. Most of the workers went east with their machines, but enough workers stayed in Kharkov to assemble the spare parts already made, and drive the last tanks against the enemy. Before their production stopped in Kharkov, their main plant was producing in the East.
How this Soviet strategy exhausted Germany, is told by Howard K. Smith in his book, Last Train from Berlin. The German war machine and the German people had fattened on the loot of Europe; they starved when Hitler entered Russia. Their troops came to the Dnieper and happily saw beyond the ruined dam the massive buildings of the great Dnieper industries, the first factories they had seen intact in the USSR, says Smith. But when they reached the buildings, every machine down to the last bolt and nut, had gone East. “That was defense,” says Smith.
“I was terrified when I saw from the air those great masses of working people,” said a German pilot in Moscow after his capture. He had been used to sowing terror among fleeing populations. But he himself felt terror at the sight of confident working people organized around their army, digging fortifications for their land.
Years earlier, when British and French military experts still thought in terms of trench warfare of 1914–18, Red Army journals had predicted the blitz type of war and had said that it would quickly overwhelm a weak enemy with little damage to the victor, but that if countries of equal strength were involved, and if the “blitz” did not at once succeed, there would be a long war which would then be decided by relative economic resources, war reserves and the people’s morale. This was the test which the Russians and Germans now faced.
By November, 1941, the Germans held the rich Ukraine and had looted Kiev; they were besieging Leningrad, the fortress of the north; they were in Moscow’s suburbs on three sides of the city, in sight of its lofty towers. The fight for the big cities began.
Modern cities are not expected to defend themselves. Civilians in most lands do not expect to fight. Paris declared itself an “open city”—when the Germans had beaten the French army, they just walked into Paris. When Warsaw’s heroic mayor fought after the government and generals fled, the world was surprised; we had forgotten how mighty the medieval cities were in defense. Stalin had not forgotten. He had fought the Finnish war to make Leningrad a defensible fortress. In Moscow, while building housing, he had also built unpublicized the world’s strongest fortress city.
Moscow was a fortress city in the Middle Ages. The walled Kremlin was its center; a mile out, this was ringed by a stone wall, and two miles out by a circle of earth-works. The wall and earthworks had long been replaced by two ring boulevards. Ten main highways shoot out from Moscow like spokes of a wheel; they are connected by these rings. Eleven railways branch out, also joined by a belt-line railway. During the Five-Year Plans, these boulevards and highways were lined with four-story apartment houses of concrete, especially thick against Russian winter. The ring boulevards were widened by transplanting their trees to backyards and parks. The beauty-lovers sighed. When the war came, Moscow found that tanks and motorized troops could maneuver in six columns at forty miles an hour anywhere in the city and shoot out in any direction without a traffic jam, protected everywhere by solid rows of concrete apartment houses four stories high. A modern fortress is not made by walls alone—the fall of the Maginot and Mannerheim Lines proved that. A modern fortress must give mobility to great force under protection. This Moscow gave. All war supplies were made inside the city, the power plant being based on lignite deposits behind the town. Air defense was based on fields within the city and to the east.
The Soviet government with the foreign embassies moved to Kuibyshev on the Volga, deep to the rear. Children went with their teachers to distant places like the Urals; they stayed two years. Civilians, whose work was not needed for the war, were also sent East. Moscow was the front; its people went on a diet of 1,600 calories. There was no coal for homes or schools; coal was for war industries. There was no electric light in homes on long winter nights that begin at four o’clock; electricity was for munitions. People went home from twelve hours work and stumbled into bed in darkness, pulling covers over their clothes. In the most dangerous weeks, one of my women friends, working on Moscow Radio, moved her bedding to the office and went on twenty-four hour duty, relieving two men who went to dig fortifications outside the town.
Stalin stayed in Moscow. On November 7, 194J, while German guns roared in the suburbs and Hitler announced Moscow already taken, Stalin reviewed the troops in the Red Square. This gave confidence to the people of Moscow; it told them that they, with their Commander-in-chief, were the hub of the nation’s defense. Moscow drove the Germans back sixty miles that winter and held them there.
Leningrad had it harder; it was under siege and gunfire two and a half years. Some of the time, people existed on five slices of black bread and two glasses of hot water a day. On this, they made munitions and fought Germans. More people in Leningrad died of hunger than of German shells. They died of lack of protein but not of the scurvy that plagued medieval besieged cities; Soviet scientists taught them to get vitamin C from pine needles in the parks. The famous composer, Shostakovich, was an air warden; he threw incendiary bombs off roofs when Germans dropped them. Between-times he composed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to struggle and victory. Anyone who lived through that siege was given a medal engraved “Leningrad Defense.”
The Germans made their furthest advance in the war’s second year. They were held in the north by Leningrad, in the center by Moscow, but in the south they drove over dry, open plains as far as the North Caucasus grainfields and the city of Stalingrad. This city is on a plain without natural defense; it consists of thirty miles of factories strung along the Volga river. Stalingrad became the southern anchor of the Soviet defense, as Leningrad was the northern.
“Take Stalingrad at any cost,” Hitler ordered in the summer of 1942. Stalingrad’s fall would open the way to encircle Moscow from the south. It would open the road to Baku oil, to Iran and India, to a junction with the Japanese in Chinese Turkestan. Day by day, a thousand planes and a thousand tanks struck at this single city. In mid-September, this became two thousand planes and two thousand tanks. The Germans cut Stalingrad in half, in a dozen pieces. More than once, Hitler announced that he had taken it. He had truly taken most of it but not the people.
“There is no land beyond the Volga,” went the word in Stalingrad. They fought from street to street, from house to house, from room to room. They used rifles, grenades, knives, kitchen chairs, boiling water. The Tank Factory continued to make tanks and drove them against the enemy right from the factory yard. “Not a building is left intact,” said the German report. Then the people fought from cellars and caves. “Every pile of bricks can be made a fortress if there is courage enough,” went the word. “Every hillock regained, gains time,” Stalin wired them. The people of Stalingrad fought thus one hundred and eighty-two days. Then, fresh reserves, organized and trained far in Siberia, drove over the plains and took the city in a great pincers. Over 300,000 Germans were caught in that trap. They surrendered February 2, 1943.
Here, the tide turned on the long front of war. Here, the German drive to subjugate the world was broken on the men and women of one heroic Volga city.
More than two grim years of battles were yet to endure. But from Stalingrad the Germans were steadily forced back. In 1943, they were driven back through the Ukraine; in early summer of 1944, they were driven back over the Soviet frontiers. In late July, the Soviet armies faced them in Warsaw. In April of 1945, the Red Army stood in Berlin. In June, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco to plan the post-war world.
In the USSR, the people began to go back to the lands the Germans had ruined. They found a total destruction such as men had not seen since the days of Genghiz Khan. The Germans, defeated, wreaked slaughter on those civilians who blocked their conquest of the world. They slew millions by torture or in gas chambers; they dumped them down flooded mines, or burned them in buildings. They drove out or slaughtered all livestock. They took three million people away as slaves. Twenty-five million people were left homeless in the fields of south Russia and the Ukraine.
One action of that time must be noted, though it is not fully explained. During the war, seven entire small nationalities were deported to the East. It was not announced. We correspondents in Moscow heard rumors but when we inquired, we were told that German and Turkish agents had been corrupting the Volga Germans and the Moslem nationalities of the Crimea and Caucasus; the details were military secrets. Not until 1956, in Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin, was the world officially told that the Kalmyks and Karachai had been moved eastward in 1943, and the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars in early 1944. Khrushchev did not mention the Volga Germans and Crimean Tartars, who were moved in 1942. No explanation was given. One notes, however, that precisely in this period, in early 1944, Stalin announced on behalf of the government that the sixteen constituent republics would henceforth be allow-ed to have armies and foreign offices of their own; they had fought so well together that they had earned this final mark of nationhood. Some readjustment of national geography clearly went on in the midst of the war. How far it was punitive, how far precautionary, how far a more rational distribution of population, done under cloak of war, has not been revealed.
I cannot end this chapter without a glance at the Soviet armies as I saw them sweep through Poland to take Berlin. I watched from cities behind the lines, Warsaw and Lodz. They were the world’s strongest army, driving back the Germans, who had been the strongest army three years before. Three merciless years had beaten the Russians into shape. Unlike the Germans, they had the qualities those “new people” developed years earlier—wide individual initiative inseparably knit in a collective force. I am no partisan of war but I could only compare to a great symphony the accurate harmony with which they moved.
In late autumn of 1944, they stood on the Vistula facing Warsaw. West of the river lie wide marshlands that will not support tanks. The great offensive waited for the freeze. The First Polish Army, recruited from Polish refugees in the USSR, held the immediate center, opposite their ruined capital which the Germans were methodically blasting and burning, block by block. A Polish officer told me they had a big artillery piece every seven feet, to break the German forts, and prepare for the drive.
On Friday, January 12, Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Army struck from southern Poland, broke nine lines of forts and advanced twenty-five miles in two days. On Sunday, two new armies drove west and were woven into the action. Marshal Zhukov’s First Byelo-Russian, including the First Polish, drove through the center, taking 1,200 populated places in two days. Marshal Rokossovsky’s Second Byelo-Russian swung through the north over frozen swamps where the Narew joins the Vistula. After the breakthrough, the armored spearheads went rapidly; Zhukov’s tanks made seventy miles in one spectacular day. Rail crews changed the gauge of the east-west railways as they advanced; supplies thus came straight from the Urals, two thousand miles to the front. The unbroken flow of shells and gasoline astonished the military experts of the world.
Even a civilian like myself, charting it on a map, could not miss the superb rhythms in which those great armies encircled cities, always taking them from an unexpected side, and always counting on each other for the exact help they needed. Zhukov took Warsaw by a triple blow from north, south, and west, every direction except the expected east. Konev’s army raced clear across south Poland, swung around a fortress city on the German border and entered from the direction of Berlin. Even the ghetto factories were still working. They thus saved eight thousand Jews, the largest single group saved anywhere in Poland, for German practice was to kill Jewish and Slav prisoners before retreating. A prong of Konev’s army then thrust backward into Cracow, taking it so unaware and undamaged that it looked like a city that had never seen war. Zhukov similarly took Lodz from the “wrong direction,” intact in a single blow. When I moved to Lodz with the Polish government, just after, I found the suitcases of a German officer in the wardrobe of my hotel room.
American prisoners of war, released by the Russian drive and streaking their way across Poland, told me in Lodz the details that impressed them. They were intrigued by the Russian initiative which, besides regular methods, used every kind o£ device. Gasoline moved not only in regular tank-cars; but Russians dug up underground cisterns of it and fastened them on flat-cars to take along. Since the rail transport was needed for the armored spearheads, the infantry used many horses. The Americans saw infantrymen advancing in small peasant carts on which two men slept while others drove, thus going forward twenty-four hours a day. When the horses wore out, they were turned into some peasant’s yard and fresh ones taken. The effect was to pile all the Polish horses into the western provinces; a first task of the new Polish government was to get them back for the spring sowing in Central Poland. “We learned a lot about war,” the Americans said.
The tasks given to the First Polish Army showed political sense in the Soviet High Command. Poles had the honor of taking Warsaw; their numbers being insufficient for the job, Zhukov’s Russians encircled the city twenty-five miles out and cut German communications, while the First Polish stormed the city itself. Poles formed the spearhead that broke into Pomerania and took the Kolberg naval base; Poles and Russians took Danzig, the Poles taking the city center and raising a Polish flag over the town hall. These victories had for Poles historic meaning, for Germans and Poles have contested that seacoast a thousand years. Meanwhile the Second Polish Army, newly recruited in liberated Poland, moved from training camps to garrison duty in all large Polish cities, all of which were entrusted from the moment of liberation to the Poles. Two months later the Second Polish helped storm the Niesse and were among the first of Zhukov’s forces in Berlin. This was their right; the war had begun with Hitler’s aggression against their land.
This great drive liberated Western Poland so swiftly and in such manner that the Germans had time for very little destruction. The great exception was Warsaw; here General Bor’s uprising, staged prematurely and uncoordinated with the Russian advance the previous summer, had provoked complete destruction of the Polish capital, before the advance which I describe began. When Warsaw was liberated, people began to return to their homes from all directions. They found only heaps of rubble. All streets were blocked by fallen buildings. Town hall and opera house were fragments against the sky. Fine cathedrals, palaces, memorials of Chopin and Copernicus, were only scrap and memory. There was no water, no electricity, no gas; basements and sewers were clogged with corpses. On January 19, two days after the city’s liberation, President Beirut reviewed the Polish Army in the midst of the ruins, announced intent to rebuild Warsaw as the capital and called on all the Polish land to help. Several thousand people had already returned to live in cellars; they gathered around the tribune and cheered. Somewhere in that wintry ruin a bunch of flowers had been found for a small girl to give to Beirut.
The drive that I watched liberate Poland halted at the Oder, established bridgeheads and built up supplies for the assault on Berlin. This began April 18.
“Nobody who was there will ever forget that dawn on the Oder,” wrote Karmen, Soviet camerareporter, in Izvestia. “With thousands of guns roaring, the whole Soviet land moved on the enemy’s capital over a score of roads.” Other reporters noted that the roads were lined with cherry trees in bloom and waving birches; that the Poles went over the Oder drinking toasts with river water. Six days later, Red Army artillery had Friedrichstrasse as target. Karmen noted the hour; it was 8:30 April 22, 1945.
All Soviet writers mention the numbers of Russian, Polish and Yugoslav slaves that poured from German factories. Often the troops dislodged the enemy slowly to avoid killing their own people. In a typical case the Germans were firing from the roof of a large factory that made silk for parachutes. Suddenly a crowd of Russian women rushed from the factory to freedom, and embraced the arriving troops.
One old woman asked everyone. “My little dears, which is the road to Orel?”
The soldiers smiled. “We’ll send you, Grandma.” They put her on a truck for the rear.