Figure 20. The Ilyushin 2m3 (Shturmovik). Designed as a ground attack aircraft, the two-seater bomber was the Soviet Union’s most effective warplane.
The thousands of soldiers who had been surrounded by the Germans but escaped captivity formed a new menace to the invaders. In the huge forests of Belorussia, the northern parts of the Ukraine, and western Russia they took refuge, collected food and weapons, and formed partisan units. The partisans began to attract local peasants as well, and to attack German communications and transport. By the fall of 1941, the disruption to the rail network was considerable, seriously reducing the output of the already desperately overstretched German supply routes. By the end of the next year there were nearly a half million partisans under arms, and they controlled substantial areas where the Nazis could not move. The Soviet command established a central partisan staff to supply them by air, sending over old and slow but sturdy and hard to detect biplanes that could land on a dime in forest clearings. Hitler’s army reacted to the partisan attacks with vicious brutality, exterminating village after village – men, women, and children – where they suspected contact with partisan units. Collaborationist units from all over Europe and the western territories of the USSR were often more savage than the Germans in dealing with the population of the partisan areas.
Still in Soviet hands but gripped by the vice of the German and Finnish armies was Leningrad. The Germans and their allies had reached the outskirts of the city in September, and from then on the only road was over Lake Ladoga. Around the city were substantial numbers of Soviet troops, but the Germans lacked the resources to take it by assault, so they hoped instead to starve it out. Hitler planned to have it destroyed when he won, as a place of no use to the new Reich. Without effective means of replacement and further reduced by German bombing, food supplies dropped rapidly and starvation began. By mid-winter ten to twenty thousand people were dying every month. Heat and electricity virtually disappeared, all with continuing German shelling and bombing to make things worse. Only workers in the few remaining factories – almost all now devoted to weapons and other war production – had anything close to adequate rations. Fortunately the lake froze, and some supplies could come in over the “Ice Road.” The authorities had to improvise, opening stations in food stores that served only hot water or tea substitutes just to keep people a bit warmer. During the next summer the improvised transportation across the lake improved, but by the time the Red Army raised the siege in January, 1944, some eight hundred thousand people had starved to death.
In Leningrad many of the factories had been evacuated before the Germans came, and more were evacuated in 1942. They were part of the massive move of Soviet industry to the east, and the population went as well, in the tens of millions all across the country. The Soviets evacuated ordinary people and groups of children as well as officials. Indeed officials were often required to stay behind to form resistance groups, and those who tried to get out ahead of the Germans, as in the Moscow panic of October 1941, found themselves stopped by the NKVD and even the local populace. Virtually everything and everyone in the country was part of the war effort, a degree of mobilization unknown even in Germany. Women not only staffed the hospitals and took care of orphan children, but they also fought in the army. Anti-aircraft regiments were mostly female, pitting young women just out of high school against the Luftwaffe. In the army, radio operators were women as were other auxiliary positions, and women also made up a fighter regiment and two bomber regiments, including a night bomber unit. Altogether over half a million women served in the armed forces. The intelligentsia went to war as well, not only scientists and engineers. The Soviets evacuated the universities, research institutes, and theaters. Artists and writers who had lived in fear through the 1930s found themselves on transport planes coming out of Leningrad with fighter escorts. Moved east to Siberia and Central Asia, they continued to work, producing major works like Eisenstein’s epic movie Ivan the Terrible, filmed in Kakazhstan, or Shostakovich’s Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony, finished at Kuibyshev on the Volga. Their work contributed immensely to the morale of the population, not only by their content but also by the simple fact that something normal was still taking place. In the rear food was spartan if generally unfailing, and housing often meant several families crammed into a school classroom. Workers who had come east with their factories lived in tents in the Siberian winter while they built buildings and barracks in which to live, sometimes starting work in new buildings before the roofs were built. Yet most who remembered the war remembered it as a time of privation and sorrow mixed with enthusiasm and the warmth of solidarity. Stalin had greatly overestimated the extent of discontent among the population, and while his agents read mail and listened in on telephone conversations in search of German sympathizers, most people just went to work to help the army, whatever their views of the ultimate value of the Soviet system.
The victory at Moscow encouraged Stalin and the generals to try to exploit their success, and early in 1942 they mounted a series of attacks from Khar’kov in the south to well north of Moscow. All of these offensives were costly failures. The Germans were pushed back here and there, but with heavy Soviet losses. Again several large units were surrounded and ground to pieces. When the spring ended and the mud season with it, Hitler decided not to move against Moscow again, as Zhukov and Stalin expected, but to go south. His aim was the Caucasus with the oil supplies in Grozny and Baku. The Third Reich was short of oil, and this seemed the way to solve the problem. The Nazis smashed through Soviet defenses, getting all the way to the line of the Caucasus Mountains, but also directly east toward the Volga. To protect his flank and cut off the Russians from Baku, he needed to cut the rail lines at Stalingrad and cross the river itself. Stalingrad was the old Tsaritsyn, where Stalin had first encountered warfare in 1918 and was now the site of an immense tractor factory that was also producing tanks, but its main importance was its location.
By the end of August the Germans were on the edge of the city, sending wave after wave of armor and mechanized infantry against the defenders dug into the ruins of the city. It seemed that the war hung in the balance. Yet the German advance had brought many problems with it. The rail lines back to Germany were now so long that transport was jammed up almost to the German border. Hitler no longer had enough German troops to secure his flanks, so the sides of the German wedge pointed at the city were held by Italian and Rumanian troops. Most important, the defenders just kept fighting. By the end of the year the Russian salients were down to just a few acres, their artillery support coming from batteries on the eastern side of the river. In one place sergeant Iakov Pavlov held out for months with just a few dozen men in the basement of a shattered apartment block. The fighting went from house to house, and many Soviet soldiers decided that the most effective weapons were sharpened trenching shovels and grenades. The Nazis could not cross the river.
Around the burning wreckage of the city the Red Army was preparing its trap. Huge armored forces moved up to the north and south, facing the hapless Italians and Rumanians across the frozen steppe. Then on November 19 they attacked with massive artillery and air support and in four days came together to encircle the six hundred thousand German soldiers in Stalingrad. German attempts to supply the trapped army were futile, and in February the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army surrendered. Berlin radio played Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s opera over and over again. Nearly a half a million men had died at Stalingrad on each side, but Soviet victory was now assured.