Other equipment was in short supply as well. The Germans genuinely feared Soviet bayonets, and troops were encouraged to use them for that reason. The problem was, for many, that they had no other choice. That June, soldiers in Belorussia and Ukraine ran out of cartridges and bullets. Anastas Mikoyan recalled his government’s surprise when it learned that the army had run out of rifles, too. ‘We thought we surely had enough for the whole army,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘But it turned out that a portion of our divisions had been assembled according to peacetime norms. Divisions that had been equipped with adequate numbers of rifles for wartime conditions held on to them, but they were all close to the front. When the Germans crossed the frontier and began to advance, these weapons ended up in the territory they controlled or else the Germans simply captured them. As a result, reservists going to the front ended up with no rifles at all.’66 Retreating troops also abandoned all the things they could not carry, which included wounded men as well as Maxim guns.
The Red Army had been restructured in the last few months of peace. The debacle in Finland had provoked an initial programme of reforms, but it was the fall of France in 1940 that inspired the General Staff to focus on their preparations for land-based attack. If they should happen to be faced with a massive strike from German planes and tanks, they reasoned, their strategy should now incorporate the deployment of large anti-tank artillery brigades in support of the infantry. The huge formations must have looked impressive, but when the attack came in 1941 they were good for little more than show. The front line would soon be so broad that the best the large armoured brigades could do was to huddle in their deep consolidated rows, unable to predict or respond to the movements of an enemy whose measure they had yet to take. Infantry divisions faced German tanks without the consistent support of their artillery. Since their air cover had also been utterly destroyed, many soldiers concluded that the back-breaking effort of Soviet industry in the 1930s, the pride of Stalin’s revolution, was now as good as wasted, lost. Soviet troops had been expecting to enjoy the science-fiction spectacle of their own machines in battle. Instead, they watched as the horizon filled with the fruits of German modernity. A new word – ‘tank fright’ – was soon coined by the General Staff to describe the conscripts’ terrified response.67
The story might have been quite different. Soviet tanks should have been world-beaters. Many had been tested during the civil war in Spain in 1936, and some designs had been refined as a result. The heavy KV model, named after Kliment Voroshilov, was a redoubtable machine, almost impervious to German fire at this stage in the war. It would, indeed, provide the model for the Germans’ own ‘Tiger’ in 1943. The lighter, more manoeuvrable T-34 eventually proved itself the best field tank in the Second World War, but at this stage the Red Army still had more of the older BT light tanks in service, as well as the obsolescent T-26 and T-28s. These machines were old, and few had been reliably maintained. The KV had a tendency to break down anyway, but every model suffered from a shortage of spare parts, to say nothing of skilled mechanical attention. In 1941, nearly three quarters of the Soviet Union’s 23,000 tanks were thought to need rebuilding or capital repairs. They would not make it to the workshops that summer. More Soviet tanks were lost in 1941 through breakdown than through German fire, and overall the Soviets lost six tanks to every German one.68
The same story could be repeated for artillery in 1941. The Red Army was well-equipped, but its sclerotic command structures deprived it of flexibility in field conditions. There were never enough men with the right skills to operate complex equipment, but the inexperienced officers who commanded them were also unlikely to give them much chance to learn for themselves. Heavy guns of every kind were hoarded by officers for whom men might be cheap but new equipment was too valuable to lose.69 Men, too, were easier to move. Tractors were sometimes used to drag the heaviest equipment into place, but horses were the main source of draught power. In 1941, the Red Army still used the civil-war tachanka, a three-horse cart, to draw some of its lighter guns to the front line. But the horses were slaughtered with the men in 1941, and though the June grass had been sweet, forage for the survivors was soon running low. Supplies of food were a problem along the entire front. Horses and men grew thinner at the same accelerated pace.
The other fatal logistical problem that summer was radio communication. Again, the difficulty came as no surprise. Poor field communications had dogged the Soviet army in the Finnish campaign, but plans to provide equipment and train new operators had not yet been fulfilled. The Red Army relied on wire far more than radio. The system was inflexible and centralized. Tank drivers, for instance, were seldom in contact with their comrades or even their commanding officers on the battlefield. The radio operators that did work at the front had not been adequately trained. As a former SS officer recalled after the war, the Soviets ‘used only simple codes and we nearly always were able to intercept and decode their radio messages without any difficulty. Thus we obtained quick information on the front situation, and frequently also on Russian intentions; sometimes I received such reports from our monitoring stations earlier than the situation reports of our own combat troops.’70 In 1941, some units were not even using code. At Uman that summer, vital messages from staff officers in the 6th Army were conveyed in clear text. ‘What else are we supposed to do,’ a lieutenant enquired, ‘when they want everything sent without delay?’71
Finally, there was little prospect of help for weak and injured soldiers at this stage. The suddenness of the German attack pre-empted plans to move hospitals and medical supplies away from the front line. Then transport difficulties strangled their retreat. By 1 July 1941, the South-Western Front could call on just 15 per cent of its planned medical facilities. In the Tarnopol garrison hospital, which would have been the first point of call for Volkov and his tired crew, more than 5,000 wounded and exhausted men were crowded into facilities intended for 200 people within five days of the first attack.72 On 30 June, a report marked ‘absolutely secret’ catalogued the losses of one week. ‘In the course of military action none of the sanitary establishments located in the western parts of Belorussia was mobilized,’ it began. ‘As a result, the [Western] Front lacked 32 surgical and 12 infection hospitals, 16 corps hospitals, 13 evacuation points, 7 administrative centres for evacuation, 3 motorized sanitary companies… and other medical facilities.’73 It added that the equipment, drugs and other supplies that these facilities controlled had been destroyed in the bombing and fires. The staff, too, frequently, were dead.