Once the fact of German invasion was beyond dispute, the authoritarianism and centralization of Stalin’s regime showed only torpidity and inertia in the face of military emergency. For example, Moscow’s order in the evening of 22 June for the west front to destroy the German concentration at Suvalki was useless: the advancing enemy was no longer there. When Stalin personally began to direct the war effort, his command that the Red Army cede no territory and his refusal to countenance withdrawal squandered tons of equipment and material and consigned hundreds of thousands of troops to death or captivity. Fifty-six per cent of all military casualties suffered by the Soviet Union during the Second World War occurred during the first eighteen of its forty-seven months. The Red Army paid dearly for Stalin’s errors in dealing with Hitler.
Phases of the War
By early autumn, despite a succession of military disasters, morale in the Red Army had stiffened. Party officials reported to Stalin that ‘flights of military units [from the battlefield] have become rarer’, and wounded soldiers were observed bearing their arms with them to the field hospitals, rather than tossing them away, as formerly. As a result of this, as well as better organization and better generalship, Germany’s string of triumphs in Russia came to an abrupt end with the battle of Moscow. The failure of the second German assault on the city in November enabled Zhukov to counter-attack in early December, forcing the Germans to fall back between 100 and 250 kilometres.
At this point Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack, not along one or two axes of advance, but along the entire two thousand kilometres of front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. This overambitious offensive had largely spent itself by April 1942. The Soviet General Staff thereupon recommended a strategic defence in order to reinforce the army and build up stocks of equipment. Stalin agreed at first, but then authorized an attack in May designed to liberate Kharkov. It disastrously misfired. The Russians retired behind the northern Donets and the Germans occupied the Crimean peninsula.
Hitler had a new plan: a south-east advance into the Don, Kuban, and Volga regions as a first step towards the conquest of oil-rich Transcaucasia. Operation Blue began in the spring of 1942. By mid-July 1942 it was evident that the Germans were driving for Stalingrad on the lower reaches of the Volga. In late August, General Friedrich von Paulus’s forces had crossed the Don and attacked Stalingrad. After two weeks of shelling, bombing, and bloody street fighting, the Germans were in possession of most of the city. The Soviets, however, had no intention of capitulating; on 19 November they counter-attacked (‘Operation Uranus’), penetrating and encircling Paulus’s army from both north and south. Now Paulus himself was besieged.
Time was not on the side of the Germans at Stalingrad. Hitler flatly forbade any attempt at a break-out, even though the Soviets succeeded in stalling F. E. Manstein’s relief columns. As the temperature fell, so too did reserves of food and ammunition; the Luftwaffe’s attempt to supply Paulus’s forces by air failed. Finally, at the end of January and in early February 1943, Paulus and the remnants of his sixth army surrendered. One hundred and fifty thousand of his men were casualties; another hundred thousand were prisoners of war. Although the battle of Stalingrad did not predetermine German defeat in the war, it made a total German victory extremely improbable.
Emboldened by success at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a series of offensives in the early months of 1943. These had three important results. First, the Soviets managed to cut a corridor through German lines to relieve beleaguered Leningrad. Second, by April they had effectively demolished Germany’s positions in the northern Caucasus. Finally by February the Red Army had defeated the German second army near Voronezh, forcing it to retreat two hundred miles, creating a bulge in the German lines known as the Kursk salient.
Hitler saw this salient as a major opportunity: a decisive blow there might shatter Russia’s defences and allow him to regain the initiative. The German plan for ‘Operation Citadel’ entailed two simultaneous thrusts towards Kursk, one south from Orel, the second north from Kharkov. However, Hitler decided to stockpile still more military equipment and postponed Operation Citadel from the spring until the summer of 1943. This delay enabled Soviet intelligence to discover the time and place of the attack and also permitted a massive reinforcement and fortification of the battlefield.
The German preliminary bombardment that began on 5 July was answered by an even more intense counter-bombardment, indicating just how ready the Soviets were. The battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in world history, with six thousand vehicles engaged on each side. It was also distinguished by an unprecedented scale of carnage and slaughter, even on the eastern front. The upshot was a Soviet victory; by the end of July, Germany had lost half a million soldiers and was forced to retreat another two hundred miles. This battle was a true turning-point in the Second World War, for henceforth the Germans would be largely on the defensive in the east.
By January 1944 the Red Army had raised the siege of Leningrad and had crossed the old 1939 border. In May it had liberated Ukraine and was driving deep into Poland and Romania. The most significant event of the year, however, was ‘Operation Bagration’, the Russian attack on Army Group Centre, which held a salient in Lithuania and Belorussia that protruded into Soviet lines. At the end of June the Soviets struck into the salient with a series of co-ordinated thrusts, even one staged through the Pripet marshes. Offensive operations continued until the end of the summer, utterly destroying seventeen German divisions, and reducing the combat strength of another fifty divisions by half.
By the end of 1944, Soviet armies had already overrun Romania and were swinging north towards Budapest. The central group of Soviet fronts were poised to clear Poland of the enemy, before invading Germany itself. The first step in this process was the Vilna–Oder operation in January and February 1945, where the Red Army used its superior numbers and firepower to smash into East Prussia. Indeed, certain units under Zhukov’s command had crossed the Oder and were but forty miles from Berlin. But because Zhukov’s forces were exhausted and had outrun their supply lines, the Soviet High Command decided to defer the battle for Berlin until the spring. In mid-April 1945, some 2.5 million Soviet troops squared off against 1 million Germans, many of them young boys, cripples, or old men. There was little doubt about the outcome. By 25 April Berlin was encircled; two days later Soviet troops had shot their way into the centre of the city; two days after that Adolf Hitler killed himself. The German government’s emissaries travelled to Zhukov’s headquarters and signed the act of unconditional surrender on 9 May 1945.